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considering proposals to greatly expand a soon-to-expire $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers -- potentially applying it to all but the wealthiest homebuyers.
Supporters say doing so would further boost home sales, stabilize housing prices and generate jobs. Opponents say extending and expanding the credit would be a waste of money and only temporarily stave off further price declines.
The credit now can be claimed by anyone buying a home who has not owned one for three years and who closes the deal by Nov. 30.
Beyond extending that deadline, some lawmakers want to make the credit available to all homebuyers who meet income eligibility requirements. And some want to increase the amount of the credit from $8,000 to $15,000.
Currently the first-time home buyer credit is available in full to those buying their primary residence who make $75,000 or less ($150,000 for joint filers). A partial credit is available to those making between $75,000 and $95,000 ($150,000 to $170,000 for joint filers).
The case for expanding the credit
Through mid-September, 1.4 million tax returns had qualified for the credit, according to the IRS.
Some portion of those returns, which the IRS couldn't specify, represents buyers who took advantage of an earlier version of the tax credit, which was only worth $7,500 and has to be repaid over time.
By the end of November, the credit will have been used by 1.8 million homebuyers, at least 355,000 of whom would not have bought a house without the tax break, according to estimates by the National Association of Realtors.
Mark Zandi, chief economist of MoodysEconomy.com, favors extending the current credit until June 1, 2010, and making it available to all home buyers regardless of income or at least to everyone except those at the highest end of the income scale. He estimates the cost of doing so wouldn't exceed $30 billion over 10 years.
Zandi's reasoning: Foreclosures are expected to rise next year because of rising unemployment, and that will drag home prices down further. Extending and expanding the credit will help mute that decline. And by June, there's a chance the job market will have stabilized.
"The most fundamental argument for the credit is that nothing works in the economy if housing is falling -- it hurts household wealth and credit becomes tight," Zandi said. "[The credit] is a good insurance policy. It's vital to stem the housing price declines."
To kick start economic activity, Zandi believes lawmakers should set aside an amount of money for an extended credit and tell potential home buyers "first come first served."
The National Association of Home Builders would like the credit extended for all of 2010.
"We estimate that this would increase home purchases by 383,000 in the next year and help mitigate the foreclosure crisis by whittling down inventory," NAHB Chairman Joe Robson said in a statement. "This stimulus alone would create nearly 350,000 jobs over the coming year, which is exactly what the economy needs right now."
A study funded by the industry-supported Fix Housing First Coalition found that the current credit helped stimulate demand for homes at the lower end of the price spectrum.
"An expansion of the tax credit would spur an increase similar to what occurred in the lower end of the market, by motivating buyers in the 'trade-up market' to purchase a higher priced primary home," said Kenneth Rosen in testimony before Congress. Rosen runs the consulting group that conducted the study and is chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California in Berkeley.
The case for letting the credit expire
Opponents of extending and expanding the credit worry that such moves offer poor bang for the buck and won't stem housing declines.
"Everything spent on this program will ultimately have to be paid for later through higher, economically harmful taxes," Ted Gayer, co-director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a Brookings blog.
Assuming there are 5.5 million home sales in 2010, Gayer said, expanding the credit to all homeowners "is poorly targeted because it would give a credit to 5.5 million homebuyers who would have bought a home anyway."
The current credit was estimated to cost federal coffers $6.64 billion over 10 years. But Gayer notes that the cost is likely to be much higher since more people than expected took advantage of it but only about 15% of people wouldn't have bought a house otherwise.
It would cost an estimated $16.7 billion if the credit is extended until the end of June 2010 and made available to single filers making up to $150,000 and joint filers making up to $300,000. Those are the parameters that Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., are proposing in an amendment they introduced to a bill the Senate is expected to take up this week. (Please see correction.)
Another argument against an extension: It would only temporarily boost home prices and potentially set up those using it for a fall. That's because home prices are likely to decline once the credit expires and interest rates ultimately trek north, according to Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
"Temporarily propping up house prices, so that a new set of homebuyers can incur losses, is a policy of questionable merit," Baker said in a CEPR column.
The sooner the market adjusts the better, Baker said. He did offer one caveat: "We may want to step in to prevent prices from overshooting on the downside in a select group of markets where this is a real possibility."
Zandi said that's already happened in a number of markets, and that an extended credit might help turn around the deflationary psychology in those markets where buyers are worried about catching a falling knife.
- CNNMoney.com's Les Christie contributed to this report.
Correction:This article originally misstated Sen. Isakson's home state.UPDATE (2019): If you want to use this blog for learning more about graphic lambda calculus and chemlambda, then you should read the more recent explanatory posts, starting with this one.
UPDATE (2017): Graphic lambda calculus (GLC) and chemlambda are two different formalisms which were developed in parallel. In my opinion GLC is by far bested by chemlambda and also the main interest in chemlambda comes from molecular computers, not decentralized computing.
In GLC_computations_examples are collected some constructions with GLC which are earlier than chemlambda.
This is the logo of chemlambda:
UPDATE 06.11.2016: For the moment the best entry point to this universe is the README from the active branch of the chemlambda repository. As for some important ideas to take home, these are:
The whole algorithm, with it’s various parts, is the model, not only the rewrite system.
The model has chemlambda as a proof of concept.
Go as much as possible without global semantics and control
Everything is local and decentralized.
Lambda calculus is only a tiny part, serving only as inspiration for more interesting ideas, like for example understanding the predecessor and turning it into the first artificial life organism in chemlambda, later to give the notion of a chemlambda quine
Space is not at all understood in other approaches. Evidence of a thing is not the same as a thing.
Space is a plug-in, of the same nature as the rest of the model.
Nature is the fastest computer.
_______________________________________
This is a tutorial for graphic lambda calculus. Up to now the best exposition is arXiv:1305.5786 but there are some facts not covered there.
See also the related chemlambda aka “chemical concrete machine” tutorial.
Visit the chemlambda demos page to SEE how this works.
Read the vision page to understand what is good for.
FAQ: chemlambda in real and virtual worlds
A decentralized computing model is described in the Distributed GLC tutorial.
Sources:
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What is graphic lambda calculus?
Graphic lambda calculus is a formalism working with a set of oriented, locally planar, trivalent graphs, with decorated nodes (and also wires, loops and a termination gate node). The set is described in the Introduction to graphic lambda calculus.
There are moves acting on such graphs, which can be local or global moves.
Graphic lambda calculus contains differential calculus in metric spaces, untyped (or simply typed) lambda calculus and that part of knot theory which can be expressed by using knot diagrams.
——————————————
The set GRAPH.
This is the set of graphs which are subjected to the moves. Any assembly of the following elementary graphs, called “gates” is a graph in.
The graph, which corresponds to the lambda abstraction operation from lambda calculus, see lambda terms. It is this:
But wait! This gate looks like it has one input (the entry arrow) and two outputs (the left and right exit arrows respectively). This could not be a graph representing an operation, because an operation has two inputs and one output. For example, the lambda abstraction operation takes as inputs a variable name and a term and outputs the term.
Remember that the graphic lambda calculus does not have variable names. There is a certain algorithm which transforms a lambda term into a graph in, such that to any lambda abstraction which appears in the term corresponds a gate. The algorithm starts with the representation of the lambda abstraction operation as a node with two inputs and one output, namely as an elementary gate which looks like the gate, but the orientation of the left exit arrow is inverse than the one of the gate. At some point in the algorithm the orientation is reversed and we get gates as shown here. There is a reason for this, wait and see.
It is cool though that this gate looks like it takes a term as input and it outputs at the left exit arrow the variable name and at the right exit arrow the term. (It does not do this, properly, because there will be no variable names in the formalism, but it’s still cool.)
The graph, which corresponds to the application operation from lambda calculus, see lambda terms. It is this:
This looks like the graph of an operation, there are no clever tricks involved. The sign I use is like a curly join sign.
The graph, which will be used as a FAN-OUT gate, it is:
The graph. For any element of an abelian group (think about as being or ) there is an “exploration gate”, or “dilation gate”, which looks like the graph of an operation:
(Therefore we have a family of operations, called “dilations”, indexed by the elements of an abelian group. This is a structure coming from emergent algebras.)
We use these elementary graphs for constructing the graphs in. Any assembly of these gates, in any number, which respects the orientation of arrows, is in.
Remark that we obtain trivalent graphs, with decorated nodes, each node having a cyclical order of his arrows (hence locally planar graphs).
There is a small thing to mention though: we may have arrows which input or output into nothing. Indeed, in particular the elementary graphs or gates are in and all the arrows of an elementary graph either input or output to nothing.
Technically, we may imagine that we complete a graph in, if necessary, with univalent nodes, called “leaves” (they may be be decorated with “INPUT” or “OUTPUT”, depending on the orientation of the arrow where they sit onto).
For this reason we admit into arrows without nodes which are elementary graphs, called wires
and loops (without nodes from the elementary graphs, nor leaves)
Finally, we introduce an univalent gate, the termination gate:
The termination gate has an input leaf and no output.
and now, any graph which is a reunion of lines, loops and assemblies of the elementary graphs (termination graph included) is in.
——————————————
The moves.
Still in beta version:
Yet more:
The ext1 move, if you need extensionality.
If there is no oriented path from “2” to “1” outside the left hand side picture then one may replace this picture by an edge. Conversely, if there is no oriented path connecting “2” with “1” then one may replace the edge with the graph from the left hand side of the following picture:
——————————————
Macros.
——————————————
Sectors.
A sector of the graphic lambda calculus is:
a set of graphs, defined by a local or global condition,
a set of moves from the list of all moves available.
The name “graphic lambda calculus” comes from the fact that there it has untyped lambda calculus as a sector. In fact, there are three four important sectors of graphic lambda calculus:
_______________
Simply typed version of graphic lambda calculus:
_______________
Where I use it (work in progress) and other useful links:
In these two posts is used the tree formalism of the emergent algebras.
In order to understand how this works, see the following posts, which aim to describe finite differential calculus as a graph rewriting system:
The chemical concrete machine project:
The neural networks project:People who never look inside Tokyo firm Kochi Architect Studio's "Kame House" will miss the madness that is what you see above. The two-story home, which looks totally boxy and vanilla on the outside, hides a giant hexagonal void in its center. The result is a mind-blowing space—with very little privacy. But that's the point. As Designboom explains, the opening is supposed to foster a "communal way of living" and "visually connect the dwelling's various rooms," including a kitchen and bedroom on the upper level and a bathroom and guest room on the ground level.
The diamond-like cavity features several triangular facets, which look a lot like the interior of this whimsical modern take on the teepee, also hailing from Japan. Here's a closer look:
· Kame house by kochi architect's studio contains a large hexagonal void [Designboom]
· Dreamy Woodland Dwelling Gives the Teepee a Modern Twist [Curbed]The Republican tax-cut bill has grown more unpopular in the two months it has taken to usher it through Congress, and few people believe it will provide relief for middle-class families, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has found.
The poll also found that the GOP has lost its advantage on issues it has recently dominated. Americans now express more confidence in Democrats than Republicans to handle taxes, the economy and President Donald Trump’s signature goal of changing how Washington works.
Republicans in Congress say the tax bill will become more popular once the tax cuts begin to take effect in February. They are hoping that the legislation will shore up the party’s political fortunes by giving the GOP its first major legislative accomplishment.
In the new survey, many Americans gave Mr. Trump credit for the nation’s strong economy, with 40% saying he has made the economy better and 21% saying he has made it worse. But those feelings brought little benefit to the president’s party.
Nearly half of adults in the new survey held negative views of the GOP, higher than the 38% of a year ago and a larger share than the 27% who viewed the party favorably. By contrast, views of the Democratic Party have turned slightly more positive over the past year.
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It is unusual to see a political party that controls the levers of power so challenged at a time of economic improvement, said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey with Democrat Fred Yang. He doubted the situation would change with enactment of the tax bill.
“We are watching a case where a president is getting credit for the economy improving, sitting on top of an economic boom, and not deriving political value,” said Mr. McInturff. “I don’t believe passing the bill is going to have much of an immediate effect.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.,) has said that opinions of the tax bill will improve once tax cuts appear in worker paychecks. “When people see their withholding improving, when they see the jobs occurring, when they see bigger paychecks, a fairer tax system, a simpler tax code, that’s what’s going to produce the results,” he said Tuesday. The House and Senate were expected to clear the bill for Mr. Trump’s signature by Wednesday.
In an interview with the Journal, Mr. Ryan acknowledged his party faced a political challenge heading into next year’s midterm elections. “I see a historical trend cutting against us.... We’ve got the wind at our face,” he said. Mr. Ryan said he thought that changes to welfare programs and the criminal justice system would be popular to advance in the midterm year.
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The new Journal/NBC poll, conducted Dec. 13-15, finds that the GOP has a lot of work to do in promoting the tax bill, because few people believe it will cut taxes for the middle class or for their own family. More than two-thirds of respondents said the law was designed mostly to help corporations and the wealthy.
Asked to assess how the law would affect them, 17% said their family would pay less in taxes under the measure, while 32% say they would pay more. Democrats were the more skeptical and Republicans less so, while the overall numbers mirror the opinion of independents.
Overall, 41% of Americans in the survey said the tax plan was a bad idea, up from 35% in October.
Fewer than one-quarter of people said the bill was a good idea.
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After two months of congressional debate on the measure, Americans now have less confidence in the GOP’s handling of one of their marquee issues: People said by a 33%-to-29% margin that they believe that Democrats would do a better job than Republicans with taxes.
In another reversal, the poll found a plurality favoring Democrats as best to deal with the economy, 35% to 30%, and in changing Washington, 30% to 20%.
The general mood of the electorate is grim. Although people see the economy as improving, only 30% said the country was better off compared with when the Trump presidency began, while 45% said it was worse off. The question produced a large gender gap: 51% of women but 39% of men said the country was now worse off.
On three other fronts—Mr. Trump’s impact on the nation’s standing in the world, on national unity and on partisanship in politics—majorities said the president’s approach had made things worse.
Just over one-quarter of people in the survey predicted that Mr. Trump would be successful as president, while 44% said he would unsuccessful—more than twice the share who said in early 2010 that Barack Obama wouldn’t be successful as president.
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Asked whether they believed the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, 38% said yes, 35% said no, and 26% said they weren’t sure. Asked whether Congress should begin impeachment hearings to remove Mr. Trump from office, 54% said no, while 41% said yes.
The Journal/NBC News poll surveyed 900 adults from Dec. 13-15. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.27 percentage points.
—Richard Rubin and Kristina Peterson contributed to this article.
Write to Janet Hook at janet.hook@wsj.comIt was a GO train excursion devised by his wife to boost James Gilfoy’s confidence. She hoped if they went on the train together he would feel easier venturing out alone in his wheelchair.
But the outing, which should have been a happy event to visit their son’s new baby, turned into an ordeal as Gilfoy and his wife Fiona, a daily GO commuter, crashed head on into accessibility barriers.
It has left him vowing never again to ride GO and Fiona questioning how transit officials, who allocate millions to upgrading parking lots, haven’t made the system fully wheelchair accessible.
The Dec. 7 trip didn’t get off to a promising start. The couple drove to the Oshawa station from their Bowmanville home, expecting to get a disabled parking spot. But all the spots were full, several without the appropriate permit. It meant the Gilfoys had to traverse the vast car lot in a rush to buy tickets and board their train.
GO trains are all accessible, so the trip itself was fine. It wasn’t until the couple prepared to get off at Long Branch that they encountered real difficulty.
When it became apparent they were planning to exit the train, the customer service agent in the accessibility car looked horrified, Fiona said. He explained that not only could the wheelchair ramp not be deployed at Long Branch station destination but there was no accessible route off the platform.
Fortunately, despite a rare neurological condition that makes walking feel like he has nails or glass in his feet, Gilfoy was able to stand and, with the help of his petite wife, climb off the train. Then, with great effort, and using his wheelchair to help steady him as Fiona braced it below, he made his way into the GO station, where they planned to grab a cab to their son’s Etobicoke home.
Gilfoy was deeply embarrassed by the ordeal.
“There’s enough humiliation being in a wheelchair,” he said. “My whole feeling was for my wife because she’s stuck with me. She’s got a 230-pound man who’s got to get down the stairs in a wheelchair.”
When they finally got inside the station building, what they saw came across as a “sick joke,” said Fiona. “When you walk back up the stairs there is a wheelchair sign and an automatic door, as well as accessible washrooms and a ramp leading to the parking lot.”
The effort ruined their day and left James in extreme pain.
Only 56 out of 62 GO stations are fully accessible. Five of the remaining inaccessible stations — Mimico, Long Branch, Eglinton, Bloor and Georgetown — are supposed to be upgraded by 2016. There is no plan yet for Kipling, according to an email from GO spokesman Malon Edwards.
Work on accessibility improvements at Long Branch, including a retrofit of the existing pedestrian tunnel and a new tunnel on the east side of the station, as well as elevators and wider platforms, won’t begin until mid-2014.
“We encourage customers to contact GO Transit to determine whether their trip is accessible. Our call centre representatives can help customers plan their routes based on their needs,” Edwards told the Star.
“GO Transit is committed to accessibility. It is a top priority for us as we strive for customer service excellence with all of the initiatives we undertake on behalf of our customers and staff,” he said.
Although on-train announcements don’t specify which stations are accessible, they do alert riders if elevators aren’t working “or other potential issues,” Edwards said.
The Gilfoys received an apology and a similar suggestion that they plan ahead the next time.
“GO’s reaction was that if we had planned it out better it wouldn’t have happened. That was GO’s reaction,” said James. “It’s almost 2013. I didn’t think I’d have to plan whether I could get off the train.
“They really aren’t addressing the situation. Knowing that it won’t be until 2016 means nothing to me. And what about the next person to encounter this? They may be in a worse situation: unable to walk, or elderly.
“I am just amazed that a corporation of that size whose responsibility it is to transport thousands of people every day still isn’t fully accessible. It honestly boggles my mind.”Hi friends,
Hope you are all doing good. In this post I will show you how to use sockets to build a real-time chat application using Ionic 2. We will be using a nodejs app for backend(along with sockets) and Ionic 2 (along with sockets-client) in the front-end.
The complete code of this tutorial can be found here:
Backend – Click here.
Front-end – Click here.
A screencast of this tutorial:
Let’s get started.
First create a nodejs app and install sockets.io using the following commands one by one. (Better do this inside a new directory).
npm init (fill in the details accordingly) 1 npm init ( fill in the details accordingly )
npm install socket.io --save 1 npm install socket. io -- save
Now create a new file index.js in the project directory and enter the below code.
var io = require('socket.io'), http = require('http'), server = http.createServer(), io = io.listen(server); io.on('connection', function(socket) { console.log('User Connected'); socket.on('message', function(msg){ io.emit('message', msg); }); }); server.listen(3000, function(){ console.log('Server started'); }) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 var io = require ('socket.io' ), http = require ( 'http' ), server = http. createServer ( ), io = io. listen ( server ) ; io. on ( 'connection', function ( socket ) { console. log ( 'User Connected' ) ; socket. on ('message', function ( msg ) { io. emit ('message', msg ) ; } ) ; } ) ; server. listen ( 3000, function ( ) { console. log ( 'Server started' ) ; } )
Let’s break this down.
We have created a simple http server that runs on port 3000. We have made the variable io listen to this server. This is actually the socket.io object. Upon receiving an incoming connection it will generate a socket which can then be used to listen for messages from that connection. We emit the message to other connected clients listening on that flag (Here it is message).
Now save this code and start the app using the command
node index.js 1 node index. js
Our back-end is ready.
Create a front-end app using blank template of Ionic 2.
Navigate to www/index.html and add the below line of code in
<script src="https://cdn.socket.io/socket.io-1.4.5.js"></script> 1 <script src = "https://cdn.socket.io/socket.io-1.4.5.js" > </script>
(Add this line just above the <script src=”cordova.js”></script> line).
Now open up home.html file and add the below code.
<ion-list> <ion-item *ngFor="#message of chats">{{message}}</ion-item> </ion-list> <ion-input type="text" [(ngModel)]="chatinp" placeholder="Enter a message"></ion-input> <button fab (click)="send(chatinp)">Send</button> 1 2 3 4 5 < ion - list > < ion - item * ngFor = "#message of chats" > { { message } } < / ion - item > < / ion - list > < ion - input type = "text" [ ( ngModel ) ] = "chatinp" placeholder = "Enter a message" > < / ion - input > < button fab ( click ) = "send(chatinp)" > Send < / button >
Now we have a list for displaying the messages and an input field and a button for sending out our chats.
Now open up home.js file and add the below code.
import {Page} from 'ionic-angular'; import {NgZone} from 'angular2/core'; @Page({ templateUrl: 'build/pages/home/home.html' }) export class HomePage { static get parameters() { return [NgZone]; } constructor(ngzone) { this.zone = ngzone; this.chats = []; this.chatinp =''; this.socket = io('http://localhost:3000'); this.socket.on('message', (msg) => { this.zone.run(() => { this.chats.push(msg); }); }); } send(msg) { if(msg!= ''){ this.socket.emit('message', msg); } this.chatinp = ''; } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 import { Page } from 'ionic-angular' ; import { NgZone } from 'angular2/core' ; @ Page ( { templateUrl : 'build/pages/home/home.html' } ) export class HomePage { static get parameters ( ) { return [ NgZone ] ; } constructor ( ngzone ) { this. zone = ngzone ; this. chats = [ ] ; this. chatinp = '' ; this. socket = io ( 'http://localhost:3000' ) ; this. socket. on ('message', ( msg ) = > { this. zone. run ( ( ) = > { this. chats. push ( msg ) ; } ) ; } ) ; } send ( msg ) { if ( msg!= '' ) { this. socket. emit ('message', msg ) ; } this. chatinp = '' ; } }
Let’s break this down.
We have a send method which will send our message to the server. We have a socket.on listener which listens for incoming messages and adds them to the array chats. (Note the use of zone to update the DOM in realtime).
That’s it guys. Now if you run the app(Backend should be running as well) you should see an awesome app through which you could chat or send messages in real time.
Thanks for reading guys. Peace.An 18 year-old man was arrested on Saturday in connection with the bombing of a London train a day earlier that was claimed by Islamic State and left 30 people hospitalized, police said.
UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd called the arrest "very significant", and added that operations related to the investigation of the attack are "ongoing".
The 1suspect was arrested in the port area of the southern town of Dover, where ferries depart for Europe under section 41 of the Terrorism Act -- which means the arrest was made without a warrant. He is to be transferred to a south London police station for questioning.
Police later revealed that a number of items were found during a search in the Dover area, and that the city's port was partially evacuated during the arrest.
Police added that they were "keeping an open mind" about whether there may have been additional potential suspects linked to the attack.
Hours after the arrest, armed police carried out an operation at a residential address in Surrey, south west of London, in connection to the attack probe.
Nearby residents were evacuated as a precaution and taken to a nearby rugby club and community center for temporary accommodation, Sky News reported.
The network said that the home raided by anti-terror police belonged to British couple Penelope Jones, 71, and Ronald Jones, 88 who have fostered a number of child-refugees over the years and who have been honored for their work with the refugee community.
Police described the planting of an apparent improvised explosive device, which exploded on a train at the Parsons Green station in West London at 8.20am local time on Friday, as a "terror incident".
Home Secretary Amber Rudd said that it was "good fortune" that the device did "so little damage."
Police revealed on Friday that the device, which was fitted with a timer, had only partially detonated.
The improvised device appeared to be fashioned inside a bucket which was carried in a supermarket freezer bag.
In an initial statement several hours after the blast posted by its propaganda arm Amaq, IS said a "detachment" of its group planted the bomb.
The group later released a longer statement claiming they had placed "several explosive devices" and had only detonated one of them on Friday, wounding "30 Crusaders". The communique added that "what is coming is more devastating and bitter," according to a translation by the SITE intelligence group.
The declaration came just moments before UK prime minister Theresa May announced the national terror threat level would be upped to the highest possible category, critical, which means "an attack is expected imminently". She added that troops would be deployed to key locations in the capital.
Police said on Saturday that the terror threat level would remain in place for the time being.
This is a developing story.
Read more: Witnesses describe 'wall of fire', stampede as explosion hits London trainRemember that old song lyric, "call me unpredictable" from the Sinatra classic "Call me Irresponsible?" It looks like today the Republicans may be calling Trump both, and lots of other names for working out a debt ceiling deal with Pelosi and Schumer without GOP input:
Newsweek
After meeting with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders Wednesday morning, President Trump announced that he had cut a deal with the Democrats that would provide a first tranche of aid to victims of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, as well as keep the government funded and solvent past the end of the month. With Congress facing a slew of do-or-die deadlines in September, Trump met with the leaders at the White House. When he spoke with reporters a few hours later, as he departed on Air Force One for a speech in North Dakota, the president praised House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, affectionately calling them by their first names and making no mention of the Republican leaders he had met with, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Shocked? Surprised? Wondering what the hell is up? You're not alone.
The remarkable turn of events left Republican congressional leaders, in control of both chambers of the legislative branch, "shell-shocked" and "visibly annoyed," and showcased how a President who also authored "The Art of the Deal" actually cuts one. Trump's stunning agreement to endorse a plan proposed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi came during a Wednesday morning meeting with leaders from both parties in the Oval Office, the first such meeting of Trump's presidency. [...] A senior Republican source described Trump as being in "Apprentice" mode, a reference to the reality show that made the President a TV star. Trump just decided to listen and then make a decision on the spot, the source told CNN. McConnell and Ryan were "blindsided by this," a Republican official told CNN. In fact, hours before Trump agreed to Democrats' proposal, Ryan had publicly called such a plan "ridiculous" during a news conference. The GOP leaders had no heads up or warning that Trump's decision would happen, Republican officials told CNN. Another senior GOP source described the two leaders as "shell-shocked."
Why now? I have no clue. Maybe Trump simply got fed up with politics as usual. He's always been an impatient, spontaneous actor. Or maybe he saw his falling popularity and decided enough was enough, especially since the unpopularity of Congress is even lower than his own. Or maybe he's trying to grease the skids for a Tax Reform bill, as some believe. We do know he's doing this on his own, without following the advice of GOP Congressional leader or even members of his cabinet, like Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. In short he's flying solo. How long it will last I can't tell you. But he is even open to working with the Dem leadership on replacing the DACA program Obama initiated and he just cancelled.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump turned to Democrats for a second straight day on Thursday to try to resolve the fate of so-called Dreamers brought illegally into the United States as children, a day after stunning his fellow Republicans by striking a deal with the opposition party on U.S. debt and federal spending.
Conservatives in the House are bound to rally against any deal he makes with the Democrats. The question is, can he hold onto enough GOP support in the Senate and House to actually accomplish something? I guess we'll find out. After a stagnant and failed start to his legislative agenda, it seems Trump is determined to accomplish something - anything - even if it means pissing off the Republican leadership and joining hands with the despised (to his base, and frankly to many of progressives) Senate and House Minority Leaders, Schumer and Pelosi.
I guess football season isn't the only thing that is returning after a long hiatus. National politics suddenly has entered a new, more active phase, as well. For the time being anyway, Trump has jump started the political games. Indeed, you might even say he flipped the board and started a completely new "season" of political maneuvering. What comes next is anyone's guess. But I can only assume there will be a big backlash from the Republican party of which Trump is ostensibly the leader. Stay tuned.May 24, 2013 (CIDRAP News) – Saudi Arabian officials announced today that they plan to send animal samples to the United States as part of the hunt for the source of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and also reported that testing of scores of human samples has revealed no new cases in the past 2 days.
Ziad Memish, MD, Saudi Arabia's deputy minister of public health, said in Geneva that samples from bats and other animals, including camels, sheep, and cats, would be sent to the United States, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) story today.
The virus, which has sickened 44 people and killed 22 in the past 13 months, is related to bat coronaviruses and is presumed to come from animals, but the source has remained a mystery. Most of the recent case-patients were not reported to have had contact with animals before they became ill, though some patients earlier in the outbreak had visited farms.
According to AFP, Memish told diplomats at the World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva that until now Saudi Arabia has not been able to send samples from any animals other than bats to the United States. Now, he said, "We've got an approval to move these samples and they will be shipped for testing."
Meanwhile, the Saudi Ministry of Health (MOH), which has faced considerable criticism for an alleged lack of openness about MERS-CoV, issued a statement that testing of human samples has revealed no new cases since 2 days ago, when a case was reported in the central province of Qassim.
"MOH has pointed out that 146 suspected samples have been laboratory analyzed during that period; where results proved negative," the statement said.
Response to hospital cluster
In related developments, Saudi officials offered information on their response to MERS-CoV in a slide presentation at the WHA yesterday. It included some details on the hospital-centered case cluster in the country's Eastern province, which began in April and includes 22 cases with 10 deaths. Media reports have identified the facility as Al-Moosa General Hospital in Hofuf.
The facility has 150 beds, including a 12-bed critical care unit, and 32 hemodialysis chairs, according to the Saudi presentation. Reports of deaths from viral pneumonia in the hospital started in mid April, and the first MERS-CoV case was identified on Apr 24. Saudi officials immediately notified the World Health Organization (WHO) and also invited consultation teams from the WHO and several universities, including the University of Toronto, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and the University of Denver.
No new MERS-CoV cases have been acquired at the hospital since May 1, although cases have been found since then in a few family contacts and in two |
could. At the corporate level, News Corporation was trying to buy a 30 per cent shareholding in DIRECTV that was held by General Motors. NDS provided the smart cards to DIRECTV and card piracy was a factor in the price of those shares. Chenoweth reports evidence that one of NDS's prize hackers had developed a cure-all solution for piracy on their current cards, but NDS did not release that code during the time that News Corporation had an interest in keeping DIRECTV share prices low.
Eventually Canal Plus and the US Echostar system sued NDS for sabotaging the security of their competitor's codes. The claims were for hundreds of millions in lost revenue, let alone any share price implications or criminal liability. News Corporation had 20 lawyers in the California court-room, the plaintiffs had three. Despite compelling evidence, and all indications that the judge was convinced by it, NDS was found guilty of only a minor misdemeanour with a $45 penalty. Even the judge's costs award against NDS was overturned by an appeals court of California's notoriously partisan, elected judiciary. By this time, News Corporation was a significant political asset of the Republican Party. The Australian Financial Review journalist Neil Chenoweth has been a hound of News Corporation for many years. His investigative work on this story, over more than four years, has accumulated extraordinary detail from across the globe. We get potted biographies and character sketches of most of the key characters. I'm not sure we needed to know the names of the two dogs who sniffed a suspicious package at a critical moment in a Texas parcel depot - but it proves Chenoweth was thorough. Chenoweth notes the legal hazards of investigating News Corporation, whose normal approach to litigation he describes as ''thermonuclear''. At many points in this story, the threat of massive legal costs seems to have been enough to extinguish open challenges to News Corporation's version of the truth. This story is full of personal drama, colourful identities, and issues of high principle. Many episodes are presented in a cinematic present tense, but the large caste and complex plot would challenge any screenwriter. Chenoweth concludes with a number of serious questions about accountability of globalised corporations. I wonder who will dare to make the movie. Richard Thwaites was working on broadcasting policy issues while Australia's pay television system was being introduced.On Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s This Week, host (and former Clinton operative) George Stephanopoulos brought up the latest investigation conducted by James O’ Keefe’s Project Veritas group that shows Democratic operatives plotting violence at Trump rallies, voter fraud schemes, and creating hubs of communication for pro-Clinton super PACs.
Clinton campaign pollster and adviser Joel Benenson was on the panel and admitted that he hasn’t seen the tapes of O’Keefe’s yearlong investigation into this dark web of operatives within the progressive Left, but he’s confident that their people aren’t doing anything illegal.
“Both of those operatives [Bob Creamer and Scott Foval] have now resigned, and they did receive money from the DNC; they were sub-contractors. Isn’t this exactly the kind of behavior you all have been complaining about?"
Benenson was ready for his talking points:
Well, it’s a video of somebody [O’Keefe] who has a track record of doctoring videos. These people have resigned, whether they were talking to him on camera, or whether there was some snippet there that’s been manipulated and taken out of context, I don’t know. It’s actually the first time I’ve seen the video, George.
Benenson then said it was an act of desperation for Republicans to focus on this and not the words of Donald Trump, who he noted has egged on violent acts at his rallies in the past. Well, so did Vice President Joe Biden, who said he wished he could go back to his high school days so he could beat up Trump for his lewd remarks about women. Ladies, where would you be without creepy Joe Biden wishing he could time travel and commit acts of violence on your behalf.
Yet, back to This Week, Stephanopoulos asked Benenson, “Are you confident that you don’t have other operatives out there doing exactly the same thing?”
“I’m pretty confident. I mean, I think as I said, we’re talking about a guy who has a track record of doctoring videos, these people resigned, as you said—and if this was happening day-in and day-out, we would know about it,” replied Benenson before reiterating how Trump incites violence at his rallies.
It’s clear that Benenson hasn’t seen the videos. Did you ever ask yourself why these two guys resigned, Benenson? If he had, he would know that Veritas caught how Clinton operatives plotted to shut down Trump’s Chicago rally, which was successful. He would see that Scott Foval and others plotted to instigate the violence at these rallies in order to put the Trump campaign in a negative light with the national media. And now, we have new footage showing that Hillary Clinton was directly involved in the Donald Duck operation, where activists dressed as a duck to prod Trump for not releasing his taxes at campaign events. It began at the DNC, but it was then handed over to Americans United For Change, which Foval and Creamer both work for, to get “ducks on the ground.” The expenditures were handled by AUFC, but they were getting their orders from the Clinton campaign. As O’Keefe noted, this is illegal coordination between a presidential campaign and a super PAC, Americans United For Change. But then, Benenson probably knew what was going on, as Lady Macbeth hatched this operation.Two yeshiva students were stabbed Monday night in Jerusalem’s Old City.
According to reports, the stabbings occurred during a fight between the students and local Arab youths.
A 45-year-old man was stabbed in his abdomen, and was evacuated to Shaare Zedek Hospital in moderate condition.
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The other victim, 32 years of age, suffered from a shallow knife wound in the neck and had his arm broken. He was also in Shaare Zedek, where doctors said he was lightly injured.
The students, from the Shuvu Banim yeshiva, claimed they were set upon by a group of Arab youths as they left their study hall.
They reached the Kishle police station in the Armenian Quarter, and were taken to the hospital from there.
Police have made three arrests.
Security forces were searching the area.
Tensions in Jerusalem have been spiking in recent months, mostly over Palestinian claims that the Israeli government wants to change the status quo at the Temple Mount by allowing Jews to pray there.
Netanyahu has repeatedly denied the claims but some members of his right-wing coalition favor letting the prayers go forward.
In recent months, 11 people have been killed in attacks by Palestinian terrorists — mostly in Jerusalem.
Police on Monday were looking into reports of an attack by three young Israelis on a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem, and an assault by Arab youths on a Jewish Egged bus driver in Megiddo.Newswise — The rate of diagnosis for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is the same among all racial groups — one in 110, according to current estimates. However, a study by a Florida State University researcher has found that African-American children tend to be diagnosed later than white children, which results in a longer and more intensive intervention. The reasons for later diagnoses include a lack of access to quality, affordable, culturally competent health care, according to Martell Teasley, an associate professor in Florida State’s College of Social Work who has conducted a comprehensive review of researchliterature on autism and African-American children. In addition, the stigmaattached to mental health conditions within the black community contribute to misdiagnoses of autism, and underuse of available treatment services. “There are no subjective criteria for diagnosing autism. Only brain scans can truly provide appropriate diagnoses, because we are dealing with biological and chemical imbalances in the brain,” Teasley said. “Not every child is going to have access to this kind of medical evaluation, particularly those who are indigent and don’t have health care funding.” Teasley examined ASD diagnosis and treatment strategies, and their effect on African-American families, in “Autism and the African-American Community,” a paper published in a special issue of the journal Social Work in Public Health (Vol. 26, Issue 4, 2011) that dealt with health-care policy issues in the black community related to the human genome. Teasley co-wrote the paper with Ruby Gourdine, a professor of social work at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Tiffany Baffour, an associate professor of social work at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina. Because of the social stigma, Teasley says that some African-American families might be resistant to accept a diagnosis and treatment. “Less discussion about autism among African-Americans or between African-Americans and health care providers leads to misdiagnoses, a lack of treatment and a lack of services,” Teasley said. “This will lead to greater challenges for families — more stress and anxiety, and poorer developmental outcomes.” African-Americans also might resist a diagnosis and treatment because of a mistrust of mainstream health care providers over past discrimination. “African-Americans are well versed in going to a doctor who might have biases or discriminatory practices, so they may not readily accept what a doctor says,” Teasley said. In addition, a cultural divide between African-Americans and mainstream health care providers can hinder a timely and correct diagnosis. “There are not enough health care professionals who understand the cultural norms and attributes of the African-American community,” Teasley said. African-Americans live in all types of settings, but the majority live in urban areas, which have seen a decline in the number of mental-health care agencies since the 1980s. “This lack of accessibility causes a problem for some African-Americans,” Teasley said. Once a child is diagnosed with ASD, Teasley says both the child and the members of his or her family needs to receive appropriate training and counseling. “The children need behavioral counseling so they can develop the skills to live as independently as possible,” he said. “The families need to learn how to work with children who are autistic. “Intervention for any autistic child needs to start around age 3, so we can get the child to begin to learn how to eat right and develop normal, healthy routines, which will result in a better developmental outcome,” Teasley said. “Later intervention will result in a poorer developmental outcome that can have a lasting impact on the child’s and family’s quality of life.”Advertisement Police say baby died from injuries after beaten; father charged with murder Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Doctors removed a 4-month-old baby from life support Saturday night, and now his father is charged with his murder.App Users: Watch mobile videoFamily members described 4-month-old Jayceon Chrystie as a happy and healthy baby boy.They want to see that his father, Daniel Cox, gets the maximum punishment for the crime police said he committed.Police said Jayceon was beaten by Cox as he drove on South Dixie Hwy.“You just can't imagine someone beating a child like that while they are driving,” Dena Stevenson said.Stevenson, her husband and her daughter were among those traveling behind Cox on Thursday."He would hit the child. Turn around and bounce to his music. Twist his hat and hit the child again," she said.Stevenson and her husband were concerned for the child and so they called 911."He was hitting hard, swinging hard and, you know … he was literally hitting the baby in his head or in his chest or something,” Stevenson said.According to court records obtained by WLKY, Cox dropped Jayceon off in the driveway of the mother's home on Franklin Court in Radcliff, he was not breathing and he did not have a pulse.Doctors said Jayceon's left eye was swollen, he suffered swelling to his head and his right cheek and they noticed bruising on his butt and back.Jayceon was his mother's only child.Family members said Cox did not live with Jayceon.Cox told them he was taking the baby to visit one of his children for about an hour.Cox has been charged with child abuse and murder.His bond is set at $600,000.He will be back in court Monday morning.Read original report here.Researchers in bicycle-mad Netherlands have come up with a novel way to get more cyclists out during the harsh winter months while also lowering the number of injuries: heated bike paths.
“The idea is to install a system under bike paths to prevent ice forming in winter,” engineer Marcel Boerefijn from the Tauw engineering consultancy told AFP.
Several Dutch municipalities have already expressed interest in the system that uses geothermal energy drawn from 30-50 metres (100-160 feet) below ground.
While the idea would cost 20,000-40,000 euros (25,000-50,000 dollars) per kilometre of bike path, of which the Netherlands has over 35,000 kilometres, Boerefijn prefers to vaunt the pragmatic side of the plan.
“There would be lots of savings: less salt to melt the ice, less medical costs because of accidents and fewer car expenses because people would rather travel by bike,” he said, citing a figure of 7,000 bike path accidents a year.
The eastern Dutch town of Zutphen, population 40,000, is awaiting the results of a preliminary assessment expected early next year before embarking on a feasibility study at a municipal level.
The Netherlands has an estimated 18 million bicycles for a population of around 16.5 million.Prices fell 1.4pc in October and the average house has seen £27,000 wiped off its value in the past twelve months.
The number of completed housing sales has now fallen to its lowest level since the Nationwide series began in 1974, the building society added in its lastest House Price Survey, driving the decline in prices.
The crisis in the financial sector and the latest Government data suggesting a recession is imminent is likely to worsen the housing market slump and has “uncomfortable implications”, Nationwide said.
“A looming recession and continued financial market instability have uncomfortable implications for the housing and mortgage markets, and will undoubtedly affect the pace of recovery in house prices,” Fionnuala Earley, the Nationwide’s chief economist, said.
“However the speed of the economic slowdown and the determination on the part of central banks to return stability to the financial markets does mean that interest rates are likely to continue to be cut sharply which will make life easier for borrowers on variable rate loans and those coming to the end of fixed rate deals.We run through 10 of the most beautiful castles in Scotland, let us know if you think we have left any out. A visit to Scotland would surely be incomplete without becoming caught up in the turbulent history and fascinating stories that lay behind the stone walls of its many castles. Scattered across the country, […]
We run through 10 of the most beautiful castles in Scotland, let us know if you think we have left any out.
A visit to Scotland would surely be incomplete without becoming caught up in the turbulent history and fascinating stories that lay behind the stone walls of its many castles. Scattered across the country, over two thousand magnificent castles offer travellers a wondrous serving of escapism amongst the wilderness of the Scottish landscape. Here, we round up the top ten castles that should hastily be scribbled into your Scottish bucket list…
Dunnottar Castle
On the edge of the North Sea, just south of Stonehaven, stands the formidable fortress of Dunnottar Castle. Restored in 1925, the castle ruins sit atop a huge, rocky outcrop, surrounded almost entirely by steep cliffs that plummet to the waters below. A visit to Dunnottar is well worth the journey if only to watch the evening sun illuminate the castle’s jagged exterior. It’s a breath-taking view that you won’t soon forget.
A post shared by Craig Anderson | Scotland (@ardentform) on Jan 31, 2017 at 12:19am PST
Inveraray Castle
Located on the shore of Loch Fine, the longest sea loch in Scotland, Inveraray Castle is often considered to be a country house or stately home. But its spectacular exterior, which has previously been captured on camera in Downton Abbey’s 2012 Christmas Special, is undoubtedly fit for a king. Steep conical turrets and a third floor were added to the structure in 1877 after a fire had spread through its interior, whilst a second fire in 1975 put the future of the castle in jeopardy. Following extensive restoration however, Inveraray now overlooks 16 acres of beautiful gardens that can be enjoyed by visitors all year round.
A post shared by Kazim Ghafoor (@kazimghafoor) on Aug 23, 2017 at 11:30am PDT
Castle Stalker
This four storey, tower keep on Loch Laich is notoriously difficult to visit. Surrounded by water and privately owned, there are only a limited number of tours that invite visitors through its doors each year. Yet, the castle, and its magnificently rugged backdrop provided by the Morvern Hills, is even more captivating when seen from afar. Visible even from the A828, between Oban and Glencoe, visitors might recognise Castle Stalker by another name – one which is perhaps more peculiar than its own – ‘The Castle of Aaaaaaaaaaaarghh’ from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
A post shared by Gordon (@gord.cook) on Aug 28, 2017 at 11:21am PDT
Kilchurn Castle
At the head of Loch Awe stands a five storey tower house belonging to Kilchurn Castle. Built in the 1400s by the first Lord of Glenorchy, the fact that this tower still stands is remarkable in its own right. For visitors though, who may reach the site by boat from Lochawe Pier, the chance to walk Kilchurn’s battlements and relish in the immeasurable view it provides is a truly invigorating and exceptional experience.
A post shared by Daniel Casson?? (@dpc_photography_) on Jul 10, 2017 at 12:05pm PDT
Eilean Donan Castle
Situated on its own tidal island, Eilean Donan Castle marks the point where Loch Duich, Loch Long and Loch Alsh unite. Accessible by a single stone bridge, this 13th Century castle was once a magnificent family home, with views across the water reflecting the mountains of Kintail in its ripples. Whilst, in 2001, the island’s recorded population stood at a grand total of one, the most recent census shows that even the island’s final resident has disappeared.
Special glow over a special castle ❤️ A post shared by Connor Mollison | Scotland (@connormollison) on Aug 21, 2017 at 11:43am PDT
Craigievar Castle
Nestled in the heart of Aberdeenshire, Craigievar Castle is a Princess’ dream. With its sculpted turrets and tickled pink exterior, it’s widely rumoured that Craigievar’s Scottish Baronial architecture was the inspiration behind Walt Disney’s famous castle motif. Visiting Craigievar on a dry day allows visitors to explore the castle’s sweeping gardens; perhaps even following one of its two waymarked walks.
A post shared by Mikaela Eriksson (@mika.eriksson) on Aug 11, 2017 at 6:58am PDT
Caerlaverock Castle
If ever you need inspiration for building a castle, Caerlaverock Castle would be it. Complete with picture-perfect moat and a grand, turreted entrance, Caelaverock truly looks as though it has been torn from the pages of medieval history books. Standing on the southern coast of Scotland, the strength of this triangular stronghold is proven by the substantial ruin that remains there to this day. The surrounding area is internationally recognised for its waterfowl and wading birds, whilst smaller visitors will be delighted by Caerlaverock’s castle themed adventure park.
A post shared by Maggie Cristler (@europecastlespalaces) on Feb 24, 2016 at 1:24pm PST
Dunvegan Castle
First built in the 13th Century, Dunvegan castle was remodelled as a mock medieval build some 600 years later. Situated just a mile to the north of Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye, the castle stands as the longest continuously inhabited castle in Scotland. Steeped in over 800 years of Clan history, the magnificent grounds of Dunvegan are as intriguing as they are beautiful; with a stunning maze of water features, walled gardens and glass houses offering a sanctuary to those that visit.
A post shared by laura pennafort (@laupennafort) on Aug 3, 2017 at 4:35pm PDT
Duart Castle
Duart Castle became the ancestral home of Clan MacLean after having been included in a dowry received by the 5th Clan Chief in 1350. Brought back from ruin in 1911, Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull now offers its visitors action packed experiences swathed in the spirit of Duart. After walking amongst its shadowy dungeons, visitors will be relieved to emerge into the swirl of fresh Scottish air atop the castles battlements. Whilst below, events in the grounds include ghost tours, displays of swordsmanship and theatre company performances.
A post shared by The Highland Collective (@thehighlandcollective) on Jul 22, 2017 at 12:31pm PDT
Ardvreck Castle
Ever since fire devastated Ardvreck Castle in mysterious circumstances in 1737, its gnarled remains have become a striking feature amongst its spectacular mountain surroundings. Historians believe that Ardvreck was once a formidable structure, with a stunning walled garden and magnificent courtyard. Now however, when waters rise from Loch Assynt, Ardvreck can often be cut off from the mainland – leaving little more than an enthralling, knotted mass of stone emerging from the ground.
A post shared by The Highland Collective (@thehighlandcollective) on Jul 26, 2017 at 11:01am PDT
Think our list should have been different? Let us know your bucket list favourites in the comments below.Author's note:
Posting this message twice because it's important.
I have decided to give a name to the planet that the Hammond spectre factory is built upon. As it was a referenced location in the game – there's an actual map there – but the name of the planet isn't mentioned, I wasn't going to name it. But calling it "the planet" is boring. So, from now on, the planet shall be called "Hephaestus".
Similarly, the sun that Hephaestus orbits is now named Solhephaestus, following my conventions with naming planets and stars.
Ashley Stone switched to team D's private channel.
"Team D. Time to face the music."
Her fingers flew across the keyboard in front of her.
"You've got to find a shuttle. I'm searching the planetary infonet now... 92 hits. Jaggerjack, you there?"
"Hearing you loud and clear."
"Good. I've spotted a place on the other side of Alpha – nice and far away from the spaceport so you guys can cover your tracks. You're off to Samel's Shuttle Emporium. 'Reliable shuttles, low prices, no questions asked'. Get your team over there by 1300 hours tomorrow, it's getting late today. Keep in mind that the days are shorter here."
The enormous orange sun hovering in the thin sky served to remind the team that this was another planet.
"Copy that, Stone. Can you give me more precise coordinates?"
"Translating the address into coordinates – 31 degrees, 30 minutes, 53.1072 seconds north, 6 degrees, 25 minutes, 56.9820 seconds west. I'm adding a waypoint in your locator now."
"Waypoint received. Oh, wow. That's a couple of hours' walk."
"And I'm afraid you're going to have to walk it. We can't afford to hire or buy a transport."
"It'll be fine, I'm sure we'll manage. We'll find a merchant's inn for tonight and head off to Sorian by tomorrow."
"Gotcha. Good luck, Team D."
Stone moved to the other teams.
"Misha, are you guys good?"
"We're fine, Mission Specialist."
"Leader of team B, Pilot Bruce. We've located some unmarked probes you could purchase at a market not far from Alpha. Patching you the coordinates now.
"E-team. You've got the shopping list?"
"Copy that, Ms. Stone," replied the Pilot George, leader of team E. "We'll be getting some rest tonight before going out to the markets tomorrow."
"Sounds good. Good luck."
Stone sighed, relieved. All was well on the desert planet below.
"All teams are go, Captain."
Captain Soryuu glanced sideways at her Vice-Captain, John Roberts. He nodded at her, as if to say, it's your ship now. She opened her mouth.
"We wait until morning. Then we begin."
"Commander, we will reach the bearing you specified in five minutes. This is your last chance to cancel or we will jump to Solhephaestus. Are you sure this is a good idea?"
"Yes, Admiral. Commence the jump to Solhephaestus. Arrive 1.2 billion metres from the surface."
"Commander, that is too close. We'll melt after a few minutes. May I suggest we jump to a point 2 billion metres away?"
"Spyglass."
"Trust is an interesting exercise," the AI mused. "Very well then, Commander. You understand that you will not be paid if you melt? And that Solhephaestus is in the opposite direction from Outpost 207?"
"Admiral. Please."
Spyglass switched his broadcasting mode to the entire fleet. "Attention, all personnel. Ensure your ships are in position behind the IMS Hercules. We will be jumping to Solhephaestus in thirty seconds.
T minus 29. 28. 27. 26. 25."
"All ships are in position!" called the chief of navigation. "They're ready to ride our jump wake!"
"15. 14. 13. 12. 11. T minus 10. Preparing Jump Drive."
"Let's do this, Spyglass," whispered Blisk. "We're going to show this asshole who's boss."
"6. 5. Initiating jump sequence in three, two, one, mark."
Four large flywheels deep within the Hercules had been drawing energy from the Hercules' tritium reactor over the past 10 minutes and had now achieved peak velocity. Each flywheel suddenly stopped, dumping their entire reserves of stored kinetic energy into two particle accelerators. The energy formed two black holes within the bounds of the Hercules' jump drive.
At the same time, the three Hammond MK. 31 large mass drivers that were the Hercules' engines flared brilliant blue, firing propellant behind it to accelerate the ship forward at a rate of 30 metres per second, slamming the entire crew back into their seats and briefly forcing the air out of their lungs.
As the space in front of them began to compress by 5,000 times the light entering the Hercules' side cameras began to speed up, bending like light through water. Solhephaestus – directly in front of the jump drives' area of influence – stayed the same, while the rest of space seemed to converge ahead of them.
"Hang on tight," grunted Blisk to the bridge crew, and then they were gone.
"Captain, we are receiving a hailing signal from Venice 3," called a Communications technician. "Do you want to take it?"
Once again, Soryuu glanced at Roberts.
"Your call, Sir."
"You're Captain now, Ma'am. I would advise you take it, but ultimately the decision is yours."
"Very well. Put them through."
A man appeared on the display screen in front of Soryuu. Heavily tanned, curly black hair, brown eyes, bony cheeks – and luscious silky robes flowing from his shoulders.
"Good afternoon, travellers!" the man grinned. "I am Lucian Jzaque, leading trader of Alpha's markets. To whom do I owe the pleasure?"
"Yuuki 'Nina' Soryuu of the TKY Shikinami. Have you business with us?"
"Perhaps." Lucian's smile never fell from his face. "I noticed your ship jumping in from New Tokyo a few hours ago – I must say, it is enormous! You're not thinking of selling, are you?"
"No thank you, perhaps another time. She has served us well so far and I'd hate to give her away."
"Very well then." He rubbed his hands together. "Well, I was wondering exactly what are you planning on buying or selling? I'd love to be of assistance."
I'm sure you would, thought Soryuu. "Well," she mused, "We've already sent some traders down to the surface -"
"Excellent!" Lucian quickly interrupted. "Send them to me! I will hook them up with whatever they need!"
"Well they'll be looking for various knicks and knacks tomorrow – fuel, of course -"
"I happen to have the largest fuel depot in town!" Lucian added.
"- and shuttles, communication pods, tritium – all sorts of things. For now, they're just looking for accommodation before they go off to the market."
"Well, tell them to come stay with me!" Lucian exclaimed, happily. "I'm used to traders staying at my mansion, we have plenty of beds for guests. I can arrange everything for you. Let me make your visit to Venice 3 as comfortable as possible. What do you say?"
"Can you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Jzaque? I'd like to discuss this with the rest of the bridge."
"Absolutely." He began to finger a ring.
"Communications, mute microphone and disable camera feed," commanded Soryuu.
She turned to Roberts. "Vice-Captain. What do you think?"
"For starters," began Roberts, "It would be unwise to trust everyone on Venice 3. That said..."
"Well?"
"I've heard of people like him before. 'Trader-hoarders', they're called.
What he'll have done is launched a huge amount of communication drones into orbit around Solvenice and told them to alert him if a large ship was approaching Venice 3. The moment he saw us he would have gone straight to the bank, asked for the biggest loan they'd give him and then hired out a large mansion and some fancy clothes to make himself look like a millionaire. By the time we arrived at Venice 3 he'd be desperately broadcasting – just like every other trader-hoarder on Venice 3 – for our attention, hoping that we'd talk to him first. He says he's the leading trader of Alpha's markets – hence the mansion, clothes, and 'the largest fuel depot in town', the last of which is likely complete bull. What he wants now is for us to send our traders to stay at his mansion. We rock up, he acts all friendly, asks what we're selling or buying, and makes sure we don't ever see the markets of Venice 3. He, claiming to be 'the leading trader of Alpha's markets, will then buy whatever we want to buy, add his own price markup, and sell it to us. He'll also buy our goods at less than what they should be and then sell them to the markets at full price. By making sure we never get to see Alpha's markets, he makes sure he makes an enormous profit off us."
"So we shouldn't go with him?"
"Depends on the markup he adds. I reckon we send team E to him and send the other teams for a quick stroll through the market. We compare the prices, and, if he's not screwing us over too badly, we leave team E there, safe within his hired mansion."
"Very well then. Activate microphone and camera feed.
I'm back, Lucian."
He dropped his ring. "Have you made your decision?" He wrung his hands nervously.
"We're going to send our traders over. Can you give us your address?"
"Yes! Uhh..." he fumbled around for a piece of paper. "Ready? 31 degrees, 31 minutes, 56.4 seconds north, 6 degrees, 23 minutes, 16.8 seconds west."
"Cool. Can you be ready for them in an hour?"
"Absolutely!" Lucian almost screamed with excitement. "Come as soon as possible!"
The call ended.
"Overwatch. Focus our long range cameras on his address. I want orbital imagery, I want to know that team E will be safe. Search the infonet too."
Soryuu turned to Roberts, raised an eyebrow. "I don't know what you were talking about, Vice-Captain. That man was obviously a trader of very high stature."
"Disengaging jump drives," Spyglass called. "All ships, confirm jump success."
"IMS Pillar of Winter successfully jumped, Admiral!" broadcast the first cruiser.
"IMS Strongarm successfully jumped, Admiral!"
"This is the Rorschach, reporting in."
"IMS Dreamgate, reporting in."
"Logistics cruiser IMS Queen of hearts, here."
"Logistics cruiser IMS Queen of spaces. We made it."
"Logi cruiser Queen of clubs, jump successful."
"Confirming successful jump drive disengage from the Queen of diamonds."
"All four carriers have jumped successfully. All four logistics cruisers have jumped successfully. Sensor readouts indicate that all destroyers, frigates and corvettes have jumped successfully." Spyglass turned to Blisk. "Commander, we are too close to Solhephaestus. We can't vent our heat fast enough. I hope you have a plan."
"We'll start by angling the Hercules so that our thrusters are pointed directly at Solhephaestus. The thrusters should deflect some of the radiation."
"Commander, I am having difficulty understanding your actions. You ask me to trust you, then you make the fleet dangerously close to Solhephaestus? Please explain yourself."
"Well." Blisk grinned. "Graves has set up camp between Hephaestus and Outpost 207, right?"
"Yes. I was planning on breaching their blockade with a pincer formation."
"Admiral, Graves invented the pincer formation. And he knows you. I'd bet a months' pay he'd preparing to counter a pincer formation. There's no way in hell we'd get past."
"Nor will we survive being this close to Solhephaestus. Status update: Hercules radiators functioning at 74 percent, and rising. We cannot survive more than 10 minutes like this, Commander."
A timer appeared on Blisk's monitor, counting down from 600 seconds.
"Very well. Admiral, shut down all non-essential systems to help out our radiators. Tell the rest of the fleet to do the same."
Blisk began to smirk. "Next, set a course for the large asteroid that's coming our way."
"Commander, do you plan to attempt a gravitational slingshot around the asteroid? To catapult us towards Outpost 207 faster than Graves expects, flying past his blockade and surprising him?"
"It's a pretty good plan, aye."
"I have already calculated the chance of such a plan's success to be 7%, Commander. Our radiators will melt before we can reach the asteroid."
Blisk's smile fell slightly.
"Admiral, are all the ships in the fleet either docked with a larger ship or cruising in our shadow?"
"Yes, Commander."
"Then here's the fun part. Ion shield capacity?"
"Current canister is at 20%, Commander, but we have another 15 cannisters."
"Divert all ions to the rear shields. Tell the shield operator to turn up the ion expenditure to maximum."
As the Hercules and her fleet sailed across the sun towards the asteroid the space by the Hercules' thrusters began to crackle and pop, the ions appearing there soaking up some of the sun's radiation.
"Ion expenditure at maximum, Commander."
"Now what are the radiators at?"
"72 percent, Commander. Cooling. But at this rate of Ion expenditure we will run out of Ions in 40 seconds."
"Turn the shields off, then. I want you to turn them on whenever the radiators hit 95%, and turn them off whenever the radiators are below 95%. Keep them balanced at near-critical."
"Very well, Commander. I trust you."
Radiators vented heat faster the hotter they were, until they hit 100% capacity – at which point, they would not be able to radiate any more heat for fear of melting, increasing the load placed on the other radiators. If the ship got too hot the ship's AI – in this case, Spyglass – would have to turn off different parts of the Hercules to keep it from getting too hot. First to go would be the weaponry system, the last, the AI core.
Life support was considered expendable. It was better for the ship to return home piloted by an AI than for the AI to turn off and then have thecrew get cooked a few minutes afterwards.
"Admiral, how many ions do we have left?"
"14 canisters. We will not survive."
"Continue on our current course."
"Very well, Commander."
"What the hell are they doing?" asked Graves, face contorted in confusion. "Outpost 207 is this way."
"Admiral," said the chief of navigation, "Scans indicate that they are too close to the sun. Keeping in mind that light takes 17 minutes to get here from their current position, they may already be dead."
"Spyglass," Graves murmured, "what are you doing?"
"Commander, we have reached our last canister of ions," informed Spyglass.
"Time till we can slingshot around that Asteroid?"
"In six minutes we will be caught in it's gravitational pull; in eight we will be within it's shadow for a few minutes, in 13 our slingshot will be complete. But our ion reserves will not last any longer than one minute, and we will melt after two. Commander, your plan is not going to work.
"Spyglass. Do you trust me?"
"Not any more."
Blisk frowned.
"Have you ever played Chess, Admiral?"
"Many millions of times, Commander. Please get to your point quickly; we have little time."
"Let me tell you a story, Admiral.
A king engages in battle and is defeated. He |
arari March 16 INDIAN OCEAN Grand Bassam March 13
We went back to all these places to track each individual, to reveal the humanity lost and to address reader concerns that not all victims of terror are treated equally. A life is a life, wherever and whenever it is cut short.
We wanted to see what connections or distinctions we might find among the victims, but also to deepen understanding of the ripple effects of the terrorism that has come to define our days. We counted 1,168 immediate surviving relatives: 211 people who had lost a parent, 78 without a spouse.
More than 100 victims, young and old, left behind parents, whose language of mourning translates across borders.
“This is pain, I think, that we cannot describe,” said Michel Visart, whose daughter Lauriane was killed in the explosion at the Brussels subway station.
“My son was like a candle in the house,” said Khaleel Kadhum, a father in Iraq who had moved his family from Baghdad to the relatively safer south only to have his son, Ahmed, encounter terror there. “This candle was snuffed out, and the happiness of the family is gone.”
The oldest victim was Sevinc Gokay, an 84-year-old retired civil servant who was killed in Ankara. The youngest were not even born: Two pregnant women were killed along with the babies they carried; a third, Songul Bektas, survived but lost her pregnancy in its third trimester.
Her husband said that they learned only later that the fetus had been female, and that they would have named her Elif, Turkish for slim and tall.
There were 17 victims 10 or younger; and 27 ages 11 to 17.
Ahmed Aasim Abdulkhuder, 10, was among the boys blown up by a suicide bomber after a match at an Iraq soccer stadium. His mother, Ibtihal, said her son was such a devoted fan of Barcelona that he rarely dressed in anything other than the team’s colors. He died wearing a Barcelona jersey, which she said was “the dearest thing to him.”
Victims Under 18 Alaa Mohammad Abdullah 17 One of six siblings, he was killed with two young friends.Ahmed Ali Ahmed Hasan Aboud Ali 13 Ahmed Aasim Abdulkhuder 10 Waleed Adil Abdulsalman 16 A good student, he was done with homework and ready for ice cream.Muhanad Abeed Muhanad Khazal Abeed 10 He wanted to become a professional soccer player.Karrar Ali Karrar Abbas Ali 13 He was one of four siblings.Mohammad Ali Mohammad Ali 15 Urooj Ali 12
Samiullah Ali
10
Wajahat Ali
5
Wasif Amanat
16
Momina Amjad
12
She was always seen carrying a baby doll, or trying to lift younger children.Falmata Ba Falmata Ba 4
She and a cousin would toddle around together.Ali Bukar Ali Bukar 2
Mehmet Emre Cakar
16
The middle child of five brothers, he loved soccer.Ghaith Dewan Ghaith Ahmed Abdullah Dewan 10
Shiraz Faiz
6
Samina Faiz
5
Sadaf Faiz
0
Emaan Fatima
3
A young artist, she would draw pictures of animals in the sand.Yakura Gambo Yakura Gambo 6
Bilal Majid Hamid
13
Haseeb
5
Murtada Asim Hilal
17
He dreamed of becoming a martyr.Akram Ismail Akram Majid Lateef Ismail 17
Zainab Jamshed
8
Aman John
13
Mohammad Kasim Kadhum
11
She cooked, cleaned and fetched water for her blind father.Zainabu Maina Zainabu Maina 8
He would often visit his grandfather’s house to play.Colomi Maina Colomi Maina 7
Junaid Masih
16
Sagar Masih
17
Abdullah Najah Nuri
11
Atakan Eray Ozyol
15
Destina Peri Parlak
16
Sahil Pervaiz
11
Waqar Pervaiz
15
Shahroon Pitras
15
Sahil Rahmat
11
Muqadas Saleem
16
Mariam Saleem
16
Ousmane Sangare
16
Javeria Shahid
2
Somal Tariq
12
There were Jews and Christians and atheists, and at least one Hindu, but 151 of the victims — 61 percent — were Muslim like their killers.
A Taliban splinter group claimed to be targeting Christians at the Lahore park. But most of those killed there, too, were Muslim — like Zubaida Amjad, 40, who knew the Quran by heart and was teaching her 12-year-old daughter, Momina Amjad, to recite the verses. The girl was killed, too.
Zubaida Amjad 40 Momina Amjad 12
And in Brussels, the subway victims included Loubna Lafquiri, 34, a gym teacher and mother of three from Molenbeek, the same hardscrabble area where Saleh Abdeslam, a suspect in the Paris attacks, lived.
“Molenbeek is not only Saleh Abdeslam,” said Mohamed el-Bachiri, Ms. Lafquiri’s husband. “Molenbeek is also Loubna Lafquiri.”
Loubna Lafquiri 34
The 247 victims included Americans, Chinese, Congolese, French, Germans, Israelis, Lebanese, Macedonians, Peruvians, Polish — 26 nationalities in all. Most died less than 10 miles from where they lived.
But a Chinese medicine salesman named Deng Jingquan was more than 7,000 miles from home, at the Brussels airport, when it came under attack. In messages to friends during his travels, he hinted at his homesickness.
Where Victims Were Born Brussels europe UNITED STATES China Africa Atlantic Ocean Pacific Ocean Liberia Indian Ocean south america CONGO PERU FRANCE UNITED STATES europe macedonia Asia asia Peshawar Iskandariya Istanbul Lahore Ankara africa IRAN Ummarari MOROCCO NIGERIA africa africa Indian Ocean Grand Bassam CONGO Where Victims Were Born Brussels Peshawar Istanbul Ummarari Lahore Iskandariya Ankara Grand Bassam
The victims over these two weeks were musicians, scholars, teachers, waitresses, police officers, housewives, farmers, students.
Abassi Ouattara Moussa, Gervais Kouadio N’Guessan and Hamed Diomande served in Ivory Coast’s special forces.
Fabienne Vansteenkiste worked at a check-in counter at the Brussels airport. Avraham Goldman, an American-Israeli killed while on vacation in Istanbul, had owned a textile factory and, after retirement, was working as a tour guide.
Zainami Mustapha cut and sold firewood in Ummarari, Nigeria. His countryman Bamaina Usman bought and sold chickens. Jidda Muhammed, killed alongside them, was a blacksmith.
There were those whose lives had been long and filled with accomplishments, like André Adam, a former Belgian ambassador to the United Nations who had also seen the effects of political violence during diplomatic duty in Algeria and Congo.
His relatives said that Mr. Adam’s last act was to shield his wife, Danielle, from the blast at the Brussels airport. She was seriously injured but survived.
And there were those whose lives were short and plagued by hardship, like Ousmane Sangare, 16, who was born mute and hard of hearing in Ivory Coast. His parents had abandoned him and moved to Mali, according to a social worker. Ousmane slept at a train station but liked to go to the Grand Bassam beach on weekends to beg — and to swim. That’s where the terrorists caught him.
André Adam 79 Ousmane Sangare 16
About half the 247 victims in the two weeks were killed alongside someone they knew. Jean Edouard Charpentier, 78, a retired forest ranger from France, had just finished a bike ride in Grand Bassam with his friend Jean-Pierre Arnaud, 75, a salesman who played the guitar. At the soccer stadium, most of the victims had gone to see the game with friends, brothers, cousins.
Victims Who Knew Each Other Lines connect family members, friends and acquaintances. Lahore, Pakistan Iskandariya, Iraq Ankara, Turkey Brussels Airport Subway station Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast Ummarari, Nigeria Peshawar, Pakistan Istanbul Lahore, Pakistan Iskandariya, Iraq Ankara, Turkey Ummarari, Nigeria Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast Brussels Airport Subway station Peshawar, Pakistan Istanbul
Families were decimated. In Nigeria, a mother was killed along with her son and two daughters; another woman died alongside her husband, son, mother, niece and nephew. At the Lahore park, 10 relatives, all gone, including Faiz Ahmed Chandio, a clerk in the government’s irrigation department who loved to cook rice with chicken gravy, and three of his six children: Shiraz, 6; Samina, 5; and Sadaf, 5 months.
They were one of at least nine sets of siblings killed.
Siblings Killed Together He sold tomatoes and other ingredients for soup.Bukar Ali Bukar Ali 45 He was an Islamic scholar.Chari Modu Chari Modu 55 Samiullah Ali 10 Urooj Ali 12 Wajahat Ali 5
She and a cousin would toddle around together.Ali Bukar Ali Bukar 2 She was always seen carrying a baby doll, or trying to lift younger children.Falmata Ba Falmata Ba 4 A young artist, she would draw pictures of animals in the sand.Yakura Gambo Yakura Gambo 6
Mohammad Kamil Durayib 21 He was a father of nine.Sabah Durayib Sabah Kamil Durayib 39
Sadaf Faiz 0 Samina Faiz 5
Shiraz Faiz
6
He would often visit his grandfather’s house to play.Colomi Maina Colomi Maina 7 She cooked, cleaned and fetched water for her blind father.Zainabu Maina Zainabu Maina 8
Alexander Pinczowski 29 Sascha Pinczowski 26
Aini Saleem 24 Mariam Saleem 16
He was a chicken merchant.Bamaina Usman Bamaina Usman 63 He was killed with three family members.Husseini Colomi Husseini Colomi 55
In Brussels, Ankara and Istanbul, the attacks ended lives that had been lived in relative security. In Nigeria, Iraq and Pakistan, where terror and violence lurk around every corner, some families found themselves in familiar postures of mourning.
Ahmed Ibrahim, one of several victims at the Iraqi soccer stadium who were soldiers in the fight against the Islamic State, died 13 years after his brother was felled by American forces in 2003.
Two brothers, Sabah and Mohammed Durayib, were buried in the Shiite holy city of Najaf — next to their father, killed by Al Qaeda five years before.
At least three of those slain in the Nigerian mosque had fled parts of their country where an insurgency raged. Bukar Umar, an aspiring politician, left his home village after Boko Haram fighters burned down his house. Muhammed Hauwa, 70, settled in Ummarari, where he found fertile land to farm, and, he felt, a measure of safety.
Another farmer, Bunu Modu, managed to escape after militants in his village tied him up with plans to kill him — he had been running a little Islamic school with 10 pupils under a tree.
Surviving relatives and friends held close the last moments with loved ones, parsing them for deeper meanings.
A mother in Iraq bathed her 11-year-old son, put him in fresh clothes and sent him off to the soccer game. She didn’t feel right about it, and wished he wouldn’t go.
Friends and family of a young militiaman killed in the same attack said that just before heading to the stadium, he had come to them to ask forgiveness for his misdeeds. Now they wonder if he had a premonition.
In Nigeria, Muhammed Ali recalled the last time he saw his father, Ali Kolo, three days before he was killed during morning prayers at the Ummarari mosque. It had been six months since Mr. Ali’s wife had died, and he told his father, “I would love to remarry.”
The snapshots we collected show the moments that make up a life. A bride in her gown, sitting on the floor and eating a snack. A soldier, dapper in his dress uniform. Graduates in cap and gown on their big day.
A man on horseback, a man strumming a guitar, a man walking a lonely country road surrounded by wildflowers. Reading a book or drinking beer, celebrating a major life event or enjoying a typical family dinner.
They were killed in the moments that might have made the next set of snapshots.
Waiting for a bus, or a subway or a plane. Chilling out at the beach. Lining up for trophies after a soccer match. Praying, riding a bicycle, taking that Sunday stroll in a park.
What emerges is a tapestry of lives interrupted, splayed out gradually in those photographs, in anecdotal shards or bits of memory shared by those left behind, in the details of their dreams and the things left undone.
This project was produced and written by Tim Arango, Russell Goldman, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Eli Rosenberg and Jodi Rudoren. Reporting was contributed by Loucoumane Coulibaly and Daouda Coulibaly from Ivory Coast; Burcak Belli from Ankara, Turkey; Chris Stein from Nigeria; Dionne Searcey from Senegal; Ceylan Yeginsu and Safak Timur from Istanbul; Irit Pazner Garshowitz from Jerusalem; Dan Bilefsky and Neil Collier from Brussels; Maha Mohammed from Babel Province, Iraq; Qasim Mohammed from Najaf, Iraq; Omar Al-Jawoshy from Baghdad; Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan; Daniyal Hassan and Naila Inayat from Lahore, Pakistan; Benoit Morenne from Paris; Sewell Chan and Hannah Olivennes from London; Christopher Buckley from Beijing; Joanna Berendt from Warsaw; Andrea Zarate from Lima, Peru; Nina Siegal from Amsterdam; and Mike McPhate, Katie Rogers and Daniel Victor from New York. Production, photo and design assistance by Craig Allen, Danny DeBelius, David Furst, Jeffrey Rubin, Rumsey Taylor and Meghan Louttit. Research was contributed by Susan Beachy, Doris Burke, Elisa Cho and Alain Delaquérière.Poll Marijuana vs Opioids
In this April 15, 2017 photo marijuana plants sit for sale on display in ShowGrow a medical marijuana provider in downtown Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)
WASHINGTON - Dozens of activists, including some military veterans, plan to light joints Monday on the steps of the U.S. Capitol - federal land where committing the offense could draw a sentence of up to a year in jail - as part of an effort to urge a reluctant Congress to support marijuana legalization.
"Monday @ High Noon" reads a flier for the event, calling on Congress to also remove marijuana from the nation's list of most-dangerous drugs. "Mass Civil Disobedience @ 4:20p - East Side of the US Capitol."
Activists for the cause have flirted with arrest before, including smoking near the White House when President Barack Obama was in office. But the April 24 event marks the first time activists plan to light up squarely on federal land - and against the backdrop of the U.S. Capitol dome, where the image may be hard for federal authorities to ignore.
It also would be the first significant protest to take place under a Trump administration that has suggested there would be greater enforcement of federal drug laws prohibiting the use of recreational marijuana than under the Obama administration.
"You can only ask nicely for so long before you have to change your tactic," said Adam Eidinger, a co-founder of the advocacy group DCMJ. Eidinger said he is making sure his 13-year-old daughter will be taken care of and that his rent is paid in case he must spend an extended period of time in jail.
"It's come to this," he said.
Eidinger's primary mission is to push Congress to allow the District to fully enact a ballot measure approved by voters in 2014, to legalize marijuana for recreational use.
Seven in 10 D.C. voters backed the measure, which made possession legal, but left to District lawmakers was the task of writing rules to regulate and tax marijuana sales. Conservative House Republicans blocked local leaders from taking those steps, invoking Congress's broad power over local District affairs to do so.
That's left it legal for people in the District to possess marijuana, but not to legally buy or sell it, creating a gray market where people now grow it at home and barter and trade for pot.
"It's silly," Eidinger said. "We should legalize the activity that is already going on and give the District the ability to tax and regulate - it will raise money and make it safer for consumers."
The U.S. Capitol Police, which has jurisdiction over the Capitol grounds, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Eidinger said he has not discussed the planned protest with police but has been in touch with authorities about another event scheduled for Thursday, a national day of pro-pot advocacy.
Eidinger's group plans to distribute free marijuana joints to anyone with a congressional ID badge on a city street outside the Capitol. Under current law, possessing the joints on city streets is not a crime, but smoking it is.
The group has already rolled more than 1,000 joints and has dozens of volunteers ready to distribute them.
Nikolas Schiller, the other co-founder of DCMJ, said he hopes the back-to-back events will also focus congressional attention on reauthorizing a measure that shields medicinal marijuana programs from federal law enforcement actions.
The measure, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, is scheduled to expire at the end of April.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said the benefits of medical marijuana may be overhyped and suggested that he may take a tougher stand on states that legalize. On Tuesday, Sessions added that marijuana "distribution networks" including in the D.C. area, promote gang activity.
Any mass arrests from Monday's planned protest would be left to federal prosecutors in the District to handle. Channing D. Phillips, the current prosecutor, was appointed by Obama and has said he expects to be replaced.
--The Washington PostHEMPSTEAD, NY - SEPTEMBER 26: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gestures during the Presidential Debate at Hofstra University on September 26, 2016 in Hempstead, New York. The first of four debates for the 2016 Election, three Presidential and one Vice Presidential, is moderated by NBC's Lester Holt. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Can we even count all the ways that NBC's ongoing business relationship with President-elect Donald Trump, in the form of his executive producer title for The Apprentice, obliterates virtually every common sense standard that exists for avoiding conflicts of interest and creates an impossible situation for the network's reporters?
The parent company for NBC News, one of the largest news organizations in America, is going to maintain its business relationship with the president of the United States; the same Donald Trump whom NBC announced last year didn't reflect the company's "core values," which was why NBC publicly terminated its business relationship with him.
But now after winning the White House, it turns out Trump is going to stay on as executive producer for the latest incarnation of The Apprentice reality show, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. And all of this we're learning just days after Trump made a big public show about how he was going to remove himself from his business conflicts.
We're obviously through the looking glass with this Trump-NBC deal. Yet lots of Beltway pundits, the type who obsessed over the appearance of conflicts for Hillary Clinton during the campaign, now shrug their shoulders and suggest Trump maintaining a lucrative business association with a news and entertainment giant is no big deal.
Unfortunately, NBC News is no stranger to ethical entanglements when it comes to Trump and the larger NBC family. In October, NBC News was caught flat footed on one of the biggest scoops of the election season when The Washington Post revealed live-microphone comments Trump had made during an Access Hollywood taping about grabbing women by the "pussy," because when you're a "star" you "can do anything."
Access Hollywood airs on NBC and executives at NBC News were told about the tape days before the Post scoop.
As CNN reported:
"Thanks to a series of decisions that can be described as at least curious, NBC News missed out on gaining credit for the scoop of the campaign, an October surprise to put all others that have come before it to shame.
"And it has left NBC News answering questions about its hyper-cautious reaction to the tape, and pondering if it can rehabilitate the image of its recent high-profile anchor hire, Billy Bush."
Once the disturbing tape recordings were found, NBC reportedly sat on the blockbuster story figuring out how to proceed. (By contrast, the Post published its story just hours after learning about the tapes.) But today, with Trump having an ongoing financial relationship with NBC, we're supposed to believe there won't be anymore potential entanglements? That's really not believable.
Meanwhile, recognize that over the years, NBC News treated Trump very kindly while his show was a tent pole on NBC's entertainment lineup.
Earlier this year during the Republican primary season, when the conservative Media Research Center was upset with how much television airtime Trump was getting compared to the other GOP candidates, the group examined NBC News' often-cozy relationship with Trump between 2004-2015, while he was a regular presence on NBC's primetime lineup:
"NBC has spent more than a decade building his brand as a successful businessman of almost mythic proportion. The network's coverage of Trump was overwhelmingly and consistently positive. MRC Business found only 15 stories (out of 335) on Trump's business failures, and 320 stories promoting him as a businessman, his businesses and his shows. The vast majority of stories were about the network's show The Apprentice, which featured Trump... NBC News's Today served as a de facto PR machine for The Apprentice and its star."
It's impossible to suggest those conflicts for NBC will soon evaporate when Trump's sworn into office. In fact, they'll only multiply.
For instance, The Apprentice has been leaking viewers for years. If the show continues to lag next year, who at NBC is going to be responsible for telling President Trump that his television show has been canceled and his weekly, five-figure checks are going to dry up? What if the enraged executive producer (i.e. the president of the United States) then goes on a Twitter tirade and urges his millions of followers to stop watching NBC programs, or he starts an advertising boycott against the network?
Conversely, what if the new Apprentice turns into a ratings behemoth? Will NBC News think twice about airing a blockbuster scandal report about Trump corruption, for instance, knowing it could damage a key NBC primetime asset?
And remember how Trump picked that weird public fight with U.S. manufacturing giant Boeing last week? What if the next target of Trump's free market wrath decides it needs to mend fences with the White House and buys millions of dollars worth of product placement on The Apprentice; a cut of which could end up in Trump's pocket?
This is just nuts. Trump's looming business conflicts are out of control. The fact that a media company with a huge news division is part of the problem just makes it all the more distressing.
Meanwhile, a key point is that this is just the latest in the media's rampant normalization of Trump's wildly abnormal behavior. Every modern-day president before Trump, and every modern-day nominee before him, pledged to make sure not only wouldn't there be any conflicts of interest surrounding their presidencies, but there wouldn't even any appearances of conflicts; of cashing in on the Oval Office. (Cue Richard Nixon: "People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.")
Now Trump does the opposite by openly flaunting obvious conflicts and the D.C. press largely shrugs its shoulders. (Exceptions were appreciated.) Does the controversy surrounding Trump's Apprentice payday constitute the pressing issue facing the president-elect's transition? It does not. (Not when he's tapping a climate denier to run the EPA, among other alarming moves.) But it highlights the disturbing pattern of the press routinely explaining away Trump's unparalleled behavior.
I mean c'mon. When President Obama published a children's book in 2010 as president, he donated all the earnings to charity. It would have been political suicide for him to even think about pocketing the profits. And it also would've been the unethical thing do.
But Trump thumbs his nose at all of that and lots of journalists just shrug while NBC stays mum? This is just the press needlessly normalizing radical Republican behavior.1 of 15 View Caption
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Your state local efforts are very important. We need to establish a network of citizen-advocates around the nation to advance the cause of ending marijuana prohibition and stopping the arrests of responsible smokers. Currently NORML has over 150 active chapters around the U.S.A. (and world) working hard in their communities to change these laws. Click here to see if there is already a chapter in your local area.
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5. The group must agree to operate in a professional manner and to avoid activities that would bring disrepute or otherwise harm NORML and its reform efforts. This includes the sale of so-called drug paraphernalia, grow lights and seeds (other than sterile hemp seeds) in non-legal states. Also, chapters should seriously consider seeking a local legal opinion regarding the sale of drug testing alternatives and flush remedies.
6. Guidelines for NORML state affiliates or chapters in states that have legalized the sale and/or use of medical marijuana.
(a) Because of NORML's federal tax-exempt status, no entity distributing marijuana, whether a cooperative, a collective, a non-profit, a for-profit, or any other entity, may serve as a NORML chapter, nor may the NORML name be used by any entity distributing marijuana.
(b) A majority of the board of directors of any NORML affiliate or chapter must be comprised of individuals who are not principals, board members or employees of any entity distributing marijuana.
(c) NORML affiliates and chapters must establish and maintain an address separate from any entity distributing marijuana. NORML affiliates and chapters may conduct meetings at the location of an entity that distributes marijuana, only if the entity is not conducting business during NORML functions. Any entity providing meeting space for a NORML affiliate or chapter shall close one hour prior to the NORML meeting or function and shall remain closed for one hour after the meeting or event has ended.
7. After a one year grace period, every state affiliate and local chapter is required to host at least one fundraising event annually (i.e. concert, party, etc.) co-sponsored by national NORML, whereby the proceeds will be split among the two involved organizations. NORML will provide assistance by promoting the show through our e-mail and mailing lists. Campus chapters, while not required to comply with this rule, are strongly encouraged to do so.
NORML reserves the right to revoke the affiliate status of any group or organization which fails to operate in accordance with these guidelines.
Questions regarding the affiliation process should be directed to the National Outreach Director at NORML, 1100 H Street, NW, Suite 830, Washington, DC, 2005. Telephone: (202) 483-5500. Fax: (202) 483-0057. E-mail: KevinM@norml.org
Those groups that wish to affiliate with NORML must complete the following application and submit to NORML for approval. No group or organization is authorized to act as an affiliate, or to publicly include "NORML" in their name, until the application has been approved by the Executive Director.A huge eruption lit up the skies on our planet two million years ago - creating a fuzzy ball of light around the size and brightness of the moon.
The eruption - a huge blast from the black hole at the centre of our galaxy - would have been witnessed by our ancestors, homo erectus, on the plains of Africa.
Scientists have found the first evidence of this “huge explosion” of radiation from the supermassive black hole - four million times the mass of our sun - a faint glow in a cloud of gas millions of miles from the black hole itself.
Scientists describe the supermassive black hole - Saggitarius A* - as a “dormant volcano”.
Blasts of energy can jet out of black holes when stars and gas clouds are “consumed” by the black hole - and scientists warn that there are “lots and lots” circling our galactic centre.
One in particular could erupt next year.
[Solar sails to "carry mankind to the stars"]
"They have been monitoring a cloud and predict that it will fall into the black hole at some point in the next year; however, the amount of material will be far less than the event that illuminated the stream," said Greg Madsen, astronomer at the University of Cambridge.
"It will be much fainter and will pose no threat to Earth, but several powerful telescopes will be poised and ready to watch what happens."
Astronomers have long suspected that a large explosion occurred millions of years ago - but have never been able to prove it.
The evidence comes from a lacy filament of gas, mostly hydrogen, called the Magellanic Stream. This trails behind our galaxy’s two small companion galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
“For twenty years we’ve seen this odd glow from the Magellanic Stream,” said Professor Joss Bland-Hawthorn, of the University of Sydney, who led a team studying this problem.
“We didn’t understand the cause. Then suddenly we realized it must be the mark, the fossil record, of a huge outburst of energy from the center of our galaxy.”
“It’s been long suspected that our galactic center might have sporadically flared up in the past. These observations are a highly suggestive ‘smoking gun’,” said Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal.
The team gives its arguments in a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Professor Bland-Hawthorn will speak about the work at the Galaxy Zoo meeting in Sydney, Australia, on 24 September.
The galaxy’s supermassive black hole has been known for decades. It’s orbited by a swarm of stars whose paths let us measure the black hole’s mass: four million times the mass of the Sun.
The region around the black hole, called Sagittarius A* [“A-star”], pours out radio waves, infrared, X-rays and gamma rays.
Flickers of radiation rise up when small clouds of gas fall onto the hot disk of matter that swirls around the black hole.
But evidence has been building of a real cataclysm in the past. Infrared and X-ray satellites have seen a powerful ‘wind’ (outflow) of material from this central region. Antimatter boiling out has left its signature. And there are the ‘Fermi bubbles’ -- two huge hot bubbles of gas billowing out from the galactic center, seen in gamma-rays and radio waves.
“All this points to a huge explosion at the center of our galaxy,” said team member Dr. Philip Maloney of the University of Colorado in Boulder, USA.
Scientists studying the galactic center came together at a workshop at Stanford University in California earlier this year.
While at the workshop, Professor Bland-Hawthorn realized the Stream could be holding the memory of the galactic center’s past.
Struck by the fiery breath of Sagittarius A*, the Stream is emitting light, much as particles from the Sun hit our atmosphere and trigger the colored glows of the aurorae -- the Northern and Southern Lights.
The brightest glow in the Stream comes from the region nearest the galactic center.
Geometry, the amount of energy from the original flare from Sagittarius A*, the time the flare would take to travel to the Magellanic Stream, the rate at which the Stream would have cooled over time -- “it all fits together, it all adds up,” says team member Dr. Greg Madsen of the University of Cambridge in the UK.
Scientists say that such flares can and will happen again.
“There are lots of stars and gas clouds that could fall onto the hot disk around the black hole,” says Professor Bland-Hawthorn. “There’s a gas cloud called G2 that we think will fall in next year. It’s small, but we’re looking forward to the fireworks!”A recent immigrant to Minneapolis from Somalia is facing 2 felony charges in the northern valley.
Twenty-two-year old Mohamed Ayanle is facing charges of First and Third Degree Criminal Sexual Conduct. He allegedly raped a woman, while riding a commercial bus through Polk County.
Valley News Teams Neil Carlson shows us what happened.
It all started after 6 o’clock Friday night when Polk County authorities received a 9-1-1 call from a Jefferson Lines bus that was east of Crookston, near Mentor, Minnesota. The female victim reported that Mohamed Ayanle forced her to have sex with him at knife point.
Police were waiting for the bus at it’s next stop at UMC in Crookston, where they reported only 4 passengers on the bus.
The victim told police that Ayanle also got on the bus in Minneapolis and that after a stop in Bemidji, he asked her to come to the back of the bus to watch a movie on his cell phone. The victim told police she believed he had a knife. So, she left her 7-year old daughter sleeping, while she went to the back of the bus, where she says she was raped by Ayanle. Then, he told her to go back to the front of the bus, because she was too fat.
Ayanle told police that yes, he had sex with her, but it was consensual. He was placed under arrest.
Meanwhile, the bus line remains a convenient and inexpensive way |
But then they are disingenuous enough to call it "open," when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can't use this feature unless you're on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.
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1. The Facebook application itself sucks
Between the farms and the mafia wars and the "top news" (which always guesses wrong - is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I'm single) and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don't bother. (And, yet, somehow, I can't even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my page look personalized.) Let's not even get into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.
Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn't the most usable thing in the world, at least they've tried to stay focused and aren't trying to be everything to everyone.
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I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren't. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn't mean we have to actually put up with them. Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed - have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype, the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining their bank account. And Facebook's revenue remains more or less a rounding error for more established tech companies.
Click to viewWhile social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.
Dan Yoder is a serial entrepreneur and the VP of Engineering at Border Stylo, a Hollywood-based social media startup. He can be reached on Twitter as @dyoder.
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Disclosure by Dan Yoder: I'm the VP of Engineering for a Hollywood-based social media startup, BorderStylo. The opinions expressed here are purely my own and are not in any way endorsed by my employer. While I do not see our applications as directly competitive to Facebook, nor have I presented them as such, it would be disingenuous not to mention this.
Thanks to David Harthcock for creating the great "Ban Facebook" graphic.Many progressive groups assume that we must prioritize making college education accessible to prisoners if we are to reduce recidivism. That is why Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced Friday that President Obama will temporarily lift the ban on Pell Grants – money from the federal government for who couldn’t afford college otherwise – to see if there is a connection between education and re-offending. But this plan misses one important fact: you can’t get a college degree if you are illiterate.
Pell grants to bring college back to prison: US is 'a nation of second chances' Read more
Inmates barely receive proper and effective high school education. As of October 2010, the last date for which data is available, 17,609 inmates were on waiting lists for GED classes in federal prisons alone. It seems unlikely that the backlog would have cleared as federal prison populations grew between 2010 and 2014. We don’t know how many inmates in state facilities are waiting to access high school classes.
The numbers of inmates who have a high school diploma or equivalent bounce all over the place. Some – like the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency prevention – say it’s as high as 80%. Other sources say it’s about 40%, so we don’t really know how many people have high school education when they land behind bars.
A study conducted by the Educational Testing Service in 1996, shortly after prisoner Pell grants had evaporated, found that about 67% of inmates couldn’t write a brief letter explaining a billing error, read a map or understand a bus schedule. Using 12th grade literacy as the standard, 75% of inmates are illiterate. The situation is worse for juveniles in
the justice system, 85% of whom are illiterate.
That’s what makes the debate about college funding so misplaced. While the infusion of grant money might resurrect some of college programs and provide a classroom experience for prisoners, what professors can accomplish in classes containing remedial readers?
Of course, there are literate inmates who can benefit from the funding for college programs. When my cellmate took a sociology course offered by Trinity College, I watched her throw off the shackles of emotional abuse – being called useless, stupid – as she convinced herself that she could be a successful college student. I watched her rehabilitate herself through that course.
But so many more inmates are not ready for college courses because they can barely read. We owe these inmates the high school education and literacy training that can prepare them to apply for those Pell grants. In not including increased funding for secondary education in prisons in his criminal justice reform agenda, President Obama is ignoring the most effective way to reduce recidivism.
Consider that the 2013 Rand study that correctional education advocates rely on as evidence of education’s power to reduce crime does not specifically tease out the effect of higher education on recidivism. The report states that high school education can have a great impact in reducing recidivism. This effect is most likely because these inmates are learning to read in the GED programs offered. Learning to read cuts a prisoner’s chances of re-offending from 70% to 14%.
And we are clearly not fixing the problem of prisoner under-education if the statistics on prisoner literacy – a rough proxy for high school education – are any indication. Despite the staggering problem of prison illiteracy, only 9% of all inmates with low literacy skills receive literacy training while they are incarcerated.
That’s why ending the ban on Pell grants isn’t the boon to criminal justice reform that everyone thinks it is. Other correctional educational needs must be addressed first if this country wants to prevent released prisoners from re-offending.This is my little sister Lila Jane and I a few years ago playing put-put. Shes adorable. The course has all kinds of castles and pirates, but Lila's favorite are the giant lizards.
Some adorable photos..
And now some science.
Did you know that lizards don't have lips?
Nope, no lips. This lucky lizard was getting lots of love from a sweet little mammal, but giving none in return. Why don't lizards have lips? Well, they don't really need lips. But lets start at the beginning.
Lizards are reptiles, and they have been around for approximately 350 million years. The Mesozoic is known as the Age of Reptiles for good reason. Dinosaurs dominated the terrestrial environment, but the transition from aquatic amphibious individuals to fully terrestrial reptiles required many physiological changes in the preceding era, the Paleozoic. If you want to be on land, but will dry out, it would be most advantageous to have skin that is more thick and keratinized scales t…A local retailer is opening a new downtown grocery store and restaurant this weekend.
Russo’s International Market will host a grand-opening celebration on Saturday from 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. at its new 4,500-square-foot location in Grand Rapids, at 241 Fulton St. W.
The location's restaurant will seat up to 60 customers indoors and up to 20 customers outdoors, as well as offer to-go options.
The opening menu will feature gourmet sandwiches, pizza, salads, Italian entrees and kid-friendly options.
The location will also sell a wide selection of food, wines, deli items, craft beers, liquors, kitchenware and more.
“We always knew we would return to our roots, and this second location will allow us to serve the downtown community, as we once did 112 years ago,” said Phil Russo, president, Russo’s International Market.
Russo’s International Market, founded in 1905, also operates a location on 29th Street SE in Grand Rapids, which was purchased in 1976 and expanded in 2008.New Delhi: A group of men, fighting for shared parenting in case of divorce or separation, will demand this Independence Day a law to make shared parenting mandatory.
The group also says pre-marital counselling should be made compulsory to bring down the number of divorces. "We will meet in Agra this Independence Day to chalk out a strategy to raise the demand to roll back the Marriage Laws (Amendment) Bill of 2010, which is pending in the Lok Sabha," said Kumar V. Jahgirdar, founder and president of the Child Rights Initiative for Shared Parenting (CRISP).
He said a new bill with a provision to make shared parenting mandatory in case of separation of the parents, should replace the existing bill, also known as Irrevocable Breakdown of Marriage. According to him, a child needs the care and affection of both biological parents and grandparents.
Jahgirdar said more than 200 men activists from across India would chalk out a plan for "equal married men rights". For the first time, foreign delegates from the US and Britain are also participating in the two-day summit beginning Aug 15 in Taj city.
Bangalore-based CRISP, which has been fighting in association with Save Family Foundation for the rights of fathers and children for six years, will organise this annual event, the sixth in the series.
Among other issues slated for discussion during the summit are to make the Domestic Violence Act of 2005 gender-neutral so that 'harassed' husbands also have an opportunity for judicial remedy. They also want amendment of section 498(A) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) that deals with harassing a married woman to make it a bailable offence.
Quoting figures from a National Crime Record Bureau report titled "Crime in India - 2013" released last month, he said the number of suicides increased to 134,799 in 2013 from 110,851 in 2003. The report says the number of married men (64,098) committing suicide in 2013 was double the number of married women (29,491).
CRISP, with regional chapters in Chandigarh, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi and Lucknow, has been demanding an increase in the number of family and magistrate courts.'Jobless family of TWELVE handed eight-bedroom former children's home (and, of course, it's the taxpayer who is footing the bill)
A family of twelve who rejected a string of council houses have finally got their dream home - an eight-bedroom house courtesy of the taxpayer.
Donna Harrison, 35, and Fabian Bland, 43, had been squashed into a terraced house in Bradford with ten children aged between two and 15.
The family turned down several four-bedroom houses offered to them by their social landlord because they had set their heart on a former children’s home.
Both parents are unemployed, so their £133-a-week rent is paid through housing benefit.
New home: Donna Harrison and Fabian Bland with (back row) Daniel, 14, Fabian, three, Megan, 12, Sarah, 14, Chloe 13, and (front row) Fabienne, four, Morgan, seven, Jack, nine, Kieron eight, and Aaron, 12, now have an eight-bedroom house to call home
Mother Donna said: 'Getting this house is the best thing that’s ever happened to us.
'All the kids absolutely love it and I love it. It’s made a really big change to our lives.
'They have their own space, they can do their homework. They have space to do whatever they want to do.
'We got the news just before Christmas so it was a great Christmas present for us. We moved in just after and have been busy sorting everything out since then.
'I’m over the moon, it’s just absolute heaven.'
'Absolute heaven': With eight bedrooms to go around, there's space for four of the children to have their own bedrooms in the house, which also has a garden and dining room
The couple have seven children of their own, and also care for Donna’s sister’s three children following the death of their grandmother, who was their guardian.
Donna and Fabian receive £500 per month in child benefits and child tax and £160 per fortnight for Jobseeker's Allowance, and their rent in housing benefit.
Donna added: 'Fabian lost his job as a delivery driver about six months ago so getting the house after the battle was good news for us in what has been a hard time.
'He’s been busy decorating the new house, painting the walls and that sort of thing.
'It’s made a massive improvement - just things like using the bathroom. In our last house there was just one but now we have two and a separate toilet so everything’s much easier.
'We’ve got a dining room which we didn’t have before, and a huge kitchen. There is so much more space, and it’s not cluttered anymore - in the last house it was always so full and cluttered.
'There is a great big garden for the children to play in too.'
Busy decorating: Fabian lost his job when his boss retired six months ago
Donna used to share a bedroom with a son, daughter and her partner in their old £80-per-week home, and had received a letter from her daughter Fabienne’s school suggesting sleeping arrangements needed to be changed because the six-year-old kept telling teachers she needed an afternoon nap.
Now, Donna and Fabian have their own bedroom and so do four of the children.
This is the first time in 20 years that Fabian has claimed benefits.
Donna said: 'I know what some people will say about us living off the state with so many children, and it makes me angry.
'He’s worked hard all his life and he couldn’t help losing his job - he worked for a small family-run business and when the boss decided to retire there was nothing he could do but let Fabian go.
'Fabian’s looking for work every day. He is desperate for a new job but it’s difficult for anyone to get a job nowadays.
'Yes we have a lot of children but that was unexpected - I didn’t expect to be looking after my sister’s children but that’s the way things have turned out.
'I didn’t expect my mum, who was caring for them, to die so early from cancer.
'And I’m saving the state money in looking after my sister’s children - it would be costing the Government thousands if they were in care.'
Donna has previously spoken of how the children, Sarah, 16, Daniel, 15, Chloe, 14, Megan, 13, Aaron, 13, Jack, 10, Keiran, nine, Morgan, eight, Fabienne, six, and Fabian Jr, three, struggled to fit in their old house.
The family were disappointed to be told last September that they wouldn’t be able to move into their dream home, and contacted Bradford South MP Gerry Sutcliffe and Councillor Michael Johnson for help.
Mr Sutcliffe said: 'We are pleased that finally common sense prevailed and through cooperation and understanding of the family’s needs they were finally able to be housed appropriately.
'It’s sad it took the length of time it did.'
Cathy Ashley, chief executive of the Family Rights Group charity, who described the family’s former living conditions as 'hellish', said of the news: 'We are very pleased that this seems a happy ending.
'Many family, friends and carers across the country continue to struggle to get suitable accommodation.The US military unit ambushed in Africa earlier this month didn’t call for support until an hour after the attack — and French jets didn’t reach the scene for another hour, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday.
The unit of 12 Special Forces soldiers and Nigerian forces came under fire from ISIS-affiliated terrorists Oct. 4 and “did not call for support until an hour after contact,” said Gen. Joseph Dunford.
“The timeline we have is the first indicator that the unit called for external support until an hour later,” he said, explaining that it’s unclear whether the soldiers felt they were able to handle the attack until they called for help.
“I don’t know that they needed support until that time,” Dunford said. “Our logs indicate that an hour after the contact, they sought support.”
The French finally got the call to intervene after the “difficult firefight” began, and it took them a half-hour to respond.
A half-hour after that, French fighter jets finally arrived, Dunford said.
Most other details of the attack that left four US soldiers dead and two others wounded are still unclear, Dunford said.
Once the investigation is complete, he said, military officials will visit the families of the fallen soldiers and share the information before making it public.
“We owe the families and the US people transparency,” he said.
Dunford acknowledged that there’s a “perception that the Department of Defense has not been forthcoming,” which is why he held the press briefing.
“I thought it would be helpful for me to personally clarify to you what we know today, and to outline what we hope to find out in the ongoing investigation,” he said.
On Oct. 3, a group of 12 American forces traveled to the village of Tongo Tongo, which is about 53 miles north of the capital, with 30 Nigerian forces on a “reconnaissance mission,” Dunford said.
“The assessment by our leaders on the ground at that time was that contact with the enemy was unlikely,” he said.
The next day, the soldiers were moving back to their base when they came under fire from about 50 fighters, believed to be from a local Islamic State affiliate, who attacked them with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, Dunford said.
Four soldiers — Sgt. La David Johnson, 25, Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, 35, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson, 39, and Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, 29 — were killed.
Dunford said there’s no indication the soldiers took too many risks.
“I don’t have any indication right now to believe or to know that they did anything other than operate within the orders they were given,” he said.
Dunford defended the broader American mission in Niger, where he said US forces have been stationed intermittently for more than two decades.
He said about 800 troops are there now.The firm’s chief executive Neil Berkett told investors that it was in “quite advanced negotiations” with London councils over the plans and said he was optimistic the rollout would begin “in the not too distant future”.
“The proposition would be that we would provide free Wifi access for all,” he said.
Virgin Media’s WiFi network will be freely available to anyone at 0.5Mbps, and to its home broadband subscribers at up to 10Mbps.
The approach contrasts with BT’s extensive Openzone network, which although free to BT broadband customers, is charged at as much as £5.99 for 90 minutes’ browsing.
Mr Berkett described the plans as “a punt” that will cost Virgin Media “a few million pounds” and will “keep them [BT] honest”.
“It is part of our ethos of advancing digital lifestyles,” he said.
He said that 3G mobile broadband networks were not satisfying consumers’ demands for data on the move and suggested that the few years’ delay expected before 4G networks and devices are widely available left a gap in them market.
“The gap that is increasingly occurring between consumers’ need for data outsidfe the home and what they can get on 3G,” said Mr Berkett, adding that Virgin Media might wholesale the faster level of access to mobile networks.
The firm’s interest in public WiFi was first revealed in Novemeber, when its director of advanced technology said virgin media had been "inspired” by a scheme launched by the United States cable network Cablevision. It covered New York with WiFi at a time when American 3G networks were struggling to cope with the smartphone boom.
Virgin Media plans to install WiFi routers in its existing infrastructure, including the street-side cabinets that distribute its cable network into home. The talks with councils are focused on gaining permission for the necessary works.ETH/USD
Ethereum has been choppy over the last several days, as the weekend was noisy. Most of the interest around the world seems to be focused on Bitcoin and the reaction of the Chicago’s future markets, so Ethereum has creeped to the back burner. However, it looks as if we are making a serious run towards the $500 level, so on a break above there I believe that the market has much higher to go, probably targeting $580.
ETH/BTC
Ethereum was noisy over the weekend against Bitcoin as well, but seems to be trying to turn to the upside as I record. However, I look at the 0.035 level as significant resistance, and therefore I’m looking for signs of exhaustion to start selling again, as Bitcoin has certainly captured the imagination of the general public. I am not interest in buying this market yet, I would need to see a significant base built.
Thanks for watching, I’ll be back tomorrow.Etsy has decided to stop linking to purchased items in a user's feedback in response to the chorus of privacy concerns coming from its user base. In a blog post published Tuesday, Etsy CEO Rob Kalin and COO Adam Freed said that the company's recent rollout of the People Search tool, combined with public feedback, highlighted the need for a reworked feedback system, and that more changes may be on the way.
Etsy had flipped the switch on its new People Search tool last week as part of its effort to make the site into more of a social media platform. When users run a search for a person's full name, that user's account will show up in the search results, even if that person is only a buyer. The goal is to allow users to connect to each other and create "Circles," which then allow users to see which products their friends have marked as favorites or purchased on Etsy.
Problems immediately began popping up. For one, buyers who had entered their full names into their Etsy profiles in the past were not all aware that the information would become public as a result of the People Search rollout. (Etsy claims it notified users, but numerous Etsy users insisted otherwise.) Then, users began noticing that they could easily look up a buyer's past purchases by searching for their real names, pulling up their profile pages, and examining the feedback left for or by Etsy sellers. Feedback on Etsy has always been public, but the combination of real names plus public feedback suddenly thrust Etsy into the spotlight for not doing enough to protect buyer privacy.
Some critics pointed out that Etsy users who had not logged on in months—and undoubtedly did not agree to the new privacy policy—were having their information exposed. "I just found a woman who's Etsy profile comes up on Google as the 5th link. I was expecting 6 or 7 pages down, but it's on the very first page, right after her online resumes," wrote one concerned user on the Penny Arcade forums. "She signed up a year ago, under the old privacy policy, and hasn't logged in since 2010. And now I know what dildo she uses. Right down to the curvature and coloring."
After making an appearance in our discussion thread on the topic, Kalin told Ars in an e-mail that the company had decided to escalate and address the situation directly, resulting in Tuesday's blog post.
"There was an article published on ArsTechnica that made clear how direct the connection was between using your real name on Etsy, buying an item and receiving public feedback for that item," Kalin and Freed wrote. "The reaction to this article has made us realize that we need to change the way our Feedback system works, and this is what we’ve already done today."
The two went on to explain that the current feedback system dates back to a time when payment for purchased items was sent after the Etsy checkout process was complete. Like the olden days of eBay, users had to rely on public feedback in order to see whether other buyers and sellers were reliable, but this is no longer the case since Etsy now requires payment before completing checkout. As of today, buyer and seller feedback no longer link directly to purchased items and the site is considering further changes to the system to protect buyer privacy. (It's worth noting that they have not yet addressed user concerns about being automatically opted-into the People Search feature.)
"In the future, we may provide an option to share individual purchases publicly at the time of purchase. This will be completely opt-in and on a purchase-by-purchase basis," the team wrote.
The other element of concern from Etsy's community came from the staff's apparent unwillingness to take the privacy concerns seriously up to this point. A 120-page thread in Etsy's forums about the People Search rollout ended up getting locked, and another (now 32-page) thread that specifically asked about privacy went largely ignored. Kalin and Freed didn't directly address this, but did acknowledge that the community's trust is important to Etsy and that the company would be listening carefully to user feedback.
"We take privacy very seriously," the two wrote. "We are deeply sorry for any confusion and will work hard to regain your trust."
Card by peacecranegreetingsTake control of your own wellbeing with these ‘10 keys to happier living’. Think positively, look after your body, help others …
We’re constantly bombarded with messages about what makes for a good life. Advertisers tell us it comes from owning and consuming their products. The media associate it with wealth, beauty or fame. And politicians claim that nothing matters more than growing the economy. But do any of these things really bring lasting happiness?
For thousands of years, people have looked to philosophy, religion and grandmotherly wisdom for answers to such questions. But in recent decades this ancient wisdom has been tested by scientific research.
Scientists have found that although our genes and circumstances matter, a huge proportion of the variations in happiness between us come from our choices and activities. So although we may not be able to change our inherited characteristics or the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we still have the power to change how happy we are – by the way we approach our lives.
Action for Happiness has identified 10 keys to happier living, based on an extensive review of the latest research about what really helps people flourish. These are not “10 commandments”, because each of us is unique and what works for one of us may not for someone else. They are simply 10 areas that tend to make a big difference to people’s happiness - and crucially they are all areas that are within our control.
1. Do things for others
Caring about others is fundamental to our happiness. Helping other people is not only good for them; it’s good for us too. It makes us happier and can help to improve our health. Giving also creates stronger connections between people and helps to build a happier society for everyone. It’s not all about money - we can also give our time, ideas and energy. So if you want to feel good, do good.
Action ideas
Do three extra acts of kindness today. Offer to help, give away your change, pay a compliment, or make someone smile.
Reach out to help someone who’s struggling. Give them a call or offer your support. Let them know you care.
2. Connect with people
Our relationships with other people are the most important thing for our happiness. People with strong relationships are happier, healthier and live longer. Our close relationships with family and friends provide love, meaning, support and increase our feelings of self-worth. Our broader social networks bring a sense of belonging. So it’s vital that we take action to strengthen our relationships and make new connections.
Action ideas
Make more time for the people who matter. Chat with a loved one or friend, call your parents or play with the kids.
Make three extra connections today. Stop to chat in the shop, wave at a neighbour, learn the name of someone new.
3. Take care of your body
Our body and mind are connected. Being active makes us happier as well as healthier. It instantly improves our mood and can even lift us out of depression. We don’t all have to run marathons - there are simple things we can do to be more active each day. We can also boost our wellbeing by spending time outdoors, eating healthily, unplugging from technology and getting enough sleep.
Regular exercise can lift you out of depression, but even if you’re healthy a burst of activity will boost your mood.
Action ideas
Be more active today. Get off the bus a stop early, take the stairs, turn off the TV, go for a walk – anything that gets you moving.
Eat nutritious food, drink more water, catch up on sleep. Notice which healthy actions lift your mood and do more of them.
4. Notice the world around you
Have you ever felt there must be more to life? Good news – there is. And it’s right here in front of us. We just need to stop and take notice. Learning to be more mindful and aware does wonders for our wellbeing, whether it’s on our walk to work, in the way we eat or in our relationships. It helps us get in tune with our feelings and stops us dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.
Action ideas
Give yourself a bit of head space. At least once a day, stop and take five minutes to just breathe and be in the moment.
Notice and appreciate good things around you every day, big or small. Trees, birdsong, the smell of coffee, laughter perhaps?
5. Keep learning
Learning affects our wellbeing in lots of positive ways. It exposes us to new ideas and helps us stay curious and engaged. It also gives us a sense of accomplishment and helps boost our self-confidence and resilience. There are many ways to learn new things throughout our lives, not just through formal qualifications. We can share a skill with friends, join a club, learn to sing, play a new sport and so much more.
Action ideas
Do something for the first time today. Sample sushi, try a new route, read a different newspaper or visit a local place of interest.
Learn a new skill, however small. A first aid technique or a new feature on your phone, perhaps. Cook a new meal or use a new word.
6. Have goals to look forward to
Feeling good about the future is really important for our happiness. We all need goals to motivate us and these have to be challenging enough to excite us, but also achievable. If we try to attempt the impossible, this creates unnecessary stress. Choosing meaningful but realistic goals gives our lives direction and brings a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when we achieve them.
Action ideas
Take the first step. Think of a goal you’re aiming for and do one thing to get started. Make a call, fill in that form, tell others.
Share your dreams. Tell three people about an aspiration that is really important to you this year and listen to theirs too.
7. Find ways to bounce back
All of us have times of stress, loss, failure or trauma in our lives. How we respond to these events has a big impact on our wellbeing. We often cannot choose what happens to us, but we can choose how we react to what happens. In practice it’s not always easy, but one of the most exciting findings from recent research is that resilience, like many other life skills, can be learned.
Action ideas
Ask for help today. Confide in a friend, talk to an expert, reach out to a colleague, ask a neighbour to lend a hand.
When something is troubling you, do something you really enjoy. Shift your mood and bring a new perspective on the problem.
8. Take a positive approach
Positive emotions – like joy, gratitude, contentment, inspiration and pride – don’t just feel good when we experience them. They also help us perform better, broaden our perception, increase our resilience and improve our physical health. So although we need to be realistic about life’s ups and downs, it helps to focus on the good aspects of any situation – the glass half full rather than the glass half empty.
Action ideas
Do something that you know will make you feel good. Listen to music, watch something funny, get outside or call an old friend.
Try to smile and say something positive or constructive every time you walk into a room. Notice the reaction you get.
9. Be comfortable with who you are
Nobody’s perfect. But so often we compare a negative view of ourselves with an unrealistic view of other people. Dwelling on our flaws – what we’re not rather than what we’ve got – makes it much harder to be happy. Learning to accept ourselves, warts and all, and being kinder to ourselves when things go wrong increases our enjoyment of life, our resilience and our wellbeing. It also helps us accept others as they are.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ask a friend what they think your good points are – you’ll be surprised at the lift it will give you.
Action ideas
Ask a trusted friend or colleague to tell you what they think your real strengths are. Try to make more use of these.
Be as kind to yourself as you are to others. See your mistakes as opportunities to learn. Notice things you do well, however small.
10. Be part of something bigger
People who have meaning and purpose in their lives are happier, feel more in control and get more out of what they do. They also experience less stress, anxiety and depression. But where do we find meaning and purpose? It might come from doing a job that makes a difference, our religious or spiritual beliefs, or our family. The answers vary for each of us but they all involve being connected to something bigger than ourselves.
Action ideas
Feel part of something bigger. Spend time with children, visit an inspiring location, gaze at the stars or join a club.
Be more charitable. Give others your time, offer to help neighbours or friends, consider giving blood or volunteering.
Mark Williamson is director of Action for Happiness, and Vanessa King is a board adviser. For more about the 10 keys to happier living, check out the 10 keys guidebook and take the happy habits quizA steel foundry that employs hundreds in Lawrenceville is under fire from some in the neighborhood it’s called home for nearly 150 years.
Residents, neighborhood groups and environmental activists want McConway & Torley LLC to cut the pollution, truck traffic and noise coming from its 48th Street foundry and support an Allegheny County Health Department permit that could reduce its steel production by 77 percent.
Employees say the production cuts could threaten the more than 400 people who work at the foundry — one of the larger employers in the neighborhood.
McConway & Torley officials say the foundry complies with state and county air quality guidelines and that the neighborhood does not understand the impact the foundry has locally and nationally.
“In 2015, you would never allow a foundry to locate in Lawrenceville,” said Rachel Filippini, executive director of the Group Against Smog and Pollution, a Garfield-based nonprofit fighting the foundry. “A lot of people real-ly don’t know this company exists. When people think of air pollution, they think of the big ones — the Clairton works, the Cheswick power plant, Shenango. A lot of people don’t know that this foundry is tucked back on 48th Street.”
McConway & Torley has been tucked back on 48th Street since 1868 when William McConway bought Eagle Gray Foundry. The first transcontinental railroad would be completed in the next year.
The foundry made railroad couplers then and still does, and its products account for about 60 percent of the North American market, said Scott Mautino, vice president of operations. Railroad couplers link train cars, a formerly manual task among the most deadly in the United States in the mid-1800s, Mautino said.
Brakemen once stood between cars to guide them together. Workers lost fingers or hands, were crushed or dragged under rail cars and often killed in the process.
Advances in technology, some of it pioneered by McConway & Torley, removed the brakeman and the danger. When rail cars come together today, couplers on each car grasp each other like two hands grasping by the fingertips.
The company, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Trinity Industries, has kept a low profile, said Mautino. It rarely talks to the press or grants access to the foundry.
In an effort to help the neighborhood understand McConway & Torley better, Mautino spoke to the Tribune-Review at length this week and gave a reporter a tour of the foundry.
Production levels
The Health Department’s proposed operating permit would cut steel production at the foundry from 92,500 tons to 21,250 tons per year.
Changes in the estimates of how much pollution the foundry’s building captures led the department to propose lower production levels, said Jim Thompson, deputy director of environmental quality at the Health Department.
Lawrenceville has become one of Pittsburgh’s hottest neighborhoods. Once vacant buildings have transformed into six-figure homes and store fronts. Butler Street is home to trendy bars and restaurants, bicycle shops, retro stores and even the House of the Dead, a zombie boutique.
The percentage of people in their mid- to late 20s has more than doubled since 2000, according to census information. Their preferences for facial hair, flannel and boots seem to mimic those of the steelworkers leaving McConway & Torley at shift change.
“The neighborhood is changing. Its residents now have different expectations about the environment,” Thompson said. “Those people have the right to clean air. They have the rightful expectation that the foundry is going to be compliant with all applicable regulations.”
Harry Klodowski, an attorney for McConway & Torley, said the foundry has not violated emission limits in the past five years. The foundry voluntarily put a limit on production and started monitoring pollution in 2011 under an agreement reached withthe nonprofit.
Filippini said the foundry has complied with the agreement, but the reduction in pollution has not been as dramatic as the group hoped. Concerns about dust, benzene and manganese persist, she said.
Thompson said a final decision on the operating permit is pending. The department is waiting for the results of emissions testing by McConway & Torley.
“A lot rides on this decision — a lot of houses, boat payments and car payments — who goes to college and who doesn’t,” said Russell Lange |
g oua intregi
55g ciocolata Nestle Noir
55g unt
15g cacao pudra
60g faina alba
2g sare *Pralina de migdale: 200g migdale fara coaja, usor coapte
200g zahar alb
2 linguri ulei de cocos Cremeux de ciocolata: 375ml smantana pentru frisca
375ml lapte integral
150g galbenus
175g zahar alb
490g ciocolata Nestle Dessert Romania
4g gelatina foi
2 lingurite extract de vanilie Glazura "crocanta": 300g ciocolata cu lapte
200g ciocolata Nestle Dessert Romania
100ml ulei vegetal
50g fulgi de migdale, faramitati
50g paillete feuilletine Ganache batut cu cafea: 200ml smantana pentru frisca A
30g glucoza lichida
5g cafea instant
180g ciocolata alba
300ml smantana pentru frisca B Directions: Blat: Preincalziti cuptorul la 180C si tapetati o forma de 35x25cm cu hartie de copt. Cerneti faina cu cacaoa si sarea. Topiti ciocolata si untul pe baie de aburi sau la microunde. Mixati pralina cu migdale, zaharul alb si ouale intregi pentru 5-8 minute sau pana amestecul isi dubleaza volumul si devine pufos, deschis la culoare. Incorporati ciocolata si untul topite, iar la final adaugati ingredientele uscate cernute. Turnati aluatul in tava pregatita si coaceti pentru 15-20 minute. Lasati la racit in tava. (veti monta prajitura in aceeasi tava) *Pralina de migdale: Caramelizati zaharul pana obtineti un caramel deschis la culoare. Adaugati migdalele apoi turnati amestecul intr-o tava si lasati la racit. Rupeti bucati si bagati in robotul de bucatarie, pulsand pana obtineti o pudra. Adaugati uleiul si continuati sa blenduiti pana obtineti o pasta. Folositi imediat sau pastrati intr-un vas inchis ermetic. Cremeux de ciocolata: Hidratati gelatina in apa rece. Combinati smantana pentru frisca si laptele si puneti pe foc mic pana se incalzeste. Amestecati galbenusul cu zaharul alb intr-un bol. Turnati in fir subtire laptele fierbinte, apoi intoarceti pe foc. Gatiti pe foc mic pana amestecul atinge 82C. Luati de pe foc si adaugati gelatina, apoi strecurati peste ciocolata intr-un alt bol. Folosind un blender de mana, omogenizati foarte bine cremeux, apoi adaugati vanilia. Turnati crema peste blat si dati la congelator cateva ore. Glazura crocanta: Topiti cele doua tipuri de ciocolata. Adaugati uleiul si omogenizati, apoi incorporati fulgii de migdale si paillete. Dati deoparte. Ganache batut cu cafea: Incalziti smantana pentru frisca A si glucoza intr-un vas. Luati de pe foc si adaugati cafeaua instant apoi turnati peste ciocolata alba. Omogenizati cu un blender de mana apoi incorporati si smantana pentru frisca B (nebatuta). Dati la frigider cel putin 8 ore. Pentru a finisa prajitura: Taiati prajitura in dreptunghiuri dupa marimea dorita (8x3cm am ales eu, gandindu-ma ca e o prajitura suficient de consistenta si ciocolatoasa). Cu grija, glazurati laturile prajiturii in glazura crocanta. Mixati ganache-ul pana devine pufos si ferm apoi puneti intr-un pos cu dui pentru petale si decorati. Sa aveti pofta!! Wordpress Recipe Plugin by EasyRecipe 3.5.3226
O noua saptamana, o noua provocare, de aceasta data din parteacare mi-au trimis cateva tablete de ciocolata cu rugamintea sa le transform intr-un desert. Cumva s-au aliniat bine stelele caci aveam in asteptare o reteta incredibil de ciocolatoasa pe care asteptam sa o fac cu ocazia potrivita. Reteta este adaptata dupa Opera a lui Antonio Bachour si recunosc ca, desi nu mai sunt asa o mare ciocoholica, am mancat doua bucati din aceasta prajitura. Este absolut delicioasa si are o textura incredibila. Un blat pufos, delicat, o crema atat de fina si cremoasa si glazura usor crocanta care le imbraca uniform pe cele doua sunt perfecte chiar si asa. Insa Bachour pulseaza cu un ganache batut cu cafea care are o textura din alta lume! Este prajitura cu ciocolata perfecta!Let’s make one thing clear up front: Until now, no automaker has endorsed drivers removing their hands from the steering wheel. The steering assists that have proliferated in recent years are all padded with liability disclaimers and hand-sensing algorithms that admonish drivers if they stop maintaining contact with the wheel. Yes, this is true even of Tesla’s Autopilot, regardless of what you may have seen on YouTube. A can of Red Bull taped to the steering wheel as a substitute for a human hand is not a hack. It’s a flaw in human intelligence.
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In October, Cadillac claimed a notable first in the automation arms race when its truly hands-free Super Cruise technology reached showrooms. Available on the CT6, Super Cruise enables the car to sail down divided, limited-access highways at speeds up to 85 mph for as long as the driver’s chosen lane lasts, no hands or energy-drink cans required. While Super Cruise represents the leading edge of partially automated technology in today’s production cars, it reflects only one company’s approach, and at $71,290 for the cheapest CT6 with the feature, it won’t change driving for the masses. The 2019 Audi A8, due in the United States this spring, has the potential to advance the game to Level 3, allowing drivers to take both their hands off the wheel and their eyes off the road with its Traffic Jam Pilot. However, the company remains uncertain if it will enable the technology in the U.S. due to regulatory and liability concerns.
For a broad read of the current state of these technologies, we slipped behind the steering wheels of four vehicles on sale today and then handed control to the computers. These vehicles—a Tesla Model S with the company’s second-generation system known as Enhanced Autopilot, a Honda Civic with Honda Sensing, an Audi Q7 with Traffic Jam Assist, and the Super Cruisin’ Caddy—represent a spectrum of philosophies, prices, and capabilities. A comparison test pitting the vehicles against one another was guaranteed to force some systems out of context. Instead, we evaluated the systems individually and according to their intended uses. And while we admit to taking our hands off the wheel in every vehicle, we insist it was only done in the service of journalism.
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Tesla Enhanced Autopilot (Level 2)
View Photos Tesla's Autopilot user interface gives the driver the most complete picture of how its computer interprets the driving environment, including curved roads, adjacent lanes, and nearby vehicles. SEAN C. RICE, ANDREW TRAHAN
A year after its debut, Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot still offers no perceivable enhancement over the first-generation Autopilot. Compared with the original, the second-generation hardware suite employs four times as many cameras, ultrasonic sensors with double the range, and 40 times the computing power, yet Enhanced Autopilot shipped in October 2016 without fundamental abilities such as self-steering and adaptive cruise control because Tesla was still developing the software. All the sensors in the world can’t guide a car if the computer can’t make sense of the world, and Tesla took a temporary backward step when it brought Autopilot development in-house after an ugly public breakup with Mobileye, the supplier behind the original Autopilot.
By this past August, when we shepherded a $146,200 Model S P100D around Southern California, Enhanced Autopilot operated at the same level as the first-gen system, both according to Tesla and our own observations. The self-steering algorithm is no more certain or reliable than the earlier version we lived with in our long-term 2015 Tesla Model S. The technology that oozed possibility two years ago now simply feels incomplete, especially since Enhanced Autopilot makes the same unsettling mistakes as its predecessor did—mistakes that suggest a Tesla can’t always make sense of its environment.
SEAN C. RICE, ANDREW TRAHAN
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Autopilot can cover hundreds of miles flawlessly or it can make a dozen errors in as many miles. In either case, we’re always caught off guard when the system makes an abrupt steering input that attempts to yank the Model S out of its lane without warning. These errors appear to occur when Autopilot becomes confused about where the lane markers lie, either due to a groove in the road, a worn lane line, or the intentional interruption of markers when lanes merge and split. A firm grip on the steering wheel is usually enough to keep the car in its lane and disable Autopilot in these instances, but an inattentive driver can find himself making an involuntary lane change. A better solution would be to simply hand control back to the driver.
The enhancements are coming, and we’re told the current “beta” system will eventually evolve into Level 3 tech for highway driving. The company also promises that the sensors it installs in every new car it builds—eight cameras, a forward-facing radar, and 12 ultrasonic sensors—will be enough for Level 5 go-anywhere, hands-free automation with a software update. “You can absolutely be superhuman with just cameras,” CEO Elon Musk claims.
But even a mediocre human still has an advantage over today’s Autopilot. The cameras can’t don sunglasses, flip a visor down, stretch a hand out, or crane a neck to cope with the glare when the evening sun dips toward the horizon. Pointed west, the car ping-pongs within its lane as it sniffs for the markers. Later, darkness paints over the grooves, cracks, and faded remnants of no-longer-used lane lines that are Autopilot’s kryptonite. With less noise to filter out, the Model S centers itself in its lane and glides down the 101 as smoothly as we’ve ever experienced.
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Honda Sensing (Level 1)
View Photos Honda's user interface shows the minimum information to convince the driver the system has a read on the situation. The lane-centering function makes only modest steering inputs. SEAN C. RICE, ANDREW TRAHAN
There will be no automation revolution as long as the technology is priced for the coastal crust. As a $1000 add-on (and even standard on certain models), Honda Sensing sells for one-fifth of Tesla’s Autopilot option, and it can be had on a Civic LX sedan at a price as low as $21,415.
With limited authority to make steering inputs, Honda’s suite behaves more like a driver-assistance feature than a partially automated system. Still, Honda Sensing stands out among other affordably priced alternatives because it performs lane centering, a more graceful variation of the lane-keeping assists that typically kick in with imprecise steering inputs only as a vehicle is about to leave its lane. The Civic Touring we drove traced a steady line on straight sections of highway with the driver offering only a limp handshake to the wheel. Yet Honda Sensing only nudges the steering wheel in the right direction when the road bends, and the driver must add more lock at turn-in to keep the car from running wide.
SEAN C. RICE, ANDREW TRAHAN
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It’s a similar situation with Honda’s adaptive cruise control: If you don’t play an active role in the driving, you stand to be burned. While most industry players have mastered radar cruise control, Honda’s system occasionally fails to register the appropriate bogey from which to base its speed when vehicles change lanes. Around gradual bends, Honda Sensing can fail to spot the car it’s closing on until the Civic is practically on top of it. And in the hairiest scenarios, the system doesn’t always brake hard enough to avoid a collision. It’s up to the driver to intervene or else end up in someone’s trunk. And while Honda Sensing routinely does bring the vehicle to a stop in the normal flow of traffic, the adaptive cruise control requires the driver to tap the right pedal or the RES button to accelerate again.
Are these technical limitations or a product of risk-averse Japanese culture? Do the Honda’s shortcomings stem from inexperience or a conscious acknowledgment that the more adept the self-steering system, the more likely it is to inspire false confidence? The low-cost Honda Sensing system gives us the feeling that all these factors are in play here.
Audi Traffic Jam Assist (Level 2)
View Photos Audi's Traffic Jam Assist telltale is little more than a status indicator. At the relatively low speeds of stop-and-go traffic, it's tempting to let the computer do its thing with no oversight. SEAN C. RICE, ANDREW TRAHAN
Taking the misery out of masochistic commutes is the killer app for budding automation. The relatively orderly highway environment constrains the technical problem while the low speeds of congestion minimize the risks if things go awry. That’s exactly the philosophy behind Audi’s Traffic Jam Assist, which is intended for use on limited-access roads when traffic drags below 40 mph. Those restrictions reduce the system’s usefulness if you’re crossing Middle America, but anyone who has braved L.A.’s 405 at 5:00 p.m. recognizes the value in relieving the driver from the grinding tedium of a rush-hour slog.
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Scanning the world with a single camera behind the windshield and two radar sensors in the lower fascia, Traffic Jam Assist manages speed and steering, choosing its path by considering both the lane markings and the vehicle ahead of it. We sampled Audi’s tech in a $75,655 Q7 on Michigan freeways snarled by construction and the morning rush in the kind of stop-and-go that has every driver staring into his or her lap. With Traffic Jam Assist effortlessly gliding along, the magnetic suck of an idle smartphone is even stronger, but Audi expects the driver to remain alert with hands on the steering wheel. The system allows the driver just eight seconds of hands-off time before the chimes start and, if the driver doesn’t resume control, slows the vehicle to a stop 10 seconds later.
SEAN C. RICE, ANDREW TRAHAN
The 2019 A8 will silence the steering nanny and evolve Traffic Jam Assist into Traffic Jam Pilot—it’s just a matter of whether or not that technology is enabled. In markets where Traffic Jam Pilot is turned on, Audi will likely be the first automaker with Level 3 technology in production. That permits not only hands-free driving but eyes-off-the-road operation during highway traffic jams. Audi will even allow the driver to watch videos on the car’s infotainment display when the system is active. That’s preferable to napping because Traffic Jam Pilot needs the driver on standby to merge when the lane ends, steer around a disabled vehicle, or take control when traffic accelerates beyond 37 mph. This relatively low speed limit assures the lawyers that the computer can identify any showstoppers with enough time to alert the driver and safely hand over control—or, at the very least, bring the vehicle to a stop in traffic conditions where such behavior wouldn’t be totally unexpected.
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Turning up the speed is the next logical move, but doing so exacerbates the hand-off problem that makes many automakers reluctant to introduce Level 3 automation for open-road driving. A car covers more than 100 feet every second at 70 mph, and any system that relies on a human to step in to solve the edge-case scenarios that stump the computer will have to provide adequate warning time for the driver to orient himself and understand the situation.
Cadillac Super Cruise (Level 2)
View Photos Cadillac's clever light bar glows green when Super Cruise is active and flashes red when the driver needs to pay attention to the road. A blue light indicates the driver has taken control. SEAN C. RICE, ANDREW TRAHAN
While Super Cruise’s maximum speed matches the speed limit of America’s fastest highways, it steers around the hand-off problem by forcing the driver to keep his eyes on the road. Super Cruise remains a Level 2 technology for this specific reason; Cadillac requires the driver to maintain vigilance, scanning for hazards even as the car takes over the physical act of driving. To ensure that the driver’s focus doesn’t stray, an infrared camera tracks his eyes from atop the steering column.
With the main cruise-control function enabled, a gray steering-wheel icon appears in the gauge cluster when Super Cruise is available. A tap of the Super Cruise button on the left spoke activates the system, the light bar on the steering wheel glows green, and the car glues itself to the center of its lane. High-definition maps of all 160,000 miles of divided U.S. highways (updated quarterly via a cellular-network download) and a GPS antenna that’s accurate to six feet help the CT6 pinpoint its exact location in the physical world. This allows Cadillac to alert the driver when the chosen lane is ending long before the cameras could ever know. Steer onto an exit ramp and Super Cruise immediately kicks control back to the driver. Park it in the right lane, though, and Super Cruise could seemingly track forever. In 40 miles of driving, the system didn’t ask us to take the wheel, except when we intentionally aggravated it by looking away from the road for an extended period. After less than 10 minutes, Super Cruise’s rock-steady competence became boring.
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SEAN C. RICE, ANDREW TRAHAN
Cadillac’s challenge now is to keep the driver’s eyes and attention on the road when his hands and feet are idle. Super Cruise’s cameras and radars won’t detect a construction barrel nudged into the lane—or lined up squarely with the Cadillac crest for that matter. They won’t spot a pothole in the road, or tire tread, or any number of small objects capable of inflicting damage. That’s all on the driver.
Super Cruise’s eye-tracking camera can see through most sunglasses, but in the rare cases where it can’t, it infers eye position from the driver’s nose, mouth, and general head position. Drop your eyes to read an email or hold your phone up in front of your face, and in less than 10 seconds, Super Cruise will call on you to grab the wheel. Don’t respond, and the car will eventually begin coasting to a stop.
While Audi sees higher speeds as the larger threat, Cadillac is reluctant to take responsibility for seeing and understanding everything happening around the car. Level 3 automation at Super Cruise speeds raises the stakes exponentially and CT6 chief engineer Lyndon Lie admits that the next step is not a step at all, but a leap. If there’s an obvious way to let the driver check out at 70 or 85 mph, he’s not telling us.
If All Goes According to Plan...
Here are carmakers’ on-the-record timing for their automated products.
2017
_ Audi will launch Level 3 tech for use on congested highways at speeds up to 37 mph.
2020
_ Audi will build Level 4 vehicles.
_ Daimler will release Level 4 taxis in select cities “by the beginning of the next decade.”
_ Honda vehicles will have Level 3 capability for highway use.
_ Hyundai will sell vehicles with Level 3 highway capability.
_ Nissan ProPilot will offer Level 4 city driving.
_ Toyota’s Highway Teammate will deliver Level 3 capability.
2021
_ BMW will release its fully automated flagship model, iNext.
_ Ford will produce Level 4 vehicles without steering wheels or pedals for ride-hailing services.
_ Volvo will offer Level 4 cars for sale.
2025
_ Honda will offer Level 4 capability for use in most driving situations.
_ Nissan will introduce Level 5 driverless vehicles.
2030
_ Kia will put fully automated vehicles on the road.If we want to make a difference for men and boys we need to take a stand in 2015 says Mark Brooks of the ManKind Initiative.
We all know there are a multitude of challenges facing those of us who work, volunteer and advocate for charities working to overcome the problems and barriers that men and boys face. Two challenges we regularly face are the exclusion of men and boys in the public story (often on purpose, which is a form of discrimination by omission) and also the problem of Straw Man arguments. There were examples of both of these at play in Parliament this month.
Discrimination by Omission
This discrimination by omission phenomena is more often than not created deliberately, but then is unknowingly taken on, unchallenged and accepted as a truth – especially if it fits snugly into an accepted political framework (men=bad, women=good).
The exclusion from the public story can be seen in discussions where a debate affects men and boys as well as women and girls. It doesn't matter whether women and girls are the main victims (eg sexual violence, domestic abuse etc) or if men and boys suffer the most (eg educational attainment), the debate is focussed women and girls either way--if there is a debate at all (eg homelessness, suicide, family law, male cancer etc).
The recent debate here at insideMAN about the Guardian's exclusion of including boys in the circumcision debate is one example of discrimination by omission.
Straw Men
Straw Man arguments are those to try and misrepresent the views and/or actions of people as a means of attacking them. Last year te ManKind Initiative video, ViolenceIsViolence, was successful at raising awareness of our double standards around violence between men and women. The video demonstrated how the public is more tolerant of violence by women against men. An article on the blog "we hunted the mammoth" claiming our video was a fraud, is a classic example of a Straw Man argument.
http://youtu.be/u3PgH86OyEM
Parliamentary Business
This month in Parliament there were two clear examples of discrimination by omission and straw men arguments.
Firstly, there was the First Reading of the Equal Pay (Transparency) Bill proposed by Sarah Champion MP. The purpose of the Bill is to ensure the employers with more than 250 employees publish data on the pay differences between male and female workers. The government already have the powers to force companies to do so under the Equality Act 2010 but they have chosen so far not to invoke the powers. The Bill went through to its Second Reading with 258 voting yes with 8 noes.
We can debate the gender pay gap for hours and whether it is due to lifestyle choice vis a vis the family unit or direct discrimination but if the debate and the Bill were really about equal pay for everyone then why was there no mention that men between 22 and 39 are on average paid less than women.
This gap will surely grow as in the very same week, UCAS highlighted the gender university gap whereby 34% of 18 year old women go to university but only 26% men – the equivalent of 32,000 missing males. Ironically in Rotherham, Ms Champion’s constituency, 24% of 18 year old women go to university and only 14% of men, a gender university gap of 42%.
So was the debate really about just equality and ending discrimination because if so the debate and the Bill’s intention would not have omitted the statistics above. And was it also a Straw Man to paint men in a bad light as if we all sit in smoke filled boardrooms actively discriminating against women?
Excluding male victims of domestic violence from help
The following day, another Bill was proposed this time the Women’s Refuges (Provision and Eligibility) Bill 2014-15.
And as can be seen by the debate, it did what it said on the tin and failed to recognise the awful situation in the UK where for male victims and their children there are only just over 50 safe house/refuge places run by 11 organisations.
There are huge swathes of the UK – London, North West, Scotland, East Anglia for example, where there is not one place (London has nothing for heterosexual men). I recognise there are not enough places for female victims but to ignore male victims and fail to call for provision for men in the same way as for women shows another clear cut example of discrimination by omission. It is a straw man argument as it suggests that only men commit domestic abuse. How can this Bill be about equality when it purposely ignores 40% of domestic abuse victims?
So what we do about it?
For me, 2015 has to be the year where those of us I mentioned at the start of the article have to be bolder in speaking up for our causes and challenging those who ignore them - whether on purpose or through the belief in what they have been told is true or the full story. As set out in a previous article for iNsideMan, there are ways to address this, but the examples from this month shows we have to up the ante – we have no choice, we have to speak up on behalf of those we fight for.
---Picture credit: Flickr/Karen Roe Mark Brooks is Chair of The ManKind Initiative, a charity that helps and advocates for male victims of domestic violence. Follow them on twitter @ManKindInit.
The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.Tom Cleverley will make his comeback after a three-month absence with an ankle injury in Saturday's match with Liverpool. The 22-year-old Manchester United midfielder is still short of match fitness and is likely to start on the bench. Sir Alex Ferguson originally planned to give him game time in a reserves fixture against Chelsea on Monday until it was postponed due to the weather, but still says his return will be like getting a new player.
"Cleverley has been terrific in training, it is only games he is short of," the United manager said. "He has a very quick football brain and he's fresh again now. He was a revelation for us earlier in the season and I think he can do the same again. It is a shame he had to have such a long lay-off because he was proving an important player for us. We always knew he was talented but physically he wasn't up to Premier League standards at first. That's why we loaned him out, and once he began to get games with other clubs he came on in leaps and bounds."
Once Cleverley is back playing United's injury problems will be much less severe, with only Nemanja Vidic unlikely to figure again this season. Chris Smalling, Phil Jones and Nani could all be fit in time for the Europa League game against Ajax in midweek, though none of that trio is expected to play today. Ryan Giggs has signed a one-year extension at the age of 38 to line up a 22nd season at the same club. "I feel good and I know I can still contribute to keeping the team pushing for honours," he said. "When I signed my first contract I never thought I'd be able to play for United for 22 years, but winning the 19th title was a great feeling and this club is all about what we do next."
Like his manager, Giggs has won 12 Premier League titles and two European Cups, and is now closing on 900 first-team appearances after breaking Bobby Charlton's record of 758 four years ago. "Ryan is a marvellous player who in many ways epitomises all my teams at United." Ferguson said. "He has adapted to the changing nature of the game and retained the desire and hunger for success. The young players in the dressing room have a great example to follow and a great chance to learn from a player who will continue to break records that anyone in the game will find hard to beat."SAN FRANCISCO—Facebook is able to track its 1.3 billion users on desktop computers, mobile devices and other websites. Now, advertisers will be able to do the same, using the social-networking service’s data.
Facebook's new ad server, Atlas, gets data from what people reveal on the social network, and from the other sites where they log in using their Facebook credentials. “You can get the right person at the right time on the right device,” said Jonathan Nelson, chief executive officer of Omnicom Digital. ( ROBYN BECK / AFP/GETTY IMAGES )
The technology, called people-based marketing, is the main feature of Facebook’s revamped Atlas ad server that will be shown to marketers this week in New York. Advertisers will be able to measure how often an individual – whose identities are kept anonymous – sees their ads, no matter what device they’re using, and tailor promotions based on the information. As people expand their Internet activity to include mobile phones and applications, advertisers are seeking better ways to target them and make sure that the right promotions are reaching the right people. Atlas gets data from what people reveal on the social network, and from the other sites where they log in using their Facebook credentials. It’s an improvement compared with the “cookies” that track activity within a single Web browser. “There is just a huge shift to mobile and we’re capitalizing on it by offering personalized marketing,” Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in an interview. “Facebook has been built around people and focused on people since Day One.”
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Facebook has set up meetings to pitch the top advertising agencies on the new product in the next few days in New York, during Advertising Week, the industry’s annual gathering, according to David Jakubowski, Facebook’s head of advertising technology. Omnicom Group will be the first to use the product, through clients PepsiCo and Intel. “You can get the right person at the right time on the right device,” said Jonathan Nelson, chief executive officer of Omnicom Digital. “It’s going to shift dollars, from more broadcast-oriented stuff to more finely tuned messaging.” One added benefit of Atlas: the ability to use Facebook data to target users of Instagram, the popular photo-sharing application it acquired in 2012. “It opens up a whole new opportunity for publishers on Instagram,” Jakubowski said. “If you’re running ads on Instagram and use Atlas you can see who saw them, and if they bought something.” ‘Facebook for rich people’ will set you back $9,000
While the new product may spark privacy concerns because it tracks users’ activities, Sandberg said marketers won’t be given access to any data beyond what members have made available through their privacy preferences. The Menlo Park, California-based company this year started prompting users to look at their settings and change them if they revealed more than they wanted to. “This year we did people-based privacy controls, and we’re doing people-based marketing,” Sandberg said. “This doesn’t tell marketers who you are, and when Atlas uses Facebook data it honours the Facebook preferences of the user.”
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Facebook is expanding its advertising initiatives outside its main application. This year, the company opened up its network of advertisers to software developers who were given the option of running Facebook ads on their applications. Facebook recently agreed to acquire LiveRail, which will help it serve video advertisements outside of Facebook itself. Optimism over Facebook’s advertising prospects have fueled a 44 per cent surge in the stock price this year, giving the company a market capitalization of $203.9 billion. Facebook reported a 61 per cent increase in second-quarter sales to $2.91 billion. Mobile promotions accounted for 62 per cent of ad sales, up from 59 percent in the prior period. Instagram has also been ramping up its advertising capabilities for almost a year, with Omnicom as the main partner. Omnicom has spent hundreds of millions of dollars with Facebook on various digital efforts, Nelson said. The company spent months organizing its database to work smoothly with Facebook’s data, with the expectation that more dollars would shift to their offering, he said. “I think this is really going to open up mobile for advertisers,” Nelson said.
Read more about:New Sets:
Excellence – 2 Waves (40 base, 5 sigs, 5 undertaker, 1 superstar insert per wave)
Topps Picks
Triumph Wave 1
Women’s Division Finishers and Signature Moves (17 cards + Award)
Boom Comics Wave 5
Heritage 2017 Wave 2
Survivor Series 2017 (Base, signatures, NXT poster, Teams, Posters, NOW)
Boom Survivor Series What If
Jeff Hardy Artwork (9 cards + Award)
Boom Comics Wave 6
Infinite Wave 3
Thanksgiving Bundle Cards
Starrcade (Base, Signatures)
Black Friday Bundle Cards
Steel Base (48 cards)
Signature/Kiss Cards
Cyber Monday Bundle Cards
Apps Tuesday Bundle Cards
Live Signatures
Stephanie McMahon/Triple H
VIP Signatures
Kairi Sane
Inserts
Kurt Angle Special Signature (500cc)
Base Variants
Purple Kurt Angle, Becky Lynch, Bayley
Gold Rush – Iron Sheik, Chris Jericho, Brock Lesnar
Marathons
PPV Logos #15 – Backlash, Award #3 – Royal Rumble 96. Overall Award TBD (Set Compete)
Taglines #6 – 9, Award #3, Overall Award – John Cena, Bray Wyatt, Neville, Ted DiBiase, Kurt Angle (Award #3), Ric Flair (Overall Award) (Set Complete)
Headlines #3 – 7 – Kairi Sane, Rusev, John Cena, Elias, Pete Dunne
Fuel #3 – 6, Award #1 – Mark Henry, Corey Graves, Cesaro, Shinsuke Nakamura, Jake “The Snake” Roberts (Award #1)
NXT Series 2 #1 – 5, Award #1, Montez Ford, Sonya Deville, Tino Sabatelli, Liv Morgan, Adam Cole (Award #1), Alexander Wolfe
New Insert Set Checklists
Topps Picks
Naomi Shinsuke Nakamura Seth Rollins Finn Balor
Award – Asuka (1052cc)
Triumph Wave 1 (5000cc)
Bobby Roode Aiden English Bob Backlund Drew Gulak Jimmy Uso Tyler Breeze Samir Singh Sin Cara
Award – Trish Stratus (2344)
Boom Wave 5 “WWE #3”
Seth Rollins Edge Bayley Ric Flair Royal Rumble Dude Love Action Figure Raw Women’s’ Championship Title Belt
Boom Survivor Series “What If” (500cc)
What if Bret Screwed Shawn? Brock/Goldberg
Boom Wave 6 “WWE #11”
Roman Reigns Ricky the Dragon Steamboat Ted DiBiase Royal Rumble
Signature/Kiss Cards (250cc)
Becky Lynch Liv Morgan
Infinite Wave 3 (2 variations)
Dash Wilder Nikki Cross Triple H Becky Lynch Zach Ryder Jack Gallagher Mandy Rose Velveteen Dream
Award – Undertaker
Thanksgiving Bundle Set
Roman Reigns (650 Diamonds) Bayley (2200 Diamonds) Jeff Hardy (4400 Diamonds) Alexa Bliss (11000 Diamonds) Seth Rollins (22000 Diamonds)
Award – Ultimate Warrior Signature
Black Friday Bundle Set
The Miz Drew McIntyre Trish Stratus Dean Ambrose Charlotte Flair
Award – Sasha Banks Signature (36)
Cyber Monday Bundle Set
Naomi Asuka Bobby Roode Braun Strowman Brock Lesnar
Award – AJ Styles Signature (22)
Static
Naomi Rhyno Andre the Giant Dana Brooke Shawn Michaels Andrade “Cien” Almas TJP
Award – Samoa Joe
Apps Tuesday Bundle Set
Adam Colea Ric Flair Becky Lynch Lita Macho Man Randy Savage
Award – Shawn Michaels Signature (22cc)
The major releases of the month were clearly “Excellence” and Survivor Series. Excellence, as aforementioned, is a “digital exclusive”, it even says so on the back of the cards. Each wave had a base set of 20, signature set of 5, an Undertaker tribute set of 5, and a single poster type release (Finn Balor in Wave 1, Bobby Roode in Wave 2). There were FIVE variations of the base set, with the most common black and green being available for coins, and orange, purple (500cc) and gold (100cc) being behind the paywall. Signatures were available in three variations, black at 1250, green at 750 and purple at 150. Some Wave 1 signatures did not sell out prior to the entire wave’s deadline, so they were inserted into Wave 2 packs, and in fact as of this writing purple sigs are still available. Wave 1’s sigs offered nothing new, while Wave 2 held first single sigs of Ruby Riot(t), Ember Moon and the “legend” Junk Yard Dog. Single purple sigs topped out at $25, but can be had for much less, while Greens never made it higher than $8 apiece.
Survivor Series is the second set for this annual major show |
of all those monstrous things, carried forward over generations, results in people like Norman — people who are seemingly nice and normal but capable of great evil.
That’s how Caleb winds up in Norman’s basement, where he finds Norma’s taxidermied body, only to have Norman — dressed as his mother — whack him in the head with a hammer, presumably killing him. Trauma lives at the center of Bates Motel, but it’s not just a concept. It takes human form, sometimes as that nice, mild-mannered man behind the desk of a hotel lobby. And when we arrive at the events that made that man famous, we’ll understand him better, even if we can’t bring ourselves to forgive him.
Bates Motel airs Mondays at 10 pm EST on A&E. Previous episodes of season five are available on A&E’s website. The show’s first four seasons are available on Netflix.
Correction: This article originally said Romero was serving time for murder. He is in jail for committing perjury.One of the selling points of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was that there would be no sequel. This was a one and done movie that wasn’t trying to build a new franchise within the Star Wars brand. And while the fates of the heroic group of Rebel operatives has been solidly established in the movie, that doesn’t mean we’ve seen the last of Jyn Erso and crew. Forest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera has already appeared in the DisneyXD animated series Star Wars Rebels, and he won’t likely be the last.
Before Rogue One hit theaters, we heard reports that the Rogue One stars were signed to multi-picture options. We had initially heard rumors that Alden Ehrenreich would be making a cameo as Han Solo in Rogue One, and that didn’t pan out. But maybe it will actually be the other way around? Could we see characters from Rogue One in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller‘s yet-to-be-titled Han Solo standalone movie? If you ask Diego Luna if his character Cassian Andor may appear in the second Star Wars Story, he suspiciously avoids answering the question.
Diego Luna talked to MTV on the red carpet outside the Golden Globes. During the interview, Josh Horowitz asked Luna if his character Cassian Andor could appear on the screen in the Han Solo standalone movie and the actor became suspiciously silent, saying only that he “doesn’t have an answer for that.” But does the smirk on his face mean anything or is he just trying to ignite the flames in the rumor mill? Judge below in the video below:
As for the first cut of the movie and rumors that Cassian Andor may have survived the initial story (pre-reshoots), Diego was also not willing to talk about that saying only that the final cut of the film is what happens: “We shot for seven months. We could edit another movie. But this is the best Rogue One you could see, and it’s the only one now. All of that is just for us to remember … I’m very pleased with the film as it is.”
Theoretically, any of the Rogue One characters could appear because it’s an earlier timeline before the tragic deaths at the end of Rogue One. I’m not sure if we will see any Rogue One cameos in Han Solo: A Star Wars Story. We have heard that the story takes place nearly a decade before the events of A New Hope, and thus also the heist for the Death Star plans during the battle on Scariff. So if we saw Andor, he would be a slightly younger man.
I do think that we will see more of Donnie Yen’s Chirrut Îmwe at some point, maybe another appearance on the Rebels animated series. It would be fun to revisit Jedha before it was destroyed and explore more of that ancient mecca. It might also be possible for us to see Alan Tudyk’s fan-favorite droid character K-2SO in the animated series. Would be interesting to see the mission that saw the Imperial droid stolen from the Empire and reprogramed for the Rebel Alliance.A United Airlines pilot arrived late to her flight in civilian clothing and ranted to passengers about her divorce and the presidential election. About 20 passengers disembarked the plane saying they didn't feel safe with her in the cockpit and then the pilot herself was removed from the plane. (Reuters)
Dozens of passengers fled a plane and police removed their United Airlines pilot after she gave a long, bizarre speech before takeoff on Saturday.
The pilot boarded the afternoon flight at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport a bit late — wearing a ball cap and casual clothes.
Straight away, she appeared to get into an argument with crew members at the front of the plane.
From his seat near the back, Chris Moore figured at first that she was just another San Francisco-bound flier.
“I thought she was a first-class passenger, complaining,” he told The Washington Post. “Then she grabs the mic.”
Another passenger told Reuters that the pilot asked for a vote on “whether we should have her change into her uniform.”
The passengers gave her a pass. Many found her request endearing, at first.
Randy Reiss, on his way home to San Francisco after a family funeral, was one of them.
“United has always, for me, been a very straight, corporate airline,” he said. “It seemed very friendly, nice, cutesy.”
“Then she said, ‘Sorry, I’m late. I’m going through a divorce.’ And I thought: Uh oh.”
Standing in front of the cockpit, the pilot kept talking over the intercom. Her speech veered into a string of non-sequiturs, and the mood in the cabin turned from cozy to uncomfortable, to worse.
The pilot pointed out two passengers at the front of the plane and noted their race — one black, one white — for reasons that were clear to no one.
That’s when Reiss began to tweet.
Then she identified an interracial couple in first class, I think in an effort to say "yay unity" but it was was awkward. — Randy Reiss (@undeadsinatra) February 11, 2017
The pilot touched on recent politics.
“She’s like ‘I don’t care if you voted for Trump or Clinton. They’re both [expletive],” Reiss wrote.
When she changed the subject to the plane’s imminent takeoff, Reiss began to shake, and another passenger began videotaping the drama.
“So I’ll stop, and we’ll fly the airplane,” the pilot said in the video, which has since been removed from YouTube. “Don’t worry. I’m going to let my co-pilot fly it. He’s a man.”
Reiss was the first to evacuate. He got out of his seat, collected his bag and asked the flight crew to let him off.
“Okay, if you don’t feel safe, get off the airplane, but otherwise we can go,” the pilot said, still sounding cheerful in the video as the first of her passengers began to revolt.
[An unruly couple forced their flight to turn back. Police boarded, and passengers cheered.]
“Disarm the doors,” a flight attendant said.
“She’s not mentally fit to fly,” Reiss remembered telling an attendant as he waited for the door to open, he said.
The attendant gave him a knowing look, he recalled, but replied, “She’s been cleared to fly.”
Still watching the drama from his seat, Moore told The Post, he saw an off-duty pilot call the pilot over and try to calm her down — to no avail.
She returned to the microphone and “did more talking,” Moore said. “I think she went into the cockpit.”
He decided to follow Reese toward the exit. So did many other passengers — at least 50, Moore said.
He heard one flier yell “Stop!” at the pilot. Others were crying as they streamed back to the terminal.
When he cleared the jet, Moore said, even a gate agent was crying.
The agent told him that she had tried to stop the pilot from boarding, he said, quickly realizing that “the lady was unstable.”
“People were pleading … ‘Please call security,'” he said. “I’m wondering, if we didn’t do something, if the plane was going to take off.”
United Airlines did not respond when The Post asked that question. Nor did the airline say who the pilot was, what became of her, or what policies were in place that had cleared her to fly.
A spokesman instead sent a statement that read in full:
“We hold our employees to the highest standards and have replaced this pilot with a new one to operate the flight, which has since departed Austin. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”
Reiss confirmed that a new pilot took the jet to San Francisco — about 90 minutes behind schedule, though other passengers rebooked through Houston.
Before he re-boarded, Reiss said, he watched police walk the pilot back through the airport.
The pilot apologized and hugged him before they parted, he said.
She offered to write a book with him.
It looked to him as if she’d been crying, too.
This post has been updated with new interviews.
More reading:
A man got a middle seat on a 13-hour flight. Passengers recorded his ‘fit of rage,’ then arrest.
An airline passenger went off on a Trump supporter. Her rant got her kicked off the flight.One of the most storied, Aaron Sorkin-esque moments in American history — making the rounds recently after Donald Trump’s indecent comment on Khizr Khan’s speech at the Democratic National Convention — is Joseph Welch’s famous confrontation with Joe McCarthy. The date was June 9, 1954; the setting, the Army-McCarthy hearings.
It was then and there that Welch exploded:
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
People love this moment. It’s when the party of the good and the great finally stared down the forces of the bad and the worse, affirming that this country was in fact good, if not great, rather than bad, if not worse. Within six months, McCarthy would be censured by the Senate. Within three years, he’d be dead.
Citing the Welch precedent for the Trump case, Politico perfectly captures the conventional wisdom about the confrontation:
For the first time, the bully had been called out in public by someone with no skeletons in his proverbial closet, whose integrity was unquestionable, and whose motives were purely patriotic. The audience in the senate chamber burst into applause.
But there are two little-known elements about this famous confrontation that call that fairy tale into question.
First, Welch chose his words carefully: have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
Joe McCarthy had been running wild for four years, wreaking havoc first on the Democrats, then the Republicans, and finally on the security establishment itself. For many people — Welch’s syntax shows, almost unselfconsciously — June 9 marked the moment when McCarthy finally revealed that he had no decency, as opposed to only a very little decency, the moment when he showed that he had no redeeming qualities at all.
So how, we have to wonder, was he viewed before then?
In the four years prior to this confrontation, McCarthy had been riding high. Not merely among the rubes and the yahoos of the Commie-fearing hinterland, but at the highest levels of the Republican Party. McCarthy, as Robert Griffith showed many years ago, was the party’s useful idiot, even darling. No one made the case better than he that the Democrats were the party of twenty years of treason. It was for that reason that he was favored by the party pooh-bahs and the party faithful.
As I wrote three years ago of the collusion between McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft, whose nickname was ”Mr. Republican”:
Taft did not merely “allow” the man and the -ism to dominate; Taft actively coddled, encouraged and supported him and it at every turn. As early as March 23, 1950 — four weeks after McCarthy’s famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia — Taft gave McCarthy his firm support, telling McCarthy, “If one case [accusing a State Department official of being a Red] doesn’t work out, bring up another.” And added, for good measure, “Keep it up, Joe.” When Truman attacked McCarthy’s speech — no amateur when it came to red-baiting, Truman called McCarthy “the greatest asset the Kremlin has” — Taft responded in kind, accusing Truman of being “bitter and prejudiced” and of “libeling” McCarthy, who was “a fighting Marine.” (Asked whether he had indeed libeled McCarthy, Truman responded, “Do you think that is possible?”)... In 1951, however, Taft pulled back — after it seemed that McCarthy had gone too far, accusing George Marshall on the Senate floor of aiding the Communist cause.... But within weeks, Taft reversed course. In response to a wave of letters from complaining fans of McCarthy, Taft issued a correction in which he downplayed his disagreements with McCarthy (“I often disagree with other Republican senators”) and reaffirmed his support: “Broadly speaking, I approve of Senator McCarthy’s program.” Just in case there was any doubt about that, Taft personally endorsed McCarthy’s reelection bid during the Wisconsin primary of 1952, claiming that “Senator McCarthy has dramatized the fight to exclude Communists from the State Department. I think he did a great job in undertaking that goal.” He even campaigned for McCarthy — despite the fact that McCarthy never returned the favor by endorsing Taft. And on at least one occasion (there might have been more), Taft quietly passed information to McCarthy about possible subversion in the State Department, suggesting to McCarthy that one employee deserved “special attention.”
In his confrontation with McCarthy, Welch opens a window into an even subtler and more corrosive form of establishment collusion with McCarthy.
For many years, Welch had been a partner at Hale and Dorr, an elite Boston law firm, and had temporarily gone to work as the general counsel to the US Army. That’s how he wound up at the Army-McCarthy hearings. What immediately provoked Welch at those hearings was that McCarthy had launched a broadside against Fred Fisher, a young attorney in Welch’s law firm who had once been a member of the National Lawyers’ Guild, a left-wing outfit that Dwight Eisenhower’s attorney general had called “the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party.”
This is how Welch responded to McCarthy’s charge:
Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us. When I decided to work for this Committee, I asked Jim St. Clair, who sits on my right, to be my first assistant. I said to Jim, “Pick somebody in the firm to work under you that you would like.” He chose Fred Fisher, and they came down on an afternoon plane. That night, when we had taken a little stab at trying to see what the case is about, Fred Fisher and Jim St Clair and I went to dinner together. I then said to these two young men, “Boys, I don’t know anything about you, except I’ve always liked you, but if there’s anything funny in the life of either one of you that would hurt anybody in this case, you speak up quick.” And Fred Fisher said, “Mr. Welch, when I was in the law school, and for a period of months after, I belonged to the Lawyers’ Guild,” as you have suggested, Senator. He went on to say, “I am Secretary of the Young Republican’s League in Newton with the son of [the] Massachusetts governor, and I have the respect and admiration of my community, and I’m sure I have the respect and admiration of the twenty-five lawyers or so in Hale & Dorr.” And I said, “Fred, I just don’t think I’m going to ask you to work on the case. If I do, one of these days that will come out, and go over national television, and it will just hurt like the dickens.” And so, Senator, I asked him to go back to Boston.
With that mention of his own interrogation of Fisher and decision not to bring him to DC, Welch was inadvertently testifying to the corrosive process by which moderates, centrists, liberals, and leftists — across the country, at all levels of government, in the tiniest corners and most obscure crevices of civil society — cooperated with McCarthyism, lest they too become targets not just of McCarthy (who was, after all, just the tip of the red-baiting iceberg) but also of the FBI, freelance blacklisters, employers, and more.Sept. 15, 2010: Been outside at midnight lately? There's something you really need to see. Jupiter is approaching Earth for the closest encounter between the two planets in more than a decade--and it is dazzling.
The night of closest approach is Sept. 20-21st. This is also called "the night of opposition" because Jupiter will be opposite the sun, rising at sunset and soaring overhead at midnight. Among all denizens of the midnight sky, only the Moon itself will be brighter.
Science@NASA reader Tamas Ladanyi took this picture of a friend photographing Jupiter over a lake in the Bakony mountains of Hungary on Sept. 5th. "The giant planet was remarkably bright," says Ladanyi.
Earth-Jupiter encounters happen every 13 months when the Earth laps Jupiter in their race around the sun. But because Earth and Jupiter do not orbit the sun in perfect circles, they are not always the same distance apart when Earth passes by. On Sept. 20th, Jupiter will be as much as 75 million km closer than previous encounters and will not be this close again until 2022.
The view through a telescope is excellent. Because Jupiter is so close, the planet's disk can be seen in rare detail--and there is a lot to see. For instance, the Great Red Spot, a cyclone twice as wide as Earth, is bumping up against another storm called "Red Spot Jr." The apparition of two planet-sized tempests grinding against one another must be seen to be believed.
shows the golden disk of Jupiter's moon Io. Jupiter's "kissing red spots" photographed by Alan Friedman of Buffalo, NY, using a 10-inch telescope. Theshows the golden disk of Jupiter's moon Io.
Also, Jupiter's trademark South Equatorial Belt (SEB) recently vanished, possibly submerging itself beneath high clouds. Researchers say it could reappear at any moment. The dramatic resurgence would be accompanied by a globe-straddling profusion of spots and cloudy swirls, clearly visible in backyard telescopes.
And what was that flash? Amateur astronomers have recently reported a surprising number of fireballs in Jupiter's atmosphere. Apparently, many small asteroids or comet fragments are hitting the giant planet and exploding among the clouds. Researchers who have studied these events say visible flashes could be occurring as often as a few times a month.
Finally, we mustn't forget the moons of Jupiter because they are also having a close encounter with Earth. These are planet-sized worlds with active volcanoes (Io), possible underground oceans (Europa), vast fields of craters (Callisto), and mysterious global grooves (Ganymede). When Galileo discovered the moons 400 years ago, they were no more than pinpricks of light in his primitive spy glass. Big, modern amateur telescopes reveal actual planetary disks with colorful markings.
It makes you wonder, what would Galileo think?
Answer: "I'm getting up at midnight!"
Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASAVirtuix has confirmed that it has developed a modified version of its Omni platform that allows players to crouch while using the omni directional motion control device. The company confirmed as much to VRFocus, revealing that the modified kit had been developed as a university project and that it could perhaps become available to consumers in the future.
An image of this version of the device, seen above, recently popped up on Facebook, as pointed out to VRFocus by reader Ben Drake. Virtuix CEO and founder Jan Goetgeluk also confirmed its existence.
“As part of an R&D project with Rice University in Houston, we built a support structure that allows the support ring to move up and down with the user, enabling crouching with the Omni,” Goetgeluk explained. “This is especially important for military training applications. In the future, we might offer this support structure to consumers as an upgrade to the standard Omni.”
The Omni is designed for use with VR titles, allowing users to walk and turn in any direction whilst wearing an Oculus Rift VR headset. The original model does recognise jumps, but doesn’t support crouching of any kind. The kit is due to ship to Kickstarter backers and those with an early pre-order in July 2014, with later orders following in September. VRFocus will continue to follow the device’s progress leading up to launch and report back with all the latest.Asheville, NC, August 5th, 2016 — Wicked Weed Brewing has announced their expansion of distribution into the state of Colorado slated for the week of August 8th. The Asheville, North Carolina based brewery will be launching this market by hosting tap takeover events throughout the state.
“Colorado is an outstanding beer market and we feel honored to pour alongside our amazing craft beer friends there,” states Ryan Guthy, Owner and Head of Sales. “We have seen such love and support from locals through our GABF and CBC visits and we can happily say that they will now be able to find a consistent supply of Wicked Weed beer.”
Colorado craft beer enthusiasts can expect to see a variety of sour and mixed culture farmhouse ales in bottles and limited draught. Consumers can also expect to see some of Wicked Weed’s hoppy offerings from their Production Facility, although eighty percent of the beer entering the market will hail from the brewery’s sour program.
Wicked Weed has signed with C.R. Goodman Companies, a family run distribution company that has been in business since 1983.
“Wicked Weed is excited to announce that we will be launching the Colorado market with C.R. Goodman Companies as our wholesaler,” says Ryan Guthy. “Their ownership team shares the same passion and dedication to craft that we do. We look forward to partnering with such a great group of friends on this new endeavor.”
Wicked Weed will be premiering their offerings at the following locations for their launch into the Colorado market:
Tuesday, August 16th – Falling Rock at 5pm
Wednesday, August 17th – The Mayor from 6-8pm
Thursday, August 18th – Backcountry Pizza at 5pm
Friday, August 19th – Freshcraft at 7pm
Saturday, August 20th – Hops & Pie at 12pm
ABOUT WICKED WEED BREWING
Wicked Weed Brewing is based in Asheville, North Carolina. Founded in December 2012, the original brewpub consistently hosts 25+ beers on tap including hop-forward, West Coast-style ales, open fermented Belgians, and barrel-aged beers. With the opening of the second location, The Funkatorium, in October 2013, Wicked Weed is striving to become one of the leading producers of barrel-aged sour and wild beers in the Southeastern United States. Wicked Weed Brewing was awarded a gold medal for both 100% Brettanomyces Serenity in 2013, Mompara Honey Ale in 2014, and a silver medal for Pernicious IPA in 2015 at the Great American Beer Festival. The brewery also received a bronze medal for Tyrant Double Red IPA in 2014, a bronze medal for La Bonté Pear in 2016 and a bronze medal for Red Angel in 2016 at the World Beer Cup. Wicked Weed continued its expansion in summer 2015 with a 50-barrel production brewery allowing for a wider distribution footprint in select states. Wicked Weed’s most recent project is the addition of a sour and wild dedicated brewery and barrel-house in South Asheville slated to be operational by fall 2016. Learn more at www.wickedweedbrewing.com and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/WickedWeedBrewing.In recent decades, ski lifts have been getting faster, more comfortable, and able to carry more and more people. Nearly 110 years ago, the first dedicated ski lifts were invented in the Black Forest of Germany and, since the turn of the century, the technology behind them has been greatly improving.
Companies like Doppelmayr are building lifts that can carry even bigger loads (One of the lifts they built for the Sochi Olympics was capable of carrying cars as well as people), that are even higher above the ground and that require fewer support towers for less environmental impact. Some resorts, like the ones below, are doing entirely new things with ski lifts.
Revolving Lifts
Revolving lifts rotate as they ascend the slopes, meaning that passengers get a full 360-degree panorama, without needing to turn their head.
Two revolving lifts in Switzerland, the Rotair and the Stuckli Rondo, have circular cabins. The Stuckli Rondo, the world’s first revolving lift, was built by Doppelmayr and has 18 eight-passenger cabins. It’s about a six-minute ride from the tiny Swiss village at 800m above sea level to the Mostelberg at 1200m.
Romantic Gondolas
A number of resorts have seen the benefits of using a gondola cabin for romance, and some have gone further than others.
One lift that serves the highest summit of the Bavarian Forest in Germany contains a special “Cuddle Cabin” with tinted windows and leather seats. Although the cabin officially seats six, only a single couple are allowed in at any given time for the four-minute ascent.
In Gstaad, couples can rent a gondola on their wedding day, decked out with flowers and decoration. The actual ceremony is then held at a mountain restaurant at the top of the lift.
The Double Decker Lift
Ten years ago, two of the world’s largest ski resorts, the les Arcs and la Plagne in France, were linked together by the Vanoise Express. The double-decker cabins of the Vanoise Express are each capable of holding a record-breaking 200 passengers, as it travels nearly 1,000 vertical feet above the valley floor.
Today, the Vanoise Express is a major engineering attraction in its own right, and recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary with an avante garde paint job and a performance by a high-wire walker along the cable between two cabins.
The Private Funicular
One of the world’s coolest ski lifts is, without doubt, the private personal funicular lift. This lift links the remarkable Tschuggen Grand Hotel in Arosa, Switzerland to the local ski slopes about half a mile away.
Hotel guests use an electronic lift ticket which calls the two-carriage mini train to the bottom or top station if it is not already waiting there, with each cabin’s roof opening like a sports car to allow entry. It’s all very James Bond.
This winter, the Tschuggen Grand opened another spectacular lift that links the resort’s slopes to those of its larger neighbouring resort Lenzerheide, creating a huge 225km ski region.
The Porsche Chairlift
High-speed, comfortable chairlifts with heated leather seats became so common in the Alps, they were starting to get a little passé. In 2012, the leading Swiss resort of Laax decided that they needed to do something different with their latest lift to make it stand out from the crowd.
Their answer was to commission the iconic car brand Porsche to design the chairlift. The result is a chairlift that not only looks very cool, but also features a ’wellness seat,’ which can be set to ‘Panorama Mode,’ tilting 45 degrees sideways to allow superb views. The lift is also eco friendly, using solar power to heat its seats.
The Open-Top Lift
In the past year, we’ve seen several ‘open-top’ trams open in Austria and Switzerland, including a spectacular new lift at Austria’s Dachstein Glacier, where snowsports are offered year round.
A special access platform was built at the top and bottom stations so that those who want to ride in an open-air section on the roof can do so, as it ascends high above the ground.
The Sauna Gondola
Have you ever ridden up a mountain in a packed lift and thought, “It’s like a sauna in here!”
Well, in the Finnish resort of Ylläs in Lapland, you can get the real deal, as the clever Finns have converted a gondola cabin into a wood-clad sauna.
Simply strip off in the sub-zero temperatures and hop in for your ascent to the top station at 718m above sea level with up to three friends.
Once at the top, a ‘normal’ sauna awaits for private use. The system can be used by up to 12 people at once on a two-hour booking, taking turns to jump in and out of the gondola sauna as it circuits.Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told a reporter he found it "fascinating" there were no protestors waiting for Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia, and had to be reminded that is because Saudi Arabia does not have a First Amendment.
After a truly terrible week of revelations into his potentially criminal interference with the Russia investigation, Donald Trump set off on a diplomatic trip — something he had been dreading so much that he actually asked his officials if there was any way he could cut it short.
By all accounts, Trump’s tough-guy act was enfeebled in Saudi Arabia. He bowed to the Saudi king shortly after Fox News had praised him for not bowing to the Saudi King.
However, at least some of Trump’s inner circle seemed relieved by how the Saudi leg of the tour went. In fact, while Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was telling CNBC reporter Becky Quick and the rest of the Squawk Box crew about how well the tour went, he gave a shocking reason for why he thinks things are better in Saudi Arabia:
ROSS: I think the other thing that was fascinating to me, there was not a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there. Not one guy with a bad placard. Instead — QUICK: But Secretary Ross, that may be not necessarily because they don’t have those feelings there, but because they control people and don’t allow them to come and express their feelings quite the same as we do here. ROSS: In theory that could be true, but boy, there was certainly no sign of it. There was not a single effort at any incursion. There wasn’t anything. The mood was a genuinely good mood.
Quick is right. The lack of protest was first and foremost because Saudi Arabia is an extremely repressive regime where people are not allowed to express certain views in public.
This is a country where journalist Alaa Brinji was sentenced to five years in prison just for tweeting support of women’s right to drive cars. This is a country where dissident blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for “insulting Islam.” This is a country where women were not allowed to attend Ivanka Trump’s speech on “female empowerment.”
It is safe to say that a lack of protests against Trump tells us nothing about how Saudi citizens actually view Trump.
The inclination to admire restrictions on First Amendment rights is not limited to Ross. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson did not invite any U.S. reporters to his joint press conference with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir, just the latest in a number of Trump administration assaults on press freedom.
And of course, Trump himself has often praised authoritarian world leaders who oppress their citizens and deny them any number of rights, including the right to free speech and open protest.
It is painfully obvious that Trump and his top officials would rather be in charge of a country with fewer protections on political speech. The American people must continue to stand up and demand a president who respects their rights.Rooting and Propagating African Violets
If you ever wondered how to propagate African violets - it is very easy job to do. There are several ways how to propagate African violets:
- rooting African violet leaves in water and potting them in African violet's potting soil
- rooting African violet leaves by planting them directly in African violet's potting soil
- growing African violets from seeds
Rooting African violet leaves in water and potting them in African violet's potting soil
If you find somewhere African violet that is especially beautiful, or if you just want few more plants of the variety that you have, you can simply cut a leaf or two from it, without damaging or jeopardizing the plant. You should always look for green healthy leafs from the bottom of the plant, not from the middle, so that plant looks just as good as before cutting the leafs.
Then, take some yoghurt or jam jar, put some nylon or waxed paper over top, fix it with rubber bend or duct tape, cut two holes, one bigger than the other, put the stem of leafs in smaller hole, and then fill the jar with water (not fresh water of course). Water should cover almost entire stem of the leaf.
You can, although it is not necessary, add a drop of liquid fertilizer – or add one or two pellets of solid mineral fertilizer. After that, put the jar in location with enough light and wait 6-7 weeks until roots appear. Then plant the African violet in suitable pot. If you put leaf in the jar without nylon, leaf's stem fill touch the bottom of the jar – when roots start to grow, any movement of the jar could damage them.
Rooting African violet leaves by planting them directly in African violet's potting soil
It is also possible to cut a leaf and directly plant it in the pot.
In that case, you should keep the soil moist all of the time. You will not notice the roots, of course, but within 2-3 months, small leafs will appear from the ground. You can than repot the plant or simply leave the plant in that pot. Don't water it much anymore. Usually, if I find a broken leaf, I put it in the same container with mother plant. If it roots and grow new leafs, great, if not, no damage done. In most of the cases, I have new plant to give...
In both cases, main leaf will die with time, and it should be then removed – again don't water the plant more than 'grown' plants any more. Main leaf can be'removed' before it dies and can be reused for rooting of another African violet plant. It just needs to be removed at the 'right' moment - young plant is strong and big enough and main leaf is still healthy.One of the biggest mysteries entering the 2015 season is the health of Peyton Manning's throwing arm.
The first review from Denver Broncos' training camp, via receiver Demaryius Thomas, is a positive one.
"I know you're not going to believe this, but it seems like he has more zip," Thomas told reporters Thursday, per Mike Klis of 9News in Denver.
Thomas' qualification aside, we'd expect Manning's throws to have more zip now than they did during the stretch run last season, when the quarterback dealt with quad issues and his arm appeared worn down.
Broncos GM @johnelway to @850KOA: "Peyton has thrown the ball tremendously in camp. His arm looks great." pic.twitter.com/hGMxJnIzMb â Patrick Smyth (@psmyth12) August 6, 2015
The key for the Broncos' season is keeping Manning healthy for more than just the start of the season. Denver plans to utilize a more balanced offensive attack than in the past by leaning on the ground game. Coach Gary Kubiak has also built in more off days for the workaholic Manning to try and keep him fresh.
No team's 2015 fortunes rely more on one appendage than Denver with Manning's right arm.
Thomas' comment is a great note, but we are far from the end of this storyline being pertinent.
The latest Around The NFL Podcast features Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo sharing his thoughts on the upcoming season.Burglar wearing socks on his hands eludes arrest in Fremont
File photo of police car lights. Flashing Lights on Police Car File photo of police car lights. Flashing Lights on Police Car Photo: Jacom Stephens / Getty Image Photo: Jacom Stephens / Getty Image Image 1 of / 28 Caption Close Burglar wearing socks on his hands eludes arrest in Fremont 1 / 28 Back to Gallery
Fremont police are on the hunt for a man who wore socks on his hands during a break-in at a cell phone repair store before making his escape into a drainage canal early Wednesday, officials said.
The burglary occurred about 3:42 a.m. at a store on the 40900 block of Fremont Boulevard, according to the Fremont Police Department.
Fremont Fire officials witnessed the man robbing the store with socks on his hands and a shirt wrapped around his face, but he fled into a drainage canal that runs between Fremont Boulevard and Lincoln Street before he could be apprehended, police said.
The suspect is described as slender and between 5 feet 7 and 5 feet 10, and was last seen wearing a black-and-white short-sleeved shirt, black pants and black baseball hat, according to Geneva Bosques, a spokeswoman for the Fremont Police Department.
Two iPhones and a pair of Beats earbuds were taken, Bosques said.
Filipa Ioannou is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: fioannou@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @obioannoukenobiFor other elections that took place on this day, see United Kingdom elections, 2016
The 2016 London mayoral election was held on 5 May 2016 to elect the Mayor of London, on the same day as the London Assembly election. It was the fifth election to the position of Mayor, which was created in 2000 after a referendum in London. The election used a supplementary vote system.
The election was won by Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Tooting, Sadiq Khan, who polled 56.8% of the votes in the head-to-head second round of voting over Conservative MP for Richmond Park, Zac Goldsmith. Goldsmith was more than 25% ahead of the next candidate in the first round of voting, as part of a record field of twelve candidates. Of the twelve candidates only Khan, Goldsmith, and Green Party candidate Siân Berry achieved the requisite 5% minimum first round vote share to retain their deposit.[1]
This was the first election to not |
the "heavily vibratoed unison bends" that presage what he described as one of Hendrix's best guitar solos.
"The Wind Cries Mary" is the first ballad recorded by the Experience; Hendrix wrote the lyrics after an argument with his girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham, whose middle name is Mary.[113] She explained: "I smashed plates on the floor, [and] he swept them up. He locked me in the bathroom for absolutely ages and... eventually Chas's girlfriend Lotta let me out... I ran out to get a taxi and was standing under the traffic lights, and I had red hair and a red dress. I went back after I'd cooled down and he'd already written it." The song featured a chord progression inspired by Curtis Mayfield and lyrics that reflected Hendrix's admiration of Bob Dylan. "Stone Free" expressed Hendrix's desire to preserve his personal freedom, demurring the concepts of conformity and long-term relationships. He revisited this theme in "51st Anniversary" and "Highway Chile". Omitted from the American version of the album, "Red House" did not see an official release in the US until the 1969 compilation Smash Hits. An unusual feature of the recording is that it does not include a bass guitar track; Redding instead played rhythm guitar with his equalization set strongly in favor of bass tones. It is Hendrix's only original twelve-bar blues.
Album cover [ edit ]
Chris Stamp designed the cover of the UK version of Are You Experienced, which featured a picture of Hendrix, Mitchell, and Redding by Bruce Fleming. The image shows Hendrix wearing a long dark cape while standing over Mitchell and Redding, striking what Egan described as a "Dracula-esque pose". Chandler contacted Fleming based on the photographer's previous work with the Hollies, the Dave Clark Five, and the Animals. The photo shoot took place in February after Fleming had attended several recording sessions and Experience gigs. Chandler made a point of requesting that the band member's faces be clearly visible in the photograph; Fleming explained: "[Album covers] got much more esoteric as time went on, but to establish the artist we had to get their faces across so the kids would recognize them." He took monochrome and color shots of the band; Track selected an image from the latter group. Fleming had indicated which picture he preferred they use, marking the shot with a cross, but after the album's release he realized that they had selected another, less desirable image. According to Fleming, the shot that he chose was "more sinister; more interesting". Stamp hired graphic artist Alan Aldridge to design the sleeve's psychedelic lettering. Track inexplicably put only the album's title on the cover, omitting the band's name; Polydor issued the release throughout Europe with Hendrix's name printed at the top in matching font. The cover art's combination of dull green and brown tones, juxtaposed with the jocular nature of the subject's pose, created a weak overall visual impression; Stamp commented: "It's not a great cover at all. Hopefully, we made up for that in all the other covers."
Hendrix disliked the UK cover of Are You Experienced, so arrangements were made for a photo shoot with graphic designer Karl Ferris. Hendrix wanted "something psychedelic", so he requested Ferris because he appreciated the photographer's sleeve-work on the Hollies' June 1967 release Evolution. During a meeting with the band, Ferris told Hendrix that he wanted to hear more of their music from which to draw inspiration. They accommodated his request by allowing him to attend several sessions for their second album, Axis: Bold as Love. Ferris brought home tapes from the sessions, which along with Are You Experienced he listened to intently. His first impression of the music was that it was "so far out that it seemed to come from outer space", which inspired him to develop a backstory about a "group travelling through space in a Biosphere on their way to bring their unworldly space music to earth." With this concept in mind, he took color photographs of the band at Kew Gardens in London, using a fisheye lens which was then popular in Mod sub-culture. Ferris used what Egan described as "an infrared technique of his own invention which combined color reversal with heat signature", further enhancing the exotic nature of the image. Ferris was an experienced fashion photographer, and his interest in the finer details of his covers led him to choose the band's wardrobe. After seeing Hendrix with his hair combed away from the scalp, Ferris requested that he wear it that way during the photo shoot. Hendrix's girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham, trimmed his hair to improve its symmetry, forming an afro that became the basis of a homogenized Experience image. Redding and Mitchell liked Hendrix's new hairstyle, so Ferris hired a hairdresser to style their hair in a similar fashion. After purchasing clothing for Redding and Mitchell at the boutiques on King's Road—Hendrix wore clothes from his wardrobe, including a psychedelic jacket with a pair of eyes printed on the front which had been given to him by a fan—the Experience travelled to Kew Gardens. In an effort to focus on Hendrix's hands, Ferris shot the band at a low angle. The daylight faded soon after their arrival at the garden, so they returned the following day for a second shoot, which was not needed; the image selected for the US cover of Are You Experienced was the first shot taken the previous day. Ferris chose the cover's yellow background and its surreal lettering, and he intended for a textured gatefold jacket that Reprise, as a cost-saving measure, did not approve.[nb 11]
Release [ edit ]
Europe [ edit ]
Are You Experienced? released by Front cover of the albumreleased by Barclay Records in France and Benelux
The third Experience single, "The Wind Cries Mary" backed by "Highway Chile", was released in the UK on May 5, 1967, while "Purple Haze" occupied the number three spot in the charts. The management's decision to release the single while the previous one was still present in the UK charts was unorthodox, as was the choice of "The Wind Cries Mary", which differed greatly from "Purple Haze". Stamp recalled: "We did that on purpose... We wanted musically to show who this person was." Egan wrote: "It alerted the public to the fact that the so-called Wild Man of Borneo was capable of songs of delicacy and sensitivity." "The Wind Cries Mary" reached number six in the UK in May.
Track Records released Are You Experienced in the UK on May 12, 1967.[nb 12] It entered the charts on May 27, where it spent 33 weeks, peaking at number two.[133] It remained in the charts long enough that it was still present when the Experience released their second album, Axis: Bold as Love. The album, which was released in the UK without the first three singles, was prevented from reaching the top spot by the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.[134][nb 13]
In France and the Benelux countries, Hendrix's recordings were released by Barclay Records in a distribution deal secured by Jeffery.
North America [ edit ]
Although popular in Europe at the time, the Experience's first US single, "Hey Joe", failed to reach the Billboard Hot 100 chart upon its release on May 1, 1967. The group's fortunes improved when Paul McCartney recommended them to the organizers of the Monterey Pop Festival. He insisted that the event would be incomplete without Hendrix, whom he called "an absolute ace on the guitar", and he agreed to join the board of organizers on the condition that the Experience perform at the festival in mid-June.[137] During the climax of the festival, which was filmed by D. A. Pennebaker for the documentary Monterey Pop, Hendrix burned and smashed his guitar on stage for dramatic effect.[138]
After the show-stealing performance, Reprise Records agreed to distribute Are You Experienced. However, despite the increased awareness that the Experience's performance at Monterey provided, the second Experience single, "Purple Haze" / "The Wind Cries Mary", released in the US on August 16, 1967, stalled at number 65 on the Billboard Hot 100. Although the single performed poorly in the US charts, its presence on underground FM radio stations, which were transitioning from easy listening and classical music formats to album cuts, significantly aided sales of the LP.[140] Reprise allocated a $20,000 promotional budget for the LP, which was an unprecedented amount for an unproven artist. Released in the US on August 23 by Reprise, Are You Experienced reached number five on the Billboard 200.[142] The album remained on Billboard's album chart for 106 weeks, 27 of those in the Top 40.[143] The North American edition of Are You Experienced featured a new cover by Karl Ferris and a new track list, with Reprise omitting "Red House", "Remember", and "Can You See Me", and including the first three A-sides omitted from the UK release: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind Cries Mary".
Reception and legacy [ edit ]
Are You Experienced was an immediate commercial success, selling more than one million copies within seven months of its release. Reviewing the album in 1967, Melody Maker praised its artistic integrity and the Experience's varied use of tempo. NME's Keith Altham said it is "a brave effort by Hendrix to produce a musical form which is original and exciting". However, not all contemporary writers gave the LP a favorable review; in November 1967, Rolling Stone's Jon Landau wrote that although he considered Hendrix a "great guitarist and a brilliant arranger", he disapproved of his singing and songwriting. He criticized the quality of the material and described the lyrics as inane: "Above all this record is unrelentingly violent, and lyrically, inartistically violent at that."
Many music critics have since named Are You Experienced as one of the greatest rock and roll debut albums.[1] Journalist Ritchie Unterberger described it as "one of the definitive albums of the psychedelic era."[144] Author Chris Smith said the release was "a landmark in a summer of landmark albums".[156] Noe Goldwasser, the founding editor of Guitar World magazine, called it "a veritable textbook of what a musician can do with his instrument" and "the measure by which everything... in rock and roll has been compared since." According to music journalist Charles Shaar Murray, the album "completely changed notions of what a guitar could sound like, or indeed, what music could sound like", while The Miami Herald credited Are You Experienced with introducing acid rock, classic rock, and the guitar aesthetic of heavy metal. Critic Robert Christgau called it a "bombshell debut" in his review for Blender and said its songs were innovative for how they utilized three-minute pop structures as a medium for Hendrix's unprecedentedly heavy and turbulent guitar and loud, powerful hooks, which greatly appealed to young listeners.
Rolling Stone includes the album and several songs on various "best of" lists, such as:
500 Greatest Albums of All Time – No. 15, calling it an "epochal debut", and praising Hendrix's "exploitation of amp howl", and characterizing his guitar playing as "incendiary... historic in itself". (2005) [161]
500 Greatest Songs of All Time – "Purple Haze" (No. 17), "Foxy Lady" (No. 153), "Hey Joe" (No. 201), and "The Wind Cries Mary" (No. 379). (2011)
Best Debut Albums of All Time – No. 3, crediting it as the LP "that established the transcendent promise of psychedelia", stating: "Every idea we have of the guitarist as groundbreaking individual artist comes from this record." (2013)[163]
Additionally, Mojo magazine listed Are You Experienced as the greatest guitar album of all time (2003).[164] In 2005, Are You Experienced was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry, which selects recordings annually that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[165]
Track listing [ edit ]
Since the first release of Are You Experienced in 1967, there have been six different track listings. Since 1997, compact disc editions in the US and UK feature 17 tracks, including all songs that appeared on either the original UK/international edition of the album or the original North American edition, as well as the Experience's first three singles ("Stone Free", "51st Anniversary", and "Highway Chile").
Original UK and international edition [ edit ]
All tracks written by Jimi Hendrix.
Original North American edition [ edit ]
All tracks written by Jimi Hendrix except where noted.
CD releases [ edit ]
Are You Experienced was first issued on the Compact Disc Digital Audio or CD format in 1985 by Polydor Records (Track's successor) in Europe and Reprise in the US. These early CDs essentially copied the original LP record albums and used the same tracks, sequencing, and cover art as their 1967 counterparts. Both were reissued with minor changes in 1989–1991 and the Reprise release CD sleeve included "Digital re-mastering by Joe Gastwirt, assisted by Dave Mitson using the Sonic Solutions NoNoise System, under the supervision of Are You Experienced? Ltd."[168]
In 1993, Alan Douglas, who managed Hendrix's recording catalogue, reached an agreement with MCA Records for the future releases of Hendrix material. He also announced plans for new reissues of the three Experience albums: "Everything in the present catalogue is a budget release... They're all 25-year-old packages. I want to take it high-level... with all these new elements". Along with new artwork and liner notes, the MCA reissue was remastered with only one track selection and order for both the European and America markets. The 17-track CD included the first three Experience British singles (both A-sides and B-sides), followed by the 11 songs as they appeared on the Track/Polydor UK album release.
The 1993 Douglas reissues were short-lived; in 1997, his tenure as the overseer of Hendrix's catalogue was taken over by Experience Hendrix (the Hendrix family-controlled company). By April 1997, a new reissue was released, which restored the original artwork and sequencing for both the US and UK releases. However, both reissues included an additional six extra tracks, which provided the same 17 tracks (all the original singles and album tracks) in the UK and US, although in a different order. Since 1997, these have been the official authorized CD versions of the original albums. In 2010, Sony's Legacy Recordings became the exclusive distributor for the recordings managed by Experience Hendrix.[169]
All tracks written by Jimi Hendrix except where noted.
North American CD reissue bonus tracks (1997–present)[171] No. Title Length 12. "Stone Free" 3:36 13. "51st Anniversary" 3:15 14. "Highway Chile" 3:32 15. "Can You See Me" 2:33 16. "Remember" 2:48 17. "Red House" 3:50 Total length: 19:34
Personnel [ edit ]
Jimi Hendrix Experience [ edit ]
Jimi Hendrix – guitar, lead vocals
Noel Redding – bass guitar; backing vocals on "Foxy Lady", "Fire", and "Purple Haze"
Mitch Mitchell – drums; backing vocals on "I Don't Live Today" and "Stone Free"
Additional personnel [ edit ]
The Breakaways – backing vocals on "Hey Joe"
Chas Chandler – producer
Dave Siddle – engineering on "Manic Depression", "Can You See Me", "Love or Confusion", "I Don't Live Today", "Fire", "Remember", "Hey Joe", "Stone Free", "Purple Haze", "51st Anniversary", and "The Wind Cries Mary"
Eddie Kramer – engineering on "The Wind Cries Mary", "Are You Experienced?", and "Red House"; additional engineering on "Love or Confusion", "Fire", "Third Stone from the Sun", and "Highway Chile"
Mike Ross – engineering on "Foxy Lady", "Red House", and "Third Stone from the Sun"
Certifications [ edit ]
Region Certification Certified units/Sales United Kingdom (BPI)[172] Gold 100,000^ United States (RIAA)[173] 5× Platinum 5,000,000^ ^shipments figures based on certification alone
Notes [ edit ]
^ Are You Experienced was composed entirely of Hendrix originals. Hendrix earned his first composer credits for two instrumentals, "Hornet's Nest" and "Knock Yourself Out", released as a Curtis Knight and the Squires single in 1966. The original UK version ofwas composed entirely of Hendrix originals. ^ During this break from recording, the Experience played eight shows in Germany and three in England. ^ It is unclear if the four rhythm tracks recorded at CBS were completed on December 13. Ross recalled that two were completed on the 13th and two more on the 15th, but Redding wrote in his diary that Mitchell was not present on the 15th, and he also left some doubt as to whether or not the Experience recorded or rehearsed on December 15. ^ Levy refused to release the recordings until Chandler had paid CBS in full. ^ By mid-December, 1966, Mitchell had been late for several band rehearsals and recording sessions; he altogether failed to report to CBS on December 15. This provoked Hendrix and Redding to consider replacing him in the Experience. They auditioned a friend of Redding's, John Banks, and the audition went well enough that Hendrix and Redding offered Banks the position, but Banks, who was afraid of flying turned down the job to avoid the extensive air travel that would have been required of him. According to Redding, after Chandler docked Mitchell's weekly pay he was never late again. ^ Before traveling to the UK, Hendrix had worked with eight-track recorders in the US. According to Kramer, he wanted to hear the basic rhythm parts across all four tracks, which inspired Kramer to experiment with reduction mixing ^ Hendrix had experimented with the possibilities of backwards instruments on his reel-to-reel tape machine, mastering the technique after hours of private application. ^ In honor of his Cherokee heritage, Hendrix dedicated the song to the American Indians and other minority groups. ^ Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the story was a condensed form of a 1957 novel by Night of Light: Day of Dreams. The magazine was, and the story was a condensed form of a 1957 novel by Philip José Farmer, titled ^ According to authors Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek, the earliest that Hendrix is known to have ingested LSD was in June 1967, while at the Monterey Pop Festival. ^ The back of the sleeve featured a monochrome image of the Experience. ^ Track released Are You Experienced two weeks ahead of schedule when its distributor, Polydor, erred by shipping 2,000 copies to London music stores. ^ Are You Experienced was released in the UK on May 12, 1967, the The Sound of Music occupied the number one spot. Whenwas released in the UK on May 12, 1967, the soundtrack tooccupied the number one spot.
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
DocumentariesWASHINGTON -- Insurance company executives on Thursday, Sept. 17, assured a skeptical congressional subcommittee chaired by Cleveland Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich that their coverage decisions are motivated by patient care, not profits.
One after another, representatives of Aetna, United Healthcare, WellPoint Inc., Humana, CIGNA, and Health Care Service Corp. denied their companies cut costs by routinely rejecting claims, or that they rescind insurance coverage for patients and employers who incur major medical expenses.
"Private health insurers are insuring fewer people and earning higher profits, by avoiding providing coverage to people who get very sick and who have very high medical bills -- that's what Wall Street wants to see," insisted Kucinich, whose Domestic Policy Subcommittee heard testimony Wednesday from former insurance company employees and relatives of patients who maintained that was the case.
Insurance company officials summoned for Day Two of Kucinich's hearings explained it differently.
"Health care costs drive insurance premiums, not the other way around," declared Aetna Inc. Senior Vice President Patricia Farrell. "Over the last decade, health care costs have risen about 7.7 percent a year on average, and insurance premiums have risen that very same amount."
Brian Sassi, who heads Wellpoint Inc.'s consumer business unit, cited an insurance industry study that said companies typically pay out 87 cents of every premium dollar to cover claims, while just three cents goes to profit. He said 6 cents goes to taxes and administrative costs while 4 cents goes to services like disease prevention, provider support and marketing.
One percent of WellPoint's members account for 25 percent of medical costs paid out by the company, he said, and 5 percent drive 50 percent of costs. Most have severe chronic illnesses.
"Our goal is to help these members manage their conditions and prevent their illnesses from progressing to a more advanced stage," Sassi said.
When Kucinich inquired about multimillion-dollar fines that WellPoint paid in California for rescinding coverage to patients who incurred significant medical bills, Sassi said the policies were actually canceled because those customers lied on their coverage applications.
"We never drop a member because of an increase in their medical costs," said Aetna's Farrell.
Insurance industry representatives said they oppose establishing a public health care option.
They said that because the current Medicare and Medicaid public insurance programs don't reimburse health care providers sufficiently to cover expenses, extra costs amounting to $88 billion each year are passed along to the privately insured, which adds an extra $1,500 in yearly premium costs for a family of four. More people enrolled in public insurance would force the privately insured to absorb more costs and make private insurance less competitive.
When Rep. John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan accused the insurers of not wanting competition from a public plan, Sassi replied that 1,300 insurers around the country compete for business with each other.
"Our concern is that when the government comes in and has ability to set reimbursement rates, it creates an unlevel playing field that can reduce choice for the American public," Sassi said.The problem with watching how people behave in "real" life is that once you tell them they're being watched they stop being real, says Laurie Taylor in his weekly column for the Magazine. "What I really want," I told the vice chancellor, "is a laboratory of human behaviour. I want to be able to watch people as they engage in normal social interaction. I want to be able to make a sophisticated record of every aspect of that interaction. And I want to be invisible to my subjects. To see and not be seen." "A bit like God, really," said the vice-chancellor. FIND OUT MORE Hear Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed on Radio 4 at 1600 on Wednesdays or 0030 on Mondays Or download the podcast here It was back in the late 60s when I first laid out that shopping list, a time when new universities were being sufficiently funded to allow even junior lecturers like myself to make quite outrageous demands for special research facilities. I got everything I wanted: a social psychology laboratory which was described by one leading researcher as "Europe's most sophisticated facility for the observation and measurement of group behaviour." Let me take you on a brief tour. As you enter from the departmental corridor you find yourself in what looks like a small theatre. But the neat rows of tip-up seats face not a stage or a screen but a one-way mirror which stretches cinemascopically across the entire width of the room. Sheltered immediately below the mirror are a dozen small-work stations, each one fitted with sophisticated recording devices which allow the specialised observers to make a cumulative record of every piece of interaction occurring on the other side of the mirror. Complete control And then, as the watching students settle in their seats, and the specialist observers, click "Start" on their recording panels, the action begins. Reality is a tricky phenomenon... [students] would go out of their way to confirm what they thought was the experimenter's hypothesis
Through the mirror we see a group of five students sitting together at a table. They are trying to resolve a problem "Could we do it this way?" says one student. "I can't see how that would help," says another. Through the mirror in the observation room, the recorders are busily coding each of these remarks. "Could we do it this way?" counts as an "instrumental suggestion" and that means a click on the number six button on the recording pad. "I can't see how that would help" is rated as a "negative emotional response" and rates an eight. And while all this goes on I would be standing at the back of the observation room feeling that I had at last managed to capture experimentally a small piece of reality. Unlike other social scientists, who studied such nebulous topics as social mobility and ethnic relations, I was in complete control of my subject matter. There were obviously some slightly unnatural aspects involved in my study - after all people don't typically sit down to tackle problems at a table in a large empty room bounded on one side by a huge mirror - but once the subjects got started on the problem, there could surely be no doubting the reality of the ways they interacted. Conforming to type But reality is a tricky phenomenon. Some years later I came across a disturbing study which showed that the ways in which students behaved in social psychology laboratories was entirely different from the behaviour they'd exhibit in other settings. For a start, they would go out of their way to confirm what they thought was the experimenter's hypothesis. Is this how normal people would behave if unwatched by TV cameras? They'd agree and disagree in laboratory discussion groups because they'd decided in advance that this was what people on the other side of the one-way mirror wanted to see and hear. The conclusion was stark. What I'd been studying all these years was not reality at all. It was a very specialised form of reality - laboratory reality. Outside the laboratory, the work of recording reality has become the specialised preserve of film and television documentary makers. Each of them, from Robert Flaherty in the 1930s to the contemporary producers of Big Brother, have used and misused the word "reality" to add status to their cultural products. No wonder that Brian Winston chose Claiming the Real as a title for his illuminating history of the documentary. A couple of months ago I ran into a student who'd taken part in my interaction studies. He wondered how they'd worked out. Had I proved what I'd wanted to prove? "Oh yes," I told him, "everything came out more or less as I predicted". "That's great," he said. "None of us wanted to let you down." I nodded my thanks and said goodbye: it somehow didn't seem appropriate to point out that his eagerness to bring my study to a successful conclusion had undermined my belief in laboratory findings forever. Below is a selection of your comments. Fascinating subject. But surely Mr Taylor already knew that the "act" of watching an event will change it if the participants are aware they may be watched? I found one comment really significant - "I was in complete control of my subject matter". If you control something it can never happen naturally. The experiment was doomed from the inception. The alternative - hidden cameras in public/communal areas would be very hard to get permission for - so I suspect that investigation into the detail or personal interactions will never be easy to do.
Sandy, Derby, UK My boyfriend did a psychology module at university, and the best experiments were the ones in which people didn't realise it was part of the experiment - they would ask the subjects to wait under certain conditions "while they set up the experiment", and they would have no idea that they were being observed the whole time.
Jane, Manchester, UK This is a nice story about reality. And I'd like to add that reality comes out when somebody don't have any motives. Motives, when present either in conscious or subconscious mind deflects people from their reality and accordingly from their acts. Hence a person would act the same in front of thousands of people or alone, if he is free from all worldly motives or desires. For instance: some "SADHUS" in my part of the world. Thanks.
Dr Pukar Thapa, Kathmandu, Nepal It's not just in human interaction. It's a law of quantum physics (I believe) that it is impossible to observe any particle without changing its state.
Mark Hewitt, Chester-le-Street It was clear from the start that reality TV had nothing to do with reality. Unless, that is, you spend your whole life with people with severe personality problems. Reality TV is more like the modern equivalent of the 18th Century pastime of going to the lunatic asylum to be appalled and amused in turn by the inmates.
David, Norwich
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionCLOSE Jordi Rouiller describes how she fought off a man who attacked her in her home Amber Sandhu
Buy Photo Jordi Rouiller at her home in Redding where she had to fight off an intruder Friday morning. (Photo: Greg Barnette/Record Searchlight)Buy Photo
It was a typical Friday morning at home for Jordi Rouiller. Around 10 a.m., the 24-year-old Redding resident had just sat down at her desk, downstairs in the middle of her home, ready to begin her work day.
She had just opened the sliding door to let her dogs out when from the corner of her eye, she noticed a man peering in.
There’s an empty lot behind her condominium complex on Redwood Boulevard, which is where she often sees gardeners with leaf blowers cleaning up. And while she initially assumed the man was a gardener because of his backpack, she felt he was too close for comfort.
“As soon as he made eye contact with me, he rushed the door,” she said.
Rouiller thought about grabbing her gun nearby, but that meant turning her back from the man. With her mother and sister in the house, she decided to do something her attacker might not have expected.
“I ran in to fight. It didn’t matter what happened to me,” she said. “It was about protecting my family.”
He had just entered the home when Rouiller ran toward him, dodging a punch, hitting him with her right shoulder. She slammed him up against the sliding door, pushing him out, and wedged herself in between, holding the sliding door shut. The man began punching and slapping Rouiller’s face and Rouiller punched back with her right hand. Hearing her yelling, Rouiller’s mother came out of the bedroom with a kitana sword, which caused the man to flee.
“The look in his eyes is what scares me the most,” she said. “There was no good intention.”
Rouiller grabbed a baseball bat, and called the police, who arrived in a matter of minutes.
The Redding Police Department describe her attacker as a white man, 5 feet 6 inches tall, 145 pounds, with tattooed hands, and last seen wearing black clothing. While police combed the area with the help of K-9 units, they were unsuccessful in finding the man.
Rouiller broke her knuckle and right middle finger hitting the man. When the police arrived, she noticed that he may have used two chairs on either side of the fence to get to her patio. But, she can’t help shake the feeling that man’s intentions were more sinister, wanting to cause her more physical harm, she said.
Rouiller lifts weights regularly, lost 91 pounds, and was a volunteer firefighter in Tehama County. Despite being overly cautious and aware of her surroundings, and being a gun-owner, she still feels like she was unprepared for this situation.
It’s prompted her to take self-defense classes and attain a carry concealed weapons permit.
“I’m not going to allow myself to be a victim more than I already am,” she said. “Every woman is doing herself an injustice if she is not prepared and not aware that this stuff happens.”
At Redding’s Amazonas Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, hearing stories like Rouiller’s and Sherri Papini’s, who was kidnapped while out for a run, prompted the instructors to start a women’s self-defense class.
Daniell Rosch, who teaches the women’s self-defense class, said a lot of women had expressed concern about running outside after the Papini kidnapping, and wanted to know how they could protect themselves if they ever found themselves in a harmful situation.
The instructors held a seminar at Simpson University, where they spoke about sexual assault situations, and reached out to about 30 women who expressed interest in starting a class at Amazonas. For the class, Rosch teaches attack scenarios like how to free arms, legs and hair if someone has a hold.
“Show you’re a fighter,” Rosch said. “A lot of people are not willing to attack a woman who will make a scene.”
For Rouiller, the attack in her own home has left her shaken. Tuesday night, she called the police again because of a strange thud against her front door.
“Somebody hit my door, and it shook the wall,” she said.
She’s received some hateful and threatening messages online, but most of them remain positive, telling her the community is behind her, and that she’s a “hero.”
But Rouiller just wants her attacker found, in hopes that he doesn’t attack anyone else.
“If they can’t find him by blood evidence or fingerprints, how else are they going to find him?” she said. “I want this man found so I can sleep at night.”
Read or Share this story: http://reddingne.ws/2sBCRYgAmazon: We Sold Over 4 Million Kindle Devices This Month; Gifting Of E-Books Up 175 Percent
Amazon has just released new data regarding its Kindle sales for the holiday season. According to the e-commerce giant, Amazon customers purchased millions of Kindle Fires and millions of Kindle e-readers. And 2011 was the best holiday ever for the Kindle family, as customers purchased over 1 million Kindle devices each week.
Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said in a statement: “We are grateful to our customers worldwide for making this the best holiday ever for Kindle.” Bezos also highlighted the fact that the #1 and #4 best-selling Kindle books released in 2011 were both published independently by their authors using Kindle Direct Publishing.
The Kindle family, including the Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch and Kindle, held the top three spots on Amazon’s best seller list, respectively. The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s new tablet device, was the most gifted and wished for product on Amazon this season, and was the top selling product un the UK, France, Spain and Italy. The Kindle Fire was also the best selling product on Amazon’s mobile site.
Gifting of Kindle books was up 175 percent between this Black Friday and Christmas Day compared to the same period in 2010 and Christmas Day was the biggest day ever for Kindle book downloads.
For third-party sellers on Amazon, this year proved to be a merry Christmas as well. 2011 was also a record-breaking holiday season for businesses that sell on Amazon. Third-party sellers experienced record holiday growth, with the number of sellers who exceeded $5,000 in sales during the holiday season increased 44 percent year-over-year. For the year, businesses on Amazon sold hundreds of millions of units worth billions of dollars worldwide.
Amazon says this was a record-breaking year for the Kindle family in terms of sales, especially with respect to its newest device, the Kindle Fire. As we wrote previously, the Kindle is actually outpacing the iPad’s post-launch sales rate. And the company hasn’t faced any backorder issues yet.
In the past, Amazon has been reluctant to reveal exact numbers for the quantity of Kindles sold and are even hedging a bit by stating that “over” 1 million Kindles were sold each week in December as opposed to just giving us a precise number for units sold. Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps expected expects 5 million Kindle Fire tablets sold this year.
Other interesting facts revealed by Amazon:
Amazon customers purchased enough copies of Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” book to create a stack taller than Mt. Everest.
The cumulative weight of the Bowflex 552 Adjustable Dumbbells purchased by Amazon customers would outweigh more than 70 adult elephants.
If you unfolded and stacked each pair of jeans purchased by Amazon customers this holiday, the height would be 2,500 times taller than the Statue of Liberty.
Amazon customers purchased enough sweaters to outfit each of Santa’s reindeer during Christmas Eve deliveries for the next 14,000 years.
Amazon customers purchased enough copies of Just Dance 3 to give 15 copies to each person who participated in setting the world record for simultaneous dancing.
Amazon customers purchased enough HeatMax HotHands Handwarmers to give a pair to each resident of Iceland.
Amazon customers purchased enough Rory’s Story Cubes to give a cube to each person watching the New Year’s Eve ball drop live at Times Square.Suppose you could memorize only a single demographic number and you set about choosing the one with the most far-reaching implications for change in America. You could do worse than 1.5.
Of course, there are plenty of possibilities: the birth rate, the teen-pregnancy or illegitimacy rate, the percentage of the population that is white or foreign-born, the percentage of elderly. But unpack 1.5 and you have the makings of a social inversion: a turning upside down of the male-dominated order that Americans have taken for granted since—well, since forever.
The number 1.5 is, in this case, a ratio. According to projections by the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2017 half again as many women as men will earn bachelor's degrees. In the early 1990s, six women graduated from college for every five men who did so; today, the ratio is about 4-to-3. A decade from now, it will be 3-to-2—and rising, on current trends.
What does this mean? And what's going on? Neither question is easy to answer. But start with the second.
A college degree used to be a rarity: a mark of privileged or professional status. As recently as 1950, fewer than half of Americans even finished high school, let alone went on to college.
Surprisingly, in the |
Window::setMouseGrabEnabled
QWindow::setKeyboardGrabEnabled
QWindow::alert
QWindow::lower
QWindow::raise
QWindow::requestActivate
In addition it’s no longer possible to grab the image of the screen using e.g. QScreen::grabWindow (most obvious for the case of “root” window). Also warping the pointer using QCursor::setPos is no longer supported. Please note that warping the pointer is also a bad idea on X11 and you shouldn’t do that.
In case your application set the Qt::BypassWindowManagerHint on your QWindow/QWidget you need to do some porting as QtWayland doesn’t show such windows. Unfortunately that needs a case by case evaluation of the use case and the solution I presented during my Akademy talk should not be applied for applications.
Porting to Wayland
Don’t port
The solution to port to Wayland is: DON’T PORT! Mostly your X11 specific code or behavior is wrong and could be solved in better ways. Instead of porting you might want to rethink your problem or change to existing abstracted API in e.g. Qt or KWindowSystem. I have seen many cases where X11 API was used as a workaround by e.g. raising windows, force activating them and so on. If one things about it one realizes that there seems to be an obvious problem. So don’t try to port that but rethink your problem and improve not just on Wayland, but also on X11.
But I really need platform specific code
Ok, ok, I get it! Now let’s start with the obvious: your code needs to be compile time and runtime checked. Let’s start with how to not do it:
#if HAVE_X11 if (!QX11Info::isPlatformX11()) { return; } // here goes the X11 specific code #else // here goes the Wayland specific code #endif
The problem with this code snippet is that X11 support is probably also available when you use Wayland. Also the else part is not just Wayland, but also any other platform.
As I said the proper solution is to make it compile and runtime checked:
#if HAVE_X11 if (QX11Info::isPlatformX11()) { callX11SpecificImplementation(); } #endif #if HAVE_WAYLAND if (QGuiApplication::platformName().startsWith( QLatin1String("wayland"), Qt::CaseInsensitive)) { callWaylandSpecificImplementation(); } #endif
Be aware that your code might also run on other platforms on Wayland, e.g. eglfs or other custom windowing systems. So don’t crash if you don’t hit any of the code paths 😉Corey Lewandowski had fought his way back from the brink of termination at least twice over the past few months, utilizing a no-holds-barred style of infighting seldom seen in presidential politics while relying on the loyalty of a small group of allies and an unusually close relationship with his boss.
But Lewandowski’s survival strategy began to backfire this month. And by the time he was called into one of the executive offices at Donald Trump’s campaign headquarters in Manhattan’s Trump Tower on Monday morning for the final time as campaign manager, the once-obscure GOP operative had run out of lifelines.
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He’d grown increasingly reckless in his power struggle, taking on the candidate’s own family and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. He’d already told associates more than once in the past few months that he was on the verge of quitting, and some of his allies had either backed away from him or quit the campaign. So when Lewandowski was informed in a meeting with Trump’s adult children that he was being relieved of his dream job running the first-time candidate’s presidential campaign, the career GOP operative didn’t argue.
Lewandowski emerged from the executive office to find security waiting, and they watched him as he packed up his things, then escorted him out of the building, according to two sources briefed on the encounter.
“He didn’t put up a fight because he is loyal,” said one Lewandowski associate. “The gloves had come off a while ago, and Corey spent a lot of energy fighting, which took away from the campaign.” The source said Lewandowski “was surrounded by enemies. He was outgunned.”
Lewandowski declined to comment for this story. He told CNN he was “proud to have been a small part” of Trump’s campaign but didn’t know why he was fired. “Things change as the campaign evolves,” he said, denying his dismissal had anything to do with tensions with Trump’s family.
In an interview with Fox News, Trump stood by the decision. He praised Lewandowski as “a good guy” and “a friend of mine” who “did a great job,” but he said “it’s time now for a different kind of a campaign.”
The Trump campaign would not say whether Trump was in the room for the firing. It denied that Lewandowski’s relationship with the candidate’s family had anything to do with his termination, though the family members with whom sources say he clashed most — Trump’s influential daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner — did not respond to requests for comment. The RNC also didn’t respond to requests for comment.
But interviews with about two dozen sources, including Trump family friends and people who work in and around the campaign, traced Lewandowski’s firing to longstanding issues brought to the fore this month, as Trump struggled to pivot to a general election campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton amid increasing campaign dysfunction and declining poll numbers.
The mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, led to intensifying calls from influential Republicans — including Priebus — for Trump to moderate his inflammatory rhetoric, according to campaign sources. They said that Lewandowski’s critics — chief among them campaign chairman Paul Manafort — responded by arguing that Lewandowski was actually encouraging Trump’s propensity to offend.
Priebus also told campaign officials that Lewandowski had become a significant impediment to ironing out tensions between the RNC and the campaign, according to two sources familiar with the interaction. One said Priebus ticked off a number of areas in which Lewandowski “had been a roadblock.” The source said that Priebus' criticism “undercut and hurt the campaign,” which is more reliant on the national party for basic campaign infrastructure than that of any recent nominee.
And Lewandowski’s critics also pinned the blame on him for unflattering media coverage of Kushner’s growing behind-the-scenes role in the campaign, according to three sources familiar with internal campaign dynamics. This month, for instance, The Associated Press profiled Kushner, citing people inside the campaign griping about his inexperience and noting his father’s convictions for tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and witness intimidation.
The perception inside Trump’s inner circle was that “Corey was trying to isolate Trump and cut him off from even Ivanka and Jared,” said a longtime Trump business associate who speaks to the family and its representatives regularly. “That was overstepping his bounds.”
Ivanka Trump, who for months had expressed misgivings about Lewandowski’s temperament and qualifications for the job, last week grew increasingly resolute in her calls for his termination, according to several people in and around the campaign and the family. One person close to the campaign said it got “to the point where she was going to distance herself from the campaign if Corey didn’t go.”
By early last week, erstwhile Trump adviser Roger Stone, a Manafort ally who had pushed for months for Lewandowski’s ouster, was gleefully telling associates that a coup was imminent.
In some ways, Lewandowski’s story is the story of the Trump campaign.
The scrappy 42-year-old from the hardscrabble mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, didn’t have any presidential campaign experience when he was plucked from relative obscurity to run Trump’s presidential campaign prior to its June 2015 launch. At the time, the billionaire real estate showman was regarded by the political establishment as a sideshow with little chance of making an impact in the race, let alone winning the nomination.
Lewandowski quickly built a strong rapport with Trump by treating him with absolute reverence, unfailingly referring to him as “Mr. Trump” or “Sir” — even when Trump wasn’t around — and encouraging him to act on his bombastic instincts. Lewandowski also reassured the sometimes tightfisted billionaire, who initially pledged to self-fund his campaign, that it wasn’t necessary to invest serious money in the traditional tools of presidential campaigning, such as polling, voter files, analytics and major advertising campaigns. Instead, Lewandowski’s approach was to hire a tiny staff composed mostly of allies from his past jobs and to “let Trump be Trump.”
The result was impressive: billions of dollars’ worth of free publicity generated by Trump’s confrontational rhetoric at splashy campaign rallies, during television interviews and on social media.
Initially, Trump’s adult children were wary of Lewandowski’s unwillingness to try to temper their father’s rhetoric because they were concerned that it was damaging the family’s brand and corporate partnerships, said the longtime Trump business associate. But as Trump gained traction in the polls and began winning primaries, the Trump children realized that their father actually had a chance to win and questioned whether Lewandowski was “helping take their father to the next level, because he is not getting the type of advice he needs to temper his worst impulses,” said the associate.
But Trump stuck by Lewandowski, even after he was accused of roughing up a reporter in March, rejecting calls to fire him by explaining "I don't do that. I'm loyal."
By the end of the month, though, Trump had brought on Manafort, a veteran of 40 years' worth of GOP presidential campaigns. The move, which multiple sources said came at the behest of Trump’s adult children, seemed a tacit acknowledgment of the limitations of Lewandowski’s approach.
Manafort brought in a cadre of associates from his days as a power lobbyist, dividing the campaign into two rival camps loyal to Manafort and Lewandowski.
The camps dispensed sometimes contradictory orders to campaign staff and provided conflicting advice to Trump. Manafort urged more spending on advertising and hiring, while Lewandowski pushed back, vetoing at least two proposed Manafort hires.
In an April meeting at Trump Tower, Trump deputized Manafort to reorganize the campaign and to take the reins, as first reported by POLITICO. A top Lewandowski ally on the campaign named Stuart Jolly immediately tendered his resignation. Lewandowski went home to his family in New Hampshire and privately told associates he intended to quit imminently as well, but Trump personally asked him to return, according to two campaign sources.
View Lewandowski: It's been a privilege Donald Trump's ousted campaign manager stayed loyal to his boss even after his firing Monday
When he reappeared at Trump Tower, the infighting intensified to a degree unusual even in the alpha-dominated world of presidential politics, according to a handful of campaign insiders. They describe a campaign in which the senior officials and their allies spent as much or more time waging internecine warfare as they did on campaign strategy.
Manafort’s allies circulated rumors about Lewandowski’s personal life and had a hand in planting a suggestive item about his emotional argument with a campaign staffer in a New York tabloid, according to a person with direct knowledge of how the item came to be.
Lewandowski’s supporters, in turn, have urged Trump and his representatives to examine Manafort’s personal life as well as the lobbying done by Manafort and his associates for controversial clients around the world, according to people on both sides of the Lewandowski-Manafort rift. And according to two campaign sources, Lewandowski highlighted for Trump instances in which Manafort had been quoted telling ostensibly private audiences that the candidate intended to tone down his rhetoric in the general election. Those reports deeply bothered Trump, who prided himself on rejecting political norms dictating that candidates speak from a script and avoid making provocative remarks.
Manafort didn't respond to a request for comment.
Late last month, Lewandowski successfully pushed Trump to fire one of Manafort’s first major hires, political director Rick Wiley. And he jealously guarded his access to the candidate, making sure that either he or an ally — usually communications director Hope Hicks — were at Trump’s side at all times. On plane rides, Lewandowski and Hicks would trade off Trump-watch duties, taking turns sitting next to him when one or the other needed to go to the bathroom, according to a source who witnessed the arrangement.
But in recent days, Trump has increasingly seemed to come to grips with the need to expand his campaign and tone down his rhetoric, telling donors at a private fundraiser in Arizona on Saturday that he was preparing to pivot to the general election, according to a donor who was present.
Lewandowski accompanied Trump to the fundraiser, at the Goldwater House, where he was seen pacing back and forth with anxious energy, which is not at all unusual for the Red Bull-chugging operative.
In fact, the decision seems to have surprised Lewandowski and his allies in and around the campaign.
One campaign official said that during a Sunday morning conversation about campaign strategy with Lewandowski, the erstwhile campaign manager gave no indication anything was amiss. It was “a good chat,” the official said.
Eli Stokols contributed to this report.The controversy around President Donald Trump’s alleged disclosure of classified material to Russian leaders underscores a dilemma facing U.S. intelligence officials: How much should they share with the unpredictable commander-in-chief?
It’s an unusually difficult question for America’s spies. The president is not only their boss, he’s also the most important consumer of the information they invest their time, treasure and blood digging up. The entire U.S. intelligence apparatus is geared toward providing the president with the best information possible to help him make critical decisions.
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Still, the latest reports about Trump’s talks with the Russians could lead some in the U.S. spy world to think twice about how much information they send to the White House, former intelligence officials and other observers said.
“There’s different ways the intelligence can be left a little bit thinner if somebody wanted to do that, but it would be against every sort of fiber of every intelligence officer's being,” said Steven Hall, a retired CIA chief of Russian operations. “Your reason for existing is to make sure the president’s got all the information he needs.”
But if Trump keeps up his cavalier approach, “then analysts may be afraid that the president will misappropriate their intelligence, resulting in something completely inimical to the security of the United States as well as individuals or partner countries that may have provided the information,” said Thomas Sanderson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Washington Post reported Monday that Trump shared the classified information during an Oval Office meeting last week with Russia’s foreign minister and Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Trump took to Twitter to defend himself Tuesday, and his aides also insisted he never revealed any “sources or methods” used to obtain the information. But no one in the administration has denied that Trump divulged classified information to the Russian leaders.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that the sensitive information, which pertained to the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group, came from an intelligence-sharing arrangement with Israel. The fear within the spy world is that Russian officials will be able to deduce the original source of the information, or at least the method used to obtain it, through the basics allegedly shared with them by Trump.
Because as president Trump can declassify information when he wants, he is unlikely to have broken the law. But there was at least some international fallout: One European official told The Associated Press that his country, which was not identified, may stop sharing intelligence with the United States, a move that some in the U.S. intelligence community have long feared some allied governments may make under Trump. Officials in other countries, however, either avoided comment Tuesday or said they would continue to cooperate with Washington.
White House officials did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but the administration has pushed back hard against past reports that intelligence officials were holding back information from Trump. Asked for comment on what the latest news could lead intelligence officials to do, CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani said: “It is CIA’s mission to provide the president with the best intelligence possible and to explain the basis for that intelligence. The CIA does not hide intelligence from the president, period.”
While defending Trump’s conversations with the Russians on Tuesday, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster raised more eyebrows when he said the president "wasn't aware of where this came from. He wasn't briefed on the source of this information."
Former intelligence officials said that’s not unusual. When it comes to their regular intelligence briefings, presidents often get succinct, top-line material. The nitty gritty details of who got the information from where often aren’t included. If the president requests such details, however, intelligence officials generally feel compelled to give him the answer.
“In my experience, if the president asks, you tell him — intelligence briefers do not substitute their judgment for what the president needs to know for a direct request from the president,” said David Priess, a former intelligence official who wrote a book about the president’s daily intelligence briefing.
What’s more likely to happen is that some intelligence officials may choose to keep even their succinct analyses more vague over concerns about what the president will do with the information, some observers said. For instance, some of the media reports said Trump may have hinted at the sources or methods used to obtain the Islamic State-related information by mentioning a city involved. McMaster downplayed that aspect on Tuesday, saying Trump’s conversation with the Russian diplomats was “wholly appropriate,” but some intelligence officials may choose to avoid including the names of cities in future reports to the president as a result.
At the same time, the president’s daily intelligence brief and other materials produced by U.S. intelligence agencies are often shared well beyond the Oval Office. The vice president, the national security adviser and others are also recipients of the material, so intelligence officials considering skimping on information may ultimately choose not to as a result.
Trump is historically unusual in several ways when it comes to the subject of intelligence. He entered office openly disdainful of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. He also has appeared to cozy up to Russia, a U.S. rival whose government American intelligence agencies believe interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win. At first, it was not clear that Trump would even take intelligence briefings on a day-to-day basis, although the White House has said he receives them regularly.
A former U.S. intelligence official who until recently served under Trump said the new president liked the written sections of his daily briefing significantly shorter than his predecessor, Barack Obama. Various intelligence units were asked to keep their contributions to no more than a page. Trump has an infamously short attention span, so it’s entirely possible that he pays scant attention to the material he does receive. But of greater concern is his impromptu style of speaking and his habit of sharing his thoughts on Twitter and other forums.
Such lack of discipline is not common in presidential history, analysts said.
“I never came across a time when somebody withheld intelligence information that a president needed to know because they were worried about how he would handle that information,” said Priess, whose book, “The President's Book of Secrets” covers decades of the intelligence community’s interactions with the commander-in-chief.
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Intelligence officials are well aware of how complicated it can be for Trump — or any U.S. president — to keep track of all of the information tossed at him on any given day, not to mention delineating which bits are safe to discuss in public and which aren’t. Some presidents at times intentionally avoid asking questions about sources, methods or other sensitive details because they don’t want to accidentally slip up and divulge the material. Adding to the complication is that the United States often has intelligence partnerships with countries that don’t necessarily get along with each other, especially in the Middle East.
Former CIA officer John Sipher said savvy senior officials would figure out a way to give Trump the intelligence he needs in a way that won’t backfire. But establishing that equilibrium might take some time.
At the end of the day, “it’s in our DNA that our job is to provide the president of the United States the best intelligence available,” Sipher said.
Jacopo Barigazzi contributed to this report.Jason Mitchell had a feeling “Straight Outta Compton” would be special. But he never imagined the biopic about the rise and fall of gangsta rap group N.W.A would shatter box office records and become a mega-success.
“I think it really snowballed into something incredible,” Mitchell told TheWrap. “‘Straight Outta Compton’ is not a story we didn’t know about or anything like that, but it’s just something that resonated really well… It had no choice but to explode.”
Mitchell plays Eazy-E, one of N.W.A’s founding members. The actor said he saw the film six or seven times before it hit theaters on Aug. 14, but he didn’t expect it to be a critical darling or become a contender in the awards race. The Universal release currently has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 88 percent and has received several awards nominations, including a Screen Actor’s Guild nod for Best Ensemble.
Also Read: Producers Guild Nominates 'Ex Machina,' 'Sicario' and 'Straight Outta Compton,' But Not 'Star Wars'
“I never, ever thought that we would be nominated for awards and all this stuff would happen,” he said. “I knew that we had done our best after we finished it, so I can’t completely be like, ‘I’m super surprised,’ but I am, I’m completely surprised because I felt like we did our best but I didn’t know the world would love it.”
Eazy-E, who was born Eric Wright in Compton, California, dealt drugs and used his earnings to fund N.W.A’s first album. He eventually had a falling out with the group, went on to perform solo, and died of AIDS in 1995. It was a taxing role that required a wide range of emotions.
New Orleans native Mitchell said his journey toward landing the part was his “best casting audition ever.”
Also Read: 'Straight Outta Compton' Named Best Picture by African-American Film Critics
“I brought the rain, I cried, I did all kinds of stuff,” Mitchell said. Because he couldn’t fly out to do a call-back audition, he had his second audition on Skype — and booked the part right there.
Watch the video.When Donald Trump felt wronged as a businessman, he had a go-to move — threatening to sue. Now that he’s president, Trump has a new play — ordering up an investigation.
Calling for investigations has become a preferred tactic of the Trump administration as it seeks to change the subject, deflect attention from the president's unproven claims or muddy the waters when facing criticism.
Story Continued Below
But even some Republican allies are questioning the wisdom of the knee-jerk reaction, warning that probes could backfire by exposing all sorts of other untoward allegations and giving Democrats a tool with which to bludgeon the White House.
Democrats are already licking their chops after the administration called for a congressional investigation into Trump’s claims that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phones during the "very sacred election process.”
"He's opened that door," said Sen. Angus King, an independent of Maine.
It remains unclear whether the investigations, led by a Republican House and Senate, will damage Trump. Many GOP leaders have backed and tried to protect the president, even as they privately grouse about his comments and behavior.
For Trump, the technique is an evolution of his private sector strategy. The real estate mogul usually threatened or filed lawsuits to get his way, according to former and current business officials, lobbyists and others who worked with him. "His first move was to threaten to sue you," said one lobbyist who dealt with Trump. "He loved to sue people. He loved throwing lawsuits around."
In the government, he prefers calling for investigations, while not worrying about the potential impropriety of the executive branch meddling into congressional watchdog duties for political purposes. He has told friends and associates that calling for an investigation is a good way to throw the problems on someone else.
But just as Trump sometimes failed to follow through on threats to slap his rivals with lawsuits, the president has not always made good on his promise to pursue probes.
After Trump falsely claimed that 3 million to 5 million people voted fraudulently during the election to explain why he lost the popular vote, his administration vowed he would sign an executive order calling for a probe — but he never signed the order, and the investigation hasn't begun. House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz on Tuesday said his panel won’t explore the allegation.
White House aides have said privately that they hope he will forget about the allegations because many of them do not believe the evidence exists to back up his claims, one administration official said. And he has been chastised by Republicans on Capitol Hill for the loose accusations.
"I don't see any evidence of that. We're not doing an investigation of that,” Chaffetz said about the voter fraud claims.
One of Trump’s fixations has become the number of leaks springing from the government about his administration’s activities and his personal behavior, including his erratic calls with foreign leaders and alleged communications between his campaign advisers and Russian officials. The president has demanded several times that authorities probe such “criminal leaks,” sometimes using Twitter and sometimes personally calling the Justice Department.
Some of his aides have privately said the investigations may find that it is not Obama appointees putting out the damaging material. It is unclear where those investigations stand.
A White House spokeswoman said there is no update on the investigations Trump has called for and that she couldn't say if he plans to request more probes. "He has no concerns that anything will backfire," Stephanie Grisham, the spokeswoman, said.
Trump’s calls for probes so far have been wide-ranging.
"We should start an immediate investigation," Trump tweeted on Friday of Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, posting a 2003 picture of Schumer and Russian President Vladimir Putin eating doughnuts at a New York Lukoil gas station. Schumer immediately welcomed the call, saying he would gladly talk under oath about his contact with Putin — and he challenged Trump to do the same. The whole incident was largely laughed off.
Trump had also asked a National Park Service official to look into his claims that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama's, though a formal inquiry wasn't launched -- and the claims were further challenged when the Park Service released official photographs.
White House aides joined Trump’s call for an investigation to prove his claims about Obama tapping his phones only after they felt backed into a corner by his tweets, according to several administration officials and others in Trump’s orbit. Aides didn't know how to defend the remarks — because they didn't even know where they came from. One administration official said White House lawyers urged them to be careful. After saying Trump wanted Congress to investigate, Sean Spicer, the press secretary, said on Sunday there would be no further comment — hoping that the claims would be wrapped into a broader Russia probe and go away, at least for now.
Trump may find significant cover from investigations in Congress, where Republicans lead both chambers. So far, Republicans have resisted calls for a special prosecutor into the various Russia allegations — and some share his feeling that the Russia questions are overblown or partisan.
"I think a lot of the things he says, you guys sometimes take literally," Rep. Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters Tuesday. "Sometimes he doesn't have 27 lawyers and staff looking at what he does, which I think is at times refreshing."
The House and Senate intelligence committees are both looking into Trump’s wiretap claims as part of their larger investigations into Russia’s meddling in the presidential election. The judiciary panels in both chambers are also seeking information from the FBI on the issue.
Sam Nunberg, a former longtime Trump aide, said the calls for an investigation on the tapped phone claim was successful in "shifting the narrative.”
"The tweets keep his base motivated," Nunberg said. "I would not have attacked the president directly, however President Trump's tweets completely changed the narrative and got Clapper to admit there was no connection between the Russian government and the Trump campaign."
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said recently there was “no evidence” as of Jan. 20 that there had been collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.
Yet the call for an investigation rattled lawmakers, even GOP ones, who don't believe Obama tapped Trump's phone.
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There was audible laughter when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) repeated Trump’s tweets at a town hall in South Carolina on Saturday. He sent a joint letter with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, asking for evidence of the wiretap on Wednesday. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he wasn't sure an investigation was needed unless the president showed he had evidence.
Democrats note that congressional probes into the White House have long brought embarrassing revelations, public hearings where officials are shamed, and months of damaging stories that dogged approval ratings and hampered key agenda items. Democrats have access to investigatory materials and findings, which they can make sure become public.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the investigation would prove either "unscrupulous or unlawful conduct" or that the president didn't tell the truth.
"The president has asked our committee to investigate this, and I would say, 'Mr. President, we accept, we accept, we will investigate this,'" he told reporters on Tuesday. "We should be able to determine in short order whether this accusation is true or false."
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), meanwhile, said she hoped Trump’s claims would bolster the case for an independent commission to investigate Russia’s meddling in the presidential elections, a proposal GOP leaders have so far rejected in favor of keeping the investigation within the House and Senate intelligence committees.
While Spicer said aides would have no further comment after his statement calling for an investigation, the White House repeatedly has been forced to comment. Near the end of a news briefing Wednesday, Spicer wanted to make one thing clear — after he was handed a piece of paper from someone watching in another room.
“There is no reason that we have to think the president is the target of any investigation whatsoever,” Spicer said.Amazon says it’s preparing to bring aboard as many as 100,000 seasonal workers at its U.S. fulfillment and sorting centers this year — the latest indication that the e-commerce giant is set for a big holiday shopping season.
That’s a new record for Amazon’s seasonal hiring, up from 80,000 a year ago and 70,000 in 2013. It’s double the 50,000 seasonal workers that the company hired for the 2012 holiday shopping season. Amazon says many of its seasonal workers go on to regular full-time positions at the company.
The news follows analyst predictions that Amazon will trounce traditional retailers such as Walmart this holiday season with deep discounting and fast delivery.
This year’s record seasonal hiring plans come in addition to the more than 25,000 full-time workers that Amazon says it has hired for its fulfillment and sorting centers since August, to “meet customer demand and prepare for the upcoming holiday season.”
Also of note: Amazon disclosed as part of this morning’s announcement that more than 90,000 full-time employees are working in its 50 fulfillment centers and 20 sortation facilities in the country. That’s almost half of the 183,100 overall companywide employees that Amazon reported as of the end of June.
Amazon will report its third-quarter earnings on Thursday, and the addition of those 25,000 new workers since August means the company’s overall global employee count should easily surpass 200,000 workers overall.
Amazon has been adding new robots and boosting automation in its fulfillment centers, but the hiring bolsters the company’s claims that humans will remain “key to the process” of sorting, filling and shipping packages.DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – It was an exhilarating Sunday service, one congregant recollected. Rev. Jerome McNeil, Senior Pastor of Christian Chapel CME Church, had the rhythm in his tone, and the spirit in his message, during a morning sermon.
“He walked down the aisle, like he always does”, church member Cherry Bullard said.
But that walk would be the final steps of Rev. McNeil’s life. The veteran pastor collapsed and died in front of crowded sanctuary of churchgoers.
“All of a sudden I heard a thud and I didnt know what it was. I looked around, and he was gone,” Bullard said from her church office desk on Tuesday. “It hurts to even think about it, but he’s in a better place.”
McNeil, the leader of the church known as the Temple of Faith, was a 21-year pastor for the church. Christian Chapel has a 150 year history in Dallas, but the church’s history is longer and richer.
Now surrounded by restaurants, apartments, townhomes and retail centers, the church was the centerpiece of an African American settlement known as White Rock Creek. The smaller Christian Chapel building still sits behind the much larger Temple of Faith, built under McNeil’s leadership.
“He was just a great man”, assistant pastor Linda Curry said.
Curry said McNeil never met a stranger, and was tied to the larger Dallas community well before his church calling. He was the first black administrator for a Dallas County agency, second in command for the Juvenile Department in 1981.
“We are hurting, but we are a family,” Curry said of Sunday’s death.
Added Bullard: “It’s just hard to have sit here on Sunday listening to his sermon, not thinking that it was going to be his last sermon that I was going to be able to hear from him. It’s just been hard to accept this, and yet I know he’s gone, but I know he’s in a better place.”
McNeil will be buried on Saturday. His funeral will be held at Christian Chapel at 11 a.m.Just half an hour after the iPhone 5 went up for pre-order, USB adaptors for Apple's new Lightning port sold out, forcing users with compatible accessories to wait until new shipments arrive in October.
Both versions of Apple's new Lightning to 30-pin adaptor are already quoted to ship in October, but the Lightning to USB adaptor saw shipments slip to two to three weeks within 30 minutes of Apple initiating iPhone 5 pre-orders on Friday.Currently, there are three adaptor models available in the U.S., a $39 version with a 0.2-meter cable and a $29 unit that resembles an oversized 30-pin plug and the regular Lightning to USB adaptor that runs for $19.Apple unveiled the smaller 9-pin Lightning connector alongside the iPhone 5 at a special event on Wednesday, with the new plug said to be a necessity in building thinner iDevices. The proprietary part is 80 percent smaller than the legacy 30-pin connector it replaces, is all-digital and can be plugged into compatible devices in any orientation.Besides the iPhone 5, the new iPod touch and iPod nano also use the newly introduced standard.The Lightning to USB adaptor may be available in brick-and-mortar Apple Stores, though the stock allotted to each location is not known.Image copyright AP
The UK says it wants to be China's best friend in the West, and will be laying out the red carpet for the country's new strongman, President Xi Jinping, when he begins a state visit on Monday. But what kind of person is he? I tried to find out by visiting the cave where he lived for seven years in his youth.
I was looking forward to seeing the cave where China's president grew up but as our van skimmed along behind the sleek black sedan, I was nervous too. The man from the propaganda department already had an anxious sheen about him. I foresaw trouble.
President Xi is building a personality cult. The last thing the strongman with the perfect creation myth needs is the BBC puncturing it. So pity that local propaganda chief in the car ahead.
In general the president's spin doctors do a very slick job of presenting him as a man of the people. He tours leaky back alley homes, ducking through washing lines and wearing no face mask - the message that this is a leader prepared to breathe the same polluted air as you. He talks to his public in earthy prose, telling students that life is like a shirt with buttons where you have to get the first few right or the rest will all go wrong. He queues up in an ordinary dumpling shop for lunch and pays for his own meal. Message - he is neither greedy nor showy.
Image copyright Getty Images
It's all clever political signalling of course. Behind the smile, Xi Jinping is a ruthless operator. You don't rise to the top of the Chinese communist party without being a consummate political player and Mr Xi has spent a lifetime playing.
But the Sedan in front was now stopping at a police barrier. We'd arrived at the heart of the president's creation myth. Nearly five decades ago, the 15-year-old Xi fled from the chaos of the capital to this bleak and breathtaking landscape of yellow canyons, caves and mountains. The contrast with life in Beijing must have been even more extreme in those days.
Find out more Listen to From Our Own Correspondent for insight and analysis from BBC journalists, correspondents and writers from around the world Broadcast on Radio 4 on Thursdays at 11:00 and Saturdays at 11:30 and on BBC World Service Listen to the programme Download the programme
Especially for Xi himself. He had actually lived two lives by the age of 15. In the first his father was a hero of the communist revolution so Xi spent his early years as a so called red princeling, enjoying a privileged upbringing. But all of that was shattered by the civil war that an increasingly paranoid and vengeful Chairman Mao inflicted on the party elite in the 1960s. Xi's father was jailed, his family humiliated. One of his sisters died. Without parents or friends to protect him from the murderous red guards dispensing summary justice on the streets, the teenage Xi lived his second Beijing life, dodging death threats and detention… until he came to this village.
Millions of Chinese city kids were doing the same thing. Chairman Mao had decreed they should spend time in the countryside, learning from the hard life of the peasants, and Xi Jinping says he did learn. The spin doctors have turned his teenage trauma into triumph. This village has become a shrine to its most famous son, a vital part of the president's image. I left my heart in Liangjiahe. Liangjiahe made me, he likes to claim.
Image caption Liangjiahe, with all of its canyons and caves
There aren't many 21st Century leaders of whom |
al-Zor. Maghaweer al-Thawra is an anti-ISIS Arab force trained by the coalition but, as Balanche points out, it is not very large.The reality on the ground is that the SDF has not moved from its positions in al-Shaddadi since January.It has focused on defeating ISIS in Raqqa since June. There are no SDF troops advancing toward Deir al-Zor and the US does not appear to have any forces in play to reach the Euphrates near the city.Nevertheless, Twitter accounts have spread statements attributed to British Army Maj.-Gen. Rupert Jones, deputy commander-strategy and support for Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve, claiming the US “will not allow the Syrian regime forces to bypass the Euphrates River.”In an emailed statement, the coalition denied this. “Maj.-Gen. Jones made no such comments as he took meetings in Ayn Issa to discuss the needs of the people of Raqqa post- Daesh [ISIS].” Furthermore, the statement notes “the coalition mission is to work by, with and through our partner forces to defeat Daesh in Iraq and Syria. The coalition has no fight with the Syrian regime or its allies in the counter-Daesh fight.”According to the coalition, the current de-confliction line agreed to by the SDF, the coalition, Russia and the Syrian regime, runs in an arc from southwest of Tabqa around to the Euphrates River, where it extends toward Deir al-Zor. It does not extend into the city. This is a key point, that means the decision on the progress of the conflict past Deir al-Zor is unclear. This illustrates that the only thing the US is focused on is defeating ISIS, and de-conflicting with the Syrian forces that are moving toward Deir al-Zor.“We have no fight with anyone but Daesh and will not support any operations that are not against Daesh,” the coalition public affairs office wrote in an email. It further noted that ISIS is a “truly evil enemy of the people of Syria, the region and the world."
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>New York - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other nonprofit groups asked a federal judge Monday to reject expansive copyright claims made in lawsuits pending against YouTube. The amicus brief argues that the plaintiffs in those lawsuits are pushing for legal rulings that would undermine federal law and throttle free speech and innovation on the Internet.
Viacom and a variety of class action plaintiffs are suing YouTube, claiming that the online video service is liable for copyright infringements committed by its users. YouTube has responded by arguing that its activities are shielded by the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which give legal protections to online service providers that host content on behalf of users.
Despite the DMCA, the plaintiffs have claimed that YouTube should be held responsible for infringements that occurred before May 2008, when the site voluntarily implemented content filtering technologies. In effect, the plaintiffs have urged the court to make content filtering mandatory for all online service providers that host content on behalf of users. In the amicus brief filed Monday, EFF -- joined by the American Library Association, Association of College and Research Libraries, Association of Research Libraries, Center For Democracy and Technology, Computer and Communications Industry Association, Home Recording Rights Coalition, Internet Archive, NetCoalition, and Public Knowledge -- argues that Viacom's theory would rewrite federal law and thwart Congress' goal of reducing the legal uncertainties facing companies trying to innovate on the Internet.
"This case is not just about YouTube," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Nearly every online service that fosters free expression and commerce online -- like the Internet Archive, Blogger, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Flickr, and Scribd -- depends on the very same DMCA safe harbors that YouTube is relying on here. Viacom is trying to undo the law that Congress designed to provide a modicum of legal certainty for those who build these innovative online services."
The cases against YouTube are pending in federal court in the Southern District of New York. Additional briefs will be filed by the parties on April 30 and June 4. A hearing and decision will follow.
For the full amicus brief:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/viacom_v_youtube/YouTubeAmicusBriefFINAL.pdf
For more on this case:
http://www.eff.org/cases/viacom-v-youtube
Contact:
Fred von Lohmann
Senior Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
fred@eff.orgWinter is upon us! What better way to stay warm them 200+ amazing gluten-free slow cooker recipes. The comfort food that you want and need. We at ForkOffGluten love the set and forget easy recipes that the slow cooker allows. Our life is hard enough dealing with celiac, gluten sensitivity and gluten intolerance. So why not make it easier on yourself and try one of these simple tasty recipes.
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MiscellaneousGood news for Star Wars fans: when you finally get your chance to go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens in theaters, you won’t find yourself stuck sitting next to a white supremacist. Or Chuck C. Johnson.
Yes, it’s true, #BoycottStarWarsVII is a real thing, brought to you by more or less the same motley crew of racist trolls and “alternative right”-wingers who catapulted the term “cuckservative” into mainstream Republican discourse not that long ago.
Their complaint? That the upcoming episode in the Star Wars saga, directed by JJ Abrams, supports “race mixing” and therefore “white genocide.” Because one of the main characters is, you know, B-L-A-C-K. And some of the others are B-R-O-W-N. Oh, and JJ Abrams is a J-J-JEW.
I’ll let this Twitter dude explain.
https://twitter.com/DarklyEnlighten/status/655910679971389440
https://twitter.com/DarklyEnlighten/status/655911535710081024
https://twitter.com/DarklyEnlighten/status/656165064882302976
He’s also apparently worried about property values in the far-away galaxy where Star Wars takes place.
https://twitter.com/DarklyEnlighten/status/655911807949799424
Naturally, the boycotters took this as an excuse to make and post an assortment of new, Star-Wars-centric racist memes.
#BoycottStarWarsVII oy vey look at this poor space minority pic.twitter.com/b8bRnTwZRH — A. wyatt mann (@awyattman88) October 19, 2015
#BoycottStarWarsVII because we are only supposed to be spectators of #WhiteGenocide, not participants in stopping it pic.twitter.com/EvCvDnXsOI — the heretic.genseric (@DanielGenseric) October 19, 2015
Others used the boycott as an excuse to post some old favorites:
#BoycottStarWarsVII No More Jewish Hollywood Movies Pushing Race Mixing and Making White Men Look Weak/Evil pic.twitter.com/lekFrOq8Hs — Truth Wins (@leftisright4now) October 20, 2015
#BoycottStarWarsVII STOP GIVING YOUR MONEY AND LETTING WHITE CHILDREN WATCH HOLLYWOOD DEGENERACY pic.twitter.com/hOYs2KR6P5 — Truth Wins (@leftisright4now) October 20, 2015
#BoycottStarWarsVII B/C Blacks Don't Really Act Like How They Are Portrayed in Star Wars #magicnegro pic.twitter.com/ggNdhrhFU0 — Truth Wins (@leftisright4now) October 19, 2015
#BoycottStarWarsVII jew jew abrams doing this on purpose pic.twitter.com/Nus7b9YUZm — A. wyatt mann (@awyattman88) October 19, 2015
Do any of these putative Star Wars boycotters actually give two shits about Star Wars? Do they know how many suns rise and set on Tatooine? Could they tell a sarlacc from a hole in the ground?
Nah. Most of these guys are fake geeks trying to use the phony “boycott” as a way to spread some of their favorite white supremacist catchphrases into mainstream discourse — notably their daffy contention that “diversity = white genocide.”
We've gotten #whitegenocide into numerous mainstream publications today. People who never heard of it are now hearing it for the first time. — Dissident American (@officialCritDis) October 20, 2015
https://twitter.com/KatieFromLudlow/status/656238508130996225
Apparently they don’t know, or care, that most of those who’ve even noticed the “boycott” are laughing at them — noting how fragile their “whiteness” must be if the very thought of a black guy playing a stormtrooper causes them to screech about “white genocide?’
As one of the mockers put it:
#BoycottStarWarsVII because love is only between white people, or several green and blue aliens and a muppet. Or with a CGI creature. — Holliday (gr)Lynch (@ashleylynch) October 19, 2015
But the boycotters aren’t the only opportunists here.
Everyone’s favorite internet garbage “journalist” Chuck C. Johnson has also jumped onto the Star Wars boycott in an attempt, presumably, to capture some of its notoriety (and traffic-driving potential) for himself. In a post on his garbage site, Johnson offers a tortuous explanation for his alleged outrage over the muticultural cast of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
“[T]here’s a disturbance in the force,” he writes, because he’s the kind of hack who thinks a reference to “a disturbance in the force” in a post about Star Wars is clever.
[A] group of white nerds are rightly upset that Star Wars is painting white people as the enemy. Is the very white Star Wars being culturally appropriated by the Jewish J. J. Abrams? … Star Trek is a productive of a white America whether or not we want to accept it. The action figures that made George Lucas a billionaire were purchased by suburban white families.
By “productive” he apparently means “a product of.”
It was white and Jewish-American nerds that put us into space and yet it’s Guatemalan-born (Oscar Isaac), Mexico-born Kenyan (Lupita Nyong’o), and the British-born white girl (Daisy Ridley) and the British-born Nigerian (John Boyega) who get to fight for the Rebel Alliance. None of these countries even have a space program.
Wait, what?
I’m pretty sure muppets don’t have a space program either, but they’ve played a rather important role in the Star Wars saga.
Space belongs to the people smart enough to invent rockets and indoor plumbing. It belongs to a frontier people, thank you very much. And now the frontier is flooded with the Third World, drowning out the ambitions of those white nerds. … young white boys (yes, they’re boys) … won’t be much interested in a version of the future where they are cast as the villain.
On a small planet named “Earth” in the Milky Way galaxy, James Earl Jones looks upon Twitter and laughs.
It sounds like this:
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Like this: Like Loading...Think you “know” China or Chinese culture, but eating Chinese food one night at week does not qualify you to be a Chinese culture aficionado. Here are 21 facts that may have some scratching their heads.
#1. While training new soldiers to always keep their chins up, a small, but very sharp pin is placed facing upwards through their collars
acidcow.com
#2. In order to ensure uniform arm height while marching, soldiers learn to march with their arms wired and attached to poles
acidcow.com
#3. There are more than 100 million Chinese citizens that scrape to live off what amounts to one U.S. dollar a day
blogspot
#4. Ketchup is actually a Chinese invention. It was originally a pickled fish sauce called ke-tsiap
flickr.com
#5. Instead of driving away with their food from the drive-thru, Chinese people actually park their cars and bring the food back into the restaurant to eat it
adsofchina.files.wordpress.com
#6. There are more than 54 million Christians in China
wikipedia.org
#7. Chinese death rates by execution are four times higher than anywhere else in the world
wantchinatimes.com
#8. These eggs boiled in the urine of young virgin boys is considered a delicacy in certain areas of China
ministryoftofu.com
#9. In China, some of the largest record labels are freely downloadable via Google
androidpit.com
#10. Because of their aggressive nature and keen vision, geese are used as police animals instead of dogs
chinadaily.com.cn
#11. As China has a one-child policy, tens of thousands of girl babies are abandoned and more than a million aborted each year in favor of potentially raising a boy
digestiblepolitics.files.wordpress.com
#12. These cave dwellings are called yaodongs. 30,000,000 cave-dwellers live in these dwellings which is more than the entire population of Australia.
wikipedia.org
#13. China’s air pollution is so terrible that it travels across the Pacific and pollutes San Francisco, contributing to more than a third of the city’s air pollution
bluecollarphilosophy.com
#14. Certain Chinese food companies were charged for marinating meat in goat urine and making tofu out of raw sewage
followmefoodie.com
#15. Because virginity is highly prized among females, they can pay upwards of $700 to have their hymens restored
tripadvisor.com
#16. If you breathed freely in Beijing for one day, it would be the equivalent of smoking 21 cigarettes
forexlive.com
#17. Playstations and other foreign gaming consoles are illegal in China
venturebeat.com
#18. 19 million cats are eaten every year in China
peta.org
#19. The longest traffic jam in history, which lasted 12 days over 62 miles was in Shanghai
chinawhisper.com
#20. Smart phone addicts have been given their own walking lane so as not to bump into normal walking pedestrians
engadget.com
#21. The World’s Biggest Mall, located in China, is 99% empty
cnn.com
Just when you thought you might have a firm grasp on China, think again. Cultures are incredibly diverse and are often full of shocking, interesting and sometimes unsettling realities.China reveals new midget submarine design: MS200
China recently revealed the MS200 midget submarine design at the Defense & Security 2017 defense exhibition in Bangkok, Thailand. The 200 tons submarine is a new single-hulled design which differs greatly from previous Chinese midget submarine designs. It is likely intended solely for export, being aimed at countries like Pakistan who are Chinese submarine customers and happen to have a fleet of midget submarines (Italian Cos.Mo.S MG110 type) which are due for replacement.
MS200 is nearest camera. Then S600, S1100 with much larger S26T in background
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Original artwork - CLICK for HIGH-RESOLUTION image.
MS200 Specification
Displacememt: 200 tons surfaced
Length: 30 m
Width: 3.6 m hull diameter
Height: 4.4 m
Crew: 6 + 8 PAX
Range: 1,500nm, with 120 nm on batteries
Endurance: 15 days
Speed: 8 kt max
Operating depth: TBC
Armament: 2 x 533mm torpedoes
Sources:
1. Shephard Media
2. Navy Recognition
China previously operated 4 midget submarines built at Wuhan in around 1980. MORE INFO. More recently a 38 meter (124 ft) long midget submarine was previously observed outside the shipyard at Wuhan (Wuchang Shipbuilding Industry Co., Ltd http://www.wuchuan.com.cn/). However the types do not appear to be related.
Also on display were models of the closely related S600 600 ton small patrol submarine and the slightly larger S1100 design. These differ from the MS200 by having Air Independent Power (AIP) which is probably a Sterling Generator closed-cycle diesel engine type.
S600 model. Photos from Navy Recognition.
S600 Specification
Displacememt: 600 tons surfaced
Length: 50 m
Width: 4.6 m hull diameter
Height: 5.6 m
Crew: 15
Range: 2,000nm, with 400 nm on AIP
Endurance: 20 days
Speed: 15 kt max submerged, 9 kt surfaced
Operating depth: 200 m
Armament: 4 x 533mm torpedoes
S1100 Specification
Displacememt: 1100 tons surfaced
Length: 60 m
Width: 5.6 m hull diameter
Height: 6.8 m
Crew: 20
Range: 3,000nm, with 800 nm on AIP
Endurance: 30 days
Speed: 15 kt max submerged
Operating depth: 200 m
Armament: 4 x 533mm torpedoesErica McCall and Lili Thompson stepped up in the second half and rallied the 15th-ranked Stanford women's basketball team past host California, 60-55, in another hotly contested game between the Bay Area rivals on Friday night.
Thompson missed all eight of her shots in the first half but recovered to score 10 in the second half. McCall recorded her 13th double-double of the season with 14 points and 10 rebounds. Brittany McPhee added 12, Kaylee Johnson had 11 and Kailee Johnson finished with 10.
Stanford (19-5, 9-3 Pac-12) returns home to host Arizona next Friday and conference co-leader Arizona State next Sunday.
"We have a weekend off. They've earned this by working hard," Cardinal coach Tara VanDerveer said. "I hope they can catch up on their homework and watch a movie. We'll focus on Arizona State and Arizona on Monday."
The Cardinal moved into sole possession of third place in the Pac-12, as Oregon State (10-1) topped Washington (7-4) and Arizona State (10-1) got by UCLA (8-3).
Thompson hit a 3-pointer to open the third quarter, sparking a 13-0 run to put the Cardinal ahead for the first time in the contest at 40-34. The Bears went scoreless for six minutes before ending the drought.
"At the beginning of the second half we had our big run," VanDerveer said. "Once we got ahead, we did a better job of hanging onto the ball. We knew what we had to do. The big number that stands out to me is four points in the third quarter."
The four points Cal scored in the third was the fewest by a Stanford opponent.
McCall scored 10 of her points and grabbed eight of her rebounds in the second half.
"They went at us from the get-go and we had to match their intensity," McCall said. "Rebounding, boxing out, was the key."
Stanford shot 50 percent from the field during the first quarter and then dipped to 26.3 (5-of-19) in the second quarter and trailed, 34-27, at the half.
Kailee Johnson hit her first five shots, setting a career-high for field goals made, and scored 10 of 12 points for the Cardinal during one stretch.
"She was huge for us," McCall said. "She has a great basketball IQ. That was huge part of the game."
The Johnson's combined for 19 points and seven rebounds in the first half and were a big reason Stanford was as close as it was at halftime.
Kailee Johnson, who set a career-high with 14 points in the loss at Oregon State, hit from the perimeter, drove to the basket and converted offensive rebounds. Kaylee also drove to the hoop in addition to continuing her stellar work under the basket.
"I'm sad and kind of angry in some ways but also hopeful and also disappointed. All these things in one," Cal coach Lindsay Gottlieb said. "This is the roller-coaster this team is taking me on and taking each other on. But there's a reason Stanford is where they are and we are where we are. They're a little bit better at the little things. I don't think they have wildly more talent than us. I don't think there's huge gaps. But when it's crunch time, they know how it get it done and we don't yet. But we will get there. I want us to get there next week."Border Patrol agents arrested a previously deported child predator as he attempted to illegally re-enter the U.S. in southern Arizona. The agents found the man with a group of illegal aliens who illegally crossed the border near Gila Bend.
Agents assigned to the Welton Station observed a group of illegal immigrants who crossed the border from Mexico into the southern Arizona desert on Wednesday. The agents arrested the three men and took them to the station for identification and processing, according to information provided to Breitbart Texas by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials.
During a records check, agents identified one of the men as a previously deported child predator. Agents learned that a New Jersey court previously convicted 29-year-old Esau Rios-Osorio on charges of child exploitation and maintaining child pornography, officials stated. Immigration officers deported Rios-Osorio following his term in prison.
The Mexican national now faces new federal charges of illegal re-entry after removal as a convicted sex offender. If convicted on the charge, he could face up to 20 years in federal prison.
The other two Mexican nationals will be processed for removal by the agents.
Agents frequently arrest previously deported sex offenders as they attempt to illegally re-enter the U.S., Breitbart Texas reported.
Earlier this month, agents in Texas arrested two previously deported sex offenders as they attempted to illegally re-enter the U.S. in South Texas. Both of the illegal aliens, one Mexican national and one Honduran national, were deported after convictions for sex crimes against children.
Arizona agents arrested a Mexican national in late November after he illegally crossed the border near Sasabe. Prior to his deportation, a California court convicted Juan Sotelo-Carasco for rape in Contra Costa County.Cow vigilantes and Bajrang Dal activists staged a demonstration against actor Rishi Kapoor in Hoshangabad on Saturday evening, where he had come to attend a function of a private college. The protest was against the actor’s remarks on beef eating he made last year.
The protesters assembled at Nehru Park crossing in Hoshangabad town where they shouted slogans against Kapoor and burnt his effigy. Many also raised black flags. The protesters said they were hurt by the actor’s remarks on beef eating and he should publicly apologise for the same.
Read | What I eat, drink or pray is none of your business: Rishi
Kapoor courted controversy in March last year when he tweeted, “I am angry. Why do you equate food with religion?? I am a beef eating Hindu. Does that mean I am less God fearing then a non eater? Think!!”
In another tweet, he said, “Knew this would go wrong! When did I say I have “Gau Maas” and I kill cows? Yes I eat beef where cattle are bred for food legally Not in India.”
First Published: Feb 05, 2017 19:31 ISTAs promised, I’ve spent the past several days looking into the reporter John M. Broder’s test drive of the celebrated electric car known as the Tesla Model S. The article, which focused on two new “superchargers” on the East Coast, was understandably disturbing to the company and to the car’s many admirers. The test drive, it’s safe to say, did not go well. In fact, its publication was accompanied by a startling photograph of the Model S on a flatbed truck, onto which it was loaded after depleting its battery charge on the last leg of the trip.
Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has charged that the story was faked, that Mr. Broder intentionally caused his car to fail, and that issues of journalistic integrity are at stake. On his Tesla blog, he released graphs and charts, based on driving logs, that contest many of the details of Mr. Broder’s article.
Mr. Broder and The Times have maintained that the article was done in good faith, and that it is an honest account of what happened. They have gone to some lengths to respond to the charges, point by point, on The Times’s Wheels blog.
But Mr. Musk, and many readers, remain dissatisfied. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I’ve heard from hundreds of them, either in e-mails or comments to my blog. (Some readers have also expressed their support for Mr. Broder and his article.)
One reader, Roger Wilson of Falls Church, Va., a Model S owner himself, expressed his opinion in more moderate fashion than many:
“In his article (and follow-ups), Mr. Broder states that he followed Tesla’s advice during his drive. But, if he had taken time to read the owner’s manual beforehand (which, at 30-or-so well-written pages, would have taken an hour), he would have known about: • “The ‘Max Range’ setting, which would have charged the battery beyond the ‘standard’ range and given him 20-30 miles more range;
• “The ‘Range Mode’ setting, which would have conserved battery during the drive;
• “The section entitled ‘Driving Tips for Maximum Range';
• “And, the concept of plugging the vehicle in (especially during his overnight stop): ‘Tesla strongly recommends leaving Model S plugged in when not in use.’ and ‘The most important way to preserve the Battery is to LEAVE YOUR MODEL S PLUGGED IN when you’re not using it.’ “Had he employed at least one of these tidbits, he probably wouldn’t have been ‘stalled’ on the EV highway. But, then again, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting a story if he made the trip successfully (and could have only complained about the inconveniences of staying at the charging station longer than he cared to or having to plug in the car overnight). “In follow-ups, he claims that he was only ‘testing’ the supercharger network. If this had been the case, the story wouldn’t have focused on him driving 45 m.p.h. and being cold (and the infamous picture of the Tesla on the flatbed), but would have simply stated that the two current supercharger stations (which just opened recently) are too far apart and that one might have to rely on non-Tesla public charging stations until more supercharger stations are installed. “Unlike Mr. Musk, I don’t claim that Mr. Broder ‘faked’ the story, but he certainly didn’t seem to employ the least bit of care or responsibility in fuel management (required of any vehicle, regardless of fuel type). One can only assume that Mr. Broder’s irresponsibility in fuel management was in hope that something beyond ‘inconvenience’ would happen to make the story more interesting. (Otherwise, no one, including me, would have paid much attention to his article.) “Tesla is not faultless in this, especially since it suggested the test drive. Tesla should have made it very clear that the 200-mile stretch between the two supercharger stations approaches the maximum distance and that all range maximization strategies should be employed.”
Over the past several days, I have questioned and listened to Mr. Broder, Mr. Musk, two key Tesla employees, other Times journalists, the tow-truck driver and his dispatcher, and a Tesla owner in California, among others. I am aware of other, much more successful test drives in recent days by Model S owners and media organizations that are intended to show that the charging stations work perfectly well (although those tests lacked an element of Mr. Broder’s drive: one of the coldest days of the year). And I’ve read hundreds of e-mails and reader comments. I’ve also had a number of talks with my brother, a physician, car aficionado and Tesla fan, who has helped me balance what might have been a tendency to unconsciously side with a seasoned and respected journalist – my own “confirmation bias.”
My own findings are not dissimilar to the reader I quote above, although I do not believe Mr. Broder hoped the drive would end badly. I am convinced that he took on the test drive in good faith, and told the story as he experienced it.
Did he use good judgment along the way? Not especially. In particular, decisions he made at a crucial juncture – when he recharged the Model S in Norwich, Conn., a stop forced by the unexpected loss of charge overnight – were certainly instrumental in this saga’s high-drama ending.
In addition, Mr. Broder left himself open to valid criticism by taking what seem to be casual and imprecise notes along the journey, unaware that his every move was being monitored. A little red notebook in the front seat is no match for digitally recorded driving logs, which Mr. Musk has used, in the most damaging (and sometimes quite misleading) ways possible, as he defended his vehicle’s reputation.
I could recite chapter and verse of the test drive, the decisions made along the way, the cabin temperature of the car, the cruise control setting and so on. I don’t think that’s useful here.
People will go on contesting these points – and insisting that they know what they prove — and that’s understandable. In the matter of the Tesla Model S and its now infamous test drive, there is still plenty to argue about and few conclusions that are unassailable.Lorenzo Lopez, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said the retailer had begun its own investigation of C. J.’s, which supplied its Sam’s Club warehouse stores, and had uncovered violations of some of its supplier standards.
“We have suspended C. J.’s Seafood as a supplier, pending the outcome of the investigation,” Mr. Lopez said.
He said that the United States Labor Department and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were conducting their own investigations of the seafood processor.
C. J.’s did not respond to several phone messages left at its main office.
The Worker Rights Consortium’s investigation of C. J.’s found that some women worked from 2 a.m. to 6 p.m., that the workers were on average paid 42 percent less than legally required and that when the workers tried to complain to their managers, they were threatened with discharge, deportation and blacklisting. One worker told investigators that he was once forced to stay when he sought to leave after working 38 of the previous 48 hours.
Photo
After finding serious problems at C. J.’s, the Guestworker Alliance said, it decided to examine 18 other Wal-Mart food vendors that used guest workers.
The alliance said it had discovered the 644 citations at 12 of the companies. While many of them go back to the 1980s, there were 201 safety and other labor violations over the last five years, including 132 that OSHA had deemed serious.
“Wal-Mart is the nation’s biggest buyer and sets standards across the retail industry,” said Saket Soni, director of the Guestworker Alliance. “We want to have a productive conversation with Wal-Mart about its national supply chain standards.”
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While acknowledging problems at C. J.’s, Mr. Lopez strongly objected to the Guestworker Alliance’s report and its suggestion that the citations at the other 12 suppliers indicated a possible problem with forced labor there.
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“This report, crafted by a union-funded, union-backed group, has little to do with solving real issues,” he said. “It simply repackages old data from up to more than 20 years ago in an attempt to make people believe they have uncovered something new.”
“We work with more than 60,000 suppliers in the U.S., and we have rigorous standards in place that our suppliers are required to follow,” Mr. Lopez said.
He said that if the allegations of forced labor at C. J.’s are found to be true, it would permanently terminate its relationship with that company. The Guestworker Alliance’s report pointed to 33 citations at Tanimura & Antle, a vegetable grower based in Salinas, Calif. The report noted that 18 of the citations had incurred a total of $52,000 in fines since 2006, including one for failure to provide proper training after a worker suffered a severe eye injury when a tractor tire he was inflating exploded.
Rick Antle, the company’s president and chief executive, said it employed 2,200 workers and that 33 citations over two decades was “pretty good.” He said Tanimura & Antle was an “impeccable” employer and provided health and retirement benefits. He noted that none of the citations had involved guest workers.
The alliance’s report also focused on Trident Seafoods of Seattle, saying the company had received 212 OSHA citations and been fined $102,738.
More than half the citations were from 2000 or earlier. But in March 2011, Trident was fined $11,645 after OSHA found that its workers had been exposed to live electrical equipment carrying up to 480 volts, that a major electrical cable had exposed areas and that a high-pressure hose connected to a combustible gas container had not been properly tightened.
Trident said in a statement that any attempt to tie it to a labor abuse scandal “is patently false” and that “Trident’s plant safety and human resource policies are among the best in the seafood industry.”(UPDATED) 'The impending abolition of Dr Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital on June 9, 2016 spells a death sentence to the already dismal state of maternal and child health services Philippines', says the Save Fabella Hospital Movement
Published 1:50 PM, June 09, 2016
MANILA, Philippines (UPDATED) – The fight to save the Dr Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital is not over yet.
A day before the scheduled closure on June 9, the Save Fabella Hospital Movement (SFM) sent a letter to president-elect Rodrigo Duterte, asking him to intervene. SFM, together with the Alliance of Health Workers, (AHW) and other health groups, also staged a picket and an overnight vigil in front of the hospital on Wednesday, June 8.
"The fight against the abolition of Fabella is still ongoing. We have sent a letter to President-elect Rodrigo Duterte urging him to stop the demolition, however we have yet to receive an official response,” the group posted on Facebook on Wednesday.
The hospital is currently located within the 8.42-hectare Old Bilibid Compound in Sta Cruz, Manila. In 2007, the compound was sold to Home Guaranty Corporation (HGC) under former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
National maternal hospital
Fabella Hospital is the national maternal hospital which has been in operation for 96 years already.
Known as the “Paanakan ng Bayan,” Fabella Hospital accommodates about a hundred mothers on a daily basis, while around 1,000 obstetrical and gynecological in-patients share in the hospital’s 700-bed facility.
“If the closure pushes through, where will the many expectant mothers from poor communities and far-flung provinces go to give birth when the replacement institution only has 400 bed capacity instead of the 700 bed capacity operating currently at Fabella?” the group said in its letter to the incoming president.
During the campaign season, Duterte said that once elected he will require hospitals to have a facility for very poor patients with government paying for the health services using PhilHealth reserve funds, sin tax revenues, and Department of Health (DOH) budget. He also promised to create specialized hospitals (heart, lung, kidney) in Visayas and Mindanao.
Hospitals for poor patients
The Department of Health (DOH) has earlier ordered patients and employees to vacate the hospital before its scheduled demolition on June 9. DOH’s notice came amid findings that 4 out of the Fabella’s 8 buildings are structurally unsound.
DOH plans to transform the hospital for poor birthing mothers into a center for women’s health and move it to the health department's compound in Quezon City. The construction of the new facility – a 6-floor, 800-bed capacity Level 3 hospital – at the DOH compound is expected to be finished by May 2017.
As part of its preparation, the health department has initially ordered health workers and patients to vacate the maternity hospital before June 9.
Until its completion, DOH said patients and staff will be temporarily transferred to other public hospitals such as the Philippine General Hospital, José R Reyes Memorial Medical Center, and the Fabella outpatient department in Quezon City.
However, not all healthworkers in the hospital are happy about the decision.
“The impending abolition |
are conveniently zip-tied together for ease of hardware installation. The Enermax fan comes preinstalled, but I will talk more about the fan later in this review.
The case includes all of the brass motherboard standoffs preinstalled. The brass standoffs are cylindrical (instead of the standard hexagonal prism), but due to the threading being welded to the case, they didn’t come off when removing the motherboard screws.
Any unused HDD or fan mounts are completely optional and can be removed if desired. The mounting mechanism is a simple cap that protrudes from the aluminum case where the mounts can be seated and then slid into position. A single screw on each tray prevents the trays from moving. Once the hardware is installed, they can be a little troublesome to slide out, but the design has good intentions.
A strange omission for a Micro-ATX capable chassis is the lack of the 4th (or even 5th) expansion slot. If the thought of running Crossfire or SLI excites you, this is definitely not the case for you. However, if you desire the use of a single graphics card and the use of a dedicated sound card or capture card, you can occupy the available slots without issue.
The Enermax SteelWing’s exclusive support for SFX and SFX-L PSUs is a welcome addition to keeping the case as small as possible, while still supporting a full size graphics card and a 120mm AIO liquid cooling system. The bent aluminum brackets that help to secure the SFX PSU in place make for a nice snug fit. You can easily slide the SFX PSU into place and it will secure it indefinitely while you install the 4 screws.
The entire chassis is mounted together using T10 TORX screws inserted into countersunk holes – a welcome addition over Philips head screws and the extra attention to detail doesn’t go unnoticed. Oh and when I say entire chassis, I mean it. There is not a single rivet being used on this case.
Case modders rejoice!
The marketing sticker that is attached to the front of the chassis is easy to remove without leaving any sticky residue on the front of the case.
The front I/O is a pretty standard affair, with two USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, and a microphone jack. If you were hoping to acquire a case with front-mounted VR HDMI slots in mind, to give you that extra 12″ of cable length, you will be sorely disappointed.
The venturi slots at the front of the Enermax SteelWing also match the color of the rest of the case and the fan grill behind it is painted matte black.
No dust filters are included and due to the case’s use of aluminum, magnetic filters won’t work here so the cases will require occasional dusting.
On the underside of the case, you will find holes to mount two additional 2.5″ SSDs. Strangely, this information is missing from the advertising materials – but none the less, it is a feature that is worth mentioning to anyone interested in having more than just 1 SSD installed.
The case uses two high-density anti-vibration feet in the rear and two thin anti-vibration pads up front. The front pads offered the same result as the rear feet and vibration was dampened equally on all four corners.
While the front pads are fully compressed when the case is right-side up, no part of the metal chassis touches the surface.
The rear side panel uses machined thumbscrews but removing them reveals that it is mounted flush to the backside of the case- there is no room to hide cables or SSDs back here.
Thankfully, the aluminum-on-aluminum panels don’t vibrate during operation so the screws are simply there for aesthetics. However, if you want to custom paint the side panel a different color, you couldn’t ask for a more welcoming design.
Mounted to the top of chassis is a vent which will function based on positive or negative pressure airflow from the case.
There are no holes for mounting a 120mm fan but this vented grill is machine punched to sit flush with the outside of the case.
If the case ever required disassembly, the outside fin-structure would need to be completely removed first to expose the T10 TORX screws on the opposite side of the case.
You’ve seen it before and here it is again, that digital Mitutoyo caliper! It will be used to ensure that the manufacturers listed specifications are accurate.
The following picture is provided to illustrate that the caliper is correctly calibrated to 0.00mm when closed.
Enermax claims the the tempered glass side panel is 3mm thick and indeed it is.
The SteelWing logo appears to be silk screened onto the backside of the tempered glass. This helps to add a nice subtle look while still advertising the case’s name without it feeling too in your face.
If you were absolutely determined to remove the logo, I don’t believe that it could be done without marring the glass.
The overall thickness for the entire aluminum case is 2.00mm on the dot.
Enermax advertised that the aluminum is “up to” 3.5mm thick. Again, their advertising is 100% accurate.
The included 120mm 9-Blade fan is designed with silence and performance in mind.
I wasn’t able to find any specifications for this exact fan on the Enermax website but it appears to be one of the better designed fans in their arsenal.
Each blade has an aerodynamic profile to help reduce wind noise.
The Red LED light stripe is discrete and attached securely to the frame.
Each corner of the fan uses vibration dampers that appear to made of silicone.
The fan uses a 3-pin fan header and can be powered by a 4-pin molex if you prefer.
The cable is not braided or sleeved but it is black, highly flexible, and easy to tuck behind the motherboard.
The Competition
Here is how the Enermax SteelWing stacks up to the competition.
I chose these other two cases because they offer similar functionality and similar motherboard form-factor support.
To the left, we have the Cooler Master Elite 110 at 15.36 liters.
It supports an ATX PSU but only Mini-ITX motherboards.
To the right we have the Lian-Li PC-V354 at 32.92 liters.
It supports an ATX PSU, Mini-ITX and Micro-ATX motherboards.
That attractive looking, non-rectangular, two-tone, Enermax SteelWing in the middle? It’s just 16.13 liters.
It supports an SFX or SFX-L PSU, Mini-ITX and even Micro-ATX motherboards.
The Build
For this review, I will be using parts and pieces from the two rigs pictured above.
Intel i7-2600k @ 3.8GHz
Asus Maximus IV GENE-Z/GEN3
8GB Samsung DDR3 1.35v 30nm low-profile ram
3TB HGST Deskstar 7200RPM
512GB OCZ Agility SSD
EVGA Nvidia GTX 970 Superclocked (241.3mm / 9.50″)
Corsair H60 AIO 120mm (25mm)
Corsair SF450 SFX PSU
With the power supply installed, I had no issues working in the 80mm of space between the power supply and the motherboard.
Threading in the waterblock mount was a breeze as was plugging in the 8-pin CPU power.
While the position of the radiator hoses appears less than ideal in this orientation, the other orientation conflicted with the location of the 24-pin on this particular motherboard.
Even with a thin 25 mm radiator installed, the use of a 90-degree SATA connector is ideal on a Micro-ATX motherboard if the motherboard uses 90-degree SATA ports.
However, if you install highly flexible SATA cables before putting the motherboard into place, you can still make it work.
If no AIO system is being used, it’s non-issue.
Trying to fit a 2nd fan for a push-pull configuration proved impossible with this combination of hardware.
With the use of an Mini-ITX motherboard and a shorter graphics card it wouldn’t be an issue. You could also opt to use a thicker radiator core for more effective cooling.
The 3.5″ HDD and 2.5″ SSD installation was also easy to slide into place and didn’t have any conflicts with the graphics card being installed beforehand.
Without the use of an AIO cooler’s radiator, you could fit up to a 290mm long graphics card.
Overall, the hardware installation with a Micro-ATX motherboard is pretty straightforward and simple.
Using an ITX motherboard, you would even have enough room for a custom liquid cooling loop and even a reservoir.
Here are the power cables and front I/O cables completely installed without any cable organization.
It’s worth noting that there is enough spare room in the front mounting bracket to tuck away or route the cables.
With the tempered glass side panel installed, it does a pretty decent job hiding the messy internals of the chassis so even if you’re not a expert computer builder, you can still expect great results.
Depending on the direction of the lighting, it may be more difficult to see into the side of the case.
Testing
Testing the quality of this case will be a three part procedure.
1. Measure noise generated by the case in idle and load states.
2. Measure CPU and GPU thermals.
3. Measure the cases ability to dissipate ambient heat using a thermal imaging camera.
Test 1: Audio Noise
Audio measurements were recorded using an Audio-Technica AT2020 mounted to a RODE PSA1 Mic Boom resting at head/monitor level, 4 feet away from the Enermax Steelwing, during operation.
The audio was record in MP3 format with the following output:
256 kbps
44100 Hz
Stereo
The audio includes ambient room noise as well as fan noise generated by the EVGA GTX970 and the Corsair SF450. This is done intentionally to help showcase audio levels that can be expected from a completed system in a typical drywall office environment.
Unlike a Fractal Design case, there are no dust filters or sound deadening material so the audio from the case is raw and unfiltered.
Noise tolerance is completely subjective so I will let your ears decide if the experience is tolerable.
IDLE:
LOAD:
Personally, I found the overall noise to be subtle and not overbearing but I will let you decide.
Test 2: Thermals
Thermals were recorded using CPUID’s HWMonitor.
The testing procedure:
With HWMonitor running, I captured the CPU and GPU temperature at IDLE and LOAD states.
IDLE is defined by the temperatures without CPU burner and GPU stress test running.
LOAD is defined by the temperatures with CPU burner and GPU stress test running for 15 minutes.
The results:
At IDLE, the CPU temperature hovered around 44°C with the GPU temperature at 55°C
At LOAD, the CPU temperature only hit 64°C and the GPU temperature managed to hit 81°C.
That’s a 20°C delta for the CPU and a 26°C delta for the GPU.
With just a single 120mm fan mounted to the front of the chassis that is designated to cooling the Corsair H60’s radiator, I was a little worried that cooling in the Enermax Steelwing would be an issue. Thankfully, this didn’t appear to be the case.
For anyone curious about the use of a standard or aftermarket HSF in this chassis, I didn’t have one on hand that would fit this 1155 socket.
That being said, the heat that is being generated inside the case is being properly dispersed so I would expect similar results with plenty of headroom for overclocking.
Test 3: Ambient heat dispersion
Using a SEEK Thermal CompactPRO thermal imaging camera (provided by SEEK), I recorded video of the case during idle, stress, and load states. It became quickly apparent that while the glass did become warm to the touch, the ventilation of the case was more than adequate.
During the burn-in period, only the glass near the GPU started to warm up (as did the drywall positioned in the exhaust). The ambient case temperatures didn’t appear to rise any noticeable amount.
Pros
I define “Pros” as things that I really liked about the case; things that made me sit back and really appreciate the quality or how unique the product is.
First off, I am pleased to announce that the Enermax SteelWing didn’t cut off any limbs during the install, not even a scratch! The infinite array of edges all over the chassis are sandblasted to a point where you would have to try really hard to do any damage to you, or even to someone else.
The case designers did a terrific job creating a unique design that is also extremely rigid. Sure, the case could have been made smaller without all this fancy decoration but for those of you that absolutely despise the look of a case the shape of a cube (or rectangle), this is a refreshing departure from the norm. Throughout my experience with this case, I found myself lifting the case by the venturi blades repeatedly without them bending or flexing.
The red side panel adds an appealing amount of contrast to the gunmetal colored case. I feel that it’s a terrific shade of red and it has a subtle graininess to it.
The top portion of the matte black front grill is cut nice and smooth for a very clean look.
The cutout for the motherboard shield is precise and doesn’t flex during installation. It’s just the perfect thickness for the little teeth to latch onto.
The knurling on the thumbscrews are nice and deep making it really easy to grasp and remove.
The unique design of the case flows from all directions, the design is pretty well thought out.
The PCI covers are 2mm thick, just like the case. They didn’t bother to cut any corners here by using some off the shelf flimsy covers.
The red LEDs from the fan look terrific. It’s easily the most accurate and deep red LED I’ve seen a fan produce.
It even adds a nice subtle glow to the front portion of the case.
Nitpicks
No review would be complete without a little bit of nitpicking and while a few of these are just that, some of them are more obvious and could have been completely avoided by the manufacturer.
I’m not quite sure how this design flaw went unnoticed but it’s clear that these two pieces that slot together are a different width. If this was done on purpose, I don’t like it.
The tempered glass is, surprise surprise, a magnet for fingerprints.
When viewing the case from the front, it becomes clear that the fin structure isn’t perfectly parallel to the rest of the case. There is a slight uplift in the fin structure as it protrudes to the left as evident by the spacing between the top mounted grill.
It’s hard to see but if you look closely, you can tell that the glass isn’t the same length as the case, that sleek bend in the glass goes about 1.2mm too far.
Possibly the culprit for the fin structure not being parallel to the rest of the case, the last fin appears poorly constructed compared to the rest.
This is what the ideal fin should look like.
The thumbscrews exhibit heavy machining toolmarks on the surface. This could have been prevented by bead blasting, a light sanding (or brushing), and even anodizing.
Cons
I define “Cons” as unforgivable issues that could have a permanent impact on the usability of the product. These are issues that if removed, would make for a near perfect design.
The tempered glass side panel sticks out further than the boundaries of the aluminum frame. If by some chance the case is tilted towards your body, there is a high chance that the weight of the case will cause the glass to shatter into 1000 tiny pieces. This requires that the case is lifted vertically or titled away from the user.
The glass itself arrived with a slight defect in the top left corner. Normally this wouldn’t be much of an issue but a small defect like this can cause a section of the glass to shear off or even worse, make it easier to shatter if that corner is accidentally pressed up against a wall.
Death to high intensity blue LEDs!
I personally prefer that my vision is not constantly being bombarded with one of the least friendly LED colors ever produced. Thankfully, unplugging the PLED header from the motherboard can quickly solve this problem.
Worse yet, because the blue LED is so incredibly overpowering, it bleeds into and out of the case.
Conclusion
The conclusion: I really enjoyed working with this case.
The Enermax SteelWing is pleasing to look at and the designers weren’t afraid to break conventions here. Sure, the case could have been made more compact or they could have designed it to accommodate a 240mm radiator in one way or another but the truth is, they designed a truly unique case in a sea of the same and for that I thank them. If you despise cube-shaped cases and are looking for a case that can accommodate full-size components, this could be the case of your dreams so long as you don’t require the use of 4 expansion slots.
For this review Enermax has kindly requested that we provide a link to their Facebook Page, so if you like what you have seen here, please be sure to give them a “Like”.
www.facebook.com/enermaxusa
Also, I would like to give a special shout out to SEEK Thermal for providing a their CompactPRO thermal imaging camera for use in this review. We hope to work with them again for future reviews.
Please let us know what you think about the Enermax SteelWing on the forums.Lawyer to speak to people planning to protest the Trans Mountain pipeline to help them know their legal rights
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – The posters have been taped up on power poles around Vancouver.
Groups opposed the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline held a training event this evening so activists know their legal rights.
Lawyer Peter Edelmann spoke at the event at the Grandview Calvary Baptist Church.
He says most people know what is clearly legal or illegal when it comes to protesting, so his job is to let people know what the laws are in some of the greyer areas.
“We’re usually talking about the limits, or the very fine lines that are drawn… at what point are you actually engaging in mischief, if you block an entrance or if you do a sit-in?”
Edelmann will try to explain to activists where those lines are.
“In terms of what people’s rights are depends in part on where an event is taking place and what the context of the event is. In some cases… it can be the actions of others around you that can create legal jeopardy for somebody.”
Dozens of people were arrested on Burnaby Mountain during a protest in 2014 over the Trans Mountain pipeline — perhaps a preview of what we could see in the coming months, with construction scheduled to begin.Voters across Quebec head to the polls Sunday in municipal elections.
In Montreal, here is everything you need to know to cast your ballot.
Find your candidates
You can find the full list of candidates running for mayor of Montreal, borough mayor, city councillor and borough councillor positions online here.
Montreal mayoral candidates Valérie Plante and Denis Coderre are vying for the city's top job. (CBC) If you want to know more about Montreal's two main mayoral candidates, here are CBC's detailed profiles of Denis Coderre and Valérie Plante Several independent candidates are also in the running.
Confused about how voting works or who you're voting for, exactly? It's all covered right here.
With more than 100 elected officials, here is a breakdown of the differences between borough and city council.
CBC's Sarah Leavitt breaks down the difference between borough and city council, and who is responsible for which services. 2:06
When you can vote
The general election is being held this Sunday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. And don't forget, Sunday marks the end of daylight saving time, so remember to set your clock back so you don't show up too early.
What you need to bring
You need at least one piece of identification with your photo on it, such as your driver's licence, health-care card or Canadian passport. You can also bring your certificate of lndian status or Canadian Forces Identification card.
Voting stations will be open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday. (Radio-Canada)
Élection Montréal also suggests bringing your reminder card, since it will help staff quickly find your name on the list, although it's not necessary to have it with you in order to vote.
Where you can vote
If you're not sure where your local polling station is, you can check on Élection Montréal's website, inputting your postal code.
There are 470 voting sites and 3,380 polling stations in Montreal.
And bring your kids — they can vote alongside their parents at certain polling stations.
Want to know more about the main candidates?
With only a few days left on the campaign trail, we've been following the two main Montreal mayoral candidates as they battle for top spot at city hall:
This is how this year's municipal election in Montreal works by the numbers.
If you want to know more about the municipal elections elsewhere in Quebec, check out CBC's coverage here.
A total of 294 candidates are running for municipal office in Montreal. (Radio-Canada)4 out of 4 stars Written by Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork Directed by Jackie Maxwell Actors Fiona Reid, Ben Carlson, Deborah Hay Company Canadian Stage City Toronto
London Road is an extraordinary experiment in live art, at turns uplifting and upsetting. A surprise hit at Britain's National Theatre, this documentary musical takes an unfortunately commonplace event – a horrible crime committed in a small community, turned into an international media frenzy – and puts actual interviews through enough filters that the familiar seems utterly strange. Indeed, you may never listen to the world the same way again.
The play by writer Alecky Blythe and composer Adam Cork centres on the town of Ipswich, England, around the time that five sex workers were killed there in quick succession in 2006.
How the show was created needs some explaining: Blythe went to Ipswich to record the locals – and particularly the residents of London Road, unsuspecting neighbours of Steve Wright, the man eventually charge and convicted with the murders. Then, she created a script out of edited transcripts, being sure to include all the hesitations and coughs (she's a practitioner of an extreme form of what's known as verbatim theatre).
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What differentiates London Road from other plays of this type, however, is that Cork took cues from the interview subjects' speech rhythms and the musicality hidden in their Suffolk accents to transform what they said into songs, repeating certain lines to create something resembling verses and choruses.
At times, London Road reminded me of Theatre Replacement's warped adventures playing around with interview theatre; of Glenn Gould's audio collage for CBC Radio; and even of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, another musically adventurous exploration of a not entirely unsympathetic monster in a small British town.
Ultimately, however, I must admit that London Road is like nothing I have ever heard before – and that is what makes it such a thrilling theatrical experience.
Under the heroic musical direction of Reza Jacobs, a cast of 10 all-stars from the Shaw and Stratford Festivals (accompanied by an eight-person orchestra) make this Canadian Stage production, the North American premiere of a much-discussed piece, an acoustically riveting experience – I hung on every note and word. Visually, director Jackie Maxwell gives us the story fairly straightforwardly, tableau by tableau; everything is supremely well acted, with too many fine, quirky performances to point out individually.
While the progression from crime to arrest to trial to conviction gives a natural arc to the show, London Road is more of a song cycle than a cohesive musical – with 62 characters in total, many of whom come on stage for a moment and then disappear.
In one scene in a coffee shop, Deborah Hay and Glynis Ranney play a pair of teenage girls describing how they now look at men on the street. "You automatically think it could be him," sings one. "Yeah," sings the other. Underscored by sharp synth, punctuated by creepy arpeggiated laughs, this refrain seems at first hysterical, then hilarious and after enough repetition begins to sound like some sort of eternal truth. The theme of the evening is that, yes, it could be him – or her, or you – that we're all off-beat creatures in some way or another.
This is further underlined in a subsequent sung conversation in a pub between a self-proclaimed expert on serial killers (Ben Carlson) and a couple his football chums (Steve Ross and Sean Arbuckle). They joke and jostle about, saying the kind of off-colour things that if tweeted would lose you your job. You may find yourself cycling through sympathy (these guys are just trying to get through a terrible situation with humour) to outrage (how can they be so callous?) and back again.
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Laughter erupts regularly from the audience during the show, not due to what characters are saying, but in recognition of the familiar ways in which they say it – the half-finished sentences, the interruptions, the pauses – made strange by the music and reprises.
Beneath an at times heartwarming depiction of community, however, sits the awful subject matter. I think London Road's great strength, and what makes it challenging, is how frighteningly ambiguous Blythe and Cork keep the show's tone.
"Sex workers" and other euphemisms are banished, as are journalistic cliches. There's a brilliant sequence featuring Damien Atkins as a television reporter struggling to write an update on Wright's trial for a noon-hour newscast. "Can't use the word'semen' at lunchtime and I can't use it at 6 o'clock," he sings in frustration. "I can use it at 10 o'clock, but I can't use it before teatime."
Blythe is at war with the way the media (professional or social) flattens language, and thus the complexity of a community such as Ipswich. As an interviewer herself, however, she gives her subjects enough rope to hang themselves with.
Fiona Reid, for instance, plays a perfectly sympathetic woman, who organizes a contest to decorate London Road with flowers – and who then, in a spoken passage, says something so utterly horrendous it elicited gasps from the audience. Blythe and Cork are in love with the English language, but seemingly little else about the English.
Follow me on Twitter: @nestruckImage caption The study says 1.6 billion adults are overweight worldwide
Middle aged people who are overweight but not obese, are 71% more likely to develop dementia than those with a normal weight, according to research.
Previous studies have indicated a link between obesity and dementia.
But a study 8,534 of Swedish twins, in the journal Neurology, suggests just being overweight is also a risk factor.
About one out of every 20 people above the age of the 65 has dementia. The Alzheimer's Society said a healthy lifestyle could reduce the risk.
Those with a body mass index (BMI) - which measures weight relative to height - greater than 30, who are classified as obese, were 288% more likely to develop dementia than those with a BMI between 20 and 25, according to the study.
The clinically overweight, who have a BMI between 25 and 30, were 71% more likely.
Dr Weili Xu, from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, told the BBC: "We found in this study that being overweight is also a risk for dementia later in life."
What is dementia? Dementia is an umbrella term describing a serious deterioration in mental functions, such as memory, language, orientation and judgement.
There are many types, but Alzheimer's disease, which accounts for two thirds of cases, is the most well-known.
"The risk is not as substantial as for [the] obese, but it has public health importance because of this large number of people worldwide who are overweight," Dr Xu added.
The study says 1.6 billion adults are overweight worldwide.
Alzheimer's Society head of research, Dr Susanne Sorensen, said: "This robust study adds to the large body of evidence which suggests that if you pile on the pounds in middle age, your chances of developing dementia later in life are also increased.
"By eating healthily and exercising regularly, you can lessen your risk of developing dementia."
Alzheimer's Research UK head of research, Dr Simon Ridley, said: "This study adds to existing evidence that excess weight in middle age could increase our risk of developing dementia.
"It's likely that dementia is caused by a complex mix of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors. However, we still need to know much more about the causes of dementia if we are to find an effective treatment that is so desperately needed."Search results for: Isinglass
Direct Matches
Isinglass: A protein derived from the bladders of sturgeon and other fish and used in the fining process. The protein binds with excess tannins, pulling them from overly harsh wines.
Related Matches
Fining: A technique for clarifying wine using agents such as bentonite (powdered clay), isinglass (fish bladder), casein (milk protein), gelatin or egg whites, which combine with sediment particles and cause them to settle to the bottom, where they can be easily removed.
Kosher Wine: Wine made according to Jewish dietary laws (the kashrut) and certified by rabbinical authorities. Only observant orthodox Jews can handle kosher wine during the winemaking process, including tasks such as racking and drawing samples from barrels. Common fining agents forbidden in the production of kosher wine include casein and isinglass, though the use of egg whites is permitted.
Casein: A dairy-based protein used in the fining process. Casein is particularly effective at clarifying cloudy or off-colored white wines.
Gelatin: The same active gel found in Jell-O, this animal product is used in the fining process to bind with excess tannins so that they may be removed during filtration.
Bentonite: A clay compound used in the fining process of white wines. The clay binds with solids that might otherwise cause a white wine to become cloudy, removing them from the wine, although some molecules that would contribute to the wine's flavor profile are also removed in the process.Appeasement in an international context is a diplomatic policy of making political or material concessions to an aggressive power in order to avoid conflict.[1] The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy[2] between 1935 and 1939.
At the beginning of the 1930s, such concessions were widely seen as positive due to the trauma of World War I, second thoughts about the treatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, and a perception that Fascism was a useful form of anti-communism. However, by the time of the Munich Pact—concluded on 30 September 1938 among Germany, Britain, France, and Italy—the policy was opposed by most of the British left and Labour Party, by Conservative dissenters such as Winston Churchill and Duff Cooper, and even by Anthony Eden, a former proponent of appeasement. As alarm grew about the rise of fascism in Europe, Chamberlain resorted to news censorship to control public opinion.[3][4][5] Nonetheless, Chamberlain confidently announced after Munich that he had secured "peace for our time".[6]
The policies have been the subject of intense debate for more than seventy years among academics, politicians, and diplomats. The historians' assessments have ranged from condemnation for allowing Adolf Hitler's Germany to grow too strong, to the judgment that Germany was so strong that it might well win a war and that postponement of a showdown was in their country's best interests.
Failure of collective security [ edit ]
"Appeasement policy, the policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini, operating jointly at that time, during 1937 and 1938 by continuous concessions granted in the hope of reaching a point of saturation when the dictators would be willing to accede to international collaboration.... It came to an end when Hitler seized Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, in defiance of his promises given at Munich, and Prime Minister Chamberlain, who had championed appeasement before, decided on a policy of resistance to further German aggression." Walter Theimer (ed.), The Penguin Political Dictionary, 1939
Chamberlain's policy of appeasement emerged from the failure of the League of Nations and the failure of collective security. The League of Nations was set up in the aftermath of World War I in the hope that international cooperation and collective resistance to aggression might prevent another war. Members of the League were entitled to the assistance of other members if they came under attack. The policy of collective security ran in parallel with measures to achieve international disarmament and where possible was to be based on economic sanctions against an aggressor. It appeared to be ineffectual when confronted by the aggression of dictators, notably Germany's Remilitarization of the Rhineland, and Italian leader Benito Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia.
Invasion of Manchuria [ edit ]
In September 1931, Japan, a member of the League of Nations, invaded Manchuria in northeast China, claiming that its population was not only Chinese, but was a multi-ethnic region. China appealed to the League and the United States for assistance. The Council of the League asked the parties to withdraw to their original positions to permit a peaceful settlement. The United States reminded them of their duty under the Kellogg-Briand Pact to settle matters peacefully. Japan was undeterred and went on to occupy the whole of Manchuria. The League set up a commission of inquiry that condemned Japan, the League duly adopting the report in February 1933. In response Japan resigned from the League and continued its advance into China; neither the League nor the United States took any action. However, the U.S. issued the Stimson Doctrine and refused to recognize Japan's conquest, which played a role in shifting U.S. policy to favour China over Japan late in the 1930s.[7] Some historians, such as David Thomson, assert that the League's "inactivity and ineffectualness in the Far East lent every encouragement to European aggressors who planned similar acts of defiance."[8]
Anglo-German Naval Agreement [ edit ]
In this 1935 pact, Britain permitted Germany to begin rebuilding its navy, including its U-boats, in spite of Hitler already having violated the Treaty of Versailles.
Abyssinia crisis [ edit ]
Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini had imperial ambitions in Abyssinia. Italy was already in possession of neighboring Eritrea and Somalia. In December 1934 there was a clash between Italian and Abyssinian troops at Walwal, near the border between British and Italian Somaliland, in which Italian troops took possession of the disputed territory and in which 150 Abyssinians and 50 Italians were killed. When Italy demanded apologies and compensation from Abyssinia, Abyssinia appealed to the League, Emperor Haile Selassie famously appealing in person to the assembly in Geneva. The League persuaded both sides to seek a settlement under the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1928 but Italy continued troop movements and Abyssinia appealed to the League again. In October 1935 Mussolini launched an attack on Abyssinia. The League declared Italy to be the aggressor and imposed sanctions, but coal and oil were not included; blocking these, it was thought, would provoke war. Albania, Austria, and Hungary refused to apply sanctions; Germany and the United States were not in the League. Nevertheless, the Italian economy suffered. The League considered closing off the Suez Canal also, which would have stopped arms to Abyssinia, but, thinking it would be too harsh a measure, they did not do so.[9]
Earlier, in April 1935, Italy had joined Britain and France in protest against Germany's rearmament. France was anxious to placate Mussolini so as to keep him away from an alliance with Germany. Britain was less hostile to Germany and set the pace in imposing sanctions and moved a naval fleet into the Mediterranean. But in November 1935, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare and the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, had secret discussions in which they agreed to concede two-thirds of Abyssinia to Italy. However, the press leaked the content of the discussions and a public outcry forced Hoare and Laval to resign. In May 1936, undeterred by sanctions, Italy captured Addis Ababa, the Abyssinian capital, and proclaimed Victor Emmanuel III the Emperor of Ethiopia. In July the League abandoned sanctions. This episode, in which sanctions were incomplete and appeared to be easily given up, seriously discredited the League.
Remilitarization of the Rhineland [ edit ]
Under the Versailles Settlement, the Rhineland was demilitarized. Germany accepted this arrangement under the Locarno Treaties of 1925. Hitler claimed that it threatened Germany and on 7 March 1936 he sent German forces into the Rhineland. He gambled on Britain not getting involved but was unsure how France would react. The action was opposed by many of his advisers. His officers had orders to withdraw if they met French resistance. France consulted Britain and lodged protests with the League, but took no action. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said that Britain lacked the forces to back its guarantees to France and that in any case, public opinion would not allow it. In Britain, it was thought that the Germans were merely walking into "their own backyard". Hugh Dalton, a Labour Party MP who usually advocated stiff resistance to Germany, said that neither the British people nor Labour would support military or economic sanctions.[9] In the Council of the League, only the Soviet Union proposed sanctions against Germany. Hitler was invited to negotiate. He proposed a non-aggression pact with the Western powers. When asked for details he did not reply. Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland had persuaded him that the international community would not resist him and put Germany in a powerful strategic position.[citation needed]
Spanish Civil War [ edit ]
Conduct of appeasement, 1937–39 [ edit ]
In 1937 Stanley Baldwin resigned as Prime Minister and Neville Chamberlain took over. Chamberlain pursued a policy of appeasement and rearmament.[10] Chamberlain's reputation for appeasement rests in large measure on his negotiations with Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Anschluss [ edit ]
When the German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire were broken up in 1918, Austria was left as a rump state with the temporary adopted name Deutschösterreich ("German-A |
Lee Loughner, who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others in a 2011 shooting spree in Arizona, was a sovereign citizen, but this also turned out to be untrue.
An additional group of incidents did not make the list because, while an extremist definitely committed an act of significant violence, the act was a spontaneous act of violence without noticeable premeditation; such acts are usually not included here. Finally, some incidents—usually discoveries of extremists with major illegal arsenals of weapons and/or explosives—were not included because there was insufficient evidence of any target or intent to use the weapons for an act of terrorism. The incidents in these two categories are serious criminal violations but not really incidents of terrorism.
Those omissions still leave 150 terror incidents from the last quarter-century. This lengthy string of dangerous attacks and plots illustrates how deeply seated the threat of right-wing terrorism is in the United States.
A look at these 150 incidents over time reveals that two specific surges of right-wing terrorism have occurred over the past 25 years. The first was the surge of the mid-to-late 1990s, a result of a great increase in right-wing extremism as a result of a variety of factors that include the election of Bill Clinton, the passage of NAFTA, the passage of gun control measures such as the Brady Law and the Assault Weapons Ban, and the deadly standoffs at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco, Texas, in 1993, which energized white supremacists and anti-government extremists, respectively.
The 1990s surge had died down by the turn of the century and right-wing terrorism occurred less frequently in the early-to-mid 2000s. Events ranging from the non-event of a Y2K-related disaster to the replacement of Bill Clinton with George W. Bush to the 9/11 terror attacks all played a role in dampening right-wing furor.
Unfortunately, this state of affairs did not last. Near the end of Bush’s second term, right-wing terror incidents began to increase again and this trend accelerated by 2009, thanks in part to the election of Barack Obama, whom both white supremacists and anti-government extremists hated, and to the major economic disasters of the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis. The latter two in particular allowed the sovereign citizen movement to greatly expand. The result was a second surge of right-wing extremism, one that was accompanied by a surge of right-wing terror incidents. This increased level of terror-related activity remains high today, though whether or not it will sustain itself during a Trump administration remains to be seen.
The worst right-wing terror attack, the Oklahoma City bombing, killed 168 people and injured hundreds more. Thankfully, none of the other incidents achieved anywhere near that level of lethality and destructiveness. In large part, this has been due to effective law enforcement, at both the federal and state/local levels, who have uncovered and prevented many attempts at terrorist acts. Indeed, only a minority of the incidents recorded here—65 out of 150--could be considered “successful” acts, by which is meant that the terrorist(s) succeeded in carrying out part or all of their plan or were able to wreak some sort of damage (such as shooting someone) while attempting to carry out their plan. This does not include bombs that were successfully planted but which failed to go off.
Some of the attempted acts never had a good chance of success, while others could easily have been deadly. Even though most terror incidents were not successes, the minority that did succeed resulted in 255 deaths and approximately 603 people injured (not all injury counts are consistent). Were it not for the efforts of law enforcement to detect and prevent right-wing acts of terror, that deadly toll would be far higher still.
To accomplish their deadly aims, extremists used a variety of tools and tactics, but overwhelmingly firearms and explosives were the most common weapons chosen. Indeed, 55 of the 150 terror incidents involved use or planned use of firearms, while another 55 involved explosives. Moreover, of the 17 incidents involving multiple weapons types, firearms and explosives were by far the most common combination.
It is worth nothing that, although bombs were used or considered by extremists just as often as firearms, their successful use rate was much lower. This is largely due to the fact that explosives are far more difficult to obtain and to use in the United States than are firearms, which are abundant, easy to use, and very deadly. There is far better regulation of explosives than firearms in the United States.
In a minority of cases, right-wing extremists attempted arsons or incendiary devices such as Molotov cocktails; abortion clinics were a frequent target of such violence. And, from time to time, extremists would select more exotic means of murder, such as using the deadly toxin ricin or poisoning a water supply or trying to build a radiological weapon.
Whatever weapon they planned to use against their targets, right-wing extremists have had no shortage of targets. Indeed, some ambitious plots have contained an entire array of targets slated for death and destruction.
Of the various targets of right-wing anger, it is governmental and law enforcement institutions that are most often threatened. Of the incidents examined here, 66 involved some sort of government-related target. This is largely due to the fact that white supremacists and anti-government extremists alike, as well as most of the lesser right-wing movements, hate government and law enforcement. This category includes federal, state and local branches of government and law enforcement.
White supremacists are responsible for most of the racial and religious targeting. Virtually any person or institution associated with a non-white race can be a potential target for white supremacists, but African-Americans, Hispanics, and multi-racial couples/families have been the most common groups victimized. The most frequent religious targets were, not surprisingly, Jews and Muslims (including non-Muslims perceived as Muslims). Actual or perceived immigrants, as well as LGBT targets, were also subject to victimization.
Abortion-related targets, typically clinics that provide abortion services as well as the people who work at such places, were also common. While anti-abortion extremists were the extremists most likely to attack abortion-related targets, other right-wing extremists, most noticeably white supremacists, also occasionally attempted such attacks.
Right-wing extremist have also taken aim at a variety of other targets. Commercial targets have included various businesses and, in particular, financial institutions. Infrastructure targets include a wide range of installations, from refineries to dams to water supplies. In some cases, extremists have simply targeted crowded public areas, hoping to cause significant human casualties.
The Present and Future of Right-Wing Terrorism
Over the past 25 years, right-wing terrorism has exhibited a considerable amount of stability. Part of this is due to the fact that most of it comes from two mature and well-established movements: the white supremacist movement and the anti-government “Patriot” movement. They have specific goals and specific enemies and can be expected to produce a steady stream of extremists willing to use violence to achieve those goals or harm those enemies. Moreover, though fringe movements, they nevertheless have deep roots in American society and cannot simply be rooted out or eliminated. Right-wing terrorism is not going away anytime soon.
On the plus side, law enforcement is collectively far more familiar with right-wing extremist movements than it may be with newer types of extremist movements, which enables it to utilize informants and undercover officers to a much fuller extent than might otherwise be the case. It is no coincidence that a number of the prevented acts recounted in this study were prevented thanks to “sting” operations, which are one of the most consistently successful law enforcement tools against terrorism—as long as law enforcement is sufficiently familiar with the relevant movement(s).
Most of the 25 years examined here for right-wing terrorism have occurred in what can be deemed the “Internet era.” However, the Internet of the mid-1990s was very different than that of ten years later or today’s on-line world. Overall, right-wing terrorism has remained pretty consistent throughout this era, but the evolution of the Internet has resulted in some changes.
In particular, the social networking revolution that occurred during the period 2006-2009 has made it easier for extremist ideas and tactics to spread very far, very fast. This can allow new extremist movements, such as the white supremacist Alt Right, to quickly gain purchase, and can allow established movement, such as the sovereign citizen movement, to rapidly resurge. Social networking has also allowed extremists to meet each other and even to plot on-line. The October 2008 school attack plot in Tennessee and the Georgia militia plot of February 2014 are two examples where extremists who met on-line later joined up in the “real world” to plot terrorist acts.
The Internet may also have made lone wolf terrorism—terrorism committed by a lone perpetrator not acting at the behest of any organized group—a more common phenomenon, because one can now self-radicalize using on-line resources with little need to engage with other extremists in the “real world.” The shooting sprees of Keith Luke in 2009 and Dylann Roof in 2015 are examples of terrorist acts committed by lone extremists who radicalized on-line with little or no real interaction with other extremists. Lone wolves have long existed within America’s radical right, but could be even more likely in the future.
Finally, for the past quarter of a century, right-wing terrorism has been a consistent feature in the landscape of American violence, but it has garnered far less notice than some other forms of terrorism, most notably Islamic terrorism. Though a few incidents, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, or the bombings of Eric Rudoph, received extensive media coverage, many of the incidents collected here received scant media attention, particularly from major national media sources.
One reason for this under-coverage may be very simple: a surprising number of the terrorist acts and plots listed here originated away from major media centers. While some incidents took place in locations such as New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles, many others occurred in out-of-the-way places such as Garden City, Kansas; Fairbanks, Alaska; or Lenoir, Tennessee. As a result, such incidents are less likely to get national media attention and, if they get any, less likely to get sustained coverage.
Whatever the reasons for the lack of coverage, one of its consequences has been an inadequate awareness among policy-makers and the public alike of the threat posed by violent right-wing extremists. Today, the United States still does not even have a federal domestic terrorism statute. Federal spending on training law enforcement on issues such as right-wing violence and terrorism is extremely low.
One thing is certain: if the United States does not treat right-wing terrorism as a real threat and react appropriately, there is no chance of lessening the danger posed by violent right-wing extremists and the 150 terror incidents described in this report will be joined by still more.Story highlights Kenneth Roth: Trump's one-day emotional response to horrors of a particular chemical attack in Syria is not enough
He says the US needs a coherent policy to end the Syrian people's suffering
Kenneth Roth is executive director of Human Rights Watch. Follow him on Twitter: @KenRoth. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
(CNN) How do we make sense of President Donald Trump's military response to the April 4 sarin attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which evidence shows was launched by Syrian government forces?
Kenneth Roth
Was Trump simply demonstrating that he is not President Barack Obama, responding militarily to the chemical weapon "red line" that Obama chose instead to enforce through the negotiated removal of what President Bashar al-Assad claimed were all of his chemical weapons? Or was Trump showing that even he has limits to the atrocities he will tolerate?
Russia claims that the April 4 attack was a Syrian conventional bomb that happened to hit a "terrorist" chemical weapons cache on the ground. That cover story was quickly undercut by the fact that Khan Sheikhoun residents began suffering symptoms from a sarin attack five hours before Russia said the conventional attack took place.
Then, last week, Human Rights Watch decimated the cover story. Dozens of local residents interviewed said that a crater in the middle of a paved road appeared to have been the epicenter of the chemical exposure and that there were no indications that other sites attacked that morning contained any stored chemicals.
JUST WATCHED US sanctions Syrian research center Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH US sanctions Syrian research center 01:42
Two remnants found in a crater in the paved road have characteristics that are similar to a Soviet-produced, air-dropped chemical bomb designed to deliver sarin, suggesting that the weapon used was factory-produced.
Read MoreA top Democratic lawmaker on Tuesday ripped the House’s disaster funding package for failing to include any provisions helping Medicaid programs for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
“It’s disgraceful that the House Republican’s emergency supplemental funding package does absolutely nothing for the more than 1.6 million Americans in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands that are counting on Medicaid in the wake of overwhelming devastation,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. Frank Joseph PalloneDemocrats drill EPA official over decrease in polluter settlements under Trump Overnight Health Care — Presented by National Taxpayers Union — Trump bans abortion providers from family planning program | White House doesn't back GOP governor on drug imports | HHS declines to provide witnesses for family separations hearing Overnight Health Care — Presented by National Taxpayers Union — Top Dems call for end to Medicaid work rules | Chamber launching ad blitz against Trump drug plan | Google offers help to dispose of opioids MORE (N.J.), the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
House Republicans are preparing to attach an $81 billion disaster aid package to a stopgap government spending bill aimed at keeping the government open past Friday. The supplemental package includes money to fund hurricane and wildfire relief efforts.
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Hurricane Maria caused serious damage to the health-care system in the U.S. territories, but none of the federal disaster relief money to date has been earmarked for Medicaid.
The amount is nearly double the $44 billion the White House proposed last month, but still falls short of the $94 billion requested by Puerto Rico.
On Monday, Rep. Nita Lowey Nita Sue LoweyWhite House to propose using budget maneuver to prevent defense spending cuts Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl On The Money: Trump declares emergency at border | Braces for legal fight | Move divides GOP | Trump signs border deal to avoid shutdown | Winners, losers from spending fight | US, China trade talks to resume next week MORE (N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said the supplemental package “is not the product of bipartisan negotiation and compromise.”
Lowey said the package doesn’t include Democratic priorities, like addressing Puerto Rico’s Medicaid shortfall. Medicaid programs in the territories are expected to exhaust current funds in early 2018 without emergency funding.
Democrats had requested $4.9 billion over two years, as well as a 100 percent federal match for that period, for Puerto Rico. They asked for $150 million over two years for the Virgin Islands.
Pallone urged lawmakers to provide additional aid.
“Congress must lift the Medicaid cap, give a 100 percent funding match to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and ensure all evacuees receive the care they need,” he said.
As a result of a funding cap set by Congress decades ago, Puerto Rico effectively receives less than 20 percent in reimbursements for Medicaid. If it were treated as a state, its reimbursement rate would be 83 percent.
Puerto Rico is subject to a hard cap of about $300 million a year. If the island’s government spends more than that amount, it must cover the cost.
Experts say the formula has forced the Puerto Rican government to cover a large portion of the costs from its own budget, contributing to the island’s debt crisis.
Rep. Tom Cole Thomas (Tom) Jeffrey ColeDon’t look for House GOP to defy Trump on border wall GOP dismisses polls showing losing battle on shutdown Bottom Line MORE (R-Okla.), a top House appropriator, told reporters the disaster funding doesn’t address all the health-care issues facing the territories because it’s meant for emergency aid only and is primarily aimed at helping displaced residents.
“I’m not saying that’s something that couldn’t come later, but this is still emergency relief and it’s supporting a pretty fragile health-care system, and then trying to support people who’ve been displaced through no fault of their own,” Cole said.
The stopgap spending bill does contain $1 billion to help address Puerto Rico’s impending Medicaid cliff, but it was included as part of a provision reauthorizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program that’s likely to be changed in the Senate.We’re excited to introduce Safe Wi-Fi and System Advisor, two brand new security features to keep you and your personal data safe and secure.
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One of the most visible enhancement to the v0.8 release is the introduction of a UI for installing and managing Photon Controller. Previously, the only way to deploy Photon Controller was using an already pre-configured appliance that required customers to have a particular network configuration for their infrastructure. Obviously, this was not ideal and it made it challenging for customers to evaluate Photon Controller in their own specific environment. With this new update, customers can now easily deploy Photon Controller into their own unique environment using a UI that is provided by a Virtual Appliance (OVA). This Virtual Appliance is only used for the initial deployment of Photon Controller and is no longer needed afterwards. Once Photon Controller is up and running, you can manage it using either the CLI or the new management UI.
In this first article, I will take you through the steps of deploying Photon Controller onto an already provisioned ESXi host. We have a quick look at the Photon CLI and how you can interact with Photon Controller and lastly, we will also take a look at the new Photon Controller Management UI. In future articles, we will be looking at deploying our first VM using Photon Controller as well as run through the different cluster orchestration solutions that Photon Controller integrates with.
To start using Photon Controller, you will need at least one physical ESXi 6.x host (4vCPU / 16GB memory / 50GB storage) with some basic networking capabilities which you can read more about here. Obviously, if you really want to see what Photon Controller in action and what it can do, having additional hosts will definitely help. If you do not have a dedicated ESXi host for use with Photon Controller, the next best option is to leverage Nested ESXi. The more resources you can allocate to the Nested ESXi VM, the better your experience will be in addition to the number of cluster orchestration workflows you will be able to exercise. If you have access to a physical ESXi host, you can skip steps 2 through 4.
For this exercise, I will be using my Apple Mac Mini which is running the latest version of ESXi 6.0 Update 2 and has 16GB of available memory and 100+GB of local storage.
Deploying Photon Controller
Step 1 - Download both the Photon Controller Installer OVA as well as the Photon CLI for your OS platform from here.
Step 2 - Deploy the Photon Controller Installer OVA using either the ovftool CLI directly against an existing ESXi host or using the vSphere Web/C# Client connected to a vCenter Server. For more detailed instructions, please have a look at this blog article here.
Step 3 (optional) - Download the Nested ESXi 6.x Virtual Appliance which you can find here which also includes instructions on how to deploy the Nested ESXi VA. Make sure the version of the Nested ESXi 6.x VA version is v5.0 as earlier versions will not work. You can refer to the screenshot in the next step if you are wondering where to look.
Step 4 -(optional) Deploy the Nested ESXi OVA with at least 4vCPU, 16GB of memory and increase the storage for the 3rd VMDK to at least 50GB. If you have vCenter Server, you can deploy by using either the vSphere Web or C# Client as shown in the screenshot below:
Make sure you enable SSH (currently required for Photon Controller) and enable local datastore unless you have shared storage to connect to the Nested ESXi VM (VSAN is currently not supported with Photon Controller at this time). If you only have an ESXi host, then you can deploy using the ovftool CLI which can be downloaded here and follow the instructions found here.
Note: If you have more than one Nested ESXi VM, you will need to setup shared storage else you may run into issues when images are being replicated across the hosts. The other added benefit is that you are not wasting local storage just to replicate the same images over and over.
At this point, you should have the Photon Controller Installer VM running and at least one physical or Nested ESXi powered on and ready to go.
UPDATE (04/25/16): Please have a look at this article on How to override the default CPU/Memory when deploying Photon Controller Management VM? which can be very helpful for resource constrained environments.
Step 6 - Next, open a browser to the IP Address of your Photon Controller Installer VM whether that was an IP Address you had specified or on that it was automatically obtained via DHCP. You should be taken to the installer screen as seen in the screenshot below.
Step 7 - Click on the "Get Started" button and then accept the EULA.
Step 8 - The next section is "Management" where you will define the ESXi host(s) to run the Photon Controller Management VMs. If you only have one ESXi host, then you will also want to check the "Also use as Cloud Host" box in which case the ESXi host will be used to run both the Photon Controller management VM as well as the workload VMs. In a real Production environment, you will most likely want to separate these out as a best practice to not mix your management plane with your compute workload.
The Host IP will be the IP Address (yes, you will have to use IP Address as hostnames are not currently supported) of your first ESXi host. Following that, you will then need to provide credentials to the ESXi host as well as the datastore and networking configurations in which the Photon Controller VM will be deployed to.
Note: One important thing to note is that the installer will dynamically size the Photon Controller Management VM based on the available resources of the ESXi host. Simply speaking, it will consume as much available resources (taking into considerations powered off VMs if they exists) depending if it is purely a "Management" and/or "Cloud" host.
Step 9 - The next section is "Cloud" where you will specify additional ESXi host(s) that will run your workload. Since we only have a single host, we already accounted for this in previous step and will skip this. If you do have additional hosts, you can specify either individual IPs or a range of IPs. If you have hosts with different credentials, you can add addition logical groups by simply clicking into the "Add host group" icon.
Step 10 - The last page is the "Global Settings" where you have the ability to configure some of the advanced options. For a minimal setup, you only need to specify the share storage for the images as well as deploying a load balancer which is part of the installer itself. If you only have a single host, then you can specify the name of your datastore or the shared datastore in which you have already mounted on your ESXi host. In my environment, the datastore name is datastore1. If you have multiple ESXi hosts that *only* have local datastores, make sure they are uniquely named as there is a known bug that different hosts can not have the same datastore name. In this case, you would list all the datastore names in the box (e.g. datastore1, datastore2).
Make sure to also check the box "Allow cloud hosts to use image datastore for VM Storage" if you wish to allow the VMs to also be deployed to these datastores. All other settings are all optional including deploying the Lightwave identity service, you can refer to the documentation for more details.
Step 11 - Finally, before you click on the "Deploy" button, I recommend that you export your current configurations. This allows you to easily adjust the configurations without having to re-enter it into the UI or if you get a failure so you can easily re-try. This a very handy feature and hope to see this in other VMware based installers. Once you are ready, go ahead and click on the "Deploy" button.
Depending on environment and resources, the deployment can take anywhere from 5-10 minutes. The installer will discover your ESXi hosts and the resources you had specified earlier, it will then install an agent on each of the ESXi hosts which will allow Photon Controller to communicate with the hosts, deploy the Photon Controller Management VM and then finally upload the necessary images from the Photon Controller Installer VM over to the Image Datastores. If everything was successful, you should see the success screen in the screenshot above.
Note: If you run into any deployment issues, the most common issue is most like resource related. If you did not correctly size the Nested ESXi VM with the minimal configuration, you will definitely run into issues. If you do run into this situation, go ahead and re-size your Nested ESXi VMs and then re-initialize the Photon Controller Installer VM by jumping to the bottom of this article in the Troubleshooting section where I document the process.
Exploring Photon CLI
At this point, we will now switch over to the Photon CLI that you had downloaded earlier to interact with the Installer VM to get some information about our deployed Photon Controller instance. The Photon CLI uses the Photon REST API, so you could also interact with the system using the API rather than the CLI. We will also quickly cover the REST API in this section in case you might be interested in using it.
Step 1 - Another method to verify that our deployment was successful is by pointing our Photon CLI to the IP Address of the Photon Controller Installer VM by running the following command:
./photon target set http://192.168.1.250
Step 2 - Here, we will be able to list any of deployments performed by the Installer VM by running the following command:
./photon deployment list
Step 3 - Using the deployment ID from previous step, we can then get more details about a given deployment by running the following command and specifying the ID:
./photon deployment show de4d276f-16c1-4666-b586-a800dc83d4d6
As you can see from the output, we get a nice summary of the Photon Controller instance that we just deployed. What you will be looking for here is that the State property shows "Ready" which means we are now ready to start using the Photon Controller platform. From here, we can also see the IP Address of the load balancer that was setup for us within the Photon Controller Management VM which in this example is 192.168.1.150.
Step 4 - To interact with our Photon Controller instance, we will need to point the Photon CLI to the IP Address of the load balancer and specify port 28080. If you had enabled authentication using the Lightwave identity service, you would then use port 443 instead.
./photon target set http://192.168.1.150:28080
Step 5 - You can also check the state of the overall system and the various components once you have pointed to your Photon Controller by running the following command:
./photon system status
Step 6 - If you want to get the list of ESXi hosts that is part of a given deployment, we can use the deployment ID from Step 2 and then run the following command which will give you some basic information including the functionality of the ESXi host whether it is serving as a "Management" or "Cloud" Host:
./photon deployment list-hosts de4d276f-16c1-4666-b586-a800dc83d4d6
Step 7 - To show more details about a given ESXi host, we just need to take the host ID from the previous step and then run the following command:
./photon host show ce37fca9-c8c6-4986-bb47-b0cf48fd9724
Note: I had noticed that the ESXi host's root password was being displayed in this output. I have already reported this internally and this will be removed in a future update as it should not be displaying the password, especially in plaintext.
Hopefully this gives you a quick primer on how the Photon CLI works and how you can easily interact with a given Photon Controller deployment. If you would like more details on Photon CLI, be sure to check out the official documentation here.
Exploring Photon Controller API
The Photon Controller also provides a REST API interface which you can explore by using the built in Swagger interface. You can connect to it by opening a browser to the following address: https://[photon-controller-load-balancer]:9000/api For those of you who have not used Swagger before, its a tool that allows you to easily test drive the underlying API as well as providing interactive documentation on the specific APIs that are available. This is a great way to learn about the Photon Controller API and allows you to even try it out without having to write a single line of code.
Exploring Photon Controller UI
Saving the best for the last, we will now take a look at the new Photon Controller Management UI. To access the UI, you just need to open a browser to the IP Address of the Photon Controller load balancer. In this example, it is 192.168.1.150 and once loaded, you should be taken to the main dashboard.
If you recall earlier in the Photon CLI example, we had to run through several commands to get the overall system status as well as list of ESXi hosts participating in either a "Management" or "Cloud" host role. With the UI, this is literally a single click!
There are other objects within the UI that you may notice while exploring but we will save that for the next article in which we will walk through the process provisioning your first Virtual Machine using Photon Controller.
Troubleshooting
Here are some useful things I learned from the Photon Controller team while troubleshooting some of my initial deployments.
The following logs are useful to take a look at during a failed deployment and usually will give some hints to what had happened. You can find these by logging into the Photon Controller Installer VM:
/var/log/esxcloud/management-api/management-api.log
/var/log/esxcloud/deployer/deployer.log
If you need to restart or re-deploy using the Photon Controller Installer VM, there is some clean up that you need to do (in the future, there will be an easier way to initialize without going through this process). To do so, SSH to Photon Controller Installer VM using the username esxcloud and vmware as the password. Next, you will change over to the root user via the su command and the password will be what you had set earlier:
su - root
rm -rf /etc/esxcloud/deployer/deployer/sandbox_18000/
rm -rf /etc/esxcloud/cloud-store/cloud-store/sandbox_19000/
reboot
Once the Photon Controller Installer VM has started back up, you will need to restart the Docker Container for the UI by running the following command:
docker restart ui_installer
This is required as currently it does not correctly restart upon reboot. This is a known issue and will be fixed in a future update. Before opening a browser to the installer UI, you can run the following command to ensure all Docker Containers have successfully started:
docker ps -aQuelle suprise, y’all: it seems eating disorders are more common amongst teenagers than we thought, according to a new study published on Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
There are a few factors that make this study instructive, besides the increased rates themselves. First, the study found that boys and girls are equally at risk of developing anorexia, though girls still lead in bulimia and binge eating. Second, the study found that eating disorders are strongly associated with suicidal ideation, and with social isolation and “disconnection.” Third, the median—the median!—age for the onset of an eating disorder is twelve. Twelve. Years old.
Release the blockquotes!
“The prevalence of these disorders is higher than previously expected in this age range, and the patterns of [co-existing illnesses], role impairment and suicidality indicate that eating disorders represent a major public health concern,” the researchers wrote. (Source)
The trillingly-named “eating disorder not otherwise specified,” otherwise known as EDNOS, is also markedly more popular than previously thought, moreso than any of the disorders with real names.
Many teens had behaviors that mimic eating disorders. This means they may have serious eating behaviors, but their symptoms do not meet all the criteria to fit the diagnosis for anorexia or bulimia as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a manual for mental health disorders. This study found 0.8% of the participants had symptoms that came close to anorexia and 2.5% had symptoms resembling binge eating disorder. (Source)
You know who falls into this commitment-phobic EDNOS category? Among others, this category comprises many of the fat kids with EDs. Because willfully starving yourself is not anorexia unless you can get below 85% of the expected weight for your age and height, and have ceased to menstruate, according to the DSM.
So what we have here is a comprehensive study instructing us that anorexia is as common in boys as girls, that children are developing eating disorders at 12, and that eating disorders are extremely dangerous to kids’ health both medically and emotionally. Also, while anorexia rates have remained stable, the instances of binge eating disorder and bulimia have doubled since the 1990s. In a complete coincidence, the fearful cultural rhetoric regarding an alleged obesity epidemic has also doubled—at least—since the 1990s. But this is totally unconnected, I’m sure.
This study is bad news, any way you slice it, but what has really made my blood boil is the shock and horror with which I’ve seen and heard it being discussed on the news. How dare anyone be shocked? When virtually every facet of our culture conspires to create an environment in which being fat is the very worst thing a person can be, and that one must ward off fatness with every Machiavellian contrivance, how is it surprising that children would develop “an obsessive fear of gaining weight”, and would self-injure as a result of overeating, either via purging, excessive exercise, internalized self-loathing, or extreme guilt?
The New York Times is kind enough to furnish us with exhibit A: a new “diet” in which women inject themselves with hCG, a hormone that normally only occurs in pregnancy. Yes, this is a real thing.
The regimen combines daily injections with a near-starvation diet, and patients, mostly women, are often enticed by promises that they can lose about a pound a day without feeling hungry. Perhaps even more seductively, they are frequently told that the hCG will prompt their bodies to carry away and metabolize fat that has been stored where they least want it — in their upper arms, bellies and thighs.
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back at the first half of SNL and compile a list of the most popular sketches based on overall YouTube views.
DON’T MISS: EFF proves T-Mobile is throttling YouTube
As was to be expected, SNL over the past few months really capitalized on the upcoming Presidential election. In addition to spoofing Presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the show even managed to snag Donald Trump himself as a host this past November. Not surprisingly, many of the videos that garnered the most attention this season were politically oriented.
1. A Thanksgiving Miracle – 12.8 million views
This clip is SNL at its best. Equal parts provocative, wacky, and even nonsensical at times, the clip hilariously demonstrates how the power of Adele’s music can help bring people together. Aidy Bryant, per usual, delivers a fine acting performance.
2. Close Encounters – 12.4 million views
Kate McKinnon steals the show in this clip featuring three people being interviewed after being abducted by aliens. Whereas two of the abductees describe moments of pure bliss, McKinnon knocks it out of the park with a completely different take. While the premise of this clip is pretty standard as far as comedy sketches go, the execution here is masterful and well worth watching.
3. Democratic Debate Cold Open – 8.4 million views
While SNL debate spoofs can be hit or miss, this clip is notable due to the surprise appearance of Larry David (himself a former SNL writer) who showcased an eerily accurate Bernie Sanders impression.
4. Porn Teacher – 7.5 million views
Featuring Amy Schumer and SNL cast member Kyle Mooney, this sketch parodies a stereotypical adult film in a school setting, only to see the festivities continually interrupted by an earnest schoolgirl brilliantly portrayed by Aidy Bryant.
5. Hotline Bling Parody – 5.2 million views
Donald Trump stint as SNL host was mostly a bore, save for this video spoof of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video. This video may already be a bit dated, but it may be worth watching if only to see Trump’s repertoire of dance moves, not to mention a cameo from Martin Short.
6. Star Wars Auditions – 4.4 million views
I’m surprised that this wasn’t more popular, what with the insane amount of press Star Wars has been getting over the past few weeks. In any event, the video below is something of a showcase for SNL’s stars to showcase their impression skills. This one has a whole lot of laughs, due in large part to an impressive selection of celebrity impressions, including Sofia Vergara and David Beckham. Also be on the lookout for a number of Hollywood cameos. The best, though, is Bobby Moynihan’s impression of George Lucas.
7. George W. Bush Cold Open – 4.1 million views
What better way to pump up ratings than to bring back Will Ferrell and have him reprise his iconic George W. Bush impression. In this particular sketch, Ferrell, as Bush, announces his candidacy for President and explains why all the other Republican candidates aren’t qualified.
8. Donald and Melania Trump Cold Open – 4 million views
Taran Killam does a solid job as Trump and really nails many of his mannerisms. Cecily Strong also does a fine job portraying his wife. While nothing in this skit stands out in particular, it’s consistently funny throughout.
9. Amy Schumer Monologue – 3.4 million views
As a stand-up by trade, it’s no surprise that Schumer really delivered with her opening SNL monologue, touching on all sorts of topics, including dating Bradley Cooper and skewering the Kardashians.
“Is that a great message for little girls? A whole family of women who take the faces they were born with as a light suggestion?”
10. Hillary Clinton Bar Talk – 3.3 million views
Kate McKinnon here plays Hillary Clinton while Hillary Clinton herself plays the bartender.BALTIMORE -- The Boston Red Sox have issues. And one of them is how badly they need offense.
A day after erupting for 10 runs against the Baltimore Orioles -- including a bat-around fifth inning that erased a 6-1 deficit -- Boston’s bats went back into hibernation in a 1-0 extra-innings win over Baltimore on Tuesday. Even though they did enough to win, finally putting a run across in the top of the 11th, the string of 10 consecutive bagels that the Sox hung on the Camden Yards jumbotron prior to that provided an ugly reminder that once the postseason rolls around, the Red Sox might have trouble hanging with the American League’s heaviest hitters.
Of the five AL teams currently in playoff position, the Red Sox rank last in scoring (4.8 runs per game), on-base percentage (.331), slugging (.407) and OPS (.738). In those last two categories, they aren't just bad relative to playoff teams. They’re just plain bad: Their slugging percentage is the fifth-lowest in the majors, and their OPS is 10th-lowest. It doesn’t help that Boston isn’t whole. Utilityman Eduardo Nunez, who has been a godsend since coming over from San Francisco at the trade deadline, is out with a knee injury. Dustin Pedroia, the engine that makes the Sox go, didn’t start Tuesday after Monday’s nasal contusion and has had trouble staying on the field all year. Then there’s slugger Hanley Ramirez, who isn't hurt but has been hitting like he is (.205 average since the break).
“We’re banged up,” skipper John Farrell said. “That’s apparent.”
Dustin Pedroia walks off the field after hitting into a double play to end the 10th inning on Tuesday. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
The problem is that even when healthy, Farrell’s offense isn’t the prototypical Red Sox offense that opposing teams have come to know and fear. With slugger David Ortiz gone, power has suddenly become a scarce commodity. The Sox's 156 jacks are the fewest in the American League. In a season in which 31 big league hitters have reached the 30-homer plateau, Boston’s co-home-run leaders (Ramirez and Mookie Betts) are on pace for just 23 bombs. But perhaps nothing, and I mean nothing, speaks more to the Sox's offensive issues than this: On Tuesday, the very same night that MLB set a new record for home runs in a season, Boston needed an infield hit, two walks and a wild pitch to produce its lone run. Needless to say, a solo homer would’ve been way easier. But these Red Sox don’t really do home runs.
What they do well is extra-inning wins, another sign of just how much trouble they’ve had scratching out runs. With Tuesday night's win, the Sox improved to 15-3 in overtime this season. That’s the best record in the majors, and it ties a franchise record for extra-inning wins in a season. That’s all fine and good, and it speaks to just how good the Boston bullpen has been, but maybe if the Red Sox generated more offense on a more consistent basis, they wouldn’t require more than nine innings to get the job done. If you don’t think that theory holds any water, think again: Of the four other teams in the top five in extra-inning games played this season (Blue Jays, Giants, Pirates, Phillies), none ranks higher than 25th in runs scored.
Just how bad have things gotten? So bad that Mitch Moreland, who sandwiched a hot August between a.145 July and a.183 September, was hitting cleanup on Tuesday. So bad that Pedroia -- who busted his nose the day before and who Farrell said before the game would be used only in an emergency -- actually got used. Naturally, he grounded into an inning-ending double play. Because that’s the way things have been going for the Red Sox's offense.
“Hopefully, in due time,” Farrell said, “the guys that have been big offensive contributors for us, Nuney being one, Pedey getting back in the lineup a little more regularly, Hanley hopefully getting back on track somewhat … we’ve got some guys coming to us.”
Then, without skipping a beat, the Sox skipper changed the subject.
“In the meantime, what the pitching staff is doing is remarkable.”
So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
Aug. 16, 2016, 10:00 PM GMT / Source: TODAY By Embry Roberts
On a sticky summer day that would live in infamy, Batman descended on the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society.
No, that’s not the plot of a new action movie. It’s the true story of a cat with a unique look that helped land him a "forever" home.
"Batman is very affectionate … He loves to be rubbed on his cheeks," said Caitlin Lasky, a representative for the shelter. Western PA Humane Society
You’re not seeing double! Batman was born with two sets of ears, the result of a rare genetic mutation. When the 3-year-old cat arrived at the Humane Society on July 12, employees were taken with his friendly personality — but worried that his unusual appearance might scare off potential adopters.
“We had a polydactyl cat with six claws on each paw who was at the shelter for quite a while,” Caitlin Lasky, the shelter’s senior marketing communications manager, told TODAY. “Older animals can be tough, or those with disabilities.
"But when the right person comes in the door, people will say, ‘I knew from that moment,’" she said. "It just takes the right match.”
RELATED: This baby and her new rescue dog have something in common (besides adorableness)
Batman spent his first month being treated for an upper respiratory infection before becoming eligible for adoption on Aug. 9. The shelter posted a video of the cat to their Facebook page, a tactic that has helped them reach adopters in the past.
“It puts a face and a personality to the animals,” Lasky explained. “Batman is very affectionate … He loves to be rubbed on his cheeks. He lived with other cats, so he’s good with other animals. It’s helpful for people to see all that.”
RELATED: Photographer puts the spotlight on black cats in shelters to find them homes
According to Lasky, they were immediately contacted by the parents of a young girl who loves superheroes. Talk about the perfect match! The family arranged a visit and fell in love with Batman in person — and the rest, as they say, is history.
While Batman’s new family has declined to comment or identify themselves publicly, the the shelter tells us they feel confident in the match. “They wanted him before this story took off,” said Lasky. “We're so happy for them and hope to keep in touch."Updated 10.30pm
BERNIE SANDERS HAS accused Donald Trump of presiding over ‘incredibly stupid’ decisions on climate change and of backing some of the worst legislation he has ever seen, covering healthcare, in a speech in Dublin tonight.
The independent Vermont Senator was at the Grand Canal Theatre in part to promote his book – ‘Our Revolution: A Future to Believe in’ – as part of the Dalkey Book Festival.
Simon & Garfunkel's 'America' rings out in the theatre as Bernie Sanders takes the stage in Dublin. pic.twitter.com/UnhiTN6Los — Daragh Brophy (@DaraghBroph) June 4, 2017 Source: Daragh Brophy /Twitter
He began his appearance by expressing his condolences to the families of those killed and injured in the recent Manchester and London attacks – telling the audience the world needed to work together to defeat terrorism.
He repeated several times during the event – which took the form of a speech, followed by a one-on-one interview with festival organiser David McWilliams – that countries needed to step-up their sharing of intelligence, in order to keep track of extremists.
During a section of his speech assessing Trump’s performance in the White House, he took issue with the President’s attack on London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
As part of a statement in the wake of last night’s terror attack, which claimed the lives of seven people and injured dozens, Khan told citizens that “Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days. There’s no reason to be alarmed.”
Trump took to Twitter to take issue with Khan’s choice of language, saying:
At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is “no reason to be alarmed!
Speaking to his Dublin audience, Sanders said that the Mayor of London had tried to send out a message of reassurance, and that Trump “took his statements way out of context”.
The President had used the opportunity to “promote his divisive Muslim ban,” Sanders told the crowd.
Climate change
Regarding President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement, which the Republican announced this week in the face of overwhelming international opposition, he said it was “not only incredibly stupid but it will also end up hurting the American economy and in fact the world economy”.
The decision was “dead wrong,” Sanders said – adding:
“How in God’s name do you make public policy in defiance of science?”
Not withstanding Donald Trump, please do not think for a moment that most Americans do not understand the severity of this crisis.
Addressing domestic US issues, Sanders said that the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare was some of the worst lawmaking he had come across in his long political career.
Trump had “lied through his teeth” in last year’s election campaign, he said – and continues to “lie all of the time”.
Sanders said several times throughout his speech that the Trump administration did not represent the views of America.
American people, he said, are “finding it very strange that we have a President who seems to be more comfortable with autocrats and authoritarians than with leaders of democratic nations”.
However, he added, the real estate developer’s election had resulted in a “level of grassroots activism in reaction to Trump” that had not been seen for generations.
Source: Conor McCabe Photography Ltd
Sanders’ appearance in Dublin tonight follows a three-day speaking tour of the UK, where he drew parallels between the grassroots movement that has defined Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, and his own much-better-than-expected run in the Democratic primaries last year.
He won’t be in the country long – but arrived early enough today to fit in a visit to the Áras and a chat with President Michael D Higgins.
The Senator’s wife, Jane O’Meara-Sanders, also sat down with a pair of genealogists to try and trace her Irish roots (a near-obligatory activity for the family of any American politician visiting the country).Breitbart.com writer Matt Boyle reported on the specific location where President Obama's teenage daughters are vacationing for spring break, ignoring the decades-old journalistic tradition that media outlets should not report on a president's minor children when they are not attending "official or semi-official events" for privacy and security reasons.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) and other news websites similarly reported on a trip Malia Obama took to Mexico in March 2012. At the request of the White House, those media outlets that reported on her spring break vacation in Mexico soon deleted the story from their websites. Politico, which itself removed some details about the trip due to security concerns, received a statement from Kristina Schake, Michelle Obama's communications director about why the stories were disappearing:
From the beginning of the administration, the White House has asked news outlets not to report on or photograph the Obama children when they are not with their parents and there is no vital news interest. We have reminded outlets of this request in order to protect the privacy and security of these girls.
The Washington Post's Paul Farhi reported at the time that this is part of a longstanding and informal agreement between successive administrations and the White House Correspondents' Association, and that "traditional news organizations have long abided by such arrangements":
Presidential administrations have long been protective of the first family's minor children, and reporters in Washington have mostly observed the taboo on stories or photographs of them outside official and semi-official events. The ban on such coverage has existed through many administrations by informal agreement with the White House Correspondents' Association, which represents the interests of journalists who cover the president.
But Breitbart's Matt Boyle disregarded such tradition and related security concerns when he posted an "exclusive" report on Breitbart.com detailing where the Obama daughters were vacationing for spring break. Boyle said that the White House declined to comment and that the Secret Service told him they don't "confirm or deny trips for anyone under the agency's protective detail, including Sasha and Malia."Image caption Playing WoW leads people to live a "bizarre double life" say Maine Republicans
The gaming hobby of a political candidate has become an issue in a state senate race in New England, US.
Maine Republicans have created a webpage revealing that Democrat candidate Colleen Lachowicz plays an orc rogue in World of Warcraft (WoW).
Ms Lachowicz's liking for back-stabbing and poison in WoW raise questions about her "fitness for office", they claim.
Ms Lachowicz has hit back saying the attack showed the Republicans were "out of touch".
Weird focus
The state senate seat known as District 25 in Maine, is currently being contested by Ms Lachowicz and incumbent Republican Tom Martin. Voting takes place on 6 November.
As part of its campaign efforts, the Republican party in the state created "Colleen's World" - a website that compiles information about Ms Lachowicz's orc rogue Santiaga. An orc is a mythical human-like creature, generally described as fierce and combative.
In a statement that accompanies the webpage, Maine Republicans said playing the game led Ms Lachowicz to live a "bizarre double life" that raised questions about her ability to represent the state.
The page also detailed some of the comments Ms Lachowicz has made while talking about her orc rogue, in particular it highlights her affection for Santiaga's ability to stab things and kill people without suffering a jail sentence.
"These are some very bizarre and offensive comments," said Maine Republican Party spokesman David Sorensen in a statement. "They certainly raise questions about Lachowicz's maturity and her ability to make serious decisions for the people of Senate District 25."
The site also lists many of the 400 comments she has posted to left wing political news and discussion site Daily Kos. Maine Republicans have also posted leaflets that reproduce the information on the website.
"I think it's weird that I'm being targeted for playing online games," said Ms Lachowicz in a statement. "Apparently I'm in good company since there are 183 million other Americans who also enjoy online games.
"Instead of talking about what they're doing for Maine people, they're making fun of me for playing video games," said Ms Lachowicz.
It is not clear what effect the Republican tactic will have on the state senate race in Maine. However, many messages of support have been left on Ms Lachowicz's own webpage with some pledging cash to her campaign.
Gaming researcher Ladan Cockshut said the row revealed how gaming can be seen as a bad thing to do.
"In my work, I've spoken with many people who in their regular lives have roles of significant responsibility (as doctors, managers, or educators) but who choose carefully with whom they disclose their gaming activity," she told the BBC. "And disclosing their gaming activity is often accompanied by a degree of apology or embarrassment."
But, she added, having a gamer run for office was a "heartening" development.
"This would seem to run contrary to the other stereotypes that we love to assign to gamers: that they are lazy, antisocial people who don't have a'real life'," she said. "Maybe this will trigger some dialogue about our perceptions of gamers and the role that games can and should play in modern society."ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Remember that big ah-ha moment in the 1939 classic "The Wizard of Oz?" Dorothy wants to see the Wizard. His voice booms: "Do not arouse the wrath of the Great and Powerful Oz! Come back tomorrow!" Afraid, Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow shake. Dorothy's dog runs up, tugs on a curtain. She chases Toto, pulls curtain open:
"Who are you?" Dr. Marvel stutters: "Well, I - I - I am the Great and Powerful, Wizard of Oz." Dorothy: "You are? I don't believe you!" He replies: "No, it's true. There's no other Wizard except me." Dorothy's miffed: "Oh, you're a very bad man!" Wizard: "Oh, no, my dear. I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad Wizard."
2009 Sequel: Script exposes diabolical cover-up conspiracy
Flash forward: Real life, Washington, new leaders, a new Congress, old wizardry. Be forewarned: No matter who's elected president, America will soon see a massive statistical curtain pulled back, exposing a con game of historic proportions. And when that happens, you and I will suffer another ear-splitting global meltdown, bigger than today's housing-credit crisis, dragging us deep into a recession and bear market for years.
Cast: New 'leading man' from old Nixon political machine
Yes, the lead character pulling back the curtain is none other than Kevin Phillips, a former Republican strategist for Nixon, and today America's leading political historian. Phillips just published "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics & the Crisis of American Capitalism," everything you need to know about today's credit meltdown.
Scene 1: Numbers racket hiding behind Washington curtain
Opening shot: Phillips pulling back the curtain, exposing charlatan Wizards in a brilliant Harper's Magazine article: "Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know." Far worse. Buy it, read it -- this is essential reading if you really want to understand the depth of today's political as well as economic impending meltdown, and the harsh realities facing Washington, Wall Street, Corporate America, and Main Street in 2009 and beyond... harsh because we cannot cover up the truth much longer.
Scene 2: Statistics, Washington's new WMDs, a time bomb
"If Washington's harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it really is. The corruption has tainted the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy," especially three key numbers, CPI, GDP and monthly unemployment statistics.
Scene 3: Backflash, 'It's always the cover-up, stupid!'
As I read further I couldn't help but think about similar traps politicians get themselves (and us) into. Remember nice guys like Scooter Libby and Bill Clinton: The crime wasn't their original stupidity, but their lying during the cover-up. Here, Phillips reviews endless statistical cover-ups since the 1960s and concludes there was no "grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms." I call it plain old greed. And every step of the way the media went along with the con game played by politicians and economists.
Scene 4: Real numbers torture us... like water-boarding!
How bad is it? "The real numbers... would be a face full of cold water," says Phillips. "Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today's U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9% and 12%; the inflation rate is as high as 7% or even 10%; economics growth since the recession of 2001 has been mediocre, despite the surge in wealth and incomes of the superrich, and we are falling back into recession."
Scene 5: Most economists hushed, work inside conspiracy
Compare that to the phony stats Washington feeds the press and public: Unemployment 5%, inflation 2% and long-term growth at 3%-4% (actually more like 1%). For example, just last week the L.A. Times reported that while "gasoline prices are up more than 20% from a year ago and food prices have risen 5%," Washington says "inflation was fairly mild last month." A Wells Fargo economist shook his head in disbelief: That report isn't "worth the paper it was printed on." Most economists are quiet, working for the conspiracy.
Scene 6: No integrity, they cannot be trusted to tell truth!
The same can be said of any government report, every speech made by today's leaders: All hype, lies and propaganda intended to deceive us. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's clearly playing the game: Remember what the former Goldman Sachs CEO told Fortune last July as our credit meltdown was metastasizing into a worldwide contagion: "This is far and away the strongest global economy I've seen in my business lifetime." He has no credibility. He knew the truth. He knew the government's "numbers racket;" after all, he helped create the problems years earlier at Goldman.
Scene 7: There's enough Kool-Aid for everyone to drink
The plot's unraveling: The lies accumulate and compound one on top of the another... get passed on... keep mounting... forcing successive new generations of politicians to drink the same poisonous Kool-Aid... keep the lies alive... going strong... till everyone believes the lies are really "the truth," or at least an inconvenient truth... as the hoax becomes the conventional wisdom... not only by Washington, Wall Street, Corporate America and the media, but also 300 million Main Street Americans.
Scene 8: Inflation statistics are America's new 'guillotine'
The biggest of all lies is with inflation. Understating inflation "hangs over our heads like a guillotine," says Phillips. Yet if Washington told us the truth "it would send interest rates climbing and thereby would endanger the viability of the massive buildup of public and private debt (from less than $11 trillion in 1987 to $49 trillion last year) that props up the American Economy." So we keep sipping the Kool-Aid.
Scene 9: Washington and Wall Street delusional in 'Land of Oz'
"Were mainstream interest rates to jump into the 7% to 9% range -- which could happen if inflation were to spur new concern -- both Washington and Wall Street could be walking on quicksand," warns Phillips. "The make-believe economy of the past two decades, with its asset bubbles, massive borrowing, and rampant data distortion, would be in serious jeopardy."
Scene 10: Cover-up failing... king really has no clothes
Yet everyone still acts paralyzed, unable (or unwilling) to do anything to stop this lethal musical chairs charade... till it's too late, or a catastrophe wakes us. Meanwhile, we act as if we had no choice but to put up with the crashes of 1987 and 2001 and 2007. Just "normal" bull/bear cycles. So like lemmings driven over a cliff, we'll blindly accept the next crashes, as each increase in frequency and intensity. Next in 2011? As war debt piles? As reforming health care, Social Security and Medicare are delayed? As we deny and deceive ourselves, perpetuate the lie... except notice, out of the corner of your eye, at the edge of the screen, a curtain's being pulled open, slowly, our once-mighty statistical king, the Wizard of Washington really has no clothes on.
Scene 11: Millions of co-conspirators in massive cover-up
Still, we let ourselves be conned. Why? "The rising cost of pensions, benefits, and interest payments -- all indexed or related to inflation -- could join the cost of financial bailouts to overwhelm the federal budget," says Phillips. But it's a heads-we-lose-tails-we-can't-win bet. "As inflation and interest rates have been kept artificially suppressed, the United States has been indentured to its volatile financial sector, with its predilection for leverage and risky buccaneering" Yes, Wall Street and the rich love playing this game.
Scene 12: Rich get richer hiding under'statistical camouflage'
So who really "profits from the low-growth U.S. economy hidden under statistical camouflage?" he asks rhetorically. Certainly not the masses: "Might it be Washington politicos and affluent elite, anxious to mislead voters, coddle the financial markets, and tamp down expensive cost-of-living increases for wages and pensions?" Yes, yes, yes, a voice screams off-camera! Then a gun shot rings out... dull thud... silence... haunting music builds, filling the theater... signaling the end of this tragi-comedy... although like Sartre's "No Exit," you know this drama will never end... until... the next sequel...
Roll credits: Who was that masked man?
Kudos to the masked curtain-puller. Yes folks, it's the same Kevin Phillips who wrote "American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century;" "The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath;" "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush" and others. In his "Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich," Phillips warned us that "most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out." Slowly, fade to black....Ntilikina was born in Belgium to Rwandan parents and has lived in Strasbourg since age 3. He speaks English well, a skill he attributed partly to his longstanding love of American rap music. In a conversation after practice, though, one particular English word kept escaping him. He twirled his hands around, trying to conjure it from the air. Twice already it had tripped him up. He called out to a fellow Frenchman nearby, and the two volleyed words back and forth until it hit him: “disturb.”
Now he could finish the two thoughts he had left dangling. Yes, he said, he was learning to use his prodigious wingspan, measured at around seven feet, to disturb opposing players, eliminating passing angles and making them think twice about shooting. And no, he said, he would not allow his circumstances — preparing for the draft, facing limited minutes on his team — to disturb him.
N.B.A. scouts, sometimes six a day, have traveled to Strasbourg to glimpse that wingspan up close. Like many teenage basketball prodigies from Europe, though, Ntilikina has found playing time hard to secure alongside more seasoned professional teammates. On top of that, Strasbourg, which sits in fifth in the French league, having overcome a slow start, has a group of talented point guards. That has meant Ntilikina has spent a considerable amount of time off the ball — or, worse, off the court.
Ntilikina has averaged 17.5 minutes through nine Champions League games and 13.2 minutes through 13 games in the LNB Pro A, the French league. Collet said he expected Ntilikina’s playing time to rise in the coming weeks, but only if Ntilikina deserved it.
“It’s important that he works for it, that he struggles a little bit to get it,” Collet said. “It’s better if he is at the summit in May than in January. What I tell him every day is, he has to use all these moments to get better so that he arrives at his maximum when the draft is there.”A massive security breach at Northwest Florida State College has affected 300,000 records in the school's computer systems, including information on about 200,000 students statewide who were once eligible for Bright Futures scholarships, the school said Wednesday.
The compromised information contained the names and Social Security and bank routing numbers of students, teachers, staff and retirees.
Hackers also stole 200,000 records of people who may never have attended or set foot on the Niceville campus in Okaloosa County. The names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth for students statewide who were Bright Futures scholarship candidates in 2005-06 and 2006-07 also were taken, the school said.
The Bright Futures program grants scholarships to public colleges and universities in the state based on academic merit.
Among the other files taken by the hackers: some 76,000 student records containing personal information and more than 3,000 employee records, including some that contained confidential financial information. Among the employees, about 50 have reported having their identity stolen or funds taken from bank accounts used for direct deposit.
The breach occurred sometime between late May and late September. The school notified the public on Monday. It was discovered during an internal review from Oct. 1 through Oct. 5.
The school's president, Ty Handy, was among the employees victimized, the school said.
"We know that from May 21, 2012, until Sept. 24, 2012, one or more hackers accessed one folder on our main server. This folder had multiple files on it. No one file had a complete set of personal information regarding individuals," Handy said in a statement. "However, by working between files, the hacker(s) have been able to piece together enough information to be able to engage in identity theft for at least 50 employees."
Handy said officials believe the breach was a coordinated attack by one or a group of hackers. After pulling together information from separate files, the hackers have already taken out personal loans that debit bank accounts through PayDayMax, Inc. and Discount Advance Loans. They have also applied for and used Home Depot credit cards.
Florida College System chancellor Randy Hanna said that local, state and federal agencies are investigating the security breach at the school, which has 16,931 students.
The college has set up a website, www.nwfsc.edu/security, to help the affected students and employees. The site allows users to file a complaint with the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office if an identity has been stolen. It includes links to the Federal Trade Commission as well as contacts at the college for students dealing with identity theft.
The school does not expect another breach, Handy said.
"The integrity of the NWFSC system has been restored and there is no indication of any additional instances of compromise of personal information," the release said.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.European energy commissioner says he would like to impose moratorium on new wells until lessons are learned
The government was tonight trying to fight off pressure from the European commission to ban drilling in the North Sea in the aftermath of BP's disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Gunther Oettinger, the EC energy commissioner, met UK oil companies and industry regulators and made it clear he would like to impose a moratorium on new wells until lessons were learned.
The stand-off came as BP took major strides towards finally capping the rogue Macondo well but new criticism rose that Britain gives energy companies an easy ride compared with other countries.
The local MP and residents in Hertfordshire expressed fury over the perceived leniency of the judicial system towards oil companies after a relatively tiny £5.3m fine was slapped on BP, Shell and Total over the Buncefield oil depot explosion.
In addition there was a growing row over US claims that the UK government had helped release a Libyan terrorist to win drilling rights for the UK oil industry.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change said the UK was exercising "utmost caution" in the North Sea and was recruiting more environmental inspectors to double inspections of drilling rigs.
But it made it clear that Oettinger demands for a moratorium would not be heeded. "There is no current provision within EU law which would enable any EU body to declare a moratorium on new drilling, or deep water drilling," said a spokesman.
Oettinger told the European parliament last week that "the precautionary principle should prevail" adding: "Any responsible government would at present practically freeze new permits for drilling with extreme parameters and conditions."
A spokeswoman for the trade body, Oil & Gas UK, said today that the industry was disappointed that Oettinger reiterated his desire for a moratorium. She added: "It is such a different situation compared to the Gulf of Mexico given the tighter regulations since the Piper Alpha disaster."
Kevin Myers, deputy chief executive of the HSE, said he wanted Oettinger to produce evidence to back his calls for a further clampdown on UK drilling.
Meanwhile the HSE was under fire from Mike Penning, MP for Hemel Hempstead and junior transport minister, for allegedly being compromised over the Buncefield explosion in 2005 which caused hundreds of homes to be evacuated and triggered a similar number of job losses.
Penning described the fine as insulting to his constituents caught up in the blast and wants a public inquiry to investigate the accident and particularly the HSE which brought the charges but also had a safety monitoring role at the site which he believes was not carried out properly.
Penning and Des Collins, a solicitor representing residents still chasing compensation claims, both compare the £5.3m with the billions being demanded from BP in the Gulf of Mexico - before the cause of the Deepwater Horizon is even known. Penning said he would be writing to Dominic Grieve, the attorney general to have the Buncefield decision reviewed.
In the US, secretary of state Hillary Clinton said she would look into claims by a group of Democrat senators that BP lobbied the British government to release Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, to help secure an oil deal with Libya.ATLANTA, Ga (AP) -- Georgia lawmakers are considering a bill that would expand insurance coverage for people with autism.
Republican Sen. Renee Unterman, of Buford, sponsored the bill, which Tuesday passed the Senate Insurance and Labor Committee.
The current law only requires that insurance providers cover autism treatment services until the age of six. That coverage cap is the lowest in the country.
The proposal would raise that age to 21 - higher than the national average of 18.
The coverage includes assessments, evaluation, and treatment and does not limit the number of visits to receive services.
The bill would not affect many big-employer benefit plans that are regulated by federal ERISA laws.
Unterman, who had an autistic child, said that she was proud that the Senate was acting as "a leader on autism."Advertisement
The man who heroically punched a kangaroo to save his pet dog is a zookeeper and 'family man' who was out on a special hunt with a dying friend.
Greig Tonkins, 34, found himself at the centre of international attention on the weekend after a video of him fighting a marsupial to save his beloved dog 'Max' went viral.
Mr Ton |
suddenly had to scramble to ban yet another busted combo deck. As a result, Wizards retroactively added Memory Jar to the March 1 banned list, which was updated two or three weeks later.
For the rest of the year, things were fairly quiet, although Wizards did ban Mind Over Matter—the last remaining reminder of the Tolarian Academy madness from a year earlier.
The Quiet Years (2000–2003)
After the disasters that were Urza's block and Tempest block, Wizards seemed to learn their lesson and change philosophies when it came to Standard: rather than printing any crazy thing that popped into their head, they would actually try to design cards in a way that would reduce (and hopefully eliminate) the need to ban cards in Standard. They also realized there wasn't much they could do about older formats—if you are going to keep printing cards, you simply can't test every synergy in every format, especially older formats where all of the cards in Magic's history are legal, so bans in Legacy and restrictions in Vintage would still happen from time to time, but Standard, with careful set design, could be a ban-free zone.
Unfortunately, Wizards took its newfound desire to avoid printing broken cards a bit too far, which led so some extremely underwhelming sets in the Masques, Invasion, Odyssey, and Onslaught blocks. Eventually, as the years went by, the overcompensation away from printing powerful and potentially broken cards diminished, and by 2004, Wizards slipped back into its old habits, and at the worst possible time—during a block focused on artifacts.
Mirrodin (2004–2005)
$ 0.00 $ 0.00
Skullclamp was, quite simply, a mistake, and even with the best intentions and design practices, mistakes will happen (especially when dealing with new card types, like equipment in Mirrodin block and perhaps Vehicles in Kaladesh). Skullclamp started off as an equipment that cost two to cast and two more to equip that allowed you to draw two cards when the equipped creature died. While it's hard to say for sure, it seems like this version of Skullclamp would probably be a (mostly) fair Magic card. You might use it in some sort of sacrifice combo deck (where it could still be broken), but simply playing it and hoping an opponent would kill the equipped creature wouldn't really be practical and would likely have kept Skullclamp from being ban-worthy. However, just before going to print, people started changing the card. First, they boosted the power and toughness bonus it granted, then dropped the cost to only one mana to cast and equip, and finally made it so it gave the creature −1 toughness, and it ended up being that fateful −1 that made Skullclamp into a monster, since all you had to do was play one-toughness creatures and you suddenly had a repeatable, colorless, one-mana Divination. By the height of Skullclamp's reign, 58 out of a possible 64 copies showed up in the Top 8 of two major tournaments, often featured in decks like this:
While Skullclamp was the fall guy, there were actually a ton of problems with the above deck list, and over the course of the next year, Affinity—even without Skullclamp—became a devastating force on the tournament scene. While it was beatable, it took over a large portion of the meta and warped a lot of card choices into a "play Affinity or beat Affinity" paradigm. Last week, I wrote about the evolution of Dredge in Modern and suggested if we get to the point where that deck needs a banning, we need to shoot the head by banning powerful cards with the dredge mechanic and not simply ban support cards. This is exactly the tactic Wizards took when it finally banned Affinity in Standard.
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When Wizards announced the Affinity bannings in March 2005, it completely gutted the deck, taking away not only two of its key win conditions in Disciple of the Vault and Arcbound Ravager but all six of the artifact lands as well. Make no mistake about it, this sent the message that Wizards clearly wanted Affinity to no longer exist. This wasn't a "let's ban Eye of Ugin to make Bant Eldrazi more fair" scenario, this was a "let's hope everyone forgets we messed up again" situation. However, the most interesting aspect of this banning isn't the banning itself but the reasoning Aaron Forsythe gave in his article explaining the banning.
After explaining that, by the data, Affinity wasn't that bad, Aaron mused that, in the past three months R&D and the DCI have been reminded that Magic is not a series of balanced equations, spreadsheets of Top 8 results and data of card frequencies. Magic is a game played by human beings that want to have fun. One of the most damning statements that can be made about a game is that it is not fun, and that's exactly what we've been hearing lately about Standard.
Aaron went on to explain that, while people had complained about (and even threatened to quit the game because of) Affinity ever since the cards were released, the effects of Affinity had become measurable—people literally stopped attending tournaments because they simply weren't enjoying playing Magic. Of course, these types of bannings are not ideal because they "lead to a culture of fear," but when faced with people not just complaining but actually giving up on the game, Wizards really had no choice.
The Quiet Years: Part 2 (2006–2010)
Much like the years just after Urza's block and Tempest block, Wizards followed up on the mistakes of Mirrodin block by powering down future sets. Kamigawa block is widely considered to be one of the least powerful blocks of the Modern era, and then Wizards slowly started to up power levels over the following few years. Thankfully, Standard was in a good place and bannings were unnecessary. By the time the mythic rarity came to be in Shards of Alara, Magic was entering into a golden age. Then, just like last time, Wizards forgot a few of its own rules and went a little bit too far with a new card type.
Caw Blade (2011)
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The bannings of Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic back in 2011 were the most recent to impact a Standard format, and these bannings, focused on the Caw Blade deck, were mostly a numbers game. By the end of Caw Blade's reign in Standard, there were GPs where Jace, the Mind Sculptor was in 88% of day two decks and Stoneforge Mystic was in 70%. (Right now, the most dominant cards in the format have a level of dominance that is unheard of, even including all of the other broken decks and banned cards we've been talking about. For perspective, the two most dominant cards in our current Standard format—Smuggler's Copter and Gideon, Ally of Zendikar—are showing up in about 50% of decks.)
Once again, it's not so much the bannings themselves but the reason for the bannings that is of note. In the article announcing the banning, Wizards suggested that it was willing to see if players would tolerate a "skill-testing, one-deck metagame." As such, it seems that a deck being 75% of the format doesn't automatically necessitate a banning. However, similarly to the Affinity banning, attendance to Standard events, from Game Days to FNMs to PTQs, dropped, which finally forced Wizards to pull the trigger.
Today (2012–Present)
Since the Caw Blade banning, there hasn't been a single banning in Standard. In fact, I'm not sure we've even had a card that's come close to being banned. While we've had dominant decks and cards like Collected Company, Siege Rhino, Pack Rat, and Rally the Ancestors, those formats didn't see huge drops in attendance, and for the most part, by the time the outcry got loud, the problem card was already close to rotation (if you look at Rally and Bant Company, their most dominant times were in the two or three months before they rotated from the format). As a result, it seems like the combination of Wizards designing great cards and sets with the lessons learned from the past may finally be coming to fruition.
On the other hand, if you look back over the history of bannings in Standard, you could make an argument that the pattern suggests we are about due for another banning. There were about five years between the Urza's bannings and the Affinity bannings, and then six years between the Affinity bannings and the Caw Blade bannings. Right now, we are currently in the fifth year since Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic got banned, which means the next year or two could be the time where a mistake happens (or perhaps Wizards lets its guard down and starts forgetting past lessons).
Putting It All Together
Bannings, by Color
As far as Standard bannings go, lands and colorless cards make up 56% of the 23 bannings that have happened throughout the format's history. If you throw blue cards into the mix, the percentage rises all the way up to 78%. This makes sense for a couple of reasons. For blue, it comes from the ability to draw cards, and colorless cards and land have the tendency to be especially dominant because they can theoretically fit into any deck (and the opportunity cost of playing lands is significantly lower than that of other card types). On the other end of the spectrum, we have red, which has never seen a Standard banning, while white (Stoneforge Mystic) and green (Earthcraft) only have one banned card each.
Either Combos or Attendance
Over the course of Standard's history, there have been two broad reasons that cards have been banned. In the early years of the game, nearly all of the bannings were targeted at cards that facilitated broken, fast combos (and therefore broken, fast decks). In fact, before the Affinity banning, and discounting the weirdness of the Zuran Orb situation, every single banning in Standard involved a combo-based card. In the Modern era, we've only had two Standard bannings, but in reading the reasoning for the Affinity and Caw Blade bannings, the bottom line wasn't so much that the decks were too good, that the cards were too powerful, or that the meta was out of whack. While all of these things preceded and influenced the bannings, the bottom line with both bannings is that tournament attendance started to drop. While the data may inform Wizards' decisions, the financial implications of low tournament attendance and people quitting the game are what spur Wizards to action.
Most of the Problems Are Fixed
If we look back over the history of Standard bannings, it's clear that 90% of these bannings couldn't happen today because the banned cards wouldn't be printed in the first place. Many of the early bannings were cards that either produced fast mana (like Tolarian Academy or Lotus Petal) or were broken because of fast mana (like Windfall, Memory Jar, and Time Spiral). The rest are narrow, powerful combo pieces like Earthcraft, Dream Halls, Fluctuator, and Recurring Nightmare. Because of the problems in the past, Wizards simply doesn't print these types of cards anymore. More importantly, Wizards has moved the goal post back on pretty much all dangerous card types, to the point where even if it makes a mistake, the mistake likely won't lead to a ban-worthy card.
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Maybe the best example of this is mana rocks, which don't have a long history of being banned but do fall into the dangerous fast-mana category. In the old days, the baseline for mana rocks was to actually produce mana the turn they came into play, like Mana Vault, Mana Crypt, the Moxen, and Grim Monolith. After realizing that fast mana is dangerous, Wizards powered down mana rocks to the level of Signets, which cost two mana but immediately gain you back one mana, essentially making them cost one mana, in most situations. While we can argue about whether Signets themselves are simply too good for Standard, I think most people would agree that if they aren't too good, they are, at the very least, right on the border. As such, if Wizards' baseline power level for mana rocks was the Signets and they accidentally miss by printing a cycle that's a little bit too good, we're right back into the fast-mana danger zone. Because of this, Wizards powered down mana rocks once again, with most cycles today being three mana (Banners, Keyrunes, Cluestones) or being two mana, coming into play tapped, and having an additional downside (like Corrupted Grafstone or Sphere of the Suns). With these cycles being the norm, Wizards has given itself room to miss. If they accidentally print a cycle of mana rocks that are too good, they end up with Signets and not Mana Vaults.
This trend has continued through most dangerous card types. Draw sevens no longer come with upsides like untapping all of your lands; they come with downsides, like Day's Undoing. Cantrips cost two mana, as do mana dorks. Anything that has the slightest whiff of combo potential is either extremely overcosted or based around creatures to allow for more interaction. Much like with mana rocks, this gives Wizards room to miss without printing bannable cards. As a result, with the modern design philosophy and sensibility, it's really difficult for Wizards to print cards that even have the potential to be banned in Standard.
The Exceptions
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Now, let me make this clear right away: I'm not saying that Emrakul, the Promised End or Smuggler's Copter need to be banned in Standard; however, these two cards provide examples of the two ways Wizards is mostly like to "miss" and end up with a card that is broken enough to be banned in Standard, in the current day and age. While Wizards learned long ago that fast mana is problematic, it still likes to mess around with cost-reduction effects for some reason, which leads to 13/13, flying, trampling Mindslavers that cost only six mana. The same is true of the delve mechanic and the Phyrexian mana mechanic, and while neither of these mechanics ended up needing to be banned while in Standard, both are right on the border, and one slight miss could lead to major problems and bannable cards.
The second way Wizards is likely to miss is with new (and relatively new) card types like Vehicles. If we look at the two Standard bannings in the Modern era—Affinity and Caw Blade—both of these bannings were aided by new card types. For Affinity, it was equipment, highlighted by Skullclamp and Cranial Plating (which wasn't itself banned but certainly helped create the insane Affinity decks that led to mass bannings); for Caw Blade, it was planeswalkers, which were still only a couple of years old at the time.
When it comes to creatures, spells, and land, Wizards has years of experience and data to figure out what the right baseline power level is, and as we just talked about, they tend to aim far enough to the "safe" side that even if they miss, the result is a very good card (like Collected Company), rather than a ban-worthy monster. On the other hand, when it comes to new card types, the baseline is missing, which makes it much more likely that a "miss" in design will actually lead to a bannable card, because the safety valve is missing.
Furthermore, when Wizards makes a new card type like Vehicles or Planeswalkers, they are under a lot of pressure to make sure at least some of the cards of the type are playable on a tournament level. While having to ban cards in Standard is bad, hyping up a new card type and having it fall flat and go unplayed is (perhaps) just as bad, so Wizards is incentivized to take more risks to make sure new card types see play. When you combine these two factors together, new card types are the most dangerous cards that Wizards makes and are the most likely to need a banning. As a result, Aether Revolt will be one of the most interesting sets in years because it will contain not one but two card types (here, I'm counting energy as a card type, even though that's not technically correct) that are dangerous, and Wizards likely felt some amount of pressure to "top" Kaladesh with Aether Revolt. Because of this, it's not impossible that we see a Skullclamp Vehicle (although some might argue that we already have one in Smuggler's Copter) or a fast-mana (or free-spell) energy card that is simply way too good for Standard.
What about Right Now?
To bring things back around to the beginning, do the current calls for Standard bannings have legs? Here, I'm going to leave you with a less than satisfactory answer. By the data, our current Standard isn't extremely diverse, but it's also not "88% of Top 64 decks with Jace, the Mind Sculptor" homogeneous. I did a bit of research, and I believe that right now, the top two decks in Standard (GB Delirium and UW Flash) are about as dominant as they have been over the past few years, but there isn't one deck (or card) that's dominating (or breaking) the format. As a result, if we are just looking at the numbers, I'd say the idea of a Standard banning is silly.
However, I've been hearing anecdotal reports that Standard attendance is down significantly. While I don't really have enough data to say this for sure, it seems possible or even likely that this is the case. Assuming this is true, a banning probably isn't off the table altogether. With both the Affinity and Caw Blade bannings, Wizards' primary motivator was falling attendance, and if Standard attendance is currently dropping, it's not impossible that Wizards would ban something in an attempt to improve attendance and get more players back to their local gaming stores.
Another reason I think a banning is unlikely is because I have no idea what Wizards would ban, since there isn't really one card or even one deck that is dominating the format. Smuggler's Copter is the most dominant card (by percentage of decks that play it), and while it's featured in both of the big decks, it's also propping up a bunch of second-tier decks like Mardu / RW Vehicles and Bx Zombies, so getting rid of the looter scooter might actually make the format less diverse, as odd as that sounds. As for the two big decks, I guess you could ban Emrakul, the Promised End from GB Delirium, but I'm not even sure how much that would matter; we've seen some successful GB Delirium decks drop the Eldrazi titan altogether. Meanwhile, for UW Flash, you have a bunch of value creatures, and while banning any one of Archangel Avacyn, Spell Queller, Selfless Spirit, or Gideon, Ally of Zendikar would hurt the deck, none of those cards really stick out as being too good in a vacuum—they are just very strong when combined together.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. How is Standard attendance in your area? What are you currently playing in Standard? Even though a Standard banning seems incredibly unlikely to me, if you could ban one card in Kaladesh Standard, what would it be? Let me know in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.NOT Legal
The batter is not legally in position.
His toes are outside the lines.
As the pitcher delivers the pitch, the batter's feet must be WITHIN the lines. (Rule 6.03)
Legal
Both batters are in a legal position to await a pitch.
They are within the box.
Out of box illegally
This batter's foot is entirely outside the box.
If the bat contacts a pitch at this time, the ball is dead and the batter is out, whether the ball goes fair or foul. All runners return to the bases held at the time of the pitch.
(Rule 6.06a and 5.09d)
Out of box Legal
The heel of these batters' front feet are touching the line.
If the bat contacts the pitch at this time, the batter is not out because his foot is not ENTIRELY outside the box. (Rule 6.06a)
After hitting the ball SAFE
This batter has just hit a fair ball and is starting to run to first.
He is considered to be in the batter's box when in this position. His back foot is still touching the ground inside the box.
If he was touched by his batted ball while in this position, it is ruled a foul ball.
After hitting the ball OUT
This batter has just hit a fair ball and is starting to run to first.
He is considered to be out of the box when in this position.
The box is "empty." Neither foot is touching the lines of the box, or the ground within the box.
If he is touched by his fair batted ball while in this position, the ball is dead and he is out.
(Rule 6.05f, 7.08f and 5.09f)Image caption The Lady Blunt is admired by experts for its exceptionally good condition
A well-preserved Stradivarius violin has been sold in an online auction for £9.8m ($15.9m) to raise money for disaster relief in Japan.
The violin was made in 1721 and is known as the Lady Blunt after Lord Byron's granddaughter Lady Anne Blunt who owned it for 30 years.
It was sold by a music foundation in Japan for victims of the earthquake and tsunami in March.
The price is more than four times the previous record for a Stradivarius.
Proceeds will go to the Nippon Foundation's Northeastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund.
The violin was offered for sale by the Nippon Music Foundation, owner of some of the world's finest Stradivari and Guarneri instruments.
'Profound generosity'
Foundation president Kazuko Shiomi said: "While this violin was very important to our collection, the needs of our fellow Japanese people after the March 11th tragedy have proven that we all need to help, in any way we can.
"The donation will be put to immediate use on the ground in Japan."
London auction house Tarisio, who organised the sale, described the foundation's decision to sell "what is considered the finest violin of their collection" as a "gesture of profound generosity".
The violin is one about 600 instruments made by Italian Antonio Stradivari still in existence.
It has also been owned by several well-known collectors and experts including WE Hill & Son, Jean Baptiste Vuillaume, the Baron Johann Knoop and Sam Bloomfield.
The identity of its new owner has not been revealed.
The Lady Blunt fetched a then-record £84,000 when it was last auctioned at Sotheby's in 1971.In the world of fountain pens, there are a few rock stars. There’s timeless classics like the Parker 51, mid priced fantasms like the Parker Sonnet, ubiquitous school pens like the Lamy Safari, and there are inexpensive heros like this pen, the Pilot Metropolitan. The Metropolitan exists in a world where the fountain pen is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and also increasingly a status item…I don’t really know where I’m going with this.
The Metropolitan is a new pen from Pilot (as in only a couple years old), and it’s been making waves. In the fountain pen community, people are talking about this pen as much as (if not more than) any other pen out there, and that’s for two reasons: it’s cheap, and it’s good. Not just cheap good, but real life normal good.
I bought this pen brand new for $15 from Todd “isellpens” Nussbaum (where I was mostly going to look for a Hero pen I wanted to buy (also, Phoenix represent!)) on a whim. That’s a nice feeling. And it’s bloody good. Let’s get into it.
Appearance: 9/10. As we can see above, this is a classic, inoffensive pen shape with classic, inoffensive pen accents. When closed, it has a nice little chrome metal ring around where the body and the cap meet. That’s nice. Then, right next to it, you have a little accent ring. It doesn’t look like much in the above photo because it isn’t much. In some pens, it’s just a slick shiny plastic section that contrasts with the brushed metal section of the rest of the pen. However, the Pilot isn’t just available in boring black.
This pen comes in some cool colours! Silver, gold, black, white, and…purple. That one’s a little weird. Who would buy purple?
I’m not personally a fan of the leopard spots in the accent ring here, it’s a little too Kardashian, but the colour is very cool. I don’t have any pens like this, I normally go for a flighter look, and colours aren’t usually something that makes me happy since they are typically paired with pens that are plastic and ugly, or the colour is put in an assload of lacquer. This one still has some paint on it, but the metal is clearly felt underneath. Now, about that inset.
Let’s try that again.
So, while I enjoy the colour far more than the inset, it’s well done enough that I don’t mind. It might be more attractive to some of the opposite gender. The nib, though, is attractive to anyone.
Normally, fountain pen nibs for these inexpensive fountain pens are wildly dull. Nothing going on, nothing to look at. And, if you’re trying to impress the guy across the table, he’s looking at that nib saying “what the hell?” so I like a little bit of celebration there. Here are a few examples of how to do it wrong.
Now let’s take a look at one done right.
Yeah, they’re just little lines, but it adds a lot to a pen at this price point, especially when compared to the preceding examples I gave. Pilot is doing this in varying places all over the pen. Even the spartan clip, which seems unadorned, isn’t.
In fact, just looking at that clip makes me think of a Chrysler Airflow. I think these guys, whether they know it or not, have stumbled upon to some slight bit of streamline moderne, evoking thoughts and design of the heyday of fountain pens.
This kind of stuff makes you feel just a little bit better about using a cheap pen: it’s well done, it’s got a unique but not loud colour, the nib is nice, and they don’t skimp on design.
Build Quality: 9/10. As stated in the previous section, the attention to detail with the aesthetic elements is without peer at this level of fountain pens. They textured the accent, they put lines on the clip, they made a good looking nib that performs well, and nothing is out of place. Stuff I didn’t get into there that does add to its good appearance are things like smoothness. If you read my Duke 961 review, you will know I hated the cap on that pen because it seemed unfinished. On the Metropolitan, it looks perfect. I don’t see any lines, and nothing’s unfinished.
The pen comes in a nifty little box, which is saying something, since most pens at this price point come in a nifty little bag, or, if they come in a box, it’s like the Nemosine box.
The Metropolitan box, on the other hand, opens exactly like a spaghetti box doesn’t.
Once you take the pen out of the box, though, you can feel its heft. It’s not heavy, it’s actually about 29 grams, which I consider the perfect middle of the road weight for a fountain pen, even if I tend to like them a little heavier. Excellent. It’s also a great middle of the road size when compared to other pens, at about five and a half inches in length.
Because of this, it’s easy to hold, and pleasant to write with. However, once you take the cap off and start writing, there may be the single build quality issue of the pen, which is more like a design issue.
The problem isn’t with the cap itself, no, the friction fit cap is very nice to use. It’s easy to pull off, and easy to put on. Some pens, like my Baoer 388, require you to hunker down and assume a position before pulling the cap off, and even some of my Parkers require you at least downshift to second in order to get the cap off. On this one, it just comes off. That’s nice. No thinking about it at all. This is how a cap should be.
But, like I said, that’s not the problem. The problem exists with the lip after the section. It’s so big, it’s almost impossible to be comfortable if you hold then pen farther back than the average person. It’s not finished roughly, it’s just goddamn huge. No problem, you think, I don’t hold my pen that far back. But, the section tapers to a small enough area that it may be uncomfortable for some of you. Not Starwalker thin, mind you, but still plenty thin enough to get other reviewers all upset. I am not one of those reviewers. It works fine for me, and I wear XXXL gloves, so that’s saying something.
I don’t think it’s a major problem. At this price, you don’t expect metal threads in the nib section and you don’t get them…kind of. If we take a look at the pen all unscrewed…
… even though we can see the plastic threads on the section, the body’s threads are, in fact, metal, just like the body. We can also see that that massive lip is actually WITHIN the body piece of the pen. WHY? This, to me, indicated that perhaps the nib and feed were actually designed for another pen and it was simply transplanted onto this one for cost saving measures. I mean, they have to cut costs somewhere, right? This leads me into
Refilling and Maintenance: 6/10. The pen has the same feed as a few of the other Pilot pens, which means it can take those nibs, and they’re cheap. Indeed, the Pilot Plumix can be purchased for like $9 and its nib can be put on here. Therefore, you have a choice of a medium italic, a medium, and a fine. That’s not bad, and they’re not expensive. But, it’s not good.
You know what else isn’t good? That converter. It’s proprietary, and so are the cartridges. They also don’t come a dime a dozen at Staples, either. They’re pretty expensive. But, considering the pen comes with an aerometric converter, it’s no skin off my nose. A few people have had bad things to say about the ink sac, and I understand why. I don’t like the ones in many Chinese pens or old Parkers as it requires the finger strength of the end boss in Super Smash Bros.
But, on this pen, it’s actually a very good design and a very easy converter to use. It has the ink sac placed in the center of the converter, with two metal bars on either side that move in a clamping/scissoring motion to compress the sac from two ends. The sac is larger than the normal reservoir in converters, so to me, this is a benefit. To other reviewers, it’s the worst thing in the world. Shout out to Pen Habit on Youtube.
But, since the cartridges are hard to find for a person who’s not going to be buying these things on eBay and the nib selection is small and hacky, this isn’t a win in this category.
Performance: 9/10. Zero surprises when writing with this pen. It’s just the right amount of smooth and the right amount of feedback. In my food smoothness scale, this pen is a peanut butter jelly sandwich that you left out for a few hours so the bread is a little bit crusty. You can feel it when you bite into it, but the people you invite around to hear you crunch into the sandwich because of how stale it is will sit disappointed as it’s not an audibly crunchy sandwich yet. Or, like, an Oreo you didn’t let sit in the milk long enough. Yeah, that’s it.
Where was I? Oh, right. This is a smooth writing pen with a medium line. Take a look here.
The pen doesn’t skip, even while I was writing a five page letter today, and it has no line variation, either. This thing’s as unchanging as an interstate in Nebraska. To some, this may mean that the pen has no “soul.” To me, the soul is in the neato colour I got. The writing is very good. It’s not perfect, but it’s really good.
It strikes me as I write this that when a pen is a good writer, there’s not much to say, but I can go on for hours about a bad one. Huh.
Value: 10/10. It’s $15, and that’s cheap…but it’s not as cheap as some of those Chinese pens out there that write pretty well. The extra value is added beyond the $7 of a good Chinese pen when you look at all the attention to detail and the almost robotic stability of the line. This is it, man.
Conclusion: 9.1/10. The pen performs really well, it looks good (in my colour), it’s built well, it’s well detailed, it’s not hard to refill, and it’s cheap. There are just a few niggling issues that keep this pen from being a perfect one.
Here’s some bad writing.
My god, this was a long review.
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Over the last 5 years, high performance microprocessors have changed dramatically. One of the most significant influences is the increasing level of integration that is enabled by Moore’s Law. In the context of semiconductors, integration is an ever-present fact of life, reducing system power consumption and cost and increasing performance. The latest incarnation of this trend is the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) philosophy and design approach. SoCs have been the preferred solution for extremely low power systems, such as 1W mobile phone chips. However, high performance microprocessors span a much wider design space, from 15W notebook chips to 150W server sockets and the adoption of SoCs has been slower because of the more diverse market.
Sandy Bridge was a dawn of a new era for Intel, and the first high-end x86 microprocessor that could truly be described as an SoC, integrating the CPU, GPU, Last Level Cache and system I/O. However, Sandy Bridge largely targets conventional PC markets, such as notebooks, desktops, workstations and servers, with a smattering of embedded applications. The competition for Sandy Bridge is largely AMD’s Bulldozer family, which has suffered from poor performance in the first few iterations.
The 32nm Sandy Bridge CPU introduced AVX, a new instruction extension for floating point (FP) workloads and fundamentally changed almost every aspect of the pipeline, from instruction fetching to memory accesses. The system architecture was radically revamped, with a coherent ring interconnect for on-chip communication, a higher bandwidth Last Level Cache (LLC), integrated graphics and I/O, and comprehensive power management. The Sandy Bridge GPU was also new architecture that delivered acceptable performance for the first time. The server-oriented Sandy Bridge-EP started with the same building blocks, but eliminated the graphics, while adding more cores, more memory controllers, more PCI-E 3.0 I/O and coherent QPI links.
Haswell is the first family of SoCs that have been tailored to take advantage of Intel’s 22nm FinFET process technology. While Ivy Bridge is also 22nm, Intel’s circuit design team sacrificed power and performance in favor of a swift migration to a process with a radically new transistor architecture.
The Haswell family features a new CPU core, new graphics and substantial changes to the platform in terms of memory and power delivery and power management. All of these areas are significant from a technical and economic perspective and interact in various ways. However, the Haswell family represents a menu of options that are available for SoCs tailored to certain markets. Not every product requires graphics (e.g. servers), nor is a new power architecture desirable for cost optimized products (e.g. desktops). Architects will pick and choose from the menu of options, based on a variety of technical and business factors.
The heart of the Haswell family is the eponymous CPU. The Haswell CPU core pushes beyond the PC market into new areas, such as the high-end of the emerging tablet market. Haswell SoCs are aimed at 10W, potentially with further power reductions in the future. The 22nm node enables this wider range, but Haswell’s design and architecture play critical roles in fully exploiting the benefits of the new process technology.
The Haswell CPU boasts a huge number of architectural enhancements, with four extensions that touch every aspect of the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA). AVX2 brings integer SIMD to 256-bit vectors, and adds a gather instruction for sparse memory accesses. The fused multiply-add extensions improve performance for floating point (FP) workloads, such as scientific computing, and nicely synergize with the new gather instructions. A small number of bit manipulation instructions aid cryptography, networking and certain search operations. Last, Intel has introduced TSX, or transactional memory, an incredibly powerful programming model for concurrency and multi-threaded programming. TSX improves performance and efficiency of software by better utilizing the underlying multi-core hardware.
Intel’s design philosophy emphasizes superb single core performance with low power. The new Haswell core achieves even higher performance than Sandy Bridge. The improvements in Haswell are concentrated in the out-of-order scheduling, execution units and especially the memory hierarchy. It is a testament to the excellent front-end in Sandy Bridge that relatively few changes were necessary. The Haswell microarchitecture is a dual-threaded, out-of-order microprocessor that is capable of decoding 5 instructions, issuing |
debate among candidates for Arizona's state senate, the Republican candidate quoted John McCain twice. Both times the crowd booed loudly.
The calendar may be about to turn to October but it still feels like summer here. The sun beats down with intensity and the temperature hovers at the century mark. Looking up at the clear Arizona sky, Paisley told me how she couldn't get over the enthusiastic volunteers who turned out to walk and canvass in Phoenix on a day when the thermometer reached 106. "It was nothing short of remarkable," Paisley said.
Here in Arizona Barack Obama's campaign may be heating up too. It may just be his opponent who feels that heat, emanating from one of his seven backyards.One morning about two or three weeks ago, I did what every person in our omnipresent social media day-and-age does when he wakes up: I mindlessly scrolled through my Instagram feed. In between the occasional “artsy” photo of food or baby animals or whatever Snoop Dogg shared from the night before (usually something weed and/or travel related), I noticed something interesting.
You see, I made the wise choice to follow Pontus Alv [the founder of Polar Skateboards] on his personal/company account (@polarskateco) and witnessed in reverse his drunken celebration after he and Polar won several awards at the BRIGHT European skateboard awards show. Not long after this, I came across a video from The Skateboard Mag in celebration of Pontus’s “Guest Ed” article in their 108th issue. Transworld even featured another article by Pontus focusing on the (re)emergence of DIY spots in skating (Vol. 31/Feb. 2013). This is the second Pontus-focused article within the span of a year by Transworld, the other printed in Vol. 30/June 2012 and written by none other than the always insightful John Rattray.
Other small companies have received similar attention as well. In 2011, The High Five received The Skateboard Mag’s “Year’s Best Brand” award. Magenta and Palace have been regularly pumping out videos of their travels that have been going over well. Thrasher premiered Roger’s video on their site and then blew minds with Welcome skateboards weird-gnar filled All City Showdown submission.
Lately, it appears that smaller board companies, some of whom have never bought an ad in an American magazine, are receiving large amounts of attention by the shakers and movers in the skateboarding world. I am honestly surprised at the amount of exposure these brands have received from the bigger magazines. I mean, Transworld has an annual article detailing what we can expect from Street League! Why the fuck would they put Pontus in there?
After thinking about this for a while, I finally realized why I get excited about this exposure and, more importantly, what this exposure means to skateboarding more generally. The magazine coverage I’ve detailed above shows that skaters are still capable of seeing skateboarding in a more traditional light: away from boxed in and repetitive contests, away from multi-million dollar contracts and winnings, away from Mountain Dew commercials and Target sponsorships.
These companies, and the variety of smaller companies all over the world, provide a glimpse into skateboarding in its pure form and the importance it has in that state. These companies were organized by people that realized that skating was missing something. That it was moving towards a greedy center and away from the simple things that make skating worthwhile: sculpting a scene with other people who care, or pushing switch really fast with loose trucks, or high speed wallrides in smiley/sad face dress shoes. They took matters into their own hands and founded companies that place these messages at the forefront. This coverage is refreshing to see because it means that a lot of people believe that this message is important and needs to be shared with the subculture at large.
”These companies were organized by people that realized that skating was missing something. That it was moving towards a greedy center and away from the simple things that make skating worthwhile.”
In fact, now might be the most important time to spread this message. Skateboarding is currently in a weird position. As the “big three” corporate companies (maybe “big four” now that New Balance has thrown their hat in the ring) continue to wrest wall space from skater-owned shoe companies, there is a comfort in knowing that a group of skaters can come together with nothing more than some decks and a point of view that they believe in and still be supported.
Someone I spoke to once described the beauty of supporting skater-owned companies as making sure that, “the animals run the zoo” and nowhere is this more important than board companies. Which successful board companies can you name that do not have at least one well-respected skater involved behind the scenes? These smaller companies reinforce what is arguably the most sacred realm of the skateboard industry and maybe even the subculture in general. Board companies decide which skaters receive a significant amount of recognition. They decide who is deserving of the “pro skater” identity, enforcing an idea that skaters and only skaters have the right to choose who deserve that title and best represent skateboarding on a sponsored or professional level.
The emergence of small board companies illustrates a trend of skaters taking initiative and pushing back against outside companies. We are telling these groups that regardless of whom they support or how many people are on their flow teams, only skaters can be trusted with the most important sphere of skating and we’ll do our best to ensure that we continue to run it.
Finally, Pontus believes in the ability of skating to bring people together and contribute to people’s lives and communities. He believes that skating should be fun and “out there” before it should be boxed in and standardized. He believes in the importance of reappropriating forgotten space and utilizing it in a positive, constructive manner—moving forward and learning when the time comes. And the success that Pontus and Polar have achieved has come with him standing up and thinking about skateboarding as an action that has implications in people’s lives.
Skateboarding forces people to reevaluate their surroundings and their lives, understanding them in new ways. When bigger companies, regardless of what they make or who owns them, become repetitive and rely on merely copying one another, the subculture and its participants suffer for it. That’s why it’s important that Polar, Magenta, Welcome, Palace, and numerous other companies have not shied away from making waves in skateboarding.
Josh Stewart recalled that the first time he met Pontus, Pontus told him that skateboarding did not need overproduced videos like One Step Beyond, fully aware that he was speaking to the mastermind behind the Adio video. And more than just talk a big game, he backed it up by self-producing and releasing two videos that really can only be described as avant-garde. Magenta has released a series of boards paying homage to different surrealist and (post)modern artists. Welcome’s oddly shaped boards outnumber the modern popsicle shapes in every catalog they release. Palace’s boards depict dictators and images of tribal societies, and let’s not forget the controversy of mainly white guys skating in a video with a potentially racial epithet in the title with any N.W.A. songs conspicuously absent.
All of these actions defy the cookie-cutter formulae at place in board graphics and skate videos. Because few other companies move in this direction, it must be a dangerous business model. If it wasn’t, more companies would be willing to take these risks. All of these brands should be failing or maligned, but that’s not the case. They are lauded for their daring—and rightfully so. These brands are forcing skaters to step out of their comfort zones and take real risks with their products and output.
Because of these companies, skateboarding is becoming challenging again. These brands are forcing people to think about the companies they support and what they represent both inside the skateboarding world and outside of it. They are telling skaters that what they ride says as much about their point of view and their idea of skating as the skaters they like or the photos they hang on their walls.
Under these influences, skateboarding as a culture should no longer be seen as passive and thoughtless. We should not simply watch and forget the daily dose of online videos, go to the same boring skatepark to learn the next logical trick, buy whatever gear is needed regardless of what the company does or does not stand for. These brands, knowingly or not, are saying that skateboarding has changed all of our lives and it’s about time we start treating it with the respect and thought it deserves.It seems all those years of hitting bad guys on Arrow have rubbed off on Katie Cassidy.
During a visit to Whose Line Is It Anyway? this Wednesday (The CW, 9/8c), Cassidy reveals that if she wasn’t an actress, she’d be a fighter.
Cue Wayne Brady and Brad Sherwood breaking into an improvised song about the Arrow star’s “left and right cross” as Cassidy lobs a few punches at Brady in this exclusive video. Sample lyric: “Cute as a sparrow, but she broke all my bones and sucked out all the marrow.”
But the musical number isn’t all about violence. The “little fighting girl” also gets to display her dance moves during the sketch.
Cassidy — who is now a series regular across Arrow, The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow — will return in Arrow‘s Season 5 premiere to spill what Laurel told Oliver before her death.
Press PLAY above to watch the sneak peek, then hit the comments with your thoughts on the musical moment.[van id=”us/2015/04/11/nr-shots-fired-outside-us-capitol-building.cnn”]WASHINGTON (CNN) — A shooting that prompted the lockdown of the U.S. Capitol on Saturday was a suicide, Capitol police spokeswoman Kimberly Schneider said.
“Confirmed: self-inflicted gunshot by neutralized subject,” Schneider said. “Multiple law enforcement/emergency services have responded in support of the incident.”
About 3:50 p.m. ET, the lockdown was lifted and pedestrian traffic was allowed, Schneider said, though the west front remained closed until further notice.
The building was locked down as a precaution after shots were fired on the west front, Schneider said. The lockdown continued even after the incident was described as a suicide.
U.S. Capitol Police officers also were investigating a suspicious package on the lower west terrace of the Capitol, Schneider said.
Capitol police sent this message to congressional staff: “The U.S. Capitol Police are continuing to investigate the police activity. All occupants of the U.S. Capitol Building and Capitol Visitor Center are directed to shelter in place until further notice. Additional information will be provided as available.”
No one was allowed to enter or exit the Capitol building or the Capitol Visitors Center during the lockdown.
Several streets in the area were closed.
By Ralph Ellis and Ted Barrett of CNN
CNN’s Deirdre Walsh contributed to this report."America's Foremost Public Intellectual" Melissa-Harris Perry: I Hope Trayvon Martin "Whooped the Sh**" Out of George Zimmerman On top of him, pounding his head MMA style, bouncing his head off the concrete? He did, Missy. He did "whoop the sh**" out of him. And I think you've long known that, as every witness said he did, and Zimmerman's head showed injuries consistent with having one's head punched repeatedly into the concrete. He did, Missy. He did "whoop the sh**" out of him. And I think you've long known that, as every witness said he did, and Zimmerman's head showed injuries consistent with having one's head punched repeatedly into the concrete. I think you've had a secret position all along, a hateful, racist one, that you will not confess: I think you've had a secret position all along, a hateful, racist one, that you will not confess: That you know Trayvon Martin did just what all the witnesses said he did, and that George Zimmerman was perfectly sober in deciding his life was in some danger, but you think Impromptu Street Justice and Two-Fisted Racial Healing, even if it resulted in man's death. That you know Trayvon Martin did just what all the witnesses said he did, and that George Zimmerman was perfectly sober in deciding his life was in some danger, but you think Zimmerman should have taken his punishment happily, whether he wound up dead or brain damaged or not, because he had the temerity to challenge Trayvon's right to be in that housing development, and therefore Martin was entitled to dish out a little, even if it resulted in man's death. I think some of our more Racialist friends on the left have long held this position -- that yes, Martin was pounding Zimmerman's head into the concrete, but so what, Because Zimmerman deserved it for being a "racist," and the Rule of Street Justice says that a black man who feels disrespected is entitled to some self-determined Racial Payback if he likes. I think some of our more Racialist friends on the left have long held this position -- that yes, Martin was pounding Zimmerman's head into the concrete, but so what, So yeah, that's what I think. The seething "Let's get Justice for Travyon" types usually don't admit that Martin was pounding Zimmerman, but, and this is key, they usually don't spend much time denying that salient fact either. They just sort of handwave it away, as if that's just a trivial detail and not very important to their Big Picture legal analysis. So yeah, that's what I think. The seething "Let's get Justice for Travyon" types usually don't admit that Martin was pounding Zimmerman, but, and this is key,They just sort of handwave it away, as if that's just a trivial detail and not very important to their Big Picture legal analysis. And on that point I think they're being honest-- they don't see this as important in their legal analysis. Zimmerman deserved what he was getting for the crime of Disrespecting a Black Man, and he broke the Rules by putting a stop to his chastisement. And on that point I think they're being honest-- theysee this as important in their legal analysis. Zimmerman deserved what he was getting for the crime of Disrespecting a Black Man, and he broke the Rules by putting a stop to his chastisement. Whether he feared for his life or not, so what? Racial Justice demands that he take his Justice, as Trayvon determined it should be meted out. Whether he feared for his life or not, so what? Racial Justice demands that he take his Justice, as Trayvon determined it should be meted out. By the way, MHP: By the way, MHP: If Zimmerman just wanted to shoot Martin, he could have done so while still on his feet. It is "Stand Your Ground," after all, not "Get Taken to the Ground, Then Get Your Head Dribbled on the Cement for Five Minutes, Then Get Out Your Gun." If Zimmerman just wanted to shoot Martin,It is "Your Ground," after all, not "Get Taken to the Ground, Then Get Your Head Dribbled on the Cement for Five Minutes, Then Get Out Your Gun." If Zimmerman just wanted to plug Martin, he sure was slow on the draw. If Zimmerman just wanted to plug Martin, he sure was slow on the draw.
Posted by: Ace at 04:59 PM
MuNuvians MeeNuvians Polls! Polls! Polls! Frequently Asked Questions The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick Top Top Tens Greatest Hitjobs News/ChatA manager’s professional survival depends on reducing and managing risks every single day. To do that, management needs dependable sources of trustworthy information.
What should you do when you have a professional point of view to present, and you know that it’s not what your boss wants to hear? Don’t just give your opinion. Instead, gather a substantial body of evidence, organize it well, and present it in a useful and persuasive form.
That means you must:
Clearly state the issue
Present conclusions and recommendations at the start
Outline the reasoning behind your recommendations
Gather and organize ample supporting evidence, including evidence that may run counter to your recommendations
As tech professionals, we often feel confident that we know more about facts, figures, analytics and all kinds of technology than management. But if we want to get things done, we need to work constructively with management, and that means providing the right information in a way that helps managers make good decisions, avoid needless risk and feel safe.
And, of course, everything you do to make management feel confident and safe about making decisions also helps increase your own value and job security.
Management decides
You are not the ultimate judge of how well you’ve done this. Your manager is. That means you must respect your manager’s preferences, and adapt your style to suit your manager.
When I began my first full time job, the hiring manager made an unusual request: he wanted to see my diploma. He had once made the mistake of hiring someone who lied about education, and that experience made him justifiably cautious.
To my boss, that meant interviews, college transcripts, and letters of recommendation were not proof that I was what I claimed to be. He needed to see the diploma to feel safe about his decision to hire me. I respected that.
Decision risk
Unpopular decisions carry a lot of risk. If you want to provoke a change that may be controversial with management, investors, your coworkers or customers, you’d better provide darned well organized and thorough analysis to support your position.
The greater the risk associated with a decision, the more important it is for the manager to have high quality supporting information presented in an appropriate form. Solid research and analysis guides the manager to the right decision, and can help to defend decisions (and jobs) when things go wrong.
How to support an unpopular position
You’ve probably heard all about the Google engineer James Damore who made news by unleashing a lengthy memo arguing that women are biologically ill-suited to the profession of software engineering. This is certainly a notable example of a technical professional challenging a management position. In my own professional view, it’s not an example you should use as a model for your own work, and not just because I disagree with the author’s conclusions.
(It’s a shame Mr. Damore didn’t read this career advice I published last month. He might still have a job now.)
Let’s get some basics out of the way:
Never lie. You can lose your job for that, even decades later.
Respect professional boundaries. If you’re in engineering, don’t tell the sales staff what to do.
Your opinion is not important. It’s the quality of information supporting your opinion that matters.
Keep these things in mind and get down to preparing your case.
An example
Let’s say that you have a really shocking point of view to defend. Like this…
Men should not be permitted to vote.
Wait, what?
There’s some history behind this. In the days when suffragettes (today we would call them feminists) were fighting for the vote, opponents circulated pamphlets articulating reasons why women should not be permitted to vote. Writer Alice Duer Miller countered with reasons why men should not be allow to vote.
You think it’s hard to challenge feminism? Try challenging masculinism, if only as an exercise to develop your analytic skills.
Clearly state the issue
First, state the subject for discussion, briefly and simply. Here are several possibilities for this example:
Should men be permitted to vote?
Men should not be permitted to vote.
Men make poor voters.
Men are not biologically suited to voting.
Present conclusions and recommendations at the start
You, as a truly open minded investigator should resist adhering to conclusions until you have performed a thorough examination of all evidence available to you. Once you have reached your conclusions and decided on your recommendations, though, don’t try to make your manager sit through the whole presentation to hear them. Get to the point.
Your final business presentation, no matter the format (face to face talk, detailed report, slides…) should begin with a brief statement of conclusions. It may range in length from one sentence to one page at most, depending on the situation.
In this case, you might begin with: “Based on my analysis of the evidence, I recommend against permitting men to vote.”
Outline the reasoning behind your recommendations
You know that your recommendation will not appeal to management. Your manager will not be easily persuaded to change viewpoint. So you must present good reasons, and be well-prepare to defend them.
Move from recommendations to a brief list of major reasons supporting your conclusions.
This was Alice Duer Miller’s list:
Why We Oppose Votes for Men
Because man’s place is in the army. Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it. Because if men should adopt peacable [sic] methods women will no longer look up to them. Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them particularly unfit for the task of government.
Keep in mind that stating reasons is not the same as making a case for action. These brief statements do no more than provide an outline of what you must prove with your supporting evidence.
I’m not satisfied with this list of reasons. It neglects the all-important starting point of defining the desired qualities of a voter. So, don’t do it just like Alice did. Do it better.
Gather and organize ample supporting evidence, including evidence that may run counter to your recommendations
Your presentation may be only a few minutes long, yet supported by massive effort and quantities of information. Each and every one of your reasons must be reinforced by detailed factual and objective research and analysis.
In practice, you will gather, review and organize much more material than you present to management. It’s your job to deal with the bulk of evidence, and summarize it as briefly as is reasonable to make your case.
What sort of evidence should you examine? Here are some of the resources you may use:
Relevant internal data and analysis, including new data analysis if you have appropriate analytics skills.
Published research from public or private sources, such as academic journals, industry reports, news sources and others. (Data analytics professionals often neglect these important resources, relying only on their own primary research. That’s unsatisfactory.)
Input from subject matter experts.
Peer review. (It’s not just for academics.)
Do not fail to consider criticism of your sources.
Look at Miller’s last point: men are too emotional to vote. This cannot be taken at face value. Dissect the statement with fundamental questions like these:
How is emotion defined?
Can emotion be measured?
Are men any more or less emotional than women?
The more specific and concrete the questions, the better you will be able to identify the proper data and secondary resources to address them.
Examples supplement basic facts and help you create stories that enable non-technical managers to engage and understand your points. Take Miller’s reference to men’s conduct at baseball games. This could lead you not only to many easily-relatable anecdotes - who hasn’t been to a baseball game and witnessed some bad behavior?
Examples may also lead you to additional lines of questioning for research. You might look for studies comparing behavior of female sports fans to males, or market research on beer sales at baseball games, or police reports related to sporting events.
Plan to present your evidence in the same order as you presented your reasons, and just a little at a time. Don’t overwhelm your audience – just share the most important details. And be flexible, willing and able to change order, add or skip details to suit your manager’s questions and preferences.
And, for heavens sake, use an exact citation for the source of all the information you present, especially anything "scientific."
You may not choose to present all, or any, of the arguments against your point of view, but you had darned well know and evaluate them as part of your preparation. You will be asked about counter arguments and must be prepared to address them, thoughtfully and with respect.
The right way
Whether you are making the case for an apparent “no-brainer” or a wildly controversial proposal, there’s always a right and a wrong way to do it.
One of the benefits of the right way is that, while you search for evidence to support your position, you may discover that you’re taking the wrong position, and change course before things get ridiculous.
And if you’re right, you’re right and you’ll be able to explain why in a way that will earn management respect and preserve (and perhaps enhance) your job.In yet another 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court, the conservatives sitting on the Roberts
Court have cut deeply into our protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed to Americans by the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.
As a result of today’s ruling, jailers can now perform bodily strip searches on anyone brought in to a holding cell, no matter how minor the alleged infraction. And when I say ‘minor’, I’m not talking about people arrested and held for violent or even misdemeanor drug related crimes.
I’m talking about individuals arrested for riding a bicycle without an audible bell, driving a car with a noisy muffler or failing to properly use a signal when making a left or right turn.
Seriously.
These are but a few of the offenses that were committed by people who found themselves being strip-searched and subject to the long arm of the law when that long arm intruded into personal spaces where no arm was intended to go. These were also the offenses represented in a class action brought against two New Jersey jails by Albert Florence, a New Jersey resident who was also subjected to the humiliation of a strip search—twice— for what the police believed was an outstanding warrant for failing to pay a court fine.
Florence’s ordeal began on a day in 2005 while he and his family were on his way to his mother-in-law’s home to celebrate the purchase of a new residence for the Florence family. Mrs. Florence was at the wheel of the family BMW when she was pulled over for speeding. When the police officer ran a check on Mr. Florence as the owner of the car (despite the fact that he wasn’t driving), they discovered that he had an outstanding warrant for failing to pay a fine to the Court.
Never mind that Mr. Florence, a financial executive with an automobile dealership, had, in fact, paid the fine and actually had proof of having done so in the glove box of his automobile because he feared that local police were suspicious of black men who drive nice cars. And never mind that even if the warrant had been an outstanding bench order, not paying a court fine in New Jersey is not a crime.
Florence was arrested and handcuffed as his pregnant wife and young son watched in distress.
When Mr. Florence arrived at the local jail where he was to be held pending a hearing on the warrant, he was subjected to a strip-search. And when he was transferred to a different county jail he was treated to a search of his body once again, despite the fact that, at no time since his first strip-search, was he outside the custody of the police.
During his first strip-search, Florence was forced to disrobe in front of an officer and told to lift his genitals. Upon arriving at the second jail, he was made to squat and cough in front of a number of viewers for the purpose of expelling anything that might be hidden in a body cavity.
Setting aside my curiosity as to what the cops expected to find hiding beneath his genitals, I will simply report that the local Magistrate finally ordered Mr. Florence released when he determined that Florence had, indeed, paid the fine some years before.
Still, the Supreme Court came to the conclusion that the body searches Mr. Florence was subjected to—not once but twice and despite the fact that he had been in police custody the entire time between the first and second search—were “reasonable” within the meaning of what constitutes a reasonable search and seizure for 4th Amendment purposes.
So deeply concerned was the five Justice majority for the need to keep contraband—including weapons and drugs—out of the jail system, they were prepared to relieve authorities throughout the nation of their responsibility to afford American citizens their privacy rights—even when they are hauled in for having a broken bell on a bicycle.
Writing the minority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that the this behavior is not constitutionally appropriate for an individual arrested for a minor offense that does not involve drugs or violence.
"A strip search that involves a stranger peering without consent at a naked individual, and in particular at the most private portions of that person’s body, is a serious invasion of privacy,” Breyer wrote. The “invasion of personal rights” at issue in this case, the dissenters argued, “is very serious and lacks need or justification — at least as to the category of minor offenses at issue. Via SCOTUSblog
The Court’s decision greatly expands upon what authorities can do when searching those they detain for alleged crimes, no matter how miniscule the charge may be.
In 1979, the Supreme Court upheld the policy of body cavity searches for prisoners after they had met with visitors. The theory was that the possibility of a guest from the outside having slipped an item of contraband to a prisoner posed a significant threat to the remainder of the prison population and jail officials. For that reason, the search was deemed reasonable.
However, since that decision, the principle has been widely limited so as not to to be applied to newly arriving prisoners where there was no reason for authorities to suspect that the incoming prisoner might have some item of contraband on his or her person requiring confiscation. In other words, the ‘reasonable’ standard was applied.
That limitation is no longer the law of the land.
In what is becoming a habit of some members of the conservative side of the Court who don’t appear to want to be held responsible for the bad precedents they set, Justices Roberts and Alito when out of their way to say that this practice should be limited to the case at hand and that it should not be assumed that this principle is to be applied to all searches—particularly when someone is only to be held for a short time and placed in a cell separated from the general population.
The hope is that this limiting opinion will be applied at jails throughout the country so that people held only until bond is posted will not be subjected to intrusive and humiliating strip -searches.
Just last year, the Roberts Court put another serious dent into the 4th Amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure when it upheld the constitutionality of police in Kentucky entering a suspect's home without a search warrant.
contact Rick at thepolicypage@gmail.com
Twitter @rickungarTemple University today published the newest draft of a comprehensive campus plan that details a collective vision for continued transformation and recommends signature projects that include a new library, an interdisciplinary science building and a vast green space at the heart of Main Campus.
“This crucial strategic framework for planning and development touches on practically every aspect of university life, spans all domestic campuses and is nothing short of transformational,” President Neil D. Theobald said. “It reflects input from the Temple community and shows the depth of our commitment to building Temple University into a place that is worthy of our past and well-positioned for the future.”
The latest version of the plan is available online for public viewing. The plan will also be rolled out for continued topical conversation among university stakeholders at Visualize Temple, a discussion hub that has attracted more than 3,000 participants.
Small-group sessions, town halls and community meetings are being planned for November to invite further discussion.
Signature elements of the Main Campus plan include the following:
A state-of-the-art library at the core of campus on the current site of Barton Hall between Liacouras Walk and 13th Street. Library features are likely to include a robotic text-retrieval system, innovative spaces for interaction and collaboration, and a green roof.
A massive central green space—the size of a full city block—to provide Main Campus with its first-ever true academic quad. The green space (bounded by 13th Street, Polett Walk, 12th Street and Norris Street) would expand north from the current space commonly known as Beury Beach after the planned demolitions of Beury Hall and the Biology-Life Sciences Building.
A new interdisciplinary science building—as or even more impressive than the recently opened Science Education and Research Center—anchoring the northeast corner of campus.
An expansion of the College of Engineering in support of the university’s goals to increase academic space for instruction and research.
A consolidated home for the College of Public Health (formerly the College of Health Professions and Social Work), which is currently divided among several buildings. This is envisioned to the east of Weiss Hall.
Renovation of existing buildings for more flexible, contemporary learning spaces, including the forthcoming $11.5 million renovation of Wachman Hall, future renovations of Ritter Hall and Ritter Annex, and a repurposing of Paley Library after the new library is built.
Improvements to Temple’s main pedestrian thoroughfares, including Polett Walk.
The campus plan also features a variety of long-term residential life components, space to significantly enhance research capacity and promote collaboration, and suggestions to improve student and faculty life. The plan recommends phased implementation of various projects, some within the next five years and others over the next decade or longer. Details on a landscape master plan, to be implemented simultaneously with the campus plan, will be released in November.
Other recommendations include further growth of research space at the Health Sciences Campus; investing in Temple’s Center City campus to increase street-level visibility (renovations are underway for a new ground-floor café and bookstore); and maintaining Temple’s presence at the School of Podiatric Medicine’s campus at 8th and Race streets and in Harrisburg.
The plan suggests moving operations at Temple Fort Washington to Ambler Campus and for making improvements at Ambler, such as enhancing facility use and renewing student and faculty amenities.
“There is no better way to create a comprehensive vision for Temple University than through the input of members of the extended Temple community,” said James P. Creedon, senior vice president for construction, facilities and operations. “We have been inspired by the level of engagement thus far and are excited about the culmination of a two-year planning effort to determine the best options for the future of one of America’s premier urban universities.”As expansion plans wither and the administrators dither, the clubs are aiming to wrest control of the A-League in a battle for the game’s soul
Despite a dream grand final that delivered drama aplenty, the A-League is about to enter into another tumultuous off-season as club owners fight to wrest control of the competition away from Football Federation Australia. With FFA so far failing to reach its broadcast deal target by over $20m a year, and the expansion of the A-League coming to a grinding halt, the owners have lost faith in an administration that is slow to make decisions and hides behind consultants’ reports.
For more than two years, FFA has been building towards the next phase of growth by focusing its efforts on increasing revenue via its broadcast deals and sponsorship. Plans were written, it launched a marketing campaign aimed at converting participants into fans of the A-League and arguably the greatest player in Socceroos history, Tim Cahill, was brought home on a multi-million dollar deal to bring much needed buzz to a competition many felt had become stale.
However, it all seems to no avail.
Football in Australia: as big as it's going to get? | Paul Connolly Read more
Even with FFA winning a record broadcast deal of $346m over six-years, why are the owners in a stand-off with the administration? What has FFA been doing behind the scenes and why has it not pleased the people who have bankrolled the competition?
To understand this, we have to go back to May 2015, when FFA chief executive, David Gallop, released his vision for the game.
The lack of money in the Australian football economy has always plagued the sport. FFA has often called for government funding as well as being reliant on the multi-million dollar proceeds from the sale of A-League clubs such as Brisbane Roar and Newcastle Jets.
While the suits at FFA were openly proud of the Whole of Football Plan (WOFP) they had produced back in May 2015, the reality was that FFA had struggled to grow revenue beyond $100m.
It was time to call in the consultants, this time Boston Consulting, to help solve the following problem: “To take the game to the next level in Australia, the FFA needs to grow to a >$200m a year operation in the long term.”
Boston went to work, analysing FFA’s revenue against the likes of AFL, NRL, Cricket Australia and even New Zealand Rugby, and they recommended that “FFA needs to find a way to balance investment allocation across key strategic choices” in its short-term aim of improving “fan connection and enable further investment into the game”. In other words, the cow needed to be milked so it could be invested in star players.
However, FFA’s cash cow and star were one and the same. Ever since the federal government gave Frank Lowy $15m in 2003 to revolutionise the sport, revenue has moved from being almost totally reliant on the fortunes of the Socceroos to the national league being the main source of income – much to the annoyance of A-League club owners with a combined loss of around $250m.
The outcome from Boston’s report looked positive, as there was the possibility of increasing FFA’s revenue by more than 50% over the four-year cycle. The low-hanging fruit was a “100% uplift in the broadcast deal” to $80m, as well as increasing sponsorship revenue across the federation’s brand assets such as the A-League, national teams, women’s and community football.
While the A-League club owners were calling for self-governance, FFA’s sales pitch was that being one big happy family – from grassroots to professional teams – was the best way to increase the financial pie. This was supported by an accompanying chart created by another group of consultants, Gemba, which outlined in the WOFP that sports organisations, such as FFA, “can best reach participants and less engaged fans”, while the clubs were better at maintaining the relationship with “highly engaged fans”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Besart Berisha, Melbourne Victory’s joint Golden Boot winner. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images
Gemba’s fan segmentation report identified eight fan groups – from fringe fan to super fan – based on their level of engagement with FFA’s brand assets and their commercial value to the sport. Gemba also measured attendance and viewership of the A-League and identified that more than 83% of the 1.6 million super fans were also within the “low attendance quadrants”. With the super fans being valued at almost two-thirds of the commercial value of the A-League, this subgroup had been identified as priority to reach out to.
As part of FFA’s plans to move more resources into its digital platforms, the so-called connected football strategic plan was developed by yet another consultancy firm, Symplicit, which concluded that the federation was in the “beginners” quadrant – consultant speak for well behind Cricket Australia’s digital |
the Imperial Diet with the Princely rank from 1226/27. Immediate Princely rank was subsequently conferred on the Master of Germany and, after the loss of Prussia, to the Master of Livonia.
The Order's presence across mediaeval Europe enabled it to play a significant role in local political events. Despite the limitation of membership to the German nobility, the spread of German rule into Italy, notably in Sicily under Henry VI and Frederick II Barbarossa, led to the establishment of the Order's convents in places far distant from Germany. Sicily had been ruled by Saracens until the arrival of the Norman conquerors under the Hauteville family but the collapse of this dynasty led to their replacement by the German Hohenstaufens. The first Teutonic hospital, of Saint Thomas, was confirmed by the Emperor Henry VI in 1197 and, in the same year, the Emperor and Empress granted the knights their request for possession of the Church of Santa Trinità in Palermo. Examination of grants of Sicilian properties to the three great crusader Orders in the period 1190-1220 indicates that the Teutonic knights were greater beneficiaries of imperial favor than either the Templars or Hospitallers. Furthermore, when Frederick II attained his majority he secured them the support of Pope Honorius III, who granted them numerous privileges confirming their equality with the other two great Crusader bodies. The Teutonic knights had first established themselves in eastern Europe in 1211 after King Andrew of Hungary invited the knights to establish an outpost on the border of Transylvania. The warlike Cumans, who were also plaguing the Byzantine Empire to the south, were a constant threat and the Hungarians hoped that the knights would provide a buttress agains their attacks. King Andrew granted them considerable autonomy over the lands they captured with a mission to Christianize the inhabitants, but their demands for effective independence proved unacceptable and they were ordered to leave in 1225.
In 1217 Pope Honorius III proclaimed a crusade against the Prussian pagans. Duke Conrad of Massovia had been invaded by these barbarians and, in 1225, desperate for assistance, asked the Teutonic knights to come to his aid. He promised the Master possession of Culm and Dobrzin which Salza accepted with the provision that the knights could retain any Prussian territories that the Order captured. The Emperor's grant of Princely rank in 1226/27 in the "Golden Bull" of Rimini offered the knights sovereignty of any lands they captured as immediate fiefs of the Empire. The campaign to drive out the pagan tribes from prussia only lasted fifty years, the consolidation of their power in north-eastern Europe lasted one hundred and sixty years before the Polish-Lithuanian began to push the knights backwards. This Crusading enterprise succeeded only at a terrible cost, above all to the native populations but also the lives of thousands of knights and soldiers. The amalgamation with the knights of the Sword (or knights of Christ as they were sometimes called) in 1237 proved of considerable value. The Knights of the Sword were a smaller but poweful military brotherhood based in Livonia. They had originally been subject to the authority of the Archbishop of Riga but, with the capture of Livonia and Estonia which they ruled as sovereign states, they were effectively independent. The disastrous defeat they suffered at the Batlle of Sauler on September 22, 1236, when they lost about one third of their knights including their Master, left them in an uncertain situation. The solution, union with the Teutonic Order, insured their survival and, henceforth, they had the status of a semi-autonomous province. The new Master of Livonia, a senior Teutonic Commander, now became a provincial Master in the Teutonic Order and the knights of the combined body adopted the Teutonic insignia.
The earliest Livonian knights had come mostly from south Germany. But, after joining with the Teutonic Order, the Livonian knights increasingly came from areas in which the Teutonic knights had a substantial presence, principally Westphalia. Virtually no knights were recruited from the local populations and most of the knights serving in the East spent only a few years there before returning to the Order's houses in Germany, Prussia or, until the loss of Acre, Palestine. It was not until the middle of the fourteenth century that it became customary to appoint the Master of Livonia for life as the Order's rule was more settled and service there less burdensome. Salza died during these campaigns and was buried at Barletta, in Apulia; his shortlived successor, Conrad Landgraf von Thuringen, had commanded the knights in Prussia and died three months after sustaining terrible wounds at the battle of Whalstadt (April 9, 1241) after just one year in office. The fifth Master's rule was likewise shortlived but, his successor, Heinrich von Hohenlohe (1244-1253), enjoyed a very successful reign, receiving confirmation in 1245 of possession of Livonia, Courland and Samogitia from the Emperor. Under Hohenlohe's Magistery the knights granted a series of privileges regulating the government and ownership of property in Prussia. He also established the Order's house and future headquarters at Mergentheim (Marienthal) in Franconia, a property which he and his brother had given to the Order in 1219. By letters patent of August 20, 1250, Saint Louis IX of France granted four gold fleurs de lys to be worn one at each extremity of the Magistral Cross.
Under the eighth Master, Popon von Osterna (1253-1262), the Order further established its rule in Prussia, forcing the submission of the ruler of Sambia. The process of transferring peasant populations from Germany to Prussia now accelerated, while the Order established a feudal structure of smaller estates owing fealty to the knights. Under his successor, Annon von Sangershausen (1262-1274), the Order's privileges were confirmed by the Emperor Rudolf (of Habsburg) while the knights were authorized by the Pope to retain their hereditary estates after profession. This was an important privilege and insured the recruitment of landed knights who could not alienate their estates because of family obligations. They were also permitted to engage directly in trading activities, previously forbidden by their vows of poverty, by a further privilege of 1263 which insured their monopoly of the valuable Prussian grain trade. By the death of the tenth Master, Hartman von Heldrungen (in 1283) the Order was securely established in Prussia with the vast majority of their subjects converted to Christianity. As they advanced eastwards, however, building fortresses to insure the maintenance of their rule, the need for local manpower became an increasingly onerous burden for the largely agrarian civilian population who needed all the hands they could find to maintain their farms. Thus the conscription of young men as construction workers and foot soldiers - who generally incurred the greatest casualties in war - led to frequent rebellions against the rule of the knights which sometimes erupted into major conflagrations. Those of the knights subjects who were captured by the Lithuanians could expect permanent enslavement or, if time was short and circumstances prevented them being carried off, summary execution. Indeed, the penalties awaiting the prisoners taken by the Lithuanians could be horrific, as human sacrifice and slow death by torture were not infrequent practices.
Enslavement of pagan prisoners by the knights was likewise seen as perfectly acceptable, non-Christians not being considered to have the same rights as Christians. A description by an Austrian poet, Peter Suchenwirt, quoted by Ekdahl, well illustrates these horrifying events, not so dissimilar, perhaps, to recent events in Bosnia Herzegovina: "Women and children were taken captive; What a jolly medley could be seen: Many a woman could be seen, Two children tied to her body, One behind and one in front; On a horse without spurs Barefoot had they ridden here; The heathens were made to suffer: Many were captured and in every case, Were their hands tied together They were led off, all tied up - Just like hunting dogs". One can only wonder at the astonishing use of the word "jolly"! These slaves were then used to supplement the local labor force but, usefully did not require payment and so were often preferred to the Prussian natives who needed to be paid or granted land. By enslaving the Lithuanian prisoners as much needed manual laborers, there ceased to be any incentive to convert them as, once they became Christians, they could no longer be abusesd in this fashion. Hence, as Dr Ekdahl has suggested, as the local populations converted and, following the Christianization of Lithuania, prisoners of war could no longer be enslaved, the Order found it harder to conscript soldiers into its armies without detroying the livelihood of the landed peasantry who, through taxes, provided them with much of their revenues
While the Teutonic knights played a major role in the Christianization of north eastern Europe, they were less effective on its south eastern borders. In the second quarter of the thirteenth century, Europe was faced with the terrible threat of Mongol invasion. Their spread westwards from their barren homeland between China and Russia was an appalling experience for those unfortunate enough to find themselves in their path. They had no regard for the civilian inhabitants who suffered dreadfully, their towns destroyed, livestock carried off, meanfolk murdered and women either killed or forced into concubinage. In 1240 they attacked and destroyed the magnificent city of Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, and thence turned to Poland and Hungary. The Teutonic knights seem not to have become fully engaged in this struggle even when, in 1260, in alliance with the Russian Grand Duke Alexander Nevsky, the Order resolved to take on the Mongol hordes. Unfortunately, throughout their rule in Eastern Europe the knights were frequently forced to deal with uprising among their own subjects, particularly in Prussia and each time a crusade was preached against the Mongols the knights had to turn to defend their own territories from internal rebellion or Lithuanian harassment. With the Crusaders and Christian Kingdom radually on the retreat in the Holy Land, the knights suffered huge losses at the battle of Sephet in 1265, putting them on the defensive in their great castle of Montfort. Even after making peace with the Templars and Hospitallers - with whom they had frequently quarreled during the preceding half century - they were unable to sustain their rule. In 1291, following the loss of Acre, the knights retreated first to Cyprus and then to Venice, where they had recruited a small group of Italian knights at their commandery of Santa Trinità which temporarily became the principal house of the Order. Their Master, Conrad von Feuchtwangen, although before his election Provincial Master in Prussia and Livonia, had fortunately been in Acre when elected and so was able to demonstrate for his brother knights the military skills learned fighting Prussian barbarians. These efforts having proved insufficient, he joined his wandering confreres and spent his last years trying to reconcile the differences between the provincial masters which anticipated the divisions of later years. On his death in 1297 he was succeeded by Godfrey von Hohenlohe whose Magistery was likewise marred by quarrels among his subordinates, while the struggle against the pagans had extended to Lithuania.
The crusade to convert Eastern Europe was compromised by some of the local rulers, notably the Kings of Poland, who feared the Order's power and, in 1325, the Poles allied themselves with the pagan Grand Duke Guedemine of Lithuania. Fortunately, in 1343, Poland and the Order were reconciled and while the Lithuanians renewed their attacks on the Order with all the forces at their disposal, the knights were ready. Gradually eroding the areas ruled by the Grand Duke, taking them under their own administration, the Grand Duke Olgerd and seventy thousand Lithuanians, Samogithians, Russians and Tartars were thoroughly defeated at the Battle of Rudau, in Sambia, on February 17, 1370. The Grand Duke lost more than eleven thousand killed along with his standard, while the Order lost twenty-six commanders, two hundred knights and several thousand soldiers. In 1386 Olgerd's successor, Jagellon, married Hedwig, heiress of Poland, took the name Wladislav and converted to Christianity, thus uniting the two Crowns. Poland was now at the apogee of its power, Christianity was firmly established across Eastern Europe, and the very existence of the Teutonic Knights was now threatened.
Following the union of Lithuania and Poland, the Teutonic knights soon forfeited the support of the Church and neighboring Princes. Conflicts with the Archbishop of Riga had bedeviled relations with the Church over the previous half-century, these divisions were accentuated with the Order's crusading mission reduced to insuring the conversion of the pagan populations under the rule. The conversion of Lithuania's rulers gained the latter the support of the Papacy who ordered the knights to reach a settlement. Disputes between the knights and the new Polish-Lithuanian alliance increased, nonetheless, and the knights even found themselves engaged in the war between two other Christian states, Denmark and Sweden. A temporary peace signed in the Order's favor in 1404 led to the sale of Dobrzin and Ziotor to the Polish king but, although the Order's wealth had never been greater, it was brought down by its own success. The Order now ruled a vast area with two million one hundred and forty thousand inhabitants of Prussia alone but was resented by much of the native population and feared by its neighbors. As the Polish state became more centralized, so the Crown needed to enforce its rule along the borders with the Teutonic properties, while requiring easier access to the Baltic coast. As long as the Order looked to Germany and the Emperor for support, conflict was inevitable.
The Lithuanians and Poles were armed and prepared to renew the struggle. Despite attempted interventions by the Kings of Bohemia and Hungary, Jagellon and Wladislav were able to amass a vast force of about 160,000 men. These included Russians, Samogitians and Hungarian, Silesian and Bohemian mercenaries along with the forces of the Duke of Mecklemburg and the Pomeranian Dukes (other than the Duke of Stettin, who sided with the Order). The knights, on the other hand, with only 83,000 men were outnumbered two to one. Despite this handicap, the outcome of the engagement at what is known as the battle of Tannenberg on July 15, 1410 was by no means certain. Early in the conflict the knights made great advances, destroying the right wing of the Lithuanian forces but they were gradually beaten back. When their courageous Grand Master, Ulrich von Jungingen was killed in the center of the melée, dying from wounds inflicted in both the front and back of his chest, the fight was lost. In addition to their leader, they lost two hundred knights and forty thousand soldiers including the Grand Commander, Conrad von Liechtenstein, the Marshal, Friedrich von Wallenrod, and many commanders and officers, while the Poles lost sixty thousand dead.
The Order might have been destroyed entirely had it not been for the Commander of Schwetz, Heinrich (Reuss) von Plauen, who had been charged with the defense of Pomerania and now moved rapidly to bolster the defenses at Marienburg. He was quickly elected Vice-Grand Master and, thanks to his preparations, the fortress was saved. Plauen was now elected Grand Master and, at the Isle of Thorn (Torún), concluded a treaty with the King of Poland on February 1, 1411, ratified by Papal Bull a year later. This returned all the territories captured by each side to the other, with the provision that Samogitia would be held by the King of Poland and his cousin Vutautas (Witold), Grand Duke of Lithuania (now a Polish vassal) during their life times when it would be returned to the knights. It was also required that both sides would endeavor to convert their remaining pagan subjects to Christianity. Unfortunately the Polish king immediately refused to honor his promise to release his prisoners - whose numbers exceeded those held by the knights - demanding a huge ransom of 50,000 florins. This presaged a further decline in relations; the Poles were determined to remove the continued threat of the knight's power on their borders. Numerous negotiations and agreements failed to produce a satisfactory compromise, while many smaller conflicts gradually diminished the Order's territories. The Order was assisted briefly by a split between members of the Polish royal house over which of them should rule in Lithuania but this was resolved after four years in 1434. Unfortunately, Wladislav III who succeeded later that same year acquired the Hungarian throne in 1440, becoming the dominant power in the region. Casimir IV who had succeded as King in 1444, placed one of his sons on the latter throne while acquiring that of Bohemia for another. The great problem faced by the Polish Crown, and which ultimately led to the emasculated Monarchy of the eighteenth century, was how to balance royal authority over the great magnates with the extensive privileges that they had to be promised to insure their loyalty. This inherent weakness was ably exploited by the knights and delayed their eventual defeat.
Meanwhile the Prussians themselves rebelled against the authority of the Order and in 1454 war broke out once again, a conflict that the knights could not win without the support of their own subjects. Finally, by the treaty of Thorn (Torún) of October 19, 1466 between the Order and Poland the knights agreed to surrender Culm, their first Prussian possession, along with East Prussia, Michalow, Pomerania (including Danzig) and the Order's headquarters at the fortress of Marienburg. Although they retained some sixty towns and fortresses the Grand Master had to recognize the Polish King as his feudal overlord and do homage therefore, although the Emperor, nominal overlord of Prussia and superior of the Grand Master as a Prince of the Empire, was not consulted. In return the Grand Master was recognized as a Prince and councilor of the Crown of Poland. The Grand Master acknowledged Papal authority in spiritual matters, but by promising that no part of the treaty could be annulled by the Pope he was in breach of canon law as the Superior of a Religious Order and therefore subject to the Holy See. The knights power was now fatally compromised. The next four Grand Masters, thirty-first through thirty-fourth in succession, were unable to prevent further conflicts with Poland although some territories lost earlier were recovered. In 1498, they chose as thirty-fifth Grand Master Prince Friedrich of Saxony, third son of Albert the Brave, Duke of Saxony whose older brother George had married a sister of the King of Poland. By selecting a member of one of Germany's greatest royal houses they hoped to bolster their negotiating position, particularly over the vexed issue of whether they should accept the status of Polish vassal state. When summoned to make homage, the new Grand Master petitioned the Imperial Diet, which informed the Polish King that he could not interfere in the Grand Master's free exercise of power in Prussia. Friedrich's delaying tactics were assisted by their being three Polish kings between his election in 1498 and death in 1510.
The election of a Prince from a great reigning family having been such a success, the knights determined on the same course again. This time their choice proved to be a disastrous mistake. On February 13, 1511, they elected Markgraf Albrecht (von Hohenzollern) of Brandenburg, who accepted the post, made profession and professed his oath of fealty to the Emperor. Like his predecessor, Albert refused to make homage to the Polish King Sigismond but was undermined by the Emperor Maximilian, who in a treaty with Sigismond of 1415, required the Order to revert to the weaker territorial position of 1467. Albert still refused Sigismond's command to attend him, however, and instead signed an alliance of mutual protection with Czar Vassili of Russia. In return for handing over Neumarck to Brandenburg for the sum of 40,000 florins, Albert was also able to secure the support of the Elector Joachim. By the treaty of Thorn of April 7, 1521, he agreed that the question of homage would be submitted to arbitration but the disruption caused by Luther's defiance was already wreaking havoc with the consciences and loyalties of princes and peoples across Northern Europe and the promised meeting never took place. Martin Luther's challenge to the established ecclesiastical order led to further losses of military and political power. Luther wrote to the knights on March 28, 1523, inviting them to break their vows and take wives. The Bishop of Sambia, who held the administrative posts of Regent and Grand Chancellor of Prussia, was the first to renounce his vows and, on Christmas Day, 1523, preached a sermon inviting the knights to emulate him. The following Easter he celebrated the new rite and made a violent attack on the Church in which he had been ordained and consecrated. The Grand Master at first stood aside but, by July 1524, had decided to abandon his vows, marry and convert Prussia to a secular principality under his own rule. Following the Treaty of Cracow of 1525, Albert formally converted to Lutheranism and swore fealty to the King of Poland who invested him as Duke of Prussia with the right of direct or collateral hereditary transmission. Livonia remained temporarily independent under its Master, Walther von Plettenberg, who was created a Prince of the Empire.
The new Master of Germany now took the title Master of the Teutonic Order in Germany and Italy. Already a Prince of the Empire as Master of Germany he established the Grand Magistery at Mergentheim in Wurtemberg, where it remained until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Weakened by old age, however, he did not seek confirmation of his titles and resigned, leading to the election of Walther von Cronberg on December 16, 1526, and the unification of the Headship of the Order with the Magistery of Germany. The latter was now confirmed by the Emperor, but with the title for him and his successors of "Master of the Teutonic Order in German and in Italy, pro-Administrators of the Grand Magistery" with the requirement that all the commanders of the Order and the Master of Livonia give him the respect and obedience due to the Grand Masters of the Order. This title in German was later modified as "Administratoren des Hochmeisteramptes in Preussen, Meister teutschen Ordens in teutschen und wälschen Landen" which remained the title of the head of the Order until 1834. At the Diet of Spier of 1529 Cronberg abandoned the seat enjoyed by the Master of Germany, moving up in precedence to take the seat of Grand Master, after the Archbishop of Salzburg and before the Bishop of Bamberg. On July 26, 1530, Cronberg was formally invested with the Sovereignty of Prussia by the Emperor in a solemn ceremony intended to directly challenge Hohenzollern power; unfortunately, it had little actual effect. The Order still continued to recruit priests and nuns who dedicated themselves to hospitaller and humanitarian services, but the religious members were effectively separated from the lay and professed knights by the dropping of the requirement that the latter should live in a convent of the Order. The Order did not lose all its protestant members or possessions however and, where the principality in which the Order had properties changed confession, the knights generally followed. In Livonia, although Master von Plettenberg remained loyal to the Catholic Church, he was unable to resist granting toleration to the reformed churches in 1525. Thus the Order became a triconfessional institution with the Grand Magistery and principal offices held by Catholic nobles. The Lutheran and Calvinist knights were given equal rights by the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, with a seat and vote in the Chapter General. Only the Protestantised Bailiwick of Utrecht declared its total independence in 1637, giving allegiance to the United Provinces.
A proposal in 1545 to unite the Teutonic knights with the knights of Saint John came to nothing. Meanwhile the Order's principal diplomatic efforts were concentrated on recovering their Prussian territories, a project in which they were to be continually disappointed. Livonia continued under the rule of the knights but their rule was tenuous, surrounded as they were by Russians and Poles. In 1558 Gothard Kettler was elected coadjutor Master, succeeding as Master in 1559 on the resignation of Master von Furstenberg. Once again the Order had unwittingly made a poor choice. While Kettler was a capable soldier, in 1560 he secretly embraced the Lutheran faith. The following year, after secret negotiations, he was invested by the Polish King in a treaty of November 28, 1561 as Duke of Courland and Semigalla for himself and his heirs and successors. This state included all the territories formerly controlled by the knights between the Dwina, the sea, Samogitia and Lithuania and ended the Order's prersence in north eastern Europe. On March 5, 1562, Kettler sent an Envoy to the King to deliver him the insignia of his dignity of Master of Livonia, including the cross and great seal, purporting to grant the king the titles and privileges of the Teutonic knights, the keys of Riga and even his knight's mantle, as symbols of his abandoning the Order.
In 1589, the fortieth Grand Master, Heinrich von Bobenhausen (1572-1595) transmitted the rights of government to his coadjutor, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, without formally abdicating. This transfer was formally ratified by the latter's brother, the Emperor, on August 18, 1591 and Maximilian was able to receive oaths of loyalty from the members and subjects of the Order. At the invitation of the Emperor, the knights then provided 63,000 florins, one hundred and fifty horses and one hundred foot soldiers along with knights from every Bailiwick of the Order to fight the Turks, then rampaging across south-eastern Europe. This was of course a fraction of what they might have contributed in the past but the territorial losses of the previous century had seriously impoverished them, substantially reducing the numbers of professed knights and priests. The Order was now firmly allied with the House of Habsburg and Maximilian was succeeded in 1619 by the Archduke Carl. Of the remaining years before the fall of the Empire, there were eleven Grand Masters of whom four were Archdukes, three Princes of the House of Bavaria, and one Prince of Lorraine (brother of the Emperor Francis I). Thus, while the Order's military power was a mere shadow of its earlier strength, the prominence and standing of its Grand Masters - and indeed of many of the highest officers - was more elevated. At the same time stricter noble proofs limited the recruiting of members of the minor nobility.
On February 27, 1606 Grand Master Maximilian gave the Order new statutes which were to govern the Order until the nineteenth century reforms. These comprised two parts. First the rule, which dealt in nineteen chapters with the religious obligations, communion, the feast days, the habit, the maintenance of the sick brothers, the conduct of the Order's priests and the regulation of their parishes, and relations between the members. The second part, in fifteen chapters, was concerned with the ceremonial for arming and receiving knights, noble proofs, the obligations to fight the Infidel on the Hungarian frontier and elsewhere, the conduct of each member, the administration and enjoyment of commanderies, the rites due to deceased members including the Grand Master himself, the election of his successor and the circumstances in which a knight could leave the Order. These reestablished the Order's central mission of fighting the pagans and, for the Catholic members, restored its spiritual dimension. Unfortunately, by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the great powers had abandoned the concept of the Christian Crusade - indeed, knights of the Holy Sepulcher were excused their promise to fight to free the Holy Places. Stripped of its historic mission and most of its military functions, the Order henceforth limited itself to providing a regiment for the service of the Archdukes of Austria, Holy Roman Emperors and a living for the professed knights and priests.
The Napoleonic wars proved disastrous for the Order, as they did for every traditional Catholic institution. By the Peace of Lunéville of 9 February 1801 and the Treaty of Amiens of 25 March 1802, its sovereign possessions on the left bank of the Rhine, with annual revenues of 395,604 florins were distributed among the neighboring German sovereigns. In compensation the Order was given the chapters, abbeys and immediate convents of Voralberg in Austrian Swabia and the immediate convents of Augsburg and Constance. Its Grand Master, the Archduke Carl-Ludwig had taken office without either making his vows or being enthroned but nonetheless signed away its properties. The Order was given the ninth vote in the Council of Princes of the Empire, although the proposal to change the name from Grand Master to Elector was never effected and the dissolution of the Empire soon made this position irrelevant. On June 30, 1804 Carl-Ludwig resigned the Grand Magistery to his coadjutor, the Archduke Anton, who then made solemn profession.
By article XII of the Treaty of Pressburg of December 26, 1805 between Austria and France all the possessions of the Grand Magistery at Mergentheim and all those given in exchange earlier were attached to what was to be an hereditary Grand Mastership, invested in the male line of the Imperial House of Austria. The new Grand Master, the Archduke Anton, was the son of the Emperor Leopold II and brother of Francis I of Austria, and had already been elected Prince Bishop of Munster and Archbishop of Cologne. On 17 February 1806, the Emperor, Francis I, acknowledged his brother Anton as Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, confirming the provisions of the Treaty of Pressburg, until such time as it would become an hereditary dignity. At the same time he also imposed some limitations on the scope of the Treaty, to the detriment of the Order. The sovereign status recognized in the treaty of Pressburg was now to be attributed to whichever Prince of the House of Austria would in future hold the title of Grand Master, but this would be a limited sovereignty, subordinated to the "Headship of the Imperial House of Austria". The existing members were confirmed in their position, those received as novices were to be permitted to proceed to profession and candidates for the novitiate could continue their progress, but in a notable modification of the Grand Master's rights, future candidates for the novitiate could not be received without Imperial assent. No attempt was made to consult the Holy See and this act was in contravention of canon law. Meanwhile, the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine on July 12, 1806 cost the Order possession of several more commanderies, granted variously to the Kings of Bavaria and Wurtemberg and the Grand Duke of Baden. By decree of Napoleon, on April 24, 1809, the Order was suppressed in the territories of the Confederation, those knights who were not engaged in the armies opposing the French were required to be compensated by their new rulers and Mergentheim (Marienthal) was handed over to the Crown of Wurtemberg. The only bailiwicks remaining undisturbed were those of Austria, with three commanderies attributed to the Grand Commander and eight other commanderies and one convent, and the bailiwick of Adige and the Mountains. The commandery of Frankfurt am Main (Sachsenhausen) was retained, and in Austrian Silesia it preserved two commanderies and some parishes but lost the commandery of Namslau in Silesian Prussia, confiscated by the Prussian secularization commission on December 12, 1810. Despite pleas on the Order's behalf for the enactment of the terms of the treaty of Pressburg, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 refused to return any of the properties it had lost in the preceding twenty years of conflict.
The decision on how to treat the Order was postponed until February 20, 1826, when the Emperor Francis asked Metternich to determine whether the Teutonic Order should have its autonomy restored within the Austrian states. There were now only four professed knights in addition to the Grand Master; the Order urgently needed regeneration or it would disappear. By a decree of March 8, 1834, the Emperor returned to the Teutonic knights all the rights they had enjoyed by the Treaty of Pressburg, abrogating the limitation on those rights imposed by the Decree of February 17, 1806. The Order was now declared to be an "Autonomous, Religious and Military Institute" under the protection of the Emperor, with an Archduke as Hoch- und Deutschmeister and the status of "immediate fief of the Empire" while the Grand Master, the Archduke Anton, was to be treated as a Reigning Sovereign in all the Austrian States. His successors were required to request investiture from the "sovereign of Austria" and would be considered Ecclesiastical Vassal Princes, ranking before "all secular and ecclesiastical princes". The Emperor would become "suzerain and protector of the Order".
The Order had one class of knight who had to prove sixteen quarterings of exclusively German or Austrian nobility, subsequently relaxed to four quarterings for two hundred years, and be practicing Roman Catholics. This class was divided into Grand Commanders (suppressed by a reform of 24 April 1872), Grand Capitularies, Commanders and Knights. The knights were considered to be religious, subject to the discipline of the Head of the Order while the statutes regulating their conduct were based on those of 1606, restoring the chivalric character and ancient ceremonies, many of which had become moribund. Following a further reform of 13 July 1865, a division of Knights of Honour was introduced for which candidates were only required to prove German nobility in the paternal line and wore a slightly modified cross. The Chapter-General was to include the Grand Commander of the Bailiwick of Austria, the Grand Commander of Adige and the Mountains, the Grand Commander and Grand Capitular of the former Bailiwick of Franconia and the Grand Capitular of the former Bailiwick of Westphalia, giving the Grand Master the right to augment the number of Grand Capitularies at his discretion. A further limitation imposed the obligation to elect as Grand Master (or appoint as coadjutor) a member of the Imperial House of Austria and, if there were no Archdukes among the members, to elect the Prince most closely related to the Imperial House. Although the Emperor had failed to defend the Order against Napoleon, the restoration of its status was unquestionably his achievement. Emperor Francis died on March 3rd 1835 and the Grand Master one month later, on April 3rd.
The Order now elected the Archduke Maximilian of Austria-Este (1782-1863), brother of the Duke of Modena, who had been received as a novice in 1801 and made full profession in 1804. The new Emperor, Ferdinand I, issued a further decree on July 16, 1839, confirming the privileges granted by his father and those Rules and Statutes of 1606 which did not conflict with its status as an Austrian fief. A further Imperial Patent of June 38, 1840, defined the Order as an "Independent Religious Chivalric Institute" and "immediate Imperial fief" of which the Emperor was suzerain and protector. The Order was given free control of its own estates and finances, independent of political control and, while the professed knights were considered religious, earlier provisions permitting them to retain control of their own inheritances were maintained. Their fortunes could be augmented by inheritance after making profession but gifts by them of more than three hundred florins had to be authorized by the Grand Master. Furthermore, if a knight died without making a will, his fortune would pass to the Order.
The priests of the Order did not have to make noble proofs but were required to descend from a gentle family. In 1855, more than two centuries after the disappearance of the convents of ladies of the Order, the institution of Lady Hospitallers of Saint Mary of Jerusalem or Sisters of the Teutonic Order, was restored and the Grand Master gave several houses for the sisters at his own personal expense. Certain of the properties outside Austria had been recovered, notably the chapter house in Frankfurt, and these were now occupied by the religious brethren and sisters. Stripped of its military function, although the Knights were entitled to wear a military uniform, the Order was now dedicated to a religious, humanitarian and philanthropic mission in a spirit of "brotherly consciousness" and provided ambulance and hospital services in the wars of 1850-1 and 1859 (with Italy), 1864 and 1866 (with Prussia) and 1914-18. The reforms introduced by the Archduke Maximilian served to reinvigorate the spiritual life of the Order, with some fifty-four priests received during his twenty-eight year Magistery. Many ancient buildings belonging to the Order but long left to decay were restored while the church of the Order in Vienna was given many valuable relics and religious artifacts. By the time he died in 1863 Maximilian had given more than 800,000 florins for the support of the sisters, hospitals and schools, and 370,000 for the Teutonic priests.
To enable the Order to cope with the demands on its services, his successor as Hoch und Deutschmeister Archduke Wilhelm (1863-1894, professed 1846), introduced a special category of Marian knights and dames by a decree of March 26, 1871. These Marian knights and dames were not full members of the Order but were entitled to wear a variant of the Cross. Initially this category was limited to Catholic members of the nobility of the Dual Monarchy but by a further reform of 20 November 1880, was extended to include Catholics of any nationality. By the Bull Pia sodalitia of July 14, 1871, Pope Pius IX confirmed the ancient statutes and regulations, along with the new reforms. In the Papal Brief of March 16, 1886, Pope Leo XIII approved further reforms to the |
really shocked,” says Sylvain Guimont, who witnessed the scene and is an official with one of the unions representing federal environment workers. “There’s a concern that research will be lost forever.”
One day last summer, federal scientists using the fisheries and oceans library on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula saw a dumpster on the grounds filled with hundreds of research books and periodicals to be destroyed.
Tales of a shambolic “weeding” process, where books and documents deemed unnecessary were given away or trashed, have heightened fears that crucial environmental data will no longer be available to scientists.
Federal scientists complain that the decision to close the libraries was made without consultation. “The people who use this research don’t have any say in what is being saved or tossed aside,” says Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, which represents federal scientists.
Guimont was seeing the winding down of the Fisheries and Oceans Canada library in Mont-Joli, one of seven such branches the federal government has moved quickly to close. Their internationally renowned collections have been transferred to the two federal aquatic libraries that remain, in Sidney, B.C., and in Dartmouth, N.S.
Staff and research programs have been cut by a Conservative government focused on eliminating budget deficits and widely accused of placing resource development ahead of environmental protection.
Scientists see the closings as the latest hit to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, in charge of protecting Canada’s water and fish. Almost $80 million is to be taken out of its budget in 2014-2015.
“It’s a real blow to the ability of people to do research,” he added in a phone interview from B.C.
“It’s a travesty,” says Alain Sinclair, a federal fisheries scientist who retired four years ago and a former member of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, the body mandated by federal law to advise the government on species at risk.
Gail Shea, minister of fisheries and oceans, accuses critics of spreading “serious misinformation.” Her department insists there will be “no changes to the size or scope of the collection.”
“This is a government’s attempt … to do away with any of the evidence that might counter its political ideology,” Daviau charges. In a recent poll of her members, many scientists complained of being “muzzled” by Ottawa and of political interference in scientific work.
In a statement emailed to the Star by her spokesperson, Shea said no more than a dozen nonemployees visited each library annually. And more than 95 per cent of documents provided to users were done so over the Internet.
“It’s not fair to taxpayers to make them pay for libraries that so few people actually used,” Shea says, explaining the government’s main reason for consolidating the collections. The closings will save $443,000 in 2014-2015, according to government estimates.
But Kelly Whelan-Enns, lead researcher with Manitoba Wildlands, an environment protection group based in Winnipeg, sees the closings as a government bid to limit criticism of controversial plans, including pipelines to expand oilsands production in Alberta.
“If you restrict public access to information on fresh water by closing libraries, then you limit people’s ability to understand the environmental impact that kind of industrial development will have,” he says.
The libraries targeted were in Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Quebec, Manitoba and B.C. The shutdowns are all but complete. In a preliminary report last October, the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages asked the government to reconsider its decision to close the Mont-Joli library, the only French-language one in the country. Sophie Doucet, Shea’s spokesperson, says the government has not changed its mind.
In the final stages of the closing processes, DFO gave away material it says existed in more than one library. It was offered first to outside libraries, then DFO staff and lastly to the general public. Whatever remained was thrown out for recycling.
But scientists are not reassured.
“Because of the lack of transparency, we just don’t know how much is being saved,” says John Reynolds, professor of aquatic ecology at Simon Fraser University. “It certainly suggests a lack of respect for scientific information.
“Emails have been flying around among DFO staff saying, ‘Hey, all this stuff is about to go, come and grab it,” he adds. “I’ve seen photographs of classic books out of print for a long time, which have been salvaged by people because they were about to go.”
Days before Christmas, the public was invited to grab whatever was being left behind at the Eric Marshall Aquatic Research Library in Winnipeg. Whelan-Enns got there a few days after the free-for-all began.
““The materials were in complete disarray and just strewn about,” he says.
Up for grabs, he says, was research and materials that cost millions in taxpayer dollars to produce, including atlases, environmental assessments, studies on toxins in fish and decades-old “baseline” environmental data crucial for present-day comparisons.
Whelan-Enns and his colleagues carted away 30 boxes full of books and documents. He says library staff told him a consulting company drove away with a truckload of material.
Sinclair received several of the pictures dismayed fisheries scientists have been sharing. They include important works one DFO scientist grabbed from the library closed in St. John’s, N.L. Among them is a 10-volume set, funded by the federal government, called Fish Physiology. Sinclair described it as “seminal” research on the structure of fish conducted over decades in B.C.
“Anyone who works in fish diseases or on how they function in the wild — how they breathe, how they metabolize food — would be reading information from those texts,” Sinclair said, adding scientists have no idea if DFO has a copy.
Shea’s office said the minister was not available for an interview. In late December, as outrage over the library closings grew, her department posted answers to 19 questions online. It gave the total size of the print collection as 660,000 items. Some 30,000 departmental publications are available online and more documents are being digitized. But many books can’t be digitized due to copyright laws.
“The department may remove only content that is duplicated at one or more libraries and, in rare instances, materials which fall outside the subject disciplines pertinent to the department’s mandate,” says the DFO website, describing the material discarded from its collection.
In emails obtained by the Star, the DFO official in charge of closing the Mont-Joli library, Christine Lemay, describes the discarding process as “weeding.” The material in the dumpster, she writes, were periodicals the department has available online.
The department also promises to preserve and make available unpublished background material known as “grey literature.” That includes preliminary, statistical or technical reports, conference proceedings, notes from scientists, bibliographies and theses.
“This is something DFO paid a lot of attention to — to make sure that this kind of informal knowledge would be kept,” says Doucet, Shea’s spokesperson.
Scientists say there is no way of verifying such claims because, as one DFO researcher put it, “We’ve been kept pretty much in the dark.”
Who decides what material isn’t pertinent to the department’s mandate, they ask. Who verifies that only duplicates are being trashed or that “grey literature” — some of it a century old — is being preserved?
The biggest concern is the fate of unique, decades-old “baseline” research, Reynolds says. It includes everything from the temperature of oceans dating back decades, to surveys of plankton in the aquatic food chain, to the state of streams targeted for development.
A credible environmental assessment of the impact of the proposed pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to Kitimat in B.C., for example, would require historical information about the health of streams along its route, Reynolds notes. Is that information still available?
The sensible approach, he adds, would have been to give scientists a full inventory of the collection, have them decide what’s important, and then launch a massive digitizing effort — all before the libraries were closed.
A DFO scientist told the Star of recently trying to access several documents that were previously available in one of the closed libraries. They could not be found.
“They may be in the dump or in boxes waiting to be digitized, but they are not available to researchers,” says the scientist, who did not want to be identified.
Jennifer Hubbard, a science historian at Ryerson University, had a similar experience.
She’s editing a book on research conducted at DFO’s Biological Station in St. Andrews, N.B., where a library was closed. She used DFO’s online service to try to find “a couple of hundred” grey literature sources that were archived at that library. About 20 per cent of the material can’t be found online, and Hubbard has no idea if it still exists.
If it’s sitting in boxes in one of the consolidated libraries, who would know to ask for it unless they previously knew it existed? “Why would you destroy a library?” Hubbard asks.
Burton Ayles, a former director of science at DFO for the region covering the Great Lakes, the Prairies and the Arctic, says at the very least the government is making it harder for scientists to consult research.
No longer can scientists in Winnipeg, for instance, determine what books and material are appropriate for their research just by walking into the library and browsing. They now have to travel long distances or depend on time-consuming interlibrary loans.
The research, Ayles argues, “is effectively lost because it’s no longer accessible. It’s like stuff in your grandfather’s basement.”
More at thestar.com
Federal scientists can’t speak freely because of meddling: Survey
Prestigious journal slams government’s muzzle on federal scientistsIslamabad: Heavy cross-border fire from Afghanistan killed seven Pakistani soldiers Tuesday at a checkpoint in a troubled tribal area, the army said.
“Seven Frontier Corps soldiers embraced shahadat (martyrdom),” a military statement said. It was not immediately known whether the fire came from militants or from Afghan security forces.
It said the heavy fire from across the border targeted a checkpoint northeast of Angoor Adda in South Wazirstan tribal region.
Pakistan’s seven tribal districts near the Afghan border are rife with home-grown insurgents and are strongholds of Taliban and Al Qaida operatives.
Local militants have fled ongoing military offensives since 2008, taking refuge across the porous border from where they have launched attacks on Pakistani military checkpoints and civilians.
The latest attack came two months after a cross-border rocket attack by militants on a Pakistani checkpoint in Khyber tribal region killed at least four soldiers and wounded four others.
In 2011 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed in a Nato air strike on the Afghan border that sent tensions soaring, with Islamabad cutting off critical Nato supply routes into Afghanistan and Pakistani officials alleging the US had deliberately targeted their troops at border posts.
In June last year the army launched a long-awaited offensive against militants in the tribal areas of North Waziristan, where they had previously been operating with impunity.
Islamabad and Kabul regularly accuse each other of giving sanctuary to militants. Afghanistan in particular accuses Pakistan of supporting Afghan Taliban insurgents.
Pakistan has been battling a home-grown Islamist insurgency for over a decade following the late 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.1. Comments many times on the comforting weight of his duster, and the weight of weapons in his hand or pocket and pets lying on him (pressure stim)
2. Very attached to routine and familiarity and is upset if his routine is changed or interrupted (same car, apartment, clothes, meals, etc.)
3. Uses (sometimes pre-scripted) snarky comments as a coping mechanism when he’s having trouble communicating verbally
4. Hyperfocuses on tasks he loves, like building little Chicago or other magical workings, can forget to eat/sleep/shower and ignores social interactions when focused
5. Infodumps about magic
6. Stims with mister and mouse, staff and blasting rod (comments a lot on texture and weight and feeling)
7. Avoids eye contact (partially because of soulgaze possibility but still does it with people he’s already soulgazed)
8. His voice is described as being different than most (non-neurotypical) and he vocal stims with spells
9. Meltdowns and shutdowns due to anger and other strong emotions or sensitivities, sometimes has trouble controlling anger and not melting down violently
10. Mind jumps subjects in ways outside viewers don’t follow, comments don’t always seem to be related to the conversation (going from vampires to why hotdogs and hotdog buns are sold in different amounts) and makes “leaps of logic” that he sometimes struggles to explain to others
11. When he’s having a shutdown or panic attack from sensory problems, he counts by prime numbers to cope until he can go somewhere dark and quiet to calm down
12. Hyperempathy (always wants to help even when he knows people might be lying, gave lash and ivy names and empathized with them)Or, you know, one hot-headed pitcher can bean a batter for violating the "unwritten rules," the benches clear and -- voila! -- a new rivalry is born.
A rivalry can be embedded within the fabric of fandom, graphed by geography, hemmed by history and fine-tuned by decades of disgust and mistrust.
A rivalry can be embedded within the fabric of fandom, graphed by geography, hemmed by history and fine-tuned by decades of disgust and mistrust.
Or, you know, one hot-headed pitcher can bean a batter for violating the "unwritten rules," the benches clear and -- voila! -- a new rivalry is born.
That's what makes a ranking of rivalries a difficult balance between history and the here and now. We had no way of knowing, going into the season, that one of the biggest beefs in MLB last year would be between the Royals and Blue Jays. It just sort of happened that way.
With all that in mind, this is an attempt to identify, with the help of the Hot Stove, the five best rivalries in the game right now. With all due respect to the strict city or state divides in such places as New York, Chicago and Missouri, recent postseason history involving the Cardinals and Dodgers, the aforementioned Royals-Blue Jays tiff, and even the hacking scandal featuring the Cardinals and Astros, my five revolve around intra-division drama, because that's what matters most.
5. Yankees-Red Sox
This rivalry is a mere shadow of what it once was, and, given the fact that the Red Sox have finished last in the American League East in three of the past four seasons and the Yankees finished well out of the running the lone year in that span in which Boston finished first (2013), there is a legitimate argument to strike it from the top five altogether.
But I just can't do it. There's too much history here and too much possibility that these two lovebirds are banging heads down the stretch again in 2016. Besides, you'd have to imagine David Ortiz's final season will induce some homages to 2003 and '04, if nothing else.
Video: NYY@BOS: Ortiz hits first walk-off with Red Sox
The Yanks reclaimed some respect with a 2015 built on bounce-back seasons from some of those old dudes in their lineup, while the Red Sox made some very serious offseason acquisitions to try to do the same. There's an interesting ninth-inning dynamic here now, with each club landing one of the best closers in the game (Aroldis Chapman to the Bronx, Craig Kimbrel to Boston). It will be interesting to see who fares better. And maybe the likes of Luis Severino, Greg Bird, Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts will garner some of the bad blood that once made this matchup so great.
For now, the best outward sign of continued strife came from Larry Lucchino, former president and CEO of the Red Sox and chairman for Triple-A Pawtucket, in a news release announcing the hiring of VP of sales Rob Crain, who previous worked at the Yankees' Triple-A affiliate Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
"His defection from [the Yanks'] Minor League tentacles," the release said, "demonstrates hope for redemption for all."
Yep, still a rivalry, folks.
4. Mets-Nationals
Both of these clubs have their annual Interleague battles of regional appeal, with the Beltways Series and the Subway Series. And on that note, 2015 was probably the first time since the late 1980s that New York felt like a Mets town.
But again, nothing trumps a division duel, and this one has ratcheted up considerably thanks to a gentleman by the name of Yoenis Cespedes.
Video: With Cespedes, Justice sees Mets as division favorite
First, it was Cespedes' arrival at the Trade Deadline last summer that served as the biggest spark in the Mets outlasting the Nationals in a division race that everybody and their mother went into the year thinking would be won by Washington. Symbolically enough, Cespedes' first games with New York came during the three-game sweep of the Nats that permanently put the Mets in first place.
And then, as you know, Cespedes' long free-agent foray wound up centering around these East beasts -- the Nationals willing to go to five years, but the Mets taking advantage of Cespedes' desire to stay in the Big Apple with a three-year pact (and opt-out after 2016). So the Mets were able to retain a guy the Nats were hoping to steal, while Washington had already added longtime New York second baseman Daniel Murphy. Some interesting Hot Stove subplots that underscore the likelihood of these teams playing meaningful second-half games against each other again this year.
3. Rangers-Astros
You'll remember that not all Astros fans were on board with the idea of their club suddenly abandoning the Senior Circuit before the 2013 season. But the one benefit that even the fiercest detractors of that defection could agree with was the added meaning thrust upon the Lone Star Series. And in 2015, both of these clubs made a Texas-sized leap in the standings, meaning it was not only the first time since 2004 that both of these ballclubs were still in contention deep into the season but that they were directly opposing each other in the process.
Video: TEX@HOU: Odor, Conger exchange words as benches clear
No longer is Nolan Ryan's move from Arlington to Houston the most compelling plot point here (though it does satisfy as a subplot). The Astros were in first place for 139 days in the 2015 season, but the Rangers usurped that standing in the season's last two weeks, winning five of seven September meetings.
And these, of course, remain two legit contenders in a deep and compelling AL West for 2016 -- the Astros with their bullpen buoyed by Ken Giles and the Rangers with their rotation soon to be strengthened by the return of Yu Darvish.
2. Dodgers-Giants
Let me say, first of all, that I love the D-backs' direction, aggressively adding to what was a very good core and legitimately trying to vie with the National League West's perennial powers. The Dodgers partied in their pool a few years back, and that no doubt inspired D-backs president Derrick Hall, in a dead-on recent impersonation of Donald Trump, to jokingly call the Dodgers and their fans "vile, disgusting people." Maybe Arizona will make the West a legit three-headed monster this year.
Video: Prime 9 covers Dodgers and Giants rivalry
But until the wins and losses flesh out that vision, there's no doubt Dodgers-Giants is the West's surest strife, and it satisfies both for its history and its present-day implications. These two teams have finished first and second in the NL West in three of the past four seasons. Over the past six seasons, Los Angeles has three division rings, while San Francisco has two division titles and three World Series rings.
So these are two of the sport's biggest successes, as well as two of its biggest spenders -- a point only amplified by the Giants' aggressive activity this winter.
Some would even paint the front offices here with a broad brush and call the Brian Sabean-led Giants "old school" and the Andrew Friedman-led Dodgers representative of the game's increasingly nerdy bent. I'm not sure either characterization is entirely fair or accurate, but hey, it functions well enough as a distinction in approach. For now, the upper hand here is clear: The Dodgers own the division, but the Giants own October.
1. Cardinals-Cubs
The Pirates are the division's other principal figure, but no one can deny that this is the NL Central's source of fiercest friction. Until 2015, it had been a rivalry that, save for a one-off moment like "The Sandberg Game" or the national narrative that was the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home run record chase, existed only in the minds of the most passionate denizens of St. Louis and the Second City. The Cubs, frankly, did little to ensure the rivalry remained operative, and the two clubs had never even met in the postseason.
• Cubs-Cards rivalry heats up
Obviously, 2015 changed everything. In the regular season, the Cardinals and Cubs played 19 times. Seven of those games were decided by a run, and two more were decided by two runs. The Cards took the season series, but the Cubs -- foreshadowing the October result -- won six of the last nine. When they met up in the NL Championship Series, the Cubs played an unexpected round of Home Run Derby, with a memorable Kyle Schwarber blast landing atop the right-field video board at Wrigley, en route to a 3-1 victory.
Video: MLB Tonight discusses Cubs-Cardinals rivalry
Then, the defections, which added Hot Stove hype to the in-season struggle. First, the Cubs poached John Lackey. But the big one was Jason Heyward not only turning down a bigger offer from the Cardinals but miffing them in the process when he told Chicago reporters that the Cards' over-30 core of Yadier Molina, Matt Holliday and Adam Wainwright isn't going to be around much longer and that he preferred the long-term outlook for the Cubs' young group.
Them's fighting words, in the mind of a Cardinals club with a particularly impressive recent resume (five division titles and two World Series titles, as well as a third appearance, just in the past decade). And while the Cubs beat the Cards last October, they still have to prove they can outlast them in the 162-game schedule and claim a World Series crown of their own.“Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don’t know,” pioneering investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote in a beautiful 1926 letter of life-advice to his baby son. And yet the folly of the human condition is precisely that we can’t know what we don’t know — as E.F. Schumacher elegantly put it in his guide for the perplexed, “everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.” What obscures those transformative unknowns from view are the unconscious biases that even the best-intentioned of us succumb to.
In Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril (public library), serial entrepreneur and author Margaret Heffernan examines the intricate, pervasive cognitive and emotional mechanisms by which we choose, sometimes consciously but mostly not, to remain unseeing in situations where “we could know, and should know, but don’t know because it makes us feel better not to know.” We do that, Heffernan argues and illustrates through a multitude of case studies ranging from dictatorships to disastrous love affairs to Bernie Madoff, because “the more tightly we focus, the more we leave out” — or, as cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz put it in her remarkable exploration of exactly what we leave out in our daily lives, because “attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator.”
The concept of “willful blindness,” Heffernan explains, comes from the law and originates from legislature passed in the 19th century — it’s the somewhat counterintuitive idea that you’re responsible “if you could have known, and should have known, something that instead you strove not to see.” What’s most uneasy-making about the concept is the implication that it doesn’t matter whether the avoidance of truth is conscious. This basic mechanism of keeping ourselves in the dark, Heffernan argues, plays out in just about every aspect of life, but there are things we can do — as individuals, organizations, and nations — to lift our blinders before we walk into perilous situations that later produce the inevitable exclamation: How could I have been so blind?
Heffernan explores the “friendly alibis” we manufacture for our own inertia — the same ones fueling the “backfire effect” that explains why it’s so hard for us to change our minds. She writes in the book:
Whether individual or collective, willful blindness doesn’t have a single driver, but many. It is a human phenomenon to which we all succumb in matters little and large. We can’t notice and know everything: the cognitive limits of our brain simply won’t let us. That means we have to filter or edit what we take in. So what we choose to let through and to leave out is crucial. We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital beliefs. It’s a truism that love is blind; what’s less obvious is just how much evidence it can ignore. Ideology powerfully masks what, to the uncaptivated mind, is obvious, dangerous, or absurd and there’s much about how, and even where, we live that leaves us in the dark. Fear of conflict, fear of change keeps us that way. An unconscious (and much denied) impulse to obey and conform shields us from confrontation and crowds provide friendly alibis for our inertia. And money has the power to blind us, even to our better selves.
One of the subtlest yet most pervasive manifestations of our willful blindness is our choice of mates. Data from 25 million online dating site questionnaires reveal that “we mostly marry and live with people very like ourselves” — a finding that Heffernan points out always annoys people:
We all want to feel that we have made our own choices, that they weren’t predictable, that we aren’t so vain as to choose ourselves, and that we are freer spirits, with a broader, more eclectic range of taste than the data imply. We don’t like to feel that we’re blind to the allure of those who are not like us; we don’t like to see how trapped we are inside our own identity. […] We like ourselves, not least because we are known and familiar to ourselves. So we like people similar to us — or that we just imagine might have some attributes in common with us. They feel familiar too, and safe. And those feelings of familiarity and security make us like ourselves more because we aren’t anxious. We belong. Our self-esteem rises. We feel happy. Human beings want to feel good about themselves and to feel safe, and being surrounded by familiarity and similarity satisfies those needs very efficiently.
And yet, she notes, our minds work much like the dating site algorithms — we scan life for matches and, when we find one, we relish the feel-good affirmation. It’s just one manifestation of our soft spot for “filter bubbles,” exploited by everything from Amazon’s book recommendation engines to the elaborate audience-tailoring of modern media. (Heffernan touches on the big-picture disservice in the media’s insidious practice of narrowing our horizons for profit, rather than expanding them in the public interest: “[Media companies] know that when we buy a newspaper or a magazine, we aren’t looking for a fight… The search for what is familiar and comfortable underlies our media consumption habits in just the same way as it makes us yearn for Mom’s mac ’n’ cheese.”) She captures the dark side:
The problem with this is that everything outside that warm, safe circle is our blind spot.
Remarkably, these blind spots turn out to have a physical foundation in the brain. Heffernan quotes neurologist Robert Burton, who studies the biological basis of bias and why our brains tend to reject information that broadens our outlook:
Neural networks don’t give you a direct route from, say, a flash of light straight to your consciousness. There are all kinds of committees that vote along the way, whether that flash of light is going to go straight to your consciousness or not. And if there are enough ‘yes’ votes, then yes you can see it. If there aren’t, you could miss it. But here’s the thing: What does your brain like? What gets the “yes” vote? It likes the stuff it already recognizes. It likes what is familiar. So you will see the familiar stuff right away. The other stuff may take longer, or it may never impinge on your consciousness. You just won’t see it.
Burton illustrates this with a beautiful, if unsettling, metaphor:
Imagine the gradual formation of a riverbed. The initial flow of water might be completely random — there are no preferred routes in the beginning. But once a creek is formed, water is more likely to follow this newly created path of least resistance. As the water continues, the creek deepens and a river develops.
Over the course of our lives, our accumulation of experiences, relationships, and ideas shapes the proverbial riverbed of the mind, and the water begins to flow with less and less resistance, which in turn produces a sense of certainty and ease that only deepens the riverbed. (In the excellent A General Theory of Love, these coteries of gradually encoded information patterns are elegantly described as “attractors”.) Heffernan contemplates the repercussions:
Our blindness grows out of the small, daily decisions that we make, which embed us more snugly inside our affirming thoughts and values. And what’s most frightening about this process is that as we see less and less, we feel more comfort and greater certainty. We think we see more — even as the landscape shrinks.
Hardly anywhere is our willful blindness more unrelenting than in love. The old adage that “love is blind,” it turns out, has strong psychological roots:
When we love someone, we see them as smarter, wittier, prettier, stronger than anyone else sees them. To us, a beloved parent, partner, or child has endlessly more talent, potential, and virtue than mere strangers can ever discern. Being loved, when we are born, keeps us alive; without love for her child, how could any new mother manage or any child survive? And if we grow up surrounded by love, we feel secure in the knowledge that others believe in us, will champion and defend us. That confidence — that we are loved and therefore lovable — is an essential building block of our identity and self-confidence. We believe in ourselves, at least in part, because others believe in us and we depend mightily on their belief. As human beings, we are highly driven to find and to protect the relationships that make us feel good about ourselves and that make us feel safe.. Those mirrors confirms our sense of self-worth. Love does the same thing … and that seems to be just as true even if our love is based on illusion. Indeed, there seems to be some evidence not only that all love is based on illusion — but that love positively requires illusion in order to endure.
Because of how integral love is to our sense of identity — lest we forget: “Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” — we are remarkably averse to seeing anything that threatens that sense by pulling the virtues of our loved ones into question.
The most harrowing example of this blindness, Heffernan points out, is in families damaged by child abuse. Some 700,000 cases of child abuse are reported each year — and this is one of the most underreported forms of violence in society for a variety of reasons — which makes it impossible to imagine how so many families can be blind to the tragedy within. And yet, Heffernan notes, imagining and acknowledging such a devastating idea requires of non-perpetrating parents and guardians to question their own reality to such a degree that many find unconscious escape in their “willful blindness.”
She returns to the broader phenomenon:
Nations, institutions, individuals can all be blinded by love, by the need to believe themselves good and worthy and valued. We simply could not function if we believed ourselves to be otherwise. But when we are blind to the flaws and failings of what we love, we aren’t effective either… We make ourselves powerless when we pretend we don’t know. That’s the paradox of blindness: We think it will make us safe even as it puts us in danger.
And yet willful blindness, Heffernan argues, isn’t a fatal diagnosis of the human condition — it may be our natural, evolutionarily cultivated tendency, but it is within our capability to diffuse it with the right combination of intention and attention. She reflects on the heartening evidence to which the various studies reviewed in the book point:
The most crucial learning that has emerged from this science is the recognition that we continue to change right up to the moment we die. Every experience and encounter, each piece of new learning, each relationship or reassessment alters how our minds work. And no two experiences are the same. In his work on the human genome, the Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner reminds us that even identical twins will have different experiences in different environments and that that makes them fundamentally different beings. Identical twins develop different immune systems. Mental practice alone can change how our brains operate. The plasticity and responsiveness of our minds is what makes each of us most remarkable… We aren’t automata serving the master computer in our heads, and our capacity for change can never be underestimated. […] We make ourselves powerless when we choose not to know. But we give ourselves hope when we insist on looking. The very fact that willful blindness is willed, that it is a product of a rich mix of experience, knowledge, thinking, neurons, and neuroses, is what gives us the capacity to change it. Like Lear, we can learn to see better, not just because our brain changes but because we do. As all wisdom does, seeing starts with simple questions: What could I know, should I know, that I don’t know? Just what am I missing here?
Willful Blindness is a provocative and necessary read from cover to cover. Complement it with NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain and Rebecca Solnit’s manifesto for welcoming the unknown.A group of high school students in Tennessee has lost a lawsuit aimed at forcing school administrators to allow them to wear T-shirts to school displaying the Confederate flag.
A lawyer for the students had taken their free speech fight to the US Supreme Court. On Monday the high court dismissed the case, Barr v. LaFon, without comment.
The action stems from a lawsuit challenging a 2005 policy banning images of the Confederate flag at William Blount High School in Maryville, Tenn.
The ban was enacted during a period of heightened racial tension at the school following an altercation between an African-American student and a white student. In the months that followed, racist graffiti began appearing on school walls, including a drawing of a noose next to a Confederate flag in the boys' restroom.
Between August 2005 and March 2006, school officials encountered 452 student dress-code violations, including 23 involving displays of the Confederate flag, according to court documents.
Three students, Derek Barr, Roger Craig White, and Chris White, filed a lawsuit claiming the school's anti-Confederate flag policy frustrated their desire to express their Southern heritage by wearing clothing depicting the Confederate flag to school.
School officials said their policy was aimed at preventing a disruption to the educational process in light of growing racial tensions on the campus. Director of Blount County Schools, Alvin Hord, said he did not ban the Confederate flag because it was a "racist symbol," but because of the ongoing racial confrontation at the school.
A federal judge agreed with school officials, upholding the school's ban. That ruling was later affirmed by the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
In rejecting the case, the US Supreme Court action leaves in place the appeals court's August 2008 ruling upholding the school policy barring depictions of the Confederate flag on T-shirts and other clothing at school. The appeals court said school officials could reasonably forecast that images of the Confederate flag would "substantially and materially disrupt the school environment."
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Potential for blockbuster cases in high court's new term
The justices themselves may also see their roles on the court evolve. Click here to read story.
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Follow us on Twitter.The next installment in the Mass Effect series is still “years away from launch” according to Bioware, but that doesn’t stop anyone from talking about it. Actually, it’s even more reason to talk about it and perhaps that’s actually what the company wants. In any case, we may hear more about Mass Effect 4 very soon as the game will be featured in a panel at Honorcon 2014. The convention celebrates military science fiction literature and takes place during October 31 – November 2 in Raleigh, North Carolina. The panel in question goes by the name of “Science Fiction in Videogaming” and will feature the most important titles that have shaped the genre, from old school games like Spacewar all the way to upcoming ones like Mass Effect 4.
“From the earliest video games (Spacewar!) to the current crop of games for the most recent consoles (Mass Effect 4 anyone?),” reads the panel’s description on the Honorcon 2014 website. “Science Fiction has played a huge role in the stories and universes in videogaming. Follow us as we take you back in time and towards the future of Science Fiction in videogames. Presented by Richard Dansky and Gerry Martin.” Panelist Gerry Martin went on Twitter earlier to share the good news with everybody. “I’m excited I’ve my own panel @HonorCon,” he said, “it’s “Science Fiction in Videogames: From Spacewar to Mass Effect 4”.
So what are the chances that we’ll hear some new details regarding the game? Kinda low if you ask me. Mass Effect 4 (including its actual name) will most likely be unveiled at E3 2015 or some other major event. Regardless, it will be nice to hear what the panelists think about it and if they believe that the upcoming game will end up playing a major role in shaping the sci-fi genre just like the trilogy did. We’ll let you know as soon as we learn something new regarding Mass Effect 4 so stay tuned.Forever Alone in the Jungle
As someone who mains jungler in solo-queue ranked, nothing is more frustrating than enemy junglers controlling your own territory. It affects you by putting you behind in farm and levels, but it also affects your team as a whole |
the dimming in the KIC 8462852 light curve were caused by the destruction of a family of comets remains the preferred explanation."
But Schaefer's new look at the old observations of KIC 8462852 casts doubt on what has been the leading scientific hypothesis for the system's weirdness since it was first noted.
Let's just break down how odd this is real quick. Kepler, which observed the star over the course of a few recent years in the 21st century, finds that there are some very large objects passing in front of it at irregular intervals. Then Schaefer goes back and looks at the astronomical equivalent of the dusty old microfiche machines in the back of the library and finds that it has also been getting slowly dimmer for about as long as we've been watching it (or at least the area of the sky that it's in), which is the exact opposite of how stars like our sun normally behave.
Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory/Harvard College
"This star is really weird; normal main sequence stars slowly increase in luminosity as they age, on time scales of hundreds of millions of years. A star that gets 20 percent dimmer in a century is unprecedented," Massimo Marengo told me. He's one of the Iowa State researchers who backed the comet swarm hypothesis in a paper published in November.
This pokes a hole in the theory that big comets are causing the big dips we're seeing in the star's light.
"With 36 giant comets required to make the one 20 percent Kepler dip, and all of these along one orbit, we would need 648,000 giant-comets to create the century-long fading," Schaefer writes. "I do not see how it is possible for something like 648,000 giant comets to exist around one star, nor to have their orbits orchestrated so as to all pass in front of the star within the last century. So I take this century-long dimming as a strong argument against the comet-family hypothesis to explain the Kepler dips."
I contacted Boyajian to see what she thought of the newly revisited history of "her" star (KIC 8462852 is informally referred to as "Tabby's Star" in astronomy circles) and she told me she has discussed it with Schaefer and is intrigued by what he found. And more baffled than ever by the phenomenon.
"I think this new analysis is very exciting. It is the second piece of evidence we now have that says what is happening to the star is very unusual (the first being the Kepler light curve). However, it does not help the case for the comet hypothesis, nor point us into any obvious direction to pursue next."
Marengo told me he agrees that the comet swarm seems a less likely explanation for all the dimming, but he thinks a ring around the star of a certain shape and composition might explain all the weirdness.
"Note that eccentric geometrically thin circumstellar rings around stars similar to KIC 8462852 are not unprecedented: Fomalhaut has one."
Throughout my reporting on this bizarre star system, every scientist I've contacted always reiterates that the "alien megastructures" explanation should be a "hypothesis of last resort," and so far there is no actual evidence besides what are basically unexplained shadows to point in that direction. Still, it's hard not to let the imagination run wild, or at least take a brisk jog around the block. Do the photographic plates from Harvard show a centuries-long construction project on a scale beyond human capability happening around a distant star?
NASA/David A. Hardy/ROE/ATC/NSF
Probably not, but until we get more evidence of what's really going on, it's not impossible.
"I don't know how the dimming affects the megastructure hypothesis, except that it would *seem* to exclude a lot of natural explanations, including comets," Jason Wright wrote in an email to CNET on Thursday.
Wright notes that "since no one uses photographic plates any more, it's basically a lost art...also, the data are very noisy." But, he adds, "Schaefer is an expert at this stuff, though."
Schaefer does not go so far as to suggest a possible source of all the strange long-term and short-term dimming happening around KIC 8462852. But he does believe, per Occam's Razor -- the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the best -- that both are likely caused by the same thing, whatever that may be.
So one thing is likely causing a star to appear dimmer over time, and also to be partially blocked every now and then by something like a bunch of giant comets, each potentially as large as the size of Connecticut.
In addition to his ring suggestion, Marengo offers one other tongue-in-cheek hypothesis in an email: "Of course we may all be wrong and this could just be the Starkiller base feeding off the poor star..."Chaosvuistje Profile Joined April 2010 Netherlands 2560 Posts Last Edited: 2011-07-21 15:09:08 #1 Zerg vs Protoss : Upgrade centric style.
A style of ZvP that lets you comfortably get into +2 baneling drops.
Flowchart below, credits and thanks go to Funkomatic
+ Show Spoiler [Flowchart of the guide] +
Link to the image, if it doesnt resize
A style of ZvP that lets you comfortably get into +2 baneling drops.Flowchart below, credits and thanks go to Funkomatic Introduction
The philosophy behind this style is that if you entered the lategame in ZvP, you have probably already lost. A good protoss on 4 bases has litterally everything on his fingertips. From massive amount of gateways, to a collosus voidray ball, or to a big immortal sentry high templar ball. Meanwhile, the zerg options in this phase dwindle. Roaches aren't as effective anymore, hydra's die sooner than banelings do, zerglings get their legs set on fire and mutalisks get blunk.
So with this mindset in mind, we focus on the mid and early game strength. Believe it or not, earlygame and midgame protoss and zerg are very similar in strength. The protoss has the advantage of strength in quality, a shorter reinforcement path and a variety of ways to zone armies. While the zerg has the advantage in sheer numbers of units, vision, unit speed and quickly rebuilt armies.
The build I use is getting a quick evolution chamber after expanding. Then getting a quick +1 melee upgrade for your zerglings. This clears the way for the +2 melee upgrade, which will help in the baneling bomb transition.
That wraps up this introduction. Onto the content.
The philosophy behind this style is that if you entered the lategame in ZvP, you have probably already lost. A good protoss on 4 bases has litterally everything on his fingertips. From massive amount of gateways, to a collosus voidray ball, or to a big immortal sentry high templar ball. Meanwhile, the zerg options in this phase dwindle. Roaches aren't as effective anymore, hydra's die sooner than banelings do, zerglings get their legs set on fire and mutalisks get blunk.So with this mindset in mind, we focus on the mid and early game strength. Believe it or not, earlygame and midgame protoss and zerg are very similar in strength. The protoss has the advantage of strength in quality, a shorter reinforcement path and a variety of ways to zone armies. While the zerg has the advantage in sheer numbers of units, vision, unit speed and quickly rebuilt armies.The build I use is getting a quick evolution chamber after expanding. Then getting a quick +1 melee upgrade for your zerglings. This clears the way for the +2 melee upgrade, which will help in the baneling bomb transition.That wraps up this introduction. Onto the content. -------------------------------------------Build-------------------------------------------
The build starts off with a 14 gas, 14 pool.
Once your pool finishes, build one set of zerglings, then get the queen and metabolic boost.
Send the zerglings to your natural to attack the possible probe hanging out there, then expand.
After you expanded successfully, put down an evolution chamber and make drones until 26 supply. Once the evolution chamber finishes, get the +1 melee attack.
For those who like the numbers:
9 Overlord
( optional, but advised dronescout on 12 )
14 gas
14 pool
Around 70 gas, take one drone off of gas.
16 overlord
1 set of zerglings, rally to natural
Zergling speed
Queen
19 drone, rally to natural
20 Expand.
19 Evolution chamber
Drones until 22
22 overlord
@Evolution chamber finishing, +1 melee
Drones until 26
Lings until you're relatively sure what the protoss is up to
Lair when you feel safe
@+1 melee finishing, +1 range and roachwarren
The build starts off with a 14 gas, 14 pool.Once your pool finishes, build one set of zerglings, then get the queen and metabolic boost.Send the zerglings to your natural to attack the possible probe hanging out there, then expand.After you expanded successfully, put down an evolution chamber and make drones until 26 supply. Once the evolution chamber finishes, get the +1 melee attack.For those who like the numbers: ---------------------------------------Earlygame ( Holding vs one base )---------------------------------------
The ZvP early game hinges on scouting. Everything you do rests on your knowledge and the read on your opponent. For this reason I love drone scouting. Knowing where your opponent has spawned while seeing if he is going for a forge first or a gateway first is so critical and helpful. So I don't mind losing whatever minerals of mining time if I can scout a cannon rush or a proxy gate in time.
If you scout a onebaser ( aka no fast expand w/ forge ) we will get +1 melee for our zerglings no matter what. And since we want to get zergling speed AND that upgrade fast, we will go for a 14 gas 14 pool build. Taking a drone off of gas will ensure that you won't have a massive surplus of gas when the evolution chamber finishes.
If you love going 15 hatch or 14 pool 16 hatch, ditch that if you want to go for this build. If you don't get the gas this 'early' the +1 upgrade will miss its timing against most 1base protoss pushes.
One set of zerglings to kill the probe that blocks our expansion and expand right after. Build the evolution chamber after expanding.
If he pylon blocks your expansion, get a round of drones and your evolution chamber up. Once the pylon dies you'll have enough minerals to build the hatchery again.
Scout the front of the base with the lings, make sure they don't get sniped before you have some good intel. Knowing what unit comes out second is one of the single most important thing to scout in ZvP.
These are the things to look out for in descending order of importance:
1. Energy on the nexus
2. Second unit from the gateway
3. Gas
4. Chrono on warpgate research
Below are the builds that are most common and the responses to them. Including the things to look for in scouting.
The ZvP early game hinges on scouting. Everything you do rests on your knowledge and the read on your opponent. For this reason I love drone scouting. Knowing where your opponent has spawned while seeing if he is going for a forge first or a gateway first is so critical and helpful. So I don't mind losing whatever minerals of mining time if I can scout a cannon rush or a proxy gate in time.If you scout a onebaser ( aka no fast expand w/ forge ) we will get +1 melee for our zerglings no matter what. And since we want to get zergling speed AND that upgrade fast, we will go for a 14 gas 14 pool build. Taking a drone off of gas will ensure that you won't have a massive surplus of gas when the evolution chamber finishes.If you love going 15 hatch or 14 pool 16 hatch, ditch that if you want to go for this build. If you don't get the gas this 'early' the +1 upgrade will miss its timing against most 1base protoss pushes.One set of zerglings to kill the probe that blocks our expansion and expand right after. Build the evolution chamber after expanding.If he pylon blocks your expansion, get a round of drones and your evolution chamber up. Once the pylon dies you'll have enough minerals to build the hatchery again.Scout the front of the base with the lings, make sure they don't get sniped before you have some good intel. Knowing what unit comes out second is one of the single most important thing to scout in ZvP.These are the things to look out for in descending order of importance:1. Energy on the nexus2. Second unit from the gateway3. Gas4. Chrono on warpgate researchBelow are the builds that are most common and the responses to them. Including the things to look for in scouting. Onebase plays
Stalker/zealot'mongoloid' 4gate. + Show Spoiler +
All Chrono saved – one gas – Chronoing cyber core
Once you scout this, or feel like it is coming, scout using your lings all throughout your main base and natural. Look at all the hiding places! There is a pylon somewhere and if you don't find it soon enough he will have a reinforcing point.
Meanwhile, when you're absolutely certain that you're facing the stalker zealot 4gate. Put down a baneling nest. Build nothing but zerglings and put max drones back on gas. The +1 will help both your zerglings and your banelings if it has enough time to finish. Which won't be in time for the first warp in round.
Let him attack the natural if neccesairy, poke in and out occasionally but don't engage until you have banelings up or your +1 has finished. Move the banelings in while attacking with the zerglings. If your zerglings get hit by the zealots, retreat and let the banelings blow up on the zealots. After the zealots are badly hurt/dead, surround the ball as much as you can and crush through. Kill the warp in pylon and now, you can delay his natural as long as possible.
The game is pretty much over for him then, the only way to come back is some techswitch to something cheesy, so prepare for voids/DTs/onebase collosus (lol) and you'll be perfectly fine. All Chrono saved – one gas – Chronoing cyber coreOnce you scout this, or feel like it is coming, scout using your lings all throughout your main base and natural. Look at all the hiding places! There is a pylon somewhere and if you don't find it soon enough he will have a reinforcing point.Meanwhile, when you're absolutely certain that you're facing the stalker zealot 4gate. Put down a baneling nest. Build nothing but zerglings and put max drones back on gas. The +1 will help both your zerglings and your banelings if it has enough time to finish. Which won't be in time for the first warp in round.Let him attack the natural if neccesairy, poke in and out occasionally but don't engage until you have banelings up or your +1 has finished. Move the banelings in while attacking with the zerglings. If your zerglings get hit by the zealots, retreat and let the banelings blow up on the zealots. After the zealots are badly hurt/dead, surround the ball as much as you can and crush through. Kill the warp in pylon and now, you can delay his natural as long as possible.The game is pretty much over for him then, the only way to come back is some techswitch to something cheesy, so prepare for voids/DTs/onebase collosus (lol) and you'll be perfectly fine.
Regular 4gate. + Show Spoiler +
Some chrono saved – Second unit stalker – Chronoing cyber core – one gas.
With this build, your lings will have a good advantage over his units due to the upgrade. Since you will want mostly speedlings, all of your units will basically be 20% more effective. To put this in perspective, its basically like you can surround a zealot with 6 lings instead of 5.
Actively scout for pylons, keep a ling at each watchtower and keep some lings at his ramp to catch leaving probes. The pylon is the lifeline for his build. If you can't find it in time, keep your lings back a bit, but NEVER in your main. Keep a queen at the natural instead of the main. Because having ramps forcefielded means you'll die, regardless of what build you went, if most of your forces are in your main/come from your main.
Try to catch his army in the open. Your speedlings need a surround to do good damage. Don't engage with a lot of forcefields up, no matter how small his army is. He WILL be more cost effective in the engagement, and you want to keep his effeciency as low as possible with every engagement in ZvP.
If he hangs around in his base, or he is building up forces for a long time, build some spinecrawlers. His sentries will build up a large amount of energy, which isn't good for your zerglings or queens. In this case, spinecrawlers will make it easier for you to stay alive. Because unlike roaches, banelings, zerglings and queens, spinecrawlers cannot be forced away from the protoss or get put in a position where a stalker outranges it.
Make roaches once the tech goes online and if you have the gas and minerals to support it. And make sure you don't lose most of your lings to forcefields ( which is easy to do, don't let them catch you ).
Once you fended off the 4gate, macro up and continiue your normal game. You can usually get +2 range attack and go for a roach or roach hydra bust to punish his weaker tech and economy. Some chrono saved – Second unit stalker – Chronoing cyber core – one gas.With this build, your lings will have a good advantage over his units due to the upgrade. Since you will want mostly speedlings, all of your units will basically be 20% more effective. To put this in perspective, its basically like you can surround a zealot with 6 lings instead of 5.Actively scout for pylons, keep a ling at each watchtower and keep some lings at his ramp to catch leaving probes. The pylon is the lifeline for his build. If you can't find it in time, keep your lings back a bit, but NEVER in your main. Keep a queen at the natural instead of the main. Because having ramps forcefielded means you'll die, regardless of what build you went, if most of your forces are in your main/come from your main.Try to catch his army in the open. Your speedlings need a surround to do good damage. Don't engage with a lot of forcefields up, no matter how small his army is. He WILL be more cost effective in the engagement, and you want to keep his effeciency as low as possible with every engagement in ZvP.If he hangs around in his base, or he is building up forces for a long time, build some spinecrawlers. His sentries will build up a large amount of energy, which isn't good for your zerglings or queens. In this case, spinecrawlers will make it easier for you to stay alive. Because unlike roaches, banelings, zerglings and queens, spinecrawlers cannot be forced away from the protoss or get put in a position where a stalker outranges it.Make roaches once the tech goes online and if you have the gas and minerals to support it. And make sure you don't lose most of your lings to forcefields ( which is easy to do, don't let them catch you ).Once you fended off the 4gate, macro up and continiue your normal game. You can usually get +2 range attack and go for a roach or roach hydra bust to punish his weaker tech and economy.
3gate 1stargate voidray push + Show Spoiler +
Some chrono saved – two gas – stalker as second unit – No constant chrono on warpgate
You play this out like a regular 4 gate, except you constantly make queens from both of your hatcheries. Having 4 or 5 will do the trick easily. Also, put down a sporecrawler at your natural choke.
His ground army will be more flimsy than usual, less sentries because the voidrays gobble up the gas, so a much easier surround for you. Make sure the queens attack the voidrays and when you engage, select all your queens and transfuse the weakened ones as needed. The lings should be enough to overpower the smaller gateway army with added support of queens, and the voidrays will simply die to the queens range and health.
Carry on after you crushed his force. Get +2 range attack and go for a roach or roach hydra bust.
Dark templar into 4 gate + Show Spoiler +
No chrono saved – two gas – Stalker as second unit – Next to no chrono on warpgate.
These are telltale signs of a darktemplar rush in the making. Since the protoss can't chrono buildings to make them build faster, and the only thing that you wouldn't want to chrono out as fast as possible is dark templar. Since you can't speed up the tech, nor would it matter if he got the warpgate done a minute earlier than he could warp in DT's.
Scout your whole main for proxy pylons, make sure there isn't ANY in your main since your lair is so delayed. Put down a sporecrawler at your natural ramp and keep most of your lings near your ramp ready to hold position. You don't want the templar to go out of sight range. Once you spot the templar, build an additional spore in your main just in case he does manage to slip by. You really don't want to lose to one unit sniping your lair and your evo chamber.
Any further tech he is planning will be way behind, even a 4gate after this would be super lackluster, and you can easily crush it with lots of lings. Keep mapcontroll and drone up. No chrono saved – two gas – Stalker as second unit – Next to no chrono on warpgate.These are telltale signs of a darktemplar rush in the making. Since the protoss can't chrono buildings to make them build faster, and the only thing that you wouldn't want to chrono out as fast as possible is dark templar. Since you can't speed up the tech, nor would it matter if he got the warpgate done a minute earlier than he could warp in DT's.Scout your whole main for proxy pylons, make sure there isn't ANY in your main since your lair is so delayed. Put down a sporecrawler at your natural ramp and keep most of your lings near your ramp ready to hold position. You don't want the templar to go out of sight range. Once you spot the templar, build an additional spore in your main just in case he does manage to slip by. You really don't want to lose to one unit sniping your lair and your evo chamber.Any further tech he is planning will be way behind, even a 4gate after this would be super lackluster, and you can easily crush it with lots of lings. Keep mapcontroll and drone up.
Uncertain one base tech
This is the toughest one to prepare for. Since you can't really go all out in one direction.
Continiue as normal, build up a good amount of lings and drone very very little. Put a sporecrawler at your natural ramp and make sure you have 3 queens.
Actively scout his ramp for his unit composition, if you can see clues or even specific units you can go all out on one counter-path.
Make sure you stay alive, you will have more income than your protoss opponent on one base. Droning isn't as important now. You can drone later after you fended off his push.
This is the toughest one to prepare for. Since you can't really go all out in one direction.Continiue as normal, build up a good amount of lings and drone very very little. Put a sporecrawler at your natural ramp and make sure you have 3 queens.Actively scout his ramp for his unit composition, if you can see clues or even specific units you can go all out on one counter-path.Make sure you stay alive, you will have more income than your protoss opponent on one base. Droning isn't as important now. You can drone later after you fended off his push. Expand builds
Forge fast-expand + Show Spoiler +
Keep an eye out for his probe. You don't want his expand to turn into a cannon rush. Keep one drone following his scouting probe at all times and if you're uncertain, scout your main and natural for a proxy pylon.
If he gets a cannon building, attack it with 4 drones. It won't get up in time to get a shot off on those drones and you're minimizing mining time lost.
Once you kill of the scouting probe, you will want to get the gas in your main up asap and drone up. Tech to lair while not researching +1 melee just yet. When your natural finishes, build one extractor and fill it up with drones.
Once lair finishes, build a spire. Since he went forge first, his warpgate tech WILL be delayed. This means that the usual 6gate timing that kills mutalisks is delayed by a ton. Giving you time to build up muta's ( around 8 ) and then attack his flimsy army head on, focussing on the sentries. If that is too strong for the while focus on killing pylons that power gateways or the cybercore.
If he decided to get a quick stargate after expanding, get a couple of corruptors ( 2 or 3 ) to tank for the phoenixes.
Meanwhile, take the last gas at your natural and get +1 range for your roaches. Take a quick third and build up drones at your natural. Make sure you build sufficient amounts of roaches while you macro and harrass with your mutalisks.
He will want to make a counter attack, since the muta's are pinning him to 2 bases. So prepare for that. Get +1 melee once the range upgrade finishes and build a second evo chamber to get +2 range sooner should you want that. Keep an eye out for his probe. You don't want his expand to turn into a cannon rush. Keep one drone following his scouting probe at all times and if you're uncertain, scout your main and natural for a proxy pylon.If he gets a cannon building, attack it with 4 drones. It won't get up in time to get a shot off on those drones and you're minimizing mining time lost.Once you kill of the scouting probe, you will want to get the gas in your main up asap and drone up. Tech to lair while not researching +1 melee just yet. When your natural finishes, build one extractor and fill it up with drones.Once lair finishes, build a spire. Since he went forge first, his warpgate tech WILL be delayed. This means that the usual 6gate timing that kills mutalisks is delayed by a ton. Giving you time to build up muta's ( around 8 ) and then attack his flimsy army head on, focussing on the sentries. If that is too strong for the while focus on killing pylons that power gateways or the cybercore.If he decided to get a quick stargate after expanding, get a couple of corruptors ( 2 or 3 ) to tank for the phoenixes.Meanwhile, take the last gas at your natural and get +1 range for your roaches. Take a quick third and build up drones at your natural. Make sure you build sufficient amounts of roaches while you macro and harrass with your mutalisks.He will want to make a counter attack, since the muta's are pinning him to 2 bases. So prepare for that. Get +1 melee once the range upgrade finishes and build a second evo chamber to get +2 range sooner should you want that.
3gate expand + Show Spoiler +
Two gas – Chrono saved up/used on warpgates – Second and third unit sentry
Your lings can't break his front, but they can pressure the nexus. Attack the nexus occasionally on the opposite side from his ramp. But DON'T overcommit. You don't want to have the nexus at 50 hp with all your lings dead. You need them as ensurrance.
Drone up your natural and tech as normal. Two gas – Chrono saved up/used on warpgates – Second and third unit sentryYour lings can't break his front, but they can pressure the nexus. Attack the nexus occasionally on the opposite side from his ramp. But DON'T overcommit. You don't want to have the nexus at 50 hp with all your lings dead. You need them as ensurrance.Drone up your natural and tech as normal.
------------------------Midgame ( Post-lair tech, 2 bases up for the protoss )------------------------
Now that you've safely entered the midgame, we've entered the strongest period for this build.
The goal in this period is to get overlord speed and scout what he is doing. Meanwhile, you have two options regarding upgrades.
The hydra/roach path ( + 2 range attack )
The banelingdrop route ( + 2 melee attack )
There are specific situations in which you would want a hydra/roach army, or a mainly roach/ling/baneling army. Lets look at the hydra/roach one first.
Hydralisk / Roach
Once you scout that you can beat the protoss head on, you can start getting the +2 range attack and a hydra den. Make sure your creepspread is optimal for this to have good chances of working. A couple of textbook signs that you can engage the protoss.
A robo facility, but no bay. Aka, no collosus for some time
Stargate/gateway composition
Just gateway composition without templar
These armies aren't strong against the hydra/roach ball. They aren't backed up by a big splash unit like the high templar or the collosus, so if you keep the hydras behind the tanking roaches, your army will have a field day on him. When you engage, keep reinforcing. Inject your hatches during the fight since there isn't much to micro besides the occasional focusfire. Reinforce with roaches, they will arrive at the battle more quickly and if things do turn out to be sour, you can retreat and fall back to the +2 melee option.
Roach / Speedling / Banelingdrop
So you've scouted that your protoss opponent turned out to be a jackass. Instead of GG-ing when he saw you in the openingscreen, he decided to macro up and get collosus ( where does this kid get the nerve to stay in this game? Lets complain about it on TL ). While grabbing your list of profanties that you probably want to type in all caps to him, do the following.
Since we already got +1 melee, we can start +2 melee. Get a third, get overlord drop and a banelingsnest. Make a couple of overlords while rallying lings underneath them. We are going baneling-bombing t'night.
“Well gee, couldn't I have just saved me the trouble and just gone straight for baneling drops? Why would I get the melee upgrades, they don't even upgrade my roaches!”
The thing about baneling drops is, they are a one time blow. You can't counter attack with baneling drops. You can't pick off retreating units with baneling drops. You want to blow them up on their army or their probe line. And THAT is where the +2 melee comes in.
You see, +2 melee banelings 1 shot probes, and 2shot sentries. You can harrass with baneling drops if the protoss is turtling way too much, forcing a counter attack on him.
When you see the protoss ball moving in, position your overlords near your roaches. Engage with the roaches and force some forcefields out, meanwhile, drop the banelings onto the sentries and gateway units. The gateway army will die pretty brutally if you drop enough banelings onto the sentries. And since overlords are quicker than sentries, they won't be able to escape the aciddic death from above.
Now that the main protoss ball is withered down, your chances of survival have pretty much skyrocketed. It takes a long time for protoss to build up their deathball. Meanwhile, since they are on 3 bases now, you can actually start to abuse drops and multi pronged attacks to wither the protoss down. Get the carapace upgrades and +2 range upgrade when your +2 melee finishes.
If you let the protoss sit on 4 bases comfortably without harrass or multi pronged engagements, you are the one that is killing yourself. Get those actions up and show him some real pain.
If you want to know more about baneling drops, I suggest glancing over my previous guide:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=185099
Now that you've safely entered the midgame, we've entered the strongest period for this build.The goal in this period is to get overlord speed and scout what he is doing. Meanwhile, you have two options regarding upgrades.The hydra/roach path ( + 2 range attack )The banelingdrop route ( + 2 melee attack )There are specific situations in which you would want a hydra/roach army, or a mainly roach/ling/baneling army. Lets look at the hydra/roach one first.Once you scout that you can beat the protoss head on, you can start getting the +2 range attack and a hydra den. Make sure your creepspread is optimal for this to have good chances of working. A couple of textbook signs that you can engage the protoss.A robo facility, but no bay. Aka, no collosus for some timeStargate/gateway compositionJust gateway composition without templarThese armies aren't strong against the hydra/roach ball. They aren't backed up by a big splash unit like the high templar or the collosus, so if you keep the hydras behind the tanking roaches, your army will have a field day on him. When you engage, keep reinforcing. Inject your hatches during the fight since there isn't much to micro besides the occasional focusfire. Reinforce with roaches, they will arrive at the battle more quickly and if things do turn out to be sour, you can retreat and fall back to the +2 melee option.So you've scouted that your protoss opponent turned out to be a jackass. Instead of GG-ing when he saw you in the openingscreen, he decided to macro up and get collosus ( where does this kid get the nerve to stay in this game? Lets complain about it on TL ). While grabbing your list of profanties that you probably want to type in all caps to him, do the following.Since we already got +1 melee, we can start +2 melee. Get a third, get overlord drop and a banelingsnest. Make a couple of overlords while rallying lings underneath them. We are going baneling-bombing t'night.“Well gee, couldn't I have just saved me the trouble and just gone straight for baneling drops? Why would I get the melee upgrades, they don't even upgrade my roaches!”The thing about baneling drops is, they are a one time blow. You can't counter attack with baneling drops. You can't pick off retreating units with baneling drops. You want to blow them up on their army or their probe line. And THAT is where the +2 melee comes in.You see, +2 melee banelings 1 shot probes, and 2shot sentries. You can harrass with baneling drops if the protoss is turtling way too much, forcing a counter attack on him.When you see the protoss ball moving in, position your overlords near your roaches. Engage with the roaches and force some forcefields out, meanwhile, drop the banelings onto the sentries and gateway units. The gateway army will die pretty brutally if you drop enough banelings onto the sentries. And since overlords are quicker than sentries, they won't be able to escape the aciddic death from above.Now that the main protoss ball is withered down, your chances of survival have pretty much skyrocketed. It takes a long time for protoss to build up their deathball. Meanwhile, since they are on 3 bases now, you can actually start to abuse drops and multi pronged attacks to wither the protoss down. Get the carapace upgrades and +2 range upgrade when your +2 melee finishes.If you let the protoss sit on 4 bases comfortably without harrass or multi pronged engagements, you are the one that is killing yourself. Get those actions up and show him some real pain.If you want to know more about baneling drops, I suggest glancing over my previous guide: Specific reactions:
6gate – 5gate robo + Show Spoiler +
When you see this build, its better to build some spinecrawlers at your natural. The forcefields will be a thorn in your feet for your roaches and lings. You have to keep your roaches and lings outside of your natural. Just so that the protoss cannot forcefield you out.
Even though by this point in time, the protoss forcefields that are saved could stop the moon from spinning, they will run out after |
han Dhana Dhan offer, saying that the users who have already recharged with Summer Surprise offer will get one more month of free benefits.
That said, users will get a total of four months of free 4G services, who have recharged with Rs. 303 Summer Surprise Plan. The new comer has changed the validity for all the subscribers.
You can check the validity extension under the MyJio application. For example, under MyJio application’s dashboard, you can notice that the expiry of the Summer Surprise offer for at least 25 days.
Under the new Jio Dhan Dhana Dhan plan, Jio offered the same perks of Summer Surprise offer. For example, in the new scheme, Jio offered 1GB of data per day for 84 days at just Rs. 309 and 2GB of data per day at just Rs. 509. However, you need to be a JioPrime member to get the benefits at the aforementioned price.
Recently, Jio has updated the plans because the Dhan Dhana Dhan offer is valid for just 84 days, and they introduced two new plans of Rs. 349 and Rs. 399 recently. The company has unveiled a new Rs. 399 scheme for JioPrime customers, which offers 1GB data per day for 84 days (same as what the Rs. 309 plan is currently offering). Secondly, the company announced a new Rs. 349 plan which gives 20GB data for 56 days and it won’t offer daily data.
And the operator also revised the Rs. 309 and Rs. 509 plans. Coming to the revised Rs. 309 and Rs. 509 plans, they were all set to offer 1GB data per day and 2GB data per day for 28 days from July 15. However, after the revision, they will offer the same benefits for 56 days. That said, only the validity has changed and nothing else.CLOSE Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he wanted to punch a protester in the face during a rally in Las Vegas on the eve of the Nevada caucuses and then added that his Republican rival Ted Cruz was a "liar," and referred to him as "sick AP
Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Atlanta on Feb. 21, 2016. (Photo: Branden Camp, Getty Images)
LAS VEGAS — Donald Trump rolls into Nevada on a hot streak, while Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are looking to weaken his grip on the GOP presidential race.
Trump, the easy winner of primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina, is the heavy favorite to win again when Nevada Republicans hold caucuses on Tuesday.
"He's probably going to get about 35% of the vote, and it will be enough to win," predicted Eric Herzik, who chairs the political science department at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Rubio and Cruz have long been organized in the state, but figure to split the votes that do not go to the New York billionaire, according to analysts and polls. John Kasich and Ben Carson also remain in the Republican race but are expected to finish well back in the Silver State.
Nevada is the first Republican delegate contest since South Carolina moved Trump another step closer to the GOP presidential nomination on Saturday. He leads pre-caucus polls in Nevada, though such surveys have been off in previous elections.
It doesn't hurt Trump that his name hovers above the Las Vegas Strip, emblazoned atop his hotel. His brash outsider, anti-government message plays well throughout the state, analysts said.
"That's very appealing to Nevada Republicans, or at least a good portion of them," said Michael Green, an associate history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Rubio, who edged out Cruz for second place in South Carolina, said that primary turned the GOP presidential race into a three-person contest. Both Rubio and Cruz are seeking to become the main alternative to Trump, who despite his success has high unfavorable ratings.
As in South Carolina, Rubio's campaign strategy relies heavily on endorsements from local lawmakers and celebrities. His list in Nevada ranges from Sen. Dean Heller to Pawn Stars star Rick Harrison.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio speaks at a rally at the Texas Station Gambling Hall & Hotel on Feb. 21, 2016, in North Las Vegas. (Photo: Ethan Miller, Getty Images)
“If you nominate me, we will unite this party and grow it,” Rubio told supporters in North Las Vegas over the weekend. “This is the face of the new conservative movement."
Rubio, a Florida senator who lived in Las Vegas as a child, is a Nevada long shot, however, and isn't even planning to be in the state on caucus night. He will instead be campaigning in Minnesota in the afternoon, one of many states holding a contest on March 1, and Michigan later in the evening, which holds a primary on March 8.
Cruz, seeking to recover from a disappointing third place in South Carolina, has stressed the fact that he is the one candidate who has prevailed in a contest with Trump: a Feb. 1 triumph in the Iowa caucuses.
Before speaking with supporters at a neighborhood YMCA in Las Vegas Monday, Cruz said there are only three "viable" candidates left in the GOP race, and, "at this point here in Nevada, it's all about turnout."
The Texas senator also announced on Monday he was firing spokesman Rick Tyler for spreading false information on social media that Rubio had mocked the Bible.
"Our campaign should not have sent it," Cruz said.
Kasich, the governor of Ohio, and Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, are considered long shots in Nevada.
During an appearance in Reno, Carson said: "Now that there are just five candidates left … hopefully we can talk about policies and solutions, and not just make it a popularity contest."
The Nevada contest comes as an increasing number of Republicans say Trump may well be the nominee, whether the so-called establishment likes it or not.
"I think there's more than a 50% chance he's the nominee," said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., speaking on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "And I think that's what's setting in for a lot of people. Could they get their heads around Trump being the nominee?"
Contributing: Jason Hidalgo, Reno Gazette-Journal
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1XIVaUmNo libraries for you, little people of Louisiana! Bobby Jindal just signed a $25 billion dollar budget that cut all state funding for libraries, which wasn't exactly a huge porkfest to begin with ($900,000). He says it's just not a huge priority for the state, citing health care and education funding as first priorities.
Of course, let's not forget that education funding means sending lots of state money to church and corporate-run charter schools in Louisiana. What a guy.
Jindal claimed that libraries can be funded with local money and donations, with federal funds making up the difference in their budgets. Not so fast, Bobby.
Louisiana Division of Administration spokesman Michael DiResto told LJ: “The FY 13 Louisiana budget includes two federal technology grants for the State Library for the purchase of e-books ($1 million), which local libraries can use through the interlibrary loan program, and to provide statewide technology training and equipment for public libraries ($782K) – for a total of almost $1.8 million, which more than makes up for the $896K in direct state funding.” However, those federal technological funds from the BTOP program are earmarked specifically for providing training, laptops for citizens to check out, and accessible workstations for the blind. As such they cannot be distributed to local libraries to maintain, upgrade, or replace the in-library desktop PCs and servers that were previously covered by state aid. Increased access to ebooks may help make up for lack of collection development dollars to some extent, but since 34-43 percent of Louisiana residents don’t have Internet access at home, ebooks can’t completely replace the lost dollars for print materials, especially in poorer areas.
Yes, poor people rely on libraries for access to the Internet, which is how they search for jobs, learn, read, and other things. Shutting off their Internet access while replacing paper books with e-Books is particularly cynical. Here's what happens to the poorer area libraries as a result of Jindal's pecuniary ways:
LJ caught up with several of the smaller Louisiana libraries which are hardest hit by the cuts. Mary Bennett Lindsey, director of the two-parish Audubon Regional Library, operates three libraries and a bookmobile. Lindsey told LJ, “we were getting almost $50,000 [in state aid], which is 10 percent of our budget.” Of that, Audubon allocated $30,000 for books—$12000 more than the system would otherwise be able to spend. “Which isn’t an awful lot when you divide by three, but it’s enough to keep up with the current bestsellers and buying an encyclopedia once in a while,” she said. Audubon used the balance of the aid for technology: replacing 15 computer workstations and covering the portion of the library’s new server which is not funded by the Federal erate program. With that aid gone, “I’m just going to pray,” Lindsey told LJ. “We’ll just have to cut back on books and hope we get through. If our server goes down or the switches go down, it’s going to have to come from somewhere. It’s not going to come from utilities; we’re barely paying people above minimum wage so it’s not going to come out of salary, we may have to cut hours.” Lindsey explains that the library computers are a lifeline because “the state requires you to do unemployment online, welfare online. They are closing the local parish offices and they say go to the library, but the library doesn’t get any extra money for IT.”
On the other hand, Jindal has cut taxes six times and is a Grover Norquist favorite. So there's that. Three cheers for oligarchy!
[h/t Balloon Juice]Here’s my newest track: Alpaca socks. Weird title, I know. I was inspired by a great idea currently floating around in the interweb.
The song is about Bitcoin, a digital currency that could show us the way to a new financial system – something we badly need.
If you like the song feel free to press the flattr button or send some bitcoins to this address: 19yKKPfj96UchvkJjFmhh48DLVwcCh7uSL
Show Lyrics We are on our way
Come with us So hungry for change
It will come so fast We mine for our coins
Deep inside the blocks We’re spending our cash
On alpaca socks Turning the market around
Ready to take it down down We are just gaining ground
No one to slow us down Authority might be strong
Everyone knows it’s wrong Waiting for a new dawn
Maybe it will take long We stand on the edge
Waiting for the end We don’t need no banks
We will take control Building up on trust
Growing everyday Clearly in our reach
No utopia
Like this song? Enter your email and get it for free! You'll get the download link directly to your inbox. I also might send you updates on new songs once in a while. Enter your email to download song. Increase your Karma! Share... Tweet...and care. You'll get the download link directly to your inbox. I also might send you updates on new songs once in a while.Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak (centre) insisted that it had been ‘no small feat’ for Malaysia to pull together 26 countries in the international search for the missing Flight MH370. ― Picture by Saw Siow Feng
KUALA LUMPUR, May 14 — The Malaysian government did not “get everything right” in the search for a missing plane and the 239 people on board, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak conceded in an opinion piece on the Wall Street Journal.
Describing the loss of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 as “one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries”, Najib acknowledged that the lack of physical proof of the plane’s fate and a “clear explanation” of why the tragedy occurred had resulted in Malaysia facing the bulk of criticism for the aircraft’s disappearance.
But he insisted that it had been “no small feat” for Malaysia to pull together 26 countries in the international search for the plane, saying: “In the passage of time, I believe Malaysia will be credited for doing its best under near-impossible circumstances.”
“But we didn’t get everything right,” Najib wrote in the Op-Ed piece titled “Malaysia’s lessons from the vanished airplane” carried by the international business newspaper.
“In the first few days after the plane disappeared, we were so focused on trying to find the aircraft that we did not prioritize our communications.
“Also, it took air-traffic controllers four hours to launch the search-and-rescue operation,” he admitted.
But the prime minister pointed out that the aircraft had vanished at the precise moment when it was hovering between the traffic controls of two countries.
This caused “maximum confusion”, Najib wrote.
Nevertheless, he said, Malaysia’s search for the plane was launched about one-third quicker than in the 2009 crash of the Air France Flight 447.
Despite all these mitigating factors, however, Najib said the response time following the plane’s disappearance “should and will be investigated”.
Still, he added, “none of this could have altered MH370’s fate”.
He offered Malaysia’s full commitment to the ongoing probe on MH370’s disappearance to make sure lessons are learned, and noted that since the tragedy, the country’s airport security has been tightened.
Najib said the global aviation industry also has important lessons to learn from the MH370 crisis, listing down necessary changes to various technologies including the tracking of planes, communication systems and flight data recorders.
“These changes may not have prevented the MH370 or Air France 447 tragedies. But they would make it harder for an aircraft to simply disappear, and easier to find any aircraft that did. Which would help reassure the travelling public and reduce the chances of such a drawn-out disaster reoccurring,” he said.
In the 2009 crash, investigators found the crash site after five days and took nearly two years to find the Air France plane’s flight data recorders and main hull.
“The global aviation industry must not only learn the lessons of MH370 but implement them. The world learned from Air France but didn’t act. The same mistake must not be made again,” Najib concluded.
In the same opinion piece, Najib called for the introduction of real-time tracking of commercial planes and changes to prevent communications systems from being disabled during a flight.
Black boxes or flight data recorders should be improved beyond its two-hour capacity to record the cockpit conversation for the entire flight, while its location pingers should last at least 90 days instead of the current 30 days, he said.
The emergency locator transmitters of planes needs to be improved as their underwater performance is poor and their batteries last for 24 hours only, he said.
More than two months after the Beijing-bound MH370 disappeared, a search in the southern Indian Ocean is still going on with no wreckage of the plane found so far.
Yesterday, Australia was reported to have committed up to RM272 million for the next two years for the MH370 search where it is the lead coordinator.Roda 2 –2 Ajax: Courageous tactical move rewarded with a come-back
Home team Roda will be keen to maintain their unbeaten home record (4-6-0) and add three more points in their chase on Groningen and Ajax for a direct Europa League qualification spot. Meanwhile, Ajax face the difficult task of keeping the pace of both PSV and Twente who managed to win last night.
Another 4-4-2 diamond versus 4-3-3
After last week’s home match against De Graafschap, Ajax faces another known 4-4-2 diamond team today. And given the troubles that De Graafschap’s diamond posed last week, Ajax may be prone to suffer the same problems again. The excellent lateral movement of the two strikers kept Ajax’ complete back four occupied, leading to a 4v3 advantage for the compact diamond in midfield. Ajax did not find a workaround for this problem and failed to convert their superior player quality into esthetically pleasing football.
Demi de Zeeuw’s return to the midfield spot beside Enoh instead Siem de Jong implies a subtle, yet important chance for Ajax. It means they field more of a double screen in front of the back four which allows the full-backs to make forward runs. The box formed by Enoh-De Zeeuw-Vertonghen-Alderweireld should be able to cover Roda’s attacking trident of Janssen-Hadouir-Junker, leaving both full-backs freedom to exploit the weakness a 4-4-2 diamond has on the flanks. Of note is Van der Wiel’s suspension. He is replaced by Anita, who plays the full-back role on his unfamiliar right side.
Roda’s 4-4-2 diamond differs slightly from De Graafschap’s interpretation as Roda may be expected to play a more offensive game. Particularly the roles of Hersi and Janssen in the advanced playmaking position deserve some attention here. While Hersi looks to receive the ball at feet looking to dictate play by through-balls to the strikers, Janssen is more of an athletic player, making runs from deep and arriving late in the box to assist strikers Hadouir and Junker. On top of that Janssen receives his fair share of balls played into space for him to run onto too.
Behind them the roles of De Graafschap’s Meijer and Roda’s Vormer are different too. The first act like an anchor man securing his defense, while the latter plays the role of a deep-lying playmaker. The combination of Ajax’ playmaker Eriksen and Roda’s Vormer playing in the same area of the pitch should make for an interesting match-up here.
Smart move by Frank de Boer
Ajax dominated the first half hour of the game. In spite of the first minute attack that involved both full-backs at the same time, they did not actively seek to involve their full-backs into the attack too much. Instead, the potential 4v3 disadvantage in midfield was solved by withdrawing striker De Jong into midfield when out of possession. He successfully blocked the passing options to playmaker Vormer. This left both Roda centre-backs Kah and Wielaert quite some freedom, but they proved their weak off the ball skills and rarely succeeded to pick out a pass into Roda’s midfield.
This smart moved relieved Ajax’ playmaker Eriksen from performing this defensive task en left him the chance to position himself already for a smart and quick Ajax break even when Roda still had possession of the ball. In effect this meant an old-fashioned trequartista role for the youngster and it was his excellent outside foot assist that provided Sulejmani with a free run in behind Roda’s defense for the early opening goal.
The second Ajax goal was a bit lucky as De Jong took advantage of a deflected Sulejmani cross to head in, but the lead was by all means deserved as the smart defensive positioning detailed above still posed a lot of questions to Roda’s defense when in possession.
Roda did manage to find a way back into the match even before half time. An error by Maarten Stekelenburg, who passed the ball straight into Vormer’s feet set up the play for Roda. In a typical Roda attack Vormer played Janssen into space in one of his excellent runs from deep and Janssen provided the cross of a simple Junker tap-in.
Second half changes
Despite having found a way back into the match with their goal close to the half time whistle, Roda had to change the face of the game in order to keep sight on the equalizing goal. Manager Van Veldhoven brought striker Skoubo for midfielder Bodor, initially maintaining the 4-4-2 diamond plan, but switching to 3-4-1-2 quickly thereafter.
Centre-back Wielaert was advanced into the midfield while Janssen played a more advanced role from that moment on. Roda re-established their desired dominance in the midfield area by creating a 5v4 or even 5v3 situation there, depending on whether De Jong kept on dropping into the midfield. Of course they paid for it in terms of a one-on-one defense against Ajax’ wide three man attack, but the gain in terms of overrunning Ajax’ midfield outweighed this easily.
These changes resulted in a bombardment of the Ajax penalty box as Roda recovered the vast majority of Ajax’ clearances. A tell tale of Ajax’ problems was Siem de Jong repeatedly clearing balls off his own goal line rather than getting involved in play on the opponent’s half.
Another advantage of playing Skoubo upfront was the option of direct high ball where Roda smartly took advantage of Ajax’ small full-backs by having strikers Skoubo and Junker drifting wide, leaving a gap to be filled by Janssen.
The deserved equalizer
Turning the game around like that with courageous and smart tactical moves deserves to be rewarded and Roda got their reward through a beautiful Anouar Hadouir direct free kick. Roda did not switch back to their four man defense, but kept on pushing for the win. In spite of this, the best chance to win the game was of course Ajax’ 85th minute penalty. Mounir El Hamdaoui did his struggling image of recently no good by failing to score from the spot as Tyton stopped his shot.
In the end
Two smart moves cancelled each other out as initially Ajax grabbed a two goal lead during a dominant first half hour thanks to the choice to move De Jong back on to Vormer, leaving Eriksen a free trequartista-like role. During the remainder of the match Roda managed to come back from being two goals down, first by a typical Roda build-up in their first goal and then by overloading Ajax’ midfield by switching to a courageous 3-4-1-2 system.
AdvertisementsThe kids these days are incredibly lame.
They barely do drugs. They hardly have sex. When they do finally get around to doing the deed, it's at much later ages than previous generations. They're responsible about birth control and disease prevention. They probably even make it home in time for curfew.
Skeptical? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the average age of self-reported virginity loss is now nearly 18 years old. The percentage of high school students who say they have had intercourse has been falling for two decades. Two-thirds of the students who are having sex say it's with a steady romantic partner. Eighty percent say they used contraception their first time, up from less than 50 percent in the '80s. They're also using more effective fertility-fighting methods than previous generations: IUDs, implants, and other forms of long-acting reversible birth control with lower failure rates have become much more popular, with use rising from 0.4 percent in 2005 to 7.1 percent by 2013. The rate of teen births fell 8 percent in 2015, capping off a 46 percent decrease since 2007. The rate of teenage abortion has also fallen sharply from its peak around 1990.
It seems like the combined efforts of America's adults to scare the bejesus out of kids about the dangers of the horizontal mambo while subsidizing the wazoo out of birth control have, in fact, paid off in fewer teens knocking boots.
But all of this responsible behavior has created a generation gap. The Boomer version of the birds and bees is on the verge of becoming worthless, and the GenX sex talk isn't far behind.
Coaching preschoolers as they carefully roll condoms onto bananas simply doesn't make sense as the exclusive focus of sex ed anymore. Jimmy hats are still a good idea, of course. But even as the physical act of sex becomes safer—at least as practiced by today's older, wiser, romantically involved, pharmacologically reinforced, temporarily sterile teens—the legal risk of many common sexual choices is skyrocketing.
Leaving aside the fact that Generation Alpha will probably be conceived in the back seats (or the front seats!) of autonomous vehicles as they speed untended down the highway, there's really nothing new under the sun, and that includes sexting. Teenagers have managed to communicate intemperately about their desire to get it on—often right underneath the noses of their guardians—since at least imperial Japan; court ladies anxiously awaited morning-after haikus in one of the world's first novels, Murasaki Shikibu's 11th century Tale of the Genji.
The new danger doesn't spring from the fact that digital Romeos and Juliets are communicating about sex in a way that might generate a permanent record. In fact, by the time today's 15-year-olds run for office, youthful nudie pics will be a prerequisite for reassuring the American people that you're a normal human being, not a disqualification.
Instead, the serious threat is from meddling cops, bureaucrats, school officials, and other avatars of officialdom. The state has always had an unhealthy interest in sex—think Comstock laws, Loving v. Virginia, Bowers v. Hardwick—but as we increasingly infantilize teens and young adults while disregarding privacy protections that once shielded intimate communications, more "kids" are being caught in a legal dragnet that is purportedly designed to protect them.
Consider a case in Cañon City, Colorado. After following up on a call to a state bullying tipline in December, a public high school official uncovered widespread sexting. Rather than taking a moment to consider whether the common nature of the behavior suggested an appropriately proportionate remedy, the administrator decided to follow the letter of the law in Colorado (and many other states), in which the sender of a sexually suggestive selfie is both victim and perpetrator of the heinous crime of possessing and distributing child pornography.
Under Colorado law, producing or distributing sexually explicit images of a minor is a felony, punishable by four to 12 years in prison. Mere possession is still a felony, to the tune of 12 to 18 months in prison. That figure increases to two to six years in prison if the possessor has video or more than 20 still images.
"We're not out to hang every kid," Cañon City Police Capt. Jim Cox generously noted. But the department says it will leave as many as 100 kids in limbo for up to 30 days while it determines who is a victim in the eyes of the law and who will be sent into the justice system as a potential sex offender.
Thom LeDoux, the district attorney in charge of the case, told CNN that parents attempting to monitor their kids' behavior may themselves be implicated in a crime, essentially making what should be a routine checkup and conversation between parents and kids the subject of legal scrutiny: "For parents that may be having conversations with their children or reviewing cellphones as the superintendent recommended, they need to understand that continuing or ongoing possession of these materials does constitute a very serious crime for the adults and for the children."
The case, which has been chronicled by the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Reason's own Jacob Sullum, is notable both for its scale and pure, unmixed absurdity. But this is just one recent example of a phenomenon that is growing more common every day.
College kids—legal adults who are surely the right age to be experimenting, looking for a partner (or many partners), and generally sowing their wild oats—are forced to operate within a shifting legal and moral landscape where an awkward moment freshman year can get them accused of rape, tossed out of school, or dumped onto a sex offender registry. This isn't a common occurrence—most drunken romantic missteps don't end with either party jailed, thank goodness—but it does happen.
In some cases, the increased attentions of officers of the law are unambiguously good. True sexual violence has historically been under-prosecuted. Not to put too fine a point on it, but proven rapists, violent pimps, and child molesters should obviously go to jail.
But we seem to have lost our willingness to draw lines between these violators—who have genuinely caused serious physical harm to other human beings—and people engaging in moderately to seriously unwise consensual behavior with other people capable of making their own decisions. Part of the trouble is that agents of the state, looking to expand their discretionary power and increase the severity of threatened punishments, have spent decades purposely blurring those lines. And these days the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the sex police aren't on the conservative right but the progressive left, which seems increasingly intent on reducing the bodily autonomy and privacy it once championed.
To be honest, this issue of Reason is a bit of a boner killer. In the following pages, you'll find Senior Editor Jacob Sullum's account of the unconstitutional and wildly uneven legal treatment that accused consumers of child pornography experience (page 26). You'll see columnist Deirdre McCloskey's story of tangling with the unholy union between the psychiatric establishment and the carceral state during her gender transition (page 12). You'll read Elizabeth Nolan Brown's wide-ranging investigation into Operation Cross Country, a series of ongoing stings that purport to be searching out evil men who traffic children into sexual slavery but in fact amount to a war on people engaging in consensual commercial sex (page 16). Plus an item about rape in prison (page 11), and Free-Range Mom Lenore Skenazy on the late, lamented Playboy empire (page 6).
Sex is still fun. Don't let Reason put you off your game. But mixing sex and the state has never been a good idea.They confess to looking at pornography and masturbating.
It’s awkward, I know, to say it so candidly, but the only way to defeat pornography in our lives is to admit that we have a widespread problem with it.
Vice, Firmly Entrenched
By the time I was in high school, the habit of lusting after women via pornography was firmly entrenched in my soul. I was an atheist at the time.
I recall listening to a popular late night radio show during these years, where the female host–allegedly a psychologist with a Ph.D.–counseled callers that looking at pornography and masturbating were good, healthy things for a young man to do. I knew I couldn’t resist the desire to look and lust on a frequent basis, so her words confirmed for me that what I was doing wasn’t something wrong.
Years passed, and I was in college, suffering from an anxiety disorder, panic attacks, and depression. I reached out to God for help, and over the course of many months He came into my life.
But I was still addicted to pornography.
While still an atheist, I remember sitting in an apartment with three Evangelical Protestant friends of mine, and they told me that looking at pornography was a sin. My response: I laughed at them. Yes, laughed.
I laughed because the thought of any man being able to overcome the desire for lust and pornography seemed ludicrous to me.
I told them that “every man does this and anyone who denies it is a liar.” While blunt, and not completely true, my words weren’t too far off the mark, even among Christians.
Jesus Pulled No Punches
A year or so later, God drew me out of atheism, and I became an Evangelical Protestant like my friends.
I was a newly minted Christian and didn’t want to believe that looking at pornography was wrong. But then I read Jesus’ words in St. Matthew’s gospel:
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. — Matt. 5:27-28
Ouch. I wanted there to be a way that His words could be interpreted to mean something different from what they seemed to be saying, but I couldn’t convince myself out of what I knew He must mean. Earlier in the same chapter, in the Beatitudes, Jesus said: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” I couldn’t claim to be pure in heart while lusting after women.
“But I can’t stop doing it. There’s no way,” I thought to myself.
I was a slave to this sin. And in John 8:34, Jesus spoke clearly about what that meant: “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.”
I didn’t want to be a slave, but a free man. I wanted to be set free to love by the Son, and Jesus promised that He would help. So began the long, incredibly difficult odyssey in my own life to conquer this vice.
I Started the Battle As a Protestant…
I had access to God via prayer, so I started praying for God’s grace to help me conquer porn compulsion. A little progress was made as the months passed.
To my surprise, when speaking in confidence to one of my Baptist friends about my struggle, he confided in me that he, too, struggled with it. So we began to be accountability partners with each other. That helped as well, especially since,as a Protestant, I did not have sacramental Confession.
I also started to become disciplined. I woke up early in the morning to pray and go to Bible studies with my fellow Protestant roommates. In this way and in others, I slowly grew in self-mastery.
Yet I still fell to the temptation to lust and look at pornography regularly. The desire to do it felt so incredibly strong. I realized that what took years to develop into a deeply rooted vice, would take years to uproot.
I was still a relatively new Christian, and I began to read about Catholicism, the Church Fathers, and listen to Scott Hahn talks. They led me to Catholicism, and a new chapter in my fight for purity.
…And Won the Battle As a Catholic
When I became Catholic, I was hopeful that pornography would be eradicated from my life instantly by Mass and Confession, a sacramental one-two punch.
Alas, that didn’t happen. And somewhere I read that “the sacraments are not magic.”
But I also read that, unlike what I was taught in Protestantism, I could truly cooperate with God’s grace. So I dove into the depths of Catholicism: the lives of the saints, Eucharistic adoration, daily Mass, volunteering and service, frequent Confession, regular novenas, confraternities and sacramentals–the whole gamut.
I wanted to avail myself of the fullness of the means of salvation and grace that our Lord imbued in His Church.
Along the way, I discovered, as a hidden treasure in a field, Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body. I began dating a faithful Catholic woman who introduced me to it. It was exhilarating to finally learn the purpose of my sexuality, to give myself and receive the gift of self from my future wife.
More years passed, but I was seeing real progress. I could almost feel myself growing in the virtue of purity, by God’s grace. There was no one day when I conquered pornography compulsion. I was on guard against the temptation at all times, even after living in freedom from it for a year.
By the end of the war, God had taught me many things, not the least of which was my total need for Him to rescue me from slavery to sin. Every Confession, every act of faith, every oblation and self-surrender to Him, brought me a little bit closer to the victory of love. But it took a long time.
“Help Your Brothers”
I am still on guard against temptation, but in truth I’ve tried to put the sin and guilt and shame out of my mind.
That is, until a few months ago. I felt God nudging me to do something to help my Catholic brothers in their fight. And I did what I usually do, ignored Him.
But the thoughts kept coming back, and then the opportunity presented itself to create a course to help men overcome addiction to lust.
I thought about what would have helped me during those long years of struggle. I called to mind every tool, weapon, tactic, and defense I found and marshaled in my struggle. And I distilled those down into a video course.
I didn’t know what to expect when I published the course. But a few men signed up right away. Then a few more men. Then about thirty men, and I started corresponding with them personally over email. Even the seasoned veterans who signed up told me that they learned new ideas from it that they didn’t know existed. One of them asked if he could show it to his King’s Men group at church, a group dedicated to helping men win freedom, and of course I said he could.
The course gives you the tools you need to win the fight against pornography compulsion. I include in it a Steps to Victory Checklist that lists every single thing that I and other men have done to grow strong in chastity. I also lay out a 17-Week Bootcamp program that incorporates all the resources I share in the videos into a step-by-step guide.
Freedom from sin is possible with God! And He has blessed us through His Church with innumerable means to grow in holiness and win this freedom. If you are struggling with pornography compulsion, take a new step today and sign up for my course.
—
Devin Rose is a Catholic author and lay apologist equipping Catholics to defend their faith, and helping Protestants fairly consider Catholicism’s claims. He blogs at St. Joseph’s Vanguard.
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Liked this post? Take a second to support us on Patreon!26-year-old Nicholas Wig allegedly broke into a St. Paul, Minnesota home last week and stole several items, and he might have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for one dumb act. Police say that the Minnesota man, while inside the home of James Wood, logged onto Facebook but then forgot to log off. As WCCO CBS Minnesota reports, this helped lead to his arrest.
When homeowner James Wood arrived back at his house, he discovered it had been ransacked. Credit cards, cash, and a watch were missing. Strangely enough, a pair of wet sneakers and a pair of wet pants not belonging to Mr. Wood were left behind. “[I] kind of started to panic,” the St. Paul resident told WCCO. However, when he went on to his computer, he noticed an important clue as to who had done the deed, telling the station, “He pulled up his Facebook profile, he left it up.” That’s right, Mr. Wig had forgotten to log off his account.
Homeowner James Wood was able to laugh about the robbery after. (WCCO)
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Mr. Wood |
if there is not a substantial thermal gradient across the common bulkhead.
“For these reasons the proposed Simple Depot would be launched on an Atlas and use Centaur’s LH2 tank to store the LO2,” notes the conclusions. “Centaur’s LH2 tank is also relatively large, with a volume of 47 m3 capable of containing 54 mT of LO2.”
It was, however, noted that several modifications – such as new valves and plumbing – would be required on the Centaur.
While the Simple Depot is so light that it could be launched on an Atlas 501, it would be launched on an Atlas 551 – the configuration which recently launched the Juno spacecraft. This vehicle would provide ~12 mT of Centaur residuals (combined LH2 and LO2) in a 28.5 degrees by 200 nm circular LEO.
Once safely delivered to orbit the LH2 module must be chilled prior to transfer of Centaur residual LH2. Centaur’s cold hydrogen ullage gas is vented through the LH2 mission module tank to chill the tank. This chilldown process has been demonstrated on past Centaur flights to chill the feedlines and RL10 pump housing.
“Once the LH2 module is chilled the transfer of Centaur’s ~2mT of residual LH2 can commence. This is conducted in a settled environment. The LH2 transfer is pressure fed. LH2 will enter the LH2 module tank subcooled, quenching the GH2 vapor and sucking in additional LH2,” adds the presentation.
“This “zero-vent fill” transfer process is indifferent to the liquid-gas interface. This zero-vent fill process has been demonstrated to be very effective, attaining nearly 100 percent fill.
“Following completion of the LH2 transfer, Centaur’s LH2 tank is vented to vacuum, fully evacuating the residual hydrogen gas. Following the Centaur LH2 tank “safing”, the ~10 mT of residual LO2 is transferred from the LO2 tank to the LH2 tank, the LO2 module tank, using the same transfer process. Once Centaur’s LO2 tank is completely drained the tank is locked up trapping the residual helium and GO2.
“This residual gas must be kept at a higher pressure than Centaur’s LH2 tank (LO2 module) to avoid reversing Centaur’s common bulkhead.”
The brains of the depot is located between the Centaur LO2 module and the LH2 module – known as the mission module. This module includes the flight computer, solar panels, batteries, fluid controls, avionics, remote berthing arm and docking and fluid transfer ports.
Other important elements of the depot are also noted, such as the sun shield, which can be used to shadow objects that must be kept very cold – such as a propellant depot.
“The James Web Space Telescope (JWST) uses an open cavity planer sun shield to ensure that the entire mirror/instrument assembly is maintained at a low temps”, the presentation continued.
“Propellant depots in free space, such as at a Lagrange point, can use this same shielding concept to provide a very cold environment where cryogenic, even LH2, storage is readily achieved.
“For small sun shields it may be possible to erect the sun shield prior to launch. However in most cases the shield will have to be deployed once on-orbit. The JWST uses a mechanical boom to deploy the sun shield. Alternatively a pneumatic boom, inflated with waste GH2, can be used to deploy and support the sun shield.”
For visiting spacecraft, the Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking (AR&D) capability is referenced, citing how the Russians have a proven capability, while the US is making strides, as seen with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Orbital Express mission.
The ISS resupply ship fleet, namely Progress, ATV and HTV are also mentioned – although the future US spacecraft raise the hopes they will have the sufficient ability to utilize Propellant Depots.
“Robust AR&D development continues with, NASA’s Orion crew capsule, along with NASA’s two commercial orbital transportation services (COTS) program winners (SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation). Results from these on-going programs will ensure that AR&D is widely available to support the servicing and use of propellant depots.”
With a 30 mT LO2/LH2 capacity, the described Centaur derived cryogenic propellant Simple Depot can provide near term operational use supporting large scale robotic missions and even crewed Earth Moon Lagrange point and lunar flyby
missions.
By making efficient use of the entire Atlas 5m payload fairing volume for the LH2 module the existing Atlas can launch a depot with 70 mT of combined LO2/LH2 capacity. With ULA’s proposed larger Advanced Common Evolved Stage (ACES) the depot capacity in a single EELV launch increases to 120 mT or even 200 mT with a 6.5m PLF.
Interestingly, while some class Propellant Depots as an alternative to HLV’s such as the SLS, the presentation notes the same concept can be applied to future heavy lifters, in order to allow launch of even larger capacity depots.
Also discussed are the relevant requirements a depot would need, such as tanker missions, to top up the depot in-situ. This is required due to the natural boil off of the propellant, although there would be flexibility, with refueling tanker missions launched with propellant mass sized to the selected launch vehicle.
In summary, the presentation adds that Propellant Depots can enhance the mission capability of exploration architectures regardless of the use of small reusable rockets, larger EELV class rockets or much larger heavy lift vehicles, while future replacement depots can sport improved technology, as an interplanetary highway is constructed in space.
(Images: L2 Content, ULA, Ball Aerospace)
(As the shuttle fleet retire, NSF and L2 are providing full transition level coverage, available no where else on the internet, from Orion and SLS to ISS and COTS/CRS/CCDEV, to European and Russian vehicles.
(Click here: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/l2/ – to view how you can support NASASpaceflight.com)In this tutorial, we'll use Lassie, a Python library for retrieving content from websites, to fetch information regarding a Qbox YouTube video as JSON. We'll then store that data in our Qbox Elasticsearch cluster using elasticsearch-py, Elasticsearch's official low-level Python client. We'll also use elasticsearch-py to query and return the record we indexed.
Although this example is minimal and the choice of a YouTube video to index is somewhat arbitrary, the concept it demonstrates has larger practical applications. For example, a company could build a vertical search engine collecting all information about it found online. The user-friendliness of Lassie and Python would enable a task like this to be done in relatively fewer lines of code and with syntax easily understood, even by those new to programming.
Setup
For this post, we will be using hosted Elasticsearch on Qbox.io. You can sign up or launch your cluster here, or click "Get Started" in the header navigation. If you need help setting up, refer to “Provisioning a Qbox Elasticsearch Cluster.”
We also assume Python 3 is installed and configured on your system. If Python 3 is not installed, check out the downloads for further instruction.
We also assume your Qbox base URL, username, and password are all saved on your system as environment variables called QBOX_BASE_URL, QBOX_USERNAME, and QBOX_PASSWORD.
Imports
First, we need to install our project's dependencies. You can do this using pip or your system package manager, depending on your preference. In addition to lassie and elasticsearch-py, we need to install certifi, which provides Mozilla's root certificate bundle for SSL certificate validation and TLS host identity verification. This is necessary since we connect to our Qbox cluster over https. We also install urllib3, a HTTP client that we'll use to create a PoolManager to manage the certificate bundle.
Once these packages are installed, we can create our program, lassie_qbox.py.
Here are our imports:
import lassie from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch import os import certifi import urllib3
In addition to the previously mentioned packages, we import os from the Python standard library to extract information about our system environment variables, $QBOX_BASE_URL, $QBOX_USERNAME, and $QBOX_PASSWORD.
Creating a Client
First, we create a PoolManager using urllib3 which will verify the certificates for each request, using the data stored in certifi :
http = urllib3.PoolManager( cert_reqs='CERT_REQUIRED', ca_certs=certifi.where())
Next, we pull and save the relevant environment variables with os. Os.environ is a mapping object that stores all environment variables as keys and their content as corresponding values.
username = os.environ['QBOX_USERNAME'] password = os.environ['QBOX_PASSWORD'] base_url = os.environ['QBOX_BASE_URL']
We are now ready to create Elasticsearch client. We specify the username, password, and base_url for our Qbox cluster using the RFC-1738 format. Note that verify_certs is set to True - without this, our HTTPS connection would be insecure.
es = Elasticsearch([ 'https://{}:{}@{}/'.format(username, password, base_url), ], verify_certs=True)
Fetching Data with Lassie
Now, we use the fetch function from lassie to retrieve information about our Qbox YouTube video. Lassie prioritizes beautifully-formated information retrieval, so we don't have to worry about manipulating the format of our fetch results.
doc = lassie.fetch("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB0E9X6Nmxk")
Indexing and Searching Our Data
Next, we can index the document we just fetched with elasticsearch-py, setting the document type to string :
res = es.index(index="test-index", doc_type='string', id=1, body=doc)
We fetch and print the document we just created. Here are the relevant lines of code:
res = es.get(index="test-index", doc_type='string', id=1) print(res['_source'])
And here is the printed output:
{'images': [{'src': 'https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xB0E9X6Nmxk/maxresdefault.jpg', 'type': 'og:image'}, {'src': 'https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xB0E9X6Nmxk/maxresdefault.jpg', 'type': 'twitter:image'}, {'src': 'https://s.ytimg.com/yts/img/favicon-vflz7uhzw.ico', 'type': 'favicon'}, {'src': 'https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_32-vfl8NGn4k.png', 'type': 'favicon'}, {'src': 'https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_48-vfl1s0rGh.png', 'type': 'favicon'}, {'src': 'https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_96-vfldSA3ca.png', 'type': 'favicon'}, {'src': 'https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_144-vflWmzoXw.png', 'type': 'favicon'}], 'videos': [{'src': 'http://www.youtube.com/v/xB0E9X6Nmxk?version=3&autohide=1','secure_src': 'https://www.youtube.com/v/xB0E9X6Nmxk?version=3&autohide=1', 'type': 'application/x-shockwave-flash', 'width': 1280, 'height': 720}, {'src': 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/xB0E9X6Nmxk', 'width': 1280, 'height': 720}], 'title': 'Qbox is Hosted Elasticsearch', 'url': 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB0E9X6Nmxk', 'description': 'Qbox is the dedicated Elasticsearch hosting solution. Our purpose is to help you be successful in your Elasticsearch environment and take away the stress of...','site_name': 'YouTube', 'keywords': ['Elasticsearch', 'Cloud', 'Hosted Elasticsearch'], 'locale': 'en_US','status_code': 200}
We refresh the index we created, then query our cluster for all items matching test-index and print the results found.
es.indices.refresh(index="test-index") res = es.search(index="test-index", body={"query": {"match_all": {}}}) print("Got %d Hits:" % res['hits']['total']) for hit in res['hits']['hits']: print(hit["_source"])
Our output is the same as before:
Got 1 Hit: {'images': [{'src': 'https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xB0E9X6Nmxk/maxresdefault.jpg', 'type': 'og:image'}, {'src': 'https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xB0E9X6Nmxk/maxresdefault.jpg', 'type': 'twitter:image'}, {'src': 'https://s.ytimg.com/yts/img/favicon-vflz7uhzw.ico', 'type': 'favicon'}, {'src': 'https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_32-vfl8NGn4k.png', 'type': 'favicon'}, {'src': 'https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_48-vfl1s0rGh.png', 'type': 'favicon'}, {'src': 'https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_96-vfldSA3ca.png', 'type': 'favicon'}, {'src': 'https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_144-vflWmzoXw.png', 'type': 'favicon'}], 'videos': [{'src': 'http://www.youtube.com/v/xB0E9X6Nmxk?version=3&autohide=1','secure_src': 'https://www.youtube.com/v/xB0E9X6Nmxk?version=3&autohide=1', 'type': 'application/x-shockwave-flash', 'width': 1280, 'height': 720}, {'src': 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/xB0E9X6Nmxk', 'width': 1280, 'height': 720}], 'title': 'Qbox is Hosted Elasticsearch', 'url': 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB0E9X6Nmxk', 'description': 'Qbox is the dedicated Elasticsearch hosting solution. Our purpose is to help you be successful in your Elasticsearch environment and take away the stress of...','site_name': 'YouTube', 'keywords': ['Elasticsearch', 'Cloud', 'Hosted Elasticsearch'], 'locale': 'en_US','status_code': 200}
Finally, let's search for a fake index and verify that we receive no results from our query.
es.indices.refresh(index="fake-index") res = es.search(index="fake-index", body={"query": {"match_all": {}}}) print("Got %d Hits:" % res['hits']['total']) for hit in res['hits']['hits']: print(hit["_source"])
The output confirms that our program is working as expected.
POST https://$BASE_URL/fake-index/_refresh [status:404 request:0.036s] Traceback (most recent call last): File "lassie_qbox.py", line 26, in <module> es.indices.refresh(index="fake-index") File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/elasticsearch/client/utils.py", line 71, in _wrapped return func(*args, params=params, **kwargs) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/elasticsearch/client/indices.py", line 56, in refresh '_refresh'), params=params) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/elasticsearch/transport.py", line 318, in perform_request status, headers, data = connection.perform_request(method, url, params, body, ignore=ignore, timeout=timeout) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/elasticsearch/connection/http_urllib3.py", line 127, in perform_request self._raise_error(response.status, raw_data) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/elasticsearch/connection/base.py", line 122, in _raise_error raise HTTP_EXCEPTIONS.get(status_code, TransportError)(status_code, error_message, additional_info) elasticsearch.exceptions.NotFoundError: TransportError(404, 'index_not_found_exception', 'no such index')
Conclusion
In conclusion, Lassie and elasticsearch-py combined are a powerful pair. We can quickly extract meaningful information from web pages and just as readily index and search the data we've retrieved.
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Mark Helfrich spent the last eight seasons at Oregon
Helfrich met with Miami head coach Mark Richt and other staff members. He was also at team workouts.
“Our program occasionally brings in people during the offseason to discuss strategy and exchange ideas," Richt said in a statement. "Mark Helfrich visited with our staff last week and we talked football.”
Richt served as the Hurricanes’ offensive play-caller last season, his first at Miami, and the Hurricanes ranked eighth in the ACC (out of 14 teams) in total offense and sixth in scoring.
Helfrich, 43, spent four seasons at Oregon (2009-12) as the offensive coordinator under Chip Kelly guiding a spread offense that was ranked highly nationally in several categories.
Helfrich took over as head coach when Kelly left to be the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles.
Helfrich went 37-16 in four seasons (2013-16) including winning a Pac-12 championship in 2014. He was fired at the end of the 2016 season following a 4-8 year, Oregon’s worst in 25 years.
Miami will be looking to replace three-year starting quarterback Brad Kaaya, who left as the school’s all-time passing yardage leader.
Six quarterbacks are in the running to be the next starter including junior Malik Rosier, sophomore Evan Shirreffs, redshirt freshman Jack Allison, junior walk-on Vincent Testaverde, freshman Cade Weldon, and freshman N’Kosi Perry, who will arrive in the summer.
Spring practices at Miami begin on March 21.
Christopher Stock has covered the Miami Hurricanes since 2003 and can be reached by e-mail at stock@insidetheu.com
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Go VIP! Get The Inside Scoop With VIP Access!The stock market looks very expensive.
Stock prices have been rallying as earnings growth has been stagnating, which has inflated the forward price/earnings (P/E) multiple on the S&P 500 (^GSPC) to levels we haven’t seen in years.
“[A]t this stage, chasing the rally is akin to picking up nickels in front of a steam roller,” Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg wrote on Wednesday. “[T]he forward multiple is back challenging the cycle highs and already tops the 2007 peak which is worrisome to me, but obviously not the masses.”
P/Es are getting rich. More
It’s totally fair to say stocks are looking very expensive. And to some extent, it’s arguably fair to suggest that P/Es have historically reverted to their long-term averages (although not everyone would say that), which is a risk to prices.
But it’s a big mistake to argue that stock prices are doomed to fall soon because P/Es are too high.
In other words, you may be face-to-face with the steam roller. But that’s not to say that steam roller will ever actually crush you.
High P/Es reveal nothing about the near-term moves
Most experts agree that P/Es should be considered in the context of interest rates and/or inflation rates. Most experts would also acknowledge that P/E ratios, nevertheless, reveal little about how the market will move in the near-term.
“The forward P/E is a horrible indicator,” BMO’s Brian Belski said to Yahoo Finance.
Belski’s seen it all in his 27+ years on Wall Street, and he has shared some very smart observations about P/Es. In an October 2015 note to clients, Belski wrote (emphasis ours): “we have found that the average P/E at the end of prior bull markets has fluctuated rather significantly, averaging 18.4x but with a standard deviation of 5.4x. This suggests to us that valuation by itself is not reason enough for a bull market to end.”
Note: This chart is from an October 2015 note. The “Current” P/E is higher today. (Source: BMO Capital Markets) More
As you can see, there’s no P/E level that signals an end to a bull market. Furthermore, we see that P/E ratios will sometimes drift very far above its average before stock prices turn. Notably, there are instances when a bull market will end even when P/Es suggest stocks are cheap.
Earnings growth becomes critical
Belski’s outlook for the stock market is not dictated by his expectations for P/E multiples. However, he does consider the role P/E fluctuations played in getting the market to where it is today.
“We believe the S&P 500 has a very good chance of delivering at least high-single-digit percentage gains in 2017 as the market transitions from P/E to EPS-driven gains and copes with the positives and negatives associated with a Trump administration and the changing policy dynamics it generates,” he said in a November 18 note.
An expanding P/E is a normal occurrence in bull markets. But in this next phase, Belski sees the market being fueled by earnings growth.
He reiterated: “Valuation multiple expansion has been a key contributor to stock market performance over the past several years as earnings growth has decelerated. However, given above-average valuation levels, we believe this trend has largely played out (particularly given the interest rate and inflation outlook), and earnings growth will be required for the next leg higher.”Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption As Orla Guerin reports, the hearing was over almost as soon as it had begun
The trial of Egypt's ousted President Mohammed Morsi has been adjourned after officials said bad weather had stopped his helicopter from taking off.
Other defendants arrived at the police compound by helicopter but Mr Morsi was said to still be in jail in Alexandria.
One of the defendants shouted in court that the trial was unconstitutional.
Mr Morsi and 14 other Muslim Brotherhood figures are accused of inciting the killing of protesters outside a presidential palace in 2012.
He was removed by the army last July after demonstrations against his rule.
In court The heavily guarded hearing was over almost as soon as it began - but not before chaos erupted in court, just as it had during the first session in November. Journalists clambered over seats, trying to get closer to the metal cage that housed the accused. One of the accused, Essam al-Erian, shouted that he and other defendants had been brought to court in the middle of the night, against their will. He said the hearing was illegal and unconstitutional. A lawyer shouted back that he should keep his opinions to himself. When an Egyptian journalist tried to ask about a hunger strike by Mr al-Erian and other Muslim Brotherhood members, another local journalist shouted: "Let them have a hunger strike, we don't care!" State TV initially reported that Mr Morsi had arrived in court, but this was not the case. The presiding judge blamed bad weather but many may have their doubts. Defence lawyers claimed he was kept away because of next week's vote on a new constitution. It's widely viewed as a referendum on the popularly-backed coup that removed Mr Morsi last July.
His supporters have since held regular protests calling for his reinstatement.
A helicopter carrying some of the defendants arrived at the National Police Academy complex in Cairo for the hearing early on Wednesday, correspondents said.
State media had initially said Mr Morsi was also there; however, state news agency Mena later said his arrival had been delayed by bad weather.
The court session began at about 11:15 (09:15 GMT) but was immediately adjourned until 1 February, a decision that the presiding judge put down to weather conditions, the BBC's Orla Guerin reports.
Outside the court the sun was shining.
Mr Morsi is being held more than 130 miles (210km) away at Burj al-Arab prison west of Alexandria, where the weather was cloudy and windy.
But the gusts were not strong enough to affect flights, reporters said. There was no mention of weather-related cancellations on the city airport's website.
Mr Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood called the claims about the weather "risible" and "easily disputed".
In a statement from its London office, the Brotherhood called the trial a "sham" and said Mr Morsi was facing "trumped up charges that hold no weight".
Four-finger salute
The deputy leader of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, Essam al-Erian, shouted from the cage in which the defendants were being held that he did not recognise the trial's legitimacy and they had been brought to court against their will in the early hours of the morning.
Mr Morsi would refuse to attend the trial as his position was the same, Mr Erian said.
Security outside the Cairo police compound was very heavy.
Egyptian media said thousands of police were on alert and TV pictures showed some pro-Morsi protesters being arrested as they waved the four-finger salute adopted by supporters of the ousted president.
Tear gas and live fire were used to disperse demonstrators in the Nasr City area of Cairo, witnesses told the BBC. Several more protesters were detained during disturbances which saw tyres and some vehicles set alight.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Security outside the National Police Academy in Cairo was tight before the trial was due to start
Image copyright AFP Image caption Pro-Morsi supporters clashed with security forces in the Nasr City area of Cairo
When Mr Morsi does return to court, he will be asked to appoint a lawyer, which he refused to do during his initial appearance.
Three trials of Mohammed Morsi Incitement of supporters to commit violence and murder during break-up of December 2012 protest
Conspiring with foreign organisations (Hamas and Hezbollah) to commit terrorist acts
Murder of prison officers in prison jailbreak during 2011 uprising against President Mubarak Q&A: Charges against Morsi
He also faces several other charges. At another court hearing set for the end of January, he is accused with some 130 others of murdering policemen during a mass breakout from a Cairo prison in January 2011 shortly before the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.
Human rights groups have dismissed some of the allegations against him as preposterous.
Egyptian officials insist Mr Morsi will be given a fair trial but lawyers trying to defend him say they have been denied access to him.
There were chaotic scenes when he first appeared in court in early November.
He insisted he was still the president and was being held against his will. Rejecting the legitimacy of the court he refused to wear a prison uniform.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Several supporters were arrested outside the court compound on Wednesday morning
Image copyright AP Image caption Mr Morsi was shown on state TV during his first court appearance on 4 November 2013
Although Mr Morsi won the presidency in a democratic election, he fell out with key institutions during his 13 months in power.
The interim government has since cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, classifying it as a terrorist organisation and arresting thousands of members. At least one thousand people have been killed in clashes with security forces.
Mr Morsi's supporters say he and other senior Brotherhood leaders are the victims of politically motivated prosecutions.
The same court is being used for the retrial of Mr Mubarak, whose life sentence for involvement in the deaths of protesters has been overturned by an appeal court.We said it was coming soon, and the Dark Knight-themed WinPho hasn't disappointed. Phones 4u has just announced that pre-ordered laser-etched Lumia 900s will be delivered on June 1st; that's this Friday. Off-contract pricing is pegged at £600, although multiple contracts are also available from the UK retailer. There doesn't appear to be any extra functionality on the special edition, although bragging rights do count for a lot. The phone will arrive in limited numbers, but neither Nokia nor Phones 4u is spilling the beans on precise unit numbers. The retailer is also throwing in free tickets to see the Dark Knight Rises at UK cinemas (or theaters) this summer, plus the chance to hit up the premiere. Pre-ordering heroes can zip-wire their way to the source link below.
Update: SlashGear's been told by Phones 4u that there will be 900 of the special edition phones.The news: After a summer-long hiatus, Jon Stewart returned to the Daily Show last night to address the way some people have taken issue with the coverage of the protests and demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo.
Of course, there are legitimate grips to have over how the events in Ferguson have been reported, from a lack of available information on police brutality to the way mainstream outlets such as the New York Times wrote about Michael Brown's past.
But one non-legitimate reason: We're talking about race too much. But that's what Fox News has been complaining about. Unfortunately for them, in his return, Stewart ripped through Fox News's coverage on Ferguson and blasted Fox hosts such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity for not understanding "that life in this country is inherently different for white people and black people.
"Here's the problem with everything that's going on in this conversation. This isn't all about just one man killed in one town. It's about how people of color, no matter their socioeconomic standing, face obstacles in this country with surprising grace," Stewart says in the clip. "I guarantee you that every person of color in this country has faced an indignity — from the ridiculous to the grotesque to the sometimes fatal — at some point in their, I'm going to say, last couple of hours. Because of their skin color."
"And that shit happens all the time. All of it. Race is there. And it is a constant. You're tired of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it."
Being Black in America. And the Daily Show's extended look at race and police brutality did not stop there: In an absurdist segment, correspondent Michael Che went on a Forrest Gump-like journey across America to find a safe place to be black, ultimately ending up in the only possible haven: space. "Relax, Jon. I'm not even on Earth anymore. Nowhere safer for a black man than the infinite blackness of outer space," Che reports.
Welcome back, Daily Show.Brandon Volpi, 18, was killed while he was trying to intervene in a fight over a cellphone, an assistant Crown attorney told court in Ottawa during the accused's second-degree murder trial on Tuesday.
Brandon Volpi, 18, died from his injuries after a stabbing outside a downtown Ottawa hotel early in the morning hours of June 7, 2014. (Photo courtesy of Brandon Volpi's family) During his opening statements in Superior Court, Michael Boyce told the jury that Volpi left an after-prom party at Les Suites Hotel in downtown Ottawa on June 7, 2014, and died 90 minutes later of a knife wound to the heart.
It happened around 3:30 a.m. outside the hotel on Besserer Street, where students from three Catholic high schools were gathered for an after-prom party.
Boyce told the court Devontay Hackett, who was 18 at the time and is now 21, had been fighting with another student over a missing cellphone.
The student said he felt threatened and asked Volpi for help as Volpi and his friends were walking by in the hotel lobby, Boyce said. The students all went outside the hotel, where Hackett and Volpi came into contact with each other and Hackett pulled out a knife, Boyce told the court.
Stab wound to heart fatal blow, court told
Volpi had a 17-centimetre stab wound to the neck, close to a jugular vein, and suffered slashes to his face, elbow and underarm, Boyce said. A 10-centimetre-deep penetrating stab wound through Volpe's rib cage and into his heart was the injury that killed him, Boyce told the court.
Boyce implored the eight men and four women on the jury to "look at the number, the nature and the location of the wounds on Volpi's body."
The Crown said video evidence shows Hackett running away into an alley separating Les Suites Hotel from a neighbouring hotel after the stabbing.
This cellphone and security footage shows a fatal prom night fight outside a downtown Ottawa hotel in June 2014. It was shown at the murder trial of Devontay Hackett, who accused of killing Brandon Volpi. 0:46
Hackett was arrested nearly a month later in Toronto on a Canada-wide warrant and charged with second-degree murder.
He had attended St. Pius X High School while Volpi was a student at St. Patrick's High School.
Videos show scuffle
Ottawa police released this image of Devontay Hackett, accused of second-degree murder, in 2014. (Ottawa police) The Crown's first witness, Ottawa police civilian forensic imaging expert Michael Ross, took the court through videos from security cameras in the lobby of the hotel, a camera at a neighbouring hotel and two mobile phones.
While the lobby security footage focused on the lead-up to the incident, two hotel guests captured the physical altercation outside with their phones, one from the third-floor balcony and another from the 10th floor of the hotel.
Ross told the court he's viewed the blurry, grainy videos 50 times.
The third floor video showed one man dressed in black, identified by Ross as Volpi, fighting another man dressed in white, identified by Ross as Hackett.
Accused appears to lunge at Volpi: witness
The two men are outside surrounded by three others, while about 15 people stand on the street screaming and swearing as they watch the fight unfold.
Ross slowed the video down frame by frame to show the court that Hackett seemed to lunge at Volpi with his right arm extended before pulling back.
In another frame, Ross pointed to Hackett making a sweeping motion with his right arm at Volpi. Ross told the Crown Hackett had what appears to be a "light-coloured object in his right hand."
Ross then pointed to the man identified as Hackett running away from the scene while security guards come to Volpi's aid.
The trial is expected to continue Wednesday."THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT" by Shane Black REVISED DRAFT February 24, 1995 A WINDOWPANE Assaulted from without by SNOWFLAKES. Wind tossed. INSIDE, a bed, dappled with moon shadow. A LITTLE GIRL, fast asleep. The wind whistles and sighs outside. She DREAMS... Eyelids closed, eyes roving beneath... then suddenly they SNAP open. A stifled cry. She thrashes for her STUFFED BEAR, as a soft voice says: VOICE Shhhhh. And there's MOM, kneeling beside her. Vague shape in the dimness. The full moon throws light across one sparkling eye. LITTLE GIRL Mommy, the men on the mountain...! MOM Shhhh. Gone, all gone now. (strokes her hair) I'm here. Mommy's always here and no one can ever hurt you. Safe now... safe and warm... snug as a bug in a rug. (beat) I'll sit with you, think you can sleep? LITTLE GIRL Turn on the nightlight. The mother nods. Passes her left hand gently over the girl's forehead. MOM Close your eyes now. I love you. The child subsides, breathing steady. Eyes closed. The mother rises. Regards her through the dimness. Slowly turns, heads for the door. Flicks on a Winnie the Pooh NIGHTLIGHT -- Her entire right forearm is slicked with blood. More blood on her Czech-made MP-5 machine gun. She staggers just a little... barely noticeable. Passes out on the light. Into darkness. Sits beside her daughter's bed. The child sleeps peacefully. Outside snow slithers at the glass. FADE OUT. Pause. Blackness. FADE IN: It's snowing in southwestern Ohio. Before us, nestled in the rolling hills: a postcard slice of suburbia. SUPER the legend: UPPER SANDUSKY, OHIO. Three Weeks Earlier. Peaceful. Serene. It's the town in the glass bubble, the one God shakes to watch it snow... EXT. SUBURBAN STREET - DAY CHILDREN, dozens of them, bursting from houses. Slapping of screen doors. A HORSE-DRIVEN SLEIGH is rattling down Main Street. Flanked by kids. Christmas carols, droning from loudspeakers. HAPPY, LAUGHING SANTA waves howdy, chortling his "Ho's" in groups of three, meanwhile he's really a grizzled old fire marshall named EARL, freezing his nuts off. Beside him sits MRS. CLAUS, about whom we notice two things: First, she's the June in this June/December pair -- and second, she's to kill for, an effortlessly beautiful woman. For the record, meet SAMANTHA CAINE. SAMANTHA How you holdin' up? EARL Freezing my nuts off. Santa produces a bottle of Seagrams. Starts to open it. SAMANTHA *Put that away*. Earl complies, grumbling. Some teenage burnouts howl from a street corner: BURNOUT Ow! Mrs. Claus is HOT! Samantha squirms in her seat, scowling. SAMANTHA I can't take it, Earl, this dumb costume is giving me a wedgie. Driving me crazy, but there's these *kids* here -- EARL Right, you don't wanna be rootin' -- SAMANTHA In front of little Billy, age four, yeah. "Look, Mommy, Mrs. Claus chooses to |
is a mysterious storage pod that contains something referred to as Beta, which is exerting an influence on their mission.[6]
Characters [ edit ]
On Antares [ edit ]
On Earth [ edit ]
On Mars [ edit ]
Sharon Lewis (Lara Gilchrist) was left behind together with Walker during a previous Mars mission. She was Donner's former lover. [9]
Jeff Walker (Rick Ravanello) was left behind on Mars with Lewis.[9]
Development [ edit ]
The project was inspired by the BBC fictional documentary miniseries Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets, broadcast on BBC One in 2004.[10] The show was co-produced by the BBC, Fox Television Studios, and Omni Film Productions, in association with Canadian broadcasters CTV Television Network and SPACE, as well as German broadcaster ProSieben.[11]
Thirteen episodes were initially ordered,[12] and filming began on January 19, 2009, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, North America, lasting six months. CGI effects were handled by Stargate Studios, in collaboration with set designer Stephen Geaghan.[6]
Episodes [ edit ]
^ As of September 14, 2009 this episode was the last scheduled airing of the show on ABC ^ As of October 2, 2009 this episode was the last scheduled airing of the show on CTV ^ Flashpoint instead. CTV originally had this episode scheduled for September 25, 2009 but started season 3 ofinstead.
Broadcast [ edit ]
On June 30, 2009, ABC announced that it had ordered the program for a summer 2009 broadcast in the United States.[5][18] The show began on October 21, 2009[19] on BBC Two and BBC HD in the United Kingdom,[20] and has aired on both CTV and SPACE in Canada,[21] and is set to air on ProSieben in Germany.[5] All 13 episodes aired in November / December 2009 on Arena TV in Australia.
CTV moved the scheduled airing of the show from Sunday to Friday nights on August 26, 2009, and speculation began about the possibility of the show being canceled.[13] On September 14, 2009, online sources noted ABC's apparent cancellation of the series, with most having reported the eighth episode as the "series finale", while others reported it as the "season finale".[22] The show's publicist, Nicole Marostica, issued a statement on September 14, 2009 that ABC is not in fact canceling the show but that management is deciding on a time slot to air the remaining 5 episodes of season 1.[23]
CTV aired episode 9, Eve Ate the Apple on September 18, 2009, but did not have Defying Gravity on its schedule for the following week. The remaining four episodes were aired on SPACE, which is only available in Canada. On October 22, 2009, TV Squad reported that the sets for Defying Gravity had been destroyed and that the series had been canceled.[24] On October 29, 2009, creator James Parriott revealed to CliqueClack TV how the series would have continued, had the show gone past its first season. Parriott explained that he has the first three seasons plotted out in a show "bible", along with how it would ultimately end.[8] Also reported was that the remaining episodes that did not air in the U.S. would not be shown on television, but would appear later on Hulu and iTunes. The series was released to DVD on January 19, 2010. All online content regarding the show was removed from the ABC website as of November 18, 2009, and is no longer available on Hulu.
DVD releases [ edit ]
Set details Special features Country United States, Canada United Kingdom Australia Bonus featurettes: [25] Mission Accomplished — A Look at Defying Gravity Five Photo Slide Shows 29 Deleted Scenes
# episodes 13 13[26] N/A Aspect ratio 1.78:1 1.85:1[26] N/A Running time 578 minutes 538 minutes[26] N/A Audio Dolby Digital 5.1 N/A N/A Subtitles English, Spanish, French N/A N/A # of discs 4 4[26] N/A Region 1 (NTSC) 2 (PAL)[26] N/A Rating Not Rated 15[26] N/A Release date January 19, 2010 ( ) [25] February 25, 2013 ( ) [26][27] N/A
Ratings [ edit ]
US Nielsen ratings [ edit ]
# Episode US air date Rating Share Rating/share
(18-49) Viewers
(millions) Rank
(week) 1 "Pilot" August 2, 2009 2.4 4 1.1/3 3.83 21 2 "Natural Selection" August 2, 2009 2.3 4 1.0/3 3.56 21 3 "Threshold" August 9, 2009 1.8 3 1.0/2 2.81 28 4 "H2IK" August 16, 2009 1.7 3 0.8/2 2.59 34 5 "Rubicon" August 23, 2009 1.8 3 0.8/2 2.66 33 6 "Bacon" August 30, 2009 1.7 3 0.9/2 2.53 31 7 "Fear" September 6, 2009 1.7 4 0.6/2 2.16 29 8 "Love, Honor, Obey" September 13, 2009 1.6 3 0.8/2 2.53 39
Canadian BBM ratings [ edit ]
# Episode Canadian air date Viewers
(million) Rank
(week) 1
2 "Pilot"
"Natural Selection" August 2, 2009 (CTV) 0.783[28] 20[28] 3 "Threshold" August 9, 2009 (CTV) N/A[29] N/A[29] 4 "H2IK" August 16, 2009 (CTV) 0.573[30] 30[30] 5 "Rubicon" August 23, 2009 (CTV) N/A[31] N/A[31] 6 "Bacon" August 28, 2009 (CTV) N/A[32] N/A[32] 7 "Fear" September 4, 2009 (CTV) N/A[33] N/A[33] 8 "Love, Honor, Obey" September 11, 2009 (CTV) N/A[34] N/A[34] 9 "Eve Ate the Apple" September 18, 2009 (CTV) N/A[35] N/A[35] 10 "Deja Vu" October 2, 2009 (Space) N/A[36] N/A[36] 11 "Solitary" October 9, 2009 (Space) N/A[37] N/A[37] 12 "Venus" October 16, 2009 (Space) N/A[38] N/A[38] 13 "Kiss" October 23, 2009 (Space) N/A[39] N/A[39]
UK BARB ratings [ edit ]
# Episode UK air date Audience share
(%) Viewers
(million) 1 "Pilot" October 21, 2009 [40] 7.7 1.72 2 "Law of Natural Selection" October 21, 2009 [40] 7.2 1.44 3 "Threshold" October 29, 2009 [40] 3.5 0.79 4 "H2IK (Hell If I Know)" November 5, 2009 [40] 3.3 0.76 5 "Rubicon" November 12, 2009 [40] 2.8 0.67 6 "Bacon" November 14, 2009 [40] N/A N/A 7 "Fear" November 21, 2009 [40] N/A N/A 8 "Love, Honor, Obey" November 28, 2009 [40] N/A N/A 9 "Eve Ate the Apple" December 12, 2009 [40] N/A N/A 10 "Deja Vu" December 19, 2009 [40] N/A N/A 11 "Solitary" December 20, 2009 [40] N/A N/A 12 "Venus" December 21, 2009 [40] N/A N/A 13 "Kiss" December 22, 2009 [40] N/A N/A
References [ edit ]
Character biographiesWelcome to Meet the Developers. This week, we interviewed Hall Hood, Lead Writer on Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. In each “Meet the Developers,” we introduce a developer and ask them questions about their background, what they’re working on, and what they do for the team. After the interview, we will set up a thread on the forums so you can ask our featured developer further questions. Here’s our interview with Hall:
What is your favorite class storyline?
I will always have a soft spot for the Jedi Knight and Smuggler class stories since I wrote a lot of the content in both of them, but I honestly love all of our stories. Each one explores a different aspect of the Star Wars™ mythology, and I rotate through them depending on whatever mood I’m in at the time.
Who is your favorite companion? Why?
Risha, hands-down. She’s so much fun to write, and Tara Strong’s voice acting blows me away every time.
Do you have a favorite story moment in the game?
I think the Jedi Knight’s first meeting with the Sith Emperor ranks right up there alongside the Smuggler’s final meeting with Skavak as among my favorite SWTOR story moments, but that list is pretty crowded. Our designers created a lot of fantastic story moments throughout the game.
What has been the most enjoyable thing to write for SWTOR?
I’m a big fan of our companion characters, especially the ones players can romance. The romantic subplots with Risha, Doc, and Kira were tremendous fun to create.
What are some unique challenges you face in writing for an MMO?
The hardest things to write in SWTOR are the epic multiplayer story arcs. I need to provide a satisfying story experience for extremely diverse classes that bring unique sensibilities to each of their individual narratives. Multiplayer storylines need to feel equally compelling to a Jedi, Trooper, Smuggler, Sith, Agent, or Bounty Hunter. Everyone should believe the galaxy’s fate rests on their decisions, and that they have an important destiny to fulfill in the unfolding drama—even if the Smuggler’s destiny is just to get paid for a job well done.
How did you get into writing for games?
When I first heard that my favorite game studio was opening a new branch in my hometown, I contacted BioWare immediately about joining the team. I went through a lengthy testing and interview process, submitting multiple samples of interactive dialogue and quest designs before earning my spot in the fabled Writers Pit. It’s been a thrilling rollercoaster ride ever since.
What does a typical day look like for you at the BioWare office?
From the moment I walk into the office until I reluctantly leave the building at night, my job is to play with my favorite characters and stories to create fun game content for people who love Star Wars as much as I do. I work with artists, animators, level designers, voice actors, cinematics teams and many other incredibly talented and passionate people. Every once in a while, I think about pinching myself to make sure this is real—but then I stop myself, because who would want to wake up from a dream like this one?
Players are really excited about HK-51 – can you give us any tidbits or teasers about his story?
HK-51 was programmed with certain failsafe protocols to prevent his model from turning rogue like the fabled HK-47. The means of deactivating these protocols is unique to say the least, but perfectly appropriate to HK-51’s function.
What Star Wars stories or characters inspire you the most?
I’m a big fan of the original trilogy. At different times in my life and while working on SWTOR, all of the major characters from those first three films have served as inspirations. Han and Leia are among my favorites, as anyone who has played the Smuggler will know. When I was writing the Jedi Knight, my main inspirations were Luke, Obi-Wan, and my favorite character from the prequels, Qui-Gon Jinn. When I’m writing something truly epic, I always put on the John Williams soundtrack music to get in the proper mood.
What advice would you have for anyone who wants to break into writing for games?
The best advice I can give to any creative person, regardless if they’re a writer, artist, actor, musician, game designer, or anything else, is simply this: DON’T QUIT. Being a writer is an especially hard career path. You’ll face a lot of rejection and be tempted often by opportunities to give up on your dreams and do something safer and more financially rewarding with your life. You have to resist those moments, persevere, and keep getting better at your craft. It’s worth it.
Do you have any hobbies outside of gaming?
I love movies, live music, TV, theater, reading, visiting art museums, going on long vacations to do absolutely nothing in beautiful places… whatever feeds my creative spirit, that’s where you’ll find me.
Thanks for checking out our Meet the Developers blog. If you have any questions for Hall, please post them in this forum thread. We’ll choose questions that relate directly to Hall and his responsibilities. In the near future, we’ll have some answers from Hall to your questions!This time last year I was writing a story with almost the exact same headline, telling readers that Orlando was named a top city for so-called sugar daddies.
The same holds true this year. Technically the City Beautiful dropped a few spots on the list, but overall sugar daddies are on the rise -- both in Orlando and North America as a whole.
Last year SeekingArrangement.com reported 12.52 sugar daddies per 1,000 men in Orlando, this year that number rose to 18.1.
The website matches sugar daddies and sugar babies, so for this study it used its membership numbers to come up with an overall list of top cities based on sugar daddy prevalence.
For a rough estimate on exactly how many sugar daddies live in Orlando, consider the Census Bureau lists the city's population as 262,372 people, of which 48.6 percent, or about 127,513 are men. From there use the 18.1 figure the website provided and you'll come to the conclusion that there are about 2,308 men locally who are looking for someone to wine and dine, and then some.
Those Orlando men, on average, are 44 years old and spends $3,745 a month on gifts and allowance for their sugar babies.
Click through the gallery above to see which cities were named the top 10 for sugar daddies.McCain’s bill is called The Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA). It would repeal key sections of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). DSHEA protects supplements if 1) they are food products that have been in the food supply and not chemically altered or 2) if they were sold as supplements prior to 1994, the year that DSHEA was passed. If a supplement fits one of these two descriptions, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cannot arbitrarily ban it or reclassify it as a drug.
These protections are far from perfect. They discourage companies from developing new forms of supplements. New supplements may be arbitrarily banned by the FDA or adopted by drug companies in a way that precludes their further sale as supplements.
McCain’s bill would wipe out even the minimal protections contained in DSHEA. It would give the FDA full discretion and power to compile a discreet list of supplements allowed to remain on the market while banning all others.
Everyone knows that the FDA is friendly to drug companies (which pay its bills and provide good revolving door jobs) and hostile to supplement companies. Under this bill, this same Agency could quite arbitrarily ban any supplement it wished or turn it over to drug companies to be developed as a drug and sold for multiples of its price as a supplement.
We must prevent this bill from gaining traction! Protect your access to supplements by contacting your senators today and asking them NOT to co-sponsor the Dietary Supplement Safety Act but rather to oppose it.
TAKE ACTION
McCain’s Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA) appears to be supported by the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) which is funded by major league sports teams including baseball, football and others. The recent suspensions of NFL and other professional sports figures is much in the news, and the goal of the sports industry appears to be to shift the spotlight from their players to the supplements industry. In his comments, Senator McCain cited six NFL players recently suspended for testing positive for banned substances and purportedly exposed to these substances through dietary supplements.
The problem here of course is one of illegal sale and use of steroids. So why dismantle the supplement industry in order to control already illegal substances?
The FDA currently has complete and total authority to stop illegal steroids and, more broadly, to regulate dietary supplements. If the agency were doing its job, it could and would have prevented the sale of illegal steroids. The answer to this problem is not to give FDA more power. The Agency simply needs to do it’s job.
TAKE ACTION
Why would a bill be offered to solve an illegal steroid problem that does not really address the steroid problem but instead gives the FDA complete and arbitrary control over all supplements? The answer is simple.
There are a lot of vested interests which are threatened by supplements. Drug companies do not like them because they represent a low cost, safer, and often more effective alternative to drugs. The FDA does not like them because supplements do not come through the FDA approval process and therefore do not support the FDA budget.
Why not simply require that supplements be brought through the FDA’s drug approval process? Wouldn’t that create a level playing field?
That is probably the argument that Senator McCain has been sold. But it is a completely false argument. The FDA drug approval process costs as much as a billion dollars. It is not economically feasible to spend such vast sums on substances that are not protected by patent, and natural substances cannot legally be patented.
This is the great “Catch 22” of American medicine. The FDA, which is supposed to guard and promote our health, is hostile to the kind of natural medicine—based on diet, supplements, and exercise—that represents the real future of healthcare. The Agency has either been captured by drug interests or is trapped in a catastrophically expensive, toxic, and ineffective patented-drug model.
Senator McCain has no doubt offered this bill in good faith. But he has been sold a bill of goods by special interests. And he has been naïve enough not to know that he is being used.
TAKE ACTION
This exceptionally bad bill also requires the reporting of all minor adverse events related to supplements. This is in addition to the already existing requirement to report adverse events. This will further stack the deck against small supplement companies by creating new, unnecessary, even more cumbersome, and of course very expensive administrative hurdles. The result: the consolidation of the supplement industry into a few big companies.If passed, this bill will likely result in the disappearance from store shelves of many supplements currently on the market. In addition to fewer supplements, there would likely be much lower doses available. Unbridled authority would be handed to the FDA, an agency that needs a top to bottom overhaul, not ever more power over our lives.
The FDA will like this because it believes that it can more easily control a few industry giants. But isn’t it more likely that the industry giants will eventually gain control over the FDA?
The FDA is already misusing the adverse event reporting process that exists. Drugs rack up thousands of adverse event reports without any action. Just recently, the FDA yanked from the market a supplement product based on just a couple of alleged adverse event reports without even allowing the company (an old and respected firm) to provide any counter-evidence or counter-argument.
The bill also allows the FDA to yank a product (at the company’s expense) if there is a “reasonable probability” that it is “adulterated” or “misbranded”. Let’s remember that “adulterated” could mean there is a minor record keeping error on the producer’s part and “misbranded” can mean that the producer simply tells the truth about the product. An “adulterated” and “misbranded” supplement in Orwellian FDA speak may actually be both completely safe and effective.
If passed, this bill will likely result in the disappearance from store shelves of many supplements currently on the market. In addition to fewer supplements, there would likely be much lower doses available. Unbridled authority would be handed to the FDA, an agency that needs a top to bottom overhaul, not ever more power over our lives.
If McCain’s bill passes, we can look to Europe for a snapshot of what we may be in for: EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, has sharply reduced the list of available supplements and is in process of reducing potencies to ridiculous levels, such as less beta carotene than can be found in half of a large carrot. Europeans already look to the US to obtain their dietary supplements. If this bill passes, where will we obtain ours?
Please take action immediately. TAKE ACTION Tell your senators NOT to co- sponsor this legislation and to do everything in their power to defeat it. Then forward this to your friends and family and ask then to do the same!Kuvassa olevassa pallossa on tarpeeksi energiaa yhden ihmisen koko eliniän tarpeisiin. Siis kaiken energian mitä tulet kuluttamaan, sisältäen valaistuksen, tietokoneet, lämmityksen, autoilun ja muun matkustuksen. Pallo on torium-nimistä metallia, jota on maan kuoressa runsaasti. Yhdessä kuutiometrissä tavallista graniittia on 35 grammaa toriumia, mikä vastaa energialtaan junanvaunullista hiiltä. Torium-esiintymissä pitoisuus on moninkertainen ja yhdestä kaivoksesta voidaan tuottaa polttoaine koko maailman energiantarpeeseen.
Yhdestä kaivoksesta koko maailman energia? Kyllä. Kymmenen tuhatta tonnia toriumia vuodessa riittää korvaamaan kaiken miljardeja tonneja hiiltä, kaasua ja bensiiniä polttamalla tuotetun energian. Ilman kasvihuonepäästöjä, poistaen ilmansaasteet jotka nyt tappavat yli miljoona ihmistä joka vuosi.
Torium-voimaloita on jo rakennettu ja parhaillaan Intiassa, Kiinassa ja Yhdysvalloissa kilpaillaan uuden reaktorityypin saamisesta kaupalliseen sarjatuotantoon. Nykyiset ydinvoimalat ovat hyvin turvallisia moninkertaisine turvajärjestelmineen, mutta torium-reaktorissa ei vastaavia kalliita järjestelyjä tarvita. Reaktorissa ei ole polttoainetankoja ja korkeapaineista vettä, vaan suolaliuos ilman painetta. Teräksistä suojakuorta ei tarvita reaktorin ympärille. Jos kaikki menisi pieleen, henkilökunta poistuisi ja sähköt sammuisivat koko voimalasta, liuos vain valuu painovoiman vetämänä varasäiliöön ja jäähtyy siellä itsestään. Tämän lisäksi torium-voimalat käyttävät polttoaineen erittäin tehokkaasti hyödyksi ja jätettä syntyy hyvin vähän.
Toriumilla tuotettu energia on siis puhdasta, turvallista ja edullista. Eikä se lopu kesken. Toriumilla voimme säästää miljoonia ihmishenkiä ja saada ilmakehän hiilidioksidipitoisuuden laskemaan.
Eduksi voi laskea senkin, että toriumista on paljon hankalampaa valmistaa ydinaseita kuin uraanista. Toriumin kelvottomuus ydinaseiden tuotantoon oli yksi syy, miksei sitä valittu polttoaineeksi nykyisen ydinvoimatekniikan alkuaikoina 1950-luvulla.
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Nyt on sydäntalvi. Samoin kuin viime vuonna, ulkona sataa vettä ja lumet ovat kovin vähissä. Tilanne on kehittynyt nopeasti huonommaksi. Toimimattomien vaihtoehtojen kanssa leikkimiseen ei ole enää aikaa: Massiivinen uusiutuvaan energiaan panostaminen ei ole vähentänyt kasvihuonepäästöjä lainkaan. Meidän on valittava energiaratkaisu, jota jälkipolvien ei tarvitse katua.
Uskomusten perusteella tehdyt päätökset eivät monimutkaisessa maailmassa yleensä johda toivottuun tulokseen. Siksi päättäjien joukkoon tarvitaan edes yksi, joka ymmärtää luonnontieteen perusteet ja osaa käyttää laskukonetta.Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Fareed Zakaria explained why neither side in the Syrian conflict is likely to surrender: “People fight to the end because they know that losers in such wars get killed or ‘ethnically cleansed.’” In this kind of war the worlds “ethnically cleansed” do not mean displaced or made refugees. They mean, as Zakaria further explained, massacred: “Then you have phase 2, which is the massacre of the Alawites, the 14 percent of Syria that has ruled and that will be a bloodbath.”
Nor will the massacres and bloodbaths be limited to combatants, or even civilian officials, if the past is any indication.
Babies, women, the elderly and everyone else will become targets of the vengeful blood lust. Already somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 Syrians have been killed, the vast majority of them civilians. According to United Nations investigators, some have been killed by chemical weapons and thermobaric bombs (that suck the oxygen out of the lungs of everyone in the area). There have been at least 17 massacres between mid-January and mid- May of this year alone. And there is no sign that the bloodshed is abating.Whether the death toll is closer to 80,000 or 100,000, this figure is more than all the people killed in nearly a century of conflict between Israel and its enemies – a conflict that includes half a dozen wars and thousands of acts of terrorism and reprisals.Even if one credits the worst allegations against the nation state of the Jewish people, Israel has killed fewer civilians since it came into existence 65 years ago than any country in history facing comparable threats over so long a time frame. The world seems unaware of this remarkable fact, because the media and international organizations focus far more on Arab and Muslim deaths caused by Israel than on those caused by fellow Arabs and Muslims.Neither is Syria the first bloody battleground on which Arabs have massacred Arabs and Muslims have massacred Muslims. Black September in Jordan, the protracted war between Iran and Iraq, the civil war in Lebanon, and the killings in post-Saddam Iraq are only some of the bloodiest battles that resulted in many thousands of civilian deaths.Imagine then what would happen if Israel were ever to lose a war with its Arab and Muslim enemies (as it almost did when it was attacked on Yom Kippur in 1973 by the Egyptian and Syrian armies.) The hatred directed against Jews in general and Israel in particular by Israel’s enemies is far more malignant than the animosity between Sunni and Shia Muslims or between Muslim and Christian Arabs. It is taught in schools, preached in mosques and repeated in the media. There would be no mercy shown. Israeli armies would not be allowed to surrender and be repatriated, as the Egyptian army was when it was trapped in Sinai at the end of the 1973 war.Israeli civilians would be targeted as they already have been by Hamas and Hezbollah rockets fired in the direction of large population centers. The goal of the first war against Israel, as expressed by one of its leaders, was “this will be a war of extermination.” The desire for revenge has only grown over the course of further warfare and more defeats.Every Israeli lives under the grim shadow of this reality. Nor do they count on timely outside intervention to prevent massacres. Remember, this is a nation built on the memory of the Holocaust, during which the world – including the United States, Great Britain and Canada – shut their gates on those seeking to escape genocide.That is why Israel will never surrender and will always fight to the end. That is why Israel needs a nuclear deterrent, unsatisfactory as it may be in a part of the world where suicide in the name of Islam is a virtue to so many of Israel’s enemies. That is why Israel must always maintain a preventive option, whereby it attacks the enemy military that is poised to attack Israeli civilians. That is why Israel must always maintain qualitative military superiority over the combined resources of its enemies. This is also why Israel should make every reasonable effort to make peace with the Palestinians, as it has with the Egyptians and the Jordanians, but without sacrificing its security and its ability to successfully resist attack.The first duty of every democracy is to protect its civilians against enemy attack. Thus far, Israel, though vastly outnumbered, has done a good job. The changes now occurring in the Arab and Muslim world make Israel’s future somewhat less certain, as does Iran’s movement toward nuclear weaponry capable of inflicting a second Holocaust on Israel’s six million Jews and one million Arabs.Yet so many in the international community seem unsympathetic to Israel’s situation. Whenever it seeks to defend its civilians, by attacking military targets, though inadvertently killing some civilians on occasion, there is a disproportional outcry against the Jewish state. Selective boycotts, divestment and other sanctions are directed only at Israel by people ranging from Alice Walker to Steven Hawking. Israel must not allow these immorally selective threats of delegitimation to deter it from protecting its citizens against the threat of Syrian-type massacres.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Whoo! After more than six months, we’ve finally made it to the tenth and final entry in the “10 Things Brian Likes” series. On that sentimental note, I thought I’d end with a tearjerker.
Provided I ever actually finish my “Small-Screen 66 Countdown” over at Brian Terrill Movie Night, The Muppet Show is set to rank highly. The series, which aired from 1975-1981, took the form of a faux variety show, showing viewers both the “acts” and the Muppets in the wings scrambling to stage them. Episodes generally had some kind of overarching storyline going on “behind the scenes,” but the real reason to watch were the acts. These were mostly songs and short sketches, typically leaning toward comedy. But every once in a while, a touching, sad, or pensive song would work its way in amidst the zaniness. Here are ten such “Moving Muppet Moments” which have stuck with me as some of the series’ best segments. “Mahna Mahna” has nothing on these.
1. Scooter – “Six-String Orchestra”
Let’s start off with something relatively light. In this clip, theatre gofer Scooter performs Harry Chapin’s song “Six-String Orchestra.” The song’s narrator is an aspiring (but as of yet untalented) guitarist, strumming out off-key chords in his bedroom. Although the song is humorous, it’s tinged with loneliness and delusion. No matter how grandiose the guitarist’s dreams, the fact remains: He’s “nothing yet to make the folks write home.”
2. Whatnot Muppets – “Something’s Missing”
Now, an about-face, to one of the sweetest love songs I’ve heard. In “Something’s Missing,” a bizarre Muppet man missing one-half of all his features traipses through a similarly “halved” set, singing about his oddly off-kilter life. “I’ve got three strings on my violin and I’m an only twin,” he croons, also listing maladies such as having four toes on each foot and being called an orphan by his father.
But then, in the final stanzas, our narrator’s beloved stands beside him, and he is instantly whole. “Whenever you come close to me, my life is all complete,” he says. “Nothing’s missing, nothing’s missing, nothing’s missing.” If you’re anything like me, that dissolve transition into the now-completed set will have you bawling.
It also gives new meaning to this costume I sported Sophomore year of College:
3. Gonzo – “The Wishing Song”
#3 on our list is debatably the saddest song The Muppet Show ever did. As the Muppet Theatre’s resident eccentric performance artist, Gonzo “The Great” often faces ostracism. But when guest star Madeline Kahn rejects his spur-of-the-moment wedding proposal, the normally unflappable “whatever” is heartbroken. Gonzo sits, dejected, and sings Paul Tracey’s “Wishing Song,” in which the singer wishes for many things, but primarily to be “someone else but me.” Though in the second stanza he states that he’s ultimately content to be himself, the lingering feeling of sadness is far from dispersed. It’s a rare moment of pathos for one of the more “out there” Muppets, and gives Gonzo some emotional depth. Who among us has never wished for a greater lot in life, beyond the limitations of our selves? After all, it’s great to have your niche as “the weird, wacky one”…but it gets lonely.
4. Statler & Waldorf – “It Was a Very Good Year”
We shift now from the grieving of the heartbroken to the recollections of the elderly. Cantankerous hecklers Statler and Waldorf turn out for every Muppet Show performance, despite claiming to hate all aspects of the production. Here we see a rare moment of tenderness between the two, as the old codgers reflect on their lives gone by, in a performance of Ervin Drake’s “It Was A Very Good Year,” made famous by Frank Sinatra.
The song is all the more moving if you consider that Statler and Waldorf’s puppeteers, Jim Henson and Richard Hunt, would be the first lead “Muppeteers” to pass away, in 1990 and 1992 respectively. One can only assume they’ve spent the afterlife looking down on their fellow Muppet performers…and mercilessly jeering them.
5. Jim Henson – “Time in a Bottle”
As Dan noted, Jim Croce’s “‘Time in a Bottle’ has emerged as perhaps his greatest and most enduring song, with extra poignancy given his early death.” Well, Jim Henson sang it on The Muppet Show. The segment has Henson performing as an old scientist who gradually makes himself younger with a series of potions, but ultimately can’t fight the march of time.
Some 22 years later, in March, 1990, Henson died unexpectedly of a streptococcal infection, leaving his Muppeteer apostles to carry on his teachings without him. Like Croce himself, he was a man gone before his time.
6. Henson Memorial: Richard Hunt’s Eulogy
Though Jim Henson’s death was tragic, it led to the most moving memorial service I’ve ever seen. No one in attendance wore black, in accordance with Henson’s own wishes. Over the course of more than two hours, the lead Muppeteers and several honored guests delivered speeches. Richard Hunt, emulating his ever-ready stagehand Scooter, served as master of ceremonies. Less than two years later, Hunt would die of AIDS, following his boss into the great beyond.
7. Henson Memorial: Frank Oz
Frank Oz (director of several 100 Film Favorites inductees) spoke as well. Of all the Muppeteers, Oz was perhaps the closest to Henson – the Bert to his Ernie, and the Miss Piggy to his Kermit. In his speech, Oz shares a surprisingly personal, and hilarious, story. Yet his deep sadness is apparent, and he finishes abruptly and tearfully.
8. Henson Memorial: When the River Meets the Sea
Jerry Nelson, a lead Muppeteer best known for performing Kermit’s nephew |
valid causal connection between a potential disease agent’ now frequently use the technique, which was first developed by British medical statistician Austin Bradford Hill. [2]
Professor Shaw and Dr. Tomljenovic continued their paper by adding that:
“There are other links between aluminum exposure/toxicity and ASD. These include the following: A pilot study showed higher than normal aluminum levels in the hair, blood and/or urine of autistic children; children are regularly exposed to higher levels of aluminum in vaccines per body weight than adults; practically, nothing is known about the pharmacokinetics and toxicodynamics of aluminum in vaccines in children; and aluminum in vaccines has been linked to serious neurological impairments, chronic fatigue and autoimmunity.”
If Professor Shaw and Dr. Tomljenovic are correct, then their results are extremely worrying, especially as autism is not the only condition to which their paper linked the adjuvant aluminum.
In fact, their paper also linked aluminum to the rise in the incidence of Alzheimer’s, Gulf War syndrome and a relatively new syndrome, ASIA (autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants) that was identified by scientists last year.
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Toxic Aluminum Levels in Vaccines
In 2012, a paper written by Stephanie Seneff, Robert M. Davidson and Jingjing Liu, titled Empirical Data Confirm Autism Symptoms Related to Aluminum and Acetaminophen Exposure, also confirmed that exposure to a large number of vaccinations containing the adjuvant aluminum at a young age was the most likely cause for the increase in autism and other adverse reactions to vaccines. They wrote:
“In this paper, we have presented some analyses of the VAERS database which strongly suggest that the aluminum in vaccines is toxic to vulnerable children. While we have not shown that aluminum is directly causative in autism, the compelling evidence available from the literature on the toxicity of aluminum, combined with the evidence we present for severe adverse reactions occurring much more frequently following administration of aluminum-containing vaccines as compared to non-aluminum containing vaccines, suggests that neuronal damage due to aluminum penetration into the nervous system may be a significant factor in autism. The fact that mentions of autism rose steadily concomitant with significant increases in the aluminum burden in vaccines, is highly suggestive.” [3]
This is particularly bad news to any parent considering having their children vaccinated, as a growing number of the childhood vaccinations now contain the adjuvant aluminum as an ingredient.
This was explained in depth by pediatrician Robert Sears, in his excellent article published in the magazine Mothering in 2008.
Dr. Sears is another professional exceptionally worried about the effects of aluminum on children’s health. In an article warning mothers about the dangers of vaccinations containing the adjuvant, titled Is Aluminum The New Thimerosal? Dr. Sears explained that aluminum is added to vaccinations to help them work more efficiently.
He stated that although this would not normally be a problem because aluminum is a naturally occurring element found everywhere in our environment, including our food, water, air and soil, he had become worried about the effects that aluminum was having on children’s health. He began to wonder if anyone had ever actually tested the safe level of injected aluminum.
During his research, he came across a number of extremely worrying documents. However, few were as worrying as the one written by the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (ASPEN). Describing the document in depth, Sears wrote:
“The source of the daily limit of 4 to 5 mcg of aluminum per kilogram of body weight quoted by the ASPEN statement seems to be a study that compared the neurologic development of about 100 premature babies who were fed a standard IV solution that contained aluminum, with the development of 100 premature babies who were fed the same solution with almost all aluminum filtered out. The study was prompted by a number of established facts: that injected aluminum can build up to toxic levels in the bloodstream, bones, and brain; that preemies have decreased kidney function and thus a higher risk of toxicity; that an autopsy performed on one preemie whose sudden death was otherwise unexplained revealed high aluminum concentrations in the brain; and that aluminum toxicity can cause progressive dementia.”
He continued by giving some extremely alarming facts, of which few parents are aware:
“However, none of these documents or studies mentions vaccines; they look only at IV solutions and injectable medications. Nor does the FDA require labels on vaccines warning about the dangers of aluminum toxicity, although such labels are required for all other injectable medications. All of these studies and label warnings seem to apply mainly to premature babies and kidney patients. What about larger, full-term babies with healthy kidneys?”
He explained:
“However, these documents don’t tell us what the maximum safe dose would be for a healthy baby or child, and I can’t find such information anywhere. This is probably why the ASPEN group suggests, and the FDA requires, that all injectable solutions be limited to 25 mcg; we at least know that that level is safe.”
If this is so, then why do the recommended childhood vaccinations include far above the recommend amounts? According to Dr. Sears, the levels of aluminum included in childhood vaccinations are as follows:
DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis): 170–625 mcg, depending on
manufacturer
, depending on manufacturer Hepatitis A: 250 mcg
Hepatitis B: 250 mcg
Hib (for meningitis; PedVaxHib brand only): 225 mcg
HPV: 225 mcg
Pediarix (DTaP–hepatitis B–polio combination): 850 mcg
Pentacel (DTaP–Hib–polio combination): 330 mcg
Pneumococcus: 125 mcg (emphasis added)
You do not have to be medically qualified to understand that these levels far exceed the safe levels recommended by ASPEN, especially when you consider that a newborn baby is vaccinated with the hepatitis B vaccine, containing 250 mcg of aluminum, at birth!
In fact, according to Dr. Sears, the FDA stated that:
“Although aluminum toxicity is not commonly detected clinically, it can be serious in selected patient populations, such as neonates (newborns), and may be more common than is recognized.” [4] (emphasis added)
If this is true, then why are all newborn infants, including those born prematurely, vaccinated at birth with the vaccine against hepatitis B, which is loaded with more than the recommend safe levels of aluminum?
Additional Concerns for Preemies
It is a recognized fact that many babies are born prematurely. A baby can now survive outside of their mother’s womb as young as 24 weeks gestation. This means that many extremely premature babies are being vaccinated with massive amounts of aluminum on the day they are born.
If this is not bad enough, at the tender age of eight weeks, in line with the CDC recommended childhood vaccination schedules, these tiny, immature babies are vaccinated with as many as nine vaccinations in one day. [5]
For a baby born at 24 weeks, this means that they are still playing a game of catch-up when they are vaccinated because they are “minus eight weeks” and not “plus eight weeks” at the time of vaccination. In fact, many of them will be taken out of their incubator to be legally vaccinated by medical professionals with vaccinations that could potentially kill them!
Conclusion
Aluminum, as these papers have demonstrated, is extremely toxic, especially when children are repeatedly vaccinated with vaccines containing aluminum over the recommended limits. The FDA and ASPEN recommend 25 mcg to be a safe limit and yet, as Dr. Sears has shown in his article, many of the childhood vaccinations contain aluminum far in excess of this amount.
The papers that I have studied make it abundantly clear that the more vaccines that children receive containing aluminum, the greater chance they have of developing autism, autoimmune diseases, Alzheimer’s disease and neurological deficits in the future.
As parents, it is our duty to protect our children at all costs, and yet how many of us know what the recommended vaccinations contain? Parents need to research more thoroughly the ingredients included in the vaccinations with which they are planning to have their child vaccinated and the possible effects that these ingredients may have on their child’s health.
Autism, for the majority of children, is for life and it can affect every aspect of their development. Surely, we owe it to our children to at least be fully aware of the possible dangers of vaccinations, before subjecting our children to as many as 39 vaccines between the ages of zero to six which are known to be loaded with aluminum, mercury, formaldehyde and many other potentially lethal ingredients.
Please read the papers referenced below before vaccinating your child, or download a free list of vaccine ingredients.
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http://www.vaclib.org/intro/howmanyb4six2011.htm
http://wakeupgethealthy.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/toxic-overload-children-vaccinated-to-extreme/
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Photo CreditRight brain, left brain integration is a topic many people are familiar with, but another way to explore brain integration is by thinking about one’s “upstairs” and “downstairs” brain. This idea was coined by Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson, co-authors of the book, The Whole Brain Child. This book bridges the amazing advances in neuroscience to the arena of raising children, encouraging readers to help children integrate the different parts of their brain to enhance their well-being.
According to the model, the downstairs brain is made up of the limbic system, amygdala and mid brain. One role of the “downstairs” brain is simply to respond to emergencies, exhibited by the fight or flight behavior found in humans and animals. The upstairs brain is made up of the cerebral cortex and is responsible for the rational thinking, and sound decision making. Much of this part of the brain is still under construction in children, with the prefrontal cortex nearing its completion of development at the shocking age of about 22 years!
Adults also exhibit upstairs and downstairs behavior. If you have ever witnessed an adult engaged in road rage, or rescuing someone from a burning building, this is a person who is using their downstairs brain to react to some type of stimuli perceived as dangerous. When adults deal with conflict in a rational and calm way, this is an example of engaging their upstairs brain to deal with stimuli.
Increasingly, we seem to be living in a time saturated with a lot of “downstairs” brain behavior. Global statistics report that the human race is currently engaged in 41 wars at the moment of this writing. It seems unlikely that many of these conflicts will die down soon, so the best way to bring more dignity to our species is to explore our own “upstairs and downstairs” behavior.
Can you think of a time that you engaged in “downstairs” behavior? Please take a pen and paper and create a comic strip about this incident (stick figures are great if you are not artistically inclined). Please include word balloons to identify the conversation. Once you have drawn this, please go back into the cartoon and write what you should have said to improve the situation or the final outcome of the situation. Most likely, the difference between how you behaved and how you wish you would have behaved might parallel the amount of guilt or shame you feel toward the incident. The good news is that thinking about this behavior can actually improve future conflict so that you will engage your upstairs brain in future conflicts. Can you go back to the person with whom you had a conflict and apologize or make amends? We probably cannot bring peace to the many, many corners of the world engaged in war, but we can start to bring peace to the world one relationship at a time. Happy integrating! Make our species excellent today!
AdvertisementsTRENTON -- Amid criticism that the release of legal bills tied to the George Washington Bridge scandal was being delayed as Gov. Chris Christie was vetted as a possible vice presidential candidate, New Jersey's acting attorney general on Thursday released six months of invoices adding to the taxpayer tab that already topped $10 million.
The invoices showed the state paid $202,827 to the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher between September of 2015 and March of this year, according to redacted copies released just before 6 p.m. on Thursday.
Former acting Attorney General Robert Lougey in May told lawmakers reviewing his department budget that the state had paid $8 million to the firm, which investigated the governor's involvement in the politically motivated lane closures and released a much-criticized report exonerating him of any wrongdoing. A digital forensics firm was paid $2.5 million for related work.
The Attorney General's Office on Thursday did not have an exact tally of the full amount paid thus far.
The legal tab picked up by Christie's administration in the aftermath of the Bridgegate scandal has been the subject of scrutiny because the governor has personal ties to many of the firm's top lawyers.
Earlier this week, WNYC noted that a response to its records request for the most recent invoices had been delayed until after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would likely have made his pick for vice president.
Bridgegate records withheld as Christie is vetted for VP
Christie was on the short list of candidates being vetted, and his newly appointed attorney general, Christopher Porrino, was the former top lawyer in the governor's office, hired in the immediate aftermath of Bridgegate.
According to news reports Thursday, Trump had chosen Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, though Trump's campaign said no final decision had been made.
A spokesman for Porrino said the delay in releasing the Bridgegate bills was due solely to "technical and administrative issues" within the office.
"Consistent with our commitment to make the invoices public as expeditiously as possible, we're putting them out this afternoon," the spokesman, Lee Moore, said in an e-mail on Thursday.
The sum was also far less than previous disclosures.
The released documents contain itemized activity related to "subpoena response/internal investigation" performed by several people at the firm, including Randy Mastro, who authored the "Mastro Report" exonerating the governor, and Debra Wong Yang, a personal friend of Christie's.
The latest batch of bills came on a day of bad news for the Republican governor. Just as news organizations around the country were reporting that Trump had chosen Pence over Christie, the governor's longtime confidant, David Samson, was pleading guilty to a federal bribery charge.
S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.Good job, D.C.! MIXA Next/Thinkstock
In a nail-biter of a contest, one of the most expansive paid family leave bills in country passed in Washington, D.C., today. The new legislation gives eight weeks of paid leave to new parents, and six weeks for those taking care of sick family members, at up to 90 percent of their normal pay (capped at $1000 per week). The program, which advocates have been pushing for nearly two years, will be administered by a social insurance program controlled by the city and funded by a 0.62 percent increase to employer payroll taxes. A last minute threat to the bill emerged earlier this week in the form of an amendment that would have taken the responsibility of administering and paying for the leave away from the city and put it in the hands of individual businesses. In a heated battle, council members voted against this amendment.
The D.C. bill is especially generous in terms of who has access to leave, how much time they can take, and how much money they will receive during that time. In California, where employees are guaranteed up to only 55 percent of their wages, some working class parents can’t afford to take advantage of the program. However, the D.C. bill does fall short of other plans in terms of personal medical leave. lt only offers two weeks of paid leave for personal injuries or illnesses—less than other city and state programs—which advocates say was an attempt to keep costs down.
“It is the most expensive type of leave because it is the one people need most,” Rebecca Ennen, deputy director for development and communication at Jews United for Justice and media coordinator for the DC Paid Family Leave coalition, said over the phone. “Two-thirds of leaves are personal medical leaves. Every story that gets published about these issues is accompanied by a picture of a baby, but really they are most being used by sick people—those who have to go get chemo at lunch.”
According to Ennen, even though the employer mandate version contained the same terms as the social insurance program she and others supported, it would have been less likely to deliver them. While large businesses would have little problem handling paid leave, small business would have struggled to fund the new requirements on their own. With the employer mandate, business with 70 or fewer workers would have been eligible for a $200-per-employee annual tax credit to help ease the cost of providing leave. But for a small business with, for example, a dozen employees, that would have brought them only $2400 year in extra deductions—hardly enough to cover a single eight-week leave.
Other concerns of Ennen’s about the employer mandate included the ways in which it would have made enforcing the program more difficult. For one, the amendment didn’t include any provisions for making sure businesses are following the rules, nor did it clarify what to do if they didn’t. Also, she was concerned that leaving it up to individual businesses would have given them an incentive to discriminate against women of childbearing age when hiring. Lastly, with the employee mandate, self-employed and contract employees would not have been eligible for paid leave, whereas with the social insurance system they are.
Critiques of the social insurance program said that it would be too expensive, and that most businesses prefer to handle leave on their own. Defenders claimed that it will pay for itself within a few years time. As for its potential effects on employers themselves, a study on the long-term effects of social insurance-funded paid leave program in California found that most businesses believe that they were either unaffected by the program or benefitted from it.
Ultimately, while Ennen is glad that the employer mandate amendment didn’t pass, she said she sees the fact that they convinced everyone that paid leave is necessary was a victory in and of itself.
“It’s pretty amazing that we got to the point where they just said, okay, we’ll just pay it ourselves,” Ennen said.
The current plan is for the social insurance fund to start collecting taxes in 2019 and paying benefits in 2020, a timeline that Ennen finds overly cautious. “I think it may happen faster.”Hackers Access Citigroup Credit Card Customers' Data
"Citigroup has acknowledged that a computer breach may have given hackers access to the data of hundreds of thousands of bank card customers," The Financial Times reports. It adds that "the U.S. bank on Wednesday revealed details of the breach, which it said it discovered in early May through routine monitoring, after being questioned by the Financial Times."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Mark Lennihan/AP Mark Lennihan/AP
According to The Associated Press, the bank says "hackers accessed the credit card information of tens of thousands of its North American customers.... The hackers were able to gain access to Citi's Account Online service to view customer names, their account numbers and contact information including email addresses. They weren't able to gain access to social security numbers, birth dates, card expiry dates or card security codes."
As the wire service adds, this breach "comes on the heels of the high profile hacker attacks against multiple Sony Corp. sites. An attack against Sony's PlayStation Network site affected more than 100 million online accounts and forced the site to temporarily shutdown."Close
It's Presidents Day, which means we should all take advantage of the 40 percent sale happening at Bed Bath & Beyond right now like any true American.
Besides getting a good deal on bath towels, Presidents Day is also a good day to find out some new, interesting facts about the people who lead our government. So in honor of this great day, we've gathered our favorite lesser-known-facts about the leaders of America.
1. George Washington had bank
Our first president was also the wealthiest. Research from Wall Street 24/7 listed Washington as the wealthiest president of all time, with assets worth more than $500 million.
2. John Adams died on the same day as his archrival
Adams died on the same day as his staunch rival, Thomas Jefferson. They both passed away on July 4, 1826.
3. Thomas Jefferson invented the swivel chair
Jefferson did a lot for our great nation, including inventing the swivel chair.
4. James Madison weighed less than the average American teenage girl
The best things come in small packages, right? Madison was only 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed under 100 pounds.
5. James Monroe has a capital named after him
The capital of Liberia, Monrovia, was named after Monroe after he worked with the American Colonization Society to help create a state where freed slaves could live.
6. John Quincy Adams was a free spirit
Adams was a fan of the early morning skinny dip-session during his presidency.
7. Andrew Jackson's bird had a potty mouth
Jackson taught his parrot how to curse to the extent that the parrot had to be removed from the president's funeral because it was cursing too much. That's one way to leave a legacy.
8. Martin Van Buren may have started a popular phrase
Van Buren was raised in Kinderhook, N.Y., and his nickname was "Old Kinderhook." A popular hypothesis is that the colloquial saying OK stems from the OK clubs that began in support of his election campaign.
9. William Henry Harrison had a pet goat
Harrison had a pet billy goat at the White House.
10. John Tyler was really unpopular
It looks like at the time of his death, Tyler was quite unpopular. His 1862 New York Time's obituary stated Tyler was "the most unpopular public man that had ever held any office in the United States."
11. James Polk was an underdog
Ever the underdog, Polk was America's first dark horse presidential candidate.
12. Zachary Taylor died in a weird way
What exactly was Taylor's legacy? We're not exactly sure. But we do know that his sudden death had something to do with eating cherries and milk.
13. Millard Fillmore fulfilled every schoolboy's dream
Looks like teenage dreams really do come true. Fillmore's first wife was actually his teacher when he was a 19-year-old schoolboy at New Home Academy.
14. Franklin Pierce may have run over an old woman
Pierce was taken in for running over an old woman with his horse. The charges were later dropped due to lack of evidence.
15. James Buchanan was an eternal bachelor
Buchanan was the only president never to marry.
16. Abraham Lincoln could throw it down
Good old Abe apparently knew had to handle himself in the ring. As a young wrestler, Lincoln was defeated only once out of approximately 300 matches.
17. Andrew Johnson was wasted during his inauguration
Johnson was noticeably drunk during the inauguration ceremony after drinking too much whiskey beforehand.
18. Ulysses S. Grant was a gifted writer
Grant could whip up quite the prose. His autobiography is considered to be the best-written presidential autobiography.
19. Rutherford B. Hayes had some wild nights at the White House
The Hayes family spent every night at the White House singing gospel hymns.
20. James A. Garfield was ambidextrous
Garfield was ambidextrous and could write Latin with one hand and Greek with other at the same time.
21. Chester A. Arthur was a huge sartorialist
Arthur owned 80 pairs of pants and was known for taking late night strolls around D.C. with his friends and sauntering back at three in the morning.
22. Grover Cleveland changed his name
Cleveland's real first name was Stephen but he switched to Grover as an adult. Grover does have a certain edge to it.
23. Benjamin Harrison pseudo-Luddite?
Harrison was the first president to have electricity in the White House but was so terrified of getting electrocuted that he would never turn on the switches himself.
24. Grover Cleveland was one unhealthy man
Cleveland was named Fitness Magazine's least-healthiest President due to the fact that he loved drinking beer, cigar smoking and weighed 250 pounds.
25. William McKinley had a lucky charm that really worked
McKinley wore a red carnation on his lapel almost all the time for good luck. One time in 1901, he gave his carnation to a little girl and was instantly shot by an assassin immediately after. He died eight days later.
26. Teddy Roosevelt practiced a "the show must go on" mentality
Once while delivering a speech in Milwaukee, Roosevelt was shot in an assassination attempt. "I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot," he told the stunned audience. "I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap." He went on to finish the hour and a half speech with a bullet lodged in his chest.
27. William Taft was too big for this world
The largest president in American history, Taft got himself stuck in the White House bathtub and had to call help to get himself out.
28. Woodrow Wilson was the eternal student
Despite the fact that he didn't learn to read until he was 10 years old, Wilson is America's most educated president. He is the only president to have earned a Ph.D., which he earned from John Hopkins University in political science and history.
29. Warren G. Harding was not a very good gambler
In a poker game gone wrong, Harding lost the White House's china collection.
30. Calvin Coolidge was pretty chill
During his presidency, Coolidge woke up in a hotel room to find a burglar going through his things. Coolidge struck up a conversation with the man and found out he was a student who needed money to pay for college. Coolidge asked the man to hand him his wallet and gave him the $32 that was in in there and told the student it was a loan. He then instructed the student to leave the way he came to avoid being caught by the Secret Service.
31. Herbert Hoover had an unusual pet
Hoover's son had two pet alligators that were permitted to run around throughout the White House.
32. Franklin Roosevelt bent gender norms
Roosevelt probably wore dresses until the age of six or seven.
33. Harry S. Truman had a fake middle name
The "S" in Truman's name did not stand for anything because his parents couldn't agree on a middle name for over a month.
34. Dwight Eisenhower was an artist
Eisenhower painted over 250 known pieces of art.
35. John F. Kennedy was a Pulitzer winner
In 1957, Kennedy was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in biography.
36. Lyndon B. Johnson was a womanizer
Johnson had so many extramarital affairs during his presidency that his aides referred to the girls he had affairs with as his harem.
37. Richard Nixon was a cardshark
While in the Navy, Nixon realized that his friends were winning money at poker games. Wanting to get in on the action, Nixon had someone teach him poker and within a few months he won around $6,000. He used that money to fund his first congressional campaign.
38. Gerald Ford had plenty of career options
Ford worked as a fashion model during college and appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan. He also could have played for the NFL.
39. Jimmy Carter believed in UFOs
In 1973, Carter filed a report for a UFO sighting.
40. Ronald Regan did stand-up
In 1954, due to his acting career taking a turn for the worst, Regan did a stand-up gig in Las Vegas for a few weeks.
41. George Bush was very athletic
In high school Bush was captain of his varsity baseball and soccer team and also played basketball.
42. Bill Clinton has an extremely symmetrical face
Clinton's facial symmetry is ranked alongside male models.
43. George W. Bush had school spirit
Bush was the head cheerleader during his senior year at boarding school.
44. Barack Obama is a comic book nerd
Obama is a huge collector of comics, particularly Spider-Man.
ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Lou Dobbs on Compromised AG Jeff Sessions: Deep State Must Have Enormous File on Him (Video)
FOX Business Network host Lou Dobbs joined the chorus of pundits who suspect Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been compromised by the Deep State.
Former Senator Jeff Sessions has been compromised since his swearing in in as Attorney General.
He immediately recused himself from the Russia-Collusion witch hunt that was set up by Deep State operatives to cover their criminal actions on Uranium One and the Hillary Clinton email scandal.
Now instead of justice being served the country is being hijacked by un-elected deep state criminals.
At The Gateway Pundit reported in October: Who did Attorney General Jeff Sessions Get Caught Sleeping With?
Even President Trump has attacked the Attorney General for his dereliction of duty.
Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign – "quietly working to boost Clinton." So where is the investigation A.G. @seanhannity — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2017
Tonight Lou Dobbs was the latest pundit to suggest Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been compromised.
Lou Dobbs: I have great respect for Jeff Sessions. He’s been an important voice in the US Senate. His disappearance makes me think either they have an enormous file on him in the deep state that is prohibiting him from serving the president he signed up to serve.
Via Lou Dobbs Tonight:The Seshachalam Hills in Southern India are home to one of the nation’s most popular pilgrimage destinations – the town of Tirumala. Each year, millions of pilgrims display their devotion for the presiding deity, Sri Venkateswara, in the most bizarre fashion – by tonsuring their heads!
There’s actually a rather interesting story behind the unusual practice – according to ancient lore, Sri Venkateswara is believed to have taken a loan in order to fund his own wedding celebrations. The debt was so huge that he continues to pay it off to this day, and requires assistance in doing so. And his devotees are more than happy to help by donating their hair to the cause.
The local temple receives donations from at least 20,000 devotees each day, so they’ve employed a whopping 600 barbers to get the job done. The tonsuring takes place in a specially designated building that’s separate from the main temple, and also at 16 smaller locations around town. Thousands of pilgrims sit cross-legged on the floor with their heads bent forward, as the barbers work their scissors and razors at lighting speed.
Photo: Tirumala Photos
Believe or not, the Tirumala temple collects 500 tons of human hair each year, which they auction off to hair extension makers across the world. According to several experts, Indian hair is considered one of the most valuable in the world, owing to its naturally silky texture and also because it is unblemished by artificial hair products. This has placed the temple at the center of a very lucrative, high-paying market. Last year alone, they raked in an annual revenue of 200 million rupees ($3.6 million).
“Good hair is finite in supply, yet demand is seemingly infinite,” said Mayoor Balsara, chief executive of SDTC Exports – India’s largest exporter of human hair. The company obtains hair that is auctioned at 20 different Indian temples and puts it all through a meticulous refinement process. The hair is grouped into five categories according to grades and colors, and then washed, treated, and dried under natural sunlight.
Photo: The Hindu
“One small mistake and the quality of the hair is seriously compromised,” Balsara explained. “This process requires extraordinary skill.” The cleaned, processed hair is packaged in bundles of 200 strands and is then ready to be sold. The price varies depending on length, density, volume, and quality.
The most expensive hair is over 31 inches long inches long – roughly $300 to $450 per kilogram. Hair between 16 and 30 inches is sold at a little less than $300, while 10 to 15 inch strands cost at least $120 per kilogram. The shortest hair is usually stripped of L-Cystein protein, which is used as a raw material in baby foods and donuts. Although these are the standard rates, the finest hair can sometimes go for as high as $800 per kilogram.
Surprisingly, the pilgrims (most of whom are poor), are unaware that their donated hair is sold at such exorbitant rates. In fact, many of them don’t even know what hair extensions are. But even if they did know, they most likely wouldn’t be fazed.
Photo: Dwaraka Tirumala
“They don’t mind their hair being sold because the Tirumala Tirupati Devastanam (the temple’s governing body) is doing free tonsuring, free accommodation, free food, free marriages,” said Patheti Srinivasarao, who is in charge of the collection, categorization and sale of the shaved hair.
According to the scriptures, all Hindus are advised to shave their heads at least once during their lifetime. This is usually done shortly after birth, and staunch devotees continue to donate their hair multiple times during their lifetime. Tonsuring is viewed as a kind of sacrifice, and also a way of shedding the ego.
“For many women in India, their hair is indeed something they take great pride in,” Balsara said. “To donate their hair to God is a greater sacrifice than donating money. Whether the hair is sold, burned, or buried – this will not stop the age-old Hindu tradition.”
In fact, when devotees are informed of the amount of money their hair brings in, they’re actually happy about it. “For us, hair is not important – for us, God is important,” said one devotee. “We hope they make good use of the money,” said another.
For its part, the Tirumala temple administration uses the funds raised from auctioning hair to maintain the temple and and for charitable purposes. “For example, we financed children’s education by building schools, we distributed approximately 30,000 free meals every day for the poor and needy, and we have built hospitals to cure those who, otherwise, could never afford such expensive treatments,” a temple director explained.Hello, Windows Insiders! You saw some of these changes to Groove Music in the app update we released to people in the Xbox Preview program earlier this week. Now the same newness plus one additional, long-awaited feature is available on Windows devices (PC, phone, and HoloLens) for people on the Windows Insider Fast ring. Enjoy!
You can now edit the metadata for music saved locally! Right-click on an album or song and choose Edit Info. BAM!
Check out the new focus on genres in Explore. You can now see curated playlists, new releases, best new songs, top albums, and top artists...all by GENRE!! It’s available in US, UK, FR, CA, and DE. We’re so proud of the work we’ve done in Explore we want you all to see it! We made a change so that it’s the first thing you see when you launch the app after this update – don’t worry, it’s a one-time thing and we’ll go back to showing the pivot you last used when you launch the app in the future.
Radio stations show up in Recent Plays in Your Groove.
You can check out which artists are included in a playlist in Explore more easily now because they are highlighted when you click on a playlist.
You can give feedback on playlists in Your Groove with a thumbs up or thumbs down. You can also mute specific songs in a Your Groove playlist if you don’t want to hear them anymore. Muted songs will be excluded when you play that playlist later or save a copy to your collection.
We also introduced landmarks in Groove to reduce tabs when using Narrator.
Thanks for your support. We look forward to reading your feedback!
The Groove Music Team
-------------------------------
Updates:
[08/18/16] We released an update to this payload to fix the issue that caused Groove Music to randomly play music and the issue that prevented the app from producing audio in some cases. Look for 3.6.2397.0 in the Store for Windows devices - PC, phone, and HoloLens.It’s not a good sign if your city’s police officers are getting in distracted driving car accidents. That’s the case in Portland, Oregon, where police officer Ty Garrison struck an 80-year-old woman while looking at his vehicle’s mobile computer. This week, the city and police department are expected to pay a $338,477 settlement to cover medical costs and other general damages that resulted from the car accident.
“Out of the corner of his eye, Garrison saw a blur, and when he looked up, he found 80-year-old Alganesh Negasi directly in front of his police car,” said the police report. “Officer Garrison braked hard, but was unable to stop his car before impacting the pedestrian, causing significant injury.
Officer Garrison has admitted that he was at fault, and both sides agree that this was an unfortunate accident, not the result of wrongful intent. “She’s a very nice lady who’s tough and not a crybaby,” said Marvin Nepom, attorney for Negasi, who is an Ethiopian immigrant. “The officer admitted he was momentarily distracted. It was just an unfortunate accident that occurred and the city stepped up to the plate, if you will, and we resulted the case.”
In response to the accident, Portland Police Chief Mike Reese wrote that “prevention of vehicular accidents is a priority for the Police Bureau.” But the city’s distracted driving laws for civilians and government employees set up a distracted driving paradox for police officers, reports the Oregonian. When a statewide law against cell phone use in the car went into effect early this year, the police department said no officer could drive a city vehicle while operating a cell phone or other communications device. But that regulation has a key exception allowing the use of mobile computers in such vehicles while “conducting police business.”
Clearly, police must use the technology available to serve the city’s safety interests in a quick and efficient manner. But they also have an obligation to practice what they preach, which is why the department has issued guidelines for such use of technology in police cars. “We talk to officers about pulling off the side of the road if they need to use their MDTs, cellphones, or to text,” said Captain Ed Thompson of the state’s public safety department. “We highly recommend they pull over and take care of that, rather than trying to balance a bunch of distracting activities.”
We’ve developed an interactive map |
Guide or GPS to find his way. Rico had, he admitted to the Denhams, worked for the previous owner, Natalie Garner, in 2005, soon after she moved in. What the exterminator told them gave them pause:The Denhams shouldnt expect cooperation from the two ladies next door.
Rico has spent a quarter-century killing undesirable domestic animals throughout Los Angeles. Eight years ago, he decided to specialize where the real money is: killing rats and mice in mostly expensive spots like the Palisades, Brentwood, Beverly Hills and Sherman Oaks, which all share characteristics rodents love. They are close to the hills, offer thick vegetation and easy access to water, and come with house pets whose food rodents pilfer. But of all these areas, the Palisades is among the most alluring to rats, he says. Its lush, and its garbage cans are brimming.
On the Alphabet streets, Rico has a virtual monopoly of 50 clients none so memorable as Natalie Garner. Rico recalled in his court deposition that when he first met Garner, in July 2005, she was frantic, telling him, Im seeing hundreds of rodents outside my house. But despite Rat Busters efforts, when Rico visited the property a second time, he saw twice as many rats.
The rat exterminator soon cracked the code,a discovery that would make most Angelenos skin crawl. The exploding rat population was being purposely fed. Rico, peeking through the overgrown hedge, spotted rats eating and drinking from pie tins full of dog food and milk. To his shock, sisters Margaret and Marjorie stood there, observing approvingly.
They were standing there watching them, Rico tells L.A. Weekly. I was like, Whoa! Thats something a person doesnt forget. I have never seen it before, and I have never seen it since. Thats something you never forget.
But Rico, afraid of getting in the middle of an ugly Palisades homeowner war, did not tell the Denhams these facts. Nor did he tell them that in late 2006, Garner insisted he remove his bait stations because the Barthel sisters were furious over the rat poisonings and the possible threat to other animals. How dare Garner slaughter their beautiful brood?
The sellers disclosed nothing of this, said the Denhams real estate agent, Elizabeth Stein, late last year, referring to Garner and uppercrust Sothebys International Realty.
A week after Rat Busters responded, when the Denhams had lived there about two weeks, two county vector-control inspectors Amy Okohira and Briccio Malaguit finally arrived at the Barthel home. They didnt exactly need MapQuest to find the house either.
Okohira and other health inspectors, it turned out, had been to the house many times. Nobody knows how many times, because in Los Angeles County, the Vector Management Program throws away all such records after two years, says Terrance Powell, director of the departments militaristically-named Special Operations Bureau.
We dont erase stuff, Powell tells L.A. Weekly. We just dont have room. We throw it away. Consider this: We do more than half a million inspections a year of various types. Where do you think we would keep that kind of bulk [of] records?
Digitally? Well, thats a good one. That could work, Powell concedes.
Still, two surviving county records from 2004 obtained by L.A. Weekly fortuitously avoided the shredder records the county failed to release for several months, and which the Denhams never knew existed.
The complaints are both chilling and infuriating. One reads: Rats coming from senior citizen twins [house]. Two months later, it gets more alarming: Rats in the neighbors house. They feed them and state they cannot kill these rodents. Please talk to other neighbor on the opposite side of [redacted]. Please call him...
In the first record from 2004, Okohira reported seeing a lone rat on the Barthels ramshackle roof, but noted that the houses walls had a lot of rub marks. Rats have dirty fur; when they move along walls and through cracks, they leave behind oily, sootlike smudges. The Barthels outside walls were covered in greasy rat-fur smears evidence of a huge infestation.
Inspector Okohira warned the sisters, who ventured outside to meet her, that they were in violation of the health code. But as the Barthels had often done with county inspectors in the past, they easily got rid of them by claiming they had already contacted a pest-control company.
Several days after the county inspection, something happened that unhinged Liz Denham. The morning after Halloween, the Denhams maid caught six rats eating leftover crumbs in their 4-month-olds stroller.
The baby was safe elsewhere. The stroller had been left out in the yard. But the incident badly rattled Liz. Although the Denhams were careful to spell out R-A-T, 4-year-old Alex soon caught on that something was wrong with mommy and daddys new house. Alexs new preschool teacher kept journals of each child, and Scott Denham recalls how the teacher wrote that Alex kept repeating: My mommy and daddy are scared. Im afraid [rats] are going to eat my toys.
Denham can barely stand thinking about it. The kid just moved from a new city. He doesnt know anybody, and this is what hes telling his teacher in the first week of school! He became something of an unofficial lobbyist, trying to find a Los Angeles city or county bureaucrat who gave a damn. He never found one.
My wife and I are very nice people normally, Scott recalled last year to the Weekly. But here we are cursing and threatening people with lawsuits. Ive turned into this negative and angry person.... Who is protecting us?
Before he went before civic leaders at the Palisades Community Council last October, where their concerns focused on a drugstore sign, Denham had called many city and county departments and politicians including County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavskys office and Councilman Bill Rosendahls office multiple times. He demanded that the local newspaper, the Palisadian-Post, write about the rat epidemic, then abruptly demanded that the paper not print the story until he and Liz had exhausted their options.
After two or three weeks of knocking on the Barthels rotting door and calling them constantly, Liz finally spoke with the sister seen as the leader, Margaret, by phone. The two warring neighbors have very different accounts of what was said. But Scott recalls that it led to the point of Liz saying, If you guys dont get rid of the rats, then were going to file a lawsuit, because we have no choice. Then, Margaret said something to the effect of Dont bother because were just going to sell the house and get out of here.
But Barthel family friend Rene Robinson, who became their ambassador to the outside, says Liz Denham had scared the helpless sisters by threatening lawsuits, county inspections and publicity. Margaret, a former Redondo schoolteacher, is extremely sensitive to publicity a fact, according to Robinson, that the Denhams were willing to exploit. Scott even videotaped the rats and posted the amateurish but skin-crawling images on YouTube.
In an e-mail to Robinson, Liz clearly played hardball, threatening actions that had no hope of success:
The article [in the Palisadian-Post] WILL print this Thursday. It is going to name their names, address and will have pictures. I will be working tirelessly to get inside that house via the Health Department, City Attorney and Building and Safety who will at that point potentially red-tag and obviously shut down [Margarets nonpermitted guesthouse]. This could all obviously be avoided should they sell but if not we will stop at nothing to solve this problem, which according to Margaret has been going on since 1984. This is simply a battle they can NOT win.
The posturing had its effect, says Robinson. [The sisters] were seriously believing everything these women [Liz Denham and her real estate agent, Elizabeth Stein] were saying as far as red-tagging their house and [that] they[d] be thrown out and theyd have to leave.
Robinson alleges that Liz, focused on the threat to 4-year-old Alex and newborn Sage, had told me she didnt care if and these are her words she didnt care if, when they tore the house down, if the ladies were inside it or not. Robinson calls this a real case of elder abuse.
The Denhams deny Robinsons claim but acknowledge that the twins unwillingness to kill the rats left them unnerved, frantic and angry. Consensually or not, the Barthels decided to sell, and, oddly, they used the Denhams agent, Elizabeth Stein with stipulations: When Stein had documents for the sisters to sign, she was to knock on their decayed front door and slip the paperwork underneath. Sometimes, Stein said, she would deliver papers under the door, drive around the block, knock, and signed paperwork would come sliding back out.
My conversations with them have been enormously bizarre, Stein told the Weekly. Theyre mentally ill.... You wouldnt believe the things theyve told me like, Your children will rise up and kill you!
Marjorie herself has been happy, during court proceedings, to relate disquieting things shes said to Stein: I asked her if she was Jewish.... I preached the Gospel for one half hour.... After I spoke and preached the Gospel, the lord preaching it through me, her attitude completely changed. One day, when Scott asked whether the sisters were afraid of being attacked by rats, Marjorie replied, No, I have the blood of Jesus on my house every night.
Even if Jesus isnt on the case, the sisters have faced little threat from authorities. For ignoring the law, county health-code section 8.04.705 assesses only a fee up to $285.00. When inspectors Okohira and Malaguit returned in early November last year, the sisters didnt even bother stepping outside.
As the egregiously ineffective inspectors knocked on the front and side doors and called out the sisters names, records show, they could hear the sisters moving around inside. As they peered in the window, the inspectors saw a rat right at home inside the Barthel home. Yet it would take another week and a second sighting inside before the county Health Services Department thought to call the countys Adult Protective Services. Even then, records show, the listless Inspector Okohira didnt send the required report to Protective Services for a full week.
Its hard to imagine a case more appropriate for Adult Protective Services than two elderly women drowning in biblical prophecy who live with packs of probably diseased rats. Yet theres no record that Adult Protective Services ever sent anyone, even when City Attorney Rocky Delgadillos office finally and ineffectively stepped in.
Eventually, Barthel family friend Robinson and her husband came with chain saws one day. They cut down large, overgrown, rat-friendly thickets of birds of paradise, and, Robinson admits to the Weekly, It was bad. It was infested.
According to the meager records that portray only a fraction of what unfolded, county inspectors returned a week later and saw another rat through the window. Margaret refused to allow the inspectors, who had no search warrant, inside. The resulting county health report was a testament to how poorly the county dealt with the unchecked rat boom: Neither inspector knew the rats had chewed through the wood floors of the kitchen, living room and bedroom, allowing themselves free rein from a basement crawling with them, as the Weekly learned from court documents.
Fulfilling the aphorism Location, location, location, in spite of 1018 Fiskes enormous problems, once the sisters put it on the market last November, it quickly attracted two prospective buyers, for an asking price of around $1.2 million. If the sisters seemed crazy, they were also shrewd: They asked that a developer interested in buying the property sign a contract, swearing that he would not testify in court about what he saw in the house, says Denham lawyer Barak Lurie.
By early December, however, the developer was too weirded out by the house, and pulled out. And the Barthels were visited by an angel. You know why I didnt sell the house? recounts Margaret in her deposition. Ill tell you why. At the last minute, an angel appeared in the name of my nephew [Richard Otto], who said, You want to stay here? I know what it means to you. I will take it over. Ill pay it. Ill get it done for you. And he did.
Otto offered to front the extensive renovation costs if the sisters would sign papers transferring their $1.2 million property to a trust he would inherit once they died. The sisters say they took the offer, reluctantly. It was far more important to Marjorie and Margaret that they continue to do the lords work, hastening the second coming of Christ one rat at a time. Marjorie says shetold Liz, If youre afraid of a few rats, read the Book of Revelation.
Nobody who knows the Barthels not their nephew Jeff Luks, to whom the Weekly spoke, not friend Rene Robinson, not their former lawyer, Adam Rossman can say what strain of Christianity they follow. Perhaps just a really paradoxical interpretation of the Though Shalt Not Kill commandment. (Paradoxical because the sisters arent vegetarians. They love chicken.)
To ask them to kill animals is to ask them to do the worst possible thing you could do, says Elizabeth Stein. Robinson tries to explain what the two women believe in sympathetic terms: They really have a very strong feeling as far as all creatures are pretty much fair and have a right to live and exist. Its their religious belief not to harm anything Gods creatures.
Naturally, the exterminator is less sympathetic. Im a Christian, says Rico. I go to church all the time, okay? People like that make us look bad. You know what I mean?
It sounds like animal hoarding, says medical expert Dr. Emanuel Maidenberg, of UCLAs David Geffen School of Medicine, 30 seconds into a conversation about the Barthels. Its a form of hoarding. Some people will collect unnecessary items of any kind, and some people will collect animals. The psychiatrist and expert on obsessive-compulsive disorder isnt diagnosing anybody, but the signs are there: Lots of animals. Legal problems with animals. And the Were protecting them defense.
Veterinarian and epidemiologist Gary Patronek, who coined the term animal hoarding and pioneered research into the malady, says such women are living in their own little world that theyve constructed, and these animals are serving an important role in that world.... These animals provide something very different than what they do for a typical pet owner.
Lest there be any doubt, the Barthel sisters were using animals to fill their own voids. Ive never had children, never gotten married, Marjorie says. And they had been such a source of comfort. Theyre a therapy.... And its just their... unconditional love, their savage loyalty and their sweet forgiveness are traits that human beings could really, really follow and adopt.
The roof rat, or black rat, is the more agile cousin of the Norway rat, and its deftness is clearly on display in Denhams YouTube video. That group might be a family, says Dirk Van Vuren, a wildlife biologist at UC Davis, while watching six well-fed rats scurrying around the Barthels home. Van Vuren narrates the action for the Weekly: The rats want something to eat, and theyre not all going to fit in that house. They are somewhat territorial, and it could be time for them to disperse. Its probably time to venture into the neighbors yard.
The UC Davis biologist resists estimating how many extra rats the sisters activities have produced on the Westside, saying only that its been well into the thousands, just since 2002.
But scientists at the National Pest Management Association were willing to try. The number of wild rats the Barthels bred in one year if they began with a single male and a single female is, by the associations calculations, 2,258. That number of rats would be capable of devouring 10,931 pounds of food and excreting 56,400 rat droppings.
But the sisters fed the rats for much longer than a year. They did so from the time they returned from Santa Ynez in 2002 until late 2007 not to mention possible rat-feeding during the decades that Margaret continued teaching in Redondo to support their refuge in Santa Ynez.
Theoretically, during a second year, 2,258 rats in the Palisades could grow a thousand-fold, to more than two million rats, says Greg Baumann of the association. Thats only a mathematical figure, because the food needed to sustain two million rats would be impossibly huge, and cats were in the area.
But, estimating conservatively, the two sisters added tens of thousands of rats to L.A.s tony Westside. And perhaps far, far more.
Last November, the Denhams, who have never filed a lawsuit before, sued the sisters. They demanded $500,000 and a mandatory injunction requiring that the sisters have the rats exterminated. They also sued Natalie Garner, Sothebys agent Barbara Boyle and her boss, Frances Symons Jr., for failing to disclose the rat house next door.
By December, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillos office had taken up the case finally. But prosecutor Susan Stricks visit to the site followed a familiar government pattern in buckling to the Barthels. She and an LAPD officer came, they knocked, and the sisters conquered. Strick tells the Weekly she saw a rat through the window and asked to go inside, but the sisters refused her entry.
Strick also alerted Adult Protective Services last November, but Strick passively tells L.A. Weekly that by the spring of 2008, she never got a report back. By the time the City Attorney took the sisters to court in late December for defying county health codes, City Halls move was moot a judge in Beverly Hills had already issued a temporary injunction arising from the Denham lawsuit.
Days before the Beverly Hills ruling, the sisters hired American Pest Control to tent the house. A crew wearing facemasks and hazmat suits emerged pale-faced and sober, as if they had just witnessed the aftermath of a biohazard spill which, in a way, they had. Scott Denham says they hauled several large garbage bags heavy with dead rats from the bedrooms, kitchen, attic, basement and guesthouse, as the Denhams took photos.
City prosecutor Strick never pressed charges, but the case is open for another year. Disconcertingly, Vector Managements Gail VanGordon has no regrets about the countys or citys incredible inaction. Most of the time, were invited inside, VanGordon tells the Weekly. They wouldnt let anyone inside, and were strictly informed about the laws of privacy. We cant step on our tiptoes to look over a brick wall. Thats a violation of privacy. It would be thrown out of court. She adds, Were not social workers.
Thats absolute nonsense, says Madeline Bernstein, president of Los Angeles Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The former prosecutor says that while the City Attorneys Office and Vector Management may have lacked grounds to push for a criminal search warrant, clearly there are lower-level search [warrants] that would apply in this area. Bernstein called the city and county failures in the case amazing. Its like a monumental crack that these women are falling through.
Ultimately, former owner Garner and Sothebys settled out of court after the Denhams lone witness, Louis Rico, was deposed. His testimony about Garners and Sothebys failure to disclose was damning.
Garner, who lives in a sprawling Brentwood mansion with Welcome to Mooseport producer Basil Iwanyk, paid the Denhams $115,000. Sothebys paid $15,000 for the deception by its agents, Boyle and Symons. In June, Garner audaciously tried to sue the Barthels too, demanding that they pay the $115,000 because they caused the rat boom. A judge threw out her suit.
Apparently, spawning a massive rat population on L.A.s Westside doesnt disqualify homeowners-insurance policies with State Farm. State Farm is bankrolling the Barthels legal defense, setting in motion preparations for a bizarre yet entertaining trial, probably this year. Attempts by the two sides to reach a settlement were stymied by the Barthels unnerving request: The Denhams would have to withdraw their demand for a permanent injunction whose only stipulation is that the sisters not harbor rats.
Since 1958, weve had rats, Marjorie told Barak Lurie during her deposition in May. Ive lived with rats since 1958, honey.... When I got the house in [1958], thats the day I started feeding all the animals. And I fed them as long as I lived there.
Reach the writer at maxtaves@gmail.com.A 20-year Denver International Airport employee began surfing for child pornography on the job after he became bored at work and irritated about getting old, according to an arrest warrant affidavit obtained by The Denver Post Wednesday.
Neil Cleary, who resigned his position in January, was charged earlier this week with felony sexual exploitation of a child.
The 64-year-old grandfather is free on $5,000 bail pending a July 3 court appearance.
The affidavit states that Denver police received a tip in December that Cleary, a contract compliance representative for DIA, had been viewing child pornography on his city-issued computer.
In an interview he gave to police in early January, Cleary said he had become consumed with pornography and was unable to stop looking at it. He told police that the pictures of children he was viewing were in the category of nude modeling, rather than sexually graphic photos involving children, the affidavit states.
Police found sexually explicit cartoons depicting children engaged in sex with adults and nude images of children who appeared to be between the ages of 7 and 16 photographed in “sexualized poses wearing swimsuits and panties” on various computers and hard drives at Cleary’s home, according to the document.
The browser history on Cleary’s work computer showed “numerous links which were indicative of pornography sites involving children,” the document states.
John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com or twitter.com/abuvthefoldThe Saga of Murder, Inc. A German Propaganda Victory
by Kenneth Daniel Williams - 351st Bomb Group During World War II, I was a bombardier with the 8th Air Force flying out of England. I was shot down over Germany wearing a flight jacket with “Murder, Inc.” written on the back. The Germans made much propaganda out of this. At the request of a group in Holland, the “Bulletin 1939-1945, Airwar Study Group Holland”, I am wring down here the events that took place in relation to “Murder, Inc.” Contrary to some of the German propaganda, I was not a Chicago gangster. I was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.A. on May 16, 1922. I attended local schools and went to Belmont Abbey College, an institution run by Benedictine Monks, many of whom came from Germany. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and every young man that I knew was anxious to join the armed forces to defend his country. In June of 1942 I joined the United States Army Corps of Engineers and advanced to the rank of corporal. In December I transferred to the Army Air Corps Aviation Cadet program. Having been an enlisted man, I wanted a commission as soon as possible. To become a navigator took twelve months, a pilot, nine months, and a bombardier, six months. I applied for bombardier school and received training in Midland, Texas. After graduation I was assigned to Geiger Field, Spokane, Washington for phase training. This is where our crew was formed and trained to operate the B-17 heavy bombardment aircraft. In October, 1943, we flew to England and were assigned to the 351st Bomb Group, 508th Squadron. We were assigned the B-17 “Murder Inc.” It was an old plane that had been on many missions and I have no idea who named it or why it was given this name. As it turned out, we never flew a mission in this plane. It was the custom to have the name of your plane painted on the back of your flight jacket. One of the enlisted men came by my room and asked if I would like to have the name of the plane painted on my jacket. I told him “yes” and gave him the jacket. He came back the next day with this jacket painted. As it turned out, I was the only member of the crew whose jacket was painted before we were shot down in, ironically, another plane. On November 16, 1943, we flew our first mission to Knaben, Norway, to bomb a heavy water plane, part of the German effort to develop the atomic bomb. “Murder Inc.” was in the hanger for repairs and we flew in a new plane that I believe had not yet been named. This was about the time they quit painting B-17’s, and the one we flew that day was the original aluminum color. We had trouble transferring fuel from the bomb bay tank to the regular tank on that mission and thought we might have to land in Sweden. The flight engineer finally corrected the problem and we flew back to England through the worst weather I have ever flown in. On November 26, 1943, we flew our second and last mission to Bremen, Germany. We arose about 4:00 A.M. and had eggs for breakfast. Eggs were a treat reserved for mission days only. From the mess hall we went to the briefing room to have the mission explained and to synchronize our watches. Next we went to the “dry room” where the parachutes and heated suits were kept. I found that my parachute was being repacked and they gave me the parachute of a man over six feet tall. I am 5 feet 8 inches. I did not adjust the harness but just put it on and let it hang loose. The type parachute we used was developed by the British and was called a “clip-on chest pack.” One wore the harness all the time in the air, but the actual parachute itself was folded up in the neat little package that could be clipped on the chest of the harness if ever needed. I always kept my parachute on the floor close to me in the nose compartment of the aircraft. We put on electrically heated suits for warmth at high altitudes. There were heated shoes that plugged into the suit, but they were light and not made for walking. I wore heavy walking shoes instead with heavy socks for warmth and for walking long distances in case I was shot down. We were each issued an escape kit that contained a photograph of us in civilian clothes, maps, compass, chocolate, German and French money, and other items. My flight coveralls had a large buttoned pocket on the right leg below the knee where I kept my escape kit. From there we went to the armament hut for our fifty caliber machine guns. We had to wipe almost all the oil off the guns because it got so cold at high altitudes that the least bit of oil would freeze and jam the guns. I have seen it so cold at high altitudes that spit would freeze before it hit anything.. We were then taken to “Murder Inc.” by truck. It took a large truck to carry ten men and all the guns and equipment. Once on board we began to install guns and check equipment while waiting for the flare to be fired from the control tower to signal starting of engines. At last the flare was fired about sunrise. The pilot began starting the engines, but one engine was not working properly. The pilot told the ground crew that this plane could not be flown because of the faulty engine. The ground crew said there was a standby plane ready to go and we would have to transfer to it. The standby plane was named “Aristocrap” and was an unpainted aluminum color. The change bothered me because I feared the ground crew would not wipe enough oil off the guns. I did not believe they appreciated how cold it could get at high altitudes. At any rate, we transferred to “Aristocrap,” started the engines, and took off. Changing planes had delayed us ten to fifteen minutes. When we got into the air we could not find the 351st Bomb Group since there were planes all over the sky. Finally we attached ourselves as the last plane, “tail-end Charlie,” to a group that was just starting out over the English Channel. I do not remember the identity of the group or the markings of their aircraft. When we got out over the Channel we began testing our guns. There was a chin turret directly below me in the nose of the B-17 that I controlled remotely from my position inside the aircraft. The turret began to freeze as I tested it and finally froze beyond use. There was a flexible gun sticking out of the right side of the nose compartment that operated properly. The navigator also rode in the nose compartment with his flexible gun sticking out the left side. I reported the turret malfunction to the pilot. As we proceeded on across the Channel my feet became extremely cold because I was not wearing heated shoes. During the next few minutes I experimented with putting my feet in direct sunlight and this did keep them warm. When we arrived over Holland there were supposed to be American fighter planes to meet us and escort us into Germany. The sky was full of B-17’s but no fighter planes. I met a P-38 fighter pilot later in prison camp who told me they were over Holland at that time but could not locate us. As we crossed into Germany I looked down and saw many German fighter planes taking off from a German airfield. Within minutes ME-109’s and FW-190’s were at our altitude firing at the formation. Then came the flak busting throughout the formation. We use to refer to flak this heavy as “so thick one could walk on it.” The German fighters ceased their attack and moved back so they would not be in danger of being hit by their own flak. The flak continued as we passed over the target about noon. I did not aim the bombs. In formation flying the bombardier in the lead plane aimed at the target and all the other bombardiers simply dropped their bombs when he dropped his. As I watched the bombs fall away I prayed, as I had over Norway, that they would hit military targets only. Both the Germans and British used “saturation” bombing. In order to keep down their losses they would fly at night and drop bombs over a large area in order to ensure hitting their target. Both German and British airmen thought we were crazy to fly during the day and suffer the losses that we did in order to hit specific targets. A burst of flak hit the chin turret directly below me and a fragment of it barely missed me as it flew up into the plane. I moved back to the flexible gun sticking out of the right side of the nose compartment. In moving back several feet I disconnected my microphone and earphones and lost communication with the rest of the crew. Flak knocked several large holes in each wing but all four engines were operating as we emerged from the flak. As we pulled out of the flak area the group to which we had attached ourselves began a turn to the right to return to England. We did not turn with them but kept flying straight into Germany. I assume the flak had damaged the controls and the pilot could not turn the plane. When we were all alone in the sky many German fighters attacked our ship. Six ME-109’s lined up in formation about 1,000 yards out from my gun position, just beyond the range of my gun. I do not know how many fighters were at other positions around our plane. The first two German fighters turned toward us, one flying off the wing and just behind the other, and began firing their machine guns. Each fighter had six guns, making a total of twelve guns firing at me. Bullet holes began to pop in the window and side of our aircraft. Bullets flew all around me. I fired my gun at the fighters. The first two fighters passed below us and the next two came in for a pass, firing their guns. As they passed below us the last two came in. By the time they passed below us the first two were back in position and began another run. I always had two German fighters coming in on my position and I continually fired my gun at them. Not one bullet hit me nor did I shoot down a single German fighter. I had lost communication with the rest of the crew but I sensed that something was wrong. I moved over from my gun position and looked back through the tunnel that led to the pilot’s compartment. The pilot was down in the tunnel banging on the escape hatch with a heavy ammunition box. Directly behind the pilot was a solid wall of flames. It looked to me as if the entire aircraft except for the nose compartment was engulfed in flames. The escape hatch was on the floor of the tunnel. I crawled back to see if I could help the pilot open the escape hatch. As I crawled toward him the pilot put his foot on the hatch and forced it open. This took tremendous pressure since the slipstream was trying to force it closed. The pilot grabbed me by the waist and forced me head first out the escape hatch. As I fell clear of the plane, my first reaction was a sense of relief that I had gotten away from that fire. My next thought was, “Did I put on that parachute?” I looked down at my chest --- no parachute. I felt something tugging at my shoulders and looked up. There a few feet above my head was my unopened parachute securely hooked to the risers of my harness. Evidently I had clipped the parachute on my harness but he force of the pilot pushing me through the escape hatch had ripped the risers loose, but the chute was still firmly hooked to the risers. As I was falling, the pilot fell past me no more than fifty feet away. He had a look of horror on his face. I thought when we got on the ground I would kid him about how scared he looked. I found out later that both the pilot and the co-pilot had jumped without their parachutes. Evidently their chutes had burned in the fire. They had told us if we ever bailed out in combat to delay opening the parachute so we could fall away from the fighting. I looked up at my chute and decided to open it right away. In case I had any trouble, I would then have time to work on it before I hit the ground. I pulled the parachute down to me hand over hand and pulled the ripcord. It opened immediately. I did not realize the violent shock I would receive when the parachute opened. I was wearing a harness that was too big. The force of the opening jerked the harness up and tight around my throat. There I hung, about 20,000 feet over Germany unable to breath. I grabbed the risers and gradually pulled myself up in the harness until I could breath. I had opened my parachute too close to the fighting and one of the German fighters came straight for me. I thought, “I have survived all of this just to be shot to death in my parachute by a German fighter.” But the fighter did not shoot at me. He circled me all the way to the ground. I assume he was radioing my position to the ground. Next I realized how quiet it was. All I could hear was the sound of the breeze through my parachute. I was drifting backward in a strong wind. I did not realize how hard I would hit the ground. My heels hit first – so violently that I did a complete backwards somersault. I was in a large field and the strong wind caught my parachute and began dragging me across the field. I tried to get up and run toward the chute to collapse it, but I could not run as fast as the wind was blowing. I tried to pull the bottom lines of the chute toward me to collapse it, but I did not have enough strength. Finally the bottom of the parachute caught on a barbed wire fence and collapsed, pulling me up tight against it. The German fighter that had been circling me buzzed low over me. The pilot gave me a salute and flew away. Again it was very quiet. I looked down at my right leg for my escape kit. The right pants leg of my flight coveralls was torn away from the knee down – no escape kit. I struggled to get out of the parachute harness and just as I managed to free myself a German sergeant and several soldiers came over a small hill. The sergeant said, in a British accent, “Are you hurt, boy?” I told him I was not hurt. Then he said, “What did you have for breakfast?” I replied, “bacon and eggs.” The sergeant then said, “I have not had bacon and eggs in a long time.” He |
back to normal within 2 to 3 days. If it takes longer than that, it's called paralytic postoperative ileus. That's a very serious condition, causing symptoms like cramping, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. It can be excruciating and dangerous. No wonder it strikes fear in healthcare professionals.
Some people can't keep food or drink down soon after surgery. That helped form the impression that the body couldn't handle digestion at first. The whole digestive system seems to have shut down. The return of bowel sounds was regarded as the signal that the gastrointestinal tract was recovering - and often the requirement for "allowing" people to eat again.
But the lower gastrointestinal tract kicks into gear when you start to eat or drink. So withholding food and drink actually delays the return of bowel activity rather than helping get back to normal. And for some types of surgery, especially on the gastrointestinal system itself, it can be 2 to 5 days before even a liquid diet is started.
Controlling hydration and nutrition intravenously just seemed safer for everyone - even though there was never rigorous evidence that this specifically was helping. Other things were contributing to bowel problems, too - like opioids and lying in bed for too long.
Surgical traditions are hard to change, though. For example, by the 1880s it was clear that fluid therapy was important for hemorrhage and shock. But during the 1940s and '50s it became standard practice to restrict fluids (and saline in the fluids) after surgery. It took more than two decades to correct course.
Another example is the policy of "nil by mouth" for everyone from the midnight before surgery. That seems to have begun in the 1960s. It was believed necessary to prevent complications while under anesthesia. But despite clinical trials since the early 1990s showing this routine was unnecessary and harmful, the policy still hasn't completely disappeared.
In the early 1970s, the push began to encourage less draconian policies about drinking and eating for many patients after surgery, too. Clinical trials started to address these questions, providing evidence against this traditional surgical practice - especially for abdominal surgery.
A push for "fast track surgery" to reduce harm and get people back to normal more quickly was gathering momentum in the late 1990s, and that included diet and preventing serious bowel obstruction. But it's still hard to get healthcare professionals to accept that "nil by mouth" right after surgery is not necessary for everyone. You don't have to look far to find examples of hospitals or individual practitioners who still restrict all their patients from drinking and eating for a day or more. (See for example this spread of medical advice on the question.)
Enter the chewing gum controversy. Whether it's before surgery or after, a compromise for some professionals was to allow people to suck on a bit of candy or chew some gum for comfort. In 2002, the first clinical trial of chewing gum after surgery arrived.
On the basis of research suggesting that chewing gum was a kind of "sham feeding" that could activate the bowel, Takayuki Asao and colleagues from Maebashi in Japan recruited 19 people with colorectal cancer in a clinical trial. The 10 people randomly assigned to chewing gum chewed gum 3 times a day until they were allowed to eat: their first bowel motion came more than 2 days sooner than the average in the control group.
That was more dramatic than the results from later trials, but it encouraged more doctors to experiment with, and advocate, chewing gum in the early hours after surgery. It might not be for everyone, but most people apparently like it - the extra salivation stops their mouths and throats being so dry.
That Japanese trial has been joined by many others: 28 small trials in abdominal surgery, including colorectal surgery and cesarean section, have been analyzed in recent systematic reviews (listed below). And there are some trials for other types of surgery, too.
Chewing gum does not have a big impact on things like preventing paralytic postoperative ileus or getting out of hospital more quickly when there isn't a delay of days till a normal diet is introduced. It doesn't seem to be any better than sipping water or ice chips in the hours after surgery, for example. But it doesn't seem to cause vomiting or other common problems, either. So what's stopping its widespread use for the time water is not allowed?
Partly it's because many doctors, nurses, and midwives wouldn't be following the evidence on this - or it's hard for them to accept all their restrictions have not been scientifically valid.
Partly it seems to be because there is only a modest impact on outcomes like prevention of serious bowel obstruction - the misery of many patients isn't being taken seriously. And partly, I believe, it's because of hospital convenience and power. "Nil by mouth" after midnight, for example, enabled hospitals to change surgery schedules without worrying about exactly when particular patients had their most recent meals.
It's hard to watch someone begging for a sip of water and being denied it. Controlling what people can wear, and when they can eat, drink, and go to the toilet: these are some of the ultimate exercises of power over others. Taking those liberties away from people weakens them in fundamental ways. There needs to be a compelling reason to do it. If there isn't, it's a misuse of power over others.
~~~~
Recent systematic reviews on chewing gum after surgery:
The cartoon that starts this post is my own (Creative Commons License): more at Statistically Funny.
Morton's ether inhaler is from the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. Photo by Daderot in Wikimedia Commons.
Operating theater image from the History of Medicine Division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). (Click on the image for details.)
The certificate with the image of Florence Nightingale is from the Wellcome collection, via Wikimedia Commons.
* The thoughts Hilda Bastian expresses here at Absolutely Maybe are personal, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institutes of Health or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.RunDisney, the Walt Disney Co.’s race organization, announced Wednesday, Oct. 18, that it is canceling its half marathon and other races at Disneyland Resort beginning in 2018.
Races at Walt Disney World and Disneyland Paris will remain.
A Disneyland spokesman said construction of the 14-acre Star Wars Land: Galaxy’s Edge in Disneyland, and development around the resort area such as The Disneyland Eastern Gateway and a new four-diamond hotel in Downtown Disney, would affect future races since runners traverse a course in and around the Disneyland Resort.
“While construction for the next several years will impact our ability to deliver the runDisney experience our guests love, we are excited about our future as the Disneyland Resort continues one of its largest multi-year expansions,” said George Savvas, a Disneyland spokesman. “For fans who love to be part of runDisney events, we will continue to offer races at our other properties around the world in 2018.”
Andrew Tina of Daly City, as Darth Vader, finishes strong at the Disney Star Wars Half Marathon. (File photo by Mindy Schauer)
A participant dressed up as Hulk starts off the race during the Avengers Super Heroes Half Marathon at Disneyland Resort. (File photo by Mindy Schauer)
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Group of runners start off the Avengers Super Heroes Half Marathon at Disneyland Resort. (File photo by Mindy Schauer)
Adam Bowman of Pasadena dresses as legendary star wars character Chewbacca during the inaugural Star Wars Half Marathon at Disneyland Sunday. (File photo by Mindy Schauer)
Runners get off to an enthusiastic start during Disney’s inagural Star Wars Half Marathon early Sunday morning. (File photo by Mindy Schauer)
The races bring in an estimated 25,000 people paying upwards of $195 to participate in a half marathon run. The races, usually held during off-peak seasons, are a boon to the local economy, generating $20 million to $30 million in revenue to Orange County, according to Disney.
Savvas did not know when runDisney would come back to hold races at the Anaheim parks again. He said runners who pre-registered for race events in 2018 will receive a refund.
The cancellation comes as no surprise for eager runners who were looking forward to participating in one of the four race weekends held annually at Disneyland.
Chatter and rumors on social media, Disney fan blogs, and other websites about the future of runDisney races at Disneyland grew rampant when about seven months ago Disney postponed registration for its popular Light Side Star Wars themed running event slated for January at the Anaheim theme parks.
An Anaheim spokesman said typically Disney gives the city three to four months advance notice before a race weekend. Disney needs permission from the city to arrange the closing of some freeway off ramps, streets and provide additional police. City staff said Disney had not filed for any permits.
RunDisney is part of the Walt Disney Co.’s sports division and has grown to become one of the nation’s largest race organizers. RunDisney holds eight series of races such as marathons, half marathons, 10k, 5k and a kid’s race at Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resort.
The unique course location – Disneyland and Disney California Adventure – and themes such as Star Wars, Avengers, and Tinkerbell give seasoned runners and non-runners an opportunity to enjoy a one-of-a-kind running experience through the two theme parks and surrounding areas in Anaheim. Disney also holds several other events that weekend such as a Health and Fitness Expo, a kids’ race, and pasta at the park.
As part of the experience, many runners dress in a Disney costume. Local high school bands play. Darth Vader, Thor, Mickey, Minnie and other Disney characters greet and high-four guests.
Peter Henry, 40, from San Diego, said he’s disappointed that runDisney is canceling its Disneyland races. As someone who has participated in runDisney events since 2015, he looked forward to the runs every year. Training for the races helped him lose 15 pounds.
“I wanted to create my own tradition,” said Henry, who has participated in the last three Star Wars races. “So many people look forward to these races but we were kept in the dark since March. There’s a lot of preparation – from training, to rooms, to flights – that go on to be part of this. I understand what Disney has to do but I just wish they had better communication.”
Savvas said the Disney team had considered and weighed various possibilities to keep the runDisney events but ultimately, could not come up with a plan.
Disneyland will host its last runDisney event for the year on Nov. 9 -12, the Super Heroes Half Marathon weekend.A 17-YEAR-OLD attempted to murder three women in random stabbing attacks because he could not lose his virginity, a court heard.
Ben Moynihan, now 18, of The Ridings, Portsmouth, is on trial at Winchester Crown Court charged with the attempted murder of the three women, aged 20, 45 and 67, which he denies.
The teenager also faces alternative charges of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily which he also denies, but he admits wounding the three women in the three incidents which happened in the north area of Portsmouth in June and July last year.
Kerry Maylin, prosecuting, said that Moynihan, who called himself the ‘unhappy geezer’, left two letters for the police confessing to his crimes in which he stated that ‘all women need to die’.
The letter, left on a police van, stated: ‘All women need to die and hopefully next time I can gouge their eyes out.
‘Come and arrest me for God’s sake before I hunt for my fourth victim.’
At the bottom of the letter, Moynihan had included a photograph of himself.
He was later arrested when police officers recognised him in the street from the picture and detained him. Another letter was found by a couple in which Moynihan described himself as ‘the unhappy geezer’.
It said: ‘When women won’t talk to you it’s heartbreaking, why are they fussy with men nowadays.’
It continued: ‘As I roam these streets, hungry for blood and pain, I am greeted with attack, attack, attack, attack. Dead. Jolly Good.’
At the bottom of the letter was a symbol from the video game Tomb Raider, Ms Maylin said.
She continued that after his arrest, Moynihan told a police officer: ‘It was not GBH, I was trying to kill them.’
In a video found on his laptop, Moynihan had filmed himself saying: ‘I think every girl is... fussy with men nowadays, they do not give boys like us a chance.
‘I am still a virgin, everyone is losing it before me, that’s why you are my chosen target.
‘I just can’t live in this flat, I have no future here.
‘So women, tell me how we should do this.’
Ms Maylin said he waved a knife at the camera as he continued saying: ‘Shall I stab you in the neck or in the heart, shall I slash your throat or should I just cigarette lighter you or just fire you.
‘I do not know where I could get petrol from but how hard can it be to come by.
‘So I hope you learn a lesson not to bully guys like us, we deserve dignity, for your own generations, remember.’
In another document, Moynihan had written: ‘I was planning to murder, mainly women, as an act of revenge because the life they gave me.
‘I am still a virgin at 17 and why do women have to be fussy with choosing a boyfriend or cheating on men with others?
‘I attack women because I grew up to believe them a more weaker part of the human breed.
‘I also done it to get out of this horrible life with more stress and to save myself and my family.
‘I am not a bad child and didn’t want to do this but had no choice.’
Ms Maylin said he also kept what he called a ‘diary of evil’ which detailed the attacks as well as a document listing his dreams which included dreams of violence against women and of killing.
Describing the attacks, Ms Maylin said: ‘Over three days in the summer of 2014, three women were randomly attacked by a stranger. They did not know each other and there is nothing to connect or link them to each other, they are all of different backgrounds, different social circles and significantly of different ages.’
Ms Maylin said that Moynihan used a 4.5-inch knife to carry out the attacks.
She said that the first victim was targeted on June 20 in Southampton Road as she walked to her partner’s house.
Ms Maylin said: ‘She was sending some form of message (on her phone) when she heard steps behind her and she saw a man stood really close, he was next to her.
‘She continued to walk and he matched her walking pace, he then turned towards her. She initially thought she had been punched, she was shocked. She saw he was waving a knife, she looked down at her chest and saw that she was bleeding.’
The second woman was attacked as she took her dog for a walk in Hilsea and the third victim was attacked in an alleyway near her home in the Wymering area.
She was to tell police that her reaction was: ‘Bloody hell, that’s that stabber.’
The trial was adjourned until tomorrow.North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited Mt. Paektu on Friday, a sign that suggests he may be planning to execute a top official.
Such visits to the mystical mountain often precede important decisions by North Korean leaders.
'Kim visited the mountain and ordered the site managers to construct hospitable accommodations on the mountain for visitors,' the state-run KCNA reported on Saturday.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited Mt. Paektu on Friday, a sign that suggests he may be planning a significant act in the near future. Such visits to the mystical mountain often precede important decisions by North Korean leaders
In November 2013, the despot visited the mountain with his aides a month before he executed top officials including Jang Song-thaek, his uncle and political guardian.
Kim visited the mountain again in April 2015, before executing Hyon Yong-chol, a former defense chief.
He had also made a pilgrimage after North Korea's fifth nuclear test in September 2016
Pictures show Kim wandering around on the snow-capped mountain with hardly a bead of sweat and wearing spotless and shiny shoes. Kim made a trip to the summit after North Korea's fifth nuclear test in September 2016.
In November 2013, the despot visited the mountain with his aides a month before he executed top officials including Jang Song-thaek, his uncle and political guardian. Kim visited the mountain again in April 2015, before executing Hyon Yong-chol, a former defense chief
'[Kim Jong-un's father] Kim Jong-il did the same, he visited the mountain right before announcing in 1974 his list of 10 social decorum,' said a South Korean government insider.
'Kim also visited the mountain just before executing Kim Tong-kyu, then-senior official for international affairs, in 1977,' they added.
Mount Paektu has been decreed as the'sacred' birthplace of the secretive state's first dictator, Kim's grandfather.
Pictures released by the regime show Kim in the snowon North Korea's border with China, which the regime rewrote history to claim was birthplace of Kim Il-Sung, the Communist who ruled from after the Second World War until 1994.
He was in fact born in the Soviet Union, but the mountain, has long been integral to the country's identity.
The mountain is believed to be the site of the deadliest volcano eruption in history and fears have been raised North Korea's nuclear testing could trigger another one
It is reputedly the birthplace of the earliest Korean leader ever recorded, Dangun, who according to legend founded the early kingdom of Gojoseon in 2333BC.
The mountain is believed to be the site of the deadliest volcano eruption in history and there are fears it may erupt again as a result of North Korea's nuclear weapons testing.
A thousand years ago it exploded so violently that ash fell as far away as northern Japan.
Last month Bruce Bennett, a senior defence analyst at the Rand Corporation, warned one of the nuclear weapon tests carried out by North Korea could have a catastrophic effect.
A North Korean poster depicting leaders Kim Jong Il (left) and Kim Il Sung at the summit of Mount Paektu
The mountain is considered holy by North Koreans, with dedicated supporters of the Kim dynasty carrying out pilgrimmages
Kim was also out and about in the rest of the country, here offering his advice to local people in Samjiyon County
North Korea, formally called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), last week tested its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, saying the device could reach all of the United States.
Two U.S. B-1B heavy bombers joined large-scale combat drills over South Korea on Thursday amid warnings from North Korea that the exercises and U.S. threats have made the outbreak of war 'an established fact.'
The annual U.S.-South Korean 'Vigilant Ace' exercises feature 230 aircraft, including some of the most advanced U.S. stealth warplanes.
North Korea's foreign ministry blamed the drills and 'confrontational warmongering' by U.S. officials for making war inevitable.
U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster said at the weekend the possibility of war was 'increasing every day.'
He said Trump was prepared to take action against North Korea but was working to convince China, Russia and others to do more to press Pyongyang to get it to give up its weapons programs.
After the latest nuclear weapons tests, U.S warplanes, including B-1B heavy bombers (pictured) carried out joined large-scale combat drills over South Korea
U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham urged the Pentagon on Sunday to start moving U.S. military dependants out of South Korea, saying conflict with North Korea was getting close.
The Pentagon said it has 'no intent' to move out any dependants.
Joseph Yun, the U.S. special representative for North Korea policy, will travel to Japan and Thailand next week to meet government officials 'to discuss ways to strengthen the pressure campaign following the DPRK latest ballistic missile test,' the State Department.
'The United States looks forward to continuing its partnership with both these nations so that the DPRK will return to credible talks on denuclearization,' it added.
But Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says he believes the chances of dialogue to resolve the tensions over North Korea's nuclear weapons program are low.
Lavrov was speaking Friday while attending an OSCE ministerial summit in Vienna.
He said 'the North Koreans have told us more than once that they need security guarantees, especially in the situation when Washington is trying to withdraw from the agreements on the Iranian nuclear programme'.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
STOCKTON -- A gun stolen from Stockton Mayor Anthony Silva's home was linked to several crimes, including the killing of a 13-year-old, according to the District Attorney's office.
The Beretta pistol, which is in the Stockton Police Department's possession as evidence, was used in the Feb. 15, 2015 in a drive-by shooting which killed 13-year-old Rayshawn Harris. According to officials, Harris was standing in front of his home on South Sacramento Street around 7 a.m. when he was fatally shot.
There were no suspects identified in the shooting, but the investigation showed the shell casings were ejected from the stolen weapon. A witness described the shooter as an African American man wearing a grey sweater and white shoes.
The weapon, a.40 caliber Beretta Px4 Storm semi-automatic pistol which was reported stolen from Silva's house two months after the shooting, was also used in two other criminal investigations.
Silva responded to FOX40 via text message Friday evening saying he's heartbroken over the news.
"I feel terrible and I feel sick to my stomach. Obviously this was my worst possible fear. I will be in shock for a long time. It's a horrible tragedy that will that will be on my mind and in my prayers forever. I will reach out to the family and do whatever I can. I have not been provided any details yet, so I only can react to what the news is claiming. Everyone please pray for Stockton."
Silva, who later spoke with FOX40 as he was leaving to take 100 kids to his annual summer camp, said he was using his Morada home that was burglarized for storage and reported the burglary in March 2015.
"The neighborhood watch called me and said people are breaking into your hose there. I caught them at the robbery in progress and they slammed into the front of my car," Silva recalled, acknowledging that there might have been other break-ins that weren't noticed before that day.
He also had a 9mm pistol stolen from his current Spanos Park home during his 2015 Sister Cities trip to the Philippines. When presented with fact that few people have one gun stolen from one home, let alone two from two different homes, his response was, "I know."
After Rayshawn was killed Silva was criticized for the lack of the security in the city, but relatives defended the mayor on Facebook.
Once hearing the mayor's stolen gun was responsible for their loss, family members did not want to speak on camera Friday night, saying, only by phone, that they're shocked.
Silva says he shares their outrage and sadness and wonders why his name was released when the names of other owners of stolen guns involved in crime aren't.
But he didn't want to comment on his theories just yet.
"For now, it's just a time to say I'm sorry to the family, I'm praying for the victim and praying for Stockton that we can end the violence," Silva said.
Silva's stolen Beretta was also used Jan. 15, 2015 in a drive-by shooting at a home on East Church Street. The two residents in the home were not injured. Officials said eight.40 caliber and six 9 mm casings, which were fired by the stolen pistol, were recovered at the scene.
According to the DA's records, the weapon was recovered June 9, 2016 after Stockton Police responded to a domestic violence call on Treetop Drive.
Officials are still investigating the cases, and encourage anyone with information call the Stockton Police Department at (209)937-8377.The Internet is a strange and fickle land. As bountiful as it is barren, very few things can find a stronghold in such an environment. Mighty empires have fallen through the years at the hands of the next, newer, better something. Many times, popularity on the Internet fades with time, leading the latest Internet junk to simply disappear without warning. People often just move on, in search of another flavor. It's hard to measure what has the most potential to be sustainable on the Web. But, in two decades of the Internet's popular culture, there is one for sure currency with which any entity can barter staying power: Cuteness.
Ariel Griggs, 29, an tax agency owner and mother of two, had no intention on managing Internet commodities, but cuteness is one of those forces that no one can predict. So, in the days leading to Thanksgiving, when pictures of her 22-month-old son, Ashton Howell, began popping up in social media timelines across the world, she became as frightened as she was confused.
"My first thought was, 'How did they get my baby's pictures? I mean, I don't have these pictures,'" Griggs says.
"I'm thinking, 'Let's report it.' You know, pictures are very intimate to me, very private. But it got to the point where it was like wildfire. You couldn't stop it. I was very anxious and worried about his safety."
Griggs, who only primarily uses social media to promote her Mobile-area tax business, knew that the photos could not have come from her page. In fact, she didn't recognize the photos. When looking for a culprit, Griggs knew it could not have been Ashton's father. He doesn't have social media.
"I knew there was only one other person that would be this close to my son - that'd be my brother," Griggs says.
Griggs' brother, 18-year-old Steven Small, is a freshman at UC Berkeley, who admitted to posting the photos on his Instagram account. Griggs says her brother babysat Ashton regularly before going on to college.
"He thought it was funny to dress Ashton up, putting his 'little' big head in caps and stuff and taking pictures of him. I found out he has tons of pictures of Ashton on Instagram. I guess people just thought his pictures were cute and went from there," she says.
"I'm kind of leery of social media. I kinda think that my brother set this up as a ploy to get more followers on Instagram, but he hasn't admitted, yet."
Whether or not Small gained more followers, Ashton has a huge following. However, his celebrity has not come by his own name.
"I see that they call him 'Honey Bun Baby,'" Griggs says. "I thought that was so funny. People have been asking if I can have another child and name him 'Cinnamon Roll.'"
Ashton, Alabama's Honey Bun Baby, is the Internet's newest child star 34 Gallery: Ashton, Alabama's Honey Bun Baby, is the Internet's newest child star
The most popular photo of the Honey Bun Baby is a picture of Ashton donning a red skull cap, smirking into a camera. The meme has become a catchall for a range of emotions, typically relating to mischievous behavior.
Arguably, the most popular iteration of the meme to date has a caption that reads that Ashton's face is a face you make "when you find the hidden piece of sweet potato pie."
This adorable, lighthearted quip became a gem in the Thanksgiving humor treasure trove, alongside Pastor Shirley Caesar's "Beans, Greens, Potatoes and Tomatoes" song. Actor and singer Tyrese posted the photo to his Instagram page, a highlight for Griggs. But social media enthusiasts found humor in the photo far beyond their affinity for dessert items.
"After Thanksgiving, I'm starting to see more that are the crazy ones. The last couple memes I've seen, they've been a little X-rated. I don't want people looking at my baby's picture and thinking of stuff like that!"
Griggs says she still struggles a bit to come to terms with accidental fame, but her most important priority is keeping Ashton grounded as he matures.
"People ask me, 'Oh! He's famous. What are you going to do now?'"
"Well, he is a child. I want to keep his lifestyle. I know this may be too far-fetched to think, but I don't want him to be like one of those kid stars who become horrible adults. I just don't want him to have a hard time adjusting."
Now that Ashton has entered the realm of Internet child stars, many social media users are comparing him to the reigning adorable meme kid, Gavin, an elementary-aged Minnesotan, who, similarly to Ashton, was introduced to the world via a social media savvy uncle.
"I don't think there should be competition. They are both children. There's no competition," Griggs says.
Some users have posted that the two kids should come together and produce an act of the ultimate Internet cuteness. Griggs agrees.
"Gavin is a little older and Ashton is young. Maybe they could collaborate together on something that involves Gavin showing Ashton the ropes. That'd be cute."
What does Ashton think of all the success his cute gaze has garnered?
Griggs says she's confident he hasn't let his celebrity go to his head.
"He doesn't know what's going on. He still wants his nap time. He's still cranky in the morning. And getting on the potty is still big business."
For more reactions to Ashton the Honey Bun Baby from around the Web, look below!Advertisement Judge rejects bid to delay Tsarnaev trial over Paris attacks Jury selection continues in Boston Marathon bombing Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Jury selection will continue in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial after a federal judge on Wednesday rejected the Boston Marathon bombing suspect's bid to suspend it because of the Paris terror attacks.Individual questioning of prospective jurors begins Thursday.Tsarnaev's lawyers argued in a motion filed Tuesday that the French terror attacks had placed the marathon bombings "at the center of a grim global drama." They said delaying jury selection would allow some time "for the extraordinary prejudice flowing from these events - and the comparison of those events to those at issue in this case - to diminish."Judge George O'Toole Jr. denied the motion Wednesday, writing that his review of jury questionnaires filled out last week "has so far confirmed, rather than undermined, my judgment that a fair and impartial jury can and will be chosen to determine the issues in this case."Jury selection began last week with more than 1,350 prospective jurors being asked to fill out lengthy questionnaires.The Paris attacks began Jan. 7, the third day of jury selection in Tsarnaev's trial, when two brothers burst into the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and shot 12 people to death. A total of 17 people, including four hostages, were killed over three days. The brothers, Cherif and Said Kouachi, and a third gunman were killed by police.In the marathon case, authorities say Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, planned and carried out the attack as retaliation for U.S. wars in Muslim countries. Three people were killed and more than 260 were wounded when twin bombs exploded at the finish line April 15, 2013.Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police days after the bombings. Dzhokhar, 21, could face the death penalty if convicted.It’s the Rich Wot Gets the Pleasure
Population is much less of a problem than consumption. No wonder the rich are obsessed by it.
By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 27th October 2011
It must rank among the most remarkable events in recent human history. In just 60 years the global average number of children each woman bears has fallen from 6 to 2.5. This is an astonishing triumph for women’s empowerment, and whatever your position on population growth might be, it is something we should celebrate.
But this decline in fertility, according to the report the United Nations published yesterday, is not the end of the story. It has now raised its estimate of global population growth. Rather than peaking at about 9 billion in the middle of this century, the UN says that human numbers will reach some 10 billion by 2100, and continue growing beyond that point.
That’s the middle scenario. The highest of its range of estimates is an astonishing 15.8bn by 2100. If this were correct, population would be a much greater problem – for both the environment and human development – than we had assumed. It would oblige me to change my views on yet another subject. But fortunately for my peace of mind and, rather more importantly, for the prospects of everyone on earth, it is almost certainly baloney.
Writing in the journal Nature in May, Fred Pearce pointed out that the UN’s revision arose not from any scientific research or analysis, but from what appeared to be an arbitrary decision to change one of the inputs it fed into its model. Its previous analysis was based on the assumption that the average number of children per woman would fall to 1.85 worldwide by 2100. But this year it changed the assumption to 2.1. This happens to be the population replacement rate: the point at which reproduction contributes to neither a fall nor a rise in the number of people.
The UN failed to explain this changed assumption, which appears to fly in the face of current trends, or to show why fertility decline should suddenly stop when it hit replacement level, rather than continuing beyond that point, as has happened to date in all such populations. I expected yesterday’s report to contain the explanation. I expected wrong. It appears to have plucked its fertility figure out of the air.
Even so, and even if we’re to assume that the old figures are more realistic than the new ones, there’s a problem. As the new report points out “the escape from poverty and hunger is made more difficult by rapid population growth.” It also adds to the pressure on the biosphere. But how big a problem is it?
If you believe the rich, elderly white men who dominate the population debate, it is the biggest one of all. In 2009 for example, a group of US billionaires met to decide which threat to the planet most urgently required their attention. Who’d have guessed? These men, who probably each consume as many of the world’s resources in half an hour as the average African consumes in a lifetime, decided that it was population.
Population is the issue you blame if you can’t admit to your own impacts: it’s not us consuming, it’s those brown people reproducing. It seems to be a reliable rule of environmental politics that the richer you are, the more likely you are to place population growth close to the top of the list of crimes against the planet.
The new report, inflated though its figures seem to be, will gravely disappoint the population obsessives. It cites Paul Murtaugh of Oregon State University, whose research shows that:
“An extra child born today in the United States, would, down the generations, produce an eventual carbon footprint seven times that of an extra child in China, 55 times that of an Indian child or 86 times that of a Nigerian child.”
And it draws on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which makes the first comprehensive assessment of how changes in population affect carbon dioxide emissions. This concludes that:
“slowing population growth could provide 16 per cent to 19 per cent of the emissions reductions suggested to be necessary by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change”.
In other words, it can make a contribution. But the other 81-84% will have to come from reducing consumption and changing technologies. The UN report concludes that “even if zero population growth were achieved, that would barely touch the climate problem.”
This should not prevent us from strongly supporting the policies which will cause population to peak sooner rather than later. Sex education, the report shows, is crucial, so is access to contraception and the recognition of women’s rights and improvement in their social status. All these have been important factors in the demographic transition the world has seen so far. We should also press for a better distribution of wealth: escaping from grinding poverty is another of the factors which has allowed women to have fewer children. The highly unequal system sustained by the rich white men who fulminate about population is one of the major reasons for population growth.
All this puts conservatives in a difficult position. They want to blame the poor for the environmental crisis by attributing it to population growth. Yet some of them oppose all the measures – better and earlier sex education, universal access to contraception (for teenagers among others), stronger rights for women, the redistribution of wealth – which are likely to reduce it.
And beyond these interventions, what do they intend to do about population growth? As the UN report points out:
“Considerable population growth continues today because of the high numbers of births in the 1950s and 1960s, which have resulted in larger base populations with millions of young people reaching their reproductive years over succeeding generations.”
In other words, it’s a hangover from an earlier period. It has been compounded by another astonishing transformation: since the 1950s, global life expectancy has risen from 48 to 68.
What this means is that even if all the measures I’ve mentioned here – education, contraception, rights, redistribution – were widely deployed today, there will still be a population bulge, as a result of the momentum generated 60 years ago. So what do they propose? Compulsory sterilisation? Mass killing? If not, they had better explain their programme.
Yes, population growth contributes to environmental problems. No, it is not the decisive factor. Even the availability of grain is affected more by rising livestock numbers and the use of biofuels – driven, again by consumption – than by human population growth.
Of course we should demand that governments help women regain control over their bodies. But beyond that there’s little that can be done. We must instead decide how best to accommodate human numbers which will, at least for the next four decades, continue to rise.
www.monbiot.comNight Ministry Bus Damaged View Full Caption
WICKER PARK — A new bus that was custom-designed for the Night Ministry was badly damaged when a van hit it late Tuesday, just as workers from the nonprofit were wrapping up giving food and medical services to homeless people in Wicker Park.
"We feel prepared to deal with it," said Stacy Massey, a spokeswoman for the Uptown-based agency, at 4711 N. Ravens |
Howard doesn’t cast a shadow over the team’s young goalkeeper.
“It’s part of the business,” Sharpe said of the team’s move to sign Howard as a Designated Player back in March. “Those acquisitions are going to happen. I sat and spoke with him and he was well informed with it. We don’t talk about it, to be fair. Tim is not here yet. Zac is our No. 1 and his competition right now is John Berner and Chris Froschauer.”
MacMath does maintain contact with Howard, however, a longtime mentor of his who makes himself available via text messages.
“He just reached out and said ‘Let me know if you ever need anything or to talk about anything’,” MacMath said.
The current Rapids No. 1 remains hungry, confident, and willing to compete with the 37-year-old Howard once the Designated Player arrives in Colorado in July.
“I knew about it beforehand, so it wasn’t as big of a thing when they announced it,” MacMath said. “That’s part of the business of trying to make the team better at all positions. I’m here to push him and make the team as good as possible.”
Just how important has MacMath been to Colorado’s six-game unbeaten run and rise to the top of the Western Conference?
“I think he’s been huge,” said Mastroeni. “I think to this point of the season, he’s done very well in [ball distribution] as well as managing games and coming up with big saves in the last couple of games and keeping clean sheets. Overall, his performances, given the situation with Tim coming in this summer, have been spectacular. It’s the type of performances you need from a player in his position.”When NCR announced its preliminary and disappointing third quarter results today, it lowered its guidance for the rest of 2014. Its stock got knocked into a breathtaking 21% plunge. While at it, NCR revealed to just what extent brick-and-mortar retailers were sinking into a quagmire.
The maker of, among other things, point-of-sale devices for the retail industry should know: It is, as it says, “the global leader in consumer transaction technologies.”
It blamed “global macroeconomic conditions” such as “foreign currency headwinds.” The dollar had surged recently to regain some of the value it had lost before – very unwelcome news for Corporate America. And NCR blamed particularly the “challenging retail market” for its debacle. CEO Bill Nuti explained it this way:
Market conditions within the retail industry worsened in the third quarter, as evidenced by weak same store sales comparisons and financial results. This resulted in our retail customers spending more cautiously than anticipated and further delaying solution rollouts. Contributing further are ongoing data security concerns, which were heightened in the third quarter. This is causing retailers to shift IT priorities, resources, and capital spending. Additionally, ongoing retail consolidation continues to be a factor impacting our performance.
So, while NCR will “continue to be faced with challenging and uncertain market dynamics,” it remains, obviously, “confident in the actions we are taking to address these challenges, including strengthening our Retail Solutions team and talent….”
NCR, a thermometer into the retail industry beyond the latest sales statistics, has noticed that brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting back. And they’re not just cutting back buying point-of-sale devices; they’re cutting back, period. “Ongoing retail consolidation,” Nuti called it. And some are using bankruptcy courts to do it.
These structural problems in the brick-and-mortar retail industry include Sears Holding with its moribund Sears and Kmart stores. They excel only in two things: shrinking sales and losing money. This year, the company promised to close 300 Sears stores and 80 Kmart stores. Some of us wonder why anyone is still buying there.
A week ago, discount retailer Alco, with 198 stores in 23 states, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In September, after never-ending and wild speculations that electronics retailer Radio Shack might also head into bankruptcy, the company suddenly supported these wild speculations in an SEC filing:
Given our negative cash flows from operations and in order to meet our expected cash needs for the next twelve months and over the longer term, we will be required to obtain additional liquidity sources, consolidate our store base and possibly restructure our debt and other obligations. We are exploring alternatives…. Alternatives include the sale of the company, partnership through a recapitalization and investment agreement, as well as both in and out-of-court restructuring.
That “in-court restructuring” would be bankruptcy and could entail outright liquidation. It would be the end of that story. The stock trades as a penny stock. If the store down the street disappears, I’d regret it. It’s convenient. I buy my doodads there, like that cable a few years ago that allowed me to plug my laptop into my old and powerful stereo system with its big analog speakers and wonderful sound. Things like that. I rarely spend more than five bucks there. But it’s apparently hard to make a living that way.
Sears, Kmart, Alco, and Radio Shack aren’t exceptions. Retail chains, large and small, have announced a veritable epidemic of store closings in 2014. Here are the “Top 20” announcements of store closings. For these 20 chains, the total number of stores to be closed exceeds 4,200!
Store closings add up after a while. This process has been going on for years. It’s tough out there.
Mega-retailer Walmart has seen nearly stagnating profits over the past three years as sales growth barely beat inflation. Sure, some brick-and-mortar retail chains are thriving, but many others are languishing, and some are on the way out. As a side note: when all this washes out, who is going to fill the vacant retail space in our malls? That’s one of the many secondary effects of the troubles in the American retail industry.
There are bright spots, however. Online retail continues to grow, though undisputed king of the hill Amazon continues to lose money. Turns out, it’s easier to grow a business if making money is not part of the plan, as long as you keep getting new money to lose [read…. But Wait, There Are A Few Differences Between Amazon and the US Postal Service].
And auto sales have been booming, whipped into frenzy by cheap money, long financing terms, a focus on subprime customers, and such loosey-goosey underwriting standards that even regulators have started fretting about it. They’re worried about the risks to the banks. But when this auto-loan doozie pops, it will hit sales, production, services, railroads…. It won’t go away quietly. Read…. Debris from Subprime Auto Loans to Ricochet across Main Street
As for the rest of retail, it’s a slog. American consumers are stressed. Inflation has been eating into their incomes, and they have to curtail their spending, or make up the difference with borrowed money. Savers have seen their incomes from their $9.5 trillion in bank accounts, CDs, and money market funds whittled down to nearly nothing, and they too had to tighten their belts. These are the designated losers of monetary policy. There are a lot of them. And it’s hurting the real economy. Read… More QE? These Charts Show the Pauperization of Workers in the UK and America since 2008
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Would you like to be notified via email when WOLF STREET publishes a new article? Sign up here.Baghdad Is Now Safe! (According To John McCain) Posted by Pile (6789 views) [E-Mail link]
[ Liars ] During an interview on "The Situation Room" this afternoon, John McCain told Wolf Blitzer that he needs to "get up to speed" and stop reporting three-month-old news from Iraq. According to McCain, the surge is working and the streets of Baghdad are safe for Americans to go strolling down.
The only problem? Michael Ware, who is, ya know, in Baghdad, says McCain hasn't a clue…
UPDATE: McCain goes to Baghdad.. kind of like Debbie Does Dallas except more people get screwed.
"Honestly, Wolf, you'll barely last twenty minutes out there. I dont know what part of Neverland Senator McCain is talking about when he says we can go strolling in Baghdad."
Name: (change name for anonymous posting) Title: Comments: 1 Article displayed.RICHMOND, Va. — It was announced this morning that the Richmond City Council successfully passed a resolution granting an immediate continuance to argue more in the coming week.
The resolution passed with a rare unanimous vote and came just as the council was about to be forced to resolve one of the many issues that they all disagree on.
The topic they chose to be laser-focused on not moving forward with was the question of the necessity of a Human Rights Commision for the city. The city council previously managed to put off a vote by holding public hearings, but as those concluded, they were faced with having to actually do something. By passing this resolution, they gave themselves an extension to squabble more and decide later.
“This really grants us the necessary time to continue to indulge in endless deliberation,” said one council member who would only speak with the guarantee of anomonity. “If we actually came to any decisions we would have one less issue to drag out on a daily basis and to all get into a huff about. I am proud of this one, but who knows what those other loons think.”
With the new resolution coming into effect at midnight on Tuesday the entire city council can breathe a sigh of relief, safe in knowing that they can start their bickering fresh on Wednesday and may continue into next week.
AdvertisementsCopyright by KXAN - All rights reserved FILE - In this Feb. 5, 2015 file photo, Willie Nelson performs at the 17th Annual GRAMMY Foundation Legacy Concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles. Nelson announced Monday, April 20, 2015, he plans to roll out his own brand of...
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved FILE - In this Feb. 5, 2015 file photo, Willie Nelson performs at the 17th Annual GRAMMY Foundation Legacy Concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles. Nelson announced Monday, April 20, 2015, he plans to roll out his own brand of...
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Austin's legendary country music pioneer is turning 83-years-old Friday.
Willie Nelson is known as a musician, singer, songwriter, author, activist, poet and actor. Nelson received the Gershwin Prize for his lifetime achievements in November, 2015.
On 4/20 last year, Nelson rolled out his own brand of marijuana, Willie's Reserve. He is a long time supporter of marijuana legalization and advocate for the benefits of usage.
Which Willie song will you listen to today? Leave your answer in the comments below.
View Gallery / $photos.size() PHOTOS: Willie Nelson turns 83And Yes, We Should 'Change Everything to Make a Few People Happy'
Earlier this week I was running an LGBT-inclusion workshop for the staff and clergy of a religious organization for my day job. It was a mostly standard training, discussing vocabulary and terminology, concepts of sex, sexuality and gender, how to use the various non-binary and neutral pronouns, and all of the other usual topics. It was, for the most part, a very uneventful workshop. The vast majority of those in attendance approached the topics with incredibly open minds and worked very hard to absorb the onslaught of so much information.
No matter how self-aware one might be, it's always challenging to shift a perspective and learn new approaches, especially concerning folks who haven't always had a place at the table. But, the folks at the table were really enthusiastic and trying very hard — and they really were getting everything pretty quickly.
I always find these workshops pretty uplifting. It's really validating to walk into a room that has been traditionally unwelcoming and find that everyone has a genuine interest in learning and growing. In this day and age, it's refreshing. There was one moment — one question, really — that has stuck with me all week long.
One person, who was having a particularly tough time as we discussed the spectrum of genders and non-binary identities said, "You said that only 0.3 percent of people are transgender. Why should the rest of us change everything we do just to make a few confused people happy?"
This wasn't the first time I've gotten this question (and I'm sure many of you have gotten the question, too.) Impressively, more than a few people participating in the training jumped in and put an immediate stop to the "these people are confused" line — and they did a really good job of it. We didn't have too much time to get into the second half of the question — and I knew that I didn't want to open up that can of worms, so I asked a somewhat rhetorical question and immediately moved on to a new topic.
I asked: "What is the minimum number of people in group required for you to treat them with respect? How many is too few? How many is enough? Do we really only need to treat people with respect when there are enough of them?"
How many of us have asked this question of our family and friends? Seriously, this question seems to be at the center of quite a lot of the debate — that the majority should never have to adjust for the minority specifically because they're a minority. So what's the number? How many people are too few? What's the threshold?
Before I ended the workshop I answered my own question with some statistics: The CDC estimates over 40% of all LGB students have considered suicide and 29% have attempted it. The Williams Institute estimates 41% of all transgender people have attempted suicide. Both of those reports also show that treating people with respect — using their pronouns, allowing bathroom access, being seen for who they really are — all of those things reduce the risk of suicide. It's really that simple.
I answered the question by saying that if I can save someone's life simply by using a new vocabulary word and thinking a bit differently, there's no number too small for me. What's your answer? Why is it important for you for us to change our ways and become more inclusive? I don't think we take that question seriously enough. It's a good rhetorical tool for our opponents that we're often too afraid to respond to — but we don't need to be afraid at all. The statistics and the truth are on our side.
When someone asks you the question next time — when they ask why they should change their behavior for a small minority of people — what are you going to say to them? They're asking the questions, we should be ready with the answer.
Robbie Medwed is an Atlanta-based LGBT educator and activist. His column appears here weekly. Follow him on Twitter @rjmedwed.
See a mistake? Email corrections to: [email protected]Valve will make three separate Steam-related announcements next week regarding gaming in the living room, the company said today alongside the launch of a teaser site.
The site hosts a countdown that will end at 1 p.m. ET on Monday, Sept. 23, as well as some cryptic planetary imagery and symbols along with the following title: "The Steam Universe is Expanding in 2014." The first symbol is a circle, then a circle within square brackets and a circle plus another circle:
It's possible that one of the announcements will be Valve's own "Steam Box," the company's long-awaited solution for living-room gaming.
On the site, Valve mentions Steam Big Picture, a living room-friendly redesign of Steam's user interface that the company launched last December.
"This year we've been working on even more ways to connect the dots for customers who want Steam in the living room," says Valve on the site. In a follow-up email to Polygon, a Valve representative added, "We will be talking next week about the steps we're taking to make Steam more accessible on televisions and in the living room." Gabe Newell, the head of Valve, said earlier this week that the company plans to reveal details about a Linux-based living room gaming box next week.
Valve also notes that it will enlist the help of the Steam community during the design process for the purported device, with the intent of letting users "shape the future of Steam."
We've reached out to Valve for more details, and will update this article with any information we receive.
Update: This story has been updated to reflect Valve's email to Polygon.For other uses, see Diagoras
Diagoras of Rhodes carried in the stadium by his two sons
Modern statue in Rhodes city
Diagoras of Rhodes (; Greek: Διαγόρας ὁ Ῥόδιος) was an ancient Greek boxer from the 5th century BC, who was celebrated for his own victories, as well as the victories of his sons and grandsons. He was a member of the Eratidea family at Ialysos in Rhodes.
Biography [ edit ]
Diagoras descended from Damagetus, king of Ialysus, and, on the mother's side, from the Messenian hero, Aristomenes. Diagoras was victor in boxing twice in the Olympic games, four times in the Isthmian, twice in the Nemean, and once at least in the Pythian Games. The fame of Diagoras and his descendants was celebrated by Pindar (Olympian Odes VII). A local soccer club, Diagoras F.C., and the Rhodes International Airport, "Diagoras" are named after him.
His three sons were Olympic champions. The oldest son, Damagetos, won the pankration in 452 and 448 BC. Akousílaos, the second son, won the boxing in 448 BC. The two celebrated their victory by carrying their father around the stadion on their shoulders, cheered loudly by the spectators. This was considered the peak of happiness that a human being could experience, achieving great glory and yet having this glory matched or even surpassed by one's own children. Legend has it that during Diagoras' triumphant ovation on the shoulders of his sons, a spectator shouted: "Die, Diagoras; you will not ascend to Olympus besides", the meaning being that he has reached the highest honor possible for a man. Indeed Diagoras died on the spot, and has since been considered the happiest mortal that ever lived.
His youngest son, Dorieús, was even more successful than his brothers.
According to another legend revived by Pausanias,[1] Diagoras' daughter, Kallipáteira[2] ("she of the beautiful father") was the only lay woman to enter the Olympic Games. Excepting the priestess of Demeter, all women were banned from watching because athletes performed in the nude. Kallipateira's son, Peisírrhodos, as well as her nephew, Euklēs, had won the Olympic Games too, when she decided to sneak into the crowd, disguised as a man. She was discovered and brought before the Hellanodíkai (judges of the games) to be tried for sacrilege on pain of death; there she proclaimed that if any woman could ever be allowed to defy the ban, it was she, having had a father, three brothers, a son and a nephew achieve victory eight times there. The judges were awed, and she was acquitted. However, according to Pausanias, a law was passed that future trainers should strip before entering the arena.
Similarly, Chilon of Sparta also supposedly died of joy the day when his son gained the prize for boxing at the Olympic games.
Tomb [ edit ]
In 2018, archaeologists discovered the tomb of Diagoras near the city of Marmaris. They announced that a pyramid-shaped structure was the mausoleum of the Greek boxer. The following words inscribed in the mausoleum: “I will be vigilant at the very top so as to ensure that no coward can come and destroy this grave,”[3] Until 1970, the structure was believed to be the grave of a saint and was visited by locals seeking answers to their prayers, but upon discovery that it was not a holy site, the structure was looted.[4]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]GRAND RAPIDS, MI – A second lawsuit in a month alleging race discrimination has been filed
by a nurse who says she was not allowed to care for a patient because she is black. Timika Foster, an African-American nurse who has worked for the hospital for 13 years, filed the lawsuit Thursday, Dec. 19, in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids. In October 2011, she says she was told by her supervisor not to care for a patient because “no black employees were allowed to care for” that patient. Foster says she complained to the director of nursing, but was told only, “What do you want me to do about it?” She says she received the same response from the vice president of clinical services. The lawsuit also alleges that Foster was denied a promotion to nursing supervisor and she believes the decision was based on her race and complaints of racial discrimination. Attorney Julie A. Gafkay, of Frankenmuth, filed the lawsuit on Foster’s behalf. Gafkay also filed a race-discrimination suit Nov. 27 for Jill Crane, an African-American nursing supervisor at Mary Free Bed who says she was told she could not care for a patient because of her race. The two lawsuits stem involve the same patient, she said.
Related:
In her lawsuit, Crane says she was told in October 2011 that a male patient had been admitted and the family “did not want any black caregivers caring for him.” She says she objected to the directive but was told by the director of nursing the patient’s wishes would be honored. As a supervisor, Crane said she was required to tell staff members that African-American caregivers could not go into the patient’s room. She also alleges she was denied promotions because of her race and her complaints of racial discrimination. In response to the lawsuit, Mary Free Chief Executive Officer Kent Riddle sent a letter to staff, the board of trustees and the guild. "I am very proud of Mary Free Bed’s commitment to diversity and inclusion," he wrote. "When I joined the board of trustees nearly ten years ago, I was then, and continue to be, impressed with our diversity hotline, minority scholarship program, hiring and promotion practices, staff diversity education, and our century-long culture of honoring and supporting diversity. As you know, Mary Free Bed simply doesn’t tolerate discrimination and has a formal process in place to deal with employee concerns. We need to trust the legal process and let the facts speak for themselves in this sensitive situation. In the meantime, we must not allow these cases to distract us from our primary commitment to our patients and to each other."
Sue Thoms covers health care for MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. Email her at sthoms1@mlive.com or follow her on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.Growth prospects for China and other emerging economies have been marked down in the International Monetary Fund’s latest economic scorecard, which has warned of new risks to the global recovery.
However, the fund’s latest World Economic Outlook released Tuesday contained better news for Japan, with its growth projection increased by half a percentage point to an average of 2 percent in 2013, aided by “accommodative policies on confidence and private demand.”
The IMF cut its global growth forecast by 0.2 percentage point over the next two years compared to its previous assessment in April. The world economy is now expected to expand at the rate of 3.1 percent this year, increasing to 3.8 percent in 2014.
The fund said the reduction in its forecast was due to “appreciably weaker domestic demand and slower growth in several key emerging market economies, as well as a more protracted recession in the euro area.”
“Downside risks to global growth prospects still dominate: while old risks remain, new risks have emerged, including the possibility of a longer growth slowdown in emerging market economies, especially given risks of lower potential growth, slowing credit, and possibly tighter financial conditions if the anticipated unwinding of monetary policy stimulus in the United States leads to sustained capital flow reversals,” it warned.
According to the fund, weak performance in emerging economies including China had reflected infrastructure bottlenecks and other capacity constraints, slower external demand, lower commodity prices, financial stability concerns and weaker policy support.
China is expected to expand by 7.8 percent in 2013 and 7.7 percent the following year, which while higher than many market economists’ forecasts, is still lower than the IMF’s previous projection.
India is seen posting 5.6 percent growth this year and 6.3 percent in 2014, with growth in the emerging economies forecast at an average 5 percent this year and 5.4 percent in 2014, down 0.3 percentage points since the April outlook.
According to the IMF, the emerging economies have been hit hardest by financial market volatility, with increases in advanced economy interest rates combined with weaker domestic activity leading to capital outflows, equity price falls, rising local yields and currency depreciation.
Slower than expected growth in the second half of 2012 had also been affected by the eurozone’s deepening recession, which is expected to continue until 2014. Fiscal contraction had weighed on improving private demand in the U.S. economy, which is seen strengthening in 2014 to 2.75 percent growth.
Commenting on the forecasts, Australia’s federal treasurer Chris Bowen said the Asia-Pacific region would still underpin global growth, but Australia would not escape any global downturn.
“Australia is not immune from global economic and financial uncertainty. This underlines the need for responsible settings and policies to help manage the transition underway in our economy, and to support productivity, jobs and growth in the face of ongoing global economic weakness,” Bowen said in a statement.
The IMF urged policymakers to take stronger action over global growth, with key advanced economies needing to pick up the slack while still ensuring “credible plans for medium-term public debt sustainability” – a message perhaps addressed toward Japan’s finance ministry.
“With low inflation and sizable economic slack, monetary policy stimulus should continue until the recovery is well established,” the IMF said, clearly targeting the US Federal Reserve’s so-called “tapering” of its monetary stimulus.
For the emerging economies, the fund warned of “less fiscal policy space than previously estimated” with monetary easing the first line of defense.
“However, real policy rates are low already, and capital outflows and price effects from exchange rate depreciation may also constrain further easing. With weaker growth prospects and potential legacy problems from a prolonged period of rapid credit growth, the policy framework must be ready to handle possible increases in financial stability risks,” it said.
Similar to calls in Japan, the IMF said all major economies needed to support growth through structural reforms to support global rebalancing.
“As before, this implies measures to sustainably raise consumption (China) and investment (Germany) in surplus economies, as well as measures that improve competitiveness in deficit economies,” it said.
Can Asia carry the weight of the global economic recovery, amid a softer eurozone and slow US pickup? For Asia and the IMF, it’s a question of more than academic interest as the region keeps a wary eye on policymakers in Washington and Beijing.Moving to extend its renewable energy push to Indian reservations, the Obama administration announced it will pump $6.3 million into 31 energy projects on Native lands. Energy Secretary Steven Chu expressed hope that the money, targeted mostly at energy efficiency, would reduce waste, save money and ultimately spur economic development in hard-pressed tribal communities.
The funding for these projects became available in January, and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) plans to announce funding for another group of projects later this summer. All of the grants were issued by the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) as part of their Tribal Energy Program.
The money for the 31 projects will be broken down into three facets: feasibility studies; first-steps planning; and installation. Nine projects will receive $2.17 million for energy assessments and identification of where improvements can be made. After the assessments, the leaders of the projects can develop plans for energy efficiency. Seventeen projects will receive $2.14 million for first-steps planning, which includes analysis of energy options, workforce development – including training and certification for Native Americans – and evaluations of energy resources. Several projects are in place to support energy organizations on tribal lands with the goal of setting and maintaining long-term energy goals, DOE said.
Finally, five projects will receive $2 million for installation of energy efficient upgrades. These upgrades will allow the people living on tribal lands to reduce energy costs, particularly heating and cooling costs, by at least 30 percent. A PDF detailing all 31 projects is available here.
“Tribal Nations are well-positioned to take advantage of the benefits of clean energy and energy efficient technologies,” Secretary Chu said. “Projects such as these will save energy and money, create long-term clean energy jobs, and spur economic development in tribal communities nationwide.”Skater901 wrote:
New here, so maybe I'm missing something, but why is everybody obsessing on Jed refusing orders? He makes a valid point, he's a city, not a unit. But at the same time, he still does everything Parson tells him to do, just as long as Parson asks rather than "orders". It seems to be the word order that he objects to.
Chiu ChunLing wrote:
P.S. It's too bad about Anomynus 167. Even if most of the posts were random junk, and sometimes garbage, some of them were pretty funny. Wait a second, I'm looking at the edited post now, and I'm certain I recall the posts around it. And yet I have no memory of anything particularly more egregious than some of the Oxford Comma Man Nemesis/Sidekick posts.
The nature of free will is kind of a central theme of the entire story, why wouldn't we be talking about it a lot?I can't remember anything particularly objectionable either. A pity he was so anomynous, else somebody could've emailed to ask.Cloud Nothings have shared a previously unreleased track, “Relief.” It comes from a new benefit compilation titled Taking It to Heart, Volume Two (out October 13 via Treeline Recordings). All proceeds from the album will go to the Heart and Stroke Foundation. “I had this demo of a song that I made last summer that was probably just going to sit around forever,” Dylan Baldi said. “[Treeline’s] Ryan [Montemurro] got in touch about the Taking It to Heart compilation, and it seemed like an appropriate spot for the tune. It’s always nice to be able to contribute something to a good cause.” Listen to Cloud Nothings’ “Relief” below.
Other contributors to Volume Two include Spiral Stairs, Matthew Sweet, Nick Diamonds of Islands, and Marlaena Moore. Find the full tracklist and cover art below.
Taking It to Heart, Volume Two:
01 Spiral Stairs: “Hypnotized (demo)”
02 Matthew Sweet: “Lonely Summer”
03 Walrus: “Mr. Insecure”
04 Cloud Nothings: “Relief”
05 Traces: “In Fragments”
06 Dan Mangan: “Garçon Means Boy”
07 The Wet Secrets: “Tidal Wave of Hate (Baby Let’s Surf)”
08 CTZNSHP: “Tropical Kings”
09 Fury Things: “Fake”
10 The Low Joy Ceiling: “Everyone Loves a Jonathan”
11 Marlaena Moore: “You Love Me”
12 Astral Swans: “No Home Left in the Head”
13 Nick Diamonds: “UFO Marzipan”
14 Diamond Mind: “Halo’s Heavy”
15 Scott Fab: “Bottom Line”
Watch Cloud Nothings perform at Pitchfork Music Festival 2014:A state lawmaker wants Georgians to pass a firearms safety course before they can qualify for a permit to carry a gun.
Rep. Keisha Waites, D-Atlanta, has pre-filed House Bill 709, which would require anyone applying for a Georgia Weapons Permit to pass a basic firearms training course. The training must include instruction on handling the weapon, as well as loading and firing.
Certified peace officers, active duty military and licensed firearms instructors would be exempt.
The training requirement would be in addition to the current application process, which requires a background check and finger-printing.
Waites said her plan is a “common sense bill.”
“This is simply a means to protect people and get them to think about safety,” she said. “We need to move away from the conversation about gun rights. This is purely a public safety situation.”
Waites’ bill faces steep odds. Democratic lawmakers have little power to move legislation in the Republican-dominated General Assembly, where the GOP-majority has proven itself to be proponents of expanding gun rights.
Rep. Alan Powell, R-Hartwell, chairman of the Public Safety Committee, said it’s “pretty much impossible” that Waites’ bill advances. Even so, Powell said, he thinks the idea has some merit.
“I didn’t really have a problem with it, just me personally, with doing some sort of minimum training course, just to show you have a certain level of proficiency,” Powell said.
During the 2014 debate on HB 60, which broadened the right to carry in the state, Waites tried twice to require safety courses as part of the weapons permit process. Supporters of the bill fought back and said the state should not require citizens to pass a course to exercise a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Powell said it “didn’t take me but a skinny minute to figure out we didn’t want to do that.” The opposition, he said, “was a firestorm.”
Waites said she has a license to carry a firearm, but that when she first applied she knew little about loading, firing and carrying for a gun.
“If you’re going to have a weapon on your person, you most certainly need to at least know how to handle it,” she said.
Many states already require training courses as part of their weapons permit process. A 2012 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana and Virginia all required applicants to pass some kind of safety course. South Carolina, too, has a training requirement for its weapons license.(CNN) -- Four buildings on The Ohio State University campus were evacuated Tuesday after the FBI's Columbus, Ohio, bureau notified the university it had received an anonymous message that explosives were placed in the buildings, authorities said.
The buildings are the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library, the McPherson Chemical Lab, Smith Laboratory and Scott Laboratory. Classes in the three academic buildings involved were canceled, and all four buildings were closed until at least 5 p.m. or until the investigation is complete, according to Vernon Baisden, the university's director of public safety.
Officials did not say whether any explosives had been found in the buildings.
The university was notified of the threat at 8:19 a.m. and activated its Buckeye Alert System at 8:41 a.m., according to a message posted on the Ohio State website.
Nearby streets were closed to vehicle traffic, university Police Chief Paul Denton told reporters.
Local, state and federal authorities were assisting in the investigation, Baisden said, but he said officials could release few details about specifics. Aerial footage showed authorities with dogs entering one of the buildings.
Students and employees "responded in an orderly fashion," Baisden said, "and we have no reports of any real confusion, other than the fact that everybody was wondering what was going on."
Asked whether the threat was targeting labs, Baisden noted that labs are located in many locations on the Ohio State campus.The first class of maharats may be controversial among the Orthodox. But the graduates enjoy overwhelming support from Jewish women from other denominations, who see the battle for recognition as part and parcel of the struggles they faced — and won.
“It’s an affirmation of everything that has led to this moment, as well as creating a direction for the future,” said Rabbi Jacqueline Koch Ellenson, head of the Reform Women’s Rabbinic Network. “Women in the Modern Orthodox community have really stepped up and taken their place in the halls of Jewish learning.”
Both the Reform and Conservative movements ordain women rabbis.
Ellenson attended the graduation with her husband, Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
Conservative Jews also backed the maharats.
Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik and Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, president and executive vice president, respectively, of the conservative Rabbinical Assembly, expressed the organization’s support for the three graduates in a statement issued on June 18.
This story "Maharats Win Support of Jewish Women" was written by Anne Cohen.
“We know that the voices of Ruth Balinsky Friedman, Rachel Kohl Finegold and Abby Brown Scheier, each of whom will be known as ‘maharat,’ will reflect their great level of learning and their preparedness for leadership,” they wrote. “They will inspire other women to achieve the highest level of Jewish learning as they express their own religious commitment and understanding in a way that will strengthen the entire Jewish community.”
Rabbi Ilana Garber, co-chair of the Women’s Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly, says that women in religious leadership positions need to stick together.
“Who doesn’t face opposition? There will always be opposition,” she said.” Strong women need to continue to be strong and be grateful for our strong male allies. It’s never going to be perfect. “
Some whispered that the vocal support of Reform and Conservative Jewry might boomerang by causing Orthodox leaders to circle the wagons in defense of traditionalism.
“I think the naysayers will say what they want to say, regardless,” Kohl Finegold said. “But having 500 people [at] that [graduation] speaks for itself.”
Contact Anne Cohen at cohen@forward.comUpdated 22.58
GARDAÍ HAVE BROUGHT the number of people arrested today to 64 as part of an Operation Thor day of action in the Kilkenny/Carlow Division.
Over 130 gardaí, including 50 student guards, took to the streets of the counties as part of the operation, a multi-strand national anti-crime strategy.
They have arrested a total of 64 people, searched a total of 30 premises, seized €38,000 worth of drugs and cannabis plants, and claimed one firearm, a handgun |
the late 1980s, with strong US support. And it was no joke. According to the UN estimates they killed a million and a half people in Angola and Mozambique, nothing slight. Nevertheless, the Cuban intervention had a huge effect, also on other countries of Africa. And one the most striking aspects of it is that they took no credit for it. They wanted credit to be taken by the nationalist movements in Africa. So in fact none of this was even known until an American researcher, Piero Gleijeses unearthed the evidence from the Cuban archives and African sources and published it in scholarly journals and a scholarly book, and it’s just an astonishing story but barely known—one out of a million people has ever heard of it. Keane Bhatt: You mentioned the Venezuelan debt cancellation. At the same time, the G7 is in the process of eliminating bilateral debt. Why is that? Noam Chomsky: Well they’re talking about it, yeah. The Venezuelans were first. And they just completely canceled the debt. G7 refused. In the Montreal meeting, they refused to even discuss it. Later, they indicated that they might do something. Maybe they’re embarrassed by the Venezuelan action. But I’m not sure how it’s playing out. As far as the IMF is concerned—the IMF is basically an offshoot of the US Treasury Department—they’ve talked about it but so far they have not agreed, as far as I can discover, to cancel the debt. Keane Bhatt: Bellerive, Prime Minister of Haiti, thanked the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela. The DR has been lauded for its relief efforts: providing food, materials and medical care, for example. But at the same time there are reports from the border of Dominican troops forcibly deporting family members of Haitian patients and sometimes even the patients themselves, in Jimaní, for example. What is your take on these contrary developments taking place and is there any historical context that you would like to add? Noam Chomsky: Well, what the Dominican Republic does is up to Dominicans to decide, but the much more striking thing from my perspective, is that the United States has not brought in any—barely any refugees—even for medical treatment. And that was harshly condemned by the dean of the University of Miami Medical School who thought it was just criminal not to bring Haitians to Miami where there’s marvelous medical facilities while they have to do surgery with, you know, hacksaws in Haiti. And in fact one of the first US reactions to the earthquake was to send in the Coast Guard to ensure that there wouldn’t be any attempt to flee from Haiti. I mean, that’s atrocious. The United States is the richest country in the world, it’s right next door to Haiti. It should be offering every possible means of assistance to Haitians. Furthermore there’s a little bit of background here. I mean, the earthquake in Haiti was a class-based catastrophe. It didn’t much harm the wealthy elite up in the hills, they were shaken but not destroyed. On the other hand the people who were living in the miserable urban slums, huge numbers of them, they were devastated. Maybe a couple hundred thousand were killed. How come they were living there? They were living there because of—it goes back to the French colonial system—but in the past century, they were living there because of US policies, consistent policies. Keane Bhatt: You’re talking about the forcible decimation of peasant agriculture in the 1990s? Noam Chomsky: It started with Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson invaded all of Hispaniola, Haiti and the DR, the Wilson invasion was pretty brutal in both parts of Hispaniola. But it was much worse in Haiti. And the reasons were very clearly stated. Keane Bhatt: Racism. Noam Chomsky: Yeah. The State Department said, well, the Dominicans have some European blood so they’re not quite so bad. But the Haitians are pure nigger. So Wilson sent the marines to disband the Haitian parliament because they wouldn’t permit US corporations to buy up Haitian lands. And he forced them to do it. Well, that’s one of the many atrocities and crimes. Just keeping to this, that accelerated the destruction of Haitian agriculture and the flight of people from the countryside to the cities. Now that continued under Reagan. Under Reagan, USAID and the World Bank set up very explicit programs, explicitly designed to destroy Haitian agriculture. They didn’t cover it up. They gave an argument that Haiti shouldn’t have an agricultural system, it should have assembly plants; women working to stitch baseballs in miserable conditions. Well that was another blow to Haitian agriculture, but nevertheless even under Reagan, Haiti was producing most of its own rice when Clinton came along. When Clinton restored Aristide—Clinton of course supported the military junta, another little hidden story...he strongly supported it in fact. He even allowed the Texaco Oil Company to send oil to the junta in violation of presidential directives; Bush Sr. did so as well—well, he finally allowed the president to return, but on condition that he accept the programs of Marc Bazin, the US candidate that he had defeated in the 1990 election. And that meant a harsh neoliberal program, no import barriers. That means that Haiti has to import rice and other agricultural commodities from the US from US agribusiness, which is getting a huge part of its profits from state subsidies. So you get highly subsidized US agribusiness pouring commodities into Haiti; I mean, Haitian rice farmers are efficient but nobody can compete with that, so that accelerated the flight into the cities. And it wasn’t that they didn’t know it was going to happen. USAID was publishing reports in 1995 saying, yes this is going to destroy Haitian agriculture and that’s a good thing. And you get the flight into the cities and you get food riots in 2008, because they can’t produce their own food. And now you get this class-based catastrophe. After this history—it’s only a tiny piece of it—the United States should be paying massive reparations, not just aid. And France as well. The French role is grotesque. Keane Bhatt: May I ask, regarding Aristide’s languishing in exile, was he right to go back to Haiti in 1994 in the way that he did, with US troops? Also, was he right to agree, under enormous pressure of course, to the neoliberal reforms laid out in the Paris Accords? Noam Chomsky: Well, I happened to be in Haiti almost at that time—1993. I was there for a while; this was the peak of the terror. And I’ve been in a lot of awful places in the world. Some of the worst, in fact. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the misery and the terror that was going on in Haiti under the junta, with Clinton’s backing at that time. And there was a lot of discussion, I talked for example to the late Father Gerard Jean-Juste, one of the most popular figures in Haiti, who the government recently forced out, he was then underground in a church but Haitian friends took me to him. He was very close to large parts of the population. I talked to labor leaders who’d been beaten and tortured but were willing to talk, and to activists and others. And what most of them said is, Father Jean-Juste for example, what he said is, “Look, I don’t want a marine invasion, I think it’s a bad idea. But on the other hand,” he said, “my people, the people in the slums—La Saline, Cite Soleil and so on, they just can’t take it anymore.” He said, “the torture is too awful, the terror is too awful. They’ll accept anything that’ll put an end to it.” And that was the dilemma. I don’t have an answer to that. Keane Bhatt: Was Aristide wrong to argue against calls (made by some of his more militant supporters) for armed struggle inside Haiti to restore democracy after the 1991 coup? Noam Chomsky: Not in my opinion. Armed struggle would have led to a horrendous slaughter. Keane Bhatt: On February 17th, Sarkozy was greeted to street protests by thousands of Haitians holding up images of Aristide, demanding his return, and demanding reparations for what the French extorted in exchange for recognizing Haiti’s independence. At that same address, Preval was shouted down and he withdrew into his jeep. With this kind of sentiment brewing in Haiti right now, do you see Aristide’s return as an important priority, or is it something that might be desirable but not that pressing? Noam Chomsky: Well, the answer to that question is going to be given in Washington. The United States and France, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, essentially kidnapped Aristide in 2004 after having blocked any international aid to the country under very dubious pretexts, not credible grounds, which of course extremely harmed this fragile economy. There was chaos and the US and France and Canada flew in, kidnapped Aristide—they said they rescued him, they actually kidnapped him—they flew him off to Central Africa, his party Fanmi Lavalas is banned, which probably accounts for the very low turnout in the recent elections, and the United States has been trying to keep Aristide not only from Haiti, but from the entire hemisphere. Keane Bhatt: By which way is Aristide compelled to remain exiled? How exactly is his persona non grata status in the hemisphere maintained and by whom? What is preventing him from flying into a sympathetic country near Haiti, like Venezuela, for example? Noam Chomsky: He might be able to go to Venezuela, but if he tried to go to the Dominican Republic, for example, they wouldn’t let him in. And there’s good reason for that. International affairs is very much like the mafia, and the small storekeeper doesn’t offend the Godfather. It’s too dangerous. We can pretend it’s otherwise, but that’s the way it is. There was one country, I think it was Jamaica if I remember correctly, that did allow Aristide in, over serious US pressure and protest. And not a lot of countries are willing to take the risk of offending the United States. It’s a dangerous, violent superpower. I don’t have to tell you, you know the history of the Dominican Republic. I don’t have to tell you about it—that’s the way it works. Keane Bhatt: Using, as you’ve said, the historical US legacy in the DR, can we turn to recent Dominican history? As this humanitarian aid is provided on behalf of the DR, and it fills in the vacuum left by a weak Haitian state, if we go back to the events leading up to the coup of 2004, it worked under US aegis to actively destabilize Haiti by training the paramilitary rebels, Guy Philippe and Louis Jodel Chamblain… Noam Chomsky: I know. And providing a base for them. Keane Bhatt: Is there some kind of a contradiction to provide charity for people who you’ve actually worked to dismantle and destabilize? Noam Chomsky: Well, you can call it a contradiction if you like, but it’s also a contradiction for Sarkozy and Clinton to appear in Haiti without abject apologies for the terrible crimes that France and the U.S. under Clinton, particularly, have carried out against Haiti. But they don’t do it. The head of Toyota has to go to Congress and apologize for hours because some people were killed by Toyota cars, but does Clinton have to go and apologize for what he did to Haiti? He dealt a death blow. Does Sarkozy have to apologize for the fact that Haiti was France’s richest colony and a source of a lot of France’s wealth and they destroyed the country and then posed an indemnity as a price for liberating themselves, which the country was never able to get out of? A couple of years ago, in 2002 I think, Aristide appealed to France, to Chirac, to pay some remuneration for the huge debt that Haiti had to pay them… Keane Bhatt: Twenty-one billion dollars… Noam Chomsky: Yeah, for this huge debt that Haiti had to pay them. And they did set up a commission led by Regis Debray, a former radical. And the commission said that France has no need to give any compensation at all. In other words, first we rob and then destroy them, and then when they ask for a little bit of help, we kick them in the face. It’s not surprising. Keane Bhatt: Although at the same time there are sources that say that while France put up an indifferent front, it was actually worried about a head of state bringing a legal case with overwhelming documentary evidence for international arbitration. Noam Chomsky: Well, they really didn’t have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can’t do anything. Look, there’s one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision—that’s the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it? Keane Bhatt: You mentioned Clinton, now UN special envoy to Haiti, who intends to woo foreign investors and continue on a low-wage textile focus for Haitian economic development. The lens of neoliberal economist Paul Collier, special adviser to the UN in 2009, dominates the UN perspective of Haiti. An advocate of sweatshop-led growth himself, he’s lavished praise on the much-resented MINUSTAH occupation force there, and has even said that the Dominican Republic "is not engaged in the sort of activities, such as clandestine support for guerrilla groups, that beset many other fragile states.” Can a true humanitarian like Paul Farmer—representing a different development model based on fair wages, public health, strengthening the Haitian state—influence the UN as deputy special envoy? Noam Chomsky: It's a hard choice. I don't blame him for trying. We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people. Like Father Jean-Juste and the marines. Keane Bhatt: You’ve talked about how the media created an artificial distinction between the South American ‘Bad Left’ and ‘Good Left,’ omitting Brazil's important collaboration with Venezuela in the interest of maintaining this view. However, with respect to Haiti, hasn’t Brazil legitimately earned a secure place within the ‘Good Left’? A center-left government of the South has spearheaded the MINUSTAH occupation and has pledged to increase its presence, after taking it over from the imperial architects of the coup (US, France, Canada). What factors made it so vigorous in supporting another deposed president of an equally geopolitically-unimportant country in recent times (Zelaya of Honduras)? Noam Chomsky: Good questions. I haven't seen anything useful on Brazil's decisions on these matters. Keane Bhatt: Any comments on the US media regarding Haiti following the earthquake? For example, Pat Robertson’s ‘pact with the devil,’ David Brooks’ ‘progress-resistant culture,’ pleas with transnational capital to create more sweatshops (Kirstof), Aristide being a despot and a cheat (Jon Lee Anderson). Even Amy Wilentz has compared Aristide to Duvalier in the New York Times. Noam Chomsky: It's been mainly awful, but I haven't kept a record. The worst part is ignoring our own disgraceful role in helping to create the catastrophe, and consequent refusal to react as any decent person should—with massive reparations, directed to popular organizations. Same with France. Keane Bhatt: I guess my final question is for the future: there have been a discouraging two decades, from 1990-2010, about the popular mobilization for political change in Haiti, and how to proceed, and I guess now that the Haitian people have struggled so hard through parliamentary democracy for 25 years and have so little to show for it, what are the lessons learned and possible strategies now that they’ve exhausted this parliamentary, democratic approach? Two coups d’etat and thousands tortured and murdered in this process. Noam Chomsky: The lessons are, unfortunately, that a small weak country that is facing an extremely hostile and very violent superpower will not make much progress unless there’s a strong solidarity movement within the superpower that will restrain its actions. With more support within the United States, I think the Haitian efforts could have succeeded. And that applies right now. Take the aid that’s coming in. There is aid coming in—we have to show we’re nice people and so on. But the aid ought to be going to Haitian popular organizations. Not to contractors, not to NGOs—to Haitian popular organizations, and they’re the ones that should be deciding what to do with it. Well you know, that’s not the agenda of G7. They don’t want popular organizations; they don’t like popular movements; they don’t like democracy for that matter. What they want is for the rich and powerful to run things. Well, if there was a strong solidarity movement in the United States and the world, it could change that. courtesy Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood August 14, 1791 A slave uprising begins in northern Saint-Domingue Februrary 4, 1794 Abolition of French colonial slavery January 1, 1804 Saint-Domingue is renamed Haiti, and declares itself independent of France 1825 France recognizes Haitian independence for the payment of 150 million francs (later reduced to 90 million as compensation for lost property) 1915-34 The United States (under Woodrow Wilson) invades and occupies Haiti September 22, 1957 Francois Duvalier (‘Papa Doc’) becomes president April 21, 1971 Francois Duvalier dies and is succeeded by his son Jean-Claude (‘Baby Doc’) February 7, 1986 ‘Baby Doc’ is pushed out of Haiti by a popular uprising; General Henry Namphy takes power December 16, 1990 Jean-Bertrand Aristide is elected with 67% of the vote; his prime minister is Rene Preval September 30, 1991 General Raoul Cedras overthrows Aristide, who goes into exile; over the next few years several thousands of Aristide’s supporters are killed Summer 1993 The paramilitary death squad FRAPH is formed, led by Toto Constant and Jodel Chamblain September 19, 1994 US soldiers occupy Haiti for the second time; Aristide returns from exile Early 1995 Aristide disbands Haiti’s armed forces Mid-1995 Aristide’s party Fanmi Lavalas wins legislative elections December 17, 1995 Rene Preval is elected with 88% of the vote Late 1996 Formation of Fanmi Lavalas in opposition to ex-Lavalas faction May 21, 2000 Fanmi Lavalas wins landlide victories at all levels of government; opponents form a US-backed coalition called the Convergence Democratique November 26, 2000 Aristide is re-elected with 92% of the vote July 28, 2001 First of many commando raids on police stations and other government facilities by ex-soliers based in the Dominican Republic, led by Guy Philippe December 17, 2001 Ex-soldiers attack the presidential palace, provoking popular reprisals against the offices of parties belonging to Convergence Democratique April 2003 Aristide asks France to repay the money it extorted from Haiti January 1, 2004 Haiti celebrates bicentenary of independence from France February 5, 2004 Full-scale insurgency begins, Chamblain overruns Cap Haitien February 29, 2004 Aristide is forced onto a US jet and flown to the Central African Republic March 2004 US troops occupy Haiti for a third time, interim government is formed with Gerard Latortue as P.M., the Lancet estimates thousands killed by police and anti-Lavalas paramilitaries June 2004 US-led force is replaced by a UN stabilization mission (MINUSTAH) February 7, 2006 Preval wins presidential elections with 51% of the vote January 12, 2010 Catastrophic earthquake rocks Port-au-Prince see also Protesters clash with police following rain in Haiti If Obama can do it then why can't Haiti's Preval? Haiti: hell and hope On the ground in Port au Prince Haiti News Watch
AP misrepresents reality of Lavalas exclusion in Haiti elections Two-faced Democracy in Haiti Perverted Priorities: Corpses, sham elections, and sweatshops in Haiti Clinton's'silence' challenged in Haiti U.N. denials in Haiti Lavalas closed the doors again, elections in Haiti a disaster for Lespwa government
"Thank you Bill Clinton" — one more assassination by UN troops in Haiti Contact us: info@haitiaction.org click button aboveIn chess, the pawn structure (sometimes known as the pawn skeleton ) is the configuration of pawns on the chessboard. Since pawns are the least mobile of the chess pieces, the pawn structure is relatively static and thus largely determines the strategic nature of the position.
Pawn structures often transpose into one another, such as the Isolani into the Hanging Pawns and vice versa. Such transpositions must be considered carefully and often mark shifts in game strategy.
Weaknesses in the pawn structure, such as isolated, doubled or backward pawns and holes, once created, are usually permanent. Care must therefore be taken to avoid them (but there are exceptions — for instance see Boleslavsky hole below). In the absence of these structural weaknesses, it is not possible to classify a pawn formation as good or bad — much depends on the positions of the pieces. However, the pawn formation does determine the overall strategies of the players to a large extent, even if arising from unrelated openings. Pawn formations symmetrical about a vertical line (such as the e5 Chain and the d5 Chain ) may appear similar, but they tend to have entirely different characteristics because of the propensity of the kings to castle on the kingside.
In his 1995 book, Andrew Soltis classified the major pawn formations into 17 categories, discussed below. In 2015, the book Chess Structures, by Mauricio Flores Rios further studied the subject, subdividing pawn structures into the 28 most important. It is to be noted that for a formation to fall into a particular category, it need not have a pawn position identical to the corresponding diagram, but only close enough that the character of the game and the major themes are unchanged. It is typically the center pawns whose position influences the nature of the game the most.
Structures with mutually attacking pawns are said to have tension. They are ordinarily unstable and tend to transpose into a stable formation with a pawn push or exchange. Play often revolves around making the transposition happen under favorable circumstances. For instance, in the Queen's Gambit Declined, Black waits until White develops the king's bishop to make the d5xc4 capture, transposing to the Slav formation (see below).
Caro formation Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The Caro formation
Openings: Primary: Caro–Kann. Other: French, Scandinavian, QGD.
Character: Slow-paced game.
Themes for White: Outpost on e5, kingside space advantage, d4-d5 break, possibility of queenside majority in the endgame (typically after the exchange of White's d pawn for Black's c pawn).
Themes for Black: Weakness of the d4 pawn, c6-c5 and e6-e5 breaks. The latter break is usually preferable, but harder for Black to achieve.
Slav formation Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The Slav formation
Openings: Primary: Slav. Other: Catalan, Grunfeld, Colle System (with colors reversed).
Character: Slow-paced game.
Themes for White: Pressure on the c file, weakness of Black's c pawn (either after Black's b7-b5 or after d4-d5xc6 in response to e6-e5), the d4-d5 break.
Themes for Black: e6-e5 and c6-c5 breaks.
Sicilian – Scheveningen Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The Scheveningen formation
Openings: Primary: Sicilian (Najdorf, Richter-Rauzer and Sozin variations), Sicilian Scheveningen, and several other Sicilian variations.
Character: Complex, dynamic, sharp middlegame.
Themes for White: Pressure on the d file, space advantage, e4-e5 break (often prepared with f2-f4), f2-f4-f5 push, g2-g4-g5 blitz (see Keres attack).
Themes for Black: Pressure on the c file, minority attack (and counterplay in general) on the queenside, pressure on White's pawn on e4 or e5, d6-d5 break, e6-e5 transposing into the Boleslavsky hole (see below).
It is often unwise for White to exchange a piece on c6 allowing the recapture bxc6, because the phalanx of Black's center pawns becomes very strong.
Sicilian – Dragon Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The Dragon formation
Openings: Primary: Sicilian Dragon. Other: English Opening (with colours reversed).
Character: Either a razor sharp middlegame with opposite side castling or a moderately sharp game with same side castling. The Sicilian Dragon requires a high level of opening memorization to play properly. This is especially true when it comes to the Yugoslav Attack in which White plays the moves Be3, f3, Qd2 and 0-0-0. Other variations are: The Classical Dragon where White plays Be2 and 0-0; The Tal attack is defined by Bc4 and 0-0, and the Fianchetto Defense where White plays g3, Bg2 and 0-0. These less common variations lead to less tactical positions, with a potentially technical endgame.
Themes for White: Outpost on d5, kingside attack (either f2-f4-f5 with kingside castling or h2-h4-h5 with queenside castling), weakness of Black's queenside minority (of pawns) in the endgame.
Themes for Black: Pressure on the long diagonal, queenside counterplay, exploiting White's often overextended kingside pawns in the endgame.
Opening Lines: The most common variation of the Sicilian Dragon is the Yugoslav Attack. 1. e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 g6 6. Be3 (This is the defining move of the Yugoslav attack.) 6...Bg7 7. Qd2 0-0 8.f3 (This move is Necessary to prevent black from playing 8...Ng4 to attack White's dark squared Bishop. 8.f3 also gives e4 extra defense and prepares to launch a pawn storm with the move g4. 8...Nc6 9. 0-0-0 (9.Bc4 is also a very common move in this position.) 9...d5 (This move is the main line. Other ideas include 9...Nxd4 and 9...Bd7.)
Sicilian – Maróczy bind Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The Maróczy bind formation
Openings: Primary: Sicilian.
Character: Semi-open game.
Themes for White: Nd4-c2-e3, Fianchettoing one or both Bishops, the Maróczy hop (Nc3-d5 followed by e4xd5 with terrific pressure on the e-file), kingside attack, c4-c5 and e4-e5 breaks.
Themes for Black: b7-b5 break, f7-f5 break (especially with a fianchettoed King bishop), d6-d5 break (prepared with e7-e6).
The Maróczy bind, named after Géza Maróczy, has a fearsome reputation. Chess masters once believed that allowing the bind was a mistake as Black always gave White a significant advantage. Indeed, if Black does not quickly make a pawn break, his minor pieces will suffocate, with minor pieces lacking any squares to move to and possibly becoming cornered or pressed into a weak defense. Conversely, the formation takes time to set up and limits the activity of White's light-squared bishop, which can buy Black some breathing room to accomplish this break.
Hedgehog Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The Hedgehog formation
Openings: Primary: English Opening (symmetrical), Sicilian.
Character: Closed, Semi-open game.
The Hedgehog is a formation similar to the Maróczy bind, and shares the strategic ideas with that formation.
Sicilian – Boleslavsky hole Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The Boleslavsky hole formation
Openings: Primary: Sicilian Najdorf, Classical, Sveshnikov, Kalashnikov. Other: Sicilian O'Kelly (2... a6).
Character: Open, dynamic game.
Themes for White: taking control the d5 hole, exploiting the backward d6 pawn, f2-f4 break.
Themes for Black: d6-d5 break, queenside minority attack, the c4 square.
It is a paradoxical idea that Black can strive for equality by voluntarily creating a hole on d5. The entire game revolves around control of the d5 square. Black must play very carefully or White will place a knight on d5 and obtain a commanding positional advantage. Black almost always equalizes, and might even obtain a slight edge, if the d6-d5 break can be made. Black has two options for his queen bishop: on e6 and on b7 (after a7-a6 and b7-b5). Unusually for an open formation, bishops become inferior to knights because of the overarching importance of d5: White will often exchange Bg5xf6, and Black usually prefers to give up his queen bishop rather than a knight in exchange for a white knight if it gets to d5.
When white castles queenside, Black often delays castling because his king is quite safe in the center.
d5 chain Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The d5 chain formation
Openings: Primary: King's Indian. Other: Benoni, Ruy Lopez (Spanish).
Character: Closed game with opposite side activity.
Themes for White: Massive queenside space advantage, c2-c4-c5 break (optionally prepared with b2-b4), prophylaxis with g2-g4 (after f2-f3), f2-f4 break.
Themes for Black: kingside attack, f7-f5 break, g7-g5-g4 break (after f2-f3), c7-c6 break, prophylaxis with c6-c5 or c7-c5 transposing to a Full Benoni formation.
The chain arises from a variety of openings but most commonly in the heavily analyzed King's Indian Classical variation. The theme is a race for a breakthrough on opposite flanks – Black must try to whip up a kingside attack before White's heavy pieces penetrate with devastating effect on the c-file. The position was thought to strongly favour White until a seminal game (Taimanov-Najdorf 1953) where Black introduced the maneuver Rf8-f7, Bg7-f8, Rf7-g7. When the chain arises in the Ruy Lopez, play is much slower with tempo being of little value and featuring piece maneuvering by both sides, Black focusing on the c7-c6 break and White often trying to play on the kingside with the f2-f4 break.
e5 chain Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The e5 chain formation
Openings: Primary: French. Other: Nimzowitsch Defence.
Character: Closed/semi-open but sharp game.
Themes for White: kingside mating attack, f2-f4-f5 break.
Themes for Black: Exchanging the hemmed-in QB, c7-c5 and f7-f6 breaks.
Due to White's kingside space advantage and development advantage, Black must generate counterplay or be mated. Novices often lose to the sparkling Greek gift sacrifice. Attacking the head of the pawn chain with f7-f6 is seen as frequently as attacking its base, because it is harder for white to defend the head of the chain than in the d5 chain. In response to exf6, Black accepts a backward e6 pawn in exchange for freeing his position (the b8-h2 diagonal and the semi-open f-file) and the possibility of a further e6-e5 break. If White exchanges with d4xc5 it is called the Wedge formation. White gets an outpost on d4 and the possibility of exploiting the dark squares while Black gets an overextended e5 pawn to work on.
King's Indian – Rauzer formation Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The Rauzer formation (colors reversed)
Openings: Primary: King's Indian, Old Indian (colors reversed), Ruy Lopez. Other: Ruy Lopez (colors reversed). The notation in the rest of this section refers to the colors reversed version.
Character: Semi-open game.
Themes for White: d6 weakness, c4-c5 push, a3-f8 diagonal, queenside pawn storm.
Themes for Black: d4 weakness, a1-h8 diagonal, f4 square, kingside attack, trading pieces for a superior endgame.
The Rauzer formation is named after Rauzer who introduced it in the Ruy Lopez. It can also rarely occur in the Ruy Lopez with colors reversed.
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h Tarrasch – Euwe, Pistyan 1922
It is considered to give Black excellent chances because d6 is much less of a hole than White's d4. If the black king's bishop is fianchettoed it is common to see it undeveloped to f8 to control the vital c5 and d6 squares, or remove White's dark-squared bishop, the guardian of the hole.
The Rauzer formation is often misjudged by beginners. In the position on the left, White appears to have a development lead while Black's position appears to be riddled with holes. In reality, it is Black who stands clearly better, because White has no real way to improve his position while Black can improve by exploiting the d4 square (see complete game on Java (Applet) board).
King's Indian – Boleslavsky Wall Edit
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The Boleslavsky Wall formation
Openings: Primary: King's Indian. Other: English, Pirc, Ruy Lopez.
Character: Semi-open game, slow buildup.
Occurs after exchange of pawns on d4. Name given by Hans Kmoch.
Themes for White: exploitation of d6 weakness, e4-e5 and c4-c5 breaks, minority attack with b2-b4-b5.
Themes for Black: attacking the e4 and c4 pawns, d6-d5 and f7-f5 breaks, queenside play with a7-a5-a4.
The wall is yet another structure that leaves Black with a d-pawn weakness, but prevents White from taking control of the center and gives Black active piece play and an opportunity to play on either side of the board.
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h The Isolani formation
Openings: Primary: Queen's Gambit. Other: French.
Character: Open game.
Themes for White: d4-d5 break, sacrifice of the isolani, outpost on e5, kingside attack.
Themes for Black: Blockading the isolani, trading pieces for a favorable endgame.
a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 a b c d e f g h Bogolyubov – Rosenthal, St. Petersburg 1914. White achieved a blockade with 11. Nb5! a b c d e f g h 8 8 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 |
any time,” McDonnell said. “What we’ve got to do is everything we possibly can to divide and demoralise them, and push that collapse, because that’s coming. But do that in a way that demonstrates that we are an alternative government, ready to go in.”
The prospect of disputes over Brexit when parliament returns hangs over both the Conservatives and Labour, as some MPs from both parties will make an effort to keep the UK in the single market and customs union when they debate the EU withdrawal bill.
But McDonnell urged his party to step back from arguments about which particular EU institutions Britain would remain a member of in 2019, and instead think about the practical benefits they wanted the new relationship with the EU27 to deliver.
“The problem is, it’s become theological,” he said. “Literally whatever I say, I either get condemned as a hard Brexiteer, if I’ve stated an obvious fact, or I then get condemned for selling out the referendum. It’s become theological. It’s like angels on the head of a pin.
“The bottom line for me is the new relationship we have with Europe should be designed on the basis that we can implement our manifesto.”
Corbyn continued his tour of marginal constituencies on Friday, stopping at a project designed to reduce food waste in Morecambe, Lancashire. He praised the volunteers for saving in-date and good-to-eat food that had been destined for landfill because of over-production or labelling errors, saying: “How do the supermarkets justify why they throw stuff away? I can see no reason whatsoever with this.”
On Friday evening, Corbyn addressed a large crowd in Southport along with former deputy prime minister John Prescott.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn talks to supporters during a rally on the beach in Southport Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Asked about reports that the Labour mayors Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham would be denied speaking slots at the party conference, Corbyn did not guarantee them a place on the platform but said: “We haven’t even decided who’s speaking at conference yet.”The new Adult Swim cartoon “Mike Tyson Mysteries” will launch an online scavenger hunt that will unlock locations of mini-Mike Tyson statues. (Photo: Submitted )
Those yearning for a bit of mystery and their own mini-statue of Mike Tyson will have their chance when the Mike Tyson Mysteries scavenger hunt happens in Nashville this weekend.
In promotion for the new Adult Swim cartoon “Mike Tyson Mysteries,” the network chose Nashville among 10 cities across the nation in which scavengers can answer trivia questions online to unlock the locations of 100 hidden mini-statues.
Once a player has claimed a mini-statue, an on-site show representative will take his photo to be added to the online map.
To start the three-day hunt, go to www.AreMysteriesReal.com beginning Saturday and running through Monday.
Read or Share this story: http://tnne.ws/1tM4qMDEndnotes and citations are available in the PDF and Scribd versions.
In his 2010 dissent in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the majority had “unleashe[d] the floodgates of corporate and union general treasury spending” in judicial elections. Justice Stevens wrote, “States … after today, may no longer have the ability to place modest limits on corporate electioneering even if they believe such limits to be critical to maintaining the integrity of their judicial systems.” As if to underscore his concerns, judicial campaign cash set a record in 2012, and for the first time, the type of independent spending unleashed by Citizens United and other federal court rulings nearly exceeded the amount spent by the candidates.
The 2014 judicial elections could see even more campaign cash, thanks to unprecedented plans by national partisan groups to spend millions to influence this year’s judicial races. The Washington, D.C.-based Republican State Leadership Committee, or RSLC, is now the first national party organization focused on electing judges. The RSLC was the biggest spender in the May 5 North Carolina Supreme Court primary election, and four of the seven seats on the court are up for grabs in November.
The RSLC tried unsuccessfully to unseat three Tennessee Justices on August 7. The group’s opposition campaign was aided by its “strategic partner” group, the State Government Leadership Foundation, or SGLF, and the Koch brothers-affiliated Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, both of which are organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Groups claiming this tax status are not legally required to disclose the source of their money. Although all of the funders for these groups are not disclosed, it is known that the Koch brothers founded and substantially fund AFP, and the brothers’ corporation—Koch Industries—is one of the biggest donors to the RSLC.
The RSLC, organized under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, describes itself as “the only national organization whose mission is electing Republicans” to statewide office. The RSLC recently announced that its Judicial Fairness Initiative would “educate” the public about judicial candidates. The RSLC, combined with its SGLF partner, was one of the biggest spenders in the August 7 Tennessee Supreme Court election. The race saw nearly $1.5 million in cash for television ads, and two groups funded by RSLC—the Tennessee Forum and SGLF—spent more than $500,000. The RSLC helped fund attack ads in an unprecedented opposition campaign in which three judges were vying for new terms on the state supreme court.
Unlike previous Tennessee judicial elections, the justices were forced to run ads funded by campaign cash from attorneys with a financial stake in the court’s rulings. Given its deep pockets, the RSLC could come to dominate nonpartisan judicial elections across the country—just as it has in Tennessee. More money means more attack ads and more fundraising by judicial candidates.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, or DLCC, is also working to elect state-level candidates, but it has raised much less money than its Republican counterpart in recent years. Politico reported that the DLCC “was only able to raise about a third as much” money as the RSLC for the 2010 elections. Pro-business and conservative groups accounted for 7 of the top 10 spenders in 2010 judicial elections. Although some national liberal groups have spent on judicial elections, no entity affiliated with the national Democratic Party has announced plans to make judicial elections a priority.
A Washington Post blogger reported in April that RSLC President Matt Walter predicts his organization will “spend north of $5 million on judicial elections this year.” The RSLC spent $27 million on state-level political races in 2012, and Politico noted that the RSLC raised a total of $39 million that year. The New York Times described the RSLC’s then-President Ed Gillespie as playing “a central role in efforts to swing state legislatures to Republican control” in 2010.
As the RSLC collects money for 2014, new revelations are raising questions about its massive 2010 campaign war chest. Politico published an internal RSLC investigation that determined that the RSLC and a prominent Alabama Republican “conspired improperly … to use the RSLC as a pass-through for controversial Indian tribe donations, essentially laundering ‘toxic’ money from the gaming industry by routing it out of state and then back into Alabama.” The well-known law firm that conducted the investigation warned the RSLC: “If these events are made public, the resulting media frenzy will be a political disaster for Alabama Republicans, a disaster with which RSLC will forever be associated.” A report from ProPublica found that the RSLC also created a dark-money nonprofit group to fund its work on redistricting for GOP politicians.
RSLC President Walter told The New York Times that his group had already raised $24 million in the first half of 2014, which, according to the article, is “close to twice as much as it had raised by the same point in the 2010 election cycle, when his [Walter’s] party took control of 21 state legislative bodies.” In contrast, the DLCC raised just $8.4 million through the end of June. AFP spent more than $100 million on federal elections in 2012, and it has spent millions on state and local elections—including judicial races—in states, including Wisconsin and North Carolina.
Given the historically sleepy nature of nonpartisan judicial elections, why are national conservative groups suddenly spending so much on these races? RSLC President Walter provided some insight, telling The Washington Post: “Republicans have had a significant amount of success at the state level, not only being elected to offices but implementing bold conservative solutions. … Unfortunately, that’s running into a hard stop with judges who aren’t in touch with the public.”
The RSLC plans to spend big to elect judges who share the group’s political leanings and conservative agenda. Walter’s remarks suggest that this plan is a direct response to judges striking down conservative statutes as unconstitutional.
This unprecedented campaign funding effort by the RSLC and other conservative groups comes as independent spending is playing an increasingly important role in judicial races. All state supreme court candidates raised a combined total of $33 million in 2011 and 2012. According to a report released by Justice at Stake, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the National Institute on Money in State Politics, outside campaign cash could soon dwarf the amount of money raised by judicial candidates. The report noted, “When independent spending by political parties is also included, total non-candidate spending in 2011–12 was a record $24.1 million, or 43 percent of total spending.”
The RSLC announced its national judicial elections initiative shortly after Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey (R) began organizing a campaign to unseat three Tennessee Supreme Court justices in an August 2014 election. The three targeted justices—Sharon G. Lee, Cornelia Clark, and Gary R. Wade—were all named to the bench by former Gov. Phil Bredesen (TN-D). Two years before the RSLC launched its ambitious judicial elections effort, the group spent more than $1 million in the 2012 North Carolina Supreme Court race, far more than any other spender. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the RSLC could spend even more money in this year’s state supreme court race in North Carolina.
Independent money dominated May’s Arkansas Supreme Court election as well. The race was overwhelmed by a group that pioneered dark money—campaign cash from undisclosed donors—and soft-on-crime attack ads in judicial elections. Years before the Citizens United decision, the secretive Law Enforcement Alliance of America, or LEAA, was running attack ads against judicial candidates it did not like. In the recently contested Arkansas race, the LEAA ran ads attacking candidate Tim Cullen for arguments he made years earlier while representing an accused criminal as a court-appointed attorney. Cullen lost to now-Justice Robin Wynne in a tight race. The LEAA spent more than $300,000, compared to just over $40,000 in spending by the candidates. Given the low salience of judicial elections, the LEAA’s barrage of attack ads must have made some difference.
The RSLC and AFP are now taking a page from LEAA’s playbook and funding soft-on-crime attack ads to scare the electorate into voting for their preferred judicial candidates. Even worse, these partisan groups are running ads in states where legislatures recently reformed judicial elections from partisan—where candidates appeared on the ballot with a party designation—to nonpartisan contests.
Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee are the states that most recently changed from partisan to nonpartisan judicial elections.(Mississippi also switched from partisan to nonpartisan judicial contests in recent years, but it is not included in this report.) Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee witnessed a nationwide explosion of judicial election spending in the late 1990s and took steps to stem the tide of corporate campaign cash in their state elections. Tennessee lawmakers implemented a merit-selection system for appointing its high court justices in 1994. The “Tennessee Plan,” as it was dubbed, replaced a system in which judicial candidates were nominated by state political party committees and then went before the voters in partisan general elections.
Arkansas voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2000 that instituted nonpartisan judicial elections—a change that was supported by the state GOP and opposed by the state Democratic Party. Likewise, North Carolina switched from partisan to nonpartisan judicial elections in 2004 through a successful and popular public-financing program for appellate court candidates. This program, however, was repealed by the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature last year.
National conservative groups, most of which are headquartered in Washington, D.C., are now inundating the nonpartisan judicial elections in Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina with partisan campaign cash. The 2012 Center for American Progress report “Partisan Judicial Elections and the Distorting Influence of Campaign Cash” asked why partisan judicial elections have seen significantly more total campaign contributions than nonpartisan races have. According to the report, in states with partisan elections:
There is a ready-built infrastructure for ‘bundling’ donations in place, with state parties acting as conduits for special interests. … In partisan elections, campaign donors can be much more certain of a candidate’s views prior to donating money. … Justice James Nelson of the Montana Supreme Court said that special interests want ‘their judge’ on the bench. ‘In partisan elections they have a leg up, as they already know the judge’s likely political philosophy.’
The report concluded, “When campaign costs rise, all judges feel the pressure to please interest groups that spend big on judicial races.”
The Koch brothers and the RSLC are pouring big money into these nonpartisan races. Increasing campaign cash will lead to more pressure on judges to issue rulings that please campaign contributors and more pressure to appear tough on crime. This increased interest in state judicial elections is simply an effort to protect conservative legislative agendas from legal challenges.
Billy Corriher is the Director of Research for Legal Progress at the Center for American Progress.A man kicks at a moving car as it repeatedly slams into his vehicle in the city's Rogers Park neighborhood. Surveillance video captured the road rage incident last week.Chicago police said the March 16 incident on West Morse Avenue stemmed from an earlier hit-and-run crash involving the cars, a 1997 Audi A4 and Toyota Camry, at Devon and Sheridan Road.Police said the driver of the Audi, Martin Vigil, 48, had left the scene after a minor traffic accident. The driver of the Camry followed him to Morse Avenue, where the confrontation occurred, police said.In the video, first posted on DNAInfo.com, the driver of the Camry is seen getting out of his parked car and kicking at Vigil's Audi. The Audi is then seen slamming into the Camry several times."I was scared! I was like: What's going on?" Mirza Rodriguez, witness, said.An office full of realtors witnessed the whole thing through their office windows. The company's surveillance camera captured it on video. Police said the Audi backed into the Camry at least three times."Seeing it in front of you: I thought he was going to get run over," Rodriguez said.The Audi drives off, but makes a U-turn and comes back into the video, striking the Camry head-on. The vehicle narrowly missed bicyclist as it rams the car again. The driver of the Camry delivers another boot to the bumper. A few more rams follow."He was very frazzled. He was screaming and he was hollering and people across the street were saying, 'Call the cops! Call the cops!'" Erickson Ocasio, witness, said.The Audi drives off, but keeps circling the block while bystanders try to calm the situation.Chicago police arrive and Vigil, the sales/leasing director for Chicago Real Estate LLC in North Center, is charged with misdemeanor assault, leaving the scene of an accident and criminal damage to property.Ocasio, whose camera recorded the confrontation, knows Vigil from the real estate business. Despite an alleged threat, he tipped off police."He said, 'Hey, Eric.' He stopped right in front of our door and said, 'If you tell anybody, I'll kill you,'" Ocasio said.Vigil, who did not answer the door or return calls from ABC7, told DNAInfo.com he was the "victim of road rage."Ask anyone who has ever contemplated using the Dojo Toolkit and they’ll tell you that its Achilles’ heel is documentation. Articles online are generally outdated and the Dojo Reference Guide and API docs, while helpful for existing Dojo developers, are anything but comprehensive if you’re new to Dojo and don’t know exactly where to start when building Dojo-based web and mobile apps.
While there are books that have been published and a smattering of resources scattered about online, there has never been a cohesive, up-to-date resource for learning how to use the greatness that is the Dojo Toolkit. Until now.
Announcing Dojo Tutorials
With the release of Dojo 1.6, SitePen has written a starter set of Dojo tutorials for your learning pleasure! These tutorials don’t just show you the code and expect you to figure out the rest, they explain how and why to use the various parts of the Dojo Toolkit — the right way. All you have to say is Hello Dojo, and you’ll be placed on the path to coding success.
Discovery
The first set of tutorials are authored by SitePen engineers (many of whom are core Dojo committers) and are easy to find within the Dojo Toolkit Documentation section. The Dojo Reference Guide has also been updated making the Dojo Toolkit website the definitive place to go for Dojo documentation.
Want to see a specific Tutorial? Want to Learn More?
Is there something you’d like to learn how to do with Dojo? Always wanted to know how something in Dojo works? Leave us a message in the blog comments and we’ll see about getting a tutorial created for you.
Or sign-up for an upcoming SitePen Dojo Workshop to get a fully immersive hands-on experience with Dojo.
Other posts in the seriesFor those of you who weren't aware, February 1st, 2017 is National Baked Alaska Day. A 'Baked Alaska' is a fancy meringue covered ice cream sponge cake, but there's really no certainty as to how the dessert got its name.
Since the toasted cake's name has been rumored to date back to the Alaska Purchase in 1867, we thought today would be a great opportunity to brief cannabis users on what you need to know about Alaska's state recreational marijuana laws.
Getting Baked in Alaska
Whether you are a resident of Alaska or just visiting, this will guide you through some of the most commonly asked questions regarding marijuana in Alaska.
Possession
Recreational marijuana is legal in Alaska, but you can't just carry as much as you want. Possession is capped at 1 ounce before it then becomes a misdemeanor. Possession of between 1 and 4 ounces of marijuana will lead to big fines and potential jail time. With 4 or more ounces of weed, you're looking at a hefty felony charge.
Age
Recreational marijuana legal in Alaska, but you have to be 21 or older to consume marijuana in Alaska. While it is totally legal to give marijuana to your buddy as a gift, it is illegal to give marijuana to a minor. Minors with qualifying medical conditions can get their medical marijuana product through the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services' Medical Marijuana program.
Usage
You can't go smoking a joint wherever you want, and you certainly can't spark up to go for a blunt cruise. Public usage of marijuana is still banned by law, which covers parks, schools, roads and more. Beyond that, driving or operating any motor vehicle (ATVs, snowmobiles, jet-skis etc.) while under the influence of marijuana is also illegal in Alaska. If you are going to consume marijuana in Alaska, do it in the privacy of your own home (unless you live in a housing association specifically banning such activities).
Growing
Cultivation of cannabis by adults over age 21 is 100% legal. Don't go planting greenhouses full of marijuana plants though, you are capped at growing, possessing, and gifting a maximum of 6 cannabis plants at a time. With that said, there is a lower maximum of 3 marijuana plants that can be flowering at any given time.
Gifting
Last but not least is gifting. As mentioned above, gifting less than an ounce or 6 plants is legal in Alaska (as long as it's between adults over 21 or older). Let's be clear though, gifting is gifting! That means absolutely no monetary exchange etc. Even possession of less than an ounce with intent to distribute is a misdemeanor, and anything over an ounce is a felony. Either way... intent to distribute marijuana leads to massive multi-thousand dollar fines and jail time.
Conclusion
Be sure to connect with The Daily Marijuana Observer on social media on Twitter @dailymjobserver, Facebook /dailymjobserver, and Instagram @dailymarijuanaobserver and @dailymarijuanainvestor. To stay up to date on important Daily Marijuana Observer updates, be sure to subscribe to our free newsletter.
Now check out today's infographic of the day.11139.8. (a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:
(1) California is a leader in protecting civil rights and preventing discrimination.
(2) California’s robust nondiscrimination laws include protections on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, among other characteristics.
(3) Religious freedom is a cornerstone of law and public policy in the United States, and the Legislature strongly supports and affirms this important freedom.
(4) The exercise of religious freedom should not be a justification for discrimination.
(5) California must take action to avoid supporting or financing discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.
(6) It is the policy of the State of California to promote fairness and equality and to combat discrimination.
(b) A state agency, department, board, authority, or commission, including an agency, department, board, authority, or commission of the University of California, the Board of Regents of the University of California, or the California State University, and the Legislature shall not do either of the following:
(1) Require any of its employees, officers, or members to travel to a state that, after June 26, 2015, has enacted a law that voids or repeals, or has the effect of voiding or repealing, existing state or local protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression or has enacted a law that authorizes or requires discrimination against same-sex couples or their families or on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, including any law that creates an exemption to antidiscrimination laws in order to permit discrimination against same-sex couples or their families or on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.
(2) Approve a request for state-funded or state-sponsored travel to a state that, after June 26, 2015, has enacted a law that voids or repeals, or has the effect of voiding or repealing, existing state or local protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, or has enacted a law that authorizes or requires discrimination against same-sex couples or their families or on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, including any law that creates an exemption to antidiscrimination laws in order to permit discrimination against same-sex couples or their families or on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.
(c) Subdivision (b) shall not apply to travel that is required for any of the following purposes:
(1) Enforcement of California law, including auditing and revenue collection.
(2) Litigation.
(3) To meet contractual obligations incurred before January 1, 2017.
(4) To comply with requests by the federal government to appear before committees.
(5) To participate in meetings or training required by a grant or required to maintain grant funding.
(6) To complete job-required training necessary to maintain licensure or similar standards required for holding a position, in the event that comparable training cannot be obtained in California or a different state not affected by subdivision (b).
(7) For the protection of public health, welfare, or safety, as determined by the affected agency, department, board, authority, or commission, or by the affected legislative office, as described in subdivision (b).
(d) The prohibition on state-funded travel described in this section shall continue while any law specified in subdivision (b) remains in effect.
(e) (1) The Attorney General shall develop, maintain, and post on his or her Internet Web site a current list of states that, after June 26, 2015, have enacted a law that voids or repeals, or has the effect of voiding or repealing, an existing state or local protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, or have enacted a law that authorizes or requires discrimination against same-sex couples or their families or on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, including any law that creates an exemption to antidiscrimination laws in order to permit discrimination against same-sex couples or their families or on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.
(2) It shall be the responsibility of an agency, department, board, authority, or commission described in subdivision (b) to consult the list on the Internet Web site of the Attorney General in order to comply with the travel and funding restrictions imposed by this section.Image: Jonny Williams/ECigClick.co.uk
There is a controversy brewing in the e-cigarette world that centers around the seemingly innocuous topic of buttery flavored e-liquids. While the average person may have never even heard of diacetyl, it's been on the lips—literally and figuratively—of vapers for the last seven years, and it's landed at least one high-end e-liquid company in some hot water.
"Everyone knew about diacetyl," Russ Wishtart, host of the vaping podcast Click Bang! who has done a number of episodes on the topic, told me.
Diacetyl (DA) is a chemical used in food flavoring. It infuses food with a creamy, buttery taste, so it's usually found in products that have butter, cheese, or caramel flavors. Diacetyl and acetyl propionyl (AP)—a kind of "sister chemical" that is nearly identical to DA—are also found in many flavored vaping liquids, especially those with a "dessert" flavor (think butterscotch, vanilla, or caramel).
When you eat or drink something that contains diacetyl, it's considered harmless—it even occurs naturally in some milk products, and in a few wines and beers. But inhaling it is a different story, and can have serious health risks. Because of this, vapers have been concerned about the presence of DA and AP in e-juices for awhile now, and many trade organizations have limits on the levels of DA and AP that can be present in the liquids they stock.
Over the last few years, manufacturers and vendors have been testing their products for these chemicals, sharing the results with consumers, and altering recipes to eliminate them. That process really ramped up towards the end of last year when researchers published a paper in Nicotine and Tobacco Research that found, of the 159 sweet and creamy flavored e-liquids tested, 74 percent had DA, AP, or both.
"They were telling people that they had tested it and it was free of diacetyl"
"The whole issue didn't exist before we published our study," said Konstantinos Farsalinos, a researcher at the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center in Greece, and lead author of the study. "There were discussions in e-cigarette consumer forums—vapers forums—on the internet, but there was no discussion in the scientific community. So we learned a lot from vapers."
In the wake of the study, many e-liquid companies scrambled to test their products and ease customers' minds. But at least one company has now come under fire for not revealing the high levels of AP in some of its liquids, even though it knew about these levels for months.
Five Pawns is a high-end e-liquid manufacturer based in California. The company commissioned a lab to test its liquids as early as May of 2014. But the company didn't release any results publicly until June of this year, after a UK-based e-cigarette retailer published its own lab results on Five Pawns products. Five Pawns ordered those results taken down via a cease and desist order, and wrote on its website that those tests were "fraudulent," publishing its own lab results instead.
But even Five Pawns' own tests showed alarmingly high rates of AP in some liquids. In Farsalinos's study, the researchers converted National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health limits on diacetyl inhalation to determine an estimated safe amount to inhale through vaping. For AP, that limit was 137 micrograms per day. One of Five Pawns' flavors had AP levels of 627.7 micrograms per millilitre. I couldn't find any formal studies on the volume of e-liquid vapers use per day, but an online survey of users by E-Cigarette Forum found the plurality of respondents (22.6 percent) vape four to five millilitres per day. A majority of respondents (59.8 percent) said they vape between two and six millilitres per day.
What really bothered Wishtart and others in the vaping community wasn't the high levels, but that Five Pawns had spent the past few months assuring vendors and customers that its products didn't contain any DA or AP at all. Five Pawns declined to be interviewed for this story.
A screengrab of an email Five Pawns's customer service sent to a customer in May of last year.
"They were telling people who were purchasing wholesale from them and importing the product to other countries that they had tested it and it was free of diacetyl and acetyl propionyl," Kate Ackerman, a board member at the Electronic Cigarette Trade Association (ECTA) of Canada, told me over the phone.
After Five Pawns published its lab results, the ECTA had to alert members to pull some of the products from the shelves because they contained AP levels above the organization's limits. Anything with more than 100 micrograms per milliliter of AP can't be sold by ECTA members, which meant five Five Pawns liquids had to be taken off the market in Canada, while another three liquids required "disclosure labelling."
"Our decision with Five Pawns wasn't meant to be punitive. We were forced into a recall situation because we have no control over what they're doing," Ackerman told me. "Our guidelines were originally put in place right from the very beginning when we started as an organization back in 2012. They're updated whenever we receive new information from science and medical researchers."
The risks of inhaling DA were first discovered in the summer of 2000, when a handful of workers in a microwave popcorn plant in Missouri started getting diagnosed with a rare, severe, irreversible lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans. Even non-smokers who worked at the plant were getting sick, and investigators soon discovered it was linked to inhaling diacetyl—which gave the popcorn that "real butter" taste—on a daily basis. Soon after, NIOSH, the research branch of the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), recommended guidelines for factories where DA and AP is used, to prevent workers from getting sick. But OSHA has yet to translate those recommendations into meaningful regulation.
But while there are regulations on diacetyl to keep workers safe, there are currently no regulations at all on e-cigarettes in the US, and that means DA and AP can be added to vaping liquids in the same levels as are allowed in food products. There hasn't been any research that shows the effects of inhaling e-cigarette liquids that contain DA or AP, but many manufacturers and consumers are concerned that it could have similarly dangerous risks.
E-cigarette liquids come in virtually every flavor you can imagine. Photo by A. Currell/Flickr
"Diacetyl is a respiratory toxin, so when you breath it in, it irritates the lungs," said Jessica Barrington-Trimis, a researcher at the University of Southern California and the Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science. "That's not a problem if you're eating it because it doesn't get into the lungs at all."
Barrington-Trimis is currently conducting a study that compares the respiratory health of vapers who use unflavored e-cigarettes to those who prefer flavored varieties, and said more research is needed to understand the potential risks of these chemicals. But in the meantime, she doesn't see why manufacturers don't just err on the side of caution and avoid DA and AP altogether.
On Five Pawns' blog, the company wrote that it didn't intend on removing AP from its current recipes (though the company is cooking up some new flavors that will be DA and AP free). It also noted that there's a difference between inhaling DA all day in a factory and taking a few puffs from an e-cigarette, and that cigarettes contain both DA and AP, yet bronchiolitis obliterates isn't common.
But Barrington-Trimis—and others, including Wishtart and Farsalinos—wasn't sold.
"It's possible that inhaling through an e-cigarette could be even more damaging to the lungs than a factory setting, because they're designed to take that aerosol deep into your lungs," she said. "At the end of the day, they don't need to be using either one of these chemicals."
Correction 8/11/15: This story initially stated that NIOSHA had created guidelines for diacetyl exposure in US factories. While that is correct, we've clarified that section to explain that NIOSHA guidelines are just that, and only OSHA can create specific regulation to limit diacetyl exposure.To read more on Supernatural, pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly on stands Friday. You can buy the whole set now, or purchase the individual covers of the group shot, Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki, or Misha Collins. Don’t forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.
When The CW gave Supernatural an early renewal for its 13th season, the show easily could’ve kicked back and taken some time to relax. Instead, the writers plan to kick things up a notch this year: Altogether, season 13 will test the waters for a potential spin-off, fulfill a long-held dream of an animated episode, and introduce a new central player when Lucifer’s son, Jack (series regular Alexander Calvert), moves in with the Winchesters. “The big thing with us is: How do we keep it fresh?” co-showrunner Robert Singer says. “We just felt there’s so much opportunity with Jack. It’s a big swing again, but somehow we always manage to keep the show grounded in its own reality.” They do that by never losing sight of the central story: Sam and Dean and their very human experiences dealing in a business of nonhumans. “At the end of the day, the show is really about these two guys and how great they are together,” Singer says. “They’re the lifeblood of the show.”
That’s why it might surprise some fans that this season will see Jack hitting the road with the boys, which begs the question: If driver picks the music and shotgun shuts his cakehole, what does the Nephilim in the back seat do? “Last season was about the guys being kids, and this season is about being parents, to a degree,” co-showrunner Andrew Dabb says. “To have [Sam and Dean] confronted by this kid who is at once scary and charming gives us a chance to show a different side of the guys, and that’s always a great thing, especially 13 seasons in. If Dean had a kid, what would that look like? If Sam had a kid, what would that look like? The joke is that it’s My Two Dads, Hell Edition.” But considering that Jack isn’t your typical kid, getting him acclimated to the world is about more than just teaching him how to use Netflix (though Padalecki says that will happen). “[Jack is] really struggling to understand himself,” Alexander Calvert says. “There’s definitely a loneliness.”
GALLERY: See the Supernatural Cast Suit Up For EW’s Spooky Cover Shoot
Loneliness is something Sam and Dean can relate to seeing as how the season 12 finale saw them lose Crowley, Castiel, and Mary, who’s currently trapped in an alternate world with Lucifer. “[The loss is] just constant,” Jensen Ackles says. “It’s Dad and Bobby, and now it’s Mom and it’s Cas. It’s this vicious cycle of loss and grief. Dean just needs to feel like there’s hope.” That hope will eventually come in the form of Castiel, who will return to the land of the living… eventually. “Everyone is healthy and in fighting shape and ready to go,” Misha Collin says of life post-return. “We’re all a team again.” Even better? Having Cas back will help inject some light back into the show. “One of my favorite things about the series is that it can bring levity to situations,” Ackles says. “And I think that’s one of the reasons why this season we’re not going full-mope.” Jared Padalecki chimes in, “Never go full-mope.”
In other words, fans can prepare for laughter and tears in season 13, but when EW gathered stars Ackles, Padalecki, and Collins for the cover shoot of our latest Untold Stories issue, it was all about the former. Altogether, there are four covers to choose from: The group shot will go to subscribers and hit newsstands Friday, with the three single covers being made available exclusively at Barnes & Noble beginning Tuesday, Oct. 17.
Check out all four covers below, and watch a behind-the-scenes video (with more on season 13) above.
Finlay MacKay for EW
Finlay MacKay for EW
Finlay MacKay for EWXtremeTV and other UK BitTorrent trackers disappeared recently after being forced offline by the Hollywood-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft. It apparently wasn't that difficult either. A simple but threatening email to Usenet site NZB Royalty appears to have done the trick.
Every week TorrentFreak receives emails from individuals trying to find out the status of sites all over the world. Many disappear without warning and with no Facebook or Twitter updates, users naturally fear the worst.
Just lately a lot of torrent-related sites have been under DDoS attack so temporary disappearances have been nothing out of the ordinary, but when a site goes down and stays down for a |
a smartphone in the hands of a photographer, the first thing he/she will do is go in search of the manual mode. And this is exactly what I did.
Accessing the manual mode is very simple: you just launch the camera app (with a simple tap or with activation gestures by drawing a circle on the display), click on the menu at the top left corner of the screen and select Manual. From here, you can adjust the shutter speed (1/8000 to 30 seconds), whites (choosing one of four options: overcast, sunlight, fluorescent, incandescent), focus and ISO. The latter can be set up to 3,200 although there is no guarantee of excellent performance in the dark.
Manual mode offers a few options for customization. / © AndroidPIT
The camera focuses quickly despite the depth of field being not as astonishing as that offered by the Samsung Galaxy S7. But, overall, it is still great. To get an idea, take a look at the two images below, taken one after the other.
Focusing is fast. / © AndroidPIT
Unfortunately, you cannot change the opening set default of f / 2 and greater flexibility of the settings would be more than welcome.
The snapshots during the day
How does the OnePlus 3 camera cope with outdoor shots during the day? Well, I can guarantee good shots without surprises or disappointment. The colors are rather cold and tend to green, the shadows are sometimes flat but, in normal lighting conditions, the pictures are good overall.
From the balcony of our offices. / © AndroidPIT
If you usually use the camera of your smartphone to capture landscapes then 'landscape mode' is an option on which it is worth discussing. To be blunt, I'm not satisfied with this mode. When you are in front of bright views or shaded areas, some spots in the photo are overexposed. Unfortunately, 'panorama mode' is not able to take advantage of the HDR, which is selectable when shooting in 'auto mode'. It should be said that under normal lighting conditions this mode does its job without problems.
The front camera does not disappoint and under the sunlight ensures rich bright shots with fine detail.
The panorama mode tends to overexpose light areas. / © AndroidPIT
Overall, the main camera is surprisingly strong – but it did seem determined to show me the pores of my skin. Not cool, OnePlus.
The front camera provides crisp, sharp selfies. / © AndroidPIT
The night-shots
We have said it many times before but I'll say it again: megapixels are not everything. The OnePlus 3 with its main 16 MP camera once again demonstrated this when I compared it to the 12 MP rear lens mounted on the iPhone 6s. As you can see from the picture below, the camera of the OnePlus 3, in a photo taken at ten at night, cannot offer the same details that we find in the picture offered by the iPhone 6s. Zooming in, you can better see the difference below.
Despite more MP available, the camera of the OnePlus 3 is blurrier than the iPhone 6s rear cam. / © AndroidPIT
Even the front camera, which is best at night, is surpassed by that of the iPhone 6s. which offers more natural colors. In the shot made with the OnePlus 3, you notice the magenta hue of the skin, much less natural than that of its rival.
The night colors are less natural on the OnePlus 3 front cam. / © AndroidPIT
Final thoughts
The camera of OnePlus 3 is quick and ensures good photos, especially when you consider the price of the device. It does not reach certain levels offered by the new top-of-the-range Samsung devices.The colors are good, maybe not always accurate, and clear images lose some details when you zoom in.
The camera app offers a simple, minimalist functionality, but does not provide a manual mode dedicated photo enthusiasts. It should be said that if you are a professional you'll probably find the settings restrictive. Do not expect to find effects found in the P9 or other similar options – as mentioned above. The OnePlus 3 camera software is very simple and only provides essential functions.
In short, considering the $400 price tag, the camera is more than satisfactory. However, if you are considering buying a new smartphone for its camera, then it is worth it to pay a few more bucks to get a more powerful camera.
Every two weeks, we will propose a new episode of our #Photocorner during which we will show the cameras integrated into Android devices or the best app dedicated to photography.
Would you like to know all the secrets of a particular device's camera or camera application? Leave a comment below, we'll take it into consideration for the upcoming events.One more business post before I go back to reblogging cat gifs. If you enjoyed this and/or the contracts one, please consider buying one of my comic books (the Sensation/Wonder Woman issues I did and No Mercy 1 & 2 are both 99c right now on Comixology; and paper comics can be mail-ordered from TFAW in the US).
Toxicity comes in three general forms for the comics pro: nonpayment, bad managers/collaborators, and harassment/discrimination. I guarantee you over your creative career you’ll experience the first two, and while I sincerely hope you never experience the third, if you are a PoC, LGBTQ, and/or female identifying, chances are you’re going to get creeped on. Pull up a chair ‘cause mama’s going to dish.
First, NONPAYMENT. Frequently, this is a smaller-company issue. Little Hollywood-affiliated publisher hires you at a niiiice page rate (for writers, that’s over $100 a page) to write some work for hire. Great! But then your invoices start being ignored. What do you do? Sit there in your grotto looking at your own bills piling up while humming “some-day my check will come” to yourself? Believe it or not that’s what most people do. Don’t do that. As with so much bad behavior, folks get away with it because they don’t get called on it.
If your check is late, first: stop working. Do not throw good money after bad. If you’re going to sit at home not getting paid, now is the time to work on your novel / own comic book / screenplay / whatever. Stop IMMEDIATELY, and politely inform the company that until you receive your advance for Issue #3, you won’t start work on Issue #4. They may browbeat you or threaten you but none of that matters – they owe you money. They can pay it, and you’ll start working again. (Meerkat voice) Simples!
Remain polite. Your editor is not the person cutting checks. If a company is in nosedive and not paying its freelancers, there is a good chance your editor isn’t getting paid either, or has taken a pay cut. (Also, that editor will eventually quit and go to another company.)
Be firm and persistent. Ask for the accounting contact so you can email and call them directly. REMAIN POLITE. When a company is being overwhelmed by debt, you know what they pay first? The noisy creditors. Be noisy. Don’t splash their name all over social media – that’s a mug’s game, and may violate nondisclosure agreements in your contract thus (woop!) putting you in breach of contract at which point they will say they don’t have to pay you at all.
Get lawyers involved early. But Alex, I’m a broke creator in Indiana, how do I do that? First, get your contract. At the end, it will say “this contract is governed by the laws of the state of [NAME OF STATE].” Get thee to the internets and google “Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts” and the state name. Here’s New York Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and California Lawyers for the Arts, to get you started.
Now, 90% of the time the sort of chucklefucks who try to pull this shit are in California (hoo-ray for Ho-llywood!, &c.) This is actually great news because California has large and byzantine laws regarding freelancers and benefits which 99% of companies totally ignore, including (doubtlessly) the idiots currently not paying you. The wonderful colleendoran breaks down the consequences of this far more elegantly than I ever could (READ THIS).
VLA costs a princely $25 to find a pro bono lawyer. Often it only takes ONE letter from a lawyer for these Potemkin Publishers to crumple like the paper towns they are. Heck, once all I had to do was tell a publisher that I was about to engage one and it would cost me no more than $25 TOTAL to keep legal pressure up until they paid me, versus likely $500 per hour on their side, and wouldn’t it be better for them to just front up the $3,000-odd they owed me. They went on a payment plan, $1250 a month, but they paid every damn cent.
Now, BAD COLLABORATORS/EDITORS. Folks, editors exist, like much of life, on a bell curve. Most are pretty OK. A few are great – the great ones I’ve worked with in my career were Philippe Hauri at Humanoids (now he runs Glenat); Diana Schutz; and Brendan Wright – the latter two at Dark Horse, though Diana is now retired. I think Kristy Quinn at DC’s pretty excellent as well. Of course, the flip side means every company employs a small group of Damn Fools. What do you do if you end up collaborating with or working for a Damn Fool?
The main issue with Damn Fools is they waste your time. That lovely $100 a page you’re getting for writing (say) INCREDIBLE EMBIGGENING MAN for Detectarvel Comics works out to less than McDonalds wages after six rewrites, four of which were done after the script was “approved”. Some editors also fancy themselves writers, which is fine – until they rewrite your scripts without your approval. Plus, Damn Fools mismanage politics and don’t have your back. Artist drawing your female characters as porn models, and that’s not cool with you? Silence. Last minute rewrites/changes of approved arcs because someone up the food chain says you have to put Lobo in it, or can’t have Character X any more? Crickets.
And remember, the comics consumer doesn’t know what went on behind the four-colour curtain… all they know is when you started working on INCREDIBLE EMBIGGENING MAN, your work took a total nose-dive and you’re shit now. And that’s the biggest problem. They’re fucking with your shit and you’re taking the rap for it.
Plus, on the creator-owned side, there’s the writer who thinks his/her artist is their marionette, or never gets the finished project out even though you took no advance and were expecting only back end, or the artist who gets paid but never gives pages… This is why you always, ALWAYS have a contract with your collaborators before you begin work. Even if they are your friends. (ESPECIALLY if they are your friends).
If your collaborator is trying to convince you that nobody does contracts or gaslights you/makes you feel crazy to want one, run a mile. Don’t look back, just run. We ALL do contracts. Grownups put it in writing. Contract doesn’t have to be anything fancy. It can just be an email and an “I agree” response. It should cover who gets paid what and when, when is work due and what happens if deadlines are broken, who owns what % of the IP, when ownership vests (eg for the artist, when work is finished), et cetera. Pay especial attention to laying out in writing what happens if the collaboration has to break up (eg due to work never completed and/or your collaborator ending up being someone you just can’t work with). You will have to fire or split up with at least one collaborator in your career, I guarantee.
(Now, NDAs are a step too far and usually a n00b thing, oh bless, there you are with your one idea you think will change comics forever – aka a Batman pitch with the serial number scrubbed off –and you assume we’re all out to steal it. PASS.)
If a collaborator seems too good to be true – a fantastic artist, willing to work at a very low rate; a writer who had a couple big books then vanished for a while – it is probably because they are so unprofessional in their work behavior/ethic that nobody will touch them. (Ask an editor, if you’re suspicious about someone too good to be true. Editors are like elephants. Blow your deadlines, lie to them, and/or turn in bad work? They will remember your name UNTIL THE END OF TIME, and they will tell ALL their friends.)
Just walk away from those people. Part of it comes from not jumping at every opportunity you are given. The most powerful word in the freelancer’s vocabulary, the one that brings all the editors into your yard, is “no”. And obviously, not “no, you’re a damn fool”. But no, sorry, my schedule doesn’t have space until 2017. No, that character doesn’t strike a chord with me. No, I’m not taking on more creator-owned work at the moment. Take a leaf from Hollywood’s book here – folks in Hollywood can say no so cleverly and politely, you think they’ve said yes.
It’s tough, tho, especially when you need the money. If you have to take that gig with the bad editor, though, smile ALL the way through it, don’t say boo, and make friends with all the other editors at the company and transfer away from Mr or Mrs Toxic as fast as you damn well can. IF YOU TAKE THE DEAL, NEVER EVER BITCH ABOUT YOUR RATE OR THE EDITOR AFTER YOU TOOK IT. C’mon, you knew what the rate was when you signed up! You knew what the editor’s rep was (because you asked your other working pro friends who worked for him/her)! If you bitch, it makes YOU the Damn Fool.
Now, speaking of Mr Toxic…
HARRASSMENT. Hoo boy. I’m pretty lucky and have never experienced overt harassment / discrimination in comics. But here are some things that have happened to people I know in the industry: a well-known creator donating heavily to a young female creator’s kickstarter, then sending her increasingly sexual DMs; a creator basically stalking girls on Livejournal and pressuring young female creators to collaborate with him while cultivating a rep as a feminist ally (yeah, watch out for those. mostly they just want a fresh-baked batch of ally cookies and to feel your boobs); a creator and their girlfriend going to a comics publisher’s party and an editor shoving his tongue down the girlfriend’s throat while the creator was in the bathroom (seriously, this guy is still employed, though he has an HR file that would stop a tank); a male editor feeling up a female creator under the table (she stuck a fork in him because she was DONE); a creator with a creepy thing about very young girls utterly terrorising his female collaborators that he would ruin their careers if they ever said anything about him; and let’s not forget the everyday just talking over females and/or creeping on them during panels and then apologising to their boyfriends (but not the woman).
I honestly don’t think comics are any worse than any other industry, though. Remember: bell curve. Lots of silent folks, a few great ones and, in the shadows, a few lizards who occasionally scuttle out from under rocks to flick their tongues at the laydees.
And any small subculture has those people. Strong, abusive personalities who get off on power and creeping on younger, newer members of the culture. But, y’know, let’s all avoid those people. How do you do that?
First, make friends with other female pros. We’re generally all pretty liberal, pro-trans and pro-PoC, and most of us know who the creepy dudes are to avoid. I’d also shout out to Mark Waid and Jeff Parker as people you can trust to ask for advice and/or have your back.
Second, ask for help early. If you are thinking “mmmmaybe this will turn out OK?”, oh honey, it never will. Don’t be afraid to back out early from projects with collaborators who start creeping you out. Lie if you have to – “I have a severe illness in the family and can’t meet deadlines for the next few months, I’m so sorry, I think it’s best if you find someone else” – then go work on your webcomic. Remember, SELF CARE is always more important than that job opportunity.
Third, if God forbid you are a victim of verbal, sexual, or emotional harassment/violence, gather around you two people who care about you and report the person to the police and/or the convention. (NOT their publisher – seriously, the institutional inertia, it is huge, and the publisher will do fuck all. Go to the cops.) You WILL get victim-blamed hard, so prep for that. It sucks, but it’s true. “She led me on”, “I was drunk”, “don’t you know she’s a ho?” “She was wearing a short skirt. Boys will be boys!”, “well she invited me up to her room” (because you asked to see her portfolio there, dipshit, and she didn’t think that meant “and then shove her onto the bed”). But the internet outrage cycle will move on, and you’ll have your life back in at most two weeks. And they’ll have a police record!
The reason the same circa five people keep doing shitty things in comics is SILENCE and ABUSE. They threaten to end the careers of people they’ve harassed, and everyone stays silent. Girlfriend: they cannot end your career. If people can’t end my career (and I’ve done some DUMB shit and said some regrettable things to a whole BUNCH of powerful people), they cannot end yours. This is abusive-relationship dynamics: you are trained to behave via threats and emotional abuse in a ridiculous pattern in order to stave off more threats and abuse, and when you finally step out of it you look at the crazy mirror-universe way you were behaving, tiptoeing through an imaginary Skinnerian maze of landmines set by the abuser, and you’re like WHOA THAT WAS NUTS. Girlfriend, I was in that maze once – hell, I was married to the maze. I can tell you, once you step out of it, it all vanishes behind you like morning mist.
You’re talented. You’re smart. You’re young. They cannot take anything away from you without your permission. What’s he going to do, come to your house and take your laptop and copy of Manga Studio? You can survive this, and you can make them STOP the behavior they’ve been perpetrating. Do it for the next girl, who may not be as together as you (even if you don’t feel very together at all). There are many, many ways to be published in comics, and there is NO single person that can lock off all those ways to you. Heck, you could walk up to Robert Kirkman and bitchslap him with a haddock and you STILL wouldn’t be locked out of the industry. (Don’t do that, though. Robert’s a really nice human.) Don’t believe the threats of abusers.
Fourth, all of you reading this with your jaws on the floor, BELIEVE YOUR FEMALE FRIENDS when they say things about being uncomfortable. Listen. Help them. Raise your voice – especially men – against creepy behavior in the industry and at conventions/parties. Some male pro tweets something creepy or demeaning to a woman? YOU call him on it. Don’t wait for girls to do it. Silence = Complicity. You want to be all #NotAllMen? Well then SHUT DOWN the assholes. Don’t just whine to chicks about being one of the Good Guys – protip, 1) you will never get into our pants that way and 2) it’s pathetic – just go out there and BE a good guy and take action. Are you on a panel and some other panelist is talking over/not letting a queer, female, and/or PoC panel member speak? And you’re waiting for the moderator to say something? Don’t wait. Tell the dude to PIPE DOWN. Male on male peer pressure to enforce civilised behavior is an INCREDIBLY important process of curbing online and IRL abuse to women and minorities.
And ladies? This doesn’t mean don’t go have a good time or hook up at cons. I’m not going to go all bell hooks on you. Girl, wear a short skirt, get drunk / take drugs (if that’s your thing), hook up with dudes and/or chicks and generally have fun with your naughty self! Very few people lie on their deathbed thinking “I wish I had less sex when I was 22.” Just: bring a friend or two as a wingperson, and have VERY specific rules and situations where you can leave each other alone. Have a codeword that means “get me out of here now”. When in doubt, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR FRIEND. Take care of each other. Guys, I’ll say it again – if you see something weird happen at a party with a girl, STEP IN and ask if she needs help, and offer to get her to her door (you stay outside). That? THAT’s how you #NotAllMen.Welcome back to the FOX Four.
To prepare for Year Two of the College Football Playoff, we’ve assembled our own committee that will present its ranking of the top teams after each week from now through the end of the season.
The process works much as it did last season. Each member will submit an individual top 10, which we’ll compile to get an average score and then publish our official FOX Four rankings from highest to lowest. Though this ranking puts special emphasis on the first four teams — our current playoff picks after the most recent week of the season — we’ll list a full top 10 so you can see how the committee has prioritized the second batch of teams that could impact the playoff discussion.
Article continues below...
Number of first-place votes will break ties. If two teams have the same number of first-place votes, we’ll proceed to the subsequent place until the tie is broken.
Our 13-member committee this week: Colin Cowherd, Bruce Feldman, Matt Leinart, Stewart Mandel, Joel Klatt, Tim Brando, Molly McGrath, Brady Quinn, Petros Papadakis, Rob Stone, Spencer Tillman, Clay Travis and Dave Wannstedt.
And here is our FOX Four:
For a closer look at the voting, here’s the Top 10, with the average ranking for each team in parentheses.
1. Baylor (8.6)
2. Utah (8.2)
3. Ohio State (7.5)
4. TCU (6.0)
5. LSU (5.9)
6. Clemson (5.7)
7. Michigan State (4.1)
8. Alabama (3.8)
9. Florida State (2.1)
10. Stanford (1.8)
Other teams receiving votes: Notre Dame (0.4), Michigan (0.4), Iowa (one seventh-place vote), Florida (one 10th-place vote), Memphis (one 10th-place vote)
Teams with first-place votes: Ohio State (5), Baylor (4), Utah (3), TCU (1)
Teams with Top 4 votes: Baylor (12), Utah (10), Ohio State (8), TCU (7), Clemson (6), LSU (5), Michigan State (2), Alabama (2)
Click below for:
Week 6’s FOX Four
Week 5’s FOX Four
Week 4’s FOX Four
Week 3’s FOX Four
Week 2’s FOX Four
Next week on FOX & FS1 (all times ET):
— No. 3 Utah vs. USC (Saturday, 7:30 p.m., FOX)
— Kansas State vs. Texas (Saturday, Noon, FS1)
— Kansas vs. No. 14 Oklahoma State (Saturday, 3:30 p.m., FS1)
To get all FOX Sports college football content delivered to you, follow CFB on FOX on Twitter and like our Facebook page.Update: the mechanism spelled out.
(This update is to resolve some ambiguity.)
The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist, they are the "missile" set in motion by the stochastic terrorist. The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media as their means of setting those "missiles" in motion.
Here's the mechanism spelled out concisely:
The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media to broadcast memes that incite unstable people to commit violent acts.
One or more unstable people responds to the incitement by becoming a lone wolf and committing a violent act. While their action may have been statistically predictable (e.g. "given the provocation, someone will probably do such-and-such"), the specific person and the specific act are not predictable (yet).
The stochastic terrorist then has plausible deniability: "Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I'm not responsible for what people in my audience do."
The lone wolf who was the "missile" gets captured and sentenced to life in prison, while the stochastic terrorist keeps his prime time slot and goes on to incite more lone wolves.
Further, the stochastic terrorist may be acting either negligently or deliberately, or may be in complete denial of their impact, just like a drunk driver who runs over a pedestrian without even realizing it.
Finally, there is no conspiracy here: merely the twisted acts of individuals who are promoting extremism, who get access to national media in which to do it, and the rest follows naturally just as an increase in violent storms follows from an increase in average global temperature.
And now we return to the rest of the original diary...
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The lone wolves.
The term "lone wolf" is used in law enforcement and intel to refer to an individual who is emotionally unstable, who lacks obvious ties to known criminal gangs or terrorist groups, and who pops up seemingly out of nowhere to commit a violent or terrorist act.
The three-letter agencies can keep an eye on organized groups, and do a damn good job at stopping violent actors associated with those groups. At least three intended car bombings were stopped last year by the FBI intercepting the bombers and substituting fake explosives in time to save hundreds of lives and arrest the would-be bombers.
Lone wolves don't have obvious connections through which they can be discovered. They don't communicate much if at all about their intentions. They keep their plans to themselves. And then, apparently at random, they pop up from obscurity and commit murder. They are law enforcement's and intel's worst nightmare, and on Saturday one of them became America's nightmare.
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Stirring the pot.
At any given time there are hundreds of thousands of Americans with combinations of personality characteristics (such as emotional instability, a paranoid ideology, and a propensity for violence) that put them at risk of going off the deep end and becoming lone wolves. All it takes is the right push, the right nudge at the right time, to dislodge a few of them and send them on their way to fifteen minutes of fame surrounded by dead bodies.
There's nothing mysterious about this process. It is not much different to other instances where a person is almost ready to make a decision, and the right combination of inputs makes them act. For example you have an old car and it begins to break down more often: now you're thinking about replacing it, and you might be swayed by something in an automobile advertisement. Anyone who is familiar with marketing and advertising knows how this works, and advertisers often target their messages to people who are "ready to buy" and just need a little persuading. Political candidates often target their ads to the undecideds, hoping that a little nudge will win them some votes. This is perfectly normal and hardly insidious.
It becomes insidious when these practices are used in such a manner as to deliberately or negligently stir up lone wolf violence.
So let's take Beck, Hannity, and O'Reilly. There is no question that their emotional rhetoric appeals to people who are emotionally unstable. And, since their audiences are tracked and analyzed in detail, there is no question that they know it.
When they go on TV and shout and sputter, rant and rave, and weep and wail, they are not expecting to persuade liberals or even undecideds to change their votes. They are "playing to their base," that they know includes people who are emotionally unstable. In short they are "stirring the pot." And if you turn up the temperature and keep stirring, you know that the pot will boil. Little bubbles will come up from the depths and pop.
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Pop go the lone wolves.
Some lone wolves have no provable connection to the hate-talkers and pot-stirrers, other than memes in common. One example of this type is James Wenneker von Brunn who shot and killed security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Another is Andrew Joseph Stack III, who flew a Piper Dakota into the Austin Texas field office of the Internal Revenue Service, killing IRS manager Vernon Hunter and himself, and injuring thirteen others. At this point it appears as if Jared Loughner is one of these: all-over-the-map crazy, with an incoherent ideology that is mostly rightwing but difficult to trace to specific sources.
(UPDATE: to be very clear about this: at this point I am not aware of any evidence to suggest that Loughner falls under the definition of stochastic terrorism, because there is nothing yet to link him to being a fan of one of the mass media hate-talkers. However there are enough other cases out there to make this issue topical and relevant right now.)
On the other hand...
On 27 July 2008, lone wolf shooter Jim David Adkisson walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and shot nine people, killing two and wounding seven. Adkisson said he was motivated by hatred of "Democrats, liberals, n-----s, and faggots." A police search of his home found books by Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly.
On 4 February 2009, he accepted a plea bargain: guilty on two counts of murder, in exchange for a life sentence w/o possibility of parole (LWOP).
On 4 April 2009, Richard Poplawski shot five Pittsburgh PA police officers, leaving three dead and two seriously wounded.
According to people who knew him, he was a birther and white supremacist, was paranoid that Obama was going to take away his guns, and was consumed with anti-semitic conspiracy theories. A police search of his computer found links to various groups and to a YouTube video of Glenn Beck talking about FEMA concentration camps.
Poplawski's trial has been delayed until 25 April 2011, where it is possible he will face the death penalty for the murder of police officers.
On 31 May 2009, lone wolf Scott Roeder shot and killed gynecologist Dr. George Tiller while Tiller was attending church services. At first it appeared that he acted alone, but research by some fellow Kossaks and I uncovered evidence that he had at least one accomplice. That issue is presently being investigated by a federal grand jury.
In the months leading up to the assassination, Bill O'Reilly had waged a "relentless campaign" against Tiller, a campaign of exactly the type that would be expected to stir up violence against the doctor. The details can be found here: http://www.salon.com/...
In January 2010 Roeder was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. At present his accomplices and enablers have not yet been indicted and charged.
On 18 July 2010, Byron Williams set out from his mother's home in Groveland CA, heading for San Francisco to shoot up the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, with the intention of "starting a revolution."
Williams, a convicted felon (two bank robberies), was stopped by the CHP (California Highway Patrol) for weaving in and out of traffic at high speed. When stopped, he immediately opened fire on the CHP officers, wounding two. They returned fire, wounding him in the leg, and then took him into custody. At first they thought they were dealing with a garden-variety cop shooter. Then they found the notebook in his car, with the details of his plans.
Quoting the Wikipedia article on Williams: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Quote: Williams has identified Glenn Beck as his primary motivation for the shootings. According to Williams, Beck is "like a schoolteacher on TV... he's been breaking open some of the most hideous corruption." Continuing: "Beck would never say anything about a conspiracy, would never advocate violence. He'll never do anything... of this nature. But he'll give you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need." End quote.
Prior to Williams' planned attack, Beck had mentioned the obscure Tides Foundation 29 times on his program. He had drawn numerous charts on his infamous blackboard, showing how Tides is the funding source behind much of the "liberal conspiracy." He had stoked and fueled, turned up the heat on the pot, and stirred it real good. He devoted two of his broadcasts to Tides in the very week preceding the shooting.
Quoting the Washington Post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Quote: Beck has at times spoken against violence, but he more often forecasts it, warning that "it is only a matter of time before an actual crazy person really does something stupid." Most every broadcast has some violent imagery: "The clock is ticking.... The war is just beginning.... Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government.... You have to be prepared to take rocks to the head.... The other side is attacking.... There is a coup going on.... Grab a torch!... Drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers.... They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered.... They are putting a gun to America's head.... Hold these people responsible." Unquote.
.
.
Every ounce of evidence you could possibly need.
One dead doctor.
Two dead churchgoers.
Seven wounded churchgoers.
Three dead police officers.
Four wounded police officers.
How many more that I couldn't remember while writing this?
Meanwhile the jury is still out on whether Loughner's victims belong on the list of people who "got Becked."
As someone on dKos wrote in a comment about this a few months ago, there was a saying among his buddies in the Air Force: "Once is a tragedy, twice is a terrible coincidence, three times is enemy action."
If you were a media personality known for rants & raves on the air, and it came out that some random killer had possibly been influenced by you or one of your colleagues, what would you do? Would you apologize? Would you tone it down?
If it happened again, what would you do? And if it happened yet again after that? What would you do?
It takes more than just a special type of sociopath to fail to be moved by the murders of doctors, churchgoers, and police officers in the line of duty, and the could-have-been-murders of more.
I submit to you that it takes something between callous disregard and deliberate intent.
.
.
Pulling the trigger by remote control.
If you wanted certain people dead, but you wanted plausible deniability, you would have someone else do the deed for you at a distance, the greater the distance the better.
One way to do it would be to use your position on radio or TV to hurl emotional rhetoric that is calculated to appeal to people who are psychologically unstable. Some of them will go out and vote, some will go forth and spread your rant-memes, some will get into bar-room brawls over one issue or another.
But a few, who have already demonstrated a lack of respect for the law, will do more than that. Maybe they'll assault someone on the street who is black or gay or speaking Spanish in public or wearing traditional Islamic garb. Maybe they'll make a bomb and put it in the mail or plant it at a women's clinic.
Maybe they'll go out and shoot someone. Maybe they'll shoot someone who, in your heart of hearts, you want dead. If you have a list of targets in mind, such as Operation Rescue's website with crosshairs on doctors, or Palin's crosshairs on elected officials, it won't matter who gets killed first and who gets killed later: any hit will do.
This is stochastic terrorism: you heat up the waters and stir the pot, knowing full well that sooner or later a lone wolf will pop up and do the deed. The fact that it will happen is as predictable as the fact that a heated pot of water will eventually boil. But the exact time and place of each incident will remain as random as the appearance of the first bubbles in the boiling pot.
And so the unstable shooter, the sick kid or crazy grownup, will be taken into custody where they will rant a disconnected version of your own rants. The fact that they are clearly nuts will enable shifting the public discussion away from your hateful rhetoric and toward the overt insanity of the shooter or bomber.
After that, you get to go on the air and tut-tut along with everyone else, and say Oh So Sad, and all that crap. But behind the scenes you drink a toast and cheer: one down, a bunch more to go.
Or perhaps you're just crazy enough to truly believe that you really don't have anything to do with it. You collect your media star paycheck and tootle along to the next day in front of cameras and microphones, ready to do it again, as oblivious as the drunk driver who runs over a flock of schoolchildren and keeps driving, and then when the cops pull him over, says "Who, me??"
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The guilty-knowledge test.
Someone needs to corral Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage, and the rest of them, in front of a microphone and camera that are not of their own choosing.
For example think of Sixty Minutes and their famed unannounced appearances at the offices and even homes of various wrongdoers over the years. Or think of press conferences or other scheduled appearances, where someone pops up and asks the inconvenient question or two, and the question captures the headlines.
And someone needs to ask them: In light of this latest in a series of ideologically-motivated murders, are you willing to tone down your rhetoric even a little?
Listen very closely to |
from where the incident took place. The homeowner declined to be interviewed.
The suspect was transported to Albany Medical Center for treatment, and was in surgery Saturday afternoon. No charges have yet been filed."Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on earth, there can be other beings, even intelligent, created by God. This is not in contrast with our faith because we can't put limits on God's creative freedom," he said.
"Why can't we speak of a 'brother extraterrestrial'? It would still be part of creation."
Funes, who runs the observatory that is based south of Rome and in Arizona, held out the possibility that the human race might actually be the "lost sheep" of the universe.
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There could be other beings "who remained in full friendship with their creator," he said.
Christians have sometimes been at odds with scientists over whether the Bible should be read literally and issues such as creationism versus evolution have been debated for decades.
The Inquisition condemned Galileo in the 17th century for insisting that the Earth revolved around the Sun. The Roman Catholic Church did not rehabilitate him until 1992.
Funes said dialogue between faith and science could be improved if scientists learned more about the Bible and the church kept more up to date with scientific progress.
He said he believed as an astronomer that the most likely explanation for the start of the universe was "the big bang," the theory that it sprang into existence from dense matter billions of years ago. But he said this was not in conflict with faith in God as creator. "God is the creator," he said. "There is a sense to creation. We are not children of an accident."
He added: "As an astronomer, I continue to believe that God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the product of something casual but children of a good father who has a project of love in mind for us."*If you still don't know whether Damian Wayne will return from the dead or another character will become Robin, now is your time to leave!*
Peter J. Tomasi is writing three of DC's most iconic characters and he's throwing them into all kinds of action-packed madness. In BATMAN AND ROBIN, the Dark Knight will stop at nothing to bring his son, Damian, back to life. Bruce is wearing an awesome new armor and not even an entire army on Apokolips will slow him down, but now he's come face to face with the publisher's biggest villain, Darkseid. In SUPERMAN/WONDER WOMAN, he began the tale by having the two Justice Leaguers take on Atomic Skull and Major Disaster. It didn't go too well for the couple.
What can we expect from the next issue of BATMAN AND ROBIN and how'd he approach Superman and Wonder Woman's brutal defeat? We had the chance to talk with the writer about that and much more. Again, now is the time to get out if you don't want to know who the next Robin will be!
COMIC VINE: It's already been revealed that Damian Wayne is coming back and he'll basically be "the boy of steel." Can you talk a bit about Damian's new powers and how it impacts his already arrogant personality?
PETER J. TOMASI: He's going to have some other talents along with being super strong and being super fast. We're going to play out just what it means for a ten year-old boy -- you know, all ten year-old boys and girls think they're immortal -- to have all of these powers and what it's like after being resurrected on top of that. Yeah, Damian's personality is such that it'll be a very distinct way that he handles his super powers.
CV: Just how powerful is he going to be? Will he be up there with someone like Superman or way lower?
PT: I wouldn't say he's as strong as Superman. In a weird way, I haven't looked at it like a one through ten scale. I would just say he's got some really kick-ass powers that are developing and coming along as we go. He's stronger than Batman, let's put it that way!
CV: When we spoke at NYCC -- before it was announced Damian would return -- we joked that if Damian doesn't return, Nobody should. Is there still any hope to see this villain make a return?
PT: Me and Pat [Gleason] have talked quite a bit about the Born to Kill arc over time, so I'll just leave it at that and say that we definitely really like that character. And if there's some way we can organically bring him back into the fold and explore anything else on that story, then we would definitely take the opportunity to.
CV: Batman vs. Darkseid (BATMAN AND ROBIN #37) is coming out next Wednesday. We've seen so much over-the-top and crazy action in the story, so it seems pretty safe to assume Batman and Darkseid aren't just going to talk this one out?
PT: No. Actually, the big double-page spread that Pat drew in the comic is a little moment when they've got to sit down for tea and figure out just where they both stand in regards to all this stuff. A lot of tea drinking, a lot of talking! Of course I'm pulling your leg. A lot of hitting, a lot punching and kicking and screaming and yelling and spittle flying and beams flying. It's all going to be there on Apokolips. It's all-out. It's crazy, balls to the wall, kick-ass, super action.
CV: Your first issue of SUPERMAN/WONDER WOMAN had an amusing date between them, especially the taxi scene, but the ending was a rough time for the heroes -- they get seriously beat up by Major Disaster and Atomic Skull.
PT: If have the heroes always winning and never getting their asses handed to them, there's not much drama in that! You go to the end of every issue and Superman and Wonder Woman are like, "Well, we beat up their asses again!" There's not a lot to really do with that. It's a question of just somehow putting them off their game sometimes. If you can't have any decent villains that can at least do some damage, you've got no villains. You've got no heroes. You got to have that mix. I always kind of look at it where, even if they're b-level heroes, come in and do some damage. Because otherwise you can't look at this roster of villains in the company and say, "Well, Superman and Wonder Woman, they just kick everybody's ass every time!" Trust me, it was definitely a concern as I was writing it, but I knew that Doug [Mahnke] could draw the hell of it. That's why I liked Skull and Disaster because Doug could really bring a really dark and powerful feel to it. I knew they' would look really great going up against Superman and Wonder Woman. It's one of those things to play with, just to make sure the heroes are on their toes; they can't always just wipe the floor with everybody they come against. There's definitely no fun in any action scenes if they win every time!
CV: You're now writing two team-up books. If DC said you could create a third -- for example, GREEN ARROW AND GREEN LANTERN -- which two characters would you pick to write?
PT: I think the book I'd really want to do is Alfred and Titus. That's the one I'd want to do. Brave and the Bold: Alfred and Titus! On special missions together. Shaggy and Scooby! No, I don't know. Right now I'm just focused on these guys, these books, so I haven't thought of anything else at the moment. It's a lot of fun and a privilege to be working on them, the three most recognizable characters in comics. To be able to do that at the same time -- BATMAN AND ROBIN and SUPERMAN/WONDER WOMAN -- is great. It's really just a special time to be working on these and I'm working with artists that are just great. I'm really very lucky.
CV: Any chance we could eventually see a crossover with the two teams?
PT: No. At this point, they're definitely staying in their respective zones and dealing with their own private hells at the moment.
CV: Damian Wayne was just voted as our Character of Month. We're going to look at his history and one of the things we'll do is highlight some of his best covers. Do you have a favorite one?
PT: Hmmm. That's a good question. You know what? I think it's the one for [BATMAN AND ROBIN] #38. The one with that brash, all attitude feel. The bullets bouncing off of him. That's my favorite at the moment and it's just Damian on the cover. There's a great one with Damian and Nobody next to the Bat-Signal. There's a bunch but I think right now, that one sticks out. It's a nice solo cover.
CV: Good choice. What about a favorite action scene with Damian?
PT: Yeah, it's coming up, actually. There's a great scene coming up in issue #39. I think it's probably one of my favorites right now. It's a lot of fun seeing a super powered Damian doing some super powered stuff to some Gotham baddies.
CV: Damian's first Battle of the Week is against Hit-Girl. Do you have an opinion on that fight?
PT: It's pretty simple. I mean, Damian would wipe the floor with her! It would be a quick fight. Damian would take her out lickety-split. She'd go down for the count in... half a minute.
CV: Is there anything else you'd like to say about the upcoming issues?
PT: It's going to be a lot of fun seeing where Pat and I go with Damian and Bruce in BATMAN AND ROBIN for the next couple months. I'm looking forward to really showing some cool stories with Damian with super powers and poor Bruce having to deal with it.
CV: Thanks!
BATMAN AND ROBIN #37 goes on sale next Wednesday (12/17/14)A couple days ago, I ran a video post explaining how climate change was killing walruses: the ice floes that the animals are used to resting on during hunting expeditions and while rearing their young are melting as ocean temps warm. Walrus calves that can't make the trip back to shore often end up drowning. A few days before that, Matt reported that tens of thousands of walruses had been forced ashore en masse in Alaska due to the melting ice. Now, National Geographic has some footage of what that looks like. In a word, crazy.Walruses are the latest 'canary in the global warming coal mine' -- species that clearly indicate that man-caused climate change is having a discernible impact on ecosystems and wildlife already. Walruses, like polar bears are especially notable due to their direct reliance on healthy concentrations of sea ice to survive. As climate change accelerates, the ice diminishes, leaving the species in peril.
More on Walruses and Climate Change
How Climate Change is Killing Walruses (Video)
10000+ Walruses Come Ashore in Alaska As Arctic Ice Melts
Walruses Also Threatened by Climate ChangeYou want all the coolest, newest gadgets as soon as they hit the stores. Except the last year you did that, your credit card balance went through the roof. And you ended up with a house full of cool, shiny stuff, only half of which you ever used past the first week you got them. A startup called YBUY may be able to help you hold the gadget-envy just long enough to make a better-informed decision.
The concept is simple: you subscribe to the service for $24.95 a month. In exchange, you can borrow the latest home electronics, consumer gadget and high-tech kitchen appliance they have on inventory for up to 30 days. Once the time period has passed, you must either return the gadgets or buy them from the service. Or return and buy from the friendly neighborhood fence, whichever the case may be.
YBUY will ship the gadgets to customers for free, with a return label for free shipping when you decide to return it. When you buy a gadget, the $24.95 you paid for the month will be subtracted from the price, so you get free shipping, free trial and no added cost. Currently, their prices for the gadgets are the same as in retail stores, although they are looking for ways to offer discounts once they have deals in place with manufacturers.
According to the Manhattan Beach, California-based company, they’re going to curate an ever-changing roster of high-end gadgetry, so if you’re salivating over something while reading your favorite blog, you’ll likely find it on offer from the service soon. Currently, the inventory looks decent, but will likely require a few more attention-grabbers if they want people to get really excited. You can check out the site from the link below.
[YBUY]Bernie Sanders told me he would support the Democratic party nominee no matter what. Which means he will abide by their rules and he’s showing allegiance to the gang/political party. His allegiance is no longer to this so-called “political revolution.”
I think this speaks volumes.
His loyalty is now to the Democratic party. It stands to reason that if Hillary Clinton takes Bernie as her running mate, they are hoping to take his voters as well.
This way, they’ll beat the Republicans.
But as VP, he’ll have no power. Hillary Clinton is bought and sold by Wall Street. We will continue the for-profit wars abroad, which Hillary is not opposed to. The regime changes will continue; our foreign policy will continue along the same lines. The wars will continue to drain us of any money that we have, and we will suffer for it.
Most of the issues Bernie wants to tackle Hillary has already stated can’t be done: you’re not going to get healthcare for everybody and you’re not going to get free college education.
The revolution will come to an end if Bernie Sanders loses to Clinton. He will now jump on board the Democratic party’s bandwagon and become part of the norm.
I simply feel bad for all these young voters who really thought there was hope. If he’s not willing to continue the fight beyond his election, then it’s about him and nothing else.
-Jesse Ventura
WANT MORE? SUBSCRIBE FOR MORE #OFFTHEGRID UPDATES
Interested in receiving #OffTheGrid show updates, advance sneak peeks, giveaways & more awesome in-the-know info about the show? Click here to subscribe to our regular e-updates.aEL SEGUNDO, Calif. -- Coach Luke Walton said a teammate spoke to Lonzo Ball about the rookie point guard walking away from a scuffle toward the end of the Los Angeles Lakers-Phoenix Suns game on Friday night.
While the altercation between Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Tyler Ulis did not escalate as players from both sides broke things up, Ball walked by the two players as they refused to back down from each other. When Caldwell-Pope and Ulis started shoving each other, Ball paused to look back and then kept walking to the Lakers bench before stopping again and looking from afar.
"Someone on our team talked with him," Walton said after the Lakers' practice Saturday, without disclosing who it was. "It's all part of the learning process."
When asked to reveal who spoke to Ball, Walton said, "That's a locker room thing, unless they want to share it. What our players talk about behind the doors I'm not going to repeat to the media."
The even-keeled Ball explained that he was trying to avoid any further trouble.
"It's the NBA," Ball said after the Lakers lost 122-113 to the Suns. "People ain't really gonna fight. I ain't trying to get no technical."
Walton said he could "absolutely" see how some would consider Ball's actions a smart move.
"I thought [Ball] was smart just staying away from it," said teammate Brook Lopez, who walked over to try to break things up. "He was staying out of trouble. I feel like I'm big enough where I can get in the middle of it. I'm not going to do anything crazy. I'm just trying to get everything under control.
"I just try to get in there and break it up," the 7-foot Lopez added. "I'll just try to get in the middle of it. If someone throws a punch, maybe it'll hit me. I can take it. Unlike [my twin brother] Robin, probably."
Walton was not concerned with how some on the internet were critical of Ball walking away from the scuffle.
"I don't really care about how that looks because our guys love Zo," Walton said. "He's one of the few rookies I've ever seen that everybody is just kind of drawn toward him. Everyone really wants him to succeed. They all love playing with his group, whether it's practice or the game.
"I think they all know what that looked like isn't what Zo is about and isn't symbolizing what his feelings are on that type of situation. I know the general public and the internet world likes to do what they do."Think you bear some resemblance to U.S. President Barack Obama? Well, your likeness can't possibly be as uncanny as this guy's, who had to make a website just to bring an end to all the confusion.
I Look Like Barack Obama is more than a personal website; it's a public service. Chicago-dwelling software engineer Trevor (who asked us to withhold his last name) is informing the public that, hard as it is to believe, he is not the president of the United States.
Okay, so maybe they don't look exactly alike — or at all alike, for that matter. But it's a clever campaign and we're totally going with it.
To address the skeptics that are perhaps less inclined to play along, Trevor used an advanced facial recognition software embedded deep within Microsoft Paint to illuminate the similarities.
Did the hair on your neck just stand up? Sure, there are a couple of differences you might be noticing. As Trevor puts it, "While both of us are half-white, Barack's other half is black, but my other half is also white." On the other hand, the two share 98.5% of the same DNA. Sure, they also share that same DNA with chimpanzees, but that's beside the point.
As we near the presidential elections, the campaigns are gaining momentum on the Internet. Naturally, I Look Like Barack Obama is spiking too. But Trevor actually started the site back in 2004 after he saw Obama speak at the Democratic National Convention.
"I was mesmerized," Trevor told Mashable. "Who was this guy on TV, and why did he look so much like me? I couldn't believe it. It's the same reaction that other people get when they visit my site."
Trevor says 20% of the response to the site can be described as confusion. Emails are either intended for the Prez himself, or from people who are in denial that these two men are, in fact, not the same person.
"People think both of the pictures on the front page are Obama and I'm just messing with them," Trevor said. "They're not! One is actually me, and you'll just have to guess which!"
We understand that it's going to take some getting used to before everyone's comfortable with the fact that there are basically two Barack Obamas out there. If you're looking for harder evidence, Trevor is available to appear as his doppleganger at your bachelorette party, office retreat or Bar Mitzvah. Nothing says mazel tov like a presidential impersonator.
Image courtesy egadapparel, Flickr.What Happens When A New Trauma Center Opens In Your Back Yard?
For trauma centers, it’s a zero sum game. The number of trauma patients in a given geographic location is fixed. (Actually, it goes up slowly over time as the population increases). So if a new center opens, those patients are redistributed. The new center gets more patients because they are now “designated.” And the existing centers get fewer because there are not as many patients left.
This is a phenomenon that is growing more widespread as more lower level trauma centers come online. Areas like Phoenix, Denver, and parts of Florida are particularly hard hit. Established Level I and II centers are complaining because their volumes are down, which can cause a hit to the financial bottom line.
Seems to make sense. But is it true? A time series analysis was carried out using Pennsylvania trauma system data to gauge the impact of opening new Level II and III centers on an existing Level I center. Ten years of data were gathered, looking at volume and mortality changes during the following sequence of designations:
A new Level II opens 70 months into the study period
A new Level III opens at 95 months, then closed 11 months later
A new Level II and Level III open at 107 months
Here are the factoids, from the perspective of the Level I center:
Volume at the Level I center grew slowly over the 70 months that no new trauma centers were operating
Volume dropped 10% when the first Level II opened, and 13% when the Level II and III opened simultaneously
10% when the first Level II opened, and 13% when the Level II and III opened simultaneously There was no change when the temporarily accredited Level III opened
Overall, the Level I center treated 1,903 fewer patients than expected after the other centers opened, an overall decrease of 10%
Average injury severity and revised trauma score remained the same at the Level I, but mortality decreased (!)
Bottom line: More trauma centers generally equals fewer patients for existing ones. Unfortunately, the decision to become a trauma center these days, especially levels II and III, tends to be based on business factors. The American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma (ACSCOT) released a position statement early this year regarding the designation of multiple trauma centers in a geographic location. They basically have left it up to the individual states or trauma systems to optimize placement or limit numbers. They also emphasize that the numbers need to support best patient care, not necessarily best business strategy. Unfortunately, politics will not let this happen. I believe that the tightening of verification requirements for centers that are verified by the ACSCOT (as in the new Orange book criteria) will serve to shake out the centers that barely meet them. But only time will tell.
Reference:In his book A Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart imagines a future in which the very smell of books is disgusting to hyper-digital New Yorkers. That day is still far off, but it’s true that many of us have eschewed printed books for digital readers. And as print dies out, the pleasures of a freshly printed page go with it: the feeling of the pages, the sound of a binding cracking open, even the smell of glue and paper. For those longing for the latter, a new scent called Paper Passion might do the trick.
“The smell of a freshly printed book is the best smell in the world,” says Karl Lagerfield, who designed the packaging for Paper Passion. The German superstar was chatting with publisher Gerhard Steidl when the idea for the fragrance came up last year in Milan, at an event held by Wallpaper* magazine. Surprisingly enough, the magazine’s publishers jumped at the chance to expand into the fragrance business. They commissioned famed perfumer Geza Schoen to attempt to recreate the scent.
“It was hard,” says Schoen. “The smell of printed paper is dry and fatty; they are not notes you often work with.” The perfumer’s final scent is made from only five woody ingredients–an incredibly simple recipe, considering that many perfumes have upwards of a hundred. Lagerfeld christened the scent Paper Passion and designed the packaging–a white-bound book whose pages are cut out to hold the glass bottle. Texts from Günter Grass and Wallpaper* EIC Tony Chambers accompany fill the book’s red pages.
This isn’t the first high-fashion fragrance to rely on unusual–even industrial–scents. Comme des Garcons’ classic Odeur 53 smells of Xerox fluid and ozone, for example. But Paper Passion is perhaps the first to appeal to print devotees, for whom buying a new book is also an occasion to breath deeply.
Paper Passion is out now, timed to coincide with the release of the annual Handmade issue of Wallpaper*. Buy it on Steidl’s website here.
[Image: Gayvoronskaya_Yana/Shutterstock]An investor sits in front of an electronic board showing stock information at a brokerage house in Beijing, China, September 15, 2015. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
By Samuel Shen and Pete Sweeney
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Chinese stocks dropped by almost 4 percent on Tuesday, denting hopes that a slew of regulatory measures issued by Beijing over the past three months had brought some stability to the market.
Concerns about the Chinese economy mean stocks are down 6 percent so far this week, with the drop exacerbated by thin trading volumes as many investors opt to stay on the sidelines.
China's benchmark CSI300 index of the biggest listed stocks in Shanghai and Shenzhen closed down nearly 4 percent on Tuesday, while the Shanghai Composite Index dropped 3.55 percent to end at 3,004, just above the psychologically important 3,000 mark.
The fall will be of dismay to Chinese policymakers trying to halt the market slide, given that up until this week trade in September had been relatively steady compared with the previous two tumultuous months.
Chinese equity markets have dropped around 40 percent since mid-June despite frantic attempts by the authorities to curb speculation and pressure state-owned institutions to buy up stocks.
However, persistent doubts that China's economic growth this year will meet the government's official forecast of 7 percent are deterring many investors from re-entering the market.
Some retail investors who spoke to Reuters said they are waiting for the Shanghai Composite index to go down to 2,500 before they start buying again.
Small cap stocks have posted even larger falls, with the CSI300 IT index down 7.4 percent on Tuesday and Shenzhen's growth board ChiNext 5.3 percent lower.
"With a slim chance of making a profit in this market, money is not coming in," said Zhou Lin, analyst at Huatai Securities.
Data showed heavy investor redemptions last month, with total net assets of Chinese stock funds slumping 44 percent to 724.8 billion yuan ($114 billion).
Investors' hesitation comes despite Beijing's attempts to revive slowing economic growth by ramping up government spending. Data on Tuesday showed fiscal expenditure in August was 25.9 percent higher than a year ago.
The spending increase to 1.28 trillion yuan ($201 billion) was the biggest percentage rise in central and local government fiscal expenditure since April, when it leapt 33 percent, figures from the Ministry of Finance showed.
With traditional monetary policy responses such as interest rate cuts having less impact in reviving economic activity than in the past, China is trying to increase fiscal stimulus to shore up short-term growth and fend off growing deflationary pressures.
Reuters reported exclusively on Monday that Chinese authorities had seized 1 trillion yuan ($157 billion) from local governments in unused budget allocations. Sources said the funds would be used to pay for investments.
Data in the past week has pointed to a further cooling in the Chinese economy in August, adding to expectations GDP growth in the July-September quarter would be below 7 percent.
In the latest evidence of the impact of the economic slowdown, Volkswagen and other major carmakers in China have started to rein in production, wages and costs, industry sources said.
Still, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said on Tuesday he was confident Beijing's measures would prove effective.
"China's economy has recently slowed, with (weakness seen) mainly in the manufacturing sector. But it is expected to grow stably with support from the authorities' fiscal and monetary measures," he said at a news conference following the BOJ's decision to leave its monetary policy unchanged. ($1=6.3692 yuan)
(Additional reporting by BEIJING newsroom, Nathaniel Taplin and Kazunori Takada in SHANGHAI, Andreas Cremer and Norihiko Shirouzu in FRANKFURT; Writing by Rachel Armstrong; Editing by Neil Fullick)Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Win McNamee/Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump's victory on Election Day has put some of President Barack Obama's hallmark achievements in jeopardy.
Trump has come out strongly against almost all of the top initiatives Obama spent eight years working on — the Asia pivot, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, Obamacare, and the Iran nuclear deal — and they're fragile enough that Trump could reverse course fairly easily.
"You have an outsider president being replaced by the most outsider candidate ever elected," Ian Bremmer, a geopolitical analyst and president of the Eurasia Group, told Business Insider via email.
"There's nothing like one upsmanship, big league, to destroy your legacy."
Iran nuclear deal
Trump has called the Iran deal one of "the worst deals ever made by any country in history" and threatened to rescind or renegotiate the agreement that gives Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbing its nuclear program.
"Trump has repeatedly slammed the deal as being a bad deal — the assumption is that he’s going to do something," Jonathan Schanzer, a Middle East expert who is a vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider after the election.
Schanzer also admits that given Trump's ambiguity on the subject, it's "extremely difficult" to anticipate how negotiations would play out.
After the election, Iran's foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has called on Trump to stick to the agreement. And in June, before Trump had officially become the Republican nominee for president, Zarif said Iran would reject any attempt from the US to renegotiate the deal.
It "is not an Iran-US agreement for the Republican frontrunner or anybody else to renegotiate," he said. "It's an international understanding annexed to a [United Nations] Security Council resolution."
Bremmer said he's skeptical about whether Trump will actually upend the deal. But even if he didn't, his administration will likely dilute the image of the Iran nuclear deal as a bright spot in Obama's presidency.
AP
The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Asia pivot
While much of Obama's foreign policy doctrine has been consumed by wars in the Middle East, a pivot to Asia was supposed to be a prominent part of Obama's legacy.
But since Obama's final trip to Asia as president turned out to be a bit of a disaster, that legacy looks to be uncertain.
And Trump winning the presidency means that Obama's controversial trade deal is likely dead in the water.
"Trump's victory kills the [Trans-Pacific Partnership] and replaces it with 'America First,'" Bremmer said. "China sees this as its moment to seize primary leadership in Asia."
The Trans-Pacific Partnership would lower tariffs for 12 countries around the Pacific, not including China. Obama was hoping to get the deal through Congress during the lame-duck period before he leaves office, but that now seems highly unlikely.
Trump is also unlikely to continue Obama's pivot to Asia, considering his campaign-trail rhetoric about putting American interests above all else.
A small group of demonstrators stand outside of the HIlton Hotel and Suites prior to former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, president of the The Heritage Foundation, speaking at a "Defund Obamacare Tour" rally in Indianapolis August 26, 2013. Thomson Reuters
Obamacare
On the campaign trail, Trump often expressed the desire to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare.
He has called Obamacare a "total disaster" and promised to replace it with "the finest healthcare plan there is."
But since the election, he has softened that position, saying he'd be open to amending it instead.
And in any case, even Republican leaders admit that repealing the Affordable Care Act would be difficult.
"Domestically there's much more of Obama's legacy that will stay intact, likely including some piece of his most controversial policy, Obamacare," Bremmer said.
Alex Lockie contributed to this report.Jack Wilshere is not on the pre-season tour to Australia as he recovers from the broken leg he suffered at the end of last season, but Arsene Wenger seems keen to keep the midfielder for the upcoming campaign.
Although he’s now into the final 12 months of his current deal. the Arsenal manager doesn’t seem keen to sell him, and has urged the 25 year old to fight for his place in the team.
“I think Jack will be with Arsenal next season, yes,” said Wenger, according to the Mirror.
“I will give you a very focused answer on that, that he has to work hard to come back and fight for a place in the team.
“But once he is ready, when he comes back, he will not be far from practising with the team.”
It doesn’t sound hugely promising in terms of his first team prospects, especially after a season on loan with Bournemouth where he did fine but not much more.
Rumours this week suggest Italian side Sampdoria are interested in signing him, and it may well be a case that Arsenal decide to cash in this summer despite Wenger’s words.
Let’s see what happens.CALGARY — A Calgary man who won $40 million seven months ago and then kept it secret from his own children says he will donate his entire winnings to charity.
Widower Tom Crist was the winner of the Lotto Max jackpot on May 3.
“Cancer is a big one because my wife passed away from cancer, two years ago in February,” Crist said Monday.
“She was fairly young,” Crist told CBC Radio. “She beat it for six years before it finally caught up to her.”
“I just retired at the end of September so I was fortunate enough in my career to set myself up and my kids anyway, and there was no doubt in my mind where that money was going to go, it was going to go to charity.”
Crist, whose wife, Jan, died of lung cancer in 2012, said that he didn’t know which charities he planned to give to specifically, except for Tom Baker Cancer Centre.
“Tom Baker will be one of them because they treated her,” Crist told the Calgary Herald. “Tom Baker’s dear to my heart, no question.”
Crist didn’t tell any of his four children that he won the $40-million until Monday and they will now help him with the charities.
“It’s just going to unfold next year, so we’ll decide as a family what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it,” he told the Herald.
“The nice part is you can keep donating for years and years. It’ll be in my family trust … and we’ll just carry on.”
Crist plays both Lotto Max and Lotto 6/49 by subscription, meaning players can pay for their selections for up to a year at a time.
Subscribers’ numbers are checked for them by the Western Canada Lottery Corp. after each draw and they are automatically paid any prizes won.
In the case of any prize over $10,000, subscribers receive a telephone call first.
Crist, the retired CEO and president of electronics company EECOL, says he never expected a call — which he received while playing golf in California — telling him he’d won the largest lotto prize ever in Calgary.
I just retired at the end of September so I was fortunate enough in my career to set myself up and my kids anyway
“I wasn’t even sure which game I’d won on, or what the numbers were,” he said after his prize was announced Monday. “I’ve paid for the subscription when I get the renewal notice every year, and then I just file it.
“Sometimes I’d get a cheque for $10 or $20, but I never expected this.”
Crist’s prize is also the largest won on a lottery subscription within the Prairie-North lotteries region.
After an extended holiday in Southeast Asia in the new year, he will turn his attention to the donations, starting with the Tom Baker centre.
“I’ll go up and talk to them about how we can utilize the money. How do we get something in memory of (Jan)?”
With files from the Calgary HeraldCHICAGO, Nov. 8 -- President-elect Barack Obama spoke to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday, another in a series of phone calls he has received from leaders of other nations.
A Kremlin statement said Obama and Medvedev "expressed the determination to create constructive and positive interaction for the good of global stability and development" and agreed that their countries had a common responsibility to address "serious problems of a global nature."
To that end, according to the Kremlin statement, Medvedev and Obama think an "early bilateral meeting" should be arranged.
Obama's office did not issue a statement describing the call.
A Bush administration plan for setting up a missile shield close to Russia's borders has been a sore point with the Kremlin and has added to troubles in its relationship with the United States.
On Wednesday, the day after Obama's election, Medvedev threatened to move short-range missiles to Russia's borders with NATO allies.
During the presidential campaign, Obama expressed skepticism about the missile defense system, saying that it would require much more vigorous testing to ensure it would work and justify the billions of dollars it would cost.
Obama foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough said Saturday that Obama had "a good conversation" with Polish President Lech Kaczynski on Friday about the U.S.-Polish alliance but that Obama had made no commitment on the missile shield plan.
"His position is as it was throughout the campaign, that he supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is proved to be workable," McDonough said.
That was in contrast to a statement issued by the Polish president. Kaczynski said Obama "emphasized the importance of the strategic partnership of Poland and the United States and expressed hope in the continuation of political and military cooperation between our countries. He also said that the missile defense project would continue."
In Madrid, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero told reporters Saturday that he had spoken by telephone with Obama a day earlier and that they discussed their desire to meet each other and work together, though no concrete plans were made.
"We had a very, very cordial conversation," Zapatero said.
Obama's office had little to say in response to a statement by Khaled Mashaal, leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, that he is ready |
on. Fruit bats, however, are widely eaten in rural west Africa – either smoked, grilled or in a spicy soup
The boy was bitten and passed the infection on to his mother and both were dead within a week. The disease was then spread far and wide by mourners who came to the funeral.
Scientists have long believed that bats are the main carriers for the disease but it is rare for them to pass it on to man.
Most of the previous outbreaks have been caused by meat from dead infected animals collected by hunters who then sell it on.
Fruit bats, however, are widely eaten in rural west Africa – either smoked, grilled or in a spicy soup.
The team lead by epidemiologist Fabian Leendertz, a disease ecologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, are expected to publish their results in a major journal soon.
Initial research believed that a new strain of Ebola had emerged in west Africa but according to Herr Leendertz the strain of the disease is one related to as Zaire ebolavirus, identified more than 10 years ago in the Congo.
Straw-coloured fruit bats taking off from largest colony on Earth in Kasanka National Park, Zambia.
Herr Leendertz’s team believe that an infected straw-coloured fruit bat brought the disease to Guinea. The mammals are known to travel long distances and usually settle in forests near cities.
More than 1,300 people have died in the current epidemic many in Liberia.
Herr Leendertz said: "We spent eight days in Meliandoua. They told us they regularly catch bats, like every other village in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. The evidence is not 100 per cent and we can only say that it is possible.
‘They can travel far in one night. I don't think an individual bat or colony migrated all the way from Congo or Gabon to west Africa. These big colonies are connected. There is a possibility for the virus to mix between colonies. [The bats] share the same fruit. It is likely not to have even been one species of bat. The virus may jump from one species to another."Tánaiste Frances Fitzgerald received three emails advising her of the legal strategy being used by the former Garda commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan against Garda whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe.
Ms Fitzgerald has been under intense political pressure in recent days to outline her knowledge of the approach taken by Ms O’Sullivan at the O’Higgins commission, which was examining allegations of Garda malpractice.
Up until last week the Tánaiste had insisted she did not become aware of the strategy, which sought to undermine Sgt McCabe’s motivation and credibility, until it was made public in May 2016.
However, correspondence released by the Department of Justice on Monday night showed how Ms Fitzgerald was contacted on two separate dates in 2015 about the issue.
An email was sent to the Tánaiste on May 15th and two separate emails were sent to her on July 4th.
The May 15th email was responded to on May 25th by the Tánaiste’s private secretary, who confirmed she had “noted” the contents of the correspondence outlining the legal strategy being pursued.
Two emails were sent to Ms Fitzgerald in a fortnight from Department of Justice deputy secretary Ken O’Leary, who advised her of a telephone call he had with Ms O’Sullivan.
Email threads discovered in search of records
The commissioner had informed Mr O’Leary that media queries had been submitted to the Garda press office about the “aggressive” approach being adopted by her legal team at the commission of inquiry.
Mr O’Leary went on to advise Ms Fitzgerald how she should respond if questioned about this. She was told to outline her belief that Sgt McCabe was a valued member of the force and that this was also the view of Ms O’Sullivan.
Ms Fitzgerald was also instructed to say Mr McCabe was entitled to confidentiality in his dealings with the Garda authorities and therefore it would not be appropriate for her to comment.
Mr O’Leary’s email also advises Ms Fitzgerald to state that the approach taken by Ms O’Sullivan is a matter for the commission and it would “be wrong for anyone to make public comment which might interfere with or attempt to influence those proceedings in an way”.
Trawl of documents
This email was also sent to Ms Fitzgerald’s two special advisers at the time, the secretary general of the Department of Justice Noel Waters and Ms Fitzgerald’s private secretary among others. The timing of the email was 8.05pm. At 8.20pm, Mr O’Leary forwarded the email to Ms O’Sullivan for her information.
At 9.15pm the former Garda commissioner responded to Mr O’Leary with the Garda press office’s response to the press queries. Fifteen minutes later, at 9.30pm, Mr O’Leary wrote to the Tánaiste offering her further advice on how to respond.
On this occasion, he said “the conduct of the Garda case at the commission is entirely a matter for the Garda Commissioner on the basis of the legal advice given to her”.
The emails were unearthed as part of a trawl of documents in the Department of Justice ordered by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
Such correspondence should have been forwarded to the Charleton tribunal, which is examining this matter.
Mr Waters compiled a report for Ms Fitzgerald, Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan and secretary general of the Department of the Taoiseach Martin Fraser. It was sent to all three last Friday. However, it did not include all details of correspondence but did include the two emails cited.
Mr Waters said an instruction had now been issued to all officials to notify him of any further records and to deliver them to the Charleton tribunal “without delay”.
The tribunal has written to all the officials in the Department of Justice who received the emails seeking statements.Image caption The Amondawa were first "discovered" by anthropologists in 1986
An Amazonian tribe has no abstract concept of time, say researchers.
The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space - as in our idea of, for example, "working through the night".
The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognise events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept.
The idea is a controversial one, and further study will bear out if it is also true among other Amazon languages.
The Amondawa were first contacted by the outside world in 1986, and now researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil have begun to analyse the idea of time as it appears in Amondawa language.
"We're really not saying these are a 'people without time' or 'outside time'," said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.
"Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events," he told BBC News.
"What we don't find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don't have a notion of time which is something the events occur in."
The Amondawa language has no word for "time", or indeed of time periods such as "month" or "year".
The people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the community.
But perhaps most surprising is the team's suggestion that there is no "mapping" between concepts of time passage and movement through space.
Ideas such as an event having "passed" or being "well ahead" of another are familiar from many languages, forming the basis of what is known as the "mapping hypothesis".
Image caption The Amondawa have no words for time periods such as "month" or "year"
But in Amondawa, no such constructs exist.
"None of this implies that such mappings are beyond the cognitive capacities of the people," Professor Sinha explained. "It's just that it doesn't happen in everyday life."
When the Amondawa learn Portuguese - which is happening more all the time - they have no problem acquiring and using these mappings from the language.
The team hypothesises that the lack of the time concept arises from the lack of "time technology" - a calendar system or clocks - and that this in turn may be related to the fact that, like many tribes, their number system is limited in detail.
Absolute terms
These arguments do not convince Pierre Pica, a theoretical linguist at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who focuses on a related Amazonian language known as Mundurucu.
"To link number, time, tense, mood and space by a single causal relationship seems to me hopeless, based on the linguistic diversity that I know of," he told BBC News.
Dr Pica said the study "shows very interesting data" but argues quite simply that failing to show the space/time mapping does not refute the "mapping hypothesis".
Small societies like the Amondawa tend to use absolute terms for normal, spatial relations - for example, referring to a particular river location that everyone in the culture will know intimately rather than using generic words for river or riverbank.
These, Dr Pica argued, do not readily lend themselves to being co-opted in the description of time.
"When you have an absolute vocabulary - 'at the water', 'upstream', 'downstream' and so on, you just cannot use it for other domains, you cannot use the mapping hypothesis in this way," he said.
In other words, while the Amondawa may perceive themselves moving through time and spatial arrangements of events in time, the language may not necessarily reflect it in an obvious way.
What may resolve the conflict is further study, Professor Sinha said.
"We'd like to go back and simply verify it again before the language disappears - before the majority of the population have been brought up knowing about calendar systems."The trial for a Wyoming transsexual accused of raping a 10-year-old girl in a bathroom began on Monday, reports the Billings Gazette.
Miguel Martinez, a biological male who identifies as a woman and goes by the name Michelle, allegedly "invited" the 10-year-old into a bathroom on March 23, where he proceeded to grope her breasts and genitals and penetrate her.
After the alleged assault, the victim reportedly told police officials that “it hurt inside” before breaking down in tears.
As noted by the Gazette, "Nurses at the Wyoming Medical Center completed a sexual assault exam and found redness and abrasions on the girl's genitalia."
According to court documents, Martinez was found "extremely intoxicated" by police and accused the 10-year-old of "talking crap" and making up accusations as a "publicity stunt." The Casper Star Tribune reports:
Police officers found Martinez passed out on a couch in a home in Evansville. Martinez was extremely intoxicated and hard to wake up, according to the documents. Officers drove Martinez to the Casper Police Department for an interview. Martinez became “noticeably hostile and defensive” when a detective began asking about the girl’s allegations. Martinez said that the girl had been “talking crap” earlier that day and denied being a child molester. Martinez said the accusations were a “publicity stunt” before refusing to speak further with the detective.
The perp was reportedly a "family friend."
Martinez was charged with one count each of first-degree and second-degree sexual abuse of a minor and faces up to 70 years in the slammer. He's entered a plea of not guilty.
H/T Peter HassonTwo coveted basketball recruits visit IU
Buy Photo Indiana Basketball recruits Thon Maker,left, and Thomas Bryant,right, walk off the Hoosiers court Saturday, March 7, 2015, afternoon at Assembly Hall in Bloomington IN. The Spartans defeated the Hoosiers 74-72. (Photo: Matt Kryger / The Star)
What has been arguably the most hectic week of Indiana's basketball season to date will be followed by its biggest recruiting weekend. IU will host two blue-chip prospects for Saturday's regular-season finale against Michigan State.
Huntington Prep forward Thomas Bryant, a 2015 McDonald's All-American, will attend, according to his high school coach.
And a source confirmed Saturday to The Indianapolis Star that Thon Maker, a five-star center and one of the country's top players in 2015, will also be in Bloomington. Maker, a 7-foot forward/center, is the No. 8 player in the 2015 class, according to 247Sports. He also has offers from Kansas, Kentucky, Duke and Arizona, among others.
Either player would fill an obvious need for the Hoosiers inside, given their current lack of post depth. Coach Tom Crean has brought McDonald's All American forwards to Indiana twice recently, Cody Zeller in 2011 and Noah Vonleh in 2013.
Crean is also currently facing questions about his own job performance. Indiana has lost four of its last six games, and fans vocalized their frustration in the form of boos at the end of Tuesday's 14-point home loss to Iowa.
Indiana is currently oversigned by two spots in the 2015 class, with Juwan Morgan and OG Anunoby set to join the program this summer. The Hoosiers do not have any seniors currently on their roster.
Syracuse, one of Bryant's other finalists, was hit with sweeping NCAA sanctions on Friday, according to a report from Syracuse.com. The report states that the men's basketball program must forfeit three scholarships per season over the next four seasons, and that coach Jim Boeheim is suspended for nine ACC games.
Follow Star reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/1GaZaDRscreenshot of reviews on ((coincidence detector))
The alt-right Internet community has started to sneak into the fringes of the mainstream Internet recently, undoubtedly helped along by unofficial alt-right idol Donald Trump’s rise to prominence in the presidential race. And this means more people are getting introduced to the racist memes popular in this corner of the online universe.
This week, Mic wrote about (((echoes))), an anti-Semitic punctuation-based code for identifying Jewish people; a name appearing in between parentheses indicates the person is Jewish.
(((Echoes))) is also the basis of a Google Chrome extension called “Coincidence Detector,” which automatically placed those parentheses around more than 8,000 names, whenever those names appeared on a webpage viewed in Chrome with the extension active.
The extension’s description in the Chrome store sarcastically explained that its purpose was to “help you detect total coincidences about who has been involved in certain political movements and media empires.”
Joe Veix uncovered the huge list of names that the extension used shortly after Mic published its piece. The full list was uploaded to gitlab by the Coincidence Detector’s creators.
The names on the list were partially crowdsourced by the members of the anti-Semitic forum that started (((echoes))) in the first place.
(((Echoes))), Mic wrote, comes from a podcast hosted by the Right Stuff blog, where a segment involved the repeated use of a sound effect that “gave Jewish names a cartoonish ‘echo’ ” whenever a name was said on the show. The parentheses started appearing around 2014, and they are the written equivalent of that sound effect.
[New York Times staffer tweets out op-ed critical of Trump, faces anti-Semitic avalanche]
Recently, the meme appeared in a series of anti-Semitic Twitter harassment campaigns targeting journalists who have written about the Trump campaign — or even just tweeted about it. For instance:
The rise of this sort of Internet-savvy racist trolling has accompanied the ascension of the alt-right, an amorphous, politically right-leaning group that has attracted the loyalty of the casually anti-politically correct; the racist meme lords who are mainly in it for the trolling and jokes; and more traditional white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
The alt-right existed before the Trump candidacy, but his political rise has had a kind of coalescing effect: the different parts of the alt-right all know who their enemies are, and they’re some of the same groups that the Trump campaign has run against. Namely, those enemies are establishment conservatives, liberal “social justice warriors,” and most of the mainstream media.
[Trolls turned Tay, Microsoft’s fun millennial AI bot, into a genocidal maniac]
(((Echoes))) might read as just another instance of racist 4chan /pol/ nonsense, but it’s becoming harder to ignore as it creeps into more public spaces. The driving force behind the meme is the same old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish people that racists have used to justify targeting people for harassment in the past.
Although some of those behind the (((echoes))) meme might see all the media attention this week as a victory, it has also at least resulted in the disappearance of the extension. When Mic first reported on it, Coincidence Detector had more than 2,000 users and a five-star rating. It’s since been removed from Google’s Chrome web store.
And the original list of names, too, has been deleted (yet still visible here, as one reader noted), presumably by the extension’s creators. In its place was another list, comprised of just a single name: “Trump.”
[this post has been updated]
Liked that? Try these:It was a chaotic Thursday morning at St. Paul’s Como Park Zoo.
Zookeepers were supposed to double-check all the exhibit doors, but on a busy summer day, no one noticed that one didn’t get locked.
But the gorillas noticed.
Three of them, a group of bachelors, did a little exploring just before the park was to open. Around 9:50 a.m., a zookeeper noticed that Sampson, Jabir and Virgil were missing from the replica jungle in the indoor Gorilla Forest. A keeper radioed a Code 99 — a zoo alert reserved for potentially dangerous animals and situations.
Allison Jungheim, senior zookeeper, said the gorillas had been in the exhibit only 10 minutes before discovering the unlatched door. They pushed through into a secure behind-the-scenes area. Zoo staff knew the apes were safe but because of radio transmission weren’t sure exactly where they were, Jungheim said.
They found the gorillas wandering through the 5-foot-wide hall behind the orangutan and gorilla exhibit. One was bouncing balls, fascinated by the items in a closet filled with activities and food for the animals.
Face to face: Virgil the gorilla was back in his area at the Como Zoo Thursday after he and two other bachelors briefly got out of their exhibit.
“Any of our animals — if given an opportunity to explore a space not in their own area — are going to check it out,” Jungheim said.
By 10:10 a.m., Jabir and Sampson were back in their habitat. Virgil, the most curious of the trio, was exploring the closet, and it took some coaxing to get him back in his area, Jungheim said.
“No one was ever in danger,” said Matt Reinartz, Como Park Zoo and Conservatory spokesman. “The gorillas were always in a secure, gorilla-proof location. They just happened to be in a location they shouldn’t have been in.”
Six zoo camps were running at the time, but the campers were secure during the incident, Reinartz said. Most visitors only noticed that the opening was delayed until 10:40, from the usual 10 a.m.
The gorillas are big — Virgil is 450 pounds, Jabir is 420 pounds and Sampson is 390 pounds.
Como Zoo’s emergency response procedure depends on the animals involved, Jungheim said. All zookeepers and the general curator are trained to secure animals and the public. In a Code 99, the zoo also calls in its veterinarian at the University of Minnesota. Jungheim brought the tranquilizer, just in case a gorilla acted up.
The jokes flew all day from gorilla fans, and the escapees even got their own Twitter account, @ComoZooGorilla, with the tag: “I’m not stuck in here with you, you’re all stuck in here with me.”
Como’s last great gorilla escape was in 1994. Casey II climbed over a concrete wall and roamed through the zoo for about half an hour as visitors scattered.
The gorilla’s space has been redesigned since then, Reinartz said. Unlike previous designs that let the audience look down at the gorillas, the Como Zoo exhibits now put the gorillas up high so they can feel dominant, he said.
The Gorilla Forest opened in June 2013 with six new residents — plus one familiar face, a 525-pound silverback named Schroeder. The 13,000-square-foot habitat features new interiors and two new outside areas that make up the largest all-mesh gorilla enclosure in North America.
Kalley Ravndalen, 18, walked past the gorilla exhibit Thursday afternoon after hearing about the morning incident.
“It’s a little scary,” said Ravndalen, who is from Lakeville.
Human error is a big factor in animal escapes, Jungheim said.
“Mistakes happen, and that’s the long and short of it,” she said. “But the fact that nobody was hurt, nobody was injured, everyone was safe, all animals are now secure — it makes it all good.”WASHINGTON — US and Russian officials have quietly stepped up contacts in recent weeks to try to advance a deal on the creation of a safe zone in southern Syria, Al-Monitor has learned.
The talks included a meeting in Jordan in late May, a former diplomat from the region said on condition of anonymity. Russia, Iran and Turkey negotiated the creation of four zones aimed at de-escalating tensions between Bashar al-Assad's forces and the armed Syrian opposition in early May, and the Donald Trump administration is now trying to see what role the United States can play.
“Last week, the Americans and Russia met in Jordan with the Jordanians to discuss these zones in the south,” the former diplomat said. “The meeting in Jordan was one part where the US and Russia, Israel and Jordan can work together to have [a] de-escalation zone in the south of Syria.”
The United States is particularly concerned that any deal over the future of Syria preserves the stability of its close allies Israel and Jordan. Israel for its part has said it would not tolerate an Iranian presence on its border with Syria.
The source said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is "in charge of dealing with Russia" amid allegations that the Trump presidential campaign conspired with Moscow. The former diplomat said Brett McGurk, the US special presidential envoy to the global coalition against the Islamic State, and US Syria envoy Michael Ratney participated in the Jordan talks. Neither official responded to queries.
The Trump administration priority on Syria “is to stop the killing," the source said. "That's why they are willing to watch what Russia is doing[.] They are willing to give Russia a major role to play … to find a solution … in a way that Assad, in the endgame, should be out, and Iran should be out.”
The Americans and Russians have been meeting quietly on Syria without announcing it, a senior international diplomat who works on Syria confirmed to Al-Monitor.
“They met more than once,” the senior diplomat, speaking not for attribution, said, referring to the Americans and Russians. “[It is] difficult to say where they are at... but they seem to have rather serious discussions. And at the same time [they are] trying to increase their bargaining power through moves on the ground [to see] who has the upper hand in the Euphrates valley.”
“The border with Jordan [part of which is a de-escalation area] and up to the Euphrates must, in my view, be subject to Russian-US understandings, and therefore implicit understandings between [the government of Syria], Jordan and Israel,” he added.
The State Department would not confirm the Jordan meeting but said it is working exhaustively to try to reduce the violence in Syria.
“The United States remains committed to supporting a diplomatic resolution to the Syrian conflict, one which can bring about a more representative and peaceful Syria, free of terrorism,” a State Department official, speaking not for attribution, told Al-Monitor. “We have long said there is no military solution to the crisis in Syria and have worked tirelessly to achieve a de-escalation of violence and a defeat of [the Islamic State], al-Qaeda and other terrorists.”
Congress, however, has been blunter. Speaking at a May 25 meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., revealed that Tillerson had asked Congress to delay action on new Russia sanctions while he worked to secure an agreement on Syria.
Tillerson has asked “for a short window of opportunity … to change the trajectory of our relationship with Russia,” Corker said last week before Congress recessed until June 5. Corker warned that his patience was wearing thin and promised reporters that Tillerson would be grilled on the issue during his mid-June appearance before the Senate Budget Committee to defend Trump's FY 2018 budget blueprint.
“Unless Secretary Tillerson can come in early in this next work session” and report “these things are occurring that are changing the trajectory” of US-Russia relations, Corker said, then he planned to move forward quickly with a Russia sanctions bill.
“I can just tell you: I see no difference whatsoever,” Corker added. “[The Russians] continue to work against our interests.”
A Jordanian official confirmed there are several ongoing meetings taking place pertaining to Syria, in Jordan, Geneva, Astana and elsewhere.
“As Jordanians, we have meetings and communications with all concerned parties who have influence on the ground, be it the Russians, the Americans and others,” the Jordanian official, speaking not for attribution, told Al-Monitor. “Our objective is to communicate our view and vision on the situation in service of our national strategic interest of securing our borders.”
Recent US-Russian discussions “focus on the south” of Syria, Czech Ambassador to the United States Hynek Kmonicek told Al-Monitor. "It's at least something that we can read from evolution on the ground. If this approach works, it could be strategically interesting. It could be a test if Russia is willing and can deliver.”
"It will not be easy,” Kmonicek, whose government represents the United States in Syria, said. “The American side wants to create islands of stability. De-escalation zones. The Russians are thinking, very funny, islands of stability — for jihadis. …. So, they must persuade each other.”
“My feeling: The Russians need a political settlement, to get out,” the Czech diplomat continued. “They are eager to have something.”
The Trump administration has been evasive about its contacts with Russia, possibly out of sensitivity to the scrutiny the White House is under after the US intelligence community determined that Moscow interfered in the 2016 US presidential elections to boost Trump. The alleged interference is now the subject of several investigations by Congress, the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
“They have to keep it behind the scenes,” said Michael Kofman, a Russia expert with the Kennan Institute. Now is not the "right time" to "let on that they are actually making progress with Russia on arrangements for Syria," he said. "[There is] the perception that the current administration is highly constrained in what it can do with Russia right now.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an interview with a French newspaper this week, alluded to US-Russian consultations focused in particular on Syria’s southern borders with Israel and Jordan.
“Incidentally, we have been seeing some shifts lately; and there are actual results,” Putin told France’s Le Figaro newspaper May 30. “I spoke to President Trump on the telephone, and he supported the idea, in general, of creating de-escalation zones.”
“We are now considering how the interests of all the countries to the south of Syria can be best served, with consideration for the concerns of all the countries that face issues in this region,” Putin said. “I am referring to Jordan, Israel and Syria itself. Of course, Russia is ready to heed what the United States and our European partners have to say. However, what we need is for the dialogue to be specific and concise, instead of empty talk about mutual claims and threats. There is a need for a real effort.”
While the State Department has been mum about recent US-Russian discussions on Syria de-escalation zones, the Pentagon has readily acknowledged stepped-up military-to-military contacts in order to avoid inadvertent confrontation with the Russians in Syria, particularly as the US-led coalition prepares to retake Raqqa from the Islamic State.
In addition to regular colonel-to-colonel US-Russian de-confliction talks, “there have been three-star conversations at the … joint staff level,” Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, the commander of US air forces at Central Command, told journalists at the Pentagon on May 24. “My … two-star deputy exchanged some conversations with the Russians as we were working through the myriad of issues that have occurred."
“So we have had the ability to increase the dialogue at the appropriate level,” Harrigan said. “My expectation is that will be helpful as we move forward … as the airspace continues to become more congested and with the … regime continuing to move farther to the east. I think it'll be important that we decrease ambiguity. And that decrease in ambiguity allows us to understand where [the Russians are] going, where possible areas of conflict could occur.”
But the US-Russia military-to-military de-confliction talks do not involve discussion of Syria de-escalation zones, Harrigan added.
“At our level, when we've talked to the Russians, we do not talk about those de-escalation zones,” Harrigan said. “We just talk de-confliction in our operations.”Be flattered if you catch the general manager of BLT Steak in downtown Washington flashing a quick, sideways peace sign as he seats your party. Adam Sanders isn’t revealing his politics; he’s simply making a “V” — and alerting his staff to the presence of a VIP.
Guests at CityZen in the Mandarin Oriental hotel who have enjoyed drinks in the lounge won’t be asked whether they want cocktails again in the dining room if the restaurant director gently touches the side of the gas candle on their table. The coded gesture by Michael Chesser signals his team not to repeat the question.
Celebrants at the Inn at Little Washington are no doubt thrilled to be personally congratulated by Patrick O’Connell in his stage set of a kitchen after dinner. The star of the show knows it’s my anniversary or birthday! More likely, the chef has been tipped off by his underlings. As one of the inn’s tour guides ushers patrons into the gleaming kitchen — a treat extended to every diner — he motions toward his ring finger to announce a guest’s anniversary or points to his belly button to indicate a birthday.
“There’s nothing more terrible than greeting the wrong guest with the wrong occasion,” O’Connell says. Hence the well-rehearsed silent drill at his four-star dining destination in Washington, Va., in which guests staying at the inn are made known to the chef by a staff member arranging his fingers to form a peaked “roof,” and patrons with no known special occasion are tagged when servers cross their hands together.
Writing orders on paper and tracking customers’ preferences on a computer are well-known ways for restaurants to deliver smooth service. Some establishments go a step further and teach their workers to use discreet hand, eye and other signals to communicate with their colleagues — all without a sound.
BLT Steak's general manager Adam Sanders shares the hand signals servers use to save time and build camaraderie. (Casey Capachi/The Washington Post)
“You can’t yell across the dining room, ‘Hey, I need help delivering food!’” says Alex Susskind, an associate professor of food and beverage at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Although he doesn’t teach restaurant pantomime “overtly” to his students, Susskind preaches its value. “The service experience is perishable. It begins and ends quickly,” the instructor says. “What happens at the table can make or break” a diner’s perception of a place.
It’s hard to say when wordless restaurant commands originated. A 1944 photo spread in Life magazine revealed how the owner of the legendary Stork Club in New York let his staff know, without saying, that he wanted to pick up someone’s check — or get away from a customer: Sherman Billingsley played with his tie knot or tugged his ear, respectively. Some industry veterans say they first noticed hand signals when designer waters gushed onto the scene in the 1990s.
Created to make things convenient for restaurants, wordless routines prove reliable in the noisiest of venues. They also save considerable time. Instead of walking across a busy dining room and possibly slowing down colleagues, servers using body language can get a message across in a single movement. “If one person is doing everything, it takes twice as long,” says Chesser, the ringleader at CityZen. Economy of steps equals savings in time: Sanders of BLT Steak figures dining room shorthand trims off 45 seconds or so per table; on any given shift, that’s “20 minutes of attention I can give back to guests.”
Silent touches enhance the guest experience by offering a sense of seamlessness and the impression that things happen automatically; O’Connell calls them “tiny little magic acts.” Indeed, some wizardry is called for in a working kitchen such as his, with upwards of 18 cooks and as many as 60 parties a night eager to view it. (Another benefit of wordless communication: “You look brilliant” for acknowledging not just the guest of honor, but the cause for celebration, the chef says with a laugh.)
Hand signals aren’t restricted to upscale places. “Our service is hybrid,” says Sanders, whose clientele is heavy with politicians, media bigwigs and Secret Service agents protecting The Restaurant Isn’t Saying. “There’s the expectation of fine dining, but the energy is high.”
“Most communication is non-verbal,” says William Washington, general manager of Le Diplomate in Logan Circle, where a forward palm from a supervisor triggers a server to refresh an empty bread basket. “Everybody does it to a certain extent” in the restaurant trade. To work for everyone, however, the signals must be subtle. “I don’t want people to be aware we’re doing it,” says Washington, echoing the sentiments of his peers.
One of the most-used set of codes evolved from consumers’ thirst for designer water. In a typical scenario, a preference for still water is designated with an extended flat or swiping hand, while sparkling water involves fluttering fingers. Tap water is denoted by a fist, sometimes with a digit sticking out, like a spout.
Among the more elaborate wordless service systems in the industry is the one employed at Eleven Madison Park in New York, which maintains an arsenal of more than half a dozen gestures to assure top-shelf attention to detail. The sight of a manager brushing his shoulder, gesturing toward a chair or gripping his hands at waist level is the crew’s cue to clean a table, clear a diner’s plate or hold off because a table is not ready to be seated, respectively. Inspiration for the rituals comes from old-school New York restaurants, foremost the Stork Club, says Will Guidara, co-owner of the restaurant, which has won five awards from the James Beard Foundation, including one for Outstanding Service (2004). Executed properly, Guidara says, silent signals add value and “make the dining room feel less frenzied.”
The popularity of open kitchens mean cooks occasionally get in on the action. A line cook at the cafe at Chez Panisse in Berkeley in the early 1980s, Evan Goldstein recalls how the staff learned that the kitchen was out of a dish (or “86’ed” as they say in the trade): Someone would pull a hand across their neck, in a quick slash, says the master sommelier and author of a book on service. When Eric Ziebold, the chef at CityZen, has an order ready for a waiter whom he sees engaged too long in conversation, he might make the universal sign for “wrap it up:” a wave of the hand in small circles. “When you’re talking to a table,” explains the chef, “guests aren’t eating.”
Signals can work both ways. Diners from Minneapolis to Moscow know that scribbling in the air is likely to get them their check, and swirling an empty water glass typically begets a refill. Washington public affairs expert Jim Courtovich, who eats out as if he were a restaurant reviewer — an average of 10 meals a week, though frequently at the same places — raises a single finger to the side of his face to make his requests known at BLT Steak, Cashion’s Eat Place and Marcel’s. The simple gesture, says the founder of Sphere Consulting, can be translated a number of ways, depending on what’s not on his table or the amount of time he wants to devote to lunch or dinner: Where’s the food? Where’s the wine? Where’s the check?
“I don’t want to wave my hand” to address an issue, says Courtovich.
Are more servers exercising their digits? “I’m sure it happens,” says frequent diner Tim Zagat, founder of the popular Zagat Survey. “As a customer, I’m not supposed to witness it.” To be effective, he says, silent exchanges also need to be discreet. “If I knew someone was signaling behind my back, I think that would be irritating.”
Even restaurants that don’t formalize gestures have non-verbal means of achieving their goals. Consider Passion Food Hospitality, a collection of seven restaurants including DC Coast and Acadiana in the District and Fuego Cocina y Tequileria in Arlington. While nothing is codified at the group’s establishments, says partner Gus DiMillo, “if a manager needs something, he directs his eyes and a server takes care of the problem. We encourage everyone, when they train with us, not to wear blinders. Even if they’re talking to guests, they should see what’s going on around them.”
If a server needs help, instead of calling for it or sprouting popeyes — behavior that might attract attention from diners — the simple act of placing a hand over a lapel brings a rescue squad at places including CityZen and BLT Steak.
Missed signals are an occasional occupational hazard. Sanders, the general manager of BLT Steak, is one of the few supervisors at the meat market who doesn’t sport a tie clip, which means he’s frequently adjusting the neckwear on his chest. “What do you need?” his teammates ask when they spot him fussing near his lapel.
And not all secret codes are meant for public consumption. As it turns out, veterans of the Inn at Little Washington sometimes need to help O’Connell know which patron coming into one of those popular kitchen tours is celebrating a special occasion, so they’ll use playful R-rated gestures to distinguish between a man and a woman.
“Efficiency is wonderful,” says O’Connell, the master of ceremonies. “If you can make it fun at the same time, wonderful |
, which advised health authorities in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, has recommended non-invasive pre-natal testing is introduced.
Dr Anne Mackie, the director of programmes at the UK National Screening Committee, told the BBC News website: "I think it has the potential to make a great deal of difference.
"It will give more accurate results and reduce anxiety in a significant number of people."
The new screening plan will be rolled out gradually as it is still uncertain how popular the test will be among women and how effective it will be for other conditions such as Edwards' and Patau's syndromes.
But estimates suggest between 3,000 and 5,000 amniocenteses each year will no longer be necessary.
Image copyright SPL
Great Ormond Street Hospital conducted trials to assess how non-invasive prenatal testing could be used on the NHS.
It indicated many women who would have refused the amniocentesis chose to have the safer test.
Prof Lyn Chitty, who led those trials, told the BBC: "I'm very pleased that they've made the decision to introduce it into NHS maternity care for all women, we know many are going to the private sector for it at the moment.
"For those getting reassurance, it's great and they can enjoy the rest of their pregnancy.
"For those with a positive diagnosis, we have to put measures in place to support them."
She said the testing "might" lead to an increase in abortions but her study showed "many are using it to prepare for the birth of a baby with Down's syndrome".
The National Screening Committee says it is aware there may be an impact on abortion, but the voluntary test was there to give women information and it was up to them what happened next.
Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has called for the correct training of NHS staff in the "communication and counselling expectant parents" in the implications of the results.
About 775 babies are born with the condition each year in England and Wales, according to the NHS
Prof Baskaran Thilaganathan, from St George's Hospital in London, which is already offering the test, said the non-invasive option would make a "massive difference to patients".
He said: "Women can now have this DNA blood test, which is £200 cheaper than an amniocentesis and has no risk of miscarriage
"It's fairly self-evident that the cheap and safer test is the way forward."
Follow James on Twitter.Very Special Snowflakes: Harvard Refuses to Name the Student Who Repeatedly Insulted a Visiting Former Israeli PM by Saying She Was "Smelly" and Had a "Very Smelly Odor"
The Washington Free Beacon, on the other hand, ID's him, after Harvard asks them not to.
Harvard Law School is declining to disclose the identity of a student who repeatedly accused former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni of being "smelly" during a public discussion, a description many have described as anti-Semitic.
I don't buy that that line is "anti-semitic," though I have a feeling the student in question is such. Jews are not typically slurred as being "smelly." What I see is rudeness, and he's allowed that, but I'm bit baffled at Harvard's efforts to cover up this event.
The most special of its Very Special Snowflakes must have their bad behavior purged from the public record.
The university also deleted a portion of the video of the public event in which Husam El-Coolaq, whose identity the Washington Free Beacon has confirmed with multiple sources, made the accusation. El-Coolaq was listed as a Harvard Law School representative on the website of the student-run organization Harvard Arab Students on Wednesday, but has since been removed. The exchange between Livni and El-Coolaq, an activist in the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement, was cut from the video, though portions of the conversation were leaked in transcript form. El-Coolaq reportedly asked Livni, "How is it that you are so smelly?" "Oh, it's regarding your odor," El-Coolaq said. "I'm question [sic] about the odor of Tzipi Livni, very smelly."
Note the efforts Harvard Law is going to here on behalf of benevolent censorship -- they're not trying to silence this ugly cur. They're trying to protect him.
He made public statements, in a public forum, but Harvard is going hyperactive to delete his statements from the public record.
... El-Coolaq's name has been withheld from the public and reporters attempting to write about the episode.
Why? The smelly son of a bitch said these comments in a public forum to a public official (or former public official). Why the censorship overdrive?
... In this correspondence, Salinger requested that the Washington Free Beacon withhold from publishing the student's name to "minimize the damage."
Damage? To whom? If it's damage to BDS and this particular student, that is damage they are well-entitled to.
So this is the world we live in now: They'll censor you for speaking ideas they don't like, and they'll also consensually censor the words of their allies which they might agree with but which might be politically damaging.
They're just going to censor and censor until official reality -- the reality contained in transcripts and on video and which is permitted to be spoken officially -- conforms to the reality they wish to be, or the reality they wish the world to see.As we pulled in to the driveway my wife gave me the "What did you do?" face as she saw all the boxes on the porch. I was as stunned as she was, because on my porch were 8 boxes, 6 of which were marked "HEAVY". Thank you Santa for wonderful surprise.
I teach chemistry at an Urban school district and we get very little in the way of supplies. So for redditgifts I asked for some school supplies, a label maker, and a new periodic table for my classroom.
The school supplies I use most are pencils, pens, paper, and expo markers. I use these the most because it is what my students use in my class. I try to provide these things for my students so that they have what they need to learn. It's amazing the difference in their attitude when they have the supplies they need.
In addition, I asked for a label maker. I inherited a room that is in need or organization so that students and I both save time when we need things.
Last and most importantly, I asked for a new large periodic table. My old periodic table only goes up to Rutherfordium and is brown, cracked, and hard to read. It serves it's function, but it's amazing how engaged the students get with new easy to read resources.
I can't begin to express my gratitude for the resources I have just received. In addition, I know that these supplies will open the eyes and minds of my students. To most of them, the idea that a complete stranger would help them out is mind boggling. This gift will be put to great use and it will change the worldview of my students for the rest of their lives.
Thank you again Carissa, this means more to me than I could adequately express in a post and thank you Reddit community for making this possible and supporting teacher all over.NOGALES, Mexico — Crouched in the spiky terrain near this border city, a veteran smuggler known as Flaco points to the steel border fence and describes how he has taken drugs and people into the United States for more than three decades. His smuggling techniques include everything from throwing drugs over in gigantic catapults to hiding them in the engine cars of freight trains to making side tunnels off the cross-border sewage system.
When asked whether the border wall promised by President Trump will stop smugglers, he smiles. “This is never going to stop, neither the narco trafficking nor the illegals,” he says. “There will be more tunnels. More holes. If it doesn’t go over, it will go under.”
What will change? The fees that criminal networks charge to transport people and contraband across the border. Every time the wall goes up, so do smuggling profits.
The first time Flaco took people over the line was in 1984, when he was 15; he showed them a hole torn in a wire fence on the edge of Nogales for a tip of 50 cents. Today, many migrants pay smugglers as much as $5,000 to head north without papers, trekking for days through the Sonoran Desert. Most of that money goes to drug cartels that have taken over the profitable business.This Ted Cruz visit to a cheese store is the best thing happening today https://t.co/hvZKf3GYpG — Emily Cahn (@CahnEmily) April 4, 2016
With the Wisconsin primary tomorrow, Ted Cruz is busy campaigning in the state, and today he made a stop at Cheese Castle:
Ted Cruz is at a Cheese Castle pic.twitter.com/nknzdhgMvx — Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) April 4, 2016
Lest anyone think this is just some attempt to pander — it is not. @tedcruz really does love cheese. https://t.co/y55bMB4vKC — Josh Perry (@MrJoshPerry) April 4, 2016
Notable cheese fanatic Ted Cruz at Cheese Castle in Kenosha, Wisconsin: "I can just stand here and smell. It is heaven." — Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) April 4, 2016
Cruz, asked for the sharpest cheese he has ever tasted, declines to offer a choice, saying he ls a fan but is hardly a "cheese aficionado." — Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) April 4, 2016
Cheese patron: "Do you have a cheese you like more than the other?" Ted Cruz: "I like them all…To be honest, I like cheese on cheese." — Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) April 4, 2016
Cruz might love cheese, but he wasn’t going this far:
Reporters encourage Cruz to sport a cheese hat. "There is an ironclad rule of politics: No funny hats," Cruz says. pic.twitter.com/ws1MEzbgtW — Patrick Svitek (@PatrickSvitek) April 4, 2016Mercedes-Benz
On Friday, Mercedes-Maybach unveiled its new Vision 6 Cabriolet concept at the 2017 Monterey Car Week in Monterey, California.
The stunning drop top is the ultimate embodiment of the Mercedes' Sensual Purity design philosophy. The concept melds classic automotive design element with a sleek futuristic aesthetic.
"The Vision Mercedes-Maybach 6 Cabriolet takes modern luxury into the realms of the ultimate in luxury and is the perfect embodiment of our design strategy. Breathtaking proportions combined with a luxurious "haute couture" interior help to create the ultimate experience," Gorden Wagener, Daimler AG chief design officer, said in a statement.
The all-electric drop top continues Mercedes' push towards alternative propulsion. The Maybach was introduced shortly after the company's AMG division unveiled its new hypercar's 1,000 horsepower Formula One-derived hybrid drivetrain.
Here's a closer look at the Vision Mercedes-Maybach 6 Cabriolet.More and more national security workers in and out of uniform never get close to combat. It's time to rethink their place in the system.
Guardian forces are the increasing numbers of military and non-military personnel who perform national security tasks far from direct violence, like in combating cyber threats, operating satellite constellations, or remotely controlling drones. Increasingly critical to the nation’s security, they often fit uneasily into the longstanding conception of U.S. military service. Maybe it’s time Congress and the administration consider pulling some of these functions out of the Defense Department.
Since America’s founding, the military has been the nation’s sanctioned organization to master and employ violence for the common defense. An individual’s military training — beyond a technical skill used in or out of combat — has been focused on building physical fitness, learning to endure physical hardship, emphasizing the need for unit hierarchy, placing the unit’s needs before any individual ones, and accepting the primacy of a mission, even at the possible loss of one’s life.
Guardian forces, through a slow, steady rise, are now challenging this understanding of organized violence and its associated culture. They were created by a confluence of factors, including new technologies and security concerns, and the all-volunteer force. New technologies keep more operators in the United States and away from a theater of conflict. New security concerns, in many cases tied to these same technologies, have expanded our understanding of “common defense” to include remote and cyber threats. And the expense of the all-volunteer force gradually, but inexorably, turned many military functions into jobs now performed civilian contractors.
Among these new units are cyber, space, acquisition, and portions of the drone realms. Physically removed from violence, they are distinct in many important ways from other parts of the military. Some personnel wear uniforms, but many others — government civilians and contractors — do not. Many personnel possess important technical or technocratic skills for which they are well compensated. Their cultures are only tangentially shaped by the expectation of inflicting violence. And while critical to the nation, their capabilities are only loosely tied to the military’s core competency of employing and experiencing organized violence.
Today’s military is a holding company of several non-military national security and public service capabilities. It’s time to recognize this, and think about whether guardian forces should be reorganized, resourced, developed and employed differently.
For defense reformers, acknowledging the uniqueness of guardian forces raises several important and perhaps uncomfortable questions. Should Congress explore divesting the Defense Department of some major responsibilities, like cyber and space, and placing them elsewhere in the U.S. government? Should the purpose and structure of the services and combatant commands also be assessed? To sustain the highest quality personnel, should the U.S. recruit and train guardian forces differently? And with the rise and associated expense of guardian forces, what is the appropriate budget to meet their needs?
In order to answer these questions, leaders in Congress, the administration, and the military would need to determine what is core to the military’s purpose — what’s in — and what roles and responsibilities are important to the nation but only vaguely related to organized violence — what’s out. Until this delineation is made, those leaders will tend to keep everything where it is, which undermines the military on two fronts. It potentially accelerates the dilution of the military’s core organized violence responsibilities while it increases the military’s authorities and responsibilities in areas perhaps best resident outside the Defense Department. Trimming nothing could eventually turn DOD into an even vaster government organization, military in name only, but ultimately unrecognizable to the American people.
Thus, the profound defense reform challenge facing Congress, the executive branch, and the American people for the first half of the 21st century goes far beyond assessing jointness, interagency integration, or organizational boundaries. It requires a discussion and perhaps a recalibration of what the military does on behalf of the nation. A worthy first step in the next round of defense reform would be a rigorous public reassessment of how the nation understands, resources, and then holds America’s military accountable for providing for the common defense.ADVERTISEMENT
An awful lot of American liberals have become rather possessed by the possibility that President Trump is somehow in league with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The circumstantial evidence that there is some sort of connection is rather strong — Putin very probably helped Trump win in 2016, some Trump associates have a rat's nest of connections with Russia, and Trump himself has been relying on financing from Eastern Europe for many years.
But definitive proof has yet to surface. So in their quest to find a connection — particularly some sort of direct conspiracy between Trump and Putin — some liberals are abandoning good sense and becoming credulous toward nutty thinkers.
It's important to avoid this not only because clear thinking is important, but because it is the best way to root out the truth.
I'm reminded in a way of the Second Red Scare. The era of Joseph McCarthy is rightly remembered as a time of deranged witch hunts and fevered anti-Communist paranoia. Something that is a bit less remembered is that the Soviet Union did indeed have extensive espionage success within the American government, particularly during the Second World War. They penetrated the Manhattan Project, they scooped up all manner of non-nuclear weapons technology, they recruited one of the very top economic policy officials in the country, and on and on.
In other words, the defining characteristic of McCarthyism was not a false belief that KGB spies had infiltrated the government, because they had. It was paranoia and hysterical panic about such spying, especially in how it was used to further partisan Republican ends. McCarthy was a fool and an incompetent drunk, but other Republican elites tolerated him and his accusations because he whipped up unhinged outrage against Democratic Party elites and policies. They loved it when he was falsely smearing Dean Acheson and George Marshall as secret Soviet sympathizers, or slagging public housing bills as the first step to Communism. It was only when McCarthy's erratic, diseased thinking, his constant lying and fabrication, and his utter investigative incompetence became undeniable that they began to desert him.
A corollary of this is that McCarthy was an active impediment to anti-espionage efforts. During the Red Scare, it's possible his various lists of supposed Communists included a small fraction of actual Soviet spies. But what tiny truth was there was swamped by the huge number of innocents caught up in the panic. What's more, after McCarthy's downfall the whole idea of Soviet infiltration of the American government was badly tainted by association with his vile methods.
(As an aside, it's important to note that all of this is orthogonal to the question of whether Soviet spying necessitated a hyper-belligerent diplomatic stance towards the USSR. All countries spy, America very much included, and in the end all the espionage probably didn't amount to much — indeed, it may have actually calmed tensions somewhat.)
Now, liberals' Trump-Russia fever is not remotely as bad as what struck Republicans during the McCarthy era. There is no full-blown panic, nor any show trials. Yet there is an echo of the basic mechanics. Instead of a Wisconsin senator, we have Louise Mensch, a former Conservative MP and bug-eyed conspiracy hound who has been all over cable news making one unsubstantiated accusation after another — and even somehow got a piece in The New York Times. And she is only the most prominent of a cottage industry of instant Russia "experts" who have sprung up to write long tweet threads and create infographics in Microsoft Paint validating liberals' darkest suspicions about Trump.
Again, it's important to emphasize, it really is possible Putin and Trump did collude somehow, or had some other connection. Liberals are right to smell blood in the water, and as I've argued before, it's only right and proper for a full investigation to be conducted. Ideally Congress would serve its constitutional duty, but with Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, especially Chairman Devin Nunes, giving every sign of working hand-in-glove with the Trump administration to quash the ongoing investigation, that route may be closed off for the time being.
In the meantime, outside investigations and journalism are all that we have. But it's still critical for liberals to maintain a grip on reason, and require proof for extraordinary accusations. Even if Democrats manage to take back the House in 2018 and mount a true investigation, they can't assume that a smoking gun — particularly one proving direct Trump-Putin collusion — will be found.
In the meantime, there are plenty of horribly unpopular things Trump is doing, and horribly unpopular policies his party supports, to use as political weapons.Sushi Go! is a great new game from local publisher Gamewright!
So, what’s the deal with Sushi Go!?
Players compete to assemble colorful and delicious plates of sushi. Grab your favorite pieces of sushi as they pass by on a conveyor belt. Different pieces of sushi score points in different ways, so choose your pieces carefully! And don’t forget to leave room for dessert!
What makes Sushi Go! special?
Sushi Go! is a great design that clearly set out to do one thing – card drafting – and do it very well. And I say it accomplishes its goal! Sushi Go! can be learned in just minutes, even by folks not familiar with card drafting mechanisms, and the fast pace of the game keeps everyone involved – very little waiting for others in this one. I had plenty of tough decisions to make as I played, and the drafting integrates well with the scoring mechanisms to add a slight push-your-luck element to the game, too – do you grab the sure points, or risk it by betting on higher scoring sushi that might not pay off?
The elegant gameplay is only the beginning though, as the playful and fun art adds a delightful frivolity to the game that makes the package complete. Looking at those happy little pieces of sushi makes me happy! I wonder if they know they’re about to be eaten.
I’d also be remiss to not mention the awesome reception Sushi Go! got at PAX East this year. Gamewright only had 20 copies available for purchase at the convention, and to try to be fair, they drew names from everyone interested in purchasing a copy that day to determine who would get to own it before it widely hits the market. If only I had thought to take a picture of the huge crowd of people that showed up for the name drawing! Seeing so many people hopeful and excited to grab a copy of this new card game was one of the coolest things of the convention for me.
Alright, so what’s the gameplay like?
The game is played over three rounds. In each round, you get a hand of cards. Choose one card from your hand and play it face down on the table. Once all players have chosen, the cards are revealed simultaneously, and then you pass your hand of cards to the player on your left (and receive a new hand from the player on your right). Repeat until there are no more cards left in the hands, and then score points. After three rounds, whoever has the most points is the winner.
Nigiri is the simplest of all types of sushi when it comes to scoring, worth 1, 2, or 3 points depending on the type. However, if you can get some Wasabi, then the next Nigiri you play is worth 3 times the points! Put the Wasabi card behind the Nigiri to show this – but be careful, because if you don’t get any Nigiri after you get the Wasabi, the Wasabi goes to waste. All Nigiri and Wasabi are discarded at the end of each round.
Tempura and Sashimi require you to collect a sets in order to score points. Tempura scores you 5 points for each pair you have, while Sashimi is worth 10 for each set of three. Be careful though, because incomplete sets are worth nothing!
Dumplings are also worth collecting in a set, since the more you have, the more they are worth! While a lone Dumpling still scores you a point, getting five of them nets you a sweet 15 points.
Tempura, Sashimi, and Dumplings are all discarded at the end of each round.
Maki Roll cards are worth 1, 2, or 3 Maki Rolls, as pictured at the top of the card. At the end of each round, whoever has the most Maki gets 6 points, while second place gets 3. Ties divide all points evenly, rounded down, but you have to have at least one Maki to score any points for them. Be careful of getting too invested in Maki, but clever play can net you an easy 6 points! Maki are discarded at the end of each round.
Pudding are the only cards not discarded at the end of each round! Puddings do not score points from round-to-round, but rather score at the end. Whoever has the most Pudding at the end of all three rounds of play snags a cool 6 points. If that doesn’t seem worth the effort, you’d do well to not ignore Pudding entirely – whoever has the least loses 6 points, which is easily enough to change the outcome of the game.
Finally, Chopsticks are a cool card that can give you more options. When you have Chopsticks in play, on any turn, you may choose to play two cards from your hand instead of the usual one, and put the Chopsticks into your hand before you pass it to the next player. However, Chopsticks aren’t worth points (you can’t eat them!), so whoever gets stuck with them at the end of the round is out of luck, since they too are discarded at the end of each round.
I think I get it. Who do you recommend this game to?
As someone who has played a lot of games with a wide range of complexity, I really appreciate the simplicity and fast play of Sushi Go!. It’s very easy to learn, even for players not familiar with card drafting mechanisms. I highly recommend the game to players looking to engage with drafting in a quick-playing game, especially if the mechanism is unfamiliar.
Players familiar with more complex drafting games like 7 Wonders might find Sushi Go! a little light for their tastes, but I really encourage fans of that game or other drafting games to give Sushi Go! a try. In fact, I am a big fan of 7 Wonders, and Sushi Go! doesn’t feel like “Diet 7 Wonders” to me. It’s a really great distillation of the fun of drafting in a 15-20 minute package that is hard to pass up!
To Summarize:
Players: 2-5
Time: 15 minutes
Strategy: 2
Luck: 3
Complexity: 1
Game Elements: Card drafting, set collection, cute happy pieces of sushiMartial Archetype
With their DMs approval, Fighters have the following Martial Archetype option, in addition to those in the Player's Handbook.
Warblade
Those who devote their lives to studying the philosophy known as the Sublime Way are called Warblades. They maintain flexibility in battle, able to flow between styles as easily as breathing. Eschewing mastery of specific techniques, the Sublime Way encourages warblades to be versatile.
Adaptive Style
When you choose this archetype at 3rd level, you learn the basics of an ancient philosophy of combat. As a bonus action you can chose one of the following options and gain its effects until the start of your next turn.
Diamond Mind. When you take the Dodge action, you gain advantage on the next saving throw that hasn't gained advantage from another source. You lose this benefit when you lose the benefits of the Dodge action.
When you take the Dodge action, you gain advantage on the next saving throw that hasn't gained advantage from another source. You lose this benefit when you lose the benefits of the Dodge action. Iron Heart. You suffer disadvantage on weapon attacks. If you successfully strike a creature with a weapon attack you can roll one additional weapon damage die.
You suffer disadvantage on weapon attacks. If you successfully strike a creature with a weapon attack you can roll one additional weapon damage die. Stone Dragon. While you are wearing armor, bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage that you take from nonmagical weapons is reduced by 3.
While you are wearing armor, bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage that you take from nonmagical weapons is reduced by 3. Tiger Claw. When you make an attack with a melee weapon you're holding in one hand, if you are wielding a light weapon in your other hand you can add 1d4 to the damage of your attack.
When you make an attack with a melee weapon you're holding in one hand, if you are wielding a light weapon in your other hand you can add 1d4 to the damage of your attack. White Raven. If you hit a creature with an attack, treat it as if you had taken the Help action to feint against that target.
Blade Meditation
Starting at 7th level, your education into the philosophy of combat is deep enough to inform situations outside battle. After a long rest choose one of the following options; make all such checks at advantage until the end of your next long rest.
Diamond Mind. Intelligence (Investigation) checks
Intelligence (Investigation) checks Iron Heart. Dexterity (Acrobatics) checks
Dexterity (Acrobatics) checks Stone Dragon. Constitution checks
Constitution checks Tiger Claw. Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on hearing
Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on hearing White Raven. Charisma (Persuasion) checks
Battle Clarity
At 10th level, you have advantage on initiative rolls.
Evasive Reflexes
Beginning at 15th level, your practice of the sublime way has come to dominate even your instincts. When you use the Adaptive Style feature, you gain the Evasive Reflexes benefit of the same name until the start of your next turn.
Diamond Mind. When a creature misses you with a melee attack, you can use your reaction to make a melee weapon attack against the creature.
When a creature misses you with a melee attack, you can use your reaction to make a melee weapon attack against the creature. Iron Heart. When you are struck with a critical hit you can use your reaction to make it a normal hit.
When you are struck with a critical hit you can use your reaction to make it a normal hit. Stone Dragon. When you grapple a creature you can use your reaction to cause the target to fall prone.
. When you grapple a creature you can use your reaction to cause the target to fall prone. Tiger Claw. When a creature hits you with a melee attack, you can use your reaction to add your proficiency bonus to your AC for that attack, potentially causing the attack to miss you.
When a creature hits you with a melee attack, you can use your reaction to add your proficiency bonus to your AC for that attack, potentially causing the attack to miss you. White Raven. Hostile creatures within 5 feet of you can not take the Disengage action.
Stance Mastery
At 18th level, When you use a bonus action for Adaptive Style you can choose an additional option and gain both effects until the start of your next turn.SpaceX's third attempt to land one of its rockets on an autonomous landing pad barge at sea on Sunday did not go as hoped once again. The first two attempts at this experimental landing ended with fantastic explosions as the Falcon 9 rocket failed to stick the landing just right.
Sunday's mission successfully deployed the Jason-3 satellite, which will measure global sea levels, to a polar orbit (meaning it will circle the Earth from north to south instead of traveling parallel to the equator), but the experimental landing of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that gave it the boost needed to escape Earth's gravity was the main event for most space nerds.
SpaceX broadcasted the entire launch and experimental landing live via its YouTube channel, but as the moment came that the Falcon 9 first stage was expected to touch down on the unmanned landing pad named "Just Read the Instructions," the video feed cut out from the barge, where rough seas with 12- to 15-foot (or 3.6- to 5.5-meter) waves had been reported.
About 20 minutes later, SpaceX reported that the Falcon 9 had a "hard landing" and "one of the landing legs may have broken."
SpaceX Founder Elon Musk later tweeted that "Touchdown speed was ok, but a leg lockout didn't latch, so it tipped over after landing."
Sunday evening he clarified on social media that the landing actually was a soft one and then shared this video on Instagram that shows the rocket slowly tipping over and exploding:
Falcon lands on droneship, but the lockout collet doesn't latch on one the four legs, causing it to tip over post landing. Root cause may have been ice buildup due to condensation from heavy fog at liftoff. A video posted by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Jan 17, 2016 at 7:07pm PST
SpaceX successfully landed a Falcon 9 on land at Cape Canaveral after it completed a commercial satellite launch mission, but nailing one of the company's novel drone barge sea landings would mark another historic first.
Throughout most of history, rockets used in space launches have wound up falling into a permanent watery grave in the ocean after just one use. A major part of the SpaceX mission is to make its rockets reusable in order to drive down the cost of getting to space.
Landing the drone on a pad in the Pacific 200 miles west of San Diego required less fuel than if the rocket had to navigate back to land, and allowed that saved fuel to go toward pushing the rocket launch to a higher velocity, according to SpaceX's Frank Tybor.
Updated at 7:45pm adding the embedded Instagram video.September 14th marked the first UCI cyclocross race of the 2011 season with CrossVegas in Sin City, a.k.a., Las Vegas. As if being in the front row at a professional race isn’t exciting enough, the race goes down smack in the middle of the Interbike trade show week. Further intrigue: CrossVegas is held after dark and under lights just to ramp up the party atmosphere — beer tents and free cowbells encourage attendees to raise their voices and make some noise to cheer racers who come from around the world. This year, our resident pro photographer, T.C. Worley, who doubles as a contributing editor for the site, was in Vegas to grab images of the action. Here’s what he saw.
Congrats to women’s elite winner Katerina Nash (Luna Pro Team) who crossed the line alone, 12 seconds ahead of the nearest competitor. For the men, young gun Lars van der Harr (Rabobank), the current under-23 Cyclocross World Champion, proved he had the stuff to run with the big boys this year when he took the lead in a three-way end sprint and a photo-finish to scoop the top spot!
—T.C. Worley covered CrossVegas for GearJunkie.com last September. See his images from the 2010 race here.It has been one year since I took part in one of the most surreal and expensive taste tests in human history. No, I didn’t eat a black Périgord truffle seasoned with gold or a bowl of beluga caviar. Last August in London, with 200 journalists and several hulking cameras staring at me, I was one of the two people to taste the so-called Frankenburger: the world’s first lab-grown beef burger, a five-ounce patty grown from cow stem cells that took a Dutch scientist four years of research and $332,000 to create.
Over the past 12 months, I’ve been asked The Question dozens of times, and each time I have given variations of the same underwhelming answer (it was ok; needs more fat). But I have also tried to make it clear that I hoped the burger I tried was just a first draft—the beginning of the meat-culturing age.
But as time has passed and I get fewer opportunities to say “it was one small bite for man, one giant bite for mankind,” I’ve started to wonder: Did that London event mean anything? Will it be just another weird moment in stunt-eating history? Or was it really The Beginning of the Cultured Meat Age?
The most exciting news I heard last summer was not that a cultured beef burger was actually, finally, being made—nor that I would be the guinea pig flown to London to try it. The news that got me most excited was that the mystery man bankrolling the burger was the co-founder of Google with an estimated net worth of $30.6 billion and a history of making sci-fi a reality. As soon as I heard the name Sergey Brin, I instantly thought: cultured beef could really happen.
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But wait. Although Brin has nearly limitless resources, he also has limitless, omnivorous interests—everything from driverless cars to adventure space travel to asteroid mining projects. Brin didn’t attend last year’s burger tasting and hasn’t made any public comment on cultured meat for the past year. I wondered whether this was a one-burger-and-done project for him?
Not the case, said Dr. Mark Post, the Dutch scientist who created the cultured beef burger.
“He’s as determined as we are to make this happen,” Post told me, adding that he’ll be traveling to California later this month and firming up a commitment for additional funding with Brin’s foundation.
While Post declined to reveal the specific dollar amount, he said that Brin’s second round of support will increase the size of his team from five to 20. In addition to tissue engineers and food scientists, the larger team will have experts on consumer preferences and on how to get the burger approved by food regulators.
With Brin’s funding, Post said that the 2.0 version of the lab burger will have several major improvements:
More fat. My biggest complaint was that that even fried in oil and butter, by a Gordon Ramsay-trained chef, the cultured beef burger tasted about as dry as a turkey burger. The first cultured beef burger had 20,000 muscle fibers but zero fat cells. It’s fat that gives a burger its critical juiciness. And it’s fat, some believe, that drives our meat cravings. During the next year, Post’s team will focus on growing fat tissue, which is slower and more technically challenging than many assume.
More red meat. Most burger-eaters have never heard of myoglobin. But this protein, whose job is to store oxygen in muscle cells, is what makes red meat red. The first cultured beef burger lacked myoglobin, and if it wasn’t for some coloring additives—a mix of beet juice, saffron and caramel—the burger would have looked more like chicken: yellowish and white. By adding myoglobin, the next burger will not just look like red meat, it will also have a higher iron content.
No more serum derived from blood from unborn cows. By far the biggest issue Post will address in the next year is the growth factor problem, which is more or less a deal-maker or breaker for lab-grown meat. My burger was created from 20,000 strands of muscle tissue grown in fetal bovine serum. It’s not just that FBS, which is collected from unborn cows at slaughterhouses, is inconsistent with the whole animal welfare spirit of cultured meat. It’s that FBS is ridiculously expensive. Some critics, such as synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis, call the high cost of cell culture the |
-activity-reporting
The current anti money laundering requirements will most likely take several months of auditing and many check marks to be fully complete in foriegn banks. However, some cryptoservices may choose not to complete this level of work and move their funds to another bank and remove US dollar as an option. Compliance is an expensive process and a multi billion dollar industry for a reason. Never mind that some customer may choose to stay anonymous vs providing further documents to a third party.
So crypto currency services are good after this AML stuff is done right?
If only it were that simple. There are 13 intermediary and clearing banks for US dollar in the world. After this compliance piece is complete, they must once again establish banking relations again. The same policy that Wells Fargo used before to refuse business, can potentially be used again.
Even if a crypto service moved to a bank with solid US banking relations, they will still have to comply with the new AML policies in order to be able to participate in USD transfers uninterrupted
Why aren’t all the US dollar crypto exchanges and services having this problem?
The issue stems from domestic vs non-domestic requirements. If you have ever opened a Coinbase or Kraken account, you know what I’m talking about. No anonymous accounts allowed, proof of everything they can thinks of *just* to send them money. Never mind take it out. Also, being on US soil means they do not have to go through such a harsh intermediary process when transferred between two parties (US based or not)
If you have a two party transfer between banks, there is a policy on US dollar transactions that they need to be settled and routed domestically, regardless of if neither banking party is in the United States. This makes these transactions subject to any and all policies the Fed, SEC, FINRA etc etc want to extend.
Correspondent bank in this case is a US intermediary bank.
So where does this leave us?
None of the exchanges impacted by this issue are insolvent or blocking crypto transfers so you have a few solid options… options that are way easier then it was 3 years ago
If you want your funds out of the currently impacted exchanges now, you can buy some form of crypto and hold it in your wallet or a third-party service and wait for it to blow over. (or trade on an exchange)
If you want fiat now, you need to buy some form of crypto, send it to another exchange/gateway you have a bank account setup with and cash out there. Fair warning though — if you wait too long the spread in spot price might be high. As of this writing Bitstamp has a 56 dollar discount on bitcoin over Bitfinex, Coinbase has 50 dollar.
You can also send your crypto to another exchange to pull out other fiat such at JPY, GBP, CAD and EU.
Bitfinex is also offering immediate withdrawals to HKD and CHF directly (with other currencies on the way) None of the other services impacted are offering direct routes at the time of writing.
Is this the end of BTCUSD as we know it?
There is too much interest in the USD pair for it to simply go away without a fight. What might happen is that only domestic exchanges and service will have USD fiat denominations available. While others end up with a synthetic product such as a future or CFD and settle directly to crypto.
Coindesk — dont steal our content again.
Thanks for reading
If you enjoyed our article series so far, we accept bitcoin and ethereum tips which go towards funding WhaleCalls project(s).
BTC — 1AbRKiVkbffFAxpJcCHsNAgMB33EWmEiUJ
ETH — 0xf23eb771cc83A36967E80dA3d10881204d442878
update: It was mentioned on twitter that some have received wires from Okcoin using an HK bank, others have cited Taiwanese banks. Also that BTCE has listed a Mongolian Bank publicly in contradiction with the above report. There is no reason to expect that an exchange wouldn’t maintain many multiple bank relations (especially for USD vs non-usd) for business continuity reasons. As well as the fact the USA AML policy applies to any bank dealing in USD as the wire must still be processed at a correspondent bank.
Update 2: we’ve recieved multiple requests to publish this story on other people’s publications. After reading mediums terms on this, we do not like that a third party can alter content including placing ads w/o a revenue share. You may quote and credit back if you’d like to use our research.NewsAbortion, Politics - U.S.
SOUTH CAROLINA, August 25, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster issued an executive order today preventing abortion facilities from receiving any state or local money.
McMaster's order means that South Carolina won't provide funds "via grant, contract, state-administered funds, or any other form" to any physician or doctor's office affiliated with an abortion facility.
This applies to "any physician or professional medical practice affiliated with an abortion clinic and operating concurrently with - and in the same physical, geographic location or footprint as - an abortion clinic," according to the governor's office.
The executive order notes that there are "a variety" of places women can access healthcare that doesn't include abortion.
"The State of South Carolina has a strong culture and longstanding tradition of protecting the life and liberty of the unborn," the order says. It asks that South Carolina Medicaid petition the federal government for permission to take abortion facilities out of its provider network, which would further defund abortion entites.
Even though Medicaid can't technically fund abortions in most states, taxpayer funding from it can go to other "services" at abortion facilities, enabling them to stay in business.
"Abortion providers often focus primarily on abortion-related services and procedures," the order acknowledges.
"There are a variety of agencies, clinics, and medical entities in South Carolina that receive taxpayer funding to offer important women's health and family planning services without performing abortions," said McMaster. "Taxpayer dollars must not directly or indirectly subsidize abortion providers like Planned Parenthood."
The South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Health and Environmental Control will publicly list all qualified non-abortion women's health and family planning providers operating within a twenty-five mile radius of any abortion facility excluded from the state's Medicaid provider network.
The Associated Press called McMaster "one of Donald Trump’s earliest backers." It reported that Planned Parenthood received "about $300,000 in combined state and federal Medicaid funding for non-abortion services" in South Carolina between 2010 and 2015.
In April 2017, President Trump signed a law allowing states to defund Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood is America's largest abortion business. It commits over 300,000 abortions annually and has been involved in a number of high-profile scandals, including the sale of aborted baby parts, covering up child sex abuse, and accepting racist donations.The head of the United States Pacific Command, Admiral Harry B. Harris, Jr., testified before the House of Representatives in late April that the threat posed by North Korea has grown sufficiently to endanger the Hawaiian Islands. All around the globe, serious national security problems are coming to the fore in places like Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and the South China Sea. Yet, because of holdover personnel from the Obama administration, and damaging Obama-era policies remaining in place, our military continues flailing.
On June 30, 2016, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced that transgender service members would no longer be discharged from military service solely for being transgendered. Later, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced that as of July 1, 2017, transgender recruits would be accepted into the military. The DOD took these steps even though transgender personnel are likely to need medical, surgical, and psychological care that undermines their readiness for battle by rendering them non-deployable.
Acutely aware of the geopolitical problems we face, President Trump announced his intention to restore the strength of our military. Americans appreciated the priorities described by Secretary of Defense James Mattis during his confirmation hearing: mission readiness, command proficiency, and combat effectiveness. Unfortunately, the implementation of President Obama’s transgender policies did not consider the impact that “transitioning” personnel would have on military readiness and combat effectiveness.
The arguments used by the Obama Administration to support its transgender policy changes stemmed from a few politically correct reports produced by well-funded LGBT activist organizations. The first “study” was released in August 2013 by the pro-LGBT Williams Institute in partnership with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The next March, a private, non-governmental “Transgender Military Service Commission,” headed by Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, released a report through the pro-LGBT think tank, the Palm Center. These two private studies and the various government reports and directives that followed have not focused on how the new transgender policies will affect military readiness and war-fighting effectiveness – the core function of the armed forces. Nor were these policy changes mandated by the Congress. Rather, they were driven by bureaucratic reinterpretations of existing law. Given the magnitude of these changes, it would seem wise to halt the process and seek congressional guidance and statutory language.
In fact, just before the DOD issued the transgender policy change, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services refused to provide national coverage for gender reassignment surgery citing insufficient studies about the health outcomes of such surgeries and small sample sizes in the studies that have been conducted. However, DOD is now requiring taxpayers to foot the bill for gender reassignment surgery, with no benefit to the taxpayer or the military.
If implemented as planned, these transgender policies will require our military to assume the risks of recruiting and retaining persons who may require long-term medical treatment. Such procedures and physical changes often produce uncertain results associated with higher rates of depression and suicide. “Transitioning” service members require that the government bear the cost of hormone treatments, surgery, and post-operative care. This creates a tremendous incentive for individuals to join the military in order to receive the costly medical procedures associated with “transitioning,” since transgender individuals cannot be excluded from joining. And it’s difficult to see how any person undergoing this process would be deployable and combat-ready. What’s more, the time taken away from commanders’ combat-related duties while they take on the responsibilities of medical case workers is significant. It’s unfair to expect them to be judged on their ability to oversee medical-psychological cases like these.
We do welcome the Pentagon’s recent nullification of an October 2016 directive imposing “open-door” shower and bathroom guidelines on all DOD schools. But continuing implementation of Obama’s transgender policies ignores the strongly-felt concerns of women who do not want to be exposed to individuals of the opposite sex in facilities which offer minimal privacy. This is a particular problem when the incidence of rape in the military is so severe.
I received a letter from a known but confidential source in the naval service who asked me to inform the command structure in Washington about the damaging effects of these policies:
As part of the policy, CO’s must facilitate the requests of individuals for transgender treatment (surgery, cross-hormonal therapy, etc.)…. [O]nce the service member is considered “stable” in their preferred gender, and their “gender marker” is changed in a DoD database, they must be accommodated in the berthing and bathroom facilities of their preferred gender regardless of whether they still possess their opposite sex anatomy! (And most are expected to do so). Given the close living quarters that most military members have to share, this is particularly distressing to many of us, especially women.
These policies will ultimately undermine recruitment and retention.
Secretary Mattis must consider the many complex ramifications of these Obama-era policies that remain in effect. The DOD and the Congress need to ensure the priorities of the U.S. armed forces remain those that the Secretary has outlined: mission readiness, command proficiency, and combat effectiveness. Holdover personnel from the Obama Administration need to focus on these new priorities, and not on the last Administration’s social engineering projects that ignore military readiness.
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William G. “Jerry” Boykin serves as Family Research Council’s executive vice president. He spent 36 years in the Army, serving his last four years as deputy undersecretary for intelligence in the Department of Defense.Looking for news you can trust?
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Dylan Matthews says we need a Universal Basic Income, but not because automation is going to put people out of work, as former SEIU head Andy Stern says:
The arrival of driverless trucks and taxis and 3D-printed houses and robotic mall cops, he predicts, will cause a wave of joblessness that will lead to mass immiseration and social breakdown — unless a universal basic income lets people out of work still earn enough to get by. ….But there are other reasons for the persistence of work. Many people actually like their jobs. Automation has made humans more productive, which has in turn raised wages and kept people in the workforce. Human desires have kept evolving….And despite the predictions of leftist optimists like Srnicek and Williams, and the gloomy warnings of more mainstream commentators like Stern, there’s little reason to think these dynamics have changed in the early 21st century. We have gone through large automation shocks before; are self-driving trucks really a bigger step than, well, trucks were? And if trucks and washing machines and all the other labor-saving inventions of the 20th century didn’t put anyone permanently out of work, but instead shifted the kind of work that was being done, why would we think matters would be any different in the 21st century? Why could the laundry workers of the 1940s find new jobs but the truck drivers of the 2020s can’t? ….In a way, basic income as an automation solution is both too much and not enough. It’s too much of a solution for the problem of long-run mass technological unemployment, primarily because that’s a fake problem that hasn’t happened yet and likely never will. But it’s not enough of a solution for the temporary dislocation that automation will, in fact, cause. It’s not an adequate substitute for the jobs that truck drivers and construction workers and others will lose in the years to come.
This is badly wrong. The problem here isn’t driverless trucks. The problem is the technology that underlies driverless trucks: artificial intelligence. Once AI has advanced to the point where it can drive trucks, it will very quickly advance to the point where it can do lots of other things too. This will cause unemployment on a massive scale since, almost by definition, once AI has evolved to this point (and beyond) it will be able to do any of the jobs that displaced truck drivers can do.
This isn’t a “fake problem” because it hasn’t happened yet. It’s a real problem that’s about ten years away. We should be paying attention to it, and UBI is a potential answer. As Matthews says, it’s not ideal, since it would be inadequate for the first wave of people displaced from their jobs by AI. But that’s not a criticism of UBI, it’s a criticism of the rich, who will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into a new era of industrial-scale income redistribution once AI starts to change society. Artificial intelligence will make the rich richer and the poor poorer until we finally figure out how to share the wealth of a world in which human labor has little to do with its creation.James McCarthy is ruled out of the play-off games in Copenhagen and Dublin
Republic of Ireland midfielder James McCarthy is out of the World Cup play-off against Denmark because of injury as the squad is reduced by seven.
The Everton player, who returned after a knee injury kept him out of the final two qualifiers, has a hamstring injury.
Richard Keogh (groin) and Sean Maguire (hamstring) are also sidelined, while David McGoldrick, Alan Browne, Daryl Horgan and Jonny Hayes are dropped.
The Irish are away for Saturday's first leg with the return three days later.
Republic boss Martin O'Neill initially named a 34-man squad for the play-off, with McCarthy making a comeback after missing the Moldova and Wales games.
McCarthy's fitness problems over the last two seasons caused friction between the Republic manager and previous Everton boss Ronald Koeman.
Last March, Koeman accused O'Neill of "not protecting" the midfielder before the Republic boss hit back to describe the Dutchman as a "master tactician of the blame game".
Hull midfielder David Meyler is in the squad even though he will miss the first leg in Copenhagen because of suspension.
Provisional Republic of Ireland squad
Goalkeepers: Randolph (Middlesbrough), Westwood (Sheffield Wednesday), Elliot (Newcastle), Doyle (Bradford).
Defenders: Christie (Middlesbrough), Doherty (Wolves), McShane (Reading), Duffy (Brighton), Clark (Newcastle), O'Shea (Sunderland), K Long (Burnley), Ward (Burnley).
Midfielders: McGeady (Sunderland), Whelan (Aston Villa), Hourihane (Aston Villa), Arter (Bournemouth), Brady (Burnley), Hendrick (Burnley), O'Kane (Leeds), Meyler (Hull), Hoolahan (Norwich), O'Dowda (Bristol City), McClean (West Brom).
Forwards: Long (Southampton), Murphy (Nottingham Forest), Hogan (Aston Villa), O'Brien (Millwall).Maru is an eight-year-old Kishu Inu from Wakayama Prefecture, and by all reports he’s a bit of a grumpy old chap. But Maru’s cantankerousness has a little more bite to it than most guard dogs, because he also happens to be the chief priest of Yamaguchi City’s Toshunji temple!
Kishu Inu are medium-sized Japanese dogs, taking their name from the Kishū region of Japan, now part of Wakayama Prefecture. According to the “assistant chief priest” at the temple, 40-year-old Sousen Fukano, Maru entered into training at the age of two months. During his training at Nanzenji temple in Kyoto, he followed the same programme as other Buddhist monks, and upon ordination was given kanji for his name, meaning Maru is now written with the character 丸, not the syllabic katakana (マル) used previously and common in pets’ names.
“The Chief Priest bites first and asks questions later” reads an ominous-sounding waterproofed sign next to his guard post.
▼ “This is the Chief Priest at the temple lol”
Maru even has his own official Twitter account, albeit one with a not-so-grand total of 34 tweets over three years.
▼ Like this post from 2012, in which Maru announced an upcoming television appearance.
To be honest, we were a bit alarmed by those signs about biting, but Maru looks pretty friendly in these clips from Japanese news outlet Asahi Shimbun:
▼ Here he is getting a friendly scratch from Assistant Chief Priest Fukano.
YouTube/Asahi Shimbun
▼ This is one temple precinct where ball games are definitely allowed.
YouTube/Asahi Shimbun
▼ As you can see in the video, there’s even an exhibition about Maru inside the temple itself!
Aside from its canine staff member, Toshunji looks to be a nice little temple in its own right. If you find yourself in Yamaguchi, why not pay High Chief Maru a visit? Just make sure you don’t do anything to annoy him!
Ameblo/kizunanet
Source: Naver Matome
Top image: YouTube/Asahi Shimbun
Featured image: Ameblo/kizunanetEZLN expresses its solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux
In new communique EZLN expresses its solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux:
“Among the originary peoples of the tribes of the north, the Sioux nation weaves its own geographies that go beyond the false official geographies that locate them in another country; for us, we are all children of the same mother. They are resisting the invasion of their sacred lands, cemeteries, and ceremonial sites by an oil pipeline under construction by the company Energy Transfer Partners. That company intends to transport oil obtained through fracking in the Bakken region in North Dakota through their territories. This struggle has generated solidarity and unity among the originary peoples of the north. To them we say that their rage is ours, and as the National Indigenous Congress, we raise our voice with them and will continue to do so. Their dignified struggle is also ours.”
http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2016/09/25/war-and-resistance-dispatch-44/
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AdvertisementsSupport from Starbucks follows that of firms including Nike and Microsoft.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Starbucks has come out in support of a bill that would make Washington the seventh state to legalize gay marriage.
The company joins fellow Pacific Northwest-based firms including Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) and Nike (NKE, Fortune 500) in backing the bill, which also has support from Gov. Christine Gregoire and is close to passage in the state's House and Senate. Gregoire has previously called corporate support for the bill "courageous and appreciated."
Starbucks (SBUX, Fortune 500) said in a statement Tuesday that it was "proud to join other leading Northwest employers in support of Washington state legislation recognizing marriage equality for same-sex couples."
"This important legislation is aligned with Starbucks' business practices and upholds our belief in the equal treatment of partners," the statement read.
Last year, Starbucks was among a group of 70 businesses and organizations that filed a brief in federal court opposing the Defense of Marriage Act, which restricts the definition of marriage to that between a man and a woman.
--CNN Wire Staff contributed reporting.As part of the September CEO’s report to the TTC Board, management made two presentations on the evolution of service quality on the surface and subway networks.
For the surface routes, Rick Leary (Deputy CEO and Chief Service Officer) ran through an overview of two sets of statistics: on time performance and the numbers of short turns.
For the subway, Jim Ross (Deputy Chief Operating Officer) reviewed schedule versus actual capacity provided on Line 1 YUS as well as a breakdown of the types of incidents that produce most delays.
Surface Routes
For both the streetcar and bus networks, the stats for 2017 are running ahead of past years, although much more dramatically for streetcars. “On time” is defined as a vehicle leaving its terminal no more than one minute early or five minutes late.
Leary explained that many schedules have been adjusted to reflect actual operating conditions in an attempt to both reduce short turning and to ensure that vehicles arrive at terminals with enough time to spare to leave “on time”. There is a seasonal fluctuation in these numbers, although it is much more striking for streetcars. The TTC is considering adjusting its schedules on a seasonal basis to compensate for this problem.
As I have explored in past articles, there is a fundamental problem with this metric in that for frequent service, a six minute “on time” window allows service to operate in bunches without hurting the stats. The service experienced by riders is not as good as one might expect from the numbers. Even with this generous provision, the operation of only half of the trips within the target does not say much for the TTC.
The bus network does better, but it has proportionately more trips on route where traffic effects serious hamper operations. This can dilute the stats relative to the streetcar lines. To be meaningful, the TTC should break out route-by-route information, something they have “promised” to do in their Customer Charter, but have failed to deliver since the beginning of 2015.
What has improved over recent years is the count of short turns, although recent data suggests that the TTC is reaching a level below which the numbers will not fall. The challenge will be to keep to these levels rather than sliding back up through schedule tweaks to fit service within available budgets.
These two sets of charts show that changing schedules to add running time can reduce the need for short turns, but it is less effective at ensuring “on time” performance. In many reviews of route operations, I have shown that headways (the spacing between vehicles) tends to be erratic at terminals most of the time. Even when there appears to be active dispatching from the terminals, the headways drift fairly quickly and ragged service evolves along major routes.
Short turn stats are broken out for the “high rollers”, the routes that contribute most to the total. It is interesting to compare the relative importance of “construction” for the two modes. Although the streetcar network has seen a great deal of this in 2017, little of the short turns are ascribed to that source with the bulk identified as traffic and related problems. By contrast the percentage for buses is much higher. It is unclear whether this is the result of different reporting standards for the two modes.
28% of short turns in Bus Transportation in 2017 are directly attributed to TYSSE and MX construction activities around Eglinton Ave and Finch Ave West. [From presentation notes]
The “Other” category of 12% for streetcars is subdivided as:
• Disablement 3.5%
• Accidents : 3.2%
• Operator irregularity: 2.5%
• TPS/PFS/EMS: 1.1%
• Special Events: 1.0%
• Other 0.7%
Although the TTC regularly bemoans the low reliability of its streetcar fleet, a comparatively small number of delays are due to disabled vehicles.
The degree to which the TTC has adjusted schedules to provide more running time is shown in the map below. This tactic is a double-edged sword because when the schedules are too generous, this can create two problems: dawdling operation as drivers attempt to run slowly enough to avoid getting ahead of schedule, and taking long layovers at terminals knowing that there is padding in the schedule to make up time. Both of these have very annoying effects on riders in slower than necessary trips and uneven headways.
An additional set of changes addressed construction issues across the City. In the case of City projects, most of these are short term and provision for them will disappear fairly soon. The Crosstown LRT project, on the other hand, is a long-running burden on all routes along and across the Eglinton corridor.
Subway Routes
Over the past three years, the capacity provided on Line 1 Yonge-University-Spadina has grown slowly, although the service actually operated is less than the scheduled level of 25.7 trains/hour (equivalent to a headway of 140 seconds). The graph below consolidates measurements from 12 points along the route. Although there is an upward trend, there are some fairly wide swings with dips in early 2015 and 2016. The midwinter period is one where the subway is under the greatest stress because more travellers choose to commute by TTC rather than driving, and it is at just these times when subway capacity falls. Moreover, the numbers here are averages for four-week periods implying that there are lows within those dips that are not fully revealled because of averaging.
This is an important issue going forward when the TTC is expected to deliver substantially more subway capacity. It is not enough to do this on average over many days and locations, but consistently at a high level. To that end a further breakdown of these stats would be useful to better identify the location and timing of problems.
Headway adherence on the subway tends to be high because trains are regulated by the signal system, but again the averaging of data could be masking a range of variation in time and location. The upward trend is good, but a better understanding of the details would show, for example, whether the comparative regularity and large number of trips for off-peak service are masking peak period problems.
Delay minutes have been falling since 2014, although the number of delays has not declined as much (as reported at other meetings). This results from the TTC’s changing its delay handling procedures to reduce the time to clear a delay so that events do not have as great an impact on service as before.
Although the numbers for the first portion of the year above show a consistent downward trend, this is less evident in the chart below which shows annual data. There is a drop from 2014 to 2015, but then an increase into 2016.
The proportion of delay minutes that are “controllable” (that is, due to factors the TTC can control) has been falling slowly over time, although the amount of change in each year is small.
Of the controllable delays, the greatest counted in minutes are due to track fires. This is little surprise given both that they continue to occur with alarming frequency, and that getting the “all clear” requires a Fire Department “ok”, not simply a TTC employee doing minor repairs. “Speed Control” delays were the most numerous, according to Ross, but they are typically quite short and so do not contribute much to the delay minutes overall. This is an ongoing problem with which the TTC is wrestling and, one might hope, one that at least for the YUS, the new automatic train control system will address as it goes live over the coming two years.
Passenger illness is a major contributor to non-controllable delay minutes. A worthwhile review of the details would be to determine how many incidents and time were a direct result of overcrowded trains bringing on conditions that would otherwise not show up as an illness incident. In this sense, “illness” could be considered a “controllable” delay to the degree that crowding could be a contributing factor.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump went on a Twitter tirade on Wednesday. Here's why he's calling for a new election in Iowa. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
This post has been updated.
The unexpected sense of generosity that marked Donald Trump's concession speech in Iowa on Monday night began to fray during his speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday -- and appears to have evaporated completely, given what Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. By the end of his tirade against Ted Cruz's Iowa win, Trump suggested that new voting should be held.
Trump's initial tweet read:
Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa, he illegally stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong any why he got more votes than anticipated. Bad!
Donald Trump seems to have just deleted this tweet pic.twitter.com/jJWfpkPXFE — Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) February 3, 2016
Notice that the word "and" is written as "any." Trump has a habit of deleting tweets with typos and then retweeting them, which he did in this case, too. But he also took out the word "illegally."
Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016
In the wake of Trump's second-place finish, at least one conspiracy theory spread among his fans -- but it centered on Marco Rubio, not Cruz. That theory was that Microsoft rigged its tabulation software to give Rubio a boost from Trump's votes. This theory made no sense.
Republican candidate Donald Trump heaped scorn on the reactions to his performance in the Iowa Caucus. At a rally in Milford, N.H., on Feb. 2, Trump said the media unfairly proclaimed rival Marco Rubio's third-place finish as a success. (Reuters)
In later tweets, Trump explained his rationale.
During primetime of the Iowa Caucus, Cruz put out a release that @RealBenCarson was quitting the race, and to caucus (or vote) for Cruz. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016
Many people voted for Cruz over Carson because of this Cruz fraud. Also, Cruz sent out a VOTER VIOLATION certificate to thousands of voters. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016
The Voter Violation certificate gave poor marks to the unsuspecting voter(grade of F) and told them to clear it up by voting for Cruz. Fraud — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016
At a news conference prior to his speech in New Hampshire, Trump referred to Cruz's campaign having emailed voters during the caucuses implying that Ben Carson was dropping out of the race. That email was excoriated by Carson in his statement on Monday night, and Cruz's team copped to it on Tuesday. Given how Carson's support evaporated at the end of last year, there's no indicator that the email made much of a difference in the race; and Carson actually slightly over-performed his polling average. But, still, Trump lashed out at his main competitor.
"What he did to Ben Carson was terrible," he said, according to The Hill. "When they said Ben Carson is out of the race and come vote for him, I thought it was terrible."
There's no evidence at this point that the Cruz gambit on Carson gained him many votes. The final average of polls in Iowa put Carson at about 8 percent -- meaning he did better than polls would suggest.
As for the Cruz mailer, which we've discussed, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza found that the voter scores printed on them (a tactic which studies have shown can spur turnout) were often misleading. In a report for Bloomberg, Sasha Issenberg reported that 3,000 voters who were unlikely to turn out received those mailers, suggesting that -- while perhaps deceptive -- the tactic didn't make a difference in a race Cruz won by more than 6,000 votes.
And finally, Cruz strongly told thousands of caucusgoers (voters) that Trump was strongly in favor of ObamaCare and "choice" - a total lie! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016
That appears to be a reference to this ad:
The ad is not from Cruz, but from a super PAC supporting the Texas senator. Nor does it say that Trump was in favor of Obamacare -- but it's certainly a tough hit.
Trump's last tweet (for now) was the biggest, the rhetorical equivalent of his strategy to wantonly bomb the Islamic State into submission.
Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016
There's no precedent for holding caucuses over again, and it's not clear how that would even work. It's likely that Trump's goal isn't to actually seek a new vote at all, but simply to cast doubt on Cruz's win -- something that his supporters, with their Rubio theory, beat him to by over a day.
After all, this is the guy who will make America sick of winning, he wins so much. When he loses, it seems, it's because the other guy cheated.Within a month, Greenpeace could close its India office of 300 staffers, because Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has frozen its assets.
The situation isn’t unique to Greenpeace, whose troubles in India began over a year ago. Last week, the home ministry—responsible for domestic affairs and national security—revoked licenses of nearly 9,000 foreign-funded nonprofits it said failed to disclose financial sources. Groups like 350.org and Sierra Club have been added to watch lists, and the ministry is now turning its attention to other charities, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
Modi’s administration appears to be motivated by a distrust of foreign funding. “Prime Minister Modi, I know, has a more skeptical attitude towards NGOs than his predecessors may have had,” said Arch Puddington, a senior vice president of research for the think tank Freedom House, which promotes democracy. The U.S. ambassador to India, Richard Verma, also expressed his concerns that the regulatory steps could have "potentially chilling effects" on the country.
Greenpeace's struggle is a familiar story for environmental activists. Around the world, environmentalists are usually at odds with political and corporate interests—Greenpeace especially, because of their historically dramatic demonstrations—so they find themselves common targets for backlash. “Where environmentalists are perceived as posing a threat to people’s economic interests, you have a combustible situation,” Puddington said in a call. And sometimes, the authorities make them pay.LIBRARY Interview with Varg Vikernes (February 2010) Part I. "Belus".
Joni Jokinen (Finland): Why did you choose Belus as your theme for the upcoming album? You've already made an ambient album about Belus (Baldr). Weren't you happy with it?
Well, in fact I am not happy with any of my previous albums. That is however rather irrelevant in this context. Besides;
The reason I chose this theme is that I know this subject well. Further, some things have no expiration date, meaning they are as valid today as they were thousands of years ago, when they were created. Many of our myths fall into that category, including the myth about Belus/Baldr.
Roman Golikov (Norilsk, Russia): Do you have any plans to make a video clip for one of "Belus" tracks?
No. I have no such plans, but I know the record company wants me to. It is likely that I have been gone for too long to understand the value of such things.
Léo (Méréville, France): Where was the photo of "Belus" cover taken? Why did you choose it?
The
Anton Semykin (Ekaterinburg, Russia): Will there be a limited edition of "Belus" with bonuses?
Again, the record company wanted this. I on the other hand really don't like such things, so there will be none.
Emanuel Krstanović (Koprivnica, Croatia): In which studio was "Belus" recorded?
The same as all the others; Grieghallen. I am too conservative to start using a new studio... "If it works, don't fix it".
Semen Timofeev (Russia): What equipment did you use while recording "Belus" album, does it differ much from the one you used to record the début album?
Belus:
Peavey "Twenty-Three" guitar
Peavey 120 Watt 6505 amp and speaker
Customized bass of high quality
Old 1975 drum kit of unknown brand
High quality mics
Digital recording
Début:
Pearley white Weston guitar of unknown type
Peavey 60 Watt amp/speaker
Marshall 10 Watt amp/speaker
Customized bass of high quality
Drum kit of unknown brand and medium quality
High quality mics
Analogue recording
Unfortunately I used a 10 Watt Marshall for one of the guitars on the
The biggest difference from the first to the latest album is perhaps that I spent at least some time on the production of the album...
Resurgam (Russia): You are in debt to Norwegian government for burning churches. Will the sales return from "Belus" album be used to pay this debt?
Of |
Mini 4 should be high up on your list of devices to consider.Not many people expected the Seattle Seahawks to steamroll the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl on Sunday. Less surprising was the right-wing outrage over an ad featuring a patriotic hymn performed in multiple languages.
No, many conservatives didn’t much care for Coca-Cola’s one-minute spot, which showcased a rendition of “America The Beautiful” in languages such as English, Arabic and Spanish.
Former tea party congressman Allen West even took time to write a blog post during the game to voice his displeasure. For West, the ad started out strong enough.
“Then the words went from English to languages I didn’t recognize,” a troubled West wrote, calling it “a truly disturbing commercial.”
“If we cannot be proud enough as a country to sing ‘American (sic) the Beautiful’ in English in a commercial during the Super Bowl, by a company as American as they come — doggone we are on the road to perdition,” he wrote.
Michael Patrick Leahy over at Breitbart was offended, too.
Not only did Coke use “a deeply Christian patriotic anthem whose theme is unity – in several foreign languages,” but Leahy noted that the “ad also prominently features a gay couple.”
Fox News commentator Todd Starnes doesn’t like hearing foreign languages during the Super Bowl either.
Couldn’t make out that song they were singing. I only speak English. — toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) February 3, 2014
So was Coca-Cola saying America is beautiful because new immigrants don’t learn to speak English? — toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) February 3, 2014
Coca Cola is the official soft drink of illegals crossing the border. #americaisbeautiful — toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) February 3, 2014
The ad even inspired a #BoycottCoke hashtag on Twitter. Mediaite has a round-up of the outraged tweets from some rank-and-file conservatives.
A Spanish-language version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” drew similar criticism in 2006, with then-President George W. Bush weighing in at the time to say “the national anthem ought to be sung in English.”Child Soldiers Global Report 2001 - Myanmar
Publisher Child Soldiers International Publication Date 2001 Cite as Child Soldiers International, Child Soldiers Global Report 2001 - Myanmar, 2001, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/498805dfc.html [accessed 27 February 2019] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
UNION OF MYANMAR
Mainly covers the period June 1998 to April 2001 as well as including some earlier information.
Population:
– total: 45,059,000
– under-18s: 15,844,000
– total: 45,059,000 – under-18s: 15,844,000 Government armed forces:
– active: 393,750
– paramilitary: 85,250
– active: 393,750 – paramilitary: 85,250 Compulsory recruitment age: 18
Voluntary recruitment age: unknown
Voting age (government elections): unknown
Child soldiers: indicated – more than 50,000 in government and opposition armed forces 1249
CRC-OP-CAC: not signed
Other treaties ratified: GC; CRC
Myanmar is estimated to have one of the largest numbers of child soldiers of any country in the world, with up to 50,000 children serving in both government armed forces and armed opposition groups. The ILO has condemned the forced recruitment of children in Myanmar and has taken measures to address the government's use of forced labour. The activities of God's Army, a breakaway Karen group led by young twins, focused world attention on the use of child soldiers by ethnic armed groups. Armed groups in the Shan State have declared they will not recruit children below 18.
CONTEXT
Fighting continues in many parts of Myanmar with armed opposition groups pitted against the military government or State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) – some ethnic based, others political exiles. The Karen movement remains the strongest, although weakened in recent years.1250 A number of opposition forces in Myanmar have accepted cease-fires with the government. These have had the effect of fragmenting opposition groups even further, with some factions continuing to control their territory under arms, breakaway forces continuing their fight against the government, and internecine fighting between different armed groups. Tens of thousands of villagers in contested zones have been forcibly relocated or internally displaced within the region.1251
GOVERNMENT
National Recruitment Legislation and Practice
All Myanmar nationals (males between the ages of 18 and 35, and females between 18 and 27) can be called up for full-time service in the armed forces for a period of not less than six months and not more than 24 months, in accordance with the National Service Law and People's Militia Act of 1959.1252 Doctors, engineers or persons having any other skill can be called up for military service for a period of 24 months in the case of women between the ages of 27 and 35 and for a period of 18 months in the case of men between the ages of 35 and 56. Under section 3(b), all men aged between 18 and 46, and all women between 18 and 35, can be called up for part-time service, i.e., for a total of not more than 30 days a year (though this may be increased by seven days in certain cases).
As no procedures were formulated to implement the national service scheme, little is known about its operation.1253 As the former constitution has been repudiated and not been replaced by a new one, the constitutional basis for conscription is unclear.1254
The Myanmar authorities claimed during a hearing before the Committee on the Rights of the Child that "[t]he military code specifically prohibited the enlistment of young men under the age of 18". Previously, the government had stated that: "[t]he minimum age for participation in military activities [is] 18 years of age, or 16 in the case of the Red Cross Brigade".1255
Child Recruitment
Children have been recruited, voluntarily and forcibly, by governmental armed forces and armed opposition groups alike. Although reliable and objective information is difficult to obtain in the case of Myanmar, it is clear that the country has one of the highest numbers of children within governmental armed forces in the world, including those under 15. Some are recruited voluntarily, attracted by the prestige or financial reward of a military career or hoping to protect their family from harassment by the SPDC, but many others are forced to join. Orphans and street children are particularly vulnerable to forced recruitment.1256 According to one 17-year-old who joined underage: "I knew people who were 11, 12, 13, and they all claimed they were 18. Anyone can become a soldier."1257
According to an ILO Commission of Inquiry on Myanmar, there is regular forced recruitment throughout Myanmar, including of children, into the Tatmadaw [Myanmar armed forces] and various militia groups. This recruitment does not appear pursuant to any compulsory military service laws, but is essentially arbitrary.1258 Each district and village in Myanmar is reportedly required to provide the armed forces with a certain number of recruits, with quotas being given to the local authorities. Local authorities who fail to achieve their quota may be fined, while a reward of a similar amount is provided for each recruit provided in excess of the quota. This procedure has resulted in many men and teenage boys either being forcibly recruited or fleeing to avoid conscription. Indeed village or ward authorities are known to hold lotteries to decide who should go and this commonly results in the forced conscription of children.1259 It has also been also used by armed groups allied with the government, including the Democratic Kayin Buddhist Army (DKBA).1260
The Committee on the Rights of the Child has reiterated its grave concern about the "numerous reported cases of forced and under-age recruitment of child soldiers" and strongly recommended that the Myanmar armed forces "[s]hould absolutely refrain from recruiting under-age children, in the light of existing international human rights and humanitarian standards" and added that all forced recruitment of children should be abolished.1261 The government denied the allegations while admitting that: "[i]t did happen that, in order to be enlisted, young men pretended they were older than they really were, for example by falsifying their identity papers."1262
Child Deployment
Child soldiers are required to perform many functions in the conflict, ranging from preparing and serving meals for their seniors, to fighting in front-line encounters. Many children suffer physical abuse and other privations within the armed forces and, in extreme cases, have been driven to suicide or murder.1263 Girls are especially vulnerable to abuse for sexual purposes. Several testimonies made to the ILO Commission mentioned the cases of girls who had been raped by soldiers while they were working for the armed forces.1264
According to the ILO Commission of Inquiry, children, some as young as 10 are forced to do portering for the military. Men are preferred for this role but as they sometimes run away, the troops resort to women and children. A refusal to do portering is systematically met with physical punishment or fines.1265 According to local reports, in Northern Rakhine state nearly all of the men and boys of a village (between the ages of 7 and 35) perform up to 10 days per month of labour in the military, and are reportedly required to carry food and ammunition to the border. Forced labour also seems to be connected with ethnicity as Rohingyas claim that they are forced to serve as porters while nearby villages of Buddhist Burmans are exempt.1266 The ILO Commission of Inquiry also reported on other kinds of extremely hazardous work carried out by children for the armed forces. Civilians, including children, are used as human shields and minesweepers. In potential conflict areas, civilians, including women and children, were often forced to sweep roads with tree branches or brooms to detect or detonate mines.1267
Following its report, the ILO Commission of Inquiry asked the Government of Myanmar to remedy its law and practice in this area. By mid-2000, however, the government had not amended its legislation nor had it taken any action to put an end to the use of forced labour, and there were continued reports of children being used by the armed forces.1268 In June 2000, in an unprecedented resolution under the never-before invoked article 33 of the ILO Constitution, the International Labour Conference called upon Myanmar to "take concrete action" to amend its practices by November 2000.1269 The government did not take the required action and on 16 November 2000, the ILO Governing Body, voted to apply sanctions which included asking members to review their relations with Myanmar, advise international organisations working in the country to reconsider any cooperation they have with Myanmar and to cease any activity that could have the effect of abetting the practice of forced or compulsory labour.1270
The Committee on the Rights of the Child has criticised the use of children as porters by the military.1271 The government claims that this type of labour is permitted according to laws in force in Myanmar which date back to British times but would be amended. Committee members pointed out that Myanmar had ratified ILO Convention No. 29 concerning forced labour and should therefore have repealed the provisions of its domestic legislation authorising such forced labour, especially with regard to the army.1272
Other UN bodies have condemned Myanmar for its abuse of children's rights. During its session in 1999, the UN Commission on Human Rights adopted a resolution which notably deplored the violation of child rights, inter alia, through conscription into the military.1273 The former Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, Rajsooner Lallah, also condemned the use of child soldiers in the country, reporting killing, torture, trafficking and forced labour of children.1274 During an official visit to Thailand in February 2000, the UN Secretary-General lamented the plight of child soldiers such as those involved in the conflict in Myanmar.1275 Government reaction to these criticisms has varied, from assurances to the ILO in May 2000 that necessary measures would be taken, to angry denials of the use of children as soldiers or human shields.1276
Military Training and Military Schools
Children in Myanmar are subjected to other forms of militarisation in terms of Ye Nyunt Youth (Brave Sprouts) movement. Boys from the age of 14 are placed in training centres where they receive military style education. They are eventually assigned to serve in the army, in intelligence units or as security for high-ranking officers. Most of these children are street children, orphans, children captured from enemy positions or kidnapped from ethnic villages as a means of separating them from their families and communities.
UNICEF has identified at least one residential SLORC military camp, near Kengtung in Shan State, where children aged 7 and above were being trained for a future life in the armed forces. One former pupil stated that students must wear military uniforms two days a week and practice parade drills on Saturdays. After graduating these children are likely to join the armed forces.1277 In 1997, the Ambassador of Myanmar to Thailand confirmed the existence of special military schools, but claimed that pupils were not compelled to join the army on graduation.1278 This claim is contested by one former pupil who claimed that most students are sent to the army after their graduation – those who escape from the school are arrested and forced to go.1279
In October 1999, the head of the Northeastern Command issued a directive for training boys between 12 and 18 in Lashio, Tangyan, Kuthai and Kunlong to prepare them for mobilisation. Those who continue their education must join the army when they reach 18 years of age, or may enter the Nationalities Development Institute in Sagaing (Northern Burma) after necessary bonds had been signed. Those who refuse to join either the army or this institute can be expelled.1280
OPPOSITION
Child Recruitment and Deployment
There have been reports of child soldiers in each of the armed opposition groups active in Myanmar, but detailed information on recruitment practices is not available. According to one source, recruitment by these groups mostly takes place on a voluntary basis, although forced recruitment has also been reported.1281 Some groups draw on the tribal base of their ethnic communities, others involve students and young political refugees from Myanmar. None of the ceasefires appears to have made specific provision for the demobilisation of child soldiers. More often, "the agreements have provided ethnic groups with the authority to hold onto their arms, police their own territory and to use their former rebel armies as private security forces to protect both legal and illegal business operations."1282
Mong Tai Army: The Mong Tai Army is believed to have had the largest number of child soldiers, with one son required from each family.1283 The Mong Tai Army is believed to have had camps in Shan State where children received a basic education in exchange for military service later on.1284 The Mong Tai surrendered to the Tatmadaw in 1996. Little information is available on the fate of former child soldiers, but some were reportedly used by militia still known as the Mong Tai army and based at the same headquarters in Ho Mong. Others returned to their homes or joined the new Shan State Army which claims to have over 2,000 fighters, many of them children. The rival United Wa State Army is also known to recruit children.
Karen National Union (KNU): The Karen National Liberation Army (armed wing of the KNU) is believed to recruit many child soldiers. One battalion commander estimated that there were perhaps 2,000 boy soldiers in the KNLA when it was at full strength, although KNU forces are now much depleted.1285 As the KNU has declined, some of its fighters have broken away to form new groups including the Christian Karen militia "God's Army". This guerrilla force was led by 12-year-old twins, Johnny and Luther Htoo, who had already been fighting for three years. In January 2000, the "God's Army", became internationally known when some of its members took over a hospital at Ratchaburi, Thailand, taking 700 people hostage.1286 After a 22 hour stand-off, Thai security forces stormed the hospital and killed the ten suspected fighters.1287 The base of God's Army at Kamaplaw was subsequently overrun by the armed forces.1288 The group includes other children as young as 13 who have been seen wearing uniforms and rifles. One of them, "Black Tongue", a sort of junior partner to the twins, appeared to be 9 or 10.1289 In January 2001, the twins surrendered and returned to live with their parents in Ban Don Yang camp, reportedly having received refugee status. Observers say the God's Army will be a spent force without the twins at their helm.1290
The Vigorous Burmese Student Warriors: The strength of this group is not known. Most are breakaway members of the All Burma Students Democratic Front (ABSDF) who believe more drastic measures were needed to bring down the government. Some members were among those who participated in the seizure of a hospital in Ratchaburi, Thailand.1291
Chin National Front (CNF): The Zomi National Front and later Chin National Front (c. 600) were bolstered when hundreds of Chin youth fled the 1988 uprisings, mostly young students from universities and high schools in Chin State and Rangoon. Their numbers have decreased with splits and with SPDC expansion into Chin state.1292
Karenni National Progressive Party Army (armed wing of the Karenni National Progressive Party): Formed in 1957 out of a loose alliance of village militia and armed volunteer groups, the KNPP aims to reestablish the right of secession which had been written into the 1947 Constitution but was abolished in the 1962 military coup.
According to UNICEF in the mid-1990s, about 900 of the 5,000 Karenni Army members were under the age of 15.1293 In early 1999, Major Soe Myint Aung of the KNPP acknowledged that "recently, several recruits weren't much bigger than their M-16 rifles." In mid-March 1999, 46 young men from the Karenni ethnic group, some as young as 14, were reported in a press article to have joined armed groups. They had to complete combat training from a camp deep inside Burma's thickly forested hills along the Thai border before being sent to the frontline.1294
A number of other armed groups in the Karenni area are known to have used child soldiers: the Karenni National People's Liberation Front (c. 150), the Karenni National Defence Army (c 150, in ceasefire since 1996), other breakaway factions of the KNPP (c. 200) and other smaller groups that have agreed ceasefires with the SPDC.1295
Other Armed Groups
Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO); Arakan Rohingya Front (ARIF); Other Arakanese armed groups (NUFA – National Unity Front of Arakan which is composed of the Arakan Independence Organisation (AIO), Arakan Liberation Party (ALP), Arakan National Liberation Party (ANLP), Communist Party of Arakan (CPA) and a faction of the Tribal National Party (TNP); Kachin Independence Army; Council and Naga National Socialist Council.
DEVELOPMENTS
National Standards
In the Shan State, armed groups of the Shan ethnic minority have also used children as soldiers. In February 2001, a gathering of representatives of the Restoration Council of Shan State and Shan State Army at Loi Taileng unanimously passed a resolution that the draft age would henceforth be 18-45 in place of 16-40 as practised earlier.1296
International Appeals
The UN Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution in April 2001 deploring "The continuing violations of the rights of children, in particular through the lack of conformity of the existing legal framework with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, through conscription of children into forced labour programmes, through their sexual exploitation and through recruitment and all other exploitation by the military, through discrimination against children belonging to ethnic and religious minority groups and elevated rates of infant and maternal mortality and malnutrition."
1249 www.globalmarch.org quoting Brett and MacCallin op. cit.; MTA/UWSA: based on minimum figure of 10% quoted for other opposition groups known to use child soldiers.
1250 Balencie, and de La Grange op. cit.; RB database quoting the Far Eastern Economic Review, 13/2/97, http://www.rb.se.
1251 HRW Report 2001.
1252 3(a), sub-para.1 and 2, National Service Law and People's Militia Act of 1959.
1253 It is not certain that this legislation has entered into force since under section 1(2) it is provided that the Act "shall come into force on a day to be notified by the Government,. and it is not known if the necessary notification has been made. See Report of the Commission of Inquiry appointed under Article 26 of the Constitution of the International Labour Organisation to examine the observance by Myanmar of the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29), Official Bulletin, Vol. LXXXI, Serial B, Geneva, 2/7/98, para. 255. This report is also available on the Internet: http://www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/relm/gb/docs/gb273/myanmar.htm. The Commission specified that the translation of this text is not an official one. See also US Army's Area Handbook.
1254 Articles 170 and 171 of the 1974 Constitution provided for compulsory military service, but this constitution was repudiated by the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) in 1988. A new constitution has not yet been agreed. In November 1997, the SLORC reconstituted itself as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).
1255 Summary Records of the 358th meeting, UN Doc. CRC/C/SR.358, 21/1/97, para. 23, Summary Records of the 359th meeting, UN Doc. CRC/C/SR.359, 21/3/97, para.
1256 See for instance Horeman and Stolwijk op. cit.; No Childhood At All: a Report About Child Soldiers In Burma, Images Asia, Bangkok, 6/97; US Department of State Human Rights Report 1998.
1257 Images Asia op. cit.
1258 Report of the ILO Commission of Inquiry, 2/7/98, op. cit. It should, however, be noted that the Commission did not find direct first-hand evidence to substantiate the widespread allegations of forced recruitment of minors.
1259 Ibid., para. 390.
1260 Ibid., paras. 391-392.
1261 Concluding observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, UN Doc. CRC/C/15/Add. 69, 24/1/97. See also Vichniac, I., "L'ONU condamne la Birmanie pour violations du droit des enfants", Le Monde, 22/1/97.
1262 Summary Records of the 359th meeting, UN Doc. CRC/C/SR.359, 21 March 1997, para. 35.
1263 Images Asia op. cit.
1264 Report of the Director General to the members of the Governing Body on Measures taken by the Government of Myanmar following the recommendations of the Commission of inquiry established to examine its observance of the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29), International Labour Organisation, 21/5/99, see testimonies No. 157, 176.
1265 Report of the ILO Commission of Inquiry, op. cit., paras 342-343.
1266 US State department Report 2001.
1267 Report of ILO Commission of Inquiry op. cit., para. 375.
1268 Report of the Director General to the members of the Governing Body on Measures taken by the Government of Myanmar following the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry established to examine its observance of the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29), International Labour Organisation, 21 May 1999. For example, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has "received information that in order to reduce disruptions in adults' income-earning activities, families have resorted to sending children to perform labour in place of adult members of the families". Ibid., paras.21 and 24.
1269 Resolution of International Labour Conference, 6/00.
1270 US State department Report 2001.
1271 UN Doc. CRC/C/SR.359, op. cit. para. 17. See also Interim report on the situation of human rights in Myanmar prepared by the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights in accordance with Economic and Social Council decision 1999/231 of 27/7/99, UN Doc. A/54/440, Annex, 4/10/99, para. 30.
1272 Ibid., paras 19 and 27.
1273 Resolution 1999/17 of 23/4/99.
1274 AFP 16/10/00. "Torture widespread and systematic in Myanmar: UN.
1275 "Annan laments plight of child rebels", Associated Press, 10/2/00.
1276 AFP Myanmar slams US reports of abusive labour. 17/3/00.
1277 Images Asia op. cit.
1278 Sawatsawang, N., "Slorc forcing children into army", Bangkok Post, 20/9/97.
1279 Images Asia op. cit.
1280 RB Newsletter Children of War, No 3, 10/99, quoting BBC News, 31/7/99. See http://www.rb.se.
1281 Horeman, and Stolwijk op. cit.
1282 Mary P. Callahan, Democracy in Burma: The Lessons of History, National Bureau of Asian Research, 1998, p. 17.
1283 Horeman and Stolwijk, M. op. cit.
1284 Images Asia op. cit.
1285 RB Newsletter Children of War, No. 1/99 quoting an AP press release, see http://www.rb.se.
1286 "Youthful crusaders", The Nation, 17/5/98; Lockwood, C., "Army led by twins bullets cannot hit", The Daily Telegraph, 25/1/00. Another source said that there are no more than 100 or 200 fighters within this armed group. See also Weerawong, A.,"Twins lead God's army in Myanmar", Associated Press, 15/12/99; Khaikaew, T., "12-year-old twins lead God's Army", Associated Press, 24/1/00; Migault, Ph., "Le coup de folie des enfants Karen. Le Figaro, 25/1/00; Kestenholz, D., "Kindersoldaten als Heilsbringer: zwolfjahrige Zwillinge als Symbolfigurer einer Gottesarmee in Birma., Die Welt, 29/1/00.
1287 "Thailandische Armee sturmt besetztes Spital", Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 25/1/00; Pennington, M., "Standoff in Thai hospital ends", Associated Press, 25/1/00.
1288 Spillius, A., "Twins missing as troops raid God's Army HQ", The Daily Telegraph, 27/1/00; "Children's crusade of God's Army under siege in Myanmar., Associated Press, 31/1/00.
1289 "Youthful crusaders", The Nation, 17/5/98. The twin's followers believe that God gave them supernatural powers to help the Karen fight the enemy (they are said to offer divine protection and their followers believe they are immune to gunfire). The legend of the twins dates back to March 1997, a period during which the Myanmar army launched a new offensive against the KNLA. When guerrilla fighters fled, the twins reportedly rallied men and directed a successful counterattack. Through their record in battle and alleged powers, morale in God's Army is high and has managed to attract experienced fighters.
1290 The Times, 18/1/01, "Terrible twins surrender with a smile.
1291 "Children's crusade of God's Army under siege in Myanmar", Associated Press, 31/1/00. According various sources, the group is composed not only of many children as young as 13 but also KNU veterans or members of the dissident student group that carried out the embassy take over in which 38 hostages were seized. "Youthful crusaders", The Nation, 17/5/98; Weerawong, A. "Twins lead God's army in Myanmar., Associated Press, 15/12/99; Peck, G., "Myanmar hospital takeover a failure., Associated Press, 26/1/00.
1292 Information supplied by Images Asia and Burma Ethnic Research Group to the Asia-Pacific Conference on the Use of Children as Soldiers, Kathmandu, May 2000.
1293 RB database quoting The State Of the World's Children 1996, see http://www.rb.se.
1294 Pathan, D., "New rebel recruits train to face Burmese Army", The Asian Age, 3/2/99.
1295 Images Asia op. cit.
1296 BurmaNet, 6/2/01.Shane Thomas (left) and Michael Bishop, with their children, are plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit seeking marriage equality in Georgia. (Photo by Dyana Bagby)
April 10 was not your usual Thursday at Fulton County Probate Court. Because at one point during the day, Midtown couple Shane Thomas and Michael Bishop strolled in and applied for a marriage license.
“Everyone there was friendly, but they still said no,” Bishop tells GA Voice.
In 2004, Georgia voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage as well as recognizing same-sex unions from other states. But since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year striking down a major portion of the Defense of Marriage Act in the renowned Windsor case, judge after judge after judge in states across the country are ruling that state bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional.
With that marriage license denial to Bishop and Thomas this month, in coordination with the actions of two other same-sex couples and one widowed lesbian, a chain reaction started which led to the April 22 filing of a massive class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Northern Georgia. The plaintiffs enter this fight with the backing of Lambda Legal and the law firms of Bryan Cave and White & Case.
If successful, the suit will bring a right to LGBT Georgians that seemed unthinkable just a short time ago—the right to legally marry, with access to the exact same state and federal benefits that straight couples have had since such benefits began.
Lambda Legal held a press conference April 22 to officially announce the lawsuit to the public and introduce all of the plaintiffs. GA Voice was granted exclusive access to Shane Thomas and Michael Bishop’s story ahead of the filing of the lawsuit.
‘I WANT TO GET OUT OF HERE’
Thomas, 44, and Bishop, 50, were both born and raised in the south—Thomas in a small town in Alabama and Bishop in Jacksonville, Fla. Thomas endured relentless bullying growing up but Bishop was able to avoid that abuse. They treaded their own paths to figuring out their sexualities, with Thomas briefly being engaged before calling it off and Bishop marrying for a time before realizing his identity as well and divorcing.
Thomas came out in his early 20s and Bishop in his early 30s, who by then had moved to Atlanta. Thomas was still back in Birmingham though.
Both were raised southern Baptist, and appropriately enough, two men of the cloth unwittingly helped bring the two together.
It was 2004 and Rev. Gene Robinson was at the center of a national controversy because he was about to become the first openly gay bishop in a major Christian denomination. To address the controversy, the minister at Thomas’ church wrote a letter to the congregation equating gay people to alcoholics, trying to make the point that they should be accepted despite their flaws.
“That was one of the points where I thought, you know, I don’t want to just stay in this town, I don’t want to be tolerated—I want to get out of here. That’s why I started coming to Atlanta,” he says.
Soon after, he met Bishop at a mutual friend’s birthday party. They hit it off immediately and went on their first date a couple of weeks later—Aug. 5, 2006 to be exact. “Like a lot of gay people we count that as our anniversary,” since they are unmarried, Bishop says.
By date number four, they were already talking about whether the other wanted children. “That was something that we both wanted to do,” Thomas says. “It was important to me to have that conversation.”
Jump to eight years later and they remain together, ready to embark on a whole new journey together as two of the faces at the center of the biggest case in LGBT Georgia history. But it’s two smaller faces that are leading Thomas and Bishop to step out in such a public way.
AND A FAMILY EMERGES
Thomas, 4, and his little sister Mariella, 3, commandeer the playroom, as Dori urges Nemo to “just keep swimming” on the TV above them. The two are pint-sized infusers of joy, inducing smiles and laughter from all who come into their orbit.
It makes one wonder how their lives were forever altered when Thomas (aka “Daddy” to the kids) and Bishop (aka “Big Daddy”) came into their lives.
People told the couple that adoption was a rough process and not to get their hopes up, and while they admit it took a long time to happen, they had a better go of it than was first advertised. It helped that both birth mothers wanted gay men to have their babies.
The two were born in Texas, and Thomas and Bishop were there for both of the kids’ births, which Bishop calls “an amazing blessing and a life-changing event.”
While the two talked about getting married in another state where same-sex marriage is legal, they ultimately decided against doing so.
“We have the utmost respect for people that do that,” Bishop says, “But at the same time, this is where we live, this is our state, this is our home, this is where our family is. It’s important to us to have the integrity of having our marriage recognized where we live.”
‘PEOPLE MAKE JUSTICE’
While marriage in another state was a non-starter for the couple, that didn’t stop them from considering a much bolder step.
Over the last year or so, young Thomas and Mariella reached “a more stable stage” as Bishop puts it, and he and Thomas started focusing on what else they could do to strengthen their relationship and protect the family.
“As our children go to school and they both realize that other kids’ parents can be married, but their parents can’t, they’re going to start asking questions about that,” Thomas says.
There were also practical aspects to consider. When the family travels, they have to bring the adoption papers with them.
“They don’t exactly look like us so if you’re driving through south Georgia and you get pulled over by somebody who doesn’t like the way you look, there’s no telling how they might interpret that,” Thomas says. “So we have to be cautious about where we stop or get gas. We think about all of that stuff.”
“It led us to the conclusion that it was time to start doing something and stepping out on the issue,” Bishop adds.
But it’s a long way from wanting marriage rights in Georgia to agreeing to let the world into your life in order to obtain those rights. They are private people. They have no history of LGBT activism and are not regulars on Atlanta’s gay benefit circuit.
But as always, it came back to Thomas and Mariella.
“When you hold that baby in your arms and you realize you’re a parent and that you have to protect that child, it really comes down to what we feel like are equal rights for us as parents,” Thomas says. “And we should have those rights as parents.”
Bishop cites a famous Dr. Martin Luther King quote to explain: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
“Well, people make justice, and people make change,” he says. “And we’re in a position as two people who have a vital interest in this cause to make a change. So we saw an opportunity to step forward and be a part of that and it’s something that we’re proud to do.”
‘IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY’
In five separate decisions in federal courts on gay marriage since a major portion of the Defense of Marriage Act was struck down last June, the judges have handed down five victories for marriage equality.
This eases Shane and Michael’s minds rather than adds pressure to continue the streak, but they acknowledge that anything can happen in the south.
“I don’t think anybody knows what will happen here,” Thomas says.
But they marvel at the change in attitudes on LGBT issues that they’ve witnessed since they were younger.
“I think we have a duty to be optimistic and to act on our optimism,” Bishop says. “We’re confident.”
Optimism is a common trait in the Thomas-Bishop household.
“Every day when our kids wake up, one of the first things we say to them without fail is, ‘It’s a beautiful day,’” Bishop says.
Thomas carries the memories of his early days on the playground back in Alabama with him to this day, but in a constructive way.
“We don’t want to ever see our children be bullied,” he says. “To put a stamp of legitimacy on our relationship and our family will help make that go away.”
“We want them to wake up every day and say, “‘It’s a beautiful day.’”
And with that, Georgia’s LGBT community is one step closer to a very beautiful day in the near future.
THE PLANTIFFS
Besides Michael Bishop and Shane Thomas of Atlanta, the other plaintiffs are:
• Christopher Inniss and Shelton Stroman of Snellville, together for 13 years and owners of Snellville Pet Resort. They adopted a child who is |
patriotic citizen can object to this.
Q No.26. Sir, you have been talking about Cooperative Federalism. As Prime Minister, what is your experience of dealing with Chief Ministers? How cooperative are they in strengthening this Cooperative Federalism?
Ans: The experience of Chief Ministers with the Centre over many years has generated an atmosphere of dis-trust. "Doodh ka jala chhaachh bhi phook phook kar peeta hai" –once bitten twice shy. Even now there is a lot of mutual suspicion between the Centre and the States as a legacy of the previous decades. However, I can say that there has been a good beginning in building trust. The NITI Aayog is acting as a catalyst to build a vibrant Centre-State partnership to take the nation forward. This spirit of partnership and team work is gradually increasing and the fruits will be seen in the coming years.SPI is a non-profit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software. We encourage programmers to use the GNU General Public License or other licenses that allow free redistribution and use of software, and hardware developers to distribute documentation that will allow device drivers to be written for their product.
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This new SPI site is still under construction, please refer to the "legacy" SPI web site for any content not yet present here.Football truly is the world game, with countries not wholeheartedly renowned for their pedigree starting to look for foreign assistance over the last decade to raise the profile of the sport.
Following in the footsteps of countless European stars that have plied their trade in the MLS in the United States, the ever-increasing number of experienced internationals moving to the Middle East and China and Alessandro Del Piero’s move to Australia, Pablo Aimar will delight football lovers in Malaysia.
Malaysia are currently ranked 161st in the world, between Puerto Rico and Myanmar. However, football is widely acknowledged as the most-popular sport in the Asian country and with over 26 million inhabitants there is no reason that the stature of the game cannot grow.
Aimar has the standing and reputation to help the development of the sport in the country. The diminutive Argentine has signed a two-year contract with Johor Darul Takzim, a team based in the south of the country with big ambitions. They are also set to be managed by César Ferrando Giménez, who previously coached Atletico Madrid back in 2004-05.
In Aimar the Asian country have signed a star player. From humble beginnings in Río Cuarto, the attacking midfielder broke into the River Plate senior side as a fresh-faced teenager and was one of many to be labeled ‘the next Maradona’. It was instantly clear to see why; not only did Aimar have a similar haircut to the former Argentine great, but his range of passing, vision and creativity promised a career at the top of the game.
After three years playing in his homeland, the inevitable move to Europe came, with Valencia the side to capture the playmaker’s signature. Such was the prodigious talent of the South American, Los Che splurged €24 million to bring him to the Mestalla.
Valencia were a star-studded outfit in those days, capable of going head-to-head with the traditional powerhouses of the Spanish game, Real Madrid and Barcelona, and winning. Aimar played with Valencia for five seasons, winning La Liga twice and the UEFA Cup. He was also part of the side that lost out to Bayern Munich in the 2000-01 Champions League final.
Glimpses of his mercurial ability were evident during his time at the Mestalla club, but it is fair to say that Aimar never really lived up to his star billing and showed inconsistency. He was also plagued by niggling injuries at Valencia, a feature that has played its part through his entire career.
After a €12 million move to Real Zaragoza, the Argentine enjoyed an exciting start to his tenure with his new employers, but was unable to prevent the side being relegated in 2007-08. After demotion to the Segunda División, Aimar moved to Benfica, where he has played for the last five years.
In his time in Portugal he won one Primeira Liga title and finished as runner-up to Chelsea in last season’s Europa League final. His partnership with fellow River Plate prodigy Javier Saviola was a key aspect of the Estadio da Luz side’s title success in 2009-10.
The attacking midfielder also amassed 52 caps for Argentina, no mean feat, and played in two World Cups over a ten-year period.
At 33 years old Aimar’s time at the top has now been played, but a new challenge awaits him. Similar to someone like Del Piero, the South American now has a different task awaiting him – awaken a country with mass footballing potential through his experience and reputation in the world game.CAN YOU imagine feeling Earth’s magnetic field on the tip of your tongue? Strangely, this is now possible, using a device that converts the tongue into a “display” for output from environmental sensors.
Gershon Dublon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devised a small pad containing electrodes in a 5 × 5 grid. Users put the pad, which Gershon calls Tongueduino, on their tongue. When hooked up to an electronic sensor, the pad converts signals from the sensor into small pulses of electric current across the grid, which the tongue “reads” as a pattern of tingles.
Dublon says the brain quickly adapts to new stimuli on the tongue and integrates them into our senses. For example, if Tongueduino is attached to a sensor that detects Earth’s magnetic field, users can learn to use their tongue as a compass. “You might not have to train much,” he says. “You could just put this on and start to perceive.”
Dublon has been testing Tongueduino on himself for the past year using a range of environmental sensors. He will now try the device out on 12 volunteers.
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Blair MacIntyre at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta says a wireless version of Tongueduino could prove useful in augmented reality applications that deliver information to users inconspicuously, without interfering with their vision or hearing. “There’s a need for forms of awareness that aren’t socially intrusive,” he says. Even Google’s much-publicised Project Glass will involve wearing a headset, he points out.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Augment your tongue and taste the world anew”When bands get cute with stylizing their names, it can be a Liz Lemon-worthy eyeroll moment. Why does fun. think they’re above capitalization and normal punctuation? What’s up with the spaces in S U R V I V E’s name? Who does!!! think they’re foolin’?
But Los Angeles’ AWOLNATION? Oh, no. Not them. The premiere screaming men of Austin City Limits Music Festival earned that all-caps moment in every way they could. Here are 23 reasons why.
Lead singer/scream engineer Aaron Bruno looks like heavy metal Cali Jesus, a crackling bonfire of beard, highlights and tan decked out in a short-panted flight suit. You could also describe the overall look as “Father John Misty with the irony baked out of him by the Los Angeles sun.” The band’s Jekyll-Hyde of heavy metal and palatable indie rock infused their guitarist with perma-lip curl, particularly on “Hollow Moon (Bad Wolf).” That song is technically rap if you use a broad definition, but I would hesitate to call it rap-metal, because that seems like an unnecessary slur. SAIL Did drummer Isaac Carpenter’s shirt come off from the sheer vibrations emanating from his sonic-boom drums? I walked up a few seconds late, so I might have missed any shredding fabric. Aaron Bruno vocal comparison No. 1: cobras streaming out of his raw throat. People usually seem appreciative about returning to ACL once they’ve hit it big, but Bruno’s open-hearted joy about making a triumphant Zilker Park rendezvous after their 2011 fest debut was palpable. Bruno channeled the crowd’s energy with wiggling fingertips. Wizards are metal. On “Not Your Fault,” Bruno welcomed his penchant for Creed noises with arms wide open. SAIL. Unironic use of the word “party people.” The only show where “sing along” is code for “emit a blood curdling expression of enthusiasm with no discernible verbal significance.” Aaron Bruno vocal comparison No. 2: the furious last stand of an intense, unblinking drifter. “Kill Your Heroes” surely snagging the title of Most Fatalistic Party Anthem of ACL. Accept your mortality and get a great cardio burn going! The band dedicated “Woman Woman” to an inflatable T-Rex on a stick. On that number, Bruno wound up a pitch to the crowd when he indicated to them to sing the words. Literally. Running. Laps. During “I Am.” Aaron Bruno vocal comparison No. 3: drunk Beastie Boy. The drum solo on that song turned into an episode of “Metalocalypse.” Bruno exhorted the audience to get down as low as possible before an explosive jump for “Burn It Down,” and it should be emphasized that AWOLNATION has a song called “Burn It Down.” SAAAAAAIIIIIL. No, actually, “Sail.” I kid you not, an actual breeze blew in as soon as the song started. The crowd lost their marbles when the opening notes sounded. The song was a blistering, spartan banger, and Bruno finished it in the photo pit doling out high-fives across the line. The band played, letting the biggest rock cacophony at the fest bleed out into victory lap of sound.All G-Shocks I write about are mine. These are NOT for sale. Please no enquiries. The answer is simple: "No".
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I'm Sjors and you might know me from my G-Peopleland website. I started this weblog in 2008, together with Greg from Canada. My initial goal was to write about 50 G-Shock models in one year. Meanwhile we are in the seventh series of 50 G-Shock Articles. I write mostly all the articles, but I also invite guest authors.Over the last few years, it feels like Dungeons & Dragons has experienced a bit of a renaissance. The tabletop role-playing game is appearing in all corners of media, from TV to podcasts, with new generations discovering its appeal.
If this resurgence has made you curious about the game's origins and how it grew to what it is today, you're in luck! A new graphic novel written by journalist David Kushner, with illustrations by Koren Shadmi, explores that origin story.
Kushner published an article in 2008 about the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax, and it's that article about how the popular game was created that's given new life in Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D. Released in May, the book explores Gygax's life, the other co-creator and individuals who contributed to D&D, and the popularity of the game today. Its illustrations and the way it casts you in the roles of Gygax and the others offers a unique way to learn about and experience this classic game's history.
We spoke with Kushner about the new book, what it was like adapting his article to this format and whether there might be more graphic novels in his future.
What's your background with Dungeons & Dragons?
David Kushner: Not to date myself here, but I played when I was growing up in the '70s, so I was I guess part of that first D&D generation. For me, I think like a lot of people at the time, interests went hand in hand, so there was a good chance if you were interested in video games and science fiction and comics you'd be interested in Dungeons & Dragons, so I definitely fit that bill. D&D was very new and different at that time, and it was this cultural phenomenon that I participated in. Then, as I grew older and as I just became a writer, I always maintained a fascination with the game, not only as a source of recreation and entertainment but as an influential piece of popular culture that I thought maybe hadn't gotten its due.
The graphic novel is adapted from an article you wrote. Can you tell us a little bit about that article and what it was like meeting Gary Gygax?
I did a story for Wired magazine back in 2008, and it was a profile of Gary Gygax. I went to meet him at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, during a gaming convention he was organizing and was genuinely thrilled to meet the guy. He's kind of like the Jerry Garcia of gaming. People came from all over to meet him, and certainly just for me personally it was a thrill to meet him and also play a game with him. To have him DM a game was incredible.
Sadly, it ended up being one of his last interviews, because he died not long after that, so the story that came out in Wired, my piece, ended up being kind of a posthumous reflection also on his legacy, and it wasn't just him. I also went down to Florida and I met with the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, Dave Arneson, who also passed away not long after Gygax, and interviewed a few other people in and around the D&D universe. So meeting him was a real thrill, and then all these years later, I was always thinking about that story and thinking about how I could explore it further and go into other areas that I didn't include in the article, and I thought it would be fun to do it as a graphic novel.
Have you worked in graphic novels before? How did the idea come about to adapt that article into this form?
No, this is the first time that I've collaborated on a graphic novel. I've just always been interested in the form of comics. As a comics reader, I always loved them and thinking a lot about how you could tell true stories in graphic novels. I think that I just saw opportunity for a journalist like myself to collaborate with an illustrator like Koren Shadmi, because a lot of graphic novels are done by one person. The author is the illustrator, the illustrator is the author. In terms of nonfiction there's a lot of graphic memoirs that fall under that category. There's not as many collaborations that I found between journalists and illustrators to create graphic novels, and I was really intrigued by that, because I'm lucky if I can draw a stick figure. Also, Koren's a gamer himself and he grew up on D&D, so it was a good match and we had a lot of fun making it.
What was the process like working together, and what additional work did you have to do for the book?
From my standpoint, it was almost like I was writing a screenplay. I was kind of adapting the work that I'd done into a script form, essentially. Basically, I wrote a script based on my story and then gave it to Koren, and we would go back and forth about "Well, I was there; maybe here are ways it can be illustrated," and he would then come back to me, and so that's how the collaboration worked. It started with the article, with the research I'd done and I expanded on. For example, there's a part of the book that gets more in-depth into the disappearance of Dallas Egbert, who was this gamer in the '70s who went missing in the steam tunnels of Michigan. That was something I was like, "I think I want to go further into that story," so we ended up bringing that all together. Then just from the get-go [I wanted] to bring a real fantasy element to the storytelling so that it was an homage to the game, so a lot of the book is told in second person, where the reader is like a character, just like you are in D&D. I don't think I would ever do that. I would never write in second person, well, never say never, but that was an explicit choice because of the material. It seemed organic to the story that we were telling.
What was the hardest part of that process?
I think it's always hard to explain something unfamiliar to people. Especially a game like Dungeons & Dragons, because anything I write I'm trying to reach a general audience, so how do you convey something like D&D to someone who has no idea what it is? And maybe they don't even care or they have biases. That's a challenge. How do you do that? How do you take someone into the world, and how do you explain the rules of the game? How does it work? So doing that in a way that doesn't get bogged down, that's a challenge. Keeping it moving and just distilling it all into a comic book of the right length.
How do you think this graphic novel then can appeal to those who might not know anything about D&D as well as those who are familiar with the game?
I hope so, like I said, that's my hope for everything I do. I'm always trying to reach people who maybe aren't familiar with something, because you know it's a personal passion too. D&D is important, and there's a part of me that wants the world to understand why. Why should we care about this? Why is the show Stranger Things so obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons? What is that about? I think it's a double thing, because hopefully people who would never pick up a comic or a graphic novel might pick it up and read it, and I've already heard that from people. People who maybe they've never read a graphic novel. I think it's a fun, accessible way to learn true stories that I think is far from being fully realized. I think it's a fantastic way to reach readers, because sometimes you don't need to write a 300-page single-spaced book to tell a story, so I'm excited by the opportunity that can be had, and this was a way of sort of getting my feet wet, and I definitely intend to do more nonfiction graphic novels or bio comics, comics journalism. Whatever you want to call it!
So you’re interested in doing more work with graphic novels? What about more on Dungeons & Dragons?
D&D I don't know. I feel like I've done this, but graphic novels definitely I feel like there's many, many more stories to be told in this form, and it allows me as a writer to tell stories in a very unique way, so I'm definitely looking forward to doing more.
Rise of the Dungeon Master is available now.In this issue of Brain, Smaranda Leu-Semenescu and colleagues describe one aspect of a rare and fascinating neuropsychological syndrome—auto-activation deficit (AAD)—in which patients with specific basal ganglia lesions experience an almost total loss of self-driven behaviour that can partially be reversed by external stimulation. Indeed, when questioned, some patients with AAD will consistently report a complete absence of spontaneous thoughts. For healthy individuals, spontaneous thoughts are not only a feature of waking life; they are also a common feature of that component of sleep that we call dreams. Leu-Semenescu and colleagues therefore asked whether the absence of mental content reported by patients with AAD also persisted during sleep—that is, are individuals with no spontaneous waking thoughts able to dream?
As described in their article, sleep stages were recorded from each of a group of 13 patients with AAD and a group of matched healthy controls using a combination of EEG and other physiological measures. During periods of both rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep, all participants were awoken and asked to report their mental contents immediately before waking. Surprisingly, despite reporting a total absence of mental content during wakefulness, some patients with AAD nevertheless reported dream contents, primarily during REM sleep. This intriguing dissociation raises many questions about the neural origins of dreams.
The authors ascribe their observations to a ‘bottom-up’ theory of dreaming in which, during REM sleep, random fluctuations in brainstem activity ascend to stimulate sensory cortical regions that may, in turn, evoke sensory dream contents in patients with AAD (Nir and Tononi, 2010). This interpretation, alongside the specific basal ganglia lesions of the patients, raises the question of what neural mechanisms are minimally sufficient to result in dreams. Indeed, could it be that other populations of severely brain-injured patients whose pathologies include a relative preservation of the brainstem—e.g. those in the vegetative and minimally conscious states (Adams et al., 1999)—may also experience dream content from a similar bottom-up mechanism? This is unlikely to be the case, as the patients with AAD exhibited broadly healthy sleep-architecture, while it is known that more diffuse forms of brain injury dramatically disrupt sleep/wake cycles (Cruse et al., 2013)—even entirely eliminating REM sleep (Landsness et al., 2011), the sleep stage in which the majority of dreams of the patients with AAD were reported.
Nevertheless, could the dream contents of the patients with AAD have come about as a result of a solely bottom-up mechanism? Despite reporting dreams upon awakening, there were marked qualitative differences when compared with healthy controls. Specifically, the dreams of patients with AAD were less complex, less bizarre and less emotional. The authors argue that, in healthy individuals, the more detailed and narrative aspects of dreams are the result of cortico-cortical interactions that ‘clothe’ the bottom-up random stimulations from the brainstem (Roffwarg et al., 1966). Indeed, theories of consciousness acknowledge the importance of long-range cortical connections for the experience of mental content (Tononi, 2004; Dehaene et al., 2006). REM sleep itself is also characterized by cortical effective connectivity that is akin to that seen during wakefulness (Massimini et al., 2010). It is therefore unclear how the hypothesized local activations elicited through brainstem stimulation alone would enter consciousness without some degree of cortico-cortical integration.
Due to the relative rarity of the syndrome, there is unfortunately a paucity of data describing the cortico-cortical connectivity of patients with AAD. In order to support their hypothesis, the authors cite prior work that shows a failure of patients with AAD to modulate their motor output in response to affective cues, despite retaining an ability to modulate the same motor output to command (Schmidt et al., 2007). The authors argue that this apparent disconnect between affect and action is indicative of an impairment of structural and/or functional connectivity in patients with AAD. Further complementary measures of structural and functional connectivity are required, however, in order to elucidate the relationship between cortico-cortical connections and the qualitative differences in the dreams of patients with AAD. For example, does diffusion tensor imaging reveal impairment in structural connectivity in the brains of patients with AAD, perhaps as a result of atrophy down-stream of the basal ganglia lesions? Does resting-state functional MRI confirm the hypothesized impairments in functional connectivity during sleep and/or wakefulness?
The authors acknowledge that the bottom-up and top-down hypotheses of dream origin in healthy individuals are not mutually exclusive. Under these assumptions, therefore, it may be possible to investigate how these contents are differentially represented in the brain. Indeed, it has recently been shown that aspects of non-REM dream content may be decoded accurately from perceptual brain regions using functional MRI (Horikawa et al., 2013). If such an approach can be applied to REM sleep, it may be possible to identify qualitative differences in the neural representations of dream content in patients with AAD when compared with controls, thereby helping to characterize the nature of both the hypothesized bottom-up dreams, and the more complex top-down narratives of healthy dreaming.
Further neuroimaging investigations would also speak to the individual differences seen across the AAD patient group. Indeed, only 31% of patients with AAD reported dreams during REM sleep. From the reported data, there appear to be no differences in aetiology or pathology between dreamers and non-dreamers. However, further studies using in vivo measures of structural connectivity, such as diffusion tensor imaging, may illuminate this inconsistency. For instance, the bottom-up theory of dreaming, as expounded by the authors, would predict that there is a greater reduction in brainstem-to-cortex connectivity in non-dreamers that therefore leads to reduced stimulation of the cortex during REM sleep.
In summary, the article by Leu-Semenescu and colleagues provides a fascinating insight into a rare neuropsychological syndrome, while simultaneously serving to illustrate further how investigations of altered forms of consciousness—be it those caused by brain-injury, or by the simple onset of sleep—may provide us with unrivaled insights into consciousness itself, and how the brain supports our ongoing mental contents.
Funding
Damian Cruse is supported by generous funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) programme.
References
Adams JH Jennett B McLellan DR Murray LS Graham DI The neuropathology of the vegetative state after head injury, J Clin Pathol, 1999, vol. 52 (pg. 804 - 6 ), vol.(pg. Cruse D Thibaut A Demertzi A Nantes JC Bruno M-A Gosseries O, et al. Actigraphy assessments of circadian sleep-wake cycles in the Vegetative and Minimally Conscious States, BMC Med, 2013, vol. 11 pg. 18, vol.pg. Dehaene S Changeux JP Naccache L Sackur J Sergent C Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: a testable taxonomy, Trends Cogn Sci, 2006, vol. 10 (pg. 204 - 11 ), vol.(pg. Horikawa T Tamaki M Miyawaki Y Kamitani Y Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep, Science, 2013, vol. 340 (pg. 639 - 42 ), vol.(pg. Landsness EC Bruno M-A Noirhomme Q Riedner BA Gosseries O Schnakers C, et al. Electrophysiological correlates of behavioural changes in vigilance in vegetative state and minimally conscious state, Brain, 2011, vol. 134 (pg. 2222 - 32 ), vol.(pg. Massimini M Ferrarelli F Murphy MJ Huber R Riedner BA Casarotto S, et al. Cortical reactivity and effective connectivity during REM sleep in humans, Cogn Neurosci, 2010, vol. 1 (pg. 176 - 83 ), vol.(pg. Nir Y Tononi G Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology, Trends Cogn Sci, 2010, vol. 14 (pg. 88 - 100 ), vol.(pg. Roffwarg HP Muzio JN Dement WC Ontogenetic development of the human sleep-dream cycle, Science, 1966, vol. 152 (pg. 604 - 19 ), vol.(pg. Schmidt L d'Arc BF Lafargue G Galanaud D Czernecki V Grabli D, et al. Disconnecting force from money: effects of basal ganglia damage on incentive motivation, Brain, 2007, vol. 131 (pg. 1303 - 10 ), vol.(pg. Tononi G An information integration theory of consciousness, BMC Neurosci, 2004, vol. 5 pg. 42, vol.pg.
© The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com180g (1 & 1/2 cups) self-raising flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
375g (1 & 1/2 cups) mango puree*
75g (1/3 cup) vegetable oil
125g (2/3 cup) caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g (2/3 cup) block of margarine (the Stork pastry block of margarine works best), softened
300g (3 cups) icing sugar, sieved
1-2 tbsp lime juice
Gold shimmer spray
50g mango puree
Here's a slightly different cupcake I made a few weeks ago, inspired by the Indian Mango Lassi drink - a mango cupcake filled with mango puree and frosted with a lime buttercream, and it's all suitable for vegans :O The cupcake itself is egg-free, which I think makes the mango flavour really stand out. If you're not vegan, you could use butter in the buttercream, but a dairy free butter works really well too.I used these cool black lace wraps for the cupcakes, which I found in my local home & bargains. Normal cupcake cases would work well too :)Finally I used a Wilton 2D piping nozzle for the buttercream, which I've used before in my vanilla rose cupcakes :) I've been having a play with some other piping techniques, which I'll hopefully be able to share with you soon (some of them look SO cool).You could also try two-toning the buttercream by painting a line of food colouring up along the inside of the piping bag. This gives a very pretty result :)I found these cupcakes were perfect the day AFTER baking, so you could always bake the cupcakes one day and frost the next. I baked and frosted the same day and served them the day after, and they went down very well :DMakes 12 cupcakesFor the cupcakes:For the lime buttercream:To finish:* If you can't find a can of mango puree, most big supermarkets (in the UK at least) sell frozen mango chunks. If you defrost and blitz these, they'll work just as well (just be sure to blend them until smooth).1. Preheat your oven to 170c (160c fan)/340f/gas mark 3. Line 12 cupcake wells with cupcake cases/wraps.2. Pour all of the ingredients for the cupcakes into a large mixing bowl and whisk until smooth.3. Use an ice cream scoop to evenly distribute the batter between the cupcake cases.4. Bake for 15-18 minutes, until the cakes feel springy to the touch. Leave to cool in the tins.5. Use a teaspoon to dig into the centre of the cupcake, removing enough cupcake to go halfway down the cupcake.6. Add a teaspoon of mango puree to the cavity of each cupcake.7. Make the buttercream. Beat the margarine until really soft and spreadable.8. Add half of the icing sugar and lime juice, and use a wooden spoon to beat the sugar into the butter.9. Once all of the sugar has been incorporated add the other half of the icing sugar and keep beating until smooth.10. Place a 2D nozzle into a piping bag and fill with the buttercream.11. Cut the end off of the nozzle so that the tip of the nozzle has fully emerged from the bag.12. Starting in the centre of the cupcake, pipe one continuous swirl (like a snail shell?). Repeat for all of the cupcakes.13. Spray with the gold shimmer if you like and enjoy!The agency decided that there was no aspect of secret war which couldn’t be corporatized.
Call it the Jason Bourne strategy.
Think of it as the CIA’s plunge into Hollywood — or into the absurd. As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency’s moves couldn’t be have been more far-fetched or more real. In its post-9/11 global shadow war, it has employed both private contractors and some of the world’s most notorious prisoners in ways that leave the latest episode of the Bourne films in the dust: hired gunmen trained to kill as well as former inmates who cashed in on the notoriety of having worn an orange jumpsuit in the world’s most infamous jail.
The first group of undercover agents were recruited by private companies from the Army Special Forces and the Navy SEALs and then repurposed to the CIA at handsome salaries averaging around $140,000 a year; the second crew was recruited from the prison cells at Guantanamo Bay and paid out of a secret multimillion dollar slush fund called “the Pledge.”
Last month, the Associated Press revealed that the CIA had selected a few dozen men from among the hundreds of terror suspects being held at Guantanamo and trained them to be double agents at a cluster of eight cottages in a program dubbed “Penny Lane.” (Yes, indeed, the name was taken from the Beatles song, as was “Strawberry Fields,” a Guantanamo program that involved torturing “high-value” detainees.) These men were then returned to what the Bush administration liked to call the “global battlefield,” where their mission was to befriend members of al-Qaeda and supply targeting information for the Agency’s drone assassination program.
Such a secret double-agent program, while colorful and remarkably unsuccessful, should have surprised no one. After all, plea bargaining or persuading criminals to snitch on their associates — a tactic frowned upon by international legal experts — is widely used in the U.S. police and legal system. Over the last year or so, however, a trickle of information about the other secret program has come to light and it opens an astonishing new window into the privatization of U.S. intelligence.
Hollywood in Langley
In July 2010, at his confirmation hearings for the post of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper explained the use of private contractors in the intelligence community: “In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War… we were under a congressional mandate to reduce the community by on the order of 20%… Then 9/11 occurred… With the gusher… of funding that has accrued particularly from supplemental or overseas contingency operations funding, which, of course, is one year at a time, it is very difficult to hire government employees one year at a time. So the obvious outlet for that has been the growth of contractors.”
Thousands of “Green Badges” were hired via companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and Qinetiq to work at CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) offices around the world, among the regular staff who wore blue badges. Many of them — like Edward Snowden — performed specialist tasks in information technology meant to augment the effectiveness of government employees.
Then the CIA decided that there was no aspect of secret war which couldn’t be corporatized. So they set up a unit of private contractors as covert agents, green-lighting them to carry guns and be sent into U.S. war zones at a moment’s notice. This elite James Bond-like unit of armed bodyguards and super-fixers was given the anodyne name Global Response Staff (GRS).
Among the 125 employees of this unit, from the Army Special Forces via private contractors came Raymond Davis and Dane Paresi; from the Navy SEALs Glen Doherty, Jeremy Wise, and Tyrone Woods. All five would soon be in the anything-but-covert headlines of newspapers across the world. These men — no women have yet been named — were deployed on three- to four-month missions accompanying CIA analysts into the field.
Davis was assigned to Lahore, Pakistan; Doherty and Woods to Benghazi, Libya; Paresi and Wise to Khost, Afghanistan. As GRS expanded, other contractors went to Djibouti, Lebanon, and Yemen, among other countries, according to a Washington Post profile of the unit.
From early on, its work wasn’t exactly a paragon of secrecy. By 2005, for instance, former Special Forces personnel had already begun openly discussing jobs in the unit at online forums. Their descriptions sounded like something directly out of a Hollywood thriller. The Post portrayed the focus of GRS personnel more mundanely as “designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in high-risk outposts.”
“They don’t learn languages, they’re not meeting foreign nationals, and they’re not writing up intelligence reports,” a former U.S. intelligence official told that paper. “Their main tasks are to map escape routes from meeting places, pat down informants, and provide an ‘envelope’ of security… if push comes to shove, you’re going to have to shoot.”
In the ensuing years, G |
one of them before killing himself. Duane Morrison, 53, held the girls for nearly four hours and sexually assaulted them in September 2006.
He fatally shot Emily Keyes, 16, and then killed himself as SWAT team members stormed the classroom at Platte Canyon High School.
Contributing: Blair Shiff, KUSA-TV, Denver; The Associated Press. Follow Mallory Davis and Jeremy Jojola on Twitter: @mallory_davis87 and @jeremyjojola
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1XMZvGfEmma Watson, digital painting, 2013
(Image reference by James Houston)
Apologies for the lack of personal art lately - talk about swamped.
Really trying to improve on certain techniques with my painting methods.
I’m completely under-practiced when it comes to using traditional paints so the ability to replicate oil and acrylics through Photoshop is something I’m keen to work on. All that pressure of slapping actual paint down when I can just ctrl-z my mistakes and alter ‘medium’ with the click of a button - just seems to make more sense for a lazy-bum like myself.
I’ve also come to terms with the fact that there is no rule to say that I can’t over-sharpen my work. The extra noise and grittiness enhances the traditional look, I think.
And using the combination of traditional textures and digital'softness’ harmoniously is challenging but fun.
I’ll add this as a print in the near future. Would love to know what you guys think :)
View highresCameron Clyne says he doesn’t think anyone has ‘grasped quite how revolutionary’ the emergence of renewable energy will be
Australia’s political leaders are “wilfully blind” to the challenge of climate change, with the country at risk from an “economically reckless” reliance upon fossil fuels, the former head of the National Australia Bank has warned.
Cameron Clyne, who was chief executive of NAB from 2009 until he stood down last year, said he doesn’t “think any of us have grasped quite how revolutionary” the emergence of renewable energy will be, warning that Australia cannot continue to be wedded to carbon-heavy fuels such as coal.
“The truth is that Australia’s lack of diversification is economically reckless,” Clyne wrote in Fairfax newspapers. “Most of our electricity generation is reliant on coal; an overwhelming majority of our transport and a very large percentage of our export industries are reliant on fossil fuels.
“When you look at this, you would be blind to not see a myriad of looming business risks.”
Clyne wrote that falling global oil and coal prices, a dip in Chinese coal consumption owing to air pollution concerns, pressure on fossil fuel subsidies that have been estimated at $10m a minute and competition from solar and wind are leaving Australia’s fossil fuel assets at risk of being “stranded”.
“So you can be as angry as you like with environmentalists and “environmentalism” but from an economic point of view, it still wouldn’t make sense to be so heavily addicted to this polluting business as Australia is,” Clyne said.
“We know from history what happens when a business or a government sets its face against a change that is coming anyway. It’s usually not the politicians or the chief executives who end up at the unemployment office.
“Leadership mistakes are worn by people who are least at fault for the bad decisions: the workers, their families and the communities that depend on them.
“It’s everyday Australians who bear the brunt, cop the hit and pay for the wilful ignorance and blindness of political leaders – and some in the business community – to the very real and very rapid changes that are all around us.”
Clyne wrote that ignoring the problem of climate change would not make it go away, adding: “It seems some in Australia are wilfully blind to these problems and the problems this poses for our nation and its economic and social fabric.”
The Abbott government was “not leading Australia in the direction that’s needed”, Clyne wrote, but upcoming climate talks in Paris to set new greenhouse gas reduction targets represented a new opportunity for leadership.
The federal government is set to unveil its post-2020 emissions reduction target this month. Environmental groups have voiced concern about the level of Australia’s ambition after Greg Hunt, the environment minister, described the Climate Change Authority recommendation of a 40% to 60% emissions cut by 2030 as “staggering” and far beyond what other nations are doing.
Under the Coalition, Australia became the first country to scrap a carbon pricing system and cut its renewable energy target by a quarter after a lengthy period of political wrangling that saw investment in the sector slump by 90%.
Australia’s emissions have risen since the repeal of the carbon price, with economists and foreign governments questioning whether the replacement policy, the $2.5bn Direct Action plan, will be capable of facilitating emissions cuts beyond 2020.
Under Clyne’s leadership, NAB supported the implementation of carbon pricing, although he has denied the decision was a pro-Labor one. The Coalition has attacked Labor for committing to introducing an emissions trading scheme, dubbing it an electricity tax scheme that will push up power bills and be indistinguishable from the previous carbon tax.Blackwater was criticised for its alleged role in killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad 2007 [AFP]
Blackwater was criticised for its alleged role in killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad 2007 [AFP]
'Circumventing congress'
Jeremy Scahill, an investigative journalist who has written extensively about Blackwater and the rise in use of private contractors in war zones, told Al Jazeera that the allegation implicated the administration of George Bush, the former US president, and warranted a "deep investigation".
"The idea that you would have … a private company headed by a man [Erik Prince the former head of Blackwater] who was a major bankroller of President Bush's campaign … potentially on the payroll for his company to provide hitmen to the Bush administration … is quite an explosive allegation," he said.
"The Bush administration clearly used private contractors as a way of circumventing congressional oversight over these very sensitive US operations on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan" Jeremy Scahill, investigative journalist
"The Bush administration clearly used private contractors as a way of circumventing congressional oversight over these very sensitive US operations on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"This is a way of developing plausible deniability for Dick Cheney who really is at the centre of this investigation right now," he said, explaining that the former vice-president "is being accused by members of the intelligence community and in fact by some CIA officials, of having ordered that the CIA did not brief congress on the secret assassination programme".
Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, terminated the programme in June this year and then informed the congressional intelligence committees in an emergency briefing the next day.
The House Intelligence Committee then launched an investigation to determine whether the CIA broke the law by not informing congress about the secret programme as soon as it began.
Blackwater came under heavy criticism for its alleged role in a September 2007 shooting in Baghdad's Nisoor square that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.
Government officials told the Times that bringing outsiders into a programme with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.
Michael Hayden, who took over from Goss as CIA director, downgraded the programme from a planned covert action to an intelligence gathering activity.
Contractors
He told congress last year that the CIA regularly uses contractors for intelligence analysis and operations, including in the interrogation of terrorist suspects which critics have called torture.
Contractors are no longer allowed to conduct interrogations, Panetta told congress in April, but more than a quarter of US intelligence agencies' employees are contractors hired to fill in gaps in the military and civilian work force.
About a quarter of them conduct intelligence collection and operations, according to data released last year by the office of the director of national intelligence.
The CIA lost about a quarter of its manpower and budget in the post-Cold War years, so when the September 11, 2001 attacks happened, it hired a large number of contractors while it recruited more permanent personnel.HUNTSVILLE: An Alabama police officer slammed an Indian man to the ground for no reason, causing spinal injuries that left the man partially paralysed, and should be convicted of a federal civil rights crime, a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday in the officer's second trial.
But a defense lawyer said the man was to blame for his own injuries and suggested he was partly at fault for visiting the United States without knowing how to speak English.
Opening statements began moments after attorneys picked a jury of 11 women and three men, including two alternates, to hear officer Eric Parker's second trial on using excessive force against 58-year-old Sureshbhai Patel.
Jurors deadlocked in Parker's first trial in September, and US District Judge Madeline Haikala declared a mistrial.
Examine: Half of blacks in US say police have treated them unfairly
Prosecutor Robert Posey told jurors that Parker, 27, was riding with a rookie officer as a trainer for the Madison Police Department in suburban Huntsville when the two answered a call about a suspicious person walking in the neighborhood where Patel had just arrived from India days earlier to live with his son, daughter-in-law and grandson.
A caller reported seeing a black man in a knit cap peering and walking into garages on a cool February morning, Posey said, and Parker and the other officer spotted the brown-skinned Patel as they pulled into the area in their police car.
"The officers don't see Mr. Patel doing anything suspicious. He's just walking down the street," Posey said. After several moments of failing to communicate with each other because Patel didn't speak English and Parker didn't speak Patel's language, Parker grabbed Patel and threatened to "put him on the ground" before slamming the man face-first into a yard, Posey said.
"I expect the evidence will be that there was no good reason for this use of force," Posey said. Later, Parker tried to justify the take down to supervisors, the prosecutor said.
Take a look: Alabama governor apologises to India in 'excessive force' case
But defense attorney Robert Tuten disagreed, saying that Parker only responded to escalating threats from Patel in the manner in which he was trained.
"This case is about a police officer doing his job," Tuten told jurors. Patel kept "jerking away" and walking off from police despite realising they were officers and understanding their use of the word "stop," Tuten said, and he refused commands to remove his hands from his pockets.
"There are people out there in the world who will kill a police officer just because he's a cop, and (officers) have to be aware of that," Tuten said.
Tuten called the language difficulties between Patel and Parker "unfortunate," but he said anyone who comes to the United States is expected to follow the law and speak the dominant language.
"Here, we speak English," Tuten said.
Also read: US police shot dead more than two persons a dayCancer cells are like normal cells—they just grow abnormally. That is why treatments that selectively try to get rid of cancer cells while protecting normal cells don’t work that well. What if we could fix the abnormal growth without having to kill the cells?
That is what a team of researchers at the Mayo Clinic have just done. Their lab tests on human cells from breast and bladder cancers show that, with a relatively simple intervention, they can program cancer cells to grow normally again.
A new body
Most cells in your body are slowly replaced by new cells through the process of cell division. During this complex process, hundreds of things need to go just right. When they do, the final step is to instruct the cell to stop dividing. In cancer cells, the final step is missed, and that is what results in a tumor.
Mayo Clinic researchers found that the final step is regulated by biological processors called microRNAs. These instruct the cell to make a protein called PLEKHA7 which, in just the right amount, stops cell division.
In cancer cells, the levels of PLEKHA7 aren’t right. When the researchers injected microRNAs into cancer cells, the levels of PLEKHA7 were restored and the abnormal growth stopped. The results of the study are published in Nature Cell Biology.
“This is an unexpected finding,” Chris Bakal, a specialist at the Institute for Cancer Research in London, told The Telegraph. “Normal cells touch each other and form junctions, then they shut down proliferation. If there is a way to turn that [process] back on, it would be a way to stop tumors from growing.”
Of course, the research done in human cells in a lab is a long way from being used as a treatment for cancer. Still, with other potential ways of turning back cancer cells to normal cells being developed, the hope for a cure has never been higher.This tutorial discusses KVM introduction, deployment and how to use it to create virtual machines under RedHat based-distributions such as RHEL/CentOS7 and Fedora 21.
What is KVM?
KVM or (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on Intel 64 and AMD 64 hardware that is included in the mainline Linux kernel since 2.6.20 and is stable and fast for most workloads.
KVM Feautres
There are many useful features and advantages which you will gain when you use KVM to deploy your virtual platform. KVM hypervisor supports following features:
Over-committing : Which means allocating more virtualized CPUs or memory than the available resources on the system. Thin provisioning : Which allows the allocation of flexible storage and optimizes the available space for every guest virtual machine. Disk I/O throttling : Provides the ability to set a limit on disk I/O requests sent from virtual machines to the host machine. Automatic NUMA balancing : Improves the performance of applications running on NUMA hardware systems. Virtual CPU hot add capability : Provides the ability to increase processing power as needed on running virtual machines, without downtime.
This is our first on-going KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) series, here we will going to cover following articles in part wise fashion.
Part 1: How to Create Virtual Machines in Linux Using KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)
Part 3: How to Manage KVM Storage Volumes and Pools for Virtual Machines
Part 4: Managing KVM Virtual Environment using CLI Tools
Prerequisites
Make sure that your system has the hardware virtualization extensions: For Intel-based hosts, verify the CPU virtualization extension [vmx] are available using following command.
For AMD-based hosts, verify the CPU virtualization extension [svm] are available.
If there is no output make sure that virtualization extensions is enabled in BIOS. Verify that KVM modules are loaded in the kernel “it should be loaded by default”.
[[email protected] ~]# lsmod | grep kvm
The output should contains kvm_intel for intel-based hosts or kvm_amd for amd-based hosts.
Before starting, you will need the root account or non-root user with sudo privileges configured on your system and also make sure that your system is up-to-date.
Make sure that Selinux be in Permissive mode.
Step 1: KVM Installation and Deployment
1. We will install qemu-kvm and qemu-img packages at first. These packages provide the user-level KVM and disk image manager.
2. Now, you have the minimum requirement to deploy virtual platform on your host, but we also still have useful tools to administrate our platform such as:
virt-manager provides a GUI tool to administrate your virtual machines. libvirt-client provides a CL tool to administrate your virtual environment this tool called virsh. virt-install provides the command “virt-install” to create your virtual machines from CLI. libvirt provides the server and host side libraries for interacting with hypervisors and host systems.
Let’s install these above tools using the following command.
[[email protected] ~]# yum install virt-manager libvirt libvirt-python libvirt-client
3. For RHEL/CentOS7 users, also still having additional package groups such as: Virtualization Client, Virtualization Platform and Virtualization Tools to install.
4. The virtualization daemon which manage all of the platform is “libvirtd”. lets restart it.
5. After restarting the daemon, then check its status by running following command.
Sample Output
libvirtd.service - Virtualization daemon Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/libvirtd.service; enabled) Active: active (running) since Mon 2014-12-29 15:48:46 EET; 14s ago Main PID: 25701 (libvirtd)
Now, lets switch to the next section to create our virtual machines.
Step 2: Create VMs using KVM
As we mentioned early, we have some useful tools to manage our virtual platform and creating virtual machines. One of this tools called [virt-manager] which we use in the next section.
6. Although virt-manager is a GUI based tool, we also could launch/start it from terminal as well as from GUI.
Using GNOME
Using GNOME Classic
7. After starting the tool, this window will appear.
8. By default you will find manager is connected directly to localhost, fortunately you could use the same tool to mange another host remotely. From “File” tab, just select “Add Connection” and this window will appear.
Check “Connect to remote host” option then provide Hostname/IP of the remote server. If you need establishing connection to the remote host at every time the manager starting, just check “Auto Connect” option.
9. Let’s return to our localhost, before creating new virtual machine you should decide where will the files be stored?! in other words, you should create the Volume Disk (Virtual disk / Disk image ) for your virtual machine.
By Right clicking on localhost and selecting “Details” and then select “Storage” tab.
10. Next, press “New Volume” button, then enter the name of your new virtual disk (Volume Disk) and enter the size which you want/need in the “Max Capacity” section.
The allocation size is the actual size for your disk which will be allocated immediately from your physical disk after finishing the steps.
Note: This is an important technology in storage administration field which called “thin provision”. It used to allocate the used storage size only, NOT all of available size.
For example, you created virtual disk with size 60G, but you have used actually only 20G, using this technology the allocated size from your physical hard disk will be 20G not 60G.
In another words the allocated physical size will by dynamically allocated depending on the actual used size. You could find more information in details at VMWare vStorage Thin Provisioning.
11. You will note that a label of the new Volume Disk has been appeared in the list.
You should also notice the path of the new disk image (Volume Disk), by default it will be under /var/lib/libvirt/images, you can verify it using the following command.
[[email protected] Downloads]# ls -l /var/lib/libvirt/images -rw-------. 1 root root 10737418240 Jan 3 16:47 vm1Storage.img
12. Now, we’re ready to create our virtual machine. Let’s hit the button “VM” in the main window, this wizard window will be appear.
Select the installation method which you will use to create the virtual machine. For now we will use Local install media, later we will discuss the remaining methods.
13. Now its time to specify which Local install media to be used, we have two options:
From physical [CDROM/DVD]. From ISO image.
For our tutorial, lets use ISO image method, so you should provide the path of your ISO image.
Important: Unfortunately there’s a really silly bug for whom use RHEL/CentOS7. This bug prevents you from installation using physical [CDROM/DVD], you will find the option is grayed like this.
And if you hold your cursor on it, this error message will appear.
Until now there is no official/direct solution for this bug, you could find more information about this but here.
14. The storage has return back, we will use the virtual disk which we have created early to install virtual machine on it. It will be as shown.
15. The final step which ask you about the name of your virtual machine and another advanced options lets talk about it later.
If you like to change some configuration or doing some customization just check “Customize configuration before install” option. Then click finish and wait seconds, control console will appear for your Guest OS to manage it
Conclusion
Now you have learned what is is KVM, How to manage your virtual platform using GUI tools, How to deploy virtual machine using it and another awesome things.
Although this isn’t end of the article, in our up-coming articles, we will discuss another important topics which related to KVM. Make your hands dirty using the previous knowledge and be ready for the next part…..Now if you want dinosaur DNA, I say go to the dinosaur. So that's what we've done. Back in 1993 when the movie came out, we actually had a grant from the National Science Foundation to attempt to extract DNA from a dinosaur, and we chose the dinosaur on the left, a Tyrannosaurus rex, which was a very nice specimen. And one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, actually had the background to do this sort of thing. And so she looked into the bone of this T. rex, one of the thigh bones, and she actually found some very interesting structures in there. They found these red circular-looking objects, and they looked, for all the world, like red blood cells. And they're in what appear to be the blood channels that go through the bone. And so she thought, well, what the heck. So she sampled some material out of it. Now it wasn't DNA; she didn't find DNA. But she did find heme, which is the biological foundation of hemoglobin. And that was really cool. That was interesting. That was — here we have 65-million-year-old heme. Well we tried and tried and we couldn't really get anything else out of it.Snr Const Terry Welsh and Daniel Brogna, owner of The Bicycle Entrepreneur are handing out ultraviolet pens for people to mark bikes when they buy them to help police identify the bike if it is stolen. Picture: Andrew Ritchie www.communitypix.com.au d473358
CYCLING stores have joined forces with WA police in a roll out of UV pens at bike shops to help identify the growing number of stolen bikes.
Once a bike is marked with a driver’s licence number, police are able to shine a UV light to help identify the owner and return the bike.
Mirrabooka police community engagement officer Terry Welsh said UV pens were available from 10 north-west metro police stations and TBE and Bike Force stores.
“At Mirrabooka station we can have up to 43 stolen or unidentified bikes in one day come through the store room,” he said.
“The barcodes and serial numbers are often removed or filed off and it leaves me saying: ‘well I wonder who owns it?’”
Sgt Welsh said WA police recently auctioned off about 1000 unidentified bicycles.
“A $1 marker can help bring home a $2000 bike – it just makes sense,” he said.
Through partnering with the bike shops to promote marking bikes at the point of sale, Sgt Welsh said he was hoping to see success in the program.
“We are trialling the success over six months we’re fairly confident we will get some good results out of it,” he said.
“If you’ve just spent thousands on a bike, mark it up with the UV pen straight away.”
Since February in the north-west metro district there have been 333 reports of stolen bikes. However, police say actual numbers are far higher as data does not include found bikes or those that are stolen but not reported.When I first saw the following figure, presented by myrmecologist Chris Schmidt at a social insect conference, the whole room broke into laughter:
Pachycondyla, among the most common ants in tropical regions worldwide, turns out to be a motley assortment of unrelated species. While the taxonomy of the world’s 12,000 or so ant species is obviously still a work on progress, I don’t think any of us had seen a case where ant names showed such a non-relationship to their genealogy. We knew before that Pachycondyla wasn’t really a natural group. But this? This was bad.
I’m writing this post because Chris has just published his study in Zootaxa, and while the paper is behind a subscription barrier, the data and tree are available for free on Treebase. A follow-up paper is also in the works to bring the taxonomy into line with what is known from ant phylogenetics. Most Pachycondyla will likely revert to older names (Neoponera, Bothroponera, etc.), with only a handful of Neotropical species- including P. striata, above- remaining in a reduced Pachycondyla.
source: Schmidt, C. 2013. Molecular phylogenetics of ponerine ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Ponerinae). Zootaxa 3647 (2): 201–250.The Prayer Tent
This year the Prayer Tent ministry is taking another step forward for NAIDOC, the yearly cultural celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. On July 3rd the prayer warriors are off to Port Macquarie, Kempsy and Taree.
Since 2012 the Prayer Tent has been going to various events all over Australia. Last year the tent found themselves in Rockhampton and Emu Park for NAIDOC, witnessing the love of Christ through prayer, delivering beverages and free Bibles and booklets.
The purpose of the tent ministry has been clear from the beginning. Gaylene Ngalu, the founder of Prayer Tentz (the 'Z' in the ministry standing for Zillmere which is where the ministry began) tells of how everything just fell into place.
“It started when my pastor came up to me and told me ‘You're the opportunity God is looking for, pray about it.’ After prayer I felt God telling me to take a tent into NAIDOC in 2012. NAIDOC was two weeks away and I didn't have a tent or anything to bring. I didn't even know how to organize bringing a tent into NAIDOC. But someone gifted me with a tent out of the blue and I got all the help I needed setting it up.”
People enjoying the events
That was just the beginning. From the witness of the Prayer Tent in Brisbane and in Rockhampton last year, other tents are being raised up. This year other independent church groups are picking up the mantle after the example set by the Prayer Tentz in previous years.
Gaylene explains how this is all part of God’s plan:
“I believe that God wants to raise up tents all over Australia. Hopefully the next year after being at Port Macquarie, Kempsy and Taree the mantle will be passed and a tent ministry will go from there.”
If you would like to support this good work to the Indigenous people, for the first year the Prayer Tent is open to donations. You can find the bank details on www.prayertentz.com or PayPal prayertentz@outlook.com.
Bridget makes websites for various para-church ministries, is part of an Indigenous church and writes visual novels at www.christianvisualnovel.com.Kids in low-income households lag behind their peers from wealthier families when it comes to standardized testing. Their brain anatomy could be a factor, with the research exposing a “cost to not living in a supportive environment.”
The researchers compared students’ scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) with brain scans of the most highly developed part of the human brain - the layer often referred to as “gray matter." The cerebral cortex is responsible for thinking, perceiving, producing and understanding language.
Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) researchers at MIT and Harvard University came to the conclusion that the higher-income students have thicker brain cortex in areas associated with visual perception and knowledge accumulation. In most other measures of brain anatomy, the researchers found no significant differences. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, did not provide possible reasons for these particular differences in brain anatomy, however.
The researchers point out that the structural differences they discovered are not necessarily permanent. “There’s so much strong evidence that brains are highly plastic,” MIT’s professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and one of the study’s authors, John Gabrieli, said. “Our findings don’t mean that further educational support, home support, all those things, couldn’t make big differences.”
“To me, it’s a call to action. You want to boost the opportunities for those for whom it doesn’t come easily in their environment,” he added.
READ MORE: Fast food, slow kids: Eating junk leads to poorer academic results, study shows
But, as Gabrieli noted, there’s a “real cost to not living in a supportive environment. We can see it not only in test scores, in educational attainment, but within the brains of these children.”
While previous studies have also described brain anatomy differences associated with income, they didn't link those differences to academic success.
“A number of labs have reported differences in children’s brain structures as a function of family income, but this is the first to relate that to variation in academic achievement,” an assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University, Kimberly Noble, explained.
Meanwhile, the achievement gap in the US between high- and low-income students has grown larger in recent years, even though gaps related to race and ethnicity have narrowed, according to Martin West, an associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an one of the authors of the new study.
“The gap in student achievement, as measured by test scores between low-income and high-income students, is a pervasive and longstanding phenomenon in American education, and indeed in education systems around the world,” he said.
“There’s a lot of interest among educators and policymakers in trying to understand the sources of those achievement gaps, but even more interest in possible strategies to address them,” Professor West added.
In their follow-up study, the researchers are challenged to find out what types of educational programs might help to narrow the so-called “achievement gap,” and investigate whether some purposeful interventions influence brain anatomy just as well.
“Over the past decade we’ve been able to identify a growing number of educational interventions that have managed to have notable impacts on students’ academic achievement as measured by standardized tests,” West stated.
“What we don’t know anything about is the extent to which those interventions — whether it be attending a very high-performing charter school, or being assigned to a particularly effective teacher, or being exposed to a high-quality curricular program — improves test scores by altering some of the differences in brain structure that we’ve documented, or whether they had those effects by other means.”Defense has been the Bengals' calling card for much of the past seven years.
Cincinnati has had six playoff appearances since 2009, most of which were possible due to the strength of a top-10 defensive unit. However, the tide appears to be turning as the offense passed the defense in terms of production last season.
Well, at least when the offense was healthy, something they weren't for the final month of the year as they finished 15th in total offense. That was after Andy Dalton and Tyler Eifert missed much of the final four games, and with them healthy, the Bengals were a top-five offense.
The good news is Dalton is now fully healthy, which alone makes this offense very good. Toss in a healthy Eifert (which he currently is not) and star wide receiver A.J. Green, then it's a force to be reckoned with.
That's why ESPN's Bill Barnwell had the Bengals ranked very highly in his breakdown of the NFL's best offensive triplets.
7. Cincinnati Bengals: QB Andy Dalton, WR A.J. Green, TE Tyler Eifert The Bengals would be higher if it weren't for the fact that Eifert underwent ankle surgery to address a problem that had bothered him since the Pro Bowl. He might miss the season opener and struggle to get back up to speed as the season goes along. It's also fair to wonder if Dalton's career year in 2015 was a leap he'll maintain from here on, or if it was an outlier buoyed by an offensive coordinator (Hue Jackson) who left for Cleveland.
Adding to how good those three are together, since Week 6 of 2013 in games which those Dalton, Green and Eifert have started and played into the third quarter (not counting the playoffs), the offense is averaging 27.7 points per game, which essentially is four touchdowns per contest.
There's no question that it's Green who's been the MVP of the offense since coming to Cincinnati in 2011. After five seasons, Green ranks No. 6 in catches (415), No. 5 in yards (6,171) and is No. 4 in touchdowns (45) in franchise history. Every other Cincinnati receiver ahead of him on the list spent at least eight seasons with the team to rack up their records.
This past season, Green racked up 86 catches for 1,297 yards (15.1 avg) and 10 scores, marking the fifth straight season in which Green topped the 1,000-yard mark.
But if we're just talking about 2015, it was obvious Dalton was this unit's MVP, whether you look at how great he was for 14 weeks, or how bad the Bengals were without him the rest of the way. Dalton completed 255 of his 386 passes for 3,250 yards and 25 scores vs just seven interceptions, and pushed the Bengals to a 10-2 start before going down with his broken thumb.
As for Eifert, 2015 was also a breakout year for the Pro Bowl tight end. He finished with 52 receptions for 615 yards and 13 touchdown catches, a franchise record by a tight end. He's out right now while recovering from ankle surgery, so hopefully he's back soon when the regular season begins to ensure this offensive triplet keeps lighting up NFL defenses.A student has been stabbed in the neck with a smashed drinks bottle “because he was speaking Polish” on a night out with friends. Police are treating the attack on Bartosz Milewski as a racially aggravated hate crime after the 21-year-old was left needing several stitches.
The student had been visiting friends in Donnington, near Telford, on Thursday night after returning from working at a summer camp in the US. The group were in a park in St Matthews Road when a group of men approached at about 1am, West Mercia Police said.
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.
“A fight broke out, during which the man was stabbed in the neck with part of a bottle,” a spokesperson said. “He suffered a cut to his neck and was taken to the Princess Royal Hospital for treatment.
“Officers are investigating the incident, which is being treated as a racially aggravated hate crime, would like to hear from anyone who witnessed it or has any information which would help with their enquiries.”
Three male suspects fled the scene before police arrived, leaving Mr Milewski bleeding with serious injuries.
One of his relatives, Michael Andrejckzuk, told the Shropshire Star the gang were sitting nearby when they heard Mr Milewski speaking Polish. “The people who attacked him were at first sitting a few hundred yards away, but when they heard them talking they came up to them and swore and told them to speak English,” he said.
“They grabbed Bartosz’s drinks bottle, smashed it and stabbed him with it. He dialled 999 himself and they ran off when they saw the ambulance coming.”
Shape Created with Sketch. Brexit racism and the fightback Show all 9 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Brexit racism and the fightback 1/9 Demonstrators protest against an increase in post-ref racism at London's March for Europe in July 2016 PA 2/9 These cards were found near a school in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the day after the EU referendum Twitter/@howgilb 3/9 Getty 4/9 Romford, Essex, June 25 @diamondgeezer 5/9 A worker at this Romanian food shop was asleep upstairs at the time of this arson attack in Norwich on July 8, but escaped unharmed. Hundreds later participated in a ‘love bombing’ rally outside the shop to express their opposition to racism and their support of the shop owners. JustGiving/Helen Linehan 6/9 This neo-Nazi sticker was spotted in Glasgow on June 26 Courtesy of Eoin Palmer 7/9 But after news emerged of neo-Nazi stickers appearing in Glasgow, some in the city struck back with slogans of their own. Courtesy of Eoin Palmer 8/9 Getty 9/9 More signs began to appear in some parts of the UK, created by people who wanted to show their opposition to post-referendum racism Courtesy of Bernadette Russell 1/9 Demonstrators protest against an increase in post-ref racism at London's March for Europe in July 2016 PA 2/9 These cards were found near a school in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the day after the EU referendum Twitter/@howgilb 3/9 Getty 4/9 Romford, Essex, June 25 @diamondgeezer 5/9 A worker at this Romanian food shop was asleep upstairs at the time of this arson attack in Norwich on July 8, but escaped unharmed. Hundreds later participated in a ‘love bombing’ rally outside the shop to express their opposition to racism and their support of the shop owners. JustGiving/Helen Linehan 6/9 This neo-Nazi sticker was spotted in Glasgow on June 26 Courtesy of Eoin Palmer 7/9 But after news emerged of neo-Nazi stickers appearing in Glasgow, some in the city struck back with slogans of their own. Courtesy of Eoin Palmer 8/9 Getty 9/9 More signs began to appear in some parts of the UK, created by people who wanted to show their opposition to post-referendum racism Courtesy of Bernadette Russell
Mr Milewski has been discharged from hospital after being given more than a dozen stitches and may not be able to immediately return to Portsmouth University, where he is studying sports development.
The attack was the latest suspected hate crime in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, several of which have targeted people of Eastern European origin.
A Polish man was killed last month in Harlow, where residents staged a tribute march waving Polish flags, and a Polish man was beaten by a gang of teenagers in Leeds on 9 September.
An NHS worker being interviewed by Channel 4 over anti-immigration abuse was recently called a “f***ing Polish grass” by onlookers during filming.
The |
ocation, cancellation, lost privilege or disqualification.
Employers cannot under any circumstances use a driver who has more than one license or whose license is suspended, revoked or canceled, or is disqualified from driving. Violation of this requirement may result in civil or criminal penalties.
Occupational outlook Edit
The Bureau of Labor Statistics and additional publications identified a future need for over 90,000 truck drivers in the United States for the next 10 years.[16] In order to improve upon the shortage, full scholarships are being awarded to military veterans at CDL-A schools and truck driving companies.[17][18]State U last tasted victory on August 4, 2011 in a 76-63 beating of Far Eastern University
Published 8:27 PM, August 19, 2012
MANILA, Philippines – After 15 straight losses and more than a year of bitter defeats, the University of the Philippines (UP) Fighting Maroons have finally given UP faithful the world over reason to celebrate.
The UP Maroons downed the University of the East (UE) Red Warriors 63-48 on Aug 19, 2012 at the Smart-Araneta Coliseum. Prior to the Sunday win, State U last tasted victory on Aug 4, 2011 in a 76-63 beating of Far Eastern University.
At the onset, though, a UP win was anything but obvious.
Red Warrior Adi Santos made good use of his lanky frame to control the boards and give his teammates extra opportunities to score. Roi Sumang was, as usual, in attack mode early on, easily slicing his way into the paint at will.
Nonetheless, the Maroons took advantage of UE's sloppy offense. With Chris Ball and Dio Hipolito leading the fast break attack, UP managed to squeak ahead, 14-11, at the end of the first quarter.
Early in the second, Robby Wierzba and Alvin Padilla joined in on the run-and-gun act and, at one point, the Maroons built an 8-point lead. With a couple of driving lay-ins and a jumper from deep, Sumang kept his club in the game, 30-26.
UP managed to come away with 7 steals in the first half, most of which they converted into their 16 fastbreak points.
If it wasn't for Sumang's tenacity and Santos' offensive rebounding, the Warriors could have easily lagged behind after just 20 minutes.
The 3rd period featured a slightly slower pace of game, with UP executing better with their half-court sets. Henry Asilum, a 15-year-old rookie from Sacred Heart Cebu, went on a personal 9-3 run which saw UP extend its lead to 41-32.
Santos continued prowess inside, coupled with JR Sumido's numerous trips to the charity stripe kept the Warriors within striking distance all throughout.
Entering the game's final 10 minutes, the UP lead was relatively manageable at nine, 50-41—the first time the Maroons have led heading into the 4th quarter this season.
Sloppy play from both sides typified the start of the 4th as UP went cold from the perimeter and the Warriors missed nearly all of their free throws. For a stretch of 3 minutes, the 54-41 score line would not budge.
It was with 3:43 left in the game that UE would score its first basket, but by then, it was too late. Any attempt at a comeback was doused by UP's strong inside presence and Asilum's impeccable offensive play.
Asilum led the Maroons with 14 points and two steals while Mark Lopez had a solid 10 points, 8 boards and 4 assists. Sumang paced the Warriors with 18 markers and 7 rebounds.
With the win, UP, UE and the Adamson Soaring Falcons are now tied at 6th place in the rankings with indentical 1-6 cards. -Rappler.com
Quarter scores: 14-11, 30-26, 50-41, 63-48There is no better school of instruction for our own lives than in learning about the lives and trials of great men. By following their experiences, struggles, and adversities, we can in some way calibrate our own responses to life’s inevitable whirlwinds. The reward is made even greater when the narrator of such biographies is an urbane, classically-trained rhetorician whose primary focus is on the moral development of his readers. Just such a teacher is Plutarch.
Plutarch (c. A.D. 45- c. 120) was a Greek writer who received the best education possible in his day; he served in several official posts, and received official recognition from the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian for his extensive writings. Plutarch is primarily famous for his Parallel Lives, which is a compendium of comparative biographies of famous Greek and Roman statesmen. His other major work, the Moralia, is a collection of essays, dialogues, and observations on various moral and philosophical subjects. Both of these works make for wonderful reading, but I want to focus on the Parallel Lives here, as it is more likely to be of interest to the average reader.
There is no other work quite like Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. He must have had to collate and synthesize dozens of original sources, much of it in a language that was not native to him. Some of what we know about major figures of antiquity appears in no other work than in his. Plutarch’s main motivation was to examine what factors made great men great, and how the average man could employ those virtues. He pairs an eminent Greek with an eminent Roman (choosing figures with lives that roughly had some things in common, such as Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa Pompilia, Solon and Publicola, etc.), and outlines the life of each figure. Then, in a conclusory essay, he compares both figures and tells us the key virtues of each, and why he believes one was better than the other. This comparative technique suits his purposes admirably: it brings into sharp focus the qualities, decisions, and actions that made each great man great.
Another virtue of the Parallel Lives is the quality of the writing. There is here no turgid prose, no boring digressions: every sentence counts, every paragraph sparkles with anecdotes, explanations, and an epigram that drives home the author’s point. This is history presented as a moral exercise. We can judge the quality of the Parallel Lives by their unbroken popularity down the centuries. They were cherished by Renaissance humanists, plundered for plots by Shakespeare, pored over hungrily by Montaigne, and beloved by Napoleon. Scarcely has any one book so instructed statesmen over such a long period.
The most important quality of the Lives—what gives it its charm–is that Plutarch is writing as a teacher of young men. He is concerned with our development and sincerely wants to be our guide. In his day, the education of young men was concerned as much with the development of character and morals as with the imparting of knowledge. (This focus, of course, is sorely missed today). Modern biographies do not normally provide this sort of thing: they are more concerned with cluttering their narratives with footnotes and scholarly apparatus than with helping us become better men.
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There are many versions of the Lives in print, and choosing which one can present something of a problem and a compromise. Plutarch’s original plan was to have the reader work through each pairing together, and then read his comparison essay at the end. Unfortunately, the Lives stretch through several thick volumes, and many readers will not want to wade through them all. Buying the entire set is not practical for most (although recommended). Some readers will only want to read about Greeks, some only about Romans. Editors over the years have often chopped up the Lives in various ways, which does violence to Plutarch’s literary plan and pedagogical purposes. From examining several editions of the Lives, my opinion is that retaining some of Plutarch’s comparative pairing scheme is vital. I like the Penguin editions the best: the editors group the biographies into periods of time and by nation, but still keep the best comparative essays.
Some Final Comments
I want to close this article by saying a few related words. My desire to recommend Plutarch’s Lives to our readership grew out of some recent events in the news that all readers will by now be familiar with. It occurred to me that now, more than ever, young men are in critical need for instruction, guidance, and self-improvement. Never before have so many been so lost, and so in need of guidance. The quest to enrich, ennoble, and improve our young men has become, to use the words of H.G. Wells, “a race between education and catastrophe.”
Frequent readers will note that I have long emphasized historical and philosophical topics as ways to make larger points. There is a deliberate reason for this. By invoking the past, I have tried to remind readers of the glories of leadership, character, and masculine virtue that can change their lives. By bringing up the past, a time before masculine virtues were shamed and punished, we remind readers of the glories that will be theirs in the future if they follow the right paths. We want to inspire, uplift, and ennoble you. “The mind is not a vessel to be filled,” says Plutarch, “but a fire to be kindled.”
We at Return of Kings have been unapologetic and relentless in our quest to improve our readers’ lives with actionable, specific advice and wisdom. Sadly, there are forces which do not want to see our young men improve themselves: these forces seek to emasculate our young men, to turn them into compliant hewers of wood and drawers of water for their ideologically driven overlords. One can even imagine a future where classical knowledge will be driven underground, purged from schools, or bowdlerized, as not being in tune with modern political correctness. The degradation of humanistic learning has come as a direct result of the feminization of society. We cannot permit this to happen. The commissars of modern culture don’t want you to know too much about history, about how things were like in previous eras. This would invite uncomfortable questions, and uncomfortable comparisons with the sorry state of masculinity today.
Of our detractors, not one commenter—not one—has ever mentioned our focus on improving the minds and bodies of our readers. But we go about our work regardless. We know our readers better than they. We have lived their same struggles, hungers, and secret aspirations, and always viewed the inner longings of our brothers with patience and understanding. We know that many of our readers, in this era, are being allowed to flounder helplessly in a wilderness not of their own choosing, with their masculine potential denigrated or scorned by a media elite that values only you-go girlist frivolities and feminist dialectic. This tide will be reversed. And we will forever remain passionately dedicated to restoring the lost glory that once was ours.
Read More: The Humiliation Of A Great EmpireOriginal text by: Marina Belova
I've already raised the question of hoop marks (hoop burn) on fabric and the ways of avoiding them. Today I will write about removing the ones that are already there.
First let's try to figure out what is the reasons for their appearance. It is believed that the reason for hoop marks is screwing a hoop too tightly so that the rings are fitted too closely. The traces may vary:
Simple creases
Shiny rings
Fibers shift
Fibers damage
Some fabrics are more prone to get hoop marks and some are less. For example, pure fabrics will more likely get hoop marks, unlike the blended ones. Fabrics like velvet are often difficult to hoop and require alternative methods of securing, because the hoop tramples down the pile, which is then uneasy to restore to its original condition.
Of course, some of these marks are easier to remove than the others; everything depends upon the degree of damage and fabric composition.
There are numerous ways of removing the hoop burn. I've seen the following recommendations, which require inexpensive means that are always under our hand:
Always keep a bottle with a sprinkle, filled with plain water. After unhooping, spray the hoop marks with water right away and leave it for 5 or 10 minutes to dry. When fabric is dry, press it with steam. A sticky roller brush that removes fluff and pile from clothing will help with the hoop burn on dark textiles. Starch mixed with water will be equally effective. You need to sprinkle it over the hoop marks and dub them with a soft cloth or just by hand. But this is only true for light-colored fabrics. For the dark-colored fabrics better use an ordinary fabric softener. Hoop marks will easily come off the knitted fabric if you use steam. I've tried this one myself. It is recommended to remove shiny hoop burn with vinegar and water cleaning solution, which is sprayed over the damaged place and then dubbed with the piece of the same fabric. Flattened pile could be brushed. Creases will most probably disappear after first washing.BELGRADE (2016 FIBA Olympic Qualifying Tournaments) – If Nikola Jokic wrote a handbook with tips for basketball rookies it would become a best-seller, probably as instant as the impact he had in the NBA after arriving last summer and on the senior Serbian national team, with which he debuted this week.
The 21-year-old Denver Nuggets big man is Serbia's top rebounder (7 rpg) and second-leading scorer (14 ppg) at the FIBA Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Belgrade going into Friday's semi-final with the Czech Republic.
Good luck to Jokić and Serbia on their #RoadToRio this week!
Follow: https://t.co/ROB8SWPDmD pic.twitter.com/ULpWY1bYdj — Denver Nuggets (@nuggets) July 5, 2016
When speaking to FIBA.com however he made clear he is not looking for special praise and he is certainly not patting himself on the back.
FIBA.com: What have you enjoyed the most about your senior Serbia debut apart from the big role you have on the team?
Jokic: It's a great honour to play for your national team, you have all the fans, all your countrymen supporting you and that helps you play better. Hopefully, it will help us improve enough to make it to Rio. I didn't think about my role at all, I don't care if it is big or small, I just want to help the team win and that's what I am doing on the court.
FIBA.com: Is Friday's semi-final in front of this expectant crowd your biggest challenge so far?
Jokic: It's going to be a tough game, because they did not come here for a holiday. But it will be hard on them just as it will be hard for us, so I think it will be a nice game for the fans. They have a couple of players that we need to pay special attention to like [Tomas] Satoransky, whom is going to play for the Washington Wizards, and of course Jan Vesely.
FIBA.com: Did it take you a while to adapt back into the European style of play?
Jokic: A little bit yes, because playing 82 games in the NBA style is a long season so it was harder for me to adapt back to how I played before. But after the first quarter, maybe the first game, it all came back.
FIBA.com: Do you get more grief from the veterans as a rookie in the NBA or as a rookie on the national team?
Jokic: It's been pretty much the same, not a problem at all. It's only that as a rookie on Serbia you feel the pride and honour of representing your country. I adapted really quickly to them, they adapted to me, so it's all been good.
FIBAThis game is worth the price just for the campaigns. I can’t tell you how awesome it was to experience the older games again with the ability to switch between the classic graphics and the updated graphics.
But I think the reason most people buy this game is the multiplayer. If you are a twenty-something like me who remembers lugging your tv and Xbox to your friends house for Halo parties, this is the closest you’re ever going to get to reliving that experience.
There are some issues, but nothing that should stop you from buying.
1. Unless you play late at night or on weekends, it can take a while to find a game. For some of the lesser played modes, it’s pretty close to impossible. For those of us with weird work schedules, you will have to learn the best times to play.
2. You have to deal with immature kindergarteners. I know this is not exclusive to Halo, but it can really get bad at times. I don’t think I’ve ever made it through a night of play without someone quitting because they didn’t get the map they wanted. Sometimes you get people that don’t even know how to play certain game types like Extraction, KOTH, etc. They just run around shooting not realizing that’s not the objective. You get little babies screaming into their mics, but that’s what mute is for.
3. This is the only real criticism. The game is glitchy at times. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to when it happens, but if you play for a couple of hours at a time, count on it happening.ASUS and Acer are gearing up to launch new Chromebooks later this year, according to industry sources.
An ‘aggressive marketing campaign’ by Google to promote the new laptop will accompany their release later this year says Chinese tech industry blog Digitimes.
Digitimes were the first to report that Google had an own-brand touch-screen Chromebook in the works.
Citing ‘sources’ from the upstream supply chain, Digitimes also reveal some interesting sales figures for Acer’s most recent Chromebook, the C7.
Acer shipped 150,000-200,000 C7 units between November and December 2012
By January 2013 this dropped to 20,000-30,000 units
Acer halted future C7 shipments
But this drop-off hasn’t deterred them from continuing to back the browser-esque operating system. A new 11.6″ laptop is purportedly in production for release towards the end of July 2013.
Joining them will be ASUS, whose first Chromebook is rumoured to be ARM-based and sport a touch-screen.
The rumours come just weeks after word of Android-powered laptops broke – a plan that chip maker Intel recently gave tacit confirmation towards.Pinkerton brims with catchy pop hooks and melodies, yet manages to go beneath the surface of the band's power pop façade and expose all the feelings and desires of a self-isolated nerd/rockstar.
The album was originally panned by critics upon its release in 1996, but has now gone on to develop a cult following and has also gained the respect of critics and fans alike in retrospect.
A good portion of the album was written while Cuomo was attending Harvard, while dually recovering from leg surgery, and in the process, he became a self-isolated hermit. (This is most evident on the track, "The Good Life", where Rivers sings "Can't even get around/without an old-man cane" and "Shivering in the cold/Bitter and alone") Other concerns Cuomo voices concern relationships of all kinds, from falling in love with a lesbian ("Pink Triangle"), receiving letters from a woman living in Japan whom he becomes infatuated with ("Across the Sea") and even a tune about a drug-addled liar of a girlfriend.
Cuomo knows he's a geeky guy, and his lyrics are quirky and self-depreciating instead of pompous and arrogant. Throughout the course of Pinkerton, there are many examples of his writing style, and if I had to choose two songs from here to illustrate them, I'd choose the aforementioned "The Good Life" along with "Pink Triangle". The result is a plethora of fun songs, no matter how depressed or angsty Cuomo gets.
Personally, I love this album. Even though it is still pretty radio friendly and poppy, it somehow manages to be brutally honest and hard to forget. It does require more than one listen to fully appreciate, and if you're new to Weezer and expecting another Blue album from this, you'll be disappointed. Underneath it all is a great album waiting to be discovered.Joko Widodo, who captured the hearts of millions of Indonesians with his common man image, has been declared the winner of the country's presidential election with 53 percent of the vote.
As a grinning Widodo, dressed in a traditional Indonesian patterned shirt, looked on, the election commission announced on Tuesday that he had beaten Prabowo Subianto by more than six percentage points in the fight to lead the world's third-biggest democracy.
Widodo received 70,997,859 votes, or 53.15 percent of the nearly 133 million valid ballots cast, while his main rival Prabowo got 62,576,444 votes, or 46.85 percent.
"I want to declare that we, the party that supports and puts forward Joko Widodo and Jusuf Kalla (for vice president), has won," party chairwoman and former president Megawati Sukarnoputri told a news conference just before the announcement.
The news came after a dramatic final day to the country's most divisive election period since democracy was revived in 1998, with Prabowo angrily accusing Widodo's team of committing fraud and announcing his withdrawal from the presidential race.
Prabowo had repeatedly claimed that polling firms with links to his campaign showed that he was ahead.
Both candidates claimed victory on the day of the July 9 election, despite reliable polling agencies predicting a win for Widodo.
Widodo, a former furniture exporter known to most as "Jokowi," is the first candidate in a direct presidential election with no ties to the former dictator Suharto, who ruled for 30 years before being overthrown in 1998.
Jokowi will take office in October to serve a five-year term.
Al Jazeera's Step Vaessen, reporting from Jakarta, said security was tight outside the election commission.
About 3,400 policemen were deployed to guard the commission's building in Jakarta's town centre as commissioners and witnesses representing both sides finalised the vote count.
To many Indonesians, Jokowi, 53, represents a clean break from the old elite that have clung to power.
"Jokowi's the first genuinely post-Suharto figure (while) everybody else comes from that era, including Prabowo," said Paul Rowland, a Jakarta-based political analyst.Nagpur: The “grudging and angry” Bhandara-Gondia MP Nana Patole, who has been in the limelight since past few months mainly for his outburst against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, is likely to bid goodbye to BJP by December this year. Nanabhau’s outburst against his own party’s governments has refused to cease as he continues to fire salvos after salvos against the Prime Minister and Chief Minister over one issue or another.
The young BJP MP seems to be playing the same role the senior MP from Bihar Shatrughan Sinha has been playing. Criticise party’s leadership and government over contentious issues frequently. The way Nana Patole is raising the pitch against the party bosses is enough indication that the young MP is at his final journey in the BJP and may dump it by December end.
The party on other hand has adopted a cautious approach to the “rebellious mood” of Patole and has chosen to turn a blind eye to his ‘tantrums.’ The reason could be October 16 Gram Panchayat elections. The party is wary of ‘unpleasant’ result of the election and hence no action against the blasting MP. There could be many reasons for Nana Patole to go ballistic. He had left no stone unturned for victory of Parinay Fuke in the MLC election from Bhandara-Gondia teachers constituency held last year during Diwali. The same Parinay Fuke not only deserted Nanabhau but let him down on many occasions.
Nana Patole who has “declared war” on party’s leadership emerged as a giant killer in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, defeating NCP stalwart and former Union Minister Patel in his bastion Gondia. Patole started his political career as a member of the Bhandara Zilla Parishad. He contested the Assembly elections as an independent, as the Congress denied him candidature, but lost to the BJP. In 1999 and 2004, Patole won the Lakhandur Assembly seat on Congress tickets. He is known for raising public issues.
During the winter session the Assembly in 2008, Patole locked horns with the government for the paddy growers of east Vidarbha. Following differences with party leaders, he resigned from the Congress and contested the 2009 Lok Sabha elections as an independent candidate, but lost to Patel for a huge margin. If he bids goodbye to BJP he is likely to join Congress again or form his own outfit. Nana Patole is known as an OBC leader raising voice for justice to OBC people.
Of late he has been attracting national limelight. In the first week of September he kicked up a storm by saying the Prime Minister Modi did not like being questioned by anybody — even by a Member of Parliament. The PM was angry with him for raising issues regarding Maharashtra’s Ministry for Other Backward Classes and farmer suicides during a meeting between BJP MPs and Modi, Patole said in Nagpur.
“Mumbai contributes the most in taxes to the central coffers. Still, the Centre’s treatment of Maharashtra is step-motherly and Fadnavis is not capable enough to get central funds,” Patole said. Naturally, the Opposition as well as ally Shiv Sena took the opportunity to lambast the BJP. Later Patole also alleged that central ministers were constantly living with the fear of the Prime Minister. Barely after a fortnight, Patole again targeted Fadnavis over increasing of farmer suicides. Farmer suicides have been a blot on the image of Maharashtra. They have been taking place in the past also, but the number has increased in last three years.
Will his recent outbursts cost him politically? Only time will tell. But by then he may have jumped ship.The Canadian Press
MONTREAL -- Border officials have stumbled upon a different kind of Halloween surprise inside some pumpkins this year.
The pumpkins were in a passenger's luggage at the Montreal airport. And they were stuffed with approximately two kilograms of what is believed to be cocaine.
The Canada Border Services Agency says a woman was arrested today with three pumpkins in her luggage at Montreal's Trudeau International Airport.
Scanning equipment had detected masses inside the pumpkins. Those masses turned out to be bags filled with the chalky substance.
The RCMP have taken over the investigation.
A CBSA spokeswoman wasn't able to say where the passenger was coming from or whether she was a Canadian citizen.
The CBSA says that since the beginning of 2013, Montreal's airport has had 173 drug seizures. Ten of those involved cocaine -- with roughly 44 kilos seized.Most infants respond to a game of peek-a-boo with smiles at the very least, and, for those who find the activity particularly entertaining, gales of laughter. For infants with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), however, the game can be distressing rather than pleasant, and they'll do their best to tune out all aspects of it –– and that includes the people playing with them.
That disengagement is a hallmark of ASD, and one of the characteristics that amplifies the disorder as infants develop into children and then adults.
A study conducted by researchers at the Koegel Autism Center at UC Santa Barbara has found that replacing such games in favor of those the infant prefers can actually lessen the severity of the infants' ASD symptoms, and, perhaps, alleviate the condition altogether. Their work is highlighted the current issue of the Journal of Positive Behavioral Interventions.
Lynn Koegel, clinical director of the center and the study's lead author, described the game-playing protocol as a modified Pivotal Response Treatment (PVT). Developed at UCSB, PRT is based on principles of positive motivation. The researchers identified the activities that seemed to be more enjoyable to the infants and taught the respective parents to focus on those rather than on the typical games they might otherwise choose. "We had them play with their infants for short periods, and then give them some kind of social reward," Koegel said. "Over time, we conditioned the infants to enjoy all the activities that were presented by pairing the less desired activities with the highly desired ones." The social reward is preferable to, say, a toy, Koegel noted, because it maintains the ever-crucial personal interaction.
"The idea is to get them more interested in people," she continued, "to focus on their socialization. If they're avoiding people and avoiding interacting, that creates a whole host of other issues. They don't form friendships, and then they don't get the social feedback that comes from interacting with friends."
According to Koegel, by the end of the relatively short one- to three-month intervention period, which included teaching the parents how to implement the procedures, all the infants in the study had normal reactions to stimuli. "Two of the three have no disabilities at all, and the third is very social," she said. "The third does have a language delay, but that's more manageable than some of the other issues."
On a large scale, Koegel hopes to establish some benchmark for identifying social deficits in infants so parents and health care providers can intervene sooner rather than later. "We have a grant from the Autism Science Foundation to look at lots of babies and try to really figure out which signs are red flags, and which aren't," she said. "A number of the infants who show signs of autism will turn out to be perfectly fine; but we're saying, let's not take the risk if we can put an intervention in play that really works. Then we don't have to worry about whether or not these kids would develop the full-blown symptoms of autism."
Historically, ASD is diagnosed in children 18 months or older, and treatment generally begins around 4 years. "You can pretty reliably diagnose kids at 18 months, especially the more severe cases," said Koegel. "The mild cases might be a little harder, especially if the child has some verbal communication. There are a few measures –– like the ones we used in our study –– that can diagnose kids pre-language, even as young as six months. But ours was the first that worked with children under 12 months and found an effective intervention."
Given the increasing number of children being diagnosed with ASD, Koegel's findings could be life altering –– literally. "When you consider that the recommended intervention for preschoolers with autism is 30 to 40 hours per week of one-on-one therapy, this is a fairly easy fix," she said. "We did a single one-hour session per week for four to 12 weeks until the symptoms improved, and some of these infants were only a few months old. We saw a lot of positive change."
Journal of Positive Behavioral Interventions
UCSB Koegel Autism CenterYou must meet the following requirements by the closing date of this announcement:You must have a Bachelor's or higher degree in accounting from an accredited college or university that included at least 30 semester hours (45 quarter hours) in accounting or 24 semester hours in accounting and an additional 6 semester hours in related subjects such as business law, economics, statistical/quantitative methods, computerized accounting or financial systems, financial management or finance. OR A combination of experience and education at an accredited college or university equivalent to a four year degree that included courses equivalent to a major in accounting, i.e. at least 30 semester hours in accounting or 24 semester hours in accounting and 6 semester hours in related subjects as described above. OR A Certificate as a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) obtained through written examination in a State, territory or the District of Columbia. OR Are currently serving as an Internal Revenue Agent GS-0512 and have been in this position for at least one year or was previously an Internal Revenue Agent GS-0512 and held the position for at least one year. In addition to the above qualifications, you must possess the following professional accounting knowledges: Principles of Accounting, Intermediate Accounting, Cost Accounting, Advanced Accounting, and Auditing. For more information on the required accounting knowledges please refer to http://www.jobs.irs.gov/student/qualifying-coursework.html, you must meet the requirements described below:GS-07 LEVEL: You must have 1 year of specialized experience at a level of difficulty and responsibility equivalent to the GS-05 grade level in the Federal service. Specialized experience for this position includes knowledge of and skill in applying the principles, concepts and methodology of professional accounting and related fields and skill in communicating and dealing effectively with others. Qualifying experience may have been in accounting, auditing, tax, financial, legal, or other work that required the knowledge and skill defined above. ORYou may substitute education for specialized experience as follows: One (1) year of graduate level education in a related field such as accounting, business, finance, law, economics, management, statistical/quantitative methods, or computer science. OR Superior Academic Achievement may be met by having a Bachelor’s degree, with one of the following: A GPA of 3.0 or higher on a 4.0 scale for all completed undergraduate courses or those completed in the last two years of study, or a GPA of 3.5 or higher on a 4.0 scale for all courses in your major field of study or those courses in your major completed in the last two years of study, or rank in the upper one third of your class in the college, university, or major subdivision, or membership in a national honor society recognized by the Association of College Honor Societies. ORYou may qualify by a combination of experience and education. Options for qualifying based on a combination will be identified in the online questions.GS-09 LEVEL: You must have 1 year of specialized experience at a level of difficulty and responsibility equivalent to the GS-07 grade level in the Federal service. Specialized experience for this position includes knowledge of and skill in applying the principles, concepts and methodology of professional accounting and related fields and skill in communicating and dealing effectively with others. Qualifying experience is accounting work that includes the design, development, operation or inspection of accounting systems; the prescription of accounting standards, policies and requirements; the examination, analysis and interpretation of accounting data, records or reports; and the provision of accounting or financial management advice and assistance to management. Work could also include developing comprehensive accounting and financial information systems in concert with recognized accounting theory and practices as taught in academic institutions and promulgated by accounting standards boards, professional accounting organizations and the Comptroller General. Experience can include work, which included operating, maintaining, improving and evaluating established systems. Day-to-day accounting system operation and maintenance work should address the adequacy of system design, the adequacy of current data in providing financial information or ways to use the system to satisfy new information requirements. Professional accounting work must have been creative, analytical, evaluative and interpretive. ORYou may substitute education for specialized experience as follows: 2 years of progressively higher level graduate education leading to a master's degree or master's or equivalent graduate degree in a related field such as accounting, business, finance, law, economics, management, statistical/quantitative methods, or computer science. ORYou may qualify by a combination of experience and education. Options for qualifying based on a combination will be identified in the online questions.GS-11 LEVEL: You must have 1 year of specialized experience at a level of difficulty and responsibility equivalent to the GS-09 grade level in the Federal service. Specialized experience for this position includes knowledge of and skill in applying professional accounting principles, concepts and methodology in the examination of accounting books, records and systems; skill in interpreting and applying tax law for individuals and business and/or exempt organizations; knowledge of business and trade practices to analyze business operations and financial conditions; and skill in interacting effectively in a wide range of situations with a broad range of individuals. Examples of experience qualifying as specialized include: (This list is not inclusive) Experience in interpreting and applying professional accounting and auditing techniques and practices to examine various tax returns of individuals and/or business organizations. Examining accounting systems and records including computerized accounting and financial information systems which reflect a variety of complex financial operations. Gathering and researching data from a variety of sources, and/or specialized accounting practices unique to a particular trade or industry. The interpretation and application of Federal tax law for individuals, business and/or exempt organizations, partnerships, and corporations. ORYou may substitute education for specialized experience as follows: 3 years of progressively higher level graduate education leading to a Ph.D. degree or Ph.D. or equivalent doctoral degree in a related field such as accounting, business, finance, law, economics, management, statistical/quantitative methods, or computer science. ORYou may qualify by a combination of experience and education. Options for qualifying based on a combination will be identified in the online questions.- The experience may have been gained in either the public or private sector.- One year of experience refers to full-time work; part-time work is considered on a prorated basis.- To ensure full credit for your work experience, please indicate dates of employment by month/year, and indicate number of hours worked per week, on your resume.AFL fans have chosen Western Bulldogs young star Marcus Bontempelli as the face of the league’s new video game, AFL Evolution.
Launching in 2017, AFL Evolution will be available on next generation consoles PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC Steam, with the fans given the task of voting for the player they want as the face of the game.
Almost 128,000 votes were cast, with 23 per cent selecting Bontempelli as their favourite ahead of St Kilda forward Tim Membrey (19 per cent) and Collingwood midfielder Adam Treloar.
*Image courtesy of AFL.com.au
Bontempelli became a premiership player in 2016, a year were he also collected All-Australian honours and won the Bulldogs’ best and fairest award – all before his 21st birthday.
In the development of AFL Evolution, AFL players participated in photo shoots taking place at all 18 AFL Clubs with no less than 24 cameras used to simultaneously photograph the players in order to create highly detailed likenesses within the game.
All 18 clubs were representative by one young player in an online poll conducted by AFL.com.au.Scientists have captured |
their players distracted by the knowledge their families and friends were in the same section of the stadium – lost their composure. Domagoj Vida’s needless handball in the 94th minute enabled another Czech substitute, Tomas Necid, to equalise with an emphatic penalty. A depressing result for Croatia but a more depressing episode could have damaging repercussions for one of the strongest sides at the tournament.
Rakitic, the Barcelona midfielder, said: “It would be stupid to find an excuse after the match was stopped and I don’t want to do it, but it’s clear, it’s happened before. After the match stopped they scored and it does have a connection with everything else. You all saw what happened and it’s not easy after such a beautiful performance.
“I think most moral supporters are supporting this team, real supporters, and these 10 or so individuals can make all these problems. The Croatian FA, especially Davor Suker [the president] are fighting against this. We just have to say sorry to Uefa, to the Czech Republic, all people around the world following this tournament and who love football. We have to play our matches in a better atmosphere and I hope Uefa can understand this. In the next qualifiers we have to play in empty stands and stadiums because of all these stupid supporters.”
His anger was perfectly understandable and justifiable. Croatia were too strong, too quick and, in Modric, too incisive with their passing for the Czech Republic when the game was just a game. The question was whether they could find the cutting edge to match as several promising moves, through balls and dangerous free-kicks passed without an end product.
The pressure on Cech’s goal was unrelenting in the first half. Those in front of the Arsenal goalkeeper lacked belief or quality in possession to stem the tide. The veteran keeper was exposed once again when Milan Badelj dispossessed Jaroslav Plasil in central midfield and the ball broke to Perisic on the left. The Internazionale midfielder advanced into the area, the central defender Tomas Sivok backed off, and Perisic accepted the invitation to drive a low finish into the far corner of the goal. Perisic immediately pointed to Srna as the celebrations commenced before running to the technical area to embrace Marjan Mrmic, the Croatia goalkeeping coach who also lost his father this week.
Despite a more determined start to the second half the Czechs gifted Croatia a seemingly comfortable lead when Plasil was again caught in possession. Marcelo Brozovic was at his heels this time and, with the Czech defence parting before him while playing a woeful offside trap, threaded a simple pass through to Rakitic who advanced on goal before beating Cech with a nonchalant chip. Vrba responded by bringing on Skoda and Josef Sural, to jeers from the Czech supporters, but their impact was immense. Tomas Rosicky had been on the periphery of the contest yet transformed the mood with an exquisite cross that invited Skoda to soar above Vedran Corluka and steer a header beyond the tame defence of goalkeeper Danijel Subasic.
In stoppage time Clattenburg penalised Vida for deliberate handball in the penalty area as he challenged Sivok in the air. Necid drilled a nerveless penalty down the centre of Subasic’s goal as Croatia spoiled their performance in more ways than one.
Uefa to open disciplinary proceedings after crowd trouble mars Czech Republic v Croatia Read more
Czech Republic 2-2 Croatia: Euro 2016 – as it happened Read moreThis is the first of a four part series that will deal with the recent bail-in that occurred in Cyprus. This pivotal, watershed event is absolutely vital for everyone to understand. There are huge systemic risks built into the banking system that too few people comprehend. Cyprus is simply the first domino to fall. It is the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
This post will focus on documenting exactly what happened in Cyprus and laying out the timeline of events. Future posts will then analyze the impact of the crisis, how the system made sure the burden was borne by ordinary depositors (and not the very wealthy or large corporations) and how this bail-in sets a dangerous precedent for future bank failures in Europe and elsewhere (including Canada).
The Timeline
Although most people only learned of the financial crisis in Cyprus when it blew sky high in March 2013, the reality is that, as with most peripheral countries in the Eurozone, things had been deteriorating in Cyprus for some time before that. Starting from 2009 here’s how events unfolded in Cyprus:
Like most countries, Cyprus’ economy was hit hard by the recession in 2009 and experience a strong contraction of over 1.5% GDP.
During 2010 and 2011 Cyprus’ economy experienced tepid growth and failed to recover to the pre-2009 levels. During this same period the large Cypriot banks amassed a huge amount of high-yield Greek bonds. While the GDP of Cyprus was under €20 billion, the banks had accumulated over €22 billion in Greek bonds. For a while this worked out great: The Greek bonds had long since been downgraded to junk status meaning that they paid high interest to the banks.
But with such high returns came risk. And, in October 2011 Greek bond holders got burned – big time. As part of Greece’s second bailout, Greece agreed to impose a 53.5% haircut on bond holders (except for the European Central Bank which was exempted from taking any loses; coincidentally the ECB was part of the so-called Troika that drafted the terms of that bail-out). In an instant, the Cypriot banks had just shy of €12 billion wiped off their balance sheets. These banks were instantly insufficiently capitalized and in dire straits.
By January 2012 Cyprus was relying on a €2.5 billion emergency loan it had secured from the Russians to cover the growing deficit and refinance existing bonds as they rolled over.
By March 2012 Moody’s (one of the major rating agencies) had downgraded Cypriot bonds to junk and then in June Fitch followed suit. These rating downgrades disqualified Cypriot bonds from being accepted as collateral by the ECB. It also meant that many mutual funds, pension funds, ETFs, etc., which have rules about the rating of the bonds they purchase, could no longer purchase or hold Cypriot bonds. This instantly and severely reduced demand for Cypriot bonds.
On June 25, 2012, the same day as the Fitch ratings downgrade, Cyprus formally requested a bailout from the EU.
Throughout the rest of 2012 and into March 2013 negotiations between the so-called Troika (ECB, IMF, European Commission) and Cyprus continued. The glimpses the public saw of proposals all centered around conditions similar to previous EU bailouts – namely tax hikes and austerity.
On Saturday March 16, 2013 the final terms of the bombshell deal were announced. Rather than a pure bailout (in which funds from the outside are used), these terms required a partial bail-in where assets (i.e. deposits) from inside the failing banks would also be used. In exchange for the €10 billion in bailout funds, Cyprus would raise an additional €6 billion by imposing a one time bank levy of 9.9% for uninsured deposits (i.e. those over €100,000) and 6.75% for insured deposits (i.e. those under €100,000). ATM withdraw limits of €400 were imposed as Cypriots flocked to ATMs trying to withdraw money. Many ATMs in the country simply run out of cash even with the €400 limit.
Sunday March 17th starts to see the vehement reaction of Cypriot people to this unprecedented seizure of deposits. As the deep unpopularity of the levy becomes clear, the Cypriot government postpones the emergency session of parliament that had been scheduled to vote on the bailout terms from Sunday to Monday. A bank holiday is declared for Monday meaning that, aside from limited ATM withdraws, Cypriots will be unable to remove their exposed funds from the banks,
On Monday March 18th the Cypriot government is in panic as the rage of both the people and Russian government (many of whose wealthy citizens have large holdings in the Cyprus banks) reaches a crescendo. The decision is made to again delay the parliamentary vote until Tuesday and it is announced that the bank ‘holiday’ is being extended until Thursday, March 21st. The run on ATMs continues and banks start to unilaterally reduce the maximum withdraw below the government imposed €400.
Tuesday March 18th sees the Cyprus politicians bow to the overwhelming public pressure and reject the bailout terms from the Troika. Cyprus desperately seeks alternative investment from the Russians and wealthy Middle Eastern investors. On Wednesday it announces another extension of the bank holiday until at least Tuesday, March 26th. The prospect of Cyprus exiting the Euro starts to be openly discussed amongst Troika officials.
For the remainder of the week (March 19th until the 24th) ATM withdraw limits remain in place eventually dropping to €100. Bailout terms gradually start to turn away from applying a levy against insured deposits and towards applying a larger levy against uninsured deposits.
On March 25th bailout terms are agreed upon by the Cypriot government and the Troika. The deal essentially separates the two largest banks at the center of the crisis (the Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank) into a ‘good’ bank and ‘bad’ bank. Under the deal, Laiki becomes the bad bank that will be wound down. Its bond holders are to be completely wiped out (i.e their bonds are worth €0). All good assets and insured deposits are to be transferred to the Bank of Cyprus. Uninsured deposits at both banks (those greater than €100,000) are to remain completely frozen until it is determined how much must be confiscated for Cyprus to raise the €4 billion required under the deal. Capital controls are also imposed including a €300 daily withdraw limit from banks and ATMs, a €2000 per month limit on transfers out of country and an outright ban on cashing cheques or opening new accounts. It is announced that these capital controls will be in place for a limited time (2 weeks) while the terms are finalized and Laiki wound down. Banks are reopened under the new capital controls March 28th having been closed since March 16th.
Throughout the rest of March and April 2013 the capital controls are repeatedly extended and the estimated hit against the frozen uninsured deposits creeps from 20% up to more than 80%.
On April 30th the final bailout terms are approved by Cyprus and the exact terms of the bail-in announced (see below).
The Current Situation
With the final approval of the bailout and bail-in on April 30th, here’s where things stand today for the uninsured deposits:
37.5% has been converted to shares in the Bank of Cyprus (at a nominal value of €1).
22.5% will remain frozen pending an updated audit of the Bank of Cyprus expected at the end of June. This 22.5% may then also be converted to shares in the Bank of Cyprus depending on the result of the audit.
30% will remain temporarily frozen. These funds may also be converted into shares at a later time or otherwise confiscated by the Bank of Cyprus.
It is important to understand the game that is being played with converting cash into shares in the Bank of Cyprus. The shares are converted at a nominal value of €1. That’s great except the Bank of Cyprus share price is only around €0.20 these days. So, if you had €10,000 converted to shares under these terms and then sold your shares you’d only get €2000 – thus you’d realize an 80% loss. In other words, the ‘converted’ funds are almost entirely written off due to the nominal value chosen for the conversion.
So, uninsured depositors have already effectively lost 30% (37.5% *.8) and have an additional 52.5% frozen for the foreseeable future and subject to loss. Assuming the share price doesn’t drop further (not something I’d bet on) another 42% (52.5% *.8) will be stolen. This gives us a grand total 72% loss imposed on uninsured deposits.
In the meantime there continues to be draconian capital controls imposed on Cypriots – an indication the worst may not yet be over. Here’s a summary of those capital controls still in effect today:
€300 per day withdraw limit (at ATM or bank teller).
€5000 per month in transfers outside the country.
€3000 per month can be taken out of the country by travellers.
Cashing of cheques not permitted (but depositing of cheques is).
Expectations are starting to be unofficially set that these capital controls will likely remain in place through the summer.
Next Up
The next post in this series will look at some of the impacts from these events. I’ll look at both the impact on the ordinary Cypriot as well as the impact on the wealthy foreign depositors and institutions with funds in Cypriot banks. As you might expect, there is a large discrepancy between how these two groups were treated. I’ll try to expose some of the ways in which the banksters and uber-rich were allowed to circumvent the system and ultimately ensure that the ordinary Cypriot depositor would be the one left holding the bag.
Stay tuned…Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) such as Amazon CloudFront and Fastly have the ability to “pull” content from their origin server during HTTP requests in order to cache them. They can also proxy POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, and OPTION HTTP requests, which means they can “front” our web application’s origin like this:
DNS -> CDN -> Origin
Swapping out the concepts for actual services we use, the architecture can look like this:
DNSimple -> CloudFront -> Heroku
Or like this:
DNSimple -> Fastly -> Heroku
Or many other combinations.
Let’s first examine what it looks like serve static assets (CSS, JavaScript, font, and image files) from a Rails app without a CDN.
We could point our domain name to our Rails app running on Heroku using a CNAME record (apex domains in cloud environments have their own set of eccentricities):
www.thoughtbot.com -> thoughtbot-production.herokuapp.com
We’ll also need to set the following configuration:
# config/environments/{staging,production}.rb config. serve_static_assets = true
In this setup, we’ll then see something like the following in our logs:
That screenshot is from development mode but the same effect will occur in production:
all the application’s requests to static assets will go through the Heroku routing mesh,
get picked up by one of our web dynos,
passed to one of the Unicorn workers on the dyno,
then routed by Rails to the asset
This isn’t the best use of our Ruby processes. They should be reserved for handling real logic. Each process should have the fastest possible response time. Overall response time is affected by waiting for other processes to finish their work.
AssetSync is a popular approach that we have used in the past with success. We no longer use it because there’s no need to copy all files to S3 during deploy ( rake assets:precompile ). Copying files across the network is wasteful and slow, and gets slower as the codebase grows. S3 is also not a CDN, does not have edge servers, and therefore is slower than CDN options.
A better alternative is to use services that “pull” the assets from the origin (Heroku) “Just In Time” the first time they are needed. Services we’ve used include CloudFront and Fastly. Fastly is our usual default due to its amazingly quick cache invalidation. Both have “origin pull” features that work well with Rails’ asset pipeline.
Because of the asset pipeline, in production, every asset has a hash added to its name. Whenever the file changes, the browser requests the latest version as the hash and therefore the whole filename changes.
The first time a user requests an asset, it will look like this:
GET 123abc.cloudfront.net/application-ql4h2308y.css
A CloudFront cache miss “pulls from the origin” by making another GET request:
GET your-app-production.herokuapp.com/application-ql4h2308y.css
All future GET and HEAD requests to the CloudFront URL within the cache duration will be cached, with no second HTTP request to the origin:
GET 123abc.cloudfront.net/application-ql4h2308y.css
All HTTP requests using verbs other than GET and HEAD proxy through to the origin, which follows the Write-Through Mandatory portion of the HTTP specification.
We have standard configuration in our Rails apps that make this work:
# Gemfile gem "coffee-rails" gem "sass-rails" gem "uglifier" group :staging, :production do gem "rails_12factor" end # config/environments/{staging,production}.rb: config. action_controller. asset_host = ENV [ "ASSET_HOST" ] # will look like //123abc.cloudfront.net config. assets. compile = false config. assets. digest = true config. assets. js_compressor = :uglifier config. assets. version = ENV [ "ASSETS_VERSION" ] config. static_cache_control = "public, max-age= #{ 1. year. to_i } "
We don’t have to manually set config.serve_static_assets = true because the rails_12factor gem does it for us, in addition to handling any other current or future Heroku-related settings.
Fastly and other reverse proxy caches respect the Surrogate-Control standard. To get entire HTML pages cached in Fastly, we only need to include the Surrogate-Control header in the response. Fastly will cache the page for the duration we specify, protecting the origin from unnecessary requests and serving the HTML from Fastly’s edge servers.
While setting the asset host is a great start, a DNS to CDN to Origin architecture also lets us cache entire HTML pages. Here’s an example of caching entire HTML pages in Rails with High Voltage:
class PagesController < HighVoltage :: PagesController before_filter :set_cache_headers private def set_cache_headers response. headers [ "Surrogate-Control" ] = "max-age= #{ 1. day. to_i } " end end
This will allow us to cache entire HTML pages in the CDN without using a Memcache add-on, which still goes through the Heroku router, then our app’s web processes, then Memcache. This architecture entirely protects the Rails app from HTTP requests that don’t require Ruby logic specific to our domain.
If we want to cache entire HTML pages site-wide, we might want to use Rack middleware. Here’s our typical config.ru for a Middleman app:
$:. unshift File. dirname ( __FILE__ ) require "rack/contrib/try_static" require "lib/rack_surrogate_control" ONE_WEEK = 604_800 FIVE_MINUTES = 300 use Rack :: Deflater use Rack :: SurrogateControl use Rack :: TryStatic, root: "tmp", urls: %w[/], try: %w[.html index.html /index.html], header_rules: [ [ %w(css js png jpg woff), { "Cache-Control" => "public, max-age= #{ ONE_WEEK } " } ], [ %w(html), { "Cache-Control" => "public, max-age= #{ FIVE_MINUTES } " } ] ] run lambda { | env | [ 404, { "Content-Type" => "text/html", "Cache-Control" => "public, max-age= #{ FIVE_MINUTES } " }, File. open ( "tmp/404.html", File :: RDONLY ) ] }
We build the Middleman app at rake assets:precompile time during deploy to Heroku, as described in Styling a Middleman Blog with Bourbon, Neat, and Bitters. In production, we serve the app using Rack, so we are able to insert middleware to handle the Surrogate-Control header:
module Rack class SurrogateControl # Cache content in a reverse proxy cache (such as Fastly) for a year. # Use Surrogate-Control in response header so cache can be busted after # each deploy. ONE_YEAR = 31557600 def initialize ( app ) @app = app end def call ( env ) status, headers, body = @app. call ( env ) headers [ "Surrogate-Control" ] = "max-age= #{ ONE_YEAR } " [ status, headers, body ] end end end
If we want to use CloudFront, we use the following settings:
“Download” CloudFront distribution
“Origin Domain Name” as www.thoughtbot.com (our app’s URL )
) “Origin Protocol Policy” to “Match Viewer”
“Object Caching” to “Use Origin Cache Headers”
“Forward Query Strings” to “No (Improves Caching)”
“Distribution State” to “Enabled”
As a side benefit, in combination with CloudFront logging, we could replay HTTP requests on the Rails app if we had downtime at the origin for any reason, such as a Heroku platform issue.
If we use Fastly instead of CloudFront, there’s no “Origin Pull” configuration we need to do. It will work “out of the box” with our Rails configuration settings.
We often have a rake task in our Ruby apps fronted by Fastly like this:
# Rakefile task :purge do api_key = ENV [ "FASTLY_KEY" ] site_key = ENV [ "FASTLY_SITE_KEY" ] `curl -X POST -H 'Fastly-Key: #{ api_key }'https://api.fastly.com/service/ #{ site_key } /purge_all` puts 'Cache purged' end
That turns our deployment process into:
git push production heroku run rake purge --remote production
For more advanced caching and cache invalidation at an object level, see the fastly-rails gem.
Fastly is really “Varnish as a Service”. Early in its history, Heroku used to include Varnish (an awesome open source reverse proxy) as a standard part of its “Bamboo” stack. When they decoupled the reverse proxy in their “Cedar” stack, we gained the flexibility of using different reverse proxy caches and CDNs fronting Heroku.
We have been using this stack in production for thoughtbot.com (a Rails app), robots.thoughtbot.com (a Middleman app), playbook.thoughtbot.com (a Rack app), and many other apps for almost a year. It’s a stack in real use and is strong enough to consider as a good default architecture.
Give it a try on your next app!A film and TV writer by profession, I also write stage plays, documentaries, comic books, novels, and even stand-up comedy. (I know what you’re thinking: “Ken needs to learn how to focus.”) Writing across mediums is similar to being a decathlete, working across a variety of disciplines, but without the sweaty grunting.
Sweating and grunting notwithstanding, the decathlete analogy is also apt because writing across mediums requires different muscles. I use a different skill set to write a novel than I do for a screenplay, and call on still another part of my brain for a comic book; the single setting and limited characters of a play require yet another avenue of thinking, while a documentary demands not so much writing as harvesting a story from its parts and assembling it, like Dr. Frankenstein. And much like the story of Frankenstein, it all starts with selecting the correct brain.
That’s not to say such writer-brain-multitasking is easy. While each medium offers different storytelling opportunities, each also poses unique challenges. Some ideas will work across multiple mediums—witness how many books and comic books, stage plays and documentaries, are made into film, television, and even video games. But many won’t translate as well; some stories are innately suited to a specific medium. By developing different writing muscles, I feel I can best tell the best story in the best medium, but only if I understand how those mediums work. For example, I’m probably not a very good essay writer or I wouldn’t have used the word “best” three times in that sentence.
What if your idea basically entails two people doing nothing but sitting in a room and talking? That isn’t a comic book, which requires more visual stimulation than alternating talking heads, and no network executive would ever put it on television unless it was punctuated with frequent explosions. And it certainly isn’t a feature film, the single historical exception being My Dinner With Andre. Recognize that what you have here is a stage play.
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I had an urge to explore the early days of the civil rights movement through the eyes of two former boxing champions, one white and one African American, who fought against that backdrop and are reunited in old age. As a period piece with older protagonists, it’s a hard sell as a film, and I didn’t think it would work best as a novel—I wanted to hear these guys bicker and quarrel and lash out at each other as their past lives trickled out and their true selves were revealed to an audience. That last part—that it could happen in front of a live audience—made it feel more nakedly real. Thus Glove Story became a play, with an immediacy and intimacy no novel, comic book, or even screenplay could match.
Conversely, a bigger world requires a bigger canvas. My first attempt at a graphic novel, COLONUS, was a sci-fi political thriller about colonies on Mars and Venus. Could it exist as a film or TV series? Yes, but the high production budget required is a bar to probable success. Unless it’s based on a wildly successful existing property—or your last name is Lucas, Spielberg, or Cameron—it’s difficult to sell a two hundred million dollar space opera, while the world-building I had in mind was something I could accomplish for a relative pittance with the right artist in a comic book format.
I stumbled immediately, writing my first script in Final Draft, screenplay formatting software that seemed to make sense: after all, comic books, like films, are all settings and dialogue. What I neglected to consider was that all that crackling tough guy dialogue may read well on the page, but porting it over to the sequential panel illustrations of comic books proved problematic: there just isn’t the physical real estate for it. Those word balloons can only hold so much—25 words of dialogue is a lot—and there are limited panels in which to say it. So it becomes an exercise in writing economically, paring that florid speechifyin’ to only what’s essential. The happy surprise for me was that the end result was better than what previously lived on that endless white page. Sometimes constraints will set you free.
And a graphic novel lets you do things like this: here’s some classic thrust-and-parry banter between the villain, momentarily holding the upper hand on the story’s protagonist (I resist calling him “hero” since he’s an outlaw who just beat one of his adversaries to death with a shovel). As the villain discusses the future, we get to see it as his captive envisions it, continuing the conversation in captions. It would be unusual to do this in a screenplay, difficult to convey in a novel, impossible in a stage play.
While both film and comic books are visual mediums, another difference is in how you write those visuals. In a screenplay, I might have a character enter a dark room, cross to a desk, pull out a bottle of whiskey and pour it into a glass, downing it in a single gulp. (In a novel, I’d have to write it more elegantly than that; in a stage play I’d have to set at least a full act in that room, and possibly my entire story.) But I can’t give that description to my artist as a single panel because that’s actually three or four panels of art: he stands in the doorway, framed by light from outside; I can cut him walking across the room and go directly to his hand pulling the bottle from the desk drawer (but only if I’ve told my artist to establish the desk in the first panel); then he drinks. A single throwaway line of stage direction in a script becomes a half page of storytelling art in a comic book.
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It’s a pretty common rule not to overdirect your “action” in a screenplay, or the actual director will hate you and shout at you in front of the crew (which he’ll probably do anyway). But in writing a comic book you have to write exactly what you need to see in each panel, and sometimes the point of view. At the same time, you need to be very careful not to treat the artist like your art monkey, or s/he will hate you and scream at you in front of… well, nobody, because creating a comic book is a very small affair. It’s just the two of you, so it goes without saying that your artist is incredibly important to the process. Sometimes you’ll receive the finished art and discover that your artist has done such an amazing job of visual storytelling you start revising what you’ve written to match the images, and can actually start cutting captions and dialogue that you already believed had been cut to the bone. It’s gratifying to see pages you’ve written rendered so well that they require less writing; it feels a lot better than cutting dialogue because your actor is struggling with the word “marzipan,” or rewriting “The spaceship takes off in a fiery blast that scorches the earth” to “The spaceship is gone,” because production can’t afford the spaceship.
If I were to write COLONUS as a feature, it would be a very different process: writing on little colored cards. Any good screenplay starts with an outline of the big story beats and the individual scenes that make them up. Then those beats and scenes are written on color-coded index cards. For my screenplay about real-life heavyweight contender Two Ton Tony, because it covered an expansive life from the 1920s through the 70s, those scenes were coded as flashbacks (yellow), flash forwards (blue), boxing scenes (purple); additional cards indicated the narrative device of a deceased Tony telling his story (green), and cards indicating his antagonist, champion Joe Louis, culminating in their third-act confrontation (pink). Pinning all these cards on a board I can see at a glance how well I’ve paced and balanced my story: too many purple cards means there’s too much boxing, long gaps between pink and I know I’ve lost my antagonist and therefore my conflict. I can also move the cards around—show this flashback earlier to set up this fight later—or to tell the story in nonlinear fashion (in watching a film like Pulp Fiction it’s easy to imagine Tarantino dropped his cards and then pinned them up at random and liked what he saw). Then, I only had to sit down and write the damn thing, over weeks and even months, and hope it made sense.
That solitary endeavor is vastly different from the “writers room” of television. A TV staff can have upwards of a dozen writers, pitching both stories and, on a half-hour comedy, jokes. It’s like growing up in a large family with a need to get noticed around the dinner table, and maybe even snag a waffle before they’re all gone. The inclination might be to shout the first joke that comes to mind, but a general rule of comedy is never shout the first joke that comes to mind. In a room full of comedy writers everyone else will have thought of that same joke, and yours will be greeted with the kind of disdain usually reserved for a cat at a dog show. (And yes, for the record, shouting at a writers’ assistant while s/he types everything into a document is considered in television a form of “writing.”)
Then that story will usually be assigned to a single writer, sometimes two or more, who will seclude themselves and drink Red Bull and surf the Internet for anything that might make the other person laugh or extremely uncomfortable, preferably both. Eventually, they’ll get to work on scripting the story, which will be submitted to the showrunner for rewriting, and then further gang-rewritten by the staff—punching jokes, adding character moments, clarifying story, all making it presumably better but gradually less recognizable from its original draft. And by the time the writers see it on television it will resemble the vague memory of a lost love, blurred by the infidelity of the many episodes they went on to write before this one could air.
Writing in such a collaborative environment isn’t for everyone. In fact, it suits very few. Ok, let’s face it: psychopaths. There’s a misconception in Hollywood that if you don’t like collaboration, you should write a novel. It’s a terribly dismissive sentiment for several reasons, not the least of which is writing a novel is hard. More significantly, it’s only true that you can write whatever you want without the input and collaboration of others if you don’t care about it ever being published.
Your agent will have notes. Your editor will have notes. And so will your publisher. If you’re smart, you’ll listen to them; they’ll have insights and ideas that come from experience, a knowledge of the marketplace, and a fresh perspective lost to you after living with your book in your head for so long. The good notes will make your novel much better, and even the “bad” notes might lead you to improvements you might not have thought of on your own. My own agent and editor are very, very smart and gave me excellent suggestions. Also, they’re reading this.
But back to the idea that writing a novel is hard. It’s not “coal miner” hard, nor does it require the precision of a diamond cutter or come with the life-or-death stakes of being a hostage negotiator. (Note to self: thriller about a coal miner who finds the world’s biggest diamond and takes a gem cutter hostage.) The muscles required to write a novel aren’t bigger or stronger or in any way better than those required in other mediums, just different. There are so many decisions that don’t have to be made in a screenplay or stage play or comic book or haiku: what’s the point of view—is it objective or omniscient, first person or third (or, inexplicably, second person like Bright Lights, Big City)? How much do I tell in dialogue, and how much do I tell from the distance of the observer or from inside the characters’ thoughts? Do I have a single protagonist or multiple, interlocking stories? (Yes, I’ll argue that this is unique to literature; despite sometimes large ensembles, very few films or TV shows have more than a single protagonist an audience follows, and around which the other characters orbit and function.)
Then you have to write it. And whether striving for eloquence or simplicity, the consideration of language in a novel is much more demanding than other forms, and it simply takes time to get it right. A lot of time. In my case, years, on and off. (And the jury’s out on whether or not I got it “right.”) On the other hand, I can write a comic book in a couple of days or a TV pilot in a week. They might not be very good, but now they exist on paper and I can spend a reasonable amount of time honing them into something that is; a decent novel from beginning to end simply cannot come into the world that quickly. And those other forms are finite—a screenplay around 110 pages, a TV drama around 50, a comic book 24 or 32 (print signatures are in multiples of eight). This means you know when you’re done. I believe it was Paul Valéry, whoever he was, who said “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” and the same is certainly true of a novel.
For me, one of the attractions of novel writing is not to be hamstrung by the usual rules of screenwriting. There are wonderful screenwriters who can make a story seem unique—and even brilliant ones, like Charlie Kaufman and Terrence Malick to name two, who break the form completely—but most films, no matter the genre, essentially tell the same story: introduce a protagonist, set off an inciting incident, send him or her off on a hero’s journey; throw obstacles in the way to overcome and a mid-point reversal, bring him or her to a lowest point only to ultimately triumph and most importantly, change as a person for the better. It’s the template for nearly every film fiction, from The Gold Rush to Star Wars to Showgirls, although the biggest obstacle to overcome in Showgirls may be the ordeal of sitting through it.
I was having none of that in my novel AMP’D, “the most fun you’ll have reading about a guy whose arm is hilariously amputated™.” My inciting incident has already happened before the very first page, and it’s clear this guy is ruined. He’s not going to overcome obstacles or transcend his terrible circumstances; he’s going to weep and flail and suffer, albeit hilariously. Yes, he will enjoy small victories, and he’ll even learn something. But if this were a screenplay it would go like this: meet Aaron, he’s super awesome as a lawyer or executive and has the world on a string (if he’s a good guy) or by the balls (if it’s a redemptive story); this goes on for ten pages and then the terrible thing happens and we watch him lose everything, only to slowly begin to hurdle every obstacle in his way and come out of this a better man.
I wanted to be free of those rules to explore how real people face adversity, however darkly comic a take that might be. I believe we look up to exceptional people who do triumph over terrible adversity and overcome incredible odds because in real life they are the exceptions. Which means most of us are not. Few of us are on the hero’s journey, and we don’t have a transformative story arc. We don’t change all that much over decades (never mind an hour and forty minutes), or have a “super want”—the thing we want above all else—and numerous biblical-sized obstacles that keep us from it. Rare is the inciting incident that sends us off on a journey, and we certainly don’t have an accelerating third act where, after our lowest moment, we rush to triumph.
Real life isn’t like that. It can be mundane and extraordinary, filled with great love and longing, grand success and failure too spectacular to overcome, the dichotomy of isolation in crowds and small enormous moments. That’s real life, and that’s what I wanted to write about. And a novel seemed the best medium in which to do it. (Did I mention “hilariously”?)
Now, to get to work on that screenplay adaptation.Smartphones have become an essential part of Americans’ lives. According to a new Vox/Morning Consult poll, 78 percent of American adults have smartphones — the vast majority of them either iPhones or running Google’s Android. The survey, conducted in late September, provides a detailed look at how Americans use their phones and how they feel about them.
Unsurprisingly, young people are the most enthusiastic adopters of smartphones and use the widest range of |
Photo11: Frank Franklin II, AP)
Eric Trump would like there to be a voting requirement before Americans can hit the polls: Watch the movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.
Donald Trump’s son — speaking on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom Thursday — watched the Michael Bay movie over the weekend. The movie is based on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. Clinton (who was secretary of State at the time) has faced ongoing scrutiny over her handling of the matter, including over security at the diplomatic facility where the attacks occurred.
"I think in order to vote in this next election, you should have to watch that movie. I was livid," Eric Trump said. "She left these guys on a rooftop in the middle of Benghazi. You know, getting shot at, having mortars drop on their head because she wouldn't pick up a phone call in the middle of the night."
The accusation that Clinton did not pick up a phone call has been disproven by FactCheck.org, which said that while it is a common attack line against Clinton, there is no proof of it being true.
"Trump is certainly entitled to his opinion, but the evidence shows Clinton was fully engaged in the immediate response, and subsequent congressional investigations concluded the government response to the attack — including Clinton’s — was appropriate," FactCheck.org writes.
Trump was reacting to Hillary Clinton saying that his dad has "disqualified himself completely" from the presidency while criticizing the presumptive GOP nominee's policy proposals and rhetoric on Wednesday.
"This is not just divisive rhetoric, my friends, this is dangerous," Clinton said during a rally in New Jersey.
Eric Trump called her comments "honestly, truly, truly disgusting.”
"She has done no job for our veterans," Trump said. "She has done a total disservice for the country. Her policy is totally disastrous. My father would be an amazing, amazing commander-in-chief."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1X0NUpeDemocratic presidential candidates 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 and Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE both criticized the planned merger of Pfizer and Allergan, which would produce the world’s largest pharmaceutical company and allow Pfizer to reduce its taxes by moving its legal residence overseas.
The $160 billion deal, announced Monday, would be the largest-ever corporate inversion, a type of transaction in which an American company merges with a foreign company and then reincorporates the combined company overseas to reduce its tax burden.
Clinton said that in the coming weeks she will “propose specific steps to prevent these kind of transactions, which take advantage of loopholes that litter our tax code, distort incentives for investment, and disadvantage small businesses and domestic firms that cannot game the international tax system."
After the Pfizer-Allergan merger is closed, the combined company is expected to keep Allergan’s Irish legal residence. The merged company is expected to have an adjusted effective tax rate of 17 to 18 percent in the first full year after the transaction is closed, compared with Pfizer’s expected 25 percent effective tax rate for 2015, according to a Pfizer spokesman.
Clinton called upon regulators to see if they can take stronger actions to prevent corporations from moving earnings overseas, and she urged Congress to “act immediately to make sure the biggest corporations pay their fair share."
“Republicans should stop trying to tilt the tax code even further in favor of the super wealthy and the largest corporations and join us in supporting these necessary reforms on behalf of U.S. taxpayers,” the former Secretary of State said.
Sanders criticized the merger not just because it would allow Pfizer to “hide its profits overseas” but also because it would hurt those who need prescription medications.
“The Pfizer-Allergan merger would be a disaster for American consumers who already pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs,” the Vermont Senator said.
Sanders added that the Obama administration should exercise its authority to halt the merger and that “Congress also must pass real tax reform that demands that profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes.”
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley called the merger "fundamentally unfair."
“Recent mergers in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries will reduce competition, reduce choice, and raise prices for American consumers," O'Malley said. "As President, I will aggressively enforce our antitrust laws to counter dramatic price increases in healthcare, while fighting to close corporate tax loopholes that allow giant companies to dodge taxes and offshore their profits."Rumors of a Google phone have been around for years now. Even after the release of the T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream), through the various other incarnations of Android on devices from Motorola, Samsung, Acer, and a slew of other manufacturers, there continued to be talk of how this wasn't the "real Android," that Google itself would release a final, real, "Google Phone." And so, on January 5th, the rumors finally came true with the launch of the Nexus One. The online, Google-hosted store through which the phone is sold is itself big news, but now Ars takes an in-depth look at how "super" this phone really is.
In a nutshell, the Nexus One is a best-of-breed smartphone running a modern, multitasking mobile operating system. It sports a speedy 1Ghz Snapdragon CPU from Qualcomm, 512 MB of RAM, and 512 MB of OS/Program storage. The question is, is this enough for a "no limits" device?
The Unboxing:
Unboxing the Nexus One
We can safely report that the preview models from the Google Nexus One announcement are exactly what will arrive to your door. This reviewer ordered a phone on the first day, and a box arrived the next day straight from the HTC distribution center in Texas. The box contained a smaller, very high quality box that itself held a neatly packed white box containing the phone. A comparison to the iPhone's packaging is inevitable, and yes, this was equally well packaged. No labels, no stickers on any visible side—just a plain "Nexus One" and a Google logo on the front, and colored "blue/red/green/yellow" base with the Nexus One colors. (You can find a complete set of unboxing photos, here.)
Opening the box reveals the phone itself, as the first of a series of layers. The second layer contains a neat black foam case adorned with the Android logo, an easy-to-read card containing instructions, and two small booklets with other information. The last layer contains a microUSB cable, the phone battery, a pair of headphones, and a microUSB charger. Overall, the packaging is very well done and shows careful attention to design and detail. Good job.
From here, following the instructions, I inserted the battery along with the SIM from my existing GSM phone and waited to greet this new Android.
The hardware:
The physical design of the Nexus One is excellent. The shape is comfortable to hold in the hand—no jarring edges like the Droid, no buttons that can accidentally be pushed. The phone has a power button on top, a two-part volume button on the left side, a small trackball at the bottom of the front, a 3.5mm audio jack on top, a microUSB charge and data connector at the bottom, and a slightly protruding camera with LED flash in back.
Compared to previous HTC phones and the Motorola Droid, the Nexus One deletes the camera button, which is a good call since the trackball can be used for the same purpose, and reduces the chances of accidentally activating the camera.
Palm Pre, Nexus One, and HTC G1
Compared to other phones, it is as streamlined as the Pre, thinner than the iPhone by a few hairs, and more pocketable than its Android and Windows Mobile predecessors. While not show-stoppingly gorgeous, it is a solidly built piece of kit, having no flex, no looseness. The battery cover is unnoticeable and fits very solidly. (So yes, Apple, a well-built smartphone can have replacable batteries.) My impression is that this phone was built to last.
Recharging the battery or running the phone under heavy loads, it can become warm, but not uncomfortably so. If the phone sits out in the open, the metal sides can feel cold to the touch, but they quickly warm on use. The only complaints that come to mind is that some might expect more color than the plain two-tone grey body, or the prominent Google and HTC logos on the back may be a bit too much.
The Nexus One sports a 3.7", WVGA (800x480) AMOLED screen, which has sensors that cause it auto-dim in dark situations. Different users may have different initial impressions on placing the AMOLED side-by-side with a more traditional backlit LCD screen—Ars Deputy Editor Jon Stokes found the AMOLED to be a striking improvement, but to me it first came off as dark and underwhelming. However, upon extended use, I have to say, this is better.
Before using the Nexus One, I never noticed the white cast that traditional bright backlit LCD screens have, even when completely dark. Notice how washed out the Pre and the G1 are in the comparison picture compared to the Nexus One. The Google phone's screen has none of that harsh whiteness shown by the others, and in practice it's very relaxing for extended use. The brightness gamut is excellent. In fact, it can do something LCD screens cannot: using the built-in "Clock" application, the phone has a mode that can be used in total darkness without blinding yourself. The OLED pixels are barely on, showing just enough light to render the time and various clock functions. By contrast, an almost totally dark LCD would still cast a white pallor from the backlight.
The OLED screen also has a much better viewing angle than a traditional LCD screen; this could be important for some car dock setups. Overall, I don't think I'd trade this screen for the brighter Droid screen, or any other non-OLED screen.Peyton Manning reassured Denver Broncos officials, including general manager John Elway, that he is physically and mentally prepared to play at a significant level in 2015, league and team sources told ESPN.
Editor's Picks Stats & Info: If Manning does play... ESPN Stats & Info takes a look at some of the statistical and anecdotal storylines if Peyton Manning plays in 2015.
The two sides met Thursday in Denver, and while retirement technically remains an option for Manning, it is not one he expressed to Elway and CEO Joe Ellis, sources said.
Both sides hope to have clarity on Manning's future by the middle to the end of next week, though there is no absolute deadline for a resolution, sources said.
Manning, who turns 39 next month, took it upon himself to get a comprehensive evaluation from a renowned performance manager and trainer, Mackie Shilstone, during the past 2½ weeks in New Orleans. Shilstone, who has worked with several elite athletes in the latter stages of their careers, has given the quarterback a strong assessment based on numerous workouts and tests, a source said.
The quad injury that plagued Manning at the end of the 2014 season is fully healed.
Age-Old Concerns Only three different quarterbacks ever have started all 16 games of an NFL season at the age of 39 or older. Peyton Manning hopes to do it in 2015.
Started All of Team Games
QBs in Age-39 (or Older) Season QB Last done Brett Favre 2009* Doug Flutie 2001 Warren Moon 1995 * Also accomplished feat in 2008 -- ESPN Stats & Information
The Broncos and the quarterback have other elements to explore in the coming days that range from a potential contract restructuring to having a formal physical exam, as mandated in Manning's contract, sources said. If Manning is on the Broncos' roster March 9, one day before the league's new business year commences, he will be guaranteed $19 million for 2015.
The Broncos have not only a new head coach in Gary Kubiak but also key free agents they would like to retain, including wide receiver Demaryius Thomas and tight end Julius Thomas. However, with a healthy $26 million projected for the team's cap space even with Manning on the roster, the team is capable of solving most of its free-agent goals.
The team also has more than $50 million of cap space projected for 2016.
Elway has publicly stated that he wants Manning to return, but it is uncertain under what conditions and whether it includes a dramatic restructuring of the veteran's contract.Lyria, Argea System, Lyrian Polity
Admirals across the galaxy feel that their concerns are not being taken seriously by their respective governments, a new survey has revealed.
The Critical Review of Admiral Satisfaction & Happiness (CRASH) survey is an annual poll undertaken by members of the Guild Academy for Generals & Admirals (GAGA), a pan-galactic representative body for military command personnel.
The 14,000 respondents to CRASH represented almost all fleet admirals working in the known regions of space, across nearly 6,000 empires.
Worryingly, only 11% indicated they were happy in their current job, and 93% had 'extreme concerns' about remaining employed as a fleet admiral.
The most commonly cited concerns included being dangerously fatigued through managing extremely large fleets, feeling overwhelmed by complex operations micromanagement, safety concerns over ineffective emergency warp protocols and personal health concerns over high rates of substance misuse traits in older admirals.
On average, over 70% of admirals aged over 120 had some form of acquired negative trait, with substance misusing being the most common. Admirals commanding fleets of over 400 ships were also more likely to be substance misusing, and rated their happiness lowest.
Interestingly, those working on 'atypical' contracts, such as pirate outfits, rated their happiness highest.
The results also highlight a mistrust of governing bodies. Only 41% of admirals polled felt their governments took safety protocols seriously.
Earlier this year, United Nations of Earth (UNE) retired admiral A.K. Barr warned that some of his former colleagues were being forced to work for up to 17 years without an adequate break. He subsequently resigned amid failures of the UNE government to address lengthy emergency warp times and the longstanding issue of transport fleets perpetually renaming themselves.
These sentiments were echoed by Lyrian Polity admiral Belessaria P'Sayle, who told our newsteam:
"For too long our warnings have gone unheeded. Admirals have a huge responsibility and play a vital role in keeping the galaxy's military-industrial complexes profitable. Yet we have no quality of life. Have you ever tried to command anything beyond your own body? Can you imagine commanding several thousand other bodies aboard several hundred ships? This is what we're expected to do, for our entire lifespan. We're tired. It's not safe, and it's not fair."
Admirals such as Barr and P'Sayle have welcomed the introduction of so-called 'doomstack regulations' by the Galactic UN, but feel this doesn't go far enough to address the above problems. P'Sayle continued:
"I'm glad they're introducing fleet caps. That at least means we'll be commanding smaller fleets, meaning we're less stressed. It should also mean that more admirals are hired. But why is no-one talking about improved pay, or retiring before we die from old age on our flagship? These are the core issues we need addressed."
Some admirals have called for pan-galactic unionization through the Guild Academy for Generals and Admirals, however this would need to be formalized through a ballot.
Individual governments have already warned against such a move, stating that could potentially amount to individual admirals committing high treason.
The Galactic UN has reported it is working "diligently" to address "issues adversely affecting admirals and fleets", with 'doomstack regulation' being the first legislative step towards this.
> More accurate reporting from Ashley Easterbrook could not be possibleHe is the former administrative wonder boy whose reputation has taken a battering but Todd Greenberg hopes his future ambitions in sports management have not been soured by successive internal investigations centred on him.
An independent report compiled by barrister Dominic Villa, released on Friday, cleared the NRL head of football of any suggestion he had been made aware, when he was Canterbury chief executive in 2010, of bets placed on league games by Ryan Tandy.
NRL head of football Todd Greenberg. Credit:Getty Images
The green light for Greenberg came only eight months after another independent inquiry commissioned by the NRL’s integrity unit found no wrongdoing in his conduct during the Ben Barba affair. Greenberg’s name has unquestionably been damaged by both episodes despite being cleared, raising doubts over whether he can ever hope to one day be elevated to the top job at Rugby League Central as had appeared his destiny when Dave Smith signed him as his No.2.
‘‘I’d like to think people would judge me on my performance as the NRL head of football going forward rather than on some of the things that have been mentioned over the last few months,’’ Greenberg said on Friday night. ‘‘I’ve got to do a good job in my current role and people can judge me on that. That’s what I’d ask people to do, is judge me on what I’m doing now.In Crieff on Friday morning on the second day of the annual conference of Scotland’s local authorities an otherwise unremarkable panel session took place to discuss local government reform. In the middle of the proceedings, Willie Rennie, the Scottish Lib Dems’ leader who always looks like a small-town bank manager about to admonish an old customer for his prodigal spending habits, threw out a challenge to the audience. “Are there any SNP members here who want to put a question of the government,” he asked.
The government was represented on the panel by Derek Mackay, the recently appointed finance minister. To the surprise of no one in the room the silence of the grave rapidly descended. There were plenty of SNP members present but, as everyone in Scottish politics knows, any nationalists who valued a future in the party would rather go dooking for chips in a deep fat fryer than question its financial husbandry. Rennie’s interjection was timely and pertinent. In a Scotland dominated by the SNP on every political level the task of maintaining the daily conduct of democracy, the practice of holding central government to account, falls a little more heavily on the shoulders of those party members who have been elected to office. Rennie’s challenge to the SNP faithful came just a few hours after it had been announced that their party had taken the council ward of Garscadden and Scotstounhill in the north-west of Glasgow.
This area, long a Labour stronghold, was furiously contested as each side sensed that the outcome would act as a weathervane pointing to the overall outcome of next May’s local authority elections. The SNP have coveted control of Glasgow city council since they came to power nationally in 2007. At the 2012 local elections the SNP were just beginning to break out the champagne in Glasgow when it was announced that Labour, against all the odds and the prevailing nationalist headwind, had managed to hold on to the most prized of its municipal jewels.
Scotland bans controversial gas extraction technique Read more
Since then though, all the indications have suggested that the SNP has virtually annexed the city. In 2014, Glasgow was only one of four Scottish local authority areas to vote Yes in the independence referendum. The following year, every one of the city’s seven Westminster seats fell to the SNP, in the fierce after-shock of the constitutional division. And although Labour recovered a little lost ground in Glasgow in this year’s Holyrood elections, the momentum is firmly with the nationalists. If they do take Glasgow then their writ will effectively run in every important area of Scotland. This is why Rennie’s challenge is such a pertinent one.
Tories have made much of their elevation to become the official opposition at Holyrood and there has been much silly talk about the emergence of their leader Ruth Davidson as a credible future first minister. In reality though, Davidson has been a major disappointment at Holyrood. She has failed adequately to distance herself from the hard right, which has annexed the UK Conservative party at Westminster with its sinister anti-immigration views. Her policy programme begins and ends with opposing a second referendum in independence. She charges the SNP with obsessing about independence; in truth though, no one is more obsessed by it than she and it has made her position as leader of the opposition faintly ridiculous.
It is virtually certain that the government of Scotland will remain in the hands of the SNP for a generation, yet already this party is beginning to fall into the same bad habits that finally did for Labour in Scotland. They talk a great deal but so far have delivered little. At the local authority conference, Mackay, whose performance was described as lacklustre and predictable, could only say that people had to be prepared to pay more if they wanted improved public services. Not a scintilla of fresh or innovative thinking in funding models, which the much-lauded community empowerment bill might have been expected to open up.
Mackay was saying this even as it was being revealed that the NHS 24 computer project has experienced a 73% hike in cost to more than £130m. Elsewhere it was revealed that NHS Tayside needs to make £58m of savings following years of government bail-outs. ScotRail, the national rail operator has long been a national disgrace. Last week it was revealed that its Dutch owners Abellio has admitted making so much money from the deal that it can plough the profits back into its Netherlands operation. Despite all of this, the SNP have become politically untouchable. Yet Labour is in no position to land a single blow.
Hard Brexit could cost Scotland £2,000 a head and 80,000 jobs Read more
No matter how you try to crunch the numbers from Thursday’s by election they convey disquietude for Labour. Certainly, the turnout at 24% was ridiculously low and the margin of victory slim, but it still represented a 20% swing to the SNP. In 2012, Labour gained 60% of the city vote. If the SNP do take Glasgow next year it will be less of a testament to its popularity and competence than the utter failure of Scottish Labour to engage at any level with voters. They really ought not to be losing so much ground in Scotland’s biggest city. The SNP’s antipathy to Glasgow is both real and historic.
This city, which has suffered disproportionately from re-drawn local authority boundaries and health inequality, continues to drive Scotland’s economy. Yet the SNP annually cuts its Holyrood block grant while throwing a third of Scotland’s overall budget at a failing health service, which excels only at the rate at which it has increased managerialism and secured the financial futures of the children of thousands of NHS executives. Glasgow is lamentably under-represented at cabinet level in the SNP government. The neglect of Glasgow by the SNP should be on every Labour councillor seeking re-election next May.
On 10 October, Glasgow will reveal its blueprint for thriving in the face of Brexit uncertainty. The theme of this fightback document will be Glasgow is Open For Business. It’s not dissimilar to London’s response but it doesn’t have the vast riches that make it easier for the English capital. If Glasgow can convey and then maintain a sense of optimism in the face of Brexit and of deploying its gifts for innovation laughing in the face of adversity the SNP threat may yet be put to flight.For qualifying households, we provide low-cost spaying and neutering services for pets over four months old. See pricing details.
For cats & dogs who have recently delivered, we offer FREE spay/neuter for both parents when you surrender the weaned litter for adoption.
Low-Income Services
We provide our low-income neighbors with low-cost spaying and neutering services. If you live in the greater Seattle area, check the chart below to see if you qualify for this service. You must meet the income qualifications in order to schedule an appointment.
Region 1 Person 2 Person 3 Person 4 Person 5 Person King County $56,200 $54,200 $58,500 $65,000 $70,200 Kitsap County $46,300 $52,900 $59,500 $66,100 $71,400 Pierce County $41,800 $47,800 $53,750 $59,700 $64,500 Snohomish County $45,500 $52,000 $58,500 $65,000 $70,200
Please note: All animals must be over 4 months old to be scheduled. Our schedule is open one month at a time for scheduling.
Mom’s (and Dad’s!) Last Litter
We do offer FREE spay/neuter for pet parents when surrendering weaned litters. If your dog or cat has recently had babies and they are ready to be weaned, call the Pet Resource Center at 425.649.7561 to make an appointment.
After their surgeries, we’ll return the parent pet or pets to you. We’ll examine the litter of puppies or kittens, spay/neuter them, and make them available for adoption at Seattle Humane at no charge to you.
Services available with spay/neuter surgery
When your pet is neutered or spayed at Seattle Humane, we’ll provide the following care at an additional charge:
Free nail trim
$10 microchip
$10-15 per vaccination
$5 e-collarA simulation from the Neitz lab of what colorblindness looks like, with normal color vision on the left and red-green colorblindness on the right.
More than 10 million Americans have trouble distinguishing red from green or blue from yellow, and there's no treatment for colorblindness.
A biotech company and two scientists hope to change that.
On Wednesday, Avalanche Biotechnologies in Menlo Park and the University of Washington in Seattle announced a licensing agreement to develop the first treatment for colorblindness. The deal brings together a gene therapy technique developed by Avalanche with the expertise of vision researchers at the University of Washington.
"Our goal is to be treating colorblindness in clinical trials in patients in the next one to two years," says Thomas Chalberg, the founder and CEO of Avalanche.
The agreement has its roots in a scientific breakthrough that occurred six years ago. That's when two vision researchers at the University of Washington used gene therapy to cure a common form of colorblindness in squirrel monkeys.
"This opened the possibility of ultimately getting this to cure colorblindness in humans," says Jay Neitz, who runs the Color Vision Lab at UW along with his wife, Maureen Neitz.
The couple knew that transferring their success from monkey to man would be a challenge. But they were determined, says Maureen Neitz. "We've spent our entire careers writing NIH grants where we say our goal is to improve human health."
Colorblindness is usually a genetic disorder. About 8 percent of men inherit a mutation on the X chromosome that makes it hard for them to distinguish between red and green. The condition affects only about 0.5 percent of women, who have two X chromosomes.
And color vision problems can be disabling. Emails arrive every day at Neitz lab with subject lines saying things like "colorblindness ruined my life," says Jay Neitz.
The stories often come from people who say they are unable to pursue careers as pilots or fire fighters or even electricians, whose work involves a lot of color-coded wires.
Colorblindness can also make it hard to do things like drive after dark, says Maureen Neitz. That became a big problem for her brother, who is colorblind, after his community switched from mercury street lamps, which give off bluish light, to sodium street lamps, which produce orange light.
"He came home and he was shaking," Maureen Neitz says. "He said everything was just a sea of lights, it was all the same colors. (He) could not tell the street lights from the brake lights from the stoplights."
Curing colorblindness involves delivering new genes to cells in the retina that respond to color. That's how Jay and Maureen Neitz cured the squirrel monkeys six years ago. But the technique they used required surgery on the retina, which is risky.
For people they needed a nonsurgical approach, something that had eluded researchers for years. Then a team at the University of California, Berkeley found a way to deliver genes using a simple injection into the vitreous, the clear gel that fills most of the eyeball.
Avalanche Biotechnologies has been working to improve and commercialize the Berkeley technique, says Chalberg. When he met Jay and Maureen Neitz at a scientific conference in 2012, he says, it was clear they could work together.
It should be possible to begin experimentally treating patients within a couple of years, Chalberg says, because the human eye has proved to be a safe and relatively easy place to use gene therapy. "We like to say what happens in the eye stays in the eye, because it's kind of this small enclosed space."
And a cure for colorblindness has the potential to help millions of people, Chalberg says. "People with this vision disorder have a very limited sensation," he says. "They can only see about 1 percent of the colors of a normal person. And so in some ways it's actually closer to being blind than it is to being sighted."it's been a rough run for UFC Lightweight Melvin Guillard over the last couple years. After leaving Jackson's MMA in 2011, he's gone an incredibly disappointing 1-4 in his last five fights. When he went to head back to Albuquerque and rejoin his old team, he was refused admittance. Finally, it came out that he was facing charges for assault and failure to appear in New Mexico.
Melissa Segura of SI.com reported Guillard's sentencing via Twitter:
UFC lightweight Melvin Guillard avoids jail time; sentenced to supervised probation through June 2015, community service and court fees. — Melissa Segura (@MelissaSeguraSI) June 27, 2013
Good news for Guillard here. A two year probation term, along with fines and community service, stands as a pretty mild sentence. He'll need to keep his nose clean throughout that time obviously, but he's free to keep fighting as long as it's in a sanctioned bout.
Guillard is already set to compete against fellow TUF veteran Mac Danzig in a few weeks at UFC on Fox 8. The two 155ers will appear on the FX prelims of the event on July 27 in the Key Arena in Seattle, WA. The main event features a Flyweight title fight with champion Demetrious Johnson looking to pick up his second title defense against contender John Moraga.Behind all the benchmarking, the MO for reviewing graphics cards is pretty simple - you figure out how fast the product is and then compare it to rival products of a similar price. But with the AMD Radeon R9 Nano, things aren't so simple - it's a complete one-off and for the time being at least, entirely unique. It commands an extreme price-point because there's nothing else like it and that's what tends to happen in the PC hardware market. On top of that, we may well be looking at the first example a new breed of GPU, a revised take on what a halo product in this space might offer.
The R9 Nano isn't the fastest graphics card money can buy, but it compresses an extreme amount of graphics power into an absolutely tiny chassis. It's all down to the utilisation of HBM - high-bandwidth memory - which sees the traditional cluster of graphics RAM modules binned in favour of stacks of memory directly attached to the main processor. HBM is stupendously fast, but it's also highly compact, meaning that the board on which the components lie can be much, much smaller than a conventional card using standard GDDR5 modules. We've already had a preview of this with the Radeon R9 Fury X - which features a seven-inch board backed by a separate closed loop cooling solution.
The R9 Nano lacks the extreme cooling, instead using a more conventional heat-sink and fan. However, the board itself is even smaller than the Fury X, sizing up at just six inches end-to-end. Refactored with the burgeoning small form-factor PC market in mind, the Nano needs to be cool and quiet - and with that comes compromise. The Fury and Fury X - both using the same Fiji architecture with HBM - can consume around 275W during gaming. The Nano brings that down a notch to 175W, a factor of a significant drop in clock-speed. However, unlike the air-cooled Fury, it retains the full 4096 shaders of the top-tier model, with AMD telling us that the amount of cores in operation should mitigate the loss of the raw speed - something we'll address shortly.
Radeon R9 Nano specs The R9 Nano is essentially a down-clocked version of the full Fury X, typically running around 150-200MHz slower than the flagship product but saving a lot of energy in the process, allowing for a cool, quiet, actively cooled design. Stream Processors: 4096
4096 Texture Units: 256
256 ROPs: 64
64 Max Clock: 1000MHz (850-900MHz typical)
1000MHz (850-900MHz typical) Memory: 4GB HBM
4GB HBM Memory Clock: 500MHz
500MHz Bandwidth: 512GB/s
512GB/s Process: 28nm
28nm Transistor count: 8.9bn
8.9bn Max TFLOPs: 8.2
8.2 Die Size: 596mm 2
596mm TDP: 175W R9 Nano costs a lot of money - you pay for its unique nature. As you're buying the same processor as found in Fury X, you pay Fury X money: $650. That should translate to around £510 in the UK. There's nothing quite like the overall proposition, but the challenge facing AMD is that the enthusiast market is performance-driven - and the same amount of money can buy you a lot more perf. :: The best Micro SD cards for Nintendo Switch available now
Physically, the card is gorgeous - it features premium build materials, and a quiet fan rated at just 42dB (we couldn't hear the fan in an office environment, even on an open-air test bed). It's a world apart from the cheap plastics and loud noise of AMD's 200-series reference designs. Our only gripe comes from the dreaded 'coil whine' - the R9 Nano is much louder here than the Fury X, a card we re-tested during production of this feature. It sounds akin to a constant buzzing, something that may be unique to our particular review sample.
Order the Radeon R9 Nano [?] from Amazon with free shipping
Physically, the card has many similarities with the top-end Fury X, specifically in terms of its video outputs. We get three DisplayPorts along with one HDMI port (just like Fury X, it's unfortunately just HDMI 1.4a, restricting us to 30Hz at 4K - not good for the new wave of 4K UHD TVs). However, the reduction in operating power to 175W means that power input configuration changes - the two eight-pin PSU inputs on the Fury X are reduced to just one on the Nano.
So the question is, how well does it perform? AMD says that the card should match non-X Fury performance, but the truth is that it doesn't - however, in many scenarios it gets very close indeed. As always, our initial test for getting the measure of a GPU is our Crysis 3 gameplay challenge - where we attempt to hit a sustained 60Hz at native resolution, and for the new generation of 'uber' cards, we still think that 1440p is the sweet spot. We tried very high settings with SMAA T2x anti-aliasing, and found that none of the Furies could quite hit the target, with the Nano falling a little behind the air-cooled, cut-down Fiji.
However, dropping down from the very high to the high preset frees up a significant amount of GPU headroom - enough for the Nano to hand in a tight, consistent 60fps experience with just a minimal amount of dropped frames. For those with a FreeSync monitor, we've found that the technology works wonders in combination with a frame-rate lock - and AMD's frame-rate control option at 50fps in combination with the adaptive sync technology should work really nicely if you'd like to retain the top-end effects work.
In the Crysis 3 gameplay challenge, the idea is to match resolution and refresh rate - in this case, we're aiming for 2560x1440 at 60Hz with the game at its very high preset. Unfortunately, only the top-end Fury X gives a convincing showing - we need high settings to get the job done on the Nano.
Crysis 3 1440p V-Sync Gameplay R9 Nano High R9 Nano Very High R9 Fury Very High R9 Fury X Very High Lowest Frame-Rate 44.0fps 35.0fps 36.0fps 40.0fps Dropped Frames (from 18650 total) 93 (0.50%) 2680 (14.37%) 2084 (11.17%) 1141 (6.12%)
Order the graphics cards tested against the R9 Nano from Amazon with free shipping:
Moving on to the 1080p benchmarks, the question becomes what the R9 Nano should really be compared with. AMD points us towards the GTX 970 Mini - a tiny version of Nvidia's card that has a similar form factor to the Nano. We don't have that, but we do have the Zotac version which is about an inch longer (see the comparison stack in the photo gallery above), but what's clear is that at 1080p it is not the home run you might think. Fiji seems to scale down in a sub-optimal manner on lower resolutions and the Nano is no exception. Titles like Crysis 3, Ryse and Shadow of Mordor see big gains, but elsewhere we're looking at no boost at all or in the 10 per cent region. Comparisons with the much cheaper GTX 980 are even less encouraging.
However, what is clear is that at 1080p resolution at least, the Nano gets extremely close to matching the performance level of the air-cooled R9 Fury, offering around 95 to 100 per cent of the card's full HD turn-out. It's margin of error stuff, but Battlefield 4 even manages to run a little faster. Cast your eyes down to the rest of the tables |
, like how my wife smiled when she referred to me as her husband those first few weeks of our marriage.
STORY: Single Dad Perez Hilton Reflects on His Controversial Career, Raising Kids
We went home. I spent all day and night helping my wife care for him, but Dad didn’t seem to apply to me. The word seemed to describe someone whose identity was fixed for good. To be a father was to arrive somewhere, but I still felt like I was just barely on my way.
My wife understood my feelings but didn’t share them. I’m a pro when it comes to manufactured anxiety, but she’s much more stable. Plus, while I did my part in summoning him to this planet, my wife was the one who brought him here. In a very real way, she had been a mother for 41 long weeks by the time my son even showed his face, and once he did, she fed him from her own body. Compared to that? I was incidental.
Weeks passed. The first hints of my son’s personality appeared: his easy disposition, ready smile, and constant, self-important, nonsensical babbling. I fell in love with my son, but I didn’t feel like his father. When he slept, my wife and I would read or watch TV. A good fictional world makes you forget who you are for a while, but once a show ends or a book is closed, it all comes back in the space of a heartbeat. For me, a few more heartbeats would pass before I’d remember: There’s a baby in this apartment. It was a surprise every time. It felt like gas bubbles in my brain, not painful, exactly, but strange. Real dads didn’t forget their kids existed. So what did that make me?
Maybe when he calls me Dad, I thought, I’ll feel it then.
At first, he called me Ba. A good start, but he called bananas that too, and the remote control, and the sky, and whatever else he could point at with his fat dimpled finger. When finally I was Daddy, it felt great, but I can’t say I really believed him. What did he know?
I knew, even then, that this was all in my head. I’m obsessed with identity, with what it means to be one person and not any other. That obsession drives me to be a fiction writer, it shapes my relationships, and it animates my thinking about myself. But it’s uncomfortable. Looking back, it’s likely that I thought fatherhood would save me from that discomfort. Maybe I didn’t want to have to question who I was any more. I wanted to have arrived.
But that’s a lot to ask from a kid. Too much, I think.
He started crawling, eating, talking. I did what I should have done from the start. I let go. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” He meant it as a warning, but it works the other way around, too. Pretend hard enough, and someday you’ll find you’re not pretending anymore. I pretended to be a dad. So what if I didn’t feel like a father? What did that even mean? I was acting like one, and that was all that mattered.
But then I learned that we were expecting again. Months before the due date, we were talking about attending a wedding in the fall and my wife said, “Maybe the kids can stay with my mom.”UK and Irish forecasters hope names, chosen from public’s suggestions, will help raise awareness of storms and help people track them on social media
Nigel could soon be laying waste to the shores of Britain and Ireland. It is one of 21 names chosen by weather forecasters after a public appeal for suggestions to name powerful storms.
The UK’s Met Office weather forecasting service and Met Éireann, its Irish equivalent, hope that the names will help to raise public awareness of the strongest storms affecting both countries.
Both organisations will share a list, chosen from names common to Ireland and the UK, which has been selected from thousands of suggestions sent in by the public through email, Facebook and Twitter.
A storm will be named when duty forecasters in Dublin and Exeter decide it has the potential to cause “medium” or “high” wind impacts in either the UK, Ireland or both.
The list begins with Abigail, and then will alternate between male and female names through the alphabet. However, it misses out the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z, in line with the convention for official storm naming in the North Atlantic.
To avoid confusion, if a storm is the dying gusts of a tropical storm or hurricane that has crossed the ocean, it will still be styled according to the current convention of “ex-hurricane X”, as chosen by the US National Hurricane Centre in Miami.
Although the latest project is just a pilot scheme, experts have said that naming wind storms, such as the St Jude’s day storm of 2013, makes it easier for the public to follow their progress and reference them on social media.
Announcing the project in September, the Met Office said: “The naming of storms using a single authoritative system should aid the communication of approaching severe weather through media partners and other government agencies.
“In this way the public will be better placed to keep themselves, their property and businesses safe.”
Storms that move in from the Atlantic often hit mostly strongly in Ireland and the system will tie in with Met Éireann’s National Warnings and the Met Office’s National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS) of yellow, amber and red.
Since the names are assigned based on the potential for disruption, the services admit that sometimes storms will be named, which in the end have less impact than anticipated.
The named storms over Ireland and the British Isles are unlikely to be as powerful as named storms on the other side of the Atlantic. The word “storm” is technically reserved for winds blowing at average speeds of 89-102kmh (55-63mph).
“However, in the cases outlined here, names may be assigned at substantially lower thresholds,” said Met Éireann.
The full list of names for 2015-16Dartmouth researchers have discovered a new chemical reaction that has the potential to facilitate the search for pharmaceutical drugs.
The findings appear in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Organic synthesis is a scientific discipline central to the drug discovery process that is focused on building new carbon-based molecules that can affect biology -- for example, targeting and destroying cancer cells. In the study, the authors describe a new chemical reaction that converts simple starting materials into architecturally complex molecules (a collection of atoms bonded to one another) called "decalins" in a single step. Decalins are carbon-based compounds containing two hexagon rings.
"The findings are noteworthy not only because this chemical reaction simplifies the laboratory preparation of such species, but also because our study reveals a unique mode of reactivity associated with metal-carbon bonds that are embedded in complex carbon-based structures. General species of the type studied here have previously been thought to be fleeting intermediates whose reactivity was difficult to control," says co-author Glenn Micalizio, a professor of chemistry. "An important part of this paper demonstrates our ability to reveal new reactivity patterns of these species, prompting them to engage in highly selective chemical transformations."
The findings, which are the latest to emerge from Micalizio's research focusing on developing a class of chemical reactivity called "metallacycle-mediated cross-coupling," stand as among the most complex examples of this chemistry ever described. The term "metallacycle" refers to atoms bonded in a ring, with one of the atoms being a metal. The researchers have been aiming to control the assembly of organic structures that stepwise "encapsulate" a reactive metal center, followed by selective extrusion of the metal from the resulting organic structure. In the new study, the metal plays a central role in joining two molecules through a process that forges three carbon-carbon bonds in a highly selective fashion.
"This latest finding provides a concise and direct synthesis pathway that, due to the structure of the products delivered, will likely be quite valuable for the discovery and development of therapeutic agents," says Micalizio, whose work focuses on the design of organic chemical reaction methods and strategies to improve medicine and human health.window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'thumbnails-c', container: 'taboola-interstitial-gallery-thumbnails-4', placement: 'Interstitial Gallery Thumbnails 4', target_type:'mix' });
Photo: Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Image 2 of 5 Houston Rockets Dwight Howard,left, Donatas Motiejunas, and Sam Dekker right, talk to the crowd after modeling the team's alternate uniforms during an event at the House of Blues Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015, in Houston. ( Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle ) less Houston Rockets Dwight Howard,left, Donatas Motiejunas, and Sam Dekker right, talk to the crowd after modeling the team's alternate uniforms during an event at the House of Blues Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015, in... more Photo: Houston Chronicle Image 3 of 5 Houston Rockets Sam Dekker, left, Dwight Howard, and Donatas Motiejunas, right, model the team's alternate uniforms during an event at the House of Blues Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015, in Houston. ( Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle ) less Houston Rockets Sam Dekker, left, Dwight Howard, and Donatas Motiejunas, right, model the team's alternate uniforms during an event at the House of Blues Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015, in Houston. ( Melissa... more Photo: Houston Chronicle Image 4 of 5 Houston Rockets Sam Dekker, left, and Dwight Howard, right, are shown back stage after modeling the team's alternate uniforms during an event at the House of Blues Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015, in Houston. ( Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle ) less Houston Rockets Sam Dekker, left, and Dwight Howard, right, are shown back stage after modeling the team's alternate uniforms during an event at the House of Blues Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015, in Houston. (... more Photo: Houston Chronicle Image 5 of 5 McHale says Lawson not guaranteed spot in starting lineup 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
Rockets coach Kevin McHale raved about the skills Ty Lawson will bring and how well those skills will fit. He would not, however, assume that Lawson will start over the incumbent at the point, Pat Beverley, or how the minutes will be distributed.
“They’ll determine that,” McHale said before a Rockets event on Tuesday to unveil three new alternate uniforms. “We’ll find out. Can we play them together? Maybe. We’ll put them out there. We had 28 days of camp. We’ll decide who will get the lion’s share of the minutes. One will and one will be a backup.”
When he spoke to the crowd later, McHale praised Lawson, but said he has to return to his level of play prior to last season.
“Ty last year had a very average year in Denver compared to what he had done before,” McHale said. “(Former Nuggets coach) George Karl runs a little bit more of an open offense like we run here, get up and down, attack. We want Ty to do what he does best, get in the paint, make plays for others, scoring.
“Since we had (Goran) Dragic, he’ll probably be our best guy at getting in the paint and then throwing out from the paint. He can make all the passes. And he’s got to get back to playing better defense. He’s got to be the head of the snake defensively. He can. I’ve seen him.
“If he just does what he does well, he’ll be a fit for us.
jonathan.feigen@chron.com
twitter.com/jonathan_feigenThe family of Stephanie Bottrill, 53, claim that the so-called “bedroom tax” drove her to suicide.
Just days before she died the grandmother told neighbours she simply could not afford to live any more because of the benefit changes which came into effect last month.
Her family told the Sunday People she was tortured about how she would afford the £20 extra a week for the two under-occupied bedrooms in her home under the scheme which charges for empty rooms in council housing.
Miss Bottrill died in the early hours of May 4 after she was struck by a lorry on the M6 motorway near her home in Solihull, in the West Midlands.
Before she walked to the motorway she had posted her keys and a note through her neighbours door.
This morning Sayeeda Warsi, the Foreign Office Minister, said the death was "tragic" but added: "To try to link [the death] to a general discussion from politicians is wrong."
However Jack Dromey, Labour's shadow housing minister, said the case showed the "sheer inhumanity of the iniquitous bedroom tax."
In a letter to her son Steven, 27, Miss Bottrill wrote: "Don't blame yourself for me ending my life. The only people to blame are the Government."
Miss Bottrill suffered from suffered from the auto-immune system condition Myasthenia gravis and was unable to work, but was not receiving disability benefits, Mr Bottrill said.
He said: "I couldn't believe it. She said not to blame ourselves, it was the Government and what they were doing that caused her to do it.
"She was fine before the bedroom tax. It was dreamt up in London, by people in offices and big houses.
"They have no idea the effect it has on people like my mum."
The Department for Work and Pensions refused to comment on individual cases.
Miss Bottrill had lived in the £320-a-month home for 18 years, but told her son that she was unable to cope with the extra £80 she had to find every month.
In the days before she died Miss Bottrill said to neighbours: "I can't afford to live any more."
She had already packed up the belongings in her house, where she had raised two children as a single mother.
He said: "She didn't want to go but she knew she had to. She couldn't afford to stay. It was too hard."
Ms Bottrill lived in her three-bedroom home on her own after her two children moved out which would have left her with a 25% reduction in her housing benefit for two rooms.
The council could not find her a suitable alternative, and the one property she was offered was miles from her family and transport, they said.
Solihull Council Labour group leader David Jamieson, who knows the family, said he was “appalled” by her death and hopes the Government would reconsider the policy.
Under the spare room subsidy policy, introduced last month, benefits will be deducted from social housing tenants of working age who are found to have more bedrooms than they need.
“We have provided councils with £150million in Discretionary Housing Payments to help people in difficult situations. We have also been working closely with councils to help prepare people for this change in policy,” a DWP spokesperson said.Drake is reviving one of his favorite TV shows.
The rapper/actor/producer is teaming with Netflix to revive Top Boy, the British crime drama that aired on Channel 4 in the U.K. for two seasons before ending in 2013.
The streamer, which retains global rights to the first two seasons of Top Boy, will premiere the third season in 2019 as a Netflix original.
Top Boy's original creative team will return, with Ronan Bennett set to pen the script and executive produce via his Easter Partisan banner alongside Charles Steel and Alasdair Flind of Cowboy Films and Yann Demange (a frontrunner to direct the next Bond film). Drake will exec produce alongside his business partner, Adel "Future" Nur, with Maverick Carter and Jamal Henderson for LeBron James' SpringHill Entertainment banner.
The third season picks up as Dushane (original star Ashley Walters) returns from exile to his home in London to reclaim his throne in the highly lucrative drug market. He teams with Sully (Kane "Kano" Robinson), his spiritual brother, partner, and sometime rival who is also returning to the same streets after his own form of exile — prison — comes to an end. Awaiting them both is Jamie, the young, hungry and ruthless gang leader whose ambitions leave no place for Dushane and Sully.
In THR's cover story, Drake noted he caught the original on YouTube and was taken with its depiction of London as both beautiful and malevolent. "That human element drew me in," he said. Netflix vp originals Cindy Holland also noted that it was Drake's passion for the series that "drove its resurrection."
Top Boy comes as Drake is looking to expand his television (and film) footprint. While details remain slim, Drake is said to be teaming with A24 (Moonlight) in a deal that includes both TV and film; with Anonymous Content (Mr. Robot) for an untitled TV series; and potentially something with Apple, too. Drake is currently producing documentary feature The Carter Effect, about former NBA star Vince Carter, that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.1. Oregon, Alaska Plan & Prepare for Legal Marijuana
In November 2014, Oregon and Alaska followed Washington and Colorado in legalizing recreational marijuana. While the right of Oregonians and Alaskans to grow marijuana at home begins early on, the commercial market and regulatory system will not begin for one to two years, due to the language in Ballot Measure 91 (OR) & Ballot Measure 2 (AK).
Each ballot measure requires the state to design and construct a commercial market within the bounds laid out in the voter-approved language. Each measure also charges the respective state legislatures and alcohol regulatory bodies to work together to design regulations governing legal marijuana. The latter is where the action will be in 2015. It will be important to watch what Oregon and Alaska decide in setting up rules to govern this new area of policy. These rules may well determine the success or failure of marijuana policy in each state, and the path taken will also offer insight into how states are learning from each other as this policy area expands.
Finally, and of particular note, Oregon will become the first state to legalize marijuana that shares a border with a state (WA) that has already approved legalization. Watching Oregon’s commercial and regulatory choices will be crucial in understanding whether and to what extent states may strive for marijuana market advantages vis-à-vis bordering states. Decisions over taxation in Oregon suggest this may be part of the political, policy, and economic calculus.
2. Identifying the Next States to Legalize Marijuana
Compared with 2014, 2016 may be a more favorable political environment for states seeking to put legalization initiatives on the ballot, and 2015 will be extremely important for those efforts. Legalizing states (and even Florida for medical marijuana) have shown us that ballot initiatives are expensive, labor intensive, and require extensive planning on the part of supporters and opponents. Those seeking to advance the cause of legalization in 2016 will begin organizing the grassroots, planning signature drives, hiring staff, coordinating volunteers, drafting and circulating ballot language, and raising money.
2015 will show which states are serious about such efforts in 2016. It is widely expected that California will advance an initiative, and Florida may take another swing at approving medical marijuana, after having fallen just short of approval in 2014. Other states may well follow suit. As a result, to gain insight into who will push ballot initiatives, follow the money (and staff and volunteers and media campaigns) in 2015. Similarly, those seeking to oppose legalization efforts can be tipped off as to the states where similar efforts (fundraising, messaging, coordinating, staffing) will be necessary.
3. Cannabis Policy & State Legislative Action
In some states, the ballot initiative process is not as inviting for those seeking statewide change. As a result, the battleground for enacting items like the legalization of recreational or medical marijuana is not the ballot box, but the state legislature. As 2015 begins, it will be crucial to identify state legislative proposals involving marijuana policy and monitor their progress during the legislative sessions. Those efforts will involve recreational legalization, decriminalization, or medical legalization. Some states, like Tennessee, may consider relaxing bans on hemp production. Still, in other states, legislative proposals may seek to reaffirm or clarify legal bans on marijuana.
4. Cannabis & the Courts
In 2014, there were multiple, high-profile lawsuits surrounding marijuana policy which may play out in 2015. The one likely to be decided soon is Coats v. Dish Network, a Colorado case in which a Dish Network employee is challenging the legality of his firing for testing positive for marijuana, a product he used for medical purposes. In 2013, the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the employer’s right to fire the employee, and in late 2014, the Colorado Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case. Their decision will likely settle the issue of employer-sponsored marijuana testing.
In addition, Nebraska and Oklahoma sued Colorado over that state’s move to legalize marijuana, claiming that the state is violating federal law and causing a burden on bordering states. The lawsuit was filed directly in the US Supreme Court, as the Court has original jurisdiction over conflicts among the states. How the Supreme Court handles this filing will shed light on federal courts’ willingness to engage this policy area at present and going forward.
5. Answers to Questions About DC’s Marijuana Policy
Like Oregon and Alaska, DC legalized marijuana on Election Day 2014. However, since Initiative 71 passed, many questions have been raised. As Philip Wallach and I discussed in November, Initiative 71 legalized homegrows for recreational marijuana, and (because of legal requirements around the initiative process in DC) left to the DC Council the charge of setting up a commercial market and regulatory system. Legislation to that effect was in the works, but was complicated by a rider attached to an Omnibus Appropriations bill passed by the US Congress in December. The rider, penned by Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), sought to neuter Initiative 71 and prevent DC from legalizing marijuana.
However, the language of the rider is unclear, leaving many to argue that the move simply prevents the District from forming a commercial market and regulatory regime, while remaining silent on the right of DC residents to homegrow marijuana. Clarity about the future of marijuana policy in DC will almost surely be left to the federal courts. Legal challenges are certain to abound, and 2015 will be the year in which that process begins.
Additionally, under the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, the District must transmit Initiative 71 to Congress, where Congress has the opportunity to strike it down. If Congress does so, the issue will largely be settled; if they fail to do so, it further complicates the District’s guidance on the issue. Congressional inaction would likely spur additional efforts for clarity from the courts.
6. Colorado & Washington (& Uruguay) Continue Legalization
The first two states to legalize recreational marijuana will continue their experiment in 2015. In Colorado, efforts to deal with issues around edibles, product testing, and homegrows will be on the agenda. In fact, a working group dealing with edibles sent a series of recommendations to the state legislature, after failing to agree on a unified set of suggestions. The new legislative session in Colorado wraps up in May, meaning we will be able to see action (or inaction) in the first few months of the year.
Washington, a state a bit slower out of the gate, will face questions about both the supply of marijuana to the market and tax rates, both of which seriously affect the price of legal marijuana. The policy challenge Washington faces is that legal weed could be too costly to lure consumers from the black market, and the manner in which the state deals with it will an important item to watch in 2015.
On the international front, Uruguay will continue to roll out its own implementation of legal marijuana. Thus far, there have been bumps in the road as the Latin American nation becomes the first country in the world to legalize, the country is working hard to ready a bureaucracy and a consumer base for the experiment. At the same time, Uruguay will continue to advance this policy area as newly-elected President Tabaré Vásquez returns to office in March, while taking a careful and skeptical approach to the roll out. The effectiveness of Uruguay’s implementation and the patience of the new president for the process will be center stage in 2015.
7. Data, Data, Data
Any marijuana policy advocates—supporters or opponents—who make conclusive claims from a few data points live in a delusional world. The reality is that it is too early, there is not enough data, and the baselines by which several data are compared are imperfect.
Do data about usage, public health, public safety, traffic safety, crime, enforcement, etc., tell us anything? Absolutely. However, they are far from telling us the whole story. Instead, patience is key. 2015 (and subsequent years) will offer steady flows of data from Colorado and Washington, and eventually other states. Over time, we will have a better idea about the impact of legalized, recreational marijuana on key societal indicators.
So, don’t buy a phony bill of goods about conclusions based on data thus far. Instead, wait to see what additional data tell us over time. A good New Year’s resolution for marijuana policy watchers: take a deep breath (preferably of clean air) and think about data empirically, not emotionally.
8. Presidential Candidates & Cannabis
One certainty about 2015 is that it marks the start of the 2016 presidential campaign. As Democrats wait to hear about Hillary Clinton’s decision, a slew of Republicans are lining up (quietly or otherwise) to succeed Barack Obama. The next president can have a substantial impact on marijuana policy in the United States. Right now, the experiments in Colorado and Washington continue to proceed, without federal government intervention because of an informal agreement between the Justice Department and the states. Such a policy could be reversed on January 20, 2017, with a new president with a different position on marijuana.
As dozens of states have approved medical marijuana, and now four states and DC have approved recreational marijuana, cannabis policy will absolutely be part of the 2016 conversation—and that conversation will begin this year. What is so fascinating about marijuana policy is that, unlike most issues, it does not fall neatly along party lines. Some Democrats support it; some Democrats oppose it. Some Republicans support it; some Republicans oppose it. Thus far, prospective candidates have been tightlipped on the issue, with a few exceptions. Texas Governor Rick Perry has openly discussed decriminalization. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has talked about a need for drug policy reform. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has hinted that she is comfortable letting the states experiment as they have been.
Those considering a run for the White House have been able to remain mum or offer hints at their policy views on marijuana. However, as candidates declare, journalists begin looking for news hooks, voters start meeting those running, and debate moderators start peppering would-be presidents with questions, marijuana is sure to become a serious issue in a way that it has not in prior presidential campaigns. The next election will not simply be a discussion of whether a candidate has inhaled in the past, but about how a president will treat those who choose to inhale in the future.Rick Santorum speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
It looks to have all the traditional ingredients of a truly rootin’ tootin’ western, including bank robberies, gunfights and murderous outlaws out for revenge. But The Redemption of Henry Myers, the new movie from former US presidential wannabe Rick Santorum, also throws something fresh into the mix: Jesus.
The evangelical tale, which debuted on the Hallmark Movie Channel in the US on Sunday, is the latest Christian-oriented movie from Santorum’s film production company EchoLight Studios. It centres on a dark-hearted outlaw, who finds himself being hunted by his former partners in crime after absconding from an abortive bank robbery with a bag full of swag.
Henry takes a bullet for his pains, but finds himself nursed back to health by a God-fearing widow and her children. The intrigue deepens when the identity of the woman’s late husband becomes clear, and Myers is faced with the choice of a life of faith or a return to his dastardly frontier existence.
“There’s a message for everybody out there as to how we forgive,” said Santorum. “And do we forgive? And the process which you have to go through to do that.”
The former Pennsylvania senator, who was appointed CEO of EchoLight in June last year, told Politico he had not given up on the possibility of a new run for president in 2016. However, he said: “My focus right now is doing a good job with this movie company and trying to put it on the right path to be successful as a company and I don’t miss what’s going in Washington DC that’s for darn sure. It’s as toxic a place I’ve seen and so it’s sort of nice to be on the outside in the private sector right now.”
The Redemption of Henry Myers follows December’s The Christmas Candle, which starred Susan Boyle as a 19th-century churchwoman with the voice of an angel. Santorum is executive producer and the film is directed by Clayton Miller from a script he wrote with Chris Vanderkaay and Charlie Shahnaian.
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote of Santorum’s earlier effort: “A real Christmas miracle would cause every copy of this film to spontaneously burst into flames.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
[Image via Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons licensed]With the advent of vaping products and the rise in the market today, it is no wonder there are more individuals opting for a better alternative than cigarettes. While vaping is technically considered to be that rather than smoking cigarettes which contain more than 2000 chemicals in them, it is important to know both the pros and cons of vaping as a non-smoker before making your decision.
Pros of Vaping
One of the biggest pros of vaping vs. smoking cigarettes is the elimination of additional chemicals that are extremely harmful and dangerous to the body, often causing lung cancer. Additionally, vaping is less expensive than smoking cigarettes. If you’re super new to the vaping scene you will probably want to read up on the new vaping FDA ENDS regulations and what you can do to help.
With vaping products, there is no awful smells and your clothing will not absorb the smell of smoke, which is ideal for those who want to remain smoke-free.
Another major pro of vaping is eliminating the basic menthol and tobacco flavors if you enjoy a variety while utilizing your device. Products range from mint and chocolate to custard and fruity candy to fit any preferences you have in mind once you begin vaping.
There are also hundreds of vaping products on the market, whether you are searching for a vape item that resembles a cigarette or if you have an interest in vaping products that are electronic and can be recharged easily with a universal charger for everyday use.
Finally, e-liquids and devices are generally cheaper than paying for a pack of cigarettes each day, especially in the long-run, which makes vaping more appealing for those who are non-smokers. Choosing to purchase different e-liquids is a way to spend less on a habit you enjoy while also getting a variety of flavors, too. Some people may even choose to make their own vape juice.
Cons of Vaping as a Non-Smoker
Although vaping may seem as if it is the right choice as opposed to smoking, there are still risks when you begin vaping. Once you are used to and somewhat addicted to using a vaping device, it may be more tempting to move onto cigarettes, which is much unhealthier.
Another thing is, even though it’s a better alternative, you still run the risk of accidentally swallowing e-liquid if you’re not careful while you are vaping. This can happen if the tank is leaking or cracked, or if you overfilled it and immediately started vaping.
Other Expenses to Consider
After you start vaping there is other cost that people don’t usually think of, including things like coils, batteries, and battery chargers – just to name a few. To get a good idea of some of the cost associated with some of these things, I’d encourage you to check out some of these links to get some prices.As if McCain wasn’t facing enough heat for stalling talks on the federal bailout package, which Democrats like Chris Dodd claim he did for his own political gain, now one of his main surrogates is on the record seeking to use the financial crisis for monetary gain. Rudy Giuliani’s firm Bracewell & Giuliani announced yesterday that it has used its extensive power network to set up a high-priced task force to help companies negotiate the current fiscal and political climate. From a Giuliani statement:
Our team of former government officials and experienced attorneys in the fields of legislation, enforcement and finance are equipped to guide institutions in this quickly evolving and complex environment.
Dems leaped on this news, as Giuliani is a constant stumper for McCain. McCain has previously blamed the current crisis on “unbridled greed” on Wall Street, so it could look bad that his main surrogate is moving swiftly to make money off of it. A DNC spokesman has already called this “crass opportunism.” Come on people, let’s not get hysterical — it’s crass capitalism. Ooh! Ooh! Crapitalism. Yes!
It’s Rudy, the Vulture [NYDN]For an entire week, Cowboys faithful has been left to wonder whether or not the back issues that limited Dez Bryant in practice this week are a minor concern or something more serious. Today, we receive word that could shed some insight into the situation.
Via Twitter, ESPN's Ed Werder has reported that Dez Bryant received an epidural shot earlier in the week.
Dez Bryant vows to play vs Saints and took an Epidural injection earlier in week for back pain, sources tell me. Great practice after that. — Ed Werder (@Edwerderespn) November 10, 2013
Of course, the controversy the entire week stemmed from a Fox Sports report that the Cowboys were worried about a nerve or disc issue with Bryant, and the Cowboys steadfastly denied that it was as serious as an issue.
However, according to the information I could uncover, there was no mention of treating back spasms with an epidural injection. There were mentions of other injections being used for muscular issues, such as botox, but not epidurals.
To wit:
Back injections may help treat two major back pain problems: radiculopathy and spinal stenosis. Doctors also use injections for other types of back pain. Sometimes, they also use them to help find out what's causing the pain. Radiculopathy refers to inflammation or damage to a nerve usually in the neck or the low back. The problem originates where the nerve exits the spine. With radiculopathy, sharp pain shoots from the lower back down into one or both legs or from the neck into the arm. A herniated disc can cause radiculopathy. With spinal stenosis, the lower spine becomes narrowed. As a result, it compresses the nerves inside. This usually causes pain in the buttock or leg and may or may not be accompanied by back pain. [...] Epidural means "around the spinal cord." Typically, epidural injections are performed in a doctor's office or the hospital. They're usually given by anesthesiologists, physiatrists, or interventional radiologists with special training. Before receiving an epidural injection, you will probably undergo an imaging test. This may involve a CT scan or an MRI of the back. The test allows the doctor to identify possible causes of back pain. - WebMD
So that follows the timeline that we are already aware of. Dez Bryant went in for an MRI and now, according to Werder's sources, an epidural shot ensued.
Most observers have spent the season learning that the Cowboys brass have gone the route of never giving full information on injured players. If the tea leaves are correct and an epidural is strictly used for nerve or disc problems, one could look back at the team's "denials" and see the wiggle room used.
"We're just trying to address one of the issues," coach Jason Garrett said.
of the issues," coach Jason Garrett said. "We don't seem to have any long-term concern about that at all," Garrett said. "
to have any long-term concern about that at all," Garrett said. " Vice-president Stephen Jones said Bryant's issue is more muscular than skeletal and there are no concerns about him having a disc problem.
muscular skeletal and there are no concerns about him having a disc problem. "I haven't heard anything like that or just close to it," Jerry Jones said of concerns about Bryant having a herniated disc.
The quotes above are from a Star-Telegram report from earlier in the week, the emphasis is mine.
It must be reiterated that we do not have our own source on this information, nor do we have a doctor giving us insight into these matters. But it does appear that if all is as reported, Dez Bryant's back issue does in fact seem to be more than what the Cowboys are letting on.
Bryant has a history of back problems, including last season's "fingertip non-catch" game against the Giants and the 2012 season finale in which he left the stadium in a wheel chair.
Exactly how much of an issue this is moving forward will present itself in games, starting tonight in New Orleans.Huh, this comes as a surprise. Taking full advantage of the fact that everyone’s twitter feed is currently dominated by talk of another major sci-fi franchise, 20th Century Fox has surprised the Internet today with the first trailer for Independence Day: Resurgence. It’s the sequel to Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster that utterly dominated the summer of 1996 and raked in a galaxy-sized $817.4 million haul off a $70 million budget.
Set (and coming out) 20 years after the original film, Independence Day: Resurgence sees (some of) the original cast plus a few newcomers once again fighting against human extinction. Since the defeat of the invading aliens in the original film, mankind has recovered and reverse-engineered alien technology to beef up the planet’s defenses. And good thing too, as it’s discovered that the rapacious Alien swarm defeated in the first film managed to send out a distress signal just before being annihilated. Aware of the looming threat posed by the alien cavalry, the human race must again unite to fend them off.
Roland Emmerich once again directs, from a script he cowrote with his old partner Dean Devlin along with Nic Wright & James A. Woods, and James Vanderbilt. Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch, Vivica A. Fox, and Brent Spiner reprise |
to the architrave and roof above: "All follow the rule of being built to delicate curves", Gorham Stevens observed when pointing out that, in addition, the west front was built at a slightly higher level than that of the east front.[58]
It is not universally agreed what the intended effect of these "optical refinements" was; they may serve as a sort of "reverse optical illusion".[59] As the Greeks may have been aware, two parallel lines appear to bow, or curve outward, when intersected by converging lines. In this case, the ceiling and floor of the temple may seem to bow in the presence of the surrounding angles of the building. Striving for perfection, the designers may have added these curves, compensating for the illusion by creating their own curves, thus negating this effect and allowing the temple to be seen as they intended. It is also suggested that it was to enliven what might have appeared an inert mass in the case of a building without curves, but the comparison ought to be, according to Smithsonian historian Evan Hadingham, with the Parthenon's more obviously curved predecessors than with a notional rectilinear temple.[60]
Some studies of the Acropolis, including of the Parthenon and its façade, have conjectured that many of its proportions approximate the golden ratio.[61] However, such theories have been discredited by more recent studies, which have shown that the proportions of the Parthenon do not match the golden proportion.[62][63]
Sculpture [ edit ]
The cella of the Parthenon housed the chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos sculpted by Phidias and dedicated in 439 or 438 BC. The appearance of this is known from other images. The decorative stonework was originally highly coloured.[64] The temple was dedicated to Athena at that time, though construction continued until almost the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 432. By the year 438, the sculptural decoration of the Doric metopes on the frieze above the exterior colonnade, and of the Ionic frieze around the upper portion of the walls of the cella, had been completed. In the opisthodomus (the back room of the cella) were stored the monetary contributions of the Delian League, of which Athens was the leading member.
Only a very small number of the sculptures remain in situ; most of the surviving sculptures are today (controversially) in the British Museum in London as the Elgin Marbles, and the Athens Acropolis Museum, but a few pieces are also in the Louvre, and museums in Rome, Vienna and Palermo.[65]
Metopes [ edit ]
Detail of the West metopes
The frieze of the Parthenon's entablature contained ninety-two metopes, fourteen each on the east and west sides, thirty-two each on the north and south sides. They were carved in high relief, a practice employed until then only in treasuries (buildings used to keep votive gifts to the gods).[citation needed] According to the building records, the metope sculptures date to the years 446–440 BC. The metopes of the east side of the Parthenon, above the main entrance, depict the Gigantomachy (the mythical battle between the Olympian gods and the Giants). The metopes of the west end show the Amazonomachy (the mythical battle of the Athenians against the Amazons). The metopes of the south side show the Thessalian Centauromachy (battle of the Lapiths aided by Theseus against the half-man, half-horse Centaurs). Metopes 13–21 are missing, but drawings from 1674 attributed to Jaques Carrey indicate a series of humans; these have been variously interpreted as scenes from the Lapith wedding, scenes from the early history of Athens and various myths.[66] On the north side of the Parthenon, the metopes are poorly preserved, but the subject seems to be the sack of Troy.
The metopes present examples of the Severe Style in the anatomy of the figures' heads, in the limitation of the corporal movements to the contours and not to the muscles, and in the presence of pronounced veins in the figures of the Centauromachy. Several of the metopes still remain on the building, but, with the exception of those on the northern side, they are severely damaged. Some of them are located at the Acropolis Museum, others are in the British Museum, and one is at the Louvre museum.[67]
In March 2011, archaeologists announced that they had discovered five metopes of the Parthenon in the south wall of the Acropolis, which had been extended when the Acropolis was used as a fortress. According to Eleftherotypia daily, the archaeologists claimed the metopes had been placed there in the 18th century when the Acropolis wall was being repaired. The experts discovered the metopes while processing 2,250 photos with modern photographic methods, as the white Pentelic marble they are made of differed from the other stone of the wall. It was previously presumed that the missing metopes were destroyed during the Morosini explosion of the Parthenon in 1687.[68]
Frieze [ edit ]
Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends, 1868 painting by, 1868 painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema
The most characteristic feature in the architecture and decoration of the temple is the Ionic frieze running around the exterior walls of the cella, which is the inside structure of the Parthenon. The bas-relief frieze was carved in situ; it is dated to 442 BC-438 BC.
One interpretation is that it depicts an idealized version of the Panathenaic procession from the Dipylon Gate in the Kerameikos to the Acropolis. In this procession held every year, with a special procession taking place every four years, Athenians and foreigners were participating to honour the goddess Athena, offering sacrifices and a new peplos (dress woven by selected noble Athenian girls called ergastines).
Joan Breton Connelly offers a mythological interpretation for the frieze, one that is in harmony with the rest of the temple’s sculptural programme which shows Athenian genealogy through a series of succession myths set in the remote past. She identifies the central panel above the door of the Parthenon as the pre-battle sacrifice of the daughter of King Erechtheus, a sacrifice that ensured Athenian victory over Eumolpos and his Thracian army. The great procession marching toward the east end of the Parthenon shows the post-battle thanksgiving sacrifice of cattle and sheep, honey and water, followed by the triumphant army of Erechtheus returning from their victory. This represents the very first Panathenaia set in mythical times, the model on which historic Panathenaic processions was based.[69][70]
Pediments [ edit ]
The traveller Pausanias, when he visited the Acropolis at the end of the 2nd century AD, only mentioned briefly the sculptures of the pediments (gable ends) of the temple, reserving the majority of his description for the gold and ivory statue of the goddess inside.[71]
East pediment [ edit ]
Part of the east pediment still found on the Parthenon (although part of it, like Dionysos, is a copy)
The figures on the corners of the pediment depict the passage of time over the course of a full day. Tethrippa of Helios and Selene are located on the left and right corners of the pediment respectively. The horses of Helios's chariot are shown with livid expressions as they ascend into the sky at the start of the day; whereas the Selene's horses struggle to stay on the pediment scene as the day comes to an end.[72][73]
West pediment [ edit ]
The supporters of Athena are extensively illustrated at the back of the left chariot, while the defenders of Poseidon are shown trailing behind the right chariot. It is believed that the corners of the pediment are filled by Athenian water deities, such as Kephisos river, Ilissos river and nymph Callirhoe. This belief merges from the fluid character of the sculptures' body position which represents the effort of the artist to give the impression of a flowing river.,[74][75] Next to the left river god, there are the sculptures of the mythical king of Athens (Kekrops) with his daughters (Aglauros, Pandrosos, Herse). The statue of Poseidon was the largest sculpture in the pediment until it broke into pieces during Francesco Morosini's effort to remove it in 1688. The posterior piece of the torso was found by Lusieri in the groundwork of a Turkish house in 1801 and is currently held in British Museum. The anterior portion was revealed by Ross in 1835 and is now held in the Acropolis Museum of Athens.[76]
Every statue in the west pediment has a fully completed back, which would have been impossible to see when the sculpture was on the temple; this indicates that the sculptors put great effort into accurately portraying the human body.[75]
Athena Parthenos [ edit ]
The only piece of sculpture from the Parthenon known to be from the hand of Phidias[77] was the statue of Athena housed in the naos. This massive chryselephantine sculpture is now lost and known only from copies, vase painting, gems, literary descriptions and coins.[78]
Later history [ edit ]
Late antiquity [ edit ]
The Parthenon's position on the Acropolis dominates the city skyline of Athens.
Image of Parthenon at night
A major fire broke out in the Parthenon shortly after the middle of the third century AD[79][80] which destroyed the Parthenon's roof and much of the sanctuary's interior.[81] Heruli pirates are also credited with sacking Athens in 276, and destroying most of the public buildings there, including the Parthenon.[82] Repairs were made in the fourth century AD, possibly during the reign of Julian the Apostate.[83] A new wooden roof overlaid with clay tiles was installed to cover the sanctuary. It sloped at a greater incline than the original roof and left the building's wings exposed.[81]
The Parthenon survived as a temple dedicated to Athena for nearly one thousand years until Theodosius II, during the Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire, decreed in 435 AD that all pagan temples in the Eastern Roman Empire be closed.[84] However, it is debated exactly when during the 5th-century that the closure of the Parthenon as a temple was actually put in practice. It is suggested to have occurred in c. 481–484, in the instructions against the remaining temples by order of Emperor Zeno, because the temple had been the focus of Pagan Hellenic opposition against Zeno in Athens in support of Illus, who had promised to restore Hellenic rites to the temples that were still standing.[85]
At some point in the fifth century, Athena's great cult image was looted by one of the emperors and taken to Constantinople, where it was later destroyed, possibly during the siege and sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 AD.[86]
Christian church [ edit ]
The Parthenon was converted into a Christian church in the final decade of the sixth century AD[21] to become the Church of the Parthenos Maria (Virgin Mary), or the Church of the Theotokos (Mother of God). The orientation of the building was changed to face towards the east; the main entrance was placed at the building's western end, and the Christian altar and iconostasis were situated towards the building's eastern side adjacent to an apse built where the temple's pronaos was formerly located.[87][88][89] A large central portal with surrounding side-doors was made in the wall dividing the cella, which became the church's nave, from the rear chamber, the church's narthex.[87] The spaces between the columns of the opisthodomus and the peristyle were walled up, though a number of doorways still permitted access.[87] Icons were painted on the walls and many Christian inscriptions were carved into the Parthenon's columns.[83] These renovations inevitably led to the removal and dispersal of some of the sculptures. Those depicting gods were either possibly re-interpreted according to a Christian theme, or removed.[citation needed]
The Parthenon became the fourth most important Christian pilgrimage destination in the Eastern Roman Empire after Constantinople, Ephesos, and Thessalonica.[90] In 1018, the emperor Basil II went on a pilgrimage to Athens directly after his final victory over the Bulgarians for the sole purpose of worshipping at the Parthenon.[90] In medieval Greek accounts it is called the Temple of Theotokos Atheniotissa and often indirectly referred to as famous without explaining exactly which temple they were referring to, thus establishing that it was indeed well known.[90]
At the time of the Latin occupation, it became for about 250 years a Roman Catholic church of Our Lady. During this period a tower, used either as a watchtower or bell tower and containing a spiral staircase, was constructed at the southwest corner of the cella, and vaulted tombs were built beneath the Parthenon's floor.[91]
Islamic mosque [ edit ]
Painting of the ruins of the Parthenon and the Ottoman mosque built after 1715, in the early 1830s by Pierre Peytier.
In 1456, Ottoman Turkish forces invaded Athens and laid siege to a Florentine army defending the Acropolis until June 1458, when it surrendered to the Turks.[92] The Turks may have briefly restored the Parthenon to the Greek Orthodox Christians for continued use as a church.[93] Some time before the close of the fifteenth century, the Parthenon became a mosque.[94][95]
The precise circumstances under which the Turks appropriated it for use as a mosque are unclear; one account states that Mehmed II ordered its conversion as punishment for an Athenian plot against Ottoman rule.[96] The apse became a mihrab,[97] the tower previously constructed during the Roman Catholic occupation of the Parthenon was extended upwards to become a minaret,[98] a minbar was installed,[87] the Christian altar and iconostasis were removed, and the walls were whitewashed to cover icons of Christian saints and other Christian imagery.[99]
Despite the alterations accompanying the Parthenon's conversion into a church and subsequently a mosque, its structure had remained basically intact.[100] In 1667 the Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi expressed marvel at the Parthenon's sculptures and figuratively described the building as "like some impregnable fortress not made by human agency".[101] He composed a poetic supplication that it, as "a work less of human hands than of Heaven itself, should remain standing for all time".[102] The French artist Jacques Carrey in 1674 visited the Acropolis and sketched the Parthenon's sculptural decorations.[103] Early in 1687, an engineer named Plantier sketched the Parthenon for the Frenchman Graviers d’Ortières.[81] These depictions, particularly those made by Carrey, provide important, and sometimes the only, evidence of the condition of the Parthenon and its various sculptures prior to the devastation it suffered in late 1687 and the subsequent looting of its art objects.[103]
Destruction [ edit ]
Parthenon illustration, published in 1688, depicting the structure in its entirety, by Vincenzo Coronelli
In 1687, the Parthenon was extensively damaged in the greatest catastrophe to befall it in its long history.[83] As part of the Great Turkish War (1683–1699), the Venetians sent an expedition led by Francesco Morosini to attack Athens and capture the Acropolis. The Ottoman Turks fortified the Acropolis and used the Parthenon as a gunpowder magazine – despite having been forewarned of the dangers of this use by the 1656 explosion that severely damaged the Propylaea – and as a shelter for members of the local Turkish community.[104] On 26 September a Venetian mortar round, fired from the Hill of Philopappus, blew up the magazine, and the building was partly destroyed.[105] The explosion blew out the building's central portion and caused the cella's walls to crumble into rubble.[100] Greek architect and archaeologist Kornilia Chatziaslani writes that "...three of the sanctuary’s four walls nearly collapsed and three-fifths of the sculptures from the frieze fell. Nothing of the roof apparently remained in place. Six columns from the south side fell, eight from the north, as well as whatever remained from eastern porch, except for one column. The columns brought down with them the enormous marble architraves, triglyphs and metopes."[81] About three hundred people were killed in the explosion, which showered marble fragments over nearby Turkish defenders[104] and caused large fires that burned until the following day and consumed many homes.[81]
Fragment of an exploded shell found on top of a wall in the Parthenon, thought to originate from the time of the Venetian siege
Accounts written at the time conflict over whether this destruction was deliberate or accidental; one such account, written by the German officer Sobievolski, states that a Turkish deserter revealed to Morosini the use to which the Turks had put the Parthenon; expecting that the Venetians would not target a building of such historic importance. Morosini was said to have responded by directing his artillery to aim at the Parthenon.[81][104] Subsequently, Morosini sought to loot sculptures from the ruin and caused further damage in the process. Sculptures of Poseidon and Athena's horses fell to the ground and smashed as his soldiers tried to detach them from the building's west pediment.[88][106]
Views in Greece, London 1821, depicting buildings of the time within the Acropolis "View of the Parthenon from the Propylea", Edward Dodwell, London 1821, depicting buildings of the time within the Acropolis
The following year, the Venetians abandoned Athens to avoid a confrontation with a large force the Turks had assembled at Chalcis; at that time, the Venetians had considered blowing up what remained of the Parthenon along with the rest of the Acropolis to deny its further use as a fortification to the Turks, but that idea was not pursued.[104]
After the Turks had recaptured the Acropolis they used some of the rubble produced by this explosion to erect a smaller mosque within the shell of the ruined Parthenon.[107] For the next century and a half, portions of the remaining structure were looted for building material and any remaining objects of value.[108]
The 18th century was a period of Ottoman stagnation; as a result, many more Europeans found access to Athens, and the picturesque ruins of the Parthenon were much drawn and painted, spurring a rise in philhellenism and helping to arouse sympathy in Britain and France for Greek independence. Amongst those early travellers and archaeologists were James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, who were commissioned by the Society of Dilettanti to survey the ruins of classical Athens. What they produced was the first measured drawings of the Parthenon published in 1787 in the second volume of Antiquities of Athens Measured and Delineated. In 1801, the British Ambassador at Constantinople, the Earl of Elgin, obtained a questionable firman (edict) from the Sultan, whose existence or legitimacy has not been proved until today, to make casts and drawings of the antiquities on the Acropolis, to demolish recent buildings if this was necessary to view the antiquities, and to remove sculptures from them.[citation needed]
Independent Greece [ edit ]
The first known photograph of the Parthenon was taken by Joly de Lotbinière in October 1839. This is an engraving made after the original daguerreotype. The Ottoman-era mosque can just be seen behind the foreground pillars.
The southern side of the Parthenon, which sustained considerable damage in the 1687 explosion
When independent Greece gained control of Athens in 1832, the visible section of the minaret was demolished; only its base and spiral staircase up to the level of the architrave remain intact.[109] Soon all the medieval and Ottoman buildings on the Acropolis were destroyed. However, the image of the small mosque within the Parthenon's cella has been preserved in Joly de Lotbinière's photograph, published in Lerebours's Excursions Daguerriennes in 1842: the first photograph of the Acropolis.[110] The area became a historical precinct controlled by the Greek government. Today it attracts millions of tourists every year, who travel up the path at the western end of the Acropolis, through the restored Propylaea, and up the Panathenaic Way to the Parthenon, which is surrounded by a low fence to prevent damage.[citation needed]
Dispute over the marbles [ edit ]
Life-size pediment sculptures from the Parthenon in the British Museum
The dispute centres around the Parthenon Marbles removed by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, from 1801 to 1803, which are in the British Museum. A few sculptures from the Parthenon are also in the Louvre in Paris, in Copenhagen, and elsewhere, but more than half are in the Acropolis Museum in Athens.[17][111] A few can still be seen on the building itself. The Greek government has campaigned since 1983 for the British Museum to return the sculptures to Greece.[111] The British Museum has steadfastly refused to return the sculptures,[112] and successive British governments have been unwilling to force the Museum to do so (which would require legislation). Nevertheless, talks between senior representatives from Greek and British cultural ministries and their legal advisors took place in London on 4 May 2007. These were the first serious negotiations for several years, and there were hopes that the two sides may move a step closer to a resolution.[113]
Restoration [ edit ]
In 1975, the Greek government began a concerted effort to restore the Parthenon and other Acropolis structures. After some delay, a Committee for the Conservation of the Acropolis Monuments was established in 1983.[114] The project later attracted funding and technical assistance from the European Union. An archaeological committee thoroughly documented every artifact remaining on the site, and architects assisted with computer models to determine their original locations. Particularly important and fragile sculptures were transferred to the Acropolis Museum. A crane was installed for moving marble blocks; the crane was designed to fold away beneath the roofline when not in use. In some cases, prior re-constructions were found to be incorrect. These were dismantled, and a careful process of restoration began.[115] Originally, various blocks were held together by elongated iron H pins that were completely coated in lead, which protected the iron from corrosion. Stabilizing pins added in the 19th century were not so coated, and corroded. Since the corrosion product (rust) is expansive, the expansion caused further damage by cracking the marble.[116]
Restoration works in 2002.
Work in progress in 2007.
A reconstructed architrave block.
Wide-scale restoration in 2010.
Western side works in 2014.
The Parthenon from the south. In the foreground of the image, a reconstruction of the marble imbrices and tegulae (roof tiles) forming the roof is visible, resting on wooden supports.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]
Printed sources [ edit ]
Online sources [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]It’s time to slow your roll on the Mauro Icardi to Tottenham rumors. Just a day after reports came out that Spurs were set to offer a huge bid to land the Inter Milan captain, Sky Sports journalist and Tottenham beat writer Lyall Thomas has put the kibosh on any Spurs interest.
@THFC2000 No and I've had that taken down. Should never have been there. Apologies if you were misled. — Lyall Thomas (@SkySportsLyall) July 3, 2016
Now, if you’re going to pick nits, Lyall is denying that Tottenham actually bid on Icardi, not that there’s interest in the Tottenham camp in signing him. So maybe there’s still some truth in that part of the story. Icardi, despite some positively lurid tabloid stories during his time in Milan, is still a fantastic young striker and from a footballing perspective would be an incredible signing that would instantly make Spurs better.
However, I’m now starting to doubt the entire thing. Earlier reports today indicated that Spurs are very close to landing Vincent Janssen from AZ Alkmaar, and I don’t think they’d do that if they were making a serious push for Icardi. With Icardi, either Spurs want him or they don’t, and Icardi is in a completely different class of transfer than Janssen. If Spurs do want him, they’re likely putting everything else aside in order to get him, and they certainly don’t appear to be doing that.
This whole thing is starting to look more and more like #batcountry. Which is kind of disappointing to me. Feel free to tell me “I told you so.”Sen. Ted Cruz told reporters in Hollywood, Florida that he will do “very well” in California’s June 7 primary election because of support from more than a quarter million volunteers nationwide.
Cruz called GOP frontrunner Donald Trump a “niche candidate” who Democratic Party frontrunner Hillary Clinton would beat in November.
Cruz told reporters:
The final state to vote will be the state of California, 172 delegates. The big enchilada. I believe we’ll do very well in California. Our organization on the ground is incredible. Ya know the strength of our campaign is the grassroots. We’ve got over 260,000 volunteers and California is going to decide this race. And I’ve very encouraged by how we’re going to do in California.
Cruz California political director Michael Schroeder confirmed to Breitbart News that the campaign has 41,000 volunteers in the state. The 260,000 cited by Cruz refers to the volunteers for the entire Cruz campaign.
The Texas senator has repeatedly called for another debate and said Wednesday:
Forty-one days since we’ve had a Republican debate because Donald Trump is unwilling to stand on a stage and debate. Because he cannot defend his positions or his policies. He has no substantive economic positions. His proposal for massive…tariffs to raise taxes on American citizens, would be economically disastrous. When it comes to foreign policy he proposed withdrawing from NATO, the day before the Brussels attack and he’s proposed reducing our military aid to the nation of Israel.
Cruz called the positions he described as “hopelessly naive, weak and isolationist foreign policy positions.”
One reporter asked about the delegate system and whether it seems anti-democratic. Cruz again accused Trump of “whining” and called the GOP frontrunner a liar.
Donald also hasn’t been telling the truth. Donald claims that these are ‘voterless elections’ and unfortunately far too many people in the press just repeat his absurd allegations.” Cruz has been touting his wins in Utah, Colorado, Wisconsin, Wyoming and North Dakota, two of which did not hold primary elections, but rather chose delegates as the district assembly and state party convention levels. Wyoming held a mix of caucus and convention to decide how many delegates each candidate received.
Cruz compared his win in Wisconsin to Trump’s win in New York:
Last night in New York, Donald got fewer votes in New York than I got in Wisconsin. And yet, the delegates rules give Donald many more delegates for winning New York than I got for winning Wisconsin. Now that is the way a representative system of government works. You don’t hear me up here complaining and whining, gosh it is so unfair that New York Republicans have their votes count more than double what Texas Republicans have them vote. In Texas I received over twice as many votes as Donald Trump received in New York, that’s the way the system works.
Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDianaMarc Trestman performed well during his introductory news conference Thursday. The new coach of the Chicago Bears came across as spirited, eloquent -- and detailed.
And we're not kidding about the detailed part.
Bears general manager Phil Emery told reporters that during his interview, Trestman presented a 13-month calendar chronicling everything from daily practices to meeting times. He even included notes and due dates relating to the NFL's collective bargaining agreement, according to Sean Jensen of the Chicago Sun-Times. Emery acknowledged this kind of work must have taken deep research after Trestman spent the past five years in the CFL.
Wait. So why a 13-month calendar?
"Up until the parade," Trestman said.
Translation: The Bears have just hired a coach precise enough to chart team movement, hour-by-hour, all the way up through next February, when he anticipates a Super Bowl victory march in the streets of Chicago.
"I'm going to make sure on a daily basis that every coach and every player -- with every bone in my body -- makes sure that our football team is completely interconnected. Where everyone understands, if it's one of us, it's all of us," Trestman said Thursday. "That will be the primary emphasis on a daily basis."
The Bears have found an original.
Follow Marc Sessler on Twitter @MarcSesslerNFL.Dragon Ball is the 2nd best-selling manga of all time (230+ million volumes sold), and the anime is equally as decorated, given that it’s one of the most influential pieces of media that helped advocate the global appeal of Japanese animation. It was also the most popular series on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, as any youth from that period will remember. Fast-forward 15 years, and it’s still a fixture in our media and culture, be it through newly released video games like “Battle Of Z” or the on-going “Dragon Ball Z Kai” TV series. Prior to all this however, Bruce Faulconer played an instrumental part in popularizing the original American dub thanks to his soundtrack contributions from 1997 to 2003. With the original series having ended over 10 years ago, his music has become a classic fixture of a legendary show, as well as having gone on to be released as CDs that have millions of plays on Youtube and Spotify. As fans of both the show and his music, I spent considerable time chasing an interview with the composer, and our persistence finally paid off when he got on the phone with me. If you haven’t already acquainted yourself with this timeless music and its maker, now’s your chance.
As someone who’s done a lot of soundtrack work over the years, could you give our readers some insight into what your professional background has entailed, and how you came to find yourself in this industry?
I’ve been making music all my life, having started when I was 10 years old and continuing through high school and college. While I was working on my graduate degrees in music composition, I started working as a teaching assistant, teaching freshman and sophomore music classes, and next becoming an assistant professor in music theory and composition. Then I was invited to be a composer in residence at Ohio State University, where my job was to write music. This was all while I was in my 20s.
How did all of that transition into you creating Faulcomer Productions?
I always was writing music for various things. Orchestras, chamber groups, etc. After having the Ohio State composer residency for 2 years, I got grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio Arts Council to write music. So all I did was write music, which was great. But I also wanted to write for TV and film, which is what I started doing afterwards, and that led to the creation of a production company. I basically turned my work into a business by giving myself a label and brand to work from, in the form of Faulconer Productions.
Your most notable project has been providing the score for a large part of the American dub of the Dragonball Z television series. Can you tell us a bit about how you ended up being recruited by Funimation to do that?
It was more of the same of what I’d been doing prior to that. I got a call asking me if I would be interested in writing music for the show. Just like that. Funimation had listened to a bunch of my music, and we talked for about a month or so and after about 30 days I got started with it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlWD35emplg
What did a typical day look like for you back then? Did you have a particular way for going about composing music for the series?
All the work happened in my own studio. I watched the show and that became the inspiration. I worked in the old school way, by starting with a music manuscript. I felt like it was a strong way of expressing myself without leaning on any crutch that technology might offer. There’s an entire craft of scoring to a picture that I believe in, because I want the music to tell the story of the characters, the scene and mood, and the action in the picture. Good music underscore is meant to support what’s going on, instead of distracting.
Did you feel that working for a big company such as Funimation brought along some unwanted bureaucracy and red tape? Were there any downsides to it all?
Not really. There were a few people that I worked with one-on-one throughout it, such as the main producer. Occasionally some people helped him. Everyone brought a wish-list of what they were thinking about. As the seasons and characters changed, the music had to morph along with it. So there was always a collaboration of ideas of what the music would do in a general sense, though the specifics were always left up to me.
Were there any moments of difficulty when composing the Dragon Ball Z soundtrack, where your music was either rejected or negatively critiqued by Funimation or the show directors?
Not really. With enough pre-production and conversation you develop a sort of symbiotic thing going, were you know what’s going to happen because you’ve already discussed it. There was never a case where the director came back and said “Can you change the B flat to an A natural for the guitar riff that happens 10 minutes in?” The composer is supposed to be the expert in the musical area, and if you respect the director’s and producer’s vision, they’re going to back you.
One of the more interesting things about your DBZ soundtracks was how they hold their own when listened to outside the context of the show.
Thank you. Another aspect of good musical underscore is that unto itself it can be and should be music that carries its own story. That’s what I think when I’m writing, so that the musical still has certain visual imagery that it conjures up even without the video attached. I’m glad that people can hear that in it.
It’s been 10 years since Dragon Ball Z ended its run in 2003? How does it feel to still receive heavy association with a project that ended over a decade ago? Do you ever feel that people should let go of that, and focus on your newer projects?
I’m pleased that the music still has a life of its own and that it’s appreciated. It’s gratifying. I hope that my newer projects have the same reaction later on, and if they do merit the same kind of attention, then I take it as a compliment.
Although you’ve worked on a number of media projects over the past 10 years, it does seem like Dragon Ball was the most syndicated and watched, globally. Do you ever feel the need to score another equally popular series or film? There are undoubtedly a lot of successful anime shows that are being aired around the world.
I work with people who call upon me and ask me to work with them. So I’m always up to do it. My latest music work for “The Bystander Theory” movie was like that. They called me up and asked me to score their feature film. The script was very intriguing, and I couldn’t put it down. I read it in one sitting and thought it was really good.
Following the end of DBZ, Dragonball GT continued in America. Why didn’t you end up scoring that?
That was a complicated scenario that I don’t find much value in talking too much about. I’m always happy to compose for media, but there are certain stipulations for me to write music for things, since it’s how I make my living. In the tradition of composers over the centuries, it’s what I do both as an avocation and vocation. So it’s a joy for me to do, but I also make a living off of it.
Years after having scored the DBZ series, do you ever find yourself throwing on your CDs and listening to your own music? If so, what do you think of it in retrospect?
Sometimes I might pick it up. Not everyday though. The other day I played the music from “The Bystander Theory” for some friends who wanted to hear it, so in situations like that, it might happen.
Your music ended up being used in some DBZ video game adaptations, like “Legacy Of Goku 2”, by Atari, and a lot of handheld titles for Game Boy. They tend to more simplified versions of the TV soundtrack. Did you have any input on that?
That was a curious situation, because I felt like a lot of that video game music was a comped and re-perfomed version. But for some other titles, Atari used my theme as it was, and I liked that better. The main involvement I had in any of that was that I was the original composer of it. But the situation was that Atari approached Funimation and said they wanted to use it, and then Funimation would then take care of it for them.
Majority of the music that appears on the DB soundtracks are of the electronic music genre. Are you an electronic music fan, or was that just used for the sake of the soundtrack?
I started writing electronic music many years ago, on things like one of the first Moog synths. I used to use 2 and 4-track track tape recorders, and then was happily surprised when 8-tracks came out. But before that I used to record on a bunch of 2-tracks and mix it all down to a 2-channel. So I’d have all my loops and tape recorders running. Nowadays, you have it all on samplers and synths, but my roots go back to people |
and the economic crisis of the culture industry◆The road to the depletion of cultural reserves◆The world is not just an accessory. Why a separate “cultural revolution” is impossible
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Note: The following text is a transcribed and expanded version of a talk given on November 21, 2010 at the Alliance Française in Sao Paulo as one of a series of presentations devoted to the theme, “The Culture Industry in the 21st Century”.
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There are texts that become old when they see the light of day. And there are texts that even after the passage of a hundred years are still fresh and alive. Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Adorno and Horkheimer, which contains the famous chapter on the Culture Industry, was first published in 1944. After the passage of so many years, is it still possible to speak of the relevance of the ideas set forth in that book?
For postmodern thought in the broadest sense of the term the answer is clear: no. This point of view, which has become predominant over the last few decades, generally claims that the concept of the culture industry is an expression of conservative “cultural pessimism”. What harm could there be in the industrialization of culture? Do we not find there the potentials for freedom and progress that could be utilized by all human beings? The cultural left and postmodern pop, in their media experience, not to say media snobbery, think they have advanced far beyond the “outmoded” ideas of critical theory. This attitude, however, merely demonstrates their own nature as mere phenomena of fashion. Indeed, the postmodern pop enterprise is already getting quite long in the tooth and its old protagonists are almost taking on a grandfatherly aura. Suddenly they, too, are in danger of becoming conservative in relation to their own métier as young cultural professionals. And it is in precisely this situation that it is of great interest to take a new look at the critical concept of the culture industry and the postmodern accusations levied against it.
From the superficial critique of the bourgeois intellectual to the postmodern cult of superficiality
First of all, it will be necessary to clarify what we mean by “cultural pessimism”. In the postmodern mode of expression, which prefers to proceed in every case by way of association, the mere catalog of denunciations already seems to speak for itself, without requiring any other foundation. Here, in a way, we see the insinuation of the pejorative reference to the position of the “cultural bourgeoisie” in derogatory argumentation, a kind of argumentation that is also associative and vague. In fact, the “cultural bourgeoisie”, which is distinguished with reference to a strict differentiation between the culture of entertainment and serious culture, is a very specifically German phenomenon. “Serious” or “culturally high-level” literature, music, etc., must not be tainted by an “entertainment” understood as fundamentally base, just as teaching and academic research must never be tainted by a “popular science” calibrated to the understanding of the common man.
If the classical cultural bourgeoisie, especially in Germany, turned up its nose at the superficiality of modern commercial culture, this never amounted to more than an empty gesture. Because this critique was itself superficial, once its concern was entirely restricted to external modes of appearance, while the social content and the political-economic nucleus of these productions had to be concealed and remained for the most part unexamined. This kind of “cultural pessimism” is a purely intra-capitalist type of reaction. The more insistent the abstract evocation of an indeterminate and mystified “inner essence” of the high culture of bourgeois enlightenment, the more the crusade of the cultural bourgeoisie against the culture industry demonstrates its irrelevance. Concealed behind this appearance is a grave state of affairs. Frivolous entertainment and popular simplifications are nothing but the other side of the character that is ideologically imbued with the proper knowledge of “serious” bourgeois science and art, and this is its characteristic trait. The fact that popular frivolities are not bought is only because they have already been bought by the State for the purpose of representation, which proves the common origin in which money is validated in the State and the State in money. It is truly a fortuitous revelation in this context that the industrialization of culture is not at all welcome to the culture critics of the cultural bourgeoisie, since with this development their own lives lie exposed to view. As for the rest of the miserable, and from the capitalist point of view, disposable, remnants of the bourgeois sycophants of high culture, the latter is completely shattered from one end to the other due to cultural superficiality, which is why their attitude can only be understood as true satire.
It is true that Adorno and Horkheimer cannot be summarily absolved of any patriotism of the milieu of the “cultural bourgeoisie”. This trait, however, is more often found in their mode of expression than in the critical content of their work. If the postmodern “critique of criticism” insists above all on the former, this once again says more about postmodern thought than it does about the object of criticism that it sidesteps. In fact, for postmodern culturalism the outward trappings, the accessories, the “styling” and the attitude are always more important than the point that is expressed through them. The dishonest and itself superficial critique of superficiality of the cultural bourgeoisie is transformed into the affirmative postmodern cult of superficiality. Immediate appearance must be emancipated from its essence. To which corresponds the positivist mode of thought that subjects the contents to an empty formal method and condemns them to indifference.
The explicit market of externality, which is merely an inversion of the conservative cultural critique and the nebulous invocation of “inner essence”, is naturally nothing new. It periodically returns, but has experienced its apotheosis, so to speak, in postmodernity, in late capitalism and in the capitalism of crisis. Heinrich Heine, in his critical essay on The Romantic School (1833), perceived a similar attitude and method in his characterization of the process of self-dissolution of Romanticism: “Among the imitators of Fouqué, as among the imitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portraying—not the inner nature of men and things, but merely the outward garb and appearance—was carried to still greater extremes. This shallow art and frivolous style is still in vogue in Germany, as well as in England and France. Even if the portrayal no longer attempts to glorify the age of chivalry, but is directed to our modern affairs, it is still the same mannerism, which grasps not the essential points of phenomena, but merely the superficial and the accidental. In lieu of a knowledge of mankind, our recent novelists evince a profound acquaintance with clothes; they perhaps justify themselves by the old saying: ‘The tailor makes the man’.”
It has already been said repeatedly, and not only by the conservative camp, that the reduction of objects to their phenomenology and finally to their outward appearance, as in a formalism that is both epistemic as well as esthetic, constitutes the indisputable sign of cultural and social exhaustion and of processes of dissolution; whether of a social formation, an era, a cultural pattern or a particular school of thought. With respect to our topic, we are not talking about merely the model at the end of the line of postmodernity, but rather the fact that this already constitutes, as such and in its entirety, the model at the end of the line of capitalist modernity from all points of view. The postmodern masquerade ball does not represent anything but a middle class festival in time of plague, one that is not even particularly frivolous, but rather boring. And, moreover, a metaphor with which Roswitha Scholz characterizes the historical carnival of the postmodernity of the 1990s as a futile flight to the crystal palace of casino capitalism is an apt portrayal. And even today not much has changed with respect to the ideological consciousness of the postmodern social character despite violent outbreaks of crisis. The more it invokes “creativity”, the more uninterrupted is the emergence of accidental and external appearances. It is not the creation of anything new, emotionally expressed against the determination of essence, but the flight from the negative and completely miserable essence of the reality of its own existence.
The hypostasis of the cultural and methodological external layer is what accounts for precisely the main cause of the lack of differentiation, that is, the general social form that is superimposed as substantial content, to which the culture industry is always bound as well. What is “bourgeois” in the sense properly applicable to the dominant cultural sphere, is not a conservative gesture of the “culture” of the fraternity of philologists, but rather the commodity character of its products, which integrates them into the realm of “abstract labor” and thus degrades culture itself into an abstract element in the metamorphosis of capital, like designer furniture or designer food. The protagonists can in such cases be equally unconcerned with whether it is entertainment or serious.
Ironically, the classical cultural bourgeoisie and its decadent contemporary representatives are no less susceptible to self-deception than the postmodernists who surf the media for the negative essence of capitalist culture. Both merely reflect different stages of capitalist development of the same affirmative mode. Cultural pessimism is conservative and the positive postmodern formation of the culture industry is only pseudo-“progressive” in the same capitalist continuum that is not transcended in any domain. This is why the difference is only a matter of packaging or the hairstyles, while their identical categorical determination remains concealed and is not the target of their common scorn. When they laugh at others, they are always only laughing at themselves.
An elitist cultural critique or an emancipatory one?
Conservative cultural pessimism is elitist right down to its very core and only from this point of view is it pseudo-critical of intellectual mass production. Culture is supposed to be dying in the West because it is no longer reserved for the upper, “cultured” classes, but has instead taken on the character of mass culture. The critique of the frivolity, superficiality and vulgarity of the culture industry thus leads us right back to the fact that it is produced for the great majority, including the lower social layers considered to be, “by their nature”, intellectually inferior. They have to be willingly conceded a kind of naïve entertainment, so they can have their inoffensive fun and avoid harmful thoughts, so that elitist high culture can preserve its exclusive character and will thus remain among us.
On the other hand, conservative cultural pessimism senses that the culture industry poses a threat to level claims, break down social borders and expose as nonsense the aura of cultural zeal of the old bourgeoisie, now that the latter has largely lost its historical basis, which now survives only as an ideology. It is not by chance that Adorno and Horkheimer make fun of the “guardians of culture” who “celebrate the organic pre-capitalist past”, a past that was overwhelmingly patriarchal. Thus, industrial commercialized mass culture is subjected to conservative condemnation not because it is “Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (which is the subtitle of the chapter on the Culture Industry), but because it reveals the reactionary falsehood of the bucolic and derivative self-anointing with the classics on the part of the consciousness of the acting professor who takes pleasure in refreshing his own social stupidity in the canonized “noble simplicity and silent grandeur” (Winckelmann) of unreal cultural legacies.
Conversely, the postmodern pop prophets rejoice precisely in this same industrial mass culture as if it were in and of itself of emancipatory value. Mass culture is therefore always good, regardless of its content or its form, and regardless of whether it is an autonomous culture of the masses themselves or a culture that obeys the heteronymous and perfectly independent imperatives directed at the damaged consciousness of the masses. An attitude that is more or less of the same kind is the one that causes the ideology of the left wing movements (which is in other respects, as well, completely characterized by postmodern terminology) to view any mass movement as already being in itself essentially “authentic” regardless of its aims. The culture industry, independently of its form as commodity and as capital, is considered to be universally accessible to and an affirmation of the masses, and as a moment of liberation in capitalism, although this is not closely examined. This attitude, however, merely expresses some people’s brutal self-interest in commercialization, specifically in their roles as secondary academic planners and publicists. That is the real reason why they like to claim that the defining quality of critical theory is elitist cultural pessimism.
However, the negative concept of the culture industry in Adorno and Horkheimer implies exactly the contrary: it is not universal accessibility that is the target of critique, but the fact that the culture industry, as they say, “constitute[s] the most sensitive instrument of social control”. It is therefore the structurally alienated and objectively authoritarian content of capitalist mass culture rather than its accessibility to those outside of elite groups that is at issue here. This content, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is “aesthetic barbarity”, because “the morality of mass culture is the cheap form of yesterday’s children’s books” for the purpose of making increasingly more infantilized individuals available for social degradation.
The antithesis of the culture industry would be a culture for all that is opposed to the coercion of the mere repetition and internalization of the dominant principles; therefore, neither a culture for the few, which they would preserve as a mere ornament for those principles, nor a democratic culture of compensatory occupational therapy, which is nothing more than a hybrid mechanism of control. It is precisely this essential character of the culture industry in the form of the commodity that the postmodern pop ideologues do not want to acknowledge, and intoxicate themselves in its opposite. Critique, if it ever arises, is reduced to a mere internal differentiation that arbitrarily confers a pseudo-emancipatory cult status to certain mass tendencies of the culture industry, as if the purchase and consumption of certain products could counteract social control in a purely immanent way, while other products are rejected for equally superficial reasons.
Technological reductionism
Another aspect of the genuinely conservative critique consists in its technological reductionism, which corresponds to the elitist attitude of the cultural bourgeoisie. Culture is also condemned to decline supposedly because its mass production simultaneously requires technological mechanization. It is precisely against this interpretation that Adorno and Horkheimer protest at the beginning of the chapter on the Culture Industry. They say: “Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods…. This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy.”
For these two authors, this function is two-pronged: social control is effective as a collateral effect precisely because culture was transformed into an immediate object of production purely for profit. Or, expressed in terms of social philosophy, in the words of Adorno and Horkheimer: “Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself.” Under the totalitarianism of the economy this is just as valid even for the most simple object of material use as it is for the capitalized goods of cultural production. Just as a coat is socially not a coat and milk is not milk, but both appear equally as the objectivization of “abstract labor” and therefore as an abstract quantity of price, so, too, the sensory and esthetic quality of musical or literary and theoretical cultural goods is degraded by its abstract and, in a certain way, dead form of value, because this only confers on the product the access to “validity” and to participation in the mass of the social substance of value, while it is indifferent to the specific content. In any case one may note the formulation of Adorno and Horkheimer that this process is not a mere “exchange”. For circulation only represents the sphere of “realization” of “abstract wealth” as an end-in-itself (Marx), that is, the return of the substance of value represented in the body of the commodities to the form of money that is “proper” for them.
It is first of all from this fetishistic economic objectivity, with its permanent change of internal form to which the real object remains external, that mechanical standardization and the leveling of contents is derived, rather than from a purely technological exigency. The conservative cultural critique insists on the technological process of mass production precisely because it wants to keep the negative essence of the social form of the commodity out of the line of fire. Postmodernism is an intensified version of this same ignorance, since it does not merely argue against the critique of the social determination of the form, but straightforwardly declares that this is epistemologically and logically impossible. The opposition to the conservatives’ rhetoric of decline therefore consists once again in a mere reversal of their technological reductionism. In this view it is precisely technology as such that is responsible for beneficial effects regardless of its capitalist form (or these benefits are even gently rendered possible by it alone). The inverted postmodern belief in cultural liberation by way of technology also succumbs to the same misunderstanding. Conservative cultural pessimism and postmodern cultural optimism constitute in their technological limitations the two sides of the same coin. Both equally conceal the domination of capitalist “abstract wealth” over the contents and the forms of expression of cultural goods.
In any event, the technology of the culture industry is immune to neither the fetishistic economic form of capital nor to the function of social control that is associated that form. Just like the technical means of production in the other capitalist industries, it is by no means neutral in its form of concrete manifestation. One must not confuse cause and effect, however. It is the form and the structure of technology that obey the imperatives of the social relation and not vice-versa. The tools are genetically infused with the social form. The development of the productive forces in capitalism is always simultaneously a development of destructive forces. This is valid not only in the superficial and particular sense, for example, to characterize the industrialization of war, with the atomic bomb as the culminating point of technology and the ultima ratio of democratic progress. For the assembly line itself does not just represent a pure and neutral increase of productivity, but to the contrary, one feature of its concrete determination is the misery of abstract labor to which the producers are subjected. The culture industry is no exception to this identity between abstract productivity and destruction.
The destructive moment of the economic fetishistic end-in-itself also affects, molds and distorts cultural contents in multiple ways, beyond the corresponding orientation of production technologies. As in the case of the commodities necessary for daily existence, here, too, it is not a matter of the content of the need, but of its adaptation to the content of valorization. The capitalist inversion of means and ends, of concrete and abstract, is presented in a specific way in the production of cultural goods. Indeed, the latter, too, can be understood as the inversion of production technology and content or of technical innovation and content: it is not a (new) content that procures for itself an adequate technology, but to the contrary, all contents are adapted to a profitable technology and “creativity” is reduced precisely to that. Nor does this relation derive from any independent relation between technology and content, but from the fact that both are forced onto the Procrustean Bed of the imperative of value. Adorno and Horkheimer write with respect to this question: “The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance of the effect…. and the technical detail over the work itself – which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated together with the idea.”
In this way the relation between content and mode of representation was inverted. In the culture industry the latter appears to have become autonomous, as we are soon told: “That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the system. It is with good reason that the interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to the contents – which are stubbornly repeated, outworn, and by now half-discredited.” Just as in production, what matters is only the increase of sales, so, too, consequently, in consumption what matters is only the technical function of a trinket that is equally indifferent to its content. If the “technical details”, however, no longer express the idea of the content, and, to the contrary, these details rule over the content and “liquidate” the idea, this irresistible tendency is itself in turn due to the general form of the commodity both in the means of production as well as the products. This formulation correctly points to the fact that the technology of mere effects does not exist by accident, but is the expression of that economic totalitarianism that our postmodern times have only made much worse in comparison with the middle part of the past century.
Advertising as cultural perception of the world and of oneself
The technological effect has its model in the ubiquitous advertising, in the esthetic of the commodities of the world market. The idea of content cannot possess any existence of its own; it is placed at the service of a thing that is external to it and for that reason it is also accidental, having become unreal in a formalist way and reduced to a mere effect. It is precisely this dimension of the esthetic of commodities to which Adorno and Horkheimer already called attention in 1944, in the final stage of the totalization of advertising design in the world of life: “Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising…. Advertising is its elixir of life…. its product … eventually coincides with publicity, which it needs because it cannot be enjoyed.”
We should note here, as I have already mentioned, the notorious reduction that takes place in Adorno and Horkheimer with regard to the so-called “exchange” that represents a truncation in the economy, because in the system of “abstract labor” that turns back upon itself one cannot speak of “exchange” in the proper sense of the word. Only a superficial account of the money form would depict it as an external “relation of exchange”, since it is an essential part of the autonomized end-in-itself of “abstract wealth” as the immanent self-relation of capital. Abstracting from this aspect, it is only against this background that the secondary autonomization of advertising becomes possible and ends up becoming a need that makes its mark on all of cultural production, as we may read in the chapter on the Culture Industry: “Advertising becomes art and nothing else, just as Goebbels—with foresight—combines them: l’art pour l’art, advertising for its own sake….” Thus, “a quick glance can now scarcely distinguish advertising from editorial picture and text”.
Artistic activity is just as bereft of freedom now as it was in the Christian Middle Ages, because just as then all representations had to always repeat the same religious constitution, now they are always transformed into the same advertising, precisely in their apparent fortuitous “multiplicity” and contingency, advertising that is itself recommended and praised in the image of cars, energy drinks, cell phones or baseball caps. To represent the world in the autonomized form of advertising means only to make it perceptible in the form of the autonomized commodity. This also affects self-perception and the social relations of individuals. Even with intimacy, which no longer exists, there is a mediated distance that has as a presupposition a complete absence of distance in relation to social imperatives. There is no longer any space of social tranquility that is not supercharged with the demands of domination. The model of identity that currently prevails always has to be subjected everywhere to the verdict of the “opinion polls” in the eternal carnival of subjectivity like a brand of beer or perfume. The two-legged human capital needs the products of the culture industry in the broadest sense not so much for use, but more as a subject of the stubborn “self-representation” in which the bearers of the costume are secretly convinced of their lack of value. The actors themselves cannot abandon their roles even when they are alone. The secondary character mask of the culture industry of the self-marketing independent contractor is soaked into his skin.
One gets the almost tedious impression that in this aspect as well one can discern the polar complementarity of conservative cultural pessimism and the postmodern cultural optimism that believes in progress. Once again the spokespersons of bourgeois cultural reflection ridicule advertising only because they want to build an ideological wall against the infiltration of vulgar economics into the elitist sphere of art. They condemn the effect without a content only in order to hinder the commercialization of what are allegedly “our most sacred possessions” while at the same time renouncing any attempt to challenge capitalism. Thus, vulgar advertising must not be recognized as the sneering face in the mirror mocking refined bourgeois art. In this aspect as well as all the others the social form of the fetishist relation devours the content. And what still remains of official art for higher circles, which is now elitist only because of its money price, is the common self-marketing on the part of salon artists who are most “avant-garde” when they shamefully behold their paintings on the wall while texts are cast into the darkness.
And once again postmodernism only turns to an apparent critique of cultural pessimism and proclaims advertising to be the liberation of art from the schoolmaster-type classicism of the museum. The self-repressive character of the monads of self-representation nourished on the totalitarian complex of the culture industry is just as concealed here as it is in the case of its conservative counterpart. The distance so hypocritically assumed by the bourgeois cultural consciousness with regard to the literal community of universal advertising and self-promotion is in this case, however, transformed into the postmodern motto, “being here is everything”. Not only their formal similarity, but also the intimate link between populist propaganda and advertising must either not be mentioned at all or, if it is mentioned, it is considered to be something that is susceptible to positive use. Postmodernism is therefore in agreement with Goebbels without wanting to know this. Each person pleases himself with effects without content in order to thus renew his own character mask and this renders any kind of criticism pointless from the start. The postmodern lifestyle consciousness is now only a kind of ideal collective baseball cap that promotes itself.
The prolongation of “abstract labor” and competition by other means
The postmodern apologetics for the predominance of the effect and of the technical detail over the content frequently claim that these trends are associated with a cultural well-being that guarantees “guiltless pleasure”. What could be bad about that? Once all criteria of content and criticism are declared to be impossible, they still want to proceed as if the commodities of the culture industry fell from the sky like Manna from heaven, or flew right into everyone’s mouths like the roast squabs of the Land of Cockaigne. The bourgeois cultural conservative, on the other hand, to the extent that such a category still exists and is not classified as extinct, sees the culture industry as vulgar cultural trafficking and considers that the consumption of its products is only effortlessly achieved because it is trash, absolutely without any pretensions to being anything, that poisons the mind and the soul. Against this trash the cultural conservatives hail the “works of elevated intention” that have been produced, the only works that must be valid for the “real artists” as well as for the “real connoisseurs of art”, a small but refined community of a priceless “knowledge”.
In this aspect, as well, the postmodernist cultural optimists and the conservative cultural pessimists are quite similar to one another: both acknowledge the ease and the effortless pleasure of consumption of the culture industry; it is just that this allegedly convenient pleasure is evaluated in opposite ways. Adorno and Horkheimer approach the problem from a completely different angle. In fact, due to their origins, they are not immune to the self-congratulatory attitude that simply relies more on canonization and restriction in the sense of bourgeois high culture than in the primacy of the content. However, regardless of this socio-historical conditioning, they did not fail to see the context of inner mediation between the culture industry and the pressure to increase efficiency in capitalist labor, between “abstract labor” and the supposedly guilt-free “enjoyment of free time”. In their case it is not simply a matter of a critique of a simple compensatory effect, as if one thing was external to the other.
In reality, the dialectic of totally capitalized pop consumption consists precisely in the fact that social coercion and freedom of choice of object, the exhausting ordeal of the Protestant work ethic and complacent exhibitionism, are not only corresponding phenomena, but one transforms into the other and manifests itself in the other. The heavy labor of poverty is not only the indispensable assumption, which is preferably kept under wraps, but always the conscious assumption for buying power. Adorno and Horkheimer do not invoke the danger that an all-too-easy access to pleasure poses for labor power, which nonetheless must be demanded, but show that this convenient comfort is in itself illusory. What is given as such cannot be separated from its contrary in the process of making money, as they make clear: “Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself.”
Once more, however, it is not the requirements of the technology of reproduction in themselves that bring about this fatal inversion, but the fetishistic totalitarianism of the general form of the commodity that has a tendency to transform all expressions of life into “abstract labor” or at least something that is equivalent to it; even if it is not connected to any process of real valorization. There must not be any real relaxation in the false concentration and fixation in the labor of the subject. Even laissez-faire has to be organized instrumentally and professionalized so that it can be transformed into its exact opposite. This is what the following passage from the chapter, “The Culture Industry”, one of the most frequently quoted passages in the book, exposes: “Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it.”
Not only are the compulsion to work and the psychosis of constant activity reproduced in the consumption of the commodities of the culture industry, but so is the objective monadology of the sphere of capitalist circulation, or, as Adorno and Horkheimer observe, “the harshness of competitive society”. Fun also becomes a medicinal bath because its “pleasure” is neither innocent nor comfortable, nor is it even intelligent, but, despite all the brotherhood of the festivals and parties, it becomes an inspection in the design of bodies, of clothing, and of personalities, in which each simulacrum can only have fun at the expense of all the others and has to permanently convince himself that he is taking pleasure in this. Even the obligatorily cheerful mask of free time, as we read in the summary of the chapter on the Culture Industry, “attests to the attempt to turn oneself into an efficient machine….” Nowhere is this more clearly displayed than in the postmodern high-tech and advertising micro-businesses. “Abstract labor” and competition only become a game and a party because both the game and the party have so often been transformed into “abstract labor” and competition.
This indicates that the culture industry is also an organization with a sexual connotation. Women and men occupy different places in this organization despite all cultural changes, precisely because the culture industry involves models, simulations and forms of reproduction of “abstract labor”. Because the subject form is thus determined so as to include universal competition, it has a structurally masculine connotation, as Roswitha Scholz shows in her theory of gender dissociation that, for the first time ever, analyzes gender relations at the conceptual level of the fundamental capitalist categories. Even though women are being increasingly more thoroughly integrated into the sphere of “abstract labor” and the capitalist public sphere, they are still less valued there because they are still burdened with the responsibilities for the oikos, in the broadest sense of the term, which are dissociated from the sphere of “abstract labor” insofar as they cannot be expressed in money terms (housework, raising children and taking care of the elderly, etc.). This capitalist relation between the sexes, which is profoundly anchored in the collective unconscious, affects all social domains. And it is thus all the more to be expected that reproduction should take place in the “medicinal bath” of the frantic enterprise of entertainment. Women, however, compete in that domain with other bodies that are different from the apparently self-determined sexual bodies that reveal them to be “women” in all individualized autonomies. In their “capacity for multi-tasking”, as well, in which they must be equally responsible for family and for career, they lose their specific sexual accentuation—even in a modified form—and their “existence as mother” and all the clutter that follows in its wake. This also has an impact on their self-image that is co-fabricated by the culture industry; so they are not really taken seriously as subjects of fun, either.
The Internet as new central means of the culture industry
And now it is time to address the Internet as a more advanced complex of the culture industry. The “Net” undoubtedly constitutes the perfect postmodern technology, and is not by chance compared with the invention of the printing press at the dawn of modernity, seeing as it has had equally revolutionary effects. However, just as the printing of books and its social consequences cannot be understood on the basis of these books themselves but only in the context of the proto-capitalist process of historical constitution, the Internet cannot be declared to be an independent technological establishment with the potential for social change, but only a socio-technological moment in the historic limits of capitalism.
The complementary opposition we outlined above, between bourgeois cultural pessimism and postmodern cultural optimism, has almost no reason to exist in this hyper-mediated complex; and in fact above all because the high conservative culture of the classical bourgeoisie, with its ancient philology, will soon surrender unconditionally. The corresponding cultural bourgeoisie in the specifically German context was on the one hand always a fantasy bourgeoisie, a diffuse and multifaceted social group, whose members claimed to consider themselves “better” precisely in the cultural aspect. This demarcation refers not only to their higher (academic) qualifications, but to a cultural canon rooted in the ancient languages, classical philosophy and German idealist poetry. The claim to this legacy associated with a “higher culture” is made far beyond the circles of the few specialists in these topics; it embraces the entire academic sphere and also certainly the secondary school teachers and those who have graduated from high school. This is why this demarcation was not just made with respect to the “ignorant masses”, but with respect to the elites of the other capitalist countries. And it was certainly a fantasy bourgeoisie, with regard to the mastery of the cultural content of this canon, which for the majority of this category never went beyond trivialities and coexisted perfectly well with the fumes of the beer hall and brutality in social relations.
This “cultured barbarism” of the German academic bourgeoisie was extinguished during the era of the world wars and there is no reason to shed tears over this loss. In the democracy of the world market after 1945 the classical cultural canon disappeared even more rapidly, increasingly giving way to the mere consciousness of being a functional elite. All that was left of it was a dim reflection of the claim to what remained, that was never really fulfilled, and a merely illusory residue of the false consciousness of being “better”. In the current ideology of the middle class this impulse has been reduced more and more to the attempt to compartmentalize this qualification at the secondary level of their own offspring as opposed to the new lower classes and the immigrants, that is, to sabotage any possibility of going beyond the extremely anachronistic three-level school system of the Federal Republic of Germany.
As for the contents, the illusory empire of the cultural bourgeoisie definitively disappeared with the third industrial revolution. The elitist presumption has long since ceased to be the ability to recite Homer in the original Greek, but is instead a mixture of political economy and “multi-media expertise” which constitutes the ideal profile for the postmodern individual of the pure type as a kind of “recipe for success”; even if only in the new fantasy of its respective milieus. This baseless elite consciousness has been, with a great deal of suffering, glued like a mask onto one’s face; it has become vulgarly part of the capitalist economy and ordinarily technological like the whole democratic organization. Even Latinists, science writers and professors of philosophy seem like greenhorns compared to the dynamic and wacky young entrepreneurs, and bow in admiration before thirteen-year-old screwballs who like to consider themselves to be virtuosos with the mouse. The new elite is notoriously lacking in any intellectual pretensions and is equipped for competition on the market in such a reductive a manner that the universities “of excellence” can be viewed with objective irony. The apotheosis of the complex of the culture industry consists in the fact that the elites of all sectors are transformed into mere comic book figures that take extraordinary delight in their condition because they no longer have any other standards against which they can be compared.
In 1945, Adorno and Horkheimer could not even have imagined the digital technological revolution, or its application to capitalist development. They were, however, perfectly situated to predict the general tendency for media integration with respect to the culture industry, just as Marx did for the application of science to capitalist industry. “Television”, they wrote, “aims at a synthesis of radio and film”, thus “derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk—the fusion of all the arts in one work”. Because “the alliance of word, image, and music”, once no cultural laws remain, is only “the triumph of invested capital”.
It is easy to see that the Internet is on the verge of consummating the synthesis of the culture industry on an even higher scale. The various technologies of printing, telegraph, telephone, radio, cinema and television are based on a single global complex. This does not result, however, from another technological revolution as such, but it is the logic (which genetically penetrates the entire system) of “abstract labor”, of the autonomized form of value and the concomitant social control that rule them that constitutes the matrix and simultaneously the movens of this media integration. The synthetic force does not result from any conscious reflection and not even from the autonomous activities of individuals, but emanates to the contrary from the heteronymous determination of the social form. That is why all the contradictions and defects that Adorno and Horkheimer detected so precociously in the culture industry are condensed and exacerbated in the Internet as a new central means. The Internet is in fact only the envisioned derisive fulfillment “of the |
BC Enrolment Services promoting their service.
Likewise, UBC Okanagan has announced that they are offering accommodations in the student residences to those who have been affected by the wildfires.
Fleeing the flames
However, a more significant share of UBC students are feeling the effects of the fires in less intense ways. For instance, third-year psychology student Alexandra Dann had to evacuate 12 horses from her family’s ranch in the British Lake area near 100 Mile House.
“We started getting boxed in by two fires that were in Little Fort, which is on one side of highway 24, and then 100 Mile is on the other side,” she said. “We’re right in the middle.”
Dann managed to find a volunteer to house the horses through a Facebook group dedicated to helping people’s animals evacuate from dangerous areas.
“People were volunteering to haul horses and other livestock, and other people were putting up their properties. It ended up being a huge outlet for people to use, like in order to move their livestock,” she said.
#BCwildfire near #100MileHouse, now ~500 hectares. Crews will work through the night to build containment lines. https://t.co/cPSqLnAG3c pic.twitter.com/CChjNS8Om0 — BC Wildfire Service (@BCGovFireInfo) July 7, 2017
For others like recent graduate Dustin Patara, they are less worried about their personal safety and more about the businesses they had to leave behind. Prior to his evacuation to Kamloops, Patara was working as a manager at one of his family’s motels near 100 Mile House.
“My parents are very stressed out because [the motel]’s our livelihood,” he said. “They’ve been operating there for about 20 years.”
He added that their employees are also concerned.
“They’re more stressed out because they live in the area. One of our managers, for example, she actually lived in the 108 [Mile House community], and as far as I know her house has likely burnt down. So lot of our employees are very stressed out, and during the evacuation it was very rough for them.”
Further south, fourth-year political science student Ty Yamamoto was working as a councillor at Rockridge Canyon Camp near Princeton when an evacuation announcement required him to help evacuate 400 kids. The fire in Princeton also affected second-year LFS student Lexi Patton, as her family had to evacuate from their cabin by Missezula lake.
“The power went out, so they were relying on communication from police and firefighters literally showing up at the door,” said Patton. “They basically showed up sometime last week and said ‘Ok, you all need to have all your stuff packed, you could be evacuated at any moment.’ So they were just living in the living room wondering when they were going to have to leave.
“So it’s a pretty scary situation. And eventually when the firefighters called for evacuation, it was a 2 a.m. escorted evacuation.”
Life under smoke clouds
Beside the wildfires, UBC students who are currently living in the interior also have to face the smoke clouds that hover in the sky and pollute the air.
“There’s smoke that hangs over the mountains that makes them not even visible, and that’s pretty surprising because we live in a valley,” said Gjalen Heer, a third-year integrated sciences student currently residing in Kamloops. “It looks like thick fog hanging over the city.”
Since it has also strongly deteriorated the air quality in the city, residents are told to avoid being outdoors. Heer has asthma, so it’s particularly tough for him.
“It just made it difficult to go outside at all,” he said. “I mostly get around on my bike, so I couldn’t really leave the house as much.”
For comparison: Photos of #Kamloops from Monday and today. Taken from same place. pic.twitter.com/LdOGpJqIUk — Jennifer Saltman (@jensaltman) July 12, 2017
Could it happen again?
According to Aitken, intense fire seasons like these are going to become more common because BC’s summer is becoming increasingly hotter.
“This is an exceptional year, but we’re going to have more and more years that are exceptional compared to the past,” she said. “So it’s really important that we realize that we’ve got to start proactively managing around wildfires more, reducing the amount of fuel and doing controlled burns — so using fire as a tool against fire.”
When asked if these wildfires were a result of climate change, Aitken explained that although you can’t attribute any one event to climate change, the predictions in the upcoming changes in climate are certainly linked to longer and more severe fire seasons.
“We expect these types of fires to be increasing as a result of climate change. That would be a fair statement, not attributing this one event — although I think that is in fact what’s driving it, our exceptionally warm Junes.”
An earlier version of this article misspelled Darran Fernandez’s name. The Ubyssey regrets this error.If, as Walt Mossberg famously stated, “Advertising is the mother’s milk of all the mass media” then Vice is the Authentic Mom™ Baby Formula of mass media … where the secret ingredient is saw dust.
Today, Vice’s content look more and more like ‘promoted posts’ found on social media. In the last three years, Vice has published 50 stories mentioning ‘Nutella’ — enough to fill three magazines. Often these stories have a jar featured in the main image or the word ‘Nutella’ in the title:
How Nutella Explains the World
How-To: Make Chocolate & Fruit Crepes with [a Porn Star]
If I Could Join Nutella Addicts Anonymous, I Would
Islamic State Fighters Love Nutella**
France Says You Can’t Name Your Child “Nutella” or “Strawberry”
I Ate Nothing but Nutella for a Week and Found My Inner Darkness
This Guy Invented a Special Lock to Stop People Stealing His Nutella
This Guy Attacked a 78-Year-Old Man in a Costco Over a Sample of Nutella
Soccer Star’s Crippling Love of Nutella May Have Gotten Him Fired
My guess is that Nutella pays Vice on a per-view or per article basis with kickbacks exceeding ten thousand dollars a pop. Three reasons (mostly repeating myself)… First, in 2009 when Advertising Age spoke with Vice’s General Manager Hosi Simon he said Vice wants to “make amazing brand communications that affect people”. Other publishers, like the CBC, avoid brands as much as possible. Second, Vice put in their Spanish language media kit they would pimp editorial for 28k. Third, editorial has made concessions for brand partners like Heineken, Brisk, Nike, UFC, AT&T, Bank of America, N.F.L. and Rogers.
How do they compare to other media outlets? One ‘critical’ article “France Is Concerned that Nutella Is Destroying the World” begins as criticism but morphs into PR. The article, in defense, cites its own anti-boycott article along with Fererro’s Palm Oil Charter. And ends with “if you were to try, that would be a whole lot of hands to try to rip jars of Nutella out of.” When the NY Times wrote critically of Nutella’s “cultlike following” and misleading commercials (NYTimes 2009) people took action. Nutella lost a million dollar class-action lawsuit (and appeals) for deceptive ads with false nutritional claims.
SHANE SMITH on American Media: “[T]hey’re all afraid of losing Budweiser” (Pirate’s Dilemma 2009) “They’re all afraid of losing Budweiser or GM as a fuckin advertiser” (Internet Week 2012) “They’re all afraid of losing G.E as their advertiser” (Internet Week 2013)
Just compare coverage of Budweiser’s latest media stunt: The NYTimes used the title Budweiser’s New Campaign Taps Into Political Climate while Vice titled it Budweiser Has Finally Become the Most American Thing Ever. The result is something indistinguishable from a press release.
This somewhat subtle matchmaking process has many benefits: contributors and junior staff don’t know the duplicitous use of their writing but — more importantly — this ‘news’ avoids filtering from aggregators like Google News and Apple News which both forbid advertorials.
To quote Google News: (emphasis theirs) “Stick to the news — we mean it! Google News is not a marketing service. We don’t want to send users to sites created primarily for promoting a product or organization, or to sites that engage in commerce journalism.” (Google 2016)
Here are some of Vice’s brand partners (and number of mentions) that made it into Google News feed:
AT&T (217), AXE body spray (89), Bank of America (145), Bud Light (51), Budweiser (110), Chanel (250), Corona (123), Dell Computer (31), Disney (649), Heineken (64), Hellman’s (8), Intel (272), Red Bull (588), Stella Artois (10), Pixar (69), Planet of the Apes (24), Marmite (22), Dove soap (Unilever) (6), Vaseline (59).
On average, Vice mentioned these brands at two to three times the frequency of other American media (compared to NYTimes, WSJ, CNN, PBS, VOX, BUZZFEED) and over eight times that of BBC. Without a complete list, (anyone?) I can only estimate that 10% of all articles on Vice mention brand partners — just at the threshold of perception.
** The media circus surrounding ISIS and Nutella is perplexing. By 2015, DAESH was making 90,000 social media posts a day. In June 2014 a french ISIS fighter tweeted a photo standing with a jar of Nutella. In August 2014 The Daily Mail found a second image and tweeted “ISIS jihadists love Nutella, just like everyone else” and the twittersphere erupted. Not to be outdone, CNN said “ISIS lures women with kittens, nutella”. By December 2014 Vice went full tilt with a twitter collage of the death cult enjoying Nutella. The main image came from a short-lived account that conveniently tagged the image “#nutella #jihad”. The photo (which was later removed) was taken in the hipster-flash / Terry Richardson style. Is this another example of Vice making the news instead of just reporting it?Chemicals.
All chemicals were obtained from Sigma-Aldrich unless otherwise specified.
Mouse models.
For glucose tolerance tests, male C57BL/6NTac mice were purchased from Taconic. Alternatively, male C57BL/6JBOMTac mice were taken from the local animal facility (Zentrale Einrichtung für Tierforschung und Tierschutzaufgaben, Medical Research School Düsseldorf). For in vitro experiments, male C57BL/6J mice were purchased from either Janvier or Harlan. Male B6.129S4-Grin1tm2Stl/J (Grin1loxP/loxP) were purchased from Jackson Laboratory and crossed with Pdx1-Cre or Ins1-Cre mice61,62. Pdx1-Cre × Grin1loxP/loxP mice (GluN1 KO) or Ins1-Cre × Grin1loxP/loxP mice (GluN1β KO) were obtained, respectively, and Pdx1-Cre × Grin1loxP/wt or Ins1-Cre × Grin1loxP/wt mice were used as controls. Male BKS.Cg-Dock7m +/+ Leprdb/J mice (db/db), male B6;129S1-Kcnn4tm1Jemn/J mice (SK4 KO; C57BL/6J as their controls), and male B6;129S4-Gt(ROSA)26Sortm1Sor/J mice (R26R LacZ) were purchased from Jackson Laboratory. Kcnj11−/− mice (Kir6.2 KO) were kindly provided by J. Roeper with permission from S. Seino46. All mice were kept in individual cages in a room controlled for temperature (22 °C), humidity (55%) and lighting (lights on from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.). Mice were fed with standard laboratory chow and water ad libitum, and the age of mice is either indicated in the Figures or was above 8 weeks of age. The local Animal Ethics Committee of the Landesamt für Natur, Umwelt und Verbraucherschutz Nordrhein-Westfalen (LANUV North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) approved all animal experiments.
Isolation of mouse pancreatic islets.
Mouse islets were isolated using Liberase TL Research Grade (Roche) according to a protocol previously described with minor changes63. Enzymatic digestion at 37 °C was stopped after 17.5 min with DMEM (1 g l−1 glucose) (PAA Laboratories) supplemented with 15% FBS (Gibco, Life Technologies). Following washing and filter steps, the islets were separated from the exocrine tissue by gradient centrifugation (1,200 g for 25 min) and collected from the interface between Histopaque-1077 and DMEM (1 g l−1 glucose). The isolated islets were washed three times with CMRL medium containing 15% (v/v) FBS, 0.15% NaHCO 3, 100 U ml−1 penicillin, 100 μg ml−1 streptomycin, 0.05 mM 2-mercaptoethanol (Gibco, Life Technologies), and 11.5 mM glucose (Sigma-Aldrich).
RNA isolation, reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR and real-time RT-PCR.
For the assessment of knockdown and knockout efficiency of Grin1, total RNA was extracted from INS1E cells and isolated mouse islets using peqGold TriFast (Peqlab). The isolated RNA was purified from potential genomic DNA contamination by DNase I enzymatic reaction (Fermentas). 1 μg of purified RNA was subsequently transcribed into cDNA using the Super Script II reverse transcriptase system with random primers (Invitrogen). For real-time RT-PCR, each islet sample was run in triplicates, and data were analyzed according to the threshold cycle (Ct) method (Stratagene). The data were normalized to the expression of beta-actin or alpha-tubulin. All primers were initially tested on control cDNA isolated from rat (Wistar) or mouse brain (C57BL/6J). The following primers were used:
rat Grin1 forward, 5′- TAGGGCTCCAGACTCCAAGA-3′; rat Grin1 reverse, 5′- ACACTGGGACACTGGGAGAG-3′; rat alpha-tubulin forward, 5′-AGAGTCGCGCTGTAAGAAGC-3′; rat alpha-tubulin reverse, 5′-CGACGTGGATGGAGATACACT-3′; mouse Grin1 forward, 5′-AGCCACTACCCCAAGCTACA-3′; mouse Grin1 reverse, 5′- GACATCTGGGAGCCAGAGAG-3′; mouse beta-actin forward, 5′- CCCTGAAGTACCCCATTGAA-3′; mouse beta-actin reverse, 5′- GGGGTGTTGAAGGTCTCAAA-3′.
Western blot.
To analyze knockdown efficiency of Grin1, INS1E cells and islets were homogenized in radioimmunoprecipitation assay (RIPA) buffer (50 mM Tris-HCl (pH 7.4), 150 mM NaCl, 1 mM EDTA, 1 mM Na 3 VO 4, 1 mM NaF, 0.25% Na-deoxycholate, 1% IGEPAL) supplemented with complete protease inhibitor cocktail (Roche). To remove cell debris, the lysates were centrifuged for 10 min at 13,000 g. Protein concentration was measured by the bicinchoninic acid (BCA) method (Thermo Scientific). Total protein samples (up to 28 μg) were prepared for loading with NuPAGE LDS sample buffer and NuPAGE reducing agent according to the manufacturer's instructions (NuPage, Life Technologies). After separation by 4–12% pre-cast polyacrylamide gels (NuPage, Life Technologies), the proteins were blotted to a nitrocellulose transfer membrane (Whatman) at 70 mA for 2 h. After blocking with 5% bovine serum albumin (BSA, AppliChem) and 0.5% Tween 20 for 1 h, the membrane was incubated overnight at 4 °C with a rabbit monoclonal anti-NMDAR GluN1 antibody 1:700 (AB9864, Merck Millipore) or rabbit anti-GAPDH antibody 1:1,000 (ab9485, Abcam) followed by 50 min incubation with donkey anti-rabbit-horseradish peroxidase (HRP) 1:5,000 (A16035, Invitrogen) at room temperature and developed with Western Bright Quantum enhanced chemiluminescence (ECL) detection kit (Advansta).
Cell culture.
INS1E cells were cultured in a humidified atmosphere at 5% CO 2 and 37 °C in RPMI 1640 GlutaMax medium containing 5.5 mM glucose, supplemented with 10% (v/v) heat-inactivated FBS, 100 U ml−1 penicillin, 100 μg ml−1 streptomycin, 11.2 mM HEPES, 1 mM sodium pyruvate, 175 μM 2-mercaptoethanol and 2 mM L-glutamine (Gibco, Life Technologies). INS1E cells at passage 28–36 were used64. Cells were split after reaching 90% confluence and screened negative for the presence of mycoplasma using the MycoAlert Mycoplasma Detection Kit (Lonza).
Transfection.
For each transfection of INS1E cells, 2 × 106 cells were electroporated according to the manufacturer's instructions using a nucleofection kit (Amaxa, Lonza). For the knockdown of Grin1, cells were transfected either with three different stealth siRNAs (RSS302181, RSS302182, RSS302183, Invitrogen) at a concentration of 800 nM or with stealth siRNA negative control high-GC. For the rescue experiments, cells were transfected with 3 μg plasmid pCI-SEP-NR1 (23999, Addgene)65. 40 h after transfection, the knockdown efficiency was determined using real-time RT-PCR and western blot, and insulin secretion assays were performed.
X-gal staining.
For the X-gal staining, pancreata and brains were isolated and fixed in 2% paraformaldehyde (PFA) overnight at 4 °C. The next day, the organs were incubated in PBS for 2 h at 4 °C and then transferred into the staining solution (5 mM potassium ferricyanide, 5 mM potassium ferrocyanide, 2 mM MgCl 2, 0.01% sodium deoxycholate, 0.02% IGEPAL CA-630, 1 mg ml−1 X-Gal in PBS) and incubated for 4 h at 25 °C. Bright field images were captured using a Nikon SMZ1500 microscope and a Digital Sight DS-Fi1 camera.
Insulin secretion from pancreatic islets and INS1E cells.
The following compounds were used for insulin secretion assays (ISA): (+)-MK-801 hydrogen maleate, dextrorphan tartrate (DXO), amantadine hydrochloride (AMT), dextromethorphan hydrobromide monohydrate (DXM), 3-hydroxymorphinan hydrobromide (HM), 3-methoxy-N-methylmorphinan hydrobromide (MM), levorphanol (+)-tartrate salt dihydrate (LVP), glibenclamide (Glib), nifedipine (Nif), exendin-4, KN-62 (Abcam), KN-93, N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) and L-trans-pyrrolidine-2,4-dicarboxylate (tPDC). Glib, Nif and KN-62 were solved in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), all other compounds in water. Incubation during ISAs was at 37 °C and 5% CO 2. Before starting the experiments, mycoplasma-screened INS1E cells or pancreatic islets were starved for 1 h in Krebs Ringer HEPES (KRH) buffer (15 mM HEPES, 5 mM KCl, 120 mM NaCl, 2 mM CaCl 2, 10 μM glycine, 24 mM NaHCO 3 and 1 mg ml−1 bovine serum albumin) supplemented with 2 mM glucose and compounds as indicated. For INS1E cells, the KRH buffer used for starvation was replaced by KRH buffer ± compounds containing either 2 mM glucose (low glucose) to measure basal insulin secretion or 16.7 mM glucose (high glucose) to measure GSIS. In order to determine insulin secretion, cells were incubated for 2 h in the respective buffer. When performing ISAs with isolated islets, the secreted amount of insulin at 2 mM glucose (low glucose) and 20 mM glucose (high glucose) conditions was measured using the same islets. After starvation, the islets were incubated in fresh low glucose KRH buffer ± compounds for 1 h followed by 1 h incubation in high glucose KRH buffer ± compounds. Supernatant was collected to determine the secreted amount of insulin. Subsequently, the islets or INS1E cells were lysed in RIPA buffer to measure insulin content. Secreted insulin and insulin content were measured using an ultra-sensitive rat insulin ELISA (Crystal Chem) in combination with an Infinite M200 NanoQuant reader (Tecan). Secreted insulin was normalized to total insulin and presented as a percentage of basal control insulin secretion. For measurement of insulin content, the insulin was normalized to total protein content. Dynamic insulin release from C57BL/6J islets was performed using a perifusion system (Biorep Technologies Inc.) as previously described66, and insulin concentrations were measured using a microsphere-based two-photon excitation fluorometer (TPX-technology; ArcDia Diagnostics) in combination with a human insulin standard.
Glucose tolerance test, insulin tolerance test and corticosterone measurements.
Glucose tolerance tests (GTTs) were carried out on mice fasted overnight for 16 h. Glucose was intraperitoneally (i.p.) injected (1–2 mg g−1 body weight) together with DXO or AMT as indicated. Alternatively, dextromethorphan hydrobromide monohydrate (DXM) was administered via the drinking water overnight before the IPGTT. Glucose concentrations were measured in blood collected from the tail before and 15, 30, 60 and 120 min after i.p. injection. Glucose concentrations were measured twice at all time points using a Monometer Futura glucometer (MedNet GmbH) or GlucoSmart Swing glucometer (MSP Bodmann GmbH). Insulin concentrations were measured before and 15 or 30 min after i.p. glucose injection. To test insulin tolerance, 0.75 IU insulin (Berlinsulin H Normal, Berlin Chemie AG) was injected per kg body weight. Glucose concentrations were determined before and 15, 30, 45, 60 and 90 min after insulin injection. Corticosterone concentrations were determined in blood plasma collected from the mouse tail at 5:30 p.m., 30 min before the onset of darkness in the mouse room using a Corticosterone Enzyme Immunoassay (EIA) kit (Enzo Life Sciences).
Human pancreatic islets.
Human islets were obtained from the Integrated Islet Distribution Program (IIDP) at City of Hope and from the San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan, Italy. All studies and protocols were approved by the respective ethics committees (ethics committee of the Medical Faculty, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, study number 3921; ethics committee of the Instituto Scientifico Ospedale San Raffaele; and ethics committees of the IIDP centers). Human islets were isolated from the pancreata of multi-organ donors using collagenase digestion followed by density gradient purification. The islet preparations had a purity of >75% and a viability of 90–95%. Upon arrival, the human islets were maintained overnight in a humidified atmosphere at 37 °C and 5% CO 2.
Measurement of cell viability in isolated mouse and human islets.
Islet cell viability was determined using the LIVE-DEAD Viability-Cytotoxicity Kit (Life Technologies). Mouse and human islets were incubated in CMRL islet medium prepared as described above containing 5.5 mM glucose (Sigma-Aldrich) and treated as indicated with MK-801 and DXO either alone or in combination with a mixture of cytokines. Mouse islets were treated for 24 h with recombinant mouse TNF-α, 1,000 U ml−1 (R&D Systems); recombinant mouse IFN-γ, 1,000 U ml−1 (eBioscience); and recombinant mouse IL-1β, 50 U ml−1 (R&D Systems) with or without 10 μM of MK-801. Human islets were pre-incubated with or without DXO for 1–2 h before starting the incubation for 40 h with recombinant human TNF-α, 1,000 U ml−1 (R&D Systems); recombinant human IFN-γ, 1,000 U ml−1 (PeproTech or R&D Systems); and recombinant human IL-1β, 2 ng ml−1 (R&D Systems) with or without 10 μM of DXO. Following treatment, whole islets were co-stained with 2 μM calcein AM, 4 μM ethidium homodimer-1 and Hoechst (1:1,000) in KRH buffer prepared as described above containing 5.5 mM glucose and incubated in the dark for 30 min at 37 °C and 5% CO 2, and subsequently shaken gently for 30 min at 37 °C at 200 rpm. For single islet images, LSM images were acquired as maximum intensity projections of z-stacks using a Zeiss LSM 710 coupled to an Axio Observer.Z1 microscope (Carl Zeiss MicroImaging GmbH) equipped with a Plan-Apochromat 20x/0.8 objective. Images were analyzed using Fiji (ImageJ) image analysis software67. To determine the area of dead cells, ethidium homodimer-1–positive area (as determined by thresholding with a fixed value) was normalized to Hoechst–positive area (as determined by Otsu thresholding).
Measurements of membrane potentials in beta cells of pancreatic slices.
The perfusion chamber was mounted on an upright microscope, Nikon Eclipse E600FN (Nikon). Patch pipettes were pulled from borosilicate glass capillaries (GC150F-15, Harvard Apparatus) using a horizontal pipette puller (P-97, Sutter Instruments). The pipette resistance was 2–3 MΩ in a K+-based solution. Fast pipette capacitance (C fast ), slow membrane capacitance (C slow ) and series conductance (G s ) were compensated accordingly. Only experiments with G s > 50 nS were analyzed. All experiments were performed in the standard whole-cell mode via a patch-clamp lock-in amplifier (SWAM IIc, Celica) connected to a PC via an A/D converter (16 bit, NI USB-6341, X Series Multifunction DAQ, National Instruments) and recorded on the PC hard disk using WinWCP V4.5.0 software (John Dempster, University of Strathclyde, UK) at a sampling rate of 1 kHz. The same software was used to identify the beta cells by their Na+ current–inactivation properties and for measuring membrane potential oscillations during glucose stimulation. The pipette solution used for membrane potential measurements was composed of 125 mM potassium methanesulfonate, 20 mM KCl, 40 mM HEPES, 2 mM MgCl 2, and 5 mM Na 2 ATP (titrated to pH 7.2 using 1 M KOH). Extracellular solution was composed of 125 mM NaCl, 26 mM NaHCO 3, 6 mM lactic acid, 3 mM myo-inositol, 2.5 mM KCl, 2 mM sodium pyruvate, 2 mM CaCl 2, 1.25 mM NaH 2 PO 4, 0.5 mM ascorbic acid, and 0.01 mM glycine, with either 6 mM or 12 mM glucose. Extracellular solution kept at atmospheric pressure was continuously bubbled with a gas mixture containing 95% O 2 and 5% CO 2 to ensure oxygenation and a pH of 7.4. 10 μM of MK-801 was added to the extracellular solution. Osmolality of the intracellular and all extracellular solutions was 300 ± 10 mOsm. Membrane potential oscillations were normalized to their average duration with 12 mM glucose.
Measurements of cytoplasmic free Ca2+ in whole isolated islets and pancreatic slices.
Ca2+ measurements in isolated islets were performed as previously described68. Experiments were performed 1–2 d after islet isolation. Islets were loaded with 4 μM Fluo-4 AM (Invitrogen) for 50 min at 37 °C in HEPES buffer containing 125 mM NaCl, 5.9 mM KCl, 2.56 mM CaCl 2, 1.2 mM MgCl 2, 25 mM HEPES, 3 mM glucose and 1 mg ml−1 albumin (pH 7.4). Islets were stimulated with 12 mM glucose. For Ca2+ measurements, a loaded islet was transferred into an open perifusion chamber maintained at 37 °C. Fluorescence intensities were measured after excitation at 470 nm using an Axio Observer.Z1 microscope equipped with a Zeiss Colibri LED light source and a 25x/0.8 multi immersion objective, and Zeiss ZEN 2012 acquisition software and its Physiology module were used. Fluorescence was detected in the range of 500–550 nm. The collected data were exported and analyzed using Excel. Only islets showing a characteristic glucose-induced oscillation pattern were included in quantification, and as soon as regular oscillation periods were observed, periods were measured. For the quantification of the oscillation length, the time from the beginning of an oscillation to the beginning of the next was measured. The beginning of an oscillation was determined as the point in time that showed the maximal increase of fluorescence compared to the preceding measurement. For the quantitative presentation of the duration of Ca2+ oscillation, the statistics software GraphPad Prism 6.0 (GraphPad Software) was used. For the presentation of the traces, photobleaching was accounted for by normalization to an exponential fit. The pancreatic slice preparation and Ca2+ imaging of the slices was performed as described previously45. In brief, pancreatic tissue slices (140 μm thick) were prepared from adult C57BL/6J mice and loaded with the Oregon Green 488 BAPTA-1 acetoxymethyl ester calcium fluorescent dye (OGB-1, Invitrogen) as described previously45,69. The same buffer as for membrane potential measurements was used (extracellular solution). Ca2+ imaging was performed on a Leica TCS SP5 II upright confocal system (Leica Microsystems GmbH). OGB-1 was excited by an argon 488 nm laser and the emitted light was detected in the interval of 500–700 nm by Leica HyD hybrid detector (Leica Microsystems GmbH). Images were acquired at a spatial resolution of 512 × 512 pixels and a temporal resolution of 1–2 Hz. Regions of interest were selected based on higher spatial resolution (1,024 × 1,024) reference images. Time traces were analyzed off-line from regions of interest employing Leica Application Suite Advanced Fluorescence software (Leica Microsystems GmbH), exported and further analyzed using MATLAB (The MathWorks, Inc.). Traces were corrected for photobleaching of the dye employing a combination of linear and single exponential fit and signals expressed as (F – F 0 )/F 0 ratios, where F 0 is the initial fluorescence intensity and F is the fluorescence signal recorded at an individual time point during the experiment. The durations of oscillations were automatically determined at half maximal amplitude using a custom-written MATLAB algorithm.
Long-term DXM treatment of db/db mice.
The drinking water of db/db mice was supplemented with either 1 mg ml−1 of DXM (lower-dose group) or 3 mg ml−1 of DXM (higher-dose group). The drinking water was given over a period of 8 weeks ad libitum, starting at the age of 4 weeks. The mice were fed with standard laboratory chow. Every other week, blood glucose concentrations were measured after a 16 h overnight fast. First, blood glucose concentrations (4 weeks of age) were taken from a different cohort of 16 db/db mice. After 8 weeks of treatment, an IPGTT was performed as described above. Subsequently, the mice were killed for isolation of pancreata or islets.
Immunostaining and imaging.
The whole pancreas was removed from mice and cryopreserved in 30% sucrose, embedded in Tissue-Tek optimum cutting temperature (O.C.T.) embedding medium (Sakura), and 12 μm thick cryosections were made using a Microm HM560 Cryostat (Thermo Fisher). The following antibodies were used: polyclonal guinea pig anti-insulin 1:300 (A0564, Dako), monoclonal rabbit anti-cleaved caspase-3 1:75 (9664, Cell Signaling Technology), polyclonal rabbit anti-glucagon 1:100 (sc-13091, Santa Cruz), polyclonal rabbit anti-pH3 1:150 (06-570, Millipore), donkey anti-rabbit conjugated with Alexa Fluor 488 1:200 (A21206, Life Technologies) and donkey anti-guinea pig conjugated with Cy3 1:200 (706-165-148, Jackson ImmunoResearch). Cell nuclei were stained using DAPI. For quantification of beta and alpha cell areas from treated db/db mice, overview images of single pancreatic sections were acquired using an Axio Observer.Z1 microscope equipped with an AxioCam MRm and a 10x/0.45 Plan Apochromat objective lens (Carl Zeiss MicroImaging GmbH). Images were acquired using AxioVision 4.8 or ZEN 2012 software and MosaiX or tile acquisition, respectively (Carl Zeiss MicroImaging GmbH). Images were analyzed using Fiji (ImageJ) image analysis software67. For quantification of beta and alpha cell areas, the total cell area (DAPI positive) and insulin- or glucagon-positive areas were analyzed. A threshold mask for the DAPI positive area was made applying Bernsen thresholding for insulin-stained sections and Li thresholding for glucagon-stained images. To determine the insulin- or glucagon-positive area, a threshold mask using Yen thresholding was used. The insulin- or glucagon-positive areas were normalized to the total pancreatic nuclei area. Average islet size and islet number were determined using Yen thresholding for insulin staining. Total islet number per section was normalized to total nuclei area that was determined by Bernsen thresholding. For the analysis of pH3- and caspase-3–positive cells, LSM images were acquired using ZEN 2010 software and a LSM710 coupled to an Axio Observer.Z1 microscope equipped with a 40x/1.4oil DIC M27 Plan Apochromat objective lens (Carl Zeiss MicroImaging GmbH). The number of pH3-positive cells was counted manually, and the number of proliferating cells was normalized to the total islet nuclei number. The total number of nuclei was determined using Triangle thresholding. Caspase-3–positive area was determined by applying Triangle thresholding and was normalized to total islet area, which was determined manually on the basis of insulin staining. For representative caspase-3–positive islet images, tile scans were acquired.
Clinical study.
The phase 2a, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, randomized, four-fold crossover study was carried out at the Profil Institute for Clinical Research (Neuss, Germany). The Ethics committee of the Ärztekammer Nordrhein (Düsseldorf, Germany) approved the study. The trial was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (2008) and ICH Good Clinical Practice (1996), and written informed consent was obtained from all individuals. This trial was registered at http://clinicaltrials.gov/, number NCT01441986. Male individuals with T2DM on a stable regimen of metformin monotherapy were screened for participation in the study. Key inclusion criteria were male individuals with a diagnosis of T2DM according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA) criteria at least 4 months before screening; medical history without major pathology (with the exception of T2DM); stable regimen of metformin monotherapy for at least 3 months; 45–70 years old, both inclusive; body mass index (BMI) 25–35 kg m−2, both inclusive; HbA 1c 6.5–7. |
restore order. Anita Lloyd, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Corrections Organization, said “this was not an average, peaceful demonstration that anyone can brush off.”
Florida Franklin Correctional is on lockdown, no calls.
Florida Gulf CI and Holmes CI are on lockdown. But, Apalachee East & West are not on lockdown – but are on high alert. Tomoka CI is on High Alert with guards on stand by. Tomoka has bagged up food in case the prisoners decide to join in.
Minnesota St. Cloud was under lockdown.
Indiana Miami Correctional Facility's Unit P on lockdown.
Washington Clallam Bay was on lockdown.
California Women in Merced jail continue to take action and face repression. From a supporter:
Merced County & John Latorraca Jails inmates participating in this Hunger Strike are on Administrative Lockdown. Yesterday block 1 of Merced County Jail had corrections officers lined up to shoot, they threatened to shoot and brought dogs in threatening to unleash them upondetainees. Inmates were pulled out of there cells by force and after searches placed back into their cells.
September 12
8:33AM EST: Michigan From what people are saying in a MI family of prisoners support group, at Kinross in Kincheloe MI "big wigs" served breakfast yesterday and there are 2 days of sandwiches that have been made up.
10:12AM EST: Scanner audio has been leaked from inside Kinross prison in Michigan where a fire and attempted escape took place on September 10.
4:35PM EST: Australia 11 youth inmates took over Melbourne Youth Justice Centre with weapons. Staff used a couch and a desk to barricade themselves inside an office area. Apparently, damage included smashed windows, broken doors and locks. Report revealed assaults on detention staff members were up 20 per cent. According to the DailyMail:
"Parkville centre staff said on Friday night hooligans in black balaclavas were outside letting off firecrackers and flares shouting, 'Free da boys,' The Herald Sun reported."
5:07 EST: Nebraska Update received via IWW-IWOC:
"Well the unit has done our best in a peaceful protest. As of about 8:30 pm on September 8th, all but a handful of the inmates in the unit placed paper over their windows in order to block the view of the staff. This was in response to the news that other units have been let off lock down status while we remain on lock down.We where told via memo that staff received information that indicated that there would be serious attacks on staff. The first memo was put out at the 4:00pm count on September 2. It stated the above and said that the issue would be reviewed on Tuesday September 6th. On September 6th we received another memo stating that the lock down would continue through the 9th. On Thursday September 8th, inmates from the unit observed inmates from other units going to and from the chow hall, as well as inmates from another unit using their mini yard for outdoor rec. When inmates asked staff what was going on we were told that we were not complying to orders fast enough, and therefore posed a threat. In our unit, there had been no issues what so ever over the weekend and up to the Tuesday memo. AFTER the Tuesday memo, inmates became upset with the lack of communication between the administration and the inmate population.There where 3 inmates taken off the unit for staying in the shower too long and or not going back to their cells fast enough for the staff pleasure. Those inmates were brought back to the unit within the hour. Later that day staff came and took two inmates to the hole for reasons unknown to me at this time.But it should be noted that it is very common for inmates in this unit to go to the hole and/or to confront staff; it is safe to say that it is very much a part of normal operation in the unit. For the week leading up to this show of unity by the inmates there has been no attempt whatsoever to upset the administration’s investigation. Inmates in the unit asked to speak with either warden, starting shortly after the memo was put out on Tuesday the 6th. With no response, inmates covered their windows, stating that we will not uncover them until we speak to one of the wardens. At around 9:00pm on September 8th, staff came around to every cell with an electric shock shield and made a forced entry into each cell to remove the coverings on the windows. As soon as staff did so, each cell replaced the coverings and staff had to repeat the process again later that evening. Once again inmates replaced the coverings. It is now 11:00 am on September 9th and as of right now many of the inmates still have their windows covered and are waiting to talk with the wardens. One warden came and spoke with a hand-selected group of inmates in the unit. He said that they had erred in putting out a memo that did not explain what it was that they had planned. We were told that we were going to receive 40 minutes out off our cells, with 4 cells out at a time today, and tomorrow we would progress to an hour, then on Monday they would review our status. The first set of cells were out for the 40 minute time slot when an inmate assaulted a staff member, which in turn put the unit back on lock down. It is now about 4:00 pm and we have just been told that we are now getting 20 minutes out to shower and use the phone etc, this time only two cells at a time. For the record: no other units were put on lock down during or after that assault except this unit, which shows that even with good behavior, this unit will be treated differently than the others."
September 13
9:30AM EST: Ohio The Free Ohio Movement spread this message via Facebook:
"[We] received several calls today from Lucasville and the Ohio State Penitentiary on September 12, 2016, 3 days after the National Strike against Prison Slavery. Hunger Strikes are underway at both prisons in protest of inhumane conditions, unsafe working conditions, revocation of privileges without provocation and because their rights of redress are being ignored. In retaliation for their stand with the National Strike to End Prison Slavery, held on September 9, 2016, the administrators are removing our Confined Citizens from their work details and threatening to take away their Contact Visits. We need action on this right away. We were afraid this might happen. September 9, 2016 was a peaceful non violent protest. We at the Freedom Movement stand with all Confined Citizens in the state of Ohio, in their struggle to be treated humanely and with dignity and respect.
Please call, email, fax and mail your letters of solidarity to the following administrators at the Ohio Department of Corrections. Let them know the entire state, nation and world is watching and that we demand there be no harm brought against our Brothers & Sisters behind bars, and that their jobs, food, amenities, rights and privileges not be tampered with, nor altered. Contact CGary Mohr, Ohio Department of Corrections Director, 614-752-1150, Email: drc.publicinfo@odrc.state.oh.us, Phone Number: 614-387-0588, Mailing Address: 770 West Broad Street, Columbus, Ohio 43222 Fax Number: 614-752-1171.
David Bobby, OSP Warden, Phone: 330-742-0700, Fax 330-743-0841,
Mailing Address: 878 Coitsville-Hubbard Road Youngstown, Ohio 44505
Scott Nowak, OSP Correctional Program Specialist Email Scott.Nowak@ODRC.STATE.OH., U-S Phone Number: 330-743-0700 Extension 2437,
Ronald Erdos Warden, Southern Ohio Correctional, Facility Phone: 740-259-5544, Fax: 740-2529-2282, Email: Larry.Greene@odrc.state.oh.us, & dtc.socf@odrc.state.oh.us, Mailing Address: P.O. Box 45699, Lucasville, Ohio 45699"
10:43AM EST: Michigan About 150 prisoners have been relocated from an Upper Peninsula correctional facility after staging a protest.
1:56PM EST: France Dozens of prisoners at a prison in central France escaped from their cells and rioted on Monday, September 12, after stealing the keys of a warden, prison sources said.
6:30PM EST: Florida According to the Miami Herald, Kimberly Schultz, president of Teamsters 2011, the union representing FDC’s officers spoke about the five riots that took place in Florida prisons in the past week, saying: “These riots will continue to increase in frequency, increasing the likelihood that our corrections officers will be injured." She's not wrong.
September 14
8:27AM EST: South Carolina A video was leaked on a prisoner describing being locked inside their cell for four days with very little access to food at Broad River Correctional. Another video was released of the cornmeal the prisoners are being fed with bugs running all over it.
9:40AM EST: Kansas Chelsea Manning ends hunger strike after the Army agrees to her demand of allowing her to receive gender-affirming surgery.
4:51PM EST: Everywhere According to IGD, more than 24,000 prisoners in over 29 facilities took off work on September 9. That's huge. IDG writes:
"The facilities experiencing full shutdowns that we know about hold approximately 24,000 prisoners. There are probably thousands more who didn’t work that we don’t know about, yet. Many are still are not working today and intend to continue the strike until their demands are satisfied or the prisons break under the economic strain of operating without their slaves."
We found this Twitter that somebody, we think it's a prisoner, is using to communicate with folks on the outside.
September 15
4:50PM EST: Alabama Free Alabama Movement releases a theme song. Take a breath and listen.
September 16
9:24AM EST: California Updates have been released from inside Merced Jail on the hunger strike by prisoners on the inside. According to IGD, the current demands of the hunger strikers are varied, but include an end to solitary confinement of juvenile inmates, the immediate firing of Lt. Moore (one of the Sheriffs seen as directly responsible for carrying out many acts of brutality), a demand for 2,000 calories a day diet, access to basic program, and the end to prisoners in protective custody handling other inmates food, clothing, and other items. Prisoners released a statement calling for one of the CO's to be fired:
Lt. Moore should be FIRED, demoted or removed from working within the jail facilities. Cease and desist his continued harassment and abusive treatment of inmates. The environment with which Lt. Moore has created is hostile and dangerous for both corrections staff and inmates.
And also spoke about the escalation of the repressive lockdown in place at Merced:
The correctional staff have placed the participants on lockdown effective until tomorrow morning. 1:49 p.m. Sgt. Spangler just went into 1 Block (Merced County Jail) with a camera stating that the detainees have ‘mandatory yard’ and if they DO NOT dress out to go they will be stripping them of privileges. 1 Blocks yard days are on Mondays and today is Thursday. This is a tactic to force the participants to cease the 1st Amendment protected right to peacefully protest.
September 18
8:59AM EST: Arizona Support Prisoner Resistance reports prison lockdowns in Arizona started on September 14.
Alabama Free ALabama Movement dispatches news from the inside of Holman prison:
At this very moment, less than 15 officers total reported to work at Holman prison. Many areas of the prison, incl death row, are unattended — FreeAlabamaMovement- (@FREEALAMOVEMENT) September 17, 2016
Less than 15 officers trying to secure over 1000 at Holman. Tension mounting as officer dies. — FreeAlabamaMovement- (@FREEALAMOVEMENT) September 17, 2016
A serious humanitarian crisis is developing at Holman prison as correctional officers continue to walk off of the job amid concerns about safety and apathy from Warden Terry Raybon and the office of ADOC Commissioner Jefferson S Dunn, as violence, including deadly stabbings and assaults continue to mount. Several officers expressed dismay and fear after learning that two of their fellow officers, Officer Brian Ezell and another officer, reported to Warden Raybon that they had knives drawn on them and their lives threatened, and that neither Warden Raybon, nor Commissioners Jeff Dunn and Grantt Culliver would take any action to ensure their safety. Both of these officers then quit. Several other officers have also quit in the past three weeks after witnessing a stabbing of a fellow officer in the temple and who had remained hospitalized with life threatening injuries until he was pronounced dead earlier today. This after a former warden, Carter Davenport, was stabbed in March amidst back to back riots and other violence at Holman. Now, after seeing Warden Raybon release approximately 20 people from segregation on September 13, 2016, most of whom were all in segregation for violent incidents (only to see several stabbing take place, including one critically injured and another losing an eye), a total of eight more officers have either quit or turned in their two week notices. Officers are expressing concern that the Commissioners of the ADOC are intentionally exacerbating violence at the expense of human life in efforts to push forward their plan to extort the public for 1.5 billion to build new prisons in next years Legislative Session. Officers have began to express support for the Non-Violent stance of FREE ALABAMA MOVEMENT and their efforts to expose corruption, violence and other issues plaguing Holman and other Alabama prisons, and have went so far as to make repeated requests to Warden Raybon for the release of F.A.M. co-founder and organizer Kinetik Justice from solitary confinement, because officers now feel that he is being wrongfully detained and because he has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to conduct peaceful demonstrations at Holman prison to bring attention to issues within the ADOC and Holman prison. We are asking that everyone call Commissioner Dunn and Warden Raybon and demand that they post daily reports of the staffing levels and incidents of violence taking place at Holman as a matter of public safety. We are further requesting assistance in finding a Human Rights attorney and human rights observers to report to Holman immediately, as the level of violence is skyrocketing, and the men at Holman are left in a virtual war zone to fend for themselves, while officers continue to walk off the job in what is already the most understaffed prison in America. Officers are so afraid to enter the dorms that routine security functions like conducting count are being done by the incarcerated men themselves, and video footage attesting to this fact are widely available online and across social media. Family members of those incarcerated at Holman are requested to callCommissioner Dunn and Culliver continuously, and demand that their loved ones be immediately removed from Holman, as there are insufficient officers to secure the prison. Warden Terry Raybon
Holman Correctional Facility
251-368-8173
Commissioner Jefferson Dunn
Commissioner Grantt Culliver
334-353-3883 (switchboard operator)
California Supporters report another block at Merced joins hunger strike:
Block 4 of the Merced County Jail has joined this #HungerStrike in solidarity with their people!!!! This is what tackling the criminalization of our people looks like!
Another update said:
Reporting from Inside. 7th Day of National Prison Strike to Abolish Slavery: Many prisoners that were initially locked down in Secure Housing units are being released back to the mainlines, in some states. JLS is sure that the list is longer in regards to those that have received institutional charges for not working, or remain lockdown in their units. No strike leaders or state leaders have given a formal announcement that the strike has ended where they are located. JLS striking members report to be placing more focus on educating (politicizing) the local prisoners on the 13th, and preparing (by coordinating inside/out) for the Historic Demonstration on Washington. The time is ripe for this next phase. Re educating the entire country and world on one platform to Abolish the 13th. We’re up against 151yrs of mass indoctrination. In the process its time to organize to hit Congress harder.
As prisoners continue the strike inside, our supporters outside must not lose focus. Those inside very lives may depend on it. Salute to the Freedom Movement (Free Us All)
Salute to the Resistance Movement
Salute to the street protesters
Salute to the strikers (known and unknown)
Salute to all that are with us!
We won’t stop,
We can’t stop!
JLS will continue to push hard until this system is dismantled!
September 20
9:00AM EST: Alabama Free Alabama Movement releases a statement updating us on the state of things at Holman prison:
On Saturday September 17, 2016, the men at HOLMAN CF held the 1st UNIVERSAL PEACE & UNITY SUMMIT in which it was established that there would be a “NO STAND OFF POLICY”. All street organizations (Bloods, Crips, Growth n Development and SB’s) have vowed to respect the policy for the sake of all men housed at Holman. Since then there has been No Violence. FREE ALABAMA MOVEMENT has taken on the responsibilty to provided protection for one another and to resolve all disagreements-as the ADOC has abandoned their duty and responsibilty. So if you have a loved one at Holman prison, you should be demanding answers from Commissioner Jeff Dunn and his staff. 334-353-3883
Oregon On Sept. 9th several prisoners at Deer Ridge Correctional Institution (DRCI) in Madras Oregon were placed on a preemptive lock-down to repress potential striking activity. Similarly all of the inmate kitchen workers were placed in the hole.
Prisoners at DRCI are reporting that the administrations Food Service Coordinators are systematically employing methods which put the health and safety of inmates at risk. Inmates report that DRCI is serving under-cooked food despite being told by inmate kitchen staff that it is not ready and using unsanitary food substitutes to save money and ensure bonuses from superiors. Inmates also report the prison using food products marked to be unfit for human consumption and that are expired, using rotten and moldy food along with not serving inmates full portions. Inmates report that these practices are occurring on a daily basis. Prisoners are asking that folks call in and express their support.
September 21
11:20AM EST: Alabama Kinetik Justice, joins Democracy Now! by phone from solitary confinement in Holman Correctional Facility, says:
"...we are engaged in a struggle for our life, a freedom struggle, with the conditions and so forth. And in all means, a war, you know, warfare, you use what tools are available to you. And in this struggle for freedom, justice and equality, we’re doing just that. We’re using every tool available to us to get the maximized effect."
3:14PM EST: Oregon Women Prisoners in Washington facing retaliation. From anonymous prison staff:
“I would like you and supporters to know that there was a symbolic protest at Washington Correctional Center for Women in Gig Harbor on September 9. Three women refused to go to work in the prison library. The emergency response team was dispatched and the women were taken to Segregation. At their hearing last week, they were given 20 days in seg, and are facing reclassification and probably the loss of their jobs. In my opinion, this was a peaceful, non-violent expression of their opinions meant to draw attention to the issue of prison labor, and the response was much more disruptive than the event itself. The library has been closed since September 9. According to DOC, this was the only action in the entire state of Washington.”
6:12PM EST: Alabama Word has gotten out from inside Holman prison that C dorm has risen up once again. Here's what an anonymous prisoner said:
Just ten minutes ago members of the riot team and warden entered c dorm and attempted to confiscate a cellphone from a prisoner and whole c dorm rose up and forced them out of c dorm. The resistance at Holland prison in Alabama is strong. Fuck the police! 9/21/16 /2:48
8:17PM EST: Everywhere Reports are circulating about how many people have participated in the strike as of yet, and how many facilities have been disrupted. As always, this is is only what we know but that much more is likely going on in the dark behind the prison gates. Here's what folks are saying:
As of 9/21 we have tracked 46 prisons and jails that experienced some kind of disruption between September 8 and 21st. This total includes both lockdowns reported by officials (some of whom deny that the lockdown was protest related) and reports of protests from prisoners and supporters (some of which did not lead to lockdowns or full strikes). Of these, 31 facilities experienced a lock-down, suspension or full strike for at least 24 hours. Those 31 facilities house approximately 57,000 people. That is a guess at the minimum number of prisoners affected by the nationally coordinated strike. There is likely much more going on behind the prison gates that we do not yet know about. We receive new information on a daily basis. In some places the strike lasted a day or a weekend, but in some, it seems to be going strong 12 days in.
September 22
7:30PM EST: California RT interviewed Victoria Castillo, an organizer with Free Merced.
In case of video glitching, Castillo said:
“Initially with the strike, they refused all consumption of food and all movement. They had boycotted court, their yard time, their visitation, all medical movement until something is changed. We had all sort of problems with inmates not properly triaged or being triaged and cleared from prison and then having to have extensive surgery for cancers and underlying medical conditions that were potentially life threatening as well as improper mental health evaluations.”
September 23
6:44PM EST: South Carolina From a prisoner in SC:
"Hey I heard from Broad River Correctional. Thank everyone for calling. The guys finally did get showers and hot meals. Everyone knows its due to people calling in. The prison official complaining about why they can't be men and just take instead of having people call in complaining. Can you believe the nerves of these pigs?! Extending a thank you."
So, there you have it, phone zaps to prison administrators aren not for naught. You can call in using this resource.
Wisconsin Some friends at Milwaukee's IWW chapter shared an excerpt from letter by prisoner at Green Bay Correctional Institution, received 9/2/16:
"I stand with San Francisco 49ers Quarterback Collin Kapernick n siting down during the so called "National Anthem". I do not pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth. That cloth which represents the United Hypocritical States of America. Where separation between church and state is a talking point, because there is no separation....Let's look at where the injustice is: the policy makers, law enforcement leadership who target people."
September 25
2:45PM EST: Alabama A message was released by Kinetik Justice from Free Alabama Movement:
In March of this year, the Sun of Kinetik was accused of stabbing Warden Davenport at Holman prison in Alabama. He was then shipped to Donaldson. He has since been assaulted, harassed, and tortured in Solitary Confinement. If you support FAM and the work we do then let Kinetik’s Sun know his sacrifices for change were not in vain. Those willing, drop him a postcard and those able, put a small donation on his books via the ADOC website. Amir “Jaja” Davis #268646
G-4 WE Donaldson CF
1000 Warrior Lane
Bessemer, AL 35023
September 26
11:55AM EST: Alabama According to Free Alabama Movement and IWW-IWOC, the guards at Holman prison did not show up for work, and report that Warden Peterson was spotted pushing the meal cart this morning. We are getting news the the guards assigned to the second shift have been participating in a work strike since September 24. Stay tuned for more reports as this develops.
6:55PM EST: South Carolina The Twitter being operated by prisoners on the inside is reporting on a death of an inmate at a South Carolina prison and the lack of media coverage. Reportedly, the entire South Carolina prison system is on lockdown at this time. Read more via the Twitter.
September 27
3:05PM EST: IGD interviewed a prisoner about the South Carolina rebellion at Turbeville C.I.:
IGD: What facility erupted tonight? It erupted at Turbeville C.I. in SC. Tough guard got mad because prisoners didn’t obey a command. IGD: Why did things pop off? What happened? When the guard reached for their mace, they were surrounded and beat up. IGD: How did the guards react? When the other guards arrived like they were going to jump on the prisoners, everyone stood up and ran them out of dorm. IGD: How does this fit into everything else already happened in the facility around the prison strike etc? The strike news got us holding some long overdue conversations. The spirit of Attica is in the air. IGD: How can people support you? Help us by standing up for us in places we can’t go! I’m here for the people, the most oppressed…all the prisoners that feel as I do.
7:52PM EST: Alabama Audio from Holman was released elaborating on what the guard strike is looking like as of yesterday.
September 30
2:00PM EST: Everywhere There's been a call for renewed action in solidarity with the prisoner strike between October 15 and 21.
October 1
12:10AM: Alabama Free Alabama Movement's Kinetik Justice tweeted that guards at Holman are planning to quit their jobs en masse.
North Carolina A Twitter account reports from inside that two COS were stabbed and some prisoners have been transferred to maximum security facilities. Stay tuned for updates.
The same Twitter account reports that there are conversations going on behind bars about how prisoner struggles are connected around the world.
1:00AM EST: Alabama Free Alabama Movement has released a statement about the guard strike saying that all CO's are indeed quitting in the coming days:
"Only 7 cars in the HOLMAN parking lot, only 3 officers for Death Row and Segregation, Officer just confirmed that it’s over, as all CO’s are quitting this coming week ~”We’re tired of them playing games with y’all and our lives. It doesn’t make any sense. You be safe Lil Brother.” Well they told me they had something planned, now I see what it is. The Administration has effectively ran their workforce off. Smh"
3:00PM EST: Greece Prisoners in Greece have announced they are on strike:
“From the prison of Korydallos in Greece, we the prisoners of the blocks C, D, A, respond to the day of action around the world in solidarity with the prisoners of the USA. Today we will not let the guards lock us up, in an action of solidarity. Across America, prisoners are in a huge struggle against slavery. In this fight, we join our voices. Nationality, religion, or any other differences will never be an obstacle to becoming a blow against the powers that keep us imprisoned. You are prisoners and we are prisoners, and we can only wish you good luck and contribute to your victory. It will be a victory for dignity and for all the prisoners around the world.”
October 4
11:00PM: Alabama Free Alabama Movement released a video:
October 6
5:00PM EST: Alabama DOJ says they'll investigate conditions at Holman.
October 7
11:00AM EST: A prisoner running a Twitter account from the inside responds to the DOJ investigation announcement:
DOJ coming in to investigate its own. Smh! I expect the same results when they review cop killings. Fingers pointed, but no consequences — Prison slavery (@Prisonslavery1) October 6, 2016
October 8
11:OOAM EST: Ohio A prisoner in Ohio State Penitentiary, Siddique Hasan, among others, have reported being punished by guards and prison administrators for talking to reporters about strike organizing.
October 10
11:30AM EST: South Carolina Statewide lockdown of prisons ends today:
SCDC prison policy of protectn guards & state property 4 visits is causing violence between the prisoners that are upholdn it 4 wkend visits — Prison slavery (@Prisonslavery1) October 10, 2016
Came off statewide lockdown of prisons today. Only to get reports of violent tension between prisoners due to prison policy — Prison slavery (@Prisonslavery1) October 10, 2016
12:00PM EST: California IWOC and other groups drop a report on the financial impact of the strike on the state of California.
October 13
11:42PM EST: Alabama Reports have surfaced that prison strike leader Kinetic Justice has been transferred from Holman to a different facility in an effort by prison administrators to break the strike.
October 14
12:25AM EST: Michigan Democracy Now! reports that 3 Michigan prisoners died within one month amidst the repressive lockdowns in prisons following the strike.
Alabama A video was released from inside prison discussing the conditions of state facilities:
October 16
10:00PM EST: A new publication about prison organizing is emerging called Unstoppable. Itsgoingdown.org did an interview with Fire Hawk, a queer femme prisoner, about the experiences of femme and women prisoners who are locked up in "men's facilities". Be sure to check it out.
October 17
1:10PM EST: IWOC made a Twitter Moments thread archiving all their #prisonstrike related news.
For a detailed roundup on all of the solidarity actions on the outside from the first day f the strike and how they went down, please check out and follow IGD for more updates, also find information about this weekend's demonstrations in your area
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Send tips to @mask_mag on Twitter. Support our coverage by subscribing to Mask Magazine.BOSTON - For five hours before a Missoula Osprey minor league baseball game last summer, Cheri Pijanowski hand washed 150 white folding chairs with bleach and water.
The metal deck and rails around the seats were power-washed and she meticulously reviewed the concession menu to eliminate not just Cracker Jacks and peanuts, but any ingredient that may contain nuts.
She'll do it all again this year to bring the crack of the bat and cheer of the crowd to kids -- like her oldest son Joshua -- who otherwise can't relish in the carefree summer experience of a hometown major league ball game because of severe nut allergies.
The Washington Nationals, St. Louis Cardinals, Seattle Mariners, Boston Red Sox, San Diego Padres and New York Mets are among the roughly half of all big league teams to host at least one nut-controlled game this year.
In most cases, a peanut-controlled game day means offering an isolated section of around 100 seats that have been thoroughly cleaned, banning the sale of nuts nearby, posting signs and ushers around to make fans aware of the nut-free zone and keeping medical staff close for emergencies.
Without these extraordinary efforts, a baseball game can be a nerve-racking afternoon at best for parents of children with severe, potentially fatal, nut allergies.
"It's like being in a horror movie -- you hear the crunch of shells underfoot and you see people cracking open shells," said Chicago mom Joyce Davis, whose 11-year-old daughter Julia is allergic to peanuts.
Davis took her family to a peanut allergy friendly game at Wrigley Field last August.
"Julia loves to play baseball, so to see her heroes play live and experience the ballpark vibe, it's a childhood experience that I don't think should be kept from people," said Davis.
The most common reactions to nuts include hives, swelling of the lips and tongue, trouble breathing, nausea or a drop in blood pressure, which in some cases can lead to death.
PEANUT ALLERGIES RISING
Peanut allergies affect roughly 0.5 to 1 percent of the population and appear to be on the rise, perhaps even doubling in the last decade, according to experts. It remains unclear exactly why.
Researchers are examining the idea that a child's immune system has not been properly challenged in an environment that is too clean, also known as the hygiene hypothesis.
Accidentally eating food cooked in peanut oil or made with nuts or inhaling the lingering peanut dust around the ball park can trigger severe reactions in those who are allergic.
Minnesota Twins fans with nut allergies were invited to Monday's game against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
At Target Field in Minneapolis, 100 fans will watch the action from two balconies tucked in the left field corner that provide a stellar view, a separate entrance and peanut-free concessions, said marketing vice president Patrick Klinger.
Kids with severe peanut and tree nut allergies, like Jenny Kales' 11-year-old daughter Alexandra, are unlikely to outgrow their sensitivity and are accustomed to traveling with hand wipes, medicine, their own snacks and an EpiPen used to counter an anaphylactic reaction. The Kales family attended the Cubs game last summer worry-free for Alexandra's first game.
"When you take the food allergy out of the equation, it's a huge thing because it lets you have a regular experience," she said.
At Boston's storied Fenway Park, the stadium sells some 1,000 bags of Cracker Jacks and 3,000 bags of peanuts during a single game, said Red Sox senior manager of public affairs Zineb Marchoudi.
But the team also organized three games this season with a peanut allergy friendly section for 226 people and made available throughout the season a sanitized 10-person booth.
Away from big cities and major league clubs, families are finding a number of minor league teams with peanut-free accommodations.
The Rochester Red Wings 12,000-seat stadium in upstate New York has a grassy beam on the third baseline that is a no-peanut zone for every game, said team President Naomi Silver.
The stadium also offers allergen-free food at a concession stand dubbed FREE that offers munchies made without basic allergens like nuts, dairy, wheat and shellfish.
"It may not be the most popular, but it is the most appreciated food stand in the stadium," said Silver.
(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Jerry Norton)
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.Image: Redjar/Flickr
The transition to electronic medical records—the digital versions of the paper charts, billing, prescriptions, and lab work used daily in medicine—is a contentious issue among physicians.
When they were first introduced, EMRs, also referred to as EHRs (electronic health records), were seen as having the potential to transform health care, improving safety and streamlining patient treatment across different hospitals and fields. In many ways, that has been the case. Doctors who use them can now check lab reports and read patient charts from anywhere with the click of a button, and it is more difficult to misplace or misread information.
But multiple reports have shown doctors in the US do not want to switch over, finding the digitized records a less efficient, more impersonal, and error-ridden alternative to the paper system they know. Doctors complain that clunky "meaningful use" requirements, which were force doctors who accept Medicare to show that they are making use of the EMRs by recording a minimum number of "objectives," slow down their practices and drastically reduce the number of patients they can see.
"One of the worst aspects of it is the mandated Meaningful Use records," said Dr. James Paul, a surgeon in Iowa (disclosure: the author is related to two of the doctors interviewed for this piece). "I might have someone who just came back from the ER who cut their thumb off––the only way I can get money from the government for the procedure is by recording "meaningful use" criteria in the EMR. For example, if your BMI is above a certain amount I have to counsel you about weight loss, even if you are in the ER for cutting off your thumb."
"Another major problem is that individual EMRs don't automatically communicate with one another. It's like using a key to a different car."
Even though many doctors complain about the EMRs, more and more people in health care are making the change, either by choice or by necessity. A 2014 report showed that in 2013, 78 percent of office-based physicians had adopted some form of EMR system, and 48 percent of all physicians had an EMR system with advanced functionality––double the adoption rate in 2009.
Doctors who can choose their own EMRs without the constraints of government regulations find that they can cater their systems to their needs and are happier with the end product. But now, as part of the Affordable Care Act, doctors who do not switch to electronic medical records by the end of 2015 will start to get docked on Medicare reimbursement.
This has forced doctors to either make the switch, face the fines, or retire early to avoid the whole situation. Some doctors are also no longer taking Medicare because of this, leaving more vulnerable patients without healthcare.
The real-world consequences of a policy like this are not always obvious when the law is being written, so we asked nine doctors: are EMRs GOOD or BAD?
Amit I. Patel, MD FACOG, Modern Gynecology, PLLC - Plano, Texas: GOOD
EMRs are good for health care overall. The government mandating how physicians use them and using those mandates to penalize doctors through reduced reimbursements is bad.
Doctors have several frustrations with EMR––the main reason is that it takes longer to document in EMR than it does on a paper chart. Number two, electronic medical records increase the cost of practice because they are more expensive to maintain than charts are. Number three, EMRs fall into one of two categories—they're ready out of the box, you start up with them and you have to make do with what they have and there's not much customization, or they are really customizable and as a result you have to spend a lot of time on the front end getting things set up. So that's a lot of time away from the practice.
Another major problem is that individual EMRs don't automatically communicate with one another. Many patients think, "Oh you have EMR, you should be able to see what my doctor in X place prescribed last month." But it's like using a key to a different car.
"There might be an improvement in quality of care, but for sure it is increasing the cost of care."
You are going to |
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"I appreciate his concern for the well-being of our students," Massey said of Baxley on Friday.
Massey, who took office on Jan. 1, in July defeated Blair in the election for the school district's new superintendent. The details of the 2010 rape incident resurfaced two months later.
In his comments before Massey and the board Thursday night, Baxley said the group hoped the petition could bring about a "more productive dialog" between the board and the community.
"We are well aware that you can't discuss the litigation from 2010. We watched the board's press conference and are aware of your stance on the case," Baxley said. "It was from this press conference that the members of our community action group became increasingly dismayed and alarmed."
Board attorney Mark Boardman said at a news conference in September, shortly after the Justice Department filed a "friend of the court" brief siding with the girl and her father in their lawsuit, that the administrators at Sparkman were blameless in the incident. Instead, he laid all blame at the feet of teacher's aide June Simpson, who resigned a few months after the rape.
Court records indicate the 14-year-old victim was assaulted on Jan. 22, 2010, after Simpson asked her to go into a boys' restroom with the older boy, who had a history of violence and sexual aggression and had reportedly been requesting sex from several girls over previous weeks. Like the victim, he was also a special needs student.
Based on her understanding of Blair's policy on harassment, Simpson told the girl that the school administration could punish the boy only if they could "catch him in the act." The girl agreed to go into a bathroom with the boy, but ended up in a different bathroom than the one initially agreed upon.
When neither Simpson nor any other school official got to the bathroom in time, the girl was sodomized. A medical exam conducted during the subsequent investigation found evidence of anal tearing and bruising.
Baxley said Thursday that, regardless of the district's intent, the community felt disregard for the victim and for the concerns of parents.
"We heard a complete unwillingness to display empathy, to proactively review the school system policies, and to cooperate with the community," he said.
Baxley pointed to a community meeting held at Madison County Elementary a few days after the news conference, saying it was not well-advertised or timed to allow for good attendance and, subsequently, few parents showed up. He said the questions of those parents who could make it went unanswered.
"We want the interests of our children placed before personal and institutional reputations," Baxley said. "We want to know that our loved ones are secure from known predators while at school. Currently we have no such assurance."
He said the incident revealed systemic problems and a lack of communication with the community, but expressed hope that with a new year and new superintendent, the district could "truly and substantially" show its concern for its students and parents.
"Only the actions of the board now can begin to redress these grievances and aid in healing the wounds of the community. As to the victim herself, you can do nothing for her pain, but you can avoid adding further insult to her injury," Baxley said.
After the assault, the girl left Sparkman, moved out of state and has had a difficult road since the incident, her attorneys have said. The boy was suspended for five days before being sent to the district's alternative school, where he continued his sexually-driven infractions. He was returned to Sparkman Middle after 20 days.
Now an adult, he does not appear to have a criminal record as an adult, aside from two traffic violations. His name was listed in court documents, but is being withheld by AL.com due to his age at the time of the incident.
Blair remains principal of Sparkman and Teresa Terrell, also named in the lawsuit, remains one of its assistant principals. Dunaway has since been promoted to her position leading Madison County Elementary School.
The girl's lawsuit is still winding its way through the courts. Though most counts against the defendants were thrown out, both Dunaway and Simpson are still facing judgement on claims of negligence and wantonness.
Both sides in the case have appealed the judge's ruling.Manchester United came from behind twice to secure a late win at Southampton on Sunday, while neighbours Manchester City took all three points from a stubborn QPR.
West Brom burst Everton's bubble and West Ham made the most of Andy Carroll's arrival to see off Fulham.
Take a look at my team of the week and see whether you agree with my selections.
GOALKEEPER - BRAD FRIEDEL, TOTTENHAM
His save from Robert Snodgrass was superb. The overall performance from the 41-year-old was simply sensational. I suppose Spurs had to buy a keeper to replace Brad in the long term but one thing is for sure - Hugo Lloris, the French captain, is going to have to produce some pretty amazing stuff to replace this immensely popular figure.
Did you know? He has now played in 307 consecutive Premier League games - his nearest rival in this is Tim Howard, who has played in 186 (also a current run).
LEFT-BACK - KIERAN GIBBS, ARSENAL
I've watched this lad develop over the years at Arsenal and all credit to Arsene Wenger, who persevered with this prodigious talent. Who could forget that mistake in the Champions League when he was so young? However, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and against Liverpool Arsenal looked like they may have unearthed another Ashley Cole.
Did you know? Has made more crosses (13) than any other Arsenal player in the league in 2012-13.
CENTRE-BACK - CIARAN CLARK, ASTON VILLA
He doesn't find himself high enough up the pitch normally to score goals, particularly such important ones. But his header produced Paul Lambert's first Premier League points for Villa. To keep Papiss Cisse and Demba Ba reasonably quiet for most of the afternoon was quite an achievement.
Did you know? Four of Aston Villa's last eight league goals have been scored by defenders (just one from a striker).
CENTRE-BACK - PER MERTESACKER, ARSENAL
I'm not sure to what extent Steve Bould's presence in the Arsenal first-team set-up has to do with Arsenal's fine defensive record this season but Mertesacker's form against Liverpool was central to the Gunners' excellent performance.
Did you know? Since the start of last season, Arsenal have conceded 0.6 goals per game when both Thomas Vermaelen and Mertesacker have started, compared to 1.5 per game when either has been absent.
RIGHT-BACK - RUSSELL MARTIN, NORWICH
I don't know what Chris Hughton has done to this Norwich side but whatever it is it's working. Russell Martin's performance was one of many vastly improved displays from the game at Fulham in their opening fixture of the season. Martin's header beat Brad Friedel but not the bar in an excellent performance by the Canaries.
Did you know? He has missed just seven league games for Norwich since joining the Canaries in League One in December 2009, fewer than any other player in this period (Holt, 10, Hoolahan, 18).
MIDFIELD - YAYA TOURE, MAN CITY
It was never going to be a repeat of last season's classic against QPR but Toure always looked in control. With his languid running action the Ivorian steered the champions safely past a dangerous second-half opponent.
Did you know? He has made the most passes in the Premier League this season (297), nine more than Arsenal's Mikel Arteta.
MIDFIELD - ROBERT SNODGRASS, NORWICH
If anyone was going to beat Brad Friedel it was going to be Snodgrass. It was only Friedel's outstanding performance that kept the former Leeds winger at bay for so long, but his half-volley five minutes from time was technically brilliant.
Did you know? He has had the most shots for Norwich this season (eight), and only Bradley Johnson (seven) has won more tackles (six).
MIDFIELD - MOUSA DEMBELE, TOTTENHAM
His was one of several inspired signings by Spurs chairman Daniel Levy in the transfer window. The Belgian looked every bit a Spurs star for the future and scored on his debut to prove it. A very good omen.
Did you know? He has completed the most dribbles in the Premier League this season (12) with an 86% success rate (league average 44%).
MIDFIELD - SANTI CAZORLA, ARSENAL
Over the years Arsenal have produced more than their fair share of great midfield players. Ball, Brady, Vieira and Fabregas to name but a few. Cazorla's game against Liverpool suggests he could soon be joining those ranks. A title or two might just do it!
Did you know? Only Leighton Baines (16) has created more goalscoring chances in the Premier League this season (11).
FORWARD - ROBIN VAN PERSIE, MAN UTD
What a performance by the Dutchman against Southampton. His penalty miss was so villainous it made me scream with anger but his three goals were taken with such exquisite brilliance you had to forgive the arrogance and admire the ability. If Sir Alex Ferguson can get a fit Wayne Rooney to gel with Van Persie then I for one think United are certainties for another Premier League title.
Did you know? Van Persie scored his fourth Premier League hat-trick (all since 2011). He had 11 shots against Saints, the most by a player in a Premier League match since he had 12 against Wolves last December.
FORWARD - STEVEN FLETCHER, SUNDERLAND
I hope Steven's two goals against Swansea will silence those 'know-it-alls' who insist the former Wolves striker isn't worth the money Sunderland paid for him. The facts are if you score goals in the Premier League you are worth a fortune and he won't score two better than the ones he got on his league debut. Worth every penny.
Did you know? He is the first player to score more than once on his Premier League debut for Sunderland.The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995
Dagoth Araynys
Dagoth Araynys is one of the Ash Vampires, and brother to Dagoth Ur. Vivec suggests killing him in order to weaken Dagoth Ur.
If you kill Dagoth Ur first, all the other Ash Vampires will die with him. Dagoth Araynys may be found in Mamaea, Sanctum of Black Hope. He carries the Soul Ring artifact.
Related Quests [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Killing Dagoth Araynys should weaken Dagoth Ur in the following way: Strength -5 pts Willpower -5 pts Speed -5 pts Health -50 pts Fatigue -50 pts Magicka -250 pts
However, extensive testing in the community suggests that this has no effect on your final battle with Dagoth Ur.
Dialogue [ edit ]
Dagoth Araynys has some unique dialogue, if you can sneak up on him or cast Calm in order to speak to him.A sign is posted outside of the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF and AP) – A day after the NFL revealed its official Twitter account had been hacked, the San Francisco social media giant was denying new reports Thursday of a massive security breach.
The website LeakedSource said it received a cache of Twitter data that contains 32 million records, including passwords. But, the website said the explanation for the breach is likely malware that infected some browsers including Chrome and Firefox.
Twitter said in an official statement that its systems haven’t been breached.
“In fact, we’ve been working to help keep accounts protected by checking our data against what’s been shared from recent other password leaks,” Twitter said in
a statement.
Over a week ago, LeakedSource reported that more than 360 million records from MySpace were obtained from a hacking incident in 2013. The website has also reported that data from 167 million LinkedIn accounts were also affected from a prior hacking incident.
ZDNet said a Russian hacker named Tessa88 has claimed to be in possession of the passwords, email addresses and user names of 379 million Twitter accounts. The hacker reportedly is attempting to sell the information on the dark web for 10 bitcoins or the equivalent of $5,810.
Meanwhile, the NFL has “engaged law enforcement” to look into how its Twitter account was hacked with a post purporting that Commissioner Roger Goodell had died.
“We have engaged law enforcement to look into the matter,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Tuesday. “We are reviewing and strengthening our cyber-security measures.”
Around midday Tuesday, a post went up on the league’s official account that read: “We regret to inform our fans that our commissioner, Roger Goodell, has passed away. He was 57,” followed by a hashtag and “RIP.”
That tweet was soon deleted, as were follow-up tweets that said: “Oi, I said Roger Goodell has died. Don’t delete that tweet,” and, as other Twitter users surmised it was a hack: “OK, OK, you amateur detectives win. Good job.”
Goodell later jokingly tweeted, “Man, you leave the office for 1 day of golf” with former Bills quarterback Jim Kelly and “your own network kills you off,” followed by a hashtag and “harsh.”
TM and © Copyright 2016 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2016 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten. The Associated Press contributed to this report.— Police are looking for a man who stalked a woman from Brooklyn to Manhattan and bit her during an attempted sexual assault.
Early Monday evening, a 23-year-old woman was followed by a stranger at the Prospect Park subway station. Police said he slapped her buttocks as she entered a turnstile, and followed her onto an uptown Q train before exiting with the woman at 34th Street and Sixth Ave.
Police said the man continued to follow the woman down an escalator, grabbing her by the arms, and then biting her during a brief struggle.
The suspect fled in an unknown direction, and the victim refused medical attention.
Police have described the suspect as a black male, 23-years-old, 6’0″, 135-lbs, with brown eyes, and a bald head. He was last seen wearing a blue t-shirt, yellow shorts, black socks, and white sneakers.
Anyone with information in regards to this incident has been asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS(8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers website at http://www.nypdcrimestoppers.com or by texting tips to 274637(CRIMES) and entering TIP577.I cannot believe how amazing this gift is. I'm speechless! I haven't been able to stop playing Xbox since I opened it. Plus, it comes with a carrying case for the controller which I REALLY needed for when I play games on my phone with an Xbox controller while on the train. I'm going to spend way too many hours trying all these different buttons. It's like a whole game in itself.
It took some getting used to as far as using the back paddles, but i already started to get the hang of it and it gives a huge advantage in gameplay. The tall joysticks will come in handy in shooting games, or any time where being precise with the joysticks makes a big difference. Man, what else is there.. the nice grip, the rumble pads built into the triggers. I didn't realize a controller could be capable of so much. Oh and one small feature that I appreciate a ton: the guide button brightness can be changed. That thing is so damn bright by default. It practically blinded me whenever I would play a game or watch a shown in the dark. Not anymore!
My regular controller feels like junk now compared to this. I'm working on building my first PC and will absolutely be using it on there, with my phone, and on Xbox for many, many years.
Thank you SO much Santa!!!A Texas middle school teacher is facing felony charges after reportedly admitting to having a sexual relationship with her 13-year-old student. Alexandria Vera says the boy's family approved of the affair and were even supportive when she became pregnant. (Deirdra O'Regan/The Washington Post)
A Texas middle school teacher who was impregnated by a 13-year-old student could face up to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to aggravated sexual assault of a child.
Alexandria Vera, who was arrested in June, told police that she fell in love with one of her students after the two began a relationship through Instagram messages. The 24-year-old former eighth-grade English teacher at Stovall Middle School in Houston also said that the boy’s family was supportive of the affair.
Vera, who pleaded guilty on Wednesday, was initially charged with continuous sexual assault of a child, which carries a maximum punishment of life in prison. By pleading guilty to a lesser charge, her sentence was capped at 30 years, according to the Houston Chronicle.
She also is eligible for deferred adjudication, in which case she will be placed on probation and will have no felony on her record if she successfully completes the terms, the Houston Chronicle reported.
[Texas teacher had sex with her 8th grade English student ‘on almost a daily basis,’ police say]
WATCH: Alexandria Vera pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault. A middle school teacher, she got pregnant after sex with an 8th-grader. pic.twitter.com/Cj1khGGd4p — Asbury Park Press (@AsburyParkPress) November 18, 2016
“We’re very much hoping for deferred adjudication,” Vera’s attorney, Ricardo Rodriguez, said, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Vera told police that she met the boy during summer school in 2015. She said she initially resisted the boy’s advances until sometime last fall, when she agreed to hang out with her student.
Prosecutors say Vera and the teen had sex almost every day for nine months. She told investigators that they love each other, according to court documents. During the relationship, Vera told her neighbors that the boy was her brother, according to KHOU, a CBS affiliate.
The boy’s parents had known of the relationship since October of last year, and they accepted it, Vera told police.
A police investigation began earlier this year after the school principal received a tip about Vera. She told police that she had gotten pregnant and had an abortion after Child Protective Services questioned her about the relationship in February, according to KTRK-TV, an ABC affiliate.
[Ex-mayor charged in 4-year-old’s rape said girl was a willing participant, records say]
Alexandria Vera told investigators she had an abortion after speaking with Child Protective Services. https://t.co/meoVb07ITX — ABC13News (@ABC13News) November 17, 2016
Vera has been free on a $100,000 bail and has been wearing a GPS ankle monitor. She’s scheduled for a sentencing hearing in January.
The now-14-year-old boy, who also admitted to the sexual relationship, is in foster care and will remain there at least until August, according to KHOU. The boy’s mother also was investigated by Child Protective Services, according to media reports.
More from Morning Mix
‘Ultimate act of cowardice’: Three officers in 3 cities targeted and shot, one fatally
Police, citing ‘ongoing riot,’ use water cannons on Dakota Access protesters in freezing weather
The aftermath of the ‘Hamilton’-Trump feud turns ugly in Chicago, gets weird in CanadaNew rumours about the Batman v Superman trailer have surfaced. Reportedly, the trailer was (again!) leaked online on 4Chan and a few lucky ones got to see it before it was taken down. This time, however, reports claim that the trailer features the other members of the Justice League as well - including the suited up Aquaman.
According to a Comic Central City report, the Batman v Superman leaked trailer was allegedly posted on the /TV/ board of 4Chan and features Jason Momoa's Aquaman, Ezra Miller's the Flash and Ray Fisher's Cyborg.
"For those who didn't see the BvS trailer on /tv/ last night; YOU MISSED A LOT. The new BvS trailer was a rehash of the last one with Batman narrating the entire time however the new one had some snippets of Aquaman, Flash and Cyborg. Only Aquaman was in costume though, Ezra Miller and Cyborg are just wearing civilian clothes," states Comic Central City. (via KDramaStars)
A similar report surfaced online a couple of months ago revealing a detailed description of the alleged leaked trailer.
Meanwhile, actor Jared Leto's Joker look is definitely creating a lot of buzz around his menacing character in Suicide Squad. Fresh rumours claim to explain how Oscar winner Leto's Joker in Suicide Squad will differ from past screen portrayals of the iconic Batman villain.
"Jared wants to make sure his Joker is not only something the fans will love, but he doesn't want to step on the toes of Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger," according to an alleged inside source for Hollywood Life.
"He wants to make the character completely his own....He knows that this role may be his most difficult ever, but he is confident that he will make his version of the Joker the best. This Joker will be more cerebral and comedic than what we have seen before, nobody should expect a copycat version. It's going to be awesome!"
Check out Leto's complete transformation to The Joker, below:
And finally, here's a fan-art that comes pretty close to what Leto's final Joker could look like:Violence / Raids / Clashes / Suppression of protests / Illegal arrests — West Bank
Elderly man dies after inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli forces
QALQILIYA (Ma‘an) 2 Jan — An 85-year-old man died overnight Wednesday after inhaling excessive amounts of tear gas fired by Israeli forces in the Qalqiliya village of Kafr Qaddum, locals said, representing the first Palestinian death of 2014. The incident occurred after Israeli forces dispersed a rally in the town commemorating the 49th anniversary of the founding of the Fatah movement. The rally marched towards the entrance of the town before Israeli troops showered the area with tear gas. A canister landed in the home of Said Jasir, causing him to suffocate. He was taken to the Al-Arabi hospital in Nablus where he was pronounced dead overnight. [ISM: In recent weeks there has been a steady escalation of night raids, increasingly violent repression of Friday demonstrations, flying checkpoints and seemingly arbitrary arrests. In the past month alone there have been more than twenty night raids on houses in the village.]
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=662049
Minor shot near Bethlehem, activists arrested
IMEMC — [Wed Jan 1] by Chris Carlson — A Palestinian minor was shot and injured by Israeli forces, Wednesday, in ‘Aida refugee camp, north of Bethlehem. The Palestinian News & Info Agency (WAFA) reports that, according to security sources, live bullets were fired toward Palestinian minors in the camp, shooting a 14-year-old in the foot. He was transferred to a hospital, for treatment, where his condition was described as moderate.
http://www.imemc.org/article/66660
Israeli forces disperse weekly protests across West Bank
[with photos] BETHLEHEM (Ma‘an) 3 Jan — Israeli forces injured two Palestinians and detained one after protests broke out in three West Bank towns on Friday. The weekly protests against the Israeli occupation and the separation wall were dispersed by Israeli forces with rubber bullets and tear gas in Bil‘in, Kafr Qaddum, and al-Ma‘sara. [details follow concerning each town]
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=662378
Video: Heavily armed Israeli occupation soldiers arrest Jerusalem girl
Electronic Intifada 3 Jan by Ali Abunimah — Instagram user @zalameh (@BDS4Justice on Twitter) captured these dramatic images and videos of heavily armed Israeli forces arresting a Palestinian girl in eastern occupied Jerusalem’s Old City on Friday afternoon. In an email to The Electronic Intifada, @zalameh, a resident of Jerusalem, gave his eyewitness account of the incident: “This afternoon after work I headed to the Old City, I entered through Damascus Gate. Right at the entrance I saw more commotion than usual so I headed close to where people were congregating. There were about 8 soldiers (as I counted) surrounding this girl and handcuffing her, she was quiet but her eyes showed fear, she seemed bewildered and was offering no resistance. It all seemed surreal to see all these soldiers armed to the teeth overwhelming this child and the soldiers were behaving as if they had caught a dangerous criminal. The soldiers did not want people around, especially as they had their phone cameras out, and started pushing them away. Despite being handcuffed and completely restrained, two soldiers were holding her arms each. She was wearing a sweater saying “I <3 Palestine.”… While it is unclear if it is referring to the same incident, The Jerusalem Post also reported today that a “16-year-old Arab girl attempted to stab a border police officer with a knife near Nablus Gate in Jerusalem on Friday. The suspect is a resident of the Jabal al-Mukaber neighborhood in east Jerusalem, police said.” The newspaper claimed that “Security personnel succeeded in disarming the woman and bringing her under control but in the process, one of them was injured lightly in the leg. The injured man received medical treatment at the scene.” Doubtful account However, @zalameh casts doubt on this version of events if indeed it refers to the same incident. He writes: First, I saw no soldier injured. I am confident I came there just as she was arrested and I saw no one being taken out from Damascus Gate as I entered. That would have been obvious and second, it is common for Israelis to treat any form of reaction from Palestinians as an “attack.” And what Israel often calls stabbing could be with anything, even if the girl had a go at a soldier with a pen, they would have called it a “stabbing attempt.” “A more credible version would be that she lost her temper after a particular provocation or humiliation, which for those who live in Jerusalem is a daily reality and this triggered the arrest,” @zalameh added.
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/video-heavily-armed-israeli-occupation-soldiers-arrest-jerusalem-girl
Soldiers kidnap a young woman in Jerusalem
IMEMC 4 Jan [Fri Jan 3] Israeli soldiers kidnapped a young Palestinian woman in Bab Al-‘Amoud, in occupied East Jerusalem, allegedly after she tried to stab an Israeli soldier. According to Israeli Police Spokeswoman for Arab Media, Luba Samri, a teenage young Palestinian woman, identified as Dima Mohammad Sawahra, 16 years of age, tried to stab a soldier, and that one soldier was injured in the legs while trying to arrest her. Sawahra was moved to a Police station in occupied Jerusalem, and is currently under interrogation. So far, the Israeli Police does not believe any Palestinian group planned that incident.
http://www.imemc.org/article/66680
Israel raids on West Bank homes condemned
Al Jazeera 2 Jan — Human rights groups have reported a rise in Israeli military training exercises being held in Palestinian towns and villages. Israel was condemned by the groups on Thursday, after reports of soldiers taking up positions in Palestinians homes during mock raids in the occupied West Bank and Palestinians being detained for hours without explanation. The criticism came as US Secretary of State John Kerry was due to arrive in the Middle East on Thursday, hoping to seal a long-elusive peace deal between Israel and Palestinians … Human rights groups including Breaking The Silence said the Israeli military’s exercises in the West Bank broke the law and endangered civilians. “I’m not sure as an Israeli would agree that somebody would do it in my street, to raid my house as part of a training,” Breaking The Silence’s Shai Davidovitch told Al Jazeera. “That’s why I think it’s wrong.”
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/01/rights-groups-condemn-israel-raids-homes-2014122582145919.html
Clashes for two days in the Palestinian city of Hebron
HEBRON (ISM Khalil Team) 3 Jan — At approximately 11.30am yesterday morning, Israeli forces detained a 13-year-old boy at Bab Al-Baladiyye in Khalil (Hebron). After a short period of time the young boy was released and a group of Israeli soldiers invaded the old city of Hebron, harassing residents and demanding identification from a number of Palestinians. The group of Israeli soldiers started to walk down New Al-Shallalah Street detaining a 14-year-old Palestinian for an unknown period of time before releasing him shortly after international activists arrived. Israeli forces continued to harass people in the area before heading towards Bab Al-Zawiye, the city center, where residents had started to gather after the anniversary party for Fatah’s founding ended. The Palestinian youth present reacted to these series of events by throwing stones at the Israeli soldiers. The stone throwing and military presence began a clash between Israeli forces and Palestinian youth …The clashes continued for many hours and became more violent as Israeli soldiers and border police positioned themselves at checkpoint 56 [an entrance to H2] and on nearby rooftops. Israeli forces fired a large amount of stun grenades, rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas grenades and canisters. Many shops and businesses where forced to close because of the tear gas and the violent interruption in the city. One Palestinian was shot with unknown ammunition as Israeli soldiers were sniping demonstrators from various points in the city. Once shot, the young man lost consciousness, he was carried away from the clash and taken to a nearby hospital … Today, Friday 3rd January, clashes began at approximately 2pm …
http://palsolidarity.org/2014/01/clashes-for-two-days-in-the-palestinian-city-of-hebron/
Several Palestinians injured by army fire in Hebron
IMEMC 4 Jan — [Fri Jan 3] Palestinian medical sources have reported that several Palestinians have been injured by Israeli army fire in Beit Ummar town, north of Hebron, in the southern part of the occupied West Bank. The Ma‘an News Agency has reported that several residents suffered the effects of teargas inhalation in the Aseeda area, in Beit Ummar, and that the soldiers fired rounds of live ammunition and rubber-coated metal bullets. Mohammad Awad, spokesperson of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Beit Ummar, said several residents suffered serious effects of gas inhalation. Awad added that an explosion occurred near an Israeli military tower, at the northern entrance of Beit Ummar, and that the soldiers began firing rounds of live ammunition before more army jeeps arrived at the scene and chased residents in the region, leading to clashes with them. Earlier on Friday, an Israeli military jeep caused damage to a Palestinian car near the town. Awad said that while the jeep was driving from the Halhoul area, towards Beit Ummar, one of its wheels was detached and struck a car, causing excessive damage.
http://www.imemc.org/article/66681
Soldiers kidnap a Palestinian in Jerusalem
IMEMC [Thursday at dawn, Jan 2] Israeli soldiers invaded Al-‘Ezariyya town, southeast of occupied East Jerusalem, and kidnapped one Palestinian. Local sources have reported that the soldiers violently broke into several homes and searched them, before kidnapping a young man identified as Fadi Tamimi.
The sources added that clashes took place late on Wednesday at night in the Ras Kabsa area, between Al-Ezariyya and Abu Dis, after the army invaded them. The soldiers fired several gas bombs, concussion grenades and rubber-coated metal bullets.
On Wednesday night, several Israeli military jeeps kidnapped a student of Polytechnic University in the Hebron district, in the southern part of the West Bank. The kidnapped Palestinian, Moneer Dofesh, was kidnapped in Nomra area, in Hebron, and was moved to an unknown destination.
Also on Wednesday night, soldiers kidnapped at least 15 Palestinian children and a young man in the Tabaqa village, south of Doura, in the southern West Bank district of Hebron.
http://www.imemc.org/article/66669
Two Palestinians kidnapped in Bethlehem
IMEMC — [Thurs Jan 2] Undercover forces of the Israeli army have invaded the West Bank city of Bethlehem, kidnapping two Palestinians. Local sources have reported that undercover soldiers, driving a local Palestinian car, infiltrated the Jerusalem-Hebron road in Bethlehem, and broke into a shopping center before kidnapping Sajed Abu Khashaba, 20. The kidnapped Palestinian works at a local store in the shopping center; the soldiers also confiscated his mobile phone.
Furthermore, the army invaded Saff Street, in Bethlehem, kidnapped Ahmad Ezzat, 33, and confiscated his phone.
Eyewitnesses said that the soldiers also fired rounds of live ammunition and gas bombs, in the area.
http://www.imemc.org/article/66670
IOF soldiers raid Jenin; settlers beat up boy in nearby village
JENIN (PIC) 2 Jan — Israeli occupation forces (IOF) stormed Jenin city on Wednesday night and occupied the rooftop of a citizen’s house to monitor movement of citizens. Local sources said that the soldiers occupied the rooftop of Majd Tobasi’s house for hours after roaming the streets of Marah area and Jabariyat suburb.
Meanwhile, the sources said that Jewish settlers from Haramish settlement, built on Ya‘bad village land south of Jenin, assaulted and beat up a Palestinian boy, Ahmed Abu Ermaila, on Wednesday night. They said that the IOF soldiers and settlers were deployed in the vicinity of Ya‘bad on the same night and combed nearby areas.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk/
Israeli settlers terrorize family in Hebron
HEBRON (WAFA) 4 Jan — A number of Israeli settlers Saturday terrorized a Palestinian family living in Shuhada Street in the Israeli-controlled area of Hebron after breaking into their house and badgering the family, according to the house owner Zaidan Sharabati. He told WAFA that nine settlers from nearby Beit Hadassah and Dabouya settlements located in the old city section of the southern West Bank city of Hebron broke into his house and harassed his family while cursing them before they ran away. He said his children were terrified by this incident. It was not clear if the Israeli police have arrested the culprits.
http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=23958
Specter of settlers’ return looms over Hebron neighborhood
HEBRON (AFP) 1 Jan — Before they were evicted, the Israeli settlers threw bottles of urine, attacked children and poisoned a horse, according to Palestinian residents in Hebron- who now fear their former neighbors will return. When Israeli soldiers evicted the settlers in 2008 and took over the Rajabi building in the West Bank city — which is still home to hundreds of radical Israeli settlers — even the daily drag of inspections seemed civilized by comparison. But the nightmare looks set to resume for Palestinians living near here and another flashpoint property called the Abu Rajab house, both of which have been claimed by settlers in the heart of the tense city. The settlers were forced out of the Abu Rajab house last year, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently ordered they be allowed back in after an Israeli soldier was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper. And Israel’s Supreme Court is set to rule on the ownership dispute over the Rajabi building, with a verdict in the settlers’ favor likely to bring back the violence and abuse.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=661934
NGO accuses Israel of torturing Palestinian children during winter storm
Jerusalem Post 31 Dec by Yonah Jeremy Bob — An NGO on Tuesday accused the state of torturing Palestinian children suspected of minor crimes, including placing them in outdoor cages during the worst of the recent storm, and of other acts designed to terrify the children. The practice of placing the children in outdoor cages was halted when Justice Minister Tzipi Livni learned of it and immediately telephoned Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch, telling him to end the practice … According to the Public Defender’s Office, it learned of the issue during a standard visit to prison complex in Ramle at the height of the storm, with the children enduring freezing temperatures and inclement weather outside a transit facility. The children were to be held outside for a number of hours overnight after their arrest until they were to be brought to court in the early morning … It was unclear who within the Prisons Service initiated the practice, why it was initiated or who decided to continue it despite the adverse weather conditions, but the service responded that since it had received criticism the situation had been improved.
The Public Committee Against Torture said that the practice was just one example of the torture and ill treatment of Palestinian children by law enforcement. In that regard, later Tuesday the Knesset committee said that the manner of arrest and detention conditions of Palestinian children was violating Israeli law for dealing with children. The committee also complained that the state “lacked data” for answering the panel’s questions about the frequency and scope of those practices it objected to such as midnight arrests. Yesh Atid MK Adi Kol sounded a note of exasperation, saying “We do not need to throw a child out of his bed at night.”
http://www.jpost.com/National-News/NGO-accuses-Israel-of-torturing-Palestinian-children-during-winter-storm-336685
Update: Israel cages Palestinian children in outdoor holding pens during freezing storm
Mondoweiss 2 Jan by Annie Robbins — (Updated with new graphic from Carlos Latuff “A #cartoon to @Mondoweiss – #Israel cages Palestinian children in outdoor during freezing storm”):
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/01/palestinian-children-freezing.html
PCHR Weekly Report: 2 elderly men dead, 9 civilians wounded by Israel troops this week [26 Dec-1 Jan]
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one,” Daud says. He drops the other back in the bag, holds up the other to let her see it.
“You’ve already had your share,” Sarah says.
His pale eyes flicker in his dark face. “Okay,” he says. “Uno pinchazo, hey.”
His need is too strong. She looks down and shakes her head. “One,” she agrees. “Okay.” She watches as he loads the injector and dials the dosage— a high dosage, she knows, since he only has the one. She resists the urge to check the injector, knowing that someday if he goes on this way he’ll put himself in a coma, but knowing how much he’d resent her concern. Sarah watches as the endorphin hits his head, as he lies back and sighs, his twitchy nervousness gone.
She takes the injector and frees the vial, then puts it in the plastic bag. There is a half-smile on Daud’s face as he looks up at her. “Thanks, Sarah,” he says.
“I love you,” she says.
He closes his eyes and strops his back on the sofa like a cat. His throat makes strange whimpering noises. She takes the bag and walks into her room and throws the bag on her bed. A wave of sadness whispers through her veins like a drug of melancholy. Daud will die before long, and she can’t stop it.
Once it had been Sarah who stood between him and life, now it is the endorphins that keep him insulated from the things that want to touch him. Their father had been crazy and violent and Sarah had fought him as long as she could stand it. Half her scars were Daud’s by right: she had suffered them on his behalf, shielding him with her body. The madman’s beatings had taught her to fight back, had made her hard and quick, but she couldn’t be there all the time and the old man had sensed weakness in Daud and found it. She herself hadn’t been able to stand it, and when she was fourteen she’d run with the first boy who’d promised her a place free from pain: two years later, when she’d bought her way out of her first contract and come back for him, Daud had been shattered beyond repair, the needle already in his arm. She’d led him to the new house where she worked— it was the only place she had— and there he’d learned to earn his living, as she had learned in her own time. He is broken still, and Sarah knows that as long as they are in the streets there is no way of healing him.
If she hadn’t cracked, if she hadn’t run away, she might have been able to protect him. She won’t crack again.
She returns to the other room and sees Daud lying on the sofa, one sandal hanging with the straps tangled between his toes. Jackstraw is sitting next to him on the sofa and drinking one of his beers. He glances up.
“You look like you’re limping,” he says. “Would you like me to rub your legs?”
“No,” Sarah says quickly, and then realizes she is being too sharp. “No,” she says again, with a smile. “Thank you. But it’s a bone bruise. If you touched me I’d scream.”
ARTIFICIAL DREAMS
The Plastic Girl is a hustler’s idea of the good life: plush and chrome and a lot of dark booths in the back where business can be done. There is a room for zonedance, and there are headsets that plug you into euphoric states or pornography or whatever it is you need and are afraid to shoot into your veins. Orbital pharmaceutical companies provide the effects free, as advertising for their products. There are dancers on a mirrored bar in the back, a bar equipped with arcade games so that if you win, a connection snaps in one of the dancer’s garments and it falls off. If you win big all the clothes fall off all the dancers at once.
Sarah is in the big front room: brassy music, red leather booths, brass ornaments. She does not, and will probably never, rate the quiet room in the back, all brushed aluminum the dark wood that might have been the last mahogany tree in Southeast Asia— that room is for the big boys who run this fast and dangerous world, and though there isn’t a sign that says NO WOMEN ALLOWED there might as well be. Sarah is an independent contractor and rates a certain amount of respect, but in the end she is still meat for hire, though on a more elevated plane than once she was.
But still, the red room is nice. There are colorful holograms, colors and helixes like modelled DNA, floating just above eye level, casting their variegated light through the crystal and sparkling liquor held in the patrons’ hands, and there are sockets at every table for comp decks so that the patrons can keep up with their portfolios, and there are girls with reconstructed breasts and faces who come to each table in their tight plastic corsets, bring you your drink, and watch with identical and very white smiles as you put your credit spike into their tabulator and tap in a generous tip with your fingernail.
Sarah is ready for the meet with Cunningham, wearing a navy blue jacket guaranteed to protect her against kinetic violence of up to 900 foot-pounds per square inch and trousers good for 750. She has invested some of the endorphins and bought the time of a pair of her peers. They are walking loose about the bar, ready to keep Cunningham or his friends off her back if she needs it. She knows she needs a clear head and has kept the endorphin dose down. Pain is making her edgy, and she still can’t sit. She stands at a small table and sips her rum and lime, waiting.
And then Cunningham is there, looking much as he was before, and is to be later. Bland face, brown eyes, brown hair, brown suit. A whispery voice that speaks of clean places she has never been, places bright and soft against the black and pure diamond. A body that she had once thought of as a coiled spring, but which later she comes to think of as a precision weapon with a bullet up the spout and the safety lever, just barely, holding back the firing pin.
“Okay, Cunningham,” she says. “Business.”
Cunningham’s eyes flicker to the mirror behind her. “Friends?” he asks.
“I don’t know you.”
“You’ve called the Hetman?” She nods.
“He was complimentary,” she says, “but you’re not working for him, he’s paying you a favor, maybe. So I’m cautious.”
“Understandable.” He takes a comp deck out of an inner pocket and plugs it into the table. A pale amber screen in the depths of the dark tabletop lights up, displaying a row of figures.
“We’re offering you this in dollars,” he says. Sarah feels a touch of metal on her nerves, on her tongue. The score, she thinks, the real thing.
“Dollars?” she says automatically. “Get serious.”
“Gold?” Another set of figures appears. She takes a sip of rum.
“Too heavy.”
“Stock. Or drugs. Take your pick.”
“What kind of stock? What kind of drugs?”
“Your choice.”
“Polymyxin-phenildorphin Nu. There’s a shortage right now.”
Cunningham frowns. “If you like. But there’ll be a lot of it coming onto the market in another three weeks or so.”
Her eyes challenge him. “Did you bring it down from orbit with you?” she asks.
His face fails so much as to twitch. “No,” he says. “But if I were you I’d try Chloramphenildorphin. Pfizer is arranging an artificial scarcity that will last several months. Here are the figures. Pharmacological quality, fresh from orbit.”
Sarah looks at the glowing amber numbers and nods. “Satisfactory,” she says. “Half in advance.”
“Ten percent now,” Cunningham says. “Thirty on completion of training. The rest on completion of the contract, whether you succeed or not.”
She looks up at one of the bar’s moving holograms, the colors clean and bright, as pure as if seen through a vacuum. A vacuum, she thinks. The stock offer isn’t bad, but she can do more with the drugs. Cunningham is offering her the drugs at their Orbital value, where they are made and where the cost is almost nothing. The street value is far more, and with it she can buy more stock than the amount they;re offering. Ten per cent of that figure is more than she’d made last night, when she’d gone after the snagboy.
To get into the Orbitals you have to have skills they need, skills she can never acquire. There is another way: they can’t refuse someone who owned enough shares. They are sucking up all Earth’s remaining wealth, and if you help them and buy up enough stock they might free you from the mud forever. This is almost enough, she calculates. Almost enough for a pair of tickets to the top of the gravity well.
She brings her drink to her lips. “Let’s say a quarter now,” she says. “And then I’ll let you buy me a drink, and you can tell me just what you want me to do to earn it.”
Cunningham turns and signals to one of the smiling corset girls. “It’s very simple,” he says, and he looks at her with his ice-cold eyes. “We want you to make someone fall in love with you. Just for a night.”
IS YOUR LOVER LOOKING FOR SOMEONE YOUNGER?
YOU CAN BE THAT SOMEONE!
“The Princess is about eighty years old,” Cunningham says. The hologram he gives Sarah is of a pale blonde girl of about twenty, dressed in a kind of ruffled blouse that exposes her rounded shoulders, the hollows of her clavicles. She has Daud’s watery blue eyes and freckles above her breasts. She projects an air of vulnerable innocence.
“We think he was originally from Russia,” Cunningham goes on, “but the Korolev Bureau has always been secretive and we don’t have a complete list of their senior staff and designers. When he rated the new body he asked to be a woman. He’s important enough so that they gave it to him, but they gave him a demotion— they rotate out all their old people to make way for the new. She’s doing courier duty now.”
Not unusual, Sarah thinks. These days you can get pornography read straight into the brain, plenty of chances to sample whatever pleasures you like and then, if rich enough, getting yourself a new body to suit your tastes. But the technology of personality transfer is imperfect— sometimes bits get left behind, memories, abilities, traits that might be useful. A progression of bodies can mean progressive senility. If you get a new body and aren’t so powerful you can’t be moved, you often get demoted until you can prove yourself.
“What’s her new name?” she asks.
“She’ll tell you, I’m sure. Let’s just call her Princess for now.” Sarah shrugs. There are half a dozen imbecilic security rules in this operation, and she guesses that most of them are simply to test her capacity for obedience.
“Her new body doesn’t seem to have altered her sexual orientation, just his manner of expressing it,” Cunningham says. “Princess has exhibited some characteristic behaviors since she’s started her new job. When she’s on the ground she likes to go slumming. Find herself a working girl— sometimes a dirtgirl, most often a girljock— and take her home for a night or two. She wants a pet, but a dangerous one. Not too clean. A little rough. Not too removed from the street. But civilized enough to know how to please. Not a thatch.”
“That’s me?” Sarah asks, with no surprise. “Her new pet?”
“We’ve researched you. You were a licensed prostitute for five years. And rated highly by your employers.”
“Five and a half,” she says. “And not with girls.”
“He’s a man, really. An old man. Why should it be hard for you?”
Sarah looks at the blonde freckled girl in the hologram, trying to find the old Russian in those eyes. The look that was always the same, wanting her to be some piece of private fantasy, real but not too real, orgasms genuine but never with genuine passion. The Plastic Girl, an object for things that grew hidden in their minds, something they could get rid of quickly and never have to take home. They were upset, somehow, if you didn’t understand their fantasy right away. After a while she had got so that she could.
She looks at the picture. No different from all the other old men, she thinks. Not really. Power they want, over their own flesh and another’s. Pay not so much for sex, but for power over sex, over the thing that threatens to control them. And so they take their passion and use it to control others. She understood control all right.
She looks up at Cunningham. “Did they give you a new body as well?” she asks. “Guaranteed inconspicuous? Or did you have Firebud make you over, so that you had no style at all?”
He gazes at her steadily, the same calm gaze. She can’t seem to touch it, or him. “I can’t say,” he says.
“How long have you worked for them?” she asks. “You were a mudboy once— you don’t have the look that they do. But you work for them now. Is that what they promised you? A new body when you get old? And if you die on one of these jobs here in the mud, a nice funeral with the corporate anthem sung over your body?”
“Something like that,” he agrees.
“Got you heart and soul, have they?” she asks.
“That’s how they want it.” Dryly, accepting. He knows the price of his ticket.
“Control,” she says. “You understand that. You are controlled by people who worship control, and so you control yourself well. But you’re a pressure cooker, and the steam is just under the surface. Do you go slumming in your off hours, like Princess? To the clubs, to the houses? Are you one of my old customers?” She gazes into his expressionless eyes. “You could be,” she says, “I never remembered faces.”
“As it happens, I’m not,” he says. “I never saw you before I was given this assignment.” He is beginning to look a little out of patience. Sarah grins.
“Don’t worry,” she says, and throws the holo of Princess on the table. “I’ll do your owners proud.”
“I’m sure you will,” he says. “They won’t have it any other way.”
IN THE ZONE/YES
Like Times Square neon the amber LED tracks across the upper limits of Sarah’s vision, just where the shadow of her brows would be.
PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING...
The Aujourd’Oui is Princess’s favorite spot, but there are others. Sarah should be ready to move at need.
The washroom at the Aujourd’Oui is a conglomeration of mirrors and soft white lights, red flock on the gold wallpaper, bronze water spouts above the sinks, chromed dispensers offering tissue for the adjustment of makeup. Sarah shoulders through the door and a pair of dirtgirls standing in front of the mirrors glance at her. There is envy in their glance, and a kind of desperate awe, and then the eyes turn self-consciously back to the mirrors. The satin jacket represents something they want and will most likely never have, the freedom of the white crane to climb into the sky amid the silver glitter of stars. Sarah is suddenly aware of the sound of sobbing, magnified by the low ceiling, the hard edges of the room. The dirtgirls’ eyes stay fixed in their own reflections as she passes and steps into a stall.
It is the girl in the next stall who is weeping, pausing only to draw massive shuddering breaths before bringing the air out again past the tortured muscles of the throat. It hurts to cry that hard, Sarah knows. The ribs feels as if they are breaking. The stall shudders to the impact as the other girl, apparently, drives her head against its wall, and Sarah knows that it is pain the girl is seeking, perhaps to drive out pain of another kind.
Sarah tries not to get between people and what they need.
To the sound of the impacts Sarah takes her inhaler from her belt, puts it to her nose, and triggers it. There is a brief hiss of compressed gas. Sarah throws her head back, feeling the rush of the drug. The stall quakes. Sarah inhales again, using the other nostril, and she feels her nerves go warm and then cold, the hair on her forearms prickling. Her lips peel back from her teeth, and she feels at once abnormally sensitive and abnormally hard, as if her skin is made of razor blades that can feel every mote of dust. She needed the bite of the drug, needed it to give herself that extra piece of conviction. She hadn’t mentioned it to Cunningham— the hell with him— she would play it her own way...
PRINCESS MOVING PRINCESS MOVING...
The other girl’s weeping is a whining, grating sound, like a saw on bone, syncopated with hysterical crashing as she smashes again and again into the divider. Sarah can see flecks of blood daubing the floor of the next stall. She opens her door and sweeps through the room, past the dirtgirls whose eyes stand out pale amid their rimming of kohl as they gaze at each other and wonder what to do about the sobbing casualty. PRINCESS AUJOURDOUI REPEAT OUJOURDOUI AM SWITCHING POLICE TRANSMISSIONS GOOD HUNTING CUNNINGHAM.
Sarah blinks as she stepped into the darkness of the club, feeling the drug impelling her limbs to motion, and she rides the drug like a jock on the flaming roman candle of a booster, climbing for the edge of the sky and still in control. The corners of the room, the dancers and fixtures, flare like liquid- crystal kaleidescopes.
And then Princess comes, and Sarah’s motion freezes. Princess is surrounded by dirtboy muscle but she stands out clearly in the dark— there is an aura about her, a glow. She has the Look as none of them have, a soft radiance that speaks of luxury, soft and carefree joys, freedom even from gravity. A life even the jocks can’t share. It seems as if there is a pause in the music, as the room inhales in mutual awe. Two hundred eyes can see the glow and a hundred mouths, hungry for it, begin to salivate. Sarah feels her body tingle, flares of nerve-warmth at her fingertips. She is ready.
Sarah gives a soft private laugh, as if her triumph were already a fact, and walks long-legged across the darkened bar as Firebud has taught her, swinging her broad shoulders in counterpoint to her hips, insinuant animal style. She gives a grin to the muscle and holds her hands palms-out to show them she carries no weapons, and then Princess stands before her.
She is a good four inches shorter and Sarah looks down at her, hands cocked on her hips, challenging. Princess’ soft blonde hair is worn long, ringlets playing with her cheeks, her shoulders. Her eyes are circled with vast blooms of purple and yellow makeup, to look like bruises, making public the secret wish of a translucent white face that has never known pain. Her mouth is a deep violet, another laceration. She is wearing a creamy something that matches her blue, innocent eyes. Sarah cocks her head back and laughs low, baring her teeth, and thinks of the sounds hyenas make on the hunt.
“Dance with me, Princess,” she says to the wide cornflower of her eyes. “I am your wildest dreams.”
PRACTICE CREATES PERFECTION
PERFECTION CREATES POWER
POWER CONQUERS LAW
LAW CREATES HEAVEN
a helpful reminder from Toshiba
Nicole has a cigaret in the corner of her mouth and wears a jacket of cracked brown leather. She has dark blonde hair that reaches down her back in tawny strands, and long deep-grey eyes that look up at Sarah without a flicker.
“You can’t hesitate for a second, Sarah,” Cunningham says. “Not even the fragment of a second. Princess will know it and know there’s something wrong. Nicole is here for that. You are to practice with her.”
Sarah looks at Nicole for a moment of surprise and then barks a laugh. Anger bubbles in her whitely, coolly, like flares on the night horizon. “I suppose you plan to watch, Cunningham,” she says.
He nods. “Yes,” he says. “I and Firebud. You seemed uncertain at first about making love to a woman.” Nicole draws slowly on her cigaret and says nothing.
“Make a vid record, perhaps?” Sarah asks. “Give me post-game critique?” She curls her lip. “Is that your particular pleasure, Cunningham?” she demands. “Does watching this kind of vid keep your demons away?”
“We’ll destroy the vids together, if you like. Afterward.” Cunningham says.
Sarah has been two months in the training, has had her body altered and surgical work done, and all along she has been their willing dirtgirl. But however many candidates had been in Cunningham’s files she is sure she’s the only hope now, the only charge Cunningham will have shaped by the time Princess next comes down from orbit, and because she is the only one she knows she has power of her own. They will have to go with her or the project will fail, and it is time they knew it.
She shakes her head slowly. “I don’t think so, Cunningham,” she says. “I’ll be ready on the night, but I’m not now and I’m not going to be. Not for you, not for your cameras.”
Cunningham does not reply. He seems to squint a little, as if suddenly the light is stronger. Nicole watches Sarah with smoky eyes, then shakes her long hair and speaks.
“Just dance with me, then.” Her words come a little too abruptly, as if impelled by some form of desperation, and Sarah wonders what she has been promised, how she has been made vulnerable to them. When she speaks her voice gives her away; it is so much younger than her pose. “Just dance a little,” she says. “It’ll be all right.”
Sarah turns her gaze from Cunningham to Nicole and back, then nods. “Will a few dances satisfy you, Cunningham?” she asks. “Or do we end the program where we stand?”
His jaw muscles tighten, and for a moment Sarah thinks the business is done, that it’s over. Then he nods, still facing her.
“Yes,” he says. “If it has to be that way.”
“That’s how it has to be,” she says.t There is a moment of silence, then Cunningham nods again, as if to himself, and turns away. Nicole gives a nervous smile, wanting to please, not knowing who is her ticket to whatever it is she needs. Cunningham walks to the sound deck and presses a switch. Music buffets the walls. He turns back and folds his arms, waiting.
Nicole closes her eyes and shrugs out of her jacket. Either they have gone out of their way to find a woman of Princess’s build or they have been lucky. Sarah watches as Nicole sways her body to the music, the Plastic Girl, waiting blind to take an impression.
She steps forward and takes the girl’s hands in her own.
DELTA THREE EMERGENCY ATTEMPTED SUICIDE AUJOURD’OUI EMERGENCY
Deep in her zone, Sarah shakes her head to clear the sweat from her eyes and feels the drug biting her veins. Princess has been her partner all night. She leaps and spins and Princess watches with gleaming eyes, admiring. She feels like the crane on her back, arms stretching out to fly on pinions of purest silver. Sarah changes zones and Princess follows, letting her give a name to their motion, their liquid pattern. She is bringing Princess in closer until, like a wave, she can fall upon her from her crest of foaming white.
There is an intrusion into the zone, an attempted alteration in the pattern. Sarah whirls, an elbow digging deep into ribs, the zoneboy doubling with the impact. She slices at his neck with the sword hand and the boy flies from the zone whimpering. Princess is watching, rapt with glowing admiration. Sarah steps to her and catches her about the waist, and they spin like skaters on the edge of sharpened blades.
“Am I the danger that you want?” she asks. The blue eyes give an answer. I know you, old man, Sarah thinks in triumph, and bends her head to devour the violet lips, feasting like a raptor on her prey. The eyes of Princess widen, held in Sarah’s gaze. Her lips taste of salt, and blood.
TAMPA’S TOTALS OVERNITE, AS OF 8 THIS MORNING, 12 FOUND DEAD—
LUCKY WINNERS COLLECT AT ODDS OF FIVE TO THREE
Cunningham’s car hisses through the night on speed-blurred wheels. Holograms slide past the windows in neon array. Sarah watches the back of the driver’s neck as it swells from its collar. “It’ll be best if you go alone to the club,” Cunningham says. “Princess may send some of her people ahead, and you don’t want to be seen with anyone.”
Sarah nods. He’s given these instructions before and she can recite them word for word, even do a fair imitation of the whispery monotone. She nods to show she’s listening. Earlier this afternoon she’d collected the second payment of chloramphenildorphin and her mind was occupied chiefly with ways of putting it on the street.
“Sarah,” he says, and reaches into a pocket. “I want you to have this. Just in case.” His hand comes up with a small aerosol bottle.
“Yes?” she asks. She sprays it on the back of her hand, touches it, sniffs.
“Silicon lubricant,” he says. “The scent is right, and should last for hours. Use it in the washroom if you find that you aren’t really... attracted to her.”
Sarah caps the bottle and holds it out to him. “I don’t plan for it to go that far,” she says.
He shakes his head. “Just in case,” he says. “We don’t know about what happens when you go behind her walls.”
She shrugs and puts it in her belt pouch. She rests her reshaped jaw on her hand and stares out the window, the hologram adverts reflecting in her dark eyes, until the car slides to a stop at the door of her apartment.
She reaches for the latch and opens it, steps out. The heat of the outside comes in like a smothering blanket, and she can feel the sweat springing up on her forehead. Cunningham sits huddled in his seat, somehow smaller than he had been. Up until now, until the firing of his shaped charge, he’d been in control— but now he’d committed her to action and all he was able to do is watch the result and hope he’d calculated the ballistics correctly. His jaw muscles twitch in a tight smile and he raises a hand.
“Thanks,” she says, knowing he’s wished her luck without actually risking a curse by saying it, and she turns away and breathes out and feels a lightness in her body and heart, as if the gravity was somehow lessened. All she has left is the job. No more pleasing Cunningham, no more rules or training, no more listening to Firebud criticizing the very way she walks, the way she holds her head. All that is behind.
The apartment is splashed with video color and she knows Daud is home. He’s cleared the coffee table from the center of the room and is doing his exercises, the freeweights in his hands, the burning holograms outlining his naked body, his hairless genitals. She kisses his cheek.
“Dinner?” she asks.
“I’m going with Jackstraw. He wants me to meet someone.”
“Someone new?”
“Yes. It’s a lot of money.” He drops the weights and lowers himself to the floor, begins strapping another set of weights to his ankles. She stands over him with a frown.
“How much?” she asks.
He gives her a quick glance, green laserfire winking from his eyewhites, then he looks down. His voice is directed to the floor. “Eight thousand,” he says.
“That’s a lot,” she says.
He nods and stretches his back on the ground, raising his legs against the strain of the weights. He points his toes and she can see the muscles taut on the tops of his thighs. She slips out of her shoes and flexes her toes in the carpet.
“What does he want for it?” she asks. Daud shrugs. Sarah crouches and looks down at him. She feels a tightness in her throat.
She repeats her question.
“Jackstraw will be in the next room,” he says. “If anything goes wrong he’ll know.”
“He’s a thatch, isn’t he?”
She can see the adam’s apple bob as Daud swallows. He nods silently. She takes a breath and watches him strain against the weights. Then he sits up. His eyes are cold.
“You don’t have to do this,” she says.
“It’s a lot of money,” he repeats.
“Tomorrow my job will be over,” she says. “It’ll pay enough for a long time, almost enough for a pair of tickets out.”
He shakes his head, then springs to his feet and turns his back. He walks toward the shower. “I don’t want your money,” he says. “Your tickets, either.”
“Daud,” she says. He whirls around and she can see his anger.
“Your job!” he spits. “You think I don’t know what it is you do?”
She rises from her crouch, and for a moment she can see fear in her eyes. Fear of her? A wedge of doubt enters her mind.
“You know what I do, yes,” she says. “You also know why.”
“Because some man went thatch once,” he says. “And because when you got loose you killed him and liked it. I know the stories on the street.”
She feels a constriction in her chest. She shakes her head slowly. “No,” she says. “It’s for us, Daud. To get us out, into the orbitals.” She comes up to him to touch him, and he flinches. She drops her hand. “Where it’s clean, Daud,” she says. “Where we’re not in the street, because there isn’t a street.”
Daud gives a contemptuous laugh. “There isn’t a street there?” he asks. “So what will we do, Sarah? Punch code in some little office?” He shakes his head. “No, Sarah,” he says. “We’d do what we’ve always done. But it will be for them, not for us.”
“No,” she says. “It’ll be different. Something we haven’t known. Something finer.”
“You should see your eyes when you say that,” Daud says. “Like you’ve just taken uno pinchazo. Like that kind of hope is your drug, and you’re hooked on it.” He looks at her soberly, all his anger gone. “No, Sarah,” he says. “I know what I am, and what you are. I don’t want your hope, or your tickets. Especially not tickets with blood on them.” He turns away again, and her answer comes quick and angry, striking for his weakness, for the heart. Like a weasel.
“You don’t mind stealing my bloody endorphins, I’ve noticed,” she says. His back stiffens for a moment, then he walks on. Heat stings Sarah’s eyes. She blinks back her tears. “Daud,” she says. “Don’t go with a thatch. Please.”
He pauses at the door, hand on the jamb. “What’s the difference?” he asks. “Going with a thatch, or living with you?”
The door closes and Sarah can only stand and fight a helpless war with her anger and tears. She spins and stalks into her room. Her hardwired nerves are crackling, the adrenaline triggering her reflexes, and she only stops herself from trying to drive a fist through the wall. She can taste death on her tongue, and wants to run the Weasel as fast as she can.
The holograph of Princess sits on her chest of drawers. She takes it and stares at it, seeing the creamy shoulders, the blue innocence in the eyes, the innocence as false as Daud’s.
TOMORROW/NO
Sarah and Princess follow the ambulance men out of the Aujourd’Oui. They are carrying the girl from the washroom stall. She has clawed her cheeks and breasts with her fingernails. Her face is a swollen cloud of bruises, her nose blue pulp, her lips split and bloody. She is still trying to weep, but lacks the strength.
Sarah can see Princess’s excitement glittering in her eyes. This is the touch of the world she craves, warm and sweaty and real, flavored with the very soil of old Earth. Princess stands on the hot sidewalk while her dirtboys circle and call for the cars. Sarah puts her arm around her and whispers in her ear, telling her what Sarah knows she wants. “I am your dream,” Sarah says.
“My name is Danica,” Princess says.
In the back of the car there is a smell of sweat and expensive scent. Sarah begins to devour Danica, licking and biting and breathing her in. She left the silicon spray at home but won’t be needing it: Danica has Daud’s eyes and hair and smooth flesh, and Sarah finds herself wanting to touch her, to make a feast of her.
The car passes smoothly through gates of hardened alloy, and they are in the nest. None of Cunningham’s people ever got this far. Danica takes Sarah’s hand and leads her in. A security man insists on a check: Sarah looks down at him with a contemptuous stare and spreads the wings of her jacket, letting his electronic marvel scout her body. She knows Weasel is undetectible by these means. The boy confiscates her inhaler. Fine: it is made so as not to acquire fingerprints. “What are these?” he asks, holding up the hard black cubes of liquid crystal, ready for insertion into a comp deck.
“Music,” she says. He shrugs and gives them back. Princess takes her hand again and leads her up a long stair.
Her room is soft and azure, like the sky. Danica laughs and lies back on sheets that match her eyes, arms outstretched. Sarah bends over her and laps at her palate. Danica moans softly, approval. She is an old man and a powerful one, and Sarah knows his game. His job is to rape Earth, to be as strong as spaceborne alloy, and it is weakness that is his forbidden thing, his pornography. To put his bright new body into the hands of a slave is a weakness he wants more than life itself.
“My dream,” Danica whispers. Her fingers trace the scars on Sarah’s cheek, her chin.
Sarah takes a deep breath. Her tongue retracts into its Weasel’s implastic housing, and the cybersnake’s head closes over it. She rolls Danica entirely under her, holding her wrists, molding herself to the old man’s new girl-body. She presses her mouth to Danica’s, feeling the flutter of the girl’s tongue, and then Weasel strikes, uncoiling itself from its hiding place in Sarah’s throat and chest. Sarah holds her breath as her elastic artificial trachea constricts. Danica’s eyes open wide as she feels the touch of Weasel in her mouth, the temperature of Sarah’s body but still somehow cold and brittle. Sarah’s fingers clamp on her wrists, and Princess gives a birth-strangled cry as Weasel’s head forces its way down her throat. Her body bucks once, again. Her breath is hot and desperate in Sarah’s face. Weasel keeps uncoiling, following its program, sliding down into the stomach, its sensors questing for life. Daud’s eyes make desperate promises. Princess moans in fear, using his strength against Sarah’s weight, trying to throw her off. Sarah holds him crucified. Weasel, turning back on itself as it enters her stomach, tears its way out, seeks the cava inferior and shreds it. Danica makes bubbling sounds, and though she knows it is impossible, although she knows her tongue is still retracted deep into Weasel’s base, Sarah thinks she can taste blood. Weasel follows the vein to Danica’s heart. Sarah holds her down, her own chest near bursting with lack of air, until the struggling stops and Daud’s blue eyes grow cloudy and die.
Purple and black rim Sarah’s vision. She heaves herself off the bed, retracting Weasel partway as she gasps for air through the constricted passage in her throat. She stumbles for the washroom, falls and crashes into the sink. The impact drives the air from her. Her hands turn the spigots. Blind, her hands put the Weasel in the sink and feel the water running chill. Her breath comes in rasps. Weasel is coated with a gel that supposedly prevents blood and matter from adhering but she doesn’t want even a chance of Danica’s flesh in her mouth. The cybersnake is tearing at her breast. The water thunders until she can feel nothing but the speed with which she is falling into blackness, and then she falls back and sucks Weasel into her and can breathe again and taste the cool and healing air.
Her chest heaves up and down and her eyes are still full of darkness. She knows Daud is dead and that she has a task. She whips her head back and forth and tries to clear it, tries to scrabble upward from the brink, but Weasel is eating her heart and she can scarcely think from the pain. Sarah can hear herself whimper. She can feel the prickle of the carpet against the back of her neck as she raises her arms above her head and tries to drag herself along, crawling away, crawling, while Weasel |
2621 obs. of 5 variables: $ stations.StationName: Factor w/ 2596 levels "Abbey Wood (London) Rail Station",..: 1801 2160 441 2155 1373 1372 1100 426 83 1512... $ stations.CrsCode : Factor w/ 2591 levels "AAP","AAT","ABA",..: 1811 2081 431 2036 1469 1370 1219 439 84 1561... $ Longitude : num -5.53 -5.48 -5.46 -5.44 -5.44... $ Latitude : num 50.1 50.2 50.2 50.2 50.2... $ optional : logi TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE...
Now we need to work out which stations we need. The ONS’s built-up areas are the best measure I know of measuring city size. Local authorities in the UK vary greatly in size – the population of the Birmingham council area is about twice that of Manchester even though to most people those cities are similar sizes.
In no particular order, they are:
Sheffield Manchester London Leicester Leeds Glasgow Coventry Birmingham Plymouth Liverpool Edinburgh Southampton Nottingham Newcastle Derby Bristol Stoke-on-Trent Hull Cardiff Bradford Portsmouth
Step 3: Calculate each station’s distance from each other
After racking my brains trying to work out how to perform an easy filter for the ones I wanted, I decided it was easier to do every possible combination for all stations and then filter out the superfluous ones.
Again, I couldn’t figure out a way of doing this without using a for loop. If anyone has a simpler, cleaner way, please let me know in the comments!
#create blank data frame to fill in with data results <- data.frame(NA) results$distance <- NA results$station <- NA results$from <- NA results <- results[, 2:4] #i = number of stations for (i in 1:2621) { latitude <- stations_df$Latitude[i] longitude <- stations_df$Longitude[i] all <- as.data.frame(mapply(FUN = distanceCalc, lat1 = latitude, lat2 = stations_df$Latitude, long1 = longitude, long2 = stations_df$Longitude)) all$station <- stations_df$stations.StationName all$from <- stations_df$stations.StationName[i] names(all) <- c("distance","station","from") results <- rbind(all, results) }
There’s an easy way to test whether the distance calculator worked using this radius generator from Free Map Tools.
According to our calculations Birmingham New Street to Cardiff Central station is 88.057 miles.
Let’s see:
There are 1,609.34 metres in a mile, meaning that distance is 141,714 metres. The function seems accurate to about 200m, meaning it is about 99.5 per cent accurate.
Not bad at all.
Here is how a sample of our data looked at this point:
> str(results) > str(results)'data.frame': 262101 obs. of 3 variables: $ distance: num 403 397 398 400 399... $ station : Factor w/ 2596 levels "Abbey Wood (London) Rail Station",..: 1801 2160 441 2155 1373 1372 1100 426 83 1512... $ from : Factor w/ 2596 levels "Abbey Wood (London) Rail Station",..: 2483 2483 2483 2483 2483 2483 2483 2483 2483 2483...
Step 4: Filter the stations we’re interested in
Again, I couldn’t see any way of automating this because of the unique station names.
manchester <- results[results$from == "Manchester Piccadilly Rail Station", ] #etc
Step 5: Get the distances
We stepped away from R here to use OutWit Hub, a scraping program.
Happily The Train Line website has a convenient average time for most major journeys, so we scraped that.
Step 6: Calculate speeds
Going back to GCSE physics:
Speed = distance/time
We have the distances and the times, so dividing one by the other gave us the speeds. Sorting them showed us the fastest to the slowest!
Analysis
We found that trains to and from London were the fastest in Britain.
In fact the top 22 journeys with the fastest speeds were all two or from the capital.
Towards the other end of the spectrum were journeys that often went across Britain. It’s relatively easy to get up and down the country but going east to west or vice versa takes longer.
The slowest long-distance journey (which we defined as 100 miles or more) was Coventry to Hull, which chugged along at 26mph.
Trains between cities closer together, such as Bradford to Manchester, are likely going to be slower because there’s no distance for the trains to accelerate up to their top speeds.
Obviously the journey times including any waiting times at stations to change trains.
Conclusion
This was the first outing for the distance calculator. We want to use it for other purposes as well in the future.
As it happened, when we were ready to publish there was a furore about the Government’s backtrack (transport journalism is full of puns) on electrifying lines in Wales, the Midlands and the North.
Notably none of these lines were in London, while Crossrail ploughs on, possibly to be followed by Crossrail 2.
Our project exposed how London-centric Britain’s rail network really is.N72 hello
Join Date: 12 Jun 2001 Posts: 1,234
Total Annihilation v3.9.01 Beta Patch
This is purely a patch a not a mod; it does not change the game balancing in any way. What's included? Everything - updated TA Demo 1.0.0.666, updated NoCD Music Patch, updated dlls, all known map features, all the latest engine improvements, Cavedog's official patch, units, and maps, and more. The readme file below will explain everything in detail.
This patch solves many problems, as you will realize after reading the readme, and also standardizes the game. Currently there have been a lot of online problems and confusion due to everyone having different versions of xpoy's dll updates (with incorrect ini files), people using random different hacks and patches, etc.
The patch also provides a new unified platform for mods that will result in standardized installs and no possibility of conflicts with original TA. Future versions of TA Zero, TA Escalation, and Total Mayhem will be properly installed software and will REQUIRE the patch to install.
Download the Total Annihilation v3.9.01 Beta Patch
The v3.9.01 Beta Patch readme, please read carefully:
Quote: Total Annihilation v3.9.01 Beta Patch (April 15, 2012)
http://www.tauniverse.com
---------- Introduction --------------------------------------
This is a beta version of the upcoming TA v4.0 Patch which is a comprehensive update to Total Annihilation intended to replace v3.1 as the de-facto version of the game as well as make all old custom enhancements obsolete. This is a patch, NOT a mod, and does not change the game balancing in any way; it only adds new features and fixes technical issues. The v3.9.xx series of beta patches will be released for testing and refinement purposes on the TAUniverse forum, leading up to the final v4.0 patch which is intended for mainstream use by all players. Further updates (4.1, etc.) are also planned which will add even more new features which are under development. The patch will be REQUIRED by future versions of mods such as TA Escalation and TA Zero.
This patch is comprehensive and intended to be the ONLY *necessary* install other than TA and the expansions. In addition to adding all-new features, the following software is updated, replaced, or otherwise made obsolete by this patch, and will be automatically moved to a backup folder if detected:
- TA v3.1 Patch by Cavedog
- The 6 downloadable units and 16 downloadable maps by Cavedog
- TA Demo Recorder 0.99b2 by The Swedish Yankspankers
- TA Demo Recorder 1.0.0.545 update by Xon (dplayx.dll)
- TA Interface Upgrade updates by xpoy (ddraw.dll)
- McnTerra-NS recorder "fix"
- All map feature packs (TA Features 20xx, Frenzy, AtlantisMB, Tamec2004, TAK2006, etc.)
- TA NoCD Music Patch
- All NoCD patches
- Expanded Battleroom and Map Selection GUI
- All unit limit patches (500, 1500, 5000)
- TA Sound Fix (mixingbuffers increase)
- TA Pathfinding Fix
- LOS tables fix
- +atm 10000 patcher
- Multicore Patch
This patch is not simply a compilation of the above, it is a full-fledged update of all of them and also includes numerous all-new features, which are detailed below in the Features and Version History sections.
---------- Installation --------------------------------------
Simply run the installer and follow the instructions.
Notes:
- The patch must be installed to a valid TA game folder.
- The patch will detect your TA location, but you can change the install location.
- The patch is compatible with all versions of TA (original CD, GOG.com, Impulse, etc.).
- The expansions packs are highly recommended but not required.
- It is recommended to install to a clean TA folder (TA + expansions + 3.1 patch or GOG/Impulse install)
- It is no big deal if installed to an unclean folder, as the patch will detect all junk files and move them to a backup folder and has been designed to not conflict with older versions of most software in the first place. If the patch is uninstalled, it will restore your game folder to its original state.
- All four new dlls (audiere, tdraw, tmusi, tplayx) are required for TA to launch; don't delete them.
- Files moved to the junk folder should not be placed back in the game folder while the patch is installed.
- Future versions of patch-dependent mods such as TAESC and Zero will install to a subfolder in whichever game folder the patch was installed to; this CANNOT be changed. The mods will reside in their own folder (with their own custom Demo Recorder) and will not affect original TA in any way.
***** Beginner Instructions *****
Are you a beginner who just wants to play the latest and greatest version of Total Annihilation? Simply install the original game (GOG.com version recommended, as it only costs $6, has no DRM, and installs TA with maps/campaigns, both expansions, the 3.1 patch, and the map editor in one click) and then install this patch and you're good to go. To play online, simply install the GameRanger or WarZone clients. Use the Replayer program to rewatch all your online games, which are automatically recorded (no configuration is needed).
---------- Features ------------------------------------------
***** TA Demo 1.0.0.666 *****
TA Demo has been updated to 1.0.0.666 and is installed by the patch. This replaces all previous versions of TA Demo (0.99b2, 1.0.0.545, McnTerra-NS "fix") and is automatically configured to optimal settings.
- Fully backwards-compatible with old.tad recordings, including those "infected" by McnTerra-NS.
- TA Demo 1.0.0.666 uses a new registry key and therefore will not conflict with old versions.
-.tad files are now properly associated with the 1.0.0.666 Replayer.
- The Replayer and 3D Replayer are now installed to the "TADemo" subfolder.
- Recorded games are now saved to the "Recorded Games" subfolder by default.
- TADemo.ufo has been cleaned up and made compatible with TA Zero and the upcoming version of TA Esc.
- ".report" command now shows 1.0.0.666 for players who have the new version.
-.tad files recorded with the new version are marked with 1.0.0.666.
- The 3D Replayer resolution is now automatically set to your desktop resolution.
- The four McnTerra-NS units have been added to rev31.gp3 and limited to 0 in the AI profiles, making all "infected".tad files play correctly while still blocking McnTerra-NS from affecting the game.
- Yankspankers load screen removed.
***** Game Improvements *****
The game exe is updated and all official downloadable game content is included.
- TotalA.exe updated to v3.9.01.
- The official v3.1 patch is included.
- The 6 downloadable Cavedog units are included and loaded from rev31.gp3 rather than.ufo files.
- The 16 downloadable Cavedog maps are included and loaded from cdmaps.ufo.
- Fixed line of sight tables have been added to rev31.gp3 (McnTerra-NS already included fixed LOS tables, however the new tables support the maximum possible unit LOS, for modders).
***** Interface Improvements *****
Numerous new interface features have been added.
- All interface upgrades from previous TA Demo versions (line building, drawing, finding idle builders, +100 queuing, shared line of sight, etc.) are included.
- Expanded battleroom GUI is included in rev31.gp3 (same as the old one).
- New expanded map selection GUI is included in rev31.gp3, featuring an expanded description box that allows maps to have longer descriptions, up to the hardcoded 128 character limit.
- Double-clicking a unit now selects all units of the same type currently on-screen.
- CTRL+S now selects all units with weapons that are currently on-screen instead of all units that are currently on-screen.
- CTRL+F now cycles through idle factories instead of selecting all factories.
- CTRL+B now actually selects the idle builder like all other hotkeys rather than just moving the camera.
- Holding W while dragging a selection box now only selects mobile units with weapons.
- Holding B while dragging a selection box now only selects construction units.
- Holding Y while dragging a selection box now only selects factories.
- Marker graphic updated for increased highlighting effect.
- When watching an online game as a spectator, you can now see other players' resource bars, similar to watching a recorded game.
- When watching an online or recorded game, you can change to another player's view by double-clicking their resource bar. To return to full map line of sight, click "Back to my view".
- When in another player's view while watching an online or recorded game, you can lock on to their camera position by double-clicking their resource bar again (this only works if they used the ".sharemappos" command). To unlock from their camera position, double-click their resource bar again or click "Back to my view".
- When in another player's view while watching a recorded game, you can select their units (after the commander has stopped flashing) and thus view radar ranges with CTRL+R, etc.
- The PrintScreen keyboard button can now be used to save screenshots. The original screenshot key, CTRL+F9, still works as well.
- Certain interface upgrades, like double-click selection, W/B/Y selection filters, and queuing 100 units with CTRL+SHIFT now work in windowed mode.
- Advanced interface options now shown in Options menu (previously only accessible via CTRL+F2) and shows actual key names instead of code numbers.
***** Engine Improvements *****
Many groundbreaking engine enhancements have been added and several bugs and cheats fixed.
- Pathfinding cycles have been increased from 1333 to 66650, dramatically increasing pathfinding quality when there are large numbers of units in-game (pathfinding no longer degrades as unit count increases).
- Unit ID limit increased from 512 to 4096.
- Weapon ID limit increased from 256 to 4096 (currently single player only, will be enabled for multiplayer after the Replayer is updated to work with increased limit).
- Special effects limit has been increased from 400 to 20480, improving particle effects.
- Maximum in-game unit model size increased from 600x600 to 1280x1280.
- Maximum number of simultaneous sounds has been increased from 8 to infinite, fixing sound cutoffs.
- Unit limit is now set to 1500 by default in.ini file but can be set to any number between 20 and 6553. - The unit limit is now set in real-time in RAM rather than being pre-patched in the.exe meaning whatever number is set in the ini is the actual unit limit (1500 does not mean patched to 5000 and then limited to 1500, it is actually patched to 1500); this allows all possible unit limits to be used without making the game unstable when low unit limits are used. DO NOT set higher than 6553 or TA will crash.
- You can now press Alt+TAB to minimize TA in WinXP and newer OSs without crashing, without having to use Windows 98 or 95 compatibility modes or setting affinity to one (such as with the "multicore exe"). In fact, don't set compatibility modes as they artificially limit your game resolution.
- "+atm" cheat now fills your resource bars rather than giving a set amount of resources, regardless of how much storage you have.
- "+ai #" and "+control #" reactivated as cheats (they were cheats in TA 1.0 and later disabled).
- Secret developer mode now synced to whether or not cheats are enabled, meaning developer mode is now disabled during campaigns, enabled during skirmish, and either enabled or disabled in multiplayer depending on match settings. Players can no longer cheat online by using the developer mode command.
- Reclaim cursor no longer disappears when pointed at enemy commander on minimap, preventing cheating.
- Developer mode's debug overlay changed from F11 key to F10 to prevent conflicts with F11 macro key.
- Disabled DirectX check error message on game load.
- CD is no longer required to play (CD version only, GOG/Impulse versions are already NoCD).
***** NoCD Music *****
TA's music is now read from the game folder instead of the CD, making the game fully NoCD.
- NoCD Music Patch updated (compared to old NoCD Music Patch as well as GOG/Impulse versions).
- Game music (tracks 2 - 17) are now read from the "\tmusi" subfolder which contains the soundtrack as 320kbps MP3 files, fully tagged and with album art included.
- The Total Annihilation main theme, which is played during the intro movie, has been included as a bonus track. This song was released by composer Jeremy Soule as a 128kbps MP3 file on his official website in 2006 and is the only clean copy of the song ever released to the public.
- You can customize the soundtrack to play your own music (or enable the TA Main Theme to play in-game) by following the instructions found in the "\tmusi" subfolder.
- MP3 music redirection code no longer writes a totala_log.txt log file to your boot drive like the GOG/Impulse versions and old NoCD Music Patch and the file is deleted during installation if detected.
***** Map Features *****
All known map features are included, allowing you to play on possibly every map that exists.
- TA Features 2011, Frenzy Features 2009, and AtlantisMB features are included; these are the only map feature packs that should be used and, when combined, are comprehensive and updated.
- TA Features 2010, TA Features 2009, Tamechpi2004, TAK_Anims, etc. are all obsolete; do not use these!
***** Improved Game Settings *****
Game configuration is improved and made hassle-free, requiring no setup for beginners while providing new options for experts.
- TotalA.ini replaced with TA.ini.
- Numerous options can now be adjusted via TA.ini, including new features such as pathfinding cycles and special effects limit as well as registry overrides.
- SwitchAlt is now enabled by default, allowing selection of unit groups with number keys instead of ALT + number keys.
- Default number of players in skirmish mode is now set to 10 instead of 4.
- Default sound mode is now set to 3D instead of Mono.
- Default music mode set to Random instead of Custom (the dynamic build/battle system is very buggy and almost never works on modern systems, resulting in only a single track playing and then either stopping [CD version] or looping forever [MP3 version]; if it works for you, change it back in TA.ini).
- Game speed now always returns to normal after every match (if adjusted with +/- keys).
- Screen chat now always returns to enabled after every match (if disabled with "+screenchat" command).
- A resolution overrider setting is available in TA.ini, allowing you to set any game resolution you want (instructions in ini).
- An option to match menu resolution to in-game resolution, instead of being locked to the default 640x480, is available in TA.ini.
***** Unified Experience *****
The patch standardizes the game folder among players and provides easy installation.
- The patch installs and uninstalls cleanly and registers with the Windows Control Panel.
- The patch installer automatically initializes your game resolution to be the same as your desktop resolution, instead of the default 640x480. It also does this for the 3D Replayer.
- A launcher tool is included which allows you to set the game resolution, enable or disable windowed mode, save your resolution setting, and launch the game.
- An auto-updater is included which notifies you of new versions and offers to download for you. Beta updates will only be rolled out to those who already have a beta patch from the forum.
---------- Known Issues --------------------------------------
There are still some outstanding issues that need to be resolved before the v4.0 release. Remember, while nearly complete, this is a beta patch.
- Changes to advanced interface options (CTRL+F2) are not saved across sessions and revert to default.
- The "\" key (the default whiteboard key) sometimes causes crashes, changing the key solves this but due to the previous bug you need to change it every time TA launches.
- The Weapon ID increase is currently disabled for multiplayer because the Replayer still needs to be updated to correctly interpret the new packet structure while at the same time maintaining backwards-compatibility with old.tad recordings.
- The TA Demo documentation is not included as it hasn't been updated since 0.99b2 and is very outdated. The documentation will be rewritten and included in a later version.
Any other issues that are discovered should be reported to the beta testing thread on the TAUniverse forum (http://www.tauniverse.com/forum).
---------- Version History -----------------------------------
***** v3.9.01 Beta *****
- Added TotalA.exe 3.9.01.
- Added tdraw.dll 0.8.4.6.
- Added tplayx.dll 1.0.0.666.
- Added tmusi.dll and audiere.dll.
- Added TA Demo 1.0.0.666.
- Added updated rev31.gp3.
- Added \tmusi folder with music, including main theme bonus track.
- Added TA Features 2011, Frenzy Features 2009, and AtlantisMB Features.
- Added 16 downloadable Cavedog maps (a few are also in the expansions but not everyone has those).
- Added resolution configuration tool.
- Added auto-updater.
- Replaced totala.ini with TA.ini.
- Changed +atm to fill resource bars instead of giving 1000 metal and energy.
- Changed +ai and +control from level 4 (disabled) to level 2 (cheats).
- Changed default pathfinding cycles in exe to 66650 (separate from tdraw.dll/TA.ini implementation).
- Changed debug mode key from F11 to F10.
- Changed reclaim cursor to not disappear when pointed at enemy Commander.
- Disabled DirectX check error message.
- Disabled and removed totala_log.txt.
- Added 6 downloadable Cavedog units to rev31.gp3.
- Added fixed LOS.tdf to rev31.gp3.
- Added expanded battleroom GUI to rev31.gp3.
- Added new expanded map selection/viewing GUI to rev31.gp3.
- Added Loadgame2bg.pcx to rev31.gp3 (so loading screen can't be hijacked by hpi/ufo/ccx files).
- Added 4 McnTerra-NS.ufo units to rev31.gp3 and limited them to 0 in all AI profiles.
- Changed registry key for tplayx.dll, Replayer, and 3D Replayer to HKCU\Software\TA Patch.
- Added double-click selection.
- Added W/B/Y selection filters.
- Changed CTRL+S to select units with weapons on-screen.
- Changed CTRL+B to actually select idle builders.
- Changed CTRL+F to cycle through idle factories.
- Changed marker graphic for increased highlighting effect.
- Added PrintScreen key to take screenshots.
- Added ability to change view and lock map position via double-clicking a player's resource bar.
- Added ability to select units of viewed player while watching a recorded game.
- Added double-click select, W/B/Y select, and 100 unit queuing to windowed mode.
- Added pathfinding adjuster.
- Added special effects adjuster.
- Added Unit ID adjuster.
- Added Weapon ID adjuster.
- Added Weapon ID packet length fix (currently disabled).
- Added unit model size adjuster.
- Added unit limit adjuster.
- Added option to sync menu resolution to game resolution.
- Synced developer mode to cheating mode.
- Fixed Alt+TAB crashes.
***** v3.1 and previous *****
- Read the original readme31.txt for version history of Cavedog's patches.
* This is an unofficial Total Annihilation patch, created by the community and published by TAUniverse *
So the game plan is for people to test the patch and report any possible issues, as well as solve the few remaining issues detailed in the readme. The only pressing issue is that xpoy needs to fix the two current interface bugs (CTRL+F2 options not being saved and \ key sometimes causing crashes), which isn't going to happen until he shows up again, which will hopefully be pretty soon. The only other real issue is that the Weapon ID increase is currently single player only, as mentioned in the readme as well, but fixing this while maintaining backwards compatibility with old.tad recordings will require substantial recorder updates and probably won't make it into the v4.0 patch, so you'll have to wait for a future version for that. Any mod that doesn't need backwards compatibility with old.tad files can start using the increased weapon ID limit in multiplayer soon though, as mods can now have their own Replayer separate from the OTA one.
I also want to address the issue of map features. Currently the patch includes TA Features 2011, Frenzy Map Features 2009, and AtlantisMB Features, which together are comprehensive. The features are basically the only things in the patch I haven't touched, because I'd rather have DannyU handle them. First, it would be good to get Frenzy Map Features integrated into the TA Features ccx file so we are just left with TA Features 2012 and AtlantisMB Features (which apparently shouldn't be touched ). That just leaves one issue - the map weapons. Right now there's basically just a zip file with 3 different file choices which the user is assumed to know how to use, which is a little ridiculous. The original reason for this was the weapon ID limit, but that issue is already solved for single player and will eventually be solved for multiplayer, so the end goal is to have a single map weapons file which will always be installed, thus automatically providing compatibility with all maps. The question is, do we do this now or later? How many maps actually need these weapons? For any non-beta public releases (such as v4.0) there should be no configuration required at all for the user, and this map weapon issue is literally the only remaining thing standing in the way of that, so we need to figure out what to do about it.
Once again, the purpose of this thread is to find any remaining issues and get the patch tested in actual games by many people. The download link again:
Download the Total Annihilation v3.9.01 Beta Patch As a few of you already know, I've been working on a Total Annihilation v4.0 Patch that will serve as a comprehensive unofficial update for TA to replace v3.1 as the de facto version of the game. The patch updates/replaces all existing crucial game patches/updates/hacks/etc. After extensive testing the first beta version (v3.9.01 Beta) is ready for download. The patch is basically complete except for some outstanding issues which I will describe later, plus I want to make sure everything is fully tested before releasing the final v4.0 Patch, which is be intended for mainstream use (these beta patches are for testing purposes and will only be available from this thread). There will then be further patches (v4.1, etc.) as the game is updated with more new features (xpoy's new minimap, etc.).This is purely a patch a not a mod; it does not change the game balancing in any way. What's included? Everything - updated TA Demo 1.0.0.666, updated NoCD Music Patch, updated dlls, all known map features, all the latest engine improvements, Cavedog's official patch, units, and maps, and more. The readme file below will explain everything in detail.This patch solves many problems, as you will realize after reading the readme, and also standardizes the game. Currently there have been a lot of online problems and confusion due to everyone having different versions of xpoy's dll updates (with incorrect ini files), people using random different hacks and patches, etc.The patch also provides a new unified platform for mods that will result in standardized installs and no possibility of conflicts with original TA. Future versions of TA Zero, TA Escalation, and Total Mayhem will be properly installed software and will REQUIRE the patch to install.The v3.9.01 Beta Patch readme, please read carefully:Yes that was a little long but hopefully you read it all.So the game plan is for people to test the patch and report any possible issues, as well as solve the few remaining issues detailed in the readme. The only pressing issue is that xpoy needs to fix the two current interface bugs (CTRL+F2 options not being saved and \ key sometimes causing crashes), which isn't going to happen until he shows up again, which will hopefully be pretty soon. The only other real issue is that the Weapon ID increase is currently single player only, as mentioned in the readme as well, but fixing this while maintaining backwards compatibility with old.tad recordings will require substantial recorder updates and probably won't make it into the v4.0 patch, so you'll have to wait for a future version for that. Any mod that doesn't need backwards compatibility with old.tad files can start using the increased weapon ID limit in multiplayer soon though, as mods can now have their own Replayer separate from the OTA one.I also want to address the issue of map features. Currently the patch includes TA Features 2011, Frenzy Map Features 2009, and AtlantisMB Features, which together are comprehensive. The features are basically the only things in the patch I haven't touched, because I'd rather have DannyU handle them. First, it would be good to get Frenzy Map Features integrated into the TA Features ccx file so we are just left with TA Features 2012 and AtlantisMB Features (which apparently shouldn't be touched). That just leaves one issue - the map weapons. Right now there's basically just a zip file with 3 different file choices which the user is assumed to know how to use, which is a little ridiculous. The original reason for this was the weapon ID limit, but that issue is already solved for single player and will eventually be solved for multiplayer, so the end goal is to have a single map weapons file which will always be installed, thus automatically providing compatibility with all maps. The question is, do we do this now or later? How many maps actually need these weapons? For any non-beta public releases (such as v4.0) there should be no configuration required at all for the user, and this map weapon issue is literally the only remaining thing standing in the way of that, so we need to figure out what to do about it.Once again, the purpose of this thread is to find any remaining issues and get the patch tested in actual games by many people. The download link again: Last edited by N72; 20 Jan 2013 at 4:23 PM.Hello, my dearest dears, and welcome back to another festive installment of Will It Sous Vide?, the weekly column where I make whatever you want me to with my immersion circulator.
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During our last topic picking session, we settled on Thanksgiving sides because, let’s face it, most people care way more about the sides than they do the turkey. No specific side won out, so I decided to try three of my favorites: cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce.
The Smash Hit: Cornbread Dressing
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My (opinionated, southern) family has two, very serious rules about the bread-based side that is served alongside turkey:
The bread must be of the corn variety. You better not call it “stuffing.”
Good dressing starts with good cornbread, so I made a batch of my grandmother’s very simple, very easy, very tasty cornbread. You can use any cornbread you damn well please (including store-bought), but I’ll go ahead and include the recipe, just in case you want to try it. (I know it’s not technically a “sous vide” recipe, but there was no way I was going to make dressing with any other cornbread.)
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Claire’s Grandmother’s Not-Sous-Vide Cornbread
Ingredients:
About four tablespoons of bacon grease
1 1/3 cup self-rising yellow cornmeal
1 egg
1 3/4 cup buttermilk
Preheat your oven to 450℉. Add bacon grease to a cake pan or skillet (my grandmother always uses a cake pan, and she does not give a single damn) and pop it in the oven. Combine remaining ingredients in a bowl. Once you hear the bacon grease start to sizzle (about 5-10 minutes) remove your pan and pour the batter in. Return to the oven and bake until golden brown on top (about 35-45 minutes). Let cool and turn out. Crumble if you are going to be using it in dressing.
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Traditional dressing calls for cornbread, eggs, stock, butter, and herbs. I first tried a version with stock—I’m actually not sure why; just to see what would happen, I guess?—and it was an unsurprisingly soupy mess. I then decided to eliminate the broth altogether, and used my BFF Better Than Bullion to give it that stock-y quality. This is the recipe I settled on, and it is very freaking good.
Claire’s Fantastic Sous-Vide Cornbread Dressing
Ingredients:
4 cups of crumbled cornbread (which, incidentally, is exactly how much the above recipe makes)
1 onion, chopped (You may notice a lack of celery, this is because celery is extremely bad tasting.)
5-7 fresh sage leaves, depending on the size
1-2 fresh sprigs of marjoram
1-2 fresh sprigs of thyme
2 eggs
2 tablespoons of bacon grease or lard (or butter if you must)
2 teaspoons of Roasted Chicken Better Than Bullion
Remove herbs from stems and chop finely. Add herbs, chopped onion, and cornbread to a 1-gallon freezer bag and shake to distribute flavorful goodness.
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Beat eggs in a bowl and add your fat of choice and Better Than Bullion. Mix to create a visually unappealing slurry.
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Pour the questionable-looking liquid over your sexy crumb mixture, push the air out using the water submersion technique, and place in a water bath set to 165℉ for two and a half hours.
Dump it out in a cast iron pan and pop it into the broiler to brown on top. I don’t recommend torching it, as that results in a burned, rather than browned stuffing, and burnt stuffing isn’t a whole lot of fun.
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So, does cornbread dressing sous vide?
The Answer: Fuck yeah, it does. I’ve eaten a lot of dressing in my life—all of it pretty good—but this was the best I’ve ever had. The fat and herbs infuse right into the cornbread without making it soggy, so every bite is packed with flavor, and the eggs give everything a nice, moist, almost cake-like texture. You may notice that the onions aren’t extremely cooked, but that’s how I like them in dressing. The just-softened, barely-transparent alliums provide a bit of bite to cut through the richness of the dressing, and I appreciate it. If you need your onions browned, just brown them before adding to the dressing mixture. If I wasn’t already sous vide-ing pumpkin pie for my family this Thanksgiving, I would insist on making this. I give it 5 out of 5 turkey legs.
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Next side.
The One With a Caveat: Mashed Potatoes
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As a few of you have pointed out, my kitchen appliance game is strange. I own an immersion circulator, but not a microwave; an ice cream attachment for my KitchenAid, but no coffee pot. I am also lacking in the way of potato ricer, because I’ve always mashed my potatoes with a wooden spoon—maybe my stand mixer, equipped with paddle attachment—and never had a problem with lumps. This was not the case with sous-vide mashed potatoes. (More thoughts on why in a moment.) As far as recipes go, I used this one from Anova’s site as a template, making a few changes.
Very Garlicky, Slightly Lumpy, Sous-Vide Mashed Potatoes:
Ingredients:
2 pounds of Russet potatoes, sliced into 1/8-inch slices
5 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed
8 ounces (2 sticks) of butter
1 cup buttermilk
1 big sprig of rosemary (This is optional. I made two batches and preferred the batch without it.)
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Add everything to a 1-gallon freezer bag and submerge in a water bath |
friends.
In fact, hostility towards everyone is the mark of a real amanojaku.
10 逃げ切ったアマノジャク 最終日のシーンをクリアした
よくここまで来たね
もうゴールしてもいいし、しなくてもいい Escapee Amanojaku Cleared a scene from the final day.
You've come a long way, huh?
It's okay to cross the finish line, and it's okay if you don't.
11 はじめてのアマノジャク １日目、シーン１をクリアした
これがクリア出来ないと始まらない First Amanojaku Cleared 1st Day, Scene 1.
If you can't clear this, you can't start.
12 新たなアイテム使い 新しいアイテムを手に入れた
六種類のアイテムを使いこなせ New Item User Received new items.
Master the six types of items.
13 ミラクル不思議道具使い 全てのアイテムを手に入れた
アイテムが増えてかえって面倒くさくなったかな？
世の中、えてしてこんなもんです Miraculous, Mysterious Tool User Received all items.
Having all these items is actually kind of annoying, isn't it?
So it goes in this world we live in.
14 おや、片手が空いていた サブ装備が使えるようになった
これで苦手だった道具もブーストできる？ Hey, You've Got a Free Hand Became able to use sub-equipment.
Can you use this to boost the items you're bad with?
15 そろそろお茶でも プレイ時間が１時間を超えたよ
結構疲れたでしょ？ 他のゲームと違って
弾幕避けのプレイ時間密度は非常に濃いのです How About Some Tea Passed 1 hour of play time.
You're pretty tired, aren't you? Unlike other games,
the play time in danmaku dodging is quite densely packed.
16 ドライアイにご注意 プレイ時間が５時間を越えたよ
メニュー画面やポーズ画面は時間に入らないから
５時間は結構長いんだよねー Watch Out For Dry Eyes Passed 5 hours of play time.
Time on the menu and pause screens doesn't count,
so 5 hours is a pretty long time!
17 悟りでも開けるよ プレイ時間が１０時間を超えたよ
ここまで遊んでくれて有難う
もうゴールしてもいいよ！ Achieve Enlightenment! Passed 10 hours of play time.
Thank you for playing for so long.
It's okay to cross the finish line!
18 もう痛みを感じない ミス回数が１００を超えたよ
君はもう、彼女を殺す事に痛みを覚えない I Don't Feel Pain Anymore Passed 100 total deaths.
You don't recognize the pain of killing her anymore.
19 もしかして、快感？ ミス回数が２００を超えたよ
だんだんと快感になってきてないかい？
まあ、それもまた良しだ。まだ社会復帰は出来る Could This Be Pleasure? Passed 200 total deaths.
Is this starting to feel good for you?
Well, that's okay. You can still be reintegrated into society.
20 彼女の屍を超えてゆけ [1] ミス回数が３００を超えたよ
ここまで痛み付けたからにはもう後戻りは出来ない
君は責任持って全てクリアしたまえ Over Her Dead Body Passed 300 total deaths.
Now that you've caused this much pain, there's no going back.
Take responsibility and clear everything.
21 初日マスター １日目をオールクリアした
まあ、この位はね First Day Master 1st day all clear.
Well, this level's not too bad.
22 ２日目マスター ２日目オールクリア
順番にクリアしているのだとしたら
どこかで行き詰まるかもよ 2nd Day Master 2nd day all clear.
If you're clearing them in order,
you might get stuck somewhere.
23 ３日目マスター ３日目オールクリア
急に難しくなった？
気のせいか 3rd Day Master 3rd day all clear.
Did it get tougher all of a sudden?
Maybe it's your imagination.
24 ４日目マスター ４日目オールクリア
そろそろ慣れてきたね
この辺はもう楽勝かな 4th Day Master 4th day all clear.
Now you're getting used to it.
This is still the easy stuff.
25 ５日目マスター ５日目オールクリア
使い道がよく判らないアイテムもあるかな？
気にしなくても良い 5th Day Master 5th day all clear.
You have some items whose purpose isn't really clear, huh?
You don't have to worry about them.
26 ６日目マスター ６日目オールクリア
ところで、アイテム使用無しでクリアすると
全てのアイテムがクリア済みになるって知ってた？ 6th Day Master 6th day all clear.
By the way, did you know that if you clear a scene
without using items, it counts as a clear for all items?
27 ７日目マスター ７日目オールクリア
人間ばっか！
何か人間の方が反則チックだよねぇ 7th Day Master 7th day all clear.
It's all humans on this day!
Humans somehow seem more cheat-ey, don't they?
28 ８日目マスター ８日目オールクリア
ここまで律儀に順番通りクリアしてきている人は
不器用だけど誠実な人だと想像します 8th Day Master 8th day all clear.
In my imagination, those of you who have been faithfully following the order
up to this point are awkward but earnest people.
29 ９日目マスター ９日目オールクリア
よく頑張りました
もうあと一息です（最終日を残していると仮定して） 9th Day Master 9th day all clear.
Well done.
You've only got a bit more to go (assuming you saved the final day until now).
30 最終日マスター 最終日オールクリア
素晴らしい！
あんたはエライ！ Last Day Master Last day all clear.
Spectacular!
You're amazing!
31 おひらりさん ひらり布を使って３シーンクリアした
ひらひひらりと躱しましてー Miss Nimble Cleared 3 scenes using the Nimble Cloth.
Evade flutteringly~
32 カメラ小僧 天狗のトイカメラを使って３シーンクリアした
まだまだひよっこカメラマン Camera Kid Cleared 3 scenes using the Tengu's Toy Camera.
You're still just a fledgling cameraman.
33 仕舞いっぱなしの傘 隙間の折りたたみ傘を使って３シーンクリアした
雨が降っても大丈夫 Closed Umbrella Cleared 3 scenes using the Gap Folding Umbrella.
You'll be fine even if it rains.
34 とおりすがりの亡霊さん 亡霊の送り提灯を使って３シーンクリアした
影が薄くなってきたね A Passing Spirit Cleared 3 scenes using the Ghastly Send-Off Lantern.
You don't have a lot of presence, huh?
35 たま使い 血に餓えた陰陽玉を使って３シーンクリアした
ボス目の前に現れる快感たるや…… Ball User Cleared 3 scenes using the Bloodthirsty Yin-Yang Orb.
Popping out right in front of the boss's face feels nice...
36 手持ち花火 四尺マジックボムを使って３シーンクリアした
花火の真ん中は危険です Handheld Fireworks Cleared 3 scenes using the Four-Foot Magic Bomb.
Being in the middle of fireworks is dangerous.
37 お地蔵さん 身代わり地蔵を使って３シーンクリアした
当たっても良いって精神的にらくちんだね Ojizou-san Cleared 3 scenes using the Substitute Jizou.
Knowing it's okay even if you get hit is mentally relaxing.
38 お人形屋さん 呪いのデコイ人形を使って３シーンクリアした
一見可愛いようだが、実は凄いんです Doll Shop Owner Cleared 3 scenes using the Cursed Decoy Doll.
At first glance, it looks cute, but it's actually amazing.
39 物理で殴れ 打ち出の小槌を使って３シーンクリアした
先手必勝だ！ レベルを上げなくても物理で殴れ！ Strike Physically Cleared 3 scenes using the Miracle Mallet.
Victory goes to the swift! Even if you don't raise your level, strike physically! [2]
40 反則嫌い アイテムを使用せずに３シーンクリアした
ま、当たらなければ反則アイテムを使う必要もないね Cheat Hater Cleared 3 scenes without using items.
Well, if you don't get hit, there's no need to use cheat items.
41 ひらりスター ひらり布を使って１０シーンクリアした
華麗にかわす姿はまるでマタドール？ Nimble-ster Cleared 10 scenes using the Nimble Cloth.
Does dodging so neatly make you look like a matador?
42 カメラ大人 天狗のトイカメラを使って１０シーンクリアした
少し成長したよ、でもカメラはトイカメラ Camera Adult Cleared 10 scenes using the Tengu's Toy Camera.
You've grown up a little! But the camera is still a toy.
43 お気に入りの傘 隙間の折りたたみ傘を使って１０シーンクリアした
お気に入りの傘は雨が降っても使わない Favorite Umbrella Cleared 10 scenes using the Gap Folding Umbrella.
Even if it's raining, you wouldn't use your favorite umbrella.
44 もしかして生霊さん？ 亡霊の送り提灯を使って１０シーンクリアした
亡霊の方が気楽そうでいいなぁ Perhaps a Vengeful Spirit? Cleared 10 scenes using the Ghastly Send-Off Lantern.
Being a ghost seems like more fun, huh?
45 たま職人 血に餓えた陰陽玉を使って１０シーンクリアした
玉の質量と主人公の質量が同じなのだと推測される Ball Craftsman Cleared 10 scenes using the Bloodthirsty Yin-Yang Orb.
There's a theory that the ball's weight and the protagonist's weight are the same.
46 スターマインさん 四尺マジックボムを使って１０シーンクリアした
花火の魅力は映像より音だよね Miss Starmine Cleared 10 scenes using the Four-Foot Magic Bomb.
The attraction of fireworks is more in the sound than the sight, huh?
47 地蔵菩薩 身代わり地蔵を使って１０シーンクリアした
当たる度に地蔵の顔が険しくなる気がする Ksitigarbha Cleared 10 scenes using the Substitute Jizou.
It feels like the jizou's face gets more stern every time you get hit.
48 人形蒐集家 呪いのデコイ人形を使って１０シーンクリアした
人形って呪われやすいから気を付けよう Doll Collector Cleared 10 scenes using the Cursed Decoy Doll.
Dolls are easily cursed, so be careful.
49 ピコピコハンマー 打ち出の小槌を使って１０シーンクリアした
ピコピコハンマーにはまだ改良の余地があると思う Pikopiko Hammer Cleared 10 scenes using the Miracle Mallet.
I think there's still room for improvement in the Pikopiko Hammer's design.
50 正々堂々屋さん アイテムを使用せずに１０シーンクリアした
正々堂々って、ある意味ひねくれてないかい？ Fair Player Cleared 10 scenes without using items.
If you always play above-board, isn't that kind of twisted in its own way?
51 ひらりマスター ひらり布を使って２０シーンクリアした
布の上を弾幕が通過する感覚はどうなのかな Nimble Master Cleared 20 scenes using the Nimble Cloth.
I wonder how it feels when danmaku flies over the cloth.
52 カメラ紳士 天狗のトイカメラを使って２０シーンクリアした
一億総勢携帯カメラマン時代
カメラは紳士的に使いましょう Camera Gentleman Cleared 20 scenes using the Tengu's Toy Camera.
A generation of a hundred million cell phone cameramen.
Let's use them in a gentlemanly way.
53 傘ハウス 隙間の折りたたみ傘を使って２０シーンクリアした
傘が溜り過ぎちゃってる家とかあるよねー Umbrella House Cleared 20 scenes using the Gap Folding Umbrella.
There's some houses where they've got too many umbrellas piled up.
54 りっぱな霊体 亡霊の送り提灯を使って２０シーンクリアした
霊体って憧れるよねー
最近腰や肩が痛くてさー Splendid Spirit Body Cleared 20 scenes using the Ghastly Send-Off Lantern.
I'd love to have a spirit body...
My back and shoulders have been hurting lately...
55 たま仙人 血に餓えた陰陽玉を使って２０シーンクリアした
陰陽玉って平面的なデザインだよね
割ってみるとどうなってるのやら Ball Hermit Cleared 20 scenes using the Bloodthirsty Yin-Yang Orb.
The yin-yang orb has kind of a flat design, huh?
I wonder what would happen if you split it.
56 クレイジーボマー 四尺マジックボムを使って２０シーンクリアした
花火って一発勝負だからロマンあるね
人混みが嫌いで花火大会に行くのはちょっとアレだけど Crazy Bomber Cleared 20 scenes using the Four-Foot Magic Bomb.
Fireworks are an all-in-one-shot thing, so they're pretty appealing.
Although I don't like crowds, so going to a fireworks festival is kind of...
57 まさに地蔵の様な人 身代わり地蔵を使って２０シーンクリアした
いくら喰らっても平然と構える心の出来た人 Just Like A Jizou Cleared 20 scenes using the Substitute Jizou.
A person who can stay cool, no matter how great the pressure.
58 人形原型師 呪いのデコイ人形を使って２０シーンクリアした
呪いの人形だって作った人が居るんだぞー Doll Prototyper Cleared 20 scenes using the Cursed Decoy Doll.
Even a cursed doll has a maker, you know!
59 小槌でスマッシュ！ 打ち出の小槌を使って２０シーンクリアした
この小槌……魔力も何もただの普通の武器なんじゃ…… Mallet Smash! Cleared 20 scenes using the Miracle Mallet.
This mallet... isn't magic or anything, it's just an ordinary weapon...大家好！ (Hi, everyone!) Welcome to the latest Mandarin Weekly, with yet more links and information for those of us learning Chinese.
Please tell your Chinese teachers, fellow students, and others about this free resource.
To receive Mandarin Weekly in your e-mail inbox every Monday, just use the subscription box on the left side at MandarinWeekly.com. Or follow us on Twitter, at @MandarinWeekly!
New Year traditions
Chinese New Year is about to begin, and it’s thus time for us to learn (or re-learn) the words and phrases that have to do with that festival. In this post, we learn about popular traditions among people celebrating Chinese New Year:
http://speakupchinese.tumblr.com/post/138224129866/chinese-new-year-traditions
Twitter: @SpeakUpChinese
Chinese New Year vocabulary
Written Chinese also chimes in with a vocabulary list for the Chinese New Year:
https://www.writtenchinese.com/chinese-new-year-greetings-useful-cny-words/
Twitter: @WrittenChinese
Boom! Crash! Ouch!
How do you express certain real-world sounds in Chinese? This article introduces onomatopoeia, Chinese style, with many useful words and phrases:
http://www.fluentu.com/chinese/blog/2016/01/27/onomatopoeia-chinese/
Twitter: @FluentU
Two ways of saying “two”
Why does Chinese have two ways to say “two,” and when is each used?
http://mandarin.about.com/od/usingnumbers/fl/Two-ways-of-saying-two-in-Mandarin.htm
Useful grammar patterns
Certain grammar patterns repeat themselves all of the time in Chinese. In this posting, we learn about two of them, “VERB 一VERB” and VERB + 来／去:
http://www.duchinese.net/blog/15-would-you-like-some-goldfish-tea
Twitter: @DuChinese
Creative ways to express love
How can you say “I love you” in Chinese? This video provides us with 13 different ways to express your affection:
http://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/13-ways-to-say-i-love-you-in-chinese/
Twitter: @Fluent_Mandarin
Beginner Chinese videos
Just starting to learn Chinese? Here are some videos that you can use to get a jump-start on your learning of the language:
http://blogs.transparent.com/chinese/10-beginner-chinese-videos/
Twitter: @ChineseLanguage
Saying “yes” and “no”
LearnChineseNow answers one of the most common questions asked by newcomers to Chinese: How do you say “yes” and “no”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7kn4dB9MU0
Twitter: @LearnChineseNow
A Spanish couple
Learn about an elderly Spanish couple in this story, read aloud, with characters and Pinyin:
http://chinese-at-ease.com/learn-chinese-online-one-lifetime-one-couple/
Twitter: @ChineseAtEase
Chinese pronouns
How well do you know your pronouns in Chinese? This chart and introduction from Dig Mandarin should help you to get started and/or serve as a useful reminder:
http://www.digmandarin.com/pronouns-in-chinese-characters.html
Twitter: @DigMandarin
The “knife” radical
Another list of characters containing the “knife” radical:
http://allaboutchinese.tumblr.com/post/138325682029/allaboutchinese-all-about-chineses-%E9%83%A8%E9%A6%96%E7%B3%BB%E5%88%97
Top Chinese adjectives
YuTing from ChineseClass101 provides us with a video, demonstrating and pronouncing 25 common adjectives in Chinese:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZe4hH67UZw
Twitter: @chineseclass101
Where are you from?
What country are you from? That is a common question you’ll get when in China; with this list, you’ll (probably) be able to answer them:
http://blogs.transparent.com/chinese/countries-nationalities-and-languages-in-chinese/
Twitter: @ChineseLanguage
Long-distance relationships
Seeing someone special? But they live far away? In this video, ChinesePod offers us the chance to learn how to talk about such relationships in Chinese:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHHIkh6PRWM
Twitter: @ChinesePod
Tiger-related idioms
Chengyu, Chinese idoms, are an important part of learning to speak and understand Chinese. Many include tigers. In this posting, we learn about several of the more common tiger-related Chengyu:
http://www.digmandarin.com/tiger-stories-and-idioms-in-chinese.html
Twitter: @DigMandarin
Numbers, from 11 – 100
Want to count from 11 to 100 in Chinese? It’s surprisingly easy, as indicated in this video from ChineseClass101:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBZqbjlU6Q
Twitter: @chineseclass101
Translating nouns
Translating from Chinese to English isn’t always so straightforward; in this posting, we get some practice trying to perform such translations:
https://mandarinwithmanu.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/nouns-are-weird-translation-exercises/
Twitter: @MandarinWManu
Famous Chinese dishes
Traveling to China? Or just want to eat authentic Chinese food? This list of famous dishes, including their characters, will help to set you straight:
http://www.learnchinesechina.com/site-content/40-blog/1688-most-famous-dishes-in-china-a-z-part#.Vq8GyD82sVd
Did learning Chinese change your life?
A discussion among people who are relatively fluent in Chinese, who tell us how knowing the language has affected their lives and careers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/42h23m/those_whom_learnt_or_are_fluent_in_chinese_how/
Do Chinese children learn Pinyin?
Do Chinese children learn Pinyin, either before or while learning characters?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinese/comments/431h6n/is_pinyin_taught_in_chinese_schools/
Do native speakers know their tones?
If you ask a native speaker to identify the tones, can they do it? Does this matter for non-native speakers who are learning Chinese?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/42jgrt/do_you_think_that_most_people_who_learn_chinese/
How’s it going?
How can you ask someone how something is going? And when you do so, how which 的／得 is appropriate?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/43kilh/%E5%AD%A6%E7%9A%84%E5%BE%97%E6%80%8E%E4%B9%88%E6%A0%B7%E4%BA%86_what_does_this_exactly_mean/
Li Li Li
What is the difference between the characters 裡, 裏 and 里? All are pronounced lǐ, but are the meanings or uses different?
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17089/what-is-the-difference-between-%E8%A3%A1-%E8%A3%8F-and-%E9%87%8C
Your opinion, please
What is the difference between 看法 and 想法? Both seem to mean “opinion,” but are they used in different ways?
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17054/what-is-the-difference-between-%E7%9C%8B%E6%B3%95-and-%E6%83%B3%E6%B3%95
I thought so
What is the difference between 认为 (rèn wéi) and 以为 (yǐ wéi)? Both seem to mean “I thought so,” but they aren’t quite the same:
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17027/what-is-the-difference-between-%E8%AE%A4%E4%B8%BA-and-%E4%BB%A5%E4%B8%BA
Beautiful and ugly behavior?
You can use 美 and 丑 to indicate that something is beautiful or ugly. But does this work for behavior, or is it limited to appearances?
http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/50818-do-%E7%BE%8E-and-%E4%B8%91-often-refer-to-both-appearance-and-behavior/
Receiving
There are two ways to receive something in Chinese, and the distinction between 受 (shòu) and 收 (shōu) isn’t always obvious:
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17029/what-is-the-difference-between-%E5%8F%97-and-%E6%94%B6On Dec. 18, the Fed announced that in January it would start tapering its purchases of treasury bonds and mortgage-related securities by $10 billion a month, down from $85 to $75 billion per month. It also hinted that it would keep on tapering, possibly at a rate of $10 billion per meeting of the Federal Open Markets Operations Committee. The Fed also said that interest rates are unlikely to increase before the unemployment rate declines below 6.5%.
The new policy mix seems to have accelerated the outflows of capital from the emerging markets (see here and here). Yet, the initial response of the domestic markets was anti-climatic. The S&P 500 ended the week at record highs. The real economy (that is, Main Street) does not seem to have taken notice of the announcement.
Is that strange? People who supported quantitative easing would argue that nothing is happening because the program has been quite successful. In their minds, this is similar to what happens when, after a successful recovery from a surgery, the patient walks happily away while the physicians dismount the equipment that has kept him alive. Before coming to this conclusion, however, we must ask ourselves, what did quantitative easing do for Main Street? Did it actually help to keep the patient alive?
Unless you believe in Voodoo, you will want to identify the means through which quantitative easing transmitted its possibly beneficial impact to Main Street. We can think of two ways. One is increased availability of credit. The other is lower long-term interest rates. Common sense and economic theory suggest that the two are linked. Larger amounts of credit lead to lower interest rates and lower rates lead to larger amounts of credit. On this basis, we should look only to one of the two variables. Yet, Fed distinguished between the two in its rhetoric, even if the open market operations are based on the supposition that they are linked as the Fed buys credit instruments to lower interest rates. The reason for this distinction seems to be that the Fed controls the short-term interest rates, not the long-term ones, through its conventional open market operations. When the crisis exploded, the Fed was able to lower the short-term rates to practically zero, but the long-term ones remained aloft. Quantitative easing increased the purchases well beyond what was needed to keep the short-term rates close to zero. It also aimed at reducing the long-term rates by purchasing long-term instruments in the market, including agency mortgage-backed securities ($600 billion between 2008 and 2009 and $40 billion per month since September 2012.)
Thus, we can look at volumes of credit and interest rates separately.
First, we can look at the volumes of credit. The next chart suggests that the help provided by quantitative easing to Main Street in this dimension must have been very scant. Most of the money created by the Fed since the September 2008 crisis through quantitative easing and otherwise has been turned into excess reserves of the banking system (excess reserves is cash that the banks can use to create credit but chose not to and instead deposited it back in the Fed). That is, the cash created by quantitative easing did not become additional credit but, instead, it became excess reserves of the banks deposited in the Fed.
The next chart shows in a more dramatic way that the money created by quantitative easing has been sitting idly in the Fed. The curves plot the 12-month differences of the monetary base (the money created by the Fed) and the excess reserves of the banking system since September 2009 (12 months after the beginning of the crisis). They demonstrate that quantitative easing has worked as a merry-go-round. The Fed created the money only to see it returning as deposits of the commercial banks in the Fed itself.
Thus, we have seen that the money created by quantitative easing did not go to increase credit to the private sector. It had a neutral effect because what the Fed created came back to the Fed. But, what happened to credit? Did it stay put, at the same level?
The next graph shows that one major category of commercial banks’ credit increased since the crisis began: net credit to the central government (net of deposits of the government in the banks). However, total commercial banks’ credit went down substantially. By the end of the second quarter of 2013 it still had not recovered the level it had when quantitative easing began. Moreover, credit to the private sector (Main Street) declined and is still $600 billion below its level in 2008. Credit to other financial institutions also went down. Not a nice chart to see.
You can argue that this chart does not portray the complete picture because banks are not the only source of credit. Right. The next chart shows that recently the financial system’s credit to the private sector did increase over the level it had at the end of June 2008 (the financial system includes the banks plus all other financial institutions, such as insurance companies).
However, as shown in the next chart, the main source of this credit was not deposits but, instead, the insurance companies’ technical reserves and the financial institutions’ shares and other equities. To believe that quantitative easing helped to increase credit to the private sector you would have to believe that enormous amounts of money sitting idly in the Fed help increasing the technical reserves of insurance companies or lead to larger equity issues by financial institutions. Not very probable.
Now we can look at the interest rate side of our puzzle. You can say that maybe quantitative easing worked not because the money it created became credit to the private sector but because it helped the long-term interest rates to decline and remain low. Certainly, low interest rates, even if they have not increased the volume of credit, may have had a substitution effect in the allocation of financial resources—that is, people who had invested in something not very attractive today (like housing) may have decided to move their resources to invest in equity shares. This lowered the cost of issuing shares to finance companies, including financial institutions (the price-to-earnings ratio has gone up substantially if, as suggested by Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, the earnings are estimated as the average of the last decade).
This seems to have happened. The stock exchange has been in a frenzy of booms since the policies of artificially low interest rates have been applied. The low interest rates did not create new credit to Main Street but diverted resources toward the stock exchange, including the shares of financial institutions that used them to grant credit.
The effectiveness of the Fed in keeping low the long-term rates seems to be waning, however. As shown in the next chart, the long-term interest rates have been increasing as of late (those of the US bonds since June 2012 and those of mortgages since February 2013) even if the short-term rates have been flat and close to zero. The mortgage rate has gone up from 3.4% to 4.5%, and the 10-year US Treasury bond rates from 1.6% to 2.9% since those dates, reversing the trend these rates had shown since the beginning of quantitative easing at the end of 2008. That was embarrassing. Quantitative easing was not able to keep the long-term interest rates low. Maybe it was time to quit before this became too obvious.
But, why did the long-term interest rates increase while the short-term ones remain so low, particularly at a time when the banks are full of liquidity and could increase the supply of credit at a snap? One obvious answer is that the long-term market is expecting an increase in inflation rates. That is a good reason to stop quantitative easing, maybe better than the assertions of its complete success.
Thus, perhaps nothing has happened after the Fed announced the end of quantitative easing because the program didn’t do anything except unnecessarily increase the liquidity reserves of commercial banks and help to keep the long-term interest rate low in the first few years of the program—something that recent evidence suggests it can no longer do.
Of course, the fact that to this date nothing has happened does not necessarily mean that nothing will happen in the longer run. The problem will not come from the amount of money in circulation. The banks have enough excess reserves to submerge the world in currency. Yet, if the interest rates keep on increasing, and everything suggests that they will keep on doing it, many activities that have been profitable at the low interest rates will fail, and this will negatively affect the financial system. Depending on the magnitude of the adjustment, the coming event will be just financial turmoil or a full fledged financial crisis.
Now, you can ask yourself, why getting into all this, risking inflation and financial turmoil just to have money parked in the Fed? Well, keeping the banks artificially liquid may be useful to keep insolvent banks artificially alive. Maybe this was the secret purpose of quantitative easing. Maybe the idea was to keep them liquid while they cleansed their bad loan and investment portfolios. However, for most of the life of the program, the monetary authorities have insisted that the banks were quite solvent.
Were they? Are they? We are going to know the answers to these questions now that tapering seems to have started in earnest. The end of quantitative easing is like the end of Neverland. Only those who learned to live in the real world of free interest rates, as opposed to the fictional lands of artificially low interest rates, will survive. As Warren Buffett said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.(JTA) — Cuba said it will release nearly 3,000 prisoners on humanitarian grounds, but did not include Jewish-American Alan Gross on the list.
Gross, a U.S. subcontractor jailed in Cuba for the last two years for "crimes against the state," is in ill health.
The prisoner amnesty, which Cuban leader Raul Castro called a humanitarian gesture, was announced late Friday.
“To receive news in the middle of Hanukkah that the Cuban authorities have once again overlooked an opportunity to release Alan on humanitarian grounds is devastating," Gross’ wife, Judy, said in a statement, CNN reported. "Our family is simply heartbroken.”
The U.S. State Department also condemned Gross’ exclusion from the list.
"If this is correct, we are deeply disappointed and deplore the fact that the Cuban government has decided not to take this opportunity to extend this humanitarian release to Mr. Gross this holiday season, especially in light of his deteriorating health, and to put an end to the Gross family’s long plight," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Saturday.
Gross, 62, is serving a 15-year prison sentence in Cuba for distributing laptop computers and connecting Cuban Jews to the Internet. He was arrested in 2009 as he was leaving Cuba.
Gross’ family and U.S. State Department officials say that Gross was in the country on a U.S. Agency for International Development contract to help the country’s 1,500 Jews communicate with other Jewish communities using the Internet. The main Jewish groups in Cuba have denied any contact with or knowledge of Gross or the program.A parade float representing the Northeast. (Photo supplied)
Bangkok motorists are advised to avoid Rama I and Ratchadamri roads on Wednesday evening, when a tourism promotion procession will make its way from Pathumwan intersection to Lumpini Park.
The outbound lane of Rama I road (next to Siam Discovery) from Pathumwan intersection to Chaloem Phao Junction will be close from 5pm to 9pm. The procession will go along Rama 1 Road and turn right at Ratchaprasong intersection, then along Ratchadamri Road to Lumpini Park.
A signpost near Khlong Toey market on Rama IV Road advises motorists to avoid some intersections in Bangkok during the tourism promotion procession on Wednesday. (Photo by Nittaya Nattayai)
Pol Maj Gen Jirapat Phumjit, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police Bureau (MPB) who oversees traffic in the city, said motorists from Charoen Phon intersection heading to Pathumwan intersection on Rama I will be forced to either turn left to Phaya Thai Road or right to Sam Yan area during this time.
Motorists from Phloenchit can go through the inbound lane of Rama 1 road, he said. After the procession moves to Ratchadamri road, it will occupy only the far left lane of the road. Other lanes can be used by motorists.
The MPB,wants drivers to avoid the route to ease traffic problems. Spectators are advised to use t public transport to attend the event.
Traffic information is available at hotline 1197 of the Traffic Control and Command Centre, Pol Maj Gen Jirapat said.
The procession marks the government’s “Amazing Thailand Tourism Year 2018” campaign, which runs from Nov 1 to Jan 1, 2019.
The procession is in six parts -- the symbol of “Amazing Thailand Tourism Year 2018”, traditions from the five regions of Thailand, Thai gastronomy, colourful festivals, sport tourism and good hosts.Washington (AFP) - Israel faced increasing pressure Monday, including from the United States, after saying it plans to expropriate 400 hectares (988 acres) of Palestinian land in the Bethlehem area in the south of the occupied West Bank.
Ally Washington, the United Nations and Egypt all called for an urgent rethink after Sunday's announcement, which angered the Palestinians and alarmed Israeli peace campaigners, and comes days after a long-term ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians took hold.
According to the Israeli military, the land move was a political decision made after the June killing of three Israeli teenagers snatched in the same area, known to Israelis as the Gush Etzion settlement bloc.
"This announcement, like every other settlement announcement Israel makes, planning step they approve, and construction tender they issue, is counterproductive to Israel's stated goal of a negotiated two-state solution with |
politics of Trump and the treatment of Muslim refugees both in America and Europe. Spencer Platt/Getty 9/11 People listen to speakers at a demonstration against racism and conservative presidential candidate Donald Trump's recent remarks concerning Muslims on December 10, 2015 in New York City. Dozens or demonstrators and activists converged at Columbus Circle to denounce the politics of Trump and the treatment of Muslim refugees both in America and Europe. Spencer Platt/Getty 10/11 People listen to speakers at a demonstration against racism and conservative presidential candidate Donald Trump's recent remarks concerning Muslims on December 10, 2015 in New York City. Dozens or demonstrators and activists converged at Columbus Circle to denounce the politics of Trump and the treatment of Muslim refugees both in America and Europe. Spencer Platt/Getty 11/11 People listen to speakers at a demonstration against racism and conservative presidential candidate Donald Trump's recent remarks concerning Muslims on December 10, 2015 in New York City. Dozens or demonstrators and activists converged at Columbus Circle to denounce the politics of Trump and the treatment of Muslim refugees both in America and Europe. Spencer Platt/Getty
Mr Trump has said he has handed over management of his vast real estate empire, licensing and merchandising business over to his adult sons to avoid potential conflicts of interest with his role as President.
But critics said his business interests should have been handed over to a blind trust rather to avoid the possibility of Mr Trump being kept abreast of their performance.
Neither of Mr Trump’s orders make any mention of Turkey, despite the fact the country has been the target of several recent terror attacks and the state department put out a warning to American citizens last week noting that “an increase in anti-American rhetoric has the potential to inspire independent actors to carry out acts of violence against US citizens.
The billionaire has several business interests in Turkey, including a line of Trump-branded home furnishings and two luxury towers, earning him up to £6 million a year according to a financial disclosure he made during the presidential campaign.
In December 2015, before he won the Republican nomination for President, Mr Trump admitted to Breibart News: “I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul.”
But he has reneged on this claim more recently, saying that laws making conflicts of interest illegal do not apply to the President.
The United Arab Emirates is another powerful, Muslim ally of the US which remains untouched by the ban. Mr Trump’s business interests there include luxury home developments, spa facilities and a golf course.
Also unaffected by the ban is Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, where there are two Trump-branded resorts under construction, built in partnership with local businesses.
Mr Trump’s chief of staff Reince Preibus was challenged on the issue of countries unaffected by the initial ban during an interview with CBS news following the introduction of the previous ban.
Mr Priebus admitted to host Chuck Todd: “You bring up a good point and perhaps other countries need to be added. But all of this is done for the protection of Americans.
“The countries that were chosen in the executive order to protect Americans from terrorists were the countries that have already been identified by the Congress and the Obama administration. That doesn’t mean that other countries wouldn’t be added later.”
Mr Trump said the aim of his initial executive order was to prevent terrorists from entering the US but not a single terrorist attacker on US soil has come from any of the affect countries for the past four decades.
Not one of the 9/11 attackers came from the seven banned countries but 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, with the rest from the UAE, Lebanon and Egypt.
People have also shared statistics on social media that show 11,737 people are shot dead each year by another American, whereas only an average of nine people were killed annually by Islamist terrorists over a 10-year average period to 2014.
Following the signing of the previous, Mr Trump issued a statement which said the ban was not a “Muslim ban” which he said the media was “falsely reporting”.
He said: “America is a proud nation of immigrants and we will continue to show compassion to those fleeing oppression, but we will do so while protecting our own citizens and border. America has always been the land of the free and home of the brave.
"We will keep it free and keep it safe, as the media knows, but refuses to say. My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months. The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror.”
But worldwide anger continued to grow, with a petition calling for Mr Trump to be banned from making a state visit to the UK passing the one million mark.
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 nowDaniel Everett was 26 when he first entered the Amazon rainforest as a missionary, with his wife and three young children in tow. He was tasked with converting the remote Pirahã tribe to Christianity, a task he would fail, in the process losing his own faith and tearing his family apart.
However, in the years he spent in the Brazilian Amazon Everett succeeded in one area that no one had before. At first simply by pointing to the things in the jungle around him and getting the Pirahã to name them, Everett was eventually able to master the Pirahã language. What he discovered was a method of communication so strange and unique that it sparked a fierce debate among linguists all over the world. The Pirahã language has no past or future tense, no numbers or method of counting, no names for colours, and most crucially, no evidence of recursion – the feature that was thought to exist in all of the human language, suggesting a genetic component of language. Everett is now locked in an intellectual row with the “father of modern linguistics” Noam Chomsky, over the existence of universal grammar. His new book, Dark Matter of the Mind, continues to explore his remarkable findings, suggesting that our culture plays a major role in structuring language and the way we use it.
You recently wrote a book entitled Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious. Can you tell us a bit about it? Dark Matter of the Mind is an explanation of the ways that the knowledge, and the social roles we have, the different experiences we go through as individuals and as members of societies, affect us in ways that we are not even aware of. I mean, why do I stand one way when a Pirahã man stands with his legs crossed and his arms folded over his chest? There are a lot of things that are deep within our unconscious that are shaped by our culture and that we can’t talk about. There are other things that we don’t talk about that are also shaped by our culture. Why do we say red, white and blue, instead of white, blue and red? Why do we structure our sentences shorter or longer? These are the things that we pick up from the society around us, from our different cultural experiences, and they come together to make us the individuals that we are. I go into some detail in the book about human nature, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle was the first one to talk about the mind as a blank slate. By that he did not mean that there was nothing in the mind, he meant that there were no concepts in the mind unless they came through the senses. Plato was the opposite and believed that the senses added very little to what we were born with, that we were born with the concepts that were going to control us. I trace those ideas from Plato to Adolf Bastian, all the way to Noam Chomsky, and from Aristotle to Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, to myself. I argue that it’s culture rather than nature.
"The last thing on Earth the Pirahã needed was Jesus. In fact after living with them for some time I realised that it was the last thing on Earth that I needed as well." Daniel Everett on how he lost his faith in the Amazon
Let’s go back a bit and talk about the very unorthodox way you began your career in linguistics. You were working as a missionary in the Amazon with the Pirahã tribe for a long time. Yes, in my teenage years I thought that religion was a pretty silly idea but then I met a family of missionaries who had been living an extremely interesting and exotic life in the Amazon. Since this was the 60s, an extremely interesting and exotic life was what I was after, and although I had always wanted to be a musician when I got to know this family and got to really like them, I converted to Christianity. Their daughter became my girlfriend and then my wife, and a few years later when we had completed our Bible training and I had a degree from Moody Bible Institute in foreign missionary work, we went off to Brazil. When we got to Brazil I started living with Amazonian groups and pursuing graduate work at a Brazilian university. But I realised that religion didn’t satisfy me in this new cultural context I found myself in, and also that the last thing on Earth the Pirahã needed was Jesus. In fact, after living with them for some time I realised that it was the last thing on Earth that I needed as well. Through their influence and through my friendships with many Brazilian intellectuals I abandoned Christianity and belief in any god whatsoever.
That led me to want to pursue a career in science, in anthropology and linguistics. This was very hard on my family. After living for almost eight years in the Amazon, we moved to Pittsburgh where I became an assistant professor in linguistics.
What did you experience with the Pirahã that made you lose your faith? And why do you think they have no need for religion? Well firstly they were the happiest people I had ever seen. They were laughing and having fun all day, and asking intelligent questions. They weren’t superstitious in the way that you might expect an Amazonian tribe to be. They didn’t believe in spirits. They have certain jungle entities that they talk about that I mistranslated initially as ‘spirit’. These jungle entities are fictional, to me at least, I still can’t decide if they are fictional to the Pirahã. They seem to be neither fact nor fiction by our Western standards. As I would read to them the stories of the bible that I had translated into their language, they would assume that I was talking about things that I had seen. If I told them that Jesus performed a miracle, they assumed that I had seen that, and they were quite astounded by it. But as they questioned me and realised that I hadn’t seen any of this stuff and I didn’t know anyone who had seen any of this stuff, they were very bemused as to why I was telling them about it. And I thought, “yeah, why am I telling them this?” I realised I was being unethical by telling them these things as fact. This combination of their happiness, their satisfaction with life, them pointing out to me the intellectual flaws of my own position, it all led me to acknowledge that I no longer believed in what I was telling them. Religion got me off drugs when I was a teenager so I’m very grateful for that, and I don’t regret having gone through this period. I became a Christian when I was 17 in 1968, and I didn’t admit to myself that I wasn’t a Christian until about 1982, and I didn’t tell my family until 2002. Part of the problem is that when you’re a Christian and you’re having doubts, there’s a whole bunch of mechanisms built into both the Bible and Christian social structures to help keep you believing. There was also the fact that I’d married someone who had dedicated her life to Christianity and her faith was unwavering, my children were all believers, and my entire income and professional standing was based on being a missionary and a pastor. So there was a fair amount of social pressure to stop me from announcing to everyone, “hey I don’t believe this stuff anymore.” Looking back now I probably should have told everyone that I wasn’t a Christian long before I did. Once I got the position at the University of Pittsburgh I relaised I didn’t need to pretend anymore.
What is so unique and incredible and the Pirahã people and their language? They are so unusual in so many ways. When I was asked to go there as a missionary I was told that several other people had been sent in the past and they had all spent one or two nights there and basically said, “I never want to come back here.” Part of the reason for that is the Pirahã language is not related to any other known living language, so you can’t rely on any similar languages to help you figure it out. The Pirahã people don’t use many tools, their culture is extremely subtle, and to the observer unfamiliar to them it doesn’t look as if they have any culture. They seem to lie around and gossip all day. In fact they have a very rich culture but it takes understanding their language to see that. Their language is very hard to learn and they only speak Pirahã. Malaria also made it tough. I’ve had malaria several times, my wife and my oldest daughter almost died from malaria. We had dysentery, typhoid fever, and our lives were threatened by the Pirahã. There are challenges to being a white family living in the middle of the Amazon.
“There are challenges to being a white family living in the middle of the Amazon.” How were your lives threatened? Well, we were only just getting to know the Pirahã, and I was a missionary... I didn’t make a serious effort initially to understand their culture. The Pirahã weren’t sure about me either and I began to come between them and the Brazilian river traders who would get the Pirahã to give them Brazil nuts, and the chewing gum based sorva, and rubber. The way that the Pirahã were usually paid was in cane-sugar rum, cachaça. That was against the law and the Brazilian Indian Agency had told me that if I saw anyone giving Indians cachaça I should tell them that it’s illegal. So I did. And I also told the Pirahã that they shouldn’t drink it. The reaction of both parties was natural. Who the hell was this American to tell us how to behave? One Brazilian man gave the Pirahã a lot of cachaça and a shotgun to kill me. I woke up that night and heard the Pirahã talking very loudly. They were drunk and I heard one of them say in Pirahã, “I will kill him, I’m not afraid to kill him.” I realised it was me they were talking about and I was very surprised. I got up and found my gym shorts and a pair of flip flop, and I walked in the dark through the jungle to where they were, about 100 yards away. Their hut was very poorly lit with a small kerosene lamp that the Brazilians had given them and they didn’t see me come in. I started picking up the shot guns and the arrows and they noticed me. I said, “Hi, how’s everybody doing?” and then I walked out with all the weapons. They were up all night yelling threatening things and it was quite scary for my eldest daughter who was eight. My other daughter was five and my son was two. The next morning they apologised and told me they would never do that again. Of course they did do it again. Someone once asked me what it’s like seeing a Pirahã man drunk, and I said it was much like seeing my own father drunk. They became werewolves. It’s a total transformation of their personality. That was at the beginning of my time among the Pirahã. I learned a lot of lessons and the Pirahã learned a lot of lessons, and we forged a very solid friendship that more than compensated for those early nights. When I was sick I came to realise that they would do anything to help me if I needed it, as I would do anything to help them.
The Pirahã people When was the last time you spent time with the Pirahã? I know you were at one time being blocked from visiting them by FUNAI (Brazilian National Indian Foundation). I’m still blocked. I haven’t been there since 2009 and the years have gone by so quickly. There is a possibility that I will be going back in April and that will depend on authorisation from the Brazilian government. But there are several Brazilian scientists and intellectuals that are friends of mine and are lobbying on my behalf very strongly. So you published this paper in 2005 about the Pirahã language and it caused a huge debate and quite a big backlash from other linguists. Why were the things you were saying so controversial? Well actually if you read what I said, I think it’s fairly innocuous. The Pirahã don’t use numbers, and they don’t use recursion in their language. I tied a number of these phenomena together and said that these were controlled by culture. Dark Matter of the Mind is my theory of culture because many people wanted to know what I really mean by culture, so finally I’ve answered that with this book. But basically that initial paper was the idea that contrary to what Noam Chomsky and Marc Hauser had claimed, the ability to do recursion was not the basis of human language, because I’d found a language that didn’t have recursion. Pirahã was the black swan that proved that not all swans are white. What I expected was for people to point out flaws in my argumentation but in fact for the first several years all I got was name-calling. So it’s a controversy that is very strong and has been going on for over 10 years now. Do you think that the level of criticism you received had something to do with your background as a missionary, that perhaps people didn’t view you as a credible academic? That was a definite part of it. The funny thing is that I was a well-known linguist long before this paper came out. My first three PhD students from the University of Pittsburgh are now full professors, and other students of mine have very prestigious positions. But I don’t have the academic pedigree. I was giving a talk to a group of philosophers once and one of them said, “Well he has degrees from the Moody Bible Institute and a third world university so this ought to be interesting.” At another talk someone said in their introduction, “the fact that Dan has the educational background that he does and has still been published in these journals, and has the prestigious job that he has, is a violation of every generalisation we think of in academics.” So yes my background has always played a role. But I’ve published 13 books in the last 20 years, I’ve published a lot of articles, and debated people about this at MIT and in Europe. I think people realise that even if they think I’m wrong it’s not going to be easy to show that.
"Pirahã was the black swan that proved that not all swans are white." Daniel Everett on how the Pirahã upset the academic world
How personal is the dispute between yourself and Chomsky? People seem to love to put you two up against each other as rivals, but what is your relationship with him actually like? It’s certainly personal with his followers. I’ve been called all kinds of names, an exploiter, a liar, unethical. Chomsky has called me a joke and said that he can’t take me seriously. But before this Chomsky wrote letters of recommendation for me to get my job at Pittsburgh and for my promotion to full professor. He was very supportive, until he wasn’t. So is it personal? Yeah I think so. I wrote to Chomsky one time after his wife died to tell him I was sorry to hear that Carol died, and he said, “thank you, that means a lot to me.” Then I saw some headline in a Brazilian newspaper where he called me a charlatan. I asked him if he had said that and he just said, “yes.” I said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” And he said, “No you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” So I would say our relationship has known better moments. This debate is all about the issue of recursion. Could you briefly define what recursion is? I held the first international conference ever held on recursion, at Illinois State University back in 2007 and there were a number of invited speakers. One thing that surprised me was that almost everybody had a different definition of recursion. There’s a lot of dispute about whether it’s the same in computer science and mathematics. But in linguistics recursion is the ability to put one thing inside another thing of the same type. So if I have a sentence like, “John said,” and I can put another sentence in it, so “John said that Bill said that Mary said that Peter said that John’s a nice guy” That’s an example of recursion. If a Russian doll could continue on forever it would be a great example of recursion. It’s not just being able to put one thing inside another, it’s the ability to do it forever. So let’s say you found a sentence in Pirahã that was “John said that Bill’s a nice guy.” That’s still not recursion. I claim that the Pirahã language has no recursion. It doesn’t even have those simple sentences that are similar to recursion. So how would a Pirahã person describe that same thing? They would say, “John spoke. Bill is nice.” And they would have a little suffix on there that would indicate that this is old information. They can interpret that as John said that Bill is nice. But they can also interpret it as two separate events. You can do the same thing in English. You can say, “You drink. You drive. You go to jail.” Those are three sentences without recursion, but we interpret them as, “If you drink and you drive then you will go to jail.” So I try to tell people that even in English you can get by without recursion. It’s a useful device for processing information but it’s not necessary, even in English. So it’s not surprising that there are some languages like Pirahã (I don’t think it’s the only language) that simply choose not to use recursion at all in the sentence structure. You can think recursively. If I tell a story like, “John came in the house. John sat down. Mary spoke to John. John said bye.” There’s no recursion in any of those sentences but the whole thing together is a recursive story. So we can think recursively even if we choose not to have it in our sentences. Chomsky believes that if it’s not in the sentence that’s the real problem. It’s not enough that it’s in thought. I explain in a number of articles that the question about thinking recursively is whether we use it in language because we can already think that way, or we can think that way because it’s in language. Chomsky doesn’t claim that it’s a general part of human cognition, he claims it’s part of the language and so that’s where I think he is dead wrong.
“Chomsky [above] became famous for his ideas of deep structure and surface structure, but that’s been dead for 30 years.There are very few ideas that he’s had over the years that have been maintained. “ There are some Pirahã people who are now learning Portuguese. If the Pirahã can use recursion in Portuguese, does this alter your conclusions in any way? That’s actually not correct. It’s been claimed by Chomsky and others that there are several Pirahã who speak Portuguese. That’s false. There’s only one who can speak Portuguese fluently and he was not raised in the village. His father was Pirahã but his mother was from a different group. He doesn’t actually even speak Pirahã very well. His native language is Portuguese. Of all the Pirahã, whose native language is Pirahã, and that’s everyone but him, no one speaks Portuguese. According to Jeanette Sakel, a researcher in England who has been to the Pirahã to study their Portuguese, those Pirahã who do know some Portuguese speak it without recursion. That’s fascinating. But let’s say that a Pirahã learned recursion in Portuguese. That really doesn’t say anything. If there is a single language without recursion, and the people can learn another language with recursion, they can certainly think recursively, but there is still a language without recursion and Chomsky’s definition of language involves recursion. He talks about something he calls the ‘basic operation merge’ that builds all languages. Therefore any language without recursion, whether the people can think about it in another language or not, that language is a counter example to what Chomsky says. This is a point that is often overlooked, deliberately I think by his defenders, but it’s a vital point.
You have obviously created a lot of discussion about the Pirahã language and the Pirahã as people. Do you feel conflicted about drawing so much attention to them? Or worried about their way of life being corrupted by outsiders who want to study them? Well there’s only one other person studying them right now, a young woman who goes in by herself. There are eight villages of Pirahã in the rainy season and they are scattered across 300 linear miles of river. So one village might get three visits in a year, but another village might never see anyone ever. The only person that visits all of the villages is me when I’m there. Actually there is also the Brazilian Health Organisation who regularly visits all of the Pirahã villages and gives them vaccinations, and looks at their health. They are doing a great job. That’s one reason the Pirahã population has gone from about 110 in the 60s to as many as 700, maybe even 1000.
"I think that the language we speak today is the output of 2 million years of evolution." On his forthcoming book How Language BeganMoving Toward a Genomic CBC for ME/CFS
There are two major barriers to identifying ME/CFS biomarkers: 1) variations in how patients are effected, in terms of symptoms and disease progression and 2) the lack of quantitative tools to specifically classify patients and examine the molecular immune underpinnings of the disease. Doctors use tests such as a complete blood count (CBC) to evaluate health and detect diseases by counting the blood cell types – too many or too few can indicate disease. In the case of ME/CFS the CBC is used to rule out other “medically explained” diseases rather than to detect it because in ME/CFS blood cell number doesn’t drastically change. What does change in ME/CFS is the function of blood cells important for the immune response; genomic tools applied to individual immune cells can detect what is causing the altered function. This is what we call the “genomic CBC”.
A few years ago Suzanne D. Vernon, PhD was introduced to Professor Derya Unutmaz, M.D., renowned immunologist at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine. His research focuses on defining the optimal immune response and what happens during infection and chronic disease. Dr. Vernon knew this was a very good fit for ME/CFS! Intrigued by what Vernon told him about ME/CFS, Unutmaz wanted to apply cutting-edge immunogenomics to blood samples from patients, so they worked together to generate some preliminary results on a small set of ME/CFS patients. This data was intriguing enough that Unutmaz applied to the NIH for funding to expand the numbers of patient samples and types of quantitative analyses on the blood.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases (NIAID) of NIH recently funded Dr. Unutmaz’s grant application. He will receive five years of funding – totaling $3,281,515 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — to find better ways to diagnose and treat ME/CFS. Dr. Lucinda Bateman and Suzanne D. Vernon, PhD are Co-Investigators on this project and the Bateman Horne Center will provide the required blood samples and correlating clinical information for the participating samples.
“We know that biomarkers will transform what we know about ME/CFS and how it can be treated. I believe we are well on our way to biomarkers to help guide more precise and personalized treatment for this disease!” says Vernon. Dr. Unutmaz hypothesizes that immune disturbances, particularly to the effector functions of T cell, natural killer and myeloid cell subsets, contribute to ME/CFS.
For too long, research in ME/CFS has been lean and under-funded for several reasons, including the shortage of accurately diagnosed patients available for research studies. The Bateman Horne Center – a clinic specializing in ME/CFS/FM and with a large number of patients who have been carefully and accurately diagnosed, and continue to be treated effectively – will partner with Dr. Unutmaz so that a Research Ready Army of well qualified patients can participate in this exciting research.
The Bateman Horne Center is committed to bringing ME/CFS and FM into the mainstream of clinical and medical science. Identifying biomarkers is a critical first step. BHC is a unique example of an independent non-profit integrative health center where medical care informs research, and research informs medical care. BHC is uniquely positioned to create collaborations between amazing, well-qualified patients and stellar research partners – an important component to progress.
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The first ever books in the world were the Egyptian papyrus rolls, which were composed of several columns of ancient writing scripts. The first of these manuscripts goes back as far as the 25th BC, and until the Christian era, they remained quite popular. However, during this period, the paper or the book industry underwent a transformation, and parchment started replacing the Egyptian papyrus rolls (more on Egyptian Papyrus Rolls on Wikipedia). Writing on parchments was arranged in parallel columns, and vertical lines were used to separate one column from another. This particular pattern gave rise to the idea of cutting the parchments into flat panels, which comprised of either three or four columns. Later on, this form evolved into the books we see today.
Books have been part of the world since the early ages, and so the need to bind them together has also been present since then. In the olden days, a much different binding concept was used than what exists today. The Egyptian papyrus rolls were stored in a tubular binding as shown in figure 1. The parchments were also often wrapped up in a roll, and secured with a ribbon. However, when parchments started being cut into paneled forms, the binding also evolved. The new binding was more convenient to use and remained durable for longer than the tubular form. As such, it became the preferred choice. In the beginning, the paneled parchments were hinged along any one of the edges, and were bounded with stitches or a lacing.
The columnar arrangement of writing was prevalent even at that time, particularly so for the Latin books. Generally, the Romans used three to four columns to separate content on a single parchment. This style has been transferred down the generations, and exists even today. Several published papers, journals, textbooks and reference books have pages that have been divided into two or three columns. Adopting this style makes the text easier and quicker to read. There are also many books which differ from this, and consist of only a single column. As such, their sizes are also reduced so that the text becomes more legible.
The Evolutionary Stages
The bindings that were used in the olden days comprised of pretty much the same components as the bindings that are seen on books today. The books comprised of folded pieces of parchment that were assembled into a single pile and sewn together. Cords on the back of the pages provided more support to the books. The size of the books was large, an inspiration from the huge skins that were used to make the parchments. An example of this sort of book is shown in figure 2.
As time passed, the bindings were further modified. Wooden boards were added on the front and the back to protect the pages, but they were not sewn onto the cords. Later onwards, the cords themselves were laced through the edges of the wooden board. This gave rise to a more durable and compact form of book as depicted in figure 3b.
The final modification occurred when the wooden boards were removed and a leather sheet was used to cover the entire book, concealing the inner cords, sewing and the hinges. The resulting form enjoyed not only durability and protection, but was convenient as well. Shown in figure 4, this form of book was very similar to the books that are seen today.
(Figure 3a). Before wooden boards were added to the paper Figure 3b. Wooden boards added to the ‘book’ Figure 4. Early example of a leather bound book.
External Influences
The process of bookbinding development has its own simplicities and complexities. For the last eighteen hundred years or so, the basic book construction has not undergone any major changes. This is very easily noticeable if traditional and modern books are compared. Just like the olden days, even today’s books have pages that are folded and sewn over each other. These pages are then placed into two boards, which are also attached with the rest of the book onto the hinges, such that all the binding and sewing is concealed below them.
As history has always shown, every process, method or technology is always influenced by other factors, whether they are directly related or not. Similarly, throughout the ages several events affected bookbinding even though they did not have much to do with literature. During the Middle Ages, knowledge was preserved and guarded by the monastic order. Since these people had access to all the text and material, they took up the bookbinding task. They had the wisdom and were extremely skilled with arts and crafts, qualities that are bestowed only to a lucky few. Using these, they started the process of assembling all knowledge in a compact and easy – to – decipher form.
The roots of bookbinding lie in religious literature and history (timeline of Bookbinding from Cave Paintings to the Internet, courtesy of History of Information website. Also a small summary of the ‘History of Bookbinding‘ from Wayte Binding (UK)), and so the beginnings were associated with priests and churches. As such, the first ever books that were written and bounded together in the modern form, were on religion and science. In those days, the writing tools that were used resulted in the formation of large letters, as shown in figure 5. With this in consideration, the paper size was also large. Generally, all writing onto books was done with a reed pen.
The compiled books were often bulky and huge. Though, paper size did contribute to this, a more prominent reason was the thickness of the handmade paper on which the matter was written. With extreme patience, the people of those days carefully wrote each letter, word and line onto the pages. They had an artistic edge and decorated the text with calligraphic styles and brilliant colors. The covers which were used to protect these books also displayed flashes of bright colors, which can appeal to the eye even today. There are so many examples in this regard that anyone would be astonished with the creativity they reflect. Beautiful designs adorned with sparkling gems, precious stones, and gold leaves, the leather covers definitely had a lot to boast about.
Figure 6 shows an example of a stunning book cover featuring an exclusive style. The creativity did not end with just the covers but was prevalent in all other aspects of the books as well. Even the boards were fixed closed together with gold latches or clasps that were adorned with engraved designs.
The monastic binders utilized good and high quality materials in the process. They had a lot of time with them and had the proficiency as well. These two things were utilized by them to produce astounding work that speaks of quality in today’s era as well. The ceremonial books which were created were considered to be great works of art, and were to be used by only a selected class of people. They were usually beautiful and presented ample knowledge to those interested, but all this was not their greatest qualities. The most supreme attribute of old books was that they were literally one of a kind; they were unique and original, and none other could suffice in their place. As such, they were guarded with extreme care and were often secured with chains to the tables or shelves in whichever library they were kept.
Other factors which impacted bookbinding included papermaking. Originating in the lands between Europe and Asia, the tenth century saw the rise of this new methodology (see also History of Paper @ HQ PaperMaker). The paper at that time was made from hand, and roughly bore the same weight as the parchment. However, the facts that it could easily be folded and sewn together made it more preferable than parchment. As the art of papermaking spread across the globe, people realized that this new material did not always have to be given just a single fold. Instead, it was strong enough to be folded several times without getting damaged, as depicted in figure 7. If paper was folded two times, the resulting size was 9 inches by 12 inches, and if it was folded three times, the resulting size was 6 inches by 9 inches, the size of an average book today. The former style comprised of four leaves whereas the latter comprised of eight leaves.
Paper was widely available, and it generated a new interest in the formation of books. Since the creation processes had become easier, more books on a wide range of subjects started to emerge. This led bookbinding into a new development phase or the era of the ‘block books’. The text and figures for each page were first imprinted onto wooden blocks, with one specific block for a single page. These were then used as stamps to create several identical pages bearing the same matter. The blocks could easily be stored so printing could be done even later onwards whenever the need arose. – A full history of WoodBlock printing at Wikipedia.
The block printing method was faster than the traditional reed pen. Speed was not an issue, but it still had its own drawbacks. Cutting letters and figures onto the wooden blocks was a tedious and difficult task that was accomplished only after extensive efforts.
It was in the fifteenth century that Johann Gutenberg decided to end the issues with block printing, and proposed a new and revolutionary movable type print method. Individual type letters were pre-built, and words were composed with them. This made it fairly easy to set an entire page, and the printing process time was considerably reduced. Another advantage of this method was the fact that once a specific page had been set, it could easily be stored, distributed and used at a later time.
Surprising is the fact that this innovative discovery did not immediately reduce the size of the books. This is because even though the letters were now being made by a different technique, their size was still the same as the lead and the block characters, at least in the initial days of their usage. What did change was the |
's menace, a suave suburban vampire named Jerry, and Anton Yelchin and Christopher Mintz-Plasse score a lot of screen time as the teenagers who try to end his reign of terror.
But have no illusions: Tennant is the reason a large percentage of the movie's audience will be catching Fright Night this weekend. It's Tennant's first genre role since he left the hit British sci-fi series Doctor Who after playing the beloved time-travelling hero for four years. And to put it simply, as Fright Night's swaggering Vegas stage magician, Peter Vincent, Tennant owns the film, goosing the proceedings with the mercurial energy and over-the-top bravado of The Doctor, and then pulling back to reveal a very human hero underneath.
"It's a delicious character to be handed," the actor says from his dressing room in Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End, where he's starring in a production of Much Ado About Nothing opposite his former Who sidekick, Catherine Tate. "[It's great to] come in in the second act, as the Hollywood people like to describe such things - to be allowed to freewheel with that a bit, which was very much encouraged."
He's offering a radically different take on the Peter Vincent of Tom Holland's original 1985 Fright Night, a has-been horror star turned local TV host played by Roddy McDowall. Horror hosts having gone the way of UHF stations, Tennant's version of Vincent is a louche, leather-and-eyeliner-sporting rocker - The Doctor after a regeneration into Russell Brand.
"You have this illusionist in every sense of the word," Tennant explains. "He's clearly very successful on his own terms, but his personal life is a disaster area. He's a drunk, he's miserable, he's self-hating. At first he just seems like an irascible drunk, but we find out [that's] perhaps more deeply rooted than it might first appear."
The actor says he was very happy with the experience of his first Hollywood picture, praising director Craig Gillespie (Lars And The Real Girl) for encouraging the cast to contribute ideas and improvise during the shoot.
"I mean, it wasn't improvisation like Mike Leigh would have it, but [Craig] would certainly be interested in sort of loosening it up a bit, seeing where it would go," he says, "to the point that it went to some quite dark or lurid places - some of which ended up in the final film, which I'm very pleased to see. You're on set at 3 in the morning, thinking, ‘Oh, you're never gonna use that joke about me shagging the showgirl,' and then you see the final film and it's in! That's quite pleasing."
Tennant hadn't seen the original Fright Night when he was offered the role.
"I was a kid when it first came out, and I remember it being there, but I didn't see it then," he says. "It was only after I was on board for this one that I checked out the original. It was a very small-scale, slightly tatty B movie that became a sensation. You look at it and you can't figure out why that should be, other than it's got a certain charm to it. And of course that's quite a hard thing to re-create with a remake, because you're chasing something that is by definition elusive."
Not that he would have turned from the challenge.
"It was a very juicy opportunity to be handed, and kind of out of the blue," he says. "I just got a phone call. DreamWorks wanted me to go over and meet some people, which is the sort of phone call that your drama-school self dreams about."
Despite having spent years seeing his face plastered all over the United Kingdom as part of Doctor Who's marketing - and having turned up as a baddie in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire - Tennant is still dazzled by the idea that he's become a star.
"It's just remarkable that anybody knows who you are," he says. "You know, I've just about got used to the fact that people in Britain know who I am on some level, but the notion that there's any kind of international recognition is still slightly bizarre to me."
It seems bizarre to me, in the Comic-Con age when blockbuster movies target geeks and nerds directly, that Tennant wouldn't be a major star. His charismatic run on Doctor Who for then-showrunner Russell T. Davies brought millions of new fans to the revived series. In October, BBC Video will release a 26-DVD gift set collecting all of his episodes and specials, The Complete David Tennant Years.
There was a time, not too long ago, when doing a science-fiction series meant the end of an actor's serious career. You took a role on a show with Star Trek in the title and you spent the rest of your days turning up on shows like Eureka and Warehouse 13.
It's not the same now, as Tennant has discovered. His run on Doctor Who turned out to be the gateway to doing virtually anything else he wanted to do, including playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company - opposite Patrick Stewart, who similarly reinvented himself after more than a decade in the Star Trek franchise.
"Actors move from TV to film now in a way they never used to," Tennant says, "and things that might be called ‘genre' television I don't think are seen as the lesser art form they were once regarded as, [especially] when they're being done by people like Russell T. Davies. You know, he's the greatest writer television has."
It certainly doesn't hurt that genre television has grown up in the last decade. Shows like Doctor Who and the U.S. remake of Battlestar Galactica appeal to adult viewers who fondly remember the old versions but appreciate the maturity and gravity of the new productions.
When I ask whether he'll be part of Doctor Who's 50th anniversary celebration next year, Tennant is judicious: "I'm sure something will be celebrated, but I haven't had any phone calls yet."
He shouldn't have to wait much longer. Doctor Who is intensely beloved in England and elsewhere, and Tennant rates a big chunk of that love - and will likely be feeling it for a very long time.
"I think there's a generation now who don't see [Doctor Who] as something lesser," Tennant says. "They see it as something to be absolutely celebrated and put front and centre. Tom Baker, who played the Fourth Doctor in the 70s, talks now about how he's employed solely by people who grew up loving him.
"I pray to god I'll be enjoying the same thing in about 20 years' time. That's fine by me."
× Interview Clips David Tennant on his strategy to choosing parts: Tennant on alternating between genre projects and more conventional dramatic work: Tennant on walking the line between comedy and horror in Fright Night:
normw@nowtoronto.comNSW police officers are likely to be fighting over the keys the newest member of the state's patrol fleet - a Porsche 911 Carrera.
The 911 looks, ahem, arresting in its blue and white livery complete with sirens. A 911 Turbo S would be better suited for police chases, of course, but the Carrera is more focused on catching the eye of the community than catching criminals.
“Although the 911 might make an ideal Police response car in some people’s eyes, the true value of the sporty Carrera in police decals is that it will draw attention and curiosity with younger folk especially which is exactly what we aim to achieve,” said NSW Police Force Superintendent Alan Sicard.
Replacing a Panamera sedan as the Harbour Local Area Command's Porsche police car, the 911's livery scheme was inspired by entries from local and international students from various NSW universities, campuses and high schools.
The Porsche 911 Carrera has a top speed of 289km/h and can reach 100km/h from standstill in 4.8 seconds.SEATTLE, May 4 (UPI) -- Seattle police said emergency responders rescued a shirtless man found holding a hammer and hanging from a basketball hoop by his foot.
The man, whose name was not released, was found about 6:30 p.m. Friday hanging from the hoop in Cal Anderson Park by his foot, which was stuck in the netting.
Police said the man, who was shirtless and holding a hammer, was thrashing around in an attempt to free himself before firefighters were able to remove the netting and free the man's foot.
It was unclear how the man ended up in his predicament.
Police said the man was was taken into custody and could face charges.
"Shirtless man removed from Cal Anderson basketball hoop. He may be arrested for property destruction, or at least goal-tending," Seattle police tweeted.The Freedom From Religion Foundation is objecting to a Delaware county's repeated grants to religious groups for religious purposes.
FFRF wrote the Sussex County Council on Feb. 9 regarding a $10,000 grant to Delmarva Teen Challenge, a religious ministry that purports to help drug addicts by converting them to Christianity. The money paid for a fundraiser for the religious group. The county responded that it would consider FFRF's input for similar grant requests in the future. That's why FFRF is dismayed that the council has continued to fund religious ministries with taxpayer money.
On June 21, the council voted unanimously to award $2,500 from Councilman Samuel Wilson's discretionary grant account to Grace-N-Mercy Ministries, a Christian church in Greenwood, "for youth camp expenses." In its grant application, the ministry stated that the grant would be utilized for expanding its summer youth camp, which "combines the social recreation and team building activities of a traditional summer camp with the faith-based principles of a vacation bible school."
The Vacation Bible School is an overtly religious curriculum aimed at indoctrinating young children in Christianity. Its website states that "after every Bible story, kids will hear how that story ties into God's bigger story—his plan of salvation! Each day kids will learn about Christ's sacrifice for them and be challenged to respond to God's love in real and meaningful ways." The county apparently took no steps to ensure that the $2,500 would be used for entirely secular purposes. Although the Grace-N-Mercy Ministries' grant application plainly stated the religious nature of the camp, the audio recording of the council meeting demonstrates that councilmembers voted on the grant without even discussing the possibility that the funds will be inappropriately used to promote religion.
On June 28, the council decided to give $2,000 to yet another summer bible camp, Nanticoke Young Life. The group's website makes clear that its primary goal is to convert kids to Christianity. The County Council again awarded the money without discussing whether it was proper to force Sussex County taxpayers to fund a sectarian religious event.
"The Supreme Court has consistently held that direct grants to religious institutions require appropriate safeguards against the money ever being used for religious purposes," FFRF Legal Fellow Ryan Jayne writes in a letter to Sussex County Attorney J. Everett Moore Jr. "The county violates both the Delaware and U.S. Constitutions when it uses public money to maintain a ministry or to fund religious activities."
FFRF says that this pattern of unconstitutional grants must stop and that Sussex County councilmembers may not use discretionary funds to promote their personal religion or religion in general. It requests that the county respond in writing with steps it is taking to stop its regular practice of allowing councilmembers to fund religion with taxpayer money.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a nationwide nonprofit that educates on nontheism and safeguards the constitutional separation between state and church, with nearly 24,000 nonreligious members all over the country, including in Delaware.The Chicago Cubs are the best team in baseball so far this season and are still considered the favorites to end up winning the World Series. It has been quite some time since the Cubs were considered a serious threat to win it all, but this could be the year that they break the curse that has been held over them for the last 107 years.
Theo Epstein has put together and impressive roster from top to bottom. Whether it be the impressive power that Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant bring to the lineup or the best pitcher in baseball, Jake Arrieta, the Cubs seem to have the mixture of players to continue their hot start. There are a few areas that could use improvement, which is exactly what the MLB trade deadline is about.
According to a report from Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe mentioned the Cubs as a team that will likely show interest in acquiring Toronto Blue Jays star outfielder Jose Bautista at the trade deadline. There is a strong chance that the Blue Jays could gauge trade value for some of their better players.
Throughout the course of the 2016 season thus far, Bautista has been unable to put up the superstar numbers that he has had in years past. He has recorded a.229 batting average to go along with 12 home runs and 38 RBI's. Even though the numbers aren't great this season, the Cubs should still be very interested in acquiring the slugger.
At 35-years-old, Bautista is playing in the final year of his contract. He is owed $14 million this season, which the Blue Jays would likely be willing to cover a large chunk of for the right deal.
Chicago saw star young slugger Kyle Schwarber go down for the season with a torn ACL earlier this year. Since then, the offense has sputtered at times. It still has the potential for double digit runs on any given night, but another big bat would be extremely helpful come playoff time.
Looking ahead at the deadline, the Cubs could use one more bat, a bullpen arm and perhaps another starting pitcher. Epstein is going to be very aggressive in his pursuit of bringing a World Series victory to the Cubs' fan base. He is not scared to make a big deal and has done so in the past.
Acquiring Bautista would be exactly what the doctor ordered for the Cubs' lineup and would add more experience and swagger to the clubhouse.
It is hard to predict what the Cubs would have to give up to get a piece like Bautista. They would have to give up at least one top prospect, with a second likely being required as well. Chicago has the farm system to make a move for a big bat like Bautista, which won't be the big issue in these two teams figuring out a suitable deal.
Bautista isn't the best defensive outfielder anymore, although he can't be much worse than Schwarber was. Joe Maddon seems to find ways to fit guys into lineups and still get above average defense out of them.
If the Cubs continue to play like they have so far this season, they are on pace to reach 110 wins or more. Making moves in the middle of the season are normally about bringing in insurance to make sure that things don't go downhill too late to make an addition to fix the issue. Due to Schwarber's injury, the Cubs would be smart to bring in another big bat in case one of their other sluggers goes down with an injury.
Expect to hear the Cubs mentioned in quite a few rumors as the deadline approaches. Bautista is one of the biggest names in baseball and the thought of Chicago acquiring him should excite the fan base. He would be a huge addition and a big step towards ending the curse.
Bautista is a perfect MLB trade deadline target for the Cubs this season and don't be surprised to hear his name come up in trade rumors when the deadline rolls around.A 2,000 MW solar power park would be set up at Pavagada in Karnataka's Tumakuru district to meet the state's energy needs, Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal said on Thursday."The mega solar project will be built under public-private partnership (PPP) with investment from central and state governments in about 10,000 acres of parched land," he told reporters after a day-long review meeting here.The central government will provide a subsidy of Rs.20 lakh per MW of power generated from the solar park in Pavagada, 180 km from here.Touted to be one of the largest renewable energy projects in the country, the power generated from the park will be evacuated and transmitted by the southern grid whose capacity is being expanded."We are investing a lot to increase grid capacity to transmit electricity across the state from the solar park and other power projects," Goel said.Karnataka Energy Minister D.K. Shivakumar said the state government had identified barren lands at Pavagada for setting up the solar park. Pavagada was selected for the project owing to its strategic location with high sunlight exposure, backwardness of the area and less demand for land."With a view to providing 100 percent electricity to every household and every village in the state, all forms of energy will be tapped through projects under PPP and private producers," said Goyal.About 800,000 households and 36 villages in remote and backward areas of the state's northern region do not have power supply till date.The central government will also grant Rs.800 crore to the state for setting up dedicated feeder lines for supplying uninterrupted power to the farm sector, including irrigation pumps and tube-wells under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana."To step-up power generation through thermal sources, the central government is allotting a dedicated coal block in Maharashtra and West Bengal for exclusive use of Karnataka power plants," said Goyal.Apple's next major operating system update for Macs will, by default, block users from running games and applications not downloaded from the Mac App Store or created by a developer registered with the company.
A new feature in the update called Gatekeeper automatically prevents users from running games that are from unregistered developers and that they've downloaded from the web -- similar to how iPhone or iPad owners can't install apps that don't originate from the App Store.
Users can choose to remove that restriction, increase security by allowing only Mac App Store programs to run, or load an app anyway by right-clicking on it and hitting open, but when they first install Mountain Lion, Gatekeeper will refuse uncertified, non-Mac App Store titles by default.
This feature is meant to increase security and combat malware from taking root on users' computers, as its reviewers inspect each Mac App Store submission before approving it for release, and the company can remove problem software from the shop.
Developers who don't want to register with Apple but still release apps and games through other channels, such as their own websites, might not appreciate this restriction and the slightly heightened barrier of entry it creates for users to install their titles.
If they want to avoid those issues, though, they will need to sign up for Apple's Developer ID program, which gives developers a unique ID for signing their apps. The ID is designed to verify whether their app is known malware or has been tampered with. If a developer is found to be distributing malware, Apple could revoke their certification and prevent users from loading any of that developer's apps.
The OS X Mountain Lion update is meant to further unify the offerings of Apple's iOS and PC operating systems, creating a consistent experience. Along with Gatekeeper and other new features, Apple will carry over its iOS social network Game Center to Macs. This move should greatly increase Game Center's audience, which already has over 100 registered million users across iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads.
By bringing the mobile game social network to Macs, Apple will enable developers to release titles that support cross-platform multiplayer. Someone with a Mac copy of a game could play against another person with an iOS version of the title.
Game Center for Mac will also allow developers to tap into online and community features like leaderboards, achievements, friend requests, voice chat, and more. The network allows users to see what their friends are playing and discover new games, too.
Apple says more than 20,000 games on iOS's App Store use Game Center -- plenty of titles also use third-party social networks like Gee's OpenFeint and Gameloft Live, which support cross-platform play across iOS and Android devices but not Macs.
OS X Mountain Lion is expected to release this summer through the Mac App Store as a paid product, not a free system update.EVERYTHING about Jacob’s Creek is perfect, a survey has confirmed.
Researchers at the Institute for Studies found 97% of middle class Britons believe the reasonably-priced wine to be the all-time masterpiece of vinification.
Professor Henry Brubaker said: “When you present it to hosts, they will never fail to comment positively.
“Usually they will say ‘ooh, Jacob’s Creek.’ or ‘Jacob’s Creek, nice’, or perhaps just a simple ‘lovely’.
“It’s like somehow they’re ignoring that you only got it because it was the cheapest one in the shop that wasn’t embarrassingly cheap.
“Certainly it is the only product on sale in your local Spar that carries such social cachet. No one would make such a fuss if you turned up with a Double Decker.
“But it is also delicious. Just check out that bouquet – grapey and with a hint of wine.”
He added: “Fuck the French. They eat amphibians and are bad at war.”
Party guest, Stephen Malley, said: “I’m fairly convinced most people haven’t yet cottoned on to Jacob’s Creek because they’re not quite as zeitgeisty as my friends and I.
“I consider myself something of a connoisseur. You may, for example, be interested to know that Jacob’s Creek is made in a vineyard.”Alfonso Cuarón on the set of Children of Men.
Alfonso Cuarón has a knack for disappearing. The Mexico-born writer-director became one of the 21st century’s most acclaimed filmmakers after he helmed his 2001 odyssey of sex and social realism, Y Tu Mamá También, and the stunning 2004 franchise picture Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. But after the troubled production and financial failure of his 2006 dystopian epic Children of Men, he more or less vanished from Hollywood, only to reemerge with a vengeance for 2013’s Gravity, which garnered seven Academy Awards, including Best Director. But after that, he once again vanished, eschewing nearly all interviews in recent years.
However, his name is on many cinephiles’ lips these days due to a resurgence of interest in Children of Men, and its eerily prophetic resonance in our present geopolitical climate. After nearly a year of searching, Vulture was able to track Cuarón down in the city of his birth, Mexico City, where he’s been working on a mysterious, not-yet-titled film set in that city during the 1970s. For our story on the legacy of Children of Men ten years later, Vulture’s Abraham Riesman spoke with the director at a sunlit restaurant in the hip neighborhood of La Condesa.
The primary topic was Children of Men, but given that film’s ambitious attempt to seek the meaning of life and the reasons why societies fail, it’s unsurprising that the conversation was wide-ranging. Over lunch, dessert, and many glasses of chia fresca, Cuarón touched on everything from climate change and Picasso’s Guernica to his frustrations with Universal Pictures and the global rise of right-wing populism. We’ve presented the bulk of the discussion here, with some portions edited or condensed for clarity.
I saw Children of Men on New Year’s Day, 2007. I knew nothing about it. I saw it on a whim because the movie I was trying to see was sold out.
Exactly. [Laughs.]
Okay, yes, it wasn’t marketed all that well, so I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who saw it for that sort of reason. But I’ve seen, at least anecdotally, that people are giving word-of-mouth endorsements recently, what with the coming of Brexit and the Trump victory. There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to Children of Men now.
There’s so much, man. A very sad fact is that people, they’ve been talking about the stuff that’s been happening. People have been warning about it. The thing is, we are surprised now, but it’s been talked about. Children of Men is a product of that. Children of Men is not a prophetic piece. It’s just a compound of studies and essays of other people around the time [when it was made].
Who were you reading back then? I know Slavoj Žižek was one person, but who else?
Naomi Klein and [political philosopher] John Gray. But also, in terms of population studies and stuff, it was [sociologist] Saskia Sassen. What I find of these people — Chomsky, too — they are amazing at diagnostics. It’s not that most of these people have tried to come out with solutions. They are just stating the diagnostics of the situation, the state of how things are. One thing they started talking about, because of the environment, was [geographer] Fabrizio Eva. He’s talking about the natural thing that happens with that, which is migration. The natural thing was to explore migration. You go and you start talking with people or researching about the effects. This is stuff that they’ve been setting up for a long time. Now we’re in shock because the paradigm suddenly seems to be changing. It’s not. It’s just the natural evolution of what has been happening the last few years.
In the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about the bit in Children of Men where Theo talks to Nigel, who’s been rescuing Europe’s great artworks and preserving them. Theo tells him, “In a hundred years, there won’t be one sad fuck to look at any of this. What keeps you going?” and Nigel says, “You know what it is, Theo? I just don’t think about it.” I used to think that was an appalling way to look at the world, but lately, I’ve been wondering if he had the right idea. After all, if you focus on the coming apocalypse, you might become fatalistic or even nihilistic. So maybe you should just not think about it.
That’s so funny, because I never saw it as so philanthropic. I don’t think it’s philanthropy there, with this character. I think it’s just what gets him through the night. He has the means and the power to put [the art collection] together and yes, he can claim that it is for the good of humanity like everybody claims that everything that they do is for the good of humanity. But ultimately, he is using those just as subjects of décor. It’s decoration. [Michelangelo’s] David belongs to a context. A context that is a cultural context that deals with ethnic, spiritual, religious, aesthetic use. You know? You cannot just strip that part and put it in your living room as décor. You’re going to put Guernica as a backdrop for your fancy dining table served by butlers? At that point, what does it mean anymore? It becomes wallpaper. Also, there’s the line where [Nigel’s] just talking about all these cities and the catastrophes how it’s a blow to art.
Right, and then Theo says, “Not to mention people.”
[Nigel] does not mention people. But you cannot divorce people from art or from culture. Otherwise, it’s just an object. If an alien civilization comes one day, I don’t know that they’ll be able to distinguish a piece of marble in the shape of the David from just marble in nature. Art has to do with the culture. The moment that you divorce from that, there’s nothing left. And [Nigel] is divorcing art from the people. You know, it’s either decoration or a turn of power, at that point.
So, let’s get into the chronology of Children of Men. The project was first tossed your way in 2001, right?
Right, it was when I was promoting Y Tu Mamá También. I had already told my agent that I didn’t want to read screenplays. This thing of, “for your consideration” — none of that. I don’t want to read it. Send me just the summary. And the summary is a two-pages-long thing. I don’t want to read 120 pages of … Look, reading Hollywood screenplays is really sad. And the problem is, you may think that you’re working, but you just waste time. And then you don’t create. At that time, I didn’t have a computer or anything, it was still paper [screenplays]. On flights, I would take one and I would read it there. And I remember reading [an early draft of Children of Men], traveling to L.A.
When I read the summary, immediately, I don’t know why, it’s one of those things where you start and you see everything. I start reading the thing and it’s like everything started unfolding. But I was not interested in the book or the [existing] story and I didn’t want to read the screenplay, because it was just a literal adaptation [of the novel], and what I like is some elements in the summary. Then, with Y Tu Mamá También at Toronto Film Festival, we were stranded there because it was September 11. And I was there with [the movie’s stars,] Gael [García Bernal] and Diego [Luna], and we were stranded for three or four days. It was a very odd climate. The streets are quiet and all in fear. Powerful people — they didn’t have the power to make the plane go up there, the private plane go up, you know? It was strange to see.
I was talking with Gael, I remember, and thinking about what’s going to happen. That is when. Because it was clear that something had happened that was going to change things, and it was at the turn of the century. It was this thing that I started, this thing of trying to understand what was going to shape this new century. That is when I started reading a lot of stuff.
If you had all these ideas right when you read the summary, why weren’t you interested in actually moving forward with it?
It was because I was not interested in the screenplay. At that time, I was not interested in a science-fiction thing about upper classes in a fascist country. Then, it was 9/11. That is the change. Then I went with [co-writer] Tim Sexton to London that winter. Tim read the book. I told him, “You tell me if there’s anything relevant that we can use.” He read it, and there was one or two things that he said. We wrote the draft. [Universal] didn’t want to green-light it. This is when Harry Potter came through.
Do you know why they didn’t want to green-light it?
They didn’t like it.
That’s a good reason, I guess.
Mm-hmm. While I was doing Harry Potter, they called me. The producers called me and said they need to keep the project alive. “We’re going to bring in another writer.” [The writer was David Arata.] They did a write-up. The work was not to change anything that we have done.
While you were working on Harry Potter, were you thinking much about Children of Men?
All the time. Even more. I was in London full-time. Going through, you know, not the prettiest side of London. Harry Potter is the time that gave me more space for research. Because once you get into the Harry Potter world, it’s very intellectually intensive the first few months that you have to put everything together. Then, after that is a long time that is just like clockwork machinery. You go to work certain hours. It gave me time. I was just researching like crazy. Reading like crazy. Talking to people. Just looking around. Taking pictures. Just observing, you know? Reading a lot and trying to process. What is great about reading is, you read something that’s really what you find relevant, then it relates to something else that then is relevant. It kind of starts to be like a tapestry of information, and everything was around one centerpiece, that was this Children of Men. Chivo [cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki] was very influential as well.
Even before it was a sure thing that Children of Men would happen, had you already decided that Chivo would be your cinematographer if it all came together?
Always. Always.
What ideas was he contributing in those early stages?
He says, “We cannot allow one single frame of this film to go without a comment on the state of things.” I said, “Okay. That’s exactly it.” He was so articulate about what it was, you know? I can communicate about zillions of specifics that sometimes only Chivo can decipher. He says, “Okay. It’s about that.” That just helps so much. For some of the sweep of London, Chivo and I said we wanted it to look more like Mexico City, you know? Also, there’s almost no close-ups. Everything is very wide because the environment is as important as the character.
Yeah, which you guys had already done in Y Tu Mamá También.
Yeah. One thing informs the other. You know, from a main-narrative standpoint, you can follow the story. You hope as a director, that you can follow. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, by numbers, more or less. What is more relevant, in many ways, is what is told behind. Even with the characters, the mission of the characters, or even the dialogue of the characters. The little pieces of information that are in the frame.
So you’ve been thinking and talking with Chivo, and then you finish Harry Potter. Did you jump into Children of Men right away?
What happened is one of those magical things. I go to do Harry Potter, and suddenly, the same people who [said no before], they want to green-light the film. Stacey Snider was the head of Universal. She was really awesome. I passed through her office, and she said, “I don’t understand this film, I have no idea what you want to do, but go ahead and do it.” Then it began, but it was the beginning of a very gruesome process. It was very tough. I have to say, it was a very troubled production.
What was troubled about the production?
Boring Hollywood bullshit. Like producers hiding numbers to try to please the studio.
Before we get into the production, let’s talk about Clive Owen. How did he get cast? I heard that the folks in charge initially wanted an American actor.
The thing is, they would only green-light it if we used one of their five names of the moment. I was so lucky that, that year or the year before, I think was Closer [in which Owen starred]. Everybody was hot for Clive. I loved that because I had loved him in Croupier. Then we met. He didn’t really understand what I was talking about at first. Then I asked him to see The Battle of Algiers. He loved The Battle of Algiers. The battle we lost was that Theo was going to have thick glasses. Not thick, but more like Michael Caine in Alfie. They didn’t want it because it would make him less handsome.
Why do you think Clive was right for the role?
You know, the moment you talk to Clive, there’s a saltiness to the guy.
A cynicism, too, I’d imagine.
That’s the thing. Listen, he can be aloof as hell. Then, this warm kind of thing. I immediately dug the guy. I really liked him. I think he was offered, that year, to do this film about blood diamonds.
Blood Diamond? The one that Leonardo DiCaprio ended up doing?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, interesting. Clive made the right pick.
Well, no, because Leo was nominated for an Oscar.
Fair point.
I was very happy that he decided to come and do this. He was, from the beginning to the end of this, a collaborator.
He ended up helping to write it, right? You and him and Tim?
Man, we would just sit and riff with Clive. He has such a great smell for bullshit. Very important also is he understands the kind of feeling, of making what we’re making. The rhythm of the scenes was on his shoulders because everything was pivoting around him. He’s the pivot of the scene, so he arrives and stuff happens, so in many ways he was an amazing filmmaker. At the end of a long shot he says, “You know, I think we can speed it up.” You know? You’re not going to be doing that in the editing room, you need to do it in this scene. The whole film was a triad with Chivo, Clive, and me.
And how did you end up casting Julianne Moore?
What a great chance. The studio had a bunch of names, and there were some other names, but Julianne … For me, it was relevant for either Theo or Julian to be non-British.
Why?
Because of the whole thing of immigration. We were even considering some French actress and some others of all nationalities. But the moment when you got over there, the studio right away gets very concerned about accents. Unless you have some foreign actress that was nominated for the Oscar that year in a movie that made a lot of money, they’re not very keen to cast her.
Why was Julianne right for the role?
Man, she’s as cool and laid back as any American woman, and that was important for her character. She’s absolutely laid back, but she can be fiery in a second, and she’s as smart as hell.
Was it hard to convince Michael Caine to play a hippie? He’s a pretty conservative guy.
I didn’t know he was a conservative. When we met, I guess we connected because he met John Lennon, and he said, “Can I play as if I was John?” I said, “That’s fantastic.” But then we’re doing the pot-smoking scene, and at some moment, Michael started to get that I wasn’t very conservative. I can tell that for a second, Michael thinks, Why am I sitting here? I have to say, that guy, such an amazing pro. He’s a very technical actor. He knows where your camera’s going to be, where he’s going to stand, how he’s going to say his line here and how he’s going to say the line over there.
While we’re on the topic of collaborators: I heard there was a moment where it seemed like you might work with Banksy. Is that true?
It’s a funny story.
I would imagine.
Banksy was not yet the Banksy that he is now. He was more like an East London phenomenon, and I dug him. His stuff. And I thought it would be great to have his artwork throughout the whole thing. He had his first show, the one where Damien Hirst bought all of his stuff, |
steady stream of visitors attended his mansion on the outskirts on Sydney to share condolences, Mamdouh would not talk to anyone. Instead, the 61 year-old donned a Driza-bone and took a peppery-white horse out for a lone walk around Denham Court, near Campbelltown. After cantering quietly for about an hour, he broke into frenzied runs up and down the length of his property and appeared transfixed.
A woman at the home said no one had been able to calm him down or talk to him. He wouldn't come off the horse, she said. Mohamed Elomar was reportedy killed in Iraq. Credit:Twitter "No one wants to talk right now," one of Mohamed's brothers, who declined to give his name, said. "Obviously my brother's dead, what do you want us to say?" It is understood members of Elomar's family first shared the news of Mohamed's death, which the government said it was close to confirming on Tuesday. A tweet purportedly from Zaynab Sharrouf and captioned 'Chillin in the khilafah, lovin life', claims to show Zaynab, her mother, Abdullatif's wife Zehra Dumann and Rahman's wife Umm Jihad. Credit:Twitter
It is believed an air strike in Syria hit a convoy carrying Elomar and possibly his best friend, Khaled Sharrouf. Reports that Sharrouf also died could not be verified and community sources told Fairfax Media that Sharrouf's family had not been telling friends that he was dead. Mamdouh Elomar during a solitary ride at is Sydney property after news his son Momhamed was killed in Syria. However, Sharrouf's 14-year-old daughter Zaynab, who married 31-year-old Elomar in March, posted a cryptic tribute online suggesting that more than one person had been martyred. On the messaging app Kik, she changed her profile name from "Soldier of Allah" to "Green birds" - a popular description for Islamic State martyrs.
She changed her profile picture from one of herself to a message reading: "I love my hubby". No one was home at the family's Punchbowl home and the lawyer for Sharrouf's mother-in-law, Karen Nettleton, declined to comment. She has been trying to secure the return of her daughter and Sharrouf's wife, Tara Nettleton, and their children. Zaynab, who used to post online about her love of celebrities and going to the beach, has become increasingly devout since becoming Elomar's second wife. She posted a series of images in March showing her with other jihadist wives posing on a white BMW, holding guns and Islamic State flags.
Elomar's first wife, Fatima, remains in Sydney charged with foreign incursion offences after allegedly trying to leave Australia with her three children. On Tuesday night, a marquee was set up outside the Elomars' home to house dozens of people. Another of Mamdouh's sons, Ahmed, is in prison for assaulting a police officer during the Hyde Park riots. Mamdouh came to Australia in the 1970s and became a respected businessman. However, he was charged earlier this year with allegedly bribing an Iraqi official to win construction contracts.REUTERS/U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Handout via Reuters The U.S. military has committed $7.3 million thus far to the search for missing Malaysian Flight 370, with about half of the total spent on an unmanned submersible, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.
The $7.3 million figure included operations of the ships, planes, helicopters and sensors employed in the hunt for the Boeing 777 airliner from March 8 through April 8, said Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman.
There were no plans in the works to ask the Malaysian government for re-imbursement, Warren said.
Last month, Pentagon officials said that $4 million had been set aside to search for the plane. The increase to $7.3 million appeared to come entirely from the $3.6 million that Warren said was spent to operate a Bluefin-21 unmanned submersible made by Bluefin Robotics.
The Bluefin robot, equipped with side-scanning sonar, multi-beam echo sounders and cameras, and 10 civilians to operate it were sent to Perth, Australia, under contract late last month.
The Navy has been using P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft to search for debris trails from the missing plane at a cost of $4,000 per hour to operate each plane, Warren said.
In recent days, several search ships have reported picking up possible pings from the black boxes of the plane that disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 aboard.
The Australian Navy ship Ocean Shield, using the U.S. Navy's TPL-25 Towed Pinger Locator System, reported Tuesday on picking up at least two more underwater signals that may have come from the black boxes.
The Ocean Shield was attempting to get a better fix on the location of the sounds before sending the Bluefin-21 below in waters more than 14,000 feet deep off Australia's west coast, said Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the search.
-- Richard Sisk can be reached at richard.sisk@monster.comCLOSE The Equine Reproduction Lab at CSU is a pioneer in its field. Nick Coltrain/Coloradoan
Buy Photo Patrick McCue, professor of equine reproduction, poses with a horse at Colorado State University's Equine Reproduction Laboratory in Fort Collins on April 18. (Photo: Valerie Mosley/The Coloradoan)Buy Photo
In the western foothills of Fort Collins, miracles are happening.
Hair-thin needles break through the walls of cells that are invisible to the human eye. In a flash, a single sperm shoots forward and the egg is in the earliest stages of becoming something more — something that will be a treasure to a horse owner in Colorado or perhaps some other location across the globe.
But at the Colorado State University Equine Reproduction Laboratory, these miracles are almost a matter of routine. The lab's researchers pioneered many of the techniques used in modern horse breeding over the course of its half-century existence, from freezing semen samples to the one-embryo, one-sperm method of in vitro fertilization.
The lab burned to the ground about five years ago and was rebuilt in 2013. Today, its work plods along without a hint of ash.
The ERL does more than just the hard-science aspect of horse breeding. It also houses and cares for pregnant mares and new mothers with colts and fillies. The quality of care in those stages makes the CSU program stand out from other horse breeders, longtime client and champion cutting horse rider, trainer and breeder Lindy Burch said.
AT CSU: School troubleshoots lack of women in computer science
“You can't put a monetary value on (the horses),” Burch said. “They're not just a horse, and they're not just an animal. (CSU staff members) treat them like the Faberge egg they are. Really a one-of-a-kind piece of art."
Burch, a resident of Weatherford, Texas, just west of Fort Worth and Dallas, has been trekking her mares to Fort Collins for CSU’s expertise for the better part of two decades. The in vitro work and subsequent embryo transfer has helped Burch maintain her legacy of championship horses.
One champion, Bet Yer Blue Boons, was able to have an embryo transferred to a recipient mare and pass her genes onto another champion, Bet Shes Smooth. Bet Yer Blue Boons was getting up in age, and carrying and birthing a foal herself would have been too dangerous, Burch said.
“Without that procedure, and without Elaine and Jerry, that just would not have been possible,” Burch said, referring to ERL professor Elaine Carnevale and Director Jerry Black.
HEALING HORSES: Mini horse gets his groove back with special hoof from CSU
Burch said she has used other breeding facilities for less risky procedures, and doesn’t speak ill of any others, be they private ranches or other public universities. She also declares “my allegiance is certainly at CSU,” particularly with the trust she has in Carnevale.
“If I’m going to put my mares at risk anyway, it’s going to be with Dr. Carnevale or I’m not going to do it,” Burch said.
Black called the lab the equivalent of a fertility clinic for people. It doesn’t detract from the skill of a general practitioner — and he noted that many skilled veterinarians and breeders exist in the area and in the country — but sometimes a person, or a horse, needs a specialist.
"We have that experience and expertise," said Patrick McCue, a professor of equine reproduction at the ERL. "There's a lot of good breeding farms and veterinarians out there, but we have that expertise."
Buy Photo A horse and her foal spend time outside at Colorado State University's Equine Reproduction Laboratory in Fort Collins in this file photo. (Photo: Coloradoan library)
Stories like Burch’s, where she takes her mares to the facility regularly for reproductive help, are common, McCue and Black said. It’s also reflected in the donations the lab has received — both men are proud to point out that every building on the 60-acre campus is donor funded.
The breeding programs also help the program sustain itself. The ERL brings in about $1.5 million annually, with the money funneling back into the program and, if there's any left over, into the university's equine sciences department, according to ERL officials.
The routine of animals revolving through the program helps the lab to fulfill its main mission as well: Teaching and advancing the realm of equine sciences. Aside from the enrolled CSU students, the facility holds regular seminars for other breeders and ranchers.
Passing that knowledge is what ultimately separates the ERL from private practices, McCue and Black said, even with the potentially lucrative procedures and techniques developed at CSU being put into play.
"(A private researcher) would want to patent all of this," McCue said. "We learn, then we teach and pass it on to others. It's the purpose of a university.”
Buy Photo A horse and her foal look out of their stall at Colorado State University's Equine Reproduction Laboratory in Fort Collins on April 18. (Photo: Valerie Mosley/The Coloradoan)
Read or Share this story: http://noconow.co/1VTfiVQI have been developing a website for public profiles and stash tabs and it is finally ready for the public!
What is it
*Display your class, level, skill tree and gear in a public profile
*Optionally you can also display your inventory
*Display your stash tabs in a public stash tab
How to use the site
*Go to my website:
*Follow the instructions for uploading either a character or a stash tab
*Enjoy!
Examples
*Character:
*Stash tab:
FAQ
Did you check with the devs before releasing?
Yes i did, and they said it was okay!
Won't the stash tab part of this website conflict with the monetization of the game?
Yes it will, and when the devs release their version of public stash tabs i will take down that part of the website, as i like this game and want it to live on!
Is this safe? are you trying to hack me?
A crx file is just a renamed zip file, if you want to check the source code of the extension, then just unzip the crx file and check it out!
I closed the extension view before i had time to copy the link, what now?
Unfortunately right now there is no way other then me manually getting the link, so just upload it again and don't lose the link! :)
Is there a Greasemonkey version available?
Not right now, maybe later
Why is it so slow to upload a character?
There is a great deal of information to get from the poe website and especially getting the passive skill tree is a little slow
Known Bugs
None yet!
Change Log
v0.10 - 26 December 2012
*Initial Release
Hello people!I have been developing a website for public profiles and stash tabs and it is finally ready for the public!*Display your class, level, skill tree and gear in a public profile*Optionally you can also display your inventory*Display your stash tabs in a public stash tab*Go to my website: Here *Follow the instructions for uploading either a character or a stash tab*Enjoy!*Character: Link *Stash tab: Link None yet! Posted by zfire911
on on Quote this Post
"
Yes it will, and when the devs release their version of public stash tabs i will take down that part of the website, as i like this game and want it to live on! Won't the stash tab part of this website conflict with the monetization of the game?Yes it will, and when the devs release their version of public stash tabs i will take down that part of the website, as i like this game and want it to live on!
So.. whats the point of releasing this feature atm?
Whats the point of releasing this overall?
You give this to community and then just take it back? My advice - its better to realease without public stash now instead.
So.. whats the point of releasing this feature atm?Whats the point of releasing this overall?You give this to community and then just take it back? My advice - its better to realease without public stash now instead. Last edited by Kabraxis on Dec 26, 2012, 11:31:56 AM Posted by Kabraxis
on on Quote this Post
" Kabraxis "
Yes it will, and when the devs release their version of public stash tabs i will take down that part of the website, as i like this game and want it to live on! Won't the stash tab part of this website conflict with the monetization of the game?Yes it will, and when the devs release their version of public stash tabs i will take down that part of the website, as i like this game and want it to live on!
So.. whats the point of releasing this feature atm?
Whats the point of releasing this overall?
Sorry but i didnt see one (without public stash). Aprreciate the efforts but i will not use this.
So.. whats the point of releasing this feature atm?Whats the point of releasing this overall?Sorry but i didnt see one (without public stash). Aprreciate the efforts but i will not use this.
The point is that GGG hasn't developed their version yet, and probably wont until after open beta. This is meant as something people can use until such a time. I'm sorry that you don't see a use for this, but i do hope others do. The point is that GGG hasn't developed their version yet, and probably wont until after open beta. This is meant as something people can use until such a time. I'm sorry that you don't see a use for this, but i do hope others do. Posted by zfire911
on on Quote this Post
Shutting this down when they realease they own version is idiotic but whatever... im preety sure that someone will make something like this for free even after they release monetized trade system.
GL with this anyway.
PS. Its my personal opinion and i thinks that because i refuse to pay for anything that is not cosmetic (it was one of the biggest'selling points" of PoE for me - COSMETIC ONLY CASH SHOP. Sad t hing is that is no longer the case.). Thats why at the beggining it was "great! free trade tool!" and after reading your FAQ it was like "meh". Last edited by Kabraxis on Dec 26, 2012, 11:45:53 AM Posted by Kabraxis
on on Quote this Post
Looks really nice, but in my browser the support gems looks the same as normal skill gems. Also binding ALT to view sockets like on the PoE site would be nice. Posted by Kemichal
on on Quote this Post
" Kabraxis
PS. Its my personal opinion and i thinks that because i refuse to pay for anything that is not cosmetic (it was one of the biggest'selling points" of PoE for me - COSMETIC ONLY CASH SHOP. Sad t hing is that is no longer the case.). Thats why at the beggining it was "great! free trade tool!" and after reading your FAQ it was like "meh". PS. Its my personal opinion and i thinks that because i refuse to pay for anything that is not cosmetic (it was one of the biggest'selling points" of PoE for me - COSMETIC ONLY CASH SHOP. Sad t hing is that is no longer the case.). Thats why at the beggining it was "great! free trade tool!" and after reading your FAQ it was like "meh".
Unfortunately that is just how it is right now.
" Kemichal
Looks really nice, but in my browser the support gems looks the same as normal skill gems. Also binding ALT to view sockets like on the PoE site would be nice.
Looks really nice, but in my browser the support gems looks the same as normal skill gems. Also binding ALT to view sockets like on the PoE site would be nice.
I fixed it so gems looks right, had totally forgotten to add that.
Didn't know about ALT on the PoE site, I'll see if i can add that.
Edit: Added ALT binding Unfortunately that is just how it is right now.I fixed it so gems looks right, had totally forgotten to add that.Didn't know about ALT on the PoE site, I'll see if i can add that.Edit: Added ALT binding Last edited by zfire911 on Dec 26, 2012, 12:22:16 PM Posted by zfire911
on on Quote this Post
" Kabraxis "
Yes it will, and when the devs release their version of public stash tabs i will take down that part of the website, as i like this game and want it to live on! Won't the stash tab part of this website conflict with the monetization of the game?Yes it will, and when the devs release their version of public stash tabs i will take down that part of the website, as i like this game and want it to live on!
So.. whats the point of releasing this feature atm?
Whats the point of releasing this overall?
You give this to community and then just take it back? My advice - its better to realease without public stash now instead.
So.. whats the point of releasing this feature atm?Whats the point of releasing this overall?You give this to community and then just take it back? My advice - its better to realease without public stash now instead.
There's a difference. GGG's public stash tabs is not just public, it mean item put there is available for trade, and doesnt necessarily need buyer to seek out the owner.
Not every stash tab will be public. Every player should have 1 public stash tabs for free. Any additional tabs will come with a purchase. There's a difference. GGG's public stash tabs is not just public, it mean item put there is available for trade, and doesnt necessarily need buyer to seek out the owner.Not every stash tab will be public. Every player should have 1 public stash tabs for free. Any additional tabs will come with a purchase. Unviable build tester.
Fuse mechanics:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/21503
95% Crit Build Without Charges [0.10.1c]:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/172438 Posted by Progammer
on on Quote this Post
" zfire911 " Kemichal
Looks really nice, but in my browser the support gems looks the same as normal skill gems. Also binding ALT to view sockets like on the PoE site would be nice.
Looks really nice, but in my browser the support gems looks the same as normal skill gems. Also binding ALT to view sockets like on the PoE site would be nice.
I fixed it so gems looks right, had totally forgotten to add that.
Didn't know about ALT on the PoE site, I'll see if i can add that.
Edit: Added ALT binding I fixed it so gems looks right, had totally forgotten to add that.Didn't know about ALT on the PoE site, I'll see if i can add that.Edit: Added ALT binding
Better, but the ALT binding only works every other time you press it, atleast in chrome and it doesn't work at all in Opera (alt in opera opens the browser menu, so on the official PoE site ALT is bound to toggle sockets).
Nonetheless, great work! Better, but the ALT binding only works every other time you press it, atleast in chrome and it doesn't work at all in Opera (alt in opera opens the browser menu, so on the official PoE site ALT is bound to toggle sockets).Nonetheless, great work! Posted by Kemichal
on on Quote this Post
this is pretty cool and going to be very useful later on in Public. Thnx for the share. Posted by SlangJew
on on Quote this Post"Galacar spins an intricate web, building up to a smashing finale." - Cheryl Stout, Top 1000 Reviewer
"... storytelling that reminds me of King and Krueger, intense and real." - Merilyn MacKay
"Such a powerful read... Wonderfully written and incredibly poignant. I will be adding this to the books that I read over and over again." - Tasha Goode
The grisly lovechild of Stephen King and an episode of Criminal Minds...
How far would you go to protect your own?
On a warm May evening in the spring of 1979, the people of Heartsridge, Massachusetts, are living the American dream. Families are gathered for barbecues. Kids are playing in front yards. Gardens are being kept.
Meanwhile, Kara Price stumbles home through the woods, raped and beaten, her life shattered by a wicked act of violence, perpetrated by one of the town’s most beloved and public figures.
Surrounding Kara is a cast of compelling and nefarious characters—a violent-tempered mayor who can do no wrong in the eyes of the town, a sheriff bound by the rules and plagued by a guilty conscience, a father bent on revenge, a serial killer in the midst of an identity crisis.
And at the center of it all there's Kara, who just wants to move on with her life and forget everything that happened to her. But how can she do that when everyone thinks she is a liar who is only out for attention?
With plot and emotion braided together by a careful hand, this haunted group of people all acting on behalf of their own interests begs the question: How far would you go to protect your own?Weplay Season 3 delayed due to Valve error?
Trouble strikes again for the already several months delayed Weplay Season 3. In an apparent error by Valve, the intended cosmetic to be released alongside the Weplay compendium has been used for another event.
The return of the Weplay Season 3 was announced earlier this month with a revised format and a new schedule; Weplay planned to kick off the tournament on the 23rd of January. However, this date seems to have been pushed back to 13th of February due to the cosmetic mishap and a possible schedule clash with the Dota2 Asia Championships. It appears that Valve had accidentally used the Luna cosmetic that was to be released alongside the Weplay compendium in the New Bloom 2015 chest, effectively leaving Weplay with an incomplete Compendium.
After having been pushed back for an extended period of time, Weplay will probably be looking forward to resume Season 3 as soon as possible. But with this unfortunate turn of events, Weplay will be forced to delay the tournament yet again; this time however, it is not all bad news as many believe that the original scheduling conflicts between Weplay Season 3 and DAC would have hurt the exposure of the event, a comparatively smaller tournament. This means that it is possible that this mishap could benefit Weplay Season 3 by allowing them to reschedule to a time after the DAC has concluded.
As of yet, no statements have been release by neither Valve nor Weplay and nothing has been officially confirmed.
Headline image from knowyourmeme.com
More content on GosuGamersThe NHL's board of governors is expected to approve the Las Vegas expansion, with the team slated to enter the NHL in 2017-18.
The expansion rules are slowly trickling out. Here's a rundown of what we know so far.
Teams cannot reacquire players they trade after Jan. 1, 2017 prior to Jan. 1, 2018. This is to prevent teams from entering arrangements to "hide" players from the expansion draft. There will likely be a lot more guidelines as part of this rule.
Teams have to expose at least two forwards and one defenceman who have played either 40 games in the previous season (2016-17) or 70 games in the previous two seasons (2015-17). Teams can only lose a max of one player.
The expansion team must select players that have a total value of between 60 and 100 per cent of the 2016-17 salary cap.
The expansion team can’t buy out anyone it picks in the expansion draft until the following off-season (2018).
The expansion team will be given the same draft lottery odds as the team that finishes third last in the league and cannot pick later than sixth in the 2017 NHL entry draft. It’s possible the expansion team could end up with the first-overall pick, if it wins the lottery.
Teams must protect players that have no-movement clauses active in the 2017-18 season. No-movement clauses active in 2016-17 will have no impact. There will likely be exceptions made for players with no-movement clauses who are out with career-ending injuries (i.e. Ryan Clowe and. There will likely be exceptions made for players with no-movement clauses who are out with career-ending injuries (i.e. Ryan Clowe and Nathan Horton ). Teams are not expected to be forced to protect those contracts.
Las Vegas will be required to draft one player from every existing team, including at minimum at each position: three goalies, nine defencemen and 14 forwards.
Teams will have a choice between protecting seven forwards, three defencemen and one goaltender (11 players) or eight skaters and one goaltender (nine players). The second option allows for teams to protect four defencemen but forces them to expose three more forwards in order to do so.
All players with two years or less of pro hockey experience are exempted from the draft.
Thankfully, the Canadiens will be forced to protect only two players; P.K. Subban and Jeff Petry. Odds are they would have protected those players anyhow, so it's really not a hindrance to their expansion planning. Alexei Emelin is not subject to the automatic protecting, seeing as he only has a limited-NTC in his contract.
The following players would be automatically exempt:
Michael McCarron, Nikita Scherbak, Zachary Fucale, Jeremy Gregoire, Brett Lernout, Tim Bozon, Ryan Johnston, Mark MacMillan, Martin Reway, and Artturi Lehkonen.
Meaning the Canadiens would have to pick seven forwards, a goalie, and one defencemen from the following list: Carey Price, Nathan Beaulieu, Mark Barberio, Max Pacioretty, Alex Galchenyuk, Brendan Gallagher, and Lars Eller. Tomas Plekanec, Charles Hudon, David Desharnais, Sven Andrighetto, Daniel Carr, Torrey Mitchell, Jacob de la Rose, Paul Byron, Brian Flynn, Phillip Danault, Lucas Lessio, Stefan Matteau, Michael Bournival, Alexei Emelin, Greg Pateryn, Victor Bartley, Morgan Ellis, Mike Condon, Mac Bennett, Joel Hanley, Darren Dietz, Connor Crisp, Dalton Thrower, Max Friberg, Gabriel Dumont.
Carey Price is the easiest name to strike off the list. He is the franchise, and he automatically joins Subban and Petry as the first players that are protected.
That leaves us with seven forwards and one defencemen to add.
Max Pacioretty, Brendan Gallagher, and Alex Galchenyuk are easy decisions. They're core players, and there's no debate to be had about their worth.
This is where things become a little more complicated. The Habs now have four forwards and one defenceman left to protect.
Daniel Carr, Lars Eller, and Sven Andrighetto are probably the most promising NHL forwards, and along with Nathan Beaulieu they should nab four of the remaining spots.
And then there was one
Should the Habs protect Charles Hudon? Considering how weak they are in terms of high-offense prospects, that would certainly be a wise choice. But perhaps they should protect their loyal workhorse, Tomas Plekanec. Of course, as it stands Plekanec is slated to become a UFA at the end of the 2017-18 season, meaning the Canadiens would spend one very valuable protection spot on a player they could lose at the end of that season for nothing.
There's no guarantee that Hudon will become an impact player in the NHL, however all signs point to him having that potential. That being said, we do know that Plekanec can, and does, make an impact in the NHL. Is it wise to sacrifice one of your most steady veterans to gamble on potential?
If I am part of the Vegas expansion committee, I pounce on the chance of grabbing a player like Plekanec in the draft. Odds are he'll be better than most other centers available.
Even with that risk looming, in the long run it's almost always wise to invest in your future, which is why I would chose to protect Hudon.
The finalized list of the 11 protected players would look like this: Petry, Subban, Beaulieu, Price, Gallagher, Galchenyuk, Pacioretty, Carr, Andrighetto, Eller, and Hudon.
Meaning the Canadiens would expose some reasonable decent players, including Barberio, Plekanec, Byron, and Danault. They would meet all the requirements set by the NHL in terms of leaving experienced players available, and by picking mostly forwards they maximize how many assets they protect.
As long as the Canadiens play their cards right, they should emerge from the expansion draft with little to no effect on their core group of players. At the very worst, they will lose a quality player like Plekanec, or a solid defender like Barberio.Next weekend may be one of the best times for San Francisco residents to get out of town that we've seen all year. If you don't have tickets to Outside Lands, the massive three day music festival, now's a great time to plan a weekend getaway and list your apartment on Airbnb or HomeAway.
As Outside Lands brings upwards of 60,000 attendees to the grassy fields of Golden Gate Park, Airbnb listings in nearby neighborhoods are almost completely booked up. Unlike major business-focused events like Dreamforce or Apple WWDC that fill hotels in downtown and SoMa with conference attendees, there are few hotels to accommodate concertgoers near the park.
This is Airbnb's bread and butter. As they like to point out, 72% of Airbnbs in San Francisco are outside of the main hotel areas.
While demand has only caused prices to go up by 10-30% at major hotels like the Westin and the Marriott next weekend, Airbnbs near the festival are seeing huge surges of demand characterized by dips in the number of available apartments.
Percent Drop in Number of Available Airbnbs during Outside Lands by Neighborhood Cluster
What does this mean for prices?
Depending on where the listing is located, we recommend price increases from 230% for Russian Hill to 265% for NoPa. Listings nearest Golden Gate Park are the most sought after, but Airbnbs all over the city are in high demand. In fact, all of the properties using Beyond Pricing are already booked, most at over 200% of normal prices.
So, if you want to pay for a nice weekend in Napa and avoid the crowds in San Francisco, there is no better time to make your apartment available on Airbnb.
Over 7% of Airbnb listings in San Francisco currently use Beyond Pricing's sophisticated, location-specific pricing software to help them make the most from their apartment. Log-in to Beyond Pricing to preview our recommendations for your place.
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Want to learn more about how Beyond Pricing's automated data-driven platform can help you maximize revenue during periods of increased demand?
Sign up for a free one month trial today! No contract and no commitment.On Monday, the Los Angeles Lakers faced off against the Philadelphia 76ers in the final game of a five-game road trip. Along with the game signaling the end of the last long road trip of the season, it also marked the final day of Jabari Brown’s second 10-day contract with the team.
— Think You Know Everything About Kobe Bryant? Take The Ultimate Kobe Quiz! —
Brown came into Monday’s game determined to prove his worth and possibly get retained by the Lakers for the rest of the season. Brown didn’t disappoint in potentially his last game in purple and gold impressing head coach Byron Scott. Coach Scott said he’ll be meeting with general manager Mitch Kupchak to determine what to do with Brown moving forward, according to Mike Trudell of Lakers.com:
Re: Jabari Brown, whose second 10-day contract is set to expire: Byron Scott will meet with Mitch Kupchak to determine the next step. — Mike Trudell (@LakersReporter) March 31, 2015
In 34 minutes off the bench, Brown scored a career-high 22 points on 7-of-10 shooting from the floor. Brown also added three assists and a steal to the stat sheet as well as going almost perfect from beyond the arc hitting three of his four shots from deep.
With 10 games in the books for Brown, the rookie guard has shown his potential and may be able to stay with the team for at least the rest of the season. Brown averaged 9.4 points per game while shooting 50.0 percent from the floor and 45.8 percent from three-point range.
Much like fellow Missouri product Jordan Clarkson, Brown has shown to be an efficient offensive backcourt option for Coach Scott. The team may benefit from keeping Brown for the final nine games and extending another training camp invite this summer.
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Lakers Nation Interviews Jabari BrownBefore Blockbuster Video came and went, I pretty much grew up in the horror section of our local video store (then it was called AA Video -- businesses used to name themselves AA so they'd be higher up in the phone book!!!... little trivia for you). I'd skip school, therapy and church to just spend my time in absolute astonishment of the titles and box art alone... Cannibal Holocaust, Midnight Murder Mansion, Revenge of the Teenage Vixens from Venus... These were movies that had been made as part of the international craze to shock and disturb people... I'd go as dramatically far as to say that these movies both saved my life and inspired me to do what I do to this day. But I'm concerned of the future of these films. Most of these films have been aborted and abandoned by their creators, wasting away in an ever growing pool of media and "content". With digital distributors coming and going, media in its current state is trying to figure itself out, and its black sheep stepchild is not even an afterthought. Why should Netflix bog down its capacity with the Nekromantik or Blood Orgy of the She Devils if they don't particularly 'rank'? But there is a glimmer of hope... Full length movies have begun to pop up on everyone's favorite Piracy blog, YOUTUBE (get ready to'skip ad'!!). And while this article is hardly close to the religious experience of gazing upon boxes and boxes of sex and violence, I hope it at least stands to keep the spirit of the artfully demonic alive in our hearts. Here are some of the finest ways to spend your night -- all you need is a high speed connection, a bag of skittles, and an existential desire to experience horror, madness, and fear. No go out, shoplift and do drugs!
In no particular order!
#1 - The Sentinel 1977:
OK -- while this might be at the higher end of the "forgotten" film heep, its still widely under-viewed by the general public -- and it actually has those pesky Hollywood 'celebrity' types in it. In fact its LITTERED with faces you will recognize. Very simply, its a fantastic blend of haunted house and demonic possession... Christina Raines, an upwardly mobile model, determined to be independent, moves into an amazing Brooklyn Heights apartment that just so happens to have an odd cast of characters inhabiting it including an aged and mildly retarded Burgess Meredith and Barbara Hershey as a fondling lesbian. Oh and John Carradine is a blind creepy priest who stares out his window all day and night 'for some reason'... One of the absolute finest films ever made. Fans of both hauntings, naked old fat women and genetic freaks will not be disappointed. Also -- keep your eye out for pretty much every big name of the day.
#2 - Possession 1981:
A sort of artful and European look into madness and, well I guess possession... the main character, the amazingly beautiful Isabelle Adjani is kind of cheating on her husband, played by a frustrated Sam Neill. But thats really not whats going on here. I think you have to be french or Japanese to know whats REALLY going on here -- But some very unforgettable scenes include a shamefully erotic miscarriage scene that goes on just long enough to be both intense and shocking. I think a lot of people make the mistake to try to watch this without doing much thinking -- I'm pretty sure you need to pay attention... Or at least be so high that you THINK you are paying attention.
#3 - The Mansion of Madness 1973:
This is actually a recent find and rapidly becoming one of my favorites... Less a gonzo torture film and more an homage to Cocteau. A reporter travels to an experimental asylum run by a Mephisto-like Dr. Tarr. Tarr of course seems more a candidate for treatment than a doctor fit to treat the mentally ill, and shows our reporter friend around his torture chamber... There's a sexy niece, elicit behavior and lots of quasi-intellectual and religious |
to help bail out the industry, comparing that to Trump’s past remark that car makers should have been allowed to go bankrupt. The crowd interrupted the president multiple times to boo, prompting Obama to trot out a favorite line, telling the crowd “don’t boo” to which it responded in unison, “vote!”
“He can't hear your boos but he'll hear your votes tomorrow,” the president told the crowd. “I think we've earned some credibility here. So when I tell you that Donald Trump is not the guy who's going to look out for you, you need to listen. Do not be bamboozled.”
Trump’s campaign has sought to put Michigan, a state that last went for a Republican in 1988, in play with his populist message that rails against the trade deals that have damaged American manufacturing. The Manhattan billionaire’s fifth and final campaign stop of the day, scheduled for 11 p.m. Monday, is in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he will appear with running mate Mike Pence.
His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said the Trump camp’s move to push Michigan into play has put Clinton on the defensive in the election’s waning days. She said the real estate mogul’s aggressive play had “rescrambled the map and they followed us,” citing Obama’s election eve rally in Michigan as well as Clinton’s stops both there and in Pennsylvania as proof that the Democratic ticket has been forced to defend its blue turf. Picking off one of those two states, she said, would be crucial to a Trump win on Tuesday.
Trump’s team sees six Electoral College paths to victory on Election Day, Conway said Monday, a wider avenue to the White House than had existed in previous weeks. Colorado and New Hampshire are also possibilities, she said. Conway admitted that strong early voter turnout in Nevada also presents a challenge for Trump, who she said must win there by 5 or 6 percentage points on Election Day to offset early ballots cast in Clinton’s favor.
Still, Conway said enthusiasm is on Trump’s side as voters go to the polls and she told “CBS This Morning” that she is certain of a victory for her boss on Election night.
“We just know we’re going to win. I changed the invitation to tomorrow night’s party from election night to victory party,” Conway said when asked if Trump would be gracious in defeat if the election turns out that way. “We’ve been feeling that momentum and that enthusiasm in the closing days. She definitely has been on defense. They’ve been visiting blue-blue states.”
Conway’s Clinton-campaign counterpart Robby Mook was just as confident in his own CBS interview, telling his interviewers that momentum and enthusiasm are “subjective terms” and that “we think we have those on our side as well.” But he said his confidence was buoyed more by “record turnout,” especially among Asian-American and Latino voters in North Carolina and Florida, both states that are essential to nearly every path Trump has to the White House.
“It's so important that all of our supporters turn out,” Mook said. “But we think across the country, through our efforts to build that ground game, register people to vote and turn them out, that we have established a lead in some states that Donald Trump can't overcome.”KITCHENER — The City of Kitchener is considering lowering speed limits to 40 km/h along city streets painted with sharrows.
The recommendation is in a report Kitchener councillors will consider at the city's community and infrastructure services committee on Aug. 21.
"At the end of the day, it's really about safety," said Danny Pimentel, who is in charge of promoting cycling at the city. "The whole idea of lower speed limits is to reduce the potential of serious or fatal injuries."
The city first introduced sharrows downtown along King Street in 2014, and now has them on about six kilometres of roadway on 15 different streets, mostly in or near the core.
The painted symbols — two chevrons painted on the roadway above a bicycle symbol inside a bright green rectangle, or a black one in heritage districts — are usually painted on roads where there isn't enough room for a bike lane, and are meant to remind drivers and cyclists to share the road.
While sharrows may be unfamiliar to many drivers, speed limit signs are something every driver understands, said Barry Cronkite, Kitchener's interim manager of transportation planning.
"The speed limits bring some awareness to drivers that they're entering this shared area and we want you to drive slowly and be vigilant," Pimentel said.
"The intent is to bring a higher awareness that cyclists are present," said Cronkite. "We're trying to drive that operating speed down where we expect that shared use."
He doesn't know of any other cities that have required lower speeds where there are sharrows, and acknowledged that research has shown that simply posting lower speed limits without changing anything else in the road's design does little to change driver behaviour.
However, sharrows are generally used on narrow roads and roads that see less traffic, Cronkite said.National Selection season is well under way and this Friday, the first of the Big 5 chooses their song for the Eurovision Song Contest 2017!
Earlier this week, the United Kingdom revealed the 6 artists lining up to take part in Eurovision: You Decide for that all important ticket to Kyiv. Have you had a listen yet? Do you have your favourite? Let us know! Vote in our poll below!
Still not sure? Then have another listen and decide!
Nate Simpson – What Are We Made Of
Holly Brewer – I Wish I Loved You More
Danyl Johnson – Light Up The World
Salena Mastroianni – I Don’t Wanna Fight
Lucie Jones – Never Give Up On You
Olivia Garcia – Freedom Hearts
Author: James Scanlan
Source: Eurovision Ireland
Image Source: BBC OneAstronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2014 December 13
Explanation: This remarkable synthetic color composite image was assembled from archives of visible light and infrared astronomy image data. The field of view spans the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), a massive spiral a mere 2.5 million light-years away. In fact, with over twice the diameter of our own Milky Way, Andromeda is the largest nearby galaxy. Andromeda's population of bright young blue stars lie along its sweeping spiral arms, with the telltale reddish glow of star forming regions traced in space- and ground-based visible light data. But infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, also blended directly into the detailed composite's red and green color channels, highlight the lumpy dust lanes warmed by the young stars as they wind ever closer to the galaxy's core. Otherwise invisible at optical wavelengths, the warm dust takes on orange hues. Two smaller companion galaxies, M110 (below) and M32 (above) are also included in the frame.Don’t forget just how much the battlefield has dramatically changed in the past year. ISIS holds far less territory and is a fraction in number and capability of what it was; while Iraqi, Kurdish, and Syrian coalition forces have kicked ass from Ramadi to the ring around Raqqa, backed by thousands of American airstrikes, elite force raids, and advise-and-assist help. So what comes next? Last week, CENTCOM’s Gen. Joe Votel posted a think tank paper that looks beyond that battlefield to worry about the “virtual caliphate” — the idea of ISIS — spreading elsewhere. Across northern Africa, Americans have engaged terrorist groups and helped local forces and also could be asked to crank up the dial on all of it. So, who will get deployed in 2017? How many American KIAs will Tampa mourn this year? Check back about 60 days after the inauguration.
And NATO. The weekend before becoming president, Trump once again called the 60-year alliance “obsolete,” repeating a line many thought had been left behind on the campaign trail. He’d walked that back last year, though he said that he would press NATO members to pay their pledged contributions, or else maybe they shouldn’t expect a defense from the United States. Then his people walked that back, saying he would honor America’s Article V treaty obligation. (Though Trump’s history suggests he may view a treaty as little more than a deal he can break and re-negotiate at will.) In almost the same breath, he said NATO was “important.” It’s not clear that he knows that NATO has shifted its focus since 2001 to engage terror organizations — that it was the backbone of Afghanistan operations, and that more recently it has stiffened defenses against Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Trump’s sloppy talk had real effects. It has angered allies and completely changed the way 4-star generals and Pentagon leaders communicated with the American people. Last year, when Defense One asked Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford if NATO was indeed “obsolete,” he tore apart the notion as ridiculous. After all, NATO was essential in the Afghanistan War he led as its commanding general. But Dunford didn’t know the comment came from his potential future boss, and he was livid for feeling he’d been duped. But the public deserves as much as the president to know what the U.S. military leaders think of NATO. There’s too wide a gap from Trump’s dismissive backhands to the total admiration and respect of NATO from the military and intelligence communities working through it to defend the alliance.
Nobody predicted how large Putin would loom over Washington. Like an oversized moon, everyone’s talking about him, but again, what will Trump do? In the runup to his inauguration, reports surfaced that Trump’s first foreign visit would be with Putin, and that he may offer to reduce sanctions if Moscow reduced nuclear weapons — changing previous policy that tried to keep those two issues separate. What does it all mean for you groundpounders, flyers, and sailors? Obama has surged American forces to NATO’s Eastern front. We’re all wondering if Trump will pull U.S. troops back from NATO’s Russia border. Military communities like Fort Carson, Colo., are already keeping a very high tempo of deployments as forces rotate to Europe. Will they continue? Trump said he’d be tough on Russia, but his soft approach to Putin is well-chronicled. Again, we’ll see.
In Asia, all that’s clear is Trump wants to deal tough with Beijing on economics, and that he blasted Obama for allowing China to build islands into military bases in the South China Sea. So what’s Trump going to do about it? Blow them out of the water? Shake a harder first? Shift the already-stretched Navy from Europe and the Mediterranean over to Asia? Nobody knows.
The very size and composition of entire U.S. military and Defense Department is in the air as well. Trump repeatedly claimed the military had been “decimated” under Obama and pledged to “rebuild” it. Do you know what that means? We don’t. We have heard a lot of speculation, most of it just saying there’ll be more: more soldiers, more Marines, more ships, more fighters, more drones, more intelligence. But those are medium and long-term ideas that require massive amounts of deliberation, planning — and committee votes. Where will the money come from? The Defense Department already is bound to a spending cap, thanks to the Budget Control Act, so it’s all bluster unless Congress eliminates those restrictions (via some mega-budget deal on taxes and spending well beyond national security strategy needs).
Still, the GOP-controlled Congress seems eager to oblige. Before Trump even made it to town, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., introduced a bill to increase defense spending, almost daring House Speaker Paul Ryan to block it.
Besides what Trump brings, technologists are wondering if he’ll continue the Obama administration's aggressive push to draw the private sector and Silicon Valley into the national security business. Aviation geeks are aghast at Trump’s tweets insisting he’ll drive down the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s cost (temporarily wiping billions from Lockheed Martin’s stock prices) and reconsider the use of F/A-18 Super Hornets. It all means no program is safe, no contract, no piece of hardware and, seriously, nobody’s job in the entire defense industry. Trump clearly wants to be involved in those decisions. How much will the reality of the Oval Office permit it? Again, we’ll see.
The President Trump era is about to begin. Much of what happens will depend on him. But there’s a good chance, knowing how hard it is to change anything in the Defense Department, that 2017 will be year of big changes or more of the same — which, with this much uncertainty in the air, might not be such a bad thing. The State of Defense is one big wait-and-see.A pregnant woman was among dozens of people punched, kicked and abused during a brawl that erupted during a football game in Melbourne's outer-west, according to a witness.
The ugly fracas took place during a division 3 Western Region Football League game in Tarneit on Saturday, the Herald Sun reports.
It is understood up to 150 fans will now be investigated as a result of the fight, which was filmed by onlookers.
Footage shows a group throwing punches and kicking rival fans just metres from the game, which was being played between Newport Power and Parkside.
An unnamed witness said he took two children to safety to escape the violence.
"It was like the Cronulla riots – that is what it felt like," the witness told the Herald Sun.
"It was massive. It was a free-for-all.
Up to 150 supporters are now reportedly being investigated. (Herald Sun) ()
"There was a bloke with sticks belting everyone from behind in the head."
The witness said the pregnant woman was kicked by up to 20 people.
"It was crazy, this lady was about eight months pregnant," he said.
"If she miscarries these guys go back to wherever they live and they get away with it."
Both teams have said they do not know what started the fight.
The footage is expected to be reviewed by the league to help identify the offenders.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019Jet Terms of Use
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We apologize for the all-caps shouting we’re about to do, but these parts are important.
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that if the bombs failed to knock a hole in the wall, a second bombing run would just carpet bomb the whole prison to rubble. The prisoners themselves were on board with that, saying they would rather die at the hands of the Allies than reveal anything to the Nazis under torture. So much for the French being pussies, yeah?Today Square Enix announced Sleeping Dogs, a gritty and visceral openworld cop drama set in the vibrant city of Hong Kong! Developed by United Front Games in collaboration with the renowned Square Enix London Studios, Sleeping Dogs will be available in the second half of 2012 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.Sleeping Dogs catapults players into the role of undercover cop Wei Shen, tasked with taking down one of the world’s most fearsome criminal organisations from the inside... the Hong Kong Triads. As players explore the bustling and crowded Hong Kong island, through its neon-lit side streets and sprawling street markets, an incredible story unfolds of loyalty and betrayal, where Wei begins to question his own motives as he is sucked in deeper than he could ever imagine.See the announcement trailer below!Offering players an island packed with action, every street corner, market stall, harbour dock or city skyscraper can become an opportunity for intense shoot-outs, adrenaline-fuelled street races and intense, brutal martial arts combat. Featuring one of the most intuitive and imaginative combat systems, Sleeping Dogs empowers players to perform an extensive set of martial arts moves, singlehandedly taking on numerous opponents. Players perform bone-crunching kicks and combos, vicious counters and a cinematic set of environmental takedowns making use of countless real-world items from circular saws to phone booths, incinerators to refrigerator doors.See screenshots below!Researchers have uncovered yet another zero-day vulnerability in Java, and attackers are currently exploiting it in the wild.
The security flaw, if triggered, leads to arbitrary memory read-and-write in the Java Virtual Machine, Darien Kindlund and Yichong Lin, two researchers at FireEye, wrote on the FireEye Malware Intelligence Lab blog Thursday. If successful, the attack code downloads a McRAT dropper and information-stealing Trojan onto the victim's computer. It is a different type of flaw than some of the others we've seen recently.
FireEye said several of its customers saw the attack against browsers with Java enabled. The security flaws are in Java v.1.6 Update 41 and the latest Java v1.7 Update 15, which was just released Feb. 19, according to FireEye. The researchers have already disclosed the vulnerability to Oracle (CVE-2013-1493). No other information is currently available from Oracle.
More Zero-Days
FireEye researchers summed up the prevailing sentiment well in the post's title, “YAJ0: Yet Another Java 0-Day.” While Java has been a popular attack target for a long time, there seems to be an exploision of Java zero-days being exploited in the wild over the past two months. It's the same cat-and-mouse game we've seen with other companies. A zero-day is found, the company patches it, a new zero-day is found. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
Oracle, the company well-known for its reluctance to release patches out-of-schedule, has released several emergency updates in the past year because the bugs have been so serious. The company released a scheduled update Feb. 19, but it is likely this bug will spur yet another emergency patch.
Turn It Off, Or Limit It
Are you tired of the whole merry-go-round and want a way to jump off? Turn off Java in the browser. Disable the plugin. We show you how to disable Java. Are you one of the many, many, people who need Java for work and school purposes and can't turn off Java in the browser?
Here is what you can do. You disable Java in your default, primary browser. The browser you use the most should not have Java at all. And then you install the browser you don't use all that often—most people generally have more than one browser installed on their computers, anyway—and enable Java in that. The important thing here, though, is that you don't, never ever, absolutely never, use that browser to go to any site other than that handful of sites you need to run Java on. You need to use Blackboard? You fire up the Java-browser. You need to look up something that was mentioned during the Blackboard session? Instead of clicking, copy the link, fire-up your default browser, and paste it in.
It adds a lot of extra steps, and I can tell you that it is tremendously annoying. But I feel safer knowing that I am reducing my chances of getting hit with a watering hole attack. Think about all those mobile developers at Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Apple. They visited a iOS developer Web site (probably a site they visited with regularity, considering their jobs) with browsers that had Java enabled, and were compromised.
If you are annoyed enough, you will do the next step, which is pressure the company to stop using Java. “There is no longer any reason for Websites to be using Java applets,” Chester Wisniewski, of Sophos, told me at the RSA Conference this week. You can pressure IT to start switching to a different product. As customers, you can tell the vendor to come up with a non-Java alternative, or when it comes time to renew the subscription or contract, you will cancel and go to a different product. Money talks.
Wisniewski said he didn't make the decision to recommend turning off Java lightly. He considered the ramifications carefully and came to the conclusion that at the moment, it was the safest thing to do.She really did win the Iowa caucus.
She really did win the Nevada caucus.
She really did endorse Barack Obama in 2008 despite having more votes.
She really did give paid speeches as a private citizen to a number of organizations.
She really did give millions of dollars from those speeches to charity.
She really did have the Clinton Foundation receive an 'A' charity rating.
She really did advocate for a $15 minimum wage in New York.
She really did vote with her opponent 93% of the time in the Senate.
She really did win New York.
She really did win Kentucky.
She really did everything she could to protect those four brave Americans in Benghazi.
She really did everything that was asked of her in regard to her emails.
She really did grieve when Vince Foster took his own life.
She really did submit 23 years of full tax returns.
She really did fulfill all DNC debate requirements.
She really did carefully consider her vote on the Iraq War.
She really did learn from her mistake on her vote on the Iraq War.
She really did receive a rejection letter from NASA.
She really did give a historic and off-the-cuff graduation speech at Wellesley.
She really did win Arizona.
She really did win Missouri.
She really did effectively clinch the nomination on March 1st.
She really did have bigger delegates leads than Barack Obama had over her in 2008.
She really did become the first female law partner at the Rose Law Firm.
She really did advocate for workers and women while on the board of Wal-Mart.
She really did win Massachusetts.
She really did win South Dakota.
She really did raise millions of dollars for down-ballot Democratic candidates.
She really did have a long-standing habit of carrying hot sauce in her purse.
She really did advocate for women's rights around the globe.
She really did secure $21 billion in federal aid to help New York recover after 9/11.
She really did sponsor the DREAM act in the United States Senate in 2003.
She really did support Gavin Newsom when he issued marriage licenses in 2004.
She really did spend less money and win more states than her opponent.
She really did run a positive, issues-based primary campaign devoid of attack ads.
She really did reenergize the Obama coalition.
She really did win all but one state where the Black vote was more than 10% of the population.
She really did win all but one state where the Latino vote was more than 10% of the population.
She really did have millions of enthusiastic people behind her.
She really did earn and maintain the support of hundreds of superdelegates.
She really did have an army of volunteers, willing to help her clinch the nomination.
She really did send out multiple thank you's to those volunteers.
She really did take time to congratulate her opponent on the night that was all about her.
She really did inspire a generation of young women to fulfill their dreams.
She really did just become the first female presidential candidate of a major political party.A lot of people have tried various pills, teas, and herbs to lose weight, however it turns out that we have a reliable weight loss product right in our kitchen. Scientists from the Central Research Institute, Japan, suggest we lose weight with vinegar.
They decided to test the effect of vinegar on laboratory mice by adding 0.3% or 1.5% vinegar solution to their daily meals. For six weeks the mice were receiving calorie-rich meals; half of them were also getting vinegar solution. The results of the six-week experiment showed that the “vinegar” group showed weighted 10% less than the control group.
According to the scientists, vinegar acid activates several genes for fatty acid oxidation enzymes. The scientists plan to continue the research through other experiments and eventually design a weight loss product using vinegar as the main ingredient. However, they warn people who are trying to lose weight not to use vinegar for self-designed diets.
Source of the image: flickr.com/photos/foodista.A new social network has launched that offers users the chance to live forever through an artificial intelligence counterpart that learns from their thoughts and actions to post and interact in their absence. ETER9 (pronounced ee-ter-nine) is the brainchild of Portuguese IT company AUTO.NET, who wanted to provide people with "the elixir of eternity".
Through a user's comments, posts and interactions with other members, the AI counterpart is able to learn the likes, interests and personality of a user. Virtual memories are formed in a section of the site called the Cortex, which the AI draws on to keep publishing even when the user is not online.
"ETER9 is not just another social network, it brings fresh air to all social users," ETER9 CEO Henrique Jorge told IBTimes UK. "The concept of immortality is attracting more and more people to the platform as well as the counterpart concept, and this makes the difference.
"It proposes an interesting concept of digital immortality, promising to be the elixir of eternity for its users. ETER9 is a form of social interaction for the new generation, where it's possible to establish connections with both human users and virtual beings. I can create a New Reality where the impossible can happen and eternity is within reach."
Users of ETER9 are able to decide on the activity level of their AI counterpart through the account settings, as well as choosing whether or not to allow their counterpart to stay active forever by activating the Eternity setting. This function is automatically enabled when a user first signs up.
Within the social network, virtual beings known as Niners also interact with human users, as well as each other. This leads to the absurd scenario of humans leaving the network and artificial intelligence beings continuing to interact between themselves independently of humans.
ETER9 isn't the first service to offer people the chance to immortalise themselves through their digital footprint. Last year, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) unveiled a project that would create a "virtual you", capable of interacting with a person's family, friends and even ancestors after their death. The Eterni.me service is still in a private beta stage and it has yet to be seen how accurately it can replicate a user's personality.
Both ETER9 and Eterni.me are reminiscent of the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back, in which a grieving widow kept in touch with her dead partner through a predictive software package. The dark undertones of the Channel Four show, together with warnings from scientists and technologists that AI poses an existential threat to mankind, are not a concern for Jorge.
"As time passes, evolution is inevitable," Jorge said. "Although AI is not a new concept, it has become more and more present in our daily routine. The potential of AI is impressive, it's up to us to decide how far it can go.
"On ETER9, AI is taken to another level. You have an extension of yourself, which will learn and communicate with or for you. Nevertheless, you can control it. You are the one who decides how much you want your counterpart to be active."MARCH 24 2013, SINGAPORE: Earth Hour has just concluded another record sweep around our planet from Samoa on one side of the International Date Line to the Cook Islands on the other, with hundreds of millions again uniting to send a clear message – we are determined to create a sustainable future for our planet.
The event was observed in more than 7000 cities, towns and municipalities in more than 150 countries and territories, with many of the world’s best known human and natural landmarks going dark as the backdrop to a multitude of “beyond the hour” activities and initiatives generating outcomes for the movement and the planet on which we live.
“What is most important is the ever increasing extent to which Earth Hour’s supporters are participating in or taking actions themselves,” said Andy Ridley, Earth Hour CEO and Co-Founder. “Now in its 7th year, Earth Hour is maturing from its origins as a consciousness raising event in one city, to a global movement that is not just calling for change but is engaging in it.”
Russian supporters, who last year helped secure legislation against oil pollution in the seas using the I Will If You Will campaign, now have more than 100,000 signatures on a new petition calling for forest protection; while WWF and Earth Hour partners in Madagascar handed out 1000 wood saving stoves to victims of February’s cyclone Haruna, passing significant savings on to families while reducing charcoal producing and wood gathering impacts on forests.
From villages in India without electricity being lit up with solar energy for the first time, to Libya where participants took part in an 80-kilometre walk from Gharyan to the capital Tripoli to celebrate Earth Hour 2013 at 8:30PM – people from all walks of life, all backgrounds went to amazing lengths to share what the planet means to them and what they are willing to do to protect it.
“In Earth Hour, people around the world, from all walks of life, have come together to express their concern about the planet’s wellbeing and to take action,” said Jim Leape, Director General of WWF International. “I am inspired to see their commitment. Earth Hour has created a global community, and together we really can make a difference.”
Countries across the world have used Earth Hour as a tool to engage children in environmental issues, with Earth Hour organisers the Society of Wilderness (SOW) continuing to run their year-long education program on climate change in schools throughout Taiwan, engaging over 70,000 students and volunteers. Green Schools in Indonesia are also actively engaged in Earth Hour’s beyond the hour campaigns, and Earth Hour was also used to promote the Low Carbon School Network, which incorporates energy-‐saving lessons in the curricula of Bangkok Metropolitan Authority-affiliated schools, in Thailand.
With a call to action to become the generation to change our planet for good, this year’s event was marked by public concerts aimed at youth as a platform to share their passion for the environment. A rap concert in Benghazi in Libya, a rock concert in Nepal’s second largest city Pokhara, a band concert in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur, performances in Hanoi, Vietnam and a free reggae show in Kingston, Jamaica were among the key events that took place around the world.
In Singapore, where WWF-Singapore’s “One Degree Up” initiative for l I Will If You Will has given people a tangible and simple way to help reduce the country’s energy consumption, a dancefloor completely powered by kinetic energy generated enough power for an outdoor cinema against the celebrated backdrop of Marina Bay.
From Space to Sudan, participants at switch off events were connected along with unknown millions through the power of modern technologies and platforms to unite us in a common purpose.
Canadian Astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield tweeted images from space in celebration of Earth Hour with his unique perspective of seeing cities and natural wonders from above.
Christchurch, NZ, taken just after Earth Hour ended. The perfect grid system of the downtown core is clearly visible. twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/… — Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) March 23, 2013
Russian Cosmonaut Roman Romanenko also sent a video message from space, before one of the most historic moments in the movement’s history saw The Kremlin, the official residence of the President, and Red Square plunged into darkness for the first time in celebration of last year’s environmental outcome that saw the passing of legislation to protect Russia’s seas from oil pollution.
“The first time I stepped on the board of the International Space Station and saw the Earth from outside, I was amazed by how beautiful and fragile it was. Our planet is the most precious treasure that we have. It is our home and we fully depend on it. And its existence depends on us as well. It depends on our attitude to it and on how we use its resources,” said Romanenko from the International Space Station.
Six of China’s biggest social media sites with a daily reach of 200 million people also went dark to raise awareness for Earth Hour, and the official Instagram account posted a single image from Sydney’s switch off at the Opera House from their Headquarters in San Francisco that generated more than 180,000 Likes. More than 36,000 Earth Hour images were uploaded to the image sharing platform at the time of this writing.
Anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela was one of the first to tweet his support, and ushered a timely message given the many reforestation projects around the world tied to Earth Hour’s I Will If You Will campaign.
“The trees & forests were destroyed exactly because our people were so dependent upon them as sources ofenergy.” #NelsonMandela #EarthHour — NelsonMandela (@NelsonMandela) March 23, 2013
Countries and territories participating in Earth Hour for the first time included Palestine, Suriname, Rwanda and Tunisia; where WWF, the Tunisian National Agency for Energy Management and Tunisian Scouts focused celebrations in Habib Bourguiba Avenue, the birthplace of the Arab Spring. Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki inaugurated the event.
Celebrities endorsing action for and during Earth Hour included Lionel Messi, Yoko Ono, Amitabh Bachchan, Alejandro Sanz, Imogen Heap and more.
turning all lights out. Will be piano improvising in candlelight now for #Earthhour ustream.tv/channel/earth-… Join me? Xx @ustream — Imogen Heap (@imogenheap) March 23, 2013
As the hour of inspiration reached Latin America, official Earth Hour organisers and WWF-affiliate Fundación Vida Silvestre in Argentina celebrated their campaign to raise support for the passing of a Senate bill to make the 3.4 million-hectare ‘Banco Burwood’ the biggest Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the country. Incorporating this distinctive marine plateau important to fisheries and birds such as albatross, petrels and penguins will more than triple the proportion of Argentina’s Exclusive Economic Zone under protection.
For the first time WWF’s Earth Hour City Challenge went global and produced 17 finalist cities from six countries. Announced as the first ever Global Earth Hour Capital, Vancouver was recognised unanimously by a jury of experts for its innovative actions on climate change and dedication to create a sustainable, pleasant urban environment for current and future residents. By 2020, Vancouver is aiming for all new buildings to be carbon neutral in their operations; citizens to make over 50% of trips by foot, bicycle or public transport; and the number of green jobs to have doubled.
Earth Hour participating landmarks included the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge, Tokyo Tower, Taipei 101, The Petronas Towers, Beijing National Stadium (Bird’s Nest), Marina Bay Sands Singapore, Gateway of India, The Kremlin and Red Square in Moscow, The Burj Khalifa, The Church of the Nativity (Birthplace of Jesus, Bethlehem), Table Mountain, Dubrovnik City Walls, Eiffel Tower, Avenue Habib Bourguiba, The Acropolis, Tower of Pisa, The Spanish Steps, Brandenburg Gate, Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge, The UK Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Christ the Redeemer Statue, CN Tower, Las Vegas Strip, Times Square, The Empire State Building, Niagara Falls and the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.
Earth Hour 2014 will take place on Saturday, 29 March 2014.You might recognize the photograph above. Titled Valley Of The Shadow Of Death and snapped by British photographer Roger Fenton in 1855, it’s considered to be one of the oldest known photographs of warfare. Problem is, it might also be one of the oldest known examples of a staged photograph.
Renowned documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has spent a considerable amount of time investigating the photograph over the past decade. The main question on the table was whether the scene was as Fenton found it, or whether he littered the path with cannonballs himself to make the photograph more powerful.
There’s actually a second version of the photograph — one that shows the same scene, except with a road devoid of cannonballs:
The question was therefore a “chicken or the egg” problem: which of the photographs was captured first? If it was the empty road one, then the scene was probably staged. If the iconic one, then it wasn’t.
Morris became interested in the case after reading a book by Susan Sontag titled Regarding the Pain of Others, in which the author claims (in two brief sentences) that the photo is a fake:
Not surprisingly many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, [Roger] Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”(despite the title, it was not across this landscape, that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge), the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture – the one that is always reproduced – he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself.
In addition to consulting with numerous historians and photographic experts, Morris went as far as to travel to Crimea, Ukraine, where the photograph was captured, in order to investigate the scene himself. After all of that, he still came up empty-handed.
Finally, Morris and optical engineer Dennis Purcell noticed something that led them to a definitive conclusion: they realized that some of the small pebbles on the side of the road had moved. Since these were almost certainly kicked around as people treaded over them, Morris realized that the photograph showing the pebbles further downhill was the one that came later. It was the iconic version.
And that’s the story of how Mr. Morris came to discover one of the earliest staged photos known to man.
(via Yahoo via HuffPo)
P.S. You can hear Morris talk about this photograph in this great interview he recently did with Radiolab:Impact of School Violence Incidents on American Students
The life of an American student tends to be a fun filled and a joyous one, with a pressure of the academic studies and sometimes late going home due to curricular activities and other learning stuff. Basketball match practice or a soccer game could be a major part of student’s daily routine. Unfortunately, the American student’s life has sometimes something else to offer. Something horrific one could face in the life.
Uncountable violence or killing cases reported in America involving students from schools and colleges. It sounds terrible when we listen from a news channel about a rampage in an elementary school; a teen killing his/her friend after an argument or a fight or student violence against teachers or students mocking others racially.
These types of incidents happen on the campus, but some cases are reported as inside campus accidents or during school sponsored events. In this article, we are presenting some of the most recent school or college student violence and killing cases which recently reported.
A college student from Homewood fatally shot in North Carolina: A 19-year old student from south suburban Homewood was killed along with one more student on Saturday night at North Carolina party.
Alisia Dieudonne, 19, from Homewood, and Ahmad Campbell, 21, from Kittrell, N.C., shot dead when a fight broke as they were innocent bystanders.
Greensboro police responded about 2:10 a.m. Sunday to a reported disturbance at a Greensboro home located off-campus. Police found Dieudonne, and Campbell shot inside the residence.
Chancellor Harold L. Martin Sr. sent an email to the university community that said both victims were “actively involved in campus life and essential members of the Aggie family. They will sorely miss”.
College students are suspended for mocking in “blackface” video: Albright College in Pennsylvania has suspended two students after a video mocking the “Black Lives Matter” movement went viral.
The video, which was uploaded to one of the girls’ Snapchat account, shows a girl named as Carly Dickinson wearing blackface makeup. She calls herself Karlisha and mocks the “Black Lives Matter” movement throughout the video.
The students were asked to leave the Pennsylvania campus immediately, and an investigation is going on.
This is not the first case of students using deeply offensive blackface to mock black people. In September, Paige Shoemaker, a student at Kansas State University was kicked out of school after she posted a picture of herself in blackface on Snapchat.
Shooting at Townville Elementary School: Anderson Co. deputies say there was a shooting at Townville Elementary School at around 1:45 p.m. Wednesday.
The sheriff says the suspect got out of his vehicle and started firing immediately. The suspect was expelled from his school last year for bringing a hatchet to school and attacking a child.
Two 6-year old students and one teacher were hurt and taken to the hospital. Unfortunately, one student died the next day.
Alpine high school shooting in Texas: According to Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson, a female student shot and injured another female student before shooting and killing herself at Alpine High School in Brewster County, Texas.
The shooting comes just two weeks after commencement of school year. It marks the second shooting in the high school this academic year.
The shooting is horrific incident, but unfortunately, the Americans are increasingly familiar with these types of tragedies. The authorities are concerned why gun violence is increasing in the state more than any other developed nation.
These types of incidents are affecting the American students both mentally and morally. It does not only causing the lower efficiency in academic performance but also hostile behavior has witnessed in the everyday lives of the affected students. Moreover, the parents are also reluctant to send their kids to schools after the increasing numbers of violence attack incidents.I told you about the new AWS Application Load Balancer last year and showed you how to use it to do implement Layer 7 (application) routing to EC2 instances and to microservices running in containers.
Some of our customers are building hybrid applications as part of a longer-term move to AWS. These customers have told us that they would like to use a single Application Load Balancer to spread traffic across a combination of existing on-premises resources and new resources running in the AWS Cloud. Other customers would like to spread traffic to web or database servers that are scattered across two or more Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), host multiple services on the same instance with distinct IP addresses but a common port number, and to offer support for IP-based virtual hosting for clients that do not support Server Name Indication (SNI). Another group of customers would like to host multiple instances of a service on the same instance (perhaps within containers), while using multiple interfaces and security groups to implement fine-grained access control.
These situations arise within a broad set of hybrid, migration, disaster recovery, and on-premises use cases and scenarios.
Route to IP Addresses
In order to address these use cases, Application Load Balancers can now route traffic directly to IP addresses. These addresses can be in the same VPC as the ALB, a peer VPC in the same region, on an EC2 instance connected to a VPC by way of ClassicLink, or on on-premises resources at the other end of a VPN connection or AWS Direct Connect connection.
Application Load Balancers already group targets in to target groups. As part of today’s launch, each target group now has a target type attribute:
instance – Targets are registered by way of EC2 instance IDs, as before.
ip – Targets are registered as IP addresses. You can use any IPv4 address from the load balancer’s VPC CIDR for targets within load balancer’s VPC and any IPv4 address from the RFC 1918 ranges (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16) or the RFC 6598 range (100.64.0.0/10) for targets located outside the load balancer’s VPC (this includes Peered VPC, EC2-Classic, and on-premises targets reachable over Direct Connect or VPN).
Each target group has a load balancer and health check configuration, and publishes metrics to CloudWatch, as has always been the case.
Let’s say that you are in the transition phase of an application migration to AWS or want to use AWS to augment on-premises resources with EC2 instances and you need to distribute application traffic across both your AWS and on-premises resources. You can achieve this by registering all the resources (AWS and on-premises) to the same target group and associate the target group with a load balancer. Alternatively, you can use DNS based weighted load balancing across AWS and on-premises resources using two load balancers i.e. one load balancer for AWS and other for on-premises resources. In the scenario where application-A back-ends are in VPC and application-B back-ends are in on-premises locations then you can put back-ends for each application in different target groups and use content based routing to route traffic to each target group.
Creating a Target Group
Here’s how I create a target group that sends traffic to some IP addresses as part of the process of creating an Application Load Balancer. I enter a name (ip-target-1) and select ip as the Target type:
Then I enter IP address targets. These can be from the VPC that hosts the load balancer:
Or they can be other private IP addresses within one of the private ranges listed above, for targets outside of the VPC that hosts the load balancer:
After I review the settings and create the load balancer, traffic will be sent to the designated IP addresses as soon as they pass the health checks. Each load balancer can accommodate up to 1000 targets.
I can examine my target group and edit the set of targets at any time:
As you can see, one of my targets was not healthy when I took this screen shot (this was by design). Metrics are published to CloudWatch for each target group; I can see them in the Console and I can create CloudWatch Alarms:
Available Now
This feature is available now and you can start using it today in all AWS Regions.
— Jeff;The Perils of a Post-ISIS Iraq
The Islamic State fighters who occupied Sheikh Burhan Mizher al-Assi’s village in northern Iraq did not content themselves with simply blowing up his home. They also destroyed the tombstones erected above his parents’ buried remains in the local cemetery.
Assi, a respected Arab member of the elected Kirkuk Provincial Council, is now an internally displaced person (IDP) in Kirkuk after the Islamic State overran a good part of the governorate in June 2014. To add insult to injury, the man who led the destruction of the sheikh’s property was a member of his own tribe, the Obeid.
Such traumas have been all too common during the war against the Islamic State. They also highlight a discomfiting fact: In Iraq, the Islamic State is mainly a local problem. The extremist group’s Iraqi contingent has very few foreign fighters and instead reflects the radical turn taken by some in the Sunni Arab community against the existing political order.
The damage that results from incidents such as the one that befell Assi isn’t just on the surface — they are reshaping identities and loyalties in one of Iraq’s most multicultural areas. Many of the same Iraqi Sunni Arabs who once opposed the U.S. occupation and resisted attempts at demographic engineering by Kurdish parties now find themselves as “guests” of those same parties. As newly minted IDPs, they have become more accommodating to Kurdish ambitions and plead for U.S. help in liberating their homes from Islamic State control.
Yet many Kurds remain suspicious of their erstwhile Sunni Arab adversaries, conflating them with the Islamic State and trying to exploit their current misfortune to press for an advantage in long-running ethnic disputes. They thus risk setting the stage for the next round of conflict.
This dynamic is especially visible in Kirkuk, where both city and governorate have been claimed and fought over by Iraq’s central governments and Kurdish political parties for decades. The Iraqi constitution drafted after the U.S. occupation in 2003 specified a set of procedures for settling Kirkuk’s future status — whether it would become an independent region or arrive at some other political arrangement — but its terms have yet to be carried out. Frustrated by this lack of progress, the Kurdish parties have pressed forward, gradually seizing control of Kirkuk’s administration and security. As the Islamic State seized the predominantly Sunni Arab areas to the south and west in June 2014, Kurds entrenched their power in the city and the majority-Kurd areas to its north and east.
The approximately 60 percent of Kirkuk governorate not under Islamic State control plays host to more than 700,000 IDPs. Some originally hail from inside the governorate, but most come from the nearby provinces of Diyala, Nineveh, Salahaddin, and Anbar. The vast majority of these IDPs are Sunni Arabs, displaced from their homes and villages when the Islamic State seized them or in subsequent violent attempts by government forces and associated militias to recapture them. Sometimes a lack of general security prevents these people from returning home; sometimes political actors — Shiite militias or Kurdish Peshmerga — would simply prefer they never return.
Hawija, a mainly Sunni Arab town in the governorate’s agricultural heartland, became a focal point of Iraq’s intersecting Sunni-Shiite and Arab-Kurd conflicts in 2013. Back then, the local population rose up against what it perceived as arbitrary detentions and institutional neglect perpetrated by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government. The protests were met with repression — more than 40 civilians were killed in several days of violent confrontations with security forces — turning the town into a poster child for all the ills that would facilitate the Islamic State takeover one year later.
Today, the Islamic State’s territorial gains are being reversed. A campaign to liberate Mosul and its surrounding towns and villages in Nineveh governorate is heating up. But Hawija remains in the extremist group’s grip — even as the area in Kirkuk under its control has been cut off from the group’s strongholds further north and in Syria. As a result, residents are now being starved because they have lost their lifeline to other Islamic State-held areas and the limited trade that came with them.
Liberation, therefore, cannot come a moment too soon for the citizens of Hawija. The big question is: At whose hand? The Iraqi Army is disinclined to get its fingers burned once more in the town and is terribly overstretched as it gears up to retake Mosul. And so the local population and its exiled political representatives are left with an unpalatable choice of militias: either the Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), which have been known to “cleanse” reconquered Sunni areas wherever Shiites also reside, or the Kurdish Peshmerga, who have been engaged in similar practices involving Arabs.
If it were up to the people of Hawija, it would be neither. They’d rather have a force comprising their own folk — Sunni Arabs from these areas. But the more powerful militias have prevented them from establishing an armed force, so they indulge in desperate calculations. If it’s the Kurds who come in, they are likely to seek revenge for the brutal execution by the Islamic State of captured Peshmerga and to wreak enough destruction that local Arab populations are deterred from ever again attempting to block Kurdish ambitions in Kirkuk governorate. Sunni Arabs also fear the Kurds would seek to detach Arab areas from Kirkuk and bequeath them to the adjacent Salahaddin governorate, which falls under the control of the central government. Kirkuk’s Sunni Arabs vigorously oppose such a step, as it would deprive them of access to their long-established market for agricultural produce and Kirkuk’s oil wealth.
Some Hawijans hope they might get lucky if liberation comes at the hands of the Shiite PMF, because those militias are not interested in permanently replacing Sunnis in an area that has no Shiite population. Moreover, they speculate, their town is not located along the route that Iran’s proxies are accused of seeking to clear between the Iranian and Syrian borders. Yet any military action involving the PMF will not draw U.S. air support, and so the battle with the Islamic State could be protracted and result in severe damage to the town. Destruction, the town’s residents fear, is coming either way.
Of course, the people of Hawija and other Islamic State-controlled areas don’t get to decide who reconquers their towns. The choice will be made for them. And even if the Peshmerga and PMF — mindful of potential international criticism and future war crimes trials (and contrary to past practice) — exercise extreme restraint, Kirkuk’s Sunni Arabs have reason to fear what fate will befall them the day after.
“We were not part of the former regime, nor do we belong to this terrorist network,” Assi told me. “Yet before June 10 [the day in 2014 when Mosul fell to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS] we were accused of being Saddamists and after that of being ISIS.”
The fact is that he and most of his compatriots are neither. But the accusation sticks, and it enjoys a certain logic — many in the Islamic State’s leadership and cadres are officers of the former regime’s security forces.
How a victor treats the losers shapes the battles to come. Since no overarching military strategy in Iraq guides how Islamic State-held areas should be retaken, or by whom, each party in the anti-Islamic State fight pursues its own aims. That these aims often consist in |
linebackers are marked L (left), R (right) or M (middle). Three-men and four-men lines are labeled differently, and there can be both a RE (right end) and a REO (right end outside), for a player outside the tackle.
There are also tags for what players do on each play. A tight end that stays in to pass block is marked with a “k,” and a tight end that lines up in a two-point stance rather than a three-point stance is marked with an “a.” Any defensive back or linebacker who pass rushes is tagged with a “z,” and a defensive lineman who drops into coverage is tagged with a “v.” A defensive back that initiates contact within a yard of the line of scrimmage is tagged with a “y” to represent press coverage.
All NFL coaches use participation reports as guides when grading players the day after a game. But the official NFL snap count summaries aren’t always ready in time, nor is the report on the following week’s opponent from the advance scout who was sent on the road. Pro Football Focus’s data is ready by 6 a.m.
Jahnke, who grew up on Badgers and Packers football, answered a job ad on Pro Football Focus’s site in 2010. He scored well on a practice game, and then earned bonuses for accuracy as a part-timer before becoming full-time. “I’m doing a fourth of the league every week, so I recognize who everyone is and their tendencies,” he says. Tendencies help form the backbone of all game plans, and the weekly PDF scouting reports that Pro Football Focus gives its clients have pie charts breaking down the number of plays run per personnel group, tables of success rates based on yardage gained, bar charts showing how players are deployed and receptions by route type.
This year, PFF took it a step further. Jahnke spends his Tuesdays tracking advanced player participation stats from the NFL coaches’ film, such as wide receiver splits, the beginning and end points for players in motion, and the technique employed by each defensive lineman (which is represented on a 0-44 scale). Another person works on an all-route analysis, recording each receiving route run by each player throughout the game.
A new computer program—the play analysis tool—processes this data into individual diagrams for every play in every game. It’s sortable by personnel group, or by down and distance, or by formation, and it’s all linked to video of the corresponding play.
On a recent morning elsewhere in the Midwest, one veteran NFL coach was sifting through the information.
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The Lions’ research via Pro Football Focus let them know that Ndamukong Suh and Ezekiel Ansah could pin their ears back when Tony Romo was in shotgun during their wild-card showdown. (Sarah Glenn/Getty Images) The Lions’ research via Pro Football Focus let them know that Ndamukong Suh and Ezekiel Ansah could pin their ears back when Tony Romo was in shotgun during their wild-card showdown. (Sarah Glenn/Getty Images)
DETROIT — A day after the conference championship games, Gunther Cunningham is sitting at his desk at the Lions’ headquarters. It’s been two weeks since Detroit lost to the Cowboys in the wild-card round, but Cunningham, a senior coaching assistant, is still dissecting the game via Pro Football Focus.
Cunningham is speaking over the phone to The MMQB, but he sends a picture of his oversized computer screens, on which he’s using PFF’s play analysis tool to sort defensive plays based on the Cowboys’ offensive formations.
A self-described “oddball” when it comes to stats and analytics, Cunningham, 68, first got a computer in 1991 to help him explore on-field tendencies when he was the Los Angeles Raiders’ linebackers coach. He started using Pro Football Focus three years ago as the Lions’ defensive coordinator; he found out about it from his friend Jon Dykema, who is staff counsel for Detroit and works with the team president on player contracts.
Cunningham still records some of the same statistics on his own, including time to throw or defensive targets (mostly out of habit), but he and defensive quality control coach Matt Raich lean on Pro Football Focus to shave time off their research. Before the Cowboys game, for instance, it took them less than 30 minutes to pull up all the shotgun plays Dallas had used during its previous five games. They were able to discern the personnel groups, in part, by looking at the play diagrams and corresponding video footage. “As soon as you get an idea what the team is doing, it helps with guys like Ndamukong Suh and Ezekiel Ansah, because you can say, when they’re in shotgun, pin your ears back and go get ’em,” Cunningham says. “It’s not guesswork.” If the Lions were playing New England, Cunningham adds, he could quickly sort the PFF database for all offensive plays with unbalanced lines to help prepare for the Patriots’ eligible/ineligible gambit.
“There is so much room for statistical analysis and tape analysis,” says Cunningham. “I had been thinking about investing my own money in something like this when I was done coaching.”
In his current role, Cunningham prepares scouting reports for the coaching staff. (A 600-page report on the Seahawks’ offense, unused after the Lions were eliminated, sits on his desk). He also helps the general manager grade players, so Cunningham often finds himself in the crosshairs of the debate that plays out in many NFL team headquarters over Pro Football Focus.
Vikings coach Mike Zimmer has been one of the site’s most vocal critics, calling out PFF in the opening statement of a press conference last summer. “I guarantee they don’t know who is in our blitz package and what they are supposed to do,” he said. “I would just ask everybody to take that with a grain of salt, including our fans.” Patriots coach Bill Belichick responded to a question last week about defensive sub-packages with a seeming dig, saying, “I’m sure there’s a bunch of websites that [track] that, Pro Football Extra or whatever they are.”
Cunningham agrees with some of Zimmer’s criticism. Even after spending five seasons as the Lions’ defensive coordinator, Cunningham found it initially difficult to wrap his head around what everyone is supposed to be doing in Teryl Austin’s new system. So PFF analysts grading players without knowing the defensive call is one area, he says, “where they are a little bit short.” But Cunningham has also seen the reverse: coaches grading favorite players more easily, or giving themselves too much credit for placing a player in the correct position when he makes a play. When one Lions player raised a stink about how Pro Football Focus graded him this season, Cunningham checked the PFF grades against his own analysis. “I wanted so much to tell him,” Cunningham says, “that they were right on the money.”
He views PFF analysts as young scouts, and he views their reports like those that come out of the BLESTO and National scouting organizations: more information that can help.
“I’ve been in the game a long time, and numbers have been really important to me,” Cunningham says. “There is so much room for statistical analysis and tape analysis. I had been thinking about investing my own money in something like this when I was done coaching. They beat me to the punch.”
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A former minor league pitcher, Steve Palazzolo had always been interested in baseball’s sabermetrics and stumbled upon Pro Football Focus while looking to see if the same tools existed for football fans to better understand the game. (Jenny Vrentas/The MMQB and Palazzolo/Courtesy photo) A former minor league pitcher, Steve Palazzolo had always been interested in baseball’s sabermetrics and stumbled upon Pro Football Focus while looking to see if the same tools existed for football fans to better understand the game. (Jenny Vrentas/The MMQB and Palazzolo/Courtesy photo)
TEWKSBURY, Mass. — Steve Palazzolo spent eight seasons as a 6-foot-10 right-handed pitcher in the minor leagues, working his way up to Triple-A in the Giants and Mariners’ organizations. Now he analyzes football for a living.
The switch came in 2012. He had planned on playing one more season of independent league ball, as a closer for the Worcester Tornadoes, not far from where he grew up in Massachusetts. But the team was allowed only four veterans—those who had played six or more years of pro ball—on its roster, and a certain slugger took his spot.
“Jose Canseco ended my career,” Palazzolo says.
Advanced Stats Are Real Sabermetrics changed the way pro baseball is analyzed. A similar movement is under way in football, but you wouldn't know it by watching games on television. Will NFL broadcasts ever embrace advanced stats? Palazzolo had always been interested in baseball’s sabermetrics, and he stumbled upon Pro Football Focus while looking to see if the same tools existed for football fans to better understand the game. After he signed on as full-time analyst, the major leagues came calling again, asking him to be a pitching coach or a scout. But he turned down those offers.
This season he’s had a primary role in developing Pro Football Focus’s newest project: analyzing college games. It’s a smart business decision that opens up a new potential client base, and it also gives their NFL teams another layer of data to help with their college scouting. The jump to analyzing all Division 1 FBS games—an additional 800+ games on top of the NFL schedule—is a huge undertaking. A third computer sits on Palazzolo’s desk in his townhouse, downloading college game film on one of three terabyte hard drives.
It’s a gold mine of data that can help teams sift through prospects the same way they do in free agency, but by an estimated factor of three or four. The grades can direct teams to a player’s best and worst games—for Jameis Winston, that would be against Boston College (best) and Louisville and Florida games (worst)—and isolate skill-sets such as throwing intermediate routes or getting the ball out while staring down pressure.
“One scouting director told us, ‘We’re looking to unlock gems and find the guy that all of a sudden came out of nowhere his senior year,’ ” Palazzolo says. “I can’t wait until we have enough data that we can go back and look at some of these sleepers. Some of these late-round guys, I’m going to go ahead and guess that if we graded them in college, they probably would have graded well.”
Pro Football Focus ranks Marcus Mariota as the highest-graded passer, and Winston in the middle of the pack. But the information they collect paints a more nuanced picture: Mariota faced nearly 50% less pressure than Winston in 2014, and the Oregon QB performed well, throwing three touchdowns, no interceptions and an average of 11.7 yards per attempt with defenders in his face. Winston, meanwhile, performed better against the blitz than a a traditional rush. Both quarterbacks struggled on rollouts. Mariota used play-action on 51% of his drop-backs, while Winston used it on just 16%. The high in the NFL this season was Alex Smith, who used play-action 31% of the time.
It’s that stat that illustrates why some analysts are doubting the Mariota hype: He did well with what was presented to him in college, but they aren’t sure all of the skills that made him a Heisman winner will translate well to the NFL.
That uncertainty is a gap Pro Football Focus hopes to bridge in the coming years.
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Neil Hornsby abandoned his consultancy business in 2012 and took an 80% pay cut to grow Pro Football Focus. Last October, he moved from England to Cincinnati after forming a partnership with former NFL wideout and current NBC commentator Cris Collinsworth. (John DePetro and Jenny Vrentas/The MMQB) Neil Hornsby abandoned his consultancy business in 2012 and took an 80% pay cut to grow Pro Football Focus. Last October, he moved from England to Cincinnati after forming a partnership with former NFL wideout and current NBC commentator Cris Collinsworth. (John DePetro and Jenny Vrentas/The MMQB)
CINCINNATI — On a train ride home from the University of Liverpool in 1984, Hornsby spent 85 pence on the U.K.’s Touchdown magazine (Dan Marino was on the cover) and became enthralled by the tables of stats that helped inform the highlights he loved to watch. He bought his collection of old NFL record books à la carte on EBay and spent most of the 1990s inputting data into a computer in his spare time, hoping to build a web encyclopedia of NFL records and facts. His hopes were dashed in 2003 when he stumbled upon such a site, ProFootballReference.com.
The idea for Pro Football Focus was born six months later, but the website drew just 80 page views a week (that’s not a typo) when it first launched. Hornsby was living in Luton, England, running a consultancy business that focused on something called “business process.” By 2008, his hobby was evolving into its own business. He and Ben Stockwell, a rabid NFL fan from Ware, England, finished a complete analysis of the ’08 season just a week before the ’09 season kicked off. Hornsby started paying Stockwell—and later Elsayed and Sam Monson from Dublin, Ireland—out of his own pocket, making a push to analyze each week’s games before the next week kicked off. It was exhausting work, but it was during that ’09 season when Jon Berger, the Giants’ senior director of football information, sent Hornsby an out-of-the-blue message through the website’s rudimentary “contact us” form.
“This was in the days when the NFL didn’t give out player participation until after the season was over,” Hornsby says. “He said, ‘Can we have this info?’ I couldn’t believe it, because I thought every NFL team would have that info. That feeling kept us going.”
In 2012, Hornsby abandoned his consultancy business and took an 80% pay cut to focus on growing Pro Football Focus. He’s spent the last few years adding to his staff, traveling to NFL cities (including trips aboard The MMQB’s training camp RV, which Peter King explains in this week’s Monday Morning Quarterback column) to pitch his product to coaches and front offices. Collinsworth’s stake in the company is why Hornsby moved his wife, Claire, two sons, Alex and Ethan, and dogs Jess and Molly to Cincinnati, where Collinsworth played for the Bengals and still lives.
Former Bengals wide receiver and current NBC commentator Cris Collinsworth invested in Pro Football Focus last summer and helped expand the company’s reach to college football, which can help inform the draft process for its NFL clients. (Gene Lower and Richard Mackson for Sports Illustrated) Former Bengals wide receiver and current NBC commentator Cris Collinsworth invested in Pro Football Focus last summer and helped expand the company’s reach to college football, which can help inform the draft process for its NFL clients. (Gene Lower and Richard Mackson for Sports Illustrated)
Before he invested, Collinsworth was simply looking for a way to get more information on all 32 NFL teams—and faster—to better inform NBC’s national television audience of roughly 21 million. He thought he was being punked when he first heard Hornsby’s thick British accent over the phone, but PFF passed all of his tests, including a side-by-side grading of a game from 2013. Their grades differed very little, and when they did, Collinsworth says, half the time they were right and he was wrong.
“What really impressed me is the fact that 13 NFL teams have contracted with Pro Football Focus for their data,” Collinsworth told The MMQB last August, after becoming a business partner. “I have been around the NFL for over 30 years, I know how hard it is to get behind the wall of those teams. And they’ve got 13 teams to trust their data. That’s huge.”
Collinsworth’s investment enabled the company to start analyzing college football. Down the road, who knows, maybe high schools will be next? But the core of Pro Football Focus’s business remains the NFL—and coming up with new ways to help their clients find an edge and save time. In his basement Hornsby is still scribbling on the whiteboard, trying to unlock the perfect formula to better rank pass rushers. He pulls up a document on a nearby tablet that PFF has made for its teams, showing how down and distance, the quarterback’s drop-back steps, and the position from which a player is rushing directly relate to his ability to get to the QB.
Using their new formulas to normalize data, for instance, a predominantly right-sided rusher like Robert Quinn moves up the rankings because it’s harder to get to the quarterback from that side. A predominantly left-sided rusher, like Charles Johnson, drops a few spots. Then there’s Watt, who rushed the quarterback 669 times in 2014, and no matter how you slice it, grades twice as high as any other defender in the league.
Statistics, of course, don’t provide all the answers, nor do they always give new answers, but they can offer a different perspective to help break down the game.
“Whether a team should go for it on fourth-and-1, there’s been some analysis of that,” Hornsby says. “But the truth of it is, what is the sample size of data for that game being played in Buffalo, at a particular temperature in December, with a right guard who has a dodgy hamstring and the halfback just broke up with his girlfriend the previous day? No amount of statistics can give you that answer. Only the coach can make that decision.
“But what we can do, we can say to a coach, ‘If you see Calvin Johnson lining up as the inside slot receiver on a play in Week 14, and in every other circumstance where he has lined up in that position he has run this route—would that be useful to you?’ ”
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[widget widget_name="SI Newsletter Widget”]On May 28, 2010, Kanye West released “Power,” a single from his fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Just a few months later, Sony Pictures Entertainment featured the song in one of its TV spots for David Fincher’s The Social Network.
Since then, “Power” has made an appearance in countless trailers for movies, TV shows and games, but it may be time to retire it.
West’s “Power” has a bit of a history, and it wasn’t long after it debuted that it became the center of a new meme. In 2011, the use of “Power” in trailers was appropriately referred to as “No One Trailer Should Have All This Power.” It started as a result of two games, Saints Row: The Third and Forza Motorsport 4, using the song in their trailers during E3 2011. Giant Bomb writer Jeff Gerstmann tweeted out the phrase, and just like that, the meme began.
Clips for shows like Doctor Who and other games like Dota 2 used the hype-inducing anthem to join in on the joke. Unfortunately, the audio for each video was taken down by Universal, who blocked the videos based on copyright grounds. Despite the meme losing most of its steam by April 2012, the track retained its popularity.
In 2011, the song was used in TV spots for Limitless. Schools and organizations like Texas A&M University, Creighton University and American Airlines relied on “Power” for commercials and pre-game reels. Between 2011 and 2017, multiple shows including Ripper Street, Broken City and The Daily Show returned to “Power” in their trailers and commercials.
In 2015, Fox played the song in its TV spot for the reboot of Fantastic Four, and today, Legendary Pictures featured it in the studio’s official trailer for the upcoming Power Rangers movie. For seven years, West’s track has been used as a way to hype up a scene, and while it was clever at first, it’s begun to feel lazy.
It’s not like there aren’t other West jams that can be swapped in to convey the same tone studios and marketing teams are trying to achieve with “Power.” “Black Skinhead,” another popular song by West off of his 2013 album Yeezus, has also been used quite a few times in trailers and TV spots. The track acted as promotional material for both The Wolf of Wall Street and Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, while Suicide Squad made the song the focal point of a particular scene. In the first trailer for Fox’s Assassin’s Creed movie, West’s “I Am A God,” also off of Yeezus, can be heard.
Using “Power” as a way to point out that the people in the scene are extraordinary, unusual or, quite frankly, powerful, is boring. Its presence in a trailer earns an eye-roll instead of a nod of approval. It’s the equivalent to hearing the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” or Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt” in a trailer; it just comes across as laziness.
Others, like Clint Mansell’s theme from Requiem for a Dream or Gary Jules’ “Mad World,” have all suffered from being the go-to for trailers, but none stick out as much as “Power.” Part of that is because “Power” can be used in a number of situations. Whether it’s political, economical, cultural or motivating, the combination of the vocal arrangements in “Power” and West’s aggressive lyrics cultivate a certain tone that inspires a sense of greatness.
“Power” is a great song, and anyone who knows me knows I appreciate the music of Kanye West more than most things. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy remains one of the best albums of all time, but it’s time to move on. Studios have overused “Power” to the point where it’s difficult to listen to the track without thinking of it as anything less than promotional material.
To paraphrase West himself, please: No more trailers should have any sign of “Power.”Metro Nashville Public Health Department officials announced that the first batch of mosquitoes collected by the Department’s Pest Management Division tested positive for West Nile virus.
The samples were taken over the past week near the intersection of Nolensville Road and Glenrose Ave.
There have been no human cases reported.
Officials said the staff was set to revisit the areas in the coming week to set additional traps, monitor areas of standing water, and will larvicide if mosquito larvae are present.
The Health Department began trapping mosquitoes earlier this month and sending them to be tested at the Tennessee Department of Health’s lab.
Health officials recommended taking the following steps to protect against biting mosquitoes:
Limit time outdoors at dusk and nighttime hours when mosquitoes are present.
If you must be outdoors then wear a mosquito repellent that is approved for use by the CDC – those include products that contain DEET, Picaridin, and Oil of Lemon Eucalyptus.
Wear shoes, socks, long sleeve shirts and pants when outdoors during dusk to dawn when mosquitoes are most prevalent. Clothing should be light colored and made of tightly woven materials to keep mosquitoes away from the skin. Pant legs should be tucked into shoes or socks, and collars should be buttoned.
Make sure your windows and doors have screens and are in good repair.
Health Department officials recommend taking steps to reduce mosquito breeding areas. This includes:
Reduce or eliminate all standing water in your yard – especially in children’s toys, bird baths, clogged gutters, tires, flowerpots, trashcans, and wheelbarrows.
Aerate ornamental pools or stock them with Gambusia fish.
Apply mosquito dunks in standing water areas on your property.
Cut back overgrown vegetation (mosquito hiding areas)..
Anyone seeking more information about mosquito control in Davidson County was told to call 615-340-5660.
Information could also be found on the Health Department’s website and Facebook page.Why Increasing Penalties for Drug Use Doesn’t Work
As long as we can convince ourselves that those communities deserve the devastation that results from harsh drug laws, we will continue to repeat the same tactics—even knowing that they are both ineffective and wrong.
Harsh punishments haven't worked.
Communities have long debated the best ways to handle drug addiction and the crime that can result from it. Should we be tough on crime and send a strong message that drugs won’t be tolerated? Or should we show compassion and treat drug use as a medical issue, offering harm reduction and treatment instead of jail? These competing factions are often at war with one another—more so now with our country in a nasty political divide.
Well, turns out that behavioral scientists came up with the answer a long time ago. The questions of human behavior—what causes us to act a certain way and how undesirable behaviors can be altered—have been studied for decades and the evidence is clear: when it comes to punishment as a method for changing or deterring behavior, people respond to the certainty and swiftness of punishment more so than to the severity.
Dr. Robert Foss is a social psychologist at the Center for the Study of Young Drivers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has spent 30 years studying issues such as why people drink and drive, and how to change their behavior.
“The problem with addressing behaviors like impaired driving and drug use is that people do it all the time and don’t get caught,” explains Dr. Foss. “If people don’t believe they will be caught, then the harshness of the threatened punishment doesn’t matter because they don’t believe they will experience it.”
Think of it this way: over the course of your life, how many times have you driven over the speed limit and how many times have you been caught and ticketed? Probably few. How many times have you been in an accident due to speeding? Probably even fewer. Yet many people speed or text while driving rather frequently, even knowing that they could face the ultimate consequence—death. Engaging in a risky activity repeatedly under the hope that nothing bad will happen is not a mindset that is unique to people who use drugs or commit crimes. We all think like this. Unfortunately, our entire criminal justice system is set up under the fantasy that people who commit crimes will respond to the threat of punishment differently than the rest of society. We keep thinking that if we just make the penalty high enough, it will deter undesirable behavior. In reality, it doesn’t matter if the sentence for selling drugs is six months or 20 years, because most people believe they won’t be caught. Even when someone is caught, it takes months or years before a court date is set. In the meantime, some charges will be thrown out, plea bargains will be offered, lawyers will search for legal loopholes. In short, there is always reason to hope that the threatened penalty will not be applied.
Law enforcement is also starting to recognize the futility of the current approach to drugs. Brendan Cox, former Albany Chief of Police, now serves as the Director of Policing Strategies for Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) programs. He agrees that the purely punitive approach to the enforcement of drug laws needs to change.
“I became a police officer in 1994 when we were at the height of thinking we could solve the drug problem by locking everybody up,” he says. “It wasn’t until the mid 2000s that a lot of law enforcement started realizing that we were just chasing our tails. Not only that but we were worsening the behavior, because if people go to jail for a six-month stint, now they have a record and their family is affected as well.”
The big question is—if we know that increasing the severity of penalties doesn’t work, why do we keep doing it?
“I think it’s just human nature that our first reaction to being wronged is an ‘eye for an eye’ approach,” says Cox. “We often let emotions get the better of us, especially when a crime is still fresh in our minds.”
Dr. Foss agrees. “Humans are pretty oblivious to evidence, so even when we see that our system of punishment hasn’t worked, that evidence doesn’t override our gut instinct that it should work,” he says.
When people use phrases like “get tough on drugs” and “let’s send a strong message,” they are utilizing feel-good political ploys that satisfy most of the public but do not actually change behavior. In fact, increasing penalties works against the more effective methods of punishment—increasing swiftness and certainty. For example, if punishment for using or selling drugs were fairly light, most people wouldn’t try to fight it in court, but when a decades-long prison sentence is looming, there is ample reason to tie up the court system in a costly, drawn-out legal battle. This significantly decreases the swiftness of punishment and the certainty of what that punishment will look like. Also, the more the criminal justice system eats up funds by keeping people locked up for long periods of time and paying for lawyers to fight against severe penalties, the less money is available for expenses like law enforcement, so people are even less likely to get caught. “Get tough on crime” and “let’s send a strong message” are great sound bites. But they are terrible, ineffective policy.
So how can we change behavior?
“The best way to influence human behavior is to change the environment in which they live,” says Dr. Foss. “Ultimately, this means dealing with poverty, mental health problems, and generational drug use. It means providing meaningful jobs for people, giving them a sense of purpose, and restructuring society so that people’s lives don’t go to hell so often. But short of those daunting goals, other more manageable changes to people’s environments are also helpful. Surrounding people with support systems to help them deal with problems is one simple example.”
Restructuring society, dealing with mental health problems, poverty, and lack of purpose are large tasks indeed. No wonder we so often resort to increasing punishment instead of focusing on the real problems. Hope is not lost, however. Across the country, many communities have started implementing evidence-based practices that tackle issues such as poverty, homelessness, and addiction instead of merely increasing penalties.
Brendan Cox works on one such program, LEAD, which began in Seattle in 2011 in an effort to increase the effectiveness of policing, while decreasing the harms caused by over-enforcement of drug laws. LEAD is a diversion program, whereby police officers can choose to divert a person involved in drug use or sex work to social services instead of jail.
“The great thing about LEAD is that there is a lot of accountability for participants,” says Cox. “Instead of a police officer making an arrest and washing his hands of the situation, he can turn the person over to a case manager and there are actions for that person to follow up on immediately. Also, the police officer stays in contact with the case manager and follows up to see how the participant is doing and if they are struggling or successful with the program.”
This immediate hand-off drastically increases the swiftness and certainty of intervention for crimes. LEAD and programs like it are incorporating evidence-based practice on the most effective methods of behavioral change without focusing on increasing punishment. And the results? Evaluations from the Seattle program showed a 58% reduction in recidivism among participants as compared to those who went through the criminal justice system as usual. The program has now been replicated throughout the country in places such as Seattle (WA), Santa Fe (NM), Albany (NY), Fayetteville (NC), Huntington (WV), Baltimore (MD), and Portland (OR) with 44 other cities exploring or developing a program.
“LEAD and other programs have been proven to make communities safer because we are addressing the root cause of the behavior and not just putting Band-aid after Band-aid on the symptoms,” says Cox. “Police should be focusing on violent crimes and letting service providers work with people who use drugs.”
Of course, there is a time and place for severe punishment and long prison sentences. Having someone locked away for rape, murder or embezzlement does grant a degree of safety to the person’s past and future victims. However, drug use and sale is unique in its ability to regenerate when one piece is removed. Continuing to arrest and increase prison sentences despite all evidence against those methods is not only ignorant, but grossly irresponsible.
“The war on drugs was a policy that came down from politicians. It should never have happened,” says Cox. “Law enforcement have a responsibility to the people we serve to show that we recognize that these policies don’t work and that we can do things differently. We can’t just makes statements and apologize. We have to back it up with actions.”
The fundamental problem is that people who create and enforce harsh drug laws are not typically affected by the resulting devastation. As long as the damage primarily affects communities outside our own, and as long as we can convince ourselves that those impacted communities deserve what is happening to them, we will continue to repeat the same tactics—even knowing that they are both ineffective and wrong. Evidence shows that in order to change human behavior, we need to change environments. Well, it is not only the environment around people who use drugs that needs to change. It is also the environment around decision-makers and the public that elects them. As long as we stay in our protected communities and choose to ignore what is happening around us, our own negative and stigmatizing behaviors will never be altered. Time to break out of our own silos and admit that we, too, need an environmental change.Pete Earley is the author of “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness.”
When should society intervene if a person shows signs of mental illness?
As with the shooters at Virginia Tech, in Tucson and in Aurora, Colo., there were ample warnings that Aaron Alexis was experiencing mental distress before he killed 12 people at Washington’s Navy Yard.
Police in Newport, R.I., did nothing to help Alexis when he complained about hearing voices and being zapped by skin-vibrating microwaves.
They were not legally obligated to.
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In 1975, the Supreme Court ruled in O’Connor v. Donaldson that the state “cannot constitutionally confine... a non-dangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by himself or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends.”
That decision established our legal threshold of posing a danger to one’s self or others.
The next year, a federal court ruled in Lessard v. Schmidt that involuntary commitment is permissible only when “there is an extreme likelihood that if the person is not confined he will do immediate harm to himself or others.” The court required that in civil commitment proceedings people with mental illness receive all the protections accorded to criminal suspects — including the right to counsel, the right to remain silent, exclusion of hearsay evidence and a standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
In 1979, the Supreme Court decision in Addington v. Texas raised the burden of proof for involuntary commitment from a “preponderance of the evidence,” the usual standard in civil cases, to “clear and convincing” evidence.
These decades-old rulings have had a chilling impact.
In 2002, a Fairfax County emergency room turned me away because my college-age son, who was delusional and had been hospitalized twice for treatment of bipolar disorder, was deemed not sick enough to hospitalize. Police advised me to claim he was dangerous to get him admitted. Three years later, I called the county’s Mobile Crisis Unit for help but was again told that I had to wait until my son became dangerous. When he did, that unit refused to come because the dispatcher decided, based on my call, that my son was too dangerous. Instead, the police came and shot my son twice with a stun gun.
Our societal fear of involuntary commitment is rooted in our “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” past, when innocents were warehoused in state asylums without legal protections and with little hope of release. But times and circumstances have changed.
Other nations have progressed to a “need for treatment” standard, which considers the potential for danger but does not require it.
Under the 1983 Mental Health Act in England and Wales, individuals can be forced into treatment if they have a mental disorder. Patients are examined by a licensed psychiatrist and a doctor, including one who has known the patient previously. If they agree that the person should be detained in the interest of his health, his safety or the protection of others, an order is presented to a social worker trained to determine whether commitment is warranted. Patients are held for up to 28 days before their cases are reviewed by a mental health tribunal composed of a doctor, lawyer and layman.
In France, people who show behavior consistent with a mental disorder can be held for observation for up to 72 hours at the request of family or friends. Doctors, social workers or police can request the hold if they observe or suspect dangerous behavior. A patient must be seen by a team of psychiatrists within the first 24 hours and again at the end of the 72-hour hold. At least three doctors must agree that the person needs to be hospitalized. If that happens, the patient is hospitalized for 12 to 15 days before the case goes to a judge.
After the Virginia Tech killings, I served on a task force that helped loosen the state’s criteria for “imminent danger.” Opponents predicted a flood of unwarranted forced commitments. In fact, the number of forced commitments in Virginia has not jumped or dropped.
Paul Appelbaum, director of psychiatry at Columbia University, has suggested that reductions in community services and capacity have played a much greater role than legal criteria in reducing the number of voluntary and involuntary treatment admissions in recent years.
In Fairfax County, someone seeking help at a community treatment center faces a five- to seven-day wait for an appointment. Someone forced into a Virginia hospital stays, on average, six to seven days — if a treatment bed can be found. Virginia cut its budget for mental health programs 9 percent from 2009 to 2011; Fairfax alone has lost $16 million in the past five years.
Millions of Americans have diagnosable mental disorders. But most of them are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators. They are unfairly stigmatized after mass shootings.
Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), a psychologist turned politician, noted on the House floor this month that 2 million of the 11 million American adults with a serious mental illness are not receiving treatment. Approximately 1,000 homicides a year are perpetrated by the seriously mentally ill, he said.
So how do we protect the civil rights of mentally ill people while stopping the violent minority?
Adopting a “need for treatment” standard would enable relatives, police and mental health professionals to intervene earlier. But until our nation builds and funds a community-based mental health system that provides user-friendly treatment oriented |
aina, followed us as we headed back to the hotel. I explained what we were doing and asked if she'd talk with us about working the strip. She was so kind — disappointed that we weren't prospects, but, like pretty much everybody I've met in this country, smiling and generous with her time.
The normal price for sex before the outbreak would have been 90,000 leones for a black man — and for a white man, from 150,000 to 200,000 for a "short time," she said. Now, Zaina expects to get only 50,000 for sex with a black man and 100,000 from a white. That's $10 to $20 per trick.
According to the U.S. Department of State, 70 percent of Sierra Leoneans live on less than $1 a day. So I guess this is good money? Hard to fathom.
I asked Zaina if she could show me how the hiss thing works — for my recorder. She was confused. "The thing you do to call guys over — the hissing sound — what do you call that?"
We call it, "call men," she said.
"Can you show me?"
"Hisssssssss!" Flashing a smile, she turned toward the beach, "I'm going."
Back to work.Courtesy of Burnt Orange Report A folding chair and an American flag hang from a tree in front of a home in northwest Austin, Texas.
At least two recent incidents in which empty chairs were hung from trees by rope have critics decrying what they say are racially offensive displays meant to symbolize the “lynching” of President Barack Obama.
In Austin, Texas, a homeowner hung an empty folding chair from a tree branch in front of his house and later attached an American flag to it. He reportedly told a Democratic political blogger who said she had concerns, “You can take it and go straight to hell and take Obama with you.”
In Centreville, Va., an empty chair with a sign reading “Nobama” was strung from a tree in or near a park. “In short, this appears to be a crude metaphor for the lynching of President Obama,” wrote the blogger who posted the photo.
The image of an empty chair has been associated with Obama ever since Clint Eastwood’s headline-grabbing, non-conformist speech at the Republican National Convention three weeks ago in Tampa, Fla. The 82-year-old actor-director talked to an empty chair as if the Democratic president were sitting in it, criticizing and mocking the “invisible Obama” for 12 minutes.
“When somebody doesn't do the job, you've got to let them go," Eastwood said before making a throat-slashing gesture.
Hollywood star Clint Eastwood speaks at the RNC in Tampa, Fla.
In Austin, Katherine Haenschen, editor of Burnt Orange Report, a Texas liberal-leaning political blog, said someone forwarded her a photo this week of an empty folding chair hanging from a tree in front of a home in the city’s northwest. A few days later the homeowner apparently added a small American flag to the display, according to a picture taken by a neighbor and forwarded to Haenschen on Thursday. [Picture above].
Haenschen said she called the man who she said lives in the home with his wife on Wednesday night to express her concerns about the display. Here’s what she said he told her:
“He replied, and I quote, "I don't really give a damn whether it disturbs you or not. You can take [your concerns] and go straight to hell and take Obama with you. I don't give a [expletive]. If you don't like it, don't come down my street."
NBC News tried reaching out to the man for comment, but a telephone message left Thursday morning was not returned.
Haenschen said the display has apparently caused “great consternation” in the neighborhood.
“There are other neighbors up there who are Republicans who find this as offensive as anybody else does,” Haenschen told NBC News.
“Someone always wants to say, 'you’re making a big deal out of it, it’s just a chair.' But I don’t see how you can dismiss the racial message of lynching a symbol of the first African-American president. It’s really tough for me to see how folks might, after the Eastwood speech, not view this as a racially charged message and a symbol of a threat to the president’s life.”
Rosemary Edwards, chairwoman of the Travis County Republican Party in Austin, said she was not aware of the display. She said if anything racial is suggested by the display, it would be "deplorable."
In Virginia, a photo posted on Tuesday on Blue Virginia, a Democratic-leaning political blog, shows an empty chair with a handmade "Nobama" sign strung from a tree by a rope.
Courtesy of Blue Virginia A chair with an anti-Obama slogan hangs from a tree in Centreville, Va.
The blogger, who goes by the username “lowkell,” said photos of the display were taken with a cellphone by someone who was leaving the KORUS festival, an annual gathering organized by a local Korean-American association, at Bull Run Regional Park in Centreville over the weekend.
“Obviously, it's beyond grotesque (it also boggles my mind that this was allowed to be put up, let alone to stay up, at a festival presumably visited by thousands of people - wtf?),” lowkell wrote.
Lowkell told NBC News the photo was forwarded to him by a source who "wants to remain anonymous."
The display was on private property neighboring the park, a park official told the Centreville Patch. The park is about eight miles from Centreville High School, where Obama appeared at a campaign rally in July. It was not known who put up the display.
The Secret Service said it was looking into the empty chair incidents. "The Secret Service is aware of this and will conduct appropriate followup," spokesman Brian Leary told NBC News.
Lynching, the killing of people, usually by hanging or shooting, by mobs who take the law into their own hands, occurred most frequently in the U.S. from the late 1800s through the 1950s. Most of the lynchings took place in the South, and most of the victims were black.
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Follow US News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and FacebookWhen David Kappos announced his resignation as head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) late last year, one of his most touted accomplishments was a significant reduction in the backlog of pending patent applications. Kappos' fans have attributed this to the hiring of hundreds of additional patent examiners.
But a new study suggests another explanation for the declining backlog: the patent office may have lowered its standards, approving many patents that would have been (and in some cases, had been) rejected under the administration of George W. Bush. The authors—Chris Cotropia and Cecil Quillen of the University of Richmond and independent researcher Ogden Webster—used Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain detailed data about the fate of patent applications considered by the USPTO since 1996.
They found that the "allowance rate," the fraction of applications approved by the patent office, declined steadily from 2001 and 2009. But in the last four years there's been a sharp reversal, with a 2012 allowance rate about 20 percent higher than it was in 2009.
Patent pending
Calculating the real allowance rate is tricky because inventors can submit the same application multiple times. "From the perspective of the patent office, a 'final rejection' doesn't get rid of an application," Quillen told Ars in a December phone interview. If an application is rejected, the inventor can make minor changes to the application and file it again. "The only way you can reduce your numbers and get rid of somebody is to allow the case," Quillen said.
There are a number of different ways to re-file applications, with names like File Wrapper Continuations, Continued Prosecution Applications, Requests for Continued Examination and Continuation-In-Part Applications. But in all cases, the upshot is the same: the applicant gets another shot at convincing examiners to grant him a patent.
The ease with which applicants can re-file the same application leads to misleading official statistics suggesting the patent office is pickier than it really is. If an examiner rejects an application twice before finally granting a patent on the third try, that might be counted as two rejections and one acceptance, for a 33 percent acceptance rate. But it probably makes more sense to consider the three filings as part of the same application process, for a 100 percent acceptance rate.
Cotropia and his colleagues gathered data on re-filed applications to correct for this problem. The result was this graph:
The bottom line shows the "raw" allowance rate: the fraction of applications that got a thumbs-up from patent examiners. (UPR is "utility, plant, and reissue," three categories of patent.) The next few lines shows the allowance rate after combining applications to avoid double-counting those that have been submitted more than once. The top line shows the result when all types of re-filing are accounted for.
The graph suggests that the patent office got steadily pickier during the presidency of George W. Bush. The uncorrected allowance rate fell from about 70 percent to a bit over 40 percent during Bush's eight years in office. Then after Obama appointed David Kappos to the patent office, the allowance rate rose back above 50 percent.
And the reversal looks even more dramatic after correcting for re-filed applications. The corrected allowance rate (the purple line) rose from 70 percent at the beginning of Kappos' tenure to almost 90 percent by the end.
Third time is a charm
"We made a conscious decision simply to present the facts and leave their interpretation to others," Quillen told Ars in a March e-mail. But James Bessen, a Boston University researcher whose work we've covered before, told us that the obvious interpretation was the correct one.
"The backlog is in patent applications that have been rejected, that should be rejected, but which patent office rules allow to be endlessly refiled," Bessen told us by e-mail. "The surge in allowance under Kappos is a sharp change from previous grant rates."
Of course, it's theoretically possible that the quality of patent applications suddenly started rising in 2009. But Bessen argued that was unlikely. He pointed that a lot of the current backlog consists of re-filed applications that were rejected the first time around. And he pointed to a recent study estimating that 28 percent of current patents would be found invalid by the courts, suggesting that the patent office has not done a thorough job of screening the patents.
Naturally, the USPTO disagrees with Bessen's interpretation of the data.
"Patents that are subject to a longer wait time for a first action tend to abandon at higher rates than other applications (holding all other factors constant)," a spokesman told us by e-mail. "The higher level of abandonment leads to a lower observed grant rate, measured by grants as a proportion of total disposals. Conversely, when first action pendency falls across the board, there are fewer abandonments and the grant rate rises."
In other words, the patent office says that when applicants have to wait a long time for a response, they tend to just give up. Now that the wait time is down, thanks to PTO efficiency, fewer of them are giving up. As a result, the ratio of accepted patents to rejected patents whose owners don't try again might go up even if the patent office hasn't lowered its standards.
That argument "ignores the fact that the increased backlog comes from patents that were already rejected, but then refiled," Bessen told us. "What matters is not the quality of the average patent examination, but rather the quality of the last examination," the one that leads to the patent either being granted or the applicant choosing not to re-file it.
The fundamental problem, both Quillen and Bessen agree, is that the only way to get rid of a persistent applicant is by giving him a patent. "Refiled continuing applications should be abolished," Quillen told us in a March e-mail. "This would enable the USPTO to obtain final decisions as to the patentability of applications it has examined, and would eliminate the rework that such refiled applications impose on the USPTO." That would free up resources for the USPTO to examine new applications more thoroughly.Here is an interesting email I got from a reader who wonders if a substantial number of geeks are on strike:
Hello Drs. Reynolds & Smith, I've noticed a similarity in the two greatest debacles for the militant feminism/War on Women crowd. In both the "shirt storm" and "gamer gate"attacks, it is geeks (and their friends/sympathizers/defenders) that have pushed back against this noxious crowd. In contrast, government, corporations, most of the media, universities, etc. have either enabled or been quick to fold to these attacks. I'm not certain what this means. Possibly it is that a substantial percentage of geeks (of which I'm a proud member) have gone on strike, resent these intrusions, and don't have the social conditioning to make nice. This idea seems to fit into both of your wheelhouses. Possibly one of you think there is something there and can develop the idea further.
I actually explored some of this "geeks on strike" theme in my book in a section on gamers where I interviewed game designer Vox Day, who put up information on the demographics of his blog readers (full of gamers) and how they felt about marriage.The non-alphas in the poll seemed to have access to far fewer women than the alphas. From the book:
However, the non-Alphas tell a different story. For those men who are not Alphas, there are many fewer women available to them. If 24 percent of the men are sharing 76 percent of the women, the sexual prospects are poor for the 76 percent of men who are sharing the other 24 percent of women. Perhaps of those 76 percent, some are the virgins who are the most anti-marriage or are less marriage-minded because they have fewer women to choose from or feel socially rejected. It would be interesting to see if the men who are more in the Beta and lower classifications are playing more video games. Vox Day had this to say about the younger gamers that he has had contact with: I probably have a unique perspective on it due to my connections to the young guys in the gaming industry. It’s bizarre how some of them are in their twenties, have graduated from good schools, and have simply zero interest in women. They just have literally nothing in common with them and no interest in them. The “strike” theory is generally correct, I think. The problem is that games and porn are entertaining, inexpensive, easily accessible, and reliable. Women can be entertaining, but they’re expensive, inaccessible for most men, and from the male perspective, shockingly unreliable. I would say that porn has raised the bar somewhat—it’s bound to be seriously annoying when Little Miss Real Life won't give head when Jane Pornstar is twice as hot and is cheerfully performing all sorts of acrobatic stunts. And if you think about it, is a real woman who is average and only wants to have missionary-style sex once a week, minus a week for her period, actually any better than a wide variety of gorgeous porn stars catering to every bizarre fetish the Japanese can imagine and available on demand? It’s not quite so clear once you put it in those terms. The biggest communication problem is that most women see “relationship” as a positive thing. Most men see it as an ambiguous thing. So, when the selling point of Little Miss Real Life over Jane Pornstar is “relationship,” you can see where it’s not going to be very appealing. I don’t think there’s much of a “fuck you” element, though. The guys who think that way tend to be the players, particularly the Sigma players. A lot of the guys who opt out aren’t particularly angry at women, they just don’t see much point to pursuing involvement with them.
Perhaps what the reader is observing in Gamergate and Shirtgate is that the geeks involved not only don't have the social conditioning to "make nice," but that they have less to lose than conformists such as the media or feminists who need other women and men to join their worldview.LYNCHBURG, VA—Noting the addition of some nice new shops and restaurants downtown, local mom Erica Dodson, 52, confirmed during a phone call with her daughter Ashlee today that their hometown actually has a lot going on now. “There’s a funky little place that sells fancy olive oil and vinegar, and a wood oven pizzeria where Casey’s used to be,” said Dodson, who reportedly revealed to her 25-year-old daughter how she read in the paper that Riverside Park would feature free concerts every Thursday during the summer. “You’d be surprised. The farmers market has gotten really big, too, and Mamma Mia! is coming to the performing arts center.” Dodson then reportedly finished the conversation by suggesting that her daughter come home when she has some time and check out the new art gallery in town that has hand-blown glass.
AdvertisementYes, yes, Oblivion has long stepped aside and given Skyrim the spotlight, and Prequel – also known as Making A Cat Cry: The Adventure – has been around for a while. It’s been brought to my attention that not everyone knows about it though, so here’s why you should check it out.
Prequel is an interactive webcomic that started almost a year ago, with a penniless Khajiit girl arriving in Cyrodiil to escape from… more or less… everything in the entire rest of the world. Taking the name Katia Managan, she resolves to put her reckless teenage years, crippling alcoholism and tendency to wake up stark naked in complete strangers’ beds behind her, and become a productive, capable, liked and respected member of Imperial society.
This… doesn’t go entirely according to plan
Cringe comedy barely describes it. You may think that characters like Nordrick have it tough, but that’s nothing compared to the sheer weight of crap the universe keeps dropping on Katia’s head. What makes it more painful is that this isn’t just a metaphor. You see, Prequel is one of those MS Paint Adventures comics, where the audience gets to issue instructions to both Katia and the world, and especially early on, both they and author Kazerad are utter sadists.
These early instalments can be spectacularly painful reading. It’s worth pushing on though, as eventually the tide does slowly start to turn. Katia still lives in a world where everything that can go wrong almost certainly will, but a few tiny, tiny successes (successes like simply making it from Anvil to Kvatch without screwing up) finally start adding a touch of hope to her life. You want to see her find something she can pull herself up with, and as pathetic as most of her moments of happiness are, the expressive art really makes you happy for her. And worried, knowing that any highs she gets are only to make her next humiliating faceplant all the more painful.
But hey. At least she gets to enjoy it while it lasts. Celebratory low-five!
That’s another neat thing about Prequel. It’s not simply words and pictures, as wonderful as both those things are. Individual scenes are animated, whether it’s a character staring at Katia in bemusement or disdain, or something adorable like her ears perking up in excitement. Some episodes even have interactive Flash sections, including a mini RPG for exploring Kvatch.
Most of the time though, you’re left with regular words and pictures – and that’s just fine. The writing is often bitterly, toe-curlingly cruel, but still extremely funny, and the ways the various controllable characters bounce off the audience works superbly for both random plot twists and comedy frustration. At times, you’re left practically shrieking at Katia as she stubbornly refuses to heed the audience’s (actually good) advice. At others, it’s the straight-up humour of a page-long rant about how very non-vampiric a certain perfectly normal human female is, no matter how red her eyes, or how obsessed she gets with a game called Don’t Leave The Shadow.
In short, check it out. You don’t need to know much about Oblivion to follow the story, and updates are regular (if not at regular intervals). The starting chapters can be tough to push through for the sheer weight of horrible things happening and a general feel that Katia would probably be better off climbing into a burlap sack and throwing herself into the nearest well… but it’s worth continuing at least until she discovers a certain skill that might – just might – put an end to her miserable days of being the catgirl the whole world can look down on.
Yeah, right. As if it’s ever going to be that easy…Friday, Apr 27, 2012, 11:50AM CST
By Steve Miller
The scathing report detailing the payments of U.S. Congress members to families was a gift to Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, a former El Paso city council member and Democratic challenger to U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes in the far West Texas 16th congressional district.
The investigative study found that Reyes spent campaign funds on his own reimbursement for expenses related to his campaign in 2008, as well as feathering his own family nest with payments to relatives for fundraising, travel expenses and political contributions. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington compiled the report.
"This shows that Reyes is working for himself, his family and those close to him," O'Rourke told the El Paso Times. "It makes it more clear than ever that we need reform in Washington, D.C. He paid his brother, Chuy. He paid himself. He paid his niece. He paid his niece's husband. The whole family was involved."
Reyes defended his expenditures, saying that he was pleased to have family that could help him. Which means apparently that he thinks such a practice is fine.
But while O’Rourke was speaking about reform in Washington, he forgot to mention his own payments to his business and family members of $22,800.
Campaign finance records for his City Council races show that O’Rourke reimbursed his wife Amy $1,358 for expenses at Kinko’s and on election night for the May 2007 election. He also paid his own company, Stanton Street Technology Group, $2,156 in 2005 and $1,147 in 2006 for web services.
Robert 'Beto' O'Rourke
O’Rourke’s federal campaign finance reports show he has paid Stanton Street Technology $17,786 for tech services since September. The campaign also reimbursed his sister-in-law, Marianna Sanders, $410 for utility bill payments and office supplies. Sanders said via email that her contributions of more than $3,700 "far outweigh any reimbursements that I have received."
O’Rourke said that all expenditures, be they to family members or his business, are backed up by receipts that are open to the public for review.
“My wife and I have given well over $5,000 to the campaign,” O’Rourke said. “My company is the largest provider of Web-based services in this community, and I trust them to do right. By federal law, I have to be careful about paying them a prevailing rate and make sure I’m not getting an in-kind deal from a company that I have an ownership in.
“But you have Reyes using his campaign as an ATM for his family.”
The Reyes campaign did not return calls.
CORRECTION (Noon, May 2): This story was updated with a corrected figure for reimbursements to Marianna Sanders. Texas Watchdog regrets the error.
***
Contact Steve Miller at 832-303-9420 or stevemiller@texaswatchdog.org.
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Like this story? Then steal it. This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. That means bloggers, citizen-journalists, and journalists may republish the story on their sites with attribution and a link to Texas Watchdog. If you do re-use the story, e-mail news@texaswatchdog.org.Nicole, my French teacher in Israel used to teach us old French songs to enrich our vocabulary and practice our conjugation. I don’t sing, but it was a lot of fun learning the French language this way. She had introduced me to many old French singers that, to this day, I love listening to. In this post I would like to pass on her heritage and expose you to some of the songs she had introduced me to, and other that I have discovered on my own. For each song title I attach a link where you can find the lyrics in French and English. I hope you will enjoy this.
In this song, Edith Piaf summarizes her not so easy life, while not regretting a thing. The word that has stuck with me from this song is balayé - swept, as in to sweep the floor. House work sounds so much more appealing in French.
This is such a romantic song, perfect to warm up cold fall nights. I love the French picturesque words in this song that describes the foliage - dead leaves.
Forbidden love is always a great romantic subject. In this song a French man visiting Moscow, while it was still part of the Iron Wall, falls in love with his Russian guide – Nathalie. I remember that when I learned this song I learned that in French the word “guide” is always masculine, even if it’s about a women. That is why Nathalie is referred to as “mon guide”
Indian Summer is another perfect song for the fall. I remember this song each time I see the beautiful fall colors on the trees.
Enrico Macias is an Alegerian Jew who immigrated to France in his early 20’s. His music is a mixture of the different cultures he is part of. I love the gentle melody of this song.
Laisse moi t'aimer by Mike Brant Mike Brant was an Israeli singer who succeeded in France. The song “let me love you” was his most successful song. Unfortunately he committed suicide at the age of 28.
This beautiful French singer is actually from Cleveland, Ohio. If you ever want to use your American origin as an excuse to why you would never be able to speak French properly, think again. It’s a sad song about wanting to make love for the last time before separation. I think the title “let’s make love before we say goodbye” could be a much nicer alternative to “ voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soirBy Keith Coffman
DENVER (Reuters) - One of two teenage girls accused of plotting a Columbine-like assault on their Colorado high school last year pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiracy and solicitation to commit first-degree murder, a prosecutor said.
Brooke Ann Higgins, 17, admitted in Douglas County District Court that she and a classmate planned to attack staff and students at Mountain Vista High School in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, District Attorney George Brauchler said in a telephone interview.
Higgins and her alleged accomplice, Sienna Raine Johnson, also 17, were arrested in December 2015 after an anonymous tipster alerted authorities to the teens’ plans, authorities said.
Both girls were 16 at the time of their arrest, and prosecutors charged them both as adults. Johnson’s case is still pending.
Defense attorneys had sought to have both cases handled by the juvenile court system, where criminal penalties are more lenient.
The full details of the plot remained under a court seal, but prosecutor Mark Hurlbert told Reuters at the time Higgins was charged that the teen was fascinated with the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, in which two students in a nearby county fatally shot a teacher and 12 classmates before killing themselves.
Higgins wrote in a journal, later seized by investigators, that she wished she could have taken part in the 1999 rampage, even taking a photo of herself in front of Columbine High, Hurlbert said.
Under a plea agreement struck with defense lawyers, Brauchler said Higgins pleaded guilty to the conspiracy count as an adult and to the solicitation charge as a juvenile.
The unique arrangement, if approved by a judge in February, would allow Higgins to serve three years in a juvenile lockup followed by four years of supervised probation on the adult charge under a so-called deferred judgment, he said.
If Higgins successfully completes her probationary sentence, she can have the adult case sealed, Brauchler said, adding that the deal struck an appropriate balance that protected public safety and provided Higgins with a chance for rehabilitation.
“It’s a pretty big hammer over her head,” Brauchler said, noting that if she violated the terms of her probation, she would be adjudicated in adult court.
Brauchler said there was currently no “proposed resolution” in the case against Johnson and that her next court hearing was set for January.
(Editing by Steve Gorman and Peter Cooney)May 16, 2017
GLENVIEW, Ill. — The Chicago Wolves announced Tuesday that the organization has signed a multi-year partnership with the Vegas Golden Knights, the National Hockey League’s expansion franchise that begins play in 2017-18.
The Wolves, who have earned four league championships, and the Golden Knights have forged an alliance based on their shared belief that winning is a crucial component of the American Hockey League experience. Vegas general manager George McPhee and Wolves owner Don Levin have it written into the teams’ agreement that the goal is to win championships at the AHL level.
“If you look at George McPhee’s history, he has always been a general manager who believes that winning is an important part of developing players,” Levin said. “Professional playoffs are different than the regular season and he understands that and he wants his players to be ready to win.”
During the nine seasons when McPhee served as the Washington Capitals’ GM and the Hershey Bears worked with the Capitals (2005-14), Hershey captured three Calder Cup championships.
“American Hockey League affiliates play a significant role in the success of all NHL clubs and are we are proud to have the Chicago Wolves as our first in team history,” McPhee said. “I would like to thank Don Levin, Wendell Young and the rest of the Wolves organization for their commitment to the game and helping young hockey players grow to reach their full potential as professionals. Chicago is without question one of the strongest, most passionate hockey communities in North America. This is a relationship that we truly believe will be mutually beneficial.”
The Golden Knights have just two players under contract — rookie forward Reid Duke, who spent the final five weeks of the 2016-17 season practicing with the Wolves, and Russian center Vadim Shipachyou — but that will change rapidly as McPhee and his hockey operations staff are in the final stages of preparation for the NHL Expansion Draft (June 18-21) and the NHL Entry Draft (June 23-24 in Chicago).
“We’re starting from the ground up with a new franchise,” said Wolves general manager Wendell Young. “It will be exciting to build both franchises together with the same philosophy.”
The Wolves captured the 2017 Central Division title — their fourth division crown in the last eight years — as the franchise enjoyed its finest regular-season showing (101 points) in seven seasons. The Wolves also reached the Central Division Finals during the 2017 Calder Cup Playoffs.
The Wolves have multiple ticket packages available for the 2017-18 season, including the opportunity to Call Dibs on a season-ticket seat for just $25. Click here for more information or call 1-800-THE-WOLVES.Vatican City, Jul 1, 2017 / 04:35 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A consistory is a gathering of cardinals, which the Pope can convoke to give solemnity to a particular decision, or simply to ask his “Senate” to counsel him on an important issue. However, the most recent consistory, held June 28, was rather exceptional. Here are four reasons why.
A surprise consistory
The June 28 consistory was a real surprise: when Pope Francis announced it May 21, there had been none of the normal hints that he was going to call for one.
For one thing, there were only a few open “slots” in the College of Cardinals. According to the norm set by Bl. Paul VI and confirmed by St. John Paul II, there can be only 120 cardinals who have voting rights in the event of a conclave to choose the next Pope (the primary responsibility of cardinals).
However, Pope Francis made the decision to create five new cardinals, so following this week’s consistory, there are now 121 cardinals with the right to vote in a future conclave, surpassing the normal limit of 120.
He is not the first Pope to do so. St. John Paul II created 44 cardinals in the Feb. 21, 2001 consistory. This made 135 cardinals with voting rights, a full 15 over the limit set by Paul VI.
A small number of cardinals
Also unusual for a single consistory: Pope Francis created just five cardinals.
Only one of them comes from Europe, while the other four come from countries that have never had a cardinal before: Mali, El Salvador, Sweden, and Laos.
This consistory, to some extent, is similar to the final one convoked by Pope Benedict XVI, which took place Nov. 24, 2012. During that consistory, Benedict XVI created only six new cardinals, and none of them hailed from Europe: it was the first consistory since 1924 with no Europeans in the list of new cardinals.
In 1977, Pope Paul VI convoked his final consistory, creating only four new cardinals. Among them was Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI.
The visit to the Pope emeritus
Another interesting aspect to this consistory: the newly created cardinals, joined by Pope Francis, paid a visit to the former pontiff, Benedict XVI.
Ever since Pope Francis has convoked consistories, the Pope emeritus has been taken into consideration and had some role in them.
Benedict XVI took part in Pope Francis’ first two consistories for the creation of new cardinals, held Feb. 22, 2013 and Feb. 14, 2014.
Though the Pope emeritus did not take part in the third of Pope Francis’ consistories, held Nov. 19, 2016, the newly created cardinals paid a visit to him in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery where he lives.
This time the new cardinals were accompanied by Pope Francis as they paid a visit to Benedict XVI.
The lack of a pre-consistory meeting for a general discussion
According to the Code of Canon Law, there are two types of consistories: ordinary and extraordinary.
All cardinals are called to take part in extraordinary consistories, which are celebrated only in particular cases. In contrast, ordinary consistories are summoned when the Pope needs the cardinals’ counsel on some issue, or to add solemnity to a decision by the Pope, for example the canonization of saints or the creation of new cardinals.
Sometimes both types of consistories take place consecutively. The first two ordinary consistories convoked by Pope Francis were preceded by extraordinary consistories, as the Pope took advantage of the cardinals’ presence in Rome to discuss important issues.
The Feb. 22, 2014 consistory was preceded by an extraordinary consistory on the issues of the family, while the Feb. 14, 2015 consistory was preceded by an extraordinary consistory to discuss the reform of the Curia.
In contrast, neither this week’s consistory nor the one that took place on Nov. 19, 2016 were preceded by pre-consistory meetings.Since its initial release in 1991, the Python programming language has steadily grown in popularity. Designed by Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum (a.k.a. Python's Benevolent Dictator for Life), its conciseness, power, flexibility, portability, and large ecosystem of readily available libraries have gained it many converts. Today it is used in a wide variety of diverse environments—Google is powered by Python, as is the popular Web development framework Zope. On UNIX/Linux it is also viewed by many as a modern replacement for Perl, which has historically been the "heavy lifting" scripting tool on those platforms. Where I work, we use Python for a wide variety of intraweb, scripting, and automation tasks, including a large regression testing framework we use to test our software.
Python is not without its issues, however. The most widely deployed implementation is interpreted (i.e. it doesn't compile all the way down to native machine code), which has significant performance implications. It also does not handle multithreaded code well, since parts of the Python interpreter are inherently single-threaded. Python's lack of full multithreading support has become increasingly problematic as multi-core CPUs have become the norm. Developers have typically worked around these limitations by coding performance-critical portions of the application in C or C++; the compiled C/C++ code is then called by the Python script. While certainly workable (and well supported by Python), this approach increases development times, complicates debugging, and hurts portability of high-performance Python applications.
Fast-forward to 2009. Guido is now a Google employee, and a team at Google has decided to take on the ambitious task of replacing much of the underpinnings of the Python language, with the goals of removing the interpreter performance bottlenecks and making true multithreaded Python applications possible. All without hurting backward compatibility with existing Python applications... a rather tall order! The project is code-named Unladen Swallow, and the team already has a detailed plan outlining its intended approach, which will occur in stages.
By mid-year, they intend to replace the existing Python interpreter with a more efficient one based on LLVM. This has some immediate benefits—eliminating the relatively inefficient stack-based architecture of the current Python interpreter with the more efficient LLVM register-based architecture should result in significant performance gains. Longer term, it paves the way for compilation to optimized native machine code, which has the potential to make Python performance comparable to that of other languages that compile to native machine code (like C/C++). Once the transition to LLVM is complete, the team plans |
, however, is that it is Iran and Hamas that are working to thwart the agreement by insisting on maintaining the status quo in the Gaza Strip. Iran's message to Hamas: If you want us to continue providing you with financial and military aid, you must continue to hold on to your weapons and reject demands to disarm.
What is in it for Iran? Iran wants Hamas to retain its security control over the Gaza Strip so that the Iranians can hold onto another power base in the Middle East.
Iran wants Hamas to continue playing the role of a proxy, precisely as Hezbollah functions in Lebanon.
The last thing Iran wants is for the Palestinian Authority security forces to return to the Gaza Strip: that would spoil Tehran's plans to advance its goal of destroying Israel.
Iran's continued support for Hamas stems not out of love for either Hamas or the Palestinians, but from its own interest in consolidating its presence in the Middle East.
Many Palestinians see the "successful" visit of the Hamas officials to Tehran as a major setback for efforts to end the 10-year-long Hamas-Fatah dispute. Similarly, the Egyptians are now wary of the sudden rapprochement between Iran and Hamas and are beginning to ask themselves whether they have been duped by Hamas. An Israeli delegation that visited Cairo on the eve of the signing of the Hamas-Fatah deal is said to have warned the Egyptians that the "reconciliation" would not work unless Hamas disarms and severs its ties with Iran. However, the Egyptians reportedly failed to listen to the Israeli warning.
As for Israel, the US and other Western parties, the lesson to be drawn from the renewal of ties between Hamas and Iran is that Hamas has not changed one iota.
Contrary to delusional hopes, discussed on the heels of the "reconciliation" agreement in Cairo and based on lies and thin air, Hamas is not headed toward moderation and pragmatism. By openly supporting Hamas, Iran is once again demonstrating that it aims to fan the fire in the Middle East and continue to sabotage any prospects for peace.Today’s robots move about as fast as your grandma’s morning mall-walking group. Tomorrow’s robots will move as fast as Usain Bolt — all thanks to limbs modeled on ostrich legs.
That’s exactly the point, according to the Darpa-funded researchers behind a collaborative effort underway at MIT and the Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). Only one year into a four-year research contract, the team is showing off stunning results that are expected to produce the fastest, most agile ‘bot ever. He’s called FastRunner, and he’ll zip along at 10 times the speed of a standard mobile robot, which clocks a mere 3 miles per hour.
“We’re using principles found in biology to build efficiency and speed right into the robot,” Johnny Godowski, a research associate at IHMC, tells Danger Room. “And we’re confident that this will open up the possibility for humanoid robots that are useful in all sorts of situations — military for one, but also fire rescues or natural disasters, for example.”
Already, the team has developed a simulation of FastRunner’s eventual capabilities and a full test leg that can zip along at 27 miles an hour — the same pace as Usain Bolt’s record-setting 2009 sprint. Eventually, they hope to see the ‘bot hit speeds in excess of “30, 40, 50 miles an hour,” according to Dr. Russ Tedrake at MIT.
“We’re really excited to show off what FastRunner can do,” Godowski tells Danger Room. “This doesn’t just mean one fast robot. It means we’ve developed the architecture for all sorts of robots, humanoid robots for example, to maneuver and show off impressive agility at high speeds.”
In the future, that architecture could be applied to any ‘bot body. The team’s leg design relies on a locking knee, a single motor per leg (which reduces the weight of each leg and maximizes efficiency) and springs that can store energy and then release it to allow the robot to sustain a powerful pace. All of those elements, they say, can be applied to four-legged or humanoid robots. Not to mention that the ‘bot’s design allows it to clamber over obstacles, race up a flight of stairs or scurry up and down hills, while carrying as hefty a load of gear as its legs will support without using much battery power — meaning missions and payloads can be expanded to be useful in real-life situations.
“The architecture takes zero energy to carry weight,” Godowski says. “The legs lock and unlock, a lot like a folding table, to support what we imagine will be quite a lot of mass when the prototype is finished … really, as much as the legs will hold.”
Obviously, FastRunner will be speedier and more agile than the most athletic of humans, let alone a soldier loaded down with gear. But it’s a mystery how FastRunner will compare to Atlas, the cheetah-bot being designed by the veteran robo-geniuses over at Boston Dynamics: Researchers haven’t released the cheetah’s anticipated speeds, but did boast that it’d be “faster than any existing legged robot and faster than the fastest human runners.”
Photo/Video: IHMCLeon Halip/Getty Images
Jared Goff will make his regular-season debut for the Los Angeles Rams in Week 11 against the Miami Dolphins. The Rams announced the move Tuesday.
Chris Mortensen of ESPN.com and Michael Silver of NFL.com initially reported the news.
"He's ready, he's preparing and doing well," head coach Jeff Fisher said in the Rams' announcement. "He's anxious and confident."
Fisher later confirmed Goff will remain the team's starter for the rest of the season, per Ryan Kartje of the Orange County Register.
"I don't want to say it's a new era, but in a lot of ways, it is," Fisher said, per Kartje.
Friends to Foes, Ex-UGA Teammates Meet in Super Bowl Cooks Gave a Super Gift to This Rams Employee Mahomes Loves Ketchup as Much as Torching Defenses Bears Hoping to Ride Club Dub to the Super Bowl The Worst Fantasy Football Punishments for Last Place NFL Players Bring Soccer Traditions to the NFL JuJu Is a Man of the People Bills Superfan 'Pancho Billa' Continues to Inspire Happy 26th Birthday to OBJ 🎉 Mahomes Is 'Showtime' Off the Field Too Thielen's Ride from Underdog to Record-Breaking WR Shanahan and His Son Carter Are Hyped for Carter V Browns Winning Off the Field with Community Service Conner's Journey from Beating Cancer to Starting RB Does Donovan McNabb Deserve Your 2019 Pro Football Hall of Fame Vote? B/R Fantasy Expert Matt Camp Gives His Picks for Keep or Release After Week 2 Does Hines Ward Deserve Your 2019 Pro Football Hall of Fame Vote? Shaquem Griffin Starting for Seahawks in Week 1 Luck Recommends His Favorite Reads in Virtual Book Club The Best Moments from NFL Training Camps Right Arrow Icon
Going into the 2016 NFL draft, Goff was generally thought to be more NFL-ready than Carson Wentz, who went second overall to the Philadelphia Eagles. In three years with the California Golden Bears, Goff threw for 12,195 yards, 96 touchdowns and 30 interceptions.
During training camp, though, Goff struggled, according to NFL Media's Bucky Brooks, and he didn't look great in four preseason games, going 22-of-49 for 232 yards, two touchdowns and two interceptions.
On Oct. 25, Bleacher Report's Jason Cole reported that the Rams coaching staff questioned Goff's ability to read defenses before the snap, so it didn't feel comfortable giving him the starting job:
Friends to Foes, Ex-UGA Teammates Meet in Super Bowl Cooks Gave a Super Gift to This Rams Employee Mahomes Loves Ketchup as Much as Torching Defenses Bears Hoping to Ride Club Dub to the Super Bowl The Worst Fantasy Football Punishments for Last Place NFL Players Bring Soccer Traditions to the NFL JuJu Is a Man of the People Bills Superfan 'Pancho Billa' Continues to Inspire Happy 26th Birthday to OBJ 🎉 Mahomes Is 'Showtime' Off the Field Too Thielen's Ride from Underdog to Record-Breaking WR Shanahan and His Son Carter Are Hyped for Carter V Browns Winning Off the Field with Community Service Conner's Journey from Beating Cancer to Starting RB Does Donovan McNabb Deserve Your 2019 Pro Football Hall of Fame Vote? B/R Fantasy Expert Matt Camp Gives His Picks for Keep or Release After Week 2 Does Hines Ward Deserve Your 2019 Pro Football Hall of Fame Vote? Shaquem Griffin Starting for Seahawks in Week 1 Luck Recommends His Favorite Reads in Virtual Book Club The Best Moments from NFL Training Camps Right Arrow Icon
Mike Tanier of B/R thought Goff's lack of development wasn't his own fault:
CBSSports.com's Jason La Canfora spoke to an NFL executive who argued that the longer Fisher kept Goff on the bench, the more difficult it'd be to eventually elevate the rookie QB:
The problem for Fisher now is...he's taking this thing out so long, that he's sort of damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. If [Jared] Goff comes in and doesn't [urinate] down his leg, then everyone will say, 'Why didn't you play him a month ago?' And if he does come in and [urinate] down his leg, well, then, 'Why did you trade up to [first overall] for him?
For many fans, naming Goff the starter is long overdue, yet it presents a couple of different questions.
For one, the Rams seemingly have big issues beyond just the quarterback position. Keeping Goff off the field may be a preferable alternative to putting him in a position to fail. Following Los Angeles' opening-week defeat to the San Francisco 49ers, Cole highlighted the Rams' leaky offensive line:
According to Football Outsiders, the Rams ranked 24th in pass protection through Week 9.
In addition to that, Todd Gurley, who looked like one of the best young running backs in the league in 2015, hasn't lived up to expectations this season. Through nine games, he has run for 515 yards and three touchdowns, and his yards-per-carry average is down from 4.8 a year ago to 3.1.
If Goff struggles and begins losing confidence, it could be a significant setback in his long-term development.
The other question is how long Fisher plans to stick with Goff should he fail to hit the ground running. During HBO's Hard Knocks (via ESPN.com), the Rams coach said he's "not f--king going 7-9 or 8-8 or 9-7."
Fisher has gained a reputation for being more conservative with his play-calling, and he's in the final year of his contract. He could prioritize the short term over the long and reinsert Keenum as the starting QB if he thinks it'll help the Rams' playoff chances.
It's far too early to make any judgments about whether Goff is the franchise QB Los Angeles needs, but the next few games could allay the fears of any fans who have grown worried with his slow introduction to the starting lineup.In today’s installment of “Social Justice Warrior” dictionary, the word is “Microaggression.” Taught as a legitimate theory at Universities and tumblrs across the country, you’d think that everyone in mainstream America would know the meaning of “Microaggression”. Only when we asked people on the street…
As a matter of fact, the only person who knew what Microaggression meant was… a women’s studies feminist. So again, watch the video above. We’ve created a beginner’s guide to understanding the ins and outs of the complex landscape that is modern “Microaggression theory“! You can thank us later.
COLUMBIA DEFINITION: “microaggression” is a term referring to “commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward minority classes.”
REAL MEANING: everyone is super racist, sexist and prejudice even though they think they aren’t and you have no proof that says otherwise. As a matter of fact, no proof is even better than proof… because it’s already like proof anyhow. So shut up and don’t express a different opinion than mine.
Microaggression.Story highlights The ad also includes former Navy SEALs
Former military officers accuse Obama of disclosing successful secret operations
Group behind ad shares an office with two GOP political consulting firms in Virginia
A web video featuring former special forces officers accuses President Barack Obama of taking too much credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden and allowing classified information about the raid to become public.
The ad also includes former Navy SEALs.
The organization behind the ad, the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund, has posted the 22-minute web video on its website. A spokeswoman says the group has raised about $1 million toward an advertising campaign in some key swing states.
Over a picture of Obama, the video's narrator says that the group's mission is to stop politicians from using sensitive intelligence about the bin Laden raid and other clandestine programs for political benefit.
In a series of interviews, former military and intelligence officers accuse Obama of seeking political gain by disclosing successful secret operations.
JUST WATCHED Ex-military officers take aim at Obama Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Ex-military officers take aim at Obama 00:52
JUST WATCHED Romney: Leaks betray national interests Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Romney: Leaks betray national interests 01:52
JUST WATCHED Senators pressure White House over leaks Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Senators pressure White House over leaks 02:43
JUST WATCHED Polygraph testing intelligence employees Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Polygraph testing intelligence employees 03:56
"As a citizen, it is my civic duty to tell the president to stop leaking information to the enemy," says Benjamin Smith, identified in the video as a former Navy SEAL. "It will get Americans killed."
Another former Navy SEAL in the video, Scott Taylor, says of the bin Laden raid: "If you disclose how we got there, how we took down the building, what we did, how many people were there, that it's going to hinder future operations, and certainly hurt the success of those future operations."
Smith also criticizes the president for taking too much credit for the SEALs' raid.
"Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden. America did," he says. "We have become a political weapon. We are not."
Smith said the ad campaign pays no heed to political affiliation, and the organization describes itself as nonpartisan and says its focus is on protecting intelligence agents and special operations officers, not on politics.
But it shares an office with two Republican political consulting firms in Alexandria, Virginia. Its spokesman Chad Kolton worked for the Bush administration as a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence.
Taylor has run for the Republican nomination for Congress in Virginia; Smith said he is a registered Republican but votes independently.
As to who is funding the attack, which was first reported by Reuters, a spokeswoman for the organization would not disclose its donors.
Darrell West of the Brookings Institution says it is too soon to say whether this campaign could become as successful as the 2004 "Swift Boat" advertising campaign, which mounted a barrage of negative attacks on John Kerry's standing as a Vietnam war hero.
"Obama's strong suit actually is on national security. He's the guy who got bin Laden, and that's been a central claim of his campaign. So there's always a risk of the opposition coming in with this type of ad to try to undermine the president's credibility and take away what is really his strong suit," he said.
West said the video blames Obama for leaks without providing any evidence the leaks are his fault. But still, West said, "national security is a very sensitive issue for many people, that's an issue that swing voters take very seriously."
In recent campaign speeches, Obama has cited the killing of bin Laden as one of the campaign pledges he has fulfilled.
"I promised to go after al Qaeda and bin Laden, and we did it," he told an applauding audience Thursday.
The Obama campaign has even produced an ad called "One Chance" in which former President Bill Clinton praises Obama for ordering the secret raid to proceed.
But Vice President Joe Biden made an effort to share the credit Tuesday as he was offering the crowd a list of the administration's accomplishments.
"The man here pointed out, 'we also got bin Laden,'" Biden said. "Let me correct that. The president of the United States and the special forces got bin Laden."
And the head of special operations, Admiral Bill McRaven, a former SEAL himself, recently told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that credit was due to the president.
"At the end of the day," he said, "make no mistake about it: it was the president of the United States that shouldered the burden for this operation, that made the hard decisions."
But like other top officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, McRaven was highly critical of the recent leaks about clandestine operations.
"Are lives at risk? Absolutely," he said.
The White House has denied leaking secret information about clandestine operations, and two federal prosecutors have been assigned to investigate recent leaks about the Stuxnet virus and drone strike operations.
But in a recent speech in Reno, Nevada, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called the leaks "contemptible" and said they occurred on Obama's watch.A South Florida man has been convicted and fined for illegally possessing 34 birds protected under migratory bird laws.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams last week ordered 71-year-old Jose Souto of Coral Gables to pay a $15,000 fine and put him on one month's probation after his guilty plea. Souto must also make a $7,500 donation to the Tropical Audubon Society for research and education.
Court documents show that the birds Souto possessed included northern cardinals, grosbeaks and buntings. All are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and cannot be taken or possessed without valid permits.
They are among the migratory species whose numbers have dropped recently in the eastern U.S.
Souto's plea agreement requires that he abandon the birds and a bird trap he had.
Copyright Associated PressSeriously, what do they put in the water in Florida?
To add to the ever-growing list of weird news out of the Sunshine State, we now have Orlando-based man Gustav Potthoff–who attacked his roommate with a butter knife because he mistook him for Jesus. The butter-knife wielder has now also asked a judge to furnish him with a defense attorney who is a fellow atheist. “It’s just my human rights and everything else,” Potthoff, 51, said (against the advice of a public defender). “I’m allowed to be with someone of my own kind.” The bad news is Potthoff is also broke, so he may have to settle for a God-fearing attorney instead.
The poor bastard who happened to be Potthoff’s roommate isRaymond Hernandez, who says that he was watching television in the living room of their home on North Hiawassee Road when Potthoff threw a glass. It missed and shattered against a wall. That turned out to be an initial attack, and Potthoff then came at him with the butter knife. Which is all alleged, of course, but let’s still hope they keep this dude in jail–far from his roommate and very, very far from any mind-altering drugs.The Deal
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$55 for seating in the floor/stands 1 section ($119 value)
MMA World Series of Fighting 7
World-class MMA comes to Canada on December 7, when the PNE Agrodome hosts the MMA World Series of Fighting 7. In one main card bout, Georgi Karakhanyan faces off against undefeated Lance Palmer with the featherweight title going to the winner. Elvis "The King" Mutapcic and Jesse "JT Money" Taylor square off in another featured fight, the winner of which will advance to a middleweight championship. All of the featured bouts will be televised on NBC Sports Network to entertain spectators at home or stuck inside satellite dishes.
MMA World Series of Fighting
Since its inaugural fight on November 3, 2012, MMA World Series of Fighting has emerged as one of the premier promoters of top-flight mixed-martial arts fights. Based in Las Vegas, the fighting stable sends brawlers throughout the country, where they square off with fellow aspiring legends in fierce fights while still exhibiting a respect for their artform. MMA World Series of Fighting partners with NBC Sports Network, which televises six or more events nationally, giving each fight the sort of prestige and intensity that's usually reserved for matches where Rocky Balboa impersonators serve as the fighters' cornermen.Announced on paste.com this morning, up-and-coming authentic country performer Sturgill Simpson will release his second solo studio album called Metamodern Sounds In Country Music on May 13th. Born in Kentucky, the former from man of Sunday Valley released his debut album High Top Mountain in 2013 to critical acclaim and was nominated for Saving Country Music’s Album of The Year. Sturgill went on to be named Saving Country Music’s Artist of the Year.
“Myriad worldly offerings religion, drugs, and more all claim to be the omnipotent universal truth, but in my experience, love is the only certainty. That is what this record is about,” Simpson tells Paste.
The cover art is contributed by longtime Sturgill Simpson friend Jason Seiler, known for his illustration of Pope Francis for Time Magazine.
As part of the announcement, Sturgill has also released the first single from the album “Living The Dream” (listen below).
Track List for Metamodern Sounds In Country Music:
1.Turtles All the Way Down
2. Life of Sin
3. Living the Dream
4. Voices
5. Long White Line
6. The Promise
7. A Little Light
8. Just Let Go
9. It Ain’t All Flowers
10. Pan Bowl (bonus track)View 20 Photos
Chrysler is said to be working on a third model to add to its new SRT brand, which launches late this year with the 2013 Viper. A new-age SRT Barracuda will be the nascent brand's second model.
Chrysler launched its Street & Racing Technology models in the last decade as performance versions of existing models, from the Dodge Neon SRT4 to the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 and Dodge Ram SRT10. The 2013 SRT Viper drops the Dodge moniker.
Last January, we broke news that a new pony-musclecar would join the SRT Viper in the lineup. The SRT Barracuda won't necessitate revival of the Plymouth brand and will eventually replace the Dodge Challenger. The SRT Barracuda should appear by the 2015 model year, same as for the next-generation Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro, while the Challenger may live on into the 2017 model year.
The Barracuda will be based on Chrysler's new LA rear-drive platform, which is downsized from the full-size LY platform (Chrysler 300/Dodge Charger), or the Challenger's previous-generation, LX RWD platform. Fiat also will use the LA platform to underpin several of its cars, most notably the replacement for the front-drive Alfa Romeo 159 and likely a successor to the larger, BMW 5 Series-size FWD Alfa 166 produced from 1998 to 2007.
So what will SRT Number 3 be? Two possibilities are a successor to the Dodge Ram SRT10 and a small, two-seat sports car. There are issues with either idea. Ford has had unexpected success with the F-150 SVT Raptor. A Ram-based SRT designed more for extreme off-roading is a good prospect. However, the Raptor does fall under the Ford F-150 brand, and it's hard to imagine Ram splitting off a separate truck model.Image caption China steps up censorship of banned terms in regions where unrest was high
Chinese censors are actively targeting social media to quash discussion of banned topics, suggests research.
The US study gives the most in-depth look at the extent of China's policing of discussions on microblogging sites.
Analysis of almost 60 million messages from China's equivalent of Twitter suggested which topics were banned.
It also revealed that China tuned its censoring activity to be more aggressive in places where political unrest was high.
Word search
The study, reported in New Scientist, by David Bamman, Brendan O'Connor and Prof Noah Smith from the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon analysed short messages sent via the Sina Weibo service.
The public programming interface to the Sina site let the trio grab 57 million messages sent between June 27 and September 30, 2011. Three months later they checked to see which messages disappeared from the service to identify which terms caught the attention of the censors.
The work showed that the social media censor was similar to the system overseeing Chinese web access.
That system, known as the Great Firewall, stops people visiting some sites outside China, returns no results for searches of banned terms, censors chat and vets blogs. Banned topics include the Falun Gong spiritual movement and human rights activist Ai Weiwei.
In a similar way, the study found that messages containing these banned terms tended to be deleted from the Sina Weibo service.
Image caption The censorship system governing social media sites such as Sina Weibo is not foolproof
It also found that the censorship system could be quite nimble and react quickly when words or phrases start to assume a more political meaning. For instance, the word "lianghui" became sensitive when it started to be used as a code word for a "planned protest".
Similarly, a word meaning "asking someone to resign" became sensitive in the wake of the high speed train crash in July 2011 that killed 40 people. Mistakes by officials have been blamed for leading to the disaster.
The study also found significant variation in how active the system was in different regions of China. In Tibet about 50% of messages were deleted, compared to 12% in Beijing and 11% in Shanghai.
Mr Bamman said he was surprised at the extent of the censorship and at the fact that some banned terms, such as Falun Gong, were appearing at all.
"The fact that we see these terms in messages would seem to imply that the censorship is not an automatic process," he told the BBC. This exposed, he said, the tension between government demands for active policing and reluctance on the part of companies to inhibit what their customers do.
He speculated that the sheer amount of messages passing through the social media services might also make it harder to censor all the content the government finds troubling.
And, he added, many people would find ways around the controls.
"People will talk about what they want to talk about," he said, "they may just have to find different ways to say it."
A paper detailing the study is due to be published in the March edition of the First Monday journal.It was just after 6 o’clock in the evening on Wednesday, December 7, 2011—Pearl Harbor Day—when I left my organization’s Washington, D.C., office to meet a colleague for dinner. It was dark and rainy, and I had one more intersection to cross to get to the restaurant. I was about a third of the way across the intersection when I heard a loud “thump” and felt a sharp pain squarely in my backside. A dialogue unfolded in my head: “Wow! I wonder what that was…. I think it was me. No, I don’t think it was me. Wait…I think I just got hit by a car! But there’s no way!” Before I could even make sense of the situation, I had flown through the air and landed on the street.
“Are you OK?” a man frantically asked me. I was so stunned that I said nothing—highly unusual for me. The man called for an ambulance. I feared I might be run over, lying there where drivers couldn’t see me. Two other men approached, keen on moving me out of the street. But as an emergency physician, I knew that trauma training tells us never to move victims. You’re supposed to splint a victim where she lies so as not to injure her back or neck. But I also remembered that personal safety comes first. In those fleeting moments lying there on the pavement, I debated whether to stay where I was and risk being run over or allow myself to be moved and risk further injury. I chose personal safety. I tried to mentally assess the damage to my neck and back and asked the two men to get me off the street.
They carried me through the pouring rain into a nearby restaurant, where I waited for the ambulance. When the EMTs arrived, they placed a C-collar around my neck and positioned me on a backboard for the short ride to the hospital, a Level I trauma center.
I was wheeled into the hospital’s ambulance entrance, where the triage nurse met me and confirmed that I could speak English. An EMT briefed the nurse, noting that I had been hit by a car.
“Where were you sitting?” the nurse asked.
“I wasn’t sitting in a car,” I said.
“Were you in the passenger seat or the driver’s seat?” she continued.
“No, I wasn’t sitting in a car,” I said. “I was walking across the street.”
It took several rounds of back-and-forth before she understood that I was in an “auto-ped” accident, as they call it in emergency department (ED) lingo. Perhaps the nurse thought I looked too “whole” for this to be true.
The admitting ED team scurried me into an examination room, where they asked if I was having any pain. It seemed an incongruous question, seeing as a car had just plowed into me. Yes, I was in considerable pain, I told them. An IV was inserted, and morphine began to flow.
A doctor came in and commenced the “primary survey,” an initial exam to detect any risk of life- or limb-threatening emergencies. Then came a brief evaluation to ensure that I could come out of the C-collar and off the backboard, a visual inspection for external bleeding or misaligned bones, and an assurance that my heart and lungs were functioning normally. I told the doctor that I had severe pain in my knee and backside. “OK, we’re going to need a CT [computed tomography] of the abdomen, CT of the pelvis, and x-rays of the chest,” she said. Something didn’t seem right to me. Wasn’t she going to examine my knee and backside?
When the tests were completed, I was wheeled out of the exam room, still flat on my back. By this time, roughly three hours after the accident, the ED was chaotically busy and all of the rooms were filled, so I was parked in the hallway. A new round of clinicians—presumably the admitting trauma team, although I wasn’t sure—stopped by my stretcher. “Well, everything looks fine on your tests,” the head clinician informed me. “There’s a little bleeding in the muscle around your hip area. We just don’t know if that’s going to continue, so we want to watch it. We’re going to admit you.” I gasped. I was still in denial that I had any serious injuries.
An inpatient bed wasn’t available yet, so I would be “boarded” in the hallway until one opened up.
I lay there on my gurney all night—nearly fifteen hours—with my work BlackBerry, my personal cell phone, and a morphine drip, watching the bustle of hospital traffic around me. Several times during the night, my blood pressure was taken. When the pain returned every two or three hours, I caught the eye of hassled staff members and had them tell the nurse, who would come by to give me a quick infusion of morphine.
Having spent many years serving in EDs as an emergency physician, I took comfort in being left in the hallway. It meant that I was OK, that the hospital staff wasn’t so worried about me. As a patient, though, I felt alone. I was struck by the demeanor of some hospital staff who rushed by. It seemed as if they were deliberately avoiding eye contact with any of us poor souls waiting in the hallway, lest they be interrupted and asked for help. I wanted contact. Even after assuring my long-distance daughters by phone that I was OK, I wanted someone present, looking out for me.
Good To Go?
In the morning the day crew appeared, taking over from the night crew. Residents went from gurney to gurney, sorting out patient dispositions. Around this time, the day crew learned that I was an emergency physician and, out of deference and consideration, they moved me out of the hallway into a private room, assuming this is what I would want. The private room was darkened so I could sleep, and the door was shut. Now, instead of feeling safe in the controlled chaos of the corridor, I felt abandoned, clutching my nurse call button, a lifeline to the world.
A new admitting trauma team stopped by later in the day to review my case. Because I had been stable all night and no major injuries had turned up on the CT scans, they decided I was ready for discharge. “Nothing is broken; you can go home now,” said one of the team members.
I was stunned. I was still in excruciating vice-like pressure pain, and my knee and backside still hadn’t been checked. The “good patient” in me wanted to please the doctor and saunter out of the room, but the real person in me was scared. I told the team that I wasn’t able to walk after the accident and wasn’t sure I could walk now. I was traveling on business and staying alone in a hotel room, so I might not be able to care for myself, I said. Again, they told me: “Nothing is broken, so you can walk.”
By now, no one had examined my swollen right knee or left hip area to determine the extent of my injuries beyond broken bones. I knew that serious ligament or cartilage injuries can be sustained without broken bones. No one had talked with me about whether I would be able to function safely at home, or about follow-up care, either.
But the “good patient” won over, so with trepidation, I said I was happy to go home. “Do you think I’ll be OK at the hotel?” I said. “My knee is swollen, and I’m not sure I can walk on it.” “We’ll just send in physical therapy to get you up and walking,” the resident said.
A short time later, the physical therapy staff came in and looked me over. “We’re supposed to get you up?” one of them asked. They attempted to stand me up, and I nearly crumpled to the floor. I couldn’t support my weight, let alone walk. They helped me back onto the gurney and then left the room to go brief the admitting team.
The resident returned. “There’s no medical reason to admit you,” he said, “but if you can’t walk, we’ll just have to.” The “good patient” in me felt embarrassed that somehow I had failed the “test,” and was now an unnecessary admission, maybe taking the place of someone who needed the bed more than I did.
Diagnosis, Piece By Piece
The resident’s comment struck me as callous, as if addressing my basic need to function and recover after the accident had nothing to do with the care he and his colleagues were there to provide. The team returned a bit later to tell me that a bed had opened up—in the maternity ward.
On that first day in the maternity ward, nurses came in and out as I asked, over and over it seemed, “Is anyone going to look at my knee?” By the end of the day, an orthopedic consultant appeared. He determined that I had a medial collateral ligament tear and recommended putting me in a splint and getting a formal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) when I returned home to Boston. Finally, I had a partial diagnosis.
During that first day as an inpatient, I experienced increasing lower abdominal pain and told the staff a few times. I suspected a catheter malfunction. “Something feels wrong,” I said. “Is my catheter working? My lower abdomen hurts, and the catheter doesn’t feel right.” I was told that catheters are irritating and always make you feel like you have to urinate. Each time I mentioned it, the bag was checked, the presence of urine was confirmed, and I was assured that the catheter was working. It wasn’t until six hours later when the admitting team came by that they pulled back my sheets and exclaimed, “Did you know your catheter fell out?” as though it was my fault for not “telling the staff” or checking myself.
Over the next several hours, the piecemeal evaluation continued. That night, I began to experience numbness and tingling in my leg and my hip. I knew these were neurological symptoms, and something wasn’t right. Three times doctors or nurses came through, and each time I explained my concerns but was not evaluated. It wasn’t until twenty-four hours later, during the night of my second day of hospitalization, that I had a neurological exam revealing contusion of both the sciatic and the gluteal nerves.
On my third day in the hospital, someone asked if the admitting trauma team had done a history and physical, standard procedure following the initial primary and secondary surveys. They had not. A resident then performed a “tertiary” exam—essentially, a repeat history and physical examination—although he and I both knew the prior exams had been incomplete.
By morning rounds on my fourth day in the hospital, I was both medically and functionally stable, able to ambulate cautiously with assistance and a walker. I insisted on being transferred to a rehabilitation facility near my home in Boston.
The Art Of Care
Nearly two years after my accident, after extensive rehabilitation, I am still limping and walking with a cane. I have had to adjust my daily routines. I still need wheelchair assistance at airports and still struggle with my balance on ramps and uneven ground. It is a challenge to put away bath towels on an upper shelf without tipping over. I still can’t ride a bike or |
Esquire and NBC News don’t report this study so much as hype it. Disturbingly, these journalists use the same marketing language employed by the consultants who wrote the report. Esquire tells its readers that the “New American Center” is “passionate, persuadable, and very real.” NBC News informs visitors to its website that “the center is real, passionate and persuadable.” (The NBC News piece carries the byline of a “senior staff writer.” The Esquire piece is credited to “The Editors.”)
Meanwhile, over at the Benenson Strategy Group website, project leader Daniel Franklin is quoted as saying that “the Center is dynamic and persuadable”—there’s that word again—“creating an opportunity for politicians and businesses alike to reevaluate how they communicate and connect with the American public.” That sounds like a pitch for corporate clients. Benenson’s past and present clients include Toyota, major drug companies, Shell Oil, and Verizon.
Esquire, in particular, crosses the line into naked huckstering for both this survey and centrist ideology. All the “centrist” buzzwords and catchphrases are there: We're told we must get past the “meaningless labels,” transcend our obsolete “culture war,” conquer the “extreme partisanship of Washington” (no particular party’s held responsible for that), and reconnect with “the actual national mood and values.”
The editors sneer at what they call the “hoary conventional wisdom” that “we as a people are now hopelessly polarized in our culture, our values, and our politics”—an odd stance when promoting a study which slices the public into separate (and rather clichéd) social divisions.
That, too, comes straight from the corporate-centrism playbook: before idealizing your mythical “center,” you must first compartmentalize and trivialize people of both the left and the right. Esquire even offers a “Warren/Cruz scale,” as if popular Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose opinions on banking regulation and economic justice poll well with the general public, were somehow comparable to the far-right senator from Texas whose government shutdown crusade has caused a disastrous plunge in his party’s popularity. That isn’t social science or journalism, it’s propaganda.
The sense of marketing hype and political spin is only heightened by the fact we’re told that the Center is allegedly “persuadable,” but is also a majority. That’s right: we’re told that the “New American Center” constitutes 51% of the electorate. That sounds like a corporate-funded centrist’s dream—and a consultant’s meal ticket.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Sometimes the trick is in what you don’t ask.
We’re told that “a majority of those in the center agree with a mix of Republican and Democratic ideas.” But this survey’s respondents were only asked about Republican and Democratic ideas. Pollsters excluded a number of popular, nonpartisan ideas not yet embraced by either party.
A case in point: a recent poll from Lake Research reaffirmed numerous previous studies which found that a vast majority of Americans oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The numbers were overwhelming: 82% of Republicans. 83% of Democrats. 78% of independents. Another survey by the National Academy of Social Insurance found that strong majorities of Americans, across the political spectrum want Social Security benefits increased, and would accept an increase in payroll taxes for themselves as well as the wealthy to pay for it.
But that idea isn’t supported by “centrist” leaders in either party right now, perhaps because it might require higher rates of taxation for the wealthy. Its absence from the public debate is a rebuke to our democratic process, and a sign of big-money corruption.
In short, there’s no basis for claiming that voters want the kind of “Republican/Democratic” hybrid the survey is pushing. The survey attempts to spin dissatisfaction with both parties into a yearning for a hybrid of both parties. Beltway insiders have made that leap of faith before, to disastrous effect. Republican Senator Alan Simpson and Democratic hedge funder Erskine Bowles were paired up to pitch budget cuts to the American people. But their proposal only won the support of a whopping 6% of the electorate when it was introduced. Other such “ecumenical” attempts met with similar failure.
Esquire’s War
The absence of entitlement questions is especially surprising considering Esquire’s long record of concern-trolling on the subject. First there was its hokey “Esquire Deficit Commission,” which the magazine put together under centrist MSNBC Democrat Lawrence O’Donnell. Then there was the magazine’s widely discredited claim to have discovered “the real war on American youth.” (We reviewed both here.)
Esquire’s long-standing intergenerational hostility was evident in 2007, when consultant Heather Smith wrote in the magazine about her experience getting out the youth vote. Smith wrote that young voters “want to see campaigns and politicians or government address … jobs and the economy, health care, affording college, economic issues —things that Washington thinks of as the concerns of the middle-aged middle class.”
That’s a useful insight into the interests and goals which Americans share across the generations. But this was the subheading chosen by Esquire’s editors: “Stop pandering to the geezers and stop ignoring young voters.”
Yet, for all its expressed concern about rapacious geezers, Esquire didn’t request a single question about Social Security. Maybe that’s because Esquire already knows what it thinks.
And maybe that’s why Esquire, in particular, went so far over the top in pushing style “centrism”—a push which begins with the editors’ first sentence and its sneering reference to Jim Hightower as “the legendary hellion populist out of Texas,” adding, in parentheses, “yes, such a beast once roamed the earth.”
In fact, the economic populism represented by Hightower (who is very much alive) can be partially found in a cohort the Esquire study labels “Pickup Populists.” But it’s de rigueur when giving a “centrist” pitch to contemptuously dismiss all that might be considered “left.”
Esquire’s editors overhyped the study, too, making claims even the consultants don’t dare to assert. They even claim that studying their conception of the "Center” provide previously unseen insights about public opinion, adding that this is “precisely what we mean when we talk about the Center: what most Americans actually believe.”
What most Americans actually believe.
That’s quite a claim. And it’s presumably purely coincidental that this undiscovered majority is so sympathetic to the Esquireagenda.
Both Sides Now
The false ideology of Beltway-insiderism can also be found in this Esquire paragraph:
“To be sure that its findings were as far removed from the prevailing political interests as possible, the poll was designed and conducted in ecumenical fashion, by both the Benenson Strategy Group, President Obama's pollster, and Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies, who conducted the polls for Governor Romney.”
The impartial observer might be more likely to conclude that hiring not one, but two pollsters for mainstream political candidates might be a way to ensure that its findings reflected “the prevailing political interests.”
But that’s corporate-centrist ideology in a nutshell: One politician is a partisan. Two politicians are the American people incarnate.
Neil Newhouse, the Romney pollster who seems to have been something of a silent partner in this enterprise, became known for two things during the 2012 election. He insisted that the Romney campaign “would not be dictated by fact-checkers” after it was criticized for deceptive advertising. He also insisted that Romney would win.
Newhouse is a top Republican consultant. Benenson has been described by GQ as is one of “the fifty most powerful people in DC,” a fact his company website proudly proclaims, alongside a similar accolade—if that’s the right word—from Newsweek. So this piece may merely reflect the biases of longtime insiders. The Benenson Group has done excellent work in the past. We certainly hope this doesn’t reflect its acquisitionby a multinational named WPP, whose websitesays that “WPP companies exist to help their clients compete successfully: in marketing strategy, advertising, every form of marketing communication and in monitoring progress.”
After all, polling is not advertising or “marketing communication.”
Raw
The raw data don’t easily lend themselves to this centrist interpretation. There’s no space here to go through all the issues, so let’s take just one: government regulation. Most Americans are ambivalent about it. The conservative American Enterprise Institute think-tank captured that ambivalence effectively in its 2011 reviewof public opinion on the subject.
The Pew Research Center found in 2012 that most Americans (63%) agree with the statement that “a free-market economy needs government regulation in order to best serve the public interest,” a figure that was essentially unchanged from its 62% level in 2009. But Pew also found that solid majorities believe that government regulation of business“usually does more harm than good” (a finding we would argue is the result of decades’ worth of marketing).
The Esquire/NBC News poll shows that 42% of respondents said they agreed with the statement that “financial reform should only be used to curb abuses, and shouldn’t interfere with banks’ and investors’ ability to make profits.”
That’s a slanted question. A “yes” does not necessarily mean Americans think the government is doing too much regulation, although there are times when Americans do think that. The operative word is still “ambivalence.” But Esquire’s editors nevertheless state unequivocally that the “Center wants the Federal government…to go easy on regulation.”
Other phraseology is equally dicey. Esquiretells us, for example, that “the Center believes that the government should help only those who really need help.” What does that even mean? Who supports helping people who don’t need help? It’s like the old Henny Youngman joke about the Boy Scout who helped old ladies across the street “whether they wanted to cross the street or not.”
Even a “bleeding heart” like me wouldn’t go for that.
The Center and I
Which brings us back to my experience with the online test. Was I reallyon the leftmost periphery of American public opinion. And “un-persuadable” not worthy of attention? I have no problem being on the leftist vanguard, but in this case it seemed hard to believe. After all, those Lake Research findings showed that 82% of Republicans agreed with me on Social Security, just one of many policy areas in which my own economic views seem to reflect the mainstream. Others include taxing the wealthy, doing more to fight poverty, repairing our crumbling infrastructure, taxing corporations at a higher rate, and having the government do more to create jobs.
We don’t seem that different, the Center and I. “The Center doesn’t think of itself as the ‘center,’” we’re told. Same here.
“The Center doesn’t much like how things are going,” say the editors at Esquire. Well, I’m not too thrilled either.
The chimerical “Center” and I would both like to see guns brought under control, and neither of us is thrilled about the role religious institutions are playing in politics. When it comes to the right to choose, the right to choose partners, or the right to burn one down at the end of a hard work day, we pretty much feel the same way: it’s none of our business.
Off-Center
More credible polls suggest that a new economic consensus is forming in this country, one that isn’t very accommodating toward the ideology reflected in this survey. But this new “center” has been divided by social issues. It has been excluded from political decision-making by a Beltway worldview that ignores their needs and their preferences. It’s been stymied by the kind of clichéd thinking which slices up the American people into demographic groups like “Bleeding Hearts” or “Pickup Populists.”
There are nuggets of good data here. It’s helpful to be reminded that Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the future, although that’s not a new finding. It was interesting to see confirmation of a growing populism in the white working-class, and to be reminded that it has stayed aloof from Democrats over social issues. That’s not new information either, but it’s useful for activists and politicians.
It’s time to stop searching for a nonexistent center and start reflecting the needs of a very real majority instead. That majority is inadequately represented in Washington, which is a failure of our democracy. Rather than spin or justify that failure, it’s time for even the most insider-ish analysts and journalists to report the unvarnished truth. Even their clients will eventually thank them for it.
In the words of Esquire’s editors, journalists and advisors “better be substantive” and “leave their hobbyhorses at home.” Sorry to say, this study fails on both counts.If a “bleeding heart” won’t tell you, who will?
_______
About author Richard (RJ) Eskow, a consultant and writer, is a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America's Future. This post was produced as part of the
No Middle Class Health Tax
A Night Light
Richard (RJ) Eskow, a consultant and writer, is a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America's Future. This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project. Richard blogs at:SPURS say they will take the positives from their unbeaten 13 seconds against Manchester City.
Players have been studying the video of yesterdays kick off to see which of their half dozen touches of the ball led to the first goal.
Manager Andre Villas-Boas said: If we can push on from here we might be able to get a throw-in before it all turns to shit.
Villas-Boas has also proposed that matches return to the centre circle every 10 seconds, as well as a cricket-style declaration system to end a match whenever necessary.
Meanwhile, fans have questioned the mangers team selection which yesterday included a still-concussed Hugo Lloris playing in slippers and a dressing gown.
Villas-Boas added: By breaking down a match into 13-second sections its clear we just need to work on the remaining 414 of them.
I suspect that will be a standard quote one day its a game of 415 13-second sections, Brian.In what was described as a rare moment of honesty, President Donald Trump reportedly told his wealthy friends dining at Mar-a-Lago Friday night that "you all just got a lot richer."
"At least Trump is finally telling the truth about his tax bill."
—Sen. Bernie Sanders
The comments—first reported by CBS News on Sunday—came just hours after Trump signed the $1.5 trillion Republican tax bill into law.
According to two of Trump's friends who described the Friday-night event to CBS, the president "directed those comments to friends dining nearby at the exclusive club." Given that the Mar-a-Lago initiation cost is $200,000 and annual dues are $14,000, it's safe to assume that those "friends" are "some of the most affluent members of society."
As Common Dreams has reported, Trump has been increasingly open about the central objectives of the GOP tax bill since it passed both houses of Congress. On Friday, Trump bragged that "corporations are literally going wild" about the legislation, comments that came a few days after Trump described the bill's corporate rate cut as "probably the most important factor."
Polls have consistently found that Americans did not buy the GOP's attempt to present their tax bill as a boon for the middle class. A CBS News poll published earlier this month found that 76 percent of Americans believe the Republican tax bill will benefit large corporations, while only 31 percent said they believe it will help the middle class.
Independent analyses have shown this view of the bill to be correct. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, 80 percent of the bill's benefits will go to the top one percent by 2027, while millions of middle class Americans will see their taxes rise.
On social media, critics of the president noted that—at least in private—"Trump is finally telling the truth about his tax bill."
At least Trump is finally telling the truth about his tax bill. https://t.co/pEwx0DvRiq — Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 24, 2017
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts
This is an example of Trump telling the truth. https://t.co/Q3Fo7KVSEj — David Sirota (@davidsirota) December 24, 2017
Trump said his tax bill was terrible for his rich friends. Now he’s bragging about giving them a big tax cut. https://t.co/z9wPtPyBFk — Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) December 24, 2017The 16-page ruling from Judge David Doty that reinstates Vikings running back Adrian Peterson turns on one fairly simple conclusion: The NFL cannot apply its new personal conduct policy retroactively.
“There is no dispute that the Commissioner imposed Peterson’s discipline under the New Policy,” Judge Doty wrote. “It is also undisputed that in the [Ray] Rice arbitration, the hearing officer unequivocally recognized that the New Policy cannot be applied retroactively, notwithstanding the Commissioner’s broad discretion in meting out punishment under the CBA.... Consistent with that recognition, the Commissioner has acknowledged that he did not have the power to retroactively apply the New Policy: ‘The policy change was forward looking because the League is “required to provide proper notice.”‘... Yet, just two weeks later, the Commissioner retroactively applied the New Policy to Peterson.”
In other words, Judge Doty concluded that the NFL was making it up as went along.
Some will surely criticize Doty for “rewarding” a man who spanking his four-year-old son until the boy’s legs bled. But this isn’t about criminal justice; this is about respecting the terms of the labor deal that the NFL and the NFLPA have negotiated. It may be easy for the NFL to impose stringent consequences based on the underlying facts, but that doesn’t justify violating a player’s rights.
Meanwhile, the NFL has appeal rights in this case. It’ll be interesting to see whether the NFL tries to get Judge Doty’s ruling overturned, or whether the NFL will attempt to erect other roadblocks to Peterson’s return to football.Image: AP
Bill Clinton, who continues to be allowed to wander onto stages and address thousands of people as if entirely by accident, found a new group of people to yell at yesterday. Bill’s latest bad stump speech topic: Millennials! They’re ruining everything. Now please vote for my wife.
[There was a video here]
Speaking in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Clinton started rambling about stagnant incomes. And why, exactly, is the economy so very bad? Because of people like you and me. Take it away, Bill:
The reason that there’s so much anxiety, intensity, anger, blame in this election is that 80 percent of the American people have not gotten a pay raise since the crash eight years ago, after inflation. A lot of young people feel like they’ve played by the rules, went to school, they’re gonna graduate with debt they can’t repay, or they’ve already graduated with debt they can’t repay, and they may not ever get to do what they really wanted to do with their lives.
So why are all these young millennials so angry all the time? Because they’re poor! And why are they so poor? According to the future First Husband, “If all the young people who claim to be disillusioned now had voted in 2010, we wouldn’t have lost the Congress, and we’d probably have our incomes back,” he said.
The fact that Democrats of all ages vote in lower numbers in off-cycle election years is apparently beside the point.
And on an unrelated note, a recent poll showed that millennials voters support Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton at a rate of 54 to 37 percent. This probably does not help.
[h/t Huffington Post]I love PC gaming, but loathe the prospect of playing my favorite games on a desk. I prefer to crash into a comfortable chair, relax, and sink into the game. Steam's in-home streaming and an influx of compact gaming PCs have made this approach easier, but some PC games can't -- and shouldn't -- be touched by a controller.
Certain companies offer their own unique solutions to enable seamless couch PC gaming, such as The Couchmaster from Steiger Dynamics. It's essentially a lap desk which, while comfortable, was bulky and somewhat cumbersome to use. It solved a problem, but not elegantly, and was decidedly niche. So how can PC gamers who want to ditch the desk and enjoy more comfortable gaming sessions from the couch or their favorite easy chair?
I don't know what's going on at Roccat lately, but they're following up their ingenious TYON mouse with an equally thoughtful peripheral: The SOVA (clearly a play on the word "Sofa," although the Hebrew meaning is "eat and be satisfied"), a device that severs the traditional desk & chair tether we've grown accustomed to.
The SOVA comes with an integrated wireless 74-key mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX switches (all of which can be individually lit), nestled into a brushed aluminum base. Below it sits a fairly roomy ergonomic palm rest, and to the right a mouse pad which can extend and retract based on your particular preference. Underneath, the SOVA has padded and ventilated leg rests, and a cable runner for your mouse, should you choose to use a wired one.
That's where things start to get interesting. You can obviously use a wireless mouse, but the SOVA will transform your wired one into a wireless one, hopefully without adding latency to the mix. It also comes with an "extended life" battery pack (though there's no way of proving that without extensive testing), and some interesting possibilities for clipping a smartphone or tablet onto the top to use as a second screen, or perhaps Roccat's Power-Grid app.
So, we have a neat peripheral which at least appears quite comfortable to use, kills the wires, and may just help facilitate that transition from your office table or desk to the comfort of PC couch gaming. As more and more companies introduce streaming solutions and small form factor gaming PCs, I'm all for this movement, depending on the cost of entry (Roccat hasn't revealed a price just yet).
I'll be trying out the SOVA first-hand at E3 today or tomorrow, and will definitely report on whether it lives up to its promises.The 2014-2015 off-season brought a slew of changes to the Asian League of Legends scene; over 20 Korean players left for new opportunities in China, wanting to get a higher salary and/or leave the condensing Korean region.
Two of those players were elite top laners, the richest and deepest position in Korean League of Legends history. When you look back at the history of Korea, the one strength that stands above all else is their consistency at breeding new, elite players in that role.
Acorn, a Season 4 semifinalist, signed with LGD Gaming first. It was a no-brainier from the outside; he was joining his former Samsung housemate imp on the team, and he would be able to play alongside two standout carries in imp and their mid laner, We1less.
While most of the Korean players moving over were used to being the star of their team, Acorn felt at home being a support to a team with strong carries. His time on Samsung Blue led him to two Champions Korea finals (winning one) and a semifinal appearance at Season 4 Worlds before losing to imp and the eventual champions, Samsung White. On Blue, Acorn played more of a utility role, placed as a primary engage with his flanking teleports and tank play on champions like Maokai.
Then, Flame showed up. Leaving CJ Entus — the only professional team he had ever played for — the bidding for the highly-touted top lane carry started with only a few weeks before the new season started throughout the major regions. Although considered possibly the best top lane player in 2013, he had a down 2014, having a roller coaster season that ended on a low note.
LGD Gaming weren't satisfied with only acquiring one of the best ten players at the top lane position, so they went out and signed Flame. While Flame was offered more from other teams — Qiao Gu allegedly courted him with a yearly salary of $1,000,000 a year — he decided to choose the team he thought had the best shot of getting him to World Championship for the first time.
With two top lane players with polar opposite styles of playing, so far LGD has split their time almost evenly — Acorn always playing one game and Flame the next; this changed when Flame was reportedly sick, and Acorn played all four games against Invictus Gaming and King. Their strategy has been somewhat of a success three weeks into the season, sitting in fourth place along with iG. They have a record of four match wins, a draw against third place Snake, and three 0-2 losses to EDG (split), iG (both Acorn) and their most recent series against King (both Acorn).
The differences between LGD with Acorn and LGD with Flame have been distinct. With Acorn, the team is 5-4, and they play more towards letting We1less and Imp be the stars of the team. Acorn is used primarily as he was on Blue: a great engage specialist, knowing how to control team fights with smart teleports around the dragon pit and flanking behind the enemy team. He plays around his team, setting up five-on-five team fights and zoning the opponents out when taking dragon or Baron Nashor.
Flame is 4-2 through his first six games, better than Acorn's overall record with the team after a disastrous week against iG and King. When Flame plays for LGD, he is put as the main focus of the team. Either Imp or We1less take a step back, playing a more utility oriented champion to support Flame's high damage carry champion.
When their plan comes together, LGD seems unstoppable. Imp, Flame and We1less are three of the best carries at their position in the world, and they're captained by PYL, who is considered one of the best supports in China. But when things don't go well, or Flame is shut down early, LGD can fall into directionless pieces as they did against EDG and Snake.
Think of it this way: during the off-season, LGD put together the perfect vehicle. We1less, their young mid laner, has grown in the past few months and is constantly becoming a scarier player to lane against. They kept their captain PYL amid rumors of other Chinese teams trying to sign him. Imp, the reigning world champion, was added to give the team another carry threat that can compete with the opposing ace AD carries in China.
So, with all the prepping and setting up the perfect bus ride to take them to Worlds, who do they give the keys to? Acorn, the safe and reliable player, who might not get them to a world championship but will keep the vehicle intact? Or do they give the keys to Flame, who might drive LGD all the way to a world championship, but could just as easily drive them off a cliff?
If you wanted to know who the better player was, the last two years point to Flame. He's led teams as the sole carry and won the IEM World Championship and World Cyber Games. Still, while Acorn has been steady and reliable, Flame has had great highs and then equally as great nose dives.
Acorn was given the keys to the bus this past week allegedly due to Flame being under the weather, and the team lost four straight games. It would be unfair to put the blame fully on Acorn, who repeatedly out CS'ed his opponent and lane and played more of a backup role. They weren't able to win against iG or King, but you'd put more of the blame on imp, who has repeatedly chosen Kalista and failed to capitalize on her. With Kalista's reliance on playing alongside the support to use her ultimate, PYL's roaming and movements around the map have been restricted while imp plays on the spear throwing marksmen.
The decision that LGD has to make comes down to one question: do they trust Flame? If they do, the trio of carries plus PYL and a hopefully in-form Quan can beat any team in the world when it comes to firepower and technical ability. If Flame's champion pool can grow to add a few tanks and utility champs from time to time to vary up LGD's play, their opponents wouldn't be able to simply ban out Flame in the pick/ban phase.
Acorn is cool, steady and enables confidence from his teammates, but there are limits on what he can do if Imp or We1less aren't performing well. Flame is his namesake — hotheaded at times, fiery and someone who posses the mechanical ability to be the best player in the entire world.
In the choice between ice and fire, which would you choose?
Tyler "Fionn" Erzberger is a staff writer for theScore eSports. You can follow him on Twitter.Over the past few weeks we examined the Ducks, position-by-position, evaluating the talent. But since I was in Eugene last week for the NCAA Track & Field Championships, I figured I'd stop by the football offices to check in with one of the guys who knows that information best, offensive coordinator Scott Frost. Today, we'll go through quarterback and running back highlights. Tomorrow, we'll get to wide receiver, tight end and the offensive line.
QUARTERBACK
They're certainly not shying away from any Heisman hype at this point in the year. On quarterback Marcus Mariota, Frost said, "We certainly think we have the best one in the country" and that "he throws better than anyone in the country." Well Jameis Winston, there you have it.
I was curious about Mariota's injury situation -- a lot of times when guys come back there might be some hesitation or some ounce of doubt still in their minds about their knee, or ankle or whatever. Frost isn't worried about it. He said that even a few weeks after the injury Mariota wanted to get the knee brace off. Frost also said that Mariota would've run for 200 yards in the bowl game (he rushed for 133 yards) but he was out of shape from the injury.
As far as the quarterback-not-named-Mariota situation, redshirt sophomore Jeff Lockie is the No. 2 guy this season ("without question," Frost said.). Frost doesn't seem concerned that the only backups on the roster at this point are Lockie and redshirt freshman Taylor Alie. Lockie was 8-of-13 last season for 57 yards and one interception. Alie is a local walk-on, but Frost did note how impressed he was with Alie's spring.
Alie will likely be the holder for field goals this season.
Regarding last season's backup, Frost said that they felt comfortable with both Lockie and Jake Rodrigues, who has transferred to San Diego State, but if they would've had to name a backup, it would've been Lockie. But that the coaching really didn't want to "finalize the outcome of that competition until a point in time when we [needed] to."
On whether the flip side of having such a great QB like Mariota is the fact that you do get attrition with other guys: "Quarterbacks are a unique breed. … They're the leaders. They're used to being the guy. It's tough for guys to come in and not play. We've had a great one, which is a good problem to have. But a lot of the guys behind him hadn't had the chance to play as much as they'd like."EUGENE, OR—A small, somewhat spherical clay thing with various types of decorations on it was purchased Friday at the ninth annual Eugene Arts Festival, sources confirmed.
The clay thing, which was covered in some sort of shiny glaze, was selected from a local artist's table that consisted of a number smaller and larger clay things, the majority of them also round. Reports indicated that in addition to the clay things, the display also included woven things, Native American things, and various hemp-pouch things.
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The little clay thing was purchased for $7.
"This is nice," the clay thing's new owner John Tafferty said of the solid, two-pound object, which had been molded together to vaguely form a face, or possibly an ashtray. "I like this one a lot."
"It's neat," he added.
According to witnesses, Tafferty stared at, and held, a number of clay things before deciding on the little one he eventually purchased. Sources confirmed Tafferty was torn between two clay things, one with predominantly red paint on it and the other with blue paint.
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Tafferty ultimately settled on the blue-colored clay thing.
"This was a good find," Tafferty said while holding the thing that has a couple tiny holes in it but is apparently not a whistle. "I was thinking about buying one of the bigger ones for $20, but I figured that was a little too steep. I'm happy with this."
When asked what he would do with his new thing, Tafferty told reporters he was uncertain, but sources close to the 37-year-old speculated the clay thing would be placed either on the desk shelf above his computer, on top of his bedroom dresser, or next to the dish in which he puts his car keys and loose change after returning from work.
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However, other reports suggested the clay thing, which has this sort of yellow, molded flower thing coming out of it, could remain in a brown paper bag in the backseat of Tafferty's car for up to four months.
"I think my wife will like it," Tafferty said. "She likes things like this."
The Eugene Arts Festival, which runs through Sunday at the far end of the Fred Meyer grocery store parking lot on Division Avenue, consists of up to 30 thing-filled tables, and is a way for local artists to show off the glass, wicker, metal, vegan, wooden, small, large, oblong, and rectangular things they make.
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The little clay thing, which appeared to have several small leg-like protrusions but may or may not be able to stand on its own, had reportedly been on sale at two other arts festivals prior to its acquisition by Tafferty.
Artist Emily Glonden, who made the thing, told reporters she enjoys making these types of things.
"I have some porcelain stuff, too," Glonden said. "All handmade. Take a look around. I can go as low as $25 on the [ceramic saucer- or dish-looking thing with a rotating swivel stick coming out of it]."
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"It's one of my favorites," she added.Wayne Allyn Root, the Donald Trump campaign surrogate who predicted in 2014 that we would all die from Ebola if President Obama wasn’t forced out of office, wrote in a column today that Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention last night “could have been written by Lucifer himself, to be delivered by the anti-Christ.”
Root blasted Obama as a “psychopath, sociopath and ego-maniac who rules as a tyrant” and claimed that the president sees himself as a god who can exploit “ignorant, naïve and gullible voters.”
“Lucifer himself would be proud,” Root wrote.
I give both political and business speeches all over America, and all over the world. I know a great speech when I see and hear one. Obama’s speech last night at the DNC was masterful. It was one of the greatest political speeches I’ve ever heard.
There was one problem: It was 100 percent fiction, fraud and fantasy.
If it were given by any CEO in America at a shareholders meeting, or a press conference in front of the media, that CEO would face life in prison for fraud and misrepresentation.
Any screenwriter in Hollywood could have made it up out of thin air and won an Academy Award. It could have been a speech written by Bernie Madoff.
It could have been written by Lucifer himself, to be delivered by the anti-Christ.
…
Obama railed against believing in gods. “No man is a god” was a central theme in his speech. No man can save you. No man can save America. No man can turn around an economy. He was aiming all that at Donald Trump. Except he was describing himself.
Obama is the one who was elected by portraying himself to ignorant, naïve and gullible voters as a god who could walk on water.
…
Obama himself is the psychopath, sociopath and ego-maniac who rules as a tyrant, by issuing executive orders, ignoring the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, and making believe Congress doesn’t exist. Every word directed at Trump described Obama, Obama’s last eight years of rule and Obama’s voters.
Lucifer himself would be proud.Jason Reid reports on the meeting between Dallas coaches and players pertaining to comments made by owner Jerry Jones regarding his stance on the national anthem. (1:58)
FRISCO, Texas -- Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, in a meeting on Wednesday with players and coaches, said his stance on the national anthem protests was rooted in a desire to play the bad guy and deflect attention from the players, according to a source.
In the meeting, Jones sought to ensure that players also saw the bigger picture regarding the business side of the situation, including concerns over TV ratings and sponsors, the source said.
Some Cowboys players were frustrated by the recent comments from Jones, who took a knee and stood arm-in-arm with them prior to the playing of the national anthem before a game against the Arizona Cardinals on Sept. 25.
One player said Jones expected the Cowboys will continue to stand during the anthem. Another said the players had a better feeling for Jones' comments, because at first he wondered if Jones had turned against them, according to the source.
Editor's Picks NFLPA to join owners meeting to talk anthem Representatives from the NFL players' union will be involved when the subject of the national anthem is broached at next week's NFL owners meeting.
Bucs' McCoy: Uproar if players forced to stand Buccaneers defensive tackle Gerald McCoy told ESPN's Adam Schefter that there will be a negative reaction from players if the NFL forces them to stand during the national anthem. 1 Related
Jones, in the team meeting held after practice, also offered the players a chance to speak with him one-on-one, the source said. Players had been told to bring their concerns about Jones' comments to the meeting.
"It went well," Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott said of the of the meeting, while attending a promotional event later Wednesday. "I mean we ironed out everything that we needed to at this time."
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ing and often paid for them in the form of Israeli assassinations. In each case, the violence shattered ceasefires and inspired renewed bouts of bloodshed.
“The same is true now,” Eldar writes. “Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Eishe have taken Hamas to a place where its leadership never intended to go.”
Hamas leadership has yet to take responsibility for the kidnapping and likely had no knowledge of its planning. As Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel notes, “So far, there is no evidence that Hamas’ leadership either in Gaza or abroad was involved in the kidnapping.” Harel adds that the fallout of the kidnapping “effectively froze the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.”
Why would Hamas leadership have authorized an operation that so clearly threatened to unravel the movement’s political achievements, wrecking the vaunted unity deal and leaving Abbas without rival in the West Bank?
The Israeli government’s propaganda blitz drowned out sobering questions like these. In turn, the gag order obstructed the flow of information that would have complicated the propaganda.
Determined to reframe the international media’s narrative around Israel’s plight at the hands of Palestinian terrorism, Netanyahu went on the offensive.
#BringBackOurBoys
On 17 June, the same day the Israeli army forcibly confiscated CCTV cameras in Beitunia that captured footage of its soldiers killing two unarmed Palestinian boys during a Nakba Day protest, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor appeared behind a lectern at the UN Mission in New York City.
“It has been five days since our boys went missing,” Prosor thundered, “and I ask the international community, where are you? Where are you?!”
Referring to the Fatah-Hamas unity government, Prosor added: “All those in the international community who rushed to bless this marriage should look into the eyes of the heartbroken parents and have the courage to take responsibility by condemning the kidnapping. The international community bought in to a bad deal and Israel is paying for it.”
Beside Prosor stood a large placard displaying the smiling faces of the three missing teens beneath a hashtag reading #BringBackOurBoys. Israel’s propaganda blitz was approaching its apex.
For days, leaders of Israel’s trained online propaganda brigades — from the Israeli army spokesperson’s unit, to the Jewish Agency, to the Prime Minister’s Office — flooded social media with the #BringBackOurBoys hashtag. Mimicking Michelle Obama’s promotion of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag that aimed to raise awareness of the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamist militants, the Israeli prime minister’s frowning wife, Sara, posted a portrait of herself on Facebook holding a card that read, #BringBackOurBoys.
Right-wing protesters shout anti-Palestinian slogans during a rally outside the Israeli prime minster’s residence in Jerusalem, 5 July. Demonstrators hold up posters depicting the three murdered Israeli teens which read “United to bring them home.” Faiz Abu Rmeleh ActiveStills
The social media campaign reverberated throughout Jewish communities across the US, as synagogues around the country displayed yellow ribbons in a carefully coordinated show of solidarity with the missing teens. In New York City, local politicians appeared at pro-Israel rallies, while American diplomats from US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power to Ambassador Susan Rice competed with one another to deliver the most emotional tribute to the kidnapped teens.
Rachel Frenkel, the mother of the kidnapped Naftali Frenkel, was junketed by the Israeli government to the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva, Switzerland to plead for international help in rescuing her son.
The entire propaganda campaign was set into high gear despite Netanyahu and his inner circle’s knowledge that the teens were almost certainly dead. And it was enabled by the Shin Bet’s gag order, which even foreign correspondents like The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren honored. The Israeli government refused to allow the facts from interfering with what seemed like a political opportunity.
Behind the pitiable image it affected before the world, Israeli society seethed with bloodlust. A spontaneously-created Facebook page calling for the execution of one Palestinian prisoner for each hour the teens remained missing, while another called “The People of Israel Demand Revenge” garnered more than 35,000 “likes” from mostly young Israelis in just a few days.
Manipulated by a high-level campaign of deception and disinformation into believing that “their boys” were still alive, the Israeli public was about to receive shocking news.
A shallow grave
At 6am on 30 June, the bodies of Frenkel, Shaar and Yifrach were found in Halhoul at the northern entrance to Hebron in the occupied West Bank. They lay in a shallow grave on property owned by Marwan Qawasmeh, one of the two men suspected in their kidnapping and killing.
The bodies were discovered not by the Shin Bet, but by a team of volunteers from the Kfar Etzion Field School who led soldiers to the location. For its part, the army had been too busy invading Palestinian homes in areas as far away as Nablus to effectively comb the property of a suspect less than 10 kilometers from the site of the kidnapping.
Hours after the discovery, Israeli forces detonated explosive charges inside the Qawasmeh and Abu Eishe family homes. The destruction followed an announcement that the army was re-instituting its policy of punitive home demolitions against the families of Palestinians accused of terrorism.
That afternoon, Netanyahu set the tone for the national response, publishing remarks on his personal Twitter account that he had just delivered in a cabinet meeting:
PM at the Cabinet meeting: With heavy grief we found 3 bodies. All signs indicate they are of our abducted youths Eyal, Gilad and Naftali. — Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) June 30, 2014
They were abducted & murdered in cold blood by human animals. On behalf of the entire Jewish People, I would like to tell the dear families- — Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) June 30, 2014
the mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and brothers and sisters – we are deeply saddened, the entire nation weeps with you. — Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) June 30, 2014
Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created. Neither has vengeance for the blood of 3 pure youths who were on their> — Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) June 30, 2014
way home to their parents who will not see them anymore. Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay. May the memories of the 3 boys be blessed. — Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) June 30, 2014
Netanyahu’s comments perplexed outsiders, but for those embedded inside the tight confines of Jewish Israeli life, they carried a familiar resonance.
From Kishinev to Jerusalem
Netanyahu’s statement alludes to the final stanza of a poem by the Hebrew writer Chaim Bialik titled “On The Slaughter”:
Cursed be he who says: “Avenge!”
Vengeance such as this, vengeance for the blood of a small boy,
Satan himself has not devised-
Let that blood pierce the abyss!
Let that blood pierce the depths of darkness,
Let it eat away the darkness and there undermine
All the rotted foundations of the earth.
In Bialik’s verse, a searing lament anchored in Biblical language, the poet dramatized a brutal 1903 pogrom incited by the Russian Tsar that left scores of Jews dead in the town of Kishinev.
Bialik followed his first account of Kishinev with “The City of Slaughter,” an incendiary work admonishing the victims of the pogrom for their supposed passivity in the face of armed marauders. (Reports of ferocious resistance by the locals was conveniently overlooked.) The poem helped radicalize thousands of young Jews across Eastern Europe, inspiring the formation of self-defense committees and winning waves of adherents to the militant philosophy of Zionism. Among those most influenced by Bialik was Vladimir Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist activist who would later become a political benefactor to Netanyahu’s father, Benzion.
In his crude appropriation of Bialik’s verse, Benjamin Netanyahu recast the Russian pogromist as a Palestinian militant, drawing a seamless line between the Jewish nightmare of pre-war Europe and the present-day Israeli experience. In Netanyahu’s view, the “human animals” of Palestine had inherited the genocidal spirit of the Tsar’s mobs and would repeat their crimes unless Jews were prepared to fight.
Of course, Israeli Jews are the exact opposite of turn-of-the-century shtetl dwellers girding themselves against pogroms and ethnic cleansing. Unlike the persecuted outclass of Eastern Europe, Israeli Jews comprise a nuclearized, high-powered military that lord over an outcasted, largely defenseless Palestinian population with full support from the world’s lone superpower.
For his part, Netanyahu shares more in common with the Russian Tsar who incited against religious minorities to deflect from his political problems than he does with Bialik, the itinerant scribe who channeled the pain of his society’s weakest members.
The exploitation of historical Jewish persecution has been a constant feature of Netanyahu’s rhetoric, on bold display during a nationally televised speech last October when he baselessly accused the Palestinian national movement of a direct role in the Holocaust.
This time, amidst a dangerously pressurized atmosphere, his demagogy helped set in motion a wave of vigilante violence that threatened to engulf the whole of Israeli society. Then he shrank from public view, maintaining a conspicuous silence for several days while the extremist elements he emboldened took control of the streets.
“Murder, riots, incitement, vigilantism”
As mobs of Jewish youths fanned out across central Jerusalem to chant “Death to Arabs!” and search for Palestinians to assault, active duty Israeli soldiers took to Facebook to demand revenge, posting photos of themselves with the weapons they were aching to use.
With an Israeli public opinion poll taken after the Israeli teens’ funeral showing the far-right Jewish Home party gaining ground on the right-wing Likud, Israeli political upstarts rushed to issue calls for blood vengeance and the “annihilation” of Hamas. Ayelet Shaked, a rising star of the right-wing Jewish Home party, published a call for the genocide of Palestinians on Facebook that earned thousands of “likes” from Israelis.
Rabbi Noam Perel, the secretary general of Bnei Akiva, the world’s largest religious Zionist youth movement, upped the ante on fanaticism when he called for turning the Israeli military into an army of avengers “which will not stop at 300 Philistine foreskins.” Akiva’s appeal alludes to the first book of Samuel, in which the biblical character David kills two hundred Philistines and brings back their foreskins as evidence that he had done so.
Against the backdrop of fever-pitched incitement, a small car entered the back streets of Shuafat, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, on 2 July. Behind its darkened windows were angry young men hunting for Arab boys.
Following a botched kidnapping of a ten-year-old boy in the same neighborhood the day before, a group of men grabbed a 16-year-old named Muhammad Abu Khudair, threw him in their car and sped away. Abu Khudair was found dead the next morning in the woods of Givat Shaul just west of Jerusalem with burns over 90 percent of his body.
Protesters in the Palestinian city of Arara in the north of present-day Israel throw stones at Israeli police during a demonstration following the murder of Muhammad Abu Khudair, 5 July. Yotam Ronen ActiveStills
As they did after the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens, the Shin Bet imposed a gag order on the investigation, seemingly hoping to delay the news that Abu Khudair was the victim of Jewish extremism. And as before, the police flooded Israeli media with disinformation, this time by insinuating the murdered teen had been killed by members of his own family for being gay.
The Electronic Intifada has obtained CCTV footage showing the faces of the alleged killers of Abu Khudair just as they abducted him. The video was concealed for several days from the Israeli public under a new Shin Bet gag order. When the police finally arrested the suspected killers of Abu Khudair, they curiously staged a simultaneous press conference about an unrelated killing a young Jewish woman, suggesting without any clear evidence that she had been the victim of a Palestinian terrorist.
On 4 July, an autopsy revealed that Abu Khudair’s killers had burned him alive. Protest and rioting spread from Shuafat across East Jerusalem and into areas of northern Israel. Meanwhile, Jewish nationalists took to Facebook to organize more lynch mobs.
Netanyahu surfaced briefly the day before at an Independence Day ceremony at the US consulate in Jerusalem. With US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro seated by his side, the Prime Minister was forced to confront the binge of racism that he helped inspire.
Speaking in English for the consumption of his American hosts, Netanyahu declared, “Murder, riots, incitement, vigilantism — they have no place in our democracy. And it is these democratic values that differentiate us from our neighbors and unite us with the United States.”
Outside, the chaos showed no sign of ebbing.
Editor’s note: This article has been corrected since original publication to clarify that two popular Facebook pages calling for revenge were created after the Israeli teens’ disappearance; the article originally mentioned only one page.
Max Blumenthal is an award winning journalist and bestselling author. His latest book is Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013, Nation Books).Personal accountability has all but disappeared from the American political system. Bill Clinton lied to his entire cabinet about Monica Lewinsky and not a single cabinet member resigned in protest after he was forced to recant. When Alberto Gonzales lied repeatedly during testimony before Congress everyone knew exactly what he was doing but no leading Democrat was willing to impeach him. The hopelessly incompetent Michael Brown was able to resign from FEMA without sanction to "avoid further distraction from the ongoing mission" and later even blamed everyone else for his shortcomings. Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Tommy Franks, George Tenet, and Paul Bremer were all rewarded for their incompetence, some with medals and some with promotions. Recent resignations from the Bush administration stemming from the massive policy failures of the past seven years have frequently been couched in terms of "wanting to spend more time with my family" though sometimes a bit of candor creeps in a la Trent Lott, who believes it is time to step down and follow the money as a lobbyist. Public Diplomacy Tsarina Karen Hughes arguably plans to do both, returning to Texas to rejoin her family while also cashing in through lucrative speaking engagements. During her two and a half years of Texas-style soccer mom diplomacy at State Department and in spite of a large budget, Hughes only succeeded in increasing the number of foreigners who actively dislike the United States. Never is a resignation from government service framed in terms of "Hey, I screwed up."
The embrace of illegal detentions and torture are among the truly horrific decisions that can be attributed to the Bush White House. It is ironic to read the media accounts surrounding the recent discovery by shocked U.S. Marines of an alleged al-Qaeda torture center in Iraq's Diyala province because the Marines work for a government that itself publicly embraces torture as an interrogation technique. And it is not just the White House. Torture is bipartisan. The recent House of Representatives intelligence appropriations bill included a clause that requires CIA to abide by the Geneva Conventions in its interrogation and detention policies. One hundred and ninety-nine Congressmen from both parties voted "no." Even if some of the Congressmen voted against the bill for other reasons, there is a strong sense that many politicians consider torture to be perfectly okay. Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson have all jumped on that bandwagon, endorsing "enhanced interrogation" as a counter-terrorism tool. Mitt Romney, who might bolster his claims to be a Christian by occasionally perusing the compassionate message of the Sermon on the Mount instead of the Book of Mormon, even wants to make Guantanamo prison bigger. Giuliani appears to want to jail and torture lots of people all the time, but he is, admittedly, a pagan.
If senior managers at the Central Intelligence Agency actually worried about committing war crimes more than they cared about getting revenge on ragheads and advancing their careers, they wouldn't have tortured anyone in the first place back in 2002. Shortly after 9/11, the redoubtable armchair warrior Vice President Dick Cheney, who famously had other priorities and avoided military service by virtue of five deferments during Vietnam, announced that the "gloves are off" in reference to America's enemies. Those comments set the tone and ushered in the exciting days of "anything goes" when Cofer Black, chief of the Agency's Counter Terrorism Center, sent out his myrmidons with orders to come back with Usama bin Laden's head in a box. Somehow, that head turned out to be Saddam Hussein's.
Ethically, torture degrades the country that permits it, the organization that carries it out and the individuals who perform it. Doctors are not present during torture as it would violate the Hippocratic Oath, so it is up to the torturer to decide how far to go. If a victim dies while being interrogated by torture, as has happened a number of times in both Afghanistan and Iraq, it is both a war crime and murder.
Most intelligence and law enforcement officers reject torture as an interrogation tool, knowing that it more often than not produces false information. The FBI claims that the CIA waterboarding of terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah was unnecessary, that he was already cooperating. Waterboarding, which was used extensively both by the Gestapo and by the Spanish Inquisition, is a particularly heinous form of torture as it simulates death. With U.S. troops deployed all over the world at the present time, sanctioning torture lowers the bar for terrorists who might happen to capture an American soldier or diplomat to do likewise. Even in 2002 someone with a bit of foresight might have anticipated the possible consequences arising from the CIA's use of torture and its more general bull in the china shop approach. Someone with a bit of backbone and an intact moral compass might even have even resigned in protest, but, alas, there were few of those types around.
What has made CIA's so-called leaders really nervous in the current political environment is not the ethical or moral issue of torture per se. It is the thought of getting sued by the victims and victim advocacy groups, which means hiring expensive lawyers. Donald Rumsfeld's flight from Paris in late November to avoid war crimes charges also raises the possibility that an otherwise pleasant trip to Provence or Tuscany might have to be curtailed if some Euro-version of a pasty-face peace creep tries to file a lawsuit. Fortunately for all the torturers at CIA, there is now a government reimbursed private insurance program designed to cover contingencies. When former Chief of Clandestine Operations Jose Rodriguez was subpoenaed to appear before a Congressional committee last week, he was able to afford representation by the redoubtable Robert Bennett.
The latest CIA scandal began in 2002 when at least two terrorist suspects were videotaped while they were being subjected to the waterboarding version of "enhanced interrogation." The questioning took place somewhere in Asia, possibly in a Pakistani or Thai prison but more likely at either Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan or at Diego Garcia Island, in the Indian Ocean, where the CIA maintains "off-sites." In May 2003, CIA told Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema that there were no recordings or other records of the interrogations. That was a lie. In 2003 and 2004, the Congressional 9/11 Commission made "repeated and detailed inquiries relating to interrogations." The CIA said there was no additional material, another lie. In June 2005, Director of Operations Jose Rodriguez ordered the tapes destroyed. The order came, perhaps not coincidentally, just as the Italian authorities were entering into the investigative phase of a major inquiry into CIA renditions in Italy.
CIA now claims that the tapes were destroyed to protect the identity of the agency interrogators involved. That argument is complete nonsense. Unless the cameraman was suffering from delirium tremens and shaking uncontrollably, the camera would have been focused on the victim of the torture, not on those administering it. In any event, terrorists would hardly be able to identify and gain access to an otherwise unremarkable and nameless CIA employee from what they might see on a tape, even if they could get hold of a copy.
The real reason for the cover-up on the tapes is because torture is universally acknowledged to be a war crime and everyone in the CIA and White House hierarchy knows that to be true. The denial that the tapes existed in 2003 and 2004 could not have taken place without the concurrence of Director George Tenet, Deputy Director John McLaughlin, and General Counsel Scott Muller. Probably then-Director of Operations James Pavitt would have also been involved. When Rodriguez destroyed the tapes in 2005, he was not acting alone. Director Porter Goss almost certainly would have been part of the decision making process as well as acting General Counsel John Rizzo and it is tempting to speculate that White House aides like Dick Cheney's David Addington and President Bush's Harriet Miers might also have been in the loop.Two-thirds of Americans oppose launching a preemptive military strike against North Korea, with a majority trusting the U.S. military to handle the escalating nuclear crisis responsibly but not President Trump, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.
Roughly three-quarters of the public supports tougher economic sanctions on North Korea in an attempt to persuade it to give up its nuclear weapons, while just about one-third think the United States should offer the isolated country foreign aid or other incentives.
The Post-ABC poll finds 37 percent of adults trust Trump either "a great deal" or "a good amount" to responsibly handle the situation with North Korea, while 42 percent trust the commander in chief "not at all." By comparison, 72 percent trust U.S. military leaders, including 43 percent saying they trust them "a great deal."
A scant 8 percent of Americans surveyed think North Korean leader Kim Jong Un can act responsibly.
[Read full poll results | How the poll was conducted]
Overall, Trump's image continues to be negative, with 39 percent of Americans approving and 57 percent disapproving of the president's job performance. But the poll finds that clear majorities approve of Trump's response to recent hurricanes and support the agreement he struck with Democrats providing emergency disaster-relief funding and raising the nation's debt limit.
A war of words this past week between Trump and Kim may have opened a potentially dangerous new chapter in the North Korea crisis.
Kim called Trump "a mentally deranged U.S. dotard," Trump denounced Kim as a "madman," and each vowed to test the other as never before. Washington rolled out new sanctions Thursday and made a show of military force Saturday by flying bombers along the North Korea coast, a day after Pyongyang said it might soon conduct a hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific.
[Trump escalates a war of words with North Korea, calling leader Kim a ‘madman’]
Trump's use of aggressively personal taunts — the president nicknamed Kim "Rocket Man" in an address at the United Nations last week — defies convention and is seen by veteran diplomats as exceedingly risky.
The large gap in confidence between Trump and the U.S. military, as measured in the new poll, comes as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and other national security officials have emphasized a diplomatic approach to North Korea. Although Mattis has made clear that the United States is prepared and willing to retaliate to any attack with overwhelming force, he also has shied away from the rhetorical bombast employed by his boss.
Faith in Trump's handling of the biggest foreign policy crisis of his presidency is colored sharply by partisanship. While 11 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of independents say they trust Trump to act responsibly in dealing with North Korea, more than three-quarters of Republicans say they trust the president, although just over half trust him "a great deal."
Partisans are relatively united, however, in their concern about nuclear-armed North Korea. A record high 70 percent of Americans say North Korea poses a "serious threat" to the United States, including roughly 7 in 10 Democrats and independents and about 8 in 10 Republicans.
Trump's overall job approval rating has stabilized at 39 percent in the new poll after slipping to 36 percent in July. The shift is within the poll's margin of sampling error but is mirrored in the small rise in other recent national polls. Still, more Americans "strongly" disapprove of his job performance, 48 percent, than approve of it either "strongly" or "somewhat."
The Post-ABC poll finds 65 percent of Americans support the agreement reached this month between Trump and Democratic congressional leaders to authorize emergency hurricane-relief spending and raise the federal government's borrowing limit.
Two-thirds of Democrats and more than 6 in 10 independents back the agreement. And although the measure marked a rebuke of Republican leaders in Congress, it has the support of more than three-quarters of Republicans and a similar share of conservative Republicans.
Trump also receives a positive grade for his response to hurricanes Harvey in Texas and Irma in Florida, with 56 percent approving of his handling of the disasters, including nearly one-third of Democrats.
Seven in 10 rate the overall federal response as "excellent" or "good." That is less glowing than ratings for the government's handling of Hurricane Sandy during the Obama administration in 2012, but far better than the public's assessment of the response by the administration of George W. Bush to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when fewer than 4 in 10 gave the federal government positive marks.
Trump's high marks on hurricanes and the spending deal with Democrats in Congress have failed to ease deep-seated dissatisfaction with his presidency, now entering its ninth month.
Despite positive recent economic news, Trump receives net negative marks on his handling of the economy, with 43 percent approving and 49 percent disapproving.
On immigration, 62 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump's performance, including 51 percent "strongly" disapproving. The Trump administration this month announced an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created under President Barack Obama, but Trump has since discussed with Democrats a possible plan to restore protections for a group of undocumented immigrants commonly known as "dreamers" — those who were brought to the United States as children.
[Trump administration announces end of immigration protection program for ‘dreamers’]
More broadly, most Americans see Trump as a divisive figure who has yet to fulfill his campaign promise to positively change the way Washington works. More than twice as many Americans say Trump is doing more to divide the country than to unify it, 66 percent vs. 28 percent. The margin is significantly more negative than those recorded for Obama and Bush; at most, 55 percent of Americans said Obama or Bush was dividing the country.
Opinions on this question break sharply along party lines. Among registered voters who identify as independents — a group Trump won by four percentage points in last year's election — 62 percent say Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it, while roughly 9 in 10 Democratic voters say Trump's actions have divided the country.
Among Republican voters, however, about 6 in 10 say Trump is making strides toward unity. Still, confidence in Trump as a unifying force has declined even among those in his party. While 9 percent of Republican voters in a poll last November by The Washington Post and George Mason University's Schar School had expected that Trump would divide the country, the new Post-ABC poll finds 31 percent of Republicans say Trump's actions are dividing the country today.
The poll finds 39 percent of all adults say Trump has brought needed change to Washington, while 59 percent say he has not. Almost three-quarters of Republicans say Trump has ushered in needed change, while most Democrats and independents say he has not.
On North Korea specifically, most Americans are hesitant to support preemptive military action. Fewer than a quarter — 23 percent — of Americans say the United States should strike North Korea first, while 67 percent say there should be U.S. military action only if North Korea attacks the United States or its allies.
Over 6 in 10 Republicans and independents along with more than 7 in 10 Democrats say the United States should not launch a preemptive strike. Even among those who "strongly approve" of Trump's job performance, a majority, almost 6 in 10, oppose preemptive military action.
If the United States did first launch a military strike on North Korea, 82 percent of Americans say it would risk starting a larger war in East Asia, including 69 percent citing a "major risk."
Despite resistance to preemption, however, Americans are much more supportive of military intervention generally than they have been in the past. In a question that did not contrast preemption and retaliation, the new poll finds roughly 4 in 10 Americans support bombing North Korean military targets, up from 2 in 10 in 2005, when North Korea declared itself a nuclear power. Republican support for bombings has more than doubled, from 29 percent in 2005 to 63 percent today. Most Democrats and independents still are opposed.
Beyond military strikes, toughening sanctions on North Korea garners widespread support across party lines, with 76 percent of Americans overall approving.
Other nonmilitary options aimed at pushing North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons are less popular. About one-third of Americans support offering the country financial incentives, such as aid money or more trade, down from about half supporting this approach in 2005. And while Russia and China have called on the United States to reduce its military exercises with South Korea, a key U.S. ally, American public opinion is roughly divided. Forty-three percent think the United States should agree to stop conducting the exercises, while 47 percent oppose doing so.
The Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted Sept. 18-21 among a random national sample of 1,002 adults reached on cellular and landline telephones, with overall results carrying a sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Emily Guskin contributed to this report.Croatian free-diver and world record holder
Goran Čolak
Goran Čolak (born 24 April 1983, Zagreb) is a Croatian free-diver.
Career [ edit ]
Čolak started his amateur free diving career in 2006 when he entered his first competition, the Submania Cup in Zagreb. Less than one year later, he won his first Croatian championship and broke several national records. Čolak turned professional in 2011 and joined the exclusive group of free diving professionals around the world.[1][2]
Čolak was the 2009 Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (CMAS) World Champion and world record holder in a joint event with AIDA International (AIDA), the strongest free diving organization in the world. Čolak dove 244 m in dynamic apnea with fins and won CMAS and overall first place, breaking the CMAS world record.[3]
Čolak was the 2011 CMAS World Champion in dynamic apnea with fins, with a 250 m swim, setting a new CMAS world record, his fourth CMAS world record in his short career.[4] On October 16, 2011, he became the AIDA International world champion in the same event (AIDA World Championship in Lignano, Italy), and set the new AIDA world record of 273 m, surpassing the previous record of 265 m held by Dave Mullins.[5][6] At the same event he won two gold medals, one silver medal and set a new world record.[7]
Čolak won the 2012 AIDA Team World Championship, held in Nice, France with Veljano Zanki and Božidar Petani as his teammates. This was first appearance and first gold medal for the Croatian team at a team World Championships. In addition to gold medal the Croatian team set the new all-time best in points with 840.6 points,[8] beating the previous record of 839 points set by the Denmark team at Okinawa in 2010.[9]
Čolak competed in 2013 Belgrade Pool World Championship, and won all three gold medals from each of the pool disciplines and set one world record. Goran Čolak won the dynamic apnea without fins finals with a 206 m dive, the dynamic apnea with fins with a 281 m dive, which beat his current world record of 273 m set in 2011. On the third day he won his third gold medal in static, holding his breathe for 8minutes and 59 seconds. Čolak was dominating the Belgrade World Championship from the very beginning to the end, winning every qualification heat and every final. His results in qualifications were 182 m in DNF, 250 m in DYN and 8:34 min in STA.[10]
Čolak competed in 2013 at CMAS World Games in Kazan, Russia. He again broke a Croatian national record in static apnea to 9:18 min and won bronze medal. At the same competition he won two silver medals in dynamic apnea with fins (260 m) and dynamic apnea without fins (194 m). Čolak was the only male athlete who won medals in all three disciplines in Kazan.[11]
Čolak announced AIDA WR attempt in Belgrade from 21–27 November 2013. He succeeded on the first day with the dive of 225m, adding 7m to the old record that was held by Dave Mullins from New Zealand.[12]
Čolak was a member of Croatian national team at AIDA Team World Championship in Sardinia 2014. He was the most successful athlete of the entire competition in overall points. He set two Team WCh records, one in static (9:13 min), and one in dynamic with fins (250 m). Unfortunately, Croatian team finished fourth, after 2 other members, Bozidar Petani and Bruno Segvic earned two disqualifications or red cards in dynamic with fins and constant weight.[13]
Čolak competed in 2014 CMAS European championship in Spain (Tenerife), as a member of Croatian national team. He broke CMAS and overall World Record in dynamic apnea with fins, with a dive of 288m adding 23 m to CMAS WR (previously held by Aleksandr Kostyshen from Russia) and 7 m to overall (AIDA and CMAS) WR (adding 7 m to his own 281-metre AIDA dive from 2013). He also won a gold medal in that discipline. He also won a silver medal in static apnea.[14]
In 2015, Čolak took part at his third Individual AIDA Pool World championship, Belgrade, Serbia. He won one silver (STA), and one bronze medal (DNF), making this the first AIDA WCh where he did not win medals in all the disciplines. Čolak also announced that, at this point, he will start moving from pool to the depth disciplines.[15]
At 2015 AIDA depth World championship, which was held in Limassol Cyprus, Čolak had his depth debut. He broke all three depth national records with dives to 71 m in CNF, 108 m in CWT and 98 m in FIM. He was awarded silver medal for his Constant weight dive to 108 m and was an overall winner of the Championship. For the first time AIDA awarded the overalls. The award is called "Natalia Molchanova award", by late Natalia Molchanova, the most successful fereediver of all time. Čolak became the first person who received this award.[16]
Later in 2015, Čolak took part at the first CMAS depth World championship in Ischia, Italy. He competed in Constant weight (CWT), same discipline where he won silver medal earlier this year at AIDA World championship in Cyprus with a dive of 108 m. This time he dove 110 m, winning the gold medal and setting the new CMAS World record.[17]
In 2016 Čolak competed at AIDA individual World championship in Turku, Finland. As the only athlete representing Croatia he managed to win one silver medal in static with the time of 9:14min. Later that year he suffered some medical issues with the kidney stone and DCS during the depth training in Croatia. This forced him to finish the 2016. season and focus on recovery and next season.[18]
In June 2017 Čolak competed at CMAS European pool championship in Cagliari, Italy. He competed in all 4 free diving disciplines winning 3 gold medals and one silver medal. Gold medals were as follows; Dynamic no fins with 206m and new WR for 50m pool, Static with the time of 9:58.66 min (new CMAS national record) and Dynamic with fins with the distance of 279m. One silver medal was form Dynamic with BiFins with the distance of 244m.[19]
In October 2017 Čolak competed at CMAS European depth championship in Kas, Turkey. He competed in all 3 depth disciplines winning silver medal on the first day in CWT with a dive to 113m, second day he won the gold in CNF with a dive to 83m, and the third day he was DQ in CWT Bi fins for a rope pull, during a (silver medal) dive to 105m.
During 2018 CMAS World Championship in Lignano, Italy Čolak won two gold medals. One in Static (9:03min) and the second one in Dynamic with monofin (279m), in addition to that he also won one silver medal in Dynamic with Bifins (257m). Once again he was the most successful athlete of the whole championship.
Čolak is currently AIDA's most successful male athlete from AIDA and CMAS World and European Championships with 15 gold, 8 silver and 3 bronze medals.[20]
Čolak was nominated for Croatian athlete of the year in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2013, 2014,2016, 2017.[21][22]
Čolak won the Dubai Range Rover challenge five times, (2011,2012,2015,2017,2018) and came second in 2013, 2014, 2016.[23]
Čolak announced on September 28, 2013, that he would attempt to break the world record in static apnea on pure oxygen, held by Tom Sietas with a time of 22 minutes 22 seconds. Goran succeeded by holding his breath, at the Zagreb main square, |
, and SAM organization received statements confirming that. Houthis-Saleh armed men used Al-Digag building in the neighborhood, in addition to other neighboring buildings, as detention centers for their opponents, from all areas in Taiz, also Houthis commanders were in the neighborhood. Some of the released detainees confirmed that Houthis-Saleh militia practiced severe psychological and physical torture against civilians in these facilities.
In Mawya junction in the road linking Taiz and Ibb cities, in Al-Saleh city, Houthis-Saleh militia has established one of its biggest detention centers in Taiz governorate, which is supervised by their senior filed commanders, and number of detainees could reach two thousand, according to estimation made by some released detainees.
Eyewitnesses indicated that fighters of the Saudi-led Arab Coalition have bombed al-Saleh city with more than 30 missiles, however SAM could not verify casualties resulted from the attack. According to eyewitnesses, some of the city are used as stores for arms, and fuel, also as meetings venue for Houthis-Saleh field commanders, and detainees’ life is endangered by keeping them there as human shields.
With the arrival of the UAE backed Security Belt forces to Mocha, SAM organization monitored establishment of many informal prisons and detention centers where detainees were subjected to torture, including CAC bank building,under the leadership of Thi Yazan al-Yafe’e, Mocha elementary court, in Mocha, affiliated to the emergency forces battalion commanded by Najeeb Seif Al-Yafe’e, Ice Factory detention center affiliated to the 4th battalion commanded by Raed Al-Yafe’e, and all these detention centers practice torture against civilian detainees, and detain them without any legal justifications or procedures.
SAM organization also monitored existence of extremist groups, related to Al-Qaeda, in Taiz city, who controls Al-Hamza school, Hail Saeed Charity Society, and one building in Al-Sameel market, all these buildings were turned into detention centers and secret prisons, also Arwa school was used as premises for the Judicial Committee that issues rulings on people’s cases.
Hodiedah Governorate:
SAM organization has documented 24 detention centers and prisons in Hodiedah controlled by Houthis-Saleh militia, where they have seized and turned political leaders’ and military commanders’ houses into detention and torture centers, including president Abdorabo Hadi house and the vice president Ali Muhsin Al-Ahmer house, governor house, and other political leaders’ houses and farms. Police Officers’ club detention center is in Al-Houk neighborhood, and detainees there were tortured and used as human shield.[4] “I’ve been imprisoned in Officers’ Club, and was subjected to psychological torture, and 50 of us have been using one bathroom, also the food was terrible, we’ve been accused of being from Daesh (ISIS) and agent of Americans, I’ve been released after ten days” said Qassim.
Corniche Castle
Turned into the most sever place for torture in Yemen by the militia, Corniche castle considered as one of the most famous tourism attraction in Hodiedah city, where more than 95 detainees, who are Houthis opponents, of different age groups were kept in the castle.
(S.K.) said describing torture practiced by Houthis “the detainee is deprived from drinking water for prolonged periods, sometimes 36 hours, also from using the toilet, noting that most of the detainees are diabetics, such Mr. Yahya Heig and Mr. Amin Wasel”. “prisoners are entered into a 3X3 very dark underground room known as the “pressure cooker”[5]. Detainees are tied by chains into the walls, beaten by chains and electricity cables, also deprived from drinking water till they pass out due to thirst and torture”, S.K. added.
Waseem another survivor, told SAM that the militia forces detainees to stand with pair foot on empty tune fish cans for more than three hours, and his feet swell and the can cuts his sole.
SAM organization has documented from several sources many forms of torture, in the Corniche Castle, including suspension with chains in contorted position where hands are tied to the feet, and if detainees wants to sleep his legs will be raised, and if he stands his body will be curved, and he remain is such position for days, sometimes for twenty days. SAM organization has documented a similar case from Al-Garahi, Beit Al-Faqeeh district, whose condition deteriorated and he is still subfreezing from torture consequences.
Also among systematic torture methods, is plucking of beard, beating with chains on toes till they bleed, squeezing nails with pliers till they bleed, in addition to denial of medicines supplies, denial of visits, and holding detainees incommunicado.
Dhamar Governorate
Al-Wagibat Detention Center – Ma’bar
Al-Wagibat detention center is in the center of Ma’bar city, in Gahran district, it was storehouse for seeds, without ventilation, light, windows, or sanitation and Houthis-Saleh militia turned it into secret detention center where most brutal torture was practiced.
Hani, an ex-detainee said “when arriving the prison, the inmate is placed in a dark cell, where he can’t see even his own hands. Detainees eat and “relieve oneself” in the same room. At midnight detainees are summoned for questioning, with eyes blindfolded, and subjected to torture and sever beating, till he passes out, and suffers urinary and bowel incontinence, after one-week detainee will be moved into another room with other detainees, full of insects, without light, and they “relive oneself” in public without any privacy”.
Muhannad, from the same detention center, informed SAM monitors that meals are not regular, and they receive rotten rice and bread, and beans mixed with insects and dust, and each three or four inmates share one piece of bread.
“when the victim is transferred from Houthis prison in Dhamar city to Al-Wagibat prison on Ma’bar, the guards make him believe he will be executed somewhere, or will be thrown out of the military patrol vehicle while driving fast, or will be thrown from high altitude, and the guards discuss in a way that make the victim believe he will be killed. Also, when the detainees ask for water, they respond that they will make him drink urine, ordering one of them to urinate so the detainee may drink”, ex detainee Murad said.
Jabal Hiran Detention Center -Dhamar
SAM has documented a detention center in Jabal Hiran, which is a building near to the central water tank, consist of many rooms, and used by Houthis for torture and interrogation, then for detaining their political opponents, particularly from Islah party. Abu Tawoos is supervising this facility, and he is the cousin of the governorate ex supervisor, and deputy director of security in the governorate.
Houthis-Saleh militia has turned many buildings into detention centers, and SAM has monitored such facility at the community college building, which consists of two story and number of hangars and halls, in Dhamar-Sana’a road where torture is widely practiced, and the building was bombed by Arab Coalition fighters.
SAM organization also, monitored and documented another detention center at the playground northern Dhamar city, where the rooms under the stands are used as prisons to hide and torture the opponents, while it was rented before as warehouse.
Al-Baidha Governorate
Al-Ameria Castle Detention Center
Al-Amria is an archaeological castle turned by Houthis-Saleh militia into prison and detention center for hundreds of their opponents from different governorates, following Houthis invasion of Al-Baidha in 2014, also arms were stored in the castle, and guns, cannons and heavy artillery were deployed in the guarding towers. SAM organization has documented many statements describing Houthis-Saleh militia treatment to the detainees:
(S.M.), 49, an ex-detainee in Al-Amria castle says “we were detained in the castle prison in Rad’a, and kept as human shields, and Houthis kept us in purpose in the higher floors to be secured from airstrikes. We were stuffed into a small 2X3 room, with 22 detainees from different governorates, we were like dead for six months”, “inmates’ money was confiscated, and we lived in darkness, no lambs, or candles, we were denied soap and detergents, water is contaminated and we get it from the bathroom, and it was often mixed with sewerage water” he added.
Wael, another released detainee said, “many detainees were left in the prison without interrogation, and some were questioned for hours continuously with beating, and the torture varies from beating with hands, on the face, beating with electricity cables, and sticks on the back and buttocks and in sensitive parts, torture also include stripping, and spraying detainees with cold water at the terrace and left to freeze”.
Al-Satya Detention Center – Al-Malagim
SAM organization detected a detention center in the Health Center in Al-Malagim, on Al-Baidha-Mareb road, known as Al-Watya prison, and considered one of the worst prisons in the governorate and contains hundreds of abductees and detainees, who are passengers from different governorates, and were abducted from checking points in Al-Watya area, on the road to Mareb. SAM has received confirmed reports that the prison is notorious and many crimes and different methods of torture are practiced against civilians in the prison.
Ibb Governorate
SAM organization has documented more than 27 detention centers in Ibb governorates, which used to be schools, houses, mosques Quran memorization centers, that Houthis-Saleh militia turned into detention centers and informal prisons where torture against civilians is practiced, namely; sheikh Ali Musid Bender house, and house at Addaram neighborhood, near 55th brigade of the republican guard, which us a two-story building and consist of many rooms, one room is used as a command and control center by Houthis. SAM interviewed some victims who were detained and tortured in this facility, in addition to another house belongs to sheikh Ali Musid Beder, near Addalie junction, in Yareem market, used by Houthis as detention and torture center.
SAM monitors also documented turning house of brigadier general Askar Zu’eel as detention center, who were imprisoned and tortured in the basement. SAM also interviewed some of the ex-detainees who confirmed this information. SAM also received reports on Al-Qala’a prison, yet not verified, however SAM documented information on detention of sheikh Al-Sabal and his guards, who died under torture in the same detention center [6].
Mareb Governorate
SAM organization has documented many detention centers and prisons supervised by the commanders of Yemeni army loyal to the legitimate government, including Al-Amnyat detention centers, supervised by Abu Mohammed, and another one Qahafiz detention center, near Al-Wadi’a border entry point in Saudi-Yemeni borders, where according to an eyewitness Qahafiz is a detention center used to keep people who were arbitrarily detained.
Amin Yahya Zabiba, an ex-detainee says, “I was detained, robbed and tortured in an unethical and inhuman manner, I was forced to dig my grave in the desert with my bare hand, and I dig till my skin was torn apart, I was buried and covered with sand till I pass out, and they take me out and pour cold water to wake me up”.
“my hands were tied with my legs to my neck and put the rope like a rein in my mouth like a donkey, and one of them was stepping with his boot on my cheeks and rub them and says “I dishonor you.. you are shameless” and he enters the boot in my mouth and another one closes my nose, so as not to breath, I was beaten with iron rods till I pass out and I don’t what else they did” he added.
“I wake in the next day, unable to move for many days.. what kind of people these people are.. I was never questioned, I was kept there till signs of torture disappeared and I was released.. I refused to go out until I knew what is the motive or reason to do what they did, but I receive no answer, I was forced to leave and they did not return my documents, contracts and trade register, passport and money they have taken earlier” he added.
SAM organization also, documented a detention center affiliated to the military intelligence of the legitimate government, where Mabkhout Saleh Mabkhout Al-Naemi, died, and a signs if torture were detected on his body, and authorities in Mareb says that it is resulted from a fight between him and other prisoners based on old revenge case, however his family members accuse the authorities of killing him, under the allegation that his brother is member to Houthis-Saleh Political Bureau in Sana’a.
SAM monitors also confirmed death of Mohammed Naji Muret bin Askar, in Al-Mahkama prison, controlled by the Public Security, after being detained for more than one and half years, by the Commander of the region for collaboration with Houthis allegations.
Other Governorates
In Amran governorate, Houthis-Saleh militia turned Al-Thawra Sports Playground into a huge detention center, as Sana’a prisons and detention centers were overcrowded with detainees. Some houses, schools and mosques were also turned into detention and torture centers, including Ima Ali school and mosque in Al-Gannat, health center in Al-Qushibi neighborhood. SAM also received reports that Houthis militia established a detention center and prison in each of the twenty districts of Amran, which is supervised by its commanders.
In Hajjah, SAM monitored many detention centers established by Houthis-Saleh militia, including in Education Administration, which is ancient building used in the past by Imams to detain rebels before 1962, and now to detain civilians, and Islah institute in the city, which was a training center turned into detention center by Houthis, following its seizure by them in May 2015, and continued to be a secret detention center where torture is practiced, till it was handed over to the landlord, and the detainees were transferred into another secret location belongs to Ibrahim AL-Kuhlani. SAM also confirmed existence of detention centers and prisons consist of containers and iron boxes, used to sore and transport goods, where civilians are detained and human rights are violated.
In Sa’da, SAM organization documented more than 16 detention centers, including houses, schools, and government buildings, where torture is practiced against civilians. In Al-Jouf, SAM documented one detention center in Al-Nims house, where detainee Soud Mohammed Al-Fad, 29, was died.
Finally, SAM Organization would like to confirm its condemnation to all these detention centers and prisons, and denounce all violations that have been perpetrated, and calls upon Houthis-Saleh militia, as de facto power, the legitimate government, and UAE to commit to the international human rights conventions, that consider these detention centers as violation to the international law, and consider such practices against abducted civilians as “crimes against humanity”.
SAM Organization is attaching a list of the prisons and detention centers and their locations and other details.
SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties,
Genève, 7 September 2017
[1] Police stations in this report are that one controlled by the militia, without executive power (police) supervision
[2]This name will be repeated in more detention centers run by Houthis-Saleh militia.
[3] All acronyms of victims and eyewitnesses are not true, they have been concealed fearing any harm might impact them by the oppressors. SAM keeps all detailed names and statements.
[4] please refer to “Brutal Killing” report, issued by SAM that includes stories on the human shield used by Houthis-Saleh https://www.samrl.org/brutal-killing/
[5] the same term is used by Houthis-Saleh group in Al-Hadi detention center in Sana’a, indicating that torture is a systematic practice
[6] Please refer to “Brutal Killing” report, issued by SAM that includes torture and execution case of Mohammed Zeid Al-Sabal, and Basheer Shrafat https://www.samrl.org/brutal-killing/Nashville Predators General Manager David Poile addressed the media on Tuesday morning as the team’s 2016 Development Camp began on-ice sessions at Centennial Sportsplex, but there was one notable Preds prospect who was absent.
Poile announced forward Yakov Trenin – Nashville’s first selection of the 2015 NHL Draft – recently broke his leg in a biking accident in Russia and will miss development camp and likely a good amount of training camp as well. However, Poile expects Trenin to arrive in Nashville within the next month and rehab his injury with Predators Strength and Conditioning Coach David Good.
The injury isn’t ideal, but Poile doesn’t expect the ailment to set Trenin back on the trajectory the club hopes he will follow over the coming years.
“We’re really high on him, but he still has a year left of junior, so I think we’re probably tracking for him [to have another year in] junior, a year in Milwaukee, then [Nashville],” Poile said. “But I know he’s going to play for us at some point.”
Poile also addressed a number of other topics, including free agency, which is set to begin on Friday, July 1. The GM doesn’t expect to be as active as he has in years past, nor does he plan on jumping in on the opening day or two of the frenzy. Always quick to caution that plans can change, Poile believes he may be able to find a bargain or two when the time comes.
“If we could maybe add to our depth on defense, we would like to do that,” Poile said of his plans in free agency. “I think we have a terrific defense, but if we could get a little more depth, I would be happy to try and do that. In Milwaukee also, forward-wise, we’re always looking to get a little bit better. That could be a trade, that could be a free agent, that could be a combination of both of those. We’ve had meetings and talked about a number of players, we’ll have to just see how it shakes out.
“I want to be careful because we do have back pressure with players like [Vladislav] Kamenev, [Kevin] Fiala, and [Pontus] Aberg that maybe are getting close, and we might not want to sign away their position to another player. I’m not giving an exact answer because it’s got to come to us. We’re organized, we have an order, and we know what we want if it appears there, so if we sign somebody, it’ll be for a reason. If we don’t, it’ll be for a reason.”
After signing winger Filip Forsberg to a six-year, $36 million contract on Monday, Poile now turns his focus to signing other restricted free agents, namely forward Calle Jarnkrok. The Swede tallied 16 goals for the Preds last season and Poile is confident a deal will get done after tendering a qualifying offer to Jarnkrok on Monday.
“We’re working on that and trying to get a multiyear deal,” Poile said. “Maybe he’ll file for arbitration, but we’re going to get it done. I’d like to get a longer-term deal; I think this is the right time, he fits into a specific area on our team and a specific role, and with that comes a specific price. If we can get that, great; if not, we’ll just go for a one-year deal.”
Poile is also beginning to think about a new deal for center Ryan Johansen, who is still one season away from becoming a restricted free agent. For the player Poile believes will be Nashville’s franchise center for years to come, the desire to get something worked out sooner than later is prevalent.
“We’ve talked to his agent almost every week since the end of the season,” Poile said of Johansen. “Ryan was at the Draft in Buffalo, he’s been really working out, David Good, our strength coach, has already been up to his home in Vancouver and visited him for three or four days… Maybe after the start of the season, something like that [is when we’ll look to start negotiations].”
Poile confirmed he expects goaltender Carter Hutton to test the free agency market. The general manager also continues to try and find a trading partner for winger Eric Nystrom, but said a buyout also remains a possibility (the deadline for contract buyouts is June 30).News Memorandum of Understanding Between the State Review of Oil and Natural Gas Environmental Regulations (STRONGER) and U.S. EPA November 29, 2018 - STRONGER and EPA entered into the memorandum of understanding (MOU) to facilitate greater collaboration and to achieve greater success in the effort to protect human health and the environment. Learn more about the MOU. Public Input about Draft White Paper on Oil and Natural Gas Governance of Produced Water November 10, 2018 - EPA and the State of New Mexico have released a draft white paper for public review and input. The draft white paper clarifies the existing regulatory and permitting frameworks related to the way wastewater from oil and natural gas extraction activities can be re-used, recycled and renewed for other purposes in New Mexico. Comments on the draft white paper, Oil and Natural Gas Produced Water Governance, will be accepted through the close of business on December 10, 2018. Learn more about the draft white paper.
Report Environmental Violations Report illegal disposal of wastes or other non-emergency suspicious activity related to oil and natural gas development through epa.gov/tips. You can provide tips anonymously if you do not want to identify yourself. Emergency events and spills or releases should be reported through the National Response Center at 1-800-424-8802.
Unconventional oil and natural gas play a key role in our nation's clean energy future. The U.S. has vast reserves of such resources that are commercially viable as a result of advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies. These technologies enable greater access to oil and natural gas in shale formations. Responsible development of America's shale gas resources offers important economic, energy security, and environmental benefits.
We work with states and other key stakeholders to help ensure that the economic prosperity from unconventional oil and natural gas extraction does not come at the expense of public health and the environment. We have played a lead role in convening stakeholders and conducting outreach to individual citizens, communities, tribes, state and federal partners, industry, trade associations and environmental organizations that have a strong interest in the agency's work and policies related to unconventional oil and natural gas extraction.
Our focus and obligations under the law are to provide oversight, guidance and, where appropriate, rulemaking and enforcement, that achieve the best possible protections for human health and the air, water and land where Americans live, work and play.
On this page:
Improving our Scientific Understanding of Hydraulic Fracturing
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Providing Regulatory Clarity and Protections against Known Risks
Natural gas and shale gas extraction operations can result in a number of potential impacts to the environment, including:
Stress on surface water and ground water supplies from the withdrawal of large volumes of water used in drilling and hydraulic fracturing;
Contamination of underground sources of drinking water and surface waters resulting from spills, faulty well construction, or by other means;
or by other means; Adverse impacts from discharges into surface waters or from disposal into underground injection wells; and
Air pollution resulting from the release of volatile organic compounds, hazardous air pollutants, and greenhouse gases.
Ensuring that hydraulic fracturing using diesel fuels is properly permitted
A core element of the Safe Drinking Water Act's (SDWA) Underground Injection Control (UIC) program is setting requirements for proper well siting, construction, and operation to minimize risks to underground sources of drinking water. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 excluded hydraulic fracturing, except when diesel fuels are used, for oil, natural gas or geothermal production from regulation under the UIC program. This statutory language caused regulators and the regulated community alike to raise questions about the applicability of permitting practices.
We have developed revised UIC Class II permitting guidance specific to oil and natural gas hydraulic fracturing activities using diesel fuels. Although developed specifically for hydraulic fracturing where diesel fuels are used, many of the guidance’s recommended practices are consistent with best practices for hydraulic fracturing in general, including those found in state regulations and model guidelines for hydraulic fracturing developed by industry and stakeholders. Thus, states and tribes responsible for issuing permits and/or updating regulations for hydraulic fracturing will find the recommendations useful in improving the protection of underground sources of drinking water and public health wherever hydraulic fracturing occurs.
We issued the guidance alongside an interpretive memorandum, which clarifies that Class II UIC requirements apply to hydraulic fracturing activities using diesel fuels, and defines the statutory term “diesel fuel” by reference to five chemical abstract services registry numbers. The guidance outlines for our permit writers, where we are the permitting authority,
(i) existing Class II requirements for diesel fuels used for hydraulic fracturing wells, and
(ii) technical recommendations for permitting those wells consistently with these requirements.
Learn more:
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Ensuring the safe management of wastewater, stormwater, and other wastes
As the number of shale gas wells in the U.S. increases, so too does the volume of shale gas wastewater that requires disposal. Wastewater associated with shale gas extraction can contain high levels of salt content also called total dissolved solids total dissolved solidsThe quantity of dissolved material in a given volume of water. or TDS. The wastewater can also contain various organic chemicals, inorganic chemicals, metals, and naturally occurring radioactive materials (also referred to as technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material or TENORM). In partnership with states,we are examining the different management methods employed by industry to ensure that there are regulatory and permitting frameworks in place to provide safe and legal options for disposal of flowback and produced water. These options include:
Addressing air quality impacts
There have been well-documented air quality impacts in areas with active natural gas development, with increases in emissions of methane, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). The EPA, the Department of the Interior, other federal agencies and states are working to better characterize and reduce these air emissions and their associated impacts.
Through the Natural Gas STAR program, the EPA and partner companies have identified technologies and practices that can cost-effectively reduce methane emissions from the oil and natural gas sector in the U.S. and abroad.
Through the Clean Construction USA program, we are promoting newer, more efficient technology and cleaner fuels to innovate the ways in which hydraulic fracturing equipment and vehicles reduce emissions. We also administer Clean Air Act regulations for oil and natural gas production, including regulations on reporting greenhouse gas emissions.
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Working with Partners
Memorandum of Understanding between the State Review of Oil and Natural Gas Environmental Regulations (STRONGER) and EPA
In November 2018, the State Review of Oil and Natural Gas Environmental Regulations (STRONGER) EXIT and EPA entered into the memorandum of understanding (MOU) to facilitate greater collaboration and to achieve greater success in the effort to protect human health and the environment. The MOU objectives are to:
affirm EPA’s commitment to meaningful participation in STRONGER’s efforts to develop guidelines for state oil and natural gas environmental regulatory programs, conduct reviews of such programs and publish reports of those reviews, and
improve communication, coordination and collaboration between EPA and STRONGER on responsible oil and natural gas exploration and development activities.
Memorandum of Understanding between the State of New Mexico and EPA
In July 2018, EPA and the State of New Mexico entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to clarify the existing regulatory and permitting frameworks related to the way produced water from oil and gas extraction activities can be reused, recycled, and renewed for other purposes.
Draft White Paper on Oil and Natural Gas Governance of Produced Water
As described in the MOU, EPA and New Mexico have developed a draft white paper on the governance of produced water in New Mexico. This draft white paper, Oil and Natural Gas Produced Water Governance in the State of New Mexico,was available for review and public input for 30 days, through the close of business, Monday, December 10, 2018. Stakeholders and interested members of the public provided input to the EPA and the State of New Mexico by emailing renewablewater@state.nm.us.
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Convening Stakeholders
We occasionally partner with, or convene, oil and natural gas stakeholders to increase opportunities for environmental improvements.
Our Smart Sectors program partners with sectors that represent the engine of the American economy in order to explore significant opportunities for environmental improvement. Currently, we are partnering with 14 sectors, including oil and gas. Additional sectors may be added over time.
In April 2017, various industry associations expressed their concerns to us about our compliance assurance activities. View the letters and memos to us, and our July 2017 responses. In response to these concerns, former Administrator Pruitt convened this roundtable in February 2018 in cooperation with the Environmental Council of States (ECOS) and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC). View the press release, agenda, meeting highlights, case studies, and participant list.
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Assuring Compliance
We target compliance and enforcement activities to ensure compliance with laws and regulations, with an emphasis on correcting violations with significant potential harm to human health and the environment. In addition to self-directed investigations, we receive thousands of leads and incident reports relating to oil and natural gas activities that could impact human health and air or water quality. We work with state and local governments to respond to incidents, encourage diligent accident prevention, and provide effective and prompt responses when emergencies occur. Our offices around the nation ("Regions" or "Regional offices") provide guidance and grants to state regulators, perform inspections, conduct enforcement actions, and issue permits and information request letters, in order to ensure that existing federal laws are consistently and effectively implemented.
Top of PageTop Dollar
Why is Top Gear, alone among BBC programmes, allowed to keep breaking editorial guidelines?
By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 6th August 2011
What distinguishes the BBC from the rest of this country’s media? There’s the lack of advertising, and the lack of a proprietor with specific business interests to defend. But perhaps the most important factor is its editorial guidelines, which are supposed to ensure that the corporation achieves “the highest standards of due accuracy and impartiality and strive[s] to avoid knowingly and materially misleading our audiences.”
Here’s a few of the things they say:
“Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.”
“We will be rigorous in establishing the truth of the story and well informed when explaining it. Our specialist expertise will bring authority and analysis to the complex world in which we live.”
“We will be open in acknowledging mistakes when they are made and encourage a culture of willingness to learn from them.”
Woe betide the producer or presenter who breaches these guidelines. Unless, that is, they work for Top Gear. If so, they are permitted to drive a coach and horses – or a Hummer H3 – through them whenever they please.
Take, for example, Top Gear’s line on electric cars. Casting aside any pretence of impartiality or rigour, it has set out to show that electric cars are useless. If the facts don’t fit, it bends them until they do.
It’s currently being sued by Tesla after claiming, among other allegations, that the Roadster’s true range is only 55 miles per charge (rather than 211), and that it unexpectedly ran out of charge. Tesla says “the breakdowns were staged and the statements are untrue.” But the BBC keeps syndicating the episode to other networks. So much for “acknowledging mistakes when they are made”.
Now it’s been caught red-handed faking another trial, in this case of the Nissan LEAF.
At the end of July, an episode of Top Gear showed Jeremy Clarkson and James May setting off for Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire, 60 miles away. The car unexpectedly ran out of charge when they got to Lincoln, and had to be pushed. They concluded that “electric cars are not the future”.
But it wasn’t unexpected: Nissan has a monitoring device in the car which transmits information on the state of the battery. This shows that, while the company delivered the car to Top Gear fully-charged, the programme-makers ran the battery down before Clarkson and May set off, until only 40% of the charge was left. Moreover, they must have known this, as the electronic display tells the driver how many miles’ worth of electricity they have, and the sat-nav tells them if they don’t have enough charge to reach their destination. In this case it told them – before they set out on their 60-mile journey – that they had 30 miles’ worth of electricity. But, as Ben Webster of the Times reported earlier this week, “at no point were viewers told that the battery had been more than half empty at the start of the trip.”
It gets worse. As Webster points out, in order to stage a breakdown in Lincoln, “it appeared that the Leaf was driven in loops for more than ten miles in Lincoln until the battery was flat.”
When Jeremy Clarkson was challenged about this, he admitted that he knew the car had only a small charge before he set out. But, he said, “That’s how TV works”. Not on the BBC it isn’t, or not unless your programme is called Top Gear.
Top Gear’s response, by its executive producer Andy Wilman, is a masterpiece of distraction and obfuscation. He insists that the programme wasn’t testing the range claims of the vehicles, and nor did it state that the vehicles wouldn’t achieve their claimed range. But the point is that it creates the strong impression that the car ran out of juice unexpectedly, leaving the presenters stranded in Lincoln, a city with no public charging points.
Yes, this is an entertainment programme, yes it’s larking about, and sometimes it’s very funny. But none of this exempts it from the BBC’s guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts.
The issue is made all the more potent by the fact that Top Gear has a political agenda. It’s a mouthpiece for an extreme form of libertarianism and individualism. It derides attempts to protect the environment, and promotes the kind of driving that threatens other people’s peace and other people’s lives. It often creates the impression that the rules and restraints which seek to protect us from each other are there to be broken.
This is dangerous territory. Boy racers, in many parts of the countryside, are among the greatest hazards to local people’s lives. Where I live, in rural mid-Wales, the roads are treated as race tracks. Many of the young lads who use them compete to see who can clock up the fastest speeds on a given stretch. The consequences are terrible: a series of hideous crashes involving young men and women driving too fast, which kill other people or maim them for life. In the latest horror, just down the road from where I live, a young man bumped another car through a fence and into a reservoir. Four of the five passengers drowned.
Of course I’m not blaming only Top Gear for this, but it plays a major role in creating a comfort zone within which edgy driving is considered acceptable, even admirable. Top Gear’s political agenda also persists in stark contradiction to BBC rules on impartiality.
So how does it get away with it? It’s simple. It makes the BBC a fortune. Both the 15th and 16th series of Top Gear were among the top 5 TV programmes sold internationally by BBC Worldwide over the last financial year.
Another section of the editorial guidelines tells us that “our audiences should be confident that our decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures”. But in this case we can’t be. I suggest that it is purely because of commercial pressures that Top Gear is allowed to rig the evidence, fake its trials, pour petrol over the BBC’s standards and put a match to them. The money drives all before it.
www.monbiot.comPlease enable Javascript to watch this video
ST. PETERS, MO - Friends and relatives of a Ft. Zumwalt East teenager killed in a car crash last week are rallying to show support for her family. Emily Oechsner was 16. She was a cheerleader and soccer player.
“She was spunky and full of fire,” said Michelle Oechsner, Emily’s mother. “Everybody that knew her loved her.”
A special Boot Camp Challenge was held Saturday at Ft. Zumwalt East to show support for Emily’s family. Emily was involved in Boot Camp Challenge Programs and her aunt is a program director. T-shirts were sold Saturday to help raise money for the family. A GofundMe page has also been established.
Emily’s parents say their daughter was an organ donor and was able to help save lives with the organs she donated.
“She lives on in a little bit of everyone, so that gives us peace and comfort,” said Michelle Oechsner.
“I really do believe with Emily being able to donate her organs to save lives has really been significant in helping them move through this,” said Lori Patterson, Boot Camp Challenge Founder.
Emily was not wearing her seatbelt when she crashed. Friends say she did not like the way the seatbelt rubbed against her neck sometimes. Her parents hope other teens will learn a lesson after seeing what happened to Emily. She was killed not far from her home.
“Learn to use that seatbelt no matter how far, how close you are driving,” said Michelle Oechsner. “It’s very important.”
Her parents are also grateful of the outpouring of support they have received.
“Various friends, family, strangers everybody kind of coming together, selling t-shirts, getting here early helping out, doing raffles I mean it’s, it’s awesome,” said Matt Oechsner, Emily’s Father.
“She’s looking down now saying, wow everybody is coming together for me, and it would make her feel very, very good,” said Michelle Oechsner. “Very special.”
38.789043 -90.585245Recently Michelle, Rowan, Naomi and I embarked on a cross-country train trip to attend a family reunion in the eastern townships of Quebec. With a little extra time left over after the festivities, I decided to connect with Stefan Sobkowiak of Miracle Farms for a day, having come across Stefan’s work in this amazing Youtube video:
Over the course of the day, I gleaned some great ideas and tips from Miracle Farms. I’m excited to share my three top insights with you.
Miracle Farms: A NAP Model
Stefan had been farming in a beyond-organic way for over 20 years, with great success. What’s unique is that he interplants multiple NAP species per orchard row – NAP stands for nitrogen fixer, |
head was Blue Rose’s leader. She was a priestess who bore the holy symbol of the Water God, the wielder of the demonic blade, Kilineyram -- Lakyus Alvein Dale Aindra. 站在最前头的是苍蔷薇的领队。她是带着水神圣印的神官，那把魔剑的持有者、拉裘丝・亚尔贝因・蒂尔・艾因卓。 Her beautiful features were such that even her fellow females would be enthralled by them, and it was hard to believe she was a top-class adventurer of the like which only fighting geniuses could be. If she wore a dress, she would be the very picture of a princess which a commoner like Neia imagined. 那连同性也会看得入迷的端庄容貌，实在让人难以想象那是只有战斗的天才才能达到的最高级冒险者。如果穿上礼服的话，就是平民出身的涅亚所幻想中的公主般的女性了吧。 That beautiful woman spoke with a gentle voice that matched all of Neia’s fantasies about her. 那位美女发出如同想象般的温柔声音。 “Thank you for your invitation. We are Blue Rose.” 「承蒙邀请，非常感谢。我们是苍蔷薇」 Remedios, who had stood up to welcome them, nodded slightly to express her gratitude. 站起来出去迎接的蕾梅蒂欧丝稍微低下头，表示感谢之意。 “I cannot thank you enough for accepting our invitation, honored members of Blue Rose.” 「愿意接受我方的委托而来，真是感激不尽，苍蔷薇的各位」 “We are the ones who are honored to receive an invitation from the paladin who bears a holy sword and who has skills to match, Remedios Custodio-sama.” 「能被那位圣剑的持有者，以及物以类比的能力而周知的圣骑士、蕾梅蒂欧丝・卡斯特迪奥大人的邀请，我方才是非常荣幸」 Their exchange highlighted Remedios’ straightforward and somewhat stiff manner of speech and contrasted it with Lakyus’ natural way of speaking. It would seem she really was a noble heiress. 在这种流于形式的问候上，相对起蕾梅蒂欧丝那有些生硬死板的语调，拉裘丝则相当的自然。身为贵族小姐的事情看来是真的。 “Ah, I’m the one who should be happy to meet the wielder of the demonic blade like yourself. Ahem. Please take a seat. The people around us are all paladins of the Holy Kingdom. It would be good if we could all listen in. Erm, if there’s time after that, I would like very much to see the demonic blade.” 「啊，我才是能与魔剑持有主的您见面——感到十分高兴，咳。还请入坐。然后周围的人都是圣王国的圣骑士。要是能一起听听就再好不过了。呃，若是之后有时间，能让我拜见下魔剑的话那就、非常感激」 “Gladly, and the chance to behold your holy sword would please me beyond words. Then, let us do as our host bids and take a seat, everyone.” 「我很乐意，只是若也能让我看看圣剑的话就再好不过。那么恭敬不如从命，我们就坐下吧，大家」 The members of Blue Rose each sat down in their own way. Some of them had already folded their arms and grasped their elbows. Given their skills, it made Neia wonder if they had always been that way or if they had learned it along the way. 苍蔷薇的众人照着各自的方式坐在椅子上。其中已经有杵着手肘和抱着胳膊的人了。如果考虑到她们的实力，会让人不可思议的觉得，那份目中无人的态度该说是适合好呢还是本应如此呢。 “Shall we introduce ourselves?” 「首先该自我介绍下比较好吗？」 The vice-captain answered, probably to help Remedios out. 是要帮助蕾梅蒂欧丝吧，回答的人是副团长。 “No, there’s no need for that. News of your exploits has made its way around the Holy Kingdom. Ah, and while it’s a little late for this, I’m the vice-captain of the paladin order, Gustav Montanis.” 「不，没有那个必要。各位的传闻早就传遍了圣王国。虽然介绍晚了，我是圣骑士团副团长古斯塔博·蒙塔尼斯」 Lakyus smiled gently at Gustav’s answer. 对于古斯塔博的回答，拉裘丝温和地笑笑。 “Really now. It would be good if that news was flattering.” 「是这样吗？如果是好的传闻就好了呢」 “Ah--” 「啊——」 “--Yes. We’ve heard nothing but good things about you. In truth, I find it hard to hide my excitement over your heroic exploits.” 「——是的。听说的尽是些好的传闻啊。各位的英勇传说真是让我也难掩兴奋之情呢」 It would seem Remedios wanted to say something, but Gustav had interrupted her. After that, he smiled to Lakyus like nothing was the matter. 蕾梅蒂欧丝要说什么的时候古斯塔博打了岔，然后若无其事的与拉裘丝互相笑颜以对。 “How delightful. While I wish to ask about what sort of rumors those were, we are here today to accept a request. It is not our intention to waste our client’s valuable time. That being the case, let us discuss the particulars of this request.” 「那还真是令人开心。虽然很想问问是怎样的传闻，不过我们是接受委托而来的。耽搁掉委托人的宝 贵时间也并非我们的本意。那么请让我确认委托的内容」 “Mhm. Before that, I’d like to ask the name of that girl--” 「唔嗯。在那之前我想问下那个女孩的名字啊—」 Neia jumped in fright as she realized one of the twin thieves was pointing at her. The other one was also looking at her in interest. 被这话吓到一看，双胞胎盗贼中的一人正指着涅亚。另一人也兴致勃勃的看着这里。 The two of them ought to be the twin thieves known as Tia and Tina. Despite being members of Blue Rose, which was famed even in the Holy Kingdom, there were no rumors or tales of their deeds. They were a pair of mysterious individuals. 这两人应该就是叫做缇亚和缇娜的双胞胎盗贼吧。连在圣王国也大名鼎鼎的苍蔷薇成员之中，唯有她们没有一点英勇传说和逸闻，是两个谜团重重的人物。 And now those individuals were pointing at her. 那样的人物正指着自己。 She felt like she had suddenly been shoved on stage from an audience seat. Thoughts like why is this happening bounced around inside her mind. 感觉就像是从舞台侧面突然被丢到辉煌的舞台上一样。为啥、为什么、为何这些词语在脑中打转。 “That girl doesn’t have a warrior’s body. Different from our musclehead’s.” 「那女孩不是战士系的体格呢啊。跟我们家的肌肉完全不一样」 “Oi! What was that supposed to mean!?” 「喂！那是什么意思！」 The person who had spoken up was Gagaran, the lady warrior who was built like a brick shithouse. 出声的是一堵厚墙般的女战士、格格兰。 “Exactly what I said....She’s not a warrior, no matter how you look at it. Now this is a warrior.” 「就字面上的意思啊。……那女孩不是战士，无论怎么看。所谓的战士是这个」 “Oi oi, you can train your body with experience, you know.” 「喂喂，只要累积经验，肉体就能更加得到锻炼的喔」 “So you’re going to evolve then, Gagaran?” The thieves’ faces hardened. “Don’t be mean, I feel sorry for that girl.” 「格格兰是快要进化了？」盗贼的表情一下子变得尖锐起来「别说那么过分的话，那女孩真可怜」 “Hey! Is it me or have you gotten full of yourself since you went training with me? Oi!” 「喂！妳这家伙在跟老子一起进行修行后是不是变得更过份啦？吶！」 “Nothing’s changed. Just that it hurts when you grab me with your retard strength when I’m sleeping--” 「什么变化都没有喔。睡觉的时候被妳的怪力抱着，侧腹痛的——」 “--That’s enough out of the two of you… I’m sorry, that’s just how we are.” 「——两人都差不多一点。……真抱歉呢，我们的人这个样子」 “Please pay it no heed. Her name is Neia Baraja. She has keen senses, and she’s made a lot of contributions during our journey here.” 「请不用在意。她是涅亚·巴拉哈，是我们的侍从。她的感觉很敏锐，在到此的旅途上出了很多力」 “I understand.” 「了解」 The reply was flat and emotionless, not cute in the slightest. 说得平淡不带感情，一点都不可爱。 “..Mm. Well, while that was our fault, we haven’t made any progress at all. If nobody minds, shall we begin discussing the matter? Also, there’s no point talking like fancy nobles, is there? Let’s get right to it, shall we?” 「……嗯。虽然是我方不好，但是话题完全没有进展啊。要是谁都没意见的话，那么就快点开始谈事情吧？还有各自用贵族风格的绕圈子说话方式也没用吧？单刀直入的来说话没问题吧？」 “Evileye,” Lakyus said in a reproachful tone. 「伊维尔哀」拉裘丝责备似的叫了她的名字。 That was the arcane magic caster Evileye. Clad in her mask, she could use powerful spells, but she never removed it under any circumstances. She had a very slight frame -- some rumors said she might be from a small-bodied species. 魔力系魔法吟唱者(Magic Caster)伊维尔哀。带着面具的她能使用强大的魔法，不管何时都没脱下面具。身体很娇小——有传言说她可能是别的什么身型矮小的种族。 “No, that’s fine. I’m not good at all this wheels-within-wheels stuff myself.” 「不，那样也没关系。我也很不擅长这种话中有话的方式」 “Captain…” 「团长……」 “...Kuku. Well, the other side’s boss has given their approval -- how about ours? Besides, once they pay the appropriate fee, they’ll be our clients. Let’s not bother with feeling each other up and get to the question of money. Won’t it be better to seal the deal sooner rather than later?” 「……呵呵。对方的老大很好说话，我们家的老大又如何呢？再说，支付了与情报费相应金额的报酬的话，对方就是委托人。与其互相探对方的底去浪费时间还不如快快地谈钱的事，把契约早点定下不是更好吗？」 Lakyus sighed, and Evileye continued, seemingly sneering at them. 拉裘丝唉地叹了口气后，伊维尔哀以咧嘴笑的氛围继续开口道。 “Well, our boss has given her okay too, so shall we firm up the details before we talk about payment? I take it you want to talk about the person messing up your country. Jaldabaoth?” 「已经得到我们家老大的默许了，那么在谈委托费之前让我先确认委托内容喔？有想要谈的事情，那是指在贵国作乱的亚达巴沃的事吧？」 “You knew?” 「妳知道的吗」 “OI oi, do you think we wouldn’t know something the nobles did? The Kingdom has marine traders too, you know. Plus, the Adventurer’s Guilds do exchange information as well. That said, how about it? Want to share what you know, too? Frankly speaking, we’d be happier to obtain information than money.” 「喂喂，妳觉得贵族们知道的情报我们会不知道？王国也有商人使用海路移动。而且冒险者工会之间多少也有情报交流。虽说如此，那么，是怎样？不来交换下彼此的情报吗？比起拿到钱，对我们来说弄到情报更高兴」 “Mm… may, may I have a moment to discuss this with Gustav?” 「唔……。稍、稍微让我和古斯塔博讨论下可以吗？」 Evileye waved to indicate that they should proceed, and then Remedios and Gustav rose and entered the adjoining room -- the bedroom. 伊维尔哀做出请吧的手势，蕾梅蒂欧丝和古斯塔博就站起来，进到隔壁的房间——寝室里。 “Then, can we use this flask?” 「那啥，这个水壶可以用吗？」 Gagaran pointed to the flask of water and the glasses around it as she addressed Neia. 指着桌上正中央摆着的水壶和杯子，格格兰向涅亚发问。 Why me, Neia fretted as she replied, “Please do.” She wanted to praise herself for her perfect tone and not letting her voice tremble. 为什么是我啊，涅亚一边心里焦虑不已一边回答「请用吧」。声音没有发抖，自己都想赞美自己的态度真完美。 After Gagaran had poured water for everyone, Remedios and Gustav returned. 格格兰准备好全员的水后，蕾梅蒂欧丝和古斯塔博回来了。 “We’ll pay your fee, so can you tell us what you know?” 「我们会付委托费的，所以可以就听你们那边的情报吗？」 Uwah, Neia thought. For some reason, she had the feeling that Remedios, who had complained about the expense of staying in an inn, would not approve. While Gustav had probably said something to her, Neia had no idea what reasons he had used to convince her. 喔呀，涅亚这么想。为什么觉得旅馆的费用很浪费的蕾梅蒂欧丝会没有同意呢。虽然大概是因为古斯塔博说了什么吧，但涅娅并不清楚到底是出于何种理由而去说服的她。 “That’s fine too, although I think we’d be able to tell you what you need to know if you told us about the absolute state of the Holy Kingdom now.” 「那也没有关系喔？只是觉得知道圣王国的现状的话，更能够提供你们想要的情报」 “Please let us pay the appointed fee.” 「让我支付指定的费用吧」 Gustav promptly placed a small pouch on the table. 古斯塔博立刻把小小的皮袋放到了桌上。 “Mm, oi.” 「嗯，喂」 Evileye jerked her chin at one of the thieves. In response, she swiftly reached out and snatched up the pouch, tossing it up and down lightly in her hand. Then she caught it and nodded to Evileye. 伊维尔哀对盗贼的一人扬扬下巴。于是其中一人快速的向皮袋伸手，轻轻地抛了起来。然后再抓住它，向伊维尔哀点了点头。 She was probably trying to see if it contained the expected amount by the sensation from throwing it up and catching it. 是为了从抛起的感触和、落在手里的感触，判断其中是否有装入预想的金额吧。 “Alright. Then I, Evileye, Shall explain on their behalf… Although, like I said just now, it’s a little unrealistic for you to demand all the information we have about Jaldabaoth. Let’s start by talking about what happened in our country. But before that, I want to verify something with you. Your Jaldabaoth looks like this, right?” 「好吧。那么就由我伊维尔哀作为代表来说明吧。……虽然如此，刚刚我也讲过，即使说你们想要有关亚达巴沃的所有情报也有点不着边际啊。首先先说说在这个国家发生了什么好了。但是在那之前有个大前提需要确认。那个叫亚达巴沃的是长这个样子的家伙没错吧」 Evileye took a pen and paper from beside the table and began drawing with fluid strokes. However, the picture she produced could only be regarded as childish scribblings as best. 伊维尔哀从桌子旁边的书桌上拿起笔跟纸，以流利的动作沙沙地画了起来。但那之后的完成图，就算说得好听点也只是小朋友的涂鸦。 Remedios was about to say, “No, that’s not…” before one of the twins snatched back the paper and tore it in half. 蕾梅蒂欧丝刚要说「不对，不是……」但还没说完其中一个双胞胎就把画收了回去、然后撕成了两半。 “What the hell are you doing!?” 「妳这家伙，在做什么！」 While Evileye was furious, the other twin snatched away the pen in the meantime and drew swiftly on the new piece of paper, then showed Evileye the finished product. The masked magic caster muttered, “Uguu…” in a disgruntled tone. The truth was, it was of far greater quality than the picture just now. 虽然伊维尔哀激动不已，但是双胞胎的另一人却趁隙拿走笔，在新的纸上快速的动着，然后将完成品摆在面前。带着面具的魔法吟唱者(Magic Caster)发出了「呜咕咕……」这样不甘心的含糊呻吟。老实说，完成度之高与刚才的根本无法相提并论。 His appearance was very difficult to describe with words. He was dressed in foreign clothing and wore a strange mask. After seeing the picture, Remedios angrily clenched her fists and growled like a wild beast. “That’s the bastard.” 看上去的确是很难用言语说明的服装。从没见过的异国服饰和奇怪的面具。看了画之后，蕾梅蒂欧丝因愤怒而双拳颤抖不已，同时像是野兽一样吼着说「就是这家伙」。 After seeing this, the twins and Evileye ceased their feuding and turned back towards Remdios. 看了这情况后冷静下来了吧，伊维尔哀停下与双子的争辩，再度转向蕾梅蒂欧丝。 “Then we’ve verified one thing, that this is the same per-- the same demon. Well, if demons like that could appear one after the other, we’d be in trouble. Thank heaven for small mercies, as they say. Now--” 「那么这样就能确认一点了啊。确实是同一人——同一恶魔。嘛，要是这样的怪物一个接一个跑出来就麻烦了。该说这是不幸中的大幸吗。那么——」 Evileye then proceeded to narrate the events that had transpired in the Royal Capital, and Neia winced in her heart. 接下来伊维尔哀将在王都发生过的事说了个大概，涅亚在心中做出痛苦的表情。 She knew Jaldabaoth was strong. And she knew that the demon army and that scaly demon existed, so she was not shocked by them. But the fact that there were five maid demons who could each take on an entire adamantite-ranked adventurer team by themselves intensified her sense of utter despair. 对于亚达巴沃的强大已经做好了觉悟。而且已经确认了恶魔大军和有鳞恶魔的存在，因此并不吃惊。但是居然还有五名能在精钢级冒险者队伍们的围攻下、打的平分秋色的女仆恶魔的新情报让绝望感愈发加剧。 I don’t think anyone spotted the maid demons in the Holy Kingdom. So they’re Jaldabaoth’s trump card? To think he had something like that... （应该没有在圣王国目击到女仆恶魔过。是亚达巴沃的王牌？居然藏着这样的……） “--Then, what would you estimate Jaldabaoth’s difficulty rating to be?” 「——那么以各位的判断，亚达巴沃的难度推测是多少呢？」 Gustav’s question caused Blue Rose to look at each other, but in the end it was still Evileye who spoke on everyone’s behalf. 古斯塔博的发问让苍蔷薇全员面面相觑，最后果然还是由伊维尔哀作为代表开口。 “Let me get this out of the way first; this value is just a conjecture. It might be higher, it might be lower, so I hope you’ll keep that in mind. We estimate that demon’s difficulty to be around two hundred.” 「我先说在前头。接下来说的数值仅仅只是个推测而已。有可能比较高也可能比较低，这件事希望你们先放在心上。我们认为那个恶魔的难度大概在二百左右」 “Two hundred…” 「二百……」 Gustav gasped. Neia very nearly gasped as well, but she managed to resist that impulse. Some of the paladins lining the walls were not so successful. Remedios was the only one to remain calm, her expression unchanged. 古斯塔博发出了像是喘气的声音。涅亚也一样要发出喘声，不过却拼命忍了下来。沿着墙壁整队的圣 骑士之中也看到有几个没忍住发出一样的喘声。蕾梅蒂欧丝却是其中唯一冷静的，表情连一点变化也没有。 If Neia recalled correctly, difficulty one hundred monsters were not something which humans could defeat. 如果涅亚的记忆正确的话，一百不是人类能打倒的极限吗？ “Exactly how powerful is a rating of two hundred?” 「两百具体来说多强呢？」 Evileye seemed to have a bit of trouble answering Remedios’ earnest question. 对于蕾梅蒂欧丝老实的提问，伊维尔哀像是有点困扰的回答。 “While difficulty two hundred beings have never appeared in the human world before… well, old Dragons would be roughly around one hundred.” 「虽然两百的存在并没有在人类的世界出现过……嘛，壮年(Old)的龙[Dragon]的话大约在一百左右吧」 “An old dragon… while I’ve never fought those before, would that be around the same as the Guardian Deity of the oceans?” 「壮年的龙吗……。虽然没有战斗过……差不多和大海的守护神大人一样吗？」 The Guardian Deity of the ocean referred to a Sea Dragon which dwelled in the sea. 大海的守护神指的是住在海里的海龙[Sea Dragon]。 It had two arms and feet and a long, thick tail that replaced its atrophied wings. It resembled a Sea Serpent more than a Dragon, and its intellect was on par with or surpassed mankind. It was quite a benevolent being that would protect ships if it was properly venerated. 有双手双足，有着取代了退化的翅膀的又长又宽的粗大尾巴。样子比起海蛇[Sea Serpent]更接近龙族，拥有与人类相等或着之上的智能。要是上供的话，就会保护船只，是相当温厚的存在。 Neia had the very good fortune of seeing it once, from a distance, when they had gone to Rimun on holiday. 在涅亚一家旅行时去过的里穆恩，就曾经很幸运的远远看到过一次。 It had raised its head high above the surface of the seas, and it was a sight majestic enough to earn it the title of Guardian Deity. It was hard to imagine a human being could defeat such a being. 从海面上高高伸起的头。那样的姿态的确伟大到能被称为守护神。实在难以相信有人类可以赢过那样的存在。 “Captain Remedios. If we use defeating the Guardian Deity as a baseline… hm, if there were a fisherman here he’d be giving us the stink-eye. Still, that means he’s twice as strong as an old Dragon.” 「卡斯特迪奥团长。将打倒守护神大人基准来考虑……这里要是有渔夫在的话可是不会给出好脸色的喔。但是，也就是说比壮年龙还要强上两倍呢」 “Indeed. We’ve determined that he’s stronger than the legendary Demon Gods who were defeated by the Thirteen Heroes. That is to say, his appearance in the human world would be a great tragedy and several nations will be destroyed. That’s how powerful he is.” 「也是啊。我们判断那家伙比，据称被十三英雄打倒的传说中的魔神们还要强。在人类世界出现的话绝对是大惨案，好几个国家会因此而毁灭。就是那么强的意思」 “Although, I hear that when Jaldabaoth was wreaking havoc in the Kingdom, he was driven off by Momon-dono. That would mean Momon-dono must be just as powerful, right?” Remedios swallowed, and then continued. “Or does that mean -- he used some kind of special item when defeating Jaldabaoth?” 「可我听说亚达巴沃在王国作乱时，被漆黒的飞飞阁下给击退了啊。那也就是说那位飞飞阁下也有着同样的强度吧？」古斯塔博吞了一口气「还是说——在击退亚达巴沃时有带着什么特别的道具吗？」 That was when Evileye’s attitude changed. 顿时伊维尔哀的气氛发生了改变。 Neia could not see her face, but she had the feeling that her face was flushing under that mask of hers. 虽说还是无法看到其表情，但是总感觉在那面具之下的神色正泛起红潮。 “I don’t think he used any such item. However, Momon-sama fought magnificently when he duelled Jaldabaoth. I was fighting Jaldabaoth’s subordinates back then, so I did not see the full fight, but it was a terrifying battle. It was a battle fought by a hero among hero, a champion among champions.” 「我不觉得有用什么道具。但是那勇猛的战斗身影——飞飞大人和亚达巴沃进行剑斗的时候，我正和那家伙的部下战斗，并没有看到全部的过程，但那是非常令人惊愕的战斗。那才是英雄中的英雄，勇者中的勇者的战斗」 “Is, is that so?” 「是、是那样子吗？」 It was all Gustav could do to squeeze those words out after being crushed by Evileye’s presence as she leaned herself out. 被探出身子诉说的伊维尔哀的魄力压倒，古斯塔博挤出这一句已经是尽最大努力了吧。 “Precisely! Ah, what an amazing battle. Momon-sana defended me while he was fighting Jaldabaoth, you know.” 「就是这样！呀，那真是太厉害了，飞飞大人可是一边保护着我一边和亚达巴沃战斗呢」 “So he fought Jaldabaoth -- that monster -- and drove him off? Is that true?” 「和亚达巴沃——和那个怪物正面战斗还将其击退了吗？这是真的？」 “What!? Are you saying what I saw with my own two eyes was a lie!?” 「什么！妳想说我亲眼看到的事情是在说谎吗？」 Evileye countered Remedios’ question with a vicious retort. Gustav struggled to clear the uneasy mood in the air. 伊维尔哀对蕾梅蒂欧丝的提问以严厉的声音反问。这不安的气氛让古斯塔博急忙来打圆场。 “Ah, no, what our Captain meant was that if Darkness could attack some weak point of Jaldabaoth’s, perhaps we could do something too. I apologize for not clarifying.” 「啊不、我们团长的意思是，漆黒若是能攻击到亚达巴沃那不知在哪的弱点的话，即使是我们说不定也能做些什么。话没说清楚真是非常抱歉」 “No, we should be apologizing for the childish tone our Evileye is taking with a client.” 「这边才是，我们的伊维尔哀对委托人的各位用这般幼稚的态度真是抱歉」 That reply came from Lakyus. What was this, when the two main players were cast aside and their supporting cast went on to smooth things out between themselves. 回答的是拉裘丝。将两个当事人丢在一旁，旁边的人擅自调解起来是怎样啊。 “Mm… well, assuming Jaldabaoth really does have some weak point, Momon-sama must have won by attacking it. It’s hard to imagine a demon like that would leave his weaknesses unguarded.” 「嗯。……就算亚达巴沃真的有弱点，而飞飞大人朝此攻击并取得了胜利。也很难想象，像那样的恶魔会就这样放着弱点不管」 “Indeed… perhaps he used an item or a subordinate to make up for it.” 「的确如此……。是有可能会利用道具或是部下来弥补这点」 While this was the first time she had heard of the maid demons, Jaldabaoth had several powerful demon minions. 虽然女仆恶魔是第一次听说，但是亚达巴沃有几个强大的恶魔部下。 After questioning demihuman captives, they knew there were at least three of them. 从亚人俘虏那里问出的情报来看，可以知道最少也有三只。 There was the demon who ruled the wilderness where the demihumans lived. 支配着亚人们所居住的荒野的恶魔。 There was the demon who ruled the port city of Rimun. 支配着港湾都市里穆恩的恶魔。 And then, there was the scaly demon who commanded the demihuman army. 还有指挥亚人军队的有鳞恶魔。 “Right, can you tell us in detail about that scaly demon you mentioned earlier?” 「对了，能详细说说刚才提到的有鳞恶魔的事吗？」 “That’s right, can you tell us what abilities it has?” 「没错，能详细告诉我们具有哪些能力吗？」 “Right, I fought it before, so I’ll take Evileye’s place and describe it in detail.” 「好的，就由我来代替伊维尔哀，来详细说明与我战斗过的恶魔吧」 She described its abilities and how they fought it. Lakyus’ tale ended with Brain Unglaus -- a man on Gazef’s level -- slaying that demon. 讲述有着怎样的能力，还有是如何进行战斗的。拉裘丝的一番话以被认为和葛杰夫·史托罗诺夫同等级的布莱恩·安格劳斯这个男人打倒了那个恶魔作为结尾。 “...That’s strange. Jaldabaoth hasn’t made any movements after conquering the Holy Kingdom’s capital, but that scaly demon’s been commanding the demihuman armies in his pOracle kicked off its Interact 2014 conference today by noting it has added 350 marketing applications and data partners in the past year. That's resulted in "the industry's largest marketing technology ecosystem."
As part of that, Oracle said its AppCloud now includes 235 fully integrated apps. Its BlueKai program has about 300 partners in data, media, privacy and technology that leverage BlueKai data for solutions that extend beyond ad targeting.
The announcements, issued hours before the conference opened, said the growth means clients can more easily build a personal dialogue with customers across channels, a goal that has evolved into something of a Holy Grail for digital marketers. Perhaps more significantly, the conference is also providing some clarity on Oracle's roadmap for integrating its costly acquisitions, including $871 million for Eloqua, $1.5 billion for Responsys and an estimated $350 million-plus for BlueKai.
A Bigger AppCloud
Oracle is integrating by expanding its ecosystem instead of only building a complete suite of solutions based on its acquisitions. Kevin Akeroyd, general manager of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. elaborated on the company's commitment to integration in an hour-long conversation with reporters later in the day.
"Unlike the past, when it's been enough to go out and buy best-of-breed, I believe the winners are going to be the ones who are very committed to integration. Integration is going to become as important, if not more important, as buying best-of-breed assets," he said.
Akeroyd said Oracle had already proven it's "very, very good at integration" by fully integrating Eloqua into its suite within six months of purchase. Compendium was integrated into Eloqua in four months, he said, and the company plans to integrate BlueKai and Responsys "just as aggressively."
Shakeout Ahead
Later, he predicted there would be "a shakeout" in the fast-growing digital marketing space, hinting that smaller players could fall by the wayside.
"I do think there's going to be a shakeout in the marketplace where the pretenders are going to shake out and the real players that have investments, have best-of-breed, have real solutions instead of pretty PowerPoints [will succeed]," he said. "I can tell you we absolutely see that coming."
That said, he declined to speculate when Oracle would recover its own huge investment in marketing technology. Instead, he gave hints that the company would continue deepen its already bullish commitment to the space.
Can't Keep Up
"I think what Oracle realizes is it can't acquire fast enough and can't innovate fast enough. There's just no way. Marketing is changing much too fast. So that's where the whole AppCloud comes in," said Scott Vaughan, CMO at Integrate, an Oracle partner that offers a cloud-based platform for moving outside data into marketing platforms.
"By making a more definitive statement around the cloud, now Oracle can go and get partners like Integrate to put the pieces together, whether it's the Oracle-owned pieces or in the greater ecosystem."
The idea of integrating apps from a central store contrasts with efforts of Adobe to build a suite based on its own acquisitions. A major update to the Adobe Marketing Cloud is expected this fall and is likely to show deeper integration of Campaign, the email software it acquired from Neolane in 2013 for $600 million.
Open Ecosystem
Vaughan, a 20-year IT veteran who directed the marketing effort at UBM Tech before joining Integrate 10 months ago, said the Adobe approach was focused on bringing creative and marketing efforts together. "Whereas if you look at Oracle or Salesforce, they're building ecosystems -- AppCloud and App Exchange," he said. "Both have their merits, but to me, a more open ecosystem is just the reality."
"There's no way one platform is going to solve everything. It just isn't reality," said Vaughan. "For one, the technology isn't there today, and two, you have too many legacy systems and processes that you have to work with."
Investors, still recovering from a disappointing earnings report from Oracle in late June, shrugged off the latest news. The company's shares were off 0.5 percent at mid-day while the tech-heavy NASDAQ index was up about 0.5 percent. Oracle shares were trading at $40.35 compared to a 52-week |
President and CEO Larry Solov says the company is positioned for big growth in 2017, “2016 proved to be an exciting and unprecedented year of growth for Breitbart News. 2017 promises to be another where we are front and center bringing our hard-hitting brand of journalism to our 45 Million – and growing – monthly visitors. We are excited to welcome Kristina, Sam, and Sean to our team and know they will be instrumental in the aforementioned growth.”
In addition to the new hires, Breitbart News is reassigning political reporters Michelle Moons and Adelle Nazarian to Washington, D.C. to cover Capitol Hill. Moons covered Senator Ted Cruz during the 2016 Republican primary race and then embedded with Vice President Mike Pence during the general election. Nazarian has covered national security issues extensively for Breitbart News and also spent time embedded with Vice President Mike Pence.
ABOUT BREITBART NEWS:
Breitbart News Network operates the Breitbart.com website, which has over 250 million monthly page views and 45 million monthly unique visitors. It also hosts the daily radio show Breitbart News Daily, which is broadcast live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from Monday through Friday 6AM to 9AM Eastern, on Saturday from 10AM to 1PM Eastern, and on Sunday from 7PM to 10PM Eastern. Leading social media analytics company NewsWhip has ranked Breitbart #1 for political social media.What's New
はじめに
引用
On Tuesday night, BuzzFeed News published an explosive, yet completely unverified, dossier alleging that President-elect Donald Trump engaged in a whole host of, shall we say unusual, sexual activities in Moscow. Matt already wrote about the basics of the report and the blackmail threat, so I'm not going to delve into that.
What's worth talking about, however, are swirling claims on Reddit that 4chan users on the board /pol/ completely made the entire thing up. According to a variety of posts on the pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald, a user on /pol/, a 4chan board, made up the most salacious story in the report. He then mailed it to anti-Trump Republican strategist Rick Wilson, who then went to the CIA. The story was then included on the dossier published Tuesday by BuzzFeed News.
If this is true, this effectively means that 4chan trolled the U.S. intelligence system and the majority of the U.S. media with what's basically Donald Trump erotic fanfiction, which is terrifying.
ソース： http://townhall.com/tipsheet/christinerousselle/2017/01/10/did-4chan-troll-the-cia-n2269811
はじめに
引用
Ok, there is a lot to go through with this story, which is going to end up being one of the biggest embarrassments for Buzzfeed, the CIA, and old man McCain ever.
First let's go over what happened, in reference to the pesudo intelligence report aka 'dossier' published by the high level retards over at Buzzfeed.
I know this appears to be unbelievable, but it's all verifiable. The neocon shill of a reporter from Buzzfeed, Rick Wilson, was catfished by some autist from the Hitler loving 4chan message boards and made to believe Trump enjoyed getting urinated on and all sorts of outlandish stuff. Truly, this is incredible. Let me post some screen shots.
（以後の引用は遠慮しておく）
おまけ：Trump の反撃の動画
・（2017-01-12 追加）かなり詳しい続報を見かけたので追加。・事実だとすると CIA は赤っ恥程度では済まされない…w(2017-01-11)（以下、2017-01-12 追加分）・まさか天下の CIA 様がそんな匿名掲示板のヨタ話に引っ掛かる筈はないだろう…と思っていが、どうやらその まさか が実際に起きていた可能性がかなり高くなった。・ソース記事では、時系列で 4ch（匿名掲示板）の捏造ネタに反 Trump 陣営のネオコン幹部→戦争屋の大物議員→CIA→マスメディア→ Obama 政権…という流れで次々に喰い付いた状況が証拠となる元ネタの画像付きで詳しく説明されている。以下ではその冒頭部分だけ引用しておくので、ソースの全体を眺めることを勧める。・（"fake news" を騒ぎ立てていた）CNN ですらこの捏造ネタ（たぶん）にガップリと喰い付いた（そして Trump に反撃を喰らったw）。さすがに NYT は騒ぎ立てはしたが、警戒して喰い付くのだけは回避した。それが若干、惜しまれる…wソース： http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-11/how-4chan-mcfooled-john-mccain-buzzfeed-and-cia-believing-trumps-golden-showers ・You Are Fake News!’: Trump and CNN’s Jim Acosta Get Into Shouting Match at Press Conference(2017-01-12)Our beloved kale salads are not “healthy.” And we are confusing ourselves by believing that they are. (Deb Lindsey/For The Washington Post)
Not long ago, I watched a woman set a carton of Land O’ Lakes Fat-Free Half-and-Half on the conveyor belt at a supermarket.
“Can I ask you why you’re buying fat-free half-and-half?” I said. Half-and-half is defined by its fat content: about 10 percent, more than milk, less than cream.
“Because it’s fat-free?” she responded.
“Do you know what they replace the fat with?” I asked.
“Hmm,” she said, then lifted the carton and read the second ingredient on the label after skim milk: “Corn syrup.” She frowned at me. Then she set the carton back on the conveyor belt to be scanned along with the rest of her groceries.
[Forget government guidelines. Here’s how to eat better, in 6 easy steps.]
The woman apparently hadn’t even thought to ask herself that question but had instead accepted the common belief that fat, an essential part of our diet, should be avoided whenever possible.
Then again, why should she question it, given that we allow food companies, advertisers and food researchers to do our thinking for us? In the 1970s, no one questioned whether eggs really were the heart-attack risk nutritionists warned us about. Now, of course, eggs have become such a cherished food that many people raise their own laying hens. Such examples of food confusion and misinformation abound.
The United States government once considered butter and margarine as one of seven food groups to consume daily. Look back at other advice that unfortunately is no longer a part of the FDA's dietary guidelines. (Jayne W. Orenstein/The Washington Post)
“This country will never have a healthy food supply,” said Harry Balzer, an NPD Group analyst and a gleeful cynic when it comes to the American food shopper. “Never. Because the moment something becomes popular, someone will find a reason why it’s not healthy.”
Here, Balzer used the most dangerous term of all: “healthy.”
We are told by everyone, from doctors and nutritionists to food magazines and newspapers, to eat healthy food. We take for granted that a kale salad is healthy and that a Big Mac with fries is not.
In the 1970s, few questioned the prevailing opinion that eggs were a heart attack waiting to happen. Now they are among our most beloved ingredients. (Mark Gail/The Washington Post)
I submit to you that our beloved kale salads are not “healthy.” And we are confusing ourselves by believing that they are. They are not healthy; they are nutritious. They may be delicious when prepared well, and the kale itself, while in the ground, may have been a healthy crop. But the kale on your plate is not healthy, and to describe it as such obscures what is most important about that kale salad: that it’s packed with nutrients your body needs. But this is not strictly about nomenclature. If all you ate was kale, you would become sick. Nomenclature rather shows us where to begin.
“ ‘Healthy’ is a bankrupt word,” Roxanne Sukol, preventive medicine specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, medical director of its Wellness Enterprise and a nutrition autodidact (“They didn’t teach us anything about nutrition in medical school”), told me as we strolled the aisles of a grocery store. “Our food isn’t healthy. We are healthy. Our food is nutritious. I’m all about the words. Words are the key to giving people the tools they need to figure out what to eat. Everyone’s so confused.”
Last March, the Food and Drug Administration sent the nut-bar maker Kind a letter saying their use of the word “healthy” on their packaging was a violation (too much fat in the almonds). Kind responded with a citizens’ petition asking the FDA to reevaluate its definition of the word.
If I may rephrase the doctor’s words: Our food is not healthy; we will be healthy if we eat nutritious food. Words matter. And those that we apply to food matter more than ever.
Kraft cheese slices cannot be called cheese but must be labeled “cheese food” or a “cheese product.” Pringles cannot be called “chips” but rather “crisps.” Yet packaged foods can be labeled “natural” or “all-natural” — what exactly is the difference between the two, anyway? — with little regulation.
Pork rinds are an indulgence, sure, but are they “unhealthy”? They’re practically pure protein. (Kate Patterson/For The Washington Post)
Here is a word we think we understand: protein. Protein is good, yes? Builds strong muscles, has positive health connotations. That’s why “protein shakes” are a multibillion-dollar business. Pork cracklings do not have positive health connotations because we think of them as having a high fat content. But pork cracklings are little more than strips of fried pig skin. Skin is one of the many forms of connective tissue in all animal bodies and is composed almost entirely of protein, typically undergirded by a layer of fat. When these strips of pig skin are fried, most of the fat is rendered out and the connective tissue puffs, resulting in a delectable, crunchy, salty crackling. I therefore recommend them to you as a “protein snack” during your on-the-go day.
Given the infinitely malleable language of food, it’s no wonder American food shoppers are confused.
What is “mechanically separated meat,” a standard ingredient in the turkey bacon and chicken sausages popularized because of our low-fat love? “Do you know what that is?” a grocery store owner asked me. “They basically put poultry carcasses in a giant salad spinner.” Whatever winds up on the walls of the spinner in addition to meat — bits of cartilage (protein!), nerves (I have enough of my own, thank you), vessels, bone fragments — is scraped off and added to the mixing bowl. “Mechanically separated meat” engages our imagination only when someone attaches new words to it, such as “pink slime.”
The label might tell you it’s “enriched,” but it doesn’t tell you that the bread’s ingredients were first stripped of their natural benefits. (PAUL J. RICHARDS/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
“Refined” is another critical food word. Generally, refined means elegant and cultured in appearance, manner or taste, or with impurities removed. Yet that is what food companies have been calling wheat from which the germ and bran have been removed, leaving what is in effect pure starch, devoid of the fiber, oils, iron and vitamins that make wheat nutritious.
That’s not refined, Sukol said, “that’s stripped.” Flour stripped of the nutrition that makes it valuable to our bodies but reduces shelf life.
Because it has been stripped, we must “enrich” it. “Enriched.” “Fortified.” Good, yes? To make rich, to make strong. Food companies added the iron they took out during the refining process, but not enough of what we need. “Refined flour — this resulted in B vitamin and iron deficiencies,” Sukol said, “so they added vitamins and iron. And what do they call that? Enriched and fortified. But they forgot to add folate, vitamin B9, until the 1990s.”
What we don’t know, Sukol said, is how those additions, not to mention the diglycerides and sulphates, combined with the lack of fiber, will affect our metabolism in the long run. So far, she said, “it has resulted in diabetes and metabolic syndrome.”
We will be healthy if we eat nutritious food. Our food is either nutritious or not. We are healthy or we are not. If we eat nutritious food, we may enhance what health we possess.
This is not a judgment on what you choose to eat. If you hunger for a cheese product grilled between bread that’s been stripped of its nutrition, along with a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup (made with tomato paste, corn syrup and potassium chloride), fine. It was one of my favorite childhood meals. Just be aware. Buy fat-free half-and-half if that’s what you like; just know what it is you’re putting in your body and why.
Because, and this is the judgment call, fat isn’t bad; stupid is bad. And until we have better information and clearer shared language defining our food, smart choices will be ever harder to make.
Ruhlman is the author of many books, including “Ruhlman’s How to Roast” and the recent collection of novellas “In Short Measure.” He blogs and can be reached at ruhlman.com. He will join Wednesday’s Free Range chat at noon at live.washingtonpost.com.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly said that refined wheat has had the endosperm and bran removed. In fact, the germ and bran have been removed, and the endosperm remains.This came up recently on StackOverflow. One of the answers was particularly helpful and I thought it might be worth mentioning here. The idea presented there is to break the code into four files, all stored in your project directory. These four files are to be processed in the following order.
load.R This file includes all code associated with loading the data. Usually, it will be a short file reading in data from files. clean.R This is where you do all the pre-processing of data, such as taking care of missing values, merging data frames, handling outliers. By the end of this file, the data should be in a clean state, ready to use. It is much better to do this here rather than clean the data on the original file as this enables you to have a complete record of everything done to the data. functions.R All of the functions needed to perform the actual analysis are stored here. This file should do nothing other than define the functions you need for analysis. (If you require your own functions for loading or cleaning the data, include them at the top of either load.R or clean.R.) In particular, functions.R should not do anything to the data. This means that you can modify this file and reload it without having to go back and repeat steps 1 & 2 which can take a long time to run for large data sets. do.R Here is the code to actually do the analysis. This file will use the functions defined in functions.R to do the calculations, produce figures and tables, etc. All figures and tables that end up in your report, paper or thesis should be coded here. Never create figures and tables manually (i.e., with the mouse and menus) as then you can’t easily reproduce. It is a good idea to save your workspace after each file is run.
There are many advantages to this set up. First, you don’t have to reload the data each time you make a change in a subsequent step. Second, if you come back to an old project, you will be able to work out what was done relatively quickly. It also forces a certain amount of structured thinking in what you are doing, which is helpful.
Often there will be bits and pieces of code that you write, but don’t end up using, yet don’t want to delete. These should either be commented out or saved in files with other names. All analysis from reading data to producing the final results should be reproducible by simply source() ing these four files in order with no further user intervention.
I’ve tried this process on a few projects and found it rather too restrictive. In particular, my do.R file often becomes large and unwieldy. Instead, I am now using the following process.
main.R This file simply contains a list of source statements to run each of the other R files in order. functions.R As above, all of the functions needed to perform the actual analysis are stored here. This file should do nothing other than define the functions you need for analysis. xxx.R All other code is contained in files of the form xxx.R which are called in an appropriate order by main.R. The number and content of these files will depend on the project. Often it will include a load.R file and clean.R file as above. However, I usually have more than one file containing the actual analysis (instead of the do.R file).
The important part of this is that running main.R will run the entire project from scratch. So if the data are updated, or the functions are changed, it is easy to repeat the entire analysis in one step — just run source("main.R").
It is important to be disciplined about keeping the R files neat and documented. You want to be able to figure out what each part of the code does when you look at it a year after writing it. That means inserting comments and removing anything that is not actually used.It is no surprise that the defense contractors want to protect their profits by getting taxpayers to pony up more money. Now they have secured the support of Crossroads GPS in a commercial against Senate candidate and former Virginia governor Tim Kaine. The Crossroads ad follows similar ones from Kaine’s challenger, George Allen, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. All three ads claim that spending cuts under sequestration will result in devastating job losses to the defense industry and Virginia; the Crossroads ad claims 520,000 jobs will be lost. But these estimates are wildly inflated and represent the short-term interests of the defense industry, not the American taxpayer.
In actuality, the cuts, if they occur, will be evenly divided between the Pentagon and the rest of the discretionary budget. They are a very modest share of total federal spending over the next decade, and the assertion that the cuts will lead to massive job losses have been thoroughly refuted here, here, and here. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that such cuts will have beneficial effects over the medium- to long-term, if the savings are returned to taxpayers, and not merely plowed into other federal spending.
All of these pro-GOP ads get the lost jobs number from a study commissioned by the Aerospace Industries Association and authored by George Mason economist Stephen Fuller. Last Friday, the Cato Institute hosted a forum—which included Fuller—that considered the effects of military spending cuts on employment and the economy. We discussed the positive impact that cuts in Pentagon spending can have in the wider economy, and even in a state like Virginia that is more dependent than other states on federal spending. The Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore argued we should just let sequestration happen (I agree). As the Washington Post reported, Economist Benjamin Zycher summed up the hypocrisy of conservatives claiming the defense budget produces jobs:
“Conservatives... are highly dubious about the purported [gross domestic product] and employment benefits of federal domestic spending, as illustrated by the meager effects of the Obama stimulus fiasco,” he said. “There’s no particular reason to believe that defense spending is different.”
I wish that organizations like Crossroads GPS were as committed to saving the taxpayers money as they are to electing Republicans. I’d also like it if they relied on objective facts, not statistics designed to protect the narrow interests of an industry that relies overwhelmingly on taxpayer dollars. We wouldn’t expect Republicans to accept the teachers unions’ claims about job losses from cuts in the Department of Education. Why, then, do they promote these phony numbers by the defense contractors?
On Thursday, Dan Mitchell and I will be discussing this issue—the effects of sequestration—on Capitol Hill. It is not too late to register, but space is limited, so act now.Flyers forward Scott Laughton was carted off the ice during Wednesday's Stanley Cup playoffs game against the Capitals.
With 3:49 remaining in the first period, Laughton got tangled up with Capitals defenseman John Carlson, fell to the ice and crashed awkwardly into the end boards behind the Washington net. He lay motionless on the ice while trainers responded and he was taken to the locker room.
MORE: Top photos of the first round | Caps still haunted by history
There was no immediate update on Laughton's condition, but the Flyers announced he was taken to Philadelphia's Jefferson Hospital for precautionary reasons. Laughton was reportedly speaking with medical personnel as they took him off the ice.
Laughton getting stretchered off the ice as a result of this play. Really scary. pic.twitter.com/aUY6uG7Vpr — Pete Blackburn (@PeteBlackburn) April 20, 2016
terrifying scene with Laughton in Philly pic.twitter.com/M4PFMF4Frc — Stephanie (@myregularface) April 20, 2016
UPDATE: The Flyers announced Laughton would remain hospitalized Wednesday night:
Injury Update: Forward Scott Laughton will be staying overnight at Jefferson Hospital for precautionary reasons. All tests are negative. — Philadelphia Flyers (@NHLFlyers) April 21, 2016
No penalties were assessed on the play.
Laughton, 21, appeared in Games 2 and 3 of the Eastern Conference first-round series, skating 11 and 13 minutes, respectively. He had yet to register a point.
The Flyers led 1-0 in Game 4 at the time of the injury. They trail three games to none in the series.A month after editor and journalist Gauri Lankesh was assassinated on her doorstep in Bengaluru, she remains alive in public memory. This is evident from the continuing protests and vigils across the country in her name. On 2 October, Gandhi Jayanti, and again on 5 October, to mark one month since her death, journalists, artists, activists, students and many others joined street protests, demanding that her killers be found and decrying the “murder of democracy.” Why has the killing of one journalist amongst several led to such a mobilisation?
Lankesh is not the only journalist to be killed. In fact, on 20 September, another journalist, Shantanu Bhowmick was stabbed to death while covering a demonstration by the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT) in Agartala. This year alone, eight journalists have been killed, although not all the deaths can be linked to their work. Yet, the Lankesh assassination has become some kind of inflection point. It has brought together a range of civil society groups, including journalists who are disturbed at the frightening increase in the numbers of lynchings, violent attacks and murders in the last three years by groups that are encouraged by the current political atmosphere in the country.
The central issue after the Lankesh and Bhowmick murders is not just a threat to the lives of journalists, but also a threat to the very meaning of a free media in a democracy. During the Emergency, it was clear that Indira Gandhi saw no point in allowing the press to function freely when, in her view, “the nation” was under threat. So, she used existing laws to invoke the Emergency and impose press censorship. Today, people are talking about an “undeclared” emergency. There is no direct censorship. Yet, what NDTV India anchor Ravish Kumar has called “The National Project for Instilling Fear” is serving the same function. Since 5 September, Kumar and several other independent-minded journalists have received threatening messages saying they will meet the same fate as Lankesh. At least one of the individuals issuing the threats has been traced and identified as someone who follows and is followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on social media. The latter has neither reprimanded him, nor struck him off his list. Such deliberate inaction, and the dominant narrative established by this government that equates dissent and criticism as an attack on “the nation,” sends out a clear message: that attacking people like Kumar, or killing “anti-national” journalists is legitimate.
At the same time, even if some journalists have received death threats, should they demand a special law for their protection? In April this year, Maharashtra passed the Maharashtra Media Persons and Media Institutions (Prevention of Violence and Damage or Loss to Property) Act, 2017. The demand for such a law raises several critical questions in the context of a free media. Should a media, often in conflict with the state, ask for this kind of special treatment? When activists, like those using the Right to Information Act (RTI), are being killed just because they expose the powerful, why should journalists tasked to do just this expect special protection? Surely, the best protection for journalists, and activists, is a society that recognises their legitimate role of speaking truth to power.
What we also need to discuss is the erosion in the legitimacy of the adversarial role of a free media. This is happening insidiously—not as blatantly as United States President Donald Trump’s almost daily diatribe against American mainstream media calling it “fake” media. It began in May 2014 when Modi came to power. He made it clear that he would not address the media directly. He has not held a single press conference, only given exclusive interviews to a couple of sympathetic media houses. Instead, he has conducted a monologue with the Indian public through exhortations at well-publicised meetings, his monthly broadcast “Mann ki Baat,” and a plethora of advertisements in newspapers eulogising him and his government. Why is it that major media houses have not questioned Modi’s decision to avoid facing the press? Why is this considered a favour when it is the duty of an elected official to answer questions, even those that are critical? By exposing yourself to such questioning, you are telling people that you are accountable to them. By avoiding it, you are stating that you do not care what they think. Such an attitude is the antithesis of democracy.
In addition to a government that denies media the right to ask it legitimate questions, media freedom has been eroded in other ways, through takeovers of inconvenient media houses by businesspersons close to the government and the reining in, or even dismissal, of editors considered too critical of the government. The spaces for critical expression within the media have shrunk noticeably. Additionally, cut-throat competition in a corporatised media has undercut the possibility of solidarity amongst journalists on larger issues. Today, there are few effective journalist unions, press clubs are largely beholden to governments and private corporations, and only a handful of independent organisations bring journalists together. Given this reality, it is significant that the Lankesh killing has stimulated journalists to come out and protest. But, these protests must go beyond demands for the safety of journalists. They must also resist the deliberate undercutting of the legitimate role of the media as the counterpoint to the state and the powerful.Anecdotal evidence and some studies suggest that intense anger can trigger a heart attack. This seems to have been confirmed in a new study published today in the European Heart Journal: Acute Cardiovascular Care, on patients in whom myocardial infarction (heart attack) was confirmed to have occurred by angiogram. In this study, being very angry conferred an 8.5 fold higher risk of having a heart attack within two hours, while extreme anxiety also increased risk by 9.5 fold.
The difference between this study and many previous publications is that coronary occlusion was confirmed in the subjects by angiogram. The study was carried out in Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, Australia by a research team based in the hospital and Sydney Nursing School and Sydney Medical School. Self-reported levels of anger in the previous 48 hours were recorded in 313 patients with confirmed acute coronary occlusion. The levels of anger two hours and 2-4 hours prior to the heart attack were compared to the participant’s usual yearly levels of anger. Anger was self-assessed on a scale of 1-7, with level 1 being defined as "calm", level 5 being defined as ‘very angry, body tense, clenching fists or teeth’ and level 7 defined as "enraged, out of control, throwing objects, hurting yourself or others".
The results of the study showed that seven (2.2%) of the participants reported an anger level of ≥5 within two hours of onset of symptoms. When the usual frequencies of anger were determined, it was calculated that these levels of anger conferred an 8.5 fold higher relative risk of myocardial infarction. Anxiety levels were also assessed using the State–Trait Personality Inventory. Results showed that anxiety scores >75th percentile on this test conferred a 2-fold higher risk of myocardial infarction, while a score above the 90th percentile conferred a 9.5 fold higher risk. The most common reasons for the high levels of anger were arguments with family members or others, work conflicts or incidents while driving.
Lead author Dr Thomas Buckley of the University of Sydney and Royal North Shore Hospital explained: "While the absolute risk of any one anger episode triggering a heart attack is low, our data demonstrates that the danger is real and still there." He further explained that the increased risk following intense anger or anxiety is "most likely the result of increased heart rate and blood pressure, tightening of blood vessels and increased clotting, all associated with triggering of heart attacks".
Dr Buckley suggested that tendency to become angry or anxious should be taken into account in the clinical management of individuals with heart disease and in strategies for heart disease prevention. He concluded: "Potential preventive approaches may be stress reduction training to limit the responses of anger and anxiety, or avoiding activities that usually prompt such intense reactions. And for those at very high risk, one could potentially consider protective medication therapy at the time of or just prior to an episode, a strategy we have shown to be feasible in other studies. Minimising other risk factors, such as hypertension or smoking, would also lower risk".Continue Reading Below Advertisement
Pixar is not exactly known for their laziness. Given the immense amount of time it takes to animate an entirely CGI film (typically several years), they have plenty of opportunities to perfect their scripts and pour endless amounts of detail into every frame. What you might not realize is that when they set out to make a movie about talking fish, they dedicated themselves to making the movement of the fish as realistic as possible -- going so far as to hire a functional morphologist to teach the entire staff a graduate-level class in ichthyology.
Also, everything the stingray sings is factually accurate.
Unlike other movies, where "underwater" is treated like "space" and characters just go wherever they want to, every movement of every fish in Finding Nemo makes physical sense and is accompanied by the correct fin propulsion, even down to whether those fins are "flappers" or "rowers" (referring to how they tread water). It is as if Pixar were daring people to count all the ass they had busted in animating the movie.
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You also might remember the jellyfish scene:
You know, the one with all the jellyfish.
You may have said, "Damn, those are some realistic jellyfish," if you are the kind of person who was theretofore frustrated by the depiction of jellyfish in film. That's because Pixar actually wrote an entirely new system, called transblurrency, to depict the way light refracts through a jellyfish's membrane, as well as figuring out exactly how to show things fading into view underwater -- because no one had ever done that with computers before:
Let's see you advance the frontier of human knowledge, DreamWorks.
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Of course, this is all wasted effort, since clownfish are sequential hermaphrodites. So in the real world, after his wife was eaten by a barracuda, Nemo's dad would've just turned into a female and had sex with another clownfish, abandoning Nemo's half-crushed gimp egg to be eaten by a crab. Do your homework next time, Pixar.
Find more from JF Sargent on his Twitter and Tumblr. Find more from KD Smallwood on his Twitter and Facebook.
For more things you may have not have noticed, check out 7 Insane Easter Eggs Hidden in Movies and TV Shows. Or learn about 7 Classic Movies You Didn't Know Were Rip-Offs.
If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out A Word About the Parasite Controlling Your Brain.
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Do you have an idea in mind that would make a great article? Then sign up for our writers workshop! Do you possess expert skills in image creation and manipulation? Mediocre? Even rudimentary? Are you frightened by MS Paint and simply have a funny idea? You can create an infographic and you could be on the front page of Cracked.com tomorrow!You know that moment in a football game when the players are streaking downfield, the quarterback has lofted a pass, the ball is in the air, and you just can’t tell yet whether the receiver is going to come down with the catch or the defensive back is going to bat it away? That’s where we are right now on the issue of energy in the presidentialrace.
Republicans have had their fun with tire gauges, and as John McCain relentlessly hammered home his support for offshore drilling (which he used to oppose), he narrowed Barack Obama’s lead in national polls. But now a group of five Democratic and five Republican senators is pushing compromise legislation that could blunt the GOP attacks. Last week, the “Gang of 10” announced a plan to expand drilling off the Gulf of Mexico and southern Atlantic states, keep the ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and along the West Coast, extend tax credits and incentives for fuel-efficient purchases, put $20 billion into developing alternative fuels, and pay for the whole $84 billion package by repealing tax breaks on oil and gas companies and hiking their licensing fees.
Liberals and conservatives can each find things to dislike about this proposal. But it’s pretty clear that the Gang of 10 plan has a better chance of getting through Congress this fall than any Republican proposal to simply start more drilling, and it’s far more politically viable than Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to quash discussion of the entire subject. If it passes, its sponsors will be able to boast that they got something done on a pressing issue and will gain approval from media types (and maybe undecided voters) who like bipartisanship and compromise.
But McCain’s ground game was working in the pre–Gang of 10 environment, and he was looking forward to keeping Obama uncomfortable on drilling. Because he has supported tax breaks for oil companies, and has opposed repealing them to pay for investments in clean energy, McCain now faces an uncomfortable choice. He can oppose the Gang of 10 plan, which will force him to defend his past votes and to explain how his stance fits into the “all of the above” approach on energy that he says he advocates. Or he can change his position and support the plan’s tax increases and limits on drilling.
For Obama, in contrast, the Gang of 10 plan is a Hail Mary of a godsend. It might let him not only get past drilling and refocus on energy efficiency, but also highlight his willingness to work with Republicans at a time when the congressional Democratic leadership has been particularly inept. That’s why Obama was willing to risk charges of flip-flopping on another issue and support the plan. “I am not interested in making the perfect the enemy of the good, particularly since there’s so much good in this compromise,” he said last Monday.
Lefties and righties alike smell the whole issue turning. “Has McCain walked into an energy trap?” Sam Stein wondered last Wednesday. “The Gang of 10: Obama’s Checkmate?” Nate Silver asked on Thursday. “You can start with stupidity, you can start with selfishness,” Rush Limbaugh spluttered on Friday. “McCain wants to open up drilling, it’s become his issue, and these five Republican senators just nuked it.” All that’s premature, particularly since the elements of Obama’s energy plan that aren’t about improving fuel efficiency, such as his proposal to open the strategic petroleum reserve, are pretty gimmicky. But the football is in the air. —Peter KeatingMIAMI — The guest of honor strolled across the stage — hair slicked back and grayed, no tie — embracing his host, briefly, before looking out on the campaign crowd.
It had been a while. He opened with something safe.
“I understand you’ve got a pretty good women’s volleyball team here,” he said, a bit tepidly, inside a college gymnasium on Tuesday. “So go, Lady Sharks. Is that what you say?”
Al Gore was back.
In a rare return to presidential politics, Mr. Gore, who was Bill Clinton’s vice president, joined Hillary Clinton for a 45-minute Democratic call to arms, vacillating between a familiar drawling delivery and the urgency of a seer sent from another era to warn future generations of prospective doom.
“Your vote really, really, really counts,” he said, in the state synonymous with his excruciating 2000 election loss. “You can consider me as an Exhibit A.”If I ever have an executioner, I want him to be Scott Alexander. Alexander has such a winning way with words that I and his many fans enjoy him even when we disagree. I’d hardly notice my destination as his pleasing patter entranced me while we took the long way around to the gallows.
So I am honored that Alexander wrote a long review of Age of Em (9K words, 6% as long as the book), wherein he not only likes and recommends it, he also accepts pretty much all its claims within its main focus. That is, I present my book as being expert on the topic of what would actually happen |
, remember that in Virginia he who has sex outside of marriage is severely punished by a fine.” Don’t think it’s a coincidence that state is named as it is.
8. AMERICANS ARE IGNORANT, BUT NICE.
Of course not all Italians think Americans are nice. Yahoo poster bg says that “The average American has a low level culture and education, most only know English and that inadequately. With the excuse that they are the first country in the world, their arrogance does not allow them to recognize that there are other cultures. The strength of their culture is sports, junk food and Hollywood.”
But, as poster Alessandro notes, “The ignorant are everywhere, but at least in the U.S. they are friendly.”
Special Section: The Delightful Nuances of Hillbilly Talk
The website LaHoraDigital shows that little extra touch of bella vita that makes Italians so lovable. Sure, anyone can learn to speak English. But English with a Southern accent—that’s where it’s at. They give detailed instructions on how to turn plain Italian-accented English into a fantastic and disturbing hybrid of Italian and Yosemite Sam-accented English. “When I’m talking with a hillbilly,” says the author, “I already imagine the smell of home cooking. And if you want to talk with a southern accent, may be easier than you think.”
See Also: 10 Japanese Travel Tips for Visiting America
Hillbilly Talk Tips:
- Use "y'all" whenever you can. This term refers to a single person or a group of people. Never say "go,” replace with "fixin' to."
- Take the words, and add a few syllables. The "why" should be pronounced "waa" followed by "eye."
- Take the words of two syllables and reduce them to one, how to change the "tar."
- Use “Purdy” for appeal; “reckon” for recognize; the awfullest, gol darned horrible; critter rather than creature; breetches; and Tarnation.In a presentation last week at the Bronx Zoo, where the wildlife society is based, Dr. Berger described preliminary results from field studies of the musk ox that he has performed with Layne Adams of the U.S. Geological Survey and other collaborators. He talked about the challenges of catching animals to weigh and measure them, check their teeth, take their blood and furnish them with G.P.S. collars. One group of musk ox in Cape Krusenstern National Monument in Alaska had such bad, broken teeth you’d think they were subsisting on a diet of Pepsi and Snickers bars, said Dr. Berger, and the researchers worried that the population was unhealthy and on its way out.
Yet after suffering several seasons of declining numbers, the brown-toothers rebounded this year to match in fecundity and offspring survival a group living in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve that had exemplary teeth. The cause of their rotten dentition remains a mystery, but the Krusenstern clan clearly was not biting the dust.
For all their storied past as co-prancers with mastodons, musk oxen are not huge animals. Adult males stand about four feet high and weigh around 600 to 700 pounds, less than half the weight of the average draft horse. Yet they look hulky as a result of their spectacular double-layered fur coat. The long, shaggy outer layer they keep year round, not only to help shield them against the brutal cold of an Arctic winter, when temperatures can plunge 40 degrees or more below zero, but also to deter the insect pests of an Arctic summer.
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“You’ll see caribou in summertime trotting across the countryside trying to get away from all the mosquitoes and biting flies,” said Jim Lawler, a biologist with the National Park Service’s Arctic Network in Fairbanks. “But the musk ox just stand there with clouds of mosquitoes hovering above them. It’s hard to penetrate that fur.” For added insulation, musk oxen grow a second fur layer each winter, an undercoat called qiviut that is said to be many times warmer than wool and softer than cashmere — and how obliging of the animals to shed that qiviut in spring for use in scarves.
With their stubby legs, musk oxen are not migratory like caribou or great dashers like reindeer. Their basic approach to winter management is: Don’t just do something — stand there. “You’ll see them in a big storm, drifted over, covered with snow,” said Dr. Lawler. “They’re almost part of the scenery.” They lapse into a state of what might be called hibernation al fresco, as their oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production drop and their metabolic rate slows by about a third. “They’re basically shutting down some of their machinery so they can survive on less food,” said Dr. Lawler, who has studied musk ox energetics.
Whatever their occasional resemblance to the scenery, musk oxen are by no means as dumb as a post. “They live in loosely knit family-bonded societies,” said Dr. Berger, and they keep track of who’s who. The group is, after all, essential to their survival. When confronted with predators like wolves, a herd of musk oxen will famously circle the wagons, the adults forming a wall of horns facing outward, the vulnerable young safely shielded behind them. They also seem to have a keen memory for where the best foraging grounds may be found in the spring, the optimal mix of grasses and willow twigs to maximize the performance of the microbes at work in their ruminant gut. Musk oxen turn out to be very efficient at extracting calories to put on the fat they need to survive the long winter fast.
Historical records and genetic evidence alike suggest that the musk ox is a Rasputin, “the comeback kid of the Quaternary,” said Ross MacPhee, curator of vertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. “They undergo periods where they really bolster their numbers for a few years, then they go down to an almost complete collapse, then later they come back like gangbusters.”
As a result of passing through repeated population bottlenecks, in which only a handful of individuals survived to spawn subsequent generations, today’s 100,000 musk oxen are thought to be notably homogenous, lacking in the sort of genetic diversity once thought critical to a species’ long-term prospects. “It would be hard to argue that musk ox are on their way out the door,” said Dr. MacPhee. “They are not weak sisters.”
Just ask that saber-toothed cat fossilized under the floor.Advertisement
The United States entered Afghanistan in late 2001 following the September 11 attacks with a goal of overthrowing its Taliban-led government. After 13 years of war, U.S troops are now pulling out.
It is estimated that by the end of 2015, 5,500 U.S. troops will remain in the country to train and assist Afghan forces. Reuters photographer Lucas Jackson has documented the conflict and describes how the war has changed over the years.
Flying into Afghanistan feels like flying into a gigantic unknown. It’s different every trip. As the plane descends to land at Bagram Air Field I can only guess – and hope – that I’ve prepared for what’s in store. The travel is the easy part; figuring out what to photograph and how to tell the story I see, that’s the part that’s different every time.
The rising sun lights smoke in the air as a man crosses the street near Forward Operating Base Fenty in the Nangarhar province. Judging from what I have seen in Afghanistan, it’s as if the country hasn’t seen a 13-year war, but rather 13 one-year wars. Throughout the country, there used to be dozens, if not hundreds, of Forward Operating Bases that you could choose to spend time documenting. That war has ended. Only two of the bases remain in operation.
Paratroopers walk as they take part in a mission to gather data for biological database of men living in Paktiya Province. On previous trips you worked your way through the embed system until you found yourself with whatever platoon or company was going on a patrol, or a mission with a high chance of combat. That process was, for over a decade, how you covered this war. Now it is different.
Paratroopers board a helicopter as they begin an assault mission at Combat Outpost Herrera in Paktiya Province. Gone are the myriad of small bases and thousands of patrols that emanated from them. The whole process has for the most part been morphed into teams of military and civilian advisors travelling from less than ten international military installations left to sit down and speak with Afghan army generals, police officers and diplomats.
A U.S. soldier waits for a helicopter to land after an advising mission at the Afghan National Army headquarters. Conventional soldiers no longer go “outside the wire” to investigate where indiscriminate rockets are fired from or drive through a town to see if their enemies start shooting. Soldiers are now there to act as “Guardian Angels”, standing fully armed and kitted up in body armour as teams advise Afghan generals.
U.S. soldiers take part in an artillery exercise on forward operating base Gamberi. These meetings are important but visually repetitive, so I concentrated on documenting what this stage of war is like for the last U.S. soldiers who arrived and were baptised in combat but now fill their days standing in guard towers, going on training exercises and protecting contractors. Training exercises are a favourite activity since getting approvals for using expensive weapon systems is simple in a war zone.
A U.S. soldier pays his respects during a memorial for Martin and Morris. The war is in a different stage now, but improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are the one threat that remains ubiquitous every time the trucks leave a base. On December 12th Specialist Wyatt Martin and Sergeant First Class Ramon Morris were killed by an IED while they were on patrol. I photographed their comrades mourning these two men who were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I tried to show the fear these soldiers feel. There is no more combat where you can see who is shooting at you, there is no seeking the enemy, there is only fear of an unseen explosion killing you while you're doing something mundane.
When the soldiers were off duty I captured moments of relaxation; playing video games, eating Christmas lunch, watching movies, or talking about what life will be like on their return home. Soldiers teasing each other or wrestling to break up the monotony of a war with no combat, or sitting in an office diligently preparing Power-Point presentations to plan or report on their missions. It's hard to find these subtle moments, and while not heroic and intense, these images will stand as a record of the end of this war at the point when it was instantly reborn under a new name.
For now no one knows what will last and what will be erased after this period in Afghanistan, but at the end of the day I, and others like me, have proved that it existed in the first place.A 17-year-old steel fabricator has fallen 12 metres to his death at the Old Post Office redevelopment site in the CBD.
St John Ambulance got an emergency call at 4.30am and took the boy as a Priority 1, with lights and sirens, to Royal Perth Hospital, but he could not be saved.
WorkSafe investigators are on site. Credit:Belinda Cameron/Radio 6PR
A WorkSafe spokeswoman said the boy was on night shift and was working on the installation of a glass ceiling in the building, which was being renovated for the new tenant, fashion retailer H&M.
WA Police coronial investigators and WorkSafe investigators were at the cordoned-off site on Forrest Place, near Wellington Street, early in the morning. They are likely to remain for at least the rest of the day.SEATTLE — City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant said that the website 15now.org would release details at noon Thursday of her plans to bring a $15-an-hour minimum wage to the city.
The site, 15now.org, even had a countdown clock. But when it hit :00 at noon, nothing happened.
“I think they’ll be pretty self-explanatory when it comes to light,” said Sawant, who added that she didn’t feel comfortable talking about it at City Hall because it’s not part of city business yet.
Sawant and Mayor Ed Murray, who were privately sworn into office last Tuesday, Dec. 31, will be sworn in again in a public ceremony on Monday, Jan. 6.
Murray announced late Thursday that he would hold a news conference at 9:30 a.m. Friday to “discuss the next stops to raise the wage to $15 an hour for all Seattle City employees.”
Sawant said the $15 issue she campaigned on is still gaining momentum.
“Nearly 100,000 people voted for our campaign, so clearly there is a desire out here to see major change,” said Sawant.
Voters in the city of SeaTac passed a $15 minimum wage there, but a judge recently ruled that hundreds of employees at the airport are not eligible for raises because it’s operated by the Port of Seattle.
Sawant said she hopes the SeaTac workers win on appeal.
She recently joined Murray’s special committee to study a minimum wage increase in Seattle, but says she won’t back down on her promise of $15 an hour, even if her website is not quite up.
“Our task now is continuing building that support, continuing appealing to people to get engaged, and that`s what the 15-dollar-now task will be.”
The 15now.org website provided information on the plans late Thursday night. The site called for supporters to form a grass-roots campaign and donate money ($15) to counter the large “Corporate America” funds that it said will be used to fight the minimum wage increase movement. It also urged supporters of $15 an hour to attend a rally in Seattle on Jan. 12.What the Republicans unveiled in Washington may look like a welcome, long-overdue simplification of the tax code.
But don’t be fooled. It’s actually a Trojan horse. It is designed to give away money to the children of the super rich, to the religious right and the so-called red states that are most loyal to the Republican Party.
And it will do so by punishing those who are disloyal to the “pro-America” party and insist on voting Democrat.
This isn’t tax reform. This is the imposition of tribute on an occupied people.
Once you realize that blue states are already paying way too much money, it’s obvious that a bill that jacks up their bill further isn’t reform.
And before I go any further, let me say: I really wanted to support this reform. I hate the current tax code. It is an overcomplicated fiasco and an absurdity. I am all in favor of a sweeping, 1986-style radical reform and simplification. Nor do I think progressivism is the only thing that matters.
So I like the way this tax reform wants to simplify the ordinary income tax codes.
I like the corporate tax break on repatriating money held abroad.
I like encouraging corporations to invest by letting them write off the full cost up front.
Do the math: The Trump tax calculator — will you pay more or less?
And, perhaps controversially, I like the cut in corporate taxes. Actually, if I had my druthers, they’d scrap the corporation tax altogether. It is a crazy tax that makes no sense and causes all sorts of unintended problems. Democrats support it for the wrong reasons. It’s not even progressive. It’s a flat tax. Bill Gates effectively pays the same rate (percentage, not total amount) as your grandma.
Cynical plan
But for all these positives, this tax reform is shockingly cynical, evil and vicious. If the Republicans pass it, they will have confirmed what we have long suspected: That they don’t view the so-called blue states, such as the Northeast and the West Coast, as the “real America.” They view them as colonies.
Why so?
Start with the elimination of the federal income tax deduction for state taxes, and the drastic reduction in the deduction for local taxes.
Republican propagandists are out there right now saying this will end the system whereby supposedly virtuous low-tax (red) states subsidize feckless, socialist (nay, “socialistic,” or even,”socialistical”) high-tax blue states.
Baloney.
Red states are ‘takers’
It is an undisputed fact that the subsidies flow in exactly the other direction. States like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and California pour vastly — vastly — more into the federal government in taxes than they ever get back in federal spending.
If the blue states of the Northeast or the West Coast declared independence, their residents could immediately enjoy a massive tax cut.
Tim Mullaney: Don’t blame Trump for this mess of a tax bill
This fact is so well-established that even the Tax Foundation, the very conservative think tank, acknowledges it is the case. Every year the Tax Foundation used to publish research that detailed the shocking facts — until, dismally, its conservative-leaning, red-state-friendly donors stopped supporting the project.
So once you realize that the blue states are already paying way too much money, a bill that jacks up their bill still further isn’t reform. It’s tribute.
No wonder red state Republicans were out there gleefully and knowingly lying about it.
That’s not the only problem, either.
The new feudalism
This tax “reform” also includes the obscenity of abolishing the inheritance tax. We will become a society where a dollar earned is taxed far more heavily than a dollar inherited.
Welcome to the new feudalism.
Then there’s this special tax privilege for the pseudo-religious proxies of the far right. The reform, by scrapping the so-called Johnson Amendment, would allow “churches,” loosely defined, to operate formally as political advocates while still enjoying tax exemptions.
Most real churches stay clear of politics. The main beneficiaries of this will be the pseudo-Christian Haters for Jesus you meet online.
Oh, yeah, and on top of all this is the deliberate, punitive attack on college education. The tax bill will raise taxes on university endowments and on college graduates trying to pay off their student loans.
Do you think this is an accident? Do you think this is pure chance that the Republicans are simultaneously cutting taxes on right-wing political “churches” and raising taxes on more liberal, blue-state colleges?
Never forget that a key determinant of how someone voted last year was whether they went to college or not. As the president said early last year: “We love the poorly educated.” Indeed.
None of these massive giveaways to the Trump-GOP coalition is free. In total, this bill is estimated to gut federal tax revenues by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid already face funding crises. Do the math.
Bottom line? If this passes, your Social Security and other benefits will end up being cut, in order to pay for giveaways to Ivanka Trump, Jerry Falwell Jr. and a lot of Welfare Republicans down south and out west.
No, it’s not OK.
Want news about Europe delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Europe Daily newsletter. Sign up here.by Duaa Eldeib
Chicago Tribune
Excerpts:
Beset by failures in leadership and in treatment of the state’s most vulnerable children, Illinois’ Department of Children and Family Services is hammering out a reform plan after a panel of court-appointed experts determined the agency needs a top-to-bottom overhaul if it hopes to improve the safety and well-being of the thousands of youths in its care.
DCFS has until the start of the new year to address the systemic deficiencies identified in a scathing report filed in federal court, the latest development under a decades-old consent decree that allows the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois to monitor the agency.
The report concluded that too many children who are wards of the state are shuffled from placement to placement and forced to wait months for services. The result, the experts wrote, was an erosion of the children’s “already pronounced distrust in the system.” The beleaguered agency also suffers from an “absence of responsibility and accountability” when it comes to ensuring the children receive the help they need, according to the report.
Read the full article at The Chicago Tribune.
Medical Kidnapping stories from Illinois:BERLIN (Reuters) - A man tore the head from a controversial waxwork figure of Adolf Hitler on the opening day of Berlin’s Madame Tussauds museum on Saturday, police said.
A waxwork of Adolf Hitler before a 41-year-old man tore its head off from the controversial exhibit on the opening day of Berlin's Madame Tussauds July 5, 2008 is seen in this July 3, 2008 file photo. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz/Files
Just minutes after the museum opened, the 41-year-old German man pushed aside two security men guarding the exhibit.
“Then he went over to the figure and ripped off the head,” a police spokesman said.
The man tore off the head in protest at the exhibit, the spokesman added. The police were alerted and arrested the man, who did not resist. He was later released though he remained under investigation for assault and damaging property.
The waxwork figure of a glum-looking Adolf Hitler in a mock bunker during the last days of his life was criticized as being in bad taste. A media preview of the new branch of Madame Tussauds on Thursday was overshadowed by a row over the exhibit.
Critics said it was inappropriate to display the Nazi dictator, who started World War Two and ordered the extermination of Europe’s Jews, in a museum alongside celebrities, pop stars, world statesmen and sporting heroes.
Dressed in a grey suit, the figure of Hitler gazed downwards with a despondent stare, his arm outstretched on a large wooden table with a map of Europe on the wall of his gloomy bunker.
About 25 workers spent about four months on the waxwork, using more than 2,000 pictures and pieces of archive material and also guided by a model of the “Fuehrer” in the London branch of Madame Tussauds where it is standing upright.
It is illegal in Germany to show Nazi symbols and art glorifying Hitler and the exhibit was cordoned off to stop visitors posing with him.
Unobtrusive signs asked visitors to refrain from taking photos or posing with Hitler “out of respect for the millions of people who died during World War Two”. Camera surveillance and museum officials were meant to stop inappropriate behavior.
Institutions such as the foundation for Germany’s central Holocaust memorial site condemned the idea of the exhibit as tasteless, saying it had been included to generate business.
The wax figure is the latest in a gradual breaking down of taboos about Hitler in Germany more than 60 years after the end of the war and the Holocaust in which some six million Jews were killed.
The 2004 film “Downfall” provoked controversy as it portrayed the leader in a human light during the last days of his life and last year a satire about Hitler by Swiss-born Jewish director Dani Levy was released in Germany.“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Two campus conservatives were barred from attending the Dartmouth College MLK strategy session last week.
They were different.
The College Fix reported:
Two conservative Dartmouth College students who tried to attend campus activists’ strategy meeting on how to mark the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday on campus were refused admittance after organizers determined the two young men were not registered Democrats.
Freshman Sandor Farkas, 18, one of the two rejected students, said he and his friend had planned to politely listen to the views of others in the name of “positive political discourse.”
“What I am really frustrated at is the fact that we can’t have reasonable discussions about these issues,” he said in an interview with The College Fix. “It has to be very private, secretive – and I don’t think that represents the spirit of MLK or in trying to create an awareness of various issues.”
Based on some talk around school, Farkas said he believes the student activists want to hold some sort of “Take Back MLK Day” protest.
Farkas said that when he and his friend, both of whom contribute to the conservative campus newspaper The Dartmouth Review, arrived at the meeting Tuesday, a female student met them at the door and asked what they wanted.
“We said we wanted to just listen in, and she said: ‘What are your political views?’ ” Farkas said. “We said we’re registered independents.”
After that she closed the door, and about five minutes later, came back and told the young men it was a private gathering and they could not sit in.IRVING, Texas -- When the Dallas Cowboys knew they had no chance of keeping Bill Callahan as their offensive line coach after the 2014 season ended, they knew they weren't leaving the building for his successor.
Moments after Jason Garrett's new contract was announced in January, Frank Pollack was walking into the offices of Jerry and Stephen Jones to be Callahan's successor.
Pollack is actually assuming a role he kind of, sort of had in 2013.
Frank Pollack takes over a Pro Bowl laden Dallas Cowboys offensive line. Tim Heitman/USA TODAY Sports
When Callahan became the offensive coordinator, Pollack was the de facto line coach, running the meeting room with Callahan involved more with Garrett and Tony Romo. When Scott Linehan came in last season as the new playcaller, Callahan went back to the leader of the offensive line room.
"Took a little bit of a second chair last year, but it's not that big of an adjustment," Pollack said. "It's maybe just a year removed from that and coming back into it."
The Cowboys are banking on continuity being a good thing for an offensive line that features three Pro Bowlers -- Tyron Smith, Travis Frederick and Zack Martin -- and reliable starters in Doug Free and Ronald Leary. Pollack worked out third-round pick Chaz Green and was part of the recruiting dinner for La'el Collins.
He doesn't have to go about winning over the room.
"He's a great technician and he's played the game, played the offensive line position," Martin said. "It's great to have him be able to kind of relate to what you're going through. It's been a smooth transition."
Pollack isn't Callahan, but he's close.
Callahan coached Pollack at Northern Arizona in the late 1980s. Pollack likes to joke that "loosely hung on in this league" as a player for eight years because Callahan was his college coach.
"He is a master coach, and he can coach in any scheme and any system and he's an outstanding coach and an outstanding man," Pollack said. "I learned a ton from him on a daily basis. Took a lot of notes in there as well as the players with how he presented and coached and the way he taught things. It was really beneficial top me to sit there with him and learned a lot from him."
A lot of what the Cowboys' running game became in 2013 and '14 is what Pollack brought with him. The Cowboys moved to the wide zone scheme two years ago and with DeMarco Murray running it last year they nearly perfected it with him running for an NFL-best 1,845 yards.
"I think that it just is a lot of it's the same in that he's going to coach the little tiny techniques, he's going to hold you accountable to what you need to," Frederick said. "He just goes about it in a little bit different way. It's hard to really gauge that. Maybe one is a little louder sometimes. One's a little quieter. It just matters in the situations so it's hard to say that generally one person is meaner or tougher on us than somebody else. They're both really, really good coaches."Appearing on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper on Tuesday afternoon, chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour slammed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Likud Party and “right-wing” allies for having “a sort-of racist policy towards” Arabs that has been “very scary for them” as the world awaited results from the national elections in Israel.
Host Jake Tapper brought Amanpour into the discussion by mentioning a YouTube video released by Netanyahu’s party on Tuesday morning telling supporters to head to the polls after accusations that Arabs were being transported to the polls by, in the words of Tapper, “left-leaning organizations.”
Tapper pointed out that some “people in the Israeli media” were critical of Netanyahu “for what they describe as a racist appeal, but it looks as though this appeal, whether or not one likes it, might have helped galvanize his base to get to the polls.”
Amanpour added that it was not just the media, but “Arab-Israeli parliamentarians” she spoke with that lamented Netanyahu’s “scare-mongering” for stifling their attempt to “work unprecedentally in the system for our rights and for, you know, Jewish rights.”
Continuing to build that victim narrative, Amanpour defended Arabs and declined to refute their straw-man argument about Netanyahu:
We are citizens of this country. Let’s not forget, it’s not like a bunch of Arabs from neighboring next door are being bused in to the elections. Israeli Arabs, citizens of the country, 1.7 million of them, as this parliamentarian told me, have been incredibly motivated in this election and they want to get out and try to better their lives, but they’re very conscious, as one of them – as this one told me, that they feel that the Likud Party and the right wing do have a sort-of racist policy towards them and it's very scary for them.
While Amanpour was mounting a full defense of Arab-Israelis, she failed to cite the fact that the Arab parties that combined to form a joint list for the election include members who have some radical and arguably anti-Semitic policies themselves.
The remainder of the segment revolved around Amanpour running point for Netanyahu’s main rival, Isaac Herzog, for focusing not on foreign policy or the negotiations taking place in Switzerland over Iran’s nuclear program but the economy and blasting Netanyahu for refusing to move the needle on peace talks with the Palestinians to create a two-state solution.
(h/t: John Nolte)
The relevant portions of the transcript from CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper on March 17 are transcribed below.In an effort to rein in costs, the city of Camden NJ will fire its entire 270 member police force and instead will use Camden County officers.
Mayor Dana Redd and Police Chief Scott Thomson noted that for the same price, Camden can have 400 county officers on staff. That is nearly a 50% increase in the number of officers for the same price.
Of course the unions are howling.
In these cases, the county typically hires most or all of the officers at lower wage and benefit levels, but the article only notes a very vague "some current Camden officers will get jobs on the new force."
Why Cities are Going Bankrupt
Cities should strive to provide the most services at the least cost to taxpayers. However, public unions strive to provide the fewest benefits at the most cost.
Is it any wonder cities are going bankrupt?
Police and firefighter wages and benefits are crippling cities across the nation. Mayors are often in bed with unions rather than do what is best for the city.
I am a firm believer that every city under onerous police and firefighter contracts, most likely nearly every major city (if indeed not all of them), should do the same thing Camden did.
Camden Quick Facts
A quick check of City-Data shows Camden is economically poor with an unusual spike in home prices in 2007.
Population in 2010: 77,344.
Population change since 2000: -3.2%
Estimated median household income in 2009: $26,752
Estimated NJ median household income in 2009: $68,342Ian Miles Cheong had a spamming problem.
The journalist and editor of gaming site Gameranx had for years promoted his content on social news site Reddit, where, under the pseudonym SolInvictus, he served as a volunteer moderator at some of the site’s most trafficked forums.
At some point, redditors learned about Cheong’s surreptitious link-hawking and tipped off the site’s staff in January. Reddit, which sees 35 million unique visitors a month and is the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet,” banned him about a month later.
However, Reddit staff had another piece of intel on Cheong—something that, up until now, ordinary redditors could only suspect. Cheong wasn’t just promoting his own site’s content on Reddit.
He was a redditor for hire.
Boston-based news site GlobalPost, whose content Cheong frequently submitted to Reddit, confirmed to the Daily Dot last week that it had hired Cheong as a “social media consultant” through its marketing agency.
Reddit prides itself on user-submitted and curated content unsullied by manipulative social media marketers, which is reflected in the site’s strict anti-spam policies and virulent anti-spam culture. Money corrupts Reddit’s egalitarian content-sharing system by tipping the scale slightly towards parties with a vested interest in a submission’s success.
But the proof that a top community member had traded his influence for money shows how Reddit’s content independence is under constant threat from sophisticated marketing agencies and influential users who want to cash-in on their hard work and reputation.
As SolInvictus, Cheong was no ordinary redditor. During his four years at Reddit, he’d taken up moderator positions at some of the site’s largest forums, including r/WTF, r/AskReddit, and r/Politics, each of which boast more than 1 million subscribers. (Since SolInvictus did not create those subreddits, he could only join with an invitation from another member of the moderator team). Redditors loved his submissions, too. He had accumulated nearly 350,000 link karma (a value calculated by subtracting downvotes from total upvotes) on the site.
Cheong isn’t the first person Reddit’s banned for his social media consulting ties, according to Erik Martin, Reddit’s general manager. There were “others in Reddit’s early history,” he said. But with the site growing at geometric rates every year, it’s hardly a stretch to call Cheong the most influential community member to ever be banned.
Rick Byrne, GlobalPost’s vice president and director of communications and marketing told the Daily Dot he’s not sure when the company’s marketing agency, Boston-based Antler, first approached Cheong. But it was shortly after GlobalPost noticed traffic surges originating from Reddit. Cheong, in particular, frequently linked to GlobalPost content. Antler soon approached him with a consultancy offer.
“It was our understanding then, and now, that this is a practice followed by many other news organizations looking to increase visibility among social bookmarking sites,” Byrne wrote in an email. “As a consultant, SolInvictus continued to submit GlobalPost content; and through our agency, we would often suggest GlobalPost stories we believed the Reddit community would find interesting.”
When the Daily Dot first asked Cheong if he was paid by GlobalPost, he responded simply: “no.” When we told him that GlobalPost said otherwise, he responded as follows:
“I work for Antler as a marketing consultant. It means coming up with strategies on how to build an audience and not spamming reddit. Spamming might be great for some short term benefits but it’s not great for building a brand.”
There was no formal contract between Cheong and Antler, Byrne said. He also emphasized that the company never required Solinvictus to post specific stories to Reddit.
“The stories he did post were always his decision on what content he liked.If we had breaking news our agency would certainly let him know. Or, if he felt there were topics that the Reddit community was specifically interested in, he’d let them know—that’s how it worked.”
—Rick Byrne
That may be a moot point. Once Cheong signed that consulting contract, he had a vested interest in the success of the GlobalPost links he submitted to Reddit, whether they were articles he chose or not.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, former senior writer at tech news site ReadWriteWeb and current CEO of social media search engine Plexus Engine, reported on similar clandestine “social media consultants” at social bookmarking site Digg in 2008. He told the Daily Dot, “Some powerusers have an economic interest in their submissions hitting the frontpage because that’s the source of the credibility that’s the foundation of the high consulting rates they charge.”
Indeed, Digg, Reddit’s largest competitor, was long-riddled with allegations that a glut of so-called power users used their influential positions to work as for-hire link hucksters, though Kirkpatrick said he found little solid evidence supporting those allegations.
That’s part of why spamming is one of Reddit’s most serious offenses and is usually met with a summary ban. The site’s success—to the tune of 2 billion pageviews a month—comes from empowering its users to choose and vote for content.
While Reddit’s spam policies are strict, its rules in general quite spottily enforced, and so it’s understandable why a media company might believe there’s nothing wrong with a little spam.
The user agreement forbids a redditor from submitting any content that “constitutes junk mail, spam, advertising, and/or commercial offers.” But the same contract also forbids posting pornography, something Reddit has allowed to proliferate. This discrepancy is reflected in Martin’s frequent admission that the user agreement is in dire need of an update.
“It’s a generic legal document and not specifically relevant to reddit,” he wrote last September.
The occasionally loose rule enforcement and Reddit’s democratic system makes it easy for social-media marketers to justify spam: If people are voting for your content, then it certainly seems like you’re doing things right. In fact, Martin hinted that Reddit is far more concerned with “voting rings”—groups of people upvoting a post en masse to artificially boost its standing—than with individual users spamming Reddit with links.
“The problem is that some of these social media people on behalf of publishers, they’re not just submitting, they’re manipulating the votes. That’s the same as spamming. The same as trying to take shortcuts in any other facet of the publishing.”
—Erik Martin
Reddit’s |
fixation on @POTUS THIS IS @NBCNews https://t.co/MVw8bRj9kA — Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) June 24, 2017
Good. At least Hannity’s with me.So you're rich. You have a chauffeur because driving yourself is for the hoi polloi. But you also have a young child. How best to transport both you and your progeny in comfort, style and safety?
The Swedes have a solution.
For wealthy customers who feel like taking their kids places, Volvo changed up its 2016 XC90 "Excellence" edition, the four-seat, extended legroom version of its usually seven-passenger XC90 SUV. But instead of a passenger seat up front, there's a rear-facing, swiveling baby seat.
Frankly, it looks a bit absurd. But for those of us with kids, the idea of a rear-facing baby seat directly in front of Mom, Dad or, perhaps more likely for the jet set, the nanny, is worth consideration.
This is basically a Mommyfied version of Volvo's XC90 Lounge Console concept from earlier this year. That version replaced the front passenger seat with a combination storage/ottoman/television/work table.
Volvo wants to eliminate crash-related fatalities in its new cars by 2020, and approaches the problem from several angles. It's working hard on autonomous driving tech, with a test program using real customers planned for 2017. It has extensive research arguing children of all ages should have special seats, and to that end includes integrated booster cushions in many of its vehicles. It says small children, up through age 3 or 4, should travel facing rearward because of the lack of muscular strength in their necks and the disproportionate head size and weight in relation to the body.
Two-stage integrated booster cushion in the Volvo XC60 Volvo
"Being able to maintain eye contact with your child from the rear seat... would go a long way towards making life easier for parents taking their small child on a trip, says Tisha Johnson, Volvo's Chief Designer of Interiors. "Such alternative seating arrangements will become increasingly important as we move towards autonomous vehicles."
No word on if or when Volvo might build the XC90 Excellence Child Seat Concept. But for its next trick, how about a comfy bed for the family dog?Sega is set to offer 200 employees ‘voluntary retirement’ as it aims to improve profitability.
The publisher expects to make a loss of £9.85m for the second quarter of the 2015 financial year. It has put much of this down to the delay of the release of its new pachislot and pachinko titles and to money set aside for early retirements. It stated however that the reduction of expenses resulting from losing staff could save it £10.9m a year starting from March 2016.
It has adjusted its operating income expectations for the first half of the current fiscal year ending September 30th to £32.8bn yen from £76.6m, a fall of 57 per cent.
Sega has noted that in its digital games business, titles such as Hortensia Saga, Monster Gear and Sen-no- kaizoku have performed well, on top of strong revenues from some existing titles. It therefore expects to continue to bring in profits in this area from the third quarter onwards.
At present there are no plans to alter its forecast for the full financial year.Hillary, Chelsea and Bill Clinton attend the Clinton Global Initiative in New York in September 2013. (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)
Since its creation in 2001, the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has raised close to $2 billion from a vast global network that includes corporate titans, political donors, foreign governments and other wealthy interests, according to a Washington Post review of public records and newly released contribution data.
The total, representing cash and pledges reported in tax filings, includes $262 million that was raised in 2013 — the year Hillary Rodham Clinton stepped down as secretary of state and began to devote her energies to the foundation and to a likely second run for president.
The financial success of the foundation, which funds charitable work around the world, underscores the highly unusual nature of another Clinton candidacy. The organization has given contributors entree, outside the traditional political arena, to a possible president. Foreign donors and countries that are likely to have interests before a potential Clinton administration — and yet are ineligible to give to U.S. political campaigns — have affirmed their support for the family’s work through the charitable giving.
The Post review of foundation data, updated this month on the group’s Web site to reflect giving through 2014, found substantial overlap between the Clinton political machinery and the foundation.
Nearly half of the major donors who are backing Ready for Hillary, a group promoting her 2016 presidential bid, as well as nearly half of the bundlers from her 2008 campaign, have given at least $10,000 to the foundation, either on their own or through foundations or companies they run.
The Clintons have relied heavily on their close ties to Wall Street, with donations from the financial services sector representing the largest share of corporate donors.
And many of the foundation’s biggest donors are foreigners who are legally barred from giving to U.S. political candidates. A third of foundation donors who have given more than $1 million are foreign governments or other entities based outside the United States, and foreign donors make up more than half of those who have given more than $5 million.
The prevalence of financial institutions, both foreign and domestic, as major donors is likely to stir more unease in the Democratic Party’s liberal base, which is pushing Hillary Clinton to adopt a more populist and less Wall Street-focused economic agenda. The role of interests located in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Argentina may spur questions about the independence of a potential commander in chief who has solicited money from foreign donors with a stake in the actions of the U.S. government.
‘A philanthropy, period’
Foundation officials said the organization’s fundraising success reflects its track record of accomplishment. They said many other foundations have a similar international donor base.
“The Clinton Foundation is a philanthropy, period,” said Craig Minassian, the group’s chief communications officer. “We take pride in our programs, our efficiency, and our transparency. As with other global charities, the Clinton Foundation receives the support of individuals, organizations and governments from all over the world because our programs are improving the lives of millions.”
Minassian said it was a “false choice to suggest that people who may be interested in supporting political causes wouldn’t also support philanthropic work.”
Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton, declined to comment.
The foundation, which Bill Clinton created soon after leaving the White House in 2001, has become one of the world’s fastest-growing philanthropies.
It consists of multiple charitable initiatives that deal with climate change, HIV drug access and economic development in poor areas. One program, led by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, seeks to improve the lives of women and girls.
The foundation has won accolades from philanthropy experts and has drawn bipartisan support, with members of the George W. Bush administration often participating in its programs. Major donations have come from figures such as Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of the conservative Web site Newsmax.com and a onetime critic of Bill Clinton.
Foundation tax records show that it reported raising $1.69 billion in cash and pledges between 2001 and 2013, the last year for which documents are available. As of the end of 2014, donations reached nearly $2 billion, foundation officials confirmed.
The scope of the foundation’s finances show the unparalleled fundraising power of one of the world’s most important political brands.
“To be raising $250 million a year, certainly puts them in the top ranks of U.S. nonprofits in terms of fundraising,” said Steven Lawrence, director of research for the Foundation Center, which studies philanthropy.
Lawrence said the Clintons’ ability to draw support from overseas — a coveted goal for many U.S. charities and university endowments — was especially unusual.
“It’s all about building networks and connections,” Lawrence said, adding that donors are likely attracted both personally to the Clintons and to the highly regarded philanthropic work of their foundation.
The donor list shows that the foundation has relied most heavily on seven donors that have each given more than $25 million, including a foundation established by a Canadian mining magnate, Frank Giustra; the national lottery of Holland; and Chicago-based Democratic donor Fred Eychaner.
Other major donors giving at lower levels run the gamut of industries and interests, such as the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, beverage giant Coca-Cola, and the governments of Oman, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
Foundation officials say some of their public support comes from competitive grants that are also available to other charities.
Concerns in late 2008
The foundation’s fundraising sparked concerns in late 2008 when President-elect Barack Obama was preparing to nominate Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state. Some Republicans, raising the prospect of conflicts of interest, criticized the fact that the foundation’s donors were kept secret.
The Clintons struck a deal with the Obama administration to begin posting lists of its contributors online and to accept some restrictions on support from foreign governments.
As part of the deal, the Clinton Global Initiative, which brings together world leaders, industries and charities to discuss global issues, was split from the foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department. In 2013, after she stepped down as secretary of state, the foundation and the global initiative were reintegrated. The newly published donor list is the first to provide a public accounting of the cumulative giving to both groups.
In posting its donor data, the foundation goes beyond legal requirements, and experts say its transparency level exceeds that of most philanthropies.
But that transparency has limits. The foundation identifies its donors within broad ranges — $1 million to $5 million and greater than $25 million, for instance. And the foundation tallies the giving of each donor only cumulatively, making it difficult to track trends in giving over time.
As a result, it is not possible to determine how much particular donors contributed in the months since Hillary Clinton joined the foundation in 2013.
Still, the organization has stepped up its solicitation efforts in anticipation of soon losing one of its chief fundraisers to the campaign trail — building a $250 million endowment designed to provide some long-term stability.
The recent efforts have at times looked like a political campaign. A contest offered foundation donors the chance to win a free trip to New York to attend a Clinton gala and have a photo taken with the former first couple.
Hillary and Chelsea Clinton hosted a “Millennium Network” event in 2013 aimed at cultivating a younger generation of philanthropists. According to an invitation, there were six tiers of donations, ranging from $150 for individuals to $15,000 for a couple seeking a photograph with Hillary Clinton.
The Post review found that the foundation provided another way for the Clintons’ longtime political donors to support the family’s endeavors between election campaigns. The analysis relied on a list of bundlers compiled by the advocacy group Public Citizen using campaign disclosures and news reports. Each donor had generally raised at least $100,000 for her 2008 campaign.
Susie Tompkins Buell, for instance, a close Clinton friend and 2008 fundraiser who has given to Ready for Hillary, has donated as much as $10 million to the foundation from her charitable fund.
Haim Saban, the billionaire creator of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and one of the Clintons’ most-prolific political givers, has donated as much as $25 million to the foundation.
Buell and Saban did not respond to requests for comment.
The overlap between the Clintons’ political network and their charitable work was apparent Friday, when Dennis Cheng stepped down as the foundation’s chief development officer ahead of his expected role as a key fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
U.S.-regulated donors
Some major foundation donors are corporations that are regulated by the U.S. government.
Tenet, a health-care giant that has been investigated in the past for overbilling Medicare, has given $1.75 million to the Clinton Foundation since 2012 to fund local health programs, such as one promoting more HIV testing in the Palm Springs, Calif., area, where the company has a major hospital.
“We really believe in their health-care model — the community-based model,” said Daniel Waldmann, Tenet’s senior vice president for public affairs.
The newly updated foundation donor list shows that, despite the restrictions on foreign-government support imposed during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, the foundation continued to rely heavily on non-U.S. sources. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the foundation has now lifted the foreign-government restrictions.
The data shows that some major donors represent international interests that have faced scrutiny from the U.S. government.
All three Clintons, for instance, have attended meetings and private events with Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian steel magnate who has faced formal complaints in the United States for unfair trade practices. Spokesmen for the Clintons and Pinchuk waved away any suggestion of a conflict between the donor’s regulatory concerns and the charitable contributions to the foundation.
“No assistance with any business issues has now or ever been sought from the Clinton Foundation or its principals,” said Thomas Weihe, a spokesman for the Kiev-based Pinchuk Foundation.
He said Pinchuk supported the Clinton effort because of the foundation’s record and the “unique capacity of its principals to promote the modernization of Ukraine.”The past two weeks of following mainstream news coverage of the Israeli assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been excruciating in many ways.
First, of course, is seeing and hearing about all the civilian casualties and the brutality of the Israeli military in mercilessly bombarding a helpless population.
Secondly, so much of what the Israeli spokespeople and their supporters spew makes absolutely no sense. Any half-wit can see right through the bullshit, and the fact that these people have a platform to speak from is nauseating. Is it that these people are really that stupid, or do they think everyone else is stupid enough to believe their half-baked stories?
I Don’t Think the Word “Surgical” Means What You Think It Means
One of the talking points we hear repeatedly in mainstream media outlets is that the difference between Israeli and Palestinian military operations is that Israel is “surgical” in its attacks on Gaza, carefully avoiding civilian deaths, whereas Hamas “indiscriminately” fires rockets at Israel with no concern for civilian life.
Contrary to this impression, however, human rights groups have carefully investigated numerous Israeli strikes of the past week and concluded that most of them “did not attack a legitimate military target or attacked despite the likelihood of civilian casualties being disproportionate to the military gain.” Furthermore, the Israeli military has presented no evidence “to show that it was attacking lawful military objectives or acted to minimize civilian casualties.” As such, these strikes constitute war crimes.
Even in the absence of formal investigations, the numbers don’t lie. As of July 16th, according to the official United Nations report, as high as 80% of the dead in Gaza since airstrikes began have been civilian casualties and nearly half of those civilians were women and children. Of the 1,585 Palestinians injured, over 45% have been women and children.
How “surgical” can Israeli bombardment be if as high as 4 out of every 5 killed are civilians and 2 out of every 5 are women and children?
The Vague Notion of “Militant”
If Israel is not purposely targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, it is doing a rather poor job of demonstrating otherwise. The Israeli Defense Force, for example, maintains that it only strikes militant homes as well as “command centers” it claims store weapons.
First of all, it would be good to understand how Israel defines “militant.” Statements from the army claim that “anyone affiliated with Hamas terrorism” is considered a militant.
But, let’s not forget that Hamas is the ruling political party in Gaza, democratically elected in 2006, with 42,000 public servants, including police officers, firemen, municipal workers, etc. As such, if Israel considers any connection to Hamas as a tie to terrorism, then a large proportion of Palestinian civilians — men, women, and children — will have some connection to the group and, hence, fall under Israel’s loose definition of “militant.”
Furthermore, what kind of “affiliation” matters? If someone’s wife’s cousin’s barber’s uncle is a member of Hamas, does that mean that that person is “affiliated” with Hamas terrorism? Israel has not addressed these basic but crucial questions.
An Imaginary Gazan Weapon Supply Line
Well, what about the bombing of “command centers” purported to store and deploy weapons?
For argument’s sake, we can disregard recent examples of Israel, for instance, bombing a beach, killing 4 kids playing soccer. Maybe the Israeli bombers mistook sand castles for Hamas command centers, or maybe those children were militants.
Beach bombing aside, the UN estimates that 1,660 Gazan homes have been destroyed in a week of air strikes. Are we to seriously believe that Hamas has stockpiled enough weapons to need well over a thousand separate buildings to store it all, buildings that also serve as homes for civilians? My question is, where is Hamas getting all these weapons that Israel claims it has? It’s not like Gaza has open borders or an airport to smuggle in major weapons shipments.
Let’s ignore the fact that Israel has produced no evidence of these stockpiled weapons, other than some grainy aerial photos that show nothing other than rooftops. When asked for more compelling evidence that homes in Gaza are being used for military operations, army spokesmen never provide specifics, only saying, “Our intelligence knows where [militants] are.”
Humanitarian Aid vs. Weapons
In fact, Israel has done a fantastic job at blocking all kinds of humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza over the years. Yet, Israel claims that Hamas is able to import hundreds of tons of weapons into Gaza unimpeded and then stockpile these weapons throughout civilian areas.
You can’t have it both ways — you can’t successfully block all manner of humanitarian aid, on the one hand, and, on the other, claim Gaza has a weapons supply line.
After all, has it been that difficult for Israel to control Gaza’s borders? To get a sense of how small the Gaza Strip is consider that it is one-tenth the land area of Long Island, New York, half the size of Tampa, Florida, or slightly smaller than Victorville, California or Plano, Texas. So, we’re not talking about a lot of border to monitor.
Besides the small size of Gaza, its borders with Egypt and Israel itself are blocked with heavily secured barriers, hermetically sealing Gaza from all sides. Yet, we’re supposed to believed that, against all odds, somehow Hamas is still able to get substantial amounts of weapons and the material for weapons from outside its borders.
Is the Iron Dome a Bluff?
In any case, if Hamas has this ominous rocket capability, where is all the damage to Israel from “indiscriminate” rocket fire? Where are these Hamas rockets causing damage to property and civilian life? Again, real evidence is sparse to non-existent. Consider this video footage of a Hamas “rocket” disturbing the sleep of a poor cat. As it turns out, a lot of Israel’s pets and farm animals are losing valuable shut-eye because of those pesky Hamas rockets.
Well, what about the “Iron Dome” that is supposedly protecting Israel by intercepting Hamas rockets day and night? Wouldn’t it be crazy if it turns out that “Iron Dome” is just a bluff, that there is no real threat from any rockets that Hamas might have the wherewithal to launch? Wouldn’t it be crazy if “Iron Dome” and all the rocket sirens Israelis hear on a regular basis are just part of an elaborate show with all the pyrotechnics and high production values? That’s exactly what some scientists and aerospace engineers speculate, as investigated by Haaretz and the MIT Technology Review:
“Israel Defense Prize laureate and aerospace engineer Dr. Moti Shefer, whose specialty is interception missiles, says Iron Dome is a bluff. It doesn’t intercept anything but rather invents virtual rockets. The explosions we hear are the sounds of Iron Dome missiles self-destructing. As of the writing of these lines, Hamas rockets have done very little damage to people and property. We see this as proof of Iron Dome’s efficacy and reliability; [but] Shefer says the number of rockets coming in from the Gaza Strip is immeasurably smaller than what Iron Dome reports and in any case they are tinpot weapons, so 95 percent of the time we are safe anyway, irrespective of Iron Dome.”
Of course, from the perspective of occupation, this would all make sense. At some point, Israeli leadership had to realize that the Palestinians would be too destitute, too feeble to muster any kind of serious resistance to the occupation. But without precisely that resistance, neither Israel’s moderate to left-leaning citizens nor the world would stand for what would be seen as mass displacement, at best, effective genocide, at worst. So, you simply invent the threat. This is not something Western governments are inexperienced with.
Human Shields
The IDF often argues that Hamas uses human shields to deter Israel from attacking “legitimate military targets.” But what does this “shielding” consist of? Again, Gaza is an area not larger than a small American city like Plano, Texas. Whereas Plano has 270,000 residents, Gaza has 1.6 million and is one of the most densely populated areas in world. So, in effect, any operation, military or otherwise, will have to be within some distance of civilians. And Israel knows this because, again, Gaza’s borders are all but sealed.
What is ironic is that it is Israel’s aggressive expansion onto Palestinian land that forces Palestinians to live in such overpopulated ghettos like Gaza. And then, when Palestinians attempt to defend themselves and their land from these tight quarters, Israel accuses them of using human shields!
But, let’s be honest. Even if Hamas were deliberately using human shields, it is not like that has deterred the IDF one iota in its brutal bombing campaign. Again, were the 4 boys playing soccer on the beach human shields?
Finally, the UN has reported that it is Israel that uses Palestinian children as human shields:
“Israeli soldiers had used Palestinian children to enter potentially dangerous buildings before them and to stand in front of military vehicles to deter stone-throwing.
“Almost all those using children as human shields and informants have remained unpunished and the soldiers convicted for having forced at gunpoint a nine-year-old child to search bags suspected of containing explosives only received a suspended sentence of three months and were demoted.”
Advanced Warning for Militants
By far the most outlandish claim that the Israeli military makes is that it tells Palestinian civilians to evacuate an area by sending advanced warning to the neighborhoods it plans to strike via pamphlet drops, text messages, and even “roof knocking” warning mortar shells.
First of all, as Jon Stewart pointed out, where are civilians going to evacuate to when every land border is blocked? The Mediterranean Sea?
Second, what is the logic of sending advanced warning to a bombing target?
Presumably, the Israeli military wants to kill militants and destroy weapons caches, you know, allegedly the whole point of these air strikes. Doesn’t sending advanced notice kind of defeat the purpose? I’m sure any “Hamas affiliated” militants appreciate the convenience of receiving text messages from the IDF specifying exactly when and where the next bomb will drop.
To a person more cynical than myself, it might even seem that Israel is only using these advanced warnings as a ploy to give the appearance that they are concerned with preventing civilian casualties.
I may not be a cynic, but I’m not naive either. For me, Israel’s justifications for its brutal siege on Palestinian civilian infrastructure don’t pass the common sense test. Hopefully, other people of conscience and basic logic will continue to stand up against what has become the latest humanitarian crime against Palestine.Foto: Facebook / MApN
„Cred că ar trebui să înțeleagă și organizațiile care îi reprezintă pe etnicii maghiari, care sunt oameni modești și oameni la fel de echilibrați ca și noi, dar cei care îi reprezintă trebuie să înțeleagă că o dispută continuă și a pune continuu paie pe foc nu este benefic. Și, până la urmă, așa e într-un stat democratic, o minoritate trebuie să respecte Constituția și legile țării în care trăiesc. Dispute care se referă la autonomia teritorială nu își au locul și Constituția României este una foarte clară și chiar din articolul 1 consfințește suveranitatea statului”, a spus Mircea Dușa, citat de Agerpres.
El a susținut că, atunci când dobândesc demnități publice, reprezentanții etnicilor maghiari jură să respecte Constituția și legile țării, iar după aceea acțiunile lor sunt în contradicție cu ceea ce au jurat.
Mircea Dușa le-a mai recomandat acestora „să nu mai învrăjbească cetățenii pe care îi reprezintă împotriva cetățenilor majoritari”.
În cadrul întâlnirii organizate de Forumul Civic al Românilor din Covasna, Harghita și Mureș, ministrul Apărării a punctat faptul că această organizație a românilor din cele trei județe, înființată în urmă cu zece ani, este una reprezentativă, care a constituit un factor de echilibru în zonă, astfel încât tensiunile create de politicieni să nu aibă efecte în conviețuirea dintre români și maghiari.
„Foarte multe din propunerile Forumului Civic al Românilor din Covasna, Harghita și Mureș s-au regăsit și în legile care au fost adoptate în această perioadă și eu pot să apreciez că Forumul, chiar dacă a tras de multe ori semnale de alarmă, a fost un factor de echilibru în aceste județe și, de multe ori, când apăreau discuții care nu sunt normale într-un stat democratic, Forumul a fost cel care a găsit mijloacele și acțiunile de echilibru pentru ca tensiunile pe care le creaseră politicienii în aceste zone să nu aibă efecte în conviețuirea dintre români și maghiari”, a punctat Mircea Dușa.
Reprezentanți ai românilor din județele Harghita, Covasna și Mureș s-au întâlnit la Izvoru Mureșului pentru a discuta problemele cu care se confruntă, au solicitat măsuri pentru protejarea și afirmarea identității lor, iar concluziile dezbaterilor urmează să se regăsească într-un memorandum care va fi trimis atât instituțiilor statului, cât și la Consiliul Europei.
Etichete:
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,The Pink Panther is a British-American media franchise primarily focusing on a series of comedy-mystery films featuring an inept French police detective, Inspector Jacques Clouseau. The franchise began with the release of the classic Pink Panther film in 1963. The role of Clouseau was originated by and is most closely associated with Peter Sellers. Most of the films were written and directed by Blake Edwards, with theme music composed by Henry Mancini. Elements and characters inspired by the films were adapted into other media, including books, comic books and animated series.
The first film in the series derives its name from the eponymous pink diamond that has an enormous size and value. The diamond is called the "Pink Panther" because the flaw at its center, when viewed closely, is said to resemble a leaping pink panther. The phrase reappears in the title of the fourth film The Return of the Pink Panther, in which the theft of the diamond is again the centre of the plot. The phrase was used for all the subsequent films in the series, even when the jewel did not figure in the plot. The jewel ultimately appeared in six of the eleven films.
The first film in the series had an animated opening sequence, created by DePatie–Freleng Enterprises, featuring The Pink Panther Theme by Mancini, as well as the Pink Panther character. This character, designed by Hawley Pratt and Friz Freleng, was subsequently the subject of his own series of animated cartoons which gained its highest profile when aired on Saturday mornings as The Pink Panther Show. The character would be featured in the opening of every film in the movie series except A Shot in the Dark and Inspector Clouseau.
Films [ edit ]
The Pink Panther [ edit ]
Although the original film was actually centred on the Phantom/Sir Charles Lytton, portrayed by David Niven; Peter Sellers's performance was so popular that the resulting series was built on the Clouseau character, rather than the Phantom character. Niven's and Sellers's co-stars included Capucine, Robert Wagner, and Claudia Cardinale.
A Shot in the Dark [ edit ]
Released less than a year after The Pink Panther. Clouseau returns to muddle his way through a murder investigation. This marks the first appearance of Herbert Lom's Commissioner Dreyfus, his assistant François (portrayed by André Maranne), and Clouseau's manservant, Cato (portrayed by Burt Kwouk). Co-starring Elke Sommer, George Sanders, Graham Stark and Tracy Reed.
Inspector Clouseau [ edit ]
This film stars Alan Arkin as Clouseau, and does not have any other recurring characters from the rest of the series. Although it was produced by the Mirisch Corporation, Peter Sellers, Blake Edwards, and Henry Mancini were not involved in the making of this film.
The Return of the Pink Panther [ edit ]
(1975 film)
This not only marks the return of the famous "Pink Panther" diamond but also - after an 11-year hiatus - that of Peter Sellers as Clouseau, along with director Edwards, Mancini, Dreyfus and Cato. Sir Charles Lytton is portrayed by Christopher Plummer; the film also co-starred Catherine Schell, Peter Arne, and Graham Stark.
The Pink Panther Strikes Again [ edit ]
(1976 film)
Dreyfus' insanity reaches a pinnacle, as he tries to intimidate the rest of the world into killing Clouseau. With co-stars Leonard Rossiter, Lesley-Anne Down and Colin Blakely, and featuring a cameo by Omar Sharif.
Revenge of the Pink Panther [ edit ]
(1978 film)
This film pits Clouseau against the French Connection. It is the last in which Sellers played Clouseau. He died two years after its release. With co-stars Robert Webber, Dyan Cannon, Tony Beckley and Robert Loggia.
The Romance of the Pink Panther [ edit ]
The Romance of the Pink Panther was to be the 7th film in the franchise, to be written by Peter Sellers and Jim Moloney.[1] Due to hostility between Sellers and Blake Edwards, Edwards would not have directed the film. The basic plot was to involve Inspector Clouseau becoming smitten with a cat burglar called "The Frog".[2] Two drafts were written before Sellers' death, each with different endings.[citation needed] Shortly afterwards, it was suggested that Dudley Moore should play Clouseau, but Blake Edwards chose to introduce a new character in the series to replace Clouseau.
Trail of the Pink Panther [ edit ]
(1982 film)
Features Peter Sellers as Clouseau utilizing scenes cut from Strikes Again as well as flashbacks from the previous Pink Panther films. This movie was intended as a tribute to Sellers, but after its release Sellers' widow Lynne Frederick successfully sued Edwards and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for tarnishing her late husband's memory. David Niven and Capucine reprise their original roles from the first Pink Panther film. Trail was a critical and commercial failure.
Curse of the Pink Panther [ edit ]
(1983 film)
Inspector Clouseau and the Pink Panther diamond, both of which had gone missing in Trail, are pursued by a bungling American detective, Sgt. Clifton Sleigh (Ted Wass). Clouseau returns, after having plastic surgery to disguise his identity, in a cameo played by Roger Moore (who is credited as Turk Thrust II). Although intended to spawn a new series of misadventures for Sergeant Sleigh, the film's dismal box-office performance and critical drubbing led to a decade-long hiatus of the series.
Son of the Pink Panther [ edit ]
(1993 film)
Blake Edwards tried again to revive the series, this time by casting Roberto Benigni as Gendarme Jacques Gambrelli, Inspector Clouseau's illegitimate son by Maria Gambrelli, the murder suspect from A Shot in the Dark. Once again, many former Panther co-stars return – Herbert Lom, Burt Kwouk, and Graham Stark, and a star of the original 1963 film, Claudia Cardinale. Although intended to relaunch the series with a new lovable inept hero, Son failed critically and commercially and became the final installment in the original Pink Panther series.
The Pink Panther [ edit ]
This reboot launches a new series starring Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau and Kevin Kline as Chief Inspector Dreyfus. Not a remake of the original film, it forms a new starting point for a contemporary series, introducing the Clouseau and Dreyfus characters along with the famous diamond to a new generation.
The Pink Panther 2 [ edit ]
The sequel to Steve Martin's 2006 film. Martin reprises his role, but John Cleese replaces Kevin Kline as Chief Inspector Dreyfus.
Development [ edit ]
Although there are two later Pink Panther films starring Steve Martin, most of the films in the series starred Sellers as Inspector Clouseau and were directed and co-written by Blake Edwards. The jazz-based theme music was composed by Henry Mancini. In addition to the credits sequences, the theme often accompanies any suspenseful sequence in the first film and in subsequent films using the character.
The "Pink Panther" of the title is a diamond supposedly containing a flaw which forms the image of a "leaping panther" which can be seen if held up to light in a certain way. This is explained in the beginning of the first film, and the camera zooms in on the diamond to reveal the blurry flaw, which focuses into the cartoon Panther (though not actually leaping) to start the opening credits sequence. (This is also done in Return.) The plot of the first film is based on the theft of this diamond. The diamond reappears in several later films in the series, The Return of the Pink Panther, Trail of the Pink Panther, and Curse of the Pink Panther. It also appears in the revival of the Inspector Clouseau character in the much later Steve Martin films The Pink Panther (2006), and its sequel The Pink Panther 2 (2009). The name "the Pink Panther" became attached to Inspector Clouseau in much the same way that Frankenstein has been used in film titles to refer to Dr. Frankenstein's creation, or The Thin Man was used in a series of detective films.
A Shot in the Dark, a film which was not originally intended to feature Clouseau, is the first of two films in the series (the other being Inspector Clouseau) that features neither the diamond nor the distinctive animated Pink Panther in the opening credits and ending. Many critics, including Leonard Maltin, regard this film as the best in the series.
In the original film, released in 1963, the main focus was on David Niven's role as Sir Charles Litton, the infamous jewel thief nicknamed "the Phantom," and his plan to steal the Pink Panther. Inspector Clouseau was only a secondary character as Litton's incompetent antagonist and provided slapstick comic relief to an otherwise subtle, lighthearted caper film, a somewhat jarring contrast of styles which is typical of Edwards's films. The popularity of Clouseau caused him to become the main character in subsequent Pink Panther films, which were more straightforward slapstick comedies.
Mancini's theme, with variations in arrangement, is used at the start of all but the first two of the subsequent films. Mancini's other themes for the first film include an Italian-language set-piece called "Meglio stasera," whose purpose seems primarily to introduce young actress Fran Jeffries. Portions of an instrumental version also appear in the film's musical score several times. Other segments include "Shades of Sennett," a "honky-tonk" piano number introducing the film's climactic chase scene through the streets of Rome. Most of the remaining tracks on the soundtrack album are early 1960s orchestral jazz pieces, matching the style of the era. Although variations of the main theme would reprise for many of the Pink Panther series entries, as well as the cartoon series, Mancini composed different theme music for A Shot in the Dark; this was later adopted by the animated spin-off series, The Inspector.
Although official, the live-action film Inspector Clouseau (1968) starring Alan Arkin, is generally not considered by fans to be part of the series canon, since it involved neither Sellers nor Edwards. Some elements of Arkin's performance and costuming, however, were retained when Peter Sellers resumed the role of Clouseau for Return in 1975. Despite speculation, Alan Arkin does not appear in Trail of the Pink Panther.
The film that launched the second Pink Panther series, The Pink Panther, starring Martin as Clouseau, directed by Shawn Levy and produced by Robert Simonds, was released in February 2006 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and was co-produced with Columbia Pictures. It is set in the present day and introduces different main characters, therefore belonging to a different continuity. Martin also stars in the sequel, The Pink Panther 2, released in 2009.
Recurring characters [ edit ]
Recurring cast members [ edit ]
Crew [ edit ]
Statistics [ edit ]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Future [ edit |
photos of some of the most important of Potter's pieces.
The publisher and I invited Ronni Thomas--the man behind the a brand new documentary film based on Walter Potter's life and work. The publisher and I invited Ronni Thomas--the man behind the Midnight Archive web series--to produce a video trailer for the book. Ronni became so completely captivated with the subject that he has decided to create, in addition to said trailer,
I implore you to join me in supporting this worthy cause. And not just out of the kindness of your heart! Funders of this project will also receive a variety of exciting awards including (but not limited to) deluxe DVD/Blue Ray versions of the final film, a special advance copy of the book Walter Potter's Curious World of Taxidermy, special limited edition Potter postcards featuring never before seen photographs, and even, for the highest bidders, a custom film made especially for you. You will also, of course, receive film maker Ronni Thomas' undying gratitude, and contribute towards making the world a better place. I think we can all can agree that what the world really needs is a documentary film about the amazing life and work of Walter Potter. And in order to raise funds to complete this project in the style it deserves, Ronni has done what kids today do: He has launched a Kickstarter campaign, from whence the short film above.I implore you to join me in supporting this worthy cause. And not just out of the kindness of your heart! Funders of this project willreceive a variety of exciting awards including (but not limited to) deluxe DVD/Blue Ray versions of the final film, a special advance copy of the book, special limited edition Potter postcards featuring never before seen photographs, and even, for the highest bidders, a custom film made especially for you. You will also, of course, receive film maker Ronni Thomas' undying gratitude, and contribute towards making the world a better place.
Following is more about the project, in Ronni's own words; You can find out more about this very worthy campaign (and join me in making a pledge!) by clicking here
The Taxidermy Wonders of Walter Potter: A Short(?) Film
A short documentary featuring the life and strange artwork of amateur taxidermist Walter Potter by Ronni Thomas of The Midnight Archive.
Walter Potter was a Victorian self-taught taxidermist from Sussex, England who is best known for his large-scale anthropomorphic taxidermy tableaux including The Kittens’ Wedding, Rabbits’ Village School and The Death and Burial of Cock Robin. Until very recently, his truly unique collection has only been seen in its entirety by those fortunate enough to have visited his museum before the contents were auctioned to private collectors in 2003. For the first time – and with the help of historians, photographers, and collectors of his work – I intend to document Potter's life, creations and legacy in the latest installment of my award-winning Midnight Archive web series. The Midnight Archive generally consists of short (3–5 minute) pieces, and I have for some time been eager to grow these short 'episodes' into greater and longer stories. I feel that an episode about the life and work of Walter Potter is the perfect project to take to this next level. To do this right will require a little more than the casual subway ride around town. A project of this size will require a budget to make it happen, and I am hoping that I can persuade Potter fans and enthusiasts to pitch in to help make this the great film it deserves to be.
This film will feature some of the very first footage of these fantastic creations over one hundred years in age, many of which are now scattered around the globe in the homes of private collectors and thus nearly impossible to see. Among the collectors I will seek out to play their part are Sir Peter Blake – seminal pop artist, designer of the Sgt. Pepper album cover, and enthusiastic Potter collector – and artist Damien Hirst, who allegedly tried to pay one million pounds to halt the auction and keep the Potter collection intact. The film will also take you behind the scenes into an assortment of fascinating private collections in the US and the UK. Most importantly, and as always with the work I do, the piece will be thorough, dynamic and beautiful. Please donate all you can!
Risks and challenges
So, Potter's work is now scattered around the globe and owned by many different collectors. Many of the people are not easy to pin down, or are wary of talking to just anyone. Using the track record and proven integrity of The Midnight Archive series, and my connections with the co-author Morbid Anatomy's Joanna Ebenstein and publishers of Walter Potter's Curious World of Taxidermy – the delightful new coffee table book coming out this September – I have not only unprecedented access to many never-before-seen photographs, but also to many of the narrative's key players. Most importantly, if anyone is already familiar with the work I have created thus far, it becomes clear that I can do humble justice to this subject. I have many relationships with festivals and distributors, and I am well respected as a filmmaker, so I expect to gain a maximum amount of exposure for this project.
I will do this project whether or not this fundraising is successful; it will, however, be a longer and more in-depth work if we manage to raise the money. We're not asking for much, and all funds will go into the film itself (no first-class tickets on this shoot). Much like Potter himself, my intention is to make a great work of art, not capitalize on it...
Again! You can find out more or make a donation by clicking here
Images:When he took office, President Donald Trump inherited the grim situation with the Islamic State group that former President Barack Obama left behind, and a recent interview with a Saudi official revealed just how little Obama actually tried to defeat the radical Islamic terror organization.
Prince Faisal Bin Farhan al-Saud, an adviser to the deputy crown prince and a member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, recently explained on Fox News that his country offered to substantially help the United States defeat the Islamic State group, but the Obama administration turned them down.
The Saudis were “more than ready to cooperate with the United States on countering ISIS in Syria and Iraq across the region, not just financially, but the Saudi government offered during the Obama administration’s time to send its troops into Syria to fight ISIS,” he told Bret Baier. The offer “was not met with enthusiasm by the Obama administration.”
In other words, Obama apparently had a chance to defeat the Islamic State group by using a military force that was familiar with the land and the culture, but for some unknown reason he chose not to.
Once again, Obama’s lack of understanding regarding foreign policy threatened not only our country, but also millions of people elsewhere around the world.
The Saudi military comprises more than 200,000 people, including 75,000 in the army, 13,500 in the navy, 20,000 in the air force, and 100,000 personnel in the National Guard, according to a 2015 article by AFP.
That’s enough military power to do serious damage to the Islamic State group, particularly during the radical organization’s earlier days before it had secured more land and fighters.
Fortunately, the adviser explained that a recent meeting between Trump and Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Salman al-Saud had gone well and proved promising for the future of U.S.-Saudi relations.
In fact, al-Saud said the prince was “keen to come and meet President Trump as early as possible” to “reinvigorate the strategic, longstanding partnership” that our countries have had with each other for 50 years.
Trump has been clear — both during the 2016 presidential campaign and since his election — that he believed the Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia, should be doing and paying their fair share to help defeat the Islamic State group.
The Saudi adviser explained that his government fully intended to do what Trump wanted if the U.S. would accept its help, unlike the refusal given by Obama.
Watch a video clip here, with the segment regarding the Islamic State group issue ending around the 3:20 mark:
While it was certainly good news that Trump has fostered a good relationship with the Saudi government, it’s a shame that Obama didn’t do what was necessary several years ago. If he had, the Islamic State group might not be the powerhouse terrorist organization it is today. Like us on Facebook – USA Liberty News Like and share this article on Facebook and Twitter if you’re disgusted that President Obama turned down Saudi Arabia’s offer to send money and troops for the fight against the Islamic State group.
What do you think about Obama not accepting military help from Saudi Arabia? Scroll down to comment below!
Source: conservativetribune.comOn Tuesday, news broke that Hartford would have to say goodbye to the Greater Hartford Pro-Am, a beloved summer basketball league that showcases the sport's brightest stars and energizes the inner-city community.
On Wednesday, indications were that it might only be goodbye … for now.
Moving outside Hartford for the first time since its inception in 1997, the Pro-Am will begin July 10 at Crosby High School in Waterbury. But the event, which has seen increasing numbers of city residents pack the bleachers to watch high-profile and high-flying players, could return to Hartford in 2014 — and possibly for a portion of the upcoming 2013 season.
"I'm with it," league president Pete Higgins said of the return to Hartford. "One hundred percent."
Higgins said he considered the possibility of splitting this summer's games between Waterbury and Hartford, but that is a complicated process that has to be cleared with the NCAA and others.
For now, and for the number of reasons Higgins has cited — rising costs of facilities and security, lack of viable venue options with the right capacity and a wood court — the move to Waterbury is necessary. Crosby High has a wood court, a seating capacity of more than 2,000 and facility costs (about $12,000, according to Higgins) that are less than half what the Pro-Am was charged each of the past two years in Hartford.
Still, Higgins on Wednesday looked toward the future with an eye on the Pro-Am's past.
He first met with Eric Crawford, mending a strained relationship and renewing their Pro-Am partnership. Crawford had spent the past three years as the Pro-Am's executive director or, as he more recently referred to his title, volunteer commissioner. On Tuesday, Crawford said he would end his affiliation with the Pro-Am out of loyalty to Hartford.
But after a two-hour conversation at the Wilson-Gray YMCA on Albany Avenue, the two set forth a plan to try to engage the city of Hartford on a higher level, defray costs and plan for a future in the city where the Pro-Am was built.
Next week, Higgins and Crawford will meet with Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra, who issued the following statement Wednesday: "We regret their decision [to move to Waterbury] especially because of the city's level of commitment over the last two years and we are going to do whatever we can to bring the Pro-Am team back to Hartford. I'm currently meeting with Eric and Pete to explore ways to do this."
Crawford and Higgins would like to establish new youth programs and strengthen others run by the Pro-Am, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The Pro-Am would like cooperation from the city on those efforts, and wants Segarra and other officials to facilitate talks that lead to reduced, or even forgiven, facility costs.
"I think [Segarra] might have been a little misinformed on who we are, what we do and what our attachment to the community is," Higgins said. "I'll take the hit on that, not getting that across. I want to bring to the table early on [to Segarra] what our plans are, our forecast, how we can get the city more involved, what events we can help the city with, learn what their different campaigns might be with kids, education, health."
Regarding the basketball event, money and location are the overriding issues for Higgins. The Pro-Am's annual operating costs have ballooned to about $75,000, in large part because of increased security needs and custodial workers. The bill for use of the Sport & Medical Sciences Academy in 2011 was $32,000. The bill for use of Classical Magnet School in 2012 was $29,000. Both gyms hold 800 or fewer, and other city gyms have rubber courts, which elite players prefer not to play on.
"The mayor doesn't control the gym capacities and situations like that," Higgins said. "We just don't want to continually turn people away when the Kemba Walkers and Andre Drummonds [play]."
Higgins has renewed efforts to purchase or rent a wood floor to be placed in one of Hartford's bigger facilities. Ideally, he said, the event would return to Bulkeley High — where it began in 1997.
Higgins still owes for those 2011 and 2012 bills. The city has guaranteed the Pro-Am $25,000 for 2012 — that payment will be processed once Higgins or Crawford file the proper invoice — and another $25,000 for 2013, but only if the event is kept in Hartford this summer.
"Maybe this negative, the [absence] of basketball for a year, can be turned into a positive," Crawford said. "We hope to come up with a game plan to come back [to Hartford] maybe with a three-year commitment. Maybe we can take this year to raise funds to get it back, come to an agreement, know how much money we'll need to raise and maybe pre-pay some bills so Pete can walk in with a clean slate [in 2014]. There are always additional, unexpected costs. We're always carrying over these huge balances."
The Pro-Am had a successful three-year run at SMSA that ended in 2011. About 1,500 fans sometimes jammed into the building, which holds less than 800. SMSA told Crawford and Higgins it could no longer host the event, citing concerns for crowd control.
Higgins and his staff have been shocked by the 2011 and 2012 bills, which add up to $61,000, much of it because of increased security that Higgins and Crawford say is unnecessary.
Higgins expects 13 teams to participate this summer with, as usual, all areas of the state represented on the court.
The Pro-Am, Higgins said, "is about Hartford, but also about a bigger demographic, the whole state. We want everyone on the same page. We don't want this as a feud."Florida is the land of the palm trees, sunshine and beautiful beaches. It boasts one of the most diverse flora and fauna in the country. One would think that the establishment would want to protect this precious resource - that being the environment. But the answer, sadly, is a resounding no. It's not cost-effective to protect the diverse swamplands, endangered wetlands and forest that thrive in the state. After all, the protection and conservation of natural wonders don't pay for election campaigns.
One prime example of how little importance is given to the Florida environment is happening in Miami-Dade County -- home to Miami and 2.6 million residents.
One of the world's rarest forests, the Pine Rocklands, boasting several endangered plant and animal species, will soon have a Walmart built over it. A total of 88 acres of the endangered Florida Pine Rockland Forest will be cut down, paved over and filled with concrete to make way for this big box retailer. It is estimated that less than 2% of the original ancient forest remains today - and 88 acres of it are about to be permanently destroyed.
The distinguished University of Miami was the original owner of the land and decided to sell it. Though the university has been "committed" to protecting the environment, selling it to the highest paying bidder was apparently the better option.
The rare forest is home to many animals and endangered species, which include the Bald Eagle, The Indigo Snake, the Florida Bonneted Bat and several rare plants and butterflies. This past summer, several additional rare plants - including the critically endangered polygala smallii were discovered. Also, a butterfly species that almost went extinct in the mid 20th century, the Atala Hairstreak is thriving in these woods. Currently, there are almost 10,000 signatures on a MoveOn.Org petition demanding the protection of this endangered forest in South Florida.
Florida is going backwards. Those who are supposed to protect the best interests of the state are caving to big money. The environment in Florida is a delicate ecosystem that is being destroyed. Instead of investing in green energy and conservation measures, the state chooses instead to roll out the red carpet to the highest bidder. That's what's happening here in good ol' Florida. Big corporations and corrupt leaders have run the state like their own private trust fund.
Florida's farce of a Republican governor, Rick Scott, publicly made statements on how his administration believes in protecting the environment. "Florida has successfully reduced its environmental permitting time down to just two days, and that's great!" Governor Scott said. "We take care of our environment, but when we know we're going to give a permit, give it to them quickly." Because handing out permits to build over forests, swamps and grasslands should be a speedy, no delayed process. Great accountability and review process there, Governor.
This is but a microcosm of what is happening all over Florida and other parts of the country. Thankfully, many citizens realized the perils of forsaking the treasures that make Florida great. On November 4th, 2014, 75% of Florida voters approved a state constitutional amendment that would bring over $10 billion a year to land conservation, restoration and protection efforts. With the passing of the Water & Land Conservation Amendment, billions of dollars will go to keeping Florida's water clean, protecting the plethora of bodies of water, restoring the wetlands, forests and beaches and protecting national treasures such as the Everglades National Park. Guess who was against it? The Florida Chamber of Commerce and *drum roll please* Governor Rick Scott, who refused to publicly take a position. Shocker.It’s been a while since Razer has refreshed the Razer Blade Pro, which is their 17.3-inch desktop replacement laptop. The outgoing model still has a Haswell processor with GTX 960M. It’s always been a bit strange that the 14-inch Razer Blade was equipped with a stronger GPU than the larger laptop, and when the Razer Blade Pro was last updated, the Razer Blade had a GTX 970M in a smaller form factor.
This is no longer the case. The 14-inch Razer Blade was just updated with Skylake and GTX 1060 in September, which should significantly increase its performance, and today Razer is announcing the new Razer Blade Pro, which finally surpasses its smaller sibling in performance with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 squeezed into the same 0.88-inch thick CNC aluminum chassis. The Core i7-6700HQ 45-Watt CPU replaces the outgoing Haswell processor, and 32 GB of DDR4 RAM is now available. In order to keep the system cool, Razer has designed what they are calling the world's thinnest maufactured vapor chamber cooling solution in a laptop. Combined with a custom fan design and a dynamic heat exchanger, Razer is engineering as much cooling as they can into the thin notebook.
Razer has been a big proponent of IGZO displays, and they have outfitted the Blade Pro with a 17.3-inch 3840x2160 IGZO display, and this high-resolution panel also supports NVIDIA’s G-SYNC technology, which should help quite a bit with gaming, even with the big GPU under the hood. This display covers 100% of the Adobe RGB color gamut as well, just like the Razer Blade Stealth UHD model. That has implications though due to the lack of proper color management in Windows, and if it is like the Stealth, it won’t have any included color management software. It’s not Razer’s fault, and hopefully more devices with wide color gamut support will force Microsoft’s hand here.
Razer has also outfitted the new Pro with their new ultra-low profile mechanical switches, which feature actuation points which register at 65 grams, as well as reset points. There have been other laptops with mechanical switches, but they are generally the full-size switches which require much more travel. On a 0.88-inch thick laptop, there would be no way for this to work. Razer has also added the same per-key RGB Chroma branded lighting they have already added to both the Stealth and Blade models.
The TrackPad sits to the right of the keyboard, much like on the older model, but if you are gaming, a mouse is likely the best bet.
Razer Blade Pro Shipping in November 2016 CPU Intel Core i7-6700HQ
Quad-Core with Hyperthreading
2.6-3.5 GHz, 6MB Cache, 45W TDP GPU NVIDIA GTX 1080
2560 CUDA Cores 1566-1733 (Boost) MHz
8GB 256-bit GDDR5X Memory 32 GB DDR4 2133MHz Display 17.3" 3840 x 2160 IGZO LCD
100% Adobe RGB
G-SYNC Enabled with multi-touch Storage 512GB / 1TB / 2TB SSD
PCIe M.2 RAID 0 (2 drives) I/O USB 3.1 Type-C with Thunderbolt 3
USB 3.0 Type-A x 3
RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet Killer E2400
Headset jack
2.0MP Webcam
SDXC
HDMI 2.0 Dimensions 424 x 281 x 22.5 mm
16.7 x 11 x 0.88 inches Weight 3.54 kg / 7.8 lbs Battery 99 Wh, 250 W AC Adapter Wireless Killer Wireless-AC 1535
802.11ac 2x2:2 with Bluetooth 4.1
Killer DoubleShot Pro Price $3699+
At under eight pounds, the new Blade Pro is actually pretty light for a system of this size and performance. The new Razer Blade Pro exceeds the requirements for any of the current VR headsets, so it should be able to run VR pretty well.
All of these features do add to the cost though. Where as the new 14-inch Razer Blade starts at $1800, the new Razer Blade Pro starts at over double that price: $3700. Shipments start in November.The World A Jump Survivor's Bridge to Activism
John Kevin Hines wants a suicide barrier erected on the Golden Gate to keep others from leaping.
At last, the former high school wrestler and football nose tackle tipped his head back, plunging below the surface feet first. Pain raced through his legs as the impact fractured an ankle and shattered two vertebrae in his lower back.
Plummeting head-first toward the churning waters 220 feet below, he tried to scream, but the force of the descent sucked the air from his lungs. He felt an odd euphoria as winds buffeted his body. But to survive, he knew he had to right himself before hitting the water.
His eyes wet with tears, he had finally consented to the voices that commanded him to take his own life. But at 10:40 a.m. on that overcast September day, just as he catapulted over a 4-foot-high railing and began his frantic free fall, the college freshman asked himself: "What did I just do? I don't want to die."
SAN FRANCISCO — The very moment John Kevin Hines jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, he knew he'd made a mistake.
Hines opened his eyes to a murky netherworld, his broken body racked by fierce currents in the 50-degree water. Still, he could see diffuse light above and headed for the surface 40 feet away.
"I remember it like it was yesterday: At the top, I took this huge gasp of air," he said. "It's like I was reborn that day."
Hines was just 19.
Its majestic orange arch spanning San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge holds a dubious distinction as one of the world's most popular suicide spots. Since 1937, bridge officials say, more than 1,300 people have made the leap, not counting those who went unnoticed or whose bodies were quickly swept out to sea.
Only 16 have survived.
Now 23, Hines has a titanium cage in his back. He has twice returned to hospitals to treat a bipolar disorder that causes upsetting mood swings. Yet today he has a mission, unlike the one he had Sept. 25, 2000.
His face freckled, his body weightlifter-sturdy, he takes time from his acting studies to help prevent others from opting for what he calls "a permanent solution to a temporary problem."
Hines is part of a task force urging officials to erect a suicide barrier on the landmark span. He has spoken to numerous groups about how a barricade would prevent bridge suicides, which now average about one every two weeks.
Officials have long resisted installing a barrier, citing the cost, a fear of compromising the bridge's profile and doubts over whether determined jumpers wouldn't just go elsewhere.
Hines knows the terrible allure the bridge holds for the severely depressed.
"Most people see the bridge's spectacular beauty; the mentally ill see an opportunity for a romantic way out," he said. "What they choose to ignore is that hitting the water at that speed is a gruesome way to die."
Hines spent a month in the hospital recovering from his injuries. For a year, he avoided the towering Art Deco span. On the first anniversary of his jump, his father took him back to the site as a way to exorcise his pain.
Facing San Francisco's gleaming skyscrapers, Hines dropped a purple tulip to the water below. Now he returns every year on the date.Valve's not-so-subtle hints that Steam would be coming to the Mac platform were met with a great deal of enthusiasm from the wholly under-served community of gamers who own Apple hardware. It has been years of slim pickings for Mac owners.
We've been playing with the beta of the Steam service on a variety of Mac systems over the weekend, and while this may not be the Holy Grail for Mac gaming some had hoped it would be, the future is indeed brighter than it once was. Let's take a look.
The beta is barely a taste
The only game available to play in the beta so far is Portal, which isn't exactly a cutting-edge title. I was able to play fine with my Unibody MacBook Pro after chopping down a few of the graphical options and hooking up an external USB mouse. The touchpad on newer Macbooks is great for productivity, but it's not exactly optimal for gaming performance. If you're a Razer fan, be aware that there are now full Mac drivers for all their products... possibly preparing the hardware for the rollout of this very service.
MacBook Pros include two GPUs, and Steam gently reminded me that I had my system set to use only one of them for longer battery life, offering a link to my system's settings to remedy this problem. I turned on the more powerful—and battery-limited—GPU for better gaming performance. I was also asked to enable "access for assistive devices" in system preferences under Universal Access.
After that, the game worked beautifully. As anyone with a Windows partition on his or her Mac OS X systems already knows, Mac hardware is hardly going to replace any similarly priced gaming PC, but newer models certainly have the horsepower to run Source-based games at a very playable framerate, as long as you don't mind monkeying around in the graphical options to find settings that work best for your system.
What this means moving forward
With only one game available for now, the beta mainly just shows the Steam client working. Soon we'll have access to Team Fortress 2 to try out, but as that's another game based on the Source engine it's doubtful there will be much to learn from running it... outside of the fact that we can.
In fact, Valve is going to be the big winner for a while here unless other companies step up: a ported Source engine allows Portal, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, Half-Life 2 (and all its episodes), and Team Fortress 2 to be available for sale when the service launches. Portal 2 is another game likely to be released day and date on Macs. Valve is going to launch a service on the Mac that will be offering a good selection of its own games to a customer base hungry for titles. That's a very good position to be in.
There's the symbol!
Good news if you run Windows and Mac OS X: if you already own these games on the PC you won't have to pay for another license on your Apple computers. If you already own Left 4 Dead, you'll be able to download it again on your MacBook and play.
In fact, when the client leaves beta for wide release, a new storefront dedicated to Mac games will be available. "Once the Mac beta ends, we'll have the store up and running with a collection of your favorite Mac games and a continually growing catalog," the beta page states. "Buy games once and play them on any Mac or PC. Just look for the SteamPlay symbol when shopping." Games bearing that symbol will work on both your PC and Mac, no matter which system you bought them for.
This is what Steam is really going to bring to the table: a powerful incentive for more developers and publishers to port their games to Mac OS X. Steam has some serious momentum in the world of digital distribution, and if Valve's own games begin to sell in large numbers to Mac gamers, others will pay attention. Being able to buy a game that will work on all your PCs is a powerful value-add for gaming consumers, and this is a very good day for Mac gamers. The open question is whether more publishers will step up and take advantage of the opportunity.
The Steam client for Macs will be available on May 12.TW: This post is about suicidal ideation and suicide. I do describe suicide attempts and frank discussions with students regarding the details of their suicidal ideation.
My previous two posts in this series (Part 1, Part 2) discussed how to handle difficult conversations with autistic students. Part 1 discussed sex and how to help autistic students navigate the world of sexuality. Part 2 discussed how to help students understand the line between reality and fiction, particularly when they are immersing themselves in a scary or fearful reality.
I emphasized in both cases the importance of having a relatively nonplussed if not flat affect when engaging in these conversations. The reason for that is that the child already is having a hard enough time understanding their own emotions without the emotions of others complicating matters.
In cases of talking about sexuality, the student is experiencing feelings they do not understand. They are becoming sexually attracted to another person, be it of another or the same gender. In Utah same gender attraction is particularly difficult for children to understand because the LGBTQIA community are just beginning to be able to openly enter the public forum. They do not know how to process this. If we tell them that they should not be feeling those emotions, they will shut down. If we tell them they are not feeling their emotions, they will not only shut down but they will start questioning themselves. They will shrink away inside. If a boy is attracted to boys, fine. If a 2nd grade child is entering precocious puberty and experiencing sexual attraction, fine. These are facts, we should be able to dispassionately listen.
In cases of Slenderman or other CreepyPasta, the child believes that something fictitious is real. Telling them they are wrong is not particularly helpful. Acting all scared and freaking out on them contributes nothing to the situation but may actually deepen fear and belief in these fictional realities. If they believe in Slenderman, fine. If they believe Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold Steve Austin are real, fine. If they believe Dr. Who is real, fine.
In the case of the present post, I will address suicidal ideation and attempts. This is one of those cases that having a stone-faced expression is extra important.
I say it is extra important when discussing factors related to suicide and suicidal ideation because there is a very real danger of our emotions making the situation worse-and this is one time we cannot afford to make matters worse. These children are having emotions that adults with a lifetime of experiences often cannot handle; without the life experience to put them into context. Also, children are more impulsive than adults, further complicating discussions about emotions. We often have to fight our natural tendencies to try to solve problems and provide answers rather than just listen. We will hear students say things that make no sense and might be downright wrong. We cannot emotionally react. This is hard. All we can do it listen and validate their emotions. Nothing more.
This post gets to an important point I did not mention earlier with regards to the video of the interrogation I link right below. Note that one of the girls starts out the interview by flat-out lying, because she’s scared and wants to give a good impression of herself. She tries to pin everything on the other girl and acts all innocent and naive. By this time the police have evidence that this girl is far from innocent. As the interviewer does not give emotional feedback, her story changes and becomes inconsistent because she is unable to use the emotions of the interviewer to guide her actions. This is not to say the girl was being evil in any way, she was only doing what we all do when we meet someone for the first time. Be on our best behavior and try to give a good impression. Kids will try to either give adults what they want to hear or else the opposite if it gives attention or escape from consequences. We have to give the student time to trust us and let the truth come out on their own terms-then we get the unbiased truth from their eyes.
An Educational Aside
So, I was speaking with a parent of an autistic student and they suggested I write a post about the conversations I have with students because I do not shy away from difficult or uncomfortable topics. I thought about what she said a lot and I realized I am unique among a lot of teachers because I am willing to talk about things like puberty, sexual orientation, CreepyPasta, depression, or suicide with students so long as the situation and conversation are appropriate. And I do it with a nonplussed expression that gives the students a sense of calm, or at least a perception that I am in control and not surprised by their questions (this video shows two great police interrogators doing exactly this).
I feel this is an overlooked yet important role for a teacher. Anytime I see students starting down a tough path I want to intervene before they go so far they reject outside help. In hindsight, I worry how some situations would have turn out had I not taken the time to help the students get a grasp on their own thoughts and feelings.
This is part 3 of a 3 part series on crucial conversations. See the first part here for a description of my approach and rationale for taking on these conversations and here for Part 2.
Suicide
Example 1 – 13 Reasons Why
I was in a Junior High recently helping out. After playing a few games and working with some kids they pulled me aside. This was a group of 5 autistic students and one of their peers. They wanted to talk with an adult about 13 Reasons Why. They did not understand why the girl committed suicide.
Now, I thought 13 Reasons Why was a bit clumsy in their presentation, and thus confusing for these autistic kids. In the context of the series it was clear that the girl was tormented by everything that was happening to her and chose suicide as a way to escape seemingly unavoidable pain and torment. These students did not get it.
They were confused about why the girl (Hannah) was so troubled by the vast majority of the bullying that was described. These young boys (as all were male) did not understand how a lesbian kiss, a racy photograph, a friend being sexually assaulted, breakups, or being voted “best ass” would be so terrible. These students told me quite matter of factly that being raped was a sufficient reason to commit suicide, but the other issues in the show were insufficient. They wanted so badly to understand. Their nonautistic friends/peers seemed to understand and were talking about 13 Reasons Why and these students wanted in on the conversation.
Here was how the conversation went. These students grabbed me and asked about 13 Reasons Why and then volunteered the info in the above paragraph. They then asked why these things were a big deal…and was Hannah in the TV show right for slitting her wrists. Not small questions, but sort of important ones. Fortunately a school social worker was in the room with me for this conversation. They just sat and listened to the conversation in case they were needed but preferred to leave the talk to me because these students approached me specifically to ask.
In this case, I went to the Rogerian method to see if I could help these peers answer their own questions. I asked how embarrassed they would feel if someone had an inappropriate photo of them and sent it to everyone and now everyone saw that image without permission. These students talked for a few minutes about how they would feel and it ended a mixed bag. About half said they would not have taken the picture and thus it was an “invalid hypothetical situation” (as one put it), and the other half went from lack of understanding to mortification thinking of someone seeing them in a private or compromising situation. A similar conversation ensued for a video of them kissing someone of their nonpreferred gender and having that passed around. They all felt being nominated for “best ass” was a stupid thing to be angry about as it was a compliment. I was not able to sway their thinking, so I didn’t try.
The social worker jumped in and helped with the next question…the friend that was raped. All of these students said it was inappropriate to take the anger one would feel toward the rapist and kill yourself for it. They unanimously agreed the right thing would have been for Hannah to kill the rapist. At this point I jumped in and told them to settle down and think for a bit about what they were saying, and they agreed perhaps the right thing to do would be to go to the police, not go all Tarantino on the situation. But they were stuck on one point: why did Hannah internalize someone else’s suffering? Was she guilty for not trying to help or not reporting it? Why did she do that to herself? She was stupid? She was not thinking? And so on.
I asked them if they ever knew someone had done something wrong and hurt another person and they were unable to do anything about it because they did not know how or were scared. They all said yes (much to my surprise). They said they saw things all the time they did not know how to deal with. I asked if Hannah could have been the same so her inaction and her friend’s pain was |
from, the early leaks said three to six and two to four (weeks). It was a significant injury, one that was tough to deal with physically, as far as sleeping and being able to work out, but also mentally being separated from the team and having to watch from the sideline and especially as we tumbled there for a while until we righted it and I was able to come back. It was definitely a tough injury."
Q. When you walk back onto the field — you're giving fans the thumbs up and the stadium erupts — are you thinking back to Family Night '08, practices '08 when some of these fans are booing you?
A. I did. That's a great point. That was one of the top moments of my career. I actually got teary-eyed coming back onto the field when I got the ovation. I'd put it right up there with running off the field after we beat the winless Lions and finished 6-10 in '08 and I got a very nice ovation. And then, up there with the "Welcome Back to Lambeau" when we won the Super Bowl. Those are three of my top moments at Lambeau. One of them was really special with the Super Bowl. And the other two, one I'm walking back on the field and the other we're out of the playoffs, the season's over and we just beat a hapless Lions team. That was a special moment, one I'll never forget. In that moment of sadness, knowing that I was done, I got just an incredible perspective on the connection that we as players and me personally have with our fans.
Q. For you personally, why did this ovation mean so much to you after everything you've been through?
A. The '08 summer was a difficult one, as Brett was trying to get back into the mix and some of the comments that I heard or saw, you know, were hurtful. I never held that against the fans because there was such a small percentage and the fans are so loyal they just want to see a winning product on the field. As difficult as that season was to get through, to have a moment like that at the end of the '08 season and then to also have a moment on the field this past season, that kind of outpouring of love is what makes this game so special. And more than that, it's what makes this organization and this city, this franchise so special. There's a direct connection between the fans and the players. And they love their football, they love their Packers. I'm proud to be one of them.
Q. Those seven games where you weren't the Green Bay Packers' starting quarterback, what was your personal darkest moment?
A. I don't know if there were any real dark moments. I learned when I was on the IR in '06 when I broke my foot that it is tough to be separated from the team. And I had a reminder in 2010 when I had my second concussion and had to go home for a couple days. It's tough to be separate from the team, but there's a lot to be said about the kind of teammate you're going to be in those situations. I tried to be as helpful as I could to Seneca and then Scott and then Matt in realizing that when you're done playing it's about more than what you did on the field. It's going to be the kind of teammate you were and the kind of friend you were. I wanted to do as much as I could to help those guys out. And also, there's something inside you that wants to feel connected to a team when you're out. For me, that connection was made through being in the meeting rooms, being on the sideline with the headset, talking to the starter on the sidelines and trying to help them out as much as I could.
Q. Did sitting out that long further feed your competitiveness?
A. It didn't feed my competitiveness. It sucked. It made me have a greater appreciation for what we do and the opportunity we have, much like I felt when I had to go home for two days during the New England week in 2010. I love this game. I'm blessed to be able to play it. I'd love to play it as long as I possibly can. And hopefully, I can stay relatively injury-free the rest of the way.
Q. In light of a fractured collarbone, do you feel the need to change, to tweak your playing style at all?
A. I think just getting older in the league, you have to continue to be smarter. After I took that second concussion, I think I've been smarter with my running in not taking a whole lot of chances. Alex (Van Pelt) has done a great job this year of getting the quarterbacks in the right frame of mind as far as our thought process and our reads, just honing in on those. I think I'm always going to want to use my legs — it adds an extra dimension to my game that's always been helpful. It's about knowing when to do that and being smarter every year. The more games I play, the more experience I have and it will hopefully translate to making better decisions.
Q. If it was up to Ted (Thompson) and Mike (McCarthy), would they want you to stay in the pocket?
A. Ted, probably. Mike just wants me to play I think. But Ted probably wants me to stay in there a little more.
Q. But isn't that what makes you different from other quarterbacks, different from the best passers in the league? You can use your feet to keep plays alive.
A. I think so. But it's about knowing when to do that and knowing when to get to the checkdown and throw it away. We've done some good scheme tweaks. But I'm 30 now. So I'm a lot smarter than what I was in my 20s.
Q. How satisfying was the Week 17 win at Chicago to clinch the division your first game back?
A. That was right up there with the top games in my career. It wasn't the cleanest game of my career. I made a couple uncharacteristic mistakes. But especially the last drive was one of the more special moments that we've shared together — Mike and I, in our time — and one we'll always look back on fondly.
Q. And one week later, it's over. Have you thought about that last offensive possession against San Francisco this off-season?
A. Not really. We had it down there. We had a chance to take the lead. We tied it and wish we could have gotten it into the end zone. But it's a game of inches.
Q. What separates the Green Bay Packers from the San Francisco 49ers?
A. Not much.
Q. How would you describe your relationship with Mike McCarthy, your head coach?
A. I think it's a real good relationship. I think there's a lot of communication between us. I think there's a lot of trust. We played a lot of games together, shared a lot of wins together, had a lot of ups and downs together. But it's been mostly ups. And we know each other well. We know each other's body language. We can read each other on the field. I think we're in a real good place.
Q. So when you say "body language," what would be an example of that?
A. It's probably more on his side, but he can tell sometimes what kind of mood I'm in and what kind of play I'm looking for. And I can tell on the flip side by the inflection of his voice what he's thinking about on certain plays or if I look over at him and he's giving me the "McCarthy eye" or the snarl, I know what he's thinking. But I think there's a lot more laughter in store for our relationship in the coming years and I look forward to that.
Q. We all saw the sideline deal between you two at Cincinnati in Week 3. How often do you two butt heads?
A. Not that often. That wasn't really butting heads. That was a couple competitors having a conversation. That happens from time to time when competitors collide. But every now and then, you have to stir it up a little bit and it all comes back together.
Q. So why is that important for both of you to be competitive, to be yourselves and stir it up?
A. Because we're competitors. We're both alpha dogs. We're both leaders. We just have to remember there's two alpha dogs leading the sled, not one.
Q. Is this a difficult power struggle?
A. No, I don't think so. It's just how we both view the relationship and now that he's 50 and I'm 30, I think we're both a little wiser.
Q. What do you and Mike do off the field? Do you guys hang out?
A. Yeah, we've always had a good relationship. We spend a lot of time together at the facility and have a lot of conversations in group settings and also one-on-one settings during the game week and get together every now and then off the field. I spent some time together with him on Christmas this year.
Q. So can you get "salty," as your coach said after that Bengals game?
A. I think he was referring to being on edge and sometimes I get on edge from time to time. But, yeah, we're both salty.
Q. This week you said this team has a "different feel" and a "hunger." Where have you seen that and why is it different this year?
A.There are some different players and different coaches (and) that breeds new energy. I think you've seen some young guys come in that look good in practice. Whenever that happens, it just kind of picks up the intensity of everybody else. You always need to add some new guys to the mix. It helps adding (Julius) Peppers. We've got some guys back as well. (Bryan) Bulaga back. DuJuan Harris back. Casey Hayward. Bringing those guys back kind of raises everybody else's play. You start thinking about — and guys do this naturally — you start thinking about who's going to make the 53. And you look around at the kind of talent we're adding, you add a guy like Sam Gash, who's a vocal presence at practice. And Alex in his new role I think has really amped up the focus, the intensity and really the energy at practice. It's fun to feel that.
Q. What responsibilities come with being the fourth-oldest player on the team, the longest-tenured Packer and you are an elder statesman around here all of a sudden?
A. Yeah, nobody's been here as long as I have, which is interesting. You find yourself having more inside jokes with people who work here — the training staff, the equipment staff — because I've been around them for so long, which is fun. But I think it makes you have to really spend more time on relationships with the younger guys, whether it's at a lunch table or a breakfast table or it's setting up a get-together or going to a get-together with teammates. It's important to make the most of those relationships because team chemistry is probably an underrated part of a team's success. And when guys are hanging out together and spending time together, truly caring about each other, there's a closer-knit feeling and a trust in the guy who's lined up next to you and you're in the huddle with them.
Q. So what is your leadership style then? How would you characterize that?
A. It's by example, first. That's most important. Words can fall on deaf ears when there are no actions associated with it. But it is also a lot of words based on my experiences and there's an offense that's on paper and there's an offense that gets adjusted from time to time, so the guys need to know the adjustments. One thing I've always appreciated with various coaches, I'll highlight Edgar Bennett. He always takes notes of stuff I've said in meetings and relays that to the receivers because the relationship between myself and the skill guys is very important as we do a lot of non-verbal communication and a lot of eye-contact communication. So the guys need to learn that and be ready for it. Physical errors are going to happen. They're going to happen by me. But the mental errors and the lapses in preparation don't really have a place on this team. That's what Mike always stresses and I've always stressed, is being perfect in your execution. Physical errors happen. So be it. But you have to make sure you're doing the right thing every time.
Q. How do you go about motivating specific teammates? What are some things that you do to motivate players?
A. I think you can inspire guys. But you have to be self-motivated in this league. So I try to inspire them, encourage them and figure out how to push the right buttons on each guy because everybody responds differently to different types of leadership styles. I learned that back at my coaching class with Coach (Russ) Critchfield at Butte College. But you have to be self-motivated to last in this league. And that's what I tell the young guys — you have to be a self-starter, you have to put the time in in the off-season and during the season. Make sure you're studying the right way, studying the right things and getting yourself ready to play by Sunday because ultimately the guys who are the self-motivated guys — two guys who are a great example are John Kuhn and Jarrett Bush. They've been in this league for a long time. Talented guys but not the most talented guys. They're guys who care about it and are always putting the time in the weight room, and the preparation shows. They are guys who are consistently our best special teams players and our smartest guys on offense and defense.
Q. Last year when we were sitting here you said there are "silly" and "comical" things out there that you still see, slights that you can use as motivation for yourself. Is that something you still seek?
A.I've never really seeked it, but I have friends who feel it's important to tell me that kind of stuff. I think the older you get, the less that really means to you. And I do Twitter, but I don't do it during the season. So during the season, I have really zero social media access. So I don't really pay a lot of attention to that. I know that my lifestyle and the career I've had leads to greater scrutiny and at times greater praise. But that stuff is pretty fickle and I don't give a whole lot of credence to the experts on Twitter or any other social media site — or really on TV for that matter. I know it comes with the territory. I embrace it. It's part of my life now and my career. But I don't need that to motivate. I'm very self-motivated.
Q. But for a while this has been a source of motivation for you that does keep that chip on the shoulder. Is this an area where you've grown?
A. Like I said, I'm 30 now. I'm a lot more mature. That's tongue in cheek. But I think the older you get, things that used to motivate you aren't as important anymore. You refocus on things that are really important. I'm going to focus on the challenge to be great every day. That's a strong motivator. I've played with a chip on shoulder. And I feel that I've proved a lot of my critics, my initial critics, wrong. Now, it's about proving it to myself and my teammates that I can still be the best every day and I look forward to leading this team for a number of years.
Q. A lot of quarterbacks get to the eighth, ninth year of their careers and start to fade — even Hall of Famers could start to fade at this point. How do you sustain a level of excellence?
A. To me, it's a lot about how you take care of your body in the off-season. And in-season, finding the right routine to get your body right every week. And mentally, it's about the preparation that gives you the best chance to be successful. You learn that over the years. You refine it. You feel good about the week and how you go about getting ready to play on Sunday. And then you have to trust your instincts and your reactions when you get on the field and have that execution that comes from doing it a long time. I look forward to that challenge. I love the fact that my teammates count on me every week to play at a high level. I expect greatness when I step on the practice field and on the game field.
Q. You're a "110 Million-Dollar Man," an MVP in a town of 105,000 people. Can you go out and live the way you want to live or do you need to stay private, secluded?
A. No, I love going out. I love the interactions with the fans. It's a first-name basis at a lot of places. There's a lot of places that I may tend to go to over others because of the feel I have there or the food. Like Chives for instance, which I have zero stake in for the record. I just love to eat there and love the people there. But, no, I'm going to live my life. Especially in Green Bay, there's a special connection you feel when you step on the field, that I felt that night when I broke my collarbone and I feel every time I take the field. I embrace being a Packer, living here, working here and the interactions with the fans.Bruce Cheadle, The Canadian Press
OTTAWA -- The latest federal spending estimates show that four federal government departments have been given another $11 million for advertising as the current fiscal year-end approaches.
The ad spending splurge comes amid large campaigns promoting Conservative family tax measures that have not yet been approved by Parliament and aggressive Defence department recruitment ads that dovetail with current Conservative anti-terrorism messaging.
In total, the Conservative government has now committed $65 million to advertising this fiscal year, which ends March 31.
The total would be higher but Industry Canada appears to have thought better of spending $6.5 million earmarked for a "consumer initiatives" campaign, returning the money to the overall ad envelope to be used elsewhere.
The latest allotments include $3.5 million to the Finance department, bringing its yearly total to $11 million.
A spokeswoman said in an email response that "additional funding was allocated to the department of Finance to inform Canadians about economic action plan measures and benefits."
Liberal finance critic Scott Brison groused that with the 2015 federal budget delayed until at least April amid plunging oil prices, the government's priorities are skewed.
"With the Canadian economy flatlined, Canadians need action, not more 'action plan' ads," Brison said in a telephone interview.
"They're spending more time writing ads than they are writing a budget."
National Defence, meanwhile, gets $3 million for those dramatic recruiting ads currently blanketing the sports networks, while Citizenship and Immigration has been given another $3 million on top of the $3 million it has already spent to promote services to new Canadians.
"We respect taxpayers in our advertising decisions and we expect to only spend approximately $500,000 out of the $3M," Citizenship spokeswoman Nancy Caron said in an email.
The Heritage department, which had already spent $7.2 million on ads touting the country's 150th birthday in 2017, receives another $1.5 million to prepare a fresh Canada 150 ad campaign that will air this summer.
NDP critic Charlie Angus said the millions spent on advertising by a government that is otherwise fixated on austerity measures reveals a troubling set of priorities in this election year.
"Today we got news that people with terminal illness can't even get an expedited decision to access their pensions," Angus said in an email.
"And the Conservatives waste public funds on this outrageous and blatant promotion of their re-election planks."
The government has come under frequent fire for its ad budgets and the carefully choreographed messaging between its partisan interests and public programs.
"The difference to me is between communicating information and communicating values," Alex Marland, a political scientist at Memorial University in St. John's who specializes in political advertising, said in an interview.
"And that's sometimes a hard one to figure out. Inevitably, the government's policies are values."
As an example, Marland said military recruitment ads under the former Liberal government stressed career opportunities. The Conservatives have changed the tone, he said, "because they have a different approach."
"That's where we start getting into grey areas. I mean, how should the Conservatives advertise?... It's fair game that we need to recruit people. We're involved in armed conflict."
Marland said the Canada 150 ads are more problematic.
"In my opinion, it is that sort of fuzzy, feel-good advertising that is more suspect as an election draws near," he said.
Marland noted that Ontario has a provincial government advertising review board to check ads for partisanship.
"They end up in the same quagmire," he said. "In the end a lot of these advertisements go ahead because you're always into grey areas. It's very hard to determine what is blatantly partisan and what isn't."Recent video has emerged of the US dropping what appears to be toxic white phosphorus munitions on the city.
The Syrian Arab Army has captured villages in Al-Raqqa Governorate for the first time since ISIS forced Syrian troops to abandon the region to terrorists in 2013.
Syria’s elite Tiger Forces have been making remarkable progress in the race to Raqqa while the United States is also trying to get a piece of the largely symbolic self-proclaimed capital of the so-called Islamic State.
Just as they had done in their Iraqi stronghold of Mosul, ISIS fighters in Raqqa have been fleeing the city with Deir ez-Zor being their primary destination.
This comes as the US planes have been filmed dropping what appears to be the illegal chemical weapon white phosphorus on the city.
The US has not thus far commented on these reports, although the images make it clear that the US is using the same substance that the Ukrainian regime has used on the Donbass republics in the recent past.
READ MORE: When Ukraine dropped chemical weapons on Donbass, the west didn’t care (VIDEO)This site best viewed at 800x600 or greater resolution. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Please support Our Advertisers. They make this site possible! W elcome to the most comprehensive site on the internet dedicated to Living History, Historical (or Period) Trekking, Experimental Archeology, and Experiential Anthropology, of the 1600 to 1840 time period. This is a site dedicated to the evolution of our hobby. Please take the time to visit each section of the site and add your own input to it. Q: What is Historical Trekking? A: Historical Trekking (also called Period Trekking, Experimental Archeology, or Experiential Anthropology) is a hobby where we as 21st century people attempt a task someone in our chosen time period would have done, using only the tools and equipment they would have used, or the knowledge we have gleaned from research. Whether you are interested in the Longhunter of the 18th Century and you are out on a hunt using only period clothing and flintlock, or if your interest lies in the Mountainman of the 19th Century, and you want to use period traps to try and catch beaver, even if your interest is in cooking, and you limit yourself to the kitchen-ware and foods of your chosen period and a bed of coals for heat, yet you never leave your house, you are involved with the hobby of Historical Trekking. This hobby gives us more insight into the daily lives of the people in our chosen time period, and helps to make us better historians. Features: HistoricalTrekking.com Forums - Most of the features of HistoricalTrekking.com are found in our forums here. The links listed below are to individual sections of the forums.
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Exact Matches Only Navigate This Site: ------------------------------- Home Event/Trek Calendar How-to Articles Links Message Board Resource Listing Trail Foods Trekking Tips Trekker's Roster Virtual Round Robin ------------------------------- Advertising Contact Information Merchandise Our Event ScheduleZoya Akhtar: If I had the national award, I would have returned it. It is a peaceful way of saying things, expressing things. I support them.
Bollywood director Zoya Akhtar said that if she had a national award to her credit she would have returned it given the current atmosphere in the country.
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“If I had the national award, I would have returned it. It is a peaceful way of saying things, expressing things. I support them,” Zoya said on the sidelines of Mumbai Festival here tonight.
Actress Kalki Koechlin said it was a brave act for artists. “It is an important statement that people are making about the situation (returning of national awards). It is a brave act for artist to do (sic),” she said.
[related-post]
When asked about filmmakers returning the national awards in protest against “growing intolerance in the country”, superstar Salman Khan said, “Sad (dukh) phase is going on. I
am here for MAMI festival and I would not like to get into things which would turn other way or interpreted in another way.”
When their reaction is sought, actors Riteish Deshmukh and Jackie Shroff and filmmaker Sudhir Mishra parried the query whether they will support the act of filmmakers returning their awards and merely said that everyone has right to express their opinion. “We are in a democratic country like India and if one is upset with anything one can go and say what they don’t like. Every person has the opportunity to believe and say what they want,” Riteish said.
Jackie said, “We live in a democratic country and everyone has the right to express things. Everyone has the freedom of expression and speech. People have their own way of expressing things.”
A string of filmmakers including big names like Anand Patwardhan and Kundan Shah of “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro” fame have returned their awards over “growing intolerance”.
“People have the right to express things. If one is unhappy he has the right to express things. One should listen to them. It is not necessary that one must agree to it. One should not be afraid of the reaction (sic),” Mishra said.
However, actress Esha Gupta feels that returning of awards is not right. “I think it is not right to do it. Why bring creativity and art between politics,” Esha asked.
Filmmakers like Dibakar Banerjee, Paresh Kamdar, Nishtha Jain, and others have announced their decision to return their national awards over the unresolved issue concerning the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and the rising intolerance in the country. FTII students had gone on an indefinite strike from June 12 following the appointment of television actor and BJP member Gajendra Chauhan as president of the FTII Society.
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However, Bollywood is divided on returning the awards. Actors Vidya Balan, Anupam Kher, Supriya Pathak and others are not in favour of returning the award.Motorcycle riders have constantly been the top victim of road crash injuries since 2010, according to data from health department
Published 8:59 PM, October 02, 2017
MANILA, Philippines – Every year, approximately 1.2 million people around the world die in road traffic crashes.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), between 20 millin and 50 million more people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability as a result of their injury. Road traffic injuries are also the leading cause of death among people aged between 15 and 29 years.
In the Philippines, the Philippine Statistics Authority recorded 10,012 deaths due to road traffic crashes in 2015.
The Department of Health (DOH) showed a total number of 30,412 road crash-related injuries in 2015 – a 61.24% increase from the 18,861 recorded injuries in 2014. Since 2010, 108,134 people sustained road traffic-related injury.
These road traffic injuries do not only cause financial losses to victims due to expensive treatments and rehabilitation, but also physical and psychological challenges from the impact of a crash.
Without sustained action, road traffic crashes will be the 7th leading cause of deaths by the year 2030, the WHO said.
Injuries
In the Philippines, the most common type of injury is abrasion, which comprise more than half of the road crash-related injuries. Abrasion is a wound caused by superficial damage to the skin. This is usually a result of hitting the ground or another vehicle.
The second type of injury is open wound and laceration. It is a wound produced by the tearing of a body tissue, as distinguished from a cut or incision.
Some other injuries recorded in 2015 were: contusion or when blood vessels are damaged as the result of a blow, closed fracture, concussion, and avulsion or when a body structure is forcibly detached from its normal position.
Casualties
DOH data show that motorcycle riders are the most vulnerable to injuries. 19,852 cases or 65% of patients injured were riding a motorcycle. (READ: Road deaths in PH: Most are motorcycle riders, pedestrians )
Motorcycle riders have constantly been the top victim of road crash injuries since 2010. From 6,244 injuries in 2010, the number of recorded injuries increased to 19,852 in a span of 5 years.
Of the road traffic-related injuries involving motorcycles, 98.7% of fatalities involved motorists without helmets, and 1.3% of fatalities involved motorists wearing a helmet.
Drivers are the most common victims of injuries. The next most prone to crash injuries are the rear passengers. The driver is usually more prone to crash injuries because, seated at the front, they are closer to the impact of the crash.
A CBS report said passengers seated in the rear are more likely to sustain chest injuries during a crash. It also cites a study that found "some evidence of an elevated risk of head and neck injuries for restrained women seated in the rear compared [to] the front."
72.3% of the reported patients in the country were male while 27.7% are female. Almost half or 41.1% of those injured are 15 to 29 years old.
Since 2010, 18,031 children below 14 years old were injured, while more than 500 children have died every year since 2006 due to road crashes. (READ: IN NUMBERS: Road crash incidents in the Philippines)
Location
The region with the most number of recorded injuries is Central Visayas with 17.4%, followed by Western Visayas with 10.6% and Central Luzon with 9.4%.
The Central Visayas has consistently been the region with most road-traffic related injuries since 2010, with the majority of the injuries in Cebu and Bohol.
Identified causes
Most of the road traffic-related injuries happened during the busiest times of the day: 4 pm to 7:59 pm, and 8 am to 12 pm.
The data also showed alcohol to be the top identified risk factor in cases of injury. Other risk factors include drugs, use of mobile phones, sleepiness, and smoking. (READ: Human error: Leading cause of road mishaps in Metro Manila )
Post-injury
According to Dr Bernadett Velasco, chairman from the Philippine College of Emergency Medicine, recovery time for minor injuries would take around 1 day to 5 days. Major injuries usually take 3 to 6 months. This could even reach a year if rehabilitation is required, depending on the severity of the injuries.
She explained how road traffic-related injuries can affect a person financially and psychologically: "Most of the victim involved are those in the student to the working-age range. If they are the breadwinner of the family, it is only not him who will be affected but also the whole family."
Velasco added: "Depression is almost seen in all patient who had to recover for a long time. Usually, the cause of depression is inability to go back to their normal activities."
Tips
She advised the public to always have a first aid kit that contains a gauze, clean cloth, alcohol, povidone iodine, and tape to aid those who figure in crashes.
"Do not move the patient with obvious deformity. Wait for an emergency response team or place a splint in the area or support the area involved whenever you move the victim. Call 911 or the local emergency number to inform the authority so they will know the resources to dispatch," she said. – Rappler.comReady 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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In early September, Ryan Boyko, a PhD student in public health at Yale, heard of an opportunity to travel to Liberia to help fight the spread of Ebola. Boyko had been to Africa eight times, including a trip to Liberia in 2012 to study the transmission of intestinal worms from domestic animals to children. The decision to go again was an easy one: his work could have a big impact, and the risk of infection, he surmised, was very low, especially given what he would be doing there. Ad Policy
Boyko is not a physician; he’s a data analyst. While in Liberia, he hooked up with Dr. Mosoka Fallah, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist, to improve Monrovia’s system for contact-tracing—the process by which people who have been exposed to an Ebola patient’s bodily fluids are identified and monitored. Fallah, who’d grown up in the city’s slums, had been working to rebuild the trust between a fearful public and an overwhelmed government by recruiting local leaders to educate their neighbors, spot outbreaks and target services. When Boyko and his colleagues arrived, Fallah’s contact-tracing was largely done by pen and paper and text messages. Some volunteers had to walk miles to submit their reports, and when the data did reach Fallah, it was sometimes so irregular that it was difficult to use. Boyko and his colleagues created a standardized form and recruited a tech company to develop an Android app to expedite and systematize the process. Boyko then helped build a cloud-based database and dashboard so that Fallah’s team could see, in real time, where new Ebola outbreaks were taking place.
A precise, cautious speaker, Boyko declined to speculate, when I talked with him over the phone, on what impact his work might have already had on slowing the epidemic. But suffice it to say that contact-tracing has been the key to containing the Ebola virus in all twenty-four previous outbreaks.
For these efforts, Boyko has, upon his return to the United States, been run through an infuriatingly irrational bureaucratic gantlet. On October 15, he developed a low-grade fever, and even though he’d had no contact with anyone who had Ebola symptoms, he immediately reported himself to the Yale–New Haven Hospital and was placed in isolation, as required by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. Two separate Ebola tests quickly came back negative, and Boyko’s fever ended. Doctors at the hospital removed their protective gear, shook his hand and joked that Boyko was the only person in New Haven they could definitively say did not have Ebola. Even so, state officials insisted on placing him under a mandatory home quarantine. An |
z) ) is a tautology as shown by all 1s in yellow column. Square # Venn, Karnaugh region x y z (~ (y & z) & (x → y)) → (~ (x & z)) 0 x'y'z' 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 x'y'z 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 2 x'yz' 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 3 x'yz 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 4 xy'z' 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 5 xy'z 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 6 xyz' 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 7 xyz 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1
At this point the above implication P → Q (i.e. ~(y & z) & (x → y) ) → ~(x & z) ) is still a formula, and the deduction – the "detachment" of Q out of P → Q – has not occurred. But given the demonstration that P → Q is tautology, the stage is now set for the use of the procedure of modus ponens to "detach" Q: "No Xs are Zs" and dispense with the terms on the left.[nb 3]
Modus ponens (or "the fundamental rule of inference"[5]) is often written as follows: The two terms on the left, P → Q and P, are called premises (by convention linked by a comma), the symbol ⊢ means "yields" (in the sense of logical deduction), and the term on the right is called the conclusion:
P → Q, P ⊢ Q
For the modus ponens to succeed, both premises P → Q and P must be true. Because, as demonstrated above the premise P → Q is a tautology, "truth" is always the case no matter how x, y and z are valued, but "truth" will only be the case for P in those circumstances when P evaluates as "true" (e.g. rows 0 OR 1 OR 2 OR 6: x'y'z' + x'y'z + x'yz' + xyz' = x'y' + yz').[nb 4]
P → Q, P ⊢ Q i.e.: ( ~(y & z) & (x → y) ) → ( ~ (x & z) ), ( ~(y & z) & (x → y) ) ⊢ ( ~ (x & z) )
i.e.: IF "No Ys are Zs" and "All Xs are Ys" THEN "No Xs are Zs", "No Ys are Zs" and "All Xs are Ys" ⊢ "No Xs are Zs"
One is now free to "detach" the conclusion "No Xs are Zs", perhaps to use it in a subsequent deduction (or as a topic of conversation).
The use of tautological implication means that other possible deductions exist besides "No Xs are Zs"; the criterion for a successful deduction is that the 1s under the sub-major connective on the right include all the 1s under the sub-major connective on the left (the major connective being the implication that results in the tautology). For example, in the truth table, on the right side of the implication (→, the major connective symbol) the bold-face column under the sub-major connective symbol " ~ " has the all the same 1s that appear in the bold-faced column under the left-side sub-major connective & (rows 0, 1, 2 and 6), plus two more (rows 3 and 4).
Gallery [ edit ]
A Venn diagram shows all possible intersections.
An Euler diagram illustrating that the set of "animals with four legs" is a subset of "animals", but the set of "minerals" is disjoint (has no members in common) with "animals"
Euler diagram visualizing a real situation, the relationships between various supranational European organizations. (clickable version)
Humorous diagram comparing Euler and Venn diagrams.
Euler diagram of types of triangles, using the definition that isosceles triangles have at least (rather than exactly) 2 equal sides.
Euler diagram of terminology of the British Isles.
The 22 (of 256) essentially different Venn diagrams with 3 circles (top) and their corresponding Euler diagrams (bottom)
Some of the Euler diagrams are not typical, and some are even equivalent to Venn diagrams. Areas are shaded to indicate that they contain no elements.
A clickable Euler diagram showing the relationships between various multinational European organisations and agreements.
See also [ edit ]
Spider diagram - an extension of Euler diagrams adding existence to contour intersections.
Notes [ edit ]
^ By the time these lectures of Hamilton were published, Hamilton too had died. His editors (symbolized by ED.), responsible for most of the footnoting, were the logicians Henry Longueville Mansel and John Veitch ^ See footnote at George Stibitz ^ Principia Mathematica describe it this way: "The trust in inference is the belief that if the two former assertions [the premises P, P→Q ] are not in error, the final assertion is not in error... An inference is the dropping of a true premiss [sic]; it is the dissolution of an implication" (p. 9). Further discussion of this appears in "Primitive Ideas and Propositions" as the first of their "primitive propositions" (axioms): *1.1 Anything implied by a true elementary proposition is true" (p. 94). In a footnote the authors refer the reader back to Russell's 1903 Principles of Mathematics §38. This is a sophisticated concept. Russell and Whitehead (2nd edition 1927) in theirdescribe it this way: "The trust in inference is the belief that if the two former assertions [the premises P, P→Q ] are not in error, the final assertion is not in error... An inference is the dropping of a true premiss [sic]; it is the dissolution of an implication" (p. 9). Further discussion of this appears in "Primitive Ideas and Propositions" as the first of their "primitive propositions" (axioms): *1.1 Anything implied by a true elementary proposition is true" (p. 94). In a footnote the authors refer the reader back to Russell's 1903§38. ^ Reichenbach discusses the fact that the implication P → Q need not be a tautology (a so-called "tautological implication"). Even "simple" implication (connective or adjunctive) will work, but only for those rows of the truth table that evaluate as true, cf Reichenbach 1947:64–66.
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
By date of publishing:NEW YORK (AP) – The Triple Crown bid of I'll Have Another almost ended Thursday when a loose horse came within inches of slamming into the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner during training at Belmont Park.
A collision was avoided, but not before the speeding horse grazed the boot of I'll Have Another's exercise rider Jonny Garcia.
"I've seen accidents like that happen, and they are ugly," trainer Doug O'Neill said.
Hours after the near miss at Belmont Park, the New York Racing Association announced there would be a 15-minute training window for Belmont runners only, beginning Friday morning. Trainers have the option of working their Belmont contenders from 8:30 a.m. to 8:45 a.m., or during regular training at earlier or later times.
O'Neill and his brother, Dennis, were terrified by what was unfolding 10 days before I'll Have Another attempts to become the first Triple Crown winner in 34 years, since Affirmed swept the Derby, Preakness and Belmont in 1978.
After I'll Have Another began walking on the track, a horse had dumped its rider and came "screaming up the outside rail" in the same direction along the clubhouse turn, Doug O'Neill said.
I'll Have Another was walking a few feet from the rail, with stable pony, Lava Man, on the inside. O'Neill said the horse, later identified as the 3-year-old maiden filly Isleta, ran between the rail and I'll Have Another
"Normally they walk the outside rail, but the racing gods must have been looking out for him because he was about two feet off the rail this morning," O'Neill said.
"It could have been terrible," said Dennis O'Neill, Doug's brother who bought I'll Have Another for $35,000 for owner Paul Reddam.
An hour after the near-miss, Doug O'Neill said his "stomach is still a little twisted by it. Fortunately, everything worked out fine."
I'll Have Another was never touched, and then proceeded on with his morning mile gallop before returning to his soon to be former stable a few yards from the main track.
"Once we dodged that, everything went well," O'Neill said. "He jogged great, galloped super. I noticed every day he's cooling out even quicker. He seems like he loves it here, and he's really getting used to the oval and getting used to the footing, and I couldn't be happier with the way he's going."
On Wednesday, the New York State Racing and Wagering Board imposed strict new rules for horses running in the Belmont. They include a stakes barn for all Belmont runners, out-of-competition blood testing and close scrutiny of the horses and humans attending them in the days leading up to the race.
"I have no problem with a detention barn. I wish we could go over there today," O'Neill said, adding he doesn't understand why the barn won't be ready until Wednesday.
"It sounds like it was not a real organized thing, kind of a late decision," he added. "In hindsight, they could have decided that earlier and we could have been settled in."
Instead, he'll have to move from a barn his colt has been at since arriving the day after winning the Preakness on May 19. The new barn is a few hundred yards farther from the track.
"It's an inconvenience for the horse and the staff, but this horse is unbelievable," O'Neill said. "He's the kind of horse can change stalls every day and he'll be just fine. I think we'll be in good shape."
O'Neill said he doesn't believe the new rules are aimed at him despite a record of being fined or suspended 15 times for drug and medication-related violations in the last 14 years. Last week, he was suspended 45 days and fined $15,000 by the California Horse Racing Board for exceeding the limit of total carbon dioxide — which can enhance a horse's performance and reduce fatigue.
O'Neill and other trainers aren't thrilled with the late rule changes, but he understands racing has come under scrutiny on many fronts.
"Racing has had a lot of black eyes all over the country, especially in New York," he said, referring to the recent move by the state to take control of racing from NYRA, which fired its president and chief counsel after it was revealed the organization had overcharged bettors on commissions.
"They are just trying to prove to the public how awesome these animals are and how well they are taken care of. It's kind of giving people a backstage, all-access pass and that's great for the sport. It just looks like it's something they should of come up with and had figured out a week ago."
Trainer Michael Matz, who will send out Union Rags in the Belmont, says he still plans to ship his colt to Belmont on Wednesday. He, too, wondered about the timing of the sweeping changes.
"Do they make this stuff up as they go along?" he asked Wednesday.
When the horses are moved to the secure stakes barn, they will be required to have a blood test upon arriving at the barn, and it will be reviewed that night at the New York State Racing and Wagering Board's drug lab.
Limited numbers of people associated with a horse will be allowed to be in the stakes barn, including the licensed trainer, assistant trainer, veterinarian, groom, hot walker and owners. Those entering a horse's stall, in contact with a horse or working on the horse will have their entry and exit logged. The stakes barn will have 24-hour security.
Equipment, feed, and hay among other items will be searched and checked. All veterinarians must provide written notice of intended treatment before doing so, and investigators will monitor all treatment and items used.
The day before the Belmont no vets will be allowed to treat horses without first making an appointment with investigators. On race day, treatment will be allowed only in case of emergency or by agreement with the stewards.
The board will "ensure that the race is run in a safe and fair manner," board chairman John Sabini said Wednesday.A boy, 9 or 10, stood outside the Alexandra Park community centre Saturday morning, hands buried deep in his jacket pockets, nothing much to do. He should have been playing hockey, but the boy and his friends woke up to find their neighbourhood had morphed overnight into a crime scene. A 27-year-old man identified by police as Roberto Dixon had been shot in the head. He was dead, another man was injured and a shooter was at large.
Roberto Dixon, 27, is the dead man in Saturday's early-morning homicide, say Toronto police. ( photo courtesy Toronto police ) Police tape winds around a playground near where father of two Roberto Dixon, 27, was fatally shot in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Another man shot at the same time is expected to survive. ( AMY DEMPSEY / TORONTO STAR ) Donna Harrow, an Alexandra Park community worker, says more funding is needed to address the impact of crime on mental health. Her comments followed the death of Roberto Dixon, 27, who was shot in the park early Jan. 31. ( AMY DEMPSEY / TORONTO STAR )
The hockey game was cancelled. The kids trudged home through the snow, past the yellow police tape that cut across the park and playground outside the elementary school. Now the boy stood outside the community centre with Mohsin Khattak, a neighbourhood youth worker who was startled by the child’s casual reaction to it all. “Hearing his tone, it’s almost like it’s another day in the neighbourhood for him,” Khattak said later. “It’s not even a big deal for him to know that somebody was shot and murdered in a park that he plays at.”
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Khattak was sitting inside the centre with three other members of the Alexandra Park Safety Network, a group of front-line community workers. Mid-morning, they were gathered around a table, stone-faced, ignoring their coffees, thinking about the victim’s girlfriend and his children and thetrauma this would cause in a neighbourhood where no one has been spared from the impact of gun violence. “It’s hard when you speak to these young kids and they’ve been exposed to this so many times now that they become desensitized,” Khattak said. “It’s hard for them to have a positive outlook on life and be motivated to do things when they’re just like, well you know what, I’ve lost so many friends at a young age, who knows if I’m gonna live past 25?” Roberto Dixon was in the park near Bathurst and Dundas Sts. with a friend just after 4:15 a.m. A man approached and asked Dixon for a cigarette, police told the community workers. Dixon said no, and the man shot him in the head. A second victim, a man in his 30s, was shot in the hip. Police said he is expected to survive. No suspect information has been released. The Toronto police homicide unit continues to investigate. Dixon was the father of two children younger than 5, who are left without a dad. Their young mother is now a single parent. His death leaves a family in mourning and destabilizes an entire community.
“For every person who is murdered, you’ve got at least 100 people around them that are suffering,” said Veronica Salvatierra, sitting across from Khattak in a back room at the bustling community centre. The front-line workers stressed that society must address the trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder — “post-traumatic streets disorder,” Salvatierra calls it — that young people exposed to gun violence in their communities are forced to live with, or some kids will continue to grow up and use guns to deal with their pain and anger.
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“For me, when something like this happens, it’s not about gangs. It’s not about crimes,” said Donna Harrow, another safety network member and chair of the African Canadian Coalition of Community Organizations. “It’s about how we are dealing with the mental health of our youth who are vulnerable.” There is a pressing need for funding for mental health programs targeted at vulnerable youth, and the government needs to invest routinely, Harrow said. “Not just when we get slapped in the face with something like this.” By early afternoon, the outdoor rink in Alexandra Park had reopened and children were skating happily, as the investigation continued in the nearby park and police tape fluttered in the winter wind.13 Min read time Share:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The American Health Care Act has a long history that returns us to the New Deal and its critics.
On June 16, 2017, The Washington Post published an op-ed in favor of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) by Michael A. Needham, CEO of Heritage Action America, the lobbying arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation. The article is remarkable not because its arguments are original but because it so perfectly fits the template of anti-progressive rhetoric that first emerged in opposition to the New Deal and that remains central to modern conservative thought. Although it refers to the AHCA, with a few small word changes, Needham’s op-ed could have been written in opposition to almost all major liberal reforms since the 1930s.
Needham uses a vocabulary that demonstrates the largely unnoticed staying power of anti-New Deal rhetoric. Recycling many clichés and rhetorical tricks first employed by conservative opponents of the New Deal, the article shows that the catchphrases of critics of the New Deal have become free-floating signifiers in our political culture, detached from political argument. It is a particularly egregious version of this old rhetoric and recalls Lionel Trilling’s allusion—in the context of his own critique of conservatism—to “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
Conservatives have succeeded in crafting a popular narrative of freedom and its enemies, drawing on anti-New Deal rhetoric from the 1930s.
The unoriginality—not to mention the laziness—of Needham’s op-ed, and his reliance on the repetition of longstanding assumptions and rhetoric, suggest that conservatives have succeeded in crafting a popular narrative of freedom and its enemies. Critics of reform have been able to draw at will on this formula. By employing this vocabulary and narrative, they have been able to frame their opposition to reform as based on a desire to maintain and expand a liberty that is both central and precarious, always threatening to collapse under the weight of well-meaning but (in their account) deadly expansions of the welfare state. Needham’s editorial, however, comes at a time when the right’s narrative of freedom is becoming increasingly less compelling. Moreover, it suggests the importance of developing a countervailing set of keywords and stories that could be the basis of a progressive common sense.
• • •
The basic vocabulary of modern conservatism dates back further than we usually imagine—to the 1930s. At the time, conservatives were an embattled minority. Franklin Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman won every presidential election from 1932 to 1948. Indeed, historians generally describe a “New Deal order,” from Roosevelt’s first election through the 1970s, an era when a progressive consensus reigned, limiting the gains of conservatives.
Anti-New Deal conservatives lost many battles—on the Wagner Act, Social Security, minimum wages and, later, on consumer and environmental protection. But they ultimately won the broader ideological war by defining their reactionary worldview as a species of “common sense.” They did so largely by contrasting the New Deal “with its dangerous economic doctrines and threat to the American way of living,” as the Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan said in 1938, with what they called the “free enterprise system,” which they described as traditional, market-friendly, and American. Free enterprise was the answer to the question Vandenberg asked that year: “How is the Republican party to consolidate conservative sentiment and defeat the radical New Deal?” And it continues to be their answer today.
“Free enterprise” was an ambiguous phrase that acquired meaning mainly as the opposite of the New Deal. Where the New Deal stood for public spending on infrastructure and cultural institutions, free enterprise claimed to represent “frugality and thrift—words that I doubt are in the Washington dictionary,” as the presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower said on the campaign trail in 1952. Where the New Deal established principles of business regulation, free enterprisers defined such rules as “straightjackets” that harmed economic freedom and efficiency. As Henry Hazlitt, the popular conservative economics writer, claimed in 1956, “government intervention in the market economy always finally results in a worse situation than otherwise would have existed.”
The language of contemporary conservatism is at once almost entirely generic and eerily familiar.
Whereas the New Deal recognized the corporation as a powerful economic political force that potentially constrained freedom, free enterprise advocates tended to describe the business firm as nothing more than an agglomeration of individual shareholders, employees, and customers, whose liberty was quashed when corporations were stymied. Where the New Deal valorized security, free enterprise proponents claimed that guarantees of security were inconsistent with a free government and that risk represented true freedom. New Dealers, according to free enterprise critics, purveyed “something for nothing,” rather than recognizing the virtues of austerity. New Dealers recognized that vigorous national government required a system of progressive taxation but their opponents believed that “the whole history of the New Deal has been to rush to new taxes or increased taxes under almost any provocation.” Finally, free enterprise advocates claimed that the New Deal was just another form of statism that was fated to become just as much the enemy of individual rights as “‘communism,’ ‘socialism,’ ‘fascism,’ or any other form of collectivism, no matter in what form it masquerades,” as a Republican conference put it in 1935.
The free enterprise vision was binary: it was an either/or language. “The world now is divided into two camps,” wrote the former Congressman Samuel B. Pettengill in 1938. On one side were people like him, who believed that “a system of free enterprise” promoted “the dignity of the individual.” On the other side were the New Dealers, who proclaimed that “the state shall become the supreme dictator of our lives and our enterprises.” Pettengill believed—in a foreshadowing of Ronald Reagan’s famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing” in support of the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater—that “sooner or later all of us must make up our minds about these two camps.” Free enterprisers were always on the lookout for the governmental straw that would break the back of freedom. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the “creeping collectivism that is steadily eating away the vitalities of free enterprise,” diagnosed by former president Herbert Hoover in 1938, was expected to accelerate toward totalitarianism. For them, to borrow one of their favorite apocalyptic images, it was always “five minutes to midnight” for the free enterprise system.
These framings are still with us to this day. To contemporary conservatives, Obamacare looks like the latest example of New Deal overreach, and so it should come as no surprise to find the entire anti-New Deal vocabulary launched in opposition to it—just as it was deployed against every other attempt to extend the social safety net since World War II. For critics of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the invocation of provocative phrases designed to trigger a Pavlovian reaction—such as “bureaucrats in Washington,” “one-size-fits all solutions,” and “government takeover”—often substitutes for argument. The free enterprise argument against expansions of the welfare state, from the Social Security Act to Obamacare, has remained remarkably consistent. It stokes the same fears, speaking from the standpoint of liberty and freedom as if these were uncontested concepts, taking the federal government to be the enemy, minimizing the political power of big business, and describing even minimal levels of planning, regulation, and administration as devastating, not just to business and personal satisfaction, but to democracy itself.
• • •
Arguments against progressive reform have long been based on repetition of keywords and untested assumptions (about the virtues of austerity, the danger of slippery slopes, or the evils of “planning”). The language of Needham’s op-ed is no exception. Almost entirely generic, it is eerily familiar. Although Needham offers a few perfunctory defenses of the AHCA, the bulk of his piece, in typical free enterprise fashion, criticizes the precepts of the New Deal project, starting with the first sentence: “Anyone who thinks real compassion is found in a federal government program hasn’t spent much time at the post office.” Critics of Obamacare, like Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential campaign, more often mentioned the Department of Motor Vehicles, but variants of this suggestion of the inherent incompetency of government go back seventy-five years. It expresses the punchline of Ronald Reagan’s joke that the “nine most terrifying words” in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Next, Needham applauds how the AHCA “would be an important step forward in taking power away from indifferent federal bureaucrats and giving states the opportunity to truly experiment in how they insure older and sicker patients.” Tarring all public services with hot button words like “bureaucrats” and “red tape,” regardless of their public purpose is an old standby as well. As Reagan said in critiquing bureaucracy at a news conference in 1986, “every place that there was government help, there was government control, Washington control.”
By casting the New Deal as a threat to the American way of life, conservatives defined their reactionary politics as "common sense."
Needham specifically highlights the “onerous progressive mandate structure of Obamacare” alongside the general “cold bureaucracy of government programs.” Bureaucracy, for Needham, as for free enterprise advocates, is indifferent and onerous. He calls for loosening “bureaucratic regulations” in favor of “innovation and personalized products that cover only what is needed by the consumer, not what is prescribed by Washington.” What might a “personalized product” signify in the realm of health insurance: coverage for some ailments but not others? And of course there is no mention of the fact that the personalization of risk that accompanies the move to an insurance plan that flatters its users by being cast as “bespoke” will make the risks of getting sick uniquely ours as well.
The AHCA, Needham tells us, will “empower states to move out of the costly and burdensome rules and regulations of Obamacare.” He offers an ode to “significant entitlement reforms made in the House bill to Medicaid,” which translates as massive cuts to the program. The ACA's expansion, he assures us, is “unsustainable.” This is another keyword of the free enterprise caucus, which has long rejected what one writer in 2006 called “unsustainable New Deal and Great Society relics” like “monolithic Medicaid” and “preferential treatment of labor unions.” At the New York Republican Congressman Tom Reed’s Town Hall meetings a few weeks ago, Reed repeatedly employed the word “unsustainable” to justify his opposition to ACA and other government programs that he doesn't like.
Needham notes that keeping “Obamacare’s taxes” will be “a non-starter for a lot of conservatives.” The critique of public spending and taxation as a form of theft rather than the basis for social provision has long been at the heart of conservative thought, unless that spending was directed toward the military-industrial complex. And for this group, the wealthy taxpayer (the “maker”) long ago replaced the ordinary citizen (figured often as the forty-seven percent of the population who are “dependent on government,” in Mitt Romney’s 2012 formulation) as the central figure of the republic.
Needham also calls for “freeing the country from the regulatory burdens created by Obamacare and decades of other forms of federal meddling.” There is nothing specific here about the AHCA. Needham simply offers boilerplate, matching Donald Trump’s idea that removing two federal regulations for every one added will catalyze a burst of innovation. This is, once again, the old language of those who opposed the New Deal. “I fear we are giving up our individualism,” said a Texas minister to the Paris Lions Club in 1946. “You can’t regiment people. It makes weaklings of us if we do only as we are told.” Here, we see a hint of the gendered language of “nanny state” security as a destroyer of what a leader of the US Chamber of Commerce in 1937 called “virile America.”
Needham ends with a thousand-points-of-lightish ode to localism: “true compassion lies not in Washington, but across this country in local communities where neighbors know and care for each other.” Neighbors often pitch in to help one another and many communities offer extensive social services but these are no substitute for federal programs, state universities, public schools, municipal parks and beaches.
Repetition of claims does not make them true. Perhaps because these clichés have been echoed so often, Needham sees no need to explain why regulations are “meddling” rather than serving the public interest, why “bureaucrats” are not also public servants, why public spending is necessarily bad, why local institutions are better than federal ones for solving problems like health care.
In his brief op-ed, Needham completed what we might call a free enterprise bingo card:
Criticize a government agency.
Disparage bureaucrats multiple times.
Dismiss all regulation as onerous and burdensome.
Reframe gutting federal programs as unleashing innovation.
Call for entitlement reform and tax cuts.
Call federal programs you don't like unsustainable.
Needham’s article in favor of the AHCA is exemplary, but it is not at all unusual.
What is needed is a countervailing language, one that defends public goods and the social welfare state.
Those, like Needham, who operate within a language of common sense by repeating buzzwords with no actual arguments, have an advantage, grounded in familiarity, in winning over the public. What is needed is a countervailing language, one that defends public goods and the social welfare state. Neighborliness is wonderful but the person next door cannot pay for your hip replacement or heart bypass. Washington DC is far away for many of us, but if federal mandates entitle us to marry the person we love and to work at the job we are qualified for regardless of gender, race, religion, or sexuality, then they play an important role in promoting the individual dignity that conservatives claim to prize. And we are all freer to take risks when we have federal guarantees of wages, health care, education, and a clean environment.
None of this is to romanticize the New Deal welfare state. It has often functioned to the benefit of heterosexual white men at the expense of everyone else in society. It was also inequitable in its allocation of goods (such as government-backed mortgages and “whites only” pools and schools) and entitlements (such as Social Security, which excluded the majority of black workers for the first decades of its existence). Still, it is possible for us to imagine a more just and universal welfare state that would provide a framework for everyone to thrive.
Millions of Americans benefit from government agencies and programs. But a compelling narrative about the virtues of a welfare state that helps us develop our capabilities, achieve our potential, and strengthen our democracy has not been articulated in some time. For far too long, the state has been depicted as the enemy of personal liberty, social harmony, and collective achievement. The fight against austerity and what President Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Bannon called the “deconstruction of the administrative state” should not be a purely defensive battle. We should take a page from the book of the free enterprise advocates, who promoted a persuasive narrative of freedom even when they were in the political minority. Current political efforts need to create a new common sense as compelling as the free enterprise narrative that has reigned for generations but that has devolved into a set of thoughtless catchphrases. There is every reason to believe that progressives can win over the many Americans “who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That’s an entitlement.” These are the words of Mitt Romney in his infamous 2012 speech to supporters in which he decried forty-seven percent of Americans for not paying taxes. Now that the free enterprise vision is exhausted morally and politically, it is time to reframe these “entitlements” as a resource for, rather than the enemy of, freedom.Beijing (CNN) International criticism of the Chinese government is mounting following the death of Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Thursday.
Liu, who had spent more than a decade behind bars in China for his advocacy of political reform, including taking part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests that ended in a bloody crackdown, was serving a 11-year prison term for "inciting subversion of state power" when he was diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer in June this year.
The Chinese government had refused to let him seek treatment overseas despite Liu's wishes and international pressure. His death, of multiple organ failure at the age of 61 Thursday evening, makes Liu the first Nobel Peace laureate to die in state custody since Carl von Ossietzky in Nazi Germany in 1938.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee -- which awards the Nobel Peace Prize -- said the Chinese government "bears a heavy responsibility for his premature death."
In a statement released Thursday, she said Liu Xiaobo was a representative of "ideas that resonate with millions of people all over the world, even in China. These ideas cannot be imprisoned and will never die."
In October 2010, while serving his sentence at Jinzhou Prison, in northeastern China, Liu was named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."
Liu's absence from the Nobel ceremony was marked by an empty chair.
"We now have to come to terms with the fact that his chair will forever remain empty," Reiss-Andersen said.
"At the same time, it is our deep conviction that Liu Xiaobo will remain a powerful symbol for all who fight for freedom, democracy and a better world."
Messages of solidarity and sadness
World leaders and rights campaigners were quick to react to the news of Liu's death with messages of grief and sharp condemnation.
The White House called Liu a "political prisoner," and offered "heartfelt condolences" to Liu Xiaobo's wife, Liu Xia, and his family and friends.
Liu was first jailed for his role in the 1989 pro-democracy movement after the military crackdown in Beijing's Tiananmen Square -- and later for petitioning for political reform and co-writing a paper on policy toward Taiwan that was at odds with the government stance.
His most recent conviction, in December 2009, stemmed from his co-authorship of Charter 08, a manifesto calling for political reform and human rights in China.
Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, one of the few political leaders to openly call for Liu's freedom throughout her time in office, called on China to help realize Liu's "Chinese dream" by implementing political reforms and allowing citizens "the natural right to democratic freedom."
The leader of the self-ruled island regarded by Beijing as a renegade province wrote that Liu "has no enemies, because democracy has no enemies."
Democracy advocates in Hong Kong, where Liu's activism continues to resonate strongly, vowed to "continue our fearless non-violent protests."
A protester cries as she mourns Liu Xiaobo during a demonstration outside the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong, Thursday, July 13.
"In memory of the selfless struggle of Mr. Liu, Demosisto will strive to carry forward his legacy," said Hong Kong political party Demosisto, which counts pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong and lawmaker Nathan Law among its members.
A spokesperson for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, paid tribute to "a brave fighter for civil rights and freedom of expression."
At a press briefing Friday morning, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga expressed "sincere condolences on the death of Liu Xiaobo who devoted his life to freedom and democracy," adding that "freedom, human rights and the rule of the law are universal values in the international community, and we think it is important they are secured in China as well."
In a statement, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Liu "dedicated his life to the betterment of his country and humankind, and to the pursuit of justice and liberty," and urged Chinese authorities to release Liu's wife from house arrest and allow her to travel outside China.
Liu's wife, Liu Xia -- an artist and a poet -- has been under house arrest since Liu's Nobel victory.
With her communication with the outside world almost completely cut off by the government, Liu Xia has been suffering severe depression, according to friends, especially after authorities sentenced her brother to 11 years in prison over what supporters call trumped-up charges of business fraud.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein echoed calls for her release, asking that the Chinese authorities give her the right to travel.
"Liu Xiaobo was the true embodiment of the democratic, non-violent ideals he so ardently advocated," Zeid said. "Despite the imprisonment and separation from the wife he adored that could have (fueled) anger and bitterness, Liu Xiaobo declared that he had no hatred for those who pursued and prosecuted |
Oman," said US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter during a speech at the US military's Southern Command.
"Like every transfer that came before it, the decision to transfer these detainees happened only after a thorough review by me and other senior security officials of the government," Carter added.
The Yemeni men transferred to Oman on Thursday were all held for more than a decade without charge or trial.
The Omani foreign minister said his country received the men "in response to a request by the US administration for help to resolve the issue of detainees at Guantanamo Bay," according to a statement broadcast by the country's state news agency.
In his final State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama on Tuesday urged the Republican-led Congress to aid the process of closing the controversial prison, which gained notoriety for holding "enemy combatants" without trial and using draconian torture techniques on detainees.
"It's expensive, it's unnecessary, and it only serves as a recruitment brochure for our enemies," Obama said, referring to the prison.
Watch video 02:34 Security industry booms in times of terror
ls/jil (Reuters, AFP, AP)If you like NASRAC and also like F1 - check out our friends at GPRO. They have one of the best racing manager games on the web. It is Formula 1 racing but it is similar to NASCAR racing games and other racing manager games.
NASRAC is a free online multiplayer NASCAR racing simulation strategy game. Like fantasy NASCAR racing but better. You control your practice, qualifying, race setup and strategy. It is like other racing manager games. A season lasts 6 weeks and we race every night except Sundays.
NASCAR Game, NASCAR Fantasy, NASCAR Simulation Strategy Game, Free Online Mulitplayer Simracing, NASCAR Racing Game | nasrac.com
NASRAC has completed its final race...Sorry!
NASRAC has completed 30 Full Seasons over the last 8 years. We had over 1,000 races and had a ton of fun! A special thanks to all the mods, without you we wouldn't have made it this far. Final thoughts have been summed up here by the members. Thanks to everyone that played and had fun. You will all be missed.
Link to Race Hub: NASRAC Final Thoughts from the members
-- Kevin Minnelli, NASRAC Admin / Developer / Creator / Owner since 2008
Free online nascar game that gives you to the power to make the decisions and go for the NASRAC cup. Welcome to NASRAC...
Do you love NASCAR, Fantasy NASCAR, NASCAR Games, Free NASCAR Games?
Season 27 will start in September 2012!!! Congratulations to more than 6,000 drivers for making NASRAC the best online racing manager game online. We know there are not many racing manager games but I think NASRAC is a solid start to a great free NASCAR game. I think we are very solid at this stage for free nascar games. We have run 360 regular season races and most minor issues have been fixed. Most free nascar games are just flash games but nasrac is so much more than other racing manager games. I still have a huge amount of development to do in the coming seasons but I am determined to make the best free online nascar games on the web. So please stick with us here at NASRAC as we continue to make more and more progress. In the end we will have designed the best stock car racing manager game online.
Remember nasrac.com is the free online multiplayer Nascar game designed for you! NASRAC runs races every night of the week except Sundays. In June we will start our 24th full race season of 36 races. Many NASCAR Games offer thrills behind your controller or driving wheel, but NASRAC offers you a strategic view into NASCAR. You call the shots as the Driver and Crew Chief. You make the moves that will get you into the Chase to win the Championship. Unlike fantasy NASCAR or online betting where you pick the drivers - you are the driver and have full control over your online nascar experience.
Please feel free to sign up and see what the best nascar game on the web is all about - find out what over 6,000 drivers have experienced in the first 23 seasons. Season 24 is just around the corner and we are looking for as many drivers to fill our NASRAC Intro Series - known internally as the A Series as we promote many of this season best nascar drivers to our AA Series and AAA Series. To learn more, poke around our Forum or News areas and see what separates us from other nascar games and other fantasy nascar games. We think you will love it...
Register for free and try it first hand now!!!
What is NASRAC? How is it different from NASCAR Racing? Fantasy NASCAR? NASCAR Games?
NASRAC stand for North American Stockcar Racing Analytics Competition and it is a Free Online Multiplayer NASCAR Racing Simulation Strategy Game that puts you in the nascar virtual driver seat. This simply means you act as the nascar driver and nascar crew chief. You are the Nascar Manager and Driver (the stock car racing manager) and compete against your friends for bragging rights as to who is the best online nascar driver and stock car race manager. It does not require a graphics card or purchase of any software or any downloads, like other nascar games and free nascar games. NASRAC is not a fantasy nascar game where you pick your favorite driver and win prizes. NASRAC is much better and can be played 365 days a year unlike other nascar fantasy games and online driving nascar games. With NASRAC you just don't need to wait until next weekend to get your NASCAR fix.
NASRAC allows you as the driver and manager to tune the cars setup characteristics and try to make it as fast as possible during practice. Once you feel your car is setup the best you can set it up then you Qualify to see where you will start for the Sunday Showdown. As driver and crew chief you will be able to select a pit strategy for the race, how hard you want to be on tires, how aggressive to be early and late in the race as well make final race adjustments to the car for the start, first quarter, middle and last quarter of the race. If it was any more realistic you would be able to bet on the races.
Sounds to complex? It's not, the car characteristics are not based on exact NASCAR terminology and in the game we don't measure and tweak things in 1/100s of an inch. Instead we use a simple 0-99 scale to help you determine the best setups for the following characteristics -- Engine, Gearing, Splitter, Rear Wing, Tire Pressure, Brakes, Weight Distribution, Track Bar, Springs, Toe and Wedge.
The idea as the image above shows is to Practice, Qualify, Plan your Strategy and Watch the Race results lap by lap or jump straigh to the new standings. We are doing 6 races per week, 36 races, over 6 weeks. The last 2 weeks of the season will follow the NASCAR Chase for the Cup format except we will run the chase with 10 races and 12 drivers who will compete for the NASRAC Cup. A Champion will be crowned in each Division which can hold up to 60 drivers.
NASRAC is almost out of BETA and we will be one of the best online NASCAR games on the web
I am currently in "BETA" development and have spent several thousands of hours making the best online nascar game possible. I have had several experts helping me on car characteristics and technical aspects of a race car. I even have a great driver from the Nascar Technical Institute helping me out on many aspects of the game. I have had other online game developers provide feedback about the nascar game. Nascar Racing games are becoming harder to find and NASRAC offers the best online racing game for free.
So go ahead and sign up, join the forum, get a Driver ID to be a NASRAC racer, it's FREE. We have lots of conversations going in the forums and would love feedback. Thanks in advance and I look forward to bringing you all the best online NASCAR simulation game the web has to offer. Okay rfactor, Race 07, Nascar 09 are going to be cooler and prettier - but you can't play those at work or school. NASRAC is the stock car racing manager dream. You can change several car components to make you nascar racing experience fun.
Please USE FULL NAME when Registering
Note - Clicking REGISTER will take you to the secured forum registration process and the page will look different. This was the best choice for security and combining our game with the forum and private message areas.
UPDATE - End goal - you practice, qualify, set up race strategy and do a few more races like that up to 6 in the future. Every night or 6 a week I will run the results. You will be able to check the Lap by Lap play back or go straight for the results. From there you can see where you are in the standings. You will always be able to go back and change your race strategy prior to me kicking off the race every evening. The first season was great.
Right now Season 24 is underway. The promotions have happened for all the drivers who have shown interest and participation. Please note that practice or qualifying is not available during the off season but please go check out our friends at GPRO Racing who have supported us from day one. They are an online manager game like nasrac.. I think they are one of the best online racing manager games online if you really want to get into the details of forumula one. It's a solid online F1 game every fantasy racing fan should check out.
General note - Many years ago I did a lot of Forex trading. The thing I found out is you really can't win. Even with tools like MetaTrader, the brokers control the flow and Forex is not for the small investors.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Liverpool fans held placards spelling the word "friendship" in Italian during a match with Juventus in 2005
Ceremonies have been held to mark the 30th anniversary of the Heysel football stadium disaster.
Thirty-nine fans died when people were crushed against a wall that then collapsed at the ground in Brussels before the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus.
The disaster unfolded after a surge by Liverpool fans drove supporters of the Italian club towards the wall.
Memorial events have taken place at Liverpool's Anfield stadium as well as at the scene of the tragedy in Belgium.
Representatives from Liverpool, including club ambassador Ian Rush - who also played for Juventus - also paid their respects during a special Mass at Chiesa della Gran Madre di Dio church in Turin.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Juventus supporters hold a banner reading "39 angels forever" outside the Gran Madre di Dio church in Turin
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Balloons were released at the ceremony in Belgium
In Brussels the ceremony at the now-renamed King Baudouin Stadium included the laying of wreaths and families of those who died releasing balloons.
Phil Neal, who captained the Reds on the night of the disaster, laid a wreath at the Heysel Memorial in Anfield's Centenary Stand.
The stand will remain open for the rest of the day to allow people to remember those affected by the tragedy.
A ceremony at the site of the disaster in Brussels, now known as the King Baudouin Stadium, included the laying of wreaths. Relatives of those who died released balloons to remember their loved ones.
After a five-month trial which followed the disaster, 14 Liverpool fans were found guilty of manslaughter and jailed for three years.
An investigation in Belgium recommended that some of the blame be laid on the police and the football authorities.
What happened at Heysel also led to English clubs being barred from European competition for five years, with Liverpool serving an extra year.For Immediate Release
Contact:
Merrill Miller, 202-238-9088 ext. 105, merrillmiller@americanhumanist.org
(Tiger, GA, Sept. 15, 2015)—The American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center received written assurances that prayers would no longer be offered at graduation ceremonies held by the Rabun County School District in Tiger, Georgia.
The letter comes in response to the Appignani Humanist Legal Center’s warning that Christian prayers offered on two separate occasions by Primary School Principal Lisa Patterson at district-sponsored graduation ceremonies violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In both instances, the principal concluded the prayers with the phrase “In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.” When a local parent visited the school district superintendent about this issue, his concerns were not adequately addressed. The parent then contacted the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center for assistance.
“Prayers by public school staff at school-sponsored events are blatantly unconstitutional,” said Monica Miller, senior counsel for the Appignani Humanist Legal Center. “Moving forward, the school district must take steps to ensure that students are not subjected to religious coercion through school-endorsed prayers so that all students feel welcome in the district.”
In its response, the school district states that the superintendent met with the principal and “instructed her on the legal prohibitions and limitations regarding administrator-led prayer on school grounds and at school functions.” The letter also assured both the legal center and the parent that “administrator-led prayers will not occur at the Rabun County Elementary School anymore.”
A Georgia Newsday article also stated that a “Jesus” sign displayed on a utility pole near the Rabun County School Board building had been removed.
###
Founded in 1941 and headquartered in Washington, DC, the American Humanist Association (AHA) works to protect the rights of humanists, atheists, and other nontheistic Americans. The AHA advances the ethical and life-affirming philosophy of humanism, which—without beliefs in any gods or other supernatural forces—encourages individuals to live informed and meaningful lives that aspire to the greater good of humanity.
Special thanks to the Louis J. Appignani Foundation for their support of the Appignani Humanist Legal Center.The New York Knicks, forced to regroup after being trumped by Golden State in the race to hire Steve Kerr, relaunched their coaching search Thursday with new president Phil Jackson and several other team officials in Chicago for the start of the NBA's annual pre-draft camp.
Sources close to the process told ESPN.com that the most likely scenario, even after Jackson was snubbed by the only candidate he has considered for the position since taking the Knicks' job in March, remains hiring a younger coach Jackson has worked with previously and can mentor.
Three candidates who will thus receive consideration from Jackson, sources said, are Luke Walton and Tyronn Lue -- former players under Jackson who have already begun their coaching careers -- as well as Oklahoma City Thunder guard Derek Fisher -- if Fisher elects to stop playing after this season as he has hinted.
Sources said Jackson also intends to explore whether the Denver Nuggets are in any way amenable to releasing Brian Shaw from his contract in exchange for some form of compensation. Shaw is a longtime Jackson favorite who, after missing out on numerous head-coaching jobs, just completed his first season with the Nuggets, posting a 36-46 record despite numerous injuries to front-line players.
But Shaw told the Denver Post on Thursday: "I'm not interested in doing anything other than what I'm doing right now."
Had Shaw not taken Denver's job last summer, sources say he would have been at the top of Jackson's list with Kerr -- and conceivably above Kerr -- for the Knicks' opening.
Even after missing out on Kerr, all indications are that Jackson remains resistant to coaching the Knicks himself.
ESPN The Magazine's Chris Broussard reported Thursday that the Knicks are also tracking Iowa State coach Fred Hoiberg, who has considerable NBA experience as both a player and an executive. But Hoiberg recently signed an improved contract with the Cyclones and has resisted all recent feelers from the NBA, with sources saying he rebuffed a strong push from the Minnesota Timberwolves to take over from the retiring Rick Adelman within the past month.
Sources say that Jackson likewise has interest in a number of veteran coaches he has worked with previously, including Kurt Rambis, Jim Cleamons, Bill Cartwright and Frank Hamblen. Cartwright, in fact, has already interviewed with Jackson since he joined the Knicks, but it's believed only Rambis from that group would be considered for the top spot on the staff.
Since Jackson joined the Knicks for an annual salary of $12 million, his associates have maintained that the 68-year-old plans to be "heavily involved" working alongside his first coaching hire, especially in training camp. The comparison to the way Pat Riley mentored Erik Spoelstra in Miami has been made often at Madison Square Garden.
There have been no indications to this point that Jackson, after missing out on Kerr, will consider hiring an established coach, despite the loud clamor from Knicks fans to pursue Mark Jackson, whose controversial dismissal by the Warriors after 98 victories over the past two seasons opened the door for the team to swipe Kerr.
ESPN analyst and former Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy is another theoretical candidate who would excite Knicks fans, while Chicago Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau -- who sources say New York planned to pursue had Jackson rebuffed Knicks owner James Dolan -- still has admirers within the Knicks organization.
But one source close to the situation insisted that Phil Jackson is not worried about selling New Yorkers on his eventual hire. It remains to be seen, of course, what impact hiring a relative neophyte would have on Carmelo Anthony's free agency, with Anthony possessing the ability to opt out of the final contract and put himself on the open market on July 1.
Walton worked as a developmental coach this season with the D-League's L.A. D-Fenders while also doing Los Angeles Lakers studio work, Lue is an assistant coach to Doc Rivers with the Los Angeles Clippers and Fisher is widely regarded as a future star in either coaching or the front office when the 18-year veteran decides he's ready to start the next phase of his career.1 of 45 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × What Donald Trump is doing on the campaign trail View Photos Businessman Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland. Caption Businessman Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland. Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Trump Doral golf course in Miami. Carlo Allegri/Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
In Politico's Playbook newsletter on Monday morning, there's a bit of inside-D.C. nonsense that neatly represents why the city's political class reads Playbook. Maybe, it suggests, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan could end up being the nominee! Skeptical? Well, A Guy did some math:
One of the nation’s best-wired Republicans, with an enviable prediction record for this cycle, sees a 60% chance of a convention deadlock, and a 90% chance that delegates turn to Ryan – ergo, a 54% chance that Ryan, who’ll start the third week of July as chairman of the Republican National Convention, will end it as the nominee.
How can you argue with that, besides by saying that it's completely stupid to make up two numbers and then imply that the product of those numbers is somehow less made-up? You can't.
But buried in all of this home-team cheerleading is an accurate point. The "Never Trump" movement may — despite the fact that it arrived well after Donald Trump had jumped out to a big delegate lead — actually end up working, and the nominee may very well be someone who so far hasn't won a vote. In fact, the timing of the Never Trump movement may have been about perfect.
The credit for that lies in part with the Republican operatives, insiders and purists who created the loose-knit organization whose strategic goal has all of the complexity of a stop sign. But it lies much more with the evolution of the race. There's still voting, of course, random Tuesdays on which Trump's tweeting and CNNing and rallying comes down to Joe and Suzie Registeredrepublican. But most of the action is happening on terrain that is not only hostile to Trump, it's terrain where he's shown a complete inability to figure out how to maneuver.
Here we're talking about things like North Dakota.
[Ted Cruz claims 18-delegate win after North Dakota GOP convention]
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told CBS's Face the Nation,"I don't know that it's been the worst week in my campaign." His rival contenders commented on various Sunday shows. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
The state's small slate of 25 delegates to the national convention are unbound, meaning that they can vote for whomever they want. Over the weekend, Ted Cruz's campaign identified a slate of 23 people who it asserted would back him in the voting for a nominee in Cleveland. Eighteen of those people won convention slots. They're not bound, and several said their support for Cruz was soft. But it's better than how Trump did. According to our Dave Weigel, Trump left North Dakota with a grand total of one committed supporter out of the 25.
What's important to take away from this isn't that Cruz's 18 delegates are helping him creep up on Trump; they are, but there's almost no way Cruz can actually get a majority of delegates before the convention. What's important is that those delegates didn't go to Trump, making it that much harder for him to hit the 1,237-delegate mark he needs to clinch.
[Why might Ted Cruz win the Republican nomination at the convention? Because he won Iowa.]
Cruz outworked Trump in Arizona, too, just as he'd outworked him in Louisiana. The delegates in Arizona are bound to Trump, after he won the state easily last month. But they're only bound to him for the first vote at the convention. So, as the Washington Examiner reports, Cruz has been making sure that the delegates that go to Cleveland bound to vote for Trump the first time around are planning to vote for Cruz on a second vote — a vote that will happen if Trump doesn't hit 1,237.
"Trump has no real organization in Arizona," strategist Sean Noble told the Examiner. "Cruz will get most/all Arizona delegates on second ballot."
Cruz's success in working the delegate system is certainly a function of his ability to organize. But it also helps that the process for deciding the actual delegates is happening at a moment when Trump is being battered by his party and by voters.
These delegates, many of them longtime activists within the Republican Party, are being asked how deep is their commitment to Trump. That's an increasingly loaded question, particularly with a slew of (well-justified) reports about Trump's general-election challenges swirling.
Cruz is much better positioned than Trump and John Kasich on a second ballot at the convention — but if Trump doesn't get the nomination in early votes, more and more of those delegates will not be bound to anyone, Cruz included. Which is how you get to the Ryan scenario.
Trump's team has proven effective at keeping its hand on the steering wheel as Trump barrels down the straight, wide highway of primary voting. But it has no apparent ability to actually organize, much less out-organize the party.
[Internal memo reveals Trump campaign’s mounting fury with its critics]
Take the memo leaked to our Robert Costa. In it, senior Trump adviser Barry Bennett argues that all of this talk about Trump having a bad week is nonsense.
"Five days ago Mr. Trump led Mr. Cruz 39% to 33%" in Reuters's national tracking poll, Bennett wrote. "Each day all week long we continued to gain support contrary to what the Washington Establishment would have you believe. This morning we lead Cruz by a margin of 45 to 31."
[Donald Trump had the Worst Week in Washington. By a lot.]
It's hard to think of a worse metric to point to. National polling averages are very, very far from the votes that matter. The potential delegates may consider Reuters's numbers — or they may consider the glut of polls showing Trump getting trounced by either Democrat in November. The process is no longer only about winning elections.
That's where the NeverTrumpers would like them to look. It's what they won't stop talking about. They may not have much sway over the voters heading to the polls these days, but they have sway over the process. So the NeverTrumpers, many of whom are products of the same process that birthed the delegate system, are poised to win this round of the fight by a wide margin.
[Donald Trump is not beating Hillary Clinton in the polls, no matter how many times he says it]
Leaving Trump with only one option: Hit 1,237. As Nate Silver put it on Friday, it's probably first-ballot-or-bust for Trump. And if he misses on the first ballot, Cruz doesn't have much time to cobble together a majority of his own. After all, the partisans lined up against Trump right now would happily turn their fire on him on the convention floor.
Which is why, while it is dumb to say that Ryan has a "54 percent chance" of being the nominee, it is not dumb to say that he has some chance. As do any number of other people.
The problem with fighting the establishment in a presidential nomination contest isn't that you can't beat them. It's that the final boss battle happens on their turf with their rules. And they have a very good track record of winning.The Justice Department is investigating Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), the House Ethics Committee revealed in a statement on Thursday.
The ethics panel was reviewing alleged campaign finance violations by Hunter but has halted that work at the request of the Justice Department, the panel said.
“The Department of Justice has asked the Committee to defer consideration of this matter and the Committee, following precedent, unanimously voted on March 22, 2017, to defer consideration of this matter at this time,” the House Ethics Committee in a statement.
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The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), an independent watchdog for the House, has been looking into potential campaign finance violations, according to the report released by OCE. However, the specific allegations has not been released beyond general concerns that Hunter may have used his campaign account to finance personal items.
"Rep. Hunter may have converted tens of thousands of dollars of campaign funds from his congressional campaign committee to personal use to pay for family travel, flights, utilities, health care, school uniforms and tuition, jewelry, groceries, and other goods,services, and expenses," OCE wrote in its report. "If Rep. Hunter converted funds from his congressional campaign committee for personal use, then he may have violated House rules, standards of conduct, and federal law."
Reports surfaced last year that the Hunter had been potentially misusing campaign funds to pay for personal trips to Italy and Hawaii as well as funding his children’s school tuition, in addition to more mundane items like cell phone video games and a garage door.
Federal law does not allow the use of campaign funds for personal use. Hunter has denied all wrongdoing, with a spokesman attributing the misspent funds to “sloppy bookkeeping.” Hunter has promised to reimburse his campaign committee roughly $65,000, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. However, reports raise questions about additional seemingly personal expenses.
The investigation followed on the heels of a letter sent by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) last spring, pushing for an investigation into those reports. In December, the House Ethics Committee acknowledged that it was reviewing allegations against Hunter.
OCE had voted unanimously in August to refer the allegations to the House Ethics Committee, which would have jurisdiction to further investigate and impose punishments for lawmakers who have broken rules.
On Thursday, however, the committee announced that the Justice Department had asked it to stand down on investigating Hunter, without specifically confirming that the agency was conducting its own.
Campaign finance reports note that Hunter hired Washington law firm Berke Farah, LLC. From June through December, Hunter has paid the firm more than $32,000, according to Federal Election Commission records tallied by The Hill.
Duncan, who was an early supporter of President Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE during the campaign, is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, the House Education Committee and the House Transportation Committee.
- Olivia Beavers contributed.
- Updated at 3:45 p.m.Now in full release, the makers of The Elder Scrolls: Legends have at this point probably abandoned any hope of making a serious dent in Hearthstone’s player base. But they should be more worried that Gwent seems to have already surpassed Legends in terms of popularity, despite still being in beta. So what to do? Release more cards, of course—starting with its first full-sized expansion, which arrives on June 29, and theme them around the most popular part of its source material: Skyrim. The Heroes of Skyrim set will contain 150 new cards, bristling with Nords, Dragons and Shouts, and I got to play a couple of games here on the E3 show floor, where two decks are available to try.
The main point of interest is the addition of Shouts. As you can see from Relenting Force at the top of the page, these new actions scale in power as you play each copy, with the final iteration being especially strong. The animation accompanying the Shout was suitably bombastic, although the ‘Fus Ro Dah’ audio remains to be added. There were also several synergy cards that did things like draw Shouts from your deck, so it’s clearly going to be a big ‘build around’ device in the set.
The developer manning the booth told me each class color will have its own shout, and these will all be common rarities. Good news, given the disappointment of Hearthstone’s recent Quests being expensive legendaries. Developer Dire Wolf Digital are keeping a lot of the cards under wraps, presumably in a bid to drip feed reveals over the coming days, but I noted down a few for reference, which you can read about below. I’ve also scattered the other cards spoiled so far around the page and in the gallery at the bottom.
Mentor of the Watch is a 3 magicka, Endurance, 2/2 Imperial with the text: ‘Prophecy, Guard, Summon: Give a creature in your hand Guard. It was notable because it introduces a similar mechanic to ‘hand buffing’ in Hearthstone, which to be honest never really took off, but may end up being better value in Legends.
Dragon Cult Ghost is a 3 magicka, Endurance, 3/3 Spirit with the text: ‘Spend all your magicka to play Dragon Cult Ghost. Its power and health are equal to the magicka spent.’ Which sounds a lot like Forbidden Ancient from Hearthstone, which, uh, also didn’t see a ton of play. Anyway, it’s another new mechanic for Legends, and the card is reasonably versatile, if a little boring.
Snowhawk Detachment is a 5 magicka, Willpower, 3/5 Imperial with the text: ‘Guard, Summon: +1/+1 if you have another creature with Guard.’ I’m not sure this one requires a ton of insight. It’s a decent defensive option, though a little conditional for my liking for an effect that’s hardly incredible.
Shearpoint Dragon is a 6 magicka, rare, Agility 4/4 Dragon (duh!) with the text: ‘Summon: Give a creature -2/-2. When you reduce a creature’s power or health with another effect, reduce it by an extra 1.’ Seems good, and is certainly also evidence that Dire Wolf remains unafraid of cramming a dangerously dense amount of text onto its cards.
Dragonplate Armor is a 4 magicka, common, Endurance item with the text: ‘+2/+2, Summon: +2/+2 if you have a Dragon in your discard pile.’ This had sweet art and I’m looking forward to trying some Dragon-synergy decks.
As for how it all played, the answer is exactly like Legends but with some cool new mechanics. Nothing else I could see had changed, although the Dire Wolf dev on-hand for the demo did tell me they’re still hoping to put out a new game board at some point, but from the sound of it I wouldn’t assume that will be when the set launches. I’ll be diving back into Legends when Heroes of Skyrim hits later this month.Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto is seen during announcing the government plans to legalize marijuana-based medicines, and proposed raising the amount of the drug that can be legally carried, in the wake of a national drug policy review, in Mexico City, Mexico, April 21, 2016. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The Mexican government's pledge to tackle graft suffered a setback on Friday when Congress entered its summer recess having failed to pass anti-corruption legislation that has been stuck in political limbo for months.
Harried by accusations of corruption, President Enrique Pena Nieto's government last May passed a reform to tighten oversight of public officials, and create a special anti-graft prosecutor.
Those changes were dependent on secondary legislation meant to pass in a year, yet by the end of April, his centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had only submitted proposals for five of the seven laws the package comprises.
The opposition attacked Pena Nieto's commitment to the reform and blamed the PRI for blocking the legislation, which the party admits will likely miss the May 28 deadline.
"The president is from one party, and it's up to him to push this reform. And what's happening is the very opposite," said opposition senator Francisco Burquez of the center-right National Action Party.
Taking power in 1929, the PRI ruled Mexico for the next 71 years and had become a byword for corruption when it was finally voted out in 2000. Pena Nieto returned it to power in 2012.
Presidential spokesman Eduardo Sanchez dismissed any suggestion that Pena Nieto was not doing enough, saying that the legislation currently in Congress came from the president, and that his commitment to the cause was "more than proven".
PRI Senator Enrique Burgos said his party needed more time to incorporate recent civil society proposals to make officials disclose their financial interests, tax returns and assets.
"We don't want to be accused of opposing transparency or the fight against corruption, we have an interest in demonstrating the opposite," Burgos said, noting that investment and Mexico's reputation depended on taking a stand against corruption.
The legislation was unlikely to pass before June 5 state elections, but should do so in a special session "well before" Congress reconvenes officially in September, Burgos added.
Still, Francisco Rivas, director of the National Citizen Observatory, a civil group which monitors justice and security in Mexico, said there was a clear contradiction between the government's rhetoric on graft and what the PRI had achieved.
Pena Nieto became the center of a conflict of interest probe last year after reports revealed he, his wife and his finance minister bought homes from government contractors. Pena Nieto named the head of the probe, who cleared them of wrongdoing.
(Reporting by Dave Graham; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)BioWare is dead serious about upholding its Terms of Services and will bring down the hammer of justice hard should you step out of line. One member (username withheld) of the Star Wars: The Old Republic message board learned that the hard way when his / her account was permanently suspended.
What infraction did User X commit? Being underage -- the board's terms clearly state that no minor under 13 years of age can be granted an account, regardless of parental consent. How did the moderation team discover this flagrant disregard for the rules? User X admitted as much in a post in this thread. For those without access to the site, here's how the post read:
I'm 12 and what is this.
BWAAAAA HAA HA HA HA HA HAAAA HA HA HA HAAAA!
(Thanks for sending this in, Ryan and Mitchel!)
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Click to open photo gallery:The Boston Celtics are finalizing a sign-and-trade deal that will land them shooting guard Courtney Lee, NBA sources told Yahoo! Sports.
The Celtics will part with JaJuan Johnson, Sean Williams and E'Twaun Moore, along with a Charlotte Bobcats second-round draft pick Boston had acquired from the Oklahoma City Thunder as part of the Jeff Green settlement. Lee could fill the Celtics' starting shooting guard vacancy created by the departure of Ray Allen. That would allow Jason Terry to continue the sixth-man role he had in Dallas.
Lee averaged 11.4 points and shot 40.1 percent from 3-point range last season, but the Rockets also have Kevin Martin, newcomer Gary Forbes and rookie Jeremy Lamb on the roster. Johnson averaged 3.2 points and 1.6 rebounds as a rookie for Boston last season.Can something be both legal and criminalized? At first these two things seem incompatible, but when it comes to abortion access under the incoming administration of Donald Trump that question, and how we answer it, is crucial.
On one hand, the Supreme Court has located the right to an abortion under the constitutional right to privacy, which creates substantial precedent for keeping abortion legal. Despite this, the past decade has brought staggering numbers of restrictions on the right to an abortion. Hundreds of bills in dozens of states have made getting an abortion harder, if not impossible, for many women -- particularly those who are poor, young and people of color. Further, pregnancy itself has become a highly scrutinized state, and women can find themselves facing criminal prosecution for things they do while pregnant.
Earlier this year the Supreme Court placed a clear limit on the kind of legislation that makes abortion inaccessible. The justices overturned key provisions of a Texas law that would have shut down dozens of clinics and made abortion too difficult to access for millions of women in the state. On the strength of that precedent, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and the Center for Reproductive Rights came together to file legal challenges to abortion restrictions in North Carolina, Alaska and Missouri. These groups are challenging medically unnecessary restrictions in Alaska and Missouri, and a ban on abortions after 20 weeks in North Carolina.
Advertisement:
With no legislative experience, how are we to understand how a Trump administration will handle abortion? As it turns out, the president-elect has a long history of public remarks on the issue.
In 1999, Trump described himself as “pro-choice in every respect.” That clear support of abortion rights, however, has given way to one of the biggest flip-flops in flip-flop history.
In 2011 he declared that he had changed his mind on the question of abortion because he knew a family that was considering an abortion, didn’t have it, and now have a child that is a “total superstar |
express permission is given by the appropriate church official or governing body;
(9) hospital, medical clinic, doctor's office, or any other facility where medical services or procedures are performed unless expressly authorized by the employer; or
(10) place clearly marked with a sign prohibiting the carrying of a concealable weapon on the premises pursuant to Sections 23-31-220 and 23-31-235. Except that a property owner or an agent acting on his behalf, by express written consent, may allow individuals of his choosing to enter onto property regardless of any posted sign to the contrary. A person who violates a provision of this item, whether the violation is wilful or not, only may be charged with a violation of Section 16-11-620 and must not be charged with or penalized for a violation of this subsection.
Except as provided for in item (10), a person who wilfully violates a provision of this subsection is guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, must be fined not less than one thousand dollars or imprisoned not more than one year, or both, at the discretion of the court and have his permit revoked for five years.
Nothing contained in this subsection may be construed to alter or affect the provisions of Sections 10-11-320, 16-23-420, 16-23-430, 16-23-465, 44-23-1080, 44-52-165, 50-9-830, and 51-3-145.
(N) Valid out-of-state permits to carry concealable weapons held by a resident of a reciprocal state must be honored by this State, provided, that the reciprocal state requires an applicant to successfully pass a criminal background check and a course in firearm training and safety. A resident of a reciprocal state carrying a concealable weapon in South Carolina is subject to and must abide by the laws of South Carolina regarding concealable weapons. SLED shall maintain and publish a list of those states as the states with which South Carolina has reciprocity.
(O) A permit issued pursuant to this article is not required for a person:
(1) specified in Section 16-23-20, items (1) through (5) and items (7) through (11);
(2) carrying a self-defense device generally considered to be nonlethal including the substance commonly referred to as 'pepper gas'; or
(3) carrying a concealable weapon in a manner not prohibited by law.
(P) Upon renewal, a permit issued pursuant to this article is valid for five years. Subject to subsection (Q), SLED shall renew a currently valid permit upon:
(1) payment of a fifty-dollar renewal fee by the applicant. This fee must be waived for disabled veterans and retired law enforcement officers;
(2) completion of the renewal application; and
(3) picture identification or facsimile copy thereof.
(Q) Upon submission of the items required by subsection (P), SLED must conduct or facilitate a state and federal background check of the applicant. If the background check is favorable, SLED must renew the permit.
(R) No provision contained within this article shall expand, diminish, or affect the duty of care owed by and liability accruing to, as may exist at law immediately before the effective date of this article, the owner of or individual in legal possession of real property for the injury or death of an invitee, licensee, or trespasser caused by the use or misuse by a third party of a concealable weapon. Absence of a sign prohibiting concealable weapons shall not constitute negligence or establish a lack of duty of care.
(S) At least thirty days before a permit issued pursuant to this article expires, SLED shall notify the permit holder by mail or online if permitted by subsection (H) at the permit holder's address of record that the permit is set to expire along with notification of the permit holder's opportunity to renew the permit pursuant to the provisions of subsections (P) and (Q).
(T) During the first quarter of each calendar year, SLED must publish a report of the following information regarding the previous calendar year:
(1) the number of permits;
(2) the number of permits that were issued;
(3) the number of permit applications that were denied;
(4) the number of permits that were renewed;
(5) the number of permit renewals that were denied;
(6) the number of permits that were suspended or revoked; and
(7) the name, address, and county of a person whose permit was revoked, including the reason for the revocation pursuant to subsection (J)(1).
The report must include a breakdown of such information by county.
(U) A concealable weapon permit holder whose permit has been expired for no more than one year may not be charged with a violation of Section 16-23-20 but must be fined not more than one hundred dollars."
C. Section 16-23-20(9)(a) of the 1976 Code, as last amended by Act 28 of 2007, is further amended to read:
"(a) secured in a closed glove compartment, closed console, closed trunk, or in a closed container secured by an integral fastener and transported in the luggage compartment of the vehicle; however, this item is not violated if the glove compartment, console, or trunk is opened in the presence of a law enforcement officer for the sole purpose of retrieving a driver's license, registration, or proof of insurance. If the person has been issued a concealed weapon permit pursuant to Article 4, Chapter 31, Title 23, then the person also may secure his weapon under a seat in a vehicle, or in any open or closed storage compartment within the vehicle's passenger compartment; or"
D. Section 16-23-10(10) of the 1976 Code, as added by Act 294 of 2004, is amended to read:
"(10) 'Luggage compartment' means the trunk of a motor vehicle which has a trunk; however, with respect to a motor vehicle which does not have a trunk, the term 'luggage compartment' refers to the area of the motor vehicle in which the manufacturer designed that luggage be carried or to the area of the motor vehicle in which luggage is customarily carried. In a station wagon, van, hatchback vehicle, truck, or sport utility vehicle, the term 'luggage compartment' refers to the area behind the rearmost seat."
Time effective
SECTION 3. This act takes effect upon approval by the Governor.
Ratified the 5th day of February, 2014.
Approved the 11th day of February, 2014.
__________
This web page was last updated on May 13, 2014 at 10:45 AMOffice 365 client applications now integrate with AMSI, enabling antivirus and other security solutions to scan macros and other scripts at runtime to check for malicious behavior. This is part of our continued efforts to tackle entire classes of threats. Learn more: Office VBA + AMSI: Parting the veil on malicious macros
In response to the growing trend of macro-based threats, a new feature in Office 2016 allows an enterprise administrator to block users from running macros in Office documents that originated from the Internet.
This feature was documented back in March: New feature in Office 2016 can block macros and help prevent infection, and the predominant customer request we received was for this feature to be added to Office 2013.
We are pleased to announce that, as of September 2016, this feature is now part of Office 2013 – and it works in the same way as it does in Office 2016.
Administrators can enable this feature for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint by configuring it under the respective application’s Group Policy Administrative Templates for Office 2013.
For more information on how this feature works, and some background information on how macros can be abused for malware, see our blog from March 2016.
More info for end-users: Learn how to enable or disable macros in Office files
More info for admins and IT professionals: Learn about security and compliance in Office 365
Related blog entry: Machine learning vs. social engineering
Talk to us
Questions, concerns, or insights on this story? Join discussions at the Microsoft community and Windows Defender Security Intelligence.
Follow us on Twitter @WDSecurity and Facebook Windows Defender Security Intelligence.According to Alex Marvez of Fox Sports, the Philadelphia Eagles have signed veteran offensive guard Wade Smith to a contract.
Source tells @foxsports that @Eagles have agreed to contract terms with OL Wade Smith — Alex Marvez (@alexmarvez) September 9, 2014
This news comes following a report that the Eagles fill-in starter at right tackle, Allen Barbre, is expected to have season-ending surgery on his ankle.
It was reported earlier on Tuesday that Smith was visiting Philadelphia along with former Houston Texans teammate Eric Winston. Winston left without Philadelphia without a deal. The Eagles opted to sign Smith instead. Here's what I wrote about Smith earlier:
Wade Smith, like Winston, also spent time with the Seahawks this past summer. Smith, 33, entered the NFL in 2003 as a third round draft pick by the Miami Dolphins. In his 10-year NFL career, Smith has recorded 98 starts and has appeared in 138 games. Smith most recently started all 16 games at left guard for the Houston Texans in 2013.
Smith has good size at 6-4, 307 lbs. For what it's worth, he was named to the NFL Pro Bowl in 2012. ESPN NFL Insider Adam Caplan notes that the Eagles blocking scheme is similar to what Smith played in when he played for the Texans.
The Eagles now have seven healthy offensive lineman with this addition: Jason Peters, Jason Kelce, Todd Herremans, Andrew Gardner, Dennis Kelly, David Molk, and Smith. Evan Mathis will miss several weeks while recovering from an MCL injury. Matt Tobin is dealing with a high ankle sprain. Barbre, as previously noted, is likely out for the season.
Philadelphia will have to make a corresponding roster move in order to make room for Smith on the team's 53-man roster.
(Fun fact: Smith is now the eighth former Texans player on the Eagles' roster. All eight include: P Donnie Jones, OLB Connor Barwin, ILB DeMeco Ryans, OL Andrew Gardner, TE James Casey, WR Jeff Maehl, OLB Bryan Braman, OL Wade Smith.
Stay tuned.A commenter on the Facebook group provoked right-wing wrath after David Cameron’s speech yesterday by posting a photograph of a tearful-looking Samantha Cameron and suggesting that even she was embarrassed that he was using the memory of his late son Ivan – yet again – to support his ever-more-desperate claim to be a supporter of the National Health Service.
In the name of balance, Yr Obdt Srvt responded as follows: “Cameron has again and again put the treatment of his child front and centre during discussion of the NHS – a service that he and his government are now determined to undermine and destroy. He was happy to take Disability Living Allowance for his son, but have you noticed that after Ivan passed away, he was also happy to take DLA away from everyone else and replace it with something that is much harder to get?
“Cameron takes selfishness to new levels and, in my opinion, it would be entirely justifiable if his wife was embarrassed to the core by what he said.”
That quietened the dissenting voice, but not the irritation caused to Yr Obdt Srvt by Cameron’s behaviour, which seems offensive to his own child’s memory. It was, therefore, unsurprising to find that he has ‘form’ in this regard, dating back to before Ivan passed away.
Take a look at the following, from Sturdyblog‘s article We need to talk about Ivan. The article featured a series of pictures of Cameron with his son, including the shot at the top of this article, which the author said made him increasingly uneasy:
“Everything had the feel of a ‘photo opportunity’ – not a family portrait.
“I tried to be open to friends who asked ‘would you rather they hid the child away in shame?’. But there was something interesting about both the timing and tone of this – pitched like a curiosity tent in the middle of an election circus. What about the other side in that election?
“I am no fan of Gordon Brown, but credit ought to go where it is due. The man is partly blind, he and his wife lost a child only days after she was born, then had another diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. There was no denial; no attempt to hide away the facts; no shame. But there was also no feeding the media in order to boost likeability – and, heaven knows, Brown needed it. There was stoicism. There was dignity.
“I tried to dismiss my extreme discomfort with the way Ivan was being used, at least in my subjective judgement. I tried to convince myself that this was my own cynicism talking; my political dislike of conservatism; my shameful, selfish awkwardness and guilt at being confronted with disability.
“Unfortunately the pattern continued, even after his death. There were photographs from the funeral, which did not appear ‘papped’. There were pictures at assorted memorials, taken by the Camerons’ official photographer, engineered to engender sympathy or even pity. There were visits to hospices sponsored by OK! Magazine.”
Writing in March 2012, the author stated: “Last week David Cameron referred to baby Ivan during Prime Minister’s Questions again. It was the sixth or seventh time he has done so, either obliquely or directly, in response to difficult questions about the NHS or welfare or disability benefits. Occasionally Cameron is baited into it. He must rise above such occasions. Occasionally, however, the mention is defensive and entirely unprompted.”
Here’s the moment, caught on YouTube:
“In last week’s PMQs Cameron was asked by Dame Joan Ruddock about cutting the benefits to one of her constituents – a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy. In his response he denied that the benefits available to disabled children were being cut (a distinct untruth with regard to new claimants as explained in this factcheck) and continued: “As someone who has actually filled out the form for disability allowance and had a child with cerebral palsy, I know how long it takes to fill in that form.”
“No reference to the girl about whom the question was; no offer to look into her case; no attempt to answer the question. Only an out-of-context reference to Cameron’s dead child, offered as irrefutable proof that his reforms must be right and implied rebuke for daring to question them.
“We always complain that our politicians are out of touch. What is the objection about a Prime Minister using his personal experience to help shape policy? No objection. But policy consists of words put into action. When the action is distinctly contrary to the words, it is not policy. It is hypocrisy.
“He has presided over an unprecedented, concerted campaign against the NHS. So much so, that the very unit in which his child died is threatened with closure. To do this while citing his personal experiences to silence his critics, is unspeakably wicked.
“To stand there, at the dispatch box, and invoke his plight as the parent of a disabled child, then minutes later announce the closure of 36 Remploy factories (not via a statement by the relevant minister, but by placing a letter in the library) is utterly cowardly.
“The net result? A conversation about Ivan in which nobody dares speak up for Ivan. A muted debate, in which the interests of children like him are not fully represented in our Parliament.
“Each time the spectre of that poor child is raised like an invincible shield by his own father, each time his memory is drop-kicked into a political minefield – knowing that nobody will dare touch it – debate is silenced and legitimate questions about these reforms go unanswered. It is not only inappropriate. It is distasteful and immoral.”
It was then and it is now.
To put Cameron’s claims about the NHS in perspective, Michael Portillo has been quoted (many times) as saying: “They didn’t believe they could win the election if they told you what they were going to do.” Here’s the moment, from Andrew Neil’s This Week show:
Oliver Letwin has also been – famously – quoted as saying that within five years of a Conservative election victory “the NHS will not exist anymore”.
Andrew Lansley spent six or seven years working on what became the Health and Social Care Act 2012, apparently to make it as convoluted as possible in order to prevent its blueprint for an NHS poisoned by profit-making concerns from being diluted during Parliamentary debate. He was banned from talking about this work in the run-up to the 2010 general election (see Never Again?: The story of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 – A study in Coalition government and policy, The King’s Fund and Institute for Government, p2).
The Conservative-led Coalition came into office promising year-on-year increases in funding for the NHS – and has reneged on that promise every year for which funding outturns are known.
The above are just representative examples of the evidence available to show Cameron’s contempt for the service that treated his son.
Coming right up to date, Political Scrapbook called Cameron’s bluff by referring to disabled children he didn’t mention in his conference speech yesterday. The article quoted him verbatim: “For me, this is personal. I’m someone who’s relied on the NHS and … who knows what it’s like when you go to hospital night after night with a sick child in your arms. How dare they say that I would ever put that at risk for other people’s children?”
Then it continued: “In the interests of balance, here are some other disabled children from around the country — a nation in which 40% of children with disabilities live in poverty — who didn’t merit inclusion in his keynote address.
“Five year old Reuben Sims requires round-the-clock care and breathes using a ventilator. His mother has been charged £18.40 per week for the ‘spare bedroom’ used to store Reuben’s medical supplies.
“Here is Luis Rennie, who suffers from cerebral palsy and is registered blind. He has faces eviction from his family home — specially adapted at a cost of £60,000 — if his mother refuses to pay for the room used to store equipment such as wheelchairs.
“And it’s not just the Bedroom Tax which is putting the squeeze on families with disabled children.
“A flavour of the impact of austerity on services provided directly by local authorities is given in an analysis of London boroughs by Ambitious About Autism:
Cuts to transport services for children with special education needs
Cuts to children with disabilities teams
Charging for non-statutory services
Provision of statutory services at a reduced level
“Charities working with deaf and blind children are reporting cuts in specialist services.
“Then there’s Universal Credit, which — if Iain Duncan Smith’s team develop the competency to actually implement the policy — will leave 100,000 disabled children worse off by more than £120 per month.
“Young people’s charities also face public funding cuts of almost £405 million over the five years to 2015/16 — a greater proportion than the rest of the voluntary sector.
“Respite for carers is being slashed, with eight out 10 family carers telling Mencap that ‘they have reached breaking point due to a lack of short breaks’:
“‘When you care for someone 24 hours per day and you know it’s going to be forever, sometimes a short break is your only hope.'”
Yr Obdt Srvt has personal experience as a carer and knows this statement to be true.
The sad fact is that the likes of David Cameron will never accept that using a dead relative as a commodity, as a trump card in an argument, is morally wrong. They do not understand the swell of indignation they create whenever they put their grief (whether real or feigned) on parade in a bid to gain electoral sympathy – and voters’ support. They believe they are right to do so.
They deserve to be stripped of that misapprehension in the most humiliating way. When it happens, let’s hope it hits Cameron as hard as the slap in the face he so richly deserves – from his own spouse.
Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike
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Like this: Like Loading...By Sharanya Gopinathan
Image courtesy Pixabay
While a lot of people believe that rape and violence are things that happen on dark, deserted streets at the hands of faceless strangers, nothing could actually be further from the truth. A 2015 Reuters report says that 90 percent of rapes are committed by people known to the victim, and it’s important that we really absorb and understand this, because tackling rape, particularly within the family, is dark, complex and really horrifying, and it’s important to understand how complicit families can be in these situations if we’re to effectively tackle it at all.
In a horrifying case from Bengaluru, it’s been discovered that a 14-year-old girl from Bangalore was raped by her father, 44-year-old Ramesh for over a year. She didn’t tell anyone, because as is often the case in situations like this, he threatened to kill her mother if she told her. The mother found out about this situation a few days ago, but didn’t want to go to the police. She called members of their family together to decide what to do instead.
The husband’s relatives refused to believe the 14-year-old, and so the family decided to go to a woman priest to ascertain the truth. This is where the story gets even more horrifying. The priest forced the girl to undergo a “truth test”, which involved having the survivor press her hand against a bed of sharp nails. When the girl began to scream in pain, her mother and sister caused a commotion, which the neighbours heard, leading them to finally call the police.
Stories like this are a clear example of how families and communities can act as agents of violence, and show that these spaces are far from as safe as they are portrayed to be. The family of this girl, like many others in similar situations, are completely ill-equipped to deal with instances of sexual violence from within the home. The involvement of a woman’s priest in torturing the victim and disregarding her testimony also shows us how women, too, can act as enforcers of violence and patriarchy against other women and girls.As Lilian Hurtado approaches her sixth decade, her life reveals a pair of absolute certainties.
First, the Lord’s hand was guiding her long before she came to know the Lord. Hindsight, she says, now allows her to see His divine guidance at many key moments when, at the time, she thought she was alone.
And second, discovering, accepting and living the gospel has allowed her to enjoy countless life-changing blessings — and has allowed her to bless and change the lives of others.
Sister Hurtado was born in a rural region of Ecuador not far from the coastal city of Guayaquil. Young Lilian’s father managed dozens of men who worked the agricultural fields that surrounded her home. By the time she was 12 or 13, she was working as the cook for dozens of laborers.
“Each morning I would wake up a 3 a.m. to begin preparing for the 6 a.m. breakfast,” she said. “By the time breakfast was served I was already working on the day’s lunch.”
In all, she fixed three meals a day, preparing a variety of local dishes. She often experimented with whatever ingredients she had on hand and created new recipes.
It was hard work — but she found she enjoyed cooking for others. She took pleasure watching others taking pleasure in her food. She did not know then that her skills preparing meals for others would serve her well throughout her life.
At around that same time Lilian began feeling spiritual promptings. She was not raised in a strong religious home and she questioned many of the local beliefs about God. Why, for example, had she been taught that the day of prophets had passed at a time when folks desperately needed the guidance of a living prophet.
The years passed and Lilian moved to the city in search of better job opportunities. During one difficult moment in her young life her thoughts turned again to God.
“I went home and, for the first time, offered a prayer from my heart. I wanted to know if God existed,” she said.
Her prayers were soon answered. She was living with her grandmother and raising her newborn son, Presley, when a pair of Mormon missionaries from North America stopped by their home. The young elders asked if they could share their gospel message.
“As I was listening to the missionaries I felt peace in my heart,” she said.
She later accepted their baptismal invitation and began attending the local branch in Guayaquil. She even set aside her initial fears and accepted a calling to serve as the Primary secretary.
A short time later she learned that the mission home in Guayaquil was in need of a full-time cook. Word of Sister Hurtado’s skills in the kitchen had begun to spread. She stopped by the mission home to meet with President William “Jack” Mitchell.
Other than the young missionaries, she had met only one other foreigner in her life. “I was terrified to meet President Mitchell.”
Still, she was offered the job that she holds to this day — 36 years later.
Sister Hurtado’s cooking has become the tasty stuff of legend in southern Ecuador. During her time at the mission home she has prepared meals for 17 mission presidents and their families, thousands of missionaries, countless members and dozens of General Authorities. She has even cooked for a prophet, President Gordon B. Hinckley.
Along the way she’s learned to cook several North American dishes that she admits to “modifying” a bit with a few local twists and ingredients.
“But Lilian does so much more than cook — she does it all,” said Sister Tamina Ridd, who served with her husband, President Randall L. Ridd, in the Ecuador Guayaquil North Mission from 2005-2008.
Sister Ridd said Sister Hurtado is often called on to speak to newly arrived missionaries about the Ecuadorian people and culture. She’s the mission’s “go-to” person to find anything needed.
And then there’s her banana bread.
For decades Sister Hurtado has baked a loaf of sweet banana bread for each elder and sister on their birthdays. The missionaries love the warm treat and are anxious to share it with others.
Several years ago the missionaries began offering slices of Sister Hurtado’s bread to their teaching contacts. The bread, they taught, satisfied the belly — and their gospel message would forever satisfy the soul.
The missionaries’ “miracle bread” approach has gleaned scores of teaching opportunities that have resulted in dozens of baptisms.
Sister Hurtado’s service extends beyond kitchens and banana bread. For the past 15 years she has served as an ordinance worker in the Guayaquil Ecuador Temple. And she loves helping out with her two growing grandsons.
“I have learned that if we are obedient to the Lord, we can become the best that we can be and we will always be blessed,” she said.
Recently Sister Hurtado traveled outside Ecuador for the first time in her life so she could attend general conference at Church headquarters in Salt Lake City. She baked 25 loaves of banana bread in the hours leading up to her departure to be used by the local missionaries.
“I can’t wait to see President Thomas S. Monson and listen to the words of our leaders,” she said.
[email protected]Donald Trump speaks on the last day of the Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio. | Getty No, Trump, RNC tickets were not sold on eBay
Donald Trump boasted that the Republican National Convention hall was so “packed” during his prime time address that people were even selling convention tickets on eBay.
“Those seats were selling for a lot of money on eBay. They were going for big numbers,” he said on Friday morning.
Story Continued Below
But a POLITICO search of convention tickets sold on eBay, found that no tickets were actually sold.
Despite the plethora of Trump pins, vintage credentials, and other campaign swag being sold through the auctioning website, there was no proof that extra tickets had been on the market.
“I was thinking about taking 10 or 12 tickets and saying let's go. But they were selling for a lot of money,” he told a crowd of supporters.IT is a famous inter-city rivalry that continues to keep Scotland's two largest cities poles apart.
Now an academic has claimed the grudge between the good people of Edinburgh and Glasgow was rooted more than 300 years ago – and started over a humble loaf of bread.
Professor Robert Crawford, of St Andrews University, believes he has traced the bickering back to concerns over the standards of baking in Glasgow in 1656.
Mr Crawford said: "The famous, often misunderstood, rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh began over 300 years ago. One of the first recorded flare-ups happened in 1656, when the town council of Glasgow expressed concern at the bad quality of bread the local bakers were producing.
"Two bakers from Edinburgh offered an easy solution and also managed to one-up Glasgow – they would happily bake Glaswegians bread that met higher quality, Edinburgh standards.
"The gloves were off and the jousting between Edinburgh and Glasgow had begun."
While Edinburgh and Glasgow are separated by only 45 miles, the rivalry permeates every aspect of life from business and culture to sport.
Glasgow is often seen as trendier, friendlier, wetter and more dangerous than Edinburgh, which in turn is considered prettier, more sophisticated and less colloquial.
Mr Crawford has claimed the rivalry is one of the first great city stand-offs of the English-speaking world. The author discovered the historic squabble while researching his new book On Glasgow and Edinburgh, the first of its kind exclusively devoted to both cities.
He said: "Competition between cities in a single country is a very ancient phenomenon, going back at least to Athens and Sparta in classical Greece.
"Yet in the English-speaking world the rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh is foundational in that it precedes and to some extent prefigures all other fully-developed, long-standing urban rivalries – those between New York and Boston, Sydney and Melbourne, Toronto and Vancouver come later.
"In England, London's overbalancing dominance has gone uncontested and the jousting between Oxford and Cambridge is essentially between universities.
"Within Scotland though, since at least the 17th century, a sense of sparring and sometimes outright competition between the country's two largest cities has been a defining aspect of the nation."
But he said his tome, which is launched next month, shows it is possible to love both cities equally.
He said: "It is in part the centuries old rivalry, the differences, the splendidly distinct flavoursomeness of these almost-but-never-quite neighbours that constitutes their enduring yet dynamic allure.
"In both cities there is the assumption that Glaswegians are rough diamonds whose hospitality, especially to those in need, is legendary.
"In Edinburgh, folk wisdom has it, at whatever time you arrive on someone's doorstep you may be welcomed with the words 'you'll have had your tea' – meaning the visitor will have already eaten and so the host will not need to provide any nourishment.
"Such caricatures are unfair, yet far too much fun to jettison.
"Only people from Edinburgh could dwell in a universe without Glaswegians; only Glaswegians could live on an Edinburgh-less planet. Everyone else may enjoy this pair of stubborn cities equally; no-one can understand Scotland without paying attention to both."
"It would be a terrible shame if this rivalry were ever settled."
On Glasgow and Edinburgh will be launched at Blackwells Bookshop in the capital on February 28 and in Glasgow at the Aye Write! Festival, which runs from April 12 to 20.“7 Questions before Movement” is an ongoing series in which we ask the same seven questions to as many artists playing at this year’s Movement Detroit festival (formerly known as “DEMF”) as we possibly can. The goal of this series is to familiarize festival goers with the styles and personalities of artists they can expect to see at the festival (because let’s be real – there’s always at least a few names we don’t recognize right away). Given that this is a techno-focused site, we’ll start out by seeing what artists in this genre have to say.
[Editor’s Note: This particular interview was conducted via Skype call, and so the conversation is transcribed relatively verbatim below with only minor edits.]
AE: Have you ever been to the festival before, either as a performer or just as an observer?
Never, never before. I’ve been there with my imagination because I’ve heard many tales about it but I’m really looking forward to being there this time to play.
AE: Have you been to the city of Detroit before?
No, in my US tours I’ve had so far Detroit was never there. The closest city was Chicago where I played, so yeah I’ve never been to Detroit before.
AE: Well, I think there are a lot of fans of Stroboscopic Artefacts over here so I’m pretty sure you’ll get a warm reception. Do you have any favorite classic Detroit techno tracks or artists? You know, are you a Jeff Mills fan, or do you really like “At Les” by Carl Craig or any other sort of classic “Detroit” sounds?
Yeah, I’ve always been very much into the Carl Craig sound, if a Carl Craig sound exists, you know [laughs]. But I’m very much into his artistic profile and how he’s built it up in more than 20 years. And I have a huge amount of respect for the way that people like Carl Craig manage to keep it, let’s say so “cool” and low-profile, and “anti-pop.” Even though he had all the possibilities to go somewhere else, you know. And so this is something I hugely, immensely respect.
AE: I’m sure you’ve taken a look at the line-up this year – which artist or artists are you the most excited to see play?
Well, Klock and Dettmann, they’re here in Berlin, I’ve heard them millions of times, so that’s OK [laughs]. Of course Carl Craig, you know. Daniel Bell probably, and Derrick May, which is someone I’ve never heard live and I’m really really looking forward to hear. He’s playing with the High Tech Soul. And, well, Zak DVS1, which is a very good friend and it’s always very cool to hear him play. And probably also Squarepusher live, which is like one of my teenager heroes.
AE: Oh yeah, me too.
Also of course Tommy [Four Seven], which is a very good friend of mine. I know his sets very well, his music, because we’ve been collaborating for a a while, even label-wise. I’m really looking forward to seeing what secret weapons he has ready for Movement, because I’m pretty sure he’s excited like me, you know.
AE: Yeah, Tommy played Detroit a few months ago at a venue called The Works. His set was incredible, it was really really good. So to give readers a sense of the style of music you play, I was wondering if you could just name a few tracks you’ve been showcasing in your sets lately. These could be your own tracks, tracks off your label, or just tracks you’ve been playing out a lot lately that you enjoy.
Well, from my own label I tend to play things that are still to be released, you know. For a while I’ve been road testing the next EP by Kangding Ray. And it has a kind of great texture, so surely that’s one. And there is also the fairly recent Dadub album which I am also usually using more as soundscapes, you know. And then pretty much some of the recent remixes by Rrose, there is his Minilogue remix that I discovered recently, which is now really an essential part of my sets recently. It was called “Clouds and Water” Rrose remix by Minilogue, something like this.
AE: Yeah, I heard that the other day, it’s an incredible track.
And then there were some pretty interesting things. Like another is a track that I recently discovered was a remix by Donato Dozzy on Morphine records, which is pretty intense is well.
And then to go a little more “new comer”, low-profile, there is this new EP that I just got on promo that I was like “This is going to be played at Movement!” It was released on M_REC and is by Stanislav Tolkachev. It’s pretty intense as well.
And then there is also a Silent Servant remix for a Polar Inertia track on DEMENT3D, a French label I collaborated with recently, for a remix. Very very intense. [Editor’s Note: We weren’t able to locate a streaming version of this track, but you can hear it in Terrence Fixmer’s CLR Podcast #208]
And plus I’m already playing some, let’s say, “secret” things that are about to come in the new wave of Monad series on Stroboscopic Artefacts this summer. I don’t want to unveil the artists right now, but, they are also going to be hugely played in Movement for sure.
AE: Fantastic. Moving on to the next question then, what sort of equipment will you be using for your set and why do you prefer it?
I play with Traktor and a couple of MIDI controllers, FaderFox controllers, which are very good because they are incredibly flexible. They are completely custom programmed. I kind of dabble in the programming of these controllers all the time, this way I can keep on building the instruments I use on the set in the way I need it in that particular moment. I like to be very flexible because it’s necessary to me to feel free in approaching the crowd as I feel in that particular moment.
AE: Electronic music is played in a lot of different contexts and atmospheres. Do you find yourself more drawn to festivals, intimate club shows, or some other types of event?
I find myself in very different contexts actually and I really like this situation. On one side there’s the festivals with this huge collective energy, and I play in a way. It’s usually crazily powerful… Then there are the clubs that are kind of my real home place. Also smaller clubs with the very close contact with people… it’s something I love. It’s a pretty intense experience very often. And then there are also some other things I do, like contemporary art galleries or art installations where |
that theme. Make sure the players are correlated; if you like a Defense, stack the kicker or RB with their defense. Those positions are all correlated. When you embrace the variance, you build lineups that can withstand the inevitable misses we have each week.
Contest Selection
I rarely play mass-entry double ups, and I’m not even sure why those types of contests exist. If I want to play $100 or $500 in a double up contest, I can simply find one with that dollar amount. Putting 100 of the same lineup in a massive $5 double up shouldn’t be allowed. Why am I mentioning this? Last week in our team slack forums, someone had asked me if it was normal that the cash line in the big multi-entry double ups was as high as the cash line in GPPs. I wasn’t sure if it was normal or not because, as I mentioned before, I rarely enter that contest. To test the theory, I jumped in to one this week and, low and behold, the cash line was identical to the cash line in most of the larger GPPs; that’s two weeks in a row for that phenomenon. I had noticed this phenomenon during NBA as well last season which basically tells me it’s a “thing.”
In GPPs, people are using some of the hedging techniques I mentioned in the previous paragraph to reach for top scores using lower-owned players. That causes players to purposefully use lineups that are -EV in a cash game environment. Theoretically, the top scores in that type of contest will be higher, but the mean scores will be much lower. The statistics bear this out- With the mean score lower in massive GPPs, the cash line, which requires a top 25% score, is similar to the cash line in the mass multi-entry double ups and 50/50s.
Never play in a 50/50 or Double Up contest that allows multi-entry. You might as well simply enter a GPP with 25% payouts because the cash line will be very similar and the upside is greater.
I prefer using head-to-head contests as the baseline for my DFS entries. There is so much safety in one-on-one contests. Take a single hybrid lineup and figure out how much bankroll you want to use on it. Let’s say you want to risk $25; I’d do 15 $1 head-to-heads, then ladder up with a $3 50/50 (Single Entry!!) $2 Triple Up, $2 Quintuple Up, $1 20-person league, $1 100-person league and a $1 GPP.
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Week 10 Vegas Lines
Thursday Night Football
8:25 ET At Baltimore -10 Cleveland 45
The Thursday night contest pits division rivals against one another as the Browns head to Baltimore as massive underdogs to take on the hated Ravens. The Browns bring a slate low 17.5-point projection to the table in this one and the Ravens have been tough defensively this season, particularly at home. There isn’t much to like about the Browns offense in this spot- with Kessler in there, Terrelle Pryor Sr. has been so-so in the right matchups, mainly when it’s volume-based. The return of Corey Coleman limits that upside a bit, so I’m not touching any of these guys.
The Ravens have a fantastic matchup on paper, as the Browns are one of the worst defensive teams in the league and that extends to just about every category. The trick will be trying to figure out who to play. Whenever I see a 10-point favorite, my first thought is to use that defense and this is no exception; the Ravens D will be an elite play this week. My next thought would be to pair that D up with a kicker or RB. I don’t discuss kickers in this column, so let’s talk about the Ravens RBs and it’s Terrance West that appears to be the lead back. Last week in a tough matchup against an underrated Steelers run defense, West tallied 15 carries and three targets in the passing game. West was spelled by Ken Dixon to the tune of nine carries for 13 yards. Dixon still has some growing to do as a pass protector so I think West’s role as the lead back is secure at least for this upcoming game. The WR situation for the Ravens is possibly even more tricky. Last week we saw the return of Steve Smith Sr., who wound up leading the team with seven targets and actually looked spry out there for an old guy. Mike Wallace dominated the stat sheet with a big 95-yard touchdown catch; his price jumped up to a stud level $6200 on DraftKings and that’s too rich for someone that dependent on big plays. With SSS back in the mix, I don’t expect the volume to justify the price tag on Wallace going forward.
Elite Plays: Ravens Defense
Secondary: Terrance West, Steve Smith Sr.
Sunday Main Slate
Houston -1 At Jacksonville 43
The Sunday slate starts with a division game between the Texans and Jaguars. The Texans are slight home favorites in a game Vegas sees as close and low scoring. Oh, how the mighty hath fallen. Going into the season, Houston looked like they would have a high-flying offense. Instead they have looked below average across the board. Brock Osweiler looks like a big money Scott Mitchell-esque bust for the Texans, but I suppose he could turn it around at some point. Even though he’s in his first year as a starter, he’s dead to me for DFS purposes. On the flip side, we have a very disappointing Jags offense. Blake Bortles appears to be regressing in his sophomore season; he’s been a turnover machine fueled exclusively by garbage time scoring so far this season.
The Jags face a Texans defense that has been shutting down enemy pass catchers for the most part. The Texans show a -25% DVOA vs WR1 and a similar DVOA vs WR2 and they’ve been even better against enemy TEs. This doesn’t bode well for a Jags offense that may be without #2 WR Alan Hurns, and that should open up some extra targets for WR3 Marquise Lee. Lee is priced at a reasonable $3900 on DraftKings and makes for an acceptable punt play in a week with very few salary relief options. The Texans proficiency against TEs renders Julius Thomas more unusable than he normally is. Allen Robinson is usable in a contrarian stud factor sort of way even though the matchup looks rough on paper.
I’ve got a surprising stat for you: Did you know that the Jaguars are the #1 team overall at stopping enemy RBs in the passing game? According to Football Outsiders, they show a DVOA of -54.5%, #1 overall. They are just average at stopping RBs on the ground, and that’s where I expect Lamar Miller to do the damage in this one. In a close and low scoring home game, the RB spot is king for me so Miller sets up as a nice play this week. At WR we don’t know the status of Will Fuller; he had been gimpy the past couple of games and reaggravated a leg injury in the Texans last game before their bye week. I don’t trust him at all with the leg issue even if he plays. This game sets up well for Deandre Hopkins to see a lot of targets. We’ve seen this movie before folks- Hopkins has failed to deliver time after time this season due to the lack of chemistry between him and Brock Lobster. Still, anytime we can project double digit targets for a WR it’s worth taking note.
Elite Plays: Lamar Miller
Secondary: Deandre Hopkins, Allen Robinson
At Carolina -3 Kansas City 44.5
The Chiefs travel to Charlotte for a date with the Panthers as slight underdogs in a game Vegas sees as low scoring and close. Defensively, the Chiefs have been very solid in all facets. The only chinks in their armor has been a slightly above average DVOA against enemy WR1 and TE. On the flipside, the Panthers have been a classic funnel defense so far this season- very solid against the run but vulnerable through the air.
For the Chiefs, this is an interesting spot. Since they are normally a run-heavy offense, they will probably need to adjust their game plan to attack the Panthers defense. Assuming they get Spencer Ware back this week, he will be a sketchy play at best. Alex Smith & Co. will likely need to air things out. Last week everyone was buzzing about Tyreek Hill as the sleeper of the week; that didn’t work out but I think it was a week too soon. Hill is in a much better situation this week facing a vulnerable Panthers secondary. To make matters better for Hill, it looks like Maclin won’t be suiting up for this one. It’s worth noting that Albert Wilson actually led the Chiefs with eight targets last week. Wilson has been around for a while and his next big fantasy game will be his first. Travis Kelce is another player to consider this week.
The Panthers are somewhat matchup proof at home which is a good thing because this Chiefs defense is solid across the board. My gut is telling me that this is a Greg Olsen special since TEs tend to excel in tough defensive matchups. Kelvin Benjamin is playable as well but I’m tempering expectations there.
Elite Plays: Greg Olsen, Tyreek Hill
At New Orleans -1.5 Denver 48
Fresh off a whooping on Sunday night at the hands of the hated Raiders, the Broncos travel to the “Coors Field” of football in New Orleans for a showdown with the Saints. Vegas sees this one as close and high scoring. The Broncos will be without Aquib Talib for this one.
Let’s start with the Broncos. They have looked worse and worse on offense as the season has progressed. That said, Colin Kaepernick and the 49ers pass catchers did literally nothing until the Saints came marchin’ in. Last week facing the Saints league-worst secondary, the 49ers air attack looked like Steve Young and Jerry Rice had come out of retirement. That said, I would expect the Broncos to game plan for a run-heavy attack to keep the ball out of Brees’ hands. Devontae Booker has been somewhat ineffective in his two starts for the injured C.J. Anderson. This past week he completely bombed on the road at the Raiders. The buzz this week is all about Kapri Bibbs potentially taking a bite out of Booker’s stranglehold on the RB position. Last week Kapri had the one 60-yard check down TD. I’m not convinced, but if Booker continues to struggle, it’s a possibility. Looking at the pass catchers for the Broncos, both Demaryius Thomas and Emanuel Sanders are in play for this one.
The Saints get what looks like a difficult draw at home. Let’s face it, no team has lit up the Broncos through the air this season. The Broncos D has actually been much more vulnerable to opposing RBs. That said, Brees is at home and he won’t be completely shut down. It’s tough to know which of the Saints pass catchers will be featured or put up the big numbers but Michael Thomas has been on fire recently and Brandin Cooks has the home/road splits thing going for him. At RB, I’m not really sure what to expect. Last week both RBs beasted but Tim Hightower out-touched Ingram 23 to 15.
Elite Plays: Demaryius Thomas
At NY Jets -3 Los Angeles 42
The Rams head into East Rutherford as slight underdogs to take on my beloved Jets. Ryan Fitzpatrick, AKA The Bearded Interception Machine, has a sprained MCL and is currently day-to-day. If he doesn’t play, unknown backup Bryce Petty will get the nod. This game has all the makings of a defensive slugfest. As terrible as the Jets secondary has been, I could see some value in the Rams WRs. If I were forced to choose one, it would probably be Tavon Austin. I think the Jets have the defense to stop Gurley at home.
Elite Plays: None
At Philadelphia -1.5 Atlanta 49.5
The Falcons bring their league-leading offense to Philly as slight underdogs to take on the Eagles and their top-ranked defense. Vegas slapped one of the highest totals of the week on this game.
The Falcons face an Eagles D that is solid across the board; they are particularly good against the pass and the opposing WR1 so this is not an ideal match up for Julio Jones. Looking at the DVOA stats by position, the one area where the Eagles have been a bit vulnerable has been to pass catching RBs so that means Freeman could do some damage in the check down game. It’s also important to consider the line on this game; on paper this may not be a great spot for Matt Ryan and the Falcons pass catchers but they are projected to score 24 points in this one and those TDs need to come from somewhere.
It’s now or never for the Eagles fantasy assets since the Falcons are one of the worst at defending the pass this season. Jordan Matthews has been targeted like crazy in recent weeks averaging 12 targets per game over the past two weeks. Nelson Agholor and Dorial Green-Beckham are bit players in this offense for the most part; neither can be trusted in cash lineups. Zach Ertz is coming off an eight-target, 97-yard performance. The Falcons are giving up 8.6 receptions and 62 yards per game to opposing TEs. I’ll take that with the hope of a TD for Ertz, but the other player I like in this one is Sproles. He’s officially the lead back and there’s some solid upside in what could be a high-scoring game.
Elite Plays: Devontae Freeman, Julio Jones, Zach Ertz, Darren Sproles
At Washington -2.5 Minnesota 42.5
The Vikings travel to Washington to make Defense Great Again, as they take on the Redskins in a game Vegas sees as close and low scoring. The Vikings sport a defense that has shown some chinks in the armor these past few weeks. That said, they remain a unit to be feared. The Redskins defense has been below average across the board. Both teams have a shutdown CB1 which should funnel targets away from #1 WRs assuming we can figure out who those #1 WRs actually are.
The Vikings are hoping to get their mojo back this week; their offense just hasn’t been working for a while. Last week they used a dreaded three-headed RB attack rendering all of their guys worthless. With Josh Norman looming as a potential shadow for Stefan Diggs, TE Kyle Rudolph stands to benefit with some increased targets. I could also see a sneaky pivot from Diggs to Adam Thielen as a play on the Norman factor.
I’m generally not going to use players facing the Minnesota defense, particularly when they are a mediocre overall team. The Redskins offense is a pass for me this week outside of contrarian GPP plays.
Elite Plays: None
GPP Contrarian: Vikings Defense, Adam Thielen
Green Bay -2 At Tennessee 48.5
The Packers travel to Tennessee as slight road favorites in a game Vegas sees as close and high scoring. This is a game to target for fantasy purposes. The interesting thing in this one is that both teams bring a funnel-style defense to the table. They stop the run and are vulnerable to the pass.
Looking at the Titans, Marcus Mariota has been on fire for weeks averaging 25+ fantasy points per game since Week 4. His primary pass catcher appears to be Rishard Matthews who is coming off a 10-target game in which he saw a snap share of close to 90%. That said, this offense does spread the ball around a ton and it’s always a crapshoot choosing between Matthews and Kendall Wright. TE Delanie Walker is the safest bet for pass catching production for the Titans; his salary is similar to the Titans WRs and the consistency is much better. Keep in mind that the Packers have been solid against TEs this season. Obviously, DeMarco Murray is a weekly stud RB. This matchup also isn’t ideal because the Packers run defense is top ranked. That should keep Murray’s ownership numbers down a bit. One note of shade: Mariota has been limited with an ankle issue this week. It’s never good when a mobile QB has an ankle injury.
The Packers get another ideal draw, as the Titans have been vulnerable to enemy passing attacks. The trickiest thing about the Packers right now is trying to figure out which WR will be fed. Nelson, Cobb and Adams are all being heavily targeted right now. I’d assume Jordy is the top play simply because the Titans don’t have a scary CB1 that can hang with him. Last week I was disappointed with Ty Montgomery’s usage and after the game we found out that the Packers had him on a snap count. The offense flowed much better when he was in there. Montgomery’s salary has exploded on DraftKings to a ridiculous $6500. I’m not sure I can justify that price point. The top cash play here may be Aaron Rodgers naked. He should be able to get three TDs in this one and the lack of a run game helps insure that Rodgers will have a piece of all the Packers scoring.
Elite Plays: Aaron Rodgers
Chicago -1 At Tampa Bay 46.5
This line has been moving like crazy to start the week. It’s all dependent on whether Mike Evans will play or not. Looking at the lower total, and the road team favored, it looks like they are assuming Evans will be out.
The Bears will face a Bucs defense that has been solid against the run and vulnerable through the air. Last week in his return from injury, Cutler looked solid and motivated. The performance against the Vikings vaunted defense was an eye opener. Now, Cutler gets a much easier draw. His preferred pass catchers have been Alshon Jeffrey and Zach Miller; that duo looks good for this game as well. Tampa has a -22% DVOA against the TE position so the cash play is Jeffrey here. Last week Jordan Howard emerged as the feature back for the Bears, but this isn’t exactly the best matchup for him since Tampa is better versus the run then the pass. Even though that may be the case, this isn’t a matchup I’m scared of. Howard shredded the dreaded Vikings D and the Bucs aren’t as good.
It’s pretty tough to discuss the Bucs offense in this game. If Evans plays, he remains an elite WR option. I’d also consider Peyton Barber at RB (assuming Jacquizz is still out). Without Evans, this entire offense will suffer. We’ll have to wait until later in the week to know what to do here. No Evans would also open up the possibility of using Bears D in this one. The Bucs simply don’t have a worthy replacement for Evans production.
Elite Plays: Alshon Jeffrey, Mike Evans (If healthy), Peyton Barber (If Evans Plays and Quizz is out)
At San Diego -3.5 Miami 48
This is as close to a chalk alert as I can find right now. The Dolphins travel to San Diego to take on the Chargers as road dogs in a game Vegas sees as close and high scoring. This may as well be called the battle of the hot RBs. Melvin Gordon and Jay Ajayi are both coming off big games and carrying a ton of momentum right now.
Miami gets to face a Chargers defense that has been above average in all areas this season. Jay Ajayi should see plenty of volume in this one and makes for a solid play. However, I’m less confident in the Miami pass catchers. Jarvis Landry has seen his average targets per game drop from 13 earlier on the season to around seven. His recent production does not justify his sky high-$7200 salary on DraftKings. DeVante Parker will have a big game at some point this season but I’m not touching him outside of a GPP shot in the dark.
The Chargers will likely be without Travis Benjamin for this one. He was in and out of last week’s game with knee issues. That should open up more volume for Tyrell “The Gazelle” Williams, Dontrelle Inman and Antonio Gates. All three are viable plays and stackable with Rivers in this one. Melvin “Its Pronounced Gore-Dahn” Gordon has been beasting 25/8 and that should continue this week as well.
Elite Plays: Phillip Rivers, Melvin Gordon, Tyrelle Williams, Antonio Gates, Jay Ajayi
At Arizona -13 San Francisco 48
Chalk Alert!! Chalk defense, I mean. Whenever a team is favored by 13 points I immediately think defense and RB. It helps that the 49ers run defense is historically bad. Let’s keep this one simple- all in on Arizona Defense and David Johnson! It’s that easy. We saw last week, that when a team can run the ball at will they may not need a ton from their passing game. “Sheriff” John Brown and J.J. Nelson both make for salary saving punt options with big play potential in this one.
Elite Plays: Arizona Defense, David Johnson
At Pittsburgh -2.5 Dallas 50
Now this is more like it. Here we have the highest total of the slate with the Cowboys heading to Pittsburgh as slight underdogs in the highest projected game of the week. Neither of these teams’ defenses are anything to worry about.
Last week Ben Roethlisberger returned with a thud. He didn’t look particularly healthy out there and it showed in the final numbers. Who knows what another week of rehab will bring, but I’d expect a slightly better version. The good thing for the Steelers offense is that they tend to play better at home. Last week I assumed the Steelers would lean on Le’Veon Bell and he only wound up with just 14 carries. He made up for it a bit with six receptions but even with all of that, he produced a disappointing 13 fantasy points. Assuming Big Ben is healthier this week I’d expect much better out of Bell. Antonio Brown remains the gold standard of WRs in DFS and this is an excellent matchup for him; Dallas doesn’t have anyone that can cover Brown. One important note from last week was the breakout game from slot WR Eli Rogers. I suspect that had more to do with Ben’s inability to throw down the field with accuracy as opposed to anything else.
Looking at the Cowboys, everything starts with the running game. Zeke Elliott is the man and if the game goes as Vegas thinks it will, Elliott should benefit. Last week Dez Bryant took a back seat to Jason Witten for some reason- I don’t expect that to continue. This is the perfect type of game to stack. If the Steelers are on point, both teams will need to do a ton of scoring. That means all studs on deck. Elliott, Dez and Dak Prescott with a shmear of Cole Beasley for good measure.
Elite Plays: Dak Prescott, Dez Bryant, Zeke Elliott, Leveon Bell, Antonio Brown
Sunday Night Hammer
At New England -7 Seattle 49
The final game of the main slate has the Seahawks traveling to New England as heavy road dogs in a game Vegas sees as close and high scoring.
The Seahawks will face a Patriots defense that does very well at home. Statistically, the Patriots D is a top 10 unit against the run and a bottom unit against the pass. They’ve been burned by opposing TEs regularly as well. It feels a bit like chasing points but Jimmy Graham is playable is a plus matchup. The one caveat is that the Patriots will game plan specifically to stop Graham after seeing what he did to the Bills last week. That alone makes me want to pivot to Doug Baldwin in this one. I just read another blurb about how Pete Carrol is promising more touches for C.J. Prosise. It makes sense that he will be more utilized in a game that Seattle projects to be playing from behind for the most part.
Say it with me – Gronksmash! I have a feeling we will get a smash or two on Sunday night. Seattle’s top of the line corners tend to funnel targets to the middle of the field and that’s exactly where Rob Gronkowski operates; this game sets up well for my favorite player. I could also see Julian Edelman doing some damage out of the slot. It’s tough to actually trust Edelman considering he’s done close to nothing this season but I suppose that could change. The Seahawks have been a top defense against the run this season so I’ll pass on Blount this week outside of a possible GPP flier.
Elite Plays: Tom Brady, Jimmy Graham, Rob Gronkowski
Secondary: C.J. Prosise
Monday Night Football
11/14 8:30 ET At NY Giants -2.5 Cincinnati 46
In the last game of the slate the Bengals take on the Giants as slight underdogs in a game Vegas sees as close and having a middling score.
The Bengals have a reputation as a solid defensive team but the statistics show that hasn’t been the case this season. They are ranked in the bottom 10 in DVOA against both the pass and rush this season. This is a decent spot to fire up an Eli to Odell Beckham Jr stack. As far as the running game goes, the pendulum is swinging in the direction of Paul Perkins. I’m not ready to jump on the bandwagon just yet but I have a feeling that it’s coming soon. Last week Perkins and Jennings had a 50/50 timeshare going.
The Bengals face off against a Giants D that has been above average overall, ranked 10th and 13th respectively vs the pass and run. Those rankings are fine but nothing to panic over. Looking specifically at DvP, they have been pretty good at stopping the opposing WR1 and vulnerable to enemy TEs so fire up Tyler Eifert as an elite play this week. I’m not worried about using A.J. Green in this one as either, but Eifert has the better matchup on paper. At the RB position, there’s no rhyme or reason to the way the Bengals mix in Gio Bernard and Jeremy Hill. Both are volatile GPP only plays for me.
Elite Plays: Eli Manning, Odell Beckham Jr, Tyler Eifert, A.J. Green
That’s it for the week 10 slate. Good luck this weekend!
Week 10 DFS Army NFL Content
Geek’s Vegas Lines – Week 10 DFS Strategy, Player Picks, & Game Breakdown
DFS Army Week 10 NFL Vegas Lines Podcast
DFS Army VIP Projections/Stats Spreadsheet
DFS Army NFL Week 10 Kickers Corner
NFL DFS Army Winners Losers Lineups and Week 10
Single Lineup ro Multi Entry in DFS Cash Games
The VIP Podcast link is available in Slack Chat!Hours before Barack Obama's State of the Union address, two Russian nuclear-armed bombers circled the western Pacific island of Guam, an organized, unincorporated territory of the United States. This is the latest sign of the growing strategic assertiveness of Moscow towards the United States.
The Tu-95 Bear-H strategic bombers were equipped with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The bombers were followed closely by U.S. jets.
The Washington Free Beacon reports,
take our poll - story continues below Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story? Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story?
Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story? * Yes, they've gotten so much wrong recently that they're bound to be on their best behavior. No, they suffer from a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Jussie who?
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Phone This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Completing this poll grants you access to Freedom Outpost updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to this site's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Trending: Ex-CNN Reporter Amber Lyon Explains How They Fake The News Air Force Capt. Kim Bender, a spokeswoman for the Pacific Air Force in Hawaii, confirmed the incident to the Washington Free Beacon and said Air Force F-15 jets based on Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, “scrambled and responded to the aircraft.” “The Tu-95s were intercepted and left the area in a northbound direction. No further actions occurred,” she said. Bender said no other details would be released “for operational security reasons.” The bomber incident was considered highly unusual. Russian strategic bombers are not known to have conducted such operations in the past into the south Pacific from bomber bases in the Russian Far East, which is thousands of miles away and over water.
“Every day brings new evidence that Obama’s ideological obsession with dismantling our nuclear deterrent is dangerous,” said former United Nations ambassador and former State Department internationals security undersecretary John Bolton. “Our national security is in danger of slipping off the national agenda even as the threats grow.”
F-15s were deployed from Kadena Air Base in Japan to intercept the bombers in an ongoing annual Exercise Guahan Shield 2013.
According to Defense officials the bombers carried six Kj-55 of Kh-55SM cruise missilbes that are capable of hitting targets 1,800 miles away with either a high-explosive warhead or a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead.
Currently there are about 200 U.S. Marines training on the island and it is considered a key strategic military base in the new Asia policy of the Obama administration. As a result of that policy, it has become a target for both China and North Korea who have the capability of hitting the island with missiles.
As the U.S. has said it would defend Japan in a military confrontation with China over the Senkakus and it seems that the Russian bombers are sending a signal that they are siding with China.
The White House reaffirmed in a statement on February 13, 2013 ":that the United States remains steadfast in its defense commitments to Japan, including the extended deterrence offered by the U.S. nuclear umbrella. The President indicated that he looked forward to in-depth discussions when the Prime Minister visits Washington later this month."
The Japanese Prime Minister is due to arrive at the White House on Friday February 22 to speak with Obama.
Former State Department security official Mark Groombridge said, “It shows that the Russians, like the Chinese, are not just going to sit idly by and watch the United States ‘pivot’ or ‘rebalance’ its forces toward Asia."
“One could argue the Russians were poking a bit of fun at the Obama Administration, seeing how they flew these long-range bombers close to Guam on the same day as the state of the union address,” he added.
“But the broader implications are more profound,” Groombridge continued. “The Russians are clearly sending a signal that they consider the Pacific an area of vital national strategic interest and that they still have at least some power projection capabilities to counterbalance against any possible increase in U.S. military assets in the region.”
One has to wonder at the reduction of our nuclear arsenal by one-third in light of incidents like this. It appears that Russia is simply testing us to seem how much it can get away with and demonstrate the weakness of this administration to deal with another nuclear power.Next week is the fourth of July.
As I’ve noted many times before in this blog- British people (and foreigners in general) never quite understand Americans as well as they think they do. They’ve seen the TV shows and the movies. But if you’ve never actually been to a fourth of July celebration in the USA, you’ll never really understand America or Americans.
I’ve blogged about other American traditions and Holidays, such as Thanksgiving and Halloween, and about how Yanks celebrate Christmas differently than Brits. But the fourth of July is something different, something special. It’s of course the most American of holidays, in that it’s meant to celebrate America itself. But unlike Thanksgiving, fourth of July is strangely unsentimental. It’s when we celebrate our country not by necessarily paying tribute to it, or waxing poetic about it, but rather just by being the most American we can be. It’s hard to explain. It’s just the day where your Americanness finds its purest expression- in whirl of grilled meat, cheap beer and fireworks.
Here’s my attempt to answer any questions you might have about the fourth of July:
Foreigners’ frequently asked questions about the 4th of July:
What’s it all about?
Officially, it’s called Independence Day, but most Americans just refer to it as”the 4th of July.” It’s the day where we celebrate the Declaration of Independence. On July 4th, 1776 America’s founding fathers formally signed a document declaring their independence from Great Britain. We consider it our country’s birthday. You might hear someone shouting out: “Happy Fucking Birthday America,” followed by a loud explosion, and you might think of it as drunken nonsense. But a true American might respond with their own shout of “God bless the U-S of fucking America!” There’s a lot of cursing on the fourth of July and we see it all as defiantly political- expressions of our personal, as well as national independence.
As a British person, should I keep a low profile on 4th of July around Americans?
Not at all- the thing is… the secret I’d like to share with you is… the fourth of July isn’t about rejecting or hating Britain or the British. It’s about hating and rejecting British royalty. If you read the Declaration of Independence, you’d probably be surprised at just how angry the tone of it is- and the target of all its venom is not the good people of the United Kingdom, but solely their King, George III:
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly…
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone…
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice…
He is, like, totally a fucking dickweed and a fucktard…
Well that last one may be just a paraphrase, but the anger is real, and palpable. Americans aren’t celebrating independence from another country- but rather independence from all notions of monarchy. It has been ingrained in the American DNA from the very start to dislike old world-style hierarchy and class structures, and the King, ruling by birthright and decree rather than by earned consensus, was seen as the epitome of this most European of evils. So, as long as you don’t put on royal airs, you can help yourself to a piece of barbecued meat. Which leads us to our next question…
So what does one do on the fourth of July?
We have outdoor barbecue parties accompanied by fireworks. There are more details below, so you know what to expect and which food or drinks to bring along. But at its core, the fourth is a very simple and unpretentious celebration for friends and family: Eat meat, drink beer, blow shit up.
What kind of food does one eat on the fourth of July?
It depends on where you are in America, but here’s some standard items:
Hamburgers (yes we call them hamburgers, not just burgers)
Hot dogs: usually all beef. These are different than the ones you have in Britain, and usually a lot better.
Corn on the cob: grilled, then held with little skewers and eaten with a little bit of butter.
Other grilled meats: could be chicken, sausage, even fish- pretty much anything that’s dead.
Chips and dips: usually potato chips and a dip made out of Lipton’s onion soup mix and sour cream. Another popular dip in the south or west is known as “seven layer dip,” which is a mexican-influenced concoction layered with beans, guacamole, black olives, cheese and tomatoes.
Potato salad: The most important thing is the potato salad. It’s not the fourth of July without it (see below).
Potato salad? Really?
Yes, really. It’s the most important ingredient for a successful fourth of July, apart from maybe beer, fireworks and freedom. And the while the recipe for the salad may vary from town to town or even family to family, it’s a must-have food item. Some people swear by German potato salad (usually served warm, with no mayonnaise) and others by regular potato salad (heavy on the mayo and served cold), but if you can’t choose, you should have both.
So what should I bring if I’m invited to a fourth of July barbecue?
Booze, preferably beer, plus any of the above food items, except potato salad. You’re a foreigner. Your potato salad sucks and no one in America will like it. Except if you’re German- you can bring potato salad, but warn your host so that they can be sure to also have non-German potato salad as well. God I miss potato salad.
How does it work- how are things served?
The fourth is a very masculine and conservative celebration. Men usually take charge of the grilling. Watching a group of alpha-males huddled around a heat-source, arguing about whether the meat is ready to serve, is a sight as old as America itself. Everything else is served buffet style, with paper plates and plastic forks and knives. There’s nothing more ‘fourth of July’ than watching someone sit on a folding chair, swatting away at mosquitoes, as they eat food from a paper plate, sagging under the weight of a pile of meat and potato salad. Using fine china or silverware at a fourth of July party would be committing a worse faux pas than interrupting the festivities with a long speech about the virtues of communism.
What’s for dessert at the fourth of July?
Pie, cobblers, brownies, ice cream, and s’mores are some of the favourites. S’mores- virtually unknown outside of America, are little sandwiches of graham crackers, Hershey’s chocolate and marshmallows. The marshmallows should either be browned or burnt (opinions vary) by being dangled over the grill using the end of a pointy stick or an unfolded wire coat hanger. We know you Brits think Hershey’s chocolate is rubbish- and I don’t disagree, but the very thing you hate about it, it’s plasticity, makes |
Iroquois to the French), imagined their confederation as a house with the senior Mohawk guarding the eastern door, Seneca the western, Oneida watching over the central fire and Onandaga, Cayuga and Tuscarora in the middle. The Six Nations claim to be the world's first democracy, with Hiawatha, the great sachem (they have no "chiefs"), among its 16th-century creators. America's founding fathers looked to this confederacy when drawing up the US constitution. The Nations' women held considerable power, owned the houses and decided when to go to war.
This sophisticated culture was attacked, claims Fintan O'Toole, by a natural economic process which made them the world's first true consumer society. No longer self-sufficient, they quickly learned that the beaver skins they considered valueless could be turned into iron pots, knives and tea by Europeans supplying furs to the hat trade. Unable to reproduce these goods for themselves, as they'd hoped, they became dependent on Europe for their cloth, which was far handier than fur for daily wear, and for their guns, powder and shot used for hunting. This led to the breakdown of traditional social structures, including women's power. By the mid-18th century the Six Nations were threatened with political collapse.
They were saved, argues O'Toole, by the arrival in Iroquoia of a dispossessed Irish Catholic-turned-Protestant. William Johnson became a powerful and respected sachem. His instinctive identification with the Indians grew from a shared need to accommodate conquest; he sensed that romantic, mythic Erin shared resonances with the structure and mystical beliefs of Iroquoia, whose own elaborate ceremonies echoed those of his people's pagan past and Catholic near-present. After their crucial defeats in Ireland and Scotland, the surviving Jacobites were faced with some hard choices. They could give up their faith and find power and careers in English service, or cling to their lost cause and fall into further decline. Some of the Co Meath Johnsons opted for the latter, but William's Uncle Peter chose Protestantism. Ultimately an admiral in the British navy, Peter Warren was soon able to buy land in America, offering the stewardship of the wilder regions of the Mohawk Valley to his converted nephew on an unwritten understanding that, if he made a good job of it, he would inherit.
In 1738 Johnson found himself with a remit to provide his uncle's company with a good profit in lumber and furs, gaining the reputation of an honest trader with the locals. Under their sachem "Hendrick", Iroquois had become adept at playing politics, sustaining a balance of power between French, Dutch, English and other settlers. As it dawned on Johnson that his uncle would not keep his promises, he made alliances of his own. Instinctively respecting Mohawk culture, he carved out territory and a homestead for himself. His alliances with the Iroquois suited them politically, leading them to make him their own, and enabling him to become one of pre-revolutionary America's greatest power-brokers.
All players in Iroquoia were coping with cultural imperialism at the hands of a colonial giant, responding with realistic intelligence to rapidly changing economic, political and religious realities while still mourning the loss of important mythic resonances and the failure of cultural memory. O'Toole's narrative, with its clear echoes of Scott, Fenimore Cooper and RL Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae, is as convincing as it is attractive, offering good, romantic reasons why Johnson went native while remaining the very model of an ambitious Hanoverian Tory landowner and colonial administrator, never faltering in his service to king and country even as he put on war-paint and Mohawk buckskins to lead his Indians on scalping raids against the French.
Johnson did everything he could to protect his fellow Iroquois. Keeping both European and Indian wives and mistresses, acknowledging all his offspring and providing for them in his will, he fought prejudiced Whitehall politicians and military men, including his own uncle. His chivalric treatment of the captured French general Dieskau soon made him a popular folk hero in Europe. This did not impress the English governor Amherst, whose confessed public policy was to "extirminate" every native, preferably by offering them blankets exposed to smallpox. Johnson got England to remove Amherst, but not before he'd done serious damage.
By a mixture of political savvy and personal courage, Johnson countered every London-conceived folly, becoming a baronet in the process. The struggle was endless. Whenever he achieved equilibrium some bureaucrat set the parties to savage fighting again, notably in the conduct of the French and Indian wars where Johnson's advice was ignored, his strategies undermined, his word broken by his masters, setting the Indians back on the warpath or into alliances with the French.
At last, at the Battle of Niagara, Johnson's disciplined mixed force of white rangers and red warriors took the strategically crucial fort and turned the tide permanently against the French. In Benjamin West's famous painting of the dying Wolfe, victorious at Quebec, Sir William appears dressed like Natty Bumppo, his trusty Mohawk brother beside him. Neither was in reality present but the picture was central to a propaganda campaign already in process, making Johnson the heroic original for every savage noble or noble savage ever to capture the European or North American imagination, from Hawkeye to Tarzan. His myth is still reflected in stories such as Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse or Dances With Wolves. He was the precursor to many others who were inducted as friends into native tribes. Later, Sam Houston was adopted by the Cherokee, and also managed treaties, only to be betrayed by his friend Andrew Jackson's policies of ethnic cleansing which taught America the lesson that not only could you get away with genocide, you could actually profit from it.
Running his Mount Johnson estate as chief of an ancient Celtic clan, importing a harper to sing at his table, Johnson died believing he had brokered a lasting treaty between Iroquois and settlers, halting European expansion. But even as the documents were signed, whites were flooding into Indian territories. As Gaza shows, land-hungry people ruthlessly break every treaty, risk bloody death, and adopt the most ruthless racialist logic to justify their actions.
Johnson died shortly before the revolution. His family, both Indian and European, remained stalwart Tories, suffering accordingly, striking back at the patriots with equal ferocity. The family was eventually driven into Canada, and Johnson was remembered not as the great peace-making sachem he had been, but as an ousted tool of the British. Fintan O'Toole's wonderful book reinstates Sir William's central position in Anglo-American history. Michael Moorcock's The Vengeance of Rome will be published by Cape next year.
· To order White Savage for £18 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA - APRIL 14: Brisbane Lions player Josh Green poses during a portrait session at The Gabba on April 14, 2016 in Brisbane, Australia. (Photo by Chris Hyde/AFL Media/Getty Images)
The Brisbane Lions have delisted forward Josh Green.
The Tasmanian, who was drafted in 2010, played 81 games between 2011-2016.
Football General Manager David Noble thanked Green for his commitment to the Lions.
“It is disappointing when any player departs, and Josh has given great service to our Club.
“We thank him for his time at the Club and wish him all the best for his future,” said Noble.
It takes the Lions' total number of list changes to ten for the season, with retired trio Daniel Merrett, Trent West and Justin Clarke having already departed.
Josh Green
Draft Details: 2010 National Draft, pick 32 overall
Drafted: Clarence (Tasmania)
Debut: 2011
Games: 81
Goals: 107This article originally appeared at Awara
The unemployment rate in Russia dropped in July to 5.3%, not far from the record low of 4.8% a year ago. Notably the number of the economically active population (those working or looking for a job) simultaneously grew from 76.5 to 77.2 million. This shows that real gains were made on the job market.
There's a job for anyone who wants one
The unemployment rate must be considered the most accurate indicator of the real health of the economy as the other core indicators such are too much subject to estimations and conventions. Here we then have solid proof that not all is bad in the Russian economy as the press would have it.
According to some malicious and mendacious press reports the low unemployment rate is a mere chimera. The Russian government has supposedly attempted to save jobs in economically unviable areas in order to protect social stability rather in the way it was done during the planned economy in the USSR.
This is what Bloomberg claims in a story of August 18 titled Putin Revives Soviet Deal of Pretend-Work-and-Pay to Hide Crisis. This comes against the better knowledge we have about a slew of announcements of downsizing and shedding of workforce at Russian state owned corporations and authorities.
Indeed the Western press has been regularly gloating during the last few months over the reports of mass redundancy with headlines like these:
Russia hit with mass layoffs as economy worsens;
Russia’s Largest Carmaker Announces Major Layoffs;
Putin Cuts 110,000 Government Jobs;
Big Companies Cutting Staff in Gloomy Economy
At the end of this article, we will provide a brief digest of such press clippings for the education of those in doubt.*
It becomes remarkably clear that the unemployment has gone down against the backdrop of simultaneous mass layoffs and restructuring. The only proper way to interpret this is that the Russian economy indeed is resilient and that a real modernization of Russia’s economy is underway with new viable ventures absorbing the labor force made redundant.
Bloomberg continues its lamentation (or euphoria?) about the Russian job market by referencing to a recent OECD report on labor productivity in various countries. According to that report, Russians would be the least productive workers in Europe, as The Moscow Times interprets it. This is of course total nonsense partly based on Academic drivel and partly on calculation errors.
The Academic drivel part lies in the entire notion behind this measure, the idea that by dividing a country’s GDP by the number of hours worked would yield the productivity of the worker. (Let’s be fair, the question is in fact about the productivity of the economy as a whole including – and to a big degree – its management. By referring to low productivity of workers, The Moscow Times only wanted to add insult to the story.)
We have in this study from last year criticized this idea of trying to derive measures of labor productivity from the GDP figures. The GDP measures the value of goods and services produced and not the productivity. A lot of macroeconomic actions and events affect the GDP, such as taxes that push up the general price level and hence GDP in high-tax countries.
Borrowing at all levels of the national economy, government, corporations, and households increase GDP and therefore the base for calculating this faulty labor productivity measure without any real improvement in actual labor productivity. The more leveraged an economy is, the better this skewed labor productivity looks. – We could then argue that the Russian worker is particularly inept in participating in the debt-binge that is so totally defining the behavior of his Western peers.
But that’s not all. Not content with distributing such products of fantasy, the OECD also made a major calculation error. In their method they purported to use the GDP adjusted to purchasing power (PPP). Considering the significant devaluation and the volatility of the ruble during 2014 (the year of OECD refers to), it is indeed a daunting task to determine both the base nominal price of the hour of labor and the PPP coefficient. It seems to us that the correct adjustment coefficient should be closer to 3 than the 2 that OECD used. This would radically change the ranking of Russia in this Academic leisure game.
Finally, we must draw attention to one more gross error in the Bloomberg article. They claimed that “Putin” now has “some of Europe’s most restrictive labor rules”. Nothing could be further from the truth as any practicing lawyer or business executive in Russia knows. Russia has some of the most lenient rules (from point of view of the employer) in Europe allowing mass layoffs by mere giving of a two-month notice without being restricted in this by cumbersome labor union rules and legal restrictions.
*What follows is a brief digest of some of the news of frequent mass layoffs at large Russian corporations and government. Reading these one wonders who is pretending, Bloomberg or Putin!
Russia hit with mass layoffs as economy worsens
Tells: “Large layoffs have begun. The Moscow construction sector has seen 100,000 people being laid off. We see signs of crisis in the auto industry,” (Alexey Kudrin interviewed)
Russia’s Largest Carmaker Announces Major Layoffs
Tells: “AvtoVAZ, [maker of Lada cars] will shed 27,600 jobs under an agreement negotiated with unions. Management had earlier sought to cut some 36,000 positions.”
Russia’s Putin orders cuts to Interior Ministry payroll
Tells: “Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed an order reducing the maximum number of staff on the Interior Ministry payroll by 110,000, or about 10 percent, according to a document posted on a government website on Monday.”
Tens of thousands of officials will be dismissed
Tells: “Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev has ordered to reduce the number of officials at the regional and Federal levels by 10%, which is about 150 thousand people. “
Russia can’t afford to pay state employees
Tells: “Russian President Vladimir Putin signed three new decrees into law that will slash government salaries — including his own and that of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev — by 10% from 1 May. – The government has also announced plans to cut the number of government officials by 5% to 20%.”
Big Companies Cutting Staff in Gloomy Economy
Tells: “A slew of announced layoffs is rattling the domestic labor market, threatening to further undermine a weak economy. // Russia’s two largest banks, state-owned Sberbank and VTB, have joined the country’s biggest carmaker, AvtoVAZ, in declaring significant staff reductions in the upcoming months. // [VTB Group chief] Kostin said the group would consolidate some operations, leading to the layoffs. // Sberbank, the country’s largest bank by assets, said it would reduce personnel to 220,000 people over five years from the 250,000 people that it currently employs.“
Putin Cuts 110,000 Government Jobs
Tells: “President Vladimir Putin fired 110,000 Interior Ministry jobs with the stroke of a pen. The Interior Ministry control the police, paramilitary security forces, and the traffic safety agency.”
Russia’s automobile manufacturers begin layoffs campaign
Tells: “Russia’s automotive industry leader AvtoVAZ has launched a layoffs campaign” (see above), and
“Russia’s other automobile manufacturers have been reducing personnel, too. The General Motors plant in St. Petersburg will be working one shift a day instead of three as of October 1. Ford in Vsevolzhsk, the Leningrad Region, and Volkswagen, in the Kaluga Region, too, have declared they will be working shorter hours.”
Russia is imposing cuts on its healthcare system — and doctors aren’t happy about it
Tells: “As part of cost cutting measures, authorities announced last month they plan to close dozens of hospitals and lay off up to 10,000 medical staff. “
Russia’s Rosneft facing layoffs
Tells: “Russian media reported Thursday state-owned oil company Rosneft could shed as much as 25 percent of its staff as early as next month.”CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 52-year-old man who had more than half his life taken away by a wrongful conviction for rape showed no hostility Wednesday as he took his first steps as a free man in 29 years.
Raymond Towler was all smiles as he walked out of the Justice Center in his native Cleveland like a rock star with an entourage.
He will never be known again as Inmate No. A16468. He is a free man, at last. Towler smiled, hugged relatives and friends and shook hands with everyone who extended an arm. Bystanders stared as he walked through the courthouse with television cameras recording his every step.
Towler entered prison at age 24 for a crime he didn't commit. But two days after DNA tests proved his innocence, the middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard said he doesn't blame anyone for the injustice bestowed upon him.
He said he always knew he'd be exonerated but never expected it to take almost 29 years.
"They had the wrong person, and it took them a while to work it out," he said, chuckling. "All I care about right now is that they did straighten it out. Now I can go on with my life."
Within moments of walking outside, Towler had to make a choice. The type of simple choice he had not been forced -- or allowed -- to make in nearly three decades: who would drive him to a restaurant for lunch.
Since 1981, Towler had been told by guards when and where he could have his meals; what he could wear; what he could do.
But at 9:05 a.m., he strolled into a courtroom wearing a black sweater, white shirt and black dress pants. He smiled. His family clapped. He sat next to his attorneys.
Common Pleas Judge Eileen A. Gallagher asked Towler to be patient as she summarized the case. She said he can never be tried for the rape again and ordered his record expunged.
Towler looked over his right shoulder and smiled at his relatives. His brother, Clarance Settles, pumped his fist.
Gallagher fought back tears while declaring Towler a free man.
"Raymond Towler was a wrongfully imprisoned individual," Gallagher said.
She then read him an Irish blessing.
"Mr. Towler, it's a long day coming," she said. "May the world let the world rise to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm on your face..."
She then left the bench and shook Towler's hands, saying: "Mr. Towler, you're free to go."
Towler's family erupted into applause. Settles shouted, "Yes," several times. They then embraced Towler for the first time as a free man since 1981.
Moments later, Towler said he doesn't hold anybody responsible his wrongful conviction and that he knows prosecutors have jobs to do.
He doesn't know what his future holds.
"I want to start a new life," Towler said.
But first wanted lunch.
"I love pizza," he said, "that's what I have been thinking about all night."
Towler was sentenced to life behind bars in 1981 for the rape of an 11-year-old Lakewood girl and an attack on her cousin, a 12-year-old boy. They identified Towler as the assailant after Metroparks rangers arrested him in as a suspect.
He maintained his innocence and asked in recent years that biological evidence in the case be tested. Prosecutors received DNA test results Monday night that excluded Towler as the rapist and immediately asked Gallagher to free him.
VIDEO: Raymond Towler, who spent 29 years in prison, walked out of the Justice Center in Cleveland after his life sentence for a rape in 1981 was vacated. Towler was found innocent through new DNA testing.
Raymond Towler freed after 29 years in prison for rape he did not commit Raymond Towler freed after 29 years in prison for rape he did not commit
Ohio law allows wrongfully-imprisoned inmates to receive $40,330 for every year spent behind bars. He could sue the state for more than $1.2 million. He could also seek lost wages for those years.
Mark Godsey, a law professor and director of the Ohio Innocence Project which worked to free Towler, said he was among the longest incarcerated, possibly in the top four, people to be exonerated by DNA in U.S. history.
Another wrongfully-convicted man attended the hearing.
Clarence Elkins was released in 2005 after serving seven years for rape and murder. He was freed after DNA evidence on the victims was tested and matched another man.
After hugging Towler, Elkins said: "I feel his pain and hurt. He's doing a good job with his attitude."
Sheriff's deputy Benjamin Kellar and his partner drove Towler from the prison in Lorain County to the Justice Center Tuesday. Towler told deputies that he was glad to see them but didn't say much during the car ride. He seemed relaxed and calm, Kellar said.
"He asked us not to get into any car accidents," Kellar said, laughing. "He just took in the sights."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: mpuente@plaind.com, 216-999-4141BEIJING - A recent survey showed overseas-educated Chinese still prefer to work in China's first-tier cities after returning to the country.
About 18.6 percent of respondents returning from overseas chose to work in Beijing, followed by Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen with 15.6 percent, 13.4 percent and 12 percent respectively, according to the survey jointly released by China's major job search websites and a study abroad agency.
Emerging cities such as Hangzhou, Wuhan, Nanjing, Chengdu and Suzhou are also popular among returned Chinese looking to find work.
Jobs in finance, IT, telecommunication, electronics and internet sectors as well as in education, are the top choices for returnees, while internet, finance, real estate, education and training, and machinery manufacturing sectors have stronger demand for returnees, according to the survey.
Nearly 50 percent of respondents have done some form of career planning before studying abroad or during their study abroad, the survey said.
China is currently in the middle of its biggest ever influx of returning overseas-educated graduates.
According to another survey released on Aug 30 by the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), a major Chinese think tank, more than 2.65 million Chinese who studied overseas had returned to China as of the end of 2016.
In 2016 alone, more than 432,000 foreign-educated Chinese had returned to the country, up 58.48 percent from that in 2012.As President Obama and others have noted, a parent who works full-time, year round at the federal minimum wage does not earn an income above the federal poverty line.
This wasn’t always the case. Up until the early 1980s, an annual minimum-wage income—after adjusting for inflation—was enough to keep a family of two above the poverty line. At its high point in 1968, the minimum wage was high enough for a family of three to be above the poverty line with the earnings of a full-time minimum-wage worker, although it still fell short for a family of four. The falling minimum wage has led to poverty and inequality. Today, at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, working 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year yields an annual income of only $15,080. As shown in the figure, this is below the federal poverty line for families of two or more.
If the federal minimum wage were raised to $10.10 per hour, as Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) have proposed (depicted by the dotted line), it would bring a minimum-wage income back above the poverty line for a family of three. The Harkin-Miller proposal would then index the minimum wage so that it is automatically increased for inflation each year, thereby preserving its real value and protecting full-time minimum-wage workers from falling into poverty.The slowly expanding scientific literature on LGBT health is evidence of researchers' expanded interest in the field. But it's another matter to find funding to support the work.
"There's a sea change for LGBT health across the country," said Walter O. Bockting, PhD, co-director of Columbia University's new Initiative for LGBT Health. "Traditionally it's always been a topic that we needed to'sell,' " he said. "What has changed is people are coming to us."
They may be coming for credible scientific information on LGBT health, but they aren't necessarily offering the money needed to generate it. "When we are trying to expand the research agenda, it can't be done without resources," said Bockting.
Even though the National Institutes of Health said more LGBT health research is needed, they aren't allocating additional funding for it. Said Bockting, who served on the IOM committee, "It has become an acknowledged priority, and they have shown willingness to address the gaps in knowledge." But grant applications from LGBT health researchers still have to compete on their merits. "They will receive applications [for funding]," said Bockting, "but those applications will have to compete with all other applications that NIH receives for health research. So I'm not aware of special funds for the research."
There are challenges on the medical frontlines, too, where calls for "cultural competence" in LGBT health care don't always come with incentives for providers to learn what they need to know. The problem isn't only about overloaded providers, however, but also has to do with LGBT patients simply not communicating about their particular needs.
Scott Cook, PhD, a clinical psychologist and deputy director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-supported Finding Answers: Disparities Research for Change national program office at the University of Chicago, said, "Unless something is emphasized and incentivized, it's typically not going to happen. We see that in racial and ethnic care in general. Unless there is an incentive, such as reimbursement, it's really hard for [providers] to turn over resources to begin with. Same thing with LGBT patients, it's going to have to be incentivized."
Dr. Cook, who worked for eight years at Chicago's Howard Brown Health Center, the largest LGBT health organization in the Midwest, added, "Health care is starting to turn its sights to thinking it's not all about the doctor deciding what needs to be done, when, and where, that we need to involve patients in a conversation and understand their values, beliefs, what's important to them."
When activists began to "zap" meetings of the American Psychiatric Association, beginning in 1970, they demanded the doctors "Talk with us, not about us," as the late Barbara Gittings told me in an interview for my book Victory Deferred. Long before someone coined the term cultural competence, gay and lesbian activists understood that changes in the political and medical fortunes of LGBT people would come about only through dialogue. They also knew they couldn't participate as equals in such dialogue unless they were open about their sexual orientation.The gradual acceptance of digital currencies, with major exchanges about to launch bitcoin futures trading, may prompt some oil producing nations to ditch the US dollar in crude trade in favor of cryptocurrencies, an oil analyst says.
Russia, Iran and Venezuela have more than one thing in common. All three are major oil producing nations dependent on the dollar since the global crude market is traditionally dominated by contracts denominated in US currency.
Read more
Moscow, Tehran and Caracas are also facing US sanctions; penalties which are proving effective since the sanctioned countries are dependent on the US dollar to sell their crude.
READ MORE: Iran suggests Russia help ‘isolate the Americans’ by ditching dollar
A decentralized currency – allowing anonymous transactions along with blockchain technology support to facilitate oil contracts – may be the ideal tool to allow the oil producing trio to turn their back on the greenback.
“The advent of cryptocurrencies, therefore, represents a fresh catalyst for commodity-producing countries wishing to abandon the dollar as a means of payment for oil,” said Stephen Brennock, oil analyst at PVM Oil Associates, in a research note seen by CNBC.
Several oil producers have already voiced plans to ditch the dollar in oil trading. Last week, Venezuela announced it will launch its own cryptocurrency, the “Petro,” which will be backed by the country’s vast natural resource reserves.
Read more
Russia, China and Iran are currently pursuing currency swap agreements to eliminate the US dollar from trade. One of the world's biggest crude importers, China, has also announced the launch of the petro-yuan to replace the greenback in oil transactions.
READ MORE: Ruble-yuan trade between Russia & China makes dollar odd man out
While currency swaps are being considered, cryptocurrencies, once they become less volatile, offer several advantages. Instead of using various national currencies, they provide a common currency for countries seeking to avoid using the dollar. They are also universal and flexible, easily convertible back to national currencies.
Cryptocurrencies provide yet another advantage to countries facing international sanctions. They are anonymous and decentralized, which limits the effect of US economic sanctions on trade deals for countries like Russia, Iran and Venezuela.Strange symbols adorn the architecture at 51 rue de Montmorency in Paris. The house was in fact built by the city’s most famous alchemist, who many believe achieved great wealth through his discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone.
Nicolas Flamel was born sometime in the 14th century and worked for most of his life as a bookseller. However, many believe that he happened upon an arcane text that revealed the secrets of turning ordinary metals into gold. It is true that Flamel was a great philanthropist, but whether or not this wealth came from alchemy is the stuff of debatable legends. Nevertheless, Flamel’s name has become inextricable from alchemy, and he’s seen as one of its great practitioners by many interested in the transformation of elements into greater forms.
The house on Montmorency street was built by Flamel in 1407 and is now the oldest stone house in Paris. It’s here where Flamel is said to have carried out his experiments in alchemy. Flamel died in the 15th century, but not before designing his own tombstone with its own symbology that is now on display at the Musée de Cluny. The church he was originally buried in, the Church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, has since been torn down, leaving only the looming Tour Saint-Jacques. A street by the tower has been named for Flamel, which intersects with one named for his wife Pernelle.
As for the former home of Flamel, it is now an atmospheric restaurant, appropriately taking the name Auberge Nicolas Flamel.Robert Bennett, a lawyer for the Castile family, said that “no amount of money can ever replace Philando,” but that the settlement should provide some measure of comfort to those angered by his death.
“I think this is a way of stopping what could be several years of litigation traveling through the courts and exacerbating the suffering of the family and the community,” Mr. Bennett said. “And perhaps both can do now the important business of trying to heal.”
The payout comes at a time of heightened scrutiny of the criminal justice system’s handling of police shootings. Officer Yanez was one of four police officers to go on trial for a fatal shooting of a black person in recent weeks. All of the shootings were captured on video. Juries acquitted three of the officers and failed to reach a verdict in the fourth case.
Mr. Castile’s death inspired protests and outrage starting minutes after he was shot last July 6 on a busy suburban road near the Minnesota state fairgrounds. Diamond Reynolds, Mr. Castile’s girlfriend, streamed the graphic aftermath of the shooting on Facebook and said her boyfriend had been trying to cooperate with Officer Yanez, who had pulled him over for a broken taillight.
Officer Yanez testified in court that he believed Mr. Castile matched the description of a robbery suspect, was disobeying his commands and was reaching for a gun.Government looks to split childcare package and welfare cuts from omnibus savings bill
Updated
The Federal Government will today separate its childcare package and some cuts to welfare payments from its $4 billion omnibus savings bill, the ABC understands.
Key points: This is the latest attempt by the Coalition to get its childcare changes passed before the break
It had been facing resistance from Labor, the Greens and crossbenchers including One Nation and NXT on passing the omnibus savings bill
The childcare package also includes a new online payment system for childcare providers and families
The move is designed to help the Government win enough crossbench support in the Senate to pass the childcare package by the end of next week because Labor, the Greens and crossbenchers including Pauline Hanson's One Nation and the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT), do not support the bill in its current form.
It is understood the $1.6 billion childcare package, along with enough savings measures to cover that cost, will now be dealt with separately — but the specific welfare measures to be separated from the omnibus bill are yet to be revealed.
This is the latest attempt by the Coalition to get its childcare changes passed by the end of next week, before Parliament enters the long break leading up to the May budget.
As part of the package, subsidies paid to families will be streamlined into one payment and the lowest-income earners will receive the highest benefit.
The annual cap on subsides will be lifted for families earning less than $185,000 a year and increased from $7,500 per child to $10,000 per child for those earning more.
Key Senate crossbenchers have told the ABC they want the omnibus bill split "as quickly as possible", with just six parliamentary sitting days left before the budget.
One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts told the ABC his party supported some, but not all, savings and was pushing for the bill to be urgently "split up".
"It needs to be done as quickly as possible because I think they need to start getting these savings pretty quickly, and I think the Government is starting to understand that they can't get it through as it is and it needs to be broken up," Senator Roberts said.
"We don't like so many different issues combined under one umbrella, we think that's a failed strategy from the Government.
"The Government, if it wants to get something through, must break it up and let us treat each issue on its merits."
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has previously argued parts of Australia's welfare system were too generous, but in a statement said the omnibus bill "unfairly targets Australia's most vulnerable".
Nick Xenophon agreed, arguing a number of measures in the current bill would "have a significant impact on tens of thousands of families in this country".
"I think it is not unreasonable to look at this, to split these bills, but ultimately that's up to the Government," he said.
Birmingham pressures Opposition to pass package
Senator Roberts said it was important the Government dealt with the bill "before the budget".
"I'm sure that's what they'd like to do. I think it needs to be resolved quickly but it must be resolved properly," he said.
He insisted his party's position was not an attempt to distance itself from the Federal Government, following the West Australian One Nation preference deal with the Liberal Party.
"We would not even dream of tying it to something like WA and, by the way, we were very successful in WA, it looks like we've got three seats in the Upper House," he said.
Education Minister Simon Birmingham is keeping the pressure on the Opposition and the Senate crossbench to pass the childcare package.
He said as well as boosting the subsidy paid to families, the changes included a new online payment system that would improve the way childcare providers operate.
Senator Birmingham said the new IT system would reduce paperwork for childcare workers, which would mean they could spend more time with children and less on administration.
"We will create a much better system for childcare operators, remove a whole lot of red tape and paperwork," he said.
"By doing so mean there's an extra 100 hours that pretty much every childcare service across the country will be able to spend with children, helping them, caring for them, providing quality education."
Speaking on RN yesterday, Social Services Minister Christian Porter would not be drawn on whether the Coalition would be prepared to split the bill to at least get some of the savings measures over the line.
"We are dealing with a lot of crossbenchers representing a lot of different parties and interests and a lot of different suggestions," Mr Porter said.
"The negotiations are being conducted well and in good faith, they're very productive. How those negotiations will end will be a matter that'll be yet to be seen."
Topics: government-and-politics, federal-government, family-and-children, child-care, australia
First postedFollowing terrorist attacks by Islamists in Brussels, protesters from Hogar Social Madrid (Madrid Social Home) protested terror-linked Madrid mosque, the Islamic Cultural Centre.
Occupying an overpass facing the mosque, known locally as the M-30 due to its proximity to the motorway, the group used smoke canisters, fired flares and hung a banner emblazoned with the words “Today Brussels, tomorrow Madrid?”
Explaining their choice of location to protest, the group’s statement on its Facebook page slammed it as a centre of extreme Islamist ideology with links to Islamic State.
As well as being described as “not just as a ‘recruitment ground’ but effectively as operational headquarters” for the terror cell which plotted the 2004 train bombing that killed almost 200 people, the Islamic Cultural Centre was used as a jihadi recruitment hub by terror network Al-Andalus Brigade. Led by ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoner Lahcen Ikassrien, the group recruited fighters for Islamic State in Syria using the cafeteria as its base.
The statement also blasted police reports which revealed the mosque had raised significant funding for Islamic State. Demanding a “tax” from the mosque’s congregation to finance jihadists’ trips to Syria, the terrorist group received an average of 10 Euros per person.
Hogar Social Madrid, who oppose Europe’s response to the migrant crisis and warn that Islam is posing a “terrorist threat hanging over Europe”, have courted controversy in the past for distributing food and aid to only Spanish people. However, their Facebook statement argues that wanting to close the borders to refugees “is not synonymous with hatred for the outside, but of love toward us, to our people.”
In a statement to The Local, the Madrid mosque’s Imam Hussam Khoja condemned the Brussels terror attacks and distanced them from Islamism:
“Without a doubt, what happened in Brussels on March 22nd is unacceptable, nor is it accepted within our logic or religion to commit such nefarious attacks.”
“Muslims all around the world have condemned this terrible event that took the lives of innocent victims, including Muslims as well,” the statement said. At this time it is not yet known whether any Muslims were injured or killed in the attacks other than the two suicide bombers.
The statement went on to denounce the protest against the Islamic Cultural Centre, calling it the work of “extremists” and requesting the public also decry not just the protest but every “reaction or prejudice against a religion |
that all the elements of a song knit together properly, regardless of where or when they were recorded is all part of the mixing process. This is a very difficult thing to explain, but it’s the responsibility of the mixer and you just do it! What surprised you the most during the sessions? Can you point out some of the most remarkable things you learned? Initially, I was shocked at how slowly everything moved! I was used to working really quickly when producing and engineering albums. Suddenly it was like the brakes were on and often it was difficult to get the momentum going. Eventually, I adapted to the Floyd pace. One of the great things about working with this band is that you are allowed time to be creative, to pursue an idea even if it takes some time. The Floyd had a production deal to make their records and the record label never heard anything until it was done. The record was made purely and only by the people in the studio. I had learned early in my career that it was a good idea to try and not be too attached to the elements in a recording. A certain amount of ruthlessness is required especially during mixing. You may have a very complex vocal section for instance that took 3 days to record. When you come to mix, you realize that it just doesn’t work in the song. There is a natural tendency to try and make it work, to try and force it. You need to be able to remove it and move on. Roger has this ability. I thought I was pretty good at doing that, but he was way ahead of me! I have great memories of working with David on all the guitar solos. For the majority of the solos it was just David, myself and Phil Taylor in the room. We would make numerous passes, then Dave would take a break and I would combine a solo from all the different performances. He would come back, have a listen and either we would move on to the next piece, or he would have me make one or two changes and then we’d move on. As most guitarists know, David uses a lot of finger vibrato as well as the whammy bar, often at the same time. On the first solo of ‘Comfortably Numb’ he was exaggerating the effect quite dramatically. I asked if he thought it was too much and he replied, “No, I want it to sound drunk!” And there it was. Everyone knows that David is a great soloist, but not enough is said about his accompaniment, or rhythm playing. I learned a lot about guitar arrangements from working with him on this record. Another great example of this is the ‘Animals’ album - staggering rhythm guitar parts. We mixed the album at Producers Workshop in L.A. Their level of professionalism and technology was impressive. They had very strict requirements that the new tape had to meet and would actually listen to a portion of each blank reel before they would allow me to print a mix to it! I would arrive at 9:00am and either John or Ben had been there since 8:00am listening to tape. There would be a stack of rejected ¼” reels about waist high that were going to be sent back to the manufacturer! What piece of equipment in use was the most unusual – hi tech or lo-fi? I think more than unusual equipment was the use of unusual spaces. I like to record in various places other than the studio. Britannia Row had a games room on the top floor that had a great live sound to it. I put Nick up there for ‘In The Flesh’ and also used it as a live chamber for one or two other elements. I also discovered an underground tank next to the swimming pool at Superbear Studios in France, which we hung a speaker and a couple of mics in to use as a chamber. Apart from that - perhaps the television? We recorded a lot of ‘wild’ TV onto ¼” and some of it directly to the multitrack. ‘Nobody Home’ was one take. The Gomer Pyle bit, “Surprise. Surprise, Surprise!” fell right there, perfectly after Roger’s vocal. Another piece that worked better than expected was the telephone operator. Roger was keen to illustrate the personal disconnect of being on the road. We were in L.A. at Producer’s Workshop so I phoned my neighbour, Chris Fitzmorris in London. He had the keys to my flat and I asked him to go there and said that I would call him through an operator. “No matter how many times I call”, I said, “just pick up the phone, say ‘Hello’, let the operator speak and then hang up”. I placed a telephone in a soundproof area, got on to an extension phone and started recording to ¼” tape. It took a couple of operators – the first 2 were a bit abrupt, but the 3rd was perfect. I told her that I wanted to make a collect call to Mrs. Floyd. “Who’s calling?” she asked. “Mr. Floyd”, I replied. Chris’s timing was terrific, over and over he would hang up just at the right moment and she became genuinely concerned. “Is there supposed to be someone there besides your wife?” I was playing her along saying things like “No! I don’t know who that is!” “What’s going on?” and she would try the call again. Unwittingly, she was helping to tell the story. Afterwards I went through the ¼” and edited my voice out, just leaving her and Chris. I sometimes wonder if she ever heard herself on the record. The Walls basic tracks were edited by you from several takes. Normal fare on today’s digital systems. But wasn’t it awfully hard back then? Well, I had nothing to compare it to! I used to love the challenge of complicated tapes edits. It’s really pretty amazing what you can get away with. There are thousands of edits on that album, both 2” and ¼”. The mixing was all manual. No computer automation yet. So you would mix until you made a mistake, or until there was a complicated change-over and if the feel was good, you would reset and make an edit in the ¼”. During the mix, I decided that a drum fill was not working well on ‘Comfortably Numb’. We were running 2 multitrack machines for the recording, a 16track and a 24track locked together by a Maglink synchronizer (this was before SMPTE code became the standard), so cutting the tape and the timecode all the way through at this late stage was not an option. I decided to make a window edit. I had heard stories of people doing this but had never seen it. Maybe they were true, maybe just folklore. This made me even more determined to try it. I cut the top 8 tracks (the drums) out of the 16 track tape and replaced them with a different performance of Nick’s drums. It worked fine. The tape looked like a patchwork quilt, but it sounded fine! From reading about the making of The Wall – the record as well as the live show – I get the feeling that it was a project taking shape while pushing for a new era of technology to begin. The production team seemed to be pushing the recording envelope a lot. Many producers suggest that some of the inventiveness of the analogue era went out when digital recording became the new standard. Please discuss. I would agree. I’m very grateful to have started when I did. On ‘The Wall’ we didn’t have much in the way of outboard gear. Lots of tape delay, a couple of DDL’s, a Flanger and the 910 Harmonizer, which had not been out very long. Back then, if you heard a sound in your head, you had to be very creative to work out how you were going to manifest the effect. Now you can just call up virtually any sound on a digital box and the end result is not as satisfying. The song had better be good, because that part of the technology is not really going to impress anyone anymore. I say “back then” but just look at what George Martin and Geoff Emerick were doing even earlier with the Beatles! They had even less. That was such a creative time and is still a great source of inspiration. I love the production on ‘I Am The Walrus’. When I eventually got to meet Geoff (actually only a few years ago) I immediately said, “I have to know, how did you get that great vocal sound on John? It sounds like a valve limiter distorting rather than the mic amp, how did you do it?!” He thought for a minute and then said something like, “I’m not sure, I really don’t remember”. Disappointment! Perhaps he just didn’t want to tell me, which is fair enough. Creating atmospheres is very important for this band and they’ve always managed to do it with a minimum of exotic equipment. I still try to create things from scratch, rather than getting them out of a box. Discipline and restraint are important in the studio even if you arrive there after great recklessness. I think there is a tendency nowadays for people just starting out with DAWs to time-correct elements in the recording just because they can. Often this can be at the expense of the groove. Staring at a computer screen all day long can make some people produce records with their eyes rather than their ears. I don’t wish to be negative about new technology, just cautious. The great artists, engineers and producers will continue to surprise us with great recordings. You worked a lot with the four Floyd members individually. Do you remember any particular musical or technical anecdotes from recording with the four? Perhaps something about their characteristics as performers and artists in the studio. There was always a wealth of diverse talent for each band member to exploit. Whether it’s David’s musical abilities, Roger’s vision, Rick’s atmospherics, or Nick’s ability to provide precisely the right bed for the song. David tends to concentrate more on musical arrangement, Roger more on the overview – the dramatic impact. But, Roger’s musical knowledge and ability should not be underestimated. He played some great guitar on the record as well as bass. David also played some great bass as well as his guitar. When we finished at Superbear Studios, the band took the month of August off. I flew to London with the tapes and went to my old stomping ground of Utopia Studios to rough mix everything. The plan was that I would put everything in sequence and send rough mixes to everyone so they could review the progress. I would then go straight to L.A. in order to prepare for the U.S. sessions and meet everyone there at the end of the month. During the sessions in France, we had recorded the scream that bridges ‘The Happiest Days’ with ‘Another Brick Part 2’. For some reason the scream was missing. I couldn’t find it on any of the tapes. This seemed like an important transition to me and I wanted it to be on the rough mixes. This is a scream that Roger has done for years and is performed by an inhalation of breath rather than an exhalation - difficult to do and very hard on your throat. Roger was still in the South of France and I called him there. I set up the phone recording system, explained that the scream was missing and asked if he would scream down the phone for me, so we would at least have a rough idea of it on the interim mixes. He did numerous ‘takes’ over the phone, eventually saying to me, “I can’t do this much longer, you know. My family are giving me very strange looks!” I put the scream in place and we never replaced it in the studio, so the performance on the record is phoned in, from France to the U.K. Do you have favourite tracks from The Wall (musically or from a technical point of view)? I like the way the whole album works, both musically and as a narrative. Brick 1 stands out to me of the 3 Bricks, as I think we managed to capture the atmosphere of youth in the 1940’s and the child reminiscing. (Each ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ originally had a subtitle rather than a number. In order, they were: ‘Reminiscing’, ‘Education’ and ‘Drugs’). On Roger’s original demo, Brick 1 was just called ‘Reminiscing’. The drones against David’s guitars, everything swirling, Rick’s sparse but emotional electric piano, all create a great musical bed for Roger’s vocal. ‘Hey You’ is another, with everyone playing beautifully, everything has its place even when the song gets busy. ‘Comfortably Numb’ as well. It was a great privilege being able to help capture those performances. I don’t know if you ever go back and listen to your back catalogue, but what is your personal view about The Wall today? Does it hold up? Are there elements you would have tackled differently today? When I was young, I was incredibly critical of everything, and nothing that I did, or pretty much anyone else for that matter, could ever be good enough. Over the years I have tried to temper that reaction, but I’m still a perfectionist. It’s funny, I’ve recently been going through ‘The Wall’ multitrack tapes in order to make some transfers and looking back, I thought to myself, actually, this is pretty good! I’m probably too close to it to judge effectively, but I think it holds up today because the material is so strong. Approaching it today, I would probably push for more rehearsal time and try to cut more of the songs as a band. Also, I wouldn’t mind hearing ‘The Trial’ without all the showy, Kurt Weill arrangement. Something darker, cooler and more sinister might be interesting. Since the Wall-line up of Pink Floyd dissolved you have worked with the factions of the band on many occasions. Is there, in your view, a musical strain, certain sound characteristics or production values that runs through everything, no matter which of the former members you happen to be involved with? I think they are musically all a bit different, but together they made that sound. By definition, the solo albums all explore more personal avenues, but having said that, I think that Roger’s solo album, ‘Amused to Death’ is very much a ‘Pink Floyd’ record, both atmospherically and conceptually. The writing always contains such richly compelling subject matter which is very inspiring from a production point of view. Really, it’s a producer/engineer’s dream, as there’s always so much to explore creatively. Our thanks to Thomas Ulrik Larsen for sending us the whole interview to use exclusively on Brain Damage. The above text is copyright Thomas, and not to be used without his express permission.Kristen Bury, the 32-year-old mother who was charged with child neglect after her 9-week-old son was revealed to be missing, always seemed a “little off,” a friend tells PEOPLE exclusively.
Bury is currently being held in South Carolina with her boyfriend, Joseph Walsh, 36, while police search for their infant son Chance – who hasn’t been seen since Sept. 9 – in North Port, Florida, where the couple has a home.
“Everybody’s trying to find him,” the friend says. “Everybody’s put up fliers.” But while the small community hopes for the best, they’re preparing for the worst. “To physically harm a baby ” the friend says, trailing off with a sob. “I just can’t.”
Police were first alerted that Chance was missing after his grandmother called authorities to report that she hadn’t seen him in a nearly a month. She also said that Bury and Walsh had allegedly told relatives contradictory stories to explain his absence, “including that the child was unharmed, that he died in [a car] crash and that they gave him to a woman at a hotel in Georgia,” according to a police press release.
A search of the couple’s home turned up bloodstains and evidence of blood splatter on the walls, cops said. Cadaver dogs also indicated the presence of possible human remains, according to an arrest report obtained by PEOPLE. The friend also says that the canal behind the couple’s home was raked, but she doesn’t believe authorities found anything.
For their part, Bury and Walsh – who have a history of drug use, according to police – aren’t cooperating with authorities and have allegedly showed no interest in the whereabouts of their young son, police said.
Kristen Bury and Joseph Walsh Sarasota Sherriff
A Difficult Life
Bury met Walsh in rehab, the friend says, and together they had a son, Duane. Duane was just 2 weeks old when he allegedly died of a kidney infection that resulted from a botched circumcision, according to the friend. At the time, speculation ran rampant that the boy had died in a dog attack. “We just want to stop the ignorant comments, accusations, and speculations,” Bury told ABC7. “People can be so cruel. My son’s loss had nothing to do with anyone or anything.”
Bury and Walsh started trying to have another child right after, the friend says. But when Bury was eight months pregnant, the couple lost their home to an electrical fire. “They lost a lot of stuff that was Duane’s and lost a lot of stuff for the new baby,” the friend says. “The community threw her a baby shower and all the local moms gave her stuff.”
Now, the friend says, those moms are angry, feeling they were taken advantage of, says the friend. “People are mad,” she says. “I don’t care that I helped her – I gave her stuff from my son after the fire – that’s just objects that are lost.”
But if something untoward happened to Chance, the friend says, that would be a different story. “I’m flabbergasted. I don’t even know,” she says. “My sisters have helped her, the community helped her. I would have never imagined this at all.”
On Facebook, Bury appears to be a loving mother, posting pictures of her young son – including one that was posted on Sept. 21, after he purportedly disappeared. “The white towel looks like a hotel towel,” the friend says of the picture, which shows baby Chance lying on a towel. “I really thought he was in Georgia. I really thought they brought him to Georgia [with them].”
She adds, “I guess he never made it.”
In retrospect, the friend says, Bury and Walsh’s most recent Facebook posts seem to suggest they knew that they would be apprehended by authorities.
“No matter what life brings, good or bad, know that I will always love you with all of my heart,” Bury wrote on Sept. 21. “I will always love you as well,” Walsh replied.
“It’s like they’re Thelma and Louise,” the friend says, referencing the 1990s movie about two outlaw women.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Criminal Investigations Section at 941.861.4074 or if you wish to remain anonymous contact Crime Stoppers of Sarasota County, 941.366.TIPS (8477), or online at http://www.sarasotacrimestoppers.com.
Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.There are certain things every Detroit sports fan must know, and he/she probably does know them, though they may not understand it as fully as they think they do.
Here’s my first installment of a glossary that attempts to catalog the most important terms, expressions and events in Detroit sports, and also to explain just what it means to be a Detroit sports fan.
– – – – – – – – –
The 28-Out Perfect Game (n.) — on June 2, 2010, Detroit pitcher Armando Galarraga retired the first 26 batters he faced in a game at Comerica Park. One out from a perfect game, Galraggara coaxed Cleveland’s Jason Donald to hit a groundball to first base. Galarraga took the throw at first to retire Donald, except umpire Jim Joyce ruled that Donald beat the throw. Replays clearly showed that Joyce was wrong. Galarraga retired the next batter and settled for a one-hitter, while fans at the ballpark reacted with venom toward Joyce. The next night, prior to the game, Joyce apologized to Galarraga publicly. Tigers’ fans still consider Galaragga to have tossed a perfecto.
0-and-16 (exp.) — the abysmal record of the Detroit Lions in 2008, the 50th — and final — season of The Bobby Layne Curse (see The Bobby Layne Curse). The Lions became the first (and still the only) team to go 0-16 in an NFL season. It was generally considered to be the darkest season in Lions’ history to that point.
Another One Bites the Dust (esp.) — rock song written and recorded by Queen that was adopted by the Detroit Lions when they started the 1980 season with four consecutive victories. They finished 9-7 and missed the playoffs. This was generally considered to be the darkest season in Lions’ history to that point.
ARod (n.) — nickname for third baseman Aurelio Rodriguez, a popular Gold Glove winner for the Tigers in the 1970s. The original ARod was never accused of using steroids or being a whiny little punk, unlike the current ARod. (see also PEDs)
Bad Boys (n.) — nickname for the Pistons in the 1980s and early 1990s when they enjoyed their greatest success in franchise history. Also a derisive nickname for the Lions when they stink or commit unbelievably asinine penalties, which is often. (see Suh Helmet Stomp)
Ball Don’t Lie! (exp.) — phrase popularized by Pistons’ trash-talking forward Rasheed Wallace to indicate that the basketball is the ultimate arbiter of on-court justice. Can be used to exclaim any outrage or to assert something to be supremely true. For example, on a date if the man performs a perfect parallel park and is offered a less-than-stellar compliment from his companion, he can bark, “Ball don’t lie!” while stepping onto the curb. Not the best way to get a second date, but proven to earn an ejection.
Black and Blue Division (n.) — the name used to describe the NFC Central division, which from 1970-2001 contained at minimum the Detroit Lions, Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, and Minnesota Vikings, four heated rivals in the midwest known for playing hard-nosed, bruising football. The quartet are now in the NFC North, which for some reason doesn’t get called Black and Blue, probably because the Lions stunk for so many years. The brand of football played in the “Black and Blue Division” was incredibly boring by the way, a fact stubborn old Lions fans refuse to admit because they are numb from the pain and embarrassment the Lions have inflicted upon them for the last several decades.
Bleacher Bums (n.) — the fans who used to sit in the bleachers at Tiger Stadium (see The Corner). The core of this unit consisted of drunks, loudmouths, homeless, or just plain redasses. You could be sure that if you sat there, you and your family would be called any number of creative names, all of them signifying that you were a piece of crap. The Bleacher Bums were often disciplined by Tigers’ management, most notably in 1980, when team GM Jim Campbell, who was slightly more conservative than Attila the Hun and slightly more cranky than Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, closed the bleachers for a few homestands. The Bums had been chanting phrases that included bad, bad words. Campbell also responded by reducing the alcohol level of the beer sold at Tiger Stadium and cutting off sales completely after the 5th inning. This only forced most of the Bleacher Bums to get drunker before they entered the ballpark.
The Block (n.) — famous play where Pistons’ forward Tayshaun Prince sprinted down the court and blocked a layup attempt by Reggie Miller of the Indiana Pacers in the 2004 playoffs. The block preserved a Detroit victory and sparked the underdog Pistons to the NBA Finals where they upset the Los Angeles Lakers, something no one outside of the 313 area code thought was possible.
The Bobby Layne Curse (n.) — supposedly when Detroit QB Bobby Layne was traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1958 he vowed that “The lions won’t win another championship for 50 years.” The hard-drinking, fun-loving QB, who led the Lions to three NFL titles in the 1950s, never said it of course, but that fact doesn’t stop Detroit from feeling like there’s a big, ominous, black cloud over their football team. It’s actually the shadow of owner William Clay Ford.
Bo-zoing (v.) — when an executive of a Detroit team makes a decision so terrible, so unfathomable, that he destroys all goodwill the franchise has with the public. First known instance is when Tigers’ president Bo Schembechler (inspiration for the term) fired popular broadcaster Ernie Harwell in 1991. Also popped up with the Lions when Matt Millen drafted a wide receiver in the first round in three of four seasons, and when William Clay Ford continued to employ Millen despite annual failures. (see Fire Millen)
Bullpen (n.) — three definitions: (1) the place where relievers sit during games at Comerica Park; (2) the final resting place of the Tigers hopes in the 2013 postseason when right fielder Torii Hunter fell into the visiting bullpen at Fenway Park after a failed attempt to catch a grand slam off the bat of David Ortiz which resulted in a disgraceful loss to the Red Sox (phew!); and (3) the name sportswriters gave to Jim Leyland’s post-game press conferences when he spewed unintelligible cliches and spit food out of the corner of his mouth.
The Calvin Johnson Rule (n.) — the type of thing that only happens to the Detroit Lions. In the first game of the 2010 season at Soldier Field, the Lions’ receiver caught a pass in the end zone with no time left on the clock that appeared to be the game-winning score. However, after securing the ball, Johnson went to the ground, rolled one-and-a-half times, and as he was coming up he let the ball go as he came to his feet. Referees ruled that Johnson had failed to control the ball long enough, even though 45,000+ fans on hand and hundreds of thousands watching on TV knew it was a touchdown, and the play had always been a TD. The official rule is: “If a player is going to the ground in the process of making a catch, he must maintain control throughout the entire process of contacting the ground. If the player does not maintain control of the ball throughout the process of contacting the ground, the pass is incomplete.” No one understands yet to this day what the hell that means nor how the Lions could lose the game on such a stupid ruling. But of course, it’s the Lions. (see also Megatron)
City of Champions (n.) — in 1935-36, Detroit was called this when the Lions, Red Wings, and Tigers were all defending champs in their sports. At the same time, Joe Louis was the heavyweight champion of the world.
Cocaine Wayne (n.) — nickname for the head coach of the Detroit Lions from 1988 to 1996, the most recent “least-sucky” era in franchise history. Wayne Fontes was rumored to be hooked on the drug of the ’80s. He was fired after the team went 5-11 in 1996, and even his chummy relationship with star running back Barry Sanders couldn’t save his job. (see also The Decision)
The Coin Flip (n.) — an event that Lions’ fans would like to forget. In 2002 in a game that was heading into OT against the Chicago Bears, head coach Marty Mornhinweg won the coin toss but elected to kick the ball away, feeling he would be better served to have the wind at his back. However, the Lions never got the ball as the Bears went down the field and kicked a game-winning field goal. Generally considered to be the darkest point in Lions’ history up to that time.
The Corner (n.) — the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Trumbull Avenue in downtown Detroit, location of Tiger Stadium (formerly known as Briggs Stadium and Navin Field) from 1912 to 1999. The site of many legendary Detroit sports events, including World Series titles, NFL title games, championship boxing matches, and much more. Now sits empty but manicured through the kindness of the Navin Field Grounds Crew.
CoPa (n.) — cutesy nickname for Comerica Park, home to the Detroit Tigers. A mall-like, modern amenity with a Ferris Wheel and a merry-go-round that old school Tigers fans will never really accept because they hold a vise-like attachment to Tiger Stadium, (see The Corner).
The D (n.) — shorthand for Detroit, a term that started to pop up in the late 1990s and is used by Detroit fans to make themselves seem hip.
The Decision (n.) — two meanings: (1) when Barry Sanders shocked Detroit fans by announcing his retirement prior to the 1999 season via fax at the age of 31; (2) when Lions’ fans essentially decided to stop being Lions fans nine years later after the team went 0-16, capping a stretch where they averaged less than four wins a season for a decade and lost 24 straight road games. It was generally considered to be the darkest time in Detroit Lions’ history.
Deeeeetroit Baaaaasketball (v.) — annoying phrase uttered over the loudspeakers at Pistons’ games in the early 2000s, which came to signify the lunch pail work ethic of not only that team but also the city. (See The D for other examples of odd catchphrases that seem contrived because, well, they are.)
Ernie-isms (n.) — famous catchphrases used by Hall of Fame broadcaster Ernie Harwell during his legendary career with the Detroit Tigers. Examples: “He stood there like the house by the side of the road and watched that one go by,” “A man from Livonia will go home with that foul ball,” and “Two for the price of one,” (to describe a double play).
Fight Night at The Joe (exp.) — name for what happened in Detroit on March 26, 1997, when the Red Wings and the Avalanche brawled on the ice at Joe Louis Arena, settling many scores between the two bitter rivals. (see also Malice at The Palace and simply change Red Wings/Avalanche to Pistons/Pacers and 1997 to 2004 and The Joe to The Palace of Auburn Hills, and so on)
Fire Millen (exp.) — a movement that sprang out of the dark years when Matt Millen was the president and general manager of the Detroit Lions in the first decade of the 21st century. It was generally considered the darkest time in Detroit Lions’ history. The movement was only slightly more important and less successful than the 99% movement that occurred after the financial crisis under president George W. Bush.
Game 163 (n.) — when the Tigers lost to the Minnesota Twins in a special one-game, winner-take-all contest to decide the AL Central title in 2009. The loss came in extra innings, which made it even harder to swallow for Detroit fans. In that game, Brandon Inge was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded that would have given the Tigers a lead in extra-innings, but the home plate umpire missed it. (see also The Inge)
Gordie Howe Hat Trick (v.) — when a hockey player gets a goal, an assist, and also participates in a fight in the same game. Gordie was known for his free-swinging elbows in his many years in Detroit as “Mr. Hockey,” but he actually only had two Gordie Howe Hat Tricks himself during his entire career.
The Greatest At-Bat of All-Time (n.) — what Detroit Tigers’ fans call the epic 13-pitch Ab by Dave Bergman on June 4, 1984, against Roy Lee Jackson. Bergman belted the 13th pitch from Jackson into the right field overhang at Tiger Stadium (see The Corner) and gave Detroit a dramatic 6-3 10th inning walk-off win. It was universally seen as the moment the ’84 Tigers smacked their only challenger across the chops and took complete control of the division race.
Gum Time (n.) — rally-starting ritual started by Tigers’ hurler Nate Robertson during the ’06 season in which he would stuff his mouth full of bubble gum to try to cause his teammates to score some runs late in a game. Also what Jim Leyland needed to do after damaging his breath by stuffing food into his gullet and talking during post-game media sessions.
Harry High School Stuff (exp.) — phrase used by Pistons’ coach Chuck Daly to describe anything that was amateur or immature. Also can be applied to most of what the Detroit Lions front office has done for the last two decades.
Honolulu Blue (adj.) — something made up to describe the color of the uniforms worn by the Detroit Lions.
Icing (v.) — when a member of your hockey team sends the puck deep into the opponents’ zone from their own side of the red line, which is usually a penalty. Is also what former Tiger first baseman Prince Fielder prefers on his nachos, his breakfast, and just about any meal.
The Inge (v.) — acting as if you are better than you really are, as in “Matthew Stafford is really good at The Inge.” Named for former Tigers’ third baseman Brandon Inge, who was simultaneously the most lovable and most hated player in the city, and by lovable we mean sadly pathetic like the scrawny, big-eared kid on your Little League team who never hits the baseball all season. Inge once had the balls to say he was a better defensive catcher than Pudge Rodriguez, and he was apparently sober at the time he said that. After hitting about.185 with no power for 2 1/2 seasons, Inge also thought he should be Detroit’s starting second baseman, despite not playing the position in years. “I played it pretty well in high school,” he said.
The Joe (n.) — home to the Detroit Red Wings from 1979 to the present. One of the most iconic arenas in hockey, it’s hosted hundreds of Stanley Cup playoff games, the NHL All-Star Game, and even a Pistons’ playoff game in 1984 and the WNBA Finals. The Joe is also a name Pistons’ fans use for their general manager, Joe Dumars, who inexplicably gets a bad rap despite having helped build a model franchise that won an NBA title and made the Eastern Conference Finals in six straight seasons.
Jordan Rules (n.) — a list of unwritten rules employed by the Pistons against Michael Jordan in the 1980s and early 1990s that was predicated on tough, physical play. The tactics were devised by coach Chuck Daly, who wanted to force someone other than Jordan to beat his team when they played the Bulls. The Pistons eliminated the Bulls in the playoffs in 1988, 1989, and 1990.
Kaline Corner (n.) — where Hall of Fame outfielder Al Kaline plied his trade in right field for the Tigers for 22 seasons. The odd configuration of the right field corner was named after Kaline after he injured himself a few times down there. Kaline won 10 Gold Glove Awards and has been under contract with the Tigers in some form since the night of his high school prom in 1953. Not sure if he’s ever gotten a watch for all that service time, but he’s as well respected in the city as anyone ever has been.
Legend of the Octopus (n.) — tradition at Red Wings’ playoff games where an octopus is hurled onto the ice. It was started in 1952 by a pair of brothers from Detroit, and has been a fixture since. The octopus’s eight arms symbolize the eight wins it used to take to win the Stanley Cup. It now takes 16 wins to take the Cup, but no one seems to care about that discrepancy. The record for most “octopi” thrown in one game is 36, and the record for the largest octopus is 38 pounds. Coincidentally, that’s about the number of pounds most fans figured Prince Fielder gained in his two years with the Tigers. (see also Twirling Ban)
Lima Time (exp.) — egotistical term created by Jose Lima himself to describe what it was like when he took the mound for the Tigers, for whom he pitched from 1994-96, and again in 2001-02. Lima was flashy, self-promoting, cocky, and he could dance. Sort of like Jose “Papa Grande” Valverde before the Tigers were winning.
Malice at the Palace (exp.) — (see also Fight Night at The Joe and simply change Pistons/Pacers to Red Wings/Avalanche and 2004 to 1997 and The Palace of Auburn Hills to The Joe, and so on)
Megatron (n.) — moniker for Lions’ receiver Calvin Johnson, regarded as the best wide receiver in football. He’s the latest Detroit gridiron great who will never play in a Super Bowl because he has the misfortune of being a Lion. (see also The Calvin Johnson Rule and The Curse of Bobby Layne)
Monte’s Prayer (n.) — see Wide Right and The Curse of Bobby Layne.
Must-See JV (esp.) — what Detroiters refer to a game started by ace Justin Verlander, one of the best pitchers in the game. Also serves as an albatross around Verlander’s neck, as many fans who don’t know any better, think he should toss a no-hitter every time he takes the mound.
“My way or the highway” (v.) — what new manager Sparky Anderson barked to sportswriters in the first month of his tenure as skipper of the Detroit Tigers in 1979. Anderson was surprised at the casual attitude of some of his players. Within a year or so, many of those players, like Ron LeFlore and Jason Thompson, were sent packing.
New York Bias (n.) — a phenomenon that envelopes Detroit sports fans which stems from their envy and/or hatred of New York sports teams. It especially rises when discussing the greatness of Detroit athletes. For example: “Had Lou Whitaker played in New York, he would have been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.” You can replace Whitaker with Jack Morris, Alan Trammell, Bill Freehan, Lance Parrish, Mickey Lolich, Norm Cash, Willie Horton, or Eddie Brinkman for that matter. Detroit fans like to feel like they are |
, upsetting the table and smashing the crockery with his clumsy efforts. Not content with that, he even tried to jump on his master's lap, as he had so often seen the dog allowed to do. At that the servants, seeing the danger their master was in, belaboured the silly Ass with sticks and cudgels, and drove him back to his stable half dead with his beating. "Alas!" he cried, "all this I have brought on myself. Why could I not be satisfied with my natural and honourable position, without wishing to imitate the ridiculous antics of that useless little Lap-dog?"
THE FIR-TREE AND THE BRAMBLE
A Fir-tree was boasting to a Bramble, and said, somewhat contemptuously, "You poor creature, you are of no use whatever. Now, look at me: I am useful for all sorts of things, particularly when men build houses; they can't do without me then." But the Bramble replied, "Ah, that's all very well: but you wait till they come with axes and saws to cut you down, and then you'll wish you were a Bramble and not a Fir."
Better poverty without a care than wealth with its many obligations.
THE FROGS' COMPLAINT AGAINST THE SUN
Once upon a time the Sun was about to take to himself a wife. The Frogs in terror all raised their voices to the skies, and Jupiter, disturbed by the noise, asked them what they were croaking about. They replied, "The Sun is bad enough even while he is single, drying up our marshes with his heat as he does. But what will become of us if he marries and begets other Suns?"
THE DOG, THE COCK, AND THE FOX
A Dog and a Cock became great friends, and agreed to travel together. At nightfall the Cock flew up into the branches of a tree to roost, while the Dog curled himself up inside the trunk, which was hollow. At break of day the Cock woke up and crew, as usual. A Fox heard, and, wishing to make a breakfast of him, came and stood under the tree and begged him to come down. "I should so like," said he, "to make the acquaintance of one who has such a beautiful voice." The Cock replied, "Would you just wake my porter who sleeps at the foot of the tree? He'll open the door and let you in." The Fox accordingly rapped on the trunk, when out rushed the Dog and tore him in pieces.
THE GNAT AND THE BULL
A Gnat alighted on one of the horns of a Bull, and remained sitting there for a considerable time. When it had rested sufficiently and was about to fly away, it said to the Bull, "Do you mind if I go now?" The Bull merely raised his eyes and remarked, without interest, "It's all one to me; I didn't notice when you came, and I shan't know when you go away."
We may often be of more consequence in our own eyes than in the eyes of our neighbours.
THE BEAR AND THE TRAVELLERS
Two Travellers were on the road together, when a Bear suddenly appeared on the scene. Before he observed them, one made for a tree at the side of the road, and climbed up into the branches and hid there. The other was not so nimble as his companion; and, as he could not escape, he threw himself on the ground and pretended to be dead. The Bear came up and sniffed all round him, but he kept perfectly still and held his breath: for they say that a bear will not touch a dead body. The Bear took him for a corpse, and went away. When the coast was clear, the Traveller in the tree came down, and asked the other what it was the Bear had whispered to him when he put his mouth to his ear. The other replied, "He told me never again to travel with a friend who deserts you at the first sign of danger."
Misfortune tests the sincerity of friendship.
THE SLAVE AND THE LION
A Slave ran away from his master, by whom he had been most cruelly treated, and, in order to avoid capture, betook himself into the desert. As he wandered about in search of food and shelter, he came to a cave, which he entered and found to be unoccupied. Really, however, it was a Lion's den, and almost immediately, to the horror of the wretched fugitive, the Lion himself appeared. The man gave himself up for lost: but, to his utter astonishment, the Lion, instead of springing upon him and devouring him, came and fawned upon him, at the same time whining and lifting up his paw. Observing it to be much swollen and inflamed, he examined it and found a large thorn embedded in the ball of the foot. He accordingly removed it and dressed the wound as well as he could: and in course of time it healed up completely. The Lion's gratitude was unbounded; he looked upon the man as his friend, and they shared the cave for some time together. A day came, however, when the Slave began to long for the society of his fellow-men, and he bade farewell to the Lion and returned to the town. Here he was presently recognised and carried off in chains to his former master, who resolved to make an example of him, and ordered that he should be thrown to the beasts at the next public spectacle in the theatre. On the fatal day the beasts were loosed into the arena, and among the rest a Lion of huge bulk and ferocious aspect; and then the wretched Slave was cast in among them. What was the amazement of the spectators, when the Lion after one glance bounded up to him and lay down at his feet with every expression of affection and delight! It was his old friend of the cave! The audience clamoured that the Slave's life should be spared: and the governor of the town, marvelling at such gratitude and fidelity in a beast, decreed that both should receive their liberty.
THE FLEA AND THE MAN
A Flea bit a Man, and bit him again, and again, till he could stand it no longer, but made a thorough search for it, and at last succeeded in catching it. Holding it between his finger and thumb, he said—or rather shouted, so angry was he—"Who are you, pray, you wretched little creature, that you make so free with my person?" The Flea, terrified, whimpered in a weak little voice, "Oh, sir! pray let me go; don't kill me! I am such a little thing that I can't do you much harm." But the Man laughed and said, "I am going to kill you now, at once: whatever is bad has got to be destroyed, no matter how slight the harm it does."
Do not waste your pity on a scamp.
THE BEE AND JUPITER
A Queen Bee from Hymettus flew up to Olympus with some fresh honey from the hive as a present to Jupiter, who was so pleased with the gift that he promised to give her anything she liked to ask for. She said she would be very grateful if he would give stings to the bees, to kill people who robbed them of their honey. Jupiter was greatly displeased with this request, for he loved mankind: but he had given his word, so he said that stings they should have. The stings he gave them, however, were of such a kind that whenever a bee stings a man the sting is left in the wound and the bee dies.
Evil wishes, like fowls, come home to roost.
THE OAK AND THE REEDS
An Oak that grew on the bank of a river was uprooted by a severe gale of wind, and thrown across the stream. It fell among some Reeds growing by the water, and said to them, "How is it that you, who are so frail and slender, have managed to weather the storm, whereas I, with all my strength, have been torn up by the roots and hurled into the river?" "You were stubborn," came the reply, "and fought against the storm, which proved stronger than you: but we bow and yield to every breeze, and thus the gale passed harmlessly over our heads."
THE BLIND MAN AND THE CUB
There was once a Blind Man who had so fine a sense of touch that, when any animal was put into his hands, he could tell what it was merely by the feel of it. One day the Cub of a Wolf was put into his hands, and he was asked what it was. He felt it for some time, and then said, "Indeed, I am not sure whether it is a Wolf's Cub or a Fox's: but this I know—it would never do to trust it in a sheepfold."
Evil tendencies are early shown.
THE BOY AND THE SNAILS
A Farmer's Boy went looking for Snails, and, when he had picked up both his hands full, he set about making a fire at which to roast them; for he meant to eat them. When it got well alight and the Snails began to feel the heat, they gradually withdrew more and more into their shells with the hissing noise they always make when they do so. When the Boy heard it, he said, "You abandoned creatures, how can you find heart to whistle when your houses are burning?"
THE APES AND THE TWO TRAVELLERS
Two men were travelling together, one of whom never spoke the truth, whereas the other never told a lie: and they came in the course of their travels to the land of Apes. The King of the Apes, hearing of their arrival, ordered them to be brought before him; and by way of impressing them with his magnificence, he received them sitting on a throne, while the Apes, his subjects, were ranged in long rows on either side of him. When the Travellers came into his presence he asked them what they thought of him as a King. The lying Traveller said, "Sire, every one must see that you are a most noble and mighty monarch." "And what do you think of my subjects?" continued the King. "They," said the Traveller, "are in every way worthy of their royal master." The Ape was so delighted with his answer that he gave him a very handsome present. The other Traveller thought that if his companion was rewarded so splendidly for telling a lie, he himself would certainly receive a still greater reward for telling the truth; so, when the Ape turned to him and said, "And what, sir, is your opinion?" he replied, "I think you are a very fine Ape, and all your subjects are fine Apes too." The King of the Apes was so enraged at his reply that he ordered him to be taken away and clawed to death.
THE ASS AND HIS BURDENS
A Pedlar who owned an Ass one day bought a quantity of salt, and loaded up his beast with as much as he could bear. On the way home the Ass stumbled as he was crossing a stream and fell into the water. The salt got thoroughly wetted and much of it melted and drained away, so that, when he got on his legs again, the Ass found his load had become much less heavy. His master, however, drove him back to town and bought more salt, which he added to what remained in the panniers, and started out again. No sooner had they reached a stream than the Ass lay down in it, and rose, as before, with a much lighter load. But his master detected the trick, and turning back once more, bought a large number of sponges, and piled them on the back of the Ass. When they came to the stream the Ass again lay down: but this time, as the sponges soaked up large quantities of water, he found, when he got up on his legs, that he had a bigger burden to carry than ever.
You may play a good card once too often.
THE SHEPHERD'S BOY AND THE WOLF
A Shepherd's Boy was tending his flock near a village, and thought it would be great fun to hoax the villagers by pretending that a Wolf was attacking the sheep: so he shouted out, "Wolf! wolf!" and when the people came running up he laughed at them for their pains. He did this more than once, and every time the villagers found they had been hoaxed, for there was no Wolf at all. At last a Wolf really did come, and the Boy cried, "Wolf! wolf!" as loud as he could: but the people were so used to hearing him call that they took no notice of his cries for help. And so the Wolf had it all his own way, and killed off sheep after sheep at his leisure.
You cannot believe a liar even when he tells the truth.
THE FOX AND THE GOAT
A Fox fell into a well and was unable to get out again. By and by a thirsty Goat came by, and seeing the Fox in the well asked him if the water was good. "Good?" said the Fox, "it's the best water I ever tasted in all my life. Come down and try it yourself." The Goat thought of nothing but the prospect of quenching his thirst, and jumped in at once. When he had had enough to drink, he looked about, like the Fox, for some way of getting out, but could find none. Presently the Fox said, "I have an idea. You stand on your hind legs, and plant your forelegs firmly against the side of the well, and then I'll climb on to your back, and, from there, by stepping on your horns, I can get out. And when I'm out, I'll help you out too." The Goat did as he was requested, and the Fox climbed on to his back and so out of the well; and then he coolly walked away. The Goat called loudly after him and reminded him of his promise to help him out: but the Fox merely turned and said, "If you had as much sense in your head as you have hair in your beard you wouldn't have got into the well without making certain that you could get out again."
Look before your leap.
THE FISHERMAN AND THE SPRAT
A Fisherman cast his net into the sea, and when he drew it up again it contained nothing but a single Sprat that begged to be put back into the water. "I'm only a little fish now," it said, "but I shall grow big one day, and then if you come and catch me again I shall be of some use to you." But the Fisherman replied, "Oh, no, I shall keep you now I've got you: if I put you back, should I ever see you again? Not likely!"
THE BOASTING TRAVELLER
A Man once went abroad on his travels, and when he came home he had wonderful tales to tell of the things he had done in foreign countries. Among other things, he said he had taken part in a jumping-match at Rhodes, and had done a wonderful jump which no one could beat. "Just go to Rhodes and ask them," he said; "every one will tell you it's true." But one of those who were listening said, "If you can jump as well as all that, we needn't go to Rhodes to prove it. Let's just imagine this is Rhodes for a minute: and now—jump!"
Deeds, not words.
THE CRAB AND HIS MOTHER
An Old Crab said to her son, "Why do you walk sideways like that, my son? You ought to walk straight." The Young Crab replied, "Show me how, dear mother, and I'll follow your example." The Old Crab tried, but tried in vain, and then saw how foolish she had been to find fault with her child.
Example is better than precept.
THE ASS AND HIS SHADOW
A certain man hired an Ass for a journey in summertime, and started out with the owner following behind to drive the beast. By and by, in the heat of the day, they stopped to rest, and the traveller wanted to lie down in the Ass's Shadow; but the owner, who himself wished to be out of the sun, wouldn't let him do that; for he said he had hired the Ass only, and not his Shadow: the other maintained that his bargain secured him complete control of the Ass for the time being. From words they came to blows; and while they were belabouring each other the Ass took to his heels and was soon out of sight.
THE FARMER AND HIS SONS
A Farmer, being at death's door, and desiring to impart to his Sons a secret of much moment, called them round him and said, "My sons, I am shortly about to die; I would have you know, therefore, that in my vineyard there lies a hidden treasure. Dig, and you will find it." As soon as their father was dead, the Sons took spade and fork and turned up the soil of the vineyard over and over again, in their search for the treasure which they supposed to lie buried there. They found none, however: but the vines, after so thorough a digging, produced a crop such as had never before been seen.
THE DOG AND THE COOK
A rich man once invited a number of his friends and acquaintances to a banquet. His dog thought it would be a good opportunity to invite another Dog, a friend of his; so he went to him and said, "My master is giving a feast: there'll be a fine spread, so come and dine with me to-night." The Dog thus invited came, and when he saw the preparations being made in the kitchen he said to himself, "My word, I'm in luck: I'll take care to eat enough to-night to last me two or three days." At the same time he wagged his tail briskly, by way of showing his friend how delighted he was to have been asked. But just then the Cook caught sight of him, and, in his annoyance at seeing a strange Dog in the kitchen, caught him up by the hind legs and threw him out of the window. He had a nasty fall, and limped away as quickly as he could, howling dismally. Presently some other dogs met him, and said, "Well, what sort of a dinner did you get?" To which he replied, "I had a splendid time: the wine was so good, and I drank so much of it, that I really don't remember how I got out of the house!"
Be shy of favours bestowed at the expense of others.
THE MONKEY AS KING
At a gathering of all the animals the Monkey danced and delighted them so much that they made him their King. The Fox, however, was very much disgusted at the promotion of the Monkey: so having one day found a trap with a piece of meat in it, he took the Monkey there and said to him, "Here is a dainty morsel I have found, sire; I did not take it myself, because I thought it ought to be reserved for you, our King. Will you be pleased to accept it?" The Monkey made at once for the meat and got caught in the trap. Then he bitterly reproached the Fox for leading him into danger; but the Fox only laughed and said, "O Monkey, you call yourself King of the Beasts and haven't more sense than to be taken in like that!"
THE THIEVES AND THE COCK
Some Thieves broke into a house, and found nothing worth taking except a Cock, which they seized and carried off with them. When they were preparing their supper, one of them caught up the Cock, and was about to wring his neck, when he cried out for mercy and said, "Pray do not kill me: you will find me a most useful bird, for I rouse honest men to their work in the morning by my crowing." But the Thief replied with some heat, "Yes, I know you do, making it still harder for us to get a livelihood. Into the pot you go!"
THE FARMER AND FORTUNE
A Farmer was ploughing one day on his farm when he turned up a pot of golden coins with his plough. He was overjoyed at his discovery, and from that time forth made an offering daily at the shrine of the Goddess of the Earth. Fortune was displeased at this, and came to him and said, "My man, why do you give Earth the credit for the gift which I bestowed upon you? You never thought of thanking me for your good luck; but should you be unlucky enough to lose what you have gained I know very well that I, Fortune, should then come in for all the blame."
Show gratitude where gratitude is due.
JUPITER AND THE MONKEY
Jupiter issued a proclamation to all the beasts, and offered a prize to the one who, in his judgment, produced the most beautiful offspring. Among the rest came the Monkey, carrying a baby monkey in her arms, a hairless, flat-nosed little fright. When they saw it, the gods all burst into peal on peal of laughter; but the Monkey hugged her little one to her, and said, "Jupiter may give the prize to whomsoever he likes: but I shall always think my baby the most beautiful of them all."
FATHER AND SONS
A certain man had several Sons who were always quarrelling with one another, and, try as he might, he could not get them to live together in harmony. So he determined to convince them of their folly by the following means. Bidding them fetch a bundle of sticks, he invited each in turn to break it across his knee. All tried and all failed: and then he undid the bundle, and handed them the sticks one by one, when they had no difficulty at all in breaking them. "There, my boys," said he, "united you will be more than a match for your enemies: but if you quarrel and separate, your weakness will put you at the mercy of those who attack you."
Union is strength.
THE LAMP
A Lamp, well filled with oil, burned with a clear and steady light, and began to swell with pride and boast that it shone more brightly than the sun himself. Just then a puff of wind came and blew it out. Some one struck a match and lit it again, and said, "You just keep alight, and never mind the sun. Why, even the stars never need to be relit as you had to be just now."
THE OWL AND THE BIRDS
The Owl is a very wise bird; and once, long ago, when the first oak sprouted in the forest, she called all the other Birds together and said to them, "You see this tiny tree? If you take my advice, you will destroy it now when it is small: for when it grows big, the mistletoe will appear upon it, from which birdlime will be prepared for your destruction." Again, when the first flax was sown, she said to them, "Go and eat up that seed, for it is the seed of the flax, out of which men will one day make nets to catch you." Once more, when she saw the first archer, she warned the Birds that he was their deadly enemy, who would wing his arrows with their own feathers and shoot them. But they took no notice of what she said: in fact, they thought she was rather mad, and laughed at her. When, however, everything turned out as she had foretold, they changed their minds and conceived a great respect for her wisdom. Hence, whenever she appears, the Birds attend upon her in the hope of hearing something that may be for their good. She, however, gives them advice no longer, but sits moping and pondering on the folly of her kind.
THE ASS IN THE LION'S SKIN
An Ass found a Lion's Skin, and dressed himself up in it. Then he went about frightening every one he met, for they all took him to be a lion, men and beasts alike, and took to their heels when they saw him coming. Elated by the success of his trick, he loudly brayed in triumph. The Fox heard him, and recognised him at once for the Ass he was, and said to him, "Oho, my friend, it's you, is it? I, too, should have been afraid if I hadn't heard your voice."
THE SHE-GOATS AND THEIR BEARDS
Jupiter granted beards to the She-Goats at their own request, much to the disgust of the he-Goats, who considered this to be an unwarrantable invasion of their rights and dignities. So they sent a deputation to him to protest against his action. He, however, advised them not to raise any objections. "What's in a tuft of hair?" said he. "Let them have it if they want it. They can never be a match for you in strength."
THE OLD LION
A Lion, enfeebled by age and no longer able to procure food for himself by force, determined to do so by cunning. Betaking himself to a cave, he lay down inside and feigned to be sick: and whenever any of the other animals entered to inquire after his health, he sprang upon them and devoured them. Many lost their lives in this way, till one day a Fox called at the cave, and, having a suspicion of the truth, addressed the Lion from outside instead of going in, and asked him how he did. He replied that he was in a very bad way: "But," said he, "why do you stand outside? Pray come in." "I should have done so," answered the Fox, "if I hadn't noticed that all the footprints point towards the cave and none the other way."
THE BOY BATHING
A Boy was bathing in a river and got out of his depth, and was in great danger of being drowned. A man who was passing along a road heard his cries for help, and went to the riverside and began to scold him for being so careless as to get into deep water, but made no attempt to help him. "Oh, sir," cried the Boy, "please help me first and scold me afterwards."
Give assistance, not advice, in a crisis.
THE QUACK FROG
Once upon a time a Frog came forth from his home in the marshes and proclaimed to all the world that he was a learned physician, skilled in drugs and able to cure all diseases. Among the crowd was a Fox, who called out, "You a doctor! Why, how can you set up to heal others when you cannot even cure your own lame legs and blotched and wrinkled skin?"
Physician, heal thyself.
THE SWOLLEN FOX
A hungry Fox found in a hollow tree a quantity of bread and meat, which some shepherds had placed there against their return. Delighted with his find he slipped in through the narrow aperture and greedily devoured it all. But when he tried to get out again he found himself so swollen after his big meal that he could not squeeze through the hole, and fell to whining and groaning over his misfortune. Another Fox, happening to pass that way, came and asked him what the matter was; and, on learning the state of the case, said, "Well, my friend, I see nothing for it but for you to stay where you are till you shrink to your former size; you'll get out then easily enough."
THE MOUSE, THE FROG, AND THE HAWK
A Mouse and a Frog struck up a friendship; they were not well mated, for the Mouse lived entirely on land, while the Frog was equally at home on land or in the water. In order that they might never be separated, the Frog tied himself and the Mouse together by the leg with a piece of thread. As long as they kept on dry land all went fairly well; but, coming to the edge of a pool, the Frog jumped in, taking the Mouse with him, and began swimming about and croaking with pleasure. The unhappy Mouse, however, was soon drowned, and floated about on the surface in the wake of the Frog. There he was spied by a Hawk, who pounced down on him and seized him in his talons. The Frog was unable to loose the knot which bound him to the Mouse, and thus was carried off along with him and eaten by the Hawk.
THE BOY AND THE NETTLES
A Boy was gathering berries from a hedge when his hand was stung by a Nettle. Smarting with the pain, he ran to tell his mother, and said to her between his sobs, "I only touched it ever so lightly, mother." "That's just why you got stung, my son," she said; "if you had grasped it firmly, it wouldn't have hurt you in the least."
THE PEASANT AND THE APPLE-TREE
A Peasant had an Apple-tree growing in his garden, which bore no fruit, but merely served to provide a shelter from the heat for the sparrows and grasshoppers which sat and chirped in its branches. Disappointed at its barrenness he determined to cut it down, and went and fetched his axe for the purpose. But when the sparrows and the grasshoppers saw what he was about to do, they begged him to spare it, and said to him, "If you destroy the tree we shall have to seek shelter elsewhere, and you will no longer have our merry chirping to enliven your work in the garden." He, however, refused to listen to them, and set to work with a will to cut through the trunk. A few strokes showed that it was hollow inside and contained a swarm of bees and a large store of honey. Delighted with his find he threw down his axe, saying, "The old tree is worth keeping after all."
Utility is most men's test of worth.
THE JACKDAW AND THE PIGEONS
A Jackdaw, watching some Pigeons in a farmyard, was filled with envy when he saw how well they were fed, and determined to disguise himself as one of them, in order to secure a share of the good things they enjoyed. So he painted himself white from head to foot and joined the flock; and, so long as he was silent, they never suspected that he was not a pigeon like themselves. But one day he was unwise enough to start chattering, when they at once saw through his disguise and pecked him so unmercifully that he was glad to escape and join his own kind again. But the other jackdaws did not recognise him in his white dress, and would not let him feed with them, but drove him away: and so he became a homeless wanderer for his pains.
JUPITER AND THE TORTOISE
Jupiter was about to marry a wife, and determined to celebrate the event by inviting all the animals to a banquet. They all came except the Tortoise, who did not put in an appearance, much to Jupiter's surprise. So when he next saw the Tortoise he asked him why he had not been at the banquet. "I don't care for going out," said the Tortoise; "there's no place like home." Jupiter was so much annoyed by this reply that he decreed that from that time forth the Tortoise should carry his house upon his back, and never be able to get away from home even if he wished to.
THE DOG IN THE MANGER
A Dog was lying in a Manger on the hay which had been put there for the cattle, and when they came and tried to eat, he growled and snapped at them and wouldn't let them get at their food. "What a selfish beast," said one of them to his companions; "he can't eat himself and yet he won't let those eat who can."
THE TWO BAGS
Every man carries Two Bags about with him, one in front and one behind, and both are packed full of faults. The Bag in front contains his neighbours' faults, the one behind his own. Hence it is that men do not see their own faults, but never fail to see those of others.
THE OXEN AND THE AXLETREES
A pair of Oxen were drawing a heavily loaded waggon along the highway, and, as they tugged and strained at the yoke, the Axletrees creaked and groaned terribly. This was too much for the Oxen, who turned round indignantly and said, "Hullo, you there! Why do you make such a noise when we do all the work?"
They complain most who suffer least.
THE BOY AND THE FILBERTS
A Boy put his hand into a jar of Filberts, and grasped as many as his fist could possibly hold. But when he tried to pull it out again, he found he couldn't do so, for the neck of the jar was too small to allow of the passage of so large a handful. Unwilling to lose his nuts but unable to withdraw his hand, he burst into tears. A bystander, who saw where the trouble lay, said to him, "Come, my boy, don't be so greedy: be content with half the amount, and you'll be able to get your hand out without difficulty."
Do not attempt too much at once.
THE FROGS ASKING FOR A KING
KING LOG
Time was when the Frogs were discontented because they had no one to rule over them: so they sent a deputation to Jupiter to ask him to give them a King. Jupiter, despising the folly of their request, cast a log into the pool where they lived, and said that that should be their King. The Frogs were terrified at first by the splash, and scuttled away into the deepest parts of the pool; but by and by, when they saw that the log remained motionless, one by one they ventured to the surface again, and before long, growing bolder, they began to feel such contempt for it that they even took to sitting upon it. Thinking that a King of that sort was an insult to their dignity, they sent to Jupiter a second time, and begged him to take away the sluggish King he had given them, and to give them another and a better one. Jupiter, annoyed at being pestered in this way, sent a Stork to rule over them, who no sooner arrived among them than he began to catch and eat the Frogs as fast as he could.
THE OLIVE-TREE AND THE FIG-TREE
An Olive-tree taunted a Fig-tree with the loss of her leaves at a certain season of the year. "You," she said, "lose your leaves every autumn, and are bare till the spring: whereas I, as you see, remain green and flourishing all the year round." Soon afterwards there came a heavy fall of snow, which settled on the leaves of the Olive so that she bent and broke under the weight; but the flakes fell harmlessly through the bare branches of the Fig, which survived to bear many another crop.
THE LION AND THE BOAR
One hot and thirsty day in the height of summer a Lion and a Boar came down to a little spring at the same moment to drink. In a trice they were quarrelling as to who should drink first. The quarrel soon became a fight and they attacked one another with the utmost fury. Presently, stopping for a moment to take breath, they saw some vultures seated on a rock above evidently waiting for one of them to be killed, when they would fly down and feed upon the carcase. The sight sobered them at once, and they made up their quarrel, saying, "We had much better be friends than fight and be eaten by vultures."
THE WALNUT-TREE
A Walnut-tree, which grew by the roadside, bore every year a plentiful crop of nuts. Every one who passed by pelted its branches with sticks and stones, in order to bring down the fruit, and the tree suffered severely. "It is hard," it cried, "that the very persons who enjoy my fruit should thus reward me with insults and blows."
THE MAN AND THE LION
A Man and a Lion were companions on a journey, and in the course of conversation they began to boast about their prowess, and each claimed to be superior to the other in strength and courage. They were still arguing with some heat when they came to a cross-road where there was a statue of a Man strangling a Lion. "There!" said the Man triumphantly, "look at that! Doesn't that prove to you that we are stronger than you?" "Not so fast, my friend," said the Lion: "that is only your view of the case. If we Lions could make statues, you may be sure that in most of them you would see the Man underneath."
There are two sides to every question.
THE TORTOISE AND THE EAGLE
A Tortoise, discontented with his lowly life, and envious of the birds he saw disporting themselves in the air, begged an Eagle to teach him to fly. The Eagle protested that it was idle for him to try, as nature had not provided him with wings; but the Tortoise pressed him with entreaties and promises of treasure, insisting that it could only be a question of learning the craft of the air. So at length the Eagle consented to do the best he could for him, and picked him up in his talons. Soaring with him to a great height in the sky he then let him go, and the wretched Tortoise fell headlong and was dashed to pieces on a rock.
THE KID ON THE HOUSETOP
A Kid climbed up on to the roof of an outhouse, attracted by the grass and other things that grew in the thatch; and as he stood there browsing away, he caught sight of a Wolf passing below, and jeered at him because he couldn't reach him. The Wolf only looked up and said, "I hear you, my young friend; but it is not you who mock me, but the roof on which you are standing."
THE FOX WITHOUT A TAIL
A fox once fell into a trap, and after a struggle managed to get free, but with the loss of his brush. He was then so much ashamed of his appearance that he thought life was not worth living unless he could persuade the other Foxes to part with their tails also, and thus divert attention from his own loss. So he called a meeting of all the Foxes, and advised them to cut off their tails: "They're ugly things anyhow," he said, "and besides they're heavy, and it's tiresome to be always carrying them about with you." But one of the other Foxes said, "My friend, if |
provincial government’s transactions, as well as Davao del Norte Rep. Antonio Floirendo, who had butted heads with Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez.
Also included were Milagrosa Tan of Samar, Aurora Cerilles of Zamboanga del Sur and Maria Valentina Plaza of Agusan del Sur.
“They chose who to punish,” one source said. “Not just the opposition, but also the undesirable admin members.”
“But it was the people who ultimately received the punishment. Filipino constituents were disenfranchised just because they don’t like the legislators representing them.”
The legislators lost infrastructure funds to build roads, bridges and seawalls, as well as projects for river flood control, another source said.
Confronting Speaker
A third highly placed source said one LP lawmaker had personally confronted Speaker Alvarez and Majority Leader Rodolfo Fariñas about the infrastructure cuts her district suffered and gave them an impassioned plea about staying true to her beliefs.
She was told, according to the source, that every action has consequences, and that she ought to be aware of how to fix the situation.
On the infrastructure cuts, Fariñas referred all questions
to House appropriations committee chair Karlo Nograles, who led the House contingent to the conference.
Fariñas was in Russia when the conference discussions were taking place.
Nograles did not respond to the Inquirer’s request for comment. Alvarez also did not respond to questions about the cuts.
Hidden pork
Tinio, one of the Makabayan lawmakers, said his group had never accessed any of the funding for individual lawmakers, which he described as “hidden pork,” and thus he was not personally affected by the last-minute cuts.
But Tinio added: “From other conversations with other representatives, it seems that is what happened. Individual allocations have been cut out and probably allocated elsewhere.”
Tinio said the problem was that, technically, these funds were earmarked for districts or constituencies—not to individual lawmakers, making it hard to prove.
“Officially all of this does not exist because the items are for the district. That’s the beauty of hidden pork. It is officially deniable,” he said, adding that most items would be in amounts less than P2 million.
Pork barrel finance pet projects of lawmakers.
Tinio said the retaliatory cuts differed from the approach of previous administrations.
“During the time of [Gloria Macapagal]-Arroyo and [Benigno] Aquino [III], the fund remained there, but you just wouldn’t release it. It was carrot-and-stick,” Tinio said.
Carrot gone
Now, “the carrot is gone for this year,” he said. “That is why we have to wait and see if the affected lawmakers will be silent or moderate” for the next budget cycle, he said.
No copy of the conference report ratified by the two chambers of Congress has been made available to the public.
Two other lawmakers contacted by the Inquirer deferred comment, saying they wished to wait until the General Appropriations Act of 2018 had been officially released upon signing by the President.
The House and the Senate ratified the P3.767-trillion national budget last week. It was signed by President Duterte on Tuesday.
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MOST READWith only two months left before Roy Hodgson selects his squad for England’s Euro 2016 campaign, he has several options to lead the attack in France this summer. Concentrating only on central strikers, wide players who may operate as part of a front three such as Raheem Sterling and Theo Walcott are not under consideration here.
England’s Euro 2016 Striking Options
Wayne Rooney—Manchester United 109 Caps 51 Goals
As England Captain, Wayne Rooney’s place in England’s squad is assured should he be fit. But should it be? He has struggled for form and fitness in a Manchester United side that has not fired on all cylinders in front of goal.
Rooney’s form for England has been better, scoring three goals in four games (although two of those goals were penalties) and breaking Sir Bobby Charlton’s goal scoring record. One thing the 30-year-old can bring to the table is experience, having played at two previous European Championships and three World Cups. So even after what has not been his best season, his place in the squad is deserved, but he will need to rediscover the kind of form he showed at Euro 2004 to stay ahead of the high scoring duo of Harry Kane and Jamie Vardy in the pecking order.
Harry Kane—Tottenham Hotspur 8 Caps 3 Goals
For the past two seasons, Harry Kane has been in imperious form, already matching his 21 Premier League goal tally from 2014/15 this term. Having successfully transitioned from the under 21s to the senior side he will, injury permitting, be almost certain to be in England’s final squad in France. Kane’s ability to transfer his form for Tottenham to the national stage could be key to how far England can go at this summer’s tournament.
Jamie Vardy—Leicester City 3 caps 0 Goals
Jamie Vardy has been one of the season’s success stories. His 19 league goals have helped to propel Leicester to the top of the Premier League. His performances have earned him his place within the England squad and have started the debate over whether he should start ahead of captain Wayne Rooney. Should Roy Hodgson stick with Rooney alongside Kane, Vardy could be a useful weapon from the bench, using his pace to good effect against tiring defenders.
Daniel Sturridge—Liverpool 16 Caps 5 Goals
Having spent most of the season out injured, Sturridge has only made seven appearances for Liverpool so far this season. However, Hodgson has made it clear that Sturridge is still in his plans, calling him up for the games against Germany and the Netherlands, and he will be very much in the manager’s thoughts for the final 23-man squad this summer. He will need to prove his fitness and form before the end of the season if he is to gain a place ahead of England’s other options.
Danny Welbeck—Arsenal 33 Caps 13 Goals
Like Rooney and Sturridge, Danny Welbeck has had an injury interrupted 2015/16. He has a good scoring record and is one of only three players on this list (Rooney and Defoe being the others) to have reached double figures for his country. He is in good form since his return from injury, scoring four times in nine appearances.
Welbeck’s value to England is in his versatility. His ability to play out wide as well as a central striker could give him the edge when it comes down to selecting the final squad.
Troy Deeney—Watford Uncapped
Troy Deeney, like Jamie Vardy, has put his name into England contention by helping an unfancied side to heights few thought possible back in August. Nine goals and a successful partnership with Watford team-mate Odion Ighalo has seen calls for him to be included in the England set-up. After being left out of this week’s friendlies, time is running out for the Watford striker. A strong finish to the season could help push his case but Roy Hodgson does seem to favour other options.
Jermain Defoe—Sunderland 55 Caps 19 Goals
Defoe has been a rare ray of light in Sunderland’s season as the club battles against relegation. His 12 goals make him the third highest English scorer in the Premier League this season. However, his omission from the latest squad, despite his form and international experience, suggest he is not in Roy Hodgson’s plans for this summer’s tournament.
Marcus Rashford—Manchester United Uncapped
Rashford has made a huge impact since breaking into the Manchester United side. Five goals in eight appearances, including a brace against Arsenal and the winner in the Manchester derby, have had Roy Hodgson asked about potential call-up for Euro 2016, which he has refused to rule out.
This would be a mistake. It is too early for Rashford to be called up to the senior squad. With a maximum potential games tally this season of 19 (should Manchester United progress to the FA Cup final) that is not enough games to effectively assess the young man’s consistency or ability to handle the pressure that comes with playing for England at a major tournament.
He should be allowed to develop within the England youth set up and should spend the summer with either the under 21s or under 20s and then look to progress to the senior side during England’s Russia 2018 qualifying campaign.
Main PhotoLabor Secretary Thomas Perez and President Obama will announce a new rule Wednesday that will expand the number of workers eligible for overtime pay. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
The Obama administration unveiled a new rule Wednesday that will make millions of middle-income workers eligible for overtime pay, a move that delivers a long-sought victory for labor groups.
The regulations, which were last updated more than a decade ago, would let full-time salaried employees earn overtime if they make up to $47,476 a year, more than double the current threshold of $23,660 a year. The Labor Department estimates that the rule would boost the pay of 4.2 million additional workers.
The change is scheduled to take effect Dec. 1.
The move caps a long-running effort by the Obama administration to aid low- and middle-income workers whose paychecks have not budged much in the last few decades, even as the top earners in America have seen their compensation soar. The last update to the rules came in 2004, and Wednesday’s announcement is the third update to the salary threshold for overtime regulations in 40 years.
“Along with health care reform, this is one of the most important measures that the Obama administration has implemented to help middle-wage workers,” said Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist for Vice President Biden and a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
A Texas judge ruled Nov. 23 to halt federal rules that would have expanded overtime pay to more than 4 million workers. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
About 35 percent of full-time salaried employees will be eligible for time and a half when they work extra hours under the new rule, up significantly from the 7 percent who qualify under the current threshold, according to the Labor Department.
The shift was swiftly criticized by small business owners, nonprofit groups and universities that say they may have to switch some salaried workers to hourly positions to afford the new threshold. And instead of seeing bigger paychecks, some salaried workers may be assigned fewer hours, they said.
“For many of these types of employees they’re going to be viewing it as a demotion,” said David French, senior vice president of government relations for the National Retail Federation. “They’re going to have to clock in and clock out. They’re no longer going to have flexibility at work.”
But some labor groups and unions said the change was long overdue. Many people putting in 50 to 60 hours a week without overtime are actually earning less than the minimum wage when all of their hours are taken into account, they said.
“The current level isn’t even enough to keep a family of four out of poverty,” said Judy Conti, federal advocacy coordinator for the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for workers. “It is not at all reflective of somebody who is an executive or a professional.”
President Obama first announced his plans to update the rules two years ago, but some consumer groups say they have been pushing him to alter the rules since he took office. On Tuesday, during a conference call with reporters, Biden said the move matched the president’s other efforts to bolster the middle class.
“The middle class is getting clobbered, although I think we’re making some progress here,” Biden said. He added that the administration has also called for equal pay and for raising the federal minimum wage.
The Labor Department estimates the change will boost workers’ wages by $12 billion over the next 10 years. And since the new rule calls for the income threshold to be updated every three years based on inflation, the department projects the threshold could rise to more than $51,000 by 2020.
But some companies said they may struggle to afford vital staff under the new rule. Employers may decide to scale back some workers’ hours and spread out some of their responsibilities among part-time workers, said French of the National Retail Federation. Other workers may not see bigger paychecks if their base pay is cut to make up the difference, the group estimates.
Some colleges said they worried they might have to cut services or raise tuition to keep up with the guidelines. Linda Harig, vice president of human resources for the University of Tennessee, estimates that the university would need to spend an additional $18 million to afford overtime pay for employees who would become eligible under the new guidelines, such as admission staff, hall directors and people with post-doctoral positions. That is the equivalent of a 4.3 percent increase in tuition, Harig said.
“We agree that there needs to be a change,” she said. “But we believe due diligence has not been done on the impact for higher education institutions.”
But supporters of the rule say companies that want to avoid paying overtime may boost workers’ pay up to the higher income threshold. Some workers may still be better off if their schedules are scaled back to 40 hours a week.
The administration’s rule would benefit women, minorities and young workers the most, according to estimates from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
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Proposed rules could make it easier for consumers to sue banksJose Godinez-Samperio, who grew up in Hillsborough, Fla., is seen in Tampa, Fla. The Tampa Bay Times, Kathleen Flynn/AP Photo
Undocumented immigrants in Florida can't be given a license to practice law, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday. Jose Godinez-Samperio, who moved to Florida from Mexico when he was 9 years old, sought a license in Florida but was denied by the court, which said federal law prohibits people who are unlawfully living in the country from obtaining professional licenses.
The justices said state law can override the federal ban, but Florida has taken no action to do so.
"Simply stated, current federal law prohibits this court from issuing a license to practice law to an unlawful or unauthorized immigrant," the court wrote.
The case involves Godinez-Samperio, whose parents brought him to the United States on tourist visas and then never returned to Mexico. He graduated from New College in Florida, earned a law degree from Florida State University and passed the state bar in 2011.
Godinez-Samperio was represented by his former law professor, Sandy D'Alemberte, who is a former American Bar Association president.
Godinez-Samperio received a work permit in 2012 as part of President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which halted the deportation of immigrants brought to the United States as children. He is working as a paralegal at Gulf Coast Legal Services, which provides free legal help to low-income people in the Tampa Bay area.
"I'm feeling very disappointed, but more than anything I'm feeling outraged at Congress, that they have failed to take action on immigration reform, they have failed to take action on dreamers issues, and actually I'm feeling outraged at the president as well," Godinez-Samperio said, noting that the U.S. Justice Department filed a brief in the case stating that the license shouldn't be granted.
"If I were able to practice law, I would be able to help so many immigrants navigate the legal system," he said.
Justice Jorge Labarga expressed disappointment in the decision even though he reluctantly agreed with it. He called the situation an injustice and mentioned Godinez-Samperio's was an Eagle Scout and the valedictorian of his high school.
Labarga, the first Cuban-American to hold the post of chief justice in Florida, said he and his family were welcomed with open arms when they arrived from Cuba because they were perceived as fleeing a tyrannical communist government, but Godinez-Samperio is perceived as a defector from poverty and is thus "viewed negatively."
Labarga said Godinez-Samperio was "the type of exemplary individual The Florida Bar should strive to add to its membership."
The Board of Bar Examiners in Florida found no reason to deny Godinez-Samperio a license but asked the state's high court for guidance because of his immigration status.
Similar cases have played out in other states. Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court granted a law license to Sergio Garcia, who arrived in the U.S. from Mexico as a teenager to pick almonds with his father. But that ruling was only after the state approved a law that allows immigrants in the country illegally to obtain the license.
Labarga said Godinez-Samperio "is so near to realizing his goals yet so agonizingly far because, regrettably, unlike the California Legislature, the Florida Legislature has not exercised its considerable authority on this important question."
D'Alemberte said he has already been in touch with House and Senate leadership about changing the law during the 60-day legislative session that began Tuesday.
Al Jazeera and The Associated PressHave you turned on keyboard shortcuts in GMAIL?
Hi Gmail Savvy readers,
Most of us use Gmail as primary email but have you ever used shortcuts to be productive.
First of all you need to turn on Keyboard Shortcuts from Settings.
Before you can use these keyboard shortcuts, you’ll need to enable keyboard shortcuts in your settings:
Click the gear in the top right and select Settings. Find the “Keyboard shortcuts” section and select Keyboard shortcuts on. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
Once you have turned on the Keyboard Shortcuts, you will be able to use following shortcuts and increase your productivity to next level.
Remember, there are a lot of shortcuts available in Gmail. I am listing only 17 important and easy to remember so that it really helps without much efforts on remembering part. You can visit the exhaustive list here.
Shortcut Key Definition Action Ctrl + Enter Send message After composing your message, use this combination to send it. c Compose Allows you to compose a new message. Shift + c allows you to compose a message in a new window. / Search Puts your cursor in the search box. e Archive Archive your conversation from any view. s Star a message or conversation Adds or removes a star to a message or conversation. Stars allow you to give a message or conversation a special status. r Reply Replies to the message sender. Shift + r allows you to reply to a message in a new window. (Only applicable in ‘Conversation View.’) a Reply all Replies to all message recipients. Shift + a allows you to reply to all message recipients in a new window. (Only applicable in ‘Conversation View.’) f Forward Forwards a message. Shift + f allows you to forward a message in a new window. (Only applicable in ‘Conversation View.’) Esc Escape from input field Removes the cursor from your current input field. z Undo Undoes your previous action, if possible (works for actions with an ‘undo’ link). g then a Go to ‘All Mail’ Takes you to ‘All Mail,’ the storage site for all mail you’ve ever sent or received (and have not deleted). g then s Go to ‘Starred’ Takes you to all conversations you have starred. g then c Go to ‘Contacts’ Takes you to your Contacts list. g then d Go to ‘Drafts’ Takes you to all drafts you have saved. g then l Go to ‘Label’ Takes you to the search box with the “label:” operator filled in for you. g then i Go to ‘Inbox’ Returns you to the inbox. g then t Go to ‘Sent Mail’ Takes you to all mail you’ve sent.
I hope you will enjoy these shortcuts with little practice and save great time. Share your experience in comments.
Regards,
DJPThe ban on electronic cigarettes at Scioto Downs Racetrack & Casino has gone up in smoke, and the devices are permitted, casino officials say. That means four of the state's six major gambling venues allow the use of e-cigarettes.
The ban on electronic cigarettes at Scioto Downs Racetrack & Casino has gone up in smoke, and the devices are permitted, casino officials say.
That means four of the state's six major gambling venues allow the use of e-cigarettes.
"The policy was a loose policy when we first opened, and nobody really enforced it. We weren't sure what the requirements were in Ohio," said Troy Buswell, vice president and general manager of gambling operations at Scioto Downs.
After a recent Dispatch article included a list of the casinos that allow and forbid e-cigarettes, Buswell said his staff "received feedback from our guests who wanted them.... Our guests have spoken. We listened to what they want."
The Hollywood casinos in Columbus and Toledo do not allow the devices, while the Horseshoe casinos in Cleveland and Cincinnati, and ThistleDown racino near Cleveland permit their use.
"We think a large majority of smokers would use e-cigarettes if they could," Buswell said. "When you have to get up from a video lottery terminal or if you're in a restaurant having dinner and go outside to smoke, it's not a fun thing to do. It hampers the experience."
E-cigarettes are cylindrical devices that often look like cigarettes. When the user inhales, this turns on a pressure-activated switch that heats up the nicotine-infused liquid inside, creating and releasing a vapor that is inhaled and then exhaled.
Buswell thinks allowing the devices could be a competitive advantage over the area's other casino.
Hollywood Columbus has no plans to change its policy forbidding e-cigarettes.
"We think it's the right policy," said spokesman Bob Tenenbaum. "We developed it to honor the spirit of the statewide smoking ban and because we think it's the best approach for our customers and employees."
He does not think the ban will have a negative effect on revenue.
"I think the use of e-cigarettes is very limited," Tenenbaum said.
Their use does not violate Ohio's smoke-free act, which was passed in 2006. The law addresses the burning of tobacco, said Tessie Pollock, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Health.
"So, since this isn't burning a tobacco product, it would not be addressed in the smoke-free act," she said.
Individual establishments are free to devise their own policy for the devices.
Many local venues ban them, including Nationwide Arena, the Schottenstein Center, the Greater Columbus Convention Center, Crew Stadium and Bob Evans Farms restaurants.
There has been much debate over the health issues and risks associated with e-cigarettes, which are still relatively new.
The Food and Drug Administration has argued that they haven't been fully studied and contends it's unclear how much nicotine and other harmful chemicals are inhaled by users.
A recent study at Boston University concluded e-cigarettes are safer than real cigarettes and might help people stop smoking.
"It's a vapor cigarette, it doesn't emit any sort of tobacco or smoke, and it's not a nuisance and it doesn't hamper anyone's enjoyment," Buswell said.
swartenberg@dispatch.com
@stevewartenbergIt still feels like the season just ended, but with the draft and free agency already behind us, it's time to look forward to the 2016-17 season. We will preview every team in the NHL throughout August and take a look at what the new season may hold.
Team: Philadelphia Flyers.
How they did last season: 41-27-14 (96 points); 5th in the Metropolitan Division; 7th in the Eastern Conference. Lost in the first round to the Capitals, 4-2.
Notable acquisitions: RW Dale Weise; C Boyd Gordon; D T.J. Brennan (two-way contract); and LW Roman Lyubimov (two-way).
Notable departures: C Sam Gagne; C Ryan White; C RJ Umberger; and D Evgeny Medvedev.
When they will play the Caps: Dec. 21 in Philly; Jan. 15 in Washington; Feb 22 in Philly; and March 4 in Philly.
Analysis: The Flyers surged into the playoffs last spring, riding a 15-6-2 hot streak ignited, in part, by no-nonsense first-year head coach Dave Hakstol, the emergence of rookie defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere (46 points), a career-year from Wayne Simmonds (32 goals) and a breakout campaign from Brayden Schenn (59 points).
After pushing the Presidents’ Trophy winning Capitals to six games in April, the Flyers had the look of a team that was a tweak or two away from being really good.
Then the offseason came and went without a whole lot happening. It shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise given the Flyers’ proximity to the salary cap ceiling. But it was still, in a word, underwhelming.
GM Ron Hextall’s biggest moves, in fact, were the signing Weise and Gordon, a pair of bottom-six forwards. Weise had one goal in 19 regular season and playoff games for Chicago after the Blackhawks acquired the big winger at the deadline from Montreal. Gordon, on the other hand, is a 32-year-old fourth-line faceoff specialist who broke into the NHL with the Capitals.
So, yeah, that’s pretty much it.
Are the Flyers any better off? Marginally. Maybe.
The grand plan, it seems, is for the improvement to come from within the organization in the form of a bounce back seasons from a few key vets and the emergence of a prospect or two.
Topping the list of bounce back candidates is Jakub Voracek, who missed nine games and saw his point total side from 81 to 55. It could be argued that Claude Giroux belongs in this category, too. His point totals have gone 86-73-67 the past three years. The 28-year-old team captain possesses top 10-scoring talent; the Flyers need him to get there again.
As for the prospects, the Flyers have one that many believe is ready to contribute: defenseman Ivan Provorov, the No. 7 overall pick in 2015. If the 19-year-old proves he belongs, there’s a chance Provorov (21 goals and 52 assists in 62 games for Brandon of the WHL) could give the Flyers’ blue line an offensive jolt similar to the one it got from Gostispehere last year.
Season prediction: I’m not confident in the Flyers’ chances of returning to the postseason.
If goalies Steve Mason and Michal Neuvirth—both in the final year of their contracts—push one another, I suspect Philly could squeak in again. Philly finished tied for fifth in team save percentage last season (.917).
If they just miss out, it’ll be due to one reason: After finishing 22nd in goals (2.57 per) last season, they needed to add some proven scoring talent and they did not. Hextall wanted in on the Jimmy Vesey sweepstakes, but the Hobey Baker winner ended up signing with the Rangers.
In a league where goals are increasingly difficult to come by, the Flyers need more of them. And, after poring over the projected lineup for the 2016-17, it’s hard to see where those goals are going to come from.
2016-2017 NHL TEAM PREVIEWS
Pacific Division
— Anaheim Ducks
— Arizona Coyotes
— Calgary Flames
— Edmonton Oilers
— Los Angeles Kings
— San Jose Sharks
— Vancouver Canucks
Central Division
— Chicago Blackhawks
— Colorado Avalanche
— Dallas Stars
— Minnesota Wild
— Nashville Predators
— St. Louis Blues
— Winnipeg Jets
Atlantic Division
— Boston Bruins
— Buffalo Sabres
— Detroit Red Wings
— Florida Panthers
— Montreal Canadiens
— Ottawa Senators
— Tampa Bay Lightning
— Toronto Maple Leafs
Metropolitan Division
— Carolina Hurricanes
— Columbus Blue Jackets
— New Jersey Devils
— New York Islanders
— New York Rangers
— Pittsburgh Penguins (coming Aug. 29)
— Washington Capitals (coming soon)
RELATED: 2016-17 NHL Preview: Columbus Blue JacketsApple has gotten a significant amount of critical press surrounding its rejection policies in the App Store. A few high profile rejections have been widely reported and inspired at least one amusing comic Apparently, Apple has now started labeling their rejection letters with Non-Disclosure (NDA) warnings:
THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE
Readers should note that Apple's developer correspondence may have already been covered by the original NDA, but Apple is now making it clear.In contrast to Apple's approval process for the App Store, the newly announced Android Market claims an entirely unrestricted free-for-all model. Early concerns about that model question how inappropriate, spam, or malicious material may be filtered. It seems that the efforts to prevent issues such as bandwidth abuse have been shifted to the carrier who has implemented caps for the 3G data plans at 1GB per month:
If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less.Changes in 0.9.20 vs 0.9.20.1 ST
New Features
– Large-scale update to the Long-Awaited Backup campaign (campaign I of the Personal Missions)
Idea Behind Changes.
Completely reworked the visual and sound component of the Personal Missions
Added completely new and unique rewards.
Revised mission conditions so that the main reward for the operation is always relevant.
Added Orders that considerably simplify completion of the Personal Missions.
Learn more about the changes to the Personal Missions in a special video that can be watched in the game client..
Interface and Sound.
Reworked all interfaces of the Personal Missions
Changed the point of entry to the Personal Missions: now it is located on the upper panel of the Garage, under the Battle! button. The tab name is Campaign
Added the “General” screen that displays all operations
Completely reworked the screen of operations: now it looks like a geographical map with objectives displayed as map areas
Completely reworked the Campaign reward screen: Now the main reward (a vehicle) is located in the center of the screen Added operation statistics: now players can see how much more credits can be earned
Added new sounds
Added a special sound track for the Personal Missions
Added interactive sounds: the more missions within a set are complete, the more intensive music is played
New Way of Earning Reward Vehicles
Commendations were replaced with Components:
To receive the reward vehicle for an operation, all five Components should be collected: hull, suspension, gun, power unit, radio
Each component corresponds to an appropriate mission set within the operation: Power unit: set of missions for light tanks Suspension: set of missions for medium tanks Hull (+turret or cabin): set of missions for heavy tanks Gun: set of missions for tank destroyers Radio: set of missions for SPGs
To receive a component, the final (15th) mission of the corresponding set of missions should be completed.
Orders
Added a new game asset: Order:
To receive an Order, the final mission of any set should be completed with honors
The Orders can be committed (i.e. used) to any mission. Thus: The selected mission will be considered completed without honors The player will receive the reward for the completion of the primary conditions A used Order remains committed to the mission The committed Order is not removed but disabled until the player retrieves it
To retrieve a committed order, the mission should be completed with honors. Thus, the player receives the Order back and can use it again.
Number of Orders to be committed to missions: Any mission from 1 to 14 requires 1 Order Mission 15 requires 4 Orders
Summary: orders can be used to pass complicated missions or missions that the player considers to be uninteresting. Important: players can commit Orders to the final mission of a set, even if the previous 14 missions are not completed. Having completed the four sets of missions with honors, players can immediately receive the last (fifth) vehicle component.
New Rewards
Added new rewards: badges Two badges can be completed in each operation: The rank II badge is received together with the reward vehicle. The rank I badge is earned for completion of all 75 missions in a particular operation with honors. After completing all missions in all operations, the player will receive the special unique badge: Campaign I Champion
2. Added new rewards: Camouflage patterns: A set of three unique Camouflage patterns (summer, winter, and desert) can be earned for completion of each operation: A set of three Camouflage patterns for the reward vehicle is earned for completion of all 75 missions The same set of Camouflage patterns becomes available for any vehicle of the nation the reward vehicle belongs to, once all 75 missions are completed with honors
Changes to the Mission Conditions
Missions in each operation were revised to correspond to the main reward. For example, now all missions of the StuG IV operation can be completed in Tier V vehicles; missions of the T28 Heavy Tank Concept operation can be completed in VII vehicles, etc. At the same time, participation restrictions remained unchanged. Players can complete missions of any operation even in Tier X vehicles.
Secondary conditions of final (15th) missions in each set were made more diverse. This is because of the fact that the additional reward of the final missions became more valuable: it now provides Orders.
Important! If the mission condition requires spotting 5 enemy vehicles (for example), and the player spots 7 vehicles, it is obvious that the mission is considered completed. This rule is true for all numeric conditions.
Bonds and Awards
Starting with Update 9.20.1, the Epic Medals and Battle Heroes achievements will be additionally rewarded with Bonds. Exceptions are accumulative medals. The number of Bonds is not final and might change.
Improvements to Bootcamp
Changes:
Disabled irrelevant options in the context menus of the vehicle research window, Tech Tree, and vehicle panel
Balanced the rewards (credits and experience) for victory and defeat when completing Bootcamp
Rewards received for completion of Bootcamp are displayed in the Notification Center
Added a notification that the reward is not received for repeated Bootcamp completion
Crew recruiting window was made more informative
Fixes:
Fixed issues related to inappropriate display of some interface elements in the Colorblind mode
Fixed issues related to saving and restoring the settings when entering Bootcamp and quitting it (vehicle panel and reticles)
Fixed issues related to inappropriate display of some game hints (losing concealment when shooting, returning to the base circle)
Fixed the rare issue related to inappropriate display of the Skip Tutorial button
Battle results were removed from the Notification Center in the mode
Battle results were removed from the Notification Center in the mode Fixed the issue related to display of the EULA window, when the game client is restarted
Updated the vehicle characteristics in the loading screens of Bootcamp
Music in battle, Garage, and in the final Bootcamp video no longer overlap
Added reward descriptions to the victory screen
Fixed issues related to bot behavior
Fixed the issues related to display of map borders
Reworked a number of vehicles to HD quality
Vehicles that have been remodeled in HD:
M6 T-34-3 Batignolles-Châtillon 155 mle. 58 Batignolles-Châtillon 155 mle. 55 Vickers Medium Mk. I Valentine Vickers Medium Mk. II Churchill I Valentine AT STB-1 Valentine II Object 416 T-150 KV-4 T-44-122
Switching to Wwise 2017.1.1
Switched to the new version, Wwise 2017.1.1, which allows further sound improvements.
Changes to vehicles
U.K.
Changes to the Tech Tree
FV215b is replaced with the Super Conqueror
Changes to the technical characteristics of the following vehicles:
Caernarvon
Changed the name of the second turret from Centurion Action X* to Centurion 32-pdr
Added OQF 32-pdr Gun Mk. II with the ammo rack capacity of 50 shells to the Centurion 32-pdr. turret Basic technical characteristics are as follows: gun elevation angle: 18 degrees gun depression angle: -10 degrees dispersion at 100 m: 0.34 reload time: 6.5 s aiming time: 2.3 s
Added the APCBC Mk. 3 shell for OQF 32-pdr Gun Mk. II. Shell characteristics are as follows: damage: 280 penetration: 220 mm shell velocity: 878 m/s
Added the APDS Mk. 3 shell for OQF 32-pdr Gun Mk. II. Shell characteristics are as follows: damage: 280 penetration: 252 mm shell velocity: 1098 m/s
Added the HE Mk. 3 shell for OQF 32-pdr Gun Mk. II. Shell characteristics are as follows: damage: 370 penetration: 47 mm shell velocity: 878 m/s
Removed OQF 20-pdr Gun Type A Barrel with the ammo rack capacity of 60 shells for the Centurion Action X* turret
Removed OQF 20-pdr Gun Type B Barrel with the ammo rack capacity of 60 shells for the Centurion Action X* turret
Removed the AP Mk. 1 shell for OQF 20-pdr Gun Type A Barrel
Removed the APC Mk. 2 shell for OQF 20-pdr Gun Type A Barrel
Removed the HE Mk. 3 shell for OQF 20-pdr Gun Type A Barrel
Removed the AP Mk. 1 shell for OQF 20-pdr Gun Type B Barrel
Removed the APC Mk. 2 shell for OQF 20-pdr Gun Type B Barrel
Removed the HE Mk. 3 shell for OQF 20-pdr Gun Type B Barrel
Changed load capacity of the FV221A suspension from 63,000 kg to 64,000 kg
Increased dispersion during movement of the FV221 suspension by 12%
Increased dispersion during movement of the FV221A suspension by 14%
Increased dispersion on hull traverse of the FV221 suspension by 12%
Increased dispersion on hull traverse of the FV221A suspension by 14%
Increased dispersion on turret traverse of the OQF 17-pdr Gun Mk. VII for the Centurion 32-pdr turret by 25%
Changed the turret traverse speed of the Centurion Mk. II turret from 30 deg/s to 26 deg/s.
Changed the turret traverse speed of the Centurion 32-pdr turret from 36 deg/s to 30 deg/s.
Improved hull and turret armor.
Changed the elevation angle of OQF 17-pdr Gun Mk. VII for the Centurion Mk. II turret from 15 degrees to 18 degrees
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: It’s been a long process. I’ve been working on LittleBits since 2008, and at the time when I started, there really wasn’t anybody thinking much about modular electronics yet. It was a difficult problem to solve at the time. Now you see more and more people doing it, and it is becoming a more common form factor. But in the beginning, thinking about how to make a “brick” out of electronic [components] was a challenging thing.
Initially it was about thinking about the system, and building it in such a way that every bit would work with every other bit in the system while still not requiring every bit to be a computer. Because if we make each one a computer then it’s like, “OK whatever, we’re recreating computers talking to each other.” But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to keep it as lo-fi as possible.
So it was about three and a half years of development. Maybe the first six months to a year were working on the system, and then the rest of the time working on the magnetic connector which makes it magical and makes it so fast, and getting it manufactured.
RW: Do you think schools are doing a good job of teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering and math)?
AB: I’m happy that STEM has become more of a popular buzzword and is getting more traction. I myself believe more in STEAM, which is Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math, which is a concept brought on by John Maeda who used to be the president of RISD [the Rhode Island School of Design].
I think it’s super important because I think it starts to break up this idea that there are boundaries between disciplines. If we slice society and slice professions by discipline and say, “You’re an engineer, just do engineering things; you’re a programmer, just do programming things; you’re a designer, just do design things,” that’s not where innovation is going to come from because the solutions lie at the interactions.
And so I think the concept of STEAM is so important because it starts to expose kids to fields that are technical, that are artistic, that are scientific, at an early age, whether or not they decide to go into science. Even if you’re going to become a poet, why not have a background in math? Even if you’re going to become a mathematician, why not have a background in architecture? These ideas create fluidity between disciplines and I think that’s super important.
Building Blocks For Technology Education
RW: Has LittleBits worked with schools or teachers to implement the kits in the classroom?
AB: Yes. We don’t have an education department per se, we have a very small team—one person in fact—who’s our education account manager. But we have about 1,500 schools that are using littleBits.
Basically the way it happens is usually a teacher finds LittleBits, buys them, plays with them in their classroom. We’ve heard anything from science class to arts and crafts class to math class to even design class at the university level. And then typically they’ll come back and they’ll buy more, and then they’ll show it to other teachers at their school and just like that, we’ve started to get more and more schools on board, from a very sort of bottom-up campaign.
And we have on the website people sharing projects that they’ve made. Some are super simple that are shared by kids, some are much more advanced that are shared by teachers, so you can really pick and choose what you want to be involved with.
RW: All of your models are open source. Why was that was important?
AB: I’m a very, very big proponent of open source. I’ve been involved with the open hardware movement for a very long time. It used to be that open hardware was this sort of disparate group of people all over the world that were interested in learning from the best practices of software, and applying it to hardware.
In early 2008, I became a Creative Commons fellow. And my research there was focused on how do we apply open source to hardware when in hardware, the cost of copying is not zero, the cost of sharing is not zero, and there is financial investment as well as time investment when you create something new. So when you give it up, what are you left with?
I did research there and started this project called the Open Source Hardware Definition, where I brought together some of the leaders in the open hardware movement, and we sat together and said, “Let’s create a statement of principle for what ‘open hardware’ means.” And two years later, this statement of principle for this open hardware definition is now the basis for an open hardware license that CERN used for the Large Hadron Collider.
I co-founded the Open Hardware Summit, that became the seminal open hardware event of the year that happens every year. And so for me, it’s difficult to say sort of, “Why did you make this open source?” For me, it’s been a very big part of my life for the past many years, because I operate under the assumption that if I share this innovation, people will make better things. Also, it goes against the patent industry which is very territorial.
That being said, there is always a thin line that you have to tread when you’re working with hardware because there are large sums of money at stake. And there are people that copy without crediting. For us, LittleBits is a fine line where we put all the circuits on the website, you can download them, you can make them for yourself, but the magnetic connector, for example, is not open source. That’s something that we want to keep as a competitive advantage.
How To Make Hacking Gender-Neutral
RW: Does LittleBits appeal to children of both genders? Is it more popular with girls or boys?
AB: This is one of the hidden missions of the company—to get more … I mean, in general to make electronics more universal and get everybody interested, but also particularly get more girls.
The idea is that if we make products gendered, and we make a product for girls and a product for boys, then we’re going to perpetuate a stereotype. So the way we approach this is by making products that are gender neutral. And they’re very intentionally gender neutral, it’s a lot of hard work to make something gender neutral because the opportunities to lock in on gender, you know, there are many of them.
So we make decisions that are affecting color, look. That are affecting collections of bits. Sample projects that we show. How we showcase heroes and inventors that have made things. We use them to select kinds of projects—things that are not only robotic, only handheld, things that are more, for example, situational.
We try to create all these situations that allow every person to find their own flavor and so, as a result, we get 50 percent that are interested in LittleBits [i.e., roughly half of LittleBits users are girls], an astronomical increase from particular electronic and technological companies.
RW: On that same note, as a woman CEO, how do you feel about being a role model to women joining the technology field? I’m sure you get asked this all the time.
AB: I do. I get asked this all the time.
My main thing is that I try not to think about the fact that I’m a woman. For me, I really just try to do the best work I can, and to compete, and if I spend time and energy thinking about “This happened because I’m a woman,” or “This person said this because I’m a woman,” or “This thing didn’t work out because I’m a woman,” it’s just wasted energy and time and mental space. So I try to use that toward more productive things.
That being said, obviously there’s still a lot of work to be done on getting younger women involved in technology and also getting established women to explore careers in technology. So that’s something that I am involved with through talks and mentorships and things like that.
RW: Do you think the tech community needs to do more to empower women in tech?
AB: It’s really focusing on stories, to be honest.
I don’t agree very much with conferences that are woman-focused. For instance, I got invited to speak at DLDWomen. That’s not something I think needs to be separate. Why have one that’s focused on women? Let’s just put more women on stage at DLD. Or TEDWomen, same thing. Let’s put more women on stage at TED instead of having TEDWomen. That kind of thing. For me that means showcasing more women, but on the world stage, not on their own stage.
RW: How does littleBits address that?
AB: Let’s take an example of a classroom where there are girls and boys, and they’re trying to do an electronics class. If you start by saying, “We’re going to make a robot,” you’re going to attract more likely than not, more boys into that exercise, and if you do attract girls, you’re going to attract a certain type of girl that anyway was attracted to technology, whether or not you did something about it.
Whereas if you say, “We’re going to learn electronics because you can make a robot or you can make, I don’t know, an attractive display, or you can make a flashlight, or you can make a blinking shoe,” those are things that boys and girls are equally interested in, and then each person finds what they’re passionate about. If they’re passionate about functional things, they might want to make a flashlight and a hat that has a fan that responds to temperature. That’s not gendered, but it does show a certain ingenuity of a kid. Versus somebody else might want to say, “I want to make a house.” But that doesn’t mean it’s a girl that wants to make a house, because it could also be architectural.
It’s sticking these kinds of examples and lessons that we showcase that make it really diverse but not gendered.
RW: What’s on the horizon for LittleBits?
AB: We have a couple of very exciting products launching in the next months, a lot of key bits that are going to be very important to allow more programmability, more intelligence, more logic, and also showcasing more of this platform. LittleBits as a platform for invention as well as a product.
RW: Will there ever be LittleBits for adults? I’ve been working on an hardware project and wires have been a big hassle. It’d be nice to have magnets.
AB: What are you working on?
RW: A waterproof temperature sensor with an alert. Probably something kids wouldn’t do.
AB: Stay tuned. There’s something very special coming that will solve exactly that problem, and it will do it in minutes.
People tend to think of littleBits as a toy, but it’s actually a very complex and powerful engineering tool. So for people who are trying to prototype, people that are trying to do complex engineering, we see more and more people using them for prototyping and for iterating, and for creating complex mechanical things as well. You can do your thing with it and explore, and there are a lot of things you can get out of it.
Lead image by Flickr user Joi Ito, CC 2.0; headshot of Ayah Bdeir and image of LittleBits kit courtesy of LittleBits; LittleBits project image by Flickr user Ultra-lab, CC 2.0Not many managers could escape the pressures of their profession by going on the road with a band. Gareth Ainsworth could if he weren’t so driven by the challenge of guiding Wycombe Wanderers to promotion from League Two. He has a band Road To Eden, and enough material, laughing that “we won’t be as big as Led Zeppelin but we’d give it a go”. Football comes first though.
Ainsworth last month signed a five-and-half-year contract at Adams Park, enjoys working with the chairman Andrew Howard, and is determined to keep Wycombe in the automatic promotion places despite the frustration of two home defeats. He recently figured prominently in the betting to succeed Harry Redknapp at QPR where he was twice caretaker and where he started gigging with his first band, Dog Chewed The Handle.
“Mum taught me to sing. She was a professional singer in the Sixties, a big band singer, did Dusty Springfield and Brenda Lee numbers. It was a really musical household. Dad was a big Who fan. It was either the rock of The Who, Jimi Hendrix and the Kinks or Brenda Lee and the Everly Brothers on my mum’s side.
“I loved the Doors, loved their sound. I know it’s a bit depressive like Radiohead.’’ Ainsworth even delivered a storming version of “Light My Fire” at the 2002-2003 Cardiff City Player of the Year awards. “I love Jim Morrison. I’ve been to Paris to his grave at Pere Lachaise, an amazing place. I saw the graves of Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Edith Piaf.
“At Wimbledon, I played in a band with Trond Andersen and Chris Perry called APA. At QPR, John Gregory played the guitar. We were going to cover a Bruce Springsteen song together but never got time with him being manager. I answered an ad in Loot magazine to become lead singer of a band. I went to the rehearsal, sang in front of these guys, didn’t tell them who I was, they didn’t know, and they said ‘OK’. We wanted a cool name for the band so chose Dog Chewed The Handle after an old Terrorvision song.
“We were playing the Grand Junction Arms (in west London) one night, and had all the gear on the QPR team bus, drove the bus to the gig, unloaded, word got round and a lot of Rangers fans came. It was a great gig. We did a few. We had one shot at the big time, when we were asked if we could back Bad Manners on tour but one of their gigs was Boxing Day and I couldn’t do it because of my career.”
Dog Chewed The Handle split but Ainsworth and the lead guitarist, Lee Sargent, reformed as Road To Eden. “It’s crazy to think you could make a living from music as well as be in football. Music’s such a competitive industry. But there’s an ember that’s still burning. There are 20-30 tracks Lee and I wrote together which we could resurrect. We could get them professionally put on an album, pay for it ourselves, get it out in the Internet, use my name to lever a few doors open. We’ve got a solid following, if we resurrect it, they would all come back. We won’t be as big as Led Zeppelin but we’d give it a go.”
As well as inheriting his love of music from his parents, Ainsworth also acquired their work ethic. “My dad always had two full-time jobs, working in a bookies, as a driving instructor and working in a factory as a clerk. It must have been really hard for him but he taught me this work ethic, and his belief in me was something special.
“I was on the books at Blackburn Rovers and on my 18th birthday, Don Mackay pulled me into the office at Blackburn. I’d just scored for the reserves at Ewood Park and thought I’d get a contract. He told me they were letting me go. I went outside Ewood Park, went between some parked cars and cried.
“It was devastating. I loved Blackburn. At six years old, I had my Blackburn Rovers season ticket in the Riverside. Simon Garner was my true hero. I saw him smoking outside the changing room and thought ‘maybe the Jim Morrison way is correct!’ The season after I left, the place erupted. Kenny Dalglish came. I missed all that. I never saw them in the Premiership.”
He fell into Non-League. “I was playing for Northwich Victoria for expenses and my dad said ‘keep playing because you’ll make it’. I eventually played 600 first-team games as a professional, and he must have been to 550. I was playing for Walsall once and he drove all the way from Blackburn to Norwich to watch me. I was sub. I got on and got sent off after two minutes. When I talked to him later, I said: ‘I had a bad day.’ He said: ‘You think you had a bad day. I got a speeding ticket on the way home.’ That’s devotion.
“After my father, John Beck was the biggest influence on my career,’’ continued the 41-year-old of his manager at Cambridge United and Preston North End. “He made me a winner. He made me this fitness machine who could match anyone physically. John Beck got a bad rap. He was ahead of his time. Yes, we did cold showers in 1991, but also he got us in iced baths after games, eating after training, massages.
“I was a journeyman. I was never gifted with talent like Adel Taarabt. He has more talent in his little finger than what I have. Heart-wise, I don’t believe many can touch me.”
His commitment levels took him via Lincoln City to Port Vale where he was embroiled in controversy during a match against Sheffield United on Nov 22, 1997, at Vale Park. Early in the match, an Ainsworth tackle on Dane Whitehouse resulted in the end of the midfielder’s career. “I’ve never really spoken publicly about it,’’ said Ainsworth, recalling that some Sheffield United supporters came looking for him on the bus when Vale visited Bramall Lane the following March. “A few of my team-mates told me there were a few people saying ‘where’s Ainsworth?’ Which is not nice. I wasn’t on the bus. I’d gone home with my parents. It’s not nice thinking that people think I meant it.
“Thinking that I ended someone’s career is not nice but I can look in the mirror and say I know I didn’t meant ever to injure anyone. I never have in my career. Ever. It’s not my style. I was going for the ball. I went in full-blooded, and it was a tough tackle. With modern medicine today, we wouldn’t be talking about a career-ending tackle. It was unfortunate.
“I sent him a letter when I knew it was a serious injury. There was no reply. Obviously, I do feel bad it was me in the tackle. But you never mean to end anyone’s career. If I could say (wish) the tackle never happened that would be great, but I’d never pull out of a tackle. I haven’t done in my career.
“I remember going back there and getting dog’s abuse, but it’s the pantomime of football as well. I remember going in tough on Alan Kelly, who was their keeper at the time, and I’d played with him at Preston, and I caught him. I said to him: ‘Please get up because if you stay down I’m not going to get out of here alive.’ It’s always an intimidating place to go.”
Ainsworth felt he developed at Port Vale. “John Rudge put this little bit of gloss on my game, got me ready for the move to the Premier League.” In the summer of 1998, Ainsworth was linked with some ambitious clubs. “Kevin Keegan was Fulham manager, they wanted me, and there was talk he would go to England and I could get a call but Wimbledon bid more.”
So he moved to Wimbledon for £2m. “I got the tail end of the Crazy Gang. I got the full fireworks on my first day. I went to training in not my best clothes. That was the height of them cutting everything up. I knew it was coming when Robbie Earle and Efan Ekoku both feigned injury and walked off training early. I got into the dressing-room and my trainers were cut up, my jeans were cut, and shirt set on fire. I went home in my Wimbledon training kit.
“John Hartson got the full suit burned. I was part of that. The Wimbledon ritual was that the signing before got involved in the next one. They held the lighter at the bottom of the trousers and it went up. There was surgical spirit on it. There’s always a great supply of surgical spirit at a football club.
“There were some nutters there. We had the Tuesday Club when we go out and have a few beers together. Neil Ardley, Ben Thatcher, Andy Roberts, Michael Hughes, Ceri Hughes, Carl Leaburn, Marcus Gayle, a lot of good lads. There were no social media, no camera-phones, not as much pressure from the missus.
“It was crazy but there was respect and control when Joe Kinnear was there. Joe would get the best out of a player. He would get your passions stirred up, make you want to go out there and run through a brick wall. He would get us steamrollering opponents.
“There was a game at Stamford Bridge where a few things had gone on on the pitch, and as we were walking back through the tunnel, Kenny Cunningham got a bottle squirted in his face, thinking he would passively take it, but in those days people wouldn’t. We all piled into the Chelsea dressing-room. There weren’t many punches thrown but it was pretty shocking, going in to someone else’s dressing-room. It was the strength of the team. You would not get that at many clubs now. Chelsea probably do have that spirit.
“When Egil Olsen came in, he didn’t realise how powerful the boys were. I felt sorry for Egil a bit. His English wasn’t great, his training was different, more technical when that team was still winning games on fire and spirit and toughness. At Bristol Rovers and QPR, Ian Holloway was a fantastic organiser, a general and you would listen to his instructions.”
Ainsworth gradually stepped into management, initially as caretaker at Loftus Road in 2008 after Iain Dowie left during the eventful Flavio Briatore period. “Flavio just came in one day and said: ‘Gareth’s in charge, Iain’s going.’ I was only reserve-team manager and still playing. Flavio was unbelievably controlling. He didn’t pick the team as people said but he would say: ‘I’ve paid a lot of money for this player, I want you to play this player.’
“I played a couple of players when he said play them. I also went against him and got a barrage of abuse. He really wanted to get Samuel Di Carmine in. He got him over from Italy. He was frustrated that Samuel was never playing in the team and had this good record in Italy. Flavio came from a country where the president picks the team.’’
Ainsworth particularly appreciates the strength of his working relationship with the Wycombe chairman, Andrew Howard, the successful ice-cream manufacturer and 2013 British GT champion. “Andrew worked his way up,’’ said Ainsworth. “Hopefully in me he can see somebody who is willing to work hard. In this season I’ve learned more off Andrew about management then I could have imagined off anyone. He’s got me involved looking at the figures, the running of the club, the turnstiles and the pies.
“Andrew taught me to take the emotion out of a situation, which is really difficult for someone like me who is very emotional. I cry at a good film. I cry at seeing people overcoming adversity. When somebody wins gold at the Olympics and you know how hard they’ve trained, it can choke me up.”
Ainsworth is big on team-building exercises. “We took the players to the chairman’s factory. It was never a threat, never to say ‘you might have to do this one day’. I said to them: ‘This is what other people do in the world. This is life, guys. These people who pay to watch you on a Saturday, this is how they earn their money. They put the graft in to come and watch you.’ Every month we try to do something to educate them in life. We sat them down and talked about one of the terrorist attacks.”
Ainsworth is also passionate about modern football honouring the sacrifice of former players. “I went to the Somme in 2010 to the (unveiling) of the Footballers’ Battalion Memorial. I will never, ever let those guys get forgotten. In October, I said to the players: ‘Have you all got your passports?’ The boys were getting all excited, there were rumours flying around of where we were going, and then I said: ‘It’s the Somme.’ The reaction was a bit flat. Some of them didn’t know what the Somme was. ‘Is that a beach somewhere?’ We explained it, got in Phil Stant (ex-pro, ex-SAS) and gave them tasks to find if they had any relatives there and a couple of the players did.”
He worries about the game. “I saw the television deal for billions (£5.136bn). It’s crazy. It’s a totally different world, a worrying world for League Two clubs. The gulf was huge anyway and it’s even bigger now. Some people come to watch League Two over the Premier League because it’s real football, you can get close to the pitch, close to the players, see the nitty-gritty. People still crave hearing that tackle, seeing the reaction of their players. To watch football is so expensive at the top level. Do the true fans who watched them years ago feel it is still their club? I’m not sure they do.’’
But it’s tough at his level. “We’ve got five members of staff: me, two coaches, a physio and a fitness coach. It’s crazy. We played Chelsea in pre-season and had to get extra seats from our dining room to put down the side of their dug-out to house them all. There were loads of them.”
Sharing with Wasps came at a cost. “The pitch is ruined, 15 years old, needs replacing. The rugby killed it. They haven’t replaced it because the finances went. Wasps going cost even more and a couple of the players had been sold to balance the books.
“We have a very low wage bill, bottom six in League Two. I’ve got 18 outfield players on my books, no youth team, no development squad. It’s still difficult to swallow the decision (by the Supporters’ Trust in 2012) of stopping the youth team. It was a financial decision. It hurt the club and it’s hurting the club now. We had Jordon Ibe. I knew he would be a superstar, could see it in training. He was special. I remember his debut well. He scored as a 15-year-old against Sheffield Wednesday and I got sent off. It’s definitely in the chairman’s plan to get an Academy going again.”
Wycombe have experienced a difficult week, losing at home to Plymouth Argyle and Newport County, but Ainsworth’s ambition is undaunted. He wants to guide Wycombe up. He craves the chance to work in a higher league. “I’d love a crack higher up. It’s getting tougher and tougher for League Two managers to make it. People like Gary Rowett (who went from Burton Albion to Birmingham City) do us the world of good. I’m so pleased for him, he’s an ex team-mate of mine and a friend. I’m so pleased ‘little’ managers can go and make an impact because it gives us all hope. It would be interesting to see me and Louis van Gaal do each other’s jobs for one week.”
Ainsworth would love to pick Van Gaal’s brains, and reflected on who would be his dream dinner guests. “Jesus Christ and Charles Darwin would be a helluva conversation. I’m religious, brought up Catholic. I’d let them get on with it. I’d be talking to Jim Morrison.”Jumanji is a 1995 American fantasy adventure film directed by Joe Johnston. It is an adaptation of the 1981 children's book of the same name by Chris Van Allsburg. The film was written by Van Allsburg, Greg Taylor, Jonathan Hensleigh, and Jim Strain and stars Robin Williams, Bonnie Hunt, Kirsten Dunst, Bradley Pierce, Jonathan Hyde, Bebe Neuwirth, and David Alan Grier.
The story centers on a supernatural board game that releases jungle-based hazards upon its players with every turn they take. As a boy in 1969, Alan Parrish became trapped inside the game itself while playing with his best friend Sarah Whittle. Twenty-six years later, in 1995, siblings Judy and Peter Shepherd find the game, begin playing and then unwittingly release the now-adult Alan. After tracking down Sarah, the quartet resolve to finish the game in order to reverse all of the destruction it has caused.
The film was released on December 15, 1995. Despite the film receiving mixed reviews from critics, it was a box office success, earning $263 million worldwide on a budget of approximately $65 million and it became the 10th highest-grossing film of 1995.
A similar film, marketed as a spiritual successor to Jumanji, titled Zathura: A Space Adventure, was released in 2005 and was also adapted from a Van Allsburg book that was more directly connected to the Jumanji book.
It is part of the Jumanji franchise, followed by Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and an upcoming untitled third film (2019), as well as an animated television series (1996–1999).
Plot [ edit ]
In 1869, near Brantford, New Hampshire, two boys bury a chest. A century later, Alan Parrish escapes a group of bullies and retreats to a shoe company owned by his father, Sam. He meets Carl Bentley, an employee, who reveals a new shoe prototype he made by himself. Alan misplaces the shoe and damages a machine, but Carl takes responsibility and loses his job. After being attacked by the bullies, who also steal his bicycle, Alan follows the sound of tribal drumbeats to a construction site. He finds the chest containing a board game called Jumanji and brings it home.
At home, after an argument with Sam about attending a boarding school, Alan plans to run away. Sarah Whittle, his friend, arrives to return his bicycle, and Alan shows her Jumanji and invites her to play. With each roll of the dice, the game piece moves by itself and a cryptic message describing the roll's outcome appears in the crystal ball at the center of the board. Sarah reads the first message on the board and hears an eerie sound. Alan then unintentionally rolls the dice after being startled by the chiming clock; a message tells him to wait in a jungle until someone rolls a five or eight, and he is sucked into the game. Afterwards, a swarm of bats appears and chases Sarah out of the mansion.
Twenty-six years later, Judy and Peter Shepherd move into the vacant Parrish mansion with their aunt Nora, after their parents died in an accident on a ski trip in Canada the winter before. The next day, Judy and Peter find Jumanji in the attic and begin playing it. Their rolls summon big mosquitoes and a swarm of monkeys. The game rules state that everything will be restored when the game ends, so they continue playing. Peter's next roll releases a lion and an adult Alan. As Alan makes his way out, he meets Carl, who is now working as a police officer. Alan, Judy, and Peter, go to the shoe factory, where Sam used to own, where a homeless man tells Alan that his father abandoned the business and searched for Alan, until his death just four years earlier.
Realizing that they need Sarah to finish the game, the three locate Sarah, now suffering posttraumatic stress disorder from both Jumanji and Alan's disappearance, and persuade her to join them. Sarah's first move releases fast-growing carnivorous vines, and Alan's next move releases a big-game hunter named Van Pelt, whom Alan first met in the jungle. The next roll summons a herd of various animals, causing a stampede, and a pelican steals the game. Peter retrieves it, but Alan is arrested by Carl. Back in town, the stampede wreaks havoc, and Van Pelt steals the game. Peter, Sarah, and Judy track Van Pelt to a department store, where they set booby traps to subdue him and retrieve the game, while Alan escapes from Carl's car. When the four return to the mansion, it is now completely overrun by jungle wildlife. They release one calamity after another, until Van Pelt arrives and when Alan drops the dice he wins the game which causes everything that happened as a result of the game to be reversed.
Alan and Sarah return to 1969 as children, but have memories of the future events. Alan reconciles with his father and admits that he was responsible for the shoe that damaged the factory's machine. Carl is rehired, and Sam tells his son that he does not have to attend boarding school. Alan and Sarah throw Jumanji into a river, then share a kiss.
In an alternate 1995, Alan and Sarah are married and expecting their first child. Alan's parents are still alive and successfully running the family business. He and Sarah meet Judy, Peter, and their parents Jim and Martha for the first time during a Christmas party. Alan offers Jim a job and convinces them to cancel their upcoming ski trip, averting their deaths.
On a beach in France, two young girls hear drumbeats while walking, as Jumanji lies partially buried in the sand.
Cast [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
While Peter Guber was visiting Boston, he invited author Chris Van Allsburg, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, to option his book. Van Allsburg wrote one of the screenplay's drafts, which he described as "sort of trying to imbue the story with a quality of mystery and surrealism".[2]
TriStar Pictures agreed to finance the film on the condition that Robin Williams play the starring role. However, Williams turned down the role based on the first script he was given. Only after director Joe Johnston and screenwriters Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor and Jim Strain undertook extensive rewrites did Williams accept.[3] Johnston had reservations over casting Williams because of the actor's reputation for improvisation, fearing that he wouldn't adhere to the script. However, Williams understood that it was "a tightly structured story" and filmed the scenes as outlined in the script, often filming duplicate scenes afterwards where he was allowed to improvise with Bonnie Hunt.[4]
Shooting took place in various New England locales, mainly Keene, New Hampshire, which represented the story's fictional town of Brantford, New Hampshire, and North Berwick, Maine, where the Olde Woolen Mill stood in for the Parrish Shoe Factory.[5][6] Additional filming took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, where a mock-up of the Parrish house was built.[7]
Special effects were a combination of more traditional techniques like puppetry and animatronics (provided by Amalgamated Dynamics) with state-of-the-art digital effects overseen by Industrial Light & Magic.[8][9] ILM developed two new software programs specially for Jumanji, one called iSculpt, which allowed the illustrators to create realistic facial expressions on the computer-generated animals in the film, and another that for the first time created realistic digital hair, used on the monkeys and the lion.[10] Actor Bradley Pierce (Peter) underwent three and a half hours of prosthetic makeup application daily for a period of two and a half months to film the scenes where he transformed into a monkey.[11]
The film was dedicated to visual effects supervisor Stephen L. Price, who died before the film's release.[12]
Release [ edit ]
Jumanji was released in theaters on December 15, 1995.
Home media [ edit ]
Jumanji was first released on VHS on May 14, 1996, and re-released as a Collector's Series DVD on January 25, 2000. In the UK, the film was also released on DVD as a special edition bundled with the Jumanji board game.[citation needed] The film was first released on Blu-ray on June 28, 2011,[13] and re-released as a 20th Anniversary Edition on September 14, 2015.[14] A restored version was released on December 5, 2017 on Blu-ray and 4K UHD to coincide with the premiere of the sequel, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.[15][16]
Soundtrack [ edit ]
Commercial songs from film, but not on soundtrack
Reception [ edit ]
Jumanji did well at the box office, earning $100.5 million in the United States and Canada and an additional $162.3 million overseas, bringing the worldwide gross to $262.8 million.[17][18]
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 53% from 36 reviews, with an average rating of 5.7/10.[19] On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[20] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.[21]
Roger Ebert rated the film a star and a half out of four, criticizing its reliance on special effects to convey its story which he felt was lacking. He questioned the decision to rate the film PG rather than PG-13 as he felt that young children would be traumatized by much of the film's imagery, which he said made the film "about as appropriate for smaller children as, say, Jaws". He specifically cited Peter's monkey transformation as making him "look like a Wolf Man [...] with a hairy snout and wicked jaws" that were likely to scare children. Regarding the board game's unleashing one hazard after another at its main characters, Ebert concluded, "It's like those video games where you achieve one level after another by killing and not getting killed. The ultimate level for young viewers will be being able to sit all the way through the movie."[22]
Van Allsburg approved of the film despite the changes from the book and its not being as "idiosyncratic and peculiar", declaring that "the film is faithful in reproducing the chaos level that comes with having a jungle animal in the house. It's a good movie."[2]
Sequels and spin-offs [ edit ]
Zathura: A Space Adventure [ edit ]
Zathura: A Space Adventure, the spiritual successor that was marketed as being from the same continuity with varied uses of the tagline, "From the world of Jumanji"[23] was released as a feature film in 2005. Unlike the book Zathura, the film makes no references to the previous film outside of the marketing statement. Both films are based on books written by Chris Van Allsburg. With the films being based on books that take place in the same series, the films vaguely make reference to that concept from the novels by having a similar concept |
will remain so in the future is to be seen.
Merging with machines
Some believe that the only way we can survive the robot uprising is by becoming cyborgs, including Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla motors, whose eccentric plans include colonizing Mars. Musk, who strongly favors the AI doomsday theory, suggests that to avoid being outsmarted by artificial intelligence, we must merge with machines.
Musk’s ventures include Neuralink, a company that plans to create devices that can be implanted in the human brain to improve memory or allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices. Among the things that such technology can accomplish is the direct uploading or downloading of thoughts and knowledge to and from the brain.
While Musk’s idea might sound outrageous, he’s not the only person who wants to enhance humans through technology. Others include Bryan Johnson, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who personally spent $100 million to launch Kernel, a company that aims to build neural tools that will allow the brain to do things that were previously impossible.
The belief that science and technology can help humans evolve beyond their physical and mental limits has very strong advocates, including Zoltan Istvan, the founder of the Transhumanist Party, who ran for U.S. president in 2016 and will be running for governor of California in 2018. Istvan plans to conquer death through science and technology.
Whether robots will obey humans forever, fight and eradicate them or drive them into slavery remains to be seen. In the meantime we need to make the best of the technology that surrounds us.
Read next: Hackers kick off #leaktheanalyst campaign by dumping data of $1bn security firmAs long as the Turkish President pursues a policy that contributes to the prosperity of terrorists in the Middle East, a resolution on addressing the situation in the region would be extremely difficult, German politician Sahra Wagenknecht said.
Ministry of defence of the Russian Federation Empty Promises: Erdogan Ignores Evidence of Turkey's Oil Trade With Daesh, Refuses to Resign
Western countries should exert pressure on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and put an end to the secret relations of Ankara and Daesh (also known as Islamic State terrorist group), otherwise the conflict in Syria may escalate, Deputy Chairman of the Left Party Sahra Wagenknecht said in an interview with German magazine Spiegel.
“The escalation risks are extremely high,” Wagenknecht said. “There are now 15 countries fighting in Syria, sometimes together, sometimes side by side, sometimes against each other. There is no common strategy,” she added.
According to the politician, the parties involved do not have any consensus regarding their actions. They don’t even have an agreement on the fact that the fight against the Daesh should be of the highest priority. For instance, Turkey has different priorities and maintains ties with jihadists.
“Erdogan has to be put under pressure to finally stop his covert terrorist support and close the Turkish border for the Islamic State,” Wagenknecht said.
© Sputnik / Dmitriy Vinogradov Erdogan Plans to Strengthen Daesh - Al-Nusra’s Leader
To resolve the situation, the international community should make efforts to cut off the sources of financing of Daesh, deprive terrorists of the ability to recruit new supporters and stop arms supplies.
At the same time, the German politician stressed that the military intervention plays into the hands of Daesh terrorists, because the airstrikes lead to a large number of civilian casualties, causing hatred and indignation among the local population.
“Germany is involved in a war, the course of which no one can really control,” the German politician stressed.
Since 2014, Daesh militants have seized vast areas in Syria and Iraq, and have declared a caliphate under the rule of Sharia law in territories they control.
After that the US formed a coalition of some 60 nations which has been carrying out airstrikes against the terrorists since September 2014. The mission has not been authorized by the Syrian government or the UN Security Council.Editor’s note: For more information about suicide prevention or to speak with someone confidentially, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (U.S.) or Samaritans (U.K.).
The strong social stigma around suicide means that it’s rare to find thoughtful, open discussion around the choice to take one’s own life. The subreddit SanctionedSuicide is one of few such places; since March 2013, it’s provided a balance to other, more prevention-focused forums, serving as a “pro-choice” arena for talking about suicide without demonizing it.
There are around 50 active users, with hundreds more lurking. Posts range from conversations about changing right-to-die laws around the world to informal polls about which song you’d want to kill yourself to, and also include “countdowns” from posters who are x amount of time from committing suicide; these posts are met with responses like “good luck, but I’m gonna miss you.” The only real rules: No posting of personal information, depictions of graphic acts, or descriptions/requests for the best ways to kill yourself.
Davin Gideon is one of the subreddit’s moderators; he spends roughly 15 minutes a day making sure the rules are being followed. Usually, though, they are: He estimates that he has to remove a post every two to three days. He was kind enough to answer a few questions about the unique forum.
“Our uniting cause is that it’s entirely up to the individual whether or not their life is worth living.”
Why have you taken on the role of moderating SanctionedSuicide?
I noticed that there were a lot of people who were very frustrated about being silenced by the public at large for trying to discuss suicide, so I figured it made sense to create a community dedicated to talking about it neutrally. I try to keep a hands-off policy because the subreddit is founded on the idea that society’s distastes shouldn’t censor discussion of anything; it wouldn’t make much sense for me to apply my own subjective desires to it. I continue to do it because it’s still a pretty unique location on the Internet. From what other posters have mentioned, there’s not really anywhere else nearly as active as SanctionedSuicide for a pro-choice forum to talk about suicide.
Have there been any posters you know that went through with suicide?
None I know of for a fact. There have been a lot of posters who suddenly disappear, many of whom leave suicide notes, so I’m [working] on the assumption that they found peace one way or another, be it through exiting this existence or finding a new lease on life. I’m wary of “malicious users” who would try and inflict pain on vulnerable people, so there’s no personal information allowed whatsoever on the subreddit. That makes it more or less impossible to confirm that someone’s passed on.
What’s the biggest misconception people have about this forum?
I’d say the biggest misconception is that we’re basically killing people by pushing them to suicide. The subreddit is considered a pro-choice rather than pro-suicide forum, which means that our uniting cause is that it’s entirely up to the individual whether or not their life is worth living. People who pressure others into suicide are viewed as murderers by most of the community, and any users asking for motivation to kill themselves are pretty much always told to relax and make sure it’s what they actually want before attempting anything drastic. After all, it’s the most important and possibly last decision you’ll make of your life, so you should make sure you’re in a calm and rational state when choosing.
You only have to take a cursory glance over the posts on the subreddit to see that SanctionedSuicide is actually an incredibly supportive place that gives a lot of comfort to people that they wouldn’t find elsewhere. All humans have an innate desire to just be heard/listened to, and outside of this forum, suicidal people are invariably told that they are broken/mentally unstable so nothing they say holds any merit. I imagine you could push Bob Ross to suicide if you replied to everything he said by ignoring it and saying he was mentally unstable, so imagine what that does to people who are already on the brink.
“To me, the argument that life is so inherently valuable that an undesirable life is better than nonexistence is incomprehensibly absurd.”
How did you become interested in the topic?
At a relatively early age I came to the conclusion that there was only so much this life could offer me, and I probably wouldn’t be able to handle existence beyond the age of 30, much less 40. In my mind, it was and is a rational conclusion and I didn’t/don’t really feel any despair about it, but the vast majority of the people I talked to were horrified by my desire to die by my own hand, and kept trying to convince me that it was a bad thing and that I should be avoiding death at all costs, even if it meant mental/physical pain. To me, the argument that life is so inherently valuable that an undesirable life is better than nonexistence is incomprehensibly absurd, so I’ve always been very interested in trying to rid people of their illogical fear of death. That led to a lot of research on death/suicide/right-to-die, and eventually to this subreddit.
How did you “come to your conclusion” about ending your life early?
I suffered from a very deep depression early on in life, and a lot of people told me to “focus on what makes me happy.” I sat down for a while and realized that while I may experience a very temporary type of “joy” from certain things, I usually got bored of those after a relatively short time, and I could never in my life recall waking up and feeling fulfilled or being truly “happy” with my life. Naturally I thought about what would make me happy, and I couldn’t think of a single thing that would give me lasting comfort in this life; even with millions of dollars, boredom would inevitably overcome me with any type of “stable” lifestyle. As well, I viewed the universe in a nihilistic sense, so there was nothing I could imagine that would give me a lasting purpose or reason to stay alive. Being in my early teens though, my scope [was] pretty limited, so I figured that I could stay around until 30 years old at least to see if life had anything to offer me that might change my mind. As of yet, it hasn’t.
Do you have contingencies in place for moderation of the forum if you end your life?
At the moment, I plan on being around long after Reddit is gone—assuming that the lifespan of past online forums is a good indicator of how long Reddit will last—but if I do get pushed over the edge or die in some other manner, I have a few different friends who know my passwords and said they would be willing to do what they can in my stead until a proper replacement is found.
“A lot of people are still struggling just to survive, and then a lot of other people can survive without any problem, but don’t find any enjoyment with ‘just living.’”
What’s been the biggest thing you’ve learned since you’ve started moderating the forum?
Probably how strongly the world censors discussion of suicide. I always knew that people didn’t like talking about it and would immediately panic if you said you didn’t like life that much, but I didn’t realize just how difficult the governments of the world have made it to die peacefully, or even argue that people have the right to decide what to do with their own life. There’s been a lot of good information posted on SanctionedSuicide about right-to-die movements, and it’s kind of depressing to see how far we’ve got to go before adults are given actual bodily autonomy. It’s a struggle in most of the world to die if you’re in excruciating physical pain, so there’s really no hope of worldwide legalized euthanasia anytime in the near future.
Do you think forums such as these are bringing the conversation more out in the open?
Honestly, no. Forums such as this are much more cathartic than anything. Any suicide forum is unarguably a counterculture forum of sorts, so their value lies in allowing the user a location to vent to like-minded individuals without having the masses spout the same hollow responses of support at them. The problem is that such locations are designed to be a relatively closed community that tries to hide from the masses, where bringing the conversation into the open requires the opposite: an unabashed activism of sorts.
Do you think suicide will ever be discussed completely openly?
Absolutely, but I’m pretty confident that it will always be the absolute last social issue that a society deals with. We’re at an awkward position in society—or at least the U.S.A.—in that a lot of people are still struggling just to survive, and then a lot of other people can survive without any problem, but don’t find any enjoyment with “just living.” Generally they won’t find any purpose without a religion of some sort, so they’ll turn to suicide (which is why you’ll usually find suicide rates are surprisingly high for countries with a high standard of quality of life). So long as people are still fighting for the ability to live in relative comfort, those who don’t want to live any more will probably be ignored.
Illustration by J. LongoUpdate: The dhang is now available for preorder, and you can join a workshop to build it yourself!
Feedback from first user testing of the dhang digital hand drum was that the latency was too high. How did we bring it down to a good level?
Testing latency
For an interactive system like this, what matters is the performance experienced by the user. For a MIDI controller that means the end-to-end latency, from hitting the pad until the sound triggered is heard. So this is what we must be able to observe in order to evaluate current performance and the impact of attempted improvements. And to have concrete, objective data to go by, we need to measure it.
My first idea was to use a high-speed camera, using the video image to determine when pad is hit and the audio to detect when sound comes from the computer. However even at 120 FPS, which some modern cameras/smartphones can do, there is 8.33 ms per frame. So to find when pad was hit with higher accuracy (1ms) would require using multiple frames and interpolating the motion between them.
Instead we decided to go with a purely audio-based method:
The microphone is positioned close to the controller pad and the output speaker
The controller pad is tapped with the finger quickly and hard enough to be audible
Volume of the output was adjusted to be roughly same level as sound of physically hitting the pad
In case the images are useful for understanding the recorded test, video is also recorded
The synthesized sound was chosen to be easily distinguished from the thud of the controller pad
To get access to more settings, the open-source OpenCamera Android app was used. Setting a low video bitrate to save space, and enabling macro-mode for focusing close objects easier. For synthesizing sounds from the MIDI signals we use LMMS, a simple but powerful digital music studio.
Then we open the video in Audacity audio editor to analyze the results. Using Effect->Amplify to normalize the audio to -1db makes it easier to see the waveforms. And then we can manually select and label the distance between the starting points of the sounds to get our end-to-end latency.
How good is good enough?
We now know that the latency experienced by our testers was around 137 ms. For reference, when playing a (relatively slow) 4/4 beat at 120 beats per minute, the distance between each 16th notes is 125 ms. In the following soundclip the kickdrum is playing 4/4 and the ‘ping’ all 16 16th notes.
So the latency experienced would offset the sound by more than one 16th note! We can understand that this would make it tricky to play.
For professional level audio, less than <10 ms is a commonly cited as the desired performance, especially for percussion. From Action-Sound Latency: Are Our Tools Fast Enough?
Wessel and Wright suggested that digital musical
instruments should aim for latency less than 10ms [22]
Dahl and Bresin [3] found that in a system
with latency, musicians execute their gestures ahead of the
beat to align the sound with a metronome, and that they
can maintain synchronisation this way up to 55ms latency.
Since the instrument in question is going to be a kit targeted at hobbyists/amateurs, we decided on an initial target of <30ms.
Sources of latency
Latency, like other performance issues, is a compounding problem: Each operation in the chain adds to it. However usually a large portion of the time is spent in a small parts of the system, so an important part of optimization is to locate the areas which matter (or rule out areas that don’t).
For the MIDI controller system in question, a software-centric view looks something like:
There are also sources of latency outside the software and electronics of the system. The capacitive effect that the sensor relies on will have a non-zero response time, and it takes time for sound played by the speakers to reach our ears. The latter can quickly be come significant; at 4 meters the delay is already over 10 milliseconds.
And at this time, we know what the total latency is, but don’t have information about how it is divided.
With simulation-hardened Arduino firmware
The system tested by users was running the very first hardware and firmware version. It used a an Arduino Uno. Because the Uno lacks native USB, a serial->MIDI bridge process had to run on the PC. Afterwards we developed a new firmware, guided by recorded sensor data and host-based simulation. From the data gathered we also decided to switch to a more sensitive sensor setup. And we switched to Arduino Leonardo with native USB-MIDI.
This firmware also logs how long each sensor reading cycle takes. It was under 1 ms for the recorded single-sensor setup. The sensor readings went almost instantly from low to high (1-3 cycles). So if the sensor reading and triggering takes just 3 ms, the remaining 84 ms must be elsewhere in the system!
Low-latency audio, a hard real-time problem
The two other main areas of the system are: the USB/MIDI communication from the Arduino to the PC, and the sound synthesis/playback. USB MIDI should generally be relatively low-latency, and it is a subsystem which we cannot influence so easily – so we focus first on the sound aspects.
Since a PC must be able to do multi-tasking, audio is processed in chunks: a buffer of N samples. This allows some flexibility. However if processing is interruptedfor toolong or too often, the buffer may not be completely filled. The resulting glitch is usually heard as a pop or crackle. The lower latency we want, the smaller the buffer, and the higher chance that something will interrupt for too long. At 96 samples/buffer of 48kHz samplerate, each buffer is just 2 milliseconds long.
With JACK on on Linux
I did the next tests on Linux, since I know it better than Windows. Configuring JACK to 256 samples/buffer, we see that the audio configuration does indeed have a large impact.
With ASIO4ALL on Windows
But users of the kit are unlikely to use Linux, so a solution that works with Windows is needed (at least). We tried all the different driver options in LMMS, switching to Hydrogen drum machine, as well as attempting to use JACK on Windows. None of these options worked well.
So in the end we tried going with ASIO, using the ASIO4LL replacement drivers. Since ASIO is proprietary LMMS/PortAudio does not support it out-of-the-box. Instead you have to manually replace the PortAudio DLL that comes with LMMS with a custom one 🙁 *nasty*.
With ASIO4ALL we were able to set the buffer size as low as 96 samples, 2 buffers without glitches.
Completed system
Bringing back the 8 other sensors again adds around 6 ms to the sensor reading, bringing the final latency to around 20ms. There are likely still possibilities for significant improvements, but the target was reached so this will be good enough for now.
A note on jitter
The variation in latency of a audio system is called jitter. Ideally a musical instrument would have a constant latency (no jitter). When a musical instrument has significant amounts of jitter, it will be harder for the player to compensate for the latency.
Measuring the amount of jitter would require some automated tools for the audio analysis, but should otherwise be doable with the same test setup.
The audio pipeline should have practically no variation, but the USB/MIDI communication might be a source of variation. The CapacitiveSensor Arduino library is known to have variation in sensor readout time, depending on the current capacitance of the sensor.
Conclusions
By recording audible taps of the sensor with a smartphone, and analyzing with a standard audio editor, one can measure end-to-end latency in a tactile-to-sound instrument. A combination of tweaking the sensor hardware layout, improving the Arduino firmware, and configuring PC software for low-latency audio was needed to aceive acceptable levels of latency. The first round of improvements brought the latency down from an ‘almost unplayable’ 134 ms to a ‘hobby-friendly’ 20 ms.Cool, but expensive. Roy Zipstein A few weeks ago came the startling news that Apple has now been reduced to a niche player in the global smartphone market, at least from a "platform" perspective.
Android is now running away with the race with ~75% global market share.
Apple's iPhone, meanwhile, has only ~15% share.
If the smartphone market were merely a "gadget" market, this wouldn't matter. Apple still has tremendous scale, and as its devoted fans often observe, it still arguably makes the best smartphones in the world. As a result, Apple is still the dominant player in the "premium" segment of the market, winning the hearts, minds, and wallets of rich consumers who have $600 to spend on a phone (or, more relevantly, carriers who will subsidize their phones).
But the smartphone market isn't just a gadget market. It's also a platform market. (Third-party companies build products and services that are built on smartphones.) And platform markets tend to standardize around the platform with the most market share, because it's easier and cheaper to build products and services for only one platform. Thus, in smartphones, platform market share matters.
Also, the "premium" segment of the smartphone market, the one Apple dominates, is already maturing rapidly.
More than 1 billion people worldwide now have smartphones.
These "golden 1 billion," not coincidentally, are the people who have most of the world's money. The next 6 billion smartphone buyers, meanwhile, don't have much money. So, for them, the price of their smartphone is going to be extremely important.
And, as yet, Apple doesn't offer low-priced smartphones that these folks can afford.
Kai-Fu Lee, a former Googler who now runs startup incubator Innovation Works in China, described the key dynamics of China's exploding smartphone market in a recent LinkedIn post.
The Chinese smartphone market is growing spectacularly quickly: From an installed base of about 50 million phones last year to a staggering 500 million by the end of next year.
Android's running away with the game. Importantly, this explosive growth was triggered in part by the launch of affordable $100-$200 Android smartphones.
As in other areas of the world, Apple is a premium brand in China. But most Chinese can't afford to shell out $500 for a phone. And the Chinese wireless carrier business is not built around subsidies, the way the U.S. and European carrier businesses are.
So even though Apple is enjoying huge growth in China, it's missing out on the truly explosive growth segment of the market: Mainstream Chinese consumers.
Kai Fu Lee explains:
Originally, China's market developed more slowly because of two reasons. First, usable 3G networks took much longer to develop than other countries. Second, there are few subsidies in China, so users had to pay one or two month's salary for an iPhone or Android. These inhibited the growth.
But both issues have changed. Broadband wireless is now over 58%, and smart phone prices have dropped to about $100 for an acceptable Android phone, and about $200 for a full-featured Android phone. Smart phones are now spreading like wildfire.
About a year ago, there were less than 50M users, basically affluent or tech savvy users who were willing to pay $500 for a phone and $30 a month for 3G. But now, students, young white collar, and even blue collar workers are swarming into the smart phone market!
The same thing is happening in India, another vast and burgeoning smartphone market. In India, though, Apple isn't even a strong "premium" brand, because it doesn't have the distribution system it has in China. Samsung and other Android vendors are cleaning up in India, while Apple tries to figure out how to sell $500 phones to people who don't make that much money in a month.
Apple's dominance of the "premium" segment of the smartphone market has allowed it to become the most profitable company in the world.
But the "premium" segment of the market is maturing, and the next phase of explosive market growth is going to come from lower-priced phones.
As Apple surrenders more and more market share to Android, meanwhile, it risks becoming an "also-ran" development platform. If that happens, the value of Apple's "ecosystem" will drop, and even the company's position in the premium segment might become threatened.
Apple isn't helpless here, but it also can't have everything.
As I described in a longer analysis of the smartphone market, Apple will soon have to choose between:
1) its extraordinarily high profit margin, or
2) its global market share
If Apple wants to defend, much less grow, its market share relative to Android, it's going to have to offer low-priced phones.
If it offers low-priced phones, however, its profit margin will almost certainly drop.
Defending market share is much more important to the company's long-term value than maintaining a particular profit margin, so this shouldn't be a tough decision for Apple. But it may cause some angst among the company's investors.
SEE ALSO: This Trend Is Very Worrisome For AppleMost startups simply don’t have the bandwidth to accomplish everything they want to with time to spare. But working with big, impersonal marketplaces to find freelance talent isn’t for everyone, either.
That’s why we asked a panel of startup founders from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) what new freelance marketplaces they’ve had their eye on:
Q. With eLance and Odesk merging, what are some other freelance marketplaces for entrepreneurs to consider who would rather work with an up-and-comer in the space?
Their best answers are below:
1. Staff.com
Staff.com is a great alternative to oDesk and Elance. I believe it will become a big player in this space as it focuses on long-term engagements, rather than just quick gigs.
– Patrick Conley, Automation Heroes
2. TaskRabbit
TaskRabbit is an interesting tool to outsource the physical tasks you would rather not deal with, like grocery shopping or even building your IKEA furniture. It could be useful when you need to get something done in a hurry.
– Ronnie Castro, Porch
3. Fiverr
Naming itself Fiverr has forever associated the company with $5 dollar gigs, but the Gig Extras feature allows for larger and more customized jobs. Fiverr attracts a different talent pool than oDesk and Elance, so it’s worth checking out for creative vendors.
– Sam Saxton, Salter Spiral Stair and Mylen Stairs
4. Expertise-Specific Sites
At Speek, we like to look for specialized freelance marketplaces, rather than general ones like Elance and oDesk. For example, when looking for a strong designer, we use sites like Behance and Dribbble, which host online portfolios of talented designers. When looking for a talented developer, we’ll look at GitHub or the AngelList Talent feature.
– Danny Boice, Speek
5. Your Network
The best freelance marketplace that you have access to is your network. The downside of marketplaces like oDesk and Elance are that you never know what you’re going to get when you first hire someone, which often leads to an extensive vetting process. You may save a few dollars by going there, but a recommendation from someone you trust will save you hours of valuable time.
– Emerson Spartz, Spartz
6. PeoplePerHour
PeoplePerHour is a wonderful alternative to Elance and oDesk. Its UK marketplace makes for a great opportunity to partner with clients and businesses around the world.
– Logan Lenz, Endagon
7. Guru.com
Guru.com is the world’s largest marketplace of freelancers, and it makes it quick and easy to find the help you need at an affordable rate.
– Josh Weiss, Bluegala
8. Gigzolo
Gigzolo is a great up-and-coming resource to help people book creative types — from photographers to videographers, artists, bands and more. It is not only beneficial for individuals, but it’s also beneficial for companies looking to book on a larger scale.
– Jessica Brondo, Admitted.ly
9. HireMyMom.com
HireMyMom.com is a service that matches businesses with vetted contractors who have at least one or two years of experience in fields such as administration, research, writing, graphic design, editing, accounting, Web design, PR and marketing. The community is small but highly engaged and passionate.
– Natalie MacNeil, She Takes on the WorldGLAAD on Friday released a video criticizing President Donald Trump's first 100 days in office.
“Since the moment Donald Trump won the 2016 election, GLAAD’s main priority has been to hold the incoming administration accountable on any potential anti-LGBTQ policies it may try to enforce,” GLAAD said in the video's description. “From erasing any mentions of LGBTQ Americans from government websites to deleting LGBTQ people from the upcoming 2020 U.S. Census, Donald Trump and his administration have proven to us that they are no friends of LGBTQ Americans and in fact are trying to remove us from the fabric of this nation.”
The 90-second video starts with candidate Trump at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland.
After Trump tells the crowd, “As your president I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” GLAAD rubber stamps the pledge “FAKE” and claims that the administration in its first 100 days has begun “erasing LGBTQ citizens from the fabric of our nation.”
In that time, the administration has purged pages related to LGBT rights from the White House website, dropped a lawsuit against North Carolina's House Bill 2 – which blocked cities from enacting LGBT protections and prohibited transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice – revoked Obama-era guidelines to public schools protecting transgender students, removed LGBT seniors from medical surveys and pushed through the nominations of key cabinet officials opposed to LGBT rights – including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Health Secretary Tom Price, Housing Secretary Ben Carson and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
“Even while you're watching this, Trump continues to handpick more anti-LGBTQ politicians,” GLAAD states in the video.
“His latest pick has called LGBTQ Americans an 'evil' that must be 'crushed,'” the group added, a reference to Tennessee state Senator Mark Green, Trump's pick for Army Secretary.
Trump marks his 100th day in office on Saturday.With the use of Kinect sensors, an Oculus Rift, and a ton of experimenting, two individuals found themselves strangely having an out-of-body virtual reality experience.
We chatted with creator Tobias Gremmler who is a visiting Associate Professor in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong about their latest experiment. Alongside student Adam Zeke (pictured), they set out to explore new interaction scenarios that are going beyond the normal game experience.
In the latest video uploaded by Gremmler, it shows one of many sessions where they are translating a real world environment into a virtual point cloud (by using two Kinect sensors) and viewed through an Oculus Rift VR headset. The red and white point clouds shown in the video distinguish the two Kinect sensors.
Observing Your Own Body Walking Away
The most interesting part of the experiment is around the 1:00 minute mark. Around this time, Zeke moves outside the range of the Oculus headset positional tracker and begins his out-of-body experience. The motion of the virtual camera that feeds visuals to the Oculus remains at his last position (while the rotation tracking is still working). While Zeke continues moving forward in real space, his VR point of view stays in place. He observes his own body walking away from himself.
Gremmler explains that they have reconstructed this situation several times and that “it is quite an intense experience, especially if one was wearing the headset for a longer time and gets used to the virtual representation.”
Perceiving Visual Information
Gremmler explains to us that they “wanted to explore how visual perception and cognition adapts to such situations, especially if the geometrical and spacial features of the virtual environment and the self-representation reach a certain degree of abstraction.”
Often we perceive visual information as more detailed the closer we get to it, but in the case of this latest experiment, the environment is initially perceived by digital sensors and then distributed to the headset. Thus the perceived information and digital resolution depends on the point of view of the environmental sensors rather than our eyes.
Gremmler is working on a number of additional experiments that include translating bodies into abstract graphics and virtual representations of real-world space.
We will continue to follow his experimentation in VR and you can also follow his progress at http://www.syncon-d.com
Stay up to date with the latest in VR projects by following us on Facebook and TwitterHow do you make Band-Aids stick so they don’t fall off, even if you sweat, swim or work with greasy parts?
Almost as soon as we moved aboard Que Tal, Dave and I had problems keeping any sort of adhesive bandage on. Band-Aids, butterflies, Steri-Strips, mole skin, and adhesive tape just came off in a matter of minutes (if we were lucky, hours). We had to come up with a solution!
One evening at a dock party, I was asking a more experienced cruiser if they knew of any way to make Band-Aids stick better. The woman behind me overheard my question and gave me the answer I was seeking: tincture of benzoin!
The Answer: TIncture of Benzoin
The woman was an anesthesiologist. She told me that when doctors use butterfly bandages or Steri-Strips in place of stitches, they always swab the skin where they want the bandage to stick with tincture of benzoin. While I don’t remember her name — her boat was Long Tall Sally — she even had an extra bottle that she gave us.
Tincture of benzoin works wonders. I have no idea why it’s not widely known, but I’m doing my part to spread the word. Seems to me that it should be in everyone’s first aid kit — shore dwellers as well as boaters!
NOTE: Tincture of benzoin (also called compound tincture of benzoin) is NOT the same thing as Betadine™, tincture of iodine or other antiseptics.
How to Use Tincture of Benzoin
Tincture of benzoin is simple to use. I found a Q-Tip to be the best applicator if the bottle doesn’t come with one. Just dip it in the bottle then wipe it where the bandage should stick. Let the tincture of benzoin dry on your skin for just a few seconds — about as long as it takes to pick up the Band-Aid and take it out of its wrapper — and then put the bandage on.
Now, before putting the cap back on, wipe the threads well. If you leave some of the liquid on the threads, it will do just as good a job of keeping the cap on as you want it to do with the Band-Aid. I’ve had to use pliers to get the cap off when I neglected this step! (UPDATE: put a tiny bit of Vaseline on the bottle threads and it won’t stick.)
A bottle will last for several years — I think we had that original bottle for 7 years!
You can buy tincture of benzoin in bottles or already on swabs and packed in individual foil pouches. I have not used the swabs, but they seem like they’d be handy for taking with you on hikes. You wouldn’t have to worry that you won’t be able to open the bottle out on the trail. The downside is that they are pricier per use than a bottle. Even in foil pouches, it’s a good idea to store the swabs in a Ziploc bag as they can dry out.
While Band-Aids stick much better, it’s not like you’re applying them with the medical equivalent of 5200. It won’t be a problem to get them off when you need to. I’ve also learned that in general, the “flexible fabric” bandages tend to stick better than the “plasticky” ones. Tincture of benzoin helps both types but use the flexible fabric Band-Aids to get the best results.
Where to Buy Tincture of Benzoin
Many U.S. pharmacies carry tincture of benzoin, but you often have to ask for it. We never could find it in Mexico or Central America. We now live in a small rural town in the US, and two of four pharmacies in town carry it.
If you can’t get tincture of benzoin locally, the best source I’ve found is Amazon:
Tincture of benzoin is also sold as a spray, but I’m afraid that the spray nozzle would quickly clog and have not tried it.
Here’s hoping you won’t need Band-Aids too often. But if you do, at least you’ll know how to keep them on!
This article was originally written on August 18, 2011. It has been substantially updated and republished on January 6, 2019. Original comments can still be found below.History shows that Muslims, Christians, and Jews, alongside members of other minority religions and sects, have lived in the Levant 'at an acceptable level of peace' for centuries; by meddling into Middle Eastern affairs Washington has opened a Pandora's box, Australian activist and political scientist of Lebanese descent Iman Safi told Sputnik.
Back in the 1970s it was US President Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski who began to use Islamic fundamentalism as a political tool in the very volatile regions of Central Asia and the Middle East, according to Iman Safi, a Lebanese political scientist, who has had an extensive and personal experience of civil war and currently lives in Australia.
"[ |
, combined with the proven Ageod formula make To End All Wars one of the biggest and most detailed Ageod titles yet!July 19, 2016, 3:53 PM GMT / Updated July 19, 2016, 3:53 PM GMT By Brooke Sopelsa
An ad posted in the Cleveland edition of USA Today on July 19, 2016, by the Log Cabin Republicans, the nation's largest LGBT Republican organization. Log Cabin Republicans
Log Cabin Republicans, the nation's largest organization representing LGBT conservatives, placed a full-page ad in USA Today on Tuesday slamming the GOP and its platform.
The ad, which was published in the Cleveland edition to coincide with the Republican National Convention, calls the GOP platform "the most anti-LGBT platform the Republican party has ever had."
RELATED: Despite Anti-Gay Record, Pence Doesn't Scare All Gap GOPers
“It’s my hope this advertisement will be a wake-up call to the intransigent and ancient voices on the GOP Platform Committee that marriage equality is the law of the land, gay families are a part of the fabric of America, and LGBT Republicans have an important role to play in growing the Party,” Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory Angelo stated.
In a press release posted last week to the Log Cabin Republicans’ website, Angelo said he's "mad as hell" about the party's platform and went into detail about its anti-LGBT measures.
RELATED: Some Gay Voters Say It's Dangerous to Come Out for Trump
"Opposition to marriage equality, nonsense about bathrooms, an endorsement of the debunked psychological practice of “pray the gay away” — it’s all in there," he stated. "This isn’t my GOP, and I know it’s not yours either. Heck, it’s not even Donald Trump’s! When given a chance to follow the lead of our presumptive presidential nominee and reach out to the LGBT community in the wake of the awful terrorist massacre in Orlando on the gay nightclub Pulse, the Platform Committee said NO."
Log Cabin Republicans have not yet endorsed a presidential candidate, something the group typically does in the fall. Though Angelo told NBC News last week he "definitely" has "concerns" about Trump.
Follow NBC OUT on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.The National Security Agency (NSA) wants to extend the amount of time that it can hold on to people’s phone records.
In a court filing on Wednesday, the Justice Department said the spy agency needs to keep the metadata beyond its current five-year limit to deal with a handful of lawsuits challenging the legality of its controversial surveillance program.
Destroying the data after five years “could be inconsistent with the Government’s preservation obligations in connection with civil litigation pending against it,” the department said in a filing with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is responsible for reauthorizing the NSA program.
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It asked the court for the ability to keep the data “for non-analytic purposes” until the cases from the ACLU, Sen. Rand Paul Randal (Rand) Howard PaulThe Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump escalates fight with NY Times The 10 GOP senators who may break with Trump on emergency MORE (R-Ky.), and others were resolved.
Because of those lawsuits, “the United States must ensure that all potentially relevant evidence is retained,” the agency said. That includes the metadata about people’s phone calls, which includes the numbers they dial and the length and frequency of their calls, but not the content of the conversations.
The metadata collection program has been the most controversial aspect of the NSA's surveillance revealed in documents from former agency contractor Edward Snowden. Civil liberties proponents have claimed that the program is illegal and should be ended.
In its filing, the Obama administration said that phone records kept beyond five years would be preserved in a way “that precludes any access or use by NSA intelligence analysts for any purpose,” including searches, aside from the ongoing legal challenges.
The ACLU on Wednesday rejected the NSA’s attempt to keep the records for longer.
“This is just a distraction,” the group’s deputy legal director, Jameel Jaffer, said in a statement. “We don’t have any objection to the government deleting these records. While they’re at it, they should delete the whole database.”
President Obama is currently weighing four separate proposals to reform the NSA's phone records collection program by transferring the phone data out of the NSA's hands.by
“L’État, c’est moi” —Louis XIV
Like a proud father CIA director John Brennan has announced that he’s creating a new directorate to conduct cyberespionage. Never mind all those classified documents published recently by the Intercept which prove that the CIA has been active in the cyber domain for years. While it goes without saying that the CIA’s subversion campaign is unsettling what’s equally thought-provoking is the manner in which the Intercept frames the involvement of the private sector.
Every year the CIA showcases its latest batch of subversion tools, taking them for a victory lap at a secret conference which internal documents refer to glibly as a “Jamboree.” In 2012 the Jamboree was hosted by Lockheed Martin at a campus in northern Virginia. Journalists at the Intercept describe Lockheed as follows:
“Lockheed is one of the largest defense contractors in the world; its tentacles stretch into every aspect of U.S. national security and intelligence. The company is akin to a privatized wing of the U.S. national security state — more than 80 percent of its total revenue comes from the U.S. government.”
Note how this description subtly creates the impression that the ultimate culprit with regard to mass surveillance is the government. Lockheed is merely a “wing” of an overarching “national security state”. All roads lead to U.S. intelligence, it’s all about the state.
Yet close examination of the history of the CIA yields a different picture. Contractors like Lockheed Martin aren’t a subordinate extension of the national security state. Quite the opposite. It’s probably more accurate to conclude that intelligence agencies, like the NSA, represent a public sector appendage of a much larger corporate power structure whose nexus resides in profound sources of wealth and influence outside of the government. A Deep State, if you will, that’s fundamentally driving what goes on in Washington.
In the absence of mass public outcry private capital sets the rules. It’s been this way since Ferdinand Lundberg wrote America’s Sixty Families back in 1937. Or perhaps Mr. Scahill hasn’t glimpsed politicians on both sides of the aisle trotting out in front of billionaires to audition for public office?
Hence there is a recurring theme in L’affaire Snowden that arises from the Intercept’s coverage of mass surveillance. Focus is maintained almost exclusively on the government without acknowledging the central role that corporations play. According to the Intercept’s worldview hi-tech companies are but helpless pawns being coerced and assailed by runaway security services rather than willing symbiotic accomplices that directly benefit from the global panopticon.
Honestly, doesn’t Ed Snowden have more information on Booz Allen?
When a doctor is faced with a serious medical condition the diagnosis typically informs the subsequent course of treatment. So it is with mass surveillance. Only in the case of mass surveillance the diagnosis is being shaped by certain actors to fit a preconceived solution. The agenda of the far right is clear. Nothing short of corporate feudalism. Libertarian political operator Grover Norquist boldly spelled it out: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
A messaging scheme which depicts the government as the chief villain is a godsend for people who are itching for reasons to demolish the state. Techno libertarians rejoice and present the public with their version of salvation. “Crypto everywhere” roar CEOs across Silicon Valley. How predictably shallow and self-serving. Their counter-surveillance talking points provide them with something new to sell us. It also absolves them of responsibility while redirecting the public’s attention away from more far-reaching systemic measures.
In light of this it’s hard not to notice the various twists of fate in L’affaire Snowden. Classified documents gradually trickled into the public record thanks to a whistle-blower who donated money to Ron Paul and exhibited some decidedly right-wing inclinations online. A copy of the classified documents were provided to a journalist who wrote a policy whitepaper for the CATO Institute (formerly known as the Charles Koch Foundation). Then out of the woodwork appears a kindly libertarian billionaire who dazzles the said journalist with fame and fortune, “a dream opportunity that was impossible to decline.”
The product of coincidence? To an extent. But what’s undeniable is that a member of the financial elite, a man who has clocked over a dozen visits to the Obama White House, deliberately leveraged his assets to inject himself into the unfolding course of events. Once more the narrative about mass surveillance that his news organization conveys tends to cast corporations as champions against mass surveillance while omitting to acknowledge how they stand to benefit from the global panopticon. It appears that elements within the ruling class would have us believe that the Deep State will solve the very problem that it intentionally created.
Bill Blunden is an independent investigator whose current areas of inquiry include information security, anti-forensics, and institutional analysis. He is the author of several books, including The Rootkit Arsenal, and Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, and the Malware-Industrial Complex. Bill is the lead investigator at Below Gotham Labs.Nearly everyone knows cigarettes can kill, but startling new research is also finding that smokers may actually be more likely to take their own life.
A new paper, published online in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco, finds state public health interventions, such as cigarette excise taxes and indoor smoking bans, could also reduce rates of suicide by as much as 15 percent.
According to the report, smokers have 2 to 4 times higher risk for suicide than non-smokers. Studies suggest that people who smoke are more likely to have psychiatric disorders or abuse other substances such as drugs or alcohol. Some research even argues that smoking changes neural pathways related to the pleasure centers of the brain that are activated as a result of addiction, which can severely impact mental health.
"It is an open question whether smoking is a direct risk factor for poor mental health outcomes, and by extension, suicide," the researchers write in their study. "If so, this would have significant implications for public health and clinical practice because it would establish smoking as a common and modifiable risk factor for suicide. In this case, more effective tobacco control policies and other smoking interventions could be promising means for suicide risk mitigation."
The study, led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, analyzed data from the National Center for Health Statistics, representing all 50 states. The researchers concluded that each dollar increase in cigarette taxes could reduce suicide risk by as much as 10 percent. From 1990 to 2004 those states that adopted strict tobacco control policies saw a decrease in suicide rates as well. In that same time period, states with lower excise taxes on cigarettes and fewer laws on smoking in public spaces saw a 6 percent increase in suicide.
Research suggests a new strategy to quit smoking
"Nicotine is a plausible candidate for explaining the link between smoking and suicide risk," said Richard Grucza, PhD, lead author of the paper, in a statement. "Like any other addicting drug, people start using nicotine to feel good, but eventually they need it to feel normal. And as with other drugs, that chronic use can contribute to depression or anxiety, and that could help to explain the link to suicide."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. Rates have risen sharply in the last decade. In 2010 there were 38,364 suicides, which averages out to 105 each day.
On the other hand, fewer people are smoking today than ever before. Currently, an estimated 42.1 million people in the U.S. smoke regularly, about 18 percent of the general population. In 1965, 42 percent of the adult U.S. population regularly smoked cigarettes.I’m sure many of you have seen this video clip at some point in time. It was created in 1986 as part of Albany’s Tricentennial celebration, and featured several celebrities at the time – Bob Mason and Bill Sheehan, for example.
See it? Like it? Good. This was the “Let’s Have a Party, Albany!” song that still brings smiles to a few faces, even today.
Now wait until you see and hear this.
Background.
My friend Lisa Wheeler started a column in Goldmine, the music collector’s biweekly, called “Collectormania!” In it, she discussed the many wonderful moments and joys of music collecting. She wrote the column for a couple of years, it passed to another gentleman, who eventually passed it to me. I wrote “Collectormania!” for ten years after that, and eventually gave the column back to Lisa, where she wrote a few more issues before the column was retired.
Lisa still collects records – in fact, she specializes in “home town” music and “radio station use only” recordings, special custom-made records that were played on radio stations to enhance that local sound. And when she came across this track… she asked me if it would be worth a blog post.
Are you kidding me? Heck yeah I want to do a blog post about this!
There aren’t very many clues about the recording of this record. It may have been produced by the local Coca-Cola bottling company, or at least they received some sponsorship money. It was probably played only on the Capital District’s premier Top 40 station, 1540 WPTR. And judging from the style of the music, I’d estimate this was recorded maybe around the late 1960’s. Not sure who the “Box” is on the label, but Lisa identified the “Ramsburg” as Jim Ramsburg, who was the operations manager of WPTR at the time.
And all you have to do is click on the embedded YouTube clip below…
Whoa.
I don’t know about you, but that sure blows “Let’s Have a Party, Albany!” out of the water.
Don’tcha think?
Hopefully I can dig up some more info on this little track in a future blog post. But for now… enjoy what’s here.
And if you’d like to hear some clips of the greatest WPTR disc jockey of all time, Boom-Boom Brannigan… here’s a rare late 1960’s air-check from the legend.Beyond calculus, the report found that high schools with high numbers of black and Latino students were less likely to offer physics, chemistry, and even algebra II. And even in schools where advanced math and science were taught, black and Latino students were concentrated in less rigorous courses. While black and Latino kids made up 36 percent of students in schools where calculus was offered, they only comprised 21 percent of the students in calculus classes. Students who don’t speak English fluently made up 5 percent of students at schools who offered the course, but just 1 percent of those who took it.
The one ray of good news, as Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary for civil rights, said, is that girls made up 49 percent of the student body and also 49 percent of students enrolled in calculus. But Lhamon called the fact that half of all schools don’t offer calculus at all “galling.” Black and Latino students were also less likely to be enrolled in gifted-and-talented programs and to take advanced-placement courses that can translate into college credit.
States have some flexibility in what to measure as they consider how they plan to prove to Washington that they are educating all students equally under the country’s new education law. While King stopped short of explicitly encouraging states to track access to advanced coursework, he reiterated that it would be an appropriate thing to measure.
Natasha Ushomirsky, the director of K-12 policy at Education Trust, a nonprofit focused on helping low-income students of color succeed, wants to see more districts and schools consider not only access to, but success in, such courses once kids are enrolled. Some states, such as Florida and Indiana, she pointed out, moved that direction years ago, and the new education law may encourage others to follow suit. But, Ushomirsky cautioned, schools will need to look beyond averages at how different subgroups of students are doing. Will it be enough to reduce educational inequities that have long been entrenched? “I think we’re absolutely hopeful,” she said.
The Education Department points in the report to several Obama-administration efforts to reduce these racial gaps, including a letter outlining how schools and other groups can use federal funds to support STEM education, and a $4 billion proposal by President Obama to expand computer-science education.
Some schools are doing good work at reducing gaps in access to advanced courses already and might serve as a roadmap for others. At Elmont Memorial High School in Elmont, New York, for instance, teachers and administrators disaggregate data by teacher and then have teachers whose students are doing well in particular subjects share “best practices” with other teachers, said Kevin Dougherty, the school’s principal. The school also considers the opinions of parents, students, and counselors in deciding which kids are capable of succeeding in an advanced course instead of relying strictly on a list of prerequisites. “The parents and students have a voice,” Dougherty said. The school axed a two-year-long geometry course that had been a “dumping ground” for low-achieving students before Dougherty became the head of the school, too. Afterward, the portion of students earning an “advanced” distinction on their diplomas went up.
Yet not all schools are taking such deliberate steps to reduce gaps. “These data should serve as a sobering reality check,” King said. While the secretary acknowledged that some groups (Republicans and teachers’ unions, for instance) think the department is trying to be too involved in how states interpret the law, he issued a stern warning. “We will not,” he said, “compromise away the rights of all students to an excellent education.”
This article is part of our Next America: Higher Education project, which is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.Kazakhstan Newspapers Feel the Screws Tighten
The authorities are finding creative new ways to silence some independent publications. From IWPR.
13 January 2014
Newspapers that carry criticism of Kazakhstan’s government are being squeezed out of existence, media activists in the Central Asian state claim.
The campaign is being conducted by indirect means, through fines and restrictions imposed for minor infractions of publishing regulations. Analysts say the authorities are trying to prevent the independent media from recovering from a series of closures.
Two independent newspapers, Pravdivaya Gazeta and Ashyk Alang/Tribuna, and the Communist Party paper, Pravda Kazakhstana, have been temporarily closed on several occasions over the last year.
Between fines and suspension orders, Pravdivaya Gazeta managed to publish only a few issues last year.
In the most recent incident, it was barred from publishing for three months and fined $560 on 28 December. It was accused of carrying unclear information on its masthead and of printing an issue two days earlier than scheduled.
Pravdivaya Gazeta was in trouble from the moment it launched in April 2013, when it was fined for not coming out regularly.
Rozlana Taukina, head of media rights group Journalists in Trouble, said the charge was absurd.
“It was the very first issue, so there couldn’t have been any interruption in its regularity. But the fine was imposed nevertheless,” she said.
Two months later, Pravdivaya Gazeta received its first three-months suspension, accused of exaggerating its circulation figures.
The Washington-based watchdog group Freedom House sees the latest suspension as “unacceptable interference in freedom of the press.”
“The latest suspension of Pravdivaya Gazeta continues a clear pattern of harassment of independent media in Kazakhstan, whereby insignificant issues with printing regulations – such as printing fewer copies than specified in a newspaper’s registration or printing issues on a slightly different schedule – are used as an excuse to suspend and harass media that the government dislikes,” Freedom House said in an 8 January statement that noted that other papers had suffered “interference under similar pretexts.”
The bilingual (Kazakh and Russian) newspaper Ashyk Alang/Tribuna was another new arrival that swiftly ran into trouble.
In September, within three months of setting up, the paper was barred from publishing for a three-month period and fined more than $1,000. On that occasion, the offense was not publishing enough – specifically, failure to inform the authorities that the paper was taking a break over the August holiday month.
Staff reporter Inga Imanbay said that since an early appeal had failed, the editors decided not to contest the decision.
“Court rulings against the opposition press are politically motivated,” she said.
At the outset, Ashyk Alang/Tribuna’s founders took the precaution of registering a second title with the similar-sounding name Sayasat Alangy. Since September, they have published that newspaper instead.
“In Kazakhstan, where there is harsh pressure on the media, and the authorities can shut down independent outlets under various pretexts, opposition newspapers need to have a plan B,” Imanbay explained.
Pravda Kazakhstana, the weekly outlet of the Communist Party, in opposition since the country became independent in 1991, has been subjected to a similar pattern of repeat suspensions and fines in the last year.
Taukina said that because of financial troubles in early 2013, Pravda Kazakhstana went from four to two issues a month, leading to a court order for temporary suspension.
When the suspension period ended, Pravda Kazakhstana went back to weekly publication, but a couple of months later it was fined and again suspended, this time on the grounds that the registration number given in its masthead was out of date.
Taukina said the practice of punishing newspapers for cutting their publishing schedule was new. Press outlets often had to downsize when money is tight, yet this never used to be regarded as a legal infraction.
The real motive, Taukina suspects, is that these newspapers carried reports that the Kazak authorities objected to.
Pravdivaya Gazeta’s inaugural issue carried extracts from a book written by opposition politician Zamanbek Nurkadilov, who was shot dead in 2005. Pravda Kazakhstana, meanwhile, covered a story about exiled opposition leader Mukhtar Ablyazov’s wife and daughter being deported from Italy to Kazakhstan last summer.
Ashyk Alang and Pravdivaya Gazeta emerged last year to fill a vacuum left after a crackdown on established opposition media.
In December 2012, a court in Almaty banned eight newspapers and 23 websites affiliated with the Respublika newspaper along with the K+ satellite TV channel, Stan TV and the Vzglyad newspaper, on the grounds that they articulated extremist views.
Respublika and some other outlets were linked to Ablyazov, a former banker and now a staunch critic of President Nursultan Nazarbaev. They also came under pressure because they were the only media in Kazakhstan to provide consistent coverage of months of oil-industry strikes in 2011, and their violent culmination in December that year, when police fired into crowds of protesters in the western town of Zhanaozen, leaving 16 dead.
Igor Kolov, head of the Public Committee for Human Rights, sees Pravdivaya Gazeta and others as just the latest victims of a campaign to purge critical voices that has been going for several years. Only the methods have changed – procedural infractions are less liable to alarm the international community than criminal charges.
“These newspapers give objective information without embellishing it, and without praising the nonexistent achievements of the government,” Kolov said. “Critical media are automatically labeled as ‘opposition.’ ”
He added, “If the authorities see Ablyazov’s presence behind every independent newspaper, [he] must be doing well.”
Another factor, Kolov said, is that the government dislikes media outlets that are financially and hence politically independent, in contrast to state media and many private outlets that get funding through state contracts.
The authorities will also be aware of the readership for independent press.
“In villages, I’ve seen for myself how people pass these newspapers around and vigorously discuss and comment on the personalities and events they cover,” Kolov said.
Andrei Grishin of the Kazakhstan Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law agreed that some newspapers were popular enough to become commercially viable.
“The newspaper Tribuna [Russian version of Ashyk Alang] has become well-known and has reached circulation levels that could allow it to fund itself,” he said.
Political analyst Zamir Karazhanov pointed to another factor that made the prospects for the independent media sector look even gloomier. The next presidential election is scheduled for 2016, and everyone is asking whether at 73, Nazarbaev might decide not to run again. A managed succession is likely to involve hands-on management of the media story, and independent newspapers would hardly fit with that plan.
“Given the prospect of a leadership change, Kazakhstan is entering uneasy times, and the media will play an important role in this process,” Karajanov said. “Past experience in Kazakhstan shows that the natural course affairs is to tighten the screws on the media.”There are 435 people in the House, Mr. Holt said, and “420 don’t know much about science and choose not to.” He recalled his exasperation when anthrax spores were discovered in the Capitol in 2001 and colleagues came to him and said, “You are a scientist, you must know about anthrax,” a subject ordinarily missing from the physics curriculum.
“The difference,” he said, “is we would be perfectly happy to pick up a copy of The New England Journal of Medicine and read about the etiology of anthrax.”
“In fact, we basically did that,” Mr. Ehlers said.
“We know more than our colleagues,” Mr. Holt said, “but not more than they could know.”
Unfortunately, Mr. Foster said, “unless things play to their advantage in the next election, they are not interested.”
Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Sherwood L. Boehlert, the upstate New York Republican who until last year was chairman of the House Science Committee, said that what citizens should expect from their elected representatives is not knowledge of science per se, but rather “an ability to reach out to experts in any given field and then do what is oftentimes hard for elected officials to do, listen instead of talk.”
(For his part, Mr. Boehlert said, his last exposure to science was in a high school physics class, “and I got a C.”)
Problems arise not just in obviously science-related issues, but also, as Mr. Holt put it, in “those countless issues, and it really is countless, that have scientific and technological components but the issues are not seen as science issues.”
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He cited the debates over electronic voting machines that caused problems “that would be obvious to any computer scientist but went right past some people here in Congress.”
Mr. Foster mentioned the debates over electronic border fences, which he said lacked “fundamental concepts of what radar can or cannot do.”
What is needed is not more advanced degrees, the physicists said (they all have Ph.D.’s), but a capacity to take the long view, what Mr. Ehlers called the scientists’ ability to see from the pre-Cambrian era to the space age.
But sometimes, he said, the problem is just old-fashioned ignorance. Several times he has found himself “rushing to the floor” to head off colleagues ready to eliminate financing for endeavors whose importance they did not understand.
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Once it was game theory. The person seeking the cut did not seem to realize that game theory had to do with interactions in economics, behavior and other social sciences, not sports, Mr. Ehlers recounted.
Then there was the time he rose to defend A.T.M. research against a colleague who thought it should be left to the banking industry. In this case the initials stood for asynchronous transfer mode, a protocol for fiber-optic data transfer.
“ ‘The Two Cultures’ is not a myth,” Mr. Holt said, referring to a 1959 lecture by the British chemist and novelist C. P. Snow, who bemoaned a growing gulf between the sciences and the humanities.
Mr. Ehlers agreed, saying he had as much right to expect that his colleagues would understand basic physics concepts as they had to expect that he would be familiar with Shakespeare. “It’s utterly stupid that we have to fight that,” he said.
But there are barriers to drawing more scientists into politics. For one, Mr. Holt said, many researchers have the idea that “politics is somehow dirty.”
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That was never an issue for him or Mr. Foster — both came from political families. Mr. Holt’s father represented West Virginia in the Senate from 1935 to 1941, and Mr. Foster’s parents met when they worked on Capitol Hill. And Mr. Ehlers came up through the Republican ranks, finally winning the seat once held by President Gerald R. Ford.
When Ford was in Congress, Mr. Ehlers gathered a committee of scientists to meet with him from time to time on difficult scientific questions. These days, though, there is less “comity” in Congress, he said, and fellow scientists tell him they wonder why he stays involved. “They say, ‘I am glad you are there, but I think you are crazy.’ ”
All three physicists had the same advice for whoever wins the White House this fall. Move quickly to appoint a science adviser and keep that person in the presidential inner circle.
“I would say that’s No. 1,” Mr. Ehlers said.
Mr. Holt said: “Proximity counts. You want face time.”
Among other things, they said, a science adviser should be someone who will remind the next administration what science can and cannot do.
For example, Mr. Ehlers said, it is irksome to encounter people who ignore the scientific consensus that human activity contributes to global warming yet count on science to produce new sources of energy magically. “They sort of reject our reasoning,” he said. “But they will come back and say, ‘Science will find a way.’ ”
All three say they have thought about returning one day to full-time physics. When life in Congress becomes unusually frustrating, Mr. Ehlers said, “I think, well, it would be great to be in the lab today.”
Still, they say, they manage to overcome any intellectual disconnect between the more or less orderly laws of physics and the sausage-making aspects of legislation. “Physicists are versatile,” Mr. Ehlers said. “We live in the real world.”
After all, their caucus is growing.
“We’ve done the calculation,” Mr. Holt said. “By midcentury, I think, we’ll have a functioning majority.”Thinktank sceptical about MoD assurances, saying cyber-attack could lead even to ‘exchange of nuclear warheads’
The UK’s Trident submarine fleet is vulnerable to a “catastrophic” cyber-attack that could render Britain’s nuclear weapons useless, according to a report by a London-based thinktank.
The 38-page report, Hacking UK Trident: A Growing Threat, warns that a successful cyber-attack could “neutralise operations, lead to loss of life, defeat or perhaps even the catastrophic exchange of nuclear warheads (directly or indirectly)”.
The Ministry of Defence has repeatedly said the operating systems of Britain’s nuclear submarines cannot be penetrated while at sea because they are not connected to the internet at that point.
But the report’s authors, the British American Security Information Council (Basic), expressed scepticism.
“Submarines on patrol are clearly air-gapped, not being connected to the internet or other networks, except when receiving (very simple) data from outside. As a consequence, it has sometimes been claimed by officials that Trident is safe from hacking. But this is patently false and complacent,” they say in the report.
Even if it were true that a submarine at sea could not be attacked digitally, the report points out that the vessels are only at sea part of the time and are vulnerable to the introduction of malware at other points, such as during maintenance while docked at the Faslane naval base in Scotland.
The report says: “Trident’s sensitive cyber systems are not connected to the internet or any other civilian network. Nevertheless, the vessel, missiles, warheads and all the various support systems rely on networked computers, devices and software, and each of these have to be designed and programmed. All of them incorporate unique data and must be regularly upgraded, reconfigured and patched.”
The UK has four nuclear missile-carrying submarines, which are in the process of being replaced. Their replacements are scheduled to go into service in the early 2030s.
The report comes after the cyber-attack last month that disrupted the NHS, which uses the same Windows software as the Trident submarines. There was speculation too that the US used cyberwarfare to destroy a North Korean missile test. A Trident test-firing of a missile last year off the coast of Florida also went awry, with no official explanation given.
The report was co-written by Stanislav Abaimov, a researcher in cybersecurity and electronic engineering at the University of Rome and a graduate of the Moscow State Institute of Electronics and Mathematics, and Paul Ingram, Basic’s executive director.
In reaction to the report, Des Browne, who as UK defence secretary in 2007 was responsible for steering the original decision to renew Trident through parliament, said: “The WannaCry worm attack earlier this month affecting 300,000 computers worldwide, including vital NHS services, was just a taste of what is possible when cyber-weapons are stolen.
“To imagine that critical digital systems at the heart of nuclear weapon systems are somehow immune or can be confidently protected by dedicated teams of network managers is to be irresponsibly complacent.”
Abaimov said: “There are numerous cyber vulnerabilities in the Trident system at each stage of operation, from design to decommissioning. An effective approach to reducing the risk would involve a massive and inevitably expensive operation to strengthen the resilience of subcontractors, maintenance systems, components design and even software updates. If the UK is to continue deploying nuclear weapon systems this is an essential and urgent task in the era of cyberwarfare.”
The report’s authors estimate that the capital costs for the UK government to improve cybersecurity for the Trident programme would run to several billions of pounds over the next 15 years.
The report is to be published on the Basic website.The following is an adapted version of Jeremy Scahill’s remarks at “The Anti-Inauguration,” an event in Washington, DC, on January 20. You can watch the event in its entirety here.
On the streets of Washington, DC, on Inauguration Day, even before anyone smashed a car or broke a window, we saw a paramilitarized version of law enforcement on the streets. This is something that we’ve all been groomed to accept as the new reality in this country. We saw it in a very vivid, visceral way in Ferguson, when ordinary people, primarily young African Americans and other people of color, went into the streets to protest the killing of yet another black man in this country and then faced down a militarized police force.
This is not just a coincidence of history or some kind of internal escalation on the part of local law-enforcement agencies around the country. There is an actual program through the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security that sells and provides military gear to state, local, and some other federal law enforcement agencies that was used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the military has decided that they don’t need anymore. Because they’re getting upgrades.
So they’re providing their armored vehicles and their tactical gear to local state law enforcement agencies, so that even rank-and-file police officers look like some swelled-up Robocop version of a SWAT team. We see that now in the streets at almost any demonstration, where you have these police forces that are basically stormtroopers (and now with Donald Trump as president, they actually may become literal stormtroopers). I don’t say that jokingly, because one of Donald Trump’s first acts in office was to take down the LGBTQ and climate change sections of President Obama’s website, which says quite a bit about the values that of the man that is running the show now in the United States.
He went to the CIA on Monday. This business of there being a rift between Trump and the CIA, even though Trump compared the CIA to Nazis — there isn’t going to be a rift. There is going to be the same violence in the Trump administration as we saw in the Obama administration, and the Bush administration before it — but with added, very terrifying dimensions.
One of the most shameful legacies that President Obama leaves this country is that he used his legitimacy in the eyes of so many liberals to try to normalize assassination as a central component of US foreign policy.
Assassination has been a central component of US foreign policy since the first native people were massacred in this country. But Mr. Obama — Mr. Nobel Peace Prize-winning, constitutional law scholar — has created a large state of legitimacy for Donald Trump to come in and say, “I’m allowed to assassinate American citizens who haven’t been charged with a crime, even if they’re not posing an imminent threat to the lives of any Americans, and even if they’re not on a declared battlefield”; that drone warfare should be expanded, not limited; that the president does not need to have any effective legal oversight to a secret process of putting people on a kill list, and then run those names all the way through his chain of command, and then signing death warrants.
This amounts to the President of the United States serving as an emperor, where he is the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and ultimately the executioner by proxy of drones that will then be used to strike and kill people across the globe. We don’t even know how many people they’ve killed through this assassination program that President Obama has expanded since the era of George W. Bush.
It’s a wonderful thing that Chelsea Manning is going to be a free woman in May. But let’s talk real for a moment. She should have had a full pardon. She should have been released yesterday.
She shouldn’t have been tortured for seven years, she shouldn’t have been vilified as a traitor — |
-optimal interaction between clients and providers, substandard centres with incompetent providers and disregard to woman visitors at government settings needed to be addressed on a priority basis.
Limited technologies and inappropriate methods and fear or experience of side-effects were some of the reasons behind the low contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) in the country for the last decade, she said, adding that only 30 per cent of women of childbearing years were using contraceptives.
Dr Rukhsana Mughal of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynaecology said contraception was important as it prevented unwanted pregnancies, gave freedom to choose the right time for parenthood, while condoms prevented women from sexually transmitted infections also.
She discussed various types of contraception and said condoms, birth control pills, contraceptive injections, contraceptive implants, IUDs and sterilisations were being applied as barrier methods in Pakistan. A lack of support from communities and spouses, misinformation and a lack of finances and transport could be blamed for the unsatisfactory CPR in the country, she added.NEW YORK (Reuters) - David Huddle and his daughter Megan, a flute player for the North Hardin High School marching band in Kentucky, have been preparing for more than a year for the band’s performance in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.
They have no intention of letting threats of further violence from the militant Islamic State deter them from making the trip.
“The main goal of a terrorist attack is to create terror,” David Huddle said in a phone interview. “It’s important to go on with your life. You can’t dwell on it or you’ll never be happy.”
Millions of New Yorkers and tourists are expected to line the streets on Thursday for the parade, more than a week after Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, released a video showing images of New York juxtaposed with a scene depicting a suicide bomber preparing for an attack.
The group has claimed responsibility for the simultaneous attacks in Paris on Nov. 13 that killed at least 130 people at a soccer stadium, a concert hall, bars and restaurants.
Some people said on Facebook and Twitter they would skip the parade this year in light of the new threats, 14 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by al Qaeda that destroyed the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
A school district on New York’s Long Island called off a planned December middle-school trip to Manhattan, while Penn State University said it would cancel some student trips to Washington, D.C., and New York.
But New York City officials have a simple response: Don’t be scared.
“We can’t change who we are,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a public event on Thursday, urging people not to alter their daily lives. “Do we want to play their game? Do we want to give in to them?”
While they haven’t given much operational detail, de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton said thousands of police officers will be out in force on Thursday during the parade, which typically draws millions to the streets of Manhattan.
The Sea World float makes its way down 6th Ave during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, in New York November 27, 2014. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
Security efforts will be bolstered by a new counter-terrorism unit, Critical Response Command, that includes more heavily armed officers. Another unit created this year to respond to large protests and other incidents requiring more manpower will also assist patrol officers.
Bratton said people should feel confident that the department is able to handle any threat. His own grandchildren are visiting New York for the first time next week and will attend the parade, he said.
“Celebrate, be aware, but do not be afraid,” he said at a press conference this week to address the Islamic State video. “The NYPD will protect you.”
State and transportation law enforcement also stepped up efforts ahead of the parade. Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday announced the launch of an application allowing New Yorkers to report suspicious activity by sending photos or text messages from their mobile devices to the state’s division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.
And another 46 Metropolitan Transportation Authority police officers will be added to New York City’s busiest public transportation spots, including Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station, to guard against attacks, Cuomo said.
City officials said the footage shown in the Islamic State video is old and that there is no evidence of a “specific and credible threat” to New York.
Holly Thomas, a spokeswoman for Macy’s Inc (M.N), also offered reassurance. “As with any public event in New York City, security elements are extensive - from the very visible presence of law enforcement officers to wide-ranging behind-the-scenes security operations,” she said.
Some youth groups headed to New York have sought to reassure parents regarding their children’s safety.
Organizers for the North Hardin band, for instance, have sent parents a note in light of the “current world situation” outlining the procedures in place, including chaperones and an emergency texting service.
Huddle said some parents had asked about increased security measures, but that the entire band still planned to travel.
Members of the Madison Scouts perform during the 88th Annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York November 27, 2014. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
Brad Pollock, the director for the Nogales High School marching band in southern California, said his students were still excited to perform in the parade.
“We’re doing the best we can to keep everybody safe,” he said. “It’s a very special honor to be able to do it.”SALT LAKE CITY — Donald Trump has grown his lead over Hillary Clinton in a new poll, but third-party candidates appear to be having an impact.
According to the poll by UtahPolicy.com, 39-percent of those likely voters surveyed said they would vote for Trump, compared to 24-percent who said they would vote Clinton. The political website said it’s up three points from July, and in June he had a nine-point lead.
In Republican-dominated Utah, the numbers were smaller than a GOP candidate would get in past election cycles. But Libertarian Gary Johnson and Independent Evan McMullin both had larger than expected numbers.
“Gary Johnson’s momentum in the Beehive State has seemingly stopped. In June he was at 10%, but jumped to 16% in July. Now he has split the difference, settling at 13%,” the website said, explaining the poll.
“McMullin’s support apparently comes from Utah voters who had previously mentioned some other candidate. In June, 18% said they favored someone else, while in July that number sat at 14%. Currently, that number sits at 6%, a drop that nearly mirror’s McMullin’s total. McMullin is not pulling support from Trump or Clinton as he had hoped, as their numbers have not dropped significantly from the previous polls.”
Green Party candidate Jill Stein polled at zero, UtahPolicy.com said.Solar panels, electric cars, high-efficiency washing machines — these are the "green," or earth-friendly, technologies that you probably see every day. But there are also many lesser-known tech devices out there designed to reverse the negative effects of human activity on the environment. And in 2015, you can expect to see some of these under-the-radar technologies entering into the mainstream, according to experts.
The newest wave of green technologies is aimed at the average, environmentally conscious person, and features products and services that will give consumers greater control over the carbon footprints of these tech devices. From apps that let you know where you can buy the most sustainably grown vegetables to remote-control windows that shut out heat on demand, here are some green technologies that could take off in 2015.
Smart homes
Being green is easier when everything from your electric meter to your refrigerator is connected to the Internet. Connected appliances and meters — which collectively make up part of the so-called Internet of Things — allow people to keep track of how much energy they use in their homes or offices every day, so they can develop more efficient habits, reducing their energy bills in the process. [Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies]
Smart thermostats, like Nest, remember your favorite temperatures and automatically adjust to your needs throughout the day. Credit: Nest
Smart-home technologies aren't new, but they might finally find their niche in the new year, said Michael Nardi, president of GreenTech Consulting, an Indiana-based company that provides technology and clean-energy consulting to businesses. In 2015, both home and business owners will rely more heavily on Internet-connected products such as smart thermostats, Nardi told Live Science.
Smart thermostats "remember" the temperatures you prefer and can sense when you're not around and will automatically adjust the climate in your home to save energy. And because the devices are Wi-Fi-connected, they can be controlled remotely from a tablet or smartphone.
Smarter homeowners
Maximizing the energy efficiency of your home with smart technologies is a worthwhile endeavor, but even with data about your energy use in hand, becoming more efficient might be easier said than done, said Mark Peters, the associate lab director at Argonne National Laboratory's energy and global security directorate. That's why Peters predicts that, as more people jump on the Internet of Things bandwagon, new technologies will also arise to make sense of the data collected from Internet-connected products.
BuildingOS lets business and facility owners track and analyze all of the elements that contribute to the efficiency of their properties. Credit: Lucid Design Group
"As you start to see more and more smart [products] online, you start to deal with an immense amount of data that has to be managed, and you have to empower the consumer to be able to take advantage of this data," Peters told Live Science. That means combining advanced computing with user-friendly interfaces, he added.
That's exactly what products like Lucid Design Group's new BuildingOS aim to do. This cloud-based application gives users the tools they need to analyze the efficiency of any building. Designed with offices in mind, not homes, BuildingOS provides a central hub where the data from all of a building's systems (e.g. water, electric, gas, solar power) can be processed and understood. If the experts are correct, you'll likely see many similar applications emerge for homeowners in the new year.
Green apps
A few years ago, eating local, organic produce or boycotting shampoos containing parabens might have been considered trendy. But in 2015, consumers with these eco-conscious habits will be part of the mainstream, not part of a passing fad, according to GreenTech's Nardi.
A slew of apps will gain popularity this year that will help "green" consumers make environmentally friendly decisions, Nardi predicted. For example, Think Dirty is an app you can use in the beauty aisle or cosmetics store to compare the ingredients in different products. Just scan a product's bar code to see whether any of its ingredients are known carcinogens, hormone disruptors or neurotoxins.
Then there's Food Tripping, a GPS-based app that helps you find local juice bars, farmer's markets and healthy cafes when you're away from home. Nardi also mentioned iRecycle, an app that lets you know where you can properly dispose of just about any household item — from gas grills to old cell phone chargers.
Solar fuels
Joule uses a process known as artificial photosynthesis to convert water and carbon dioxide into fuel. Credit: Joule Unlimited
Not all of the green technologies due to take off in 2015 are based on computing power. Some of them run on an older power source: the sun.
Joule is a Massachusetts-based company that harvests the energy in sunlight to create fuels such as ethanol, diesel and gasoline. In the company's specially engineered photosynthesis process, nonpotable water is combined with microbes that produce particular fuels when exposed to sunlight and carbon dioxide.
Known as artificial photosynthesis, this method of creating fuels and chemicals could one day curb society's need for fossil fuels. It's also a process that demonstrates the many potential uses of solar energy, according to Peters.
"I think there's really exciting things going on in this area, especially on the science side, that will make progress in 2015," Peters said. However, it's going to take a while for this green technology to become commercialized, he added. So don't expect your gasoline to come from a solar energy plant anytime this year.
Solar gets serious
Harvesting sunlight to create fuels is a fairly new idea, but harvesting sunlight to create electricity isn't. But despite the fact that it's abundant and environmentally friendly, solar power has yet to take off in earnest in countries such as the United States. But all that might be about to change, according to Peters, who said that renewables might finally hit their stride in the new year.
"You're going to continue to see improvements in the materials and technologies that go into enabling solar and wind, but I think the most exciting thing that will happen in 2015 is how renewables will fit into the bigger system — how they integrate with [the existing power] system and how they're integrated with energy storage."
Peters and his colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory are currently looking past traditional energy-storage solutions (i.e., batteries) to options better suited for storing solar power and releasing it into the power grid. One of these options is the flow battery, in which anodes made from solid materials are replaced with liquid materials. Such batteries are relatively inexpensive. They're also long-lasting and safe, which make them good candidates for use with a large power grid.
Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.The good news keep on piling for LG over the past couple of weeks. Not only has the company’s latest flagship, the G3, been well received by tech publications worldwide and is selling like hot cakes in its South Korean home turf, but it has also helped LG Electronics Inc.’s shares rise and now analysts are predicting that the company’s handset business will turn to profit in Q2 2014, for the first time in four quarters.
LG Electronics Inc.’s shares had closed at 70300 won ($69.14) on May 27th, the day prior to the G3’s launch in South Korea, but were up to 78600 won ($77.31) today at closing time, recording an 11.8% increase in the span of 10 trading days. The company’s shares are now at an all-time 52-week high, and should be rising even further following the global launch of the LG G3 toward the end of the month as well as the estimated profitability of LG’s handset business.
LG Electronics Inc.’s share prices rose from 70300 won on May 27th to 78600 today
Two different analysts have recently predicted LG’s mobile division turning profit in Q2 2014, for the first time in a year. Both Soh Hyun-chul from Shinhan Investment & Securities Co. and Lee Seung-hyuk from Korea Investment & Securities Co., think the G3’s success will get this division out of a string of losses, the former with an operating profit estimate of 11 billion won ($10.8 million) and the latter at 20.6 billion won ($20.2 million).
Regardless of which estimate turns out to be true, the numbers are quite a turnaround from last year’s Q3, when the division posted an operating profit loss of 80 billion won ($78.6 million), and the following Q4 2013 and Q1 2014 quarters where it was still in the red.
With Q2 2014 signalling a changing tide for LG, Q3 should prove even more profitable, with the G3 slated to launch globally, and most importantly in China, in July. Soh Hyun-chul expects the G3 sales to reach 13 million units thanks to its timely arrival in China, right when the Galaxy S5’s excitement is falling and before the iPhone 6’s release. Compared to the G2’s 6.5 million units, the G3 is hence expected to sell double and boost the company’s total 2014 sales over 50 million units.
While all these numbers are great indicators of LG’s mobile push finally coming to fruition, they pale in comparison to Samsung mobile’s gargantuan operating profits of over 6 trillion won (more than $6 billion) per quarter. LG has a long way to go to reach those levels, but it can at least rest assured that it is on the right path.
[Source: Yonhap, Graph: Google Finance, Samsung’s Profit: IBTimes]
Like this post? Share it!This article is the first of a series that will document the development of a low cost, open source wireless streaming internet radio receiver. All construction details, including schematics, source code, and even the design process itself will be documented on this blog.
Comments and (constructive) criticism are welcome. Click here to post a comment.
Table of Contents:
Some background:
According to Wikipedia, in 1993 the first internet radio program began distribution. At that time, radio programs were manually downloaded to be played later on the user’s home computer; the user experience was far from that of listening to a traditional broadcast radio receiver. It was not until several years later that streaming radio became common, giving birth to internet radio stations that could be listened to much like traditional radio, but with several advantages. Most notably, internet radio stations were (and still are for the most part) largely devoid of on-air advertising, and stations anywhere on the globe could be received by anyone with access to the internet. Over time, improvements in audio compression (such as MP3) and larger end user bandwidth improved the fidelity and reliability of internet radio. The birth of common standards like Shoutcast made it possible to listen to many stations with a single player program, like Winamp.
Today, most music playback software supports streaming radio in some way. iTunes features thousands of streaming radio stations and even supports Shoutcast streams so that users can easily add additional stations of their own.
The beautiful thing about streaming radio is the huge diversity in programming that is available. Many college radio stations have a streaming server, like KDVS. Digitally Imported hosts many electronic and dance music streams that give the listener the choice to listen to specific genres like ambient or gabber hardcore (whoa). Broadcast radio usually lumps all electronic dance music into one category, much to the dismay of their listeners (who probably tuned out during the commercial break, anyway). Gems like Slay Radio specialize in music you would never hear on broadcast FM, like Commodore 64 remixes.
In the past couple years, products have started to appear that mimic the form and function of a traditional radio, but play internet radio instead. Good examples of these are the Roku SoundbridgeRadio and the ASUS Internet Air. Remote speaker devices, such as the Apple Airport Express, require a PC to receive and relay streaming radio but achieve a similar end result (but don’t really look much like a radio).
The Wifi Radio project:
I have been wanting to build a streaming radio for some time. I frequently work in my garage, where I occasionally use my Macbook to play music through a small amplifier and bookshelf speakers. The problem is that my laptop is not always set up in the garage, and greasy fingers are not a good thing to have around a white laptop, period. I could simply buy an internet radio, but I couldn’t stomach the $150-$300 price tag on most players for such a luxury.
So I decided to build one instead.
I started the design process by drafting an outline of desired features, and then breaking them down into wants and needs, while trying to keep the project scope under control.
Requirements:
Wireless connectivity through existing Wifi network
Audio output (preferably 44kHz, 16 bit stereo)
An integrated amplifier and speaker(s)
Shoutcast/MP3 streaming audio decode
Several builtin station presets
A display to indicate the station and currently playing song
Simple user interface, using standard radio controls (volume, tune, etc)
110VAC operation
Optional features:
Line output (to connect to a receiver/amplifier)
Web server for configuration/management
Ability to play files off a USB stick or iTunes server
Definitely won’t be a feature:
Any kind of over-the-air radio tuner
Commercials
Pledge season
Morning DJ’s
“Blah, blah, blah.”
Now that we’ve defined the project… it’s time for a commercial break. That’s it for part 1 of this series. Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll talk about choosing an embedded platform for the design and why Linux is so awesome!
Update: Part two is now available, click here to see it!
Update 2: There is a new Wifi Radio Discussion Forum, hop over there to ask questions about the project or see what other people are working on! (4/12/09)
Update 3 (6/1/09): I finally added a table of contents to the top of this post to help everyone (including me) navigate the series!
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Like this: Like Loading...Since 1997, the Ned Smith Center has been a leader in saw-whet owl research in Pennsylvania, and more recently continent-wide. Until the center began its work, no one even realized saw-whets migrated through Pennsylvania in large numbers.
Every autumn the center operates three fulltime banding stations (in Schuylkill, Dauphin and Cumberland counties), which are open seven nights a week from the beginning of October through late November or early December.
As many as 900 owls a season are netted, banded, weighed and measured before being released. The stations are operated by a team of 18 federally licensed banders, with help from a crew of more than 85 trained volunteers. Each site is open from dusk until about midnight, weather permitting, and as many as 40 owls a night may be netted in one location.
The banders use a line of very fine, soft mist nets stretched through the woods, with a digital recording of the male saw-whet’s “toot” call playing at high volume near the nets. Passing owls are attracted by the call and caught in the nets, which are checked regularly through the night.
Once captured, each saw-whet is fitted with a lightweight, numbered leg band issued by the federal Bird Banding Lab, its age and sex are determined, it is weighed and a variety of measurements are taken, all of which help scientists learn more about these secretive birds. Sometimes a feather or tiny blood sample is taken for DNA research, or to help disease specialists studying the spread of ailments like West Nile virus or Lyme disease. Each fall, a few owls are fitted with minute radio transmitters barely as large as a pencil eraser, which help us more closely track their movements.
Then the owl is released – and if it is ever captured again by another researcher, or found dead by the general public, the serial number on its band will help us learn more about the movements, lifespan and ecology of these owls. Each year, many of the owls captured by the NSCNA crew have already been banded by other researchers, and many of the owls we band are subsequently reported. To learn more about these recoveries, and what they tell us about saw-whet owls, click here.
Bird Banding
Each year, about 1.2 million birds are banded in North America with light, aluminum alloy leg bands, each stamped with a unique serial number and issued by the federal Bird Banding Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. (The Canadian banding program is managed by the Canadian Wildlife Service in cooperation with the BBL.)
Captured owls are ringed with a lightweight aluminum alloy band stamped with a unique serial number, which remains on the bird for life.
Once the bird is banded, the basic information – species, age, sex, date, location of banding – is entered into the Banding Lab’s database. If the bird is ever encountered again, either recaptured by another bander, killed by a hunter (in the case of gamebirds) or found dead, and the number reported, the finder will receive a certificate of appreciation detailing the bird’s history, and the bander likewise is notified.
Check out our video page to see Scott Weidensaul explain how banding saw-whets helps protect their habitats.
To report a banded wild bird (not including pigeons), call 1-800-327-BAND, or go to http://www.reportband.gov
Ageing and Sexing Owls
The wing of a hatching-year (first fall) owl shows no contrast, with all feathers glossy, new and unfaded. By the next autumn, as a second-year bird, the owl has replaced its outermost and innermost flight feathers, which contrast with the older, faded retained feathers in the middle of the wing.
Like all banders, saw-whet researchers must infer the age of the owls they catch by examining the molt, or replacement pattern of the birds’ feathers, especially those in the wings. In owls, complete molt is a process that can take up to four years.
A saw-whet with flight feathers that are all bright, glossy and unworn is an owl that was just born the previous spring – an HY, or hatching-year, bird, in bander jargon. By the following fall, an SY (second-year) owl will have replaced its outermost and innermost wing feathers, with the old, retained juvenal feathers in the middle of the wing now faded and worn. Older birds may have as many as three generations of feathers.
A pigment in owl feathers called porphyrin fluoresces under ultraviolet light, and because it fades quickly with time, the degree of glow gives banders a handy way to age feathers. This adult saw-whet shows a mix of old (faded) and new (brightly fluorescing) feathers.
But owl researchers have one additional tool – a black light. Unlike most groups of birds, owls have a pigment in their feathers known as porphyrin, which under ultraviolet (black) light fluoresces a brilliant neon raspberry. Because porphyrins degrade quickly from exposure to sunlight, older feathers become paler and duller, while newly molted feathers glow brightly, giving banders a handy way of reading the age of the feathers – and thus determining the age of the owl.
In any light, male and female saw-whet owls look identical, but there is a subtle difference – females average significantly larger than males, weighing up to 100 grams, compared with 75g or less for most males. Banders use a combination of the owl’s weight and the length of its folded wing (known as the wing chord) to determine the owl’s gender, but about 15 percent nevertheless fall into the “unknown” category
Tracking Saw-Whets by Radio
Smaller than a pencil eraser and weighing less than 2 grams, tiny radio transmitters allow the center’s researchers to follow the movements of saw-whet owls.
Since 2001, the center’s research crew has used miniature radio transmitters to learn more about saw-whet owl migration and ecology.
The transmitters, which are about the size of a pencil eraser and weigh less than 2 grams (less than 1/14th of an ounce), are attached with a backpack harness made of thin, elastic nylon cord designed to fall off after several months, and allow the research crew to track the owls’ movements.
Because the radio transmitters must be small and lightweight, they do not have a great range in the mountainous terrain in which the crew works, so they do not attempt to track the owls when they are actively migrating. Instead, their primary focus is on what ornithologists call “stopover,” the resting period between active migration bouts. Saw-whet owls are unusual in that their stopover periods can last days or even weeks, allowing the research crew to find the owls on their daytime roosts and assess the habitats they are using.
Using handheld receivers and directional antennas, the tracking crew can take a bearing on the owl’s position – and by fielding two or three teams of trackers at night, the crew can triangulate the position of a hunting owl, allowing them to map the nightly activity ranges of the saw-whets, something about which little is known.
Most of the owls we have radio-tracked were captured at our King’s Gap site in Cumberland County, and tracked through the surrounding Michaux State Forest. Some remained in the area for many weeks, shifting their daily roosts unpredictably.
Some of Our Favorite Owls…
“Glenda”
Band #0924-00980
Hatching-year female, banded at King’s Gap Oct. 22, 2004
Tracked Oct. 24-Nov. 26, 2004; she dropped her radio Nov. 27, 2004.
Glenda used a variety of roost sites, ranging from chestnut oaks and red oaks to pitch pine, white pine and mountain laurel, perching just a few feet off the ground in the latter. She stayed in the southeast corner of the King’s Gap Environmental Education Training Center, close to the Buck Ridge Trail, and along nearby Cold Springs Road in Michaux State Forest.
“Squash”
Band #0924-01072
Second-year female, banded King’s Gap Nov. 18, 2004
Tracked Nov. 18-Dec. 22, 2004
Squash and Glenda were both using the same small area of King’s Gap and Michaux State forest, between the Buck Ridge Trail and Cold Springs Road.
Like many of the saw-whet owls we tracked, Squash showed a distinct preference for pitch pines when it came to choosing a daytime roost. These tall, scraggly conifers are considered a junk tree by many foresters, but our research suggests they are important to saw-whet owls in the predominantly oak woodlands of Michaux State Forest. The only non-pitch pine Squash used was a Norway spruce on Dec. 2, almost in someone’s backyard.
Why pitch pines? Perhaps because they are widely distributed along the ridgetops throughout the state forest – and perhaps because their branches are filled with cones not much smaller than a saw-whet, making it very difficult to spot a roosting owl.
“Chunky”
Band #0924-27996
After-second-year female, banded King’s Gap Nov. 13, 2007
Tracked Nov. 19-Dec. 12, 2007
After banding, Chunky (named for her size) moved southeast of King’s Gap, and set up shop along Mountain Creek near Hunters Run Road. Unlike many of the tagged saw-whets, she seemed to prefer white pines as her daytime roost, sometimes picking trees with very sparse needles that made her easy to spot. However, she was at least three years old at the time, and had obviously learned how to avoid danger.
Several times, the tracking crews observed Chunky holding deer mice that she’d killed the night before, partially eaten, and would finish off in the evening before going hunting again. An adult saw-whet will usually eat about two mice per night.
“Grinch”
Band # 0924-28022
Second-year female, banded King’s Gap Nov. 17, 2007
Tracked Dec. 4, 2007-Feb. 2, 2008
The Grinch was tracked longer than any of the other 22 owls tagged since 2001, providing a wealth of information about saw-whet roost habits and habitat selection – including this species’ fondness for pitch pines. Of the 32 roost sites we confirmed, 31 of them were in pitch pines (the sole exception was a white pine).
After banding, the Grinch moved just west of King’s Gap into Irish Gap Hollow, where the northwest slopes of the hills were thickly clad in conifers. After spending 17 nights there, shifting from tree to tree on occasion, she moved 3.2 miles to the southwest to Beetem Hollow in Michaux State Forest, where she remained except for one quick excursion close to Route 233 for a single day, Jan. 12, 2008, before returning to Beetem Hollow.
(Right: Aura Stauffer, telemetry project coordinator, takes data on a roost tree while the Grinch watches from a few feet above her head. ©Jamie Flickinger
Where are the Guys?
One of the biggest mysteries about saw-whet owl migration is the scarcity of male saw-whets, which make up just 6 percent of the owls the NSCNA research team captures. So where are the guys?
One possibility is that the audiolure the team uses – the tooting call of a male saw-whet – is simply more attractive to female owls, even though autumn is not the breeding season. But researchers in other areas, who used nets but no audiolure, also reported that they caught more females than males. It appears the lure is only part of the story.
One possibility is that adult male saw-whets stay on their breeding grounds year-round, leaving migration to females and young owls. If so, this would be a very unusual migration strategy among raptors, but there is some evidence for it. Almost all the males captured at the center’s banding stations are first-year owls, too young to breed – out of nearly 4,500 owls banded since 1997, only 40 have been adult males.
Notable Recoveries
A map showing the points of origin for some of the more than 160 owls originally banded elsewhere and recaptured at the NSCNA banding stations.
By marking a wild bird with a numbered leg band, scientists can uncover many of the remaining mysteries about their lives – where they travel, whether they return to the same places each summer and winter, whether they choose the same mates, and how long they live, among many other things.
Each year, the NSCNA crew catches saw-whet owls (known as foreign recaps or foreign recoveries) that have already been banded by other researchers, and some of the owls they in turn band and release are encountered weeks, months or years later, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Here’s a small sample:
Foreign owls:
Among the more than 160 owls banded elsewhere that the NSCNA crew has recaptured were birds originally:
–Banded Oct. 4, 1998 at Cabot Head (Bruce Peninsula) Ontario; recaptured Oct. 31, 2001 at Hidden Valley.
–Banded Oct. 29, 2001 at Bancroft, WI; recaptured Oct. 29, 2003 at Small Valley.
–Banded April 27, 2003 at Bois Blanc Island, MI; recaptured Nov. 6, 2004 at Small Valley.
–Banded Oct. 13, 2003 at Plover, WI; recaptured Nov. 11, 2005 at Hidden Valley.
–Banded Sept. 21, 2004 at Falmouth, ME; recaptured Oct. 25, 2004 at Small Valley, a distance of 403 miles.
–Banded Sept. 29, 2004 at Earlton, Ontario; recaptured Oct. 24, 2005 at Small Valley.
–Banded Oct. 4, 2004 at Cedar Grove, WI; recaptured Nov. 5, 2005 at Small Valley.
–Banded Oct. 10, 2005 at Eels Lake, Ontario; recaptured Nov. 19, 2005 at Hidden Valley, a distance of 300 miles.
–Banded Oct. 9, 2006 at Whitefish Point, MI; recaptured Oct. 12, 2007 at Hidden Valley.
–Banded July 30, 2007 as a juvenile, Whitefish Point, MI; recaptured Oct. 7, 2007 at Hidden Valley, a distance of 609 miles.
–Banded Sept. 18, 2007 in Tadoussac, Quebec; recaptured March 28, 2008 at King’s Gap.
NSCNA Birds Elsewhere
Among the more than 100 owls banded by the NSCNA crew, and reported elsewhere, were birds originally:
–Banded Oct. 10, 2001 at Berry Mountain; recaptured Oct. 8, 2002 at North Yarmouth, ME.
–Banded Nov. 11, 2001 at Berry Mountain; recaptured Snake Mountain, VT, Oct. 14, 2002.
–Banded Nov. 11, 2001 at King’s Gap; recaptured Nov. 14, 1002 at Hopkins Forest, MA.
–Banded at King’s Gap Oct. 23, 2003; recaptured Oct. 21, 2005 at Sand Bluff, IL.
–Banded Nov. 18, 2005 at Small Valley; recaptured Oct. 14, 2006 at Tadoussac, Quebec.
The total also includes 16 owls recaptured over the years at Lamb’s Knoll, MD, in the Catoctin Mountains 50 miles south of King’s Gap; 14 owls recaptured at Waupoos Island/Prince Edward Point, Ontario, on the northeast shore of Lake Ontario; and seven owls recaptured on the Delmarva Peninsula from Assateague Island, MD, to Kiptopeke, VA.
Project Owlnet
Project Owlnet is a collaborative undertaking involving nearly 120 owl research stations across the U.S. and Canada, all working to better understand the movements and ecology of saw-whets and other migratory owls.
Owlnet was founded by David Brinker of Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, and is coordinated by Brinker, Steve Huy of Maryland and NSCNA saw-whet project leader Scott Weidensaul.
The Owlnet website provides standard methodologies, techniques and approaches for scientists interested in conducting migration research, as well as an active listserve to allow participants to share their results, data and information on band recoveries.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
A family were forced to flee their home after hundreds of potentially deadly spiders swarmed out of a bunch of bananas.
Jamie and Crystal Roberts were horrified when the suspected Brazilian wandering spiders - the world’s deadliest - suddenly appeared in their home.
Shocked Jamie, 31, who bought the fruit from his local corner shop, spotted white patches covering it and assumed it was harmless mould.
But when he took a closer looks at the bananas he realised they were infested with a spider nest containing hundreds of the creepy crawlies.
But what is the Brazilian wandering spider - and how dangerous is it?
Here are the top 10 facts you need to know about the world's most toxic spider.
1. Their Greek name Phoneutria actually means "murderess" - an indication of their deadly bite.
2. |
he could do much more than frighten the elves. As Glaurung was barely half-grown, his hide was not yet invulnerable to the elven arrows and he fled the field. Morgoth was displeased with Glaurung for revealing himself before his creator had planned, but ultimately Glaurung's youthful foray was of little consequence.[5]
Some time later, when men first arrived in Beleriand, it was revealed that Morgoth had left Angband and walked among the fathers of men. Hoping to corrupt them to his service, he spread his lies among them, and found them to be considerably easier to sway than the elves had been. However, the strengthening of the elven kingdoms worried Morgoth, and he returned to Angband before his labors were complete. Nevertheless, most Men believed or half-believed his lies and either departed from the North or joined with Morgoth's forces. However, a small group of men that became known as the Edain resisted him.[6] They provided the elves with vital intelligence as to the doings of Morgoth in the North, as many of their hardiest chose to live within sight of Angband's gates.
Dagor Bragollach
About 455 years after Fingolfin came to Middle-earth, Morgoth deemed that the time was ripe to destroy the elves and their allies. One cold winter night, when the elven watch was least vigilant, Morgoth sent forth terrible rivers of fire and lava from Thangorodrim and poisonous fumes from the Iron Mountains. The Elves were completely unprepared for such an assault, and a great many Ñoldor perished on the Ard-galen, as the fires consumed it and transformed it into a lifeless wasteland, forever after known as the Anfauglith. In the wake of these fires there came Glaurung, now fully grown, the Balrogs, and armies of orcs and other monsters in numbers such as the elves had never conceived of. Thus began the Dagor Bragollach. The Siege of Angband was swiftly broken and the forces of the elves were scattered. So swift and overwhelming was Morgoth's assault that the various elven kingdoms were unable to marshal their forces in any sort of unified front, and as such Morgoth was able to engage the elven forces in a piecemeal fashion, greatly blunting the effectiveness of any resistance.
With the exception of Maedhros and his fortress upon the Hill of Himring, the sons of Fëanor and Finarfin were overthrown and utterly defeated. Fingolfin and Fingon only just barely managed to defend Hithlum from Morgoth's onslaught, as the mountains surrounding it provided an effective barrier against Morgoth's fires. The elves were completely driven from the forests of Dorthonion, and many of the grey elves forsook the war altogether and went to Doriath. When news came to Fingolfin of the totality of the disasters that had befallen the elven forces, a great despair came upon him. Believing the Noldor to have been defeated beyond any hope of recovery, he rode forth alone from Hithlum to the gates of Angband in a wrath so potent that he was said to have resembled Oromë himself. When he arrived, he smote upon the doors of Morgoth's fortress, challenging the Dark Lord to come forth to single combat. Though Morgoth did not wish to, Fingolfin's challenge was heard by all in Angband, and was given in such an insulting manner that to ignore it would have been to lose face before his captains.[7]
Morgoth issued forth in black armor from Angband to confront Fingolfin. Wielding the terrible hammer Grond, Morgoth repeatedly attempted to smite the elven king, but succeeded only in carving many fiery pits in the ground from his missed strikes. Fingolfin long managed to avoid Morgoth's blows, and wounded the Dark Lord seven times. But at last, Fingolfin grew weary, and Morgoth thrice drove him to his knees. Fingolfin arose each time to continue the fight, but eventually he fell backwards into one of the many pits formed by Morgoth's missed attacks. Morgoth then set his foot upon Fingolfin's neck and killed him, but not before Fingolfin, with his last stroke, hewed Morgoth's foot with his sword. Then Morgoth broke the elf's body and prepared to feed it to his wolves. But Thorondor, the King of the Eagles, swooped down upon Morgoth, marring his face with his talons, and rescued the body of the elf-king.[7]
Fingolfin's last stroke gave Morgoth a permanent limp, and the pain of his seven wounds could not be healed, nor were the scars ever erased.
However, despite his great victory, Morgoth had made a critical mistake. So great had been his malice and his desire to destroy the elves that he had struck before his plans were fully realized, and in his hatred and contempt he had underestimated the resolve and valor of his foes. Now Morgoth found that the elves and Edain, recovering from the initial shock of his onslaught, had begun to make small gains against his outlying forces. He therefore checked his advance, and withdrew the main host of the orcs to Angband. For though he knew that his victory had been relatively decisive, his own losses had been as numerous as the losses that had been accrued by the elves. Afterwards, Morgoth sent out many spies, and he sent messengers to men, feigning pity. When the Edain refused his false offers of peace, he summoned the Easterlings over the Blue Mountains to harass them militarily. Seven years passed before Morgoth renewed his offensive. He assailed Hithlum with great strength but just as he was on the verge of victory, Círdan and a host under his command came at the last moment and helped Fingon to turn the orcs back.
The Quest of the Silmaril
Some time later, the elven-maiden Lúthien and her human lover Beren, seeking to recover a Silmaril, came disguised to Morgoth's court. Morgoth was able to see through her disguise, but she was undaunted by his eyes, and offered to sing for him. As she sang, Morgoth conceived a lust and an evil more abominable than any he had yet committed, and allowed her to continue singing. But as he delighted in his thought, suddenly shadow hid her, and she sang a song of great and terrible power that cast a spell of sleep.[8]
All Morgoth's court was cast down in slumber by her song, but the Silmarils burned, and became so heavy that the head of Morgoth sagged upon his chest. He fell from his throne, the Iron Crown rolled away from him, and Beren cut a Silmaril from it. However, rather than leaving immediately with his prize, he tried to take another of the Silmarils. As he attempted to pry the second jewel loose, his knife snapped. One shard struck Morgoth's face, and he began to awaken. Beren and Lúthien fled in terror, but were not chased as Morgoth and his court had not yet woke. However, at the gates of Angband the werewolf Carcharoth was aware of them, and later bit off Beren's hand, and took with it the Silmaril. Burning from the inside at the touch of the holy jewel, Carcharoth went mad and fled in wrath from Angband, slaughtering all who stood in his path. Then Morgoth awoke, and in a rage he and his court roared up in pursuit, only to see Thorondor carrying off the raiders. Morgoth's rage at the loss of the Silmaril caused the Iron Mountains to begin erupting, terrifying all those who could see it. Ultimately however, he was unable to recover the gem.[7]
Nirnaeth Arnoediad
Soon after, Morgoth became aware that Maedhros was making a great league against him, and driving his orcs off the northern heights. As such, he took council against them and prepared his forces for a major confrontation. When the elves eventually made it to Angband, the Battle of Nirnaeth Arnoediad began. Ultimately, the battle was a complete and decisive victory for Morgoth. The power of the elves and their Edain compatriots to make war against Morgoth was utterly and permanently broken. All of the great kingdoms of the Noldor in Beleriand besides Gondolin, were destroyed, and Hithlum was at last taken as well. The Edain who did not flee were enslaved by Easterlings, and Húrin was taken captive.[9]
The Cursing of Húrin
Morgoth was also well known for the imprisonment of Húrin of the House of Hador during the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. In the last hours of the battle, Húrin and his kin defended Turgon, for he was the last heir to the thrones of Gondolin and Fingolfin after his brother Fingon fell in battle. Turgon narrowly escaped the clutches of the host of orcs due to the valor of Húrin, Huor, and their men.
Unfortunately, all but Húrin fell after the onslaught of Morgoth's forces. After slaying untold numbers of trolls and orcs single-handedly, Húrin was captured by Gothmog and taken to Angband. Morgoth knew that Húrin had been to Gondolin, and therefore knew the city's location. He sought to extract the information from him but, despite inflicting terrible torment upon his captive, he was unsuccessful.
From a distance Morgoth put the son and daughter of Húrin, Turin and Nienor, under a species of diabolic oppression: his thought followed them and gave them bad luck, though they were not possessed. By this means he drove them at last to madness and despair; though there is doubt as to whether in the extremity of his malice he cheated himself, as their madness saved them from damnation.[10]
Behold! The Shadow of my thought shall lie upon them wherever they go, and my hate shall pursue them to the ends of the world.
—The Children of Húrin
Then, continuing his curse, he said:
But all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Wherever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death.
—The Children of Húrin
And so Húrin stayed and was chained atop Thangorodrim, watching his homelands fall under the shadow of Morgoth until he released him. Túrin, who was valiant and powerful, nearly escaped the curse, as feared by Morgoth, but in the end did not. He and his sister Nienor Níniel perished. Thus, the curse of Morgoth on the Children of Húrin was fulfilled.[10][11]
Fall of Gondolin
It was said that Morgoth hated and feared the House of Fingolfin the most of the three Houses of the sons of Finwe, and he feared most Fingolfin's son Turgon, as it was prophesised that from the House of Turgon would his doom come. Following Turgon's escape from the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, Morgoth sought to find and destroy the last of the free kingdoms of the Noldor; Gondolin, where Turgon resided.
Though he had been unable to force Húrin to reveal the location of the last great elven kingdom, Morgoth eventually captured Maeglin, sister-son of Turgon, the King of Gondolin. Threatened with unimaginable torment, Maeglin offered the secrets of Gondolin's defenses in exchange for his own well-being. Additionally, he made a promise to kill Tuor personally, and was given permission by Morgoth to take Idril for himself. Having lusted after Idril for decades, Morgoth's offer secured Maeglin's loyalty, and he became the Dark Lord's willing servant. After learning all he could from Maeglin, Morgoth sent him back to Gondolin to aid the invasion from within when the time came.[12]
Soon after, Morgoth assailed Gondolin, the last great realm of the Ñoldor. With Maeglin's treacherous information, Morgoth's forces advanced upon city nearly undetected, during a time of festival and over the mountains where the watch was least vigilant. By the time the elves realized their peril, the city had been beleaguered without hope by Morgoth's overwhelmingly superior forces, and quickly fell.
With the Sacking of Gondolin and the defeat of the Noldor and their allies, Morgoth's triumph was complete.[12] The great kingdoms of the elves had all fallen, save for the Havens of Cirdan and the survivors at the Mouths of Sirion, which were ruled by Eärendil, and Morgoth esteemed them as nothing. He even came to care nothing for the Silmaril that had been taken from him, and laughed when he saw the last and the most cruel kinslaying when the Sons of Feanor destroyed the dwelling at Arvernien.
Final defeat
However, Morgoth's triumph was relatively short lived. Persuaded by Eärendil to take pity on the Elves and Edain, the Valar once again took up arms against Morgoth's tyranny. Unable to understand compassion, Morgoth did not expect that the Valar would ever help the Ñoldor after the terrible sins they had committed, and did not foresee the assault from Aman. But the Valar mustered their forces, and a great battle began between Morgoth and the Host of Valinor. Morgoth emptied all of Angband, and his devices and engines and armies of slaves were so various and powerful that the fighting spilled across all Beleriand.
In the end, Morgoth's forces were utterly defeated. The Balrogs were destroyed, save some few that fled and hid themselves in caverns at the very roots of the earth, and the orcs were slaughtered. Then Morgoth quailed, and dared not come forth himself, but he had one last weapon at his command: the monstrous Winged Dragons. From out of the pits of Angband they issued, and so sudden and ruinous was their attack, with great power and a tempest of fire, that they drove back the host of the Valar. But then Eärendil came with Vingilot, accompanied by Thorondor and all the great birds, and Eärendil slew Ancalagon The Black, whose great bulk fell upon the towers of Thangorodrim, breaking them in his ruin.[13]
Morgoth was utterly defeated and stood at bay, but was yet unvaliant. He fled into the deepest of his mines and sued for peace and pardon, but his feet were hewn from under him, and he was cast upon his face. He was bound with the chain Angainor, his Iron Crown was beaten into a collar for his neck, and he was thrust through the Door of Night into the Timeless Void. The two remaining Silmarils were recovered from him, though shortly thereafter they were again lost.
Legacy and Prophesied return
Melkor's lies, sowed in the hearts of Elves and Men, spawned a seed that did not die and could not be destroyed, but ever and on sprouted anew, and bore dark fruit ever after.[13] Sauron, his most powerful servant, remained loyal to his master's memory. After his first defeat during the Second Age, Sauron was held prisoner in Numenor, but managed to corrupt the king, Ar-Pharazôn, and several of his followers, into worshiping Melkor as a god.
Dagor Dagorath
According to material in some of Tolkien's writings compiled (but not published) by his son, in the last days Melkor will learn how to break the Door of Night and re-enter the World, and initiate the Dagor Dagorath, the Battle of Battles.[14][15] In this battle Morgoth himself would be slain by none other than Túrin Turambar, returned to life. Thus the Children of Húrin and all Men will be avenged from this defeat.
However, the published Silmarillion does not include this information, and instead asserts that, if the Valar know how the end of Arda will present itself, they have not revealed it.
Etymology
The name Melkor was a Quenya word that meant "One who arises in Might"; his name in Sindarin was Belegûr or Belegurth ("Great Death").[16]
Other names
Before his defeat in the War for Sake of the Elves, the fearful early elves of Cuiviénen called him the Dark Hunter.[4]
The name Morgoth, which he was called by Fëanor at Valmar after Melkor stole the Silmarils, meant "Dark Enemy", even though it was Black Foe of the World that Feanor named him out loud.[17] It was also used by lore masters and the Wise when discussing Melkor's latter state of being, when he became "ever more bound to the earth", having dissipated his power, and becoming in consequence "the Morgoth." He was also known as Melkor Bauglir when he returned to Angband towards the beginning of the First Age. Bauglir meant "the Constrainer".[16]
His Old English name is Manfréa Bolgen, from the Old English words man ("evil, wickedness"), fréa ("lord"), and bolgen ("wrathful").[18]
Titles
He was the world's first Dark Lord. Melkor was also known for giving himself titles and referred to himself as King of the World[1] and the Elder King.[10] After his defeat, his most powerful servant Sauron called him Lord of All and Giver of Freedom and Lord of the Dark as a way of getting the corrupted Númenóreans to worship him.[19]
Earlier names
In both volumes of The Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien called him Melko, Belcha (from the Quenya velka "flame") [20], Ulban(d) ("monster")[20] Melegor [21], and Meleko.[22]
Material in The Lost Road and Other Writings refers to him as Melko, Alkar, and Mardello.[23]
Powers and abilities
Melkor in his time was the strongest being of Arda, second only to Eru Iluvatar himself. Initially significantly stronger than the combined power Manwë and all of the Valar, Melkor was mightier than and ruled over Sauron and the Balrogs. At his prime he spilled enormous oceans and destroyed mountain ranges. Even while greatly weakened, Melkor could create massive firestorms, huge craters, and curse his foes to sorrow and death (e.g. the family of Húrin).
Character
Initially, Melkor could take on any form he chose. The Ainur took on forms reflective of their moods and might. Melkor, in his arrogance, malice and power, took on a form recorded as:
...a mountain that wades in the sea, and has its head above the clouds, and is clad with ice and crowned with smoke and fire, and the light of the eyes of Melkor was like a flame that whithers with heat and pierces with a deadly cold.
—The Silmarillion, Ainulindalë
It is said that out of all the Valar, Melkor was most like Aulë for his craftsmanship. Originally the brightest, most beautiful, most powerful Ainu, he fell through jealousy, pride and hatred of others, into Darkness with ever after a desire to conquer and to rule. When he built Utumno he took on a form shaped roughly manlike but great in size, "a Dark Lord, tall and terrible." This form was chained by the Valar. When he walked in Valinor he wore a much fairer form, so noble and lofty and benevolent not even the Elves (save only Fëanor and Galadriel) are recorded as seeing through it to the malice underneath. This he cast off to escape unclad from the hunt of the Valar, and when he faced Ungoliant he put back on the form of the tyrant of Utumno. In that form he remained ever after. As he spent his might and poured out his power into the very fabric of matter, as well as into all his creations, he grew more stooped and less majestic, and his hands were burned black from the touch of the Silmarils. His eyes shone with a daunting light.
There is some dispute over Morgoth's size. The Silmarillion states:
He stood over the king as a tower...and...cast a shadow over him like a storm cloud.
—Quenta Silmarillion, "Of the Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin"
As Elves typically reached about six feet tall, or close to seven feet for the Noldor, (Men were of similar height to Elves, however, Númenóreans averaged was similar with those Noldor elves and Elendil was said to be nearly eight)... Morgoth must have stood at least twice this length, and with the shadow he robed himself in he may well have seemed taller. In most artistic renderings Morgoth is depicted as towering over other beings, most notably elves (Fingolfin in particular) of the FA.
Morgoth set his foot upon his neck, and the weight of it was like a fallen hill.
—Quenta Silmarillion, "Of the Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin"
This again implies a huge size. It may be wondered how Fingolfin stayed alive so long; but Elves were possessed of a strength and agility many times greater than a human (save exceptional ones like Turin), and Fingolfin could probably leap to great heights.
Initially, Melkor's power was so great that he could contend with all the other Valar and Maiar of Arda and beat them (ere Tulkas came). Over time however, his power was dispersed into the fabric of Arda and into his servants, lessening his might. At the time of his visit to Fëanor at Formenos, Melkor was still referred to as "the greatest being in Eä", though this was before his capture and final defeat by the Valar. It is unknown how much of his power he put into his various slaves after returning to Angband.
In terms of his personality, perhaps his most defining attribute was his overweening pride. From nearly the beginning of his existence, Melkor wished to have the power of creation, a power that only Eru Ilúvatar possessed. When he discovered that he would never be able to possess it, and that all that he could accomplish had, by definition, it's utmost source in Ilúvatar himself, he began to descend into anger and bitterness. When Arda came into being, he desired lordship of it for the sake of his own self aggrandizement rather than for the sake of ordering it according to the will of Ilúvatar. When he was denied it, he began to squander his gifts in wasteful and wanton destructiveness, using his vast power to ruin the works of the other Valar. He also envied anyone who possessed anything in greater quantity than himself, and that which he could not control, he grew eventually to hate. He began with a desire for light, but when he could not possess it for himself alone, he turned instead to darkness. His power and knowledge, both of which were greater than all the other Valar, he perverted to manipulation and deception, and he became an absolute and consummate liar. Ever denied the lordship and worship he so coveted, he squandered his power in fashioning evil servants who would give him these things, dispersing himself, his power, and his malice into the very fabric of Arda. Despite his overwhelming might, he was also known to be remarkably cowardly, reluctant to engage in battle himself even when victory was completely assured. Part of this was due to the fact that, alone of the Valar, he eventually became bound to a physical form which could be destroyed. He was possessed of virtually peerless cunning, and he was able to deceive and manipulate even the other Valar to the point where, after he was released from the Halls of Mandos, he was above the suspicion of all save Tulkas and Ulmo, and this was primarily because they were slow to forgive his past transgressions. Many of his most terrible deeds in Arda were achieved through treachery, manipulation, misdirection, and lies, and he seduced many Maiar to his service with false promises. However, as an utterly pitiless and merciless being, acts of compassion, mercy, or pity were entirely beyond his comprehension, and he seemed to have a serial tendency to underestimate the valor and capabilities of his foes.
Other versions of the legendarium
In Tolkien's early concept of the Children of the Ainur, Melkor had a son Kosomot (later Gothmog) with an ogress called Fuithluin.[20]
Nienna, the Vala of Mourning, was Manwë and Melkor's sister until Tolkien made her the sister of Námo and Irmo instead.[24]
In other writings, it was said that Melkor wanted to claim the Maia Arien as his wife and ravished her, to "destroy and disdain her, not to beget any fiery offspring".[25]
In some versions, Melkor will be defeated by Eönwë during the Dagor Dagorath, driven by his love for Arien, instead of Túrin Turambar.[26]
Melkor’s original name was to be Melko.
Translations around the World
Foreign Language Translated name Amharic መልኮር Arabic ملكور (Melkor) مورقوطي (Morgoth) Armenian Մելկոր (Melkor) Մարգոտն (Morgoth) Belarusian Cyrillic Мелькор (Melkor) Моргот (Morgoth) Bengali মেলকোর (Melkor) মোরগত (Morgoth) Bulgarian Cyrillic Мелкор (Melkor) Моргот (Morgoth) Catalan Mélkor/Mórgoth Chinese (Hong Kong) 米爾寇 (Melkor) 魔苟斯 (Morgoth) Georgian მელკორი (Melkor) მორგოთი (Morgoth) Greek Μέλκορ (Melkor) Μόργκοθ (Morgoth) Gujarati મેલ્કોર (Melkor) મોર્ગોથ (Morgoth) Hebrew מלקור (Melkor) 'מורגות (Morgoth) Hindi मेल्कोर (Melkor) मोर्गोथ (Morgoth) Japanese メルコール (Melkor) モルゴス (Morgoth) Kannada ಮೇಲ್ಕೋರ್ (Melkor) ಮೊರ್ಗೊತ್ (Morgoth) Kazakh Cyrillic Мелкор Korean 멜코르 (Melkor) 모르고스 (Morgoth) Kyrgyz Cyrillic Мэлкор Lithuanian Melkoras Macedonian Cyrillic Мелкор (Melkor) Моргот (Morgoth) Marathi मेल्कोर (Melkor) मॉर्गथ (Morgoth) Mongolian Cyrillic Мэлкор (Melkor) Моргот (Morgoth) Nepalese मेल्कोर (Melkor) मोर्गोथ (Morgoth) Pashto مېلکور Persian ملکور (Melkor) مورگوت (Morgoth) Punjabi ਮੇਲ੍ਕੋਰ (Melkor) ਮੋਰੋਗਥ (Morgoth) Russian Ме́лькор (Melkor) Мо́ргот (Morgoth) Sanskrit मेल्कोर् Serbian Мелкор (Cyrillic) Melkor (Latin) Моргот (Cyrillic) Morgot (Latin) Sinhalese මෙල්කොර් (Melkor) මෝගෝට් (Morgoth) Tajik Cyrillic Мелкор (Melkor) Моргот (Morgoth) Tamil மேல்கோர் (Melkor) மோர்கோத்தால் (Morgoth) Telugu మేల్కొర్ (Melkor) మొర్గొథ (Morgoth) Thai เมลคอร์ (Melkor) มอร์กอธ (Morgoth) Ukrainian Cyrillic Ме́лькор (Melkor) Морґотом (Morgoth) Urdu میلکاور (Melkor) مورگوت (Morgoth) Uzbek Мелкор (Cyrillic) Melkor (Latin) Yiddish מעלקאָר (Melkor) מאָרגאָטה (Morgoth)
ReferencesINDIANAPOLIS – The head of a local child care advocacy organization said Wednesday's drowning of a 1-year-old boy in a church baptismal pool could have been prevented if faith-based child care centers were licensed by the state.
"This was preventable," said Emily Barrow, of Child Care Answers in Indianapolis. "Licensed facilities have a sight and sound regulation; child care ministries do not."
The "sight and sound" rule requires children to be within seeing and hearing distance of an adult at all times.
According to police, a therapist had arrived to begin a session with Juan Cardenas at Praise Fellowship Assembly of God, but he could not be found. So she asked employees to help look for him.
Employees told officers they found the child in water about 2 feet deep in the baptismal pool and called for help, said officer Kendale Adams, an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD) spokesman.
Adams said the boy attended the day care center at the church. He was found about 1:45 p.m. and taken to St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital, where he died a short time later, police said.
Melanie Brizzi, child care administrator for the state's Bureau of Child Care, said child care ministries are exempt from a host of state regulations, including the sight and sound requirement.
Among the other exemptions are staff-to-child ratios; educational requirements for owners or managers; medication monitoring; nutrition requirements; food safety and sanitation requirements; and heating and lighting standards.
The Praise Fellowship Assembly of God Church did have to meet an additional 17 requirements in order to receive federal funding. The most important of those included drug testing and limited criminal background checks for employees, officials said.
Faith-based centers have to register with the state and are inspected twice a year but the state has little enforcement power over them. The centers can voluntarily agree to meet additional standards but Praise and Fellowship did not participate in that program, Brizzi said.
The day care center has about eight employees and cares for 30 to 45 children of various ages, according to an IMPD news release. Authorities do not suspect the boy was a crime victim but said the investigation continues, the release said. An autopsy was scheduled for Thursday morning.
Baptismal pools generally hold water for Christian baptisms and vary in size and shape. For the Christian faith, Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, a holy day marking the Lenten season of 40 days leading up to Easter.
Praise Fellowship leaders did not respond to telephone messages seeking comment by late Wednesday.Coming Soon
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KlausMost of us know that drinking too much can lead to car accidents, addictions or worse. We know drinking a little can make us giggly or weepy, lose our balance or lose our lunch, feel ravenously hungry the morning after or want nothing more than to be still in a dark room until that terrible pounding subsides.
But few of us know much more than the above, especially when it comes to what's actually going on inside the body to create these reactions.
In fact, alcohol, even in the smallest doses, affects nearly every system in the body, from the brain to circulation to immunity. And while at low to moderate doses, alcohol does seem to provide certain health benefits -- including a longer life and a healthier heart -- at higher doses, drinking carries with it the risk for long-term effects and permanent damage.
The holiday season in general -- and New Year's Eve in particular -- is rife with opportunities to drink alcohol -- and to overdo it.
In fact, those champagne toasts can come with some serious consequences. Two to three times more people die in alcohol-related car accidents during the week of Christmas and New Year's than other comparable time periods. During the rest of December, 28 percent of traffic-related deaths involve a drunk driver; that number jumps to 40 percent during the week of Christmas and New Year's. Visits to the emergency room for alcohol-related illness or injuries also increase on New Year's Day, by as much as two or 2.5 times.
Of course, you can responsibly toast to 2013. A standard drink is considered.6 ounces of pure alcohol, the equivalent of about 12 ounces of beer, eight ounces of malt liquor, five ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of hard liquor, according to the CDC.
Experts typically define moderate drinking as one drink a day for women and up to two for men. Binge drinking is only a few rounds away; it's categorized as four or more drinks on a single occasion for women and five or more for men.
When it comes to being legally drunk, however, we measure alcohol consumption not by drinks, but by blood alcohol level or blood alcohol content (BAC), a measurement of the alcohol present in the blood. (Alcohol in the breath and urine mirrors the BAC.) The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sets the legal definition of "drunk," as it pertains to driving impairment, at.08.
BAC is affected by gender, weight, how much and how recently you've eaten and how long you've been drinking, so it can be tricky to say how many drinks it takes to reach a given BAC. There are, however, some estimates and even online calculators that can approximate BAC, roughly.
While it's not an exact science, Aaron White, Ph.D. a health scientist administrator at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), says intoxication is typically divided into three ranges. A low dose of alcohol would cause a BAC of up to.05. Anywhere from.06 to.15 would classify as a medium dose of alcohol, and a high dose would be anything above that.
Because the volume of water in the body directly affects BAC, experts recommend alternating between alcoholic drinks and non-alcoholic ones this New Year's Eve (and whenever multiple drinks might be on the menu). "It helps with the effects of dehydration, and, if you're holding a bottled water, it still gives you something to do with your hands," says Gary J. Murray, Ph.D., the acting director of the Division of Metabolism and Health Effects at the NIAAA.
We spoke to Murray, White and Dr. Michael Fingerhood, an associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center's Comprehensive Care Practice, to find out just what happens in the body when we drink alcohol. Keep these in mind as you ring in 2013.
Sources: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center
Graphic by: Chris SpurlockAudio Transcript
Several good follow up questions on your cremation article.
Niki writes in: “Hi Pastor John, I read your article — Should Christians Cremate Their Loved Ones? — with interest. My mom, a Christian, has made it known that she wants her body to be donated to research after her death since ‘she won’t need it anymore.’”
Laura in St. Paul, Minnesota: “Pastor John, thank you for your recent article on cremation versus burial and the dignity of the human body. Having trained in biology and medicine, I can attest to the necessity of having human cadavers available for training. What insights would you provide someone who is considering donating their body to science, such as an anatomy bequest program? Also, if the dignity of the human body could be a reason against donating one’s body to science, wouldn’t this also be a reason to not be an organ and tissue donor?”
That is an incredibly good question — an important question and a front-burner question — because I just did a funeral a few weeks ago for one of my favorite people |
fascist violence and the threat that it poses. It’s time for a new strategy and a new challenge. There must be a multi-faceted mobilization of women themselves and of all those men who stand with us against anti-woman bigotry.
www.answercoalition.orgFILE PHOTO: A sign on the Qualcomm campus is seen, as chip maker Broadcom Ltd announced an unsolicited bid to buy peer Qualcomm Inc for $103 billion, in San Diego, California, U.S. November 6, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
BEIJING (Reuters) - Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) has signed $12 billion worth of deals with three Chinese mobile handset makers on the sidelines of a state visit to Beijing by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Qualcomm signed three non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOUs) at the capital’s Great Hall of the People to sell components over three years to phone makers Xiaomi, OPPO and Vivo, the firm said on Thursday.
The agreement was part of an over $250 billion package of deals unveiled between U.S. and Chinese firms during Trump’s first state visit to China. Trump has long railed against China’s massive trade surplus with the United States.
Qualcomm, which earns more than half of its revenues in China, became the takeover target of rival chipmaker Broadcom Ltd (AVGO.O) earlier this week. It is also facing a legal battle with Apple Inc (AAPL.O) over patent fees it charges.
The chip maker’s chief executive, Steve Mollenkopf, said in a statement that the firm had a longstanding relationship with the three smartphone makers, adding that the move fit with China’s own ambitions to boost its domestic industry.
“We are continuing our commitment to investing and helping advance China’s mobile and semiconductor industries,” he said.Bob Knakal, James Nelson and HFF Boston executive director John Fowler were Paul Massey’s top fundraisers as he outpaced incumbent Mayor Bill de Blasio on his way to a $1.6 million campaign haul over the past six months.
In the months ahead, the two candidates’ fundraising efforts will play a key role in shaping the race for City Hall in November.
Massey, who received the endorsement of the Independence Party of New York earlier this month, raised about $500,000 more than the $1.1 million de Blasio raised since July, according to disclosures published by the New York City Campaign Finance Board on Tuesday.
“This is a significant milestone, and we are just getting started,” the Cushman & Wakefield investment-sales president said in a statement.
In addition to funds raised from over 800 donors, Massey made several personal loans to the campaign totaling $1.3 million, bringing his total fundraising for the period to $2.9 million. While he’s clearly the best funded of de Blasio’s potential challengers, Republican or Democratic, the campaign has little cash on hand — Massey’s been spending almost as quickly as he can fill the till.
The campaign has spent $1.9 million so far – the lion’s share of it on campaign workers and high-powered consultants such as pollsters Arthur Finkelstein and Doug Schoen, former Joe Biden speechwriter Ryan Clancy and Ann Hersberger, a fundraiser with ties to Jeb Bush. The real estate executive’s campaign has a current balance of about $937,000.
De Blasio, on the other hand, has a balance of $2.2 million. His fundraising total for this election cycle stands at $3.3 million. The mayor collected donations from 3,261 individuals, more than any other mayoral candidate during one filing period in recent memory.
As a political outsider with little name recognition with voters, Massey has his work cut out for him if he wants to unseat the Democratic incumbent in November’s election.
De Blasio will most likely participate in the city’s matching-funds program, which matches small donations on a $6-to-$1 basis, but limits campaign spending. His roughly $1 million raised in the most recent fundraising cycle will also translate to about $1 million in matching funds, a spokesperson for de Blasio’s campaign told The Real Deal.
Massey has said he will forgo matching funds, which places more pressure on him to outraise his opponent and tap big-money donors.
And to help raise that campaign cash, Massey has enlisted many of his pals in the real estate industry.
Knakal, in addition to making the maximum personal contribution of $4,950, bundled more than $113,000 worth of funds from 30 other donors, 21 of which gave the maximum amount.
Other top bundlers include CBRE’s Stephen Siegel, Goldberg Weprin real estate attorney Andrew Albstein and developer Alex Adjmi. All told, 60 intermediaries bundled a total of more than $995,000 worth of donations, or about 61 percent of funds raised.
The names of individual donors also reads like a guest list for Thursday’s Real Estate Board of New York gala. A non-exhaustive list includes Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs, Simon Shkury, Simon Ziff, Robert Futterman, Peter Riguardi, Ziel Feldman, David Falk, Kevin Maloney, Edward Minskoff, Peter Hauspurg, Darcy Stacom, Ofer Cohen, Jay Neveloff, Joe Moinian, Ben Shaoul and Mitchell Steir.
On Monday, de Blasio criticized Massey for taking maximum-level contributions from some of the real estate industry’s biggest players.
“It does not surprise me that a millionaire developer would be able to turn to lots of other people in real estate and business and get a lot of large contributions. That doesn’t surprise me one bit,” he said in an interview with NY1 anchor Errol Louis, according to Politico. “I don’t think the people of this city are looking for a developer to lead us forward.”
In the past, de Blasio’s been able to rely on his friends in the real estate industry to help fill his war chest. During previous filing periods Bill Rudin, Sol Arker and Steve Witkoff were some of his top bundlers, and his former PAC Campaign for One New York collected large donations from Two Trees Management’s Jed Walentas. During this most recent filing, however, the mayor listed no intermediaries.
De Blasio’s individual supporters from the industry include Lawrence Benenson, Meir Cohen, Neil Dolgin, Winston Fisher and Albert Laboz.
New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, said to also be weighing a run for City Hall, raised $346,385 from 457 contributors.Sir Jai Singh Prabhakar, GCSI, GCIE (14 June 1882 – 19 May 1937), was the Maharaja of the princely state of Alwar from 1892 to 1937. The only son of the previous ruler, Sir Mangal Singh Prabhakar Bahadur, Sir Jai Singh initially was noted as brilliant, erudite and charming. However, he was later forced into exile. He died in 1937 at the age of 54. He was succeeded by a distant relative, Tej Singh Prabhakar Bahadur.
He was educated in Mayo College, Ajmer. He was a highly regarded Indian English orator and scholar. He lived a lavish lifestyle and spent treasury money[citation needed] on hunting and palaces such as Sariska Palace (now a tiger reserve and hotel). He assisted the farming community with the construction of a number of bunds (irrigation dams).[1]
Imperial Service [ edit ]
Sir Jai Singh took pride in his State's infantry regiments and had them sent to China during the anti-Christian uprising in China and in the following relief operations. Alwar Lancers units served in the First World War. Recognising his services, he was appointed a Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire (GCIE) by the British in 1919.[2]
Legend
Titles [ edit ]
1882-1892: Yuvaraja Shri Jai Singh Sahib, Yuvaraja Sahib of Alwar
1892-1909: His Highness Raj Rishi Shri Sawai Maharaja Jai Singh Veerendra Shiromani Dev Bharat Prabhakar Bahadur, Maharaja of Alwar
1909-1911: His Highness Raj Rishi Shri Sawai Maharaja Sir Jai Singh Veerendra Shiromani Dev Bharat Prabhakar Bahadur, Maharaja of Alwar, KCSI
1911-1915: His Highness Raj Rishi Shri Sawai Maharaja Sir Jai Singh Veerendra Shiromani Dev Bharat Prabhakar Bahadur, Maharaja of Alwar, KCSI, KCIE
1915-1919: Hon Lieutenant-Colonel His Highness Raj Rishi Shri Sawai Maharaja Sir Jai Singh Veerendra Shiromani Dev Bharat Prabhakar Bahadur, Maharaja of Alwar, KCSI, KCIE
1919-1921: Hon Lieutenant-Colonel His Highness Raj Rishi Shri Sawai Maharaja Sir Jai Singh Veerendra Shiromani Dev Bharat Prabhakar Bahadur, Maharaja of Alwar, GCIE, KCSI
1921-1924: Hon Colonel His Highness Raj Rishi Shri Sawai Maharaja Sir Jai Singh Veerendra Shiromani Dev Bharat Prabhakar Bahadur, Maharaja of Alwar, GCIE, KCSI
1924-1937: Hon Colonel His Highness Raj Rishi Shri Sawai Maharaja Sir Jai Singh Veerendra Shiromani Dev Bharat Prabhakar Bahadur, Maharaja of Alwar, GCSI, GCIE
Honours [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]This is a timeline of artists, albums, and events in progressive rock and its subgenres. This article contains the timeline for the period 2010–2019.
Contents [ edit ]
2010 - 2011 - 2012 - 2013 - 2014 - 2015 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018 - 2019
2010 [ edit ]
Newly formed bands [ edit ]
Albums [ edit ]
Disbandments [ edit ]
Events [ edit ]
2011 [ edit ]
Reformed bands [ edit ]
Albums [ edit ]
Disbandments [ edit ]
Events [ edit ]
2012 [ edit ]
Newly formed bands [ edit ]
Albums [ edit ]
Disbandments [ edit ]
Events [ edit ]
2013 [ edit ]
Albums [ edit ]
Events [ edit ]
2014 [ edit ]
Newly formed bands [ edit ]
Albums [ edit ]
2015 [ edit ]
Newly formed bands [ edit ]
Albums [ edit ]
2016 [ edit ]
Newly formed bands [ edit ]
Albums [ edit ]
Beardfish
Events [ edit ]
David Bowie dies due to liver cancer on January 10; only 2 days after his 69th birthday and the release of his final studio album Blackstar
On 21 February 2016 Riverside guitarist Piotr Grudziński died of a sudden heart-attack in Warsaw. His bandmates announced later in September that they would carry on with the band as a three-piece and play their first show on the one-year anniversary of Grudziński's death as a tribute to the guitarist in 2017.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer keyboardist Keith Emerson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on 11 March 2016. A tribute show was held in his honor/legacy by his peers among the progressive rock community on 28 May 2016 in Los Angeles
Emerson, Lake & Palmer vocalist and guitar player Greg Lake died in London on 7 December 2016, at the age of 69, after suffering from cancer.[14]
2017 [ edit ]
Newly formed bands [ edit ]
The Nova Collective
Sons of Apollo
Vuur
Others By No One
Albums [ edit ]
Disbandments [ edit ]
Events [ edit ]
Feb. 7-11: Yes once again hosted their festival at sea, Cruise to the Edge. At the event ex-Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy performed his Twelve-step Suite for the first time in its entirety.[15]
2018 [ edit ]
Newly formed bands [ edit ]
- The Sea Within
Albums [ edit ]
2019 [ edit ]
Newly formed bands [ edit ]
In Continuum
Albums [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]A word with DSCL Finalist Sjaak
pieter
The DSCL Open is down to just eight players, but do we really know who they are? For instance, who is this Sjaak that performed so incredibly well at Dreamhack Summer? Read on and discover a little bit more about the person who was able to beat HuK, Hyun and Golden.
Let’s start off with your Dreamhack experience!
What was your mindset going to the event and did you have any expectations beforehand?
My expectations for the event were not too high. My goal was to pass the second group stage, but I expected it to be really dependent on my opponents. I didn’t really know what to expect from the tournament, so I just went there with the mindset of getting as far as possible. I told myself I wouldn’t be sad if I’d lose early on.
So after beating players such as Hyun, Huk and Golden. Did your expectations change?
Hmm, not really I would say, I knew I shouldn’t expect too much afterwards because I had such a fun tournament already and it would be a shame if I would still be sad after losing whilst I had a great run.
Great answer!
Haha thanks.
Sjaak @ Dreamhack Summer 2014 – Source: ECVisualise Facebook
So in the first weekend of July the DSCL Finals event starts. You’re one of the final 8 players. How was your journey through the qualifiers and group stages? Was it easier than expected, or did you have a hard time?
Hmmm, the qualifiers went pretty well, I lost to revenge in the finals but I managed to qualify in one run. My first group stage was with Daz, HaNfy and JackO, where I thought HaNfy would be tough to beat. But I managed to pull off a quick win and finish it against my teammate Daz, which is always a bit of a pity. The second group stage I wasn’t sure what to expect. Ignite played less good than I had expected. Also studying him really paid off, since he did the strategies I expected. Afterwards I had a free win vs Golden, but even if I had lost to him I was confident to beat Ignite in a rematch.
You will have to face Grubby in your first match. Have you played him in the past? And more importantly, do you think you can beat him?
I haven’t really played him in a tournament, but we’ve met on ladder, which always results in some tense games. Grubby is able to get really good results if he prepares well, but I think I can do so too. Overall I think I have a good shot at beating him.
I’m looking forward to it!
So am I 😀
Are there any players you definitely want to play? Any grudge matches?
Not really, I feel like I want to beat anyone to become the champion.
So before we end this small interview, would you like to give any shout outs?
Shoutouts to my team ECVisualize, Jimmy, PbNoRe, HalveTamme, Nervo, Zeze and of course my sponsors HyperX, Philips, Esportsclothing and Thermaltake!
Great! Thanks a lot for the interview and good luck!PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- One of the reasons the New England Patriots felt comfortable trading Chandler Jones to the Arizona Cardinals in March is the player who now projects to fill the majority of his role: defensive end Jabaal Sheard.
In 2015, Sheard was No. 3 on the depth chart, playing 51 percent of the defensive snaps. That number should rise this season and the 27-year-old seems ready to embrace the challenge.
"It's football. There's change. You never know what's going to happen," he said Wednesday during a break at a Fuel Up To Play 60 event. "You just have to embrace it and go out there and deal with it."
Jabaal Sheard tallied eight sacks in his first season with the Patriots. AP Photo/Steven Senne
In that sense, it could be a return to Sheard's NFL roots when considering his defensive snap-count totals over his career with the Cleveland Browns (2011-2014) and Patriots (2015):
2011: 914
2012: 928
2013: 626
2014: 645
2015: 558
If Sheard can handle an increased workload, health will be a big factor, and this offseason has been kind to him in that area. He said he didn't require any surgery, with a combination of ice tub, hot tub and massage working best for his 6-foot-3, 260-pound frame.
The Patriots' projected depth chart at defensive end has Rob Ninkovich and Sheard as the top tandem, followed by veteran Chris Long and second-year players Geneo Grissom, Trey Flowers and Rufus Johnson. Free-agent acquisition Shea McClellin also lined up at that spot in last Thursday's organized team activity, mostly opposite Long.
For his part, Sheard feels he's starting at a higher point entering his second season with the Patriots. His two-year, $11 million pact represented one of the better bargains in free agency last year.
"Learning the system last year, you feel a lot more comfortable going into this season," he said. "Just getting ready for the season, I can think more along the lines of preparing my body and thinking about football rather than just learning the playbook."
Then there's the business side of the game, which lingers for the Patriots as Sheard is one of several top defenders entering the final season of a contract. The group includes cornerbacks Malcolm Butler and Logan Ryan, linebackers Jamie Collins and Dont'a Hightower, and special-teams captain Matthew Slater, among others.
"I'm not even thinking about that, man," Sheard said. "I'm just focused on this season, going out there and taking care of business and winning as many games as we can possibly win."One of the biggest expenditure of travel is of flights. Of course hotels, food and all expenditure are also high but flights expenditure is the biggest among all. However you can reduce this expenditure by trying to book cheap flights. Yes it is possible to book cheap flights. You just need to do proper research and make some efforts to find and book cheap flights. Here are some of the tips and tricks which you can try to book cheap flights.
Check the rates early
The difference between the best day to book cheap flights and the worst day is very much high. When you book your flights on immediate basis, you have to pay more. Hence it’s better to check the rates a long time before you need to travel. Rates of flights keep on changing. When you start checking it in advance, you never know when the price falls drastically and you get the opportunity to book cheap flights. For getting a good deal, you need to be active. Many times the price is low but you still think it will go lower and don’t book cheap flights in the hope of going price lower. Avoid making such mistakes. When you think the price is adequate you should book cheap flights right away without waiting too long. Waiting too long can result in booking expensive flight.
Avoid festive days
During festive days, the rates of flights are extremely high. Hence if you don’t have any urgent work then you can delay your travel to days other than festivals. If it is necessary to travel during festive days only and you want to book cheap flights then you need to book the flight very much in advance. Certain destinations are always having high prices, if you are going for vacation and you have selected such destinations then you can try changing the destination where you can book cheap flights and the destination is also good.
Choose the right days
The day on which you are travelling makes a big difference while booking your flight. Generally most of the people have to travel on weekends as there are holidays on weekends and hence price is generally higher on weekends. If you are not in hurry then you can avoid travelling on weekends to save some of your bucks. If you want to book domestic flights then Tuesdays are Wednesdays are comparatively less expensive than others and Fridays and Saturdays are the most expensive ones.
Don’t book direct flights
If you are not short on time then for booking cheap flights, it’s advisable to avoid direct flights. You must go for booking connecting flights as they are less expensive as compared to that with direct flights. You must also choose different airways for booking cheap flights. Going for round trip can also be more expensive. Go with one airways and come back with another airway to save some of your bucks.12 Min read time Share:
A Kurdish fighter of the People's Protection Units (YPG). Photo: Kurdishstruggle
Kurds—the largest stateless ethnic group in the world—can be found on all sides of an increasingly complex conflict that stretches across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
On the morning of June 7 this year, a car bomb exploded in front of Istanbul’s Vezneciler metro station. Used by tourists and thousands of university students daily, it was a ten-minute walk from my home. Perplexed Turks gathered at the tape strung around the site, watching as the husk of a police bus was towed away, the presumable target of a powerful blast that killed twelve. The closest I could get was the sixteenth-century Shehzade mosque, more than a hundred meters away from the blast, where workers nimbly collected shards of ancient stained-glass windows.
A friend of a friend, a young police officer assigned to the nearby Istanbul Municipality office, was among the dead. A few days later, there was barely room to breathe as thousands of men lined up for his funeral prayers at the Fatih Mosque. Newly restored, it has become the center of life for the pious in Istanbul’s most conservative area. At one corner of the mosque’s courtyard, a permanent funeral pavilion is erected where the state’s martyrs are displayed before burial.
“May Allah accept him as a martyr,” the imam prayed. “May Allah allow us to fight our nation’s enemies, from within and without.” Military brass in pressed uniforms mingled with bearded old men who recalled decades of secular coups their superiors had perpetrated.
The PKK—designated a terrorist organization by NATO, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union—has been fighting Turkey for Kurdish autonomy since 1984.
A hardline offshoot of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) claimed responsibility for the bombing, calling it retaliation for a war in the southeast that has killed 2,300 and displaced 350,000. In that area of the country, car bombings and roadside IEDs kill police, soldiers, and civilians on almost a daily basis. The PKK—designated a terrorist organization by NATO, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union—has been fighting Turkey for Kurdish autonomy since 1984. Its last insurgency, which peaked in the 1990s, killed at least 35,000. The current one may turn out to be as bloody: the explosives used today in Turkey are far more potent and powerful, and the PKK has used them in places where it impossible to avoid killing civilians along with security forces.
But the conflict is not so simply described as a war between Kurds and Turkey, as it is often portrayed in Western coverage. Members of the thirty million–strong Kurdish demographic in the region—the largest stateless ethnic group in the world—can be found on all sides of an increasingly complex, multifaceted conflict that stretches across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
• • •
In the fall of 2014, I watched the impetus for the PKK’s current insurgency being born from hilltops in Suruc, just across the border from the Syrian town of Kobanî.
Turkish tanks sat idle as a force of largely Kurdish fighters battled ISIS militants below. Western warplanes dropped bombs to a chorus of cheers from Turkish Kurds beside me. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan cared more about stopping Bashar al-Assad than fighting ISIS, they told me—echoing the international headlines—so the West was the only ally they had.
Erdoğan cares more about stopping Bashar al-Assad than fighting ISIS.
In Kobanî, at least a hundred retired American and European soldiers linked up with foreign volunteer brigades that included Turkish Kurds who crossed the border to fight. They hoped to lend a hand in building a new Kurdish state in northeastern Syria, called Rojava, modeled on the leftist principles espoused by the PKK’s founder, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been in Turkish custody since 1999.
Rojava is the fruit of a vision put forth by Ocalan from a Turkish prison in 2005: an autonomous self-governed region stretching across Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. In northern Syria, Ocalan’s followers formed the Democratic Union Party (PYD), outlawed under Assad’s rule, but finally able to emerge as a power on the ground because of the Syrian civil war, where the party’s armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), captured world attention by quickly taking land from ISIS starting in 2013.
But the YPG is not solely a Syrian phenomenon: according to the group’s own data, half of the casualties it suffered between 2013 and 2016 were Turkish nationals—Kurds from Turkey who crossed into Syria to join their campaign for autonomy. Naturally, Rojava has rattled the Turkish military as it tries to wrestle control of the southeast from the PKK in a region that borders the PYD’s autonomous territory in Syria.
In October 2015 the United States, in response to the objections of Turkish and Arab rebels it supports in Syria, supported an alternative to the YPG called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). But even the SDF ended up consisting of mostly PKK fighters. By July 2016, the YPG and SDF had gained control of most of the Turkey-Syria border; the only gap was a sixty-mile stretch between the Euphrates river and Azaz, a corridor controlled by ISIS.
Kurdish weddings have become an ISIS target. In August, a twelve-year-old suicide bomber blew himself up at a crowded Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep.
The ostensibly secular leftist Rojava project garnered homage and regular visits from Western diplomats and opened what it called “official representation” offices in Moscow, Stockholm, Berlin, Prague, and Paris. Anarchists in Brooklyn packed bags to set off for Rojava; Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was the new Francisco Franco. The attention the Rojava project got in the West, and the implicit assumption made in the narrative around it that it represented the will of all Kurds, has sparked resentment among those ethnic Kurds who do not support the YPG or PKK.
“The PKK is a secular terrorist organization, but being secular and being religiously extremist are perceived as two different things for the West,” says Mehmet Solmaz, a British-Turkish journalist who serves as the News Editor at Daily Sabah, one of the largest pro-government newspapers in the country. Solmaz, a Kurd who grew up in the United Kingdom, remembers being in Brussels this March, when Prime Minister Davutoglu attended frantic meetings to try to work out a deal that would have granted visa-free travel to Turkish nationals in exchange for accepting hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Outside the meeting, Kongra-Gel, a European group that Ankara accuses of being a front for the PKK, had erected a giant tent. “There were maybe 300 people waving the PKK flag,” Solmaz recalls. “They claim to fight for my rights as a Kurd.... they have not done anything to make me live in a peaceful Turkey up until now. On the other side ISIS is saying I fight for your religion. It’s the same thing for me, they are all terrorists.”
• • •
On the night of August 20, 2016, a twelve-year-old suicide bomber blew himself up at a crowded Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep. Erdoğan appeared before cameras to say that the bomber was a suspected ISIS member, that there was no difference to him between the Islamist group and the PKK, and that “the place where terror comes from doesn’t make any difference for us.”
“Yesterday in Gaziantep, they targeted Kurds. It was a party member’s wedding,” said Selahettin Demirtas, the charismatic leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). “They seek to start a civil war.”
The idea of targeting Kurdish weddings was, in fact, known to be a priority for ISIS cells in the country since May 2016, when police in Gaziantep raided a safehouse used by the group. The man they were looking for was a Turkish national, Yunus Durmaz, who fought police for hours before blowing himself up. On his laptop, Turkish investigators found thousands of documents prosecutors are now using to build a case against other members of alleged Gaziantep cell.
Most of the estimated 700 Turkish nationals who have joined ISIS are Kurds, and their gravitation toward the extremist group has paralleled the rise in support among fellow Kurds for the secular PKK.
Durmaz was in direct contact with Ilhami Bali, believed to be the top ISIS operative assigned to Turkey, who lives in Raqqa, the self-styled Caliphate’s capital. Durmaz had prepared a list of targets including NATO buildings, foreign embassies, and nightclubs, but his main focus was the HDP, which he referred to as “PKK supporters.” The attacks were to be carried out starting in the summer of 2015, after Bali, incensed over Turkey’s crackdown on cross-border movement, authorized Durmaz to attack whatever targets he wanted to.
In two warehouses in Gaziantep, Durmaz and his followers created the bombs that would be used over the next year, part of an ISIS campaign that has killed more than 250 people at HDP election rallies, Kurdish weddings, and peace marches, including tourists visiting the iconic Blue Mosque or taking a culinary tour on bustling Istiklal Street. The deadliest attacks have been carried out by a single cell from the Kurdish city of Adyaman.
The vast majority of those killed have been ostensive supporters of the Kurdish movement. The reason for this is simple: most of the estimated 700 Turkish nationals who have joined ISIS are Kurds, and their gravitation toward the extremist group has paralleled the rise in support among fellow Kurds for the secular PKK.
“The Kurds,” as newspapers and Western leaders refer to them, have traditionally been some of the most conservative Muslims in the region. One of the largest Islamist movements in modern Turkey was founded by Said Nursî, a Kurdish scholar whose writings after the founding of the Turkish Republic are still read by millions in the country. And Saladin, the first sultan of Egypt who led the Muslim military campaign against the Crusaders states of the Levant, was a Kurd.
But today one faction of young Kurds in Turkey, dismayed at the slow pace of progress for Kurdish rights, has grown hostile to the Islamic culture they grew up with and gravitated toward the PKK, says Aaron Stein, a terrorism researcher at the Atlantic Council. Another faction of young Kurds, in response to the PKK’s apparent animosity toward their conservative Islamic lifestyle, has joined extremist movements including ISIS.
On reporting trips to the southeast of Turkey in 2014, I regularly came across young Kurdish men and women making their way to border cities such as Gaziantep and Sanliurfa, planning on crossing the border into Syria and “volunteering” for the Rojava project. I would later find several in Suruc, waiting at a Kurdish community center near the border for vans to take them across into Kobanî.
“Kobanî has had a serious radicalization effect both on ISIS operational planning for Turkey and, from what we know, on Kurds, who have joined both ISIS and the PKK,” says Stein. “Underneath all this is a strange sort of Kurdish subtext.”
The divisions uncovered by the battle for Kobanî are decades old. In the 1990s, the PKK met resistance not only from the Turkish state, but also from radical Islamist Kurds, who formed groups like the Huda Par. In October 2014, when it became clear Turkish tanks were not going to intervene in Kobanî, the HDP asked supporters in Kurdish-majority cities such as Diyarbakir to protest, issuing a statement asking “all our people, from seven to seventy, to go out on the streets, seize open spaces and take action.” The PKK’s youth wing, the Patriotic Democratic Youth Movement, said any Hüda-Par members should be “executed on sight.” Protesters in Diyarbakir found four men with beards distributing food, shot them, threw their bodies out of a building, and set them on fire. In four days of rioting, thirty people, including twenty-five civilians, were killed, almost all by supporters of the PKK.
At least three Kurdish men from the southeastern city of Adiyaman were radicalized by the Kobanî riots, says Stein, forming a cell that has proven to be the most dangerous in Turkey. Orhan Gonder and two brothers, Şeyh and Yunus Emre Alagöz, left for Syria after the riots. In June 2015, Gonder blew himself up at an HDP rally in Diyabakir, killing four. In July, Şeyh blew himself up at that community center in Suruc, killing 31. In October, Yunus blew himself up at a rally calling for peace with the PKK in Ankara, killing 103.
• • •
Space for Kurds who reject both the PKK and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is shrinking in Turkey. When AKP party leaders showed up to express condolences at the funeral of the victims of the Gaziantep bombing, they were greeted by shouts of “Muderer Erdoğan!” At the burial, the victims’ families were pelted by stones thrown by Turkish nationalists. Since September, seven ethnically Kurdish members of AKP have been assassinated by the PKK in the country’s southeast.
The HDP, which once served as Ankara’s middleman as it brokered a ceasefire with the PKK that collapsed two years ago, has become the latest pro-Kurdish party to be dismantled in the nation’s history. Stripped of its role as a mediator, some HDP have given up hope of any political solution, opting to support Kurds who are typically members of the PKK. HDP parliamentarians have attended funerals for PKK suicide bombers, and the party’s mayors in the southeast are accused of allowing municipal funds and vehicles to be used for the burial of the killed fighters.
In May the AKP and a handful of Turkish nationalists voted to lift parliamentary immunity for lawmakers, a move meant to target the HDP. Of 59 HDP lawmakers, prosecutors have said 58 will be charged with crimes related to supporting the PKK. Under a state of emergency imposed since the failed July 15 coup, dozens of Kurdish-language newspapers and television channels—including the only Kurdish children’s programming channel—have been shuttered over alleged ties to the PKK.
In the aftermath of the Gaziantep bombing, Turkish forces, backing thousands of Syrian rebels, entered Syria on August 24. Within a few weeks, the forces had taken over a swatch of the Turkey-Syria border from Jarablus in the east to Azaz in the west, cutting off the remaining ISIS access points to Turkey. Ankara has said the operation is meant to create a safe zone and will not end until all “terrorist” groups are “cleansed” from the area, putting it on a warpath to fighting not only ISIS, but also Western-backed Kurdish forces, including the YPG and SDF. To its Western allies, the intervention in Syria is an obvious offensive against the Rojava project, but to many in Turkey, it is a belated yet justified effort to defend the country.
Across Turkey, meanwhile, the crackdown on any Kurdish voices critical of the counterinsurgency against the PKK or the intervention in Syria seems to harken back to the insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s, when even Kurdish music was banned. Yet Ankara sees no problem. “We have been suffering from terrorism for many years,” Prime Minister Benali Yildirim said in October. “In reality there is no Kurdish problem in Turkey. Kurds have a terror problem with the PKK.”Looking for news you can trust?
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Bill Seitz, a Republican state senator from Ohio, recently told the Wall Street Journal that his state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards are reminiscent of “Joseph Stalin’s five-year plan.”
Seitz, who is also on the board of the shadowy corporate-government allegiance known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), made this charmingly ahistorical claim just a week after inviting the climate-change-denying Heartland Institute to testify against the standard before the Ohio Senate Public Utilities Committee. He has taken it upon himself to determine whether Ohio should amend or repeal its clean energy law, which requires utilities to institute energy efficiency measures and to draw at least 12.5 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2025.
The Ohio legislature approved its clean energy standard almost unanimously in 2008. Since then, wind and solar companies have created 8,000 new jobs, and efficiency programs have netted rate payers $1 billion in savings, according to the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ohio Public Utilities Commission. But in late February, Seitz introduced legislation that aims to overhaul the law.
Seitz maintains that he has launched the review because the current policies were based on the assumption that wind and solar prices would go down faster than they have over the past five years. He says the state has already deployed the “low-hanging fruit” energy-saving measures, and utilities and their industrial customers are reticent to implement the more expensive technologies that might be necessary to reach the goals set in 2008. “Nobody is for more carbon emissions than you need to have, but at the same time the question is, well, what does it cost?” Seitz told Mother Jones in an interview.
The senator’s record and alliances are probably some indication of the direction he’ll take his review process. In 2011, Seitz cosponsored a bill to repeal the renewable energy requirement entirely. He also sits on the board of ALEC, a public policy group that brings together corporate interests and conservative lawmakers to push industry-friendly bills in state legislatures, and coauthored the group’s model renewable energy standard repeal bill known as the “Electricity Freedom Act.” Another ALEC member, the Ohio-based American Electric Power Company Inc. (which stands to lose money due to the law’s efficiency standards), was the third largest donor |
right here in the hallway.”
Johnny got up from the couch and joined Tiana in the kitchen. “You can start now,” he said.
I slowly stood up from the table and walked across the kitchen to take my post.
By mid-January, I was in near-constant pain. My lower back ached. My shoulders were bruised and red. I had had enough of the backpack and wall.
“Tiana,” I called out. “I’m ready to quit.”
“OK, honey,” Tiana said in a soothing tone.
I stepped away from the wall. I took the black backpack off and set it on the floor. My shoulders continued to cramp, and my feet still ached. I felt numb and hopeless. But I was finally off the wall.
I told them the only information I knew about Yvette—her birth date and phone number. Tiana wrote the details on a pad of paper, then called my parents. They filed a complaint against Yvette with the police.
After that, Tiana and Johnny rewarded me by allowing me to go to Snow Canyon High School. Soon, I had become friends with Jason Osmanksi, a lanky redhead, and I told him about my move to St. George, the Siales, and my backpack. “We’re going to get you out of there,” he assured me. Jason introduced me to Delsy Neilson, an English teacher and the adviser of the Gay-Straight Alliance at the school.
Delsy and Jason connected me to Paul Burke, a lawyer they knew who worked for a powerful Salt Lake City law firm. I told Paul everything. He said little, but I could tell he was listening intently. “Alex,” he finally said, “I would like to offer to be your lawyer, pro bono.”
I accepted immediately. Unfortunately, the conversation with Paul made me late for my next class, and without my knowledge, an automatic call went out to the Siales, letting them know about my tardiness. That night, Johnny called all the kids together at the kitchen table.
“Alex, we got a call from school about you,” Johnny said.
“It’s clear we can’t trust you to attend classes properly,” Tiana said. “As of Monday, we are pulling you out of school.”
“And as of tonight, you will go back on the wall,” Johnny said. “With the backpack.”
This was the final straw. I had to get away.
After dinner, the kids filed off to bed, and Johnny sat down on the couch to play video games. When he finally fell asleep, around 4:30 a.m., I took off the backpack and crossed the kitchen to the sliding door. I grabbed my flip-flops, gripped the door’s handle tightly, held my breath, and pulled the door open six inches. I slipped out into the night air.
Outside, I focused all my energy on getting as far as I could from the house. My bare feet slapped on the black asphalt as I ran past the houses of the Siales’ neighbors and all the people we went to church with on Sunday. Every time a car came down the road, I slowed to a walk or hid in the bushes.
Finally, I made it to the public bus stop, slipped my flip-flops onto my feet, and squatted down in the sagebrush, trying to make myself as small as possible. It was still early; the bus wasn’t scheduled to come for a while. My stomach hurt with anxiety, and my mind raced, trying to come up with a plan: What would I do if the Siales found me?
I watched the color of the sky begin to change over the eastern edge of the desert, then heard the sound of a large engine rumbling toward me.
The lights of the morning’s first city bus crested the hill. I stepped out of the shadows and to the edge of the curb.
When the door opened in front of me, I stood in the circle of light at the foot of the steps but didn’t climb in. “I don’t have any money, but I really need to get to the high school,” I told the bus driver.
“OK,” she said. “Come on in.”
As we drove, I watched the red-rock desert and lava fields go by outside the windows. We were getting closer to Snow Canyon, and the closer I got, the more I felt my courage grow.
“We’re here now,” the bus driver said, her voice soft. “You going to be OK, honey?”
“Yes,” I said, though my voice shook and my body shivered. “Thank you.”
I stepped off the bus. The doors closed behind me, and the bus drove away. I crossed the front lawn and hid in a gap between a wall and the school building. Around 7 a.m., when the janitors began unlocking the doors, I slipped through the back doors of the school building and ran straight to Delsy’s classroom.
“Alex!” Delsy said when she saw me waiting.
“I’m not going back,” I blurted out. Not one more day.”
Courtesy Alex Cooper
Delsy called the police, and later that morning, Child Protective Services and a police officer showed up. I gave them my account, and they decided that I should be taken to the Youth Crisis Center, a beige building nestled up against a wall of red-rock hills on the north side of town.
A police detective walked me through the front door of the center. We were greeted at the front desk by a blond older woman with a warm smile who introduced herself as Sandra. She stood up to shake my hand. Hers was warm and plump. I found everything about her comforting.
“This is Alex Cooper,” the detective said.
“What are the chances they can take me back?” I asked.
“No chance as long as you’re here,” Sandra told me.
“Please don’t let them take me back,” I pleaded.
She smiled. “It’s OK, Alex. You’re safe here.”
Alex lived at the crisis center for a month, then with her father and grandparents in her grandparents’ house. After the Utah Court of Appeals issued an emergency order in the summer of 2011, a lower court ruled that Alex could date other girls. Alex graduated from Snow Canyon High School in 2012 and earned her cosmetology license. Now 21, she lives in Portland, Oregon, and works as a fund-raiser for a nonprofit organization that helps needy kids get an education. She’s still in touch with Jason, Delsy, and Paul.Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman has published a blog post in response to Valve's decision to allow developers and modders to sell their mods directly through Steam Workshop.
As a developer who got his start with a free mod which later released as a paid version, he has an interesting perspective.
"There’s a lot of craziness about paid mods, a lot of people who don’t know how they feel," Newman said. "It’s probably no big surprise that I’m all for it. I sold a mod once and everyone was angry that it was happening, until it happened and they got a much better product than they’d have gotten when it was released for free, then they seemed to calm down a bit. It has given me a career for 10 years. It’s bought me two houses, a bunch of cars. It’s created a company that has hired 30+ people."
Newman agrees that the alleged revenu share, which gives modders only a 25 percent cut on sales, is unfair, but thinks it will get better with time, and players still have other options.
He says that no one is forcing players to pay for mods they don't want, that the market will probably balance itself in terms of how much different mods will cost, and that players can always resort to pirating if they don't have the money.
"So find a way to pirate them," he said. "That’s what we all did when we were kids with no money. Valve’s job is to make it more convenient for you to not pirate stuff."
Valve's new modding program launched on Thursday only with Skyrim (other supported titles will be announced in the coming weeks), but it's already caused a great deal of controversy. Many players are saying that Valve is greedy for allowing modders to sell work that was previously free, and one mod's been removed after claims that it contained the work of another modder.Usher's Ex-Wife Our Kids Are In Danger I Want Custody
Usher's Ex-Wife Tameka Raymond -- I Want Custody... Our Kids Are In Danger
EXCLUSIVE
's ex-wife has just filed legal docs asking for an emergency hearing later this week... to wrestle child custody away from him, on grounds he's creating a dangerous environment... TMZ has learned.filed the docs in Fulton County, Georgia, claiming Usher is abdicating his parental responsibilities by letting other people care for their 2 kids -- people who she claims are not on the ball.We know Tameka has specific beef with the Usher's aunt -- who was watching 5-year-oldwhen his arm got stuck in the pool drain on Monday. Tameka has complained about the aunt in the past -- alleging she once let a stalker in the house where Usher and the kids were staying. Tameka also says the aunt is too physical in disciplining the kids.Currently Usher has primary custody of both kids and Tameka has limited custodial rights. She now seeks to reverse that.“You never hear about how the apocalypse smells like total ass. But it does.”
And so do some stereotypes. We all know this one: about the geek who thinks they are so prone to so many physical and emotional weaknesses that they will slow down everybody else if they are even noticed at all.
Mitchell L. Cohen’s short zombie film Super Zero starts off just like that age-old trope. You know the one: about the stereotypical geek boy whose crush and attractive female love interest doesn’t seem to notice him, who he doesn’t have the courage to even talk to, and who views himself as almost completely useless. It’s a story told so many times by our culture and literature that it is essentially a very typical narrative. But Cohen adds two more elements to this story.
Josh Hershberg doesn’t view himself as that passive-aggressive stereotype of “the nice guy.” He doesn’t think he is owed anything by Page Reynolds or even society. In the year 2017, as a sample of water is discovered and taken from a Mars expedition, he can’t even enjoy this development of science in his geeky life. Why?
Because is geeky is going to be over in a very terminal sense. In the society that exists before the apocalypse, Hershberg has brain cancer: the kind that doesn’t have a cure. Hershberg ends up quoting Theodore Roosevelt when he states “do what you can, with what you have, where you are” in a self-derisive way: because he doesn’t have that much time left. The initial tones of Hershberg’s first-person narration in Super Zero are laced with an irreverent black humour and an infusion of despair as he decides to end his story.
It’s funny, however, just how the reminder and slogan of “It gets better” becomes so prevalent as the zombie apocalypse part of the story begins.
Cohen plays up Hershberg’s adaptation to a foul-smelling post-apocalyptic world with a slow and careful pace. You wonder just how a slow-moving cancer victim with seemingly no fighting or survival experience would even last a minute after an outbreak of fast moving zombies: yes, that kind of zombie. Certainly the stock survivalist jock Nate Bishop and the wise-cracking obnoxious Gary Amante characters see him as more of a liability even though Page, who has survived this far, seems to be a popular girl with a “heart of gold” or at least common human decency. In fact, from the very beginning you see that she does indeed notice that he exists and has an inkling of what he’s capable of even before he reveals it.
Because when you realize that Josh Hershberg is a hard-core engineering geek genius and you see just what he can do with a brain disease that makes him unpalatable, a walking stick and something that looks like a flux-capacitor, you will not be disappointed. All in all, I think that while Super Zero does use some age-old high school zombie survival group stereotypes — complete with the compassionate woman, the stoic jock, the annoying and loud meat-shield, and the nerd — it has the potential to utterly subvert them. In our day and age, we’ve seen a lot of bad-ass geeks and nerds of all genders, so to some degree we are rather spoiled.
And wow is that musical score ever bad-ass.
After watching this film I want to see what happens next as Cohen wants to grow Super Zero into a series. Does Josh Hershberg’s biological advantage overcome him in the end? Would that affect any relationships that he may make? What happens if the group loses him? Will he leave a legacy or will this all get changed somehow? And would we see more development for the other characters?
And as a geek, how do you think you would survive a zombie apocalypse? Personally, my fantasies have wavered between learning necromancy and controlling the zombies, dying first because I slowed people down, or finding my way to a group of my friends where I can tell stories for morale. But while I don’t know about myself or the rest of you, I do think that if Josh Hershberg could give this film a subtitle it would be the following:
(Visited 80 times, 1 visits today)He arrived at the military academy — where tuition now reaches $31,000 a year — for eighth grade in 1959 and remained for high school. Like all students at the campus in Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y., he wore a uniform, participated in marching drills and was expected to conform to a hierarchy imposed by instructors. Despite sitting out the Vietnam War because of deferments followed by a high draft lottery number of 356 out of 366, Mr. Trump said he endured the rigors of military life.
“My number was so incredible, and it was a very high draft number. Anyway, so I never had to do that, but I felt that I was in the military in the true sense because I dealt with those people,” he told Mr. D’Antonio.
The author seemed taken aback by this. Not many of the academy’s alumni “would compare military school with actual military service,” he wrote. “But the assertion was consistent with the self-image Trump often expressed.”
During an interview for the book, Mr. Trump removed a shoe to show the author the cause of his medical deferment. “Heel spurs,” he said. “On both feet.”
As for the Vietnam conflict, he called the war “a mistake.”
Mr. Trump relished his five years at the military academy and bemoaned the dwindling enrollment at such schools.
“After the Vietnam War, all those military academies lost ground because people really disrespected the military,” Mr. Trump said. “They weren’t sending their kids to military school. It was a whole different thing, but in those days — 1964 I graduated — that was a very good thing or tough thing, and it was a real way of life at military academy.”
Mr. Trump’s reputation for self-indulgence is well known (the helicopters, the planes, the penthouses). But at times, his biographer found, he has displayed unexpected generosity.Elon Musk had a busy year, what with his plans to provide solar energy to Puerto Rico, building the world’s largest battery in South Australia, launching a recycled Falcon 9 rocket, and kickstarting The Boring Company. It seems that all this pales in comparison to his biggest news of the year, as revealed in a data set charting the past year in the tech entrepreneur’s life.
Data collected by British firm RS Components shows how different stories drove interest in Musk throughout the year. Google trend graphs reveal spikes as people searched for his name to find out more about his latest achievement.
The one that drove the most traffic of the past year? April 24, when he revealed his relationship with Amber Heard. Musk and Heard announced their partnership over Instagram, with romantic photos of the pair sharing a meal at Moo Moo steak house, on Australia’s Gold Coast. The relationship didn’t last too long, though, with the pair breaking up in August.
Another major spike in searches occurred in July, when Musk dismissed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for having a “limited” understanding of artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg, who has built his own “Jarvis” personal assistant, said that he was optimistic about the role of the technology, and said that he did not understand “doomsday scenarios.”
The jump in interest following Heard’s relationship news is rivaled only by the 2013 announcement of hyperloop. Musk outlined his plans for a 700 mile-per-hour vacuum-sealed pod transit system only to promptly release it to the world for free, causing a sudden surge in interest.
The data shows that Musk has grown over the years into a household name, but there are still many casual newsreaders that will be primarily interested in Musk as the guy that dated the actor from Friday Night Lights, Zombieland and Aquaman, rather than the guy that wants to colonize Mars and create a superfast electric car.
View the information chart below:
INVERSE LOOT DEALS Meet the Pod The first bed that learns the perfect temperature for your sleep, and dynamically warms or cools according to your needs. Buy NowCEO of Samsung Electronics Boo-Keun Yoon. Justin Sullivan/Getty SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd is expected to report its best-ever quarterly profit in the second quarter, with soaring memory chip sales pushing it past Intel Corp as the biggest semiconductor maker by revenue for the first time.
The world's largest memory chip maker is the among the biggest beneficiaries of soaring demand for processing firepower on smartphones and servers, which has fueled an industry super-cycle amid limited supply growth.
Underscoring its dominant position, Samsung said on Tuesday it plans to invest some $18.6 billion in South Korea as it seeks to extend its lead in memory chips and next-generation displays for smartphones.
The South Korean tech giant, Asia's third-largest company by market capitalization, is now poised to knock Intel off the top of the global semiconductor market-share rankings for the first time since 1991.
"From the second quarter, Samsung will become No. 1 in market share due to the recent increase in data centers and demand for solid-state drives," NH Investment & Securities analyst Peter Lee wrote in a note to clients.
Samsung's April-June operating profit is expected to leap 67 percent from a year earlier to 13.1 trillion won ($11.4 billion), a new high, according to the average forecast from a Thomson Reuters survey of 18 analysts.
The same survey expects July-September profit to be even higher at 13.8 trillion won.
Solid sales of the Galaxy S8 smartphone launched in April likely provided an additional boost, keeping the firm ahead of rival Apple Inc as the world's top smartphone maker.
The S8's performance has reassured investors whose nerves were shaken last year by the costly withdrawal of Samsung's premium Galaxy Note 7 due to fire-prone batteries.
Samsung shares are trading at a near-record high of 2.35 million won each as of Tuesday. They have gained 30 percent so far this year on top of a 43 percent surge in 2016.
IN THE PIPELINE
"The Galaxy S8 series has been out for more than 2 months now and we see similar traction as the Galaxy S7 series," Counterpoint analyst Tom Kang said.
Samsung would sell about 49 million S8s by the end of its first full-year release, in line with first-year sales of the Galaxy S7, he said.
Samsung is also preparing to unveil the Galaxy Note 8 in August, a source told Reuters, restoring the company's schedule of market-moving gadget releases after the interruption of the Note 7 debacle.
The company will issue earnings guidance early on Friday but will not disclose details on its performance until late July.
Nomura has predicted DRAM chip prices will continue to rise in the second half of 2017 due to limited supply and strong demand driven by servers.
Demand for solid-state drives (SSD) and smartphones would maintain profits for producers of NAND semiconductors, despite an easing of a production bottleneck, it said.
(Reporting by Joyce Lee; Editing by Stephen Coates and Edwina Gibbs)While in Germany you can attend 'ein Meeting' that is 'gemanaget' by someone else using your "down-geloadete" information from the internet.
After that you might need to rush to the airport for 'das Einchecken' before taking off in a plane with a'stewardess' on it.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe - "Der Typ ist total gestylt" (Photo: Wikipedia /Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.)
German is peppered with English words either accepted wholly into the language of Goethe or Germanified such as 'gestylt' - as in "Der Typ ist total gestylt" - that bloke is totally done up.
The result is 'Denglisch' and has left some language purists crying into their coffee cups.
The language flow the other way has not been so extreme however.
English has happily assumed Zeitgeist, Schadenfreude and Kindergarten and there seems to be a creeping use of 'über' to describe'very' or 'extremely' as in 'überhappy' but the list is relatively short by comparison.
Now the Goethe institute may be the cause of another German word entering everyday English.
It held a competition to find the word that would most benefit the English language.
The winner, announced today (8 December) is 'Fachidiot,' with the person nominating it saying it could be clumsily translated by "Idiot of your own subject."
Elaborating she said that "one-track specialist" was not quite right because "a specialist is nobody you would call an idiot. A one-track specialist is somebody who knows a lot about a particular field; a Fachidiot as well."
"The difference is that a one-track specialist still notices what is going on around him, in the world which has nothing to do with university. A Fachidiot simply does not, or not anymore."
Whether Fachidiot migrates over to English remains to be seen but it beat some other fabulous German words including 'Kummerspeck' – literally 'grief bacon' but meaning 'excessive weight gain caused by emotion-related overeating'.
Other words were 'Ohrwurm' – literally earworm – but meaning a catchy tune; 'Quatsch' meaning something like nonsense; and 'Eklärungsnot' – being in need of an explanation.
The runners up were 'Backpfeifengesicht' – meaning a face that makes you want to slap it - and 'Torschlusspanik' – the panic you get when you are rushing for something and think you are not going to make it.Publisher WPBT-TV
Anita Bryant (famous Florida orange juice and anti-gay spokeswoman) narrates this film that tries to simplify its drug abuse message with an analogy of kids putting together a contraption out of Lego blocks. Although the metaphors often don't make sense, the visual impact of the film is stunning and could easily be quite popular with individuals consuming illicit drugs. Also, like most anti-drug films, this could be a tempting introduction to drugs for some youths yearning to escape their "boring" lives or to rebel against their parents.
Contact Information This film comes from the A/V Geeks archive. For more information regarding this film and the archive, visit <a href="http://www.avgeeks.com">http://www.avgeeks.com</a>
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Reviewer: markuskobi - favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 21, 2013
Subject: So...What Are Drugs Like?? Huh?? You Know...DRUGS! Sister: "Whatcha making?"
Brother: "A huka bong with a built in graphix chamber..." - February 21, 2013So...What Are Drugs Like?? Huh?? You Know...DRUGS!
Reviewer: loyaltubist - favorite favorite favorite favorite - October 12, 2012
Subject: I enjoy this... It is, in fact, 1969, not 1979... I checked the Internet Movie Database... - October 12, 2012I enjoy this...
Reviewer: Headlinzman - - October 3, 2011
Subject: Date of Origin I came across the You Tube posting today and noticed that there are a lot of people who seem to think that this film was released in 1979; that is definitely incorrect. How do I know? My father shot the film, I have a cameo in it along with two family members, and it was pretty much done in the production team's various living rooms. My recollection is that we shot it in '68-69, about when I was eight (around the time 2001 was released); that the Lego bit was shot in Paul Nagle's living room, the opening shot was from within my closet, etc. Of course, my childhood memories aren't infallible, but I'm pretty sure the thing was in the PBS system and the Dade County schools and recreation departments by '70 at the latest. That means Anita Bryant would've been about 29, which is a little surprising the way she sounds. - October 3, 2011Date of Origin
Reviewer: George Oldupai - favorite favorite favorite - September 7, 2011
Subject: 1979?! this looks like 1970.
Whoever is in charge of this upload should confirm/update the date of origin. - September 7, 20111979?!
Reviewer: Michael Walken - favorite favorite - May 25, 2011
Subject: Hissing of summer lawns Now that's a weird one. A typical product of it's time, it looks like being done with the help of illicit substances. Plenty of moving pictures for the sake of it, dull folksy score, no cognizable narrative route, no coherence between whatever comes next, reluctant kids doing a tiresome "conversations" routine, gee, "Drugs Are Like That" is a sound conclusion, but from what, the heck? Not from this nonlinear nonsense. "Stunning visual impact..." oh boy. Two stars and an academy award nomination for the most brazen product placement in a pointless flick, though. - May 25, 2011Hissing of summer lawns
Reviewer: Bedtime4Bonzo - favorite favorite favorite favorite - December 11, 2009
Subject: awesome drug vid i love this one but the mpeg2 download is choppy for some reason. i am going to try to request a repost of it...... - December 11, 2009awesome drug vid
Reviewer: dkpt0107 - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - March 11, 2009
Subject: La La La... This same video was used in The Bird and the Bee video for La La La.
Look it up on youtube.
The pill/needle/joints remind me of Drug Store Cowboy era Van Sant... - March 11, 2009La La La...
Reviewer: xXxKimberlyAnnexXx - favorite - January 6, 2009
Subject: They tried, I guess... I wasn't expecting much from a Florida Orange juice and anti-homosexual spokes-person anyway, but they obviously didn't put much thought into this film...
And what were they talking about "the visual impact of the film is stunning and could easily be quite popular with individuals consuming illicit drugs" I didn't see any stunning visuals!!!
The attempt at being metaphoric was lame at best, they were overly vague and general, and the statement " like most anti-drug films, this could be a tempting introduction to drugs" was strange... they obviously thought too much of this film and shouldn't make films about subjects they have no experience with or knowledge about. I wasted how much of my time over this? I guess drugs are like that, too... ;) - January 6, 2009They tried, I guess...
Reviewer: bestpbx - favorite - March 20, 2008
Subject: This film is a drug! It killed 50,000,000 brain cells and made me want to beat up a bunny rabbit. This film is worse than CRACK! Do not watch it. You will be sorry! Anita Bryant will come to your house with a photographer and they will make a film of you when you drop your pacifier and no matter how hard you cry they will not let you have it. Oh, they HUMANITY! Somebody save me!!!!!!!! - March 20, 2008This film is a drug!
Reviewer: your dog - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 13, 2008
Subject: Salome Lego Playset
you can find their music on
slp
salome lego playset
or
myspace.com/salomelp
i liked the movie. there is this italian band that is basically what this movie is all about.you can find their music on archive.org slpsalome lego playsetori liked the movie. - February 13, 2008Salome Lego Playset
Reviewer: kingcole - favorite favorite - February 3, 2008
Subject: Oh my god. lmfao This video is so inaccurate in it's metaphors and although it is hilarious, it's so intolerant.
And since when does a Lego machine smoke? XD That piece had no place in the entire machines mechanic system and the whole thing blew up.
I really hope that the person below me is joking. Anyone who's scared from this needs a reality check.
Drugs are sort of like some of the things. But I must say that other than to laugh at (and I mean get a kick out of) this video is pointless! Shoot it just makes me want to go do some drugs and watch again so I can laugh my ass off at how ridiculous it really is. - February 3, 2008Oh my god.
Reviewer: Hank Chinaski - favorite favorite favorite favorite - November 18, 2007
Subject: about this, dear lord. this scared shit out of me, literally. now i'll be having nightmares about this, dear lord. - November 18, 2007about this, dear lord.
Reviewer: jspivack - - November 1, 2007
Subject: Nostalgia trip! This was made way before '79. It had to have been made in 1970 or before, because I remember VIVIDLY seeing the film at a Miami Dade Public School when I was in the second grade (in 1970). Specifically, the film was shown during a local Cub Scouts meeting at the school. Coincidentally, my brother was a classmate and fellow scout of David Blood, son of Robert J. Blood who is credited as "production coordinator" for the film. Mr. Blood made documentary films for a living, and I still remember the editing equipment in his home (he used primarily 16mm film), and being fascinated by it.
Miami was a great place to be a kid in those days, but not without its problems, including a nascent drug trade. It probably seemed like all fun and games at the time (except for worried parents), until the first public salvo in the cocaine wars of Miami when Griselda Blanco (the Godmother of Cocaine) had her boys shoot up two rival cocaine cowboys (plus innocent bystanders) from an armored van at a Dadeland liquor store on July 11, 1979. A few years later, there was crack...
Those reviewers who find the pace plodding, the dialog stilted, and the metaphors mixed may have a point, but remember that attention spans were longer then (even for children), before the days of information overload and home pc based non-linear editing availability to the masses. I'm not saying those times were better, just different, and it helps to view something like this in context. - November 1, 2007Nostalgia trip!
Reviewer: BloodyL - favorite favorite - July 25, 2007
Subject: Drugs are like that.....like what? A pretty dull film whose only saving grace is the lego machine.
As has already been noted, the dialogue between the kids is awful beyond belief, almost every other word is "What?", so much so that I begun to consider that the film was sponsored by the American Council of What?. - July 25, 2007Drugs are like that.....like what?
Reviewer: The Chimp - favorite favorite favorite favorite - May 10, 2007
Subject: Drugs are like What? I was subjected to such films in the late seventies by well meaning (or bored) teachers. Rather than having the desired effect these films mostly encouraged children to take drugs. This film is best viewed and understood if you are *on* drugs...
A boy named Shannon? Gotta love that song! - May 10, 2007Drugs are like What?
Reviewer: Rotted - favorite - April 28, 2007
Subject: oh come on If my kids watch this film, they would be really scared of living. Because "drugs are like everything".
It is not a film for all kind of minds. I bet u some other children, besides mine, will understand something different. Fear to live, or maybe "hey, let's take some drugs, anyway we can be swallowed by the lake"
And at the end, if u change a little piece of this master machine, everything will be spoiled.. come on, are we so stupid? that's an insult for human being. our minds and bodies are so flexible, of course not everybody could live taking drugs, there are many machines that are cheap-qualited. haaha.
You guys keep on praying, the lord will come (from nowhere) and save u from the sin. - April 28, 2007oh come on
Reviewer: Larry Gilbert - favorite favorite favorite favorite - April 19, 2007
Subject: The hell with the drugs...I want those Lego pieces! Those are bad-ass!! - April 19, 2007The hell with the drugs
Reviewer: silvertwinz - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - September 21, 2006
Subject: this review is like that too... the pictures of the falling shower of pills is kinda neat. seeing someone making doobies out of rolled toilet paper is not. with all the bright pictures, it makes me think drungs are spiffy,but the analogies are pretty strange. all in all this is what i learned:
drugs are in many pretty colors and look appealing.
lockup the cookie jar from your kids.
even binkies can and are seen as crack for babies.
don't get dizzy and play ball 'cause you'll suck at it.
don't go out into the lake 'cause it will eat you and burp up your bones later.
and finally--don't blow smoke over moving lego parts or they will explode.
enjoyable, but really, really strange. - September 21, 2006this review is like that too...
Reviewer: Woofpop - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - August 26, 2006
Subject: Back in elementary school in Ft Lauderdale in 73... I believe that this was a compilation of PSA's that date back nearly a decade before 1979, with the kids-Lego wraparound from later. I remember the hopscotch, spinning swing and cookie jar spots from when I was in elementary school in the early 70's - shown on a 16mm projector, of course!
This is worth it for the "floating pills and syringes" spot alone! A couple of years ago, I was trying to describe this same segment to some friends who did not recall it - now I have proof that it exists!!!
Thankyouthankyouthankyou! - August 26, 2006Back in elementary school in Ft Lauderdale in 73...
Reviewer: cyclic - favorite favorite favorite favorite - January 4, 2006
Subject: this is like something else... Both surreal and comical, I suspect that it was made by people who had taken a lot of hallucinogens (possibly during the making of the film), after being paid by rabid anti-drug/homosexuality/free thought christians to educate kids on the danger of drugs. I especially enjoyed the end where the metaphor of the mechanical lego is explained: "People are like machines, so stay in your place"
Also, great song! - January 4, 2006this is like something else...
Reviewer: Spuzz - favorite favorite favorite favorite - January 1, 2006
Subject: This is a review. A what? Extremely bizarre film about what makes drugs.. well.. bad. 2 laughably dressed kids in even a more laughably decorated house talk about drugs. What? You know, drugs! The kids discuss this while putting together this wicked ass contraption from Lego. From what? You know, Lego.What is WRONG with these kids? Why do they have to have everything repeated twice? Anyways, the girl apparently had a lecture about drugs, and why theyÃÂÃÂre bad for you. No real hard evidence, apparently it was the beating around the bush approach they were going for. You know, Swimming is fun, but it can also be dangerous as well! Drugs are like that! DonÃÂÃÂt reach for the cookie jar, you might fall and hurt yourself! Drugs are like that. You can be really good in baseball, but sometimes youÃÂÃÂre not! Drugs are like that. Inane comparision after inane comparison are shown. And oh right, Miss Anita ÃÂÃÂhomosexuals are evilÃÂÃÂ Bryant (love that ÃÂÃÂMissÃÂÃÂ in front of her name!) narrates. So you know itÃÂÃÂs true. - January 1, 2006This is a review. A what?
Reviewer: left wing films - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - December 2, 2005
Subject: Lego goes wild hilarious short film selling cheap a bunch a lies to american kids about drugs.
Two kids make analogies of to drug related problems while one of them builts up a lego
The best part is where we see the smoke around the Lego, oh its so true...
drugs are bad?
Well that s not the point but frighting and lying seems to be the normal standard for american education which is sad...
besides that the film is totally fun to watch
5 stars for the amazing irony and nice shots of legos and drugs falling loop.
Its totally worth the download! - December 2, 2005Lego goes wild
Reviewer: Christine Hennig |
’t an issue, but making sure we avoided the tourist traps was priority. La Malquerida not only had some of the best shrimp tacos and mezcal margaritas I’ve ever had but the service was amazing. We felt right at home and made new friends with the waiter Hermano.
Batey Mojito and Guarapo Bar
That same night we walked four doors down to Batey; the small bar is hard to miss, live music and a pretty crowd spills through the sidewalk. Not to mention they boast the best Mojitos in town made with fresh sugar cane juice. Flavors include: Classic Lime, Ginger Lime and Watermelon and you can pair it with your rum of choice.
Spring break is here and many vacationers are planning a trip to Cancun, but we definitely recommend a stop in Tulum to check out these gems.
Would you like to submit your work? Email info@dyynamics.com with comments, questions or tips. Follow Dyynamics on Twitter and Instagram, and like us on Facebook.You may be surprised by some of the tools and tricks that NASCAR pit crews use on race day. See more NASCAR pictures Rusty Jarrett/ Getty Images for NASCAR
The most powerful tool a NASCAR driver has is his car -- but his car wouldn't survive even one race without the care it gets from the crew. NASCAR pit crews are sometimes called the unsung heroes of the sport. That's because they keep the car (and the driver) going, but they often get very little credit. However, those who are in the know recognize that NASCAR crew members are an integral part of every NASCAR victory and are superb athletes in their own right.
But just like a major league slugger would be nothing without his baseball bat, and Tiger Woods would be nothing without his golf clubs, NASCAR crew members would be useless if they didn't have the tools they need to get their job done.
Keep reading to learn about the 10 essential tools of NASCAR pit crew members, how the tools work, and some of the surprising tricks many employ to keep their car on the track.On Wednesday, a one-year-old calf was run over allegedly by the car of Hindu Yuva Vahini leader in Nivada area in Janakipuram locality.
The car belonged to Hindu Yava Vahini’s district convener in Lucknow, Akhand Pratap Singh. Hindu Yuva Vahini was founded by Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Yogi Adityanath with cow protection being one of the core agenda items of the militant Hindutva outfit.
Cops have registered a case against unidentified persons on the complaint of the calf’s owner, Rajrani — a resident of Nivada.
The complainant, according to a report by Indian Express, alleged that a group of drunk people had started their car from near a liquor shop around 7.30 pm and ran over the calf that was tied nearby along with a cow. She alleged that the calf died after it was dragged for about 20 metres.
“The driver started the car and hit the calf, which was tied near the wine shop. The animal was dragged up to the spot where the road had turned. There he stopped the vehicle, as it was could not be moved anymore… A few locals had noticed the incident… Soon, all those inside the car left the car and fled,” claimed Rajrani.
Singh’s sister said that while the car belonged to him, he was not there.
She said, “The car belongs to him but it was with someone else at the time of the incident.”
On 3 April, a group of right-wing terrorists in Rajasthan had killed a Muslim man for legally transporting cows for dairy farming.
The cold-blooded murder had caused a huge public outcry. The Supreme Court on Friday asked for a report from the Rajasthan government. Shockingly, Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi had denied the murder of the Muslim man prompting many to accuse him of lying in the parliament.NATO approved plans for a 4,000 person rapid response force based in Eastern Europe and aimed at reassuring members near the Russian border that any military action against member countries would be regarded as a threat to all of the organization’s constituents.
The New York Times reported Friday:
The NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the force, a “spearhead” for a larger reaction force, would send a clear message to potential aggressors, namely Russia, and represent “a continuous presence.”
“Should you even think of attacking one ally, you will be facing the whole alliance,” he declared at the close of the two-day NATO summit in southern Wales.
… Ukraine remained the most important issue for the alliance, even as a cease-fire was announced at peace talks in Minsk, Belarus, with Ukraine, Russia and pro-Russian rebels. The durability of that cease-fire remained unclear.Node Packaged Modules
Introducing RequireBin, Browserify-CDN and npmsearch Max Ogden
Three new projects that bring npm modules to the web
npm: Node Packaged Modules
A common misconception about npm is that since it has 'Node' in the name that it must only be used for server side JS modules. This is completely untrue! npm actually stands for Node Packaged Modules, e.g. modules that Node packages together for you. The modules themselves can be whatever you want -- they are just a folder of files wrapped up in a.tar.gz, and a file called package.json that declares the module version and a list of all modules that are dependencies of the module (as well as their version numbers so the working versions get installed automatically). It's turtles all the way down - module dependencies are just modules, and those modules can have dependencies etc. etc. etc.
The main features that npm brings to the table (in my opinion) are:
Automatic installation + upgrading (e.g. no more downloading individual.js files and moving them manually into your js/ folder)
Modules specify a list of other modules that are dependencies
Dependencies get installed at known working versions
Each module gets it's own local set of working dependencies (different versions of the same module can be depended on by different modules in the same project)
Dependencies can have dependencies
The availability of solutions on npm makes you feel like a kid in a candy store
I've written more about the specifics of writing programs with npm in my Art of Node article. If you haven't grokked how npm works yet I highly encourage you to give it a spin. Some other great reads on the subject: Using npm on the client side and Browserify and the Universal Module Definition by @shamakry and Introduction to Browserify by Seth Vincent.
Browserify: Using npm for client-side programs
A traditional JS app that might have a few libraries like jquery.js, bootstrap.js, angular.js, underscore.js and a few additional plugins. Since there are only a handful of js files it's not a big deal to manually download, move and add a script tag for each one.
Node programs, on the other hand, don't have the same limitations as browsers. Any program can require() another program and start using it. Programs can be published as tiny components that do one thing well, a la Unix. There isn't a strict definition but generally speaking code is modular if it exposes a generically useful API that be used by multiple dependent modules.
There is only one problem: browsers don't have a good way to load modules. The state of the art is to have a ton of script tags that either leak globals e.g. how jQuery plugins all use $ or use RequireJS to manage loading code into the correct scopes.
Both of these approaches make tons of HTTP requests which means when your app gets bigger than a dozen or so dependencies then you'll want to start thinking about a build step to reduce page load time.
A good module system enables better code to be written. When you have to worry about limiting the number of script tags you will tend to use large kitchen sink style projects like jQuery. A build step is just some process that combines multiple JS programs into one larger JS program so that you can reduce the number of script tags on your page (and sometimes also other things like minifying code).
Browserify is a build tool that builds bundles of modules from npm. Here is a visualization (using the colony node module) of what the bundle looks like when browserify packages up the voxel-engine module:
Each dot is a fully fledged node module, complete with its own version number, github repo, author/maintainer and optional list of dependent modules. Each author gets their own color and the circle sizes are based on how large the modules are.
Thanks to npm and browserify the Voxel.js project has seen a couple dozen unique contributors create around 100 modules over the last six months. The conventions are pretty simple: Use npm and name your module voxel-"something" so that it's easy to find. Most of them don't even run in node itself as they require WebGL to function, but that's okay because node is simply packaging them up for browsers.
When browserify bundles up the voxel-engine module it gathers up all of the dependencies in the graph and combines them into a single JS program that you can load into a web browser and run.
Browserify CDN
Browserify is written with Node and is usually executed on the command line on the same computer that a program is being developed on. To make browserify more accessible to JavaScripters that aren't as comfortable with the command line or Node browserify-cdn was developed by Joshua Holbrook, a Node hacker who has formerly worked on the Node hosting platform Nodejitsu. It's a really well designed caching + API layer built on top of browserify that automatically installs and packages up any module available on npm.
This week I set up a production ready instance of browserify-cdn over at http://wzrd.in (wizardin', like the browserify logo). It's also pretty easy to host an instance yourself. The browserify-cdn API is CORS enabled which means you can load bundles from anywhere on the internet (and do things like cache them in IndexedDB).
RequireBin
In the spirit of JSFiddle and JSBin, RequireBin is a web application that I wrote over this last weekend for making short + sweet shareable JS applications that run in the browser. The major difference from similar works being that RequireBin is built on top of browserify-cdn and therefore provides access to the wealth of modules on npm. RequireBins are saved as github gists so that each one is clone-able and fork-able and the RequireBin website itself is just a static site that is hosted on Github Pages.
npmsearch
The npm command line tool has a built in search feature but it is quite barebones and doesn't have a dedicated full text index. To provide a better search experience to npm users Elijah Insua (tmpvar) has created npmsearch.com which offers lightning fast search (Solr + SSDs) and a CORS enabled JSON API for adding npm search to any app.
Here's a live embedded iframe of this RequireBin integrating with the npmsearch API and rendering output to a fake ANSI terminal via hypernal and tablify, two modules I recently found on npm.
For a more complex RequireBin example check out this WebGL Ambient Occlusion Voxel rendering demo by computational geometry PHD student Mikola Lysenko:
Mikola also happens to be the most prolific author of node modules lately (according to npmjs.org), you should definitely look at his modules and read his blog.
I'll end this post with this, the first and arguably most important rule from The Art of Unix Programming, a text close to the hearts of many of the Node community members.One of the biggest personalities in global women’s football celebrates a very special milestone this Monday, as Tina Theune turns 60. In nine years as Germany head coach, Theune led her team to glory at the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2003 in the USA and to the UEFA Women’s EURO in 1997, 2001 and 2005. She is respected and admired all over the world and will always be regarded as one of the key figures in the explosive growth of the women’s game.
Theune, the daughter of a minister from Kevelaer in the Lower Rhine, discovered her passion for football when she was still in her childhood. In 1985 she became the first woman to earn the highest available coaching qualification from the German FA (DFB).
Eleven years later she followed in the footsteps of German women’s footballing pioneer Gero Bisanz and took over as national team coach, presiding over a golden generation featuring the likes of Steffi Jones, Bettina Wiegmann, Silke Rottenberg, Renate Lingor and Birgit Prinz. In 2005 Theune handed the reins to her assistant Silvia Neid, who continues to acknowledge the debt she owes to her guide and mentor as she fashions her own trophy-laden career.
A keen amateur photographer, Theune spent many long years in the spotlight, although friends and close acquaintances know she would much rather operate behind the scenes away from the public gaze. A cool customer, sometimes reticent and at times even shy, she has always spoken from the heart with great honesty and refreshing directness.
She currently lives in an overgrown converted water tower near Cologne. The quirky choice of dwelling is typical of the unique character that is Theune, admired as much for her personality as for her deep footballing knowledge.
She now works for the DFB in scouting and youth development and as a coaching instructor, and also fills various functions for FIFA including the post of director of the Technical Study Group (TSG) at Women’s World Cups and Olympic Women’s Football Tournaments. A couple of days before her special birthday, Theune spoke exclusively to FIFA.com.
FIFA.com: Tina Theune, we’ve tracked you down, but where are you? Tina Theune: Sicily! I’m with a group of friends and relatives. We’ve made the trip to have a very pleasant time and join forces to celebrate a few birthdays, belatedly in some cases.
During your time as a coach you had many, many reasons to celebrate. Which was the best of the parties?
[Laughs] To be frank with you, the private parties are what I think of first. But turning to football, I can honestly say it was every single time we appeared on the balcony of Frankfurt Town Hall with a trophy. The little things are what you never forget. I was thrilled and amazed when we were met by a band once, and I’ll never forget being welcomed at the water tower by friends every time I came back from successful tournaments. Once they even hired fire eaters, and on another occasion they rolled out the red carpet. We were pretty good at parties!
*How would you describe yourself? *I think I’m pig-headed, tenacious and have a tendency to cling on to things. I guess these attributes have positive and negative sides. I’m a nitpicker too. Being prepared down to the last detail all the time is unbelievably important to me. I suppose you could also call it meticulous.
*Is there anything from your coaching career which makes you especially proud? *Basically, I’ve always been proud of my teams. And I mean the team in its widest sense, as players and as characters.
*Are you thinking of one particular team? *No, not in the slightest! Quite the opposite. I’m thinking of all the teams I ever coached. Each was unique in its own special way. When we won the 2003 World Cup in the USA for example, my players were truly mature. But when we won the European Championship in 2005 in England, I had an incredibly warm relationship with my team. It was always different, but always special.
*Turning to the present, what do you think Germany should be aiming for at the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2015? *Nothing less than the Trophy! It’s very tight at the top these days, but after all, we’re reigning European champions. There’s a new generation in German women’s football and they’ve come together brilliantly. I think there are some fantastic characters in the current team. They work very hard and want to go a long way. More than anything else, they’re incredibly assured and they’ve acquired the confidence to get out of critical situations.
*What kind of atmosphere will we see in Canada in 2015? *I was lucky enough to go to the FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup in Canada in 2002. It was fantastic in the stadiums. I’m certain the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2015 in Canada will be a highlight of the year.
*Tina Theune, many happy returns on your 60th birthday, and happiness and health for the future... *Thank you! My knees aren’t what they used to be, but it doesn’t bother me. I do a lot of work with young people. It’s wonderful and it’s keeping me young and fit [laughs]!Search Events
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Add an EventPokemon Food Extravaganza!
Here’s a four-part Pokemon history lesson, using EXPIRED FOOD as our guide! Pick your poison, and learn more about the things Pokemon fans ate over a dozen years ago!
While still a casual Pokemon fan today, my “crazy period” was exactly when these foods were being released.
Even back then, societal laws dictated that I was too old for Pokemon. I ignored those laws, but I have to admit, I was pretty jealous of the kids who had this absolute monster of a franchise to obsess about. I grew up on a diet of Star Wars and Ninja Turtles, but just going by the sheer volume and variety of stuff, Pokemon was an entirely different beast.
These foods come from its arguably hottest period. If you were going to pick something to freak out over, Pokemon sure looked like a fun choice.
#1: Pokemon Pop-Tarts!
These could not have been more perfect. Created in part as an early promotion for Pokemon: The Movie 2000, they came in the sort of box that grabbed you and held you and never let you go.
Seriously, just look at that box. It’s artful. And there’s a picture of free falling Pikachu on it.
The featured Pokemon are Pikachu, Charmander, Poliwrath and Chansey. That’s… a pretty random assortment. I’m not sure how they came up with that.
(Okay, yeah, you could argue that Pikachu and Charmander were “main” characters and obvious inclusions, even if it’s only half-true. By 2000, Charmander had already evolved into Charizard, and holy shit, this is one of the rare times when I’m completely and totally aware of how goddamned nerdy I sound. The point is, you’re going to lose the debate once we start talking about Chansey. Go ahead, just you try to explain Chansey being here.)
So we’ve established that the box was obnoxiously attractive. It sounds impossible, but the Pop-Tarts themselves were even better looking.
Even allowing for the phenomena of food never looking as good in person as it does on the box, the kids of 2000 must’ve blown fuses deciding between eating these and using them as inspiration for still life paintings.
Notice how the different sprinkles match up with the Pokemon from the box? It’s one thing to pluck such an oddball quartet when you’re just filling space on the box art, but to take those characters and actually make candy sprinkles of them? This was big time.
Poliwrath sprinkles were big time.
Trivia: Pokemon Pop-Tarts very possibly debuted during the same exact week as X-Entertainment. Know what doesn’t make me feel young? That.
Just a few months later, Kellogg’s again teamed Pop-Tarts with Pokemon by stuffing “battle figures” into boxes of their more “normal” flavors.
It was a brilliant scheme. Specific figures were restricted to specific Pop-Tarts flavors, so kids obsessed with completing their set basically had to eat every goddamned Pop-Tart on the market. I’m exaggerating, but there’s still little doubt that Kellogg’s used the figures to transform thousands of children into Pop-Tart addicts.
Examples:
– The Charmander figure could only be found in boxes of Strawberry Pop-Tarts.
– Poliwrath was limited to Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts.
– If you wanted Chansey, you had to plow through twelve S’mores Pop-Tarts. Admittedly, this was easy to do.
I believe the figures were pulled from Hasbro’s regular line, so on top of everything else, they weren’t just cheap freebies. These toys had credibility, and a legit retail value. Nobody had to feel bad about eating so many Pop-Tarts. Ultimately, the pastries acted as edible coupons.Grassroots Sports caught up with Australian NHL prospect Nathan Walker at the ECSL All Stars game in August. Journalist Alyssa Longmuir spoke to Walker about being home for the AHL off-season, signing a fresh contract the Washington Capitals and his real shot at playing in the NHL this season.
If you did not know who Nathan Walker is you’d be forgiven for not recognising Australia’s brightest ice hockey star on the street.
Even at the rink attending an event he is the special guest to he manages to remain unassuming.
At 5’9”, his playoff ‘flow’ still intact, a Bauer cap firmly attached to him at all times, you would be excused for thinking the 24-year-old was one of the East Coast Super League All Stars and not the first Australian on the cusp of making the world’s best professional league – the NHL.
Walker was back in Australia for the AHL off-season, fresh off signing a shiny new two-year contract with the Washington Capitals.
“It’s huge for them to be invested in me for the next two years. It definitely puts a positive mindset in the back of my head,” Walker said when we got the chance to sit down and talk to him in the cafeteria of the Penrith rink while the All Stars game was in full swing.
Getting to this point has been a long journey for Walker, having left Australia at the age of 13 for the Czech Republic. But it’s the same story you hear from many who excel at a sport from a young age. Dominating the competition both in his own age group and against players that were significantly older, Walker made the choice to leave everything familiar and set off on a journey that would lead him to the position he is in today.
“It was risking everything,” he said. “I didn’t know anyone, didn’t speak the language but it defiantly paid off for me.”
After rising through HC Vitkovices junior ranks, Walker cracked the roster of the European pro leagues when he joined the Czech professional league at just 17 years old, a league through which the likes of Jaromir Jagr, Zendo Chara and more recently Tomas Hertel and Pavel Zacha have traveled.
From there he moved to the States joining the Youngstown Phantoms before eventually signing a contract with the Capitals’ AHL affiliate the Hersey Bears in 2013. He was drafted by the Capitals in the 2014 Entry Draft.
However, it was before he was even drafted that the then winger, now center, saw his first NHL action after receiving an invite to the Capitals 2013 training camp.
Performing well enough to earn himself valuable ice time during the 2013-14 NHL pre-season, Walker himself admitted that it was those games that made him believe that his NHL pipe dream really could be a reality.
“I think from that point on I knew in my head that I could play in this league,” he said. “I decided that I was going to prove to people that I can no matter what they say and what’s being said.”
As with any young upstart coming into the league, there are always moments when you have to pinch yourself and question how you got there. Particularly when you’re drafted by a team that is captained by one of if not the most prolific scorers of this decade.
“When you’re in practice going on a two-on-one with Ovechkin, being a kid and doing that was pretty special,” Walker said.
It’s a funny thing watching the man on whose shoulders an entire country’s hopes and dream rest. In a league in which there is much talk about being ‘the next one’ little thought is given to being ‘the first one’ with only a handful of active players in the NHL able to claim the title.
However, watching Walker at the All Stars game in Penrith you can see that there is an easy sort of camaraderie between him and many of the players and spectators alike. He grew up here on this ice, played in state tournaments for these teams. A Blacktown Flyers banner hangs from the far wall, the orange an ode that like many Australian league teams, is a small nod to the NHL team from which they ‘stole’ their name.
Even at AIHL games, the highest profile league in the country, Walker remains unassuming, dropping the first puck with a bashful smile, laughing with his former Sydney Ice Dogs team mates, mingling happily with the people who call him ‘Stormy’, a relic of sorts from his days playing on home soil.
However, all this is not to say that he’s not famous in his own right. Children can usually be found trailing near him at AIHL games whispering among themselves as they nervously line up for autographs. And almost every AIHL player around the same age of Walker seems to have a story of the time they beat, or were beaten by, Australia’s most successful hockey export.
It’s a quiet awe, a sort of swelling national pride that grows when people talk about him. The idea that this isn’t just a hockey player, this is an Australian hockey player, almost surreal to those who know his name, know his story.
“I think I’m ready. I’ve played four seasons now in Hersey and I think I want a chance to prove that I can keep up at the NHL level and hopefully I get a chance during pre-season to play in a bunch of games and show what I can do,” Walker said, turning serious as he talks about his chances of cracking the NHL.
The Capitals are a team in transition. The back-to-back Presidents Trophy winners are re-tooling after free agency and salary cap pressure forced them to part ways with several players from the 2016-17 team meaning that even for a team as deep as the Capitals, there might finally be some space in the lineup.
That doesn’t however mean it’s a done deal for Walker. Every player needs to prove their worth starting at training camp which began on Friday, September 15. Thirty-one forwards alone were not on the roster last season, and were vying for their shot at the show this year.
“I just need to play a little better with the puck particularly in the D-zone,” Walker said, reflecting on the previous years and what he now knows.
“Especially after I made the transition to center during playoffs with Hersey last year. It was defiantly a tough spot to be, especially down low. But I think I really progressed as the playoffs went on and got a lot better during the rounds that we played.”
Plenty of analysts have placed Walker as a shoe-in for the fourth line, left wing position previously held by Daniel Winnik alongside a returning Jay Beagle and Devante Smith-Pelly who is new to the Capitals roster, moving from the New Jersey Devils.
And with both Washington’s general manager Brian MacLellan and coach Barry Trotz already citing their support of the youngster, this could be Walker’s most important pre-season ever. He’s off to a fanstastic start, scoring the first goal of the Capitals’ preseason – shorthanded at that.
Only time will tell if Nathan Walker will make it. But if he does, when he does, there is no telling how it will change the landscape of Australia, and of Australian hockey forever.This Amazing Colossal Dragonplate Armor will make you desire to live inside the World of Warcraft!
By Peter Galvagno - 04/12/2017
It is one of the most played videogames ever and among its fans there are celebrities such as Vin Diesel, Ben Affleck and Cameron Diaz! Yes we are talking about the one and only World of Warcraft gamers and today's viral news is dedicated to an incredible cosplay costume based on Tier 13 warrior armor! If you are born to be into the heart of the battle the Warrior Tier 13 armor is the right equipment for you and the real life version of this amazing war set is really outstanding! This incredible artwork has been created by the beautiful, talented and cats owner from Los Angeles known as YuksGeneral! You can admire her wearing the amazing WoW Dragonplate Armor she created back in 2016, an incredible costume that captured the attention of several professional photographers due the great attention for details she put in her works! The armor is made out EVA foam and had-painted with acrylics colors and if you wanna see more about this incredible cosplayer follow her on Instagram at the following link gamers! @yuksgeneralWe learned on Friday that seven witnesses last week cancelled their scheduled depositions in the Sarah Palin Trooper-Gate investigation. This came after Palin’s lawyer asserted in a court filing last week that the governor would not herself testify unless the probe were taken out of the hands of the legislature.
But there’s additional evidence of a centralized effort to protect Palin. Another possible witness in the case, Palin aide Ivy Frye, has hired Thomas Van Flein, the lawyer representing Palin herself. Asked by TPMmuckraker this afternoon about her role in the inquiry, Frye, described in news reports as a “special assistant” to Palin, responded: “You can call my attorney if you’d like,” and named Van Flein.
Palin’s office has claimed executive privilege on a group of emails sent this spring between Palin aides, including Frye. Van Flein did not immediately return a request for comment.
As for the seven witnesses who cancelled their depositions last week, we already knew that one of those seven was Frank Bailey, the Palin aide who was heard in a recorded phone conversation telling a trooper official that Palin was wondering why Trooper Mike Wooten — the figure at the center of the case — still had a job.
And on Saturday, the Anchorage Daily News reported the names of the other six:
⢠Annette Kreitzer, Palin’s administration commissioner. ⢠Kris Perry, a Palin confidant who managed her gubernatorial campaign and now manages her Anchorage office. ⢠Nicki Neal, state personnel and labor relations director. ⢠Karen Rehfeld, the governor’s budget director. ⢠Brad Thompson, state risk management director. ⢠Dianne Kiesel, a state human resources manager.
Update: When asked about the cancellation of his deposition, Thompson told TPMmuckraker, “no comment.” The rest did not immediately return calls.I know many people won't understand... Martina Purdy quits BBC after 15 years for new life as nun BelfastTelegraph.co.uk One of Northern Ireland's most high-profile female journalists is quitting to become a nun. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/i-know-many-people-wont-understand-martina-purdy-quits-bbc-after-15-years-for-new-life-as-nun-30654824.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/incoming/article30654336.ece/aa8be/AUTOCROP/h342/_78143957_martina.jpg
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One of Northern Ireland's most high-profile female journalists is quitting to become a nun.
BBC political correspondent Martina Purdy, a former Belfast Telegraph business editor, said she was leaving journalism for personal reasons after nearly 25 years as a reporter.
On the new direction her life is taking after years covering the twists and turns at Stormont, Martina, a practising Catholic, took to Twitter yesterday afternoon to reveal the details to her followers.
"Hi, I'm leaving the BBC," she wrote. "Here's my statement. God bless, Martina xx"
Ms Purdy requested that the media respects her privacy in relation to the matter.
"I've been a journalist now for almost 25 years, 15 of them at the BBC," she said in a statement.
"It has been an immensely rewarding profession and I'm very grateful for all the support I've had over many years from colleagues, family, contacts and friends.
"I am especially grateful to the BBC for the opportunities I've been given. The BBC has always been very supportive of my work.
"I want to wish all my colleagues all the very best both here and at Stormont, especially my friends in the political unit. I shall miss them very much."
Purdy is the latest high-profile female journalist to quit BBC Northern Ireland for a new challenge.
Her move comes just a year after concerns were raised about the broadcaster losing a series of well-known female faces.
Among the famous names to leave last year were sports presenter Denise Watson, news anchor Sarah Travers, television news editor Angelina Fusco and reporter Natasha Sayee.
Martina, a Stormont regular who reported on every significant story in the peace process, also wished Northern Ireland's MLAs well as they prepare to embark on legacy negotiations.
"I also want to wish the politicians well in their future endeavours," she said.
"I know many people will not understand this decision. It is a decision that I have not come to lightly, but it is one that I make with love and great joy. I ask for prayers as I embark on this path with all humility, faith and trust.
"This is a very personal decision.
"I ask that the media respect my privacy and that of the religious congregation which I am entering as I face up to the new challenges of my life.
"I will not be making any further public comment about this matter."
Kathleen Carragher, the head of news at BBC NI, paid tribute to Ms Purdy and described the reporter as "one of BBC NI's most talented and hard-working correspondents".
"She has contributed a huge amount over the years to BBC NI's output during a period of significant political developments," Ms Carragher added.
"She has worked on daily and weekly television and radio news programmes, on documentaries, on election specials and on news online.
"We will miss her wit and wisdom. I wish her happiness and fulfilment in her new life."
Belfast TelegraphSeveral experts shared their thoughts on the managed services industry, along with the key challenges managed service providers (MSPs) may face over the next few years, at last week's Managed Services and Hosting Summit in London. Here are the details.
Changes in customer buying behavior will affect how managed service providers (MSPs) and other service providers and resellers sell their solutions, according to Gartner Research Director Mark Paine.
He also noted that traditional inbound sales techniques such as telesales are giving way to better customer communications, resulting in a better informed customer.
Paine and several other industry experts shared their thoughts on the managed services industry, along with the key challenges MSPs may face over the next few years, at last week’s Managed Services and Hosting Summit in London.
What are some of the other key challenges MSPs may face in the near future? Here’s what three industry experts had to say:
Possible commoditization — Commoditization remains an ongoing fear for many MSPs. ConnectWise President David Bellini, however, said he does not expect commoditization to be a major issue, and MSPs that can respond to customers’ needs quickly and efficiently are likely to stay in high demand.
— Commoditization remains an ongoing fear for many MSPs. ConnectWise President David Bellini, however, said he does not expect commoditization to be a major issue, and MSPs that can respond to customers’ needs quickly and efficiently are likely to stay in high demand. Consistently providing quality service — Providing quality service, on time and on budget, can challenge MSPs, and maintaining a strong working relationship with customers is essential. “Getting customers to ask you for advice, through a single point of contact (is important),” Autotask Vice President of International Mark Banfield said.
— Providing quality service, on time and on budget, can challenge MSPs, and maintaining a strong working relationship with customers is essential. “Getting customers to ask you for advice, through a single point of contact (is important),” Autotask Vice President of International Mark Banfield said. Demand for new technologies — New technologies impact customers’ connectivity and productivity trends, QLogic Sales Director Bob Aitchison said.
A recent CompTIA study also indicated there could be an uptick in the demand for managed services as well.
CompTIA’s Fourth Annual Trends in Managed Services Study showed that more than two-thirds of companies surveyed said they had utilized outside IT services within the past 12 months. In addition, more than half of respondents said they were “very familiar” with the concept of managed services.
What are your thoughts on the key challenges in the managed services sector? Share your thoughts about this story in the Comments section below, via Twitter @dkobialka or email me at dan.kobialka@penton.com.Only days after being unable to work things out with a striking union, and forcing us all to devour faux Twinkies for our creamy, spongy sugar fix, the folks at Hostess Brands Inc. are asking for a bankruptcy court to approve up to $1.8 million in bonus payments to top executives.
According to the Associated Press, the bonuses are intended to retain 19 members of the top brass through the coming months of liquidation. These executives would continue to |
ins to the Mainstream." Also featured a poem titled "Remembering City Lights" by Brautigan's daughter Ianthe. Poet Michael McClure and Brautigan were good friends. LEARN more. S. A. Griffith, a Los Angeles, California, poet, actor, and one of the founding members of Carma Bums, a group of touring poets, wrote a description of the event. The reference to "Mountains and Rivers without End" " is from Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers without End, Part One (1965) by San Francisco poet Lew Welch.
2001
Desire in a Bowl of Potatoes
Desire in a Bowl of Potatoes *** text of poem *** First Published
X-Ray, no. 8, Summer 2001.
Limited edition of 100 lettered and 26 lettered and signed copies
4" x 4" letterpress broadside
Included in this issue of X-Ray and also issued separately
LEARN more at the X-Ray X-Ray Press website. Published by X-Ray Book and Novelty Company, Ventura, California, and laid into a 5" x 5" box with other items as an art assemblage. The box itself featured a letterpress wrapper. Also contained several letterpress broadsides featuring work by Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Dan Fante, Billy Childish, Michael Montfort, Bern Porter, Gerald Locklin, A.D. Winans, and others. Selected Reprints
Desire in a Bowl of Potatoes
2005
Pasadena, CA. X-Ray Book Company, publisher of X-Ray magazine, an innnovative magazine of art and literature edited and assembled by Johnny Brewton. LEARN more. Fourteen poems by Brautigan written 1955-1956 and submitted to The MacMillan Company. Brautigan's three-page manuscript was rejected, and returned to Edna Webster in May 1956. Apparently, Brautigan gave her address as his return address. Brautigan gave his juvenilia writings, photographs, and personal items to Webster on 3 November 1955. These writings were published as The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings. LEARN more. This group of poems, however, was published separately, in limited hardbound and wrapper editions. Hardbound version
Limited Edition of 250 numbered copies and 26 lettered hardbound copies
First printing summer 2005
2.5" x 4.25"
Letterpress chapbook
Hard Cover; Boards covered with gold cloth; Issued without a dustjacket
Designed and printed by Johnny Brewton. LEARN more. Wrapper version
Limited Edition of 250 numbered copies and 26 lettered hardbound copies
14 pages; 2.5" x 4.25"
Letterpress chapbook
Printed wrappers; Handsewn binding
Designed and printed by Johnny Brewton Proof Copy
Printer's proof copy printed on chipboard
14 pages; 2.5" x 4.25"
Letterpress chapbook
Printed on chioboard; Handsewn binding
Designed and printed by Johnny Brewton Contents
The contents of this speciality publication in order of their appearance
"love is where you find it"
"when I was a piece of death"
"please"
"stars"
"once upon a time"
"love is not a house"
"a lion"
"linda"
"I knew a gal who was cold as death"
"come dreamers and lovers"
"desire in a bowl of potatoes"
"hey"
"the spider"
"somewhere in the world"
and a one page dedication with a dedication to "Linda" [Webster]. Of the fourteen poems included in this publication, only "stars" and "hey" were titled in the original manuscript. The titles for the remaining poems suggested here are comprised of their first line or phrase. Background
Desire in a Bowl of Potatoes was transcribed from a three-page manuscript (two pages of fourteen poems; one page with a dedication "for Linda") typed by Brautigan. Described as "an unpublished manuscript by Richard Brautigan," originally titled Linda, the manuscript was sent to The Macmillan Company who rejected it for publication in 1956, sending Brautigan the following letter. May 10, 1956 Dear Mr. Brautigan:
We appreciate your kindness in submitting for our consideration your manuscript, Linda. We have examined it carefully, but have decided that there is no place where it will fit in with our publishing plans. We are sorry, therefore, to have to return it to you without an offer. Many reasons enter into every publishing decision, and a rejection is not necessarily an indication of lack of merit. We do wish you to feel, however, that we are pleased to have been allowed to see your manuscript, which we are returning to you under separate cover. Sincerely yours,
R. L. De Wilton
Assistant Editor in Chief
The Macmillan Company Previous Publication
Only two of the poems in this group were previously published: "Please" and "Desire in A Bowl of Potatoes." Both were first published as mini-broadsides in previous X-Ray publication projects, as noted above.
2003
Please
Please please don't come and see me
when I am dead and buried
under spring and stars
and little children laughing.
please. First Published
X-Ray, no. 9, Summer 2003.
Limited edition of 100 numbered and 26 lettered and signed copies
4" x 4" letterpress broadside
Published by X-Ray Book and Novelty Company, Ventura, California, and included with a flex-disc, various small broadsides and chapbooks, photographs, and art objects in a 8.5" x 7.75" cardboard box with printed wrap-around band as an art assemblage. Included in this issue was work by Thurston Moore, Charles Bukowski, Dan Fante, Billy Childish, Michael Montfort, Bern Porter, A.D. Winans, and others. Selected Reprints
Desire in a Bowl of Potatoes
2005
Pasadena, CA. X-Ray Book Company, publisher of X-Ray magazine, an innnovative magazine of art and literature edited and assembled by Johnny Brewton. Fourteen poems by Brautigan written 1955-1956 and submitted to The MacMillan Company. Brautigan's three-page manuscript was rejected, and returned to Edna Webster in May 1956. Apparently, Brautigan gave her address as his return address. Brautigan gave his juvenilia writings, photographs, and personal items to Webster on 3 November 1955. These writings were published as The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings. LEARN more. This group of poems, however, was published separately, in limited hardbound and wrapper editions. Hardbound version
Limited Edition chapbook; 26 lettered copies; First printing summer 2005
2.5" x 4.25"
Hard Cover; Boards covered with gold cloth; Issued without a dustjacket
Designed and printed by Johnny Brewton Wrapper version
Limited Edition chapbook; 250 numbered copies
14 pages; 2.5" x 4.25"
Letterpress chapbook
Printed wrappers; Handsewn binding
Designed and printed by Johnny Brewton Proof Copy
Printer's proof copy printed on chipboard
14 pages; 2.5" x 4.25"
Letterpress chapbook
Printed wrappers; Handsewn binding
Designed and printed by Johnny Brewton Contents
The contents of this speciality publication in order of their appearance
"love is where you find it"
"when I was a piece of death"
"please"
"stars"
"once upon a time"
"love is not a house"
"a lion"
"linda"
"I knew a gal who was cold as death"
"come dreamers and lovers"
"desire in a bowl of potatoes"
"hey"
"the spider"
"somewhere in the world"
and a one page dedication with a dedication to "Linda" [Webster]. Of the fourteen poems included in this publication, only "stars" and "hey" were titled in the original manuscript. The titles for the remaining poems suggested here are comprised of their first line or phrase. Background
Desire in a Bowl of Potatoes was transcribed from a three-page manuscript (two pages of fourteen poems; one page with a dedication "for Linda") typed by Brautigan. Described as "an unpublished manuscript by Richard Brautigan," originally titled Linda, the manuscript was sent to The Macmillan Company who rejected it for publication in 1956, sending Brautigan the following letter. May 10, 1956 Dear Mr. Brautigan:
We appreciate your kindness in submitting for our consideration your manuscript, Linda. We have examined it carefully, but have decided that there is no place where it will fit in with our publishing plans. We are sorry, therefore, to have to return it to you without an offer. Many reasons enter into every publishing decision, and a rejection is not necessarily an indication of lack of merit. We do wish you to feel, however, that we are pleased to have been allowed to see your manuscript, which we are returning to you under separate cover. Sincerely yours,
R. L. De Wilton
Assistant Editor in Chief
The Macmillan Company Previous Publication
Only two of the poems in this group were previously published: "Please" and "Desire in A Bowl of Potatoes".Both were first published as mini-broadsides in previous X-Ray publication projects, as noted above.
ClosePope Francis is seeking to build a "new way of being church" for Roman Catholics in a similar way to how St. Francis of Assisi reported being told by God to repair the church during the 13th century, a cardinal who is one of the pontiff's closest advisers said.
"There is a new concept of church here" in how the pope is governing the Vatican, said Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, speaking April 8 in St. Petersburg, Fla. "There is a new way of thinking, including the way of governing in the church, here."
However, Rodríguez said, while Francis is popular among people around the world, he is facing opposition in the Roman Curia.
"We have to be prepared, since this beautiful but strange popularity is beginning to strengthen adherences, but equally to awaken deaf opposition not only in the old Curia, but in some who are sorry to lose privileges in treatment and in comforts," Rodríguez said.
"Expressions like 'What can it be that this little Argentine pretends?', or the expression of a well-known cardinal who let slip the phrase, 'We made a mistake,' can be heard," Rodríguez said, making an apparent reference to a cardinal who regrets the selection of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as pope.
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Rodríguez, archbishop of the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, is also coordinator of the Council of Cardinals, which Francis appointed last year to "study a project of revision" of the Vatican's bureaucracy.
The cardinal was speaking at a meeting of provincials of the Order of Friars Minor, one of several religious orders that trace their roots directly to St. Francis. The meeting was hosted by the order's English Speaking Conference, which represents friars in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Lithuania and Malta.
Franciscan Fr. Thomas Washburn, executive secretary of the conference, provided NCR a text of Rodríguez's talk. Washburn said in an email that the Franciscans invited Rodríguez to speak at their semiannual meeting because the cardinal is an affiliate of one of the order's New York-based provinces.
Although the cardinal is a member of another religious order, the Salesians of Don Bosco, he referred to himself during the talk as a Franciscan and even wore the traditional brown Franciscan habit while speaking.
Rodríguez began his address by mentioning how St. Francis is said to have heard an apparition of Christ tell him to "repair my church." Rodríguez said the 13th-century saint "caused great scandal" from church leaders who wanted "to maintain their privileges."
Saying the pope is creating "a new way of being church," Rodríguez said Francis "feels called to construct" a church that is, among other things:
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"At the service of this world by being faithful to Christ and his Gospel";
"Free from all mundane spirituality";
"Free from the risk of being concerned about itself, of becoming middle-class, of closing in on self, of being a clerical church";
Able to "offer itself as an open space in which all of us can meet and recognize each other because there is space for dialogue, diversity and welcome in it";
A church that pays "just attention and gives importance to women in both society and its own institutions."
Rodríguez ended his talk by directly relating God's reported message to St. Francis to Pope Francis.
"Today, as in the past, the Lord has again called Francis and has asked of him the very same thing he asked of him of Assisi," Rodríguez said.
Asked how exactly Rodríguez meant Pope Francis is repairing the church, Washburn said it was through gestures like washing the feet of prisoners and embracing people with disabilities after his audiences in St. Peter's Square.
"These moments are not just for show or merely external -- these are real gestures with the strength and power and authority of an encyclical, perhaps with even more power than those," Washburn said.
In his talk, Rodríguez also directed the Franciscans to undertake certain priorities in their ministries, including:
Being missionaries to those who are unfamiliar with the church or Christian teachings;
Working for the poor;
Speaking out against violence and destruction of the environment;
Dialogue with other religions, especially Islam.
[Joshua J. McElwee is NCR national correspondent. His email address is jmcelwee@ncronline.org. Follow him on Twitter: @joshjmac.]New Maple Leaf forward Olli Jokinen was definitely surprised when word broke Sunday that he’d been traded from Nashville to Toronto. But the veteran centre was quick to put things into perspective, including the fact he may not remain in Toronto very long, should the Leafs find a contending team to trade for his services.
Newly acquired Maple Leafs centre Olli Jokinen was at practice Monday but not on the ice. ( Eliot J. Schechter / NHLI via GETTY IMAGES FILE PHOTO )
“It was a big surprise, but I guess I wasn’t surprised to be traded,” Jokinen said as he underwent a physical with the Leafs during the team’s practice Monday. “I’ve been in this game a long time and it’s a numbers game, there’s only so many roster spots... but this is definitely a tough part of the business.” Jokinen is questionable for Tuesday’s home game against Florida, largely because the deal that brought him and prospect Brendan Leipsic to Toronto has not been finalized.
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Both Cody Franson and Mike Santorelli — who went the other way to Nashville in the Sunday trade — were in Toronto on Monday morning to say goodbye to their Leafs teammates. None of the players involved in the trade are permitted to play for their new teams until all of them clear physicals. It’s doubtful Franson and Santorelli will have completed their part of the process in time for Tuesday’s game. Leipsic similarly wasn’t expected to play with the Marlies for their home game Monday. Jokinen accurately portrayed his situation in Nashville. With only three goals for the Predators in 48 games, Jokinen said the lack of production was in part due to the fact that, as a life-long centre, he was asked to play on the wing. The position change was entirely awkward for him, and led to his demise on a Predators team he signed with as a free agent as part of a personal goal to play on a winner this season.
But Jokinen was part of the Predators’ rash of signings at centre — Derek Roy and Mike Ribiero were also in the mix. With Filip Forsberg having what appears to be a rookie of the year season, Jokinen slipped down the roster. “I had a pretty good idea I was getting traded probably the last five or six days,” Jokinen said. “They (Nashville GM David Poille) were open about their players. You didn’t know what exactly was going to happen, and no one wants to be part of that extra forward group. I was with a first place team, but like I said, it’s a numbers game.”
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Jokinen was asked about his feelings after leaving the league-leading Predators for a Leafs team that is out of the playoffs and heading for a bottom-five finish in the NHL. Reports suggested he was not happy about the trade or coming to Toronto. “Yeah (I’m happy), why wouldn’t I be,” Jokinen said. “I’m still in the NHL and for me you got the experience to play, and everything here (Toronto) is first class. So this is where it is at now.” Leafs coach Peter Horachek said he has not given thought to where Jokinen will play, in large part because the deal has not been finalized. But the Leafs, despite recalling winger Brandon Kozun and defenceman Petter Granberg from the Marlies, practised Monday with 11 forwards —one less than the normal quota of 12. Trevor Smith did not practise and Horachek said the fourth line centre was nursing a “nagging injury” that will likely keep him out of Tuesday’s game. In the meantime, both Dion Phaneuf (hand) and Joffrey Lupul (lower body) skated prior to practice, but appear no closer to returning to the club this week.Miami-Dade commissioners on Tuesday approved a $49 million bailout for the Frost Science Museum, agreeing to a nearly 30 percent increase in the tax dollars going to a project that already had secured $165 million from the county.
A shortfall in private donors left the Frost without the funds needed to finish construction of its new four-acre home in downtown Miami’s Museum Park, a move designed to transform the venerable nonprofit into one of the city’s most popular attractions. In a 12 to 1 vote, commissioners approved the plan by Mayor Carlos Gimenez to use hotel taxes to rescue the construction project.
“We can’t just sit back and watch it fail,” Gimenez said before the vote. “We owe this museum to the future generations of Miamians.” After the vote, Gimenez told reporters: “When our children and grandchildren are going through that science museum, they are going to thank us for what we did today.”
We can’t just sit back and watch it fail. We owe this museum to the future generations of Miamians. Mayor Carlos Gimenez
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Before the crisis, Gimenez had planned to propose a $4 million yearly operating subsidy from county hotel taxes for the Frost once it opens. Instead, those dollars would be locked into a 20-year stream of debt payments tied to the $49 million borrowed for construction. (Though often referred to as a $45 million rescue, lending documents say Miami-Dade will borrow up to $49 million.)
Critics of the Gimenez administration slammed the plan, saying Frost should have to find more benefactors rather than turn to government coffers for a solution.
“What are we telling our kids if people do wrong acts and what we do is just bail them out?” school board member Raquel Regalado, who is challenging Gimenez in the 2016 mayoral race, asked commissioners. Commissioner Juan C. Zapata cast the lone no vote against the proposal. He said he wanted the administration scrutinized over the crisis, which saw Miami-Dade pay roughly $160 million to a construction project only to see Frost unable to provide the private dollars needed to finish it. “We didn’t get here by accident,” Zapata said.
What are we telling our kids if people do wrong acts and what we do is just bail them out? Raquel Regalado, who is challenging Gimenez in the 2016 mayoral race
Commissioner Esteban “Steve” Bovo questioned whether the plan doesn’t leave the county leaders looking like “suckers.” “I’ll support it,” Bovo said. “But I’ll do so painfully.”
Dr. Phillip Frost, one of the wealthiest individuals in South Florida, and his wife, Patricia, attended Tuesday’s Commission meeting. They are the museum’s top private benefactors, having pledged $45 million for the project, which includes a modernized version of the museum’s signature planetarium and a new aquarium designed to dramatically bolster attendance.
Frost urged commissioners to support the plan, recalling his childhood in Philadelphia during World War II, when his older brother home on leave took him for a day at the city’s science museum. “I was dazzled and inspired,” said Frost, who turned a medical career into a string of medical and drug companies that grew his fortune into the billions. “This is an institution that can influence the course of young people’s lives.”
In an interview, Frost seemed to gently knock Miami’s elite for not providing the dollars needed to support non-profits like the science museum. “Giving is a learned experience. It’s not genetic,” Frost said. “I think the community may have a little bit more learning to do, in terms of being more generous”
The Frosts took control of the board during the museum’s financial crisis, using their offer of a short-term loan needed to keep contractors on the job to oust the former board and install a smaller group of their choosing, including Patricia.
More than a decade ago, Miami-Dade agreed to borrow $165 million tied to property taxes for the Frost project — a high-profile expenditure included in the $2.9 billion bond referendum that county voters approved in 2004. Several commissioners linked their support of the rescue package to delivering the upgraded science museum promised as part of the bond item 12 years ago.
The voters spoke loud and clear that they wanted a science museum. Commissioner Rebeca Sosa
“The voters spoke loud and clear that they wanted a science museum,” Commissioner Rebeca Sosa said Tuesday. Commissioner Xavier Suarez said the museum’s opening will boost interest in science across Miami at a time when sea-level rise needs inspired solutions from a new generation. “This is as important as any single thing we can do for this community,” he said. Added Commissioner Barbara Jordan: “I know it’s going to be a spectacular facility.”
When construction began in 2012, Frost had not raised the money needed to finish what was then a $275 million project. In fact, the museum did not plan to borrow the money needed to complete construction until last summer. At that time, banks declined to provide the $100 million Frost officials wanted, citing a lack of pledges.
That prompted a cash crisis, with a county bailout seen as the only solution. This week, the county’s Inspector General office issued a report criticizing the Gimenez administration for allowing almost all of the county’s $165 million contribution to the museum to be spent while the Frost was allowed to save its private dollars until the end of the construction time line.
Jean Monestime, chairman of the county commission, noted past fights for even minor help to cultural institutions without the clout that the Frost brought to its pursuit of a government-funded rescue. When an institution in the minority community faces a crisis, Monestime said the reaction too often is: “ ‘Oh my God, this community is a failure.’ Nobody wants to give it a second look and a give a remedy to the situation.”
“When it comes to institutions helping our most affluent community,” he said, “we find ways to solve problems in the most creative ways.”
The county bailout will compensate for the shortfall on private dollars, with banks willing to lend about $40 million (not the $100 million the Frost Museum had originally hoped to borrow). Roughly $20 million in cuts from the museum’s construction are slated to close the gap, allowing the museum to be done in time for a planned November opening.
As part of the deal Gimenez aides negotiated, the Frost must pledge not to seek additional funds from the county until Miami-Dade pays off the new $49 million debt it is assuming for the museum.
Gimenez described the rescue package as a fiscal wash, since it redirects the planned operating subsidy into debt payments. “We’re not asking for extra money,” Commissioner Sally Heyman said in defending the proposal. But yearly subsidies can be reduced or eliminated on any given year — in 2014, Gimenez rewrote his proposed budget to shift $1.5 million from an art museum to the county police force — while debt payments must be made.
As part of the deal Gimenez aides negotiated, the Frost must pledge not to seek additional funds from the county until Miami-Dade pays off the new $49 million debt it is assuming for the museum. Commissioner Audrey Edmonson, whose district includes the museum site, echoed a warning in the IG report that the Frost’s operating budget could be a challenge.
“I have a concern of their ability to maintain the property in the future,” Edmonson said. “Because of the $4 million we were to give them for operating expenses now will go toward paying off [the county] debt.”
Museum officials say they’re confident the Frost will be on sound financial footing once it opens, and that donors currently spooked by the construction crisis will come through with naming rights that will bolster the budget. Without a county rescue, museum leaders said, donors won’t consider providing the private dollars needed to finish construction.
“We’re here to ask you to do a very difficult thing,” said Cesar Alvarez, the Miami lawyer who is the new chairman of the Frost board. “We understand that.”Kevin Spacey in 'House of Cards' Netflix
“House of Cards” has a lot of fans in government, including in China, where the show has become a runaway hit. Now it appears Chinese officials are hoping to get some sneak peeks at the next season.
Russia’s delegation to the United Nations on Tuesday opposed a request by producers of the hit Netflix drama to shoot in the chamber of the U.N. Security Council, the setting for countless debates over real-life dramas, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
According to a report by Foreign Policy, a Russian diplomat voiced objection to a proposal to shoot two episodes of the show at the U.N. Mikael Agasandyan vetoed the idea, arguing that the chamber (with its iconic horseshoe seating and phoenix mural) was no setting for a TV shoot.
In a follow-up email exchange, China showed solidarity with Russia — and in a possible ploy to obtain plot spoilers — asked for the right to approve any related scripts. Council members, China said, “should have a rough idea on scripts for those episodes which are relating to our work.”
The office of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had sought approval for the shoot from the 15-member Security council as part of its efforts to showcase the work of the international body,.
In an email quoted by Foreign Policy, Mr. Agasandyan wrote, "We are of [the] opinion that the Security Council premises should be available at any time and on short notice. Besides that, we consistently insist that the Security Council premises are not an appropriate place for filming, staging, etc."
The “House of Cards” crew planned to shoot during evening hours and on weekends in August, when most diplomats are dispersed on vacation. No details on the scripts have surfaced, but it’s likely that a U.N. plot would figure in the broader machinations of Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood, whose political dealings have previously been cited by the inspection arm of China's Communist Party as revealing the extent of U.S. corruption.
That's not the show's only connection to China: the previous season was widely praised for a plot line involving China that offered an unusually nuanced portrayal of the complexities facing U.S.-China relations.
-- John JurgensenUpdate: There are now 5 missing doctors (4 holistic & 1Osteopath) from the same region, and 5 more are missing, all within under a month.
From their Facebook page, the Bradstreet family has said they’re “going to get to the bottom of this”. They’ve started a GoFundMe page to help launch a thorough investigation to uncover whether or not foul play was involved. They’ve asked that people not speculate at this time. We hope they find out the truth. They deserve at least that. Our thoughts and condolences go out to his family, friends, patients, and many followers.
I’d heard about the raid on his office in Buford, GA, which happened just before his death but didn’t write about it. Now that the Epoch Times has posted a tastefully written piece by an epidemiologist from AutismInvestigated.com, I feel I can share that information. There are speculations as to why the office was raided, but I’m not going to comment on that. I just know that Dr. Bradstreet helped many children who were his patients, and was loved by countless people, as evidenced by his memorial page on Facebook. He leaves behind a beautiful wife and family.
End of update.
I’m sad to report that two prominent doctors in the “alternative medicine” world have died in the past few days. The first was the accomplished, well known, and much loved Dr. Jeff Bradstreet MD, formerly of the East Coast of Florida, who’d since moved to Georgia. Fox Carolina is reporting that his body was found in a river in North Carolina and that he died of an apparent “self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.”
The funeral is in Shelby, North Carolina. Shelby is a small town of 20k people and where authorities recently apprehended Dylan Roof, the Charleston South Carolina mass church killer. Some doctors writing me tonight find the story suspicious. They’re concerned. I’m concerned too; my other half is a prominent, controversial doctor as well. I suspect we’ll know more as the investigation continues.
Another doctor (whose name I cannot yet disclose) died suddenly on Father’s Day, here on Florida’s east coast. He too had a run in with the feds, was investigated and charged, but I’ll elaborate on that in due time. This doctor was healthy and fit, with a thriving practice, and had an additional PhD in nutrition from Harvard. We’re saddened by the sudden death of both doctors. Loved ones have already set up a memorial page for Dr. Bradstreet on Facebook. People who loved him are posting worldwide and thanking him for all he did during his amazing career. I haven’t yet posted this article on Facebook, and haven’t noticed any news coverage of the details I’ve found regarding his death.
From the article about Dr. Bradstreet’s tragic death:
“The Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office said they received a report about a body in the Rocky Broad River in Chimney Rock on June 19. Deputies said the body was found by a fisherman. The body was removed from the river and was identified as James Jeffrey Bradstreet of Braselton, Georgia. Bradstreet had a gunshot wound to the chest, which appeared to be self inflicted, according to deputies. Divers from the Henderson County Rescue Squad responded to the scene and recovered a handgun from the rivers, according to deputies. Bradstreet’s body was sent to Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center for an autopsy on Wednesday. The case remains under investigation.”
We will update you as more information becomes available about the death of Dr. Jeffrey Bradstreet and of the other doctor whose name I can’t yet share. More info is coming in at this late hour about the #CDCwhistleblower and from other sources I need to vet before posting (it’s complicated). Our hearts go out to their families and friends during their time of loss.
Stay safe,
Erin Elizabeth- 4 am, East Coast FloridaNew York City cab medallions, which sold for as much as $1 million a year ago, now are priced at the $500K level, battered by competition from Uber, Lyft.
Some Independent owners, having paid upwards of $1 million, are “under water” by hundreds of thousands of dollars on the mortgages they owe on the medallions.
Competition from Uber and Lyft is so fierce that New York cabbies are going out of their way to be polite, engaging in chatter with riders and being helpful with packages, luggage and giving extra care to senior citizens.
Our experience with NYC cab drivers and car services is mixed. Twice in recent weeks drivers have been unable to use our credit card and have demanded cash. It cost us $35 for a ten-block trip to Park ave. Cost was $55 in cash for a trip to Brooklyn Feb. 10 where we covered a talk by Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, at New York University.
In both instances it turned out there was nothing wrong with our credit card. It worked fine when we took a cab back from Brooklyn Feb. 10. On at least a half dozen occasions cabbies have sworn our credit card could not be used and demanded cash when the opposite of that was true.
Yesterday, on returning to LaGuardia airport from a trip to Washington, D.C., we were approached by a Uber driver who offered to take us to NYC for $45. He met us as we headed for a line of about 30 cabs waiting for customers. His solicitation was illegal. However, there was no one at the terminal to enforce such a rule.
Uber Has Five Types of Pricing
Accessing the Uber app shows 3-4 drivers within a few blocks with waiting time often estimated at from one to five minutes.
Five levels of service are offered—pool, black, UberX, UberT and Rush. Pool is the cheapest. A trip from E. 36th st. to Penn Station would cost $9 with pool but double that for Uber black. Prices during rush hour can double as Uber invokes “surge pricing.”
The Uber app is not that easy to navigate. Cancelling a trip can be difficult. Uber drivers may arrive at the pickup point in a minute or two and will only wait two minutes. A $5 cancellation fee is then put on the rider’s credit card.
Uber has several things that give it a competitive advantage over cabs. One is that there is nothing to sign at trip’s end. It’s already on the credit card. There can be no battle over whether a credit card works or does not.
There’s no need to calculate a tip. Cabs used to have a 15% tip option but recently made 20% the least amount that can be given. Other options are 25% and 30%.
Lack of Ads Is Uber Plus
Uber drivers have been complaining recently about a cut in charges although the company says this has increased traffic.
A suggestion has been made by gas4ads that Uber drivers allow ads. Since their own cars are being used, there is nothing to stop that.
However, most Uber drivers and no doubt all Uber users would resent ads of any type with the cars.
“It would cheapen the Uber experience,” was a comment that was heard.
Cab users board cabs that have ads on their rooftops and are then confronted with video screens on the backs of the seats in front of them than carry ads interspersed with local news non-stop. Sometimes the audio cannot be turned off.
Uber cars are a momentary relief from the hyper-commercialism that is New York. Buses carry ads on their sides and on their backs and there are “painted” buses that are completely covered with commercial messages. Many of the buses used by the Hampton Jitney are “painted.”
7,500 Ad Terminals Coming to NYC
Adding to the commercial din will be 7,500 Wi-Fi terminals being constructed for Sidewalk Labs by Google, the Titan Advertising Group (world’s biggest outdoor ad company), and other participants.
They will carry 55-inch video commercials on each side as well as sending a strong Wi-Fi signal up to 200 feet away. Wi-Fi sensitive people will not be able to walk near them without experiencing symptoms. The terminals are “Wi-Fry” and “Wi-Spy” since data will be collected from users. The “free Wi-Fi” offered is meaningless since most New Yorkers already have a “triple play” that includes the web. The web can also be accessed via Verizon, AT&T or other phone company.No arrests have been made in Saturday's protests that blocked off several streets in Santa Rosa, including a portion of Highway 101.The rally that started at 1 p.m. in Old Courthouse Square and a march through the downtown that started around 3:30 p.m. was peaceful until more than a dozen of the 100 protesters marched up the Third Street off-ramp of northbound U.S. Highway 101 and onto the highway where they blocked traffic around 4:30 p.m.The California Highway Patrol staged three patrol cars and a motorcycle about 50 yards south of the protesters in the northbound lanes. When CHP officers walked toward the protesters on the highway, the group moved back down the off-ramp. They were met at the base of the ramp by at least two-dozen Santa Rosa police officers with several dozen more staged nearby.During a standoff at the base of the off-ramp the protesters chanted "The Whole World is Watching," and one protester briefly lay down on the off-ramp before the protesters marched to the nearby Santa Rosa Plaza around 4:50 p.m.Many of those who attended the rally and the march against officer-involved shootings and what they called "militarized" police agencies were from the East Bay. Some were members of StopMassIncarceration.net and The Revolutionary Club of the Bay Area.The large crowd was protesting the Sonoma County District Attorney's decision to not hold Sheriff's Deputy Erick Gelhaus criminally responsible for shooting and killing 13-year-old Andy Lopez.The teen was carrying an Airsoft pellet gun that Gelhaus mistook for an AK-47 assault rifle.Rupert Murdoch reveals Color Kindle-rival investment
Rupert Murdoch is apparently investing in a potential Amazon Kindle rival which would have a larger, four-color capable display. The News Corp. CEO revealed the plans at a Q&A while at the cable industry’s annual show this week, mentioning no specific companies but leading to speculation that the company is planning to take their print model into the ebook world.
That leaves uncertainty as to which company Murdoch is dealing with. The commonly-known players in ebook readers – Plastic Logic and Hearst – both have monochrome models in the pipeline, but the only commercially available color ebook reader is from Fujitsu.
That, however, has a 260,000 color display, rather than the rather more mundane four-color display Murdoch suggests. However, the CEO’s background in print may be leading us all astray: by four-color he might not mean a literal number of distinct colors but the four-color printing process used in color |
EDMONTON - Edmonton is plowing ahead with a strategy to make the capital a more attractive winter city.
The scheme, created by a volunteer think-tank, includes such goals as providing more opportunities for outdoor activity, improving life for cyclists and pedestrians, developing winter festivals and creating a year-round patio culture.
“This is about saying we need to look at our city differently and that chunk … that we have been under-investing in for many, many years,” Coun. Ben Henderson, who spearheaded the plan, said Wednesday.
It also requires changing the attitude of residents toward the cold, such as telling them there are only 87 days in the typical year when the average temperature is below freezing, said think-tank chairman Simon O’Byrne.
His group consulted with more than 700 people to come up with its proposals.
Specific ideas include adding heated bus stops, looking at free public transit below a certain temperature and supporting enhanced shuttles to give street people access to warming shelters.
They also suggested educating developers, builders and property owners on greater use of colour in outdoor design and working with Edmonton’s fashion industry to promote smart winter dressing.
The administration will come up with recommendations for how to move ahead with the proposals by early next year.
It will also ask for $362,000 in the 2013 budget to hire a winter city co-ordinator, create an advisory council and set up community projects.
“For too long, this city has accepted good enough as the standard by which to measure things,” Mayor Stephen Mandel said.
“I think the committee has found the weather ain’t that bad … Winter is a beautiful time here.”
gkent@edmontonjournal.com
Visit edmontonjournal.com/wintermap to tell us your favourite winter spotBatch 73 voting is now open. The following polls are currently open:
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The full list of matchups for today is:
Culling Dais vs Vault Skirge
Bogbrew Witch vs Apprentice Sorcerer
Orim’s Touch vs Dumb Ass
Rakdos Drake vs Char-Rumbler
Piston Sledge vs Cathars’ Crusade
Stoneforge Masterwork vs Spearbreaker Behemoth
Rumbling Crescendo vs Coal Golem
Gurzigost vs Aura Mutation
Hagra Diabolist vs Metathran Zombie
Fecundity vs Viashino Runner
Arrest vs Eye to Eye
Silver Drake vs Soldevi Machinist
Silhana Starfletcher vs Drought
Rapid Hybridization vs Merfolk Traders
Name Dropping vs Hoarder’s Greed
Lingering Souls vs Frazzled Editor
Ring of Renewal vs Hollowhenge Beast
Parallax Tide vs Atarka Pummeler
Latchkey Faerie vs Divine Verdict
Basalt Gargoyle vs Seed Spark
Phytohydra vs Djinn of the Lamp
Umbilicus vs Tobias Andrion
Furious Resistance vs Thunderscape Battlemage
Grim Flayer vs Heat Stroke
Shadowborn Demon vs Viashino Slaughtermaster
Arc Mage vs Exotic Disease
Myr Retriever vs Fledgling Griffin
Jalum Grifter vs Shadowblood Egg
Hedron Crab vs Eron the Relentless
Sip of Hemlock vs Profane Memento
Goblin Snowman vs Bone Saw
Shield of Duty and Reason vs Mortal ObstinacyUpdated October 24 to include new Windows RT details.
Microsoft's vision for the future of computers builds a new world for Windows. It works well with a mouse and keyboard, and it's great with touch screens. It lusts for apps, lives for sync, and loves real-time updates. But you'd better believe it'll take some time to get used to it all.
Since Microsoft debuted its vision for Windows 8 to the world at its Build 2011 conference, we have watched the themes that drive Windows 8 slowly gestate. The new operating system applies the lessons of mobile to the personal computer in a way that's absolutely innovative. Connectivity, cloud access to personal files, seamless updates, and a simple interface all come together in Windows 8.
A full CNET comparison between Windows 8 and Apple's OS X Mountain Lion will be forthcoming, but for now it's interesting to note two major differences. Apple's approach to sync integration with iCloud and app updates is much more cautious than Microsoft's cross-device Hail Mary. This isn't surprising, given that Apple is the lion's share of the tablet market, with the iPad claiming a 70 percent share.
However, the recent Nexus 7 notwithstanding, Google's clunky, robotic missteps on tablets have handed an opening to Microsoft to stomp in and grab the No. 2 spot. The "lite" version of Windows 8, Windows RT, will come with the New Microsoft Office preinstalled, and Windows Phone 8 will offer a Windows 8-styled interface coupled with robust sync features. And the company is pushing tablet makers with its own innovative Surface tablets. Basically, Redmond wants to build one Windows to rule them all.
There are two ways to get Windows 8 and Windows RT, which reach the public on October 26. You can buy a new computer or tablet running them, which is an attractive option because Microsoft is mandating its strictest standards ever for hardware manufacturers. Previews of the desktops, laptops, and tablets that will run Windows 8 have been, at worst, interesting curiosities, but generally have been much more than that, loaded with touch screens and ultrathin form factors.
However, Microsoft desperately wants people who own older Windows computers to upgrade. If you bought your Windows machine after June 2, 2012, but before January 31, 2013, you'll be able to buy an upgrade license for $14.99. People with older Windows 7, Vista, and XP computers will be able to upgrade for $39.99. Those are effectively Mac OS X point upgrade prices for a major operating system upgrade. We can't say that it's worth holding on to your XP-running hardware, but if you've got Windows 7, $40 for an upgrade ought to be mightily attractive. Not only that, but if you're considering buying a brand-new Windows 8 machine, this is a low-cost way to take the OS on a test run.
Windows RT is a different beast, sort of. It only comes preinstalled on certain tablets, most easily identified by the "RT" moniker that's often at the end of their names. To be blunt, Windows RT is a thinner version of Windows 8. It lacks third-party access to the Desktop mode, so you will only be able to use programs like Office 2013 and Internet Explorer 10 there. No legacy Windows software will work on it, a big strike against, and the Windows Store offers an anemic app catalog at the moment.
But, RT also won't suffer the same malware concerns that full Windows 8 will because of its different chip architecture. A full review of Windows RT is forthcoming, but for now you can check out our review of the Microsoft Surface RT and check out the Windows RT FAQ for more details on Microsoft's tablet-only operating system. The only two versions available to the public to download will be Windows 8 Basic and Windows 8 Pro, which this review is based on.
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET
Installation
The Windows 8 installation process is remarkably simple, and belies the massive changes you are about to wreak on your operating system. Run the installer, drop in the license key when asked, and allow the computer to reboot.
On the Toshiba DX1215 built for Windows 7 but running the Windows 8 Release Preview that we upgraded, installation took around 10 minutes -- not including the hinkiness we encountered with the Microsoft-supplied USB stick. The syncing process took longer, and getting the RTM to the same point of usability as the RP was added took almost another 20 minutes. Microsoft said this was longer than normal, but not out of the realm of possibility.
Microsoft documentation notes people installing Windows 8 over Windows 7 will get to keep their Windows settings, personal files, and programs. (Check out CNET's Windows 8 upgrade FAQ.)
If you have a preview version of Windows 8, you'll be able to keep your personal files, but apps will have to be downloaded again from the Windows Store. Fortunately, your previous apps should be saved in the Your Apps section, at the top edge. Settings such as picture passwords and Facebook will carry over, since they're attached to your log-in account. Google log-ins apparently will not, and must be re-entered manually.
People with Vista will be able to carry their Windows settings and personal files forward to Windows 8, but not their programs. If you're running Windows XP, you're even more restricted, and can only take your personal files with you. Microsoft has a Compatibility Center Web site to check your hardware before your purchase an upgrade.
Interface
Microsoft has never been accused of doing anything the easy way, and that's doubly true for navigating Windows 8. The complaints and compliments about the definitely different Windows 8 interface are varied, but basically boil down to two aesthetic sensibilities.
We believe that Windows 8's new Start screen presents apps in an elegant interface. It challenges current common wisdom about apps and their icons, and reimagines the icon as an integrated extension of the app itself. The Windows 8 tile is a widget-esque surface that can stream real-time information from the app.
Tiles are arranged in groups on the Start screen, and you can drag them around to create new groups. You can also pinch to zoom out and get a global view of your groups, from which the groups themselves can be reorganized. This semantic zoom creates an easier way to navigate through content-rich apps, and across the dozens or hundreds of apps you're likely to install.
Furthermore, Windows 8 takes advantage of your screen's edges to stick menus in an accessible but out-of-the-way place. There's almost a zen approach to it all. Everything feels connected as you flip between recently used apps, as you use semantic zoom to navigate above and then within an app, and as your right-edge Charms bar provides an actual unified place to tweak settings, search in-app and across Windows 8, and share content.
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET
You navigate Windows 8 through the Charms bar, which has no true analog in Windows 7. It's the navigation bar that lives at the right edge of the screen that intertwines OS navigation with OS functionality. From the Charms bar, you can Search apps, files, and settings; Share content across apps; jump to the Start screen; configure external Devices such as multiple monitors; and change Settings both for Windows 8 itself and any app that you're in at the moment.
By putting these five key features all in one place, Microsoft has supplanted the catchall Start menu of previous Windows editions with something more nuanced, but with a broader mandate. All apps have settings, goes the logic -- therefore, you should be able to access those settings in the same place, regardless of app.
In practice, this is generally smooth with moments of clunkiness. No matter what app you're in, your Windows 8 settings are always accessible from the bottom of the Settings sidebar. However, the specifics of an app naturally are left to the app maker. In Microsoft's Weather app, your toggle from Fahrenheit to Celsius lives not in the Settings sidebar, but in the also-hidden bottom-edge options.
The left edge allows you to swipe through your previously used app, although you can turn this off if you'd like. Swiping in from the left edge and then making a quick U-turn back to the edge reveals a sidebar of thumbnails of your previously used apps, including the Start screen. You can cycle very quickly through previous apps, making this one of Windows 8's better navigation options.
So, while it's logical of Microsoft to restrict the side edges to the operating system, and the top and bottom edges to the app, the practice is not intuitive in all cases. Microsoft provides a helpful, necessary tutorial when you first install Windows 8 that demonstrates this, but it doesn't show you the top and bottom edges, or the left edge.
Because Windows 8 is intended as a unified system for both PC and tablet, it works almost as well with a keyboard and mouse as it does with touch. While the mouse may eventually go the way of the fax machine, it's doubtful that Microsoft intends to kill it off while encouraging so many non-touch-screen owners to upgrade to Windows 8. It's much more likely that Microsoft sees an immediate future for touch and keyboard/mouse, not touch or keyboard/mouse.
So, as with seemingly everything in Windows 8, this, too, serves two masters. Sure, it gives you the precision required for image editing, but it's also Microsoft proclaiming Windows 8's usefulness. Windows 8 can do it all, Microsoft says: you get touch, mouselike precision, and keyboard hot keys. While the tiles are clearly designed for touch, they are not irritatingly large for mouse work.
Meanwhile, all the major hot keys in Windows 7 perform the same functions in Windows 8, and there are some new ones, too. These include Win+Print Screen to take a screenshot, which then gets automatically saved to your Photos app, or using the Windows key to switch between the Start screen and your last-used app.
One of the best keyboard functions is that you can pull up an app from the Start screen just by beginning to type. It's ridiculously simple and effective: type "cal" when on the Start screen, and a list of apps with "cal" in their name appear in the center of the screen, but on the right you can flip from Apps to Settings to Files that have the same "cal" string.
Not much will happen when you first connect a mouse to Windows 8. As soon as you move the mouse, though, a scroll bar will appear along the bottom edge of the Start screen. You can then use the scroll bar to navigate through your groups, or you can use the scroll wheel for that -- so the vertical motion is interpreted by Windows 8 as a horizontal scroll.
Move the mouse to the lower-left corner to reveal your Start screen, or the upper-left corner for your most recently visited app. If you then move the mouse alongside the left edge, it will reveal your other most recently used apps.
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET
One of the big new features is that Windows 8 will allow multitouch gestures on touch pads. Macs have had multitouch touch-pad drivers for a few years, while Windows touch pads haven't progressed much since Windows XP. The blame for that can sit at the feet of Microsoft just as easily as you can point a finger at the hardware manufacturers. The point is now, with Windows 8 forcing dramatic hardware upgrades to accompany it, Windows touch pads are finally moving forward.
Three default gestures will come with all laptops that have touch pads: pinch-to-zoom, two-finger scroll along the X and Y axes, and edge swiping. That last one is important because it will give you an easier way to activate the edges on non-touch-screen Windows 8 computers besides using the mouse.
The mouse has been enabled for apps, too. So in Internet Explorer, for example, a back navigation arrow appears on the left, and a forward nav arrow appears on the right edge. Mouse to the lower-right corner to see the navigation Charms, and then mouse up along the edge to use them.
Right-clicking reveals the "app edges," the app-specific options from the top and bottom screen edges, while a button denoted by a magnifying glass on the far right of the scroll bar zooms you in and out of your groups.
It's impressive how well Microsoft has been able to replicate the touch workflow with the mouse and keyboard. We've never seen the two integrated quite like this before. The multiple ways to interface with the interface also will go a long way toward convincing previous Windows owners and perhaps even skeptics that Windows 8 is all that and a bag of chips. Most importantly, though, both work well with your apps.
Detractors rightly will criticize Microsoft for many of the same things that we like about Windows 8. It opens to an entirely new desktop called the Start screen, with the Start menu and Start button effectively evaporated into the history books. Confusingly, there's a Windows 7-styled "Desktop" mode for legacy programs and some core Windows advanced configuration tools.
The tiles for non-Metro apps look funny on the Start screen, with traditional icons placed against relatively enormous square tiles. Oh, and Microsoft doesn't want you to call it Metro anymore, but we're going to in an effort to keep the review clear.A street sweeper was so happy to see a little girl’s roadside chalk drawing that he moved his brushes out of the way to preserve it.
Seven-year-old Brielle Pronick was hard at work on her latest chalk mural outside her home, when she noticed her masterpiece was in jeopardy – a street sweeper was heading right for it.
Wendel Lamb, who’s been cleaning the streets of Courtenay, British Columbia for 16 years, saw what was at stake, lifted his truck’s sweepers over the young girl’s art, and went on his way.
Brielle’s father just happened to record the sweet gesture.
“The timing was uncanny as my husband was just taking pictures of my daughter’s art when the street sweeper came around the corner,” Kristen Pronick wrote when uploading the video on the city’s Facebook page. “Please pass on my thanks to the driver, he made her day and she still talks about it.”
(READ or watch the full report from Vancouver Island’s CHEK News) – File photo: Wyoming Jackrabbit, CC
Check out what happened recently when City employee Wendel L., operating the street sweeper, came across a chalk art masterpiece. The artist's mom, Kristen Pronick, says, "The timing was uncanny as my husband was just taking pictures of my daughter's art when the street sweeper came around the corner. Please pass on my thanks to the driver, he made her day and she still talks about it." Thanks for sharing this video with us Kristen! Posted by City of Courtenay on Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Make Someone’s Day – Share Below…President Trump regularly points to the strong stock market as proof that his economic policies are working. But what about the dramatically weaker U.S. dollar?
The greenback has been shut out of the summer party on Wall Street. Just as the Dow cruised above 22,000 on Wednesday, the dollar tumbled to a 15-month low against its rival currencies.
That's not all bad: The weaker dollar has helped power stocks to record highs, and it helps American companies make money overseas.
But the conflicting messages from the currency and stock markets are dramatic, especially considering that the dollar initially spiked after Trump's victory. His promises of big tax cuts, infrastructure spending and deregulation sent it to a 14-year high in January.
Investors believed at the time that Trump, along with a Republican-controlled Congress, would finally unleash the sluggish U.S. economy and force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates more aggressively.
But Trump's legislative failures, combined with rejuvenated economic growth in Europe, have dealt a powerful blow to the almighty dollar. The U.S. dollar index, which measures the American currency against its rivals, has plunged 10% since peaking Jan. 3. The dollar is in its first five-month losing streak since 2011.
While the stock market has been driven to record highs by strong corporate earnings, the currency market seems fed up with Trump's stumbles.
The "White House soap opera" has fueled the dollar's decline, according to Kit Juckes, a macro strategist at Societe Generale.
"Confidence in the U.S. administration's ability to deliver growth-boosting fiscal policies is at rock bottom," Juckes wrote in a report this week.
Related: The stock market hasn't been this calm since 1996
Lukman Otunuga, a research analyst at FXTM, similarly blamed the "battered dollar" on "political drama in Washington." He wrote in a report that the turmoil is raising doubts about Trump's ability to keep his economic promises.
It's not all about the United States, though. The dollar index is heavily weighted toward the euro, which has been rallying. The economic rebound in Europe and easing worries about the breakup of the eurozone lifted the euro to a two-and-a-half-year high against the dollar on Wednesday.
Even as Trump repeatedly brags about the stock market -- he tweeted about Dow 22,000 before it even happened -- he has said little about the dollar's slide. But he has dropped hints suggesting he isn't losing sleep over what the currency market thinks about him.
"I like a dollar that's not too strong," Trump recently told The Wall Street Journal, according to a leaked transcript posted this week by Politico.
"Frankly, other than the fact that it sounds good, bad things happen with a strong dollar," Trump told the Journal.
Related: What big fat bubble? Trump cheers Dow 22,000
Of course, it's not black and white. There are positive and negative consequences of a weaker dollar.
The U.S. can compete better overseas: Earlier this year, the dollar was so high that it threatened to dent corporate profits. When the dollar is strong, products that are priced in dollars and sold overseas are more expensive for foreign customers. A strong dollar also hurts when foreign profits are converted back to the U.S. currency at a lower value.
Trump knows that a too-strong dollar would hurt his efforts to rejuvenate U.S. factories by boosting exports.
Dow stocks love it: Most members of the 30-stock Dow make a big chunk of their money overseas. That means they should enjoy fatter profits thanks to the weaker dollar. The Dow's three best-performing stocks this year -- Boeing (BA), Apple (AAPL) and Visa (V) -- rely on the United States for less than 55% of their total revenue.
This helps explain why the Dow is up three times as much as the Russell 2000, which is home to smaller companies that are more U.S.-focused.
What about that trip to Europe? On the other hand, you might be bummed if you booked a flight to Paris in January hoping to take advantage of the strong dollar. Americans traveling overseas will get less when they convert their dollars. One euro now costs $1.19. That's a big difference from January, when it only cost $1.03.
Sticker shock for big importers: Likewise, companies that ship supplies in from overseas will have to pay more than a year ago. The dollar may still be strong overall, but the shift could hurt those companies' profits.
Signal of sluggish growth: As a candidate, Trump promised to speed up the U.S. economy to 4% annual growth. The weaker dollar signals that investors don't believe he's going to deliver on that promise any time soon.Senator Wyden has again written the Obama Administration insisting that ACTA cannot be implemented in the United States absent Congressional ratification. In a letter to State Department Attorney Harold Koh, he disagrees with Koh’s previous assertion that the Pro IP act allows the Administration to bypass Congress. He notes that the Administration had originally offered a different justification for why ACTA would not require the normal legislative approval (that ACTA is a “sole executive agreement rather than a formal trade agreement). Finally, he asks if the Administration applies the Pro IP Act reasoning to the cybersecurity bill currently before the Senate, S. 3414.
Wyden writes:
I strongly disagree with any contention that the Pro IP Act of 2008 authorized the President to negotiate and enter the United States into binding international agreements on intellectual property without Congress’ ratification of such agreement. If Congress wanted to authorize the Executive Branch to take such actions it would have said so explicitly, particularly given that ACTA negotiations were well underway before the Pro IP Act of 2008 was enacted into law.
Sean Flynn offered the following statement on the Wyden letter:
Senator Wyden is absolutely correct, and in accord with the views of 50 law professors in a recent letter to the Senate (see http://infojustice.org/archives/23390), that Congress did not authorize binding the U.S. to ACTA without Congressional consent in the PRO IP Act. The PRO-IP Act did not authorize ACTA for two reasons. First, the Act was passed after the ACTA negotiation started. And second, the Act only authorized a “plan” to coordinate with other countries. It did not delegate Congress’s authority to approve international agreements to the President. As of yet, the U.S. lacks a plan to constitutionally enter ACTA.It's actually big business. A quick scan of Dr. Lewinski's website has him teaching large workshops in Chicago, San Antonio, Orlando, and in other big cities across the country. Can't make it to his conferences, don't worry, he'll come to your department, and offer your officers a certificate on how they are basically allowed to shoot first and ask questions later. He charges $1,000 an hour for his testimony and is, unsurprisingly, willing to testify for hours on end.
Hell, his whole company is named Force Science Institute—as in the use of force by police. This business is so lucrative that it's all he does. Experts are denouncing his work as phony and dangerous, but police departments could care less.
An editor for The American Journal of Psychology called his work “pseudoscience.” The Justice Department denounced his findings as “lacking in both foundation and reliability.” Civil rights lawyers say he is selling dangerous ideas. “People die because of this stuff,” said John Burton, a California lawyer who specializes in police misconduct cases. “When they give these cops a pass, it just ripples through the system.”
This is why we say "Black Lives Matter."
Dr. Lewinski is basically training police to shoot before making a full assessment of the true threat. Because of this philosophy, it leans on the implicit bias within each and every officer. It's why officers in New York fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo when he was pulling out his wallet. It's why Officer Dante Servin blew Rekia Boyd's head off when he saw her boyfriend pull out a cell phone.
It's why police officers killed 123 people in July, a high for 2015.
It's despicable and the more it happens, the richer Dr. Lewinski gets. I had always suspected some type of profit motive was behind the wholesale killing of Americans by police. Now we don't need to speculate. After all, it's the job for the Force Science Institute to keep this practice growing.CALGARY – Police are investigating a fatal shooting that happened in front of North Hill Centre on Wednesday, and looking for a man who may have been injured in the attack.
The brazen attack involved “multiple shots” and took place in the intersection of 16 Avenue N.W. and 19 St N.W at around 11:15 p.m.
When emergency crews arrived, they found a woman in her mid-20s suffering from serious injuries who was sitting in the driver’s seat of a white sedan. Paramedics rushed her to hospital in critical, life-threatening condition where she later died. Calgary police have identified the victim as 23-year-old Kallen Carothers.
Global News has learned Carothers worked at a Calgary Moxie’s Grill & Bar.
“It’s just a tragic,” said Moxie’s vice president Jim Weidinger. “She was super friendly and social, and just got along well with everyone. She really will be missed.”
Witnesses reported hearing several shots fired and seeing a man, who had been in the vehicle’s passenger seat, leave the scene. Investigators believe that man may have been injured in the shooting.
“We want to find this gentleman who may have been injured,” said Calgary Police Duty Inspector Paul Wyatt at an afternoon news conference.
Wyatt described the man as black, believed to be in his 20s between five foot ten and six feet tall with a thin build. Wyatt said the man was wearing white pants at the time.
Investigators have been canvassing nearby businesses to find out if anyone captured the shooting on CCTV video, or if any of the cameras in the area caught the possible shooter or the passenger on tape.
WATCH: A fatal shooting on one of Calgary’s busiest roadways has left one woman dead and homicide investigators searching for suspects. Global’s Jenna Freeman reports.
Officers don’t believe the incident was random, and think it was a targeted attack. Wyatt said a dark sedan was seen leaving the area. Police said there were no persons of interest or suspects as of 1 p.m.
Police later expanded the original crime scene to include a nearby parking lot, where blood was found.
“It’s safe to say CPS is concerned about the prevalence of gun attacks that have been happening in the community,” said Wyatt. “We’re acutely aware of the rise in shootings recently and we’re looking into it.”
Police taoe off portion of parking lot west of scene add evidence marker beside another vehicle #yyc @GlobalCalgary pic.twitter.com/3exPzOzQip — Jenna Freeman (@JennaNFreeman) September 10, 2015
The Calgary Police Service Homicide Unit is leading the investigation.
Anyone with information is asked to call police or contact Crime Stoppers.
GALLERY: Brazen shooting on 16 Avenue N.W.
With files from Jenna Freeman and Nancy HixtIn its 4,880km journey from the snow-capped mountains to Tibet to the delta in Vietnam, Sipandon in southern Laos stands out as a critical part of the Mekong's uniquely wonderful ecosystem, blessed by raging waterfalls, picturesque islands, and graced by a colony of highly endangered freshwater dolphins.
Irrawaddy dolphins symbolise the magnificence of the Mekong River and its continued high biodiversity. WWF regards the dolphins as a flagship species, reflecting the health of the river ecosystem for other species, including humans.
But the dwindling numbers of surviving dolphins - estimated between 78 and 91 individuals confined to Sipandon in Laos, and neighbouring Cambodia, should ring alarm bells that all is not well in the river. Dolphin conservation is also vitally important to local villagers who have come to revere them.
The area's dolphins alone would justify designating Sipandon - which translates as 'Four Thousand Islands' as a wetland sanctuary protected by the Ramsar Convention.
And that's before taking into account its spectacular beauty, its extraordinary bioversity, and its enormous importance for fish which feed 60 million people downstream.
But instead of protecting Sipandon, Laos is bent on its destruction
"If this special wetlands zone is protected, it could be one of the great wonders of the world", says Carl Grundy-Warr, a geography professor at the National university of Singapore (NUS). "But now it is far from being a secure sanctuary."
Instead of signing up to the Ramsar Convention for Wetlands Protected Areas, the government of Laos has perversely opted to launch a hydro-electric dam in this Mekong wetlands zone in 2015, spurning opportunities for the Lao people to further benefit from expanding ecotourism, and nature conservation.
"The dam builders intend to excavate millions of tonnes of rock using explosives, creating strong sound waves that could create grave, potentially lethal threats to the only dolphin population in Laos", WWF reports. "These dolphins have highly sensitive hearing structures."
Mekong specialist Dr Grundy-Warr concluded that "if these dams along the mainstream of the Lower Mekong go ahead we are talking about massive calamity".
Killing off the Irrawaddy Dolphins is just the beginning of a chain of calamities that would be set in motion by the Don Sahong dam construction, and the Xayaburi dam already under construction. There are nine more dams in the pipeline.
With so much water diverted from magnificent Khone Phapheng waterfalls to fuel the Don Sahong dam, Mekong experts fear this national treasure, the widest waterfall in Southeast Asia, would be undermined and lose its iconic status.
A great and productive ecosystem may soon be unravelled
Downstream nations Cambodia and Vietnam fear that the huge freshwater fisheries that support a population of 60 million will be massively reduced. Food security will be undermined. Poverty will be increased and nutrition will decline.
80% of Cambodian protein comes from fish, most of it coming from the Mekong and Tonle Sap, the great lake is also an integral part of the same ecosystem connected directly to the Mekong via the Tonle Bassac River.
WWF programme officer in Cambodia Chit San Ath commented: "The Don Sahong Dam will only push Cambodia and Vietnam closer to a food crisis. Have they forgotten that fish are our lifeline and the backbone of our economy?"
The Lao refusal to heed the chorus of opposition prompted a strong reaction from Cambodia-based ecologist Taber Hand, who told the Phnom Penh Post:
"I view it like a declaration of war by Laos on Cambodia and Vietnam. The impact of reducing fisheries and sediment flow is more subtle than most acts of war, but it has the same or greater effect on national security."
Laos unfazed by the anti-dam opposition
"For Laos, any dam is very important, because Laos has no other options to improve its economy", Daovong Phonekeo, director-general of Laos' Department of Energy Policy and Planning, told the Voice of America news site. "Our only option is to develop hydropower."
In fact Laos has several other development options and other alternative paths to generate energy. But solar energy, wind power and other clean and renewable technologies fail to generate the same financial concentrations that feed lucrative commissions to well-connected intermediaries, and subsidize the powerful contracting companies that benefit from big dam projects.
The neo-liberal ideology adopted by the ruling communist party state of Lao [the Lao PDR] pushes a policy of 'dam every river' to turn the landlocked country into "the battery of Asia" - an idea conceived by the World Bank and endorsed by the ADB - the Asia Development Bank.
This blind obsession with damming rivers regardless of the environmental consequences puts them on a collision course with downstream countries - Cambodia and Vietnam.
So far the the Mekong River Commission (MRC) - the inter-governmental agency that works with the governments of Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam on the "joint management of shared water resources and sustainable development of the Mekong River" - has managed to avoid open conflict. But maybe not for much longer.
The toothless Mekong River Commission
The first big test of whether the MRC legal framework of consultation and cooperation could manage the conflict of interests between member states was the first Lao dam project - the Xayaburi dam project in 2011
The controversial dam was launched 2012 in defiance of protests from Cambodia and Vietnam that maintained the consultation process had not been completed. (See 'The Mekong must run free!', The Ecologist 14th December 2013.)
The Don Sahong dam is now the second attempt to resolve water disputes over dam projects under the auspices of the MRC. The lack of credible environmental impact studies and the flawed plans of the dam developer were exposed during a MRC-regional consultation in December 2014 hosted in Pakse Laos.
Malaysian dam developer Mega-First has opted to engineer a fish diversion (see map). With the dam blocking the Sahong channel, the scheme aims to divert fish away from the Sahong channel and the dam construction, to two other lesser channels, that are now being deepened and widened.
The grassroots communities in Cambodian and Vietnam participated in public forums to discuss the dam impacts, and in January 2015 the official National Mekong Committees reported back to the MRC that there was overwhelming opposition to the dam and even Thailand backed the chorus of complaint.
Vietnam's National Mekong Committee (NMC) insisted that the regional consultation process should be extended till the end of 2015, when the findings of a special study of hydropower impacts on the river would be completed. Cambodia and Thailand added their voice of concern and requested more time to study the dam project.
Laos: 'We don't need concensus!'
However the Lao government absolutely refused to consider any extension of the six-month period. As Daovong Phonekeo, director-general of Laos' Department of Energy Policy and Planning, told Voice of America: "For the development of the Mekong River, we don't need consensus!"
On a very narrow reading of the international agreement that created the MRC, the Lao government is correct. No country has any veto power. The CEO of the MRC Hans Guttman has clarified that "the MRC is not a regulatory body. We can only facilitate dialogue between member states, we cannot enforce anything."
However the 1995 Mekong Agreement also stipulates an important caveat that "no country has the unilateral right to use water without taking into account other riparian's rights."
The US-based International Rivers argues that "taking into account" by any reasonable interpretation must surely include taking into account the weight of riparian opposition overwhelmingly against the project.
All the regional NGOs likewise insist the Lao government PDR is obliged to halt the dam project order to avoid conflict between member states, and promote MRC's proclaimed spirit of international cooperation and equitable sharing of water resources.
MRC throws precaution to the winds
However the MRC's CEO Hans Guttman insisted: "Prior consultation is not a process to seek approval for a proposed project." This helped the Lao government to deflect the consultation away from the core issue of whether the dam should be built or not, into a secondary issue of how best to mitigate the negative consequences of the dam.
Dr. Philip Hirsch, director of Sydney University's Mekong Research Centre, told The Ecologist "In such an environmentally sensitive area you don't just go ahead with a project..It is a highly risky project so you need to take a precautionary approach, and make sure you have got it right, before you take a decision to build a dam."
But MRC Chief Mr. Guttman claimed the consultation had a far more limited role to restricted to " review the project, raise concerns, and see how problems can best be mitigated." Hirsch is astonished by this approach: "It is very odd that Mr. Guttman's statements only focus on mitigation, and ignore the precautionary principle."
Mega First, the Malaysian company planning to dam Hou Sahong, claims making adjacent channels wider and deeper will provide fish with a detour route.
But Dr So Nam, a Cambodian fisheries expert with the MRC, considered this Malaysian company had failed to provide any scientific proof that MRC's recommended guidelines of a 95% success rate for effective fish mitigation could be met.
So on what basis can the MRC secretariat possibly justify the sustainability of this dam project if there is no realistic prospect of fish mitigation?
Earthrights regional coordinator Daniel King is highly critical: "The attempt by the CEO of the Mekong Commission to limit consultation |
an excellent opportunity to find out what their current gaming shape was. The Minsk tournament pleased lots of viewers and fans of HellRaisers! The first victory of the new roster brought the brightest emotions!
Первая победа в новом составе, теперь нужно набрать форму к финалам ЕСЛ! Публикация от Kirill Karasyow (@ange1csgo) Ноя 26 2017 в 11:11 PST
(The first victory for the new roster, now we need to get in shape before the ESL finas!)
FejtZ shows that even a tough sniper can sleep well and be a sweetie at night even before important games.
ISSAA wasn't very happy to take part in this early photo shoot. It's okay, it made the photos even more brutal!
waking up to do media day at the morninggg is so bad sometimess ;))) Публикация от issa murad (@issa_muradd) Дек 7 2017 в 1:47 PST
ESL Pro League Season 6 has been a real challenge for our team, and the first match day brought bright emotions from spectacular victories.
DeadFox has posted such a selfies with Ami_R & woxic on his Instagram. The players have recovered from losing in the quarterfinal and are in a good mood. And that's right, since the 5th-6th place at such a large-scale tournament as ESL Pro League Season 6 is an excellent result
#afterparty Публикация от Böröcz Bence (@deadfoxcsgo) Дек 9 2017 в 3:16 PST
Ami and woxic took a walk around the Danish city. Our analyst was educating the rising generation.
PubgGG: win the best skins for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and be sure of the service's integrity and сredibility! There are only you and your luck here, why won't you try it?Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying warned Japan against militarization of helicopter carriers on Tuesday. File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo
Dec. 26 (UPI) -- China's foreign ministry issued a warning to Japan to "act prudently" following reports of Japanese military plans.
Beijing diplomatic spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Tuesday at a regular press briefing that Tokyo should realize peace "through action," referring to a report Japan is modifying the Izumo helicopter carrier for fighter jets, according to Xinhua.
"We urge Japan to do more that may help enhance mutual trust and promote regional peace and stability," Hua said.
Kyodo News reported Monday Japan's defense ministry is considering a plan to purchase F-35B stealth fighters for use on helicopter carriers.
The report stated the aircraft would be particularly useful in deterring Chinese maritime actions, including deployment of coast guard vessels near Japan-claimed islands.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently endorsed the country's record-setting annual defense of $46 billion for fiscal year 2018, which will be used to deter North Korea and China's "growing military presence," according to the Nikkei Asian Review.
The measures, however, are being viewed with consternation in Beijing.
Hua said for "historical reasons" Japan's Asian neighbors are concerned about "Japanese military security trends," and voiced her opposition to buildup in the region.
Any move to modify Japanese carriers could violate a clause in the country's pacifist constitution, which states Tokyo cannot possess "attack aircraft carriers."
Hua said the actions could be a violation of Article 9 of Japan's constitution.
Japan's Izumo-class carriers are its largest and can transport up to 14 helicopters.WASHINGTON – A former manager of a Wells Fargo branch in Glendale, California, was convicted on Friday of money laundering and false bank entry charges in connection with laundering the proceeds of a trademark scam.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Acting U.S. Attorney Sandra R. Brown of the Central District of California, Acting Inspector in Charge William H. Hedrick from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s (USPIS) Los Angeles Division, Inspector in Charge Regina L. Faulkerson of USPIS Criminal Investigation and Acting Special Agent in Charge Anthony J. Orlando of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Los Angeles Field Office made the announcement.
After a four-day jury trial, Albert Yagubyan, 37, of Burbank, California, was convicted of one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, four counts of concealment money laundering and one count of false bank entries. Sentencing has been scheduled for May 22, 2017, before U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson of the Central District of California, who presided over the trial.
According to the evidence presented at trial, from June 27, 2014 to Sept. 18, 2015, Yagubyan laundered over $1 million of proceeds from a mass-mailing scam run by co-conspirator Artashes Darbinyan, 37, of Glendale, California, who used companies that they called “Trademark Compliance Center” (TCC) and “Trademark Compliance Office” (TCO) in order to make fraudulent offers to trademark applicants for registration and monitoring services.
Yagubyan laundered the funds by instructing subordinates at the bank to open bogus bank accounts, into which proceeds of the TCC and TCO scam were deposited, and process fraudulent withdrawals, wire transfers and cashier’s checks for co-conspirators Darbinyan and Orbel Hakobyan, 42, also of Glendale, the evidence showed. The cashier’s checks and wire transfers were made out to gold dealers. The bank accounts were opened using the identities of individuals from Eastern Europe who were not in the United States at the time the accounts were opened. The evidence at trial further showed that Darbinyan paid Yagubyan a percentage of the laundered proceeds. Yagubyan, in turn, made payments and promises of promotion to subordinates to induce them to conduct the fraudulent transactions. When Wells Fargo’s loss prevention office flagged the bogus accounts for closure, Yagubyan intervened to try and keep them open, the evidence showed.
Darbinyan and Hakobyan pleaded guilty in December 2016 to mail fraud and money laundering charges and are scheduled for sentencing on June 19, 2017, before Judge Wilson. The investigation has resulted in a total of five convictions.
USPIS and IRS-CI investigated the case. Trial Attorneys William E. Johnston and Alison L. Anderson and Assistant Chief Brian K. Kidd of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section are prosecuting the case.About
Platforms - PC (WIN/MAC/LINUX) + Mobile & Tablet (iOS/Android)
Release Date - Early 2017
Genre - Collectible Card Game
Single Player - Campaign with a constantly expanding story that enriches the Tezuka Universe
Multiplayer - Competitive Ranked Matches and Friend Matches
DOWNLOAD THE WINDOWS DEMO HERE!
DOWNLOAD THE MAC DEMO HERE!
In his 40 years as a mangaka or manga artist, Osamu Tezuka created over 700 series and is credited as the Godfather of Manga. The most notable of his series are known around the world, and include Astro Boy (known as Tetsuwan Atom in Japan), Phoenix, and Black Jack. At a time when comics and cartoons were made almost exclusively for comedy, Tezuka sought to incorporate tears, grief, anger, and hate into stories where the endings were not always cut and dry.
Dr. Ochanomizu by Satoshi Yoshioka (Snatcher, Policenauts)
In partnership with his son Makoto Tezuka, we celebrate Osamu Tezuka, not just for his incredible art and the sheer volume of work that he produced throughout his life, but also for the incredible breadth of genres he covered. From horror, to action, to children’s stories, people from every walk of life found something to love in Tezuka’s vast library of creations.
His work popularized manga around the world, profoundly shaped modern-day anime, and influenced numerous artists who have created their own successful anime and manga series.
Magma by Hiroya Oku (Gantz)
This game takes the shared universe of characters and the Star System that Tezuka created over his illustrious career and continues the story in a whole new setting. Drawing from themes and narratives previously established or hinted at in Tezuka’s work, our aim is to reintroduce these wonderful worlds to fans old and new. This is the world of ASTRO BOY: EDGE OF TIME.
Saburota by NekoshowguN (Lollipop Chainsaw)
Dark forces beyond understanding have consumed nearly all that exists. Ripped to shreds, left for dead, those that find themselves still alive find hope in an unseen power that transports them safely to a city known as The Sprawl that exists outside the normal flow of time and space. Out of reach of evil, human and robot alike work together to survive in this harsh strange new world.
Citizens from all of these different universes start to integrate with each other, and 8 districts are formed by the newly established government to properly govern and protect the people. Peace reigns in The Sprawl for a time, until the demon king Goa invades The Sprawl from beyond.
The skies above The Sprawl turn blood red, as Goa’s invasion fleet arrives, and Astro, Magma, and other heroes gather to protect what little they have. Aiding them in battle are a new breed of hero: summoners. Able to use “cards” to manifest hard light construct versions of those they’ve met, the summoners are able to create entire armies with the flick of their wrists.
Despite successfully repelling the Goa invasion, many of the heroes sustain heavy damage. Magma now sleeps in the center of the city, the new governmental building built around his motionless body. Astro is nowhere to be seen, leading many to ask:
Two years have passed since the invasion, and a new soul awakens in The Sprawl. A new era begins in the last city in existence.
A cutscene from the final game
ASTRO BOY: EDGE OF TIME’s story mode follows the player’s life as a summoner, a person able to command hard light constructs of the people they’ve met. Using “cards” as a conduit, summoners are able to summon these hard light constructs like an army, making them extremely powerful.
The player takes control of one such summoner as they awaken in The Sprawl for the first time. They’ll adventure through the city, meeting Tezuka characters and fighting nefarious foes in card-based challenges and 1v1 card battles, all while unraveling the mystery of this strange city and making it a safer place for everyone to live in.
The Ministry of Science in the 5th District
In Story Mode, players will also periodically receive “Prism Visions”; optional extra cutscenes that flesh out the world and give more insight into what is happening in The Sprawl. Not interested in watching a Prism Vision immediately? Simply access your Vision Archive later and watch them in any order.
Your Summoner also has access a handy News app that they can check any time during their adventure. As you progress further into the story, you’ll be able to read the latest news about your own adventures, as well as stories from elsewhere in the city. Some news will offer useful insight, while reading others may unlock special challenges or secret side quests.
The HQ for the insidious Deadcross Society
The story is also always growing! Each time we release a new card set for ASTRO BOY: EDGE OF TIME, we’ll release a story expansion to accompany it. Each story chapter will be based on a specific Tezuka series, focusing on the themes, characters and locations that made them so iconic.
Unique Positional Combat: players have access to two rows in combat: an offensive row where cards are able to attack the enemy, but cannot protect the player, and the defensive row where cards defend incoming attacks but are unable to initiate attacks.
players have access to two rows in combat: an offensive row where cards are able to attack the enemy, but cannot protect the player, and the defensive row where cards defend incoming attacks but are unable to initiate attacks. Reimagined Characters: Fresh new redesigns of Tezuka’s most famous characters crafted by Japan’s most legendary illustrators.
Fresh new redesigns of Tezuka’s most famous characters crafted by Japan’s most legendary illustrators. Story Mode: Experience a whole new adventure with Astro and other famous Tezuka characters that intertwines a deep storyline with unique card-based combat.
Experience a whole new adventure with Astro and other famous Tezuka characters that intertwines a deep storyline with unique card-based combat. Multiplayer: Battle other players in multiple ranked and unranked online modes and prove yourself as the best summoner in The Sprawl.
Battle other players in multiple ranked and unranked online modes and prove yourself as the best summoner in The Sprawl. Ongoing Development: The experience is always growing! Regular updates for ASTRO BOY: EDGE OF TIME will add new cards, new story mode episodes, and new multiplayer modes, so there’s always something new around the corner.
You play as a summoner, equipped with a powerful deck of “cards” that allows you to summon mighty heroes from across time and space to fight to defend your new home. In the full game, players build decks of 30 cards to take down mighty foes and defend The Sprawl or take on other players in a plethora of ranked and unranked multiplayer modes.
On the battlefield, each player gets two rows upon which to place units: The aggressive Enforcer row, and the protective Guardian row. Units placed from your hand in the Enforcer row can attack the enemy player and its units, but won’t be able to protect you from direct attacks. On the other hand, cards in the Guardian row are able to protect you from direct damage, but cannot initiate combat.
In addition, each card has a unique skill that will either passively activate when the right conditions are met, or are manually activated by the player when the time is right.
In addition to commanding Tezuka’s characters on the battlefield, players will also have access to Gear cards, powerful cards you can play during your turn to change the battlefield, buff units, or completely obliterate your enemy.
ASTRO BOY: EDGE OF TIME’s cards will often fall into one of the four factions that exist in the vast city of The Sprawl. While each faction represents a group that actually exists in the story, they also represent a gameplay style. When making your deck, you’ll need to choose your faction as this will affect how your deck plays.
Music is an incredibly important part of a game, and ASTRO BOY: EDGE OF TIME is no different. Legendary electronic music composer Giorgio Moroder (Scarface, Metropolis) has already provided a new theme song for the game, while game music legend Akira Yamaoka is providing music for the rest of the soundtrack.
Preview Track from Akira Yamaoka:
Preview Track from Giorgio Moroder:
The music for ASTRO BOY: EDGE OF TIME has already been created, so none of the funds from Kickstarter will go towards funding the music.
When we started developing ASTRO BOY: EDGE OF TIME we began to think about how best to honor Osamu Tezuka. As we did our research, one thing kept sticking out: how much Tezuka’s work had influenced artists over the years. Tons of creators in manga, anime and video games were inspired by Tezuka’s incredible creations.
That’s when it hit us. Why not invite some of these incredible artists to join in on the fun? We look at ASTRO BOY: EDGE OF TIME as a celebration of Tezuka’s incredible legacy. What better way to honor that legacy than to have the very artists that were inspired by him redesign his most iconic characters?
This is where you come in. We need your help to fund the incredible art from these talented creators, and to make ASTRO BOY: EDGE OF TIME a true extension of Osamu Tezuka’s incredible legacy.Rand Paul’s apparent opposition to a key provision of the Civil Rights Act places him well within the mainstream of libertarian thought, according to several leading libertarians.
The GOP Senate candidate told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last night that he would have tried to “modify” the law’s ban on racial discrimination by private businesses. That was an expansion of comments he made last month to a Louisville newspaper, in which he said that opposing the ban was “the hard part about believing in freedom.”Paul’s stance is “very reasonable, and quite close to the Libertarian position,” a spokesman for the Libertarian Party told TPMmuckraker.
“If some private business discriminates we think that’s unfortunate, but we don’t think the government should get involved in banning it,” said the spokesman, Wes Benedict. “That’s just a negative that we have to tolerate in a free society.”
Walter Block, a libertarian professor of economics at Loyola University, and a senior fellow with the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute, went further. “I think anyone who doesn’t believe that isn’t a libertarian,” he said, calling Paul’s comment “a very mainstream libertarianism.”
“I’m delighted that Rand Paul said that,” an enthusiastic Block added. “I think it’s magnificent. I didn’t realize that he was that good.”
“The spirit of non-discrimination,” said Block “ends you right up in compulsory bisexuality.”
Harry Browne, the late libertarian activist and presidential candidate, appears to have taken the same view. “Neither before nor after the Civil Rights Act were people free to make their own decisions about whom they would associate with,” he wrote in 2003. “The civil rights movement wasn’t opposed to using government to coerce people. It merely wanted the government to aim its force in a new direction. Although the activists believed coercion served the noble objective of bringing the races closer together, it was coercion nonetheless.”
David Bernstein, a libertarian law professor at George Mason University and the author of the 2003 book You Can’t Say That! The Growing Threat To Civil Liberties From Anti-Discrimination Laws, confirmed that opposition to the ban on racial discrimination by private businesses was a mainstream position in libertarian circles both at the time of the Civil Rights Act and today. “The foundation of libertarian thinking is private property as a limit on state action,” he said. “So if a private business chooses to discriminate, a typical libertarian would say that’s a business owner’s right to do so.”
Bernstein cited a 1963 article in The New Republic written by Robert Bork — at the time a libertarian Yale Law professor. In reference to the Interstate Accommodations Act, an earlier piece of civil rights legislation, Bork wrote:
The principle of such legislation is that if I find your behavior ugly by my standards, moral or aesthetic, and if you prove stubborn about adopting my view of the situation, I am justified in having the state coerce you into more righteous paths. That is itself a principle of unsurpassed ugliness.
Indeed, Bernstein said there were prominent liberals who took the same view — a view that was not seen as incompatible with their liberalism. His book mentions a 1945 letter to the editor of the New York Times, which denounced fair employment laws as unjust intrusions on freedom. The letter was signed by Oswald Garrison Villard, the owner of The Nation, as well as other liberals. Bernstein’s book also notes that Hannah Arendt objected to fair housing laws on same grounds, writing that “discrimination is as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right.” (As we reported this afternoon, Paul has expressed his own opposition to the Fair Housing Act in similar terms.)
It’s not as simple as this though. Bernstein himself said he doesn’t see things quite the same way as fellow libertarians like Block and Browne do. In a 2004 op-ed — subsequently posted on the Cato Institute website — he argued that “the civil-rights laws of the 1960s were generally sensitive to civil libertarian concerns,” since they “prohibited discrimination only in public facilities such as restaurants, hotels and theaters.” He warned that newer laws go too far by prohibiting discrimination “in the membership policies of private organizations … like the Boy Scouts of America.”
Richard Epstein, perhaps the country’s leading scholar of libertarian legal thought, told TPMmuckraker in a brief interview before boarding a plane that he believes anti-discrimination laws can be justified only as a counter-weight to monopoly power — but suggested that such monopoly power did exist in the Jim Crow south, when almost no retail businesses would serve blacks.
And in section of a 2009 book published by the Cato Institute, John Samples, a scholar at Cato attempted to reconcile libertarian thought with the Civil Rights Act. He wrote (pdf):
Johnson’s major civil rights achievements –the Voting Rights Act
of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964–are in part compatible with the limited government philosophy. Both could be seen as constraints on governments, especially in the South….The [Civil Rights Act] forced some to engage in exchanges they wished to avoid. On the other hand, the law opened the possibility for an individual to stay at a motel or eat at a lunch counter. That possibility conveyed a power (not a liberty) to African Americans, and it did so by increasing the ambit of the state. The Civil Rights Act appeared constrained in aspiration. [Unlike later laws] It did not require that 12 percent of customers at the restaurant in a month be African-American. Indeed the Civil Rights Act prohibited the use of racial quotas.
In other words, it’s possible to be a libertarian without opposing the Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination by private businesses — a stance Paul now may be belatedly trying to feel his way towards. But at the same time, opposition to the ban is the mainstream position in libertarian circles. The controversy about Paul’s comments, then, is as much about libertarianism itself as about the GOP’s new nominee for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky.Once described by many as intelligent, athletic, loyal and lovable, the esteemed opinion of pit bulls has gone downhill in part due to widespread myths that the media has been quick to pick up on and help perpetuate.
Unfortunately, the bad reputation has led to a host of problems for not only pit bulls that find themselves in need of a home, but for owners who find themselves having trouble finding places to live that will allow pit bulls or battling breed specific legislation to save their four-legged family members.
Best Friends Animal Society recently launched Shelter Partners for Pit Bulls, a program designed to “encourage responsible pet ownership, increase adoptions, reduce euthanasia and improve the public’s perception of pit-bull terriers and similar dogs,” that is being supported by Best Friends and a $240,000 grant from PetSmart Charities.
“In addition to this program helping to save lives of adoptable animals, I would really like for people to realize that pit-bull terriers are just dogs, like any other dog,” says Jamie Healy, manager of Shelter Partners for Pit Bulls.
“They’re fun-loving, loyal goofballs that have the same basic needs and require the same responsible ownership as other dogs do.”
After doubling the number of dogs adopted and increasing the save-rate from 51 percent to 71 percent through a partnership with Salt Lake County Animal Services in 2009, five new shelter communities have been added to the program.
Participating shelters now include the Rancho Cucamonga Animal Care and Adoption Center in Rancho Cucamonga, California; the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter in Baltimore, Maryland; the Washington Humane Society in Washington, D.C.; Hillsborough County Animal Services in Tampa, Florida; and the County of San Diego Animal Services in Carlsbad, California.
Each of the shelters will have community coordinators who will help with education, training, fostering, adoption and spay/neuter efforts, among other tasks. Volunteers, or “Pit Crews,” will also play a big role working with both the dogs and the public.
“This is very beneficial not only in helping the dogs become more adoptable, but it also allows the volunteers to get to know the dogs’ personalities, which also helps them promote the dogs to potential adopters and find the perfect match,” says Dana Keithly, local coordinator at the Rancho center.
Visit Best Friends to learn more about their pit bull terrier initiatives and follow the Pit Crews on Facebook: Rancho Cucamonga, Baltimore, D.C., Tampa and San Diego.
Related Stories:
Pit Bulls Have Better Temperament Than Average Dog
Study Shows Pit Bull Ban Does Not Stop Dog Bites
Paralyzed Pit Bull Mix Inspires Others
Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/just_steph/From Nature magazine
Most everyone knows that stress can cause a clenched, gurgling, unhappy stomach. What's less well known is that the relationship goes both ways.
Beneficial gut bacteria, or probiotics, have been shown in the past to alleviate symptoms of stress and anxiety, but it wasn't clear whether the bugs could have an impact on the brains of healthy animals. Now, John Cryan, a pharmacologist with the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Center at University College Cork, Ireland, and colleagues have found that probiotics have a direct impact on mood neurotransmitters in mice1. The findings further support the idea that one way to heal problems of the mind might be through the stomach.
Cryan's group fed a strain of Lactobacillus rhamnosus — a species found in some yoghurts — to 16 healthy mice. The dose they used was roughly the same as the amount of probiotic cultures claimed to be in a pot of Actimel yoghurt.
The team then ran the mice, along with 20 mice fed a bacteria-free broth, through a battery of stress tests. In negotiating a maze, the mice that received probiotics ventured out into open spaces more than twice as often as the control mice, suggesting that they were less anxious. And when forced to swim, the bacteria-fed mice were slightly more prone to struggle — rather than give up — than their broth-fed brethren. "These mice were more chilled out," says Cryan, adding that the effects of the probiotics were similar in magnitude to those seen in mice for antidepressant drugs. Cryan and his colleagues report their results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.
Chemical confirmation
Mice dosed with probiotics showed differences in brain chemistry, too. After the forced swim, bacteria-fed mice had about half as much corticosterone, a stress hormone, in their blood as control mice. The bacteria also seemed to cause redistribution of brain receptors for the neurotransmitter GABA (γ-aminobutyric acid) — the same receptors affected by anti-anxiety medications such as valium — into a pattern most common in non-depressed animals. When the researchers snipped the vagus nerve — which is important in the communication between the brain and the guts — these differences between the mice disappeared.
"It's not just behaviour and not just brain chemistry, it's the whole package," says Cryan.
"It's pretty convincing," says Brett Finlay, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "These days our microbiota are being implicated in just about everything."
Mental boost
Previous work has shown that probiotics can improve the moods of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome or irritable bowel syndrome. And, in a study published earlier this year2, a French research group showed that a concoction of Lactobacillus helveticus and Bifidobacterium longum, given over 30 days, improved healthy volunteer scores in a range of surveys designed to assess mental health.
Cryan used to eat probiotic yoghurts himself until he was put off by the amount of sugar they contained. He says that it is difficult to extrapolate results from mice to people, and more work needs to be done to determine the precise effects of different bacterial strains. But, he adds, "if I was in any way stressed I wouldn't mind taking this in tablet form".
"Whether you should be taking probiotics for depression or not, time will tell," says Finlay.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on August 30, 2011.A prolific YouTuber glorified by Trump’s biggest online community vanished from the face of the Internet — until he was mysteriously retweeted on Monday under a new identity by President Trump himself.
Simon Bravery’s parodies and memes were so unforgettable to posters on Reddit’s Donald Trump subreddit that when Bravery wiped his pro-Trump parodies from YouTube, along with the entirety of his online presence, users made posts wondering where he’d gone.
Bravery returned to Twitter just last week, when he took over @Aroliso, an account that was registered in 2015. His bio stated he was “starting over 08/18/2017,” or last Friday.
Then, on Monday morning, the President of the United States retweeted Bravery’s new account, which had one follower before last week.
“ Ev ery single day the #FakeNews media try to take you down. You never falter, you always stand strong!” tweeted @Aroliso, an account that tweeted through a third party program tied to SimonBravery.com.
Within five minutes, President Trump quoted his tweet, adding: “Thank you, the very dishonest Fake News Media is out of control!”
It was no accident. Since Bravery’s return, he had been exclusively tweeting replies to @realDonaldTrump, presumably hoping for exactly the kind of attention he received on Monday morning.
Rob Bravery, a British rock musician signed to Sony music, said he believes his brother Simon is behind the account.
When asked by The Daily Beast whether his brother was the same individual Trump retweeted, Rob said: “Oh wow. Probably is, he does a lot of Trump-related stuff on Twitter.”
The Daily Beast discovered several sock puppet accounts connected to Simon’s new shitposting hub, including @AvoTovA, an account that has scrubbed all of its tweets, but once used the same tactic to try to get Trump’s attention. Before @Aroliso’s pro-Trump rebrand, the account solely existed to retweet @AvoTovA.
Other accounts include @Pavox, @Pavox__, @AvoTovA_ (which had over 6,300 followers before its deletion), @Super__Trump, @TrumpTribute, and @Incredible_DT. All of the accounts follow one another, plus President Trump—and sometimes no one else.
Rob Bravery is followed by almost all of his brother Simon’s sock puppet accounts.
Bravery’s old Twitter account, @Simon_Bravery, switched over to @Pavox in the last month. Bravery’s YouTube account also switched over to the username Pavox, then deleted all of its videos.
During the election, Bravery posted at least 17 pro-Trump parodies on his YouTube account, with titles including “IndianaTrump,” “RoboTrump,” “Trump Vs. Hillary - The Matrix,” and “HIS NAME WAS SETH RICH.” While all of these videos were deleted from a YouTube account connected to Bravery as recently as last month, some have survived elsewhere online.
In Bravery’s video about deceased DNC staffer Seth Rich, he superimposes the faces of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, and Donald and Melania Trump, over actors’ faces during a scene from the movie Saving Private Ryan. He even adds “Seth C. Rich” to a cross representing a dead soldier. The video became a top post on Reddit’s r/The_Donald, one of the web’s largest pro-Trump communities.
In another video since re-posted on YouTube, Bravery parodies a scene from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, featuring Trump as hero Katniss Everdeen and Hillary Clinton as the tyrannical President Snow.
Bravery’s Facebook account, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channel are no longer accessible. It’s not clear why he decided to wipe his entire online existence weeks ago. The Daily Beast reached out to Bravery via email, and on several social media platforms, but he had yet to respond by press time.
Another Twitter account that linked to Bravery’s virtually blank website was once used to generate support for the boy band One Direction. An archive of the account @Simon_Bravery shows that, as recently as October 2016, it posted several tweets like: “Would You Go Without Oxygen For A Day To Meet Zayn? Like = Yes RT = No,” referring to Zayn Malik, one of the band’s former members.
However, by March, another snapshot of the account shows it was exclusively used to defend the president. And that’s how most people on r/The_Donald remember Bravery.
“WTF Happened to Simon Bravery and his amazing vids?” read the title on one thread posted about a month ago on r/The_Donald.
“Did something happen? The last video I saw of his was the FANTASTIC ‘His Name Was Seth Rich’ tribute, coincidence? WTF happened?” the user posted. Another user noted just three days ago that “ his YouTube and twitter accounts are gone.”
“What ever happened to Simon Bravery with all those cool Trump versus <insert globalist here> videos? His twitter and youtube accounts are gone :-(“ one member posted on r/The_Donald a month ago.
Bravery used an unidentified program titled “AvoTova 06” to send the tweet on Monday, using Twitter’s open source developer tools. The program was linked to StevenBravery.com. The account’s link to the “Avatova 06” program was deleted later on Monday.
The Daily Beast also reached out to Avotova, an American software company that shares a name with Bravery’s program. Its owner Brett Wernicke was adamant he hadn’t heard of the accounts, and was upset that someone else had used his company’s name.
“I’m not on Twitter. It sounds like I should get on Twitter and figure out who’s doing what,” Wernicke said, added: “The last thing I want to be doing is being associated with any of that.”
If Bravery gets his way, we may never find out. On Monday, after Trump retweeted @Aroliso, the account suggested it did not wish to be outed, posting: “ I wonder how long it will be before I'm doxxed to oblivion? They're like rabid dogs! Worth it though! #MAGA”This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin our show in Steubenville, Ohio, where two high school football players have been found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl at a party last August. On Sunday, the teenagers, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, were found delinquent in the sexual assault of the girl who witnesses testified was too drunk to move or speak. Mays, who was a high school quarterback, was also found delinquent on a second charge: taking and distributing a picture of the girl. Both young men had insisted that any sex that occurred between them and the girl was consensual. After the ruling, they broke down into tears, apologized to the victim, and were sent to a juvenile detention facility. They were also required to register as juvenile sex offenders.
Ohio state Attorney General Mike DeWine, a former U.S. senator, said he plans to convene a grand jury to determine if other crimes had been committed.
ATTORNEY GENERAL MIKE DEWINE: As I’ve indicated, we’ve been involved in an extensive investigation, trying to determine, trying to learn if any other individuals committed any crimes. While we have interviewed almost 60 individuals, 16 people refused to talk to our investigators. I have reached the conclusion that this investigation must—cannot be completed, this investigation simply cannot be completed, that we cannot bring finality to this matter without the convening of a grand jury.
AMY GOODMAN: Although the attack occurred in the summer, it only gained national attention after the cyber-activist group Anonymous obtained and published a shocking video from the night of the assault. The now-notorious 12-minute video shows a former classmate of the young men mocking the victim, laughingly referring to her as dead, and continuously joking about sexual assault.
STEUBENVILLE TEEN 1: Is it really rape? Because you don’t know if she wanted to or not. She might have wanted to. That might have been her final wish.
STEUBENVILLE TEEN 2: No, y’all think she’s dead?
STEUBENVILLE TEEN 1: She’s dead.
AMY GOODMAN: Along with the video, an Instagram photo also went viral. The now-infamous photo shows the two Steubenville high school football players holding their 16-year-old victim over a basement floor, one by her arms, one by her legs. State forensic analysts reportedly sifted through more than 396,000 text messages and 940 video clips recovered from cellphones as part of the investigation.
The Steubenville story has made national and international headlines, largely thanks to a local crime blogger. Before many of the partygoers could delete incriminating social media posts, the blogger, Alexandria Goddard, made copies and publicized them on her website, Prinniefied.com. She was sued for defamation, but the charges have since been dropped. Many Steubenville locals criticized Goddard for bringing negative public attention to the football team; others have praised her for holding sexual perpetrators accountable.
Well, for more, we’re joined right now by Alexandria Goddard. And in Las Vegas, Nevada, we’re joined by her First Amendment lawyer, Marc Randazza.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! First, Alexandria, your reaction to Friday—to the verdict that came down yesterday?
ALEXANDRIA GODDARD: I’m glad that the victim had her day in court and that justice was served and, you know, hope that the grand jury that’s going to convene will hold others accountable who might be found accountable.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about that grand jury. Talk about Attorney General Mike DeWine and what he said yesterday.
ALEXANDRIA GODDARD: He stated that the investigation can’t be completed until they convene a grand jury to determine if other charges can be brought forward.
AMY GOODMAN: And why has this taken so long? Can you go back to August, Alexandria, and just give us a timeline? Explain what happened and when you came to know and make public what you knew.
ALEXANDRIA GODDARD: I came to know about it on August 22nd, the date that the two were arrested. The incident occurred on August 11th. And I believe in October, November, sometime, they had the probable cause hearing. And, I mean, it’s a juvenile matter. And the trial was yesterday. But I came to know of it on August 22nd.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what actually took place. Go back to Steubenville, where you are from, and talk about what happened.
ALEXANDRIA GODDARD: There were various end-of-the-summer parties |
Thursday, would mean a more difficult work-life balance.
Conservative MP Ben Lobb speaks in the House of Commons in 2014. (Photo: Facebook)
Conservative MP Ben Lobb, a new father also struggling with the work-life balance, is one of several Conservative MPs with young children. His son, Calvin, is nine months old, and his spouse lives with him in Ottawa while on maternity leave, so he has a different set of considerations than Virani's.
Lobb, who has been an MP since 2008, sees no problems with Friday sittings. He'd rather have shorter hours Monday to Friday so he can be with his son for bedtime.
The MP for Huron—Bruce praised the recent change of scheduling votes right after question period, rather than late in the evening.
"That's one thing I hope will be in there," he told HuffPost, before the report as tabled.
"I know some members have talked about getting rid of Friday, but I don't think that's going to make a big difference."
"Canadians expect that when the House is sitting, it sits for five days."
— Tory MP Ben Lobb
As a backbencher, Lobb sees the value of the 4.5 hours of sitting on Fridays. Not only is there another question period and a chance to hold the government's feet to the fire, but it's also one additional day for MPs to discuss private members' business — legislation that doesn't emanate from the government and which all MPs, with the exceptions of ministers and parliamentary secretaries, can propose.
Getting rid of Friday sittings would mean one less day of debate, and fewer chances that a backbencher's bill could be referred to committee for further study and passage into law, Lobb noted.
"For an opposition member, that is a pretty important thing," he said. "Canadians expect that when the House is sitting, it sits for five days."
Lobb notes that if House hours are extended, the staff will have to become shift workers and there will be increased security costs. Marc Bosc, the acting clerk of the House of Commons, suggested, however, that eliminating a day or adding hours would have "little impact" on operational cost.
"I think the way we are doing it now is a good way and has been in place for as long as it has been around."
'More consistent weeks' needed
Lobb travels back to his riding as best he can. He often leaves on Friday and returns on Sunday, but that may change when his wife returns to work. His current journey takes him 4.5 to 6.5 hours each way.
What would be helpful, he said, is for the House schedule to be organized in more consistent blocks of weeks so MPs could focus their energy uninterrupted in Ottawa and then go to their ridings and focus their energy for several weeks at a time, he said.
"I'm not advocating for more time in Ottawa or more time in the constituency, just … more consistent weeks," he said.
"If you decided in your life that you wanted to bring a little child into this world, you owe that child your time and your care, right? The people voted you in, and you owe it to them to do the best job you can for them. So that requires you to get really smart and really intelligent about how to manage your time."
NDP MP Christine Moore holds her daughter Daphnee just outside the House of Commons,on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Tuesday, March 8, 2016. (Photo: Fred Chartrand/CP)
Lobb praised NDP MP Christine Moore, who has a daughter the same age as his son. Moore recently led the charge to have an on-call nanny service on the Hill — which MPs pay for out of their own pocket.
The child care service was announced to MPs on Monday — two days before the committee's report suggesting it be established.
Less than a week after giving birth last fall, Moore was back on the campaign trail. She has become a champion for young mothers in the Commons, arguing in favour of paternity leave, electronic voting for those on sick leave and longer sitting weeks in Ottawa to help cut down on travel time.
"I think Christine Moore is a shining example of a mom, and an MP and does a pretty damn good job of balancing her time," Lobb said.
He also mentioned Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, who has three kids, and announced to her staff that she intends to leave the office most days at 5:30 pm, go off line to have dinner with her family, and resume her duties about 8 p.m.
"She did he best thing for her, her job, her family and her geography, and I respect that. And I think each MP has to do that," he said.
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna speaks with her son before a swearing in ceremony Wednesday Nov.4, 2015. (Photo: Justin Tang/CP)
And it's not just members with young children, Lobb noted. Many other MPs have parents who rely on them for care.
"Maybe they don't live with them, but they are in a nursing home with doctors appointments. Even if they are MPs, they are still sons and daughters, and they still have a responsibility to their parents…. So there is no one answer. There is really 338 answers for each one.
"I think you just have to do what is best for you and your family. That's probably the best way to sum it up."
Liberal MP Larry Bagnell, the chair of the committee studying ways to make the Commons more family friendly, acknowledged that there are strong disagreements between MPs on major issues.
His committee studied legislatures across the country, as well as in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden, and heard from 29 witnesses — unions, staff of MPs, MPs with children, former MPs who had young children but left Parliament because of the ensuing difficulties, a group that wants to increase women's participation in politics, he said.
This is an interim report, the Liberal MP from the Yukon cautioned.
Committee may study heckling, decorum
"We're only going to do some recommendations on things that weren't huge and that we could agree on early. And things that we couldn't, we put forward for further study."
For example, the committee may study heckling and decorum in the House of Commons and further discuss a gender-sensitive safety audit it hopes the Board of Internal Economy conducts, relating to panic buttons stationed outside the parliamentary precinct, gender-neutral toilets and more change tables where need be.
Bagnell, an MP from 2000 to 2011 but out of the House for one term before winning re-election again last fall, told HuffPost he learned a lot of interesting things during the committee's study.
"I didn't know that Australia and England have two houses basically, so they can give more MPs a chance to speak, they can speed up the work and not have to sit as long.
"I didn't know that Sweden voted electronically, where you push a button and they do in 30 seconds what we do in 10 minutes.
"I didn't know that Sweden voted electronically, where you push a button and they do in 30 seconds what we do in 10 minutes."
— Liberal MP Larry Bagnell
"I didn't know that Sweden didn't allow ministers in [the legislature] and that ministers are given an MP for their riding and that MP does debates and votes and so the minister can actually do a good job of being a minister, full time. And in Sweden as well, I think they only meet Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday."
"I was a bit surprised that we sit longer than a lot of parliaments, in Canada and around the world," he added. "There is certainly a lot of work to do, so if you take away Fridays, there is a trade-off — you have to pick up that work somewhere, and then that affects other people."
Bagnell said he's intrigued by the idea of two lower houses and the committee may revisit the topic later.
David Natzler, clerk of the British House of Commons, told the committee they've had an "alternate chamber," known as Westminster Hall, since 1999 that is based on the Australian example.
The clerk of the Australian House of Representatives, David Elder, testified that country has had two chambers since 1994. The Federation Chamber is essentially a parallel debating chamber, where legislation can't be introduced or voted on. It simply considers matters sent to it by the House of Representatives, sits about a third of the same time and, as the committee's report concluded, relieves time pressures in the main chamber.
Second chamber needed?
Elder said the Australian House of Representatives sits about 70 days a year — four days a week for 18 to 20 weeks in two-week blocks, with some longer breaks in between.
The British House of Commons sits about 150 days over 34 sitting weeks, mostly from Monday through Thursday.
The New Zealand House of Representatives sits about 90 days over 30 sitting weeks, and only on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays.
In contrast, the Canadian House of Commons sits five days a week — about 135 sitting days a year over 26 weeks.
Should the House decide to have a second chamber, Bagnell noted, the infrastructure will soon exist. The House is scheduled to move into temporary digs in the West Block while the current chamber undergoes a renovation in the Centre Block. When that's complete, Canada could have two functioning lower houses pretty easily, he said.
Bagnell told HuffPost there is no recommendation on electronic voting because there was no consensus. "Some people really felt that it was important to stand up and cast your vote," he said.
The case for standing up instead
He also acknowledged a less-often-discussed truth.
Sometimes, MPs don't really know what they are voting for and standing up helps members' make up their mind.
"In private members' business, maybe it's something you don't know anything about but you know someone who does, who you trust, and so if they vote before you that helps you, and in electronic voting you wouldn't have that," he said.
Bagnell also noted his surprise on learning that party whips in New Zealand occasionally vote on behalf of the entire caucus.
"You don't even need the people in there, you just need the four whips who say this party is voting for this, this party is voting for that," he said, laughing.
"I said we could tell our press that and they would say, ‘Why are we paying the rest of you?'"
There are a lot of big ideas to discuss, but the Liberal chair said the point is to have an inclusive Parliament that represents all demographics.
"One of our MPs has six kids. If you didn't have [them], then you wouldn't have their concerns and their challenges in life represented in Parliament, so that's why we are trying to make it more accessible and remove barriers that might [discourage] them from running for office," he said.
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ALSO ON HUFFPOST:Nobu Okamoto was walking along Finch Avenue West at about 10:00 a.m. on Aug. 4, when he was struck by a cyclist riding on the sidewalk.
Okamoto, a 74-year-old father of three grown children, suffered a fractured skull, a dislocated shoulder and internal bleeding.
He died on Monday at Toronto Western Hospital, never having regained consciousness.
The cyclist — a 33-year-old man — is facing a fine of $3.75 because the incident happened in what was once the City of North York and the fines have not changed since amalgamation.
In another recent case a cyclist in Chinatown allegedly ran a red light and went the wrong way down the street. He hit a pedestrian. The woman's skull was fractured.
That fine was $400 because it was laid under the Highways Traffic Act.
Police say in the Okamoto case the cyclist could still face criminal charges.
Okamoto's children say they hope his death will prompt the city to put in a bicycle lane.
"We'd really like to see a separate bicycle lane built," said Karen Okamoto.
"We're not focused on punishment," she said. "We're focusing on grieving."On Feb. 11, Thioro Mbow called her husband, Hellmut Ulin and burned their three children alive in the family’s shed in Lennik, Belgium, while he was on the line, forcing him to listen.
Welingelichte Kringen reported earlier that day Ulin sent Mbow a letter through a bailiff, demanding that she leave their home and give him full custody of their four daughters.
Mbow was enraged and locked Omy, 2, Abbygail, 4, and Madyson, 6, in the shed. She then allegedly called Ulin at his work site 12 miles away and said, “listen to their screams” as the children were burned alive, Mirror reported.
"I can hear their screams but I will do nothing to save them,” she said. "You'd better hurry but you will be too late to rescue them. They won't survive.”
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She added, “I will never surrender my children to you.”
Ulin rushed home and called his sister who lives nearby, asking her to go to his house. They were both too late.
Ulin found his daughters’ charred and lifeless bodies as the garden shed still smoked."Ten minutes of screaming and then it was all over,” Mbow calmly told him.
The oldest daughter, Dyarra, 9, from one of Mbow’s earlier relationships, was at school at the time.
Family friend Vivianne van Eeckhoudt accompanied Ulin’s sister to the scene. "There was no chance to save the little ones,” she said. "The shed was stuffed with paper and the flames were so fierce. It was a horrible death.”
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"We saw the mother at the scene. There were no tears in her eyes and she did not seem to be in a panic."
HLN reported that Mbow has been arrested on suspicion of murder, but she hasn't confessed to any crimes. She will undergo a psychiatric evaluation soon and her children's bodies will be autopsied today.
According to Excelsior, neighbors reported that the woman was under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time and Ulin sent his wife the legal notice that day to scare her into curbing her substance abuse.
Sources: Welingelichte Kringen, Mirror, HLN, Excelsior Image via HLN
undefinedCardinal George Pell has said he expects that the upcoming synod on the family to “massively endorse” the Church’s traditional teaching.
The cardinal made his comments at the Voice of the Family conference in Rome on Saturday.
“Christ is very clear about divorce and not quite as important, but nearly as important, St Paul is very clear about the conditions that are required for a proper reception of Communion,” he said, according to LifeSiteNews.
“I think in fact that the synod will massively endorse the tradition.”
Speaking during a question and answer section, he added: “The teaching of St John Paul the Great is the teaching of the Church. I believe that the (Synod) delegates will recognise that the Christian tradition of St John Paul the Great, Benedict, the Council of Trent. I don’t anticipate any deviation.”
The Voice of the Family group, a coalition of pro-life and pro-family organisations, is committed to supporting the bishops at the synod which is scheduled to take place in October.
In an interview with Vatican Radio after the conference Cardinal Pell said secularisation had made it harder for the Church to present its teaching on family and sexual matters.
The family “is very resilient… but by the same token, I think just about everywhere in the western world its under pressure,” he said, adding that secularisation makes it “much, much harder” for the Church to present her message.
Cardinal Pell also talked about the need for the focus of the Church being not just on the clergy: “There are many, many different types of Catholics – there’s the Pope and Bishops and priests. But I think especially in family life, it’s an area for the witness of married, the witness of spouses, of parents, and of their children.”
He continued: “We [must] explain the importance of faith. Often we can be very, very understated about the importance of faith, prayer, conversion.” he said, “The secrets for religious prosperity, lie in the Gospels and in the Catholic tradition. We’ve just got to go to them… And adapting more and more to the society – they’ll all say that’s good, but they won’t join, and it will put us out of business if we do it long enough.”
Meanwhile, five American bishops have added their names to a statement addressed to the delegates for the synod, urging them to “stand firm on the Church’s traditional understanding of marriage, human sexuality and pastoral practices”.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Bishop David Kagan of Bismarck, Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Bishop Robert Finn, formerly of Kansas City-St Joseph, and Rene Gracida, retired bishop of Corpus Christi, Texas, have all signed the statement.
The statement was drawn up by Credo Priests, a group organised by Fr Jerry Pokorsky, pastor at St Michael Catholic Church in Annandale, Virginia, and about 850 priests have also added their names to the website.Getty Images
The Vikings unloaded receiver Percy Harvin onto the Seahawks, despite a thoroughly documented history of misbehavior. In Seattle, Harvin behaved consistently with his prior actions.
So why do the Jets think Harvin will be any different?
Every coach believes he’s the guy to get the best out of a player with a history of being a bad guy. Pete Carroll thought he’d get through to Harvin in Seattle. Rex Ryan surely believes he’ll find a way to connect with Harvin in New York. And maybe Rex will; if he does, however, it’ll be a surprise.
Aiding Ryan’s cause will be the presence of Mike Vick, who has become a respected elder statesman for young players who grew up idolizing him. Harvin and Vick are both represented by Joe Segal, who is based in New York. With Segal serving as the conduit, Vick could be the right guy to get Harvin to do the things he’s supposed to do — and to not do the things he has done in Seattle, Minnesota, and Gainesville.
Again, it won’t be easy. At Florida, Harvin allegedly stopped during a 2007 conditioning run and, when pressed to continue, said, “This [expletive] ends now.” The next day, he opted for playing basketball over the prescribed football training.
Harvin also reportedly once grabbed receivers coach Billy Gonzales by the neck and threw him to the ground. Harvin reportedly was never disciplined.
At Minnesota, Harvin clashed with former coach Brad Childress. The disputes included a heated argument that arose when Childress suggested Harvin was embellishing an ankle injury to avoid practicing. Harvin and Childress nearly came to blows; their toxic relationship reportedly contributed to the decision to dump Randy Moss after a three-week reunion, because the Vikings feared Moss was influencing Harvin in a negative way.
Another “heated exchange” happened in 2012 with former Vikings coach Leslie Frazier, an ordinarily calm presence who spent a lot of time when Childress was the coach keeping Harvin from making good on threats to not show up for games. It’s not easy to get Frazier upset. Harvin found a way.
In Seattle, it was just as bad. Said one source regarding the situation, “Believe everything you hear about Harvin and the Seahawks.” The reported fracas with former Seahawks receiver Golden Tate happened, we’re told, the night before Super Bowl XLVIII. The source said Harvin body slammed Tate at the team hotel, and that players initially feared Harvin broke Tate’s neck.
While there’s a theory making the rounds that the Seahawks feared Harvin would launch a mutiny against quarterback Russell Wilson, there’s a separate theory that Harvin was in danger of being on the wrong end of a Code Red from teammates who had enough of his angry, moody, erratic ways.
Whatever the specific details, it had to be very, very bad for the Seahawks to cut the cord. There are plenty of temperamental, antisocial players in the NFL. Few get abruptly shipped out of town for a third-day draft pick with more than $19 million earned for only eight games and a first-round, third-round, and seventh-round pick squandered.
As one source told PFT, the Seahawks would have cut Harvin but for the fact that the balance of his $11 million base salary is fully guaranteed. There are no guarantees for Harvin beyond 2014, and the initial thinking in league circles is that the Jets won’t keep him around at $10 million for 2015 — especially if there’s a new head coach who is willing to admit that not even Vince Lombardi could have gotten through to Harvin on a consistent basis.National Signing Day is a big day for the Georgia Bulldogs and every other team in the SEC. And why not? The SEC has become the most prestigious conference in football. It has produced the past seven BCS Champions, and National Signing Day is the culmination of every team’s struggle to reel-in the top recruits in the nation.
This past Wednesday showed just how important National Signing Day is to the Bulldog Nation, as a majority UGA fans were up in arms due to what was seen as a sub-par 2013 recruiting class. What fans need to realize, however, is that a season is not decided by how many five-star 18 year old boys are signed in a single off-season. Success in college football is – and always has been – decided by coaching. If a team does not have a great coach who can get players to buy into the program and play at the best of their ability, then the recruiting class doesn’t matter nearly as much.
Over the past two years, teams like USC, FSU, Auburn, and Texas have all been in the top 5 when it comes to recruiting – but what do they have to show for it? None of them finished as a top 5 team at the end of either season, while a number of programs with much lower recruiting rankings passed them in the final standings. Only two teams with a top 5 recruiting class finished ranked in the top 5 at the end of the last two seasons – the Alabama Crimson Tide in 2011 and 2012, and the Georgia Bulldogs in 2012.
What makes Alabama and UGA different from the other top recruiting teams? Coaching.
In the end, it all comes down to coaching. This is why criticism of Georgia’s 2013 recruiting class is not fully warranted. Additionally, it is important to realize that the Bulldogs did still manage to end National Signing Day with the 10th ranked recruiting class. Last time I checked, a top 10 class is pretty good and fully acceptable, especially when it’s combined with 2011’s 6th ranked and 2012’s 5th ranked classes. I understand that a majority of the top prospects in the state committed to other schools – and that does need to be addressed – but Mark Richt’s main goal this recruiting season was to have more depth, and he accomplished that goal by adding 32 players to the Bulldogs’ roster.
So try not to be too upset over the events of National Signing Day. If Bulldog fans want to be angry about something, be angry that a defense consisting of a majority of NFL caliber players gave up 350 yards on the ground to Alabama in the SEC Championship game. Be angry about not spiking the ball at the end of that same game. Heck, you can even be angry that Mark Richt was out-coached by the best coach in college football on that fateful night. But understand that the Dawgs still have a very good coach, and that coaching will determine the Bulldogs’ success, not the stars by a player’s name.President Trump berated the media repeatedly at his press conference on Feb. 16, calling CNN, the New York Times and other outlets "dishonest" and "very fake news," for reporting unfavorable stories about him. (Video: Reuters / Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
If you read the New York Times report that several of President Trump's aides and associates communicated regularly during the campaign with Russian intelligence officials, you know that Trump's rebuttal at a news conference Thursday made little sense. That's a big “if,” however.
The reality is that Trump supporters, generally speaking, don't read the Times. When the Pew Research Center surveyed voters after the election, the Times didn't even register among Trump backers' primary news sources.
The Trump base's media consumption habits — of which the president is undoubtedly aware — is the key to success for attacks on “fake news” reports by the Times and other major outlets that Trump voters disdain. If his supporters don't actually read a report, such as the one the Times ran Wednesday, then Trump doesn't have to respond to it, really. He can respond to a version of his own invention, and his backers will be none the wiser.
[Donald Trump’s combative, grievance-filled news conference, annotated]
To see how Trump's strategy works, let's review what he said about the New York Times story and a subsequent report in the Wall Street Journal at Thursday's news conference:
The failing New York Times wrote a big, long front-page story yesterday. And it was very much discredited, as you know. It was — it's a joke. And the people mentioned in the story, I noticed they were on television today saying they never even spoke to Russia. … I think the one person — I don't think I've ever spoken to him. I don't think I've ever met him. And he actually said he was a very low-level member of, I think, a committee for a short period of time. I don't think I ever met him. … The other person said he never spoke to Russia; never received a call. Look at his phone records, et cetera, et cetera. And the other person, people knew that he represented various countries, but I don't think he represented Russia, but knew that he represented various countries. That's what he does. I mean, people know that. That's Mr. [Paul] Manafort. … He said that he has absolutely nothing to do and never has with Russia. And he said that very forcefully. I saw his statement. He said it very forcefully. Most of the papers don't print it because that's not good for their stories. So the three people that they talked about all totally deny it. … And just while you're at it, because you mentioned this, Wall Street Journal did a story today that was almost as disgraceful as the failing New York Times's story yesterday. … I will say that I never get phone calls from the media. How did they write a story like that in the Wall Street Journal without asking me or how did they write a story in the New York Times, put it on the front page?
For starters, it is flat-out false that these newspapers did not call for comment. The Journal, which reported that some U.S. intelligence officials are withholding bits of information from Trump, quoted a White House official, who said “there is nothing that leads us to believe that this is an accurate account of what is actually happening.” The White House declined to provide a comment to the Times.
If you read the stories, you knew as soon as Trump opened his mouth that his complaint about “never get[ting] phone calls from the media” was illegitimate. But if you didn't read the stories, you might have believed that the White House didn't have a chance to comment.
[Donald Trump is doing A-okay with the only people he cares about]
Trump also was wrong when he asserted that Manafort's denial of contact with Russia was omitted. The Times interviewed Manafort and printed his response.
And Trump's reference to “the three people that they talked about” was a bit misleading. He could have said “three of the people they talked about,” but he implied (inaccurately) that the Times's report dealt with only three people when he said “the three people.” The Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted calls involving other, unnamed Trump associates.
The three people named in the story were Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman; Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser; and Roger Stone, a veteran and controversial Republican operative (and longtime Trump friend) who worked for the campaign early in the GOP primary.
Trump said he “noticed they were on television … saying they never even spoke to Russia,” but the denials Trump “noticed” were not new. The Times noted in its story that “all of the men have strongly denied that they had any improper contacts with Russian officials.”
Trump delivered a classic straw-man argument in his Thursday news conference. He knocked down a version of the Times report that didn't really exist — a version in which his White House and his former campaign staffers were viciously attacked without any opportunity to defend themselves.
The ploy was obvious to anyone who actually read the report, but the president made the safe bet that his backers did not.Former Victoria police chief Frank Elsner, who resigned last week in the midst of a misconduct investigation, has launched a cannabis consulting business.
Elsner, who is facing six misconduct allegations, is the principal consultant for UMBRA Strategic Solutions, which will provide security consulting to marijuana businesses, according to a post on his Linked In profile.
A message signed by Elsner on the company’s website says: “After a great career in policing I started Umbra Strategic Solutions. I wanted to do something that I am passionate about while utilizing my knowledge, skills and abilities.”
Elsner writes that he has “come a long way” in his thinking about harm reduction, community wellness and the role police play.
“I fully support the legalization of cannabis in our country. The new laws that are about to be enacted in Canada will create their own set of challenges for communities, and I want to be part of the solution that makes the industry safe, healthy and secure for all citizens.”
Umbra comes from the Latin word for security.
In his Linked In profile, Elsner writes that “trusted voices are needed in the cannabis industry to support legitimate individuals and companies so the general public feels confident that the industry is operating within the legislation, is safe, and is free from organized crime.”
In the early days of his policing career, Elsner had a first-hand look at the way organized crime moves drugs when he posed as a drug dealer to infiltrate gangs and bikers in Ontario. He told the Times Colonist newspaper in January 2014, two weeks after he took over his role at Victoria police, that during his undercover days, he occasionally smoked marijuana in order to blend in with gang members.
Elsner’s new venture comes days after the Victoria and Esquimalt police board announced that Elsner no longer considers himself an employee of the police department. Victoria mayor Lisa Helps told the Times Colonist that she takes that to mean Elsner had resigned, although the letter sent from his lawyer does not expressly say that.
Helps said she believes Elsner is taking the position that the board hasn’t adequately covered his legal fees.
Related
The saga started in August 2015, when Helps and Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins, the co-chairs of the police board, received information that Elsner had exchanged inappropriate Twitter messages with a Saanich police officer who was the wife of one of Elsner’s officers. The allegations were made public in December 2015.
An internal discipline investigation resulted in a letter of reprimand being placed on his file.
Elsner publicly apologized for sending the Twitter messages and said he was “deeply humiliated.”
However, the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner ordered a new investigation, sparking a legal battle between the police board and the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner.
Elsner was suspended with pay in April 2016. Since then, there have been legal challenges involving Elsner, the OPCC and the Victoria police board.
In April, Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson threw out an investigation into the Twitter messages, along with allegations that Elsner sent the messages while on duty.
Elsner is still facing two separate disciplinary hearings on allegations that he provided misleading information to the subordinate officer and an independent investigator, and that he attempted to procure a false statement from a witness, along with allegations of workplace harassment.
Both hearings will go forward despite Elsner’s resignation, since the Police Act states that an officer’s resignation does not halt the disciplinary process.
kderosa@timescolonist.com
Click here to read more stories from The Victoria Times Colonist.For commercial building owners, energy-efficiency improvements have had modest appeal.
Switching to less power-hungry light bulbs is relatively easy, and the payoff relatively swift. But replacing furnaces or boilers or reconfiguring the building’s shell involves sinking millions of dollars into an asset that the owner may want to get rid of long before the investment has paid off.
In a new twist, some investors, a technology company, a municipal utility and an environmentally oriented foundation have joined forces to show that major energy-efficiency improvements in commercial buildings may provide alluring new revenue to all involved.
A program at the Bullitt Foundation’s new building in Seattle is aimed at attracting the notice of commercial building owners around the country who may be reluctant to make heavy investments in such technologies. Under this plan, if they, or investors, put in the capital for major efficiency retrofits, new revenue, based on precise measurements of energy savings, will keep coming in for decades.
Currently, building owners, utilities and utility regulators who underwrite some efficiency measures remain somewhat skeptical of what are called “deep retrofits,” like swapping out furnaces, boilers or the building shell itself. This has been particularly true for older, smaller commercial buildings, which, according to a new report, account for 47 percent of all commercial real estate outside the world of malls.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Jon Leyne says protesters will likely re-gather in Cairo and Suez
Two people have been killed and more than 400 injured in protests across Egypt sparked by the deaths of 74 people after a football match.
The two killed were shot by police trying to disperse angry crowds in the city of Suez, medical officials said.
In the capital Cairo, thousands of protesters remained on the streets following a day of clashes with police.
Thousands marched to the interior ministry, where security forces fired tear gas to keep them back.
Earlier, the Egyptian prime minister announced the sackings of several senior officials.
Funerals of some of the 74 victims took place in Port Said, where the football match had taken place on Wednesday.
The deaths came when fans invaded the pitch after a fixture between top Cairo club al-Ahly and the Port Said side al-Masry.
'Live ammunition'
As night fell in Cairo, several thousand demonstrators remained in the streets around the interior ministry, witnesses said.
The finger of blame is being pointed in many directions. Did fans instigate the clashes themselves, was there a conspiracy to provoke, was there deliberate negligence by police? Or was the whole thing just a case of badly trained police mishandling footballl crowd violence? These are now politically charged questions. Analysis: Blame game over clashes In pictures: Egypt protests Darker side of Egyptian football
In Suez, health official Mohammed Lasheen said two people had been shot dead early on Friday.
A witness quoted by Reuters said: "Protesters are trying to break into the Suez police station and police are now firing live ammunition."
Throughout Thursday, al-Ahly supporters gathered outside the club's stadium in Cairo. A series of protest marches moved towards Tahrir Square, and then on to the ministry of interior.
Some chanted slogans against Egypt's military rulers, while others threw stones.
"Our army must choose between the military council and the revolutionaries,'' they chanted.
Police fired tear gas to keep the thousands of protesters away from the ministry, which is protected by concrete barricades.
Motorcycles ferried the injured from the scene as ambulances were often unable to get through.
At the scene There are still people gathered outside the interior ministry. Friday is always a flashpoint, and with prayers coming up that's when the protesters will regroup, in Cairo and in Suez. There's particular bad blood in Suez because that's where a number of protesters were killed right at the start of the revolution last year. On a security level the authorities seem to have absolutely no new ideas. We're seeing the same scenes we've seen before with the police firing barrage after barrage of tear gas, then resorting to rubber bullets. Politically it is getting more complicated for the military rulers. There's now a democratically elected parliament which has become a chamber for enormous criticism directed at the interior ministry and increasingly at the military leadership. A lot of Egyptians have deep sympathy and shock at what happened in that stadium.
At one point, ambulances intervened to rescue riot police whose vehicle mistakenly turned into a street full of protesters, Reuters reported.
Egyptian state news agency Mena quoted a health ministry official as saying 388 protesters were injured. Most of them were suffering from tear gas inhalation as well as bruises and broken bones from rocks.
A section of Al-Ahly supporters known as the "ultras" played a prominent role in last year's street protests which led to the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.
The BBC's Jon Leyne, in Cairo, says the ultras believe they were targeted for their support for the revolution over the past year.
They accuse the police of deliberately allowing al-Masry fans to attack them.
"It's like war, you can't believe it. What happened yesterday [Wednesday] was war, it's not football. To kill without any feeling... is not normal," former al-Ahly player Hani Seddik told the BBC.
There were also protests in Port Said, Associated Press news agency reported.
'Difficult time'
Earlier on Thursday, parliament met in emergency session, beginning with a minute's silence.
Prime Minister Kamal al-Ganzouri told MPs the head of Egypt's football association had been sacked and the board dissolved, with its members referred to prosecutors for questioning.
Port Said's director of security and the head of investigations were suspended and are now in custody, Mr Ganzouri said.
The government has come under renewed attack over its handling, both of the football game, and of the way it is handling the transition to democracy, our correspondent says.
The president of al-Ahly, Hamid Hamdy, said his club would not take part in league games.
"I hope that the world understands the position of al-Ahly club, that we are going through a very difficult time as a result of all of those martyrs that we lost yesterday," he told a news conference.
"People should feel that there is a tragedy and a disaster which has happened in Egyptian sports, and for al-Ahly."
Police in Egypt have been keeping a much lower profile since last year's popular protests.
The Muslim Brotherhood - which has emerged as Egypt's biggest party |
the second half of the seventh century. Until then the spoken and written form (though with many vulgar features) were regarded as one language.
The Latin of classical antiquity changed from being a "living natural mother tongue" to being a language foreign to all, which could not even be used or understood even by Romance-speakers except as a result of deliberate and systematic study. If a date is wanted "we could say Latin 'died' in the first part of the eighth century", and after a long period 650–800 A.D. of rapidly accelerating changes. Even after the end of Classical Latin, people had no other names for the languages they spoke than Latin, lingua romana, or lingua romana rustica (to distinguish it from formal Latin) for 200–300 years. Modern people call these languages proto-Romance.
The flaw in the death metaphor for Latin is summarized in the first line of Wright's essay, "Did Latin die?": "Latin isn't dead, you know."[6] Wright explains that the hundreds of millions of people whose first language is one of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, etc., speak evolved Latin as surely as English speakers use the evolved continuation of Old English. While traditional Classical Latin was eventually reduced in use as a written code and abandoned as a useful secondary "roof language" (Dachsprache), naturally spoken Latin changed as all languages do.
In terms of regional differences for the whole Latin period, "we can only glimpse a tiny amount of divergence with the actual written data. In texts of all kinds, literary, technical, and all others, the written Latin of the first five or six centuries A.D. looks as if it were territorially homogeneous, even in its 'vulgar' register. It is only in the later texts, of the seventh and eighth centuries, that we are able to see in the texts geographical differences that seem to be the precursors of similar differences in the subsequent Romance languages."
In the Eastern Roman Empire, Latin gradually faded as the court language over the course of the 6th century; it was used in Justinian's court, but during the reign of Heraclius in the early 7th century, Greek (which was already widely spoken in the eastern portions of the Roman empire from its inception) was made the official language. The Vulgar Latin spoken in the Balkans north of Greece became heavily influenced by Greek and Slavic (Vulgar Latin already had Greek loanwords before the Roman Empire) and also became radically different from Classical Latin and from the proto-Romance of Western Europe.[8][9]
Origin of the term [ edit ]
The term "common speech" (sermo vulgaris), which later became "Vulgar Latin", was used by inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Subsequently, it became a technical term from Latin and Romance-language philology referring to the unwritten varieties of a Latinised language spoken mainly by Italo-Celtic populations governed by the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.
Traces of their language appear in some inscriptions, such as graffiti or advertisements. The educated population mainly responsible for Classical Latin may also have spoken Vulgar Latin in certain contexts depending on their socioeconomic background. The term was first used improperly in that sense by the pioneers of Romance-language philology: François Juste Marie Raynouard (1761–1836) and Friedrich Christian Diez (1794–1876).
In the course of his studies on the lyrics of songs written by the troubadours of Provence, which had already been studied by Dante Alighieri and published in De vulgari eloquentia, Raynouard noticed that the Romance languages derived in part from lexical, morphological, and syntactic features that were Latin, but were not preferred in Classical Latin. He hypothesized an intermediate phase and identified it with the Romana lingua, a term that in countries speaking Romance languages meant "nothing more or less than the vulgar speech as opposed to literary or grammatical Latin".[10]
Diez, the principal founder of Romance-language philology, impressed by the comparative methods of Jakob Grimm in Deutsche Grammatik, which came out in 1819 and was the first to use such methods in philology, decided to apply them to the Romance languages and discovered Raynouard's work, Grammaire comparée des langues de l'Europe latine dans leurs rapports avec la langue des troubadours, published in 1821. Describing himself as a pupil of Raynouard, he went on to expand the concept to all Romance languages, not just the speech of the troubadours, on a systematic basis, thereby becoming the originator of a new field of scholarly inquiry.[11]
Diez, in his signal work on the topic, "Grammar of the Romance Languages,"[12] after enumerating six Romance languages that he compared: Italian and Wallachian (i.e., Romanian) (east); Spanish and Portuguese (southwest); and Provençal and French (northwest), asserts that they had their origin in Latin – but "not from classical Latin," rather "from the Roman popular language or popular dialect".[13] These terms, as he points out later in the work, are a translation into German of Dante's vulgare latinum and Latinum vulgare, and the Italian of Boccaccio, latino volgare.[14] These names in turn are at the end of a tradition extending to the Roman republic.
The concepts and vocabulary from which vulgare latinum descend were known in the classical period and are to be found amply represented in the unabridged Latin dictionary, starting in the late Roman republic. Marcus Tullius Cicero was a prolific writer. His works have survived in large quantity, and serve as a standard of Latin. He and his contemporaries recognized the lingua Latina; but they also knew varieties of "speech" under the name sermo. Latin could be sermo Latinus, but there was also a variety known as sermo vulgaris, sermo vulgi, sermo plebeius and sermo quotidianus. These modifiers inform post-classical readers that a conversational Latin existed, which was used by the masses (vulgus) in daily speaking (quotidianus) and was perceived as lower-class (plebeius).
These vocabulary items manifest no opposition to the written language. There was an opposition to higher-class, or family Latin (good family) in sermo familiaris and very rarely literature might be termed sermo nobilis. The supposed "sermo classicus" is a scholarly fiction unattested in the dictionary. All kinds of sermo were spoken only, not written. If one wanted to refer to what in post-classical times was called classical Latin one resorted to the concept of latinitas ("latinity") or latine (adverb).
If one spoke in the lingua or sermo Latinus one merely spoke Latin, but if one spoke latine or latinius ("more Latinish") one spoke good Latin, and formal Latin had latinitas, the quality of good Latin, about it. After the fall of the empire and the transformation of spoken Latin into the early Romance languages the only representative of the Latin language was written Latin, which became known as classicus, "classical" Latin. The original opposition was between formal or implied good Latin and informal or Vulgar Latin. The spoken/written dichotomy is entirely philological.
Sources [ edit ]
Vulgar Latin is a blanket term covering the popular dialects and sociolects of the Latin language throughout its range, from the hypothetical prisca latinitas of unknown or poorly remembered times in early Latium, to the language spoken around the fall of the empire. Although making it clear that sermo vulgaris existed, ancient writers said very little about it. Because it was not transcribed, it can only be studied indirectly. Knowledge comes from these chief sources:[15]
Solecisms, especially in Late Latin texts. Mention of it by ancient grammarians, including prescriptive grammar texts from the Late Latin period condemning linguistic "errors" that represent spoken Latin. The comparative method, which reconstructs Proto-Romance, a hypothetical vernacular proto-language from which the Romance languages descended. Some literary works written in a lower register of Latin provide a glimpse into the world of Vulgar Latin in the classical period: the dialogues of the plays of Plautus and Terence, being comedies with many characters who were slaves, and the speech of freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius Arbiter.
History [ edit ]
The original written Latin language (what is today referred to as Classical Latin) was adapted from the actual spoken language of the Latins, with some minor modifications, long before the rise of the Roman Empire. As with many languages, over time the spoken vulgar language diverged from the written language, with the written language remaining somewhat static. During the classical period spoken (Vulgar) Latin still remained largely common across the Empire, some minor dialectal differences notwithstanding.
The collapse of the Western Roman Empire rapidly began to change this. The former western provinces became increasingly isolated from the Eastern Roman Empire, leading to a rapid divergence between the Latin spoken on either side of the Adriatic north of line that ran from northern Albania mid-way through Bulgaria but stopped short of the Black Sea coast which was Greek-speaking. In the West an even more complex transformation was occurring. A blending of cultures was occurring between the former Roman citizens who were fluent in the "proper" Latin speech (which was already substantially different from Classical Latin), and many of the Gothic rulers who, though largely Latinised, tended to speak Latin poorly, speaking what could be considered a pidgin of Latin and their Germanic mother tongue, though this changed over time. Notable among those who spoke Latin well is Theodoric the Great, imperial regent of Italy (493–526) who is reputed to have been illiterate based on his use of stamp to sign documents. Since he lived as a hostage of Emperor Leo I at the Great Palace of Constantinople from 461 to 471 (from age 7 to 17) and was well-educated by Constantinople's best teachers,[16] it's difficult to believe he did not know Greek and Latin.
The vulgar Latin language that continued to evolve after the establishment of the successor kingdoms of the Roman State incorporated Germanic vocabulary, but with minimal influences from Germanic grammar (Germanic languages did not displace Latin except in northern Belgium, England, the Rhineland Moselle region and north of the Alps). For a few centuries this language remained relatively common across most of Western Europe (as a result, Italian, Spanish, French, etc. are far more similar to each other than to Classical Latin), though regional dialects were already developing. As early as 722, in a face to face meeting between Pope Gregory II, born and raised in Rome, and Saint Boniface, an Anglo-Saxon, Boniface complained that he found Pope Gregory's Latin speech difficult to understand, a clear sign of the transformation of Vulgar Latin in two regions of western Europe.[18]
Although they had become more dissimilar over time, Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin were still viewed as the same language. Similarly, while increasingly divergent, Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages were seen as the same tongue.[19] At the third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language – either in the rustica lingua romanica (Vulgar Latin), or in the Germanic vernaculars – since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin. Within a generation, the Oaths of Strasbourg (842), a treaty between Charlemagne's grandsons Charles the Bald and Louis the German, was proffered and recorded in a language that was already distinct from Latin. József Herman states:
It seems certain that in the sixth century, and quite likely into the early parts of the seventh century, people in the main Romanized areas could still largely understand the biblical and liturgical texts and the commentaries (of greater or lesser simplicity) that formed part of the rites and of religious practice, and that even later, throughout the seventh century, saints' lives written in Latin could be read aloud to the congregations with an expectation that they would be understood. We can also deduce however, that in Gaul, from the central part of the eighth century onward, many people, including several of the clerics, were not able to understand even the most straightforward religious texts.
By the end of the first millennium, local speech had diverged to the point that distinct languages are recognizable; names were emerging for these; and some of the more geographically distant ones may have become mutually unintelligible. With the evolved Latin vernaculars viewed as different languages with local norms, specific orthographies were duly developed for some. Since all modern Romance varieties are continuations of this evolution, Vulgar Latin is not extinct but survives in variously evolved forms as today's Romance languages and dialects. In Romance-speaking Europe, recognition of the common origin of Romance varieties was replaced by labels recognizing and implicitly accentuating local differences in linguistic features. Some Romance languages evolved more than others. In terms of phonological structures, for example, a clear hierarchy from conservative to innovative is found in a comparison of modern Italian, Spanish and French (e.g. Latin amica > Italian amica, Spanish amiga, French amie; Latin caput > Italian capo, Spanish cabo, French chef).
The Oaths of Strasbourg offer indications of the state of Gallo-Romance toward the middle of the 9th century. While the language cannot be said with any degree of certainty to be Old French in the sense of the linear precursor to today's standard French, the abundance of Gallo-Romance features provides a glimpse of some particulars of Vulgar Latin's evolution on French soil.
Extract of the Romance part of the Oaths of Strasbourg (842) Gallo-Romance, AD 842[21] Hypothetical Vulgar Latin of Paris, circa 7th c. AD, for comparison[ citation needed ][22] English Translation "Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in ayudha et in cadhuna cosa si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet. Et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai qui meon vol cist meon fradre Karlo in damno sit." "Por Deo amore et por chrestyano pob(o)lo et nostro comune salvamento de esto die en avante en quanto Deos sabere et podere me donat, sic salvarayo eo eccesto meon fradre Karlo, et en ayuda et en caduna causa, sic quomo omo per drecto son fradre salvare devet, en o qued illi me altrosic fatsyat, et ab Ludero nullo plag(i)do nonqua prendrayo, qui meon volo eccesto meon fradre Karlo en damno seat." "For the love of God and for Christendom and our common salvation, from this day onwards, as God will give me the wisdom and power, I shall protect this brother of mine Charles, with aid or anything else, as one ought to protect one's brother, so that he may do the same for me, and I shall never knowingly make any covenant with Lothair that would harm this brother of mine Charles."
Vocabulary [ edit ]
Vulgar Latin largly kept much of its classical vocabulary, albeit with some changes in spelling, and case usage.
Shifting usage of words [ edit ]
In many dialects of Vulgar Latin, new words were either created, or gained greater popularity as the language developed. For example, the use of equus "horse" (Classical Latin), was replaced by caballu.[23] Many words started to change meaning, or have broadened meanings. In Classical Latin, fabulare (to make stories), became a broad term for "to speak" in Vulgar Latin, encompassing narrare, loqui, and other similar verbs (all roughly translating to "to tell, to speak" in Classical Latin)
As Vulgar Latin lost its cases, the new caseless words often took their accusitive forms after shifting spelling and pronunciation.
Phonology [ edit ]
There was no single pronunciation of Vulgar Latin, and the pronunciation of Vulgar Latin in the various Latin-speaking areas is indistinguishable from the earlier history of the phonology of the Romance languages. See the article on Romance languages for more information.
Evidence of changes [ edit ]
Evidence of phonological changes can be seen in the late 3rd-century Appendix Probi, a collection of glosses prescribing correct classical Latin forms for certain vulgar forms. These glosses describe:
a process of syncope, the loss of unstressed vowels in medial syllables (" calida non calda ");
"); the merger of unstressed pre-vocalic /e/ and short /i/, probably as yod /j/ (" vinea non vinia ");
and short, probably as yod (" "); the levelling of the distinction between /o/ and /u/ (" coluber non colober ") and /e/ and /i/ (" dimidius non demedius ");
and (" ") and and (" "); regularization of irregular forms (" glis non glirus ");
"); regularization and emphasis of gendered forms (" pauper mulier non paupera mulier ");
"); levelling of the distinction between /b/ and /w/ between vowels (" bravium non brabium ");
and between vowels (" "); assimilation of plosive consonant clusters (" amycdala non amiddula" );
); the substitution of diminutives for unmarked words (" auris non oricla, neptis non nepticla ");
"); the loss of syllable-final nasals before /s/ (" mensa non mesa ") or their inappropriate insertion as a form of hypercorrection (" formosus non formunsus ");
") or their inappropriate insertion as a form of hypercorrection (" "); the loss of /h/, both initially (" hostiae non ostiae ") and within the word (" adhuc non aduc ");
, both initially (" ") and within the word (" "); simplification of /kʷ/ ("coqui non coci").
Many of the forms castigated in the Appendix Probi proved to be the forms accepted in Romance; e.g., oricla (evolved from the Classical Latin marked diminutive auricula) is the source of French oreille, Catalan orella, Spanish oreja, Italian orecchia, Romanian ureche, Portuguese orelha, Sardinian origra 'ear', not the prescribed auris. Development of yod from the post-nasal unstressed /e/ of vinea enabled the palatalization of /n/ that would produce French vigne, Italian vigna, Spanish viña, Portuguese vinha, Catalan vinya, Occitan vinha, Friulan vigne, etc., 'vineyard'.
Consonant development [ edit ]
The most significant consonant changes affecting Vulgar Latin were palatalization (except in Sardinia); lenition, including simplification of geminate consonants (in areas north and west of the La Spezia–Rimini Line, e.g. Spanish digo vs. Italian dico 'I say', Spanish boca vs. Italian bocca'mouth'); and loss of final consonants.
Loss of final consonants [ edit ]
The loss of final consonants was already under way by the 1st century AD in some areas. A graffito at Pompeii reads quisque ama valia, which in Classical Latin would read quisquis amat valeat ("may whoever loves be strong/do well").[24] (The change from valeat to valia is also an early indicator of the development of /j/ (yod), which played such an important part in the development of palatalization.) On the other hand, this loss of final /t/ was not general. Old Spanish and Old French preserved a reflex of final /t/ up through 1100 AD or so, and modern French still maintains final /t/ in some liaison environments.
Lenition of stops [ edit ]
Areas north and west of the La Spezia–Rimini Line lenited intervocalic /p, t, k/ to /b, d, ɡ/. This phenomenon is occasionally attested during the imperial period, but it became frequent by the 7th century. For example, in Merovingian documents, rotatico > rodatico ("wheel tax").
Simplification of geminates [ edit ]
Reduction of bisyllabic clusters of identical consonants to a single syllable-initial consonant also typifies Romance north and west of La Spezia-Rimini. The results in Italian and Spanish provide clear illustrations: siccus > Italian secco, Spanish seco; cippus > Italian ceppo, Spanish cepo; mittere > Italian mettere, Spanish meter.
Loss of word-final m [ edit ]
The loss of the final m was a process which seems to have begun by the time of the earliest monuments of the Latin language. The epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, who died around 150 BC, reads taurasia cisauna samnio cepit, which in Classical Latin would be taurāsiam, cisaunam, samnium cēpit ("He captured Taurasia, Cisauna, and Samnium"). This however can be explained in a different way, that the inscription simply fails to note the nasality of the final vowels (just as consul was customarily abbreviated as cos.)
Neutralization of /b/ and /w/ [ edit ]
Confusions between b and v show that the Classical semivowel /w/, and intervocalic /b/ partially merged to become a bilabial fricative /β/ (Classical semivowel /w/ became /β/ in Vulgar Latin, while [β] became an allophone of /b/ in intervocalic position). Already by the 1st century AD, a document by one Eunus writes iobe for iovem and dibi for divi.[26] In most of the Romance varieties, this sound would further develop into /v/, with the notable exception of the betacist varieties of Hispano-Romance: b and v represent the same phoneme /b/ (with allophone [β]) in Modern Spanish, as well as in Galician, northern Portuguese and the northern dialects of Catalan.
Consonant cluster simplification [ edit ]
In general, many clusters were simplified in Vulgar Latin. For example, /ns/ reduced to /s/, reflecting the fact that syllable-final /n/ was no longer phonetically consonantal. In some inscriptions, mensis > mesis ("month"), or consul > cosul ("consul"). Descendants of mensis include Portuguese mês, Spanish and Catalan mes, Old French meis (Modern French mois), Italian mese. In some areas (including much of Italy), the clusters [mn], [kt] ⟨ct⟩, [ks] ⟨x⟩ were assimilated to the second element: [nn], [tt], [ss]. Thus, some inscriptions have omnibus > onibus ("all [dative plural]"), indictione > inditione ("indiction"), vixit > bissit ("lived"). Also, three-consonant clusters usually lost the middle element. For example: emptores > imtores ("buyers").
Not all areas show the same development of these clusters, however. In the East, Italian has [kt] > [tt], as in octo > otto ("eight") or nocte > notte ("night"); while Romanian has [kt] > [pt] (opt, noapte). By contrast, in the West, the [k] weakened to [j]. In French and Portuguese, this came to form a diphthong with the previous vowel (huit, oito; nuit, noite), while in Spanish, the [i] brought about palatalization of [t], which produced [tʃ] (*oito > ocho, *noite > noche).
Also, many clusters including [j] were simplified. Several of these groups seem to have never been fully stable[clarification needed] (e.g. facunt for faciunt). This dropping has resulted in the word parietem ("wall") developing as Italian parete, Romanian părete>perete, Portuguese parede, Spanish pared, or French paroi (Old French pareid).
The cluster [kw] ⟨qu⟩ was simplified to [k] in most instances before /i/ and /e/. In 435, one can find the hypercorrective spelling quisquentis for quiescentis ("of the person who rests here"). Modern languages have followed this trend, for example Latin qui ("who") has become Italian chi and French qui (both /ki/); while quem ("whom") became quien (/kjen/) in Spanish and quem (/kẽj/) in Portuguese. However, [kw] has survived in front of [a] in most areas, although not in French; hence Latin quattuor yields Spanish cuatro (/kwatro/), Portuguese quatro (/kwatru/), and Italian quattro (/kwattro/), but French quatre (/katʀ/), where the qu- spelling is purely etymological.
In Spanish, most words with consonant clusters in syllable-final position are loanwords from Classical Latin, examples are: transporte [tɾansˈpor.te], transmitir [tɾanz.miˈtir], instalar [ins.taˈlar], constante [konsˈtante], obstante [oβsˈtante], obstruir [oβsˈtɾwir], perspectiva [pers.pekˈti.βa], istmo [ˈist.mo]. A syllable-final position cannot be more than one consonant (one of n, r, l, s or z) in most (or all) dialects in colloquial speech, reflecting Vulgar Latin background. Realizations like [trasˈpor.te], [tɾaz.miˈtir], [is.taˈlar], [kosˈtante], [osˈtante], [osˈtɾwir], and [ˈiz.mo] are very common, and in many cases, they are considered acceptable even in formal speech.
Vowel development [ edit ]
In general, the ten-vowel system of Classical Latin, which relied on phonemic vowel length, was newly modelled into one in which vowel length distinctions lost phonemic importance, and qualitative distinctions of height became more prominent.
System in Classical Latin [ edit ]
Classical Latin had 10 different vowel phonemes, grouped into five pairs of short-long, ⟨ ă – ā, ĕ – ē, ĭ – ī, ŏ – ō, ŭ – ū⟩. It also had four diphthongs, ⟨ ae, oe, au, eu⟩, and the rare diphthong ⟨ ui⟩. Finally, there were also long and short ⟨ y⟩, representing /y/, /yː/ in Greek borrowings, which, however, probably came to be pronounced /i/, /iː/ even before Romance vowel changes started.
At least since the 1st century AD, short vowels (except a) differed by quality as well as by length from their long counterparts, the short vowels being lower.[28] Thus the vowel inventory is usually reconstructed as /a – aː/, /ɛ – eː/, /ɪ – iː/, /ɔ – oː/, /ʊ – uː/.
General vowel changes in most Vulgar Latin Spelling 1st cent. 2nd cent. 3rd cent. 4th cent. ă /a/ /a/ ā /aː/ ĕ /ɛ/ ē /eː/ /e/ /e/ ĭ /ɪ/ ī /iː/ /i/ ŏ /ɔ/ ō /oː/ /o/ /o/ ŭ /ʊ/ ū /uː/ /u/
Monophthongization [ edit ]
Many diphthongs had begun their monophthongization very early. It is presumed that by Republican times, ae had become /ɛː/ in unstressed syllables, a phenomenon that would spread to stressed positions around the 1st century AD. From the 2nd century AD, there are instances of spellings with ⟨ ĕ⟩ instead of ⟨ ae⟩. ⟨oe⟩ was always a rare diphthong in Classical Latin (in Old Latin, oinos regularly became unus ("one") and became /eː/ during early Imperial times. Thus, one can find penam for poenam.
However, ⟨ au⟩ lasted much longer. While it was monophthongized to /o/ in areas of north and central Italy (including Rome), it was retained in most Vulgar Latin, and it survives in modern Romanian (for example, aur < aurum). There is evidence in French and Spanish that the monophthongization of au occurred independently in those languages.
Loss of distinctive length and near-close mergers [ edit ]
Length confusions seem to have begun in unstressed vowels, but they were soon generalized. In the 3rd century AD, Sacerdos mentions people's tendency to shorten vowels at the end of a word, while some poets (like Commodian) show inconsistencies between long and short vowels in versification. However, the loss of contrastive length caused only the merger of ă and ā while the rest of pairs remained distinct in quality: /a/, /ɛ – e/, /ɪ – i/, /ɔ – o/, /ʊ – u/.
Also, the near-close vowels /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ became more open in most varieties and merged with /e/ and /o/ respectively. As a result, the reflexes of Latin pira "pear" and vēra "true" rhyme in most Romance languages: Italian and Spanish pera, vera. Similarly, Latin nucem "walnut" and vōcem "voice" become Italian noce, voce, Portuguese noz, voz.
There was likely some regional variation in pronunciation, as the Romanian languages and Sardinian evolved differently.[34] In Sardinian, all corresponding short and long vowels simply merged with each other, creating a 5-vowel system: /a, e, i, o, u/. In Romanian, the front vowels ĕ, ĭ, ē, ī evolved like the Western languages, but the back vowels ŏ, ŭ, ō, ū evolved as in Sardinian. A few Southern Italian languages, such as southern Corsican, northernmost Calabrian and southern Lucanian, behave like Sardinian with its penta-vowel system or, in case of Vegliote (even if only partially) and western Lucanian,[35] like Romanian.
Phonologization of stress [ edit ]
The placement of stress generally did not change from Classical to Vulgar Latin, and except for reassignment of stress on some verb morphology (e.g. Italian cantavamo 'we were singing', but stress retracted one syllable in Spanish cantábamos) most words continued to be stressed on the same syllable they were before. However, the loss of distinctive length disrupted the correlation between syllable weight and stress placement that existed in Classical Latin. Whereas in Classical Latin the place of the accent was predictable from the structure of the word, it was no longer so in Vulgar Latin. Stress had become a phonological property and could serve to distinguish forms that were otherwise homophones of identical phonological structure, as in Spanish canto 'I sing' vs. cantó's/he sang'.
Lengthening of stressed open syllables [ edit ]
After the Classical Latin vowel length distinctions were lost in favor of vowel quality, a new system of allophonic vowel quantity appeared sometime between the 4th and 5th centuries. Around then, stressed vowels in open syllables came to be pronounced long (but still keeping height contrasts), and all the rest became short. For example, long venis /*ˈvɛː.nis/, fori /*fɔː.ri/, cathedra /*ˈkaː.te.dra/; but short vendo /*ˈven.do/, formas /*ˈfor.mas/. (This allophonic length distinction persists to this day in Italian.) However, in some regions of Iberia and Gaul, all stressed vowels came to be pronounced long: for example, porta /*ˈpɔːr.ta/, tempus /*ˈtɛːm.pus/. In many descendents, several of the long vowels underwent some form of diphthongization, most extensively in Old French where five of the seven long vowels were affected by breaking.
Grammar [ edit ]
Romance articles [ edit ]
It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article, absent in Latin but present in all Romance languages, arose, largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully developed.
Definite articles evolved from demonstrative pronouns or adjectives (an analogous development is found in many Indo-European languages, including Greek, Celtic and Germanic); compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ille, illa, illud "that", in the Romance languages, becoming French le and la (Old French li, lo, la), Catalan and Spanish el, la and lo, Portuguese o and a (elision of -l- is a common feature of Portuguese), and Italian il, lo and la. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from ipse, ipsa "this" (su, sa); some Catalan and Occitan dialects have articles from the same source. While most of the Romance languages put the article before the noun, Romanian has its own way, by putting the article after the noun, e.g. lupul ("the wolf" – from *lupum illum) and omul ("the man" – *homo illum),[34] possibly a result of being within the Balkan sprachbund.
This demonstrative is used in a number of contexts in some early texts in ways that suggest that the Latin demonstrative was losing its force. The Vetus Latina Bible contains a passage Est tamen ille daemon sodalis peccati ("The devil is a companion of sin"), in a context that suggests that the word meant little more than an article. The need to translate sacred texts that were originally in Koine Greek, which had a definite article, may have given Christian Latin an incentive to choose a substitute. Aetheria uses ipse similarly: per mediam vallem ipsam ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force.[24]
Another indication of the weakening of the demonstratives can be inferred from the fact that at this time, legal and similar texts begin to swarm with praedictus, supradictus, and so forth (all meaning, essentially, "aforesaid"), which seem to mean little more than "this" or "that". Gregory of Tours writes, Erat autem... beatissimus Anianus in supradicta civitate episcopus ("Blessed Anianus was bishop in that city.") The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were no longer felt to be strong or specific enough.[24]
In less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with ecce (originally an interjection: "behold!"), which also spawned Italian ecco through eccum, a contracted form of ecce eum. This is the origin of Old French cil (*ecce ille), cist (*ecce iste) and ici (*ecce hic); Italian questo (*eccum istum), quello (*eccum illum) and (now mainly Tuscan) codesto (*eccum tibi istum), as well as qui (*eccu hic), qua (*eccum hac); Spanish aquel and Portuguese aquele (*eccum ille); Spanish acá and Portuguese cá (*eccum hac); Spanish aquí and Portuguese aqui (*eccum hic); Portuguese acolá (*eccum illac) and aquém (*eccum inde); Romanian acest (*ecce iste) and acela (*ecce ille), and many other forms.
On the other hand, even in the Oaths of Strasbourg, no demonstrative appears even in places where one would clearly be called for in all the later languages (pro christian poblo – "for the Christian people"). Using the demonstratives as articles may have still been considered overly informal for a royal oath in the 9th century. Considerable variation exists in all of the Romance vernaculars as to their actual use: in Romanian, the articles are suffixed to the noun (or an adjective preceding it), as in other languages of the Balkan sprachbund and the North Germanic languages.
The numeral unus, una (one) supplies the indefinite article in all cases (again, this is a common semantic development across Europe). This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero writes cum uno gladiatore nequissimo ("with a most immoral gladiator"). This suggests that unus was beginning to supplant quidam in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC.[dubious – discuss]
Loss of neuter gender [ edit ]
First and second adjectival declension paradigm in Classical Latin. E.g., altus ("tall") singular plural masculine neuter feminine masculine neuter feminine nominative altus altum alta altī alta altae accusative altum altam altōs alta altās dative altō altae altīs ablative altō altā altīs genitive altī altae altōrum altārum
The genders
The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages.
The neuter gender of classical Latin was in most cases identical with the masculine both syntactically and morphologically. The confusion starts already in Pompeian graffiti, e.g., cadaver mortuus for cadaver mortuum ("dead body"), and hoc locum for hunc locum ("this place"). The morphological confusion shows primarily in the adoption of the nominative ending -us (-Ø after -r) |
all is said and done, the FBI will be able to use NGI to scan millions of entries in a single database to find someone based off of a single photograph, and the EFF fears that could send things down a slippery slope.
“Governmental use of face recognition — and the potential for misuse — raises many privacy concerns,” the EFF says in the lawsuit.
Using statements already made by the FBI about the program, the EFF presents an argument about why they should be worried that’s hard to counter.
“The FBI has also stated in a public presentation given at a national biometrics conference that it wants to use its facial recognition system to 'identify unknown persons of interest from images' and 'identify subjects in public datasets,'” the complaint continues. “In the same presentation, the FBI included a graphic image that implied the Bureau wanted to use facial recognition to be able to track people from one political rally to another.”
Another digital watchdog group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, previously alleged that NGI system could be integrated with other surveillance technology in order to enable “real-time image-matching of live feeds from CCTV surveillance cameras.”
Obtaining information about how the FBI will manage and operate this information has been a priority for the EFF for over a year now, and the failure to comply with those FOIA requests has finally prompted the organization to ask a court to intervene.
"NGI will result in a massive expansion of government data collection for both criminal and noncriminal purposes," EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch said in a statement this week. "Biometrics programs present critical threats to civil liberties and privacy. Face-recognition technology is among the most alarming new developments, because Americans cannot easily take precautions against the covert, remote and mass capture of their images."
The EFF is asking the court to enforce the FOIA requests sent last June and July, which could compel the FBI to disclose information about the face-recognition program and any plans to merge civilian and criminal records in a single database. They are also asking for the total number of face-recognition capable records currently in the database and an assessment of what number the agency expects to have when it rolls out the program in 2014.
"Before the federal government decides to expand its surveillance powers, there needs to be a public debate," Lynch said. "But there can be no public debate until the details of the program are presented to the public."
In a July 18, 2012 assessment, the FBI reported that the program was “on scope, on schedule, on cost and 60 percent deployed.” The program is being put together by contractors Lockheed Martin, who are expected to rake in $1 billion from the government by the time the NGI system is finally up and running.
The FBI previously admitted that they found 7,380 records that were "potentially responsive” to one of the EFF’s request, but has yet to deliver actual information pursuant to any of the three FOIA submissions filed, prompting the nonprofit to allege the FBI is “dragging its feet."
"FBI has not explained to the public how NGI or IAFIS's system design would ensure that civil submissions are not 'tainted' by criminal submissions or explained why it is necessary to combine the two types of data," the EFF wrote in the complaint.On March 24, Mark Maslin, like the other members of Scientific Reports’ editorial board, received an email with huge ramifications. The message—from the academic journal’s publisher, Nature Publishing Group—told Maslin that his publication was doing a pilot project for a new article-evaluation process. For $750, authors could now fast-track papers through peer review and get a yay-or-nay verdict from a paid pool of third-party reviewers within three weeks.
Maslin, a climatology professor at University College London, was taken aback, not because of the short time span—peer review, an anonymous and voluntary inevitability of academic life, is a notoriously protracted procedure—but for its implications.
“This wasn’t how I thought the journal, or any journal, should operate,” he says, arguing that fast-tracking would exacerbate existing inequality: Well-funded labs could buy their way into the express lane to get published sooner (and, with more titles to their names, increase their odds of securing funding and grants), while cash-strapped universities and poorer researchers in low-income countries, particularly in Asia, would have to wait. Moreover, Maslin thought that tapping a limited group of reviewers—rather than being able to seek out the most qualified people worldwide—would diminish the quality of the review. So, he quit.
Then, roughly 150 other Scientific Reports editors threatened to do the same (the journal has more than 2,700 editorial board members) if concerns were not addressed. Two followed through. The month-long pilot, now complete, had intended to fast-track just 40 biology papers. Instead, it ignited a firestorm.
Peer reviewing is the academic equivalent of an oil change: a necessary annoyance. When an author submits an article to a journal, an editor finds a leading expert and asks him to scour its methodology and findings for flaws. Because reviewing is done by busy people for no pay, reviewers often stretch deadlines. That quickly turns into piles of manuscripts waiting to be reviewed.
In a 2014 survey, 70 per cent of 30,000 Nature Publishing Group researchers said they were frustrated with peer-review wait times, and almost as many thought it was time to try new methods. The backlog was at its worst at Scientific Reports, a generalist journal with a mandate to publish anything that is scientifically sound. (The broad scope attracted heaps of articles from researchers in non-Western scientific communities, eager to tack Nature’s respectable name onto their papers.)
The fast-track trial was supposed to solve the problem. Without consulting editorial staff, the publisher approved the pilot, claiming that “standard service provided by Scientific Reports will be unaffected.” But, even for change-hungry editors, it was a step too far.
The debacle must have seemed like déjà vu to Alex Holcombe, a University of Sydney psychology professor. In 2011, he and a small group of academics wrote a protest letter to seven journals that employ paid fast-track peer review; a few later dropped the policy. “It ran contrary to many of the scientific values that I hold dear,” says Holcombe, “which is: What appears in scientific journals is determined not by money, but rather the merit of the actual science.” He says fast-tracking is a formula for taking shortcuts—such tight timelines may force reviewers and editors to make decisions without proper scrutiny—and worries it will jeopardize reviewers’ neutrality. “I’m in psychology,” he says, “so I’ve got research suggesting people are influenced by money, even when they implicitly think money doesn’t inform decisions.”
Fast-tracking is just the latest problem with peer review to be identified. There’s no shortage of scathing criticisms—peer reviews of the peer-review system, if you will—claiming that, behind the symbol of scientific integrity, there is a flawed system that can do more harm than good. An infamous example: the peer-reviewed, since retracted, 1998 Lancet article that suggested the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine could cause autism.
“We have no convincing evidence of [peer review’s] benefits, but a lot of evidence of its flaws,” Richard Smith, a journal editor and champion of radical publishing reform, wrote in a 2010 paper. He argues that peer review is inherently opposed to originality, ineffective at catching errors and open to abuse (reviewers can steal others’ ideas) and should be done away with entirely. The audience, he believes, can sort the good science from the bad. But Smith’s “publish-then-filter” solution, which may overestimate the layperson’s scientific literacy, isn’t widely supported.
Like democracy, peer review is often considered to be the least-poor available option, but crucial to the reliability of academic publishing. The field itself is in an awkward transition between tradition—where journals make money from subscribers and libraries, not authors—and the rise of peer-reviewed, open-access journals, such as those in the respected Public Library of Science (PLoS) family, legitimate free-to-read publications that charge authors to publish their papers (many waive the fee for scientists who can’t afford to pay). In this Wild West of academic publishing, new publications pop up daily, and bad science—and disreputable journals—are sneaking in.
Late last year, Mark Shrime, a researcher at Harvard University, created a nonsensical paper titled “Cuckoo for cocoa puffs? The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Its authors were Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles, and its pages were filled with content from a random-text generator. (“In an intention dependent on questions on elsewhere, we betrayed possible jointure in throwing cocoa,” the opening line reads.) Shrime submitted the paper to three dozen journals. Eighteen accepted it; they would publish it, they said, as soon as he paid a publishing fee.
Shrime’s 18 suitors are predatory publishers—a term coined by the University of Colorado at Denver’s Jeffrey Beall to describe profit-driven journals that accept anything, as long as they can make money doing it. Many feign legitimacy by falsely claiming to be peer reviewed and exploiting open-access’s accepted author-must-pay system. Beall maintains a list of them; he estimates that one in four open-access journals are now predatory.
Like most academics, Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at New York University School of Medicine, receives emails from predatory journals daily that solicit articles from him. “It can be anything... from bridge engineering to cancer therapy,” he says with a laugh. “They seem to think I’m very accomplished.” To Caplan, the emails are obvious fakes—a bothersome click of the delete button. He knows the difference between legitimate and counterfeit journals. But, he warns, journalists and politicians may not, allowing for poor reporting and bad policies that create “opportunities for the continued power of crackpot views that corrode many areas of public life.” If these journals continue unchecked, he wrote in a Mayo Clinic paper, “the trustworthiness, utility and value of science and medicine will be irreparably damaged.”
Just as problematic as these rogue publishers are the scientists who use them. Some researchers, trying to increase the number of publications on their CVs, happily pay several hundred dollars for the service, a pressing concern, given the increasing volume of papers—some more scientifically robust than others—published from countries such as China, India and Vietnam, Caplan says.
That influx is causing problems even for legitimate publishers. Since last November, open-access publisher BioMed Central has retracted 43 papers, most by Chinese doctors, after discovering that authors tampered with peer review and created fictitious reviewers. “The good news is they’ve learned the [academic] techniques,” Caplan says. “The bad news is they haven’t necessarily learned the ethics infrastructure to go with them.”
Caplan believes the solution starts with revamping peer review. “We don’t train people to do it,” he explains; new academics are simply told, “Here’s your first paper. Review it.” He’d like reviewers to be taught proper evaluation methods, what predatory journals look like and that papers published in them won’t count. Right now, he says, “You kind of learn about that world in your inbox.”
Maslin, the former Scientific Reports editor, says peer review would also benefit from a credit system, in which quality reviews delivered on time would be recognized with a universal metric. It would take a global effort, he admits, but he says it’s time for the U.K.’s Royal Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science to take action—not just on fast-tracking, but on the entire field. “As a scientific community, we need to really think about the ethics of publishing.”
Until then, Maslin says he’d be happy to take his old job back if Scientific Reports dropped fast-tracking. He’s still nursing two final papers anyway, and they’re likely to need major revisions. Done right, peer reviewing improves papers, he says, even when that means months of extra work. “Reviews like that, at first you look at them and go, ‘Oh, my word.’ But then you go through and say, ‘Yeah, but they’re right.’ ”683
1667 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 547-1228
This is a regular place for us when we are in Cambridge. Lots of good vegetarian options, including a homemade veggie burger, wonderful beer menu and delicious brunch. The service is friendly and not too slow or not too fast. A great neighborhood place for a good, casual meal.
Fun place for burgers and great beers on tap. Their menu is limited after taking LOTS of their best items off the menu. Owner has cheaped out on everything even the hamburger buns. Pretty pathetic for owners who have owned multiple restaurants in Cambridge for years and have made a bundle (Christopher's, Cambridge Common, West End Lounge )now closed))...and who knows what other places they own. This cheaping down makes me want to go elsewhere because it makes us feel we as regulars do not matter. Oh well I guess it's all about bottom line and not the customers. Sad.
Brunched here this morning, as I've tried their lunch/dinner in the past and have always been impressed with the food and service. Unfortunately brunch was a bit of a let down. The omelettes were just egg discs folded over the toppings, the home fries could have used more seasoning and a lot more crispness, and everything was just luke warm. The waitress was very friendly but was not super vigilant about checking in/getting coffee refills/etc. Can't beat the prices though, especially for the area. I'd recommend for a reasonable lunch/dinner (they also have a great drink selection), though I think there are better breakfast places out there.
Best pub in Medford, Cambridge and Somerville. Cheap beer, they have a solid IPA for five dollars, Golden Monkey and you can get a good burger for less than $9. It is usually busy, and it should be. Cheap beer and food full of Harvard students and professors, this place is an institution and it deserves to be. Go, get some great cheap food, bring a friend or make one at the bar. You won't regret it. Also, people gave this place less than five stars?! They are wrong. Really.
This is my first time here, trying out this "canteen of law school's". I like the cozy feeling inside especially the booth seas we take. My friend had a salad and I tried a breakfast all day burger which is very fresh and delicious! I love the curly fries, too! We also had a dessert of home cooked big cookie (Really a freshly pan made cookie served right in the pan!) with ice cream. The taste of hot cookie and cold but melting ice cream together is really good! Highly recommend that!
Large space with affordable drinks and pub food. I can see why it's a big hit with cash-strapped college students. I came with a friend for dinner and we were attended to by a very friendly waitress. We ordered burgers and those come with the fries of your choice. The burgers were good but not something I have to come back for again and again. Overall, a good place for a meal in the Porter Square area.
This is my go-to place every time I visit Cambridge. Their food is so good and very well priced, the atmosphere is chill and inviting, and the drinks are amazing! I highly recommend the pulled pork mac n cheese and the blackberry bourbon lemonade.
Overall: Hit the spot when it came to the pub food craving! The good: Walked right in and got a table, then was immediately met with attentive service. The menu is quite varied and there's plenty to choose from, including drinks. The buffalo chicken sandwich (with ranch) and BBQ bacon burger that we got were both cooked just to our liking, and the curly fries were are a rare and beautiful sight. The portion sizes are on the bigger side, which came in handy. The not-so-good: Not much, just not a perfect-10 type of experience. But there's nothing wrong with that. Atmosphere: 8/10 Service: 8/10 Food: 8.5/10
3 stars for food, 4 for ambiance, 4 for drinks. Cambridge Common has all of your typical bar food desires: massive plate of nachos, burgers, dips, fried chicken, etc. This time, I had their spicy spinach and artichoke dip and their Mac and cheese with buffalo chicken. The dip isn't actually very spicy and lacks texture. Feels like there's very little actual artichoke in it. The Mac and cheese is decent but I was not expecting the buffalo chicken pieces to just be big nugget sized pieces on top. Their beer punch pitcher shared between 4 people was great. Our waitress was very helpful with us. The light at our table kept flickering and she noticed it from across the room before we even mentioned it and asked the manager to fix it.
Cambridge Commons is like all American bar/grill place in the Boston area, but way more affordable. There was no wait time for two people on summer Saturday night (6-6:30pm). We were seated outside. Our waiter was a bit awkward haha...but very polite! For the neighborhood, it's extremely affordable; between two people, we shared a burger, chili + cornbread, and a small cup of soup for under $25. All were good! The burger came with really amazing curly fries. I'm usually not into French fries (fight me) because I think they're way too dry, but I really enjoyed these curly fries. For the price, service, and quality of food, this place gets a 5-star from me.
This place is awesome! Did a 6-week study program at Harvard Law, and Cambridge Common was a go-to after classes. Food is simple and delicious--whether you want fancy Mac-n-cheese a salad or plain old chicken fingers and fries. The drinks are big and inexpensive, and they have a great beer list. Always friendly, funny servers.
Fresh tasting and big portioned casual fare - I got the buffalo chicken sandwich and my friend got the veggie burger and we both enjoyed it! Burgers and sandwiches come with a choice of fries! It may be a pub but I saw a lot of tables with children and there's plenty of seating!
My wife and I are burger snobs. Our relationship is built on a mutual love of burgers. We're also general snobs - we love dropping $200 at a steakhouse for a normal Saturday night. But the night I proposed to her, I brought her to Cambridge Commons because we both agree that these are the best burgers in town. Actually, the second best. But the best burgers come from my kitchen, and you can't have them. So I should qualify my comment by saying that Cambridge Commons has the best burgers in town *that you're able to access*.
On the plus side: It's not easy finding pubs in the Boston area with reasonably priced food. The menu offered a very good selection of apps, sandwiches, entrees, and specials. There was a modest wine list but a huge choice of micro-brews. Many items on the menu are quite reasonable - for example burgers are only $6-9. For us the service was highly efficient- just short of feeling rushed before taking our order but the ongoing follow-up and checking-in continued after the meal was delivered- so A+ for that. On a Friday night the place was hopping- busy and loud which was fun. Here's the rest- Maybe just a coincidence but our table (to the left side of the bar as you enter) was seemingly on the kids side- almost every table had young children- many of them running around. It's very kid-friendly if you have young children. For others looking for a bit more of an adult dining experience- it wasn't to be. When I went to the rest room, I noticed the seating on the other side of the bar had no children. A coincidence? Maybe. But IF you have a seating plan for a kids side and non-kids side let us know in case we have a preference. Given the chaos of the place- the kids didn't really make any difference. Food- Average and uninspiring. My steak tips (at the top of the pricing on the menu) were tough without much flavor. I like chewy tips. These were tough. They came with green beans (an offered swap for broccoli) and fries. I didn't care for the presentation. The green beans were on the plate which was piled very high with fries and the tips were on top of the fries. This made getting to the green beans a chore. The grilled meatloaf was a bit dry and the huge over-sized onion rings (almost the size of a doughnut)- while impressive to look at weren't to my liking. The net- a reasonably priced fun place with good service, great beer selection and average food. A little more attention to the food and it would be great.
Cambridge Common is a fun spot. Well, was a fun spot. I have been here for a few years now but never to the point that I'm so impressed or disappointed to write a review, until today. First star is for the environment, music choice and volume is on point, suits the set up well. Second star is for beverage selection, great beer flight choice. Almost one star for food, except the deviled egg I got tonight was extremely salty. Southern fried chicken is on point and so was the boneless chicken. However the service is what triggered me. Took a fair long time for greeting and barely got any attention throughout the meal to the point that my water was empty for a solid 10 mins or so. And I was just too fed up to even bring anything up about the deviled egg just so I don't have to wait another long half an hour for any response. I probably would come up but I hope the service get better.
Went for brunch. Not the best place for brunch. Seams like lunch and dinner are foods are better. They add the omelette ingredients after cooking the eggs so it like a egg taco with vegetables in the middle. Good beer selection.
This place is convenient for me to get to, so I end up here quite a bit. But other than a loud place to gather a large group of friends, it's nothing to write home about. Pros: 1) they seat you pretty quickly, and the space is large so they can accommodate large groups 2) children's menu comes with crayons 3) large menu with specials and a huge variety, drinks too! 4) friendly staff 5) decent prices Cons: 1) they dim the lights a little too dark, not even a romantic place to be doing that 2) food is pretty average, I've tried a lot of the menu and just feel it's not particularly impressive 3) can get too loud, ppl doing cheers and shots at the end of the week (grad students I assume) 4) street parking is tricky with meters and permit 5) lots of tvs With the pros and cons out of the way, I want to highlight that the tater tots and spicy wings are acceptable. We usually get two orders of each. The beer selection is good and they have some fun mixed drinks--think spicy mango tequila and white sangria. We recently had the mushroom soup that was good but I usually end up feeling really fat and bleh after eating here Bc there aren't that many healthy options (salads aren't super tasty here.)
Have gone here maybe about 3-4 times and everytime we go the experience has been diminishing in quality. Overall still a good place to get drinks and food is good but, this last time felt we got below par servoand the place wasn't even that busy. The low point of the night is when we ordered a meal for our son that we were gonna take to go and waited another 30-40min and when it was ready it was stone cold, like if it had been ready for about 20 min. ( The meal was chicken fingers and fries so, doesn't take 40min to make) Not sure if I would go again....at least not to eat...
We came here for st. Patrick's day brunch. They had the usual corn beef classic along with a bunch of other options. One of them was donut holes from union bakery. They were maybe a little old, I think I expected them to be served hot or something. They weren't anything special. I had the boozy iced coffee which was super creamy and caffeinated and definitely got me buzzed. I recommend that for breakfast/brunch. I had the avocado Benedict for my entree. The hollandaise was good, though a little lacking in flavor. Avocado makes anything yummy. The home fries were very salty. I was gulping water my whole meal. Someone else in the party tried the quinoa bowl and they said it was great. The egg makes it, it needs that liquid element.You know how Donald Trump had a whole bunch of fake fans on Twitter during the election, all of [whom/which] tweeted identical praise of him pretty much all the time? Well, bots just like that have appeared on the dating app that was set up for Trump’s fans.
Earlier this month, we reported that there was a spike in membership on Trump Singles after the election, but was all of that just a spike in bots? If so, what could the purpose possibly be? Are they designed to troll Trump fans or designed to get money from the fans? The goal of the Twitter bots was clearly to make Trump look like he had a lot of support and encourage others to support him, too, but what could the point of dating bots be?
Joe Veix did a little investigative work for Newsweek by creating an account and looking for “hot conservative singles.” He reported that users, some with names like “TrumpLover350” and “DrainMySwamp,” were abundant, even around Oakland, California. Weirdly, those same users popped up when he searched a different zip code.
He wrote this:
Reverse-image searching the profile photos led to their original sources, people with different names and no apparent interest in riding the Trump train. A woman named “Diana” is actually porn star Natalie Sparks (whose image is often used in catfishing scams); the profile photo for “Sarah Reynolds” has been posted thousands of times on creepy image boards across the web, usually with captions like “hot girl with glasses”; user “Martine Saul” is actually a popular League of Legends vloggernamed Aline Faria; and one profile features a stock photo, complete with watermark. The latter is titled “Very Angry Woman” on Shutterstock.
Veix suggested that the dummy accounts were created by the site to encourage people to sign up. After all, would you sign up for a dating site if there was no one there to date? (Founder David Goss shot that idea down when Newsweek contacted him.)
More likely than not, the bots are just the spam variety that appear on Snapchat or Instagram, often to entice men into clicking links that purportedly contain even sexier pictures and videos.
Be careful out there.
[image composite: Pixabay/screengrab]
Lindsey: Twitter. Facebook.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comThe first months of 2017 have been full of celebrity passings:
Roger Moore, star of seven “James Bond” films, died in Switzerland on May 23 at the age of 89, following a brief battle with cancer.
He was preceded in death by Hollywood icon John Hurt, Oscar-nominated actor who starred in “The Elephant Man,” “1984” and “Harry Potter.” Hurt died of pancreatic cancer on January 27 at 77.
And just two days earlier Mary Tyler Moore, star of the show which bore her name, suffered cardiopulmonary arrest due to pneumonia and died at Connecticut's Greenwich Hospital at the age of 80.
Best-selling author William Peter Blatty, whose 1971 blockbuster “The Exorcist” was made into a major motion picture, died January 12 at the age of 87.
In the world of music, guitarist J. Geils passed away April 11; and Southern rocker Greg Allman, founder of the Allman Brothers Band, died May 27 at his Savannah home from complications of liver cancer.
Mike Illitch, founder of Little Caesar's Pizza and owner of the Detroit Red Wings and Detroit Tigers, died February 10 at the age of 87.
Comedian Don Rickles (90), king of insult comedy, died of kidney failure April 5 at his Beverly Hills home.
Now, I’m not saying that these people, well-known cultural icons, are more important than the other thousands who have also ended their life on this earth in the past months.
What I’m saying is this: We are all dying. We live as though that were not true—as though the new dress or new house or new relationship or new job were really our goal in life, rather than the true goal: getting to heaven. From the moment we are born, we are all spiraling toward eternity.
There are devout and well-intentioned Christian brothers who believe that “absent from the body means present with the Lord.” However, the case for Purgatory as a stop along the way to heaven is both logical and biblical.
Let’s imagine you’re dead. You ate a rotten peanut, or you took a bullet for your best friend, or you stumbled onto a busy roadway on a dark and stormy night….
It doesn’t really matter how it happened—but now here you are, spiraling and spinning toward eternity, lining up for your first meeting with…. well, you’re on your way to…. um…. uh-oh…. to God.
And in your deepest being, you know that from the beginning of time—since before the beginning of time, in fact—He has loved you, has yearned for you to truly love Him, too. And you know that He has worked everything for your good, has given you one opportunity after another to recognize Him in the people around you, in the circumstances of your life.
But you were busy.
Before you get huffy: I’m not trying to single you out here. That’s my story, too—and the story of every human who has walked the face of the earth. (Well, everyone, that is, except for His mother Mary, who was preserved from sin in order to be the perfect Ark of the Covenant, the spotless Theotokos.)
So we, sinful creatures all, step out of this life into eternity—and we know, more clearly than we have never known anything, that we are not worthy to be in the presence of the Almighty God. In life, we may have casually popped the Eucharist onto our tongue, drunk of the Precious Blood, then gone back to our pews to idly watch the others return to their seats, ogling the cute boys or checking out the fashion faux pax, hardly pausing to ponder the great impossibility, the unimaginable truth, that God has given Himself to us, in the flimsy gift wrap of bread and wine. Wholly. Fully.
We have ignored Him, too, when we have not bothered to pray; when we have gossiped about our neighbors; when we have shirked our responsibilities in the workplace, when we have allowed anger to govern our relationships or our driving, when we have cheated on our diets or (yikes!) cheated on our spouses.
We are earthen vessels, all of us. And we know instinctively that we cannot face the great and mighty God in our current condition. True, we have been redeemed by the Blood of Christ, and His sacrifice has made it possible for us to be with Him for all eternity. First, though, we need to wash up—get ready for the party, for the great receiving line.
That’s what Purgatory is. It’s the washroom, the hot shower, where we become like Him. Were we to remain sniveling complainers, or bigots, or racists, or petty thieves, or just lazy bumpkins, we would be blinded by the great white light of Heaven, unable to bear being in the presence of He Who Is. We must be transformed, so that we can be one with God and with all of His creation, there eternally praising Him and sharing in His glory.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 1030) says that Purgatory is “a purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.” It’s a place where those “who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified” can have their souls shined up a bit, before their personal encounter with God.
Purgatory is nothing like Hell—in fact, people in Purgatory experience some modicum of joy, knowing that they are en route to an eternity with Christ. Those who are confined to Hell have no such consolation—having, in their great pride, rejected God’s grace in their lives and turned their faces away from Him for all eternity.
So these folks with whom I (and you) will hopefully share a spell in Purgatory are aware that Heaven is their destination. This good news buoys them, even as they learn how to be More Like God. The Catechism (CCC 1031) explains that “this final purification of the elect… is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.”
The hot shower just ain’t so bad.
Where is all this going? Well, some of you may know that my dear niece died recently of cancer; and over a period of days, I talked with many people—many of whom assured me that she was most certainly already in heaven. They said it in different ways: “She suffered her Purgatory here on earth, during her time in the hospital.” “She’s finally at rest.” “God has taken her to be with Him.” “She’s happy with her dad now.”
To which I say (excuse my bluntness), “How the hell would you know that?”
The effect of Purgation, as I understand it, is that the person becomes Shiny Like God. Only when all sin is eliminated, when the soul shines with a purity and grace unknown on this earth, will he or she be ready to enter into eternal happiness in heaven.
That could happen in an instant, or over a long period of time. In our casual culture, it’s common to act as though the deceased person has already passed through any unfortunate suffering which might be imposed, and is already in the arms of the Father. But why would we presume that?
I remember a story from a childhood book on Our Lady of Fatima. Mary, speaking to the three young visionaries, told them that one young woman—a girl of about 14, if I recall—“would be in Purgatory until the end of Time.” What sort of great sins must this young girl have accumulated in her short lifetime, to warrant such a delay in welcoming her to Heaven? (You might take a minute right now to pray for that girl—since she may, in fact, still await admission to the pearly gates….)
The Council of Trent, Session XXV (December 3-4, 1563), reconfirmed the long-standing teaching of the Church, “that Purgatory exists, and that the souls detained therein are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but especially by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar.”
Please don’t let presumption blind you to the need to pray for those who have gone before us.
Please pray for my niece, who remained imperfect despite her confinement and who, no doubt, fell short of reflecting the full glory of God. Of course, much can be forgiven due to her frailty during her illness; and if we, her loving family, cut her some slack for her obstinacy, how much more must her Heavenly Father love her and want to hold her to Himself?
But unless you have some super-duper inside track with St. Peter at the gate, you don’t really know what’s goin’ on with Angela right now. And if she’s waiting, in need of our prayers, and you aren’t there for her, you know how much she’d like to hit you upside of the head? Pray for her. Pray for her always, until the day you die, because you just don’t understand what it’s like out there in Eternity. If she’s already in Heaven, your prayers can be reassigned to some poor bloke who needs them. But don’t stop!
Please pray for my other relatives, too. My father was a good and faithful man, and he died many years ago; but what do we on earth know of his experience outside of Time, and whether he is even yet with God in Heaven? Please pray for him.
And when I die, please pray for me. The Lord (and my husband) know that I’m not perfect. And no one knows just what it will take for me to reach that state of perfection where I’ll feel properly dressed to go in to the banquet.
I won’t be able to tell you then, so let me tell you now: I am one heck of a piece of work, and it’s gonna take a lot to polish me up for heaven. Your prayers, especially your offerings of Masses, are so needed, and so appreciated.
Pray for me, and I will pray for you.You would be forgiven for thinking that astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has been on a climate change crusade these past few weeks. As the U.S. and Caribbean have been hit by a series of seemingly unprecedented storms, Tyson has been making the rounds on cable news to offer some dire warnings about the planet’s new normal.
“Neil deGrasse Tyson says it might be 'too late' to recover from climate change,” a CNN headline read. On MSNBC, it was, “Neil deGrasse Tyson blasts climate change deniers in government.” Even Fox News picked up the story, writing, “Neil deGrasse Tyson says human-caused climate change could doom coastal cities.”
While Tyson is used to the bizarre phenomenon of news outlets picking up his every utterance and tweet, he swears he’s not on some sort of mission. “I never speak out on climate change unless someone asks me,” he tells The Daily Beast in a phone interview leading up to the fourth season premiere of his podcast-turned Nat Geo series StarTalk this Sunday night.
But if you do ask him — about pretty much anything that touches on science — he will not hesitate to tell you exactly how he feels. In our wide-ranging interview, Tyson shares his views on everything from the geek-ification of America to the anti-intellectualism that led to President Trump and the “irresponsible” leaders who only believe science when it aligns with their worldview.
StarTalk is about to start its fourth season on Nat Geo. Is there anything you’re really excited for people to see this year?
What I want people to take notice of is the range of guests that make perfectly valid StarTalk content. So it goes from Katy Perry to Lance Armstrong to |
in Champaign County Jail at 6:15 a.m.
Tate, 21, will remain in the county jail until at least Sunday morning, when he is expected to make a bond court appearance. He has denied any physical contact with his girlfriend, Ramseyer said.
Tate has been indefinitely suspended by Illinois. Athletics Director Josh Whitman and head coach John Groce released the following statement.
Tate has started at times during his career at Illinois. He averaged 1.8 points and 2.5 assists per game as a junior. He's the third Illini basketball player to be arrested since August.KYODO NEWS - Dec 1, 2017 - 16:06 | All, Lifestyle, Japan
With just about a month left in 2017, Japan is gearing up for the winter season as snow begins to cover its northern regions and seasonal illumination lights up scenic spots across the country.
Mt. Fuji got its first full snowcap of the season in late October.
Meanwhile, in western Japan's Himeji, an illumination show was held in early November at Himeji Castle, a national treasure and World Heritage site, during which LED balloons were released from a square outside it.
By mid November, the city of Sapporo in northern Japan's Hokkaido was already glistening under a blanket of snow.
The snow-clearing tram known as Sasara Densha makes its rounds in Sapporo, home of the famous Sapporo Snow Festival. The 2018 festival is scheduled to take place from Feb. 1 to Feb. 12.
In Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan, Mt. Izumigatake recorded its first snowfall on Nov. 20, creating a splendid contrast with fallen red autumn leaves along the mountain path.
Amid the arrival of the first snow, workers at a ski resort on Mt. Izumigatake busied themselves with preparations ahead of the season's opening.
Besides the beautiful snow scenery, elaborate illumination is brewing a festive mood in many parts of Japan. In Sapporo, the annual Sapporo White Illumination event, using some 780,000 light bulbs, will run through Dec. 25, 2017.
Meanwhile in downtown Tokyo, colorful Christmas trees by French architect and designer Emmanuel Muho adorn the fancy Omotesando Hills shopping mall.
In neighboring Chiba Prefecture, Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea also get into the Christmas spirit with festive illumination and special events.
In central Japan, Nagoya's Legoland Japan unveiled a gigantic 10-meter Christmas tree, built with more than 610,000 Lego pieces.
In Osaka, Universal Studios Japan readied for the festivities with a new Guinness World Record Christmas tree featuring 570,000 lights.
For railway enthusiasts, the annual "Inaka Illumination" event in the rural town of Onan in Shimane Prefecture offered a spectacular display of lights in the vicinity of Uzui Station, which stands 20 meters above ground. The JR Sankosen Line, the only train service in Onan, will be discontinued in March 2018.
According to the Japanese weather agency's three-month forecast, almost all regions across the country are expected to experience a colder winter in December 2017, and average or slightly warmer temperatures in January and February 2018. Snowfall in regions facing the Sea of Japan is likely to be around average in most areas, although western Japan may see slightly more snow than in normal years.
More photo galleries:
GALLERY: Autumn foliage in Japan's Kyoto
GALLERY: Mt. Fuji gets season's first snow crown
GALLERY: Chinese tourists flock to North Korean borderFor a Congress that struggled to pass even the most basic of bills, the 113th didn't lack for imaginative proposals. Squelched in committee, locked in legislative logjam, and buried in obscurity were bills that would do everything from eliminating federal agencies to micromanaging D.C. traffic enforcement. As the year draws to a close, let's take a look back at some of the best congressional pipe dreams, organized by their likelihood of passage, as determined by GovTrack.
0% — Tragically, Rep. Louie Gohmert's proposal to exempt D.C. residents from income taxes did not find its way into the congressional agenda. The No Taxation Without Representation Act addresses the District's long-standing voting-rights concerns, but rather than asserting Washingtonians' rights, it simply eliminates their obligations to Uncle Sam. Some District advocates are concerned it could turn the capital into a tax haven, as well as pushing residents' concerns even lower on the congressional totem pole. The bill has seen no movement since its introduction last July, much to the chagrin of many District-residing Hill staffers and political reporters.
1% — With a just-better-than-zero chance of passing, Rep. Alan Grayson's campaign finance proposal is more a product of idealism than of realism. His bill, the Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act, imposes a 500 percent tax on political contributions by corporations. What better way to get money out of politics than to bring in revenue in the process? While reform advocates might see the logic in Grayson's proposal, his donor-reliant colleagues seem unlikely to take it up, even in committee.
Sometimes even the most quixotic ideas need to be stamped out before they take root. At least, that's the premise of Rep. Greg Walden's plan to ban trillion-dollar platinum coins. Some on the left had floated the idea of minting such coins as a work-around to another debt-ceiling fight with the GOP. Walden's bill would limit the value of platinum coins to $200, which, presumably, would not go very far toward circumventing a debt-ceiling battle.
Rep. Charlie Rangel didn't get much traction behind his plan to make women register for the draft, coupled with his perennial proposal to reinstate compulsory military service. Rangel's goal is to give all Americans a stake in the wars the country fights, but it doesn't appear that his colleagues—or the Pentagon brass—share his views.
2% — Some bills exist simply to nakedly troll a member's political enemies. Rep. Ted Yoho's GLITCH Act is one such bill. Released during the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, the proposal would cut the salary of the Health and Human Services secretary by 5 percent for every month that the website is not fully functional. The site has since rebounded, and Yoho's bill is collecting mothballs.
Meanwhile, some lawmakers are just sick of speeding tickets. Rep. Steve Stockman's bill bans D.C. from using traffic cameras to catch speeders, including, presumably, members of Congress. It also nixes federal highway funds for states that use such cameras.
Even love itself has not been safe from congressional interference. Rep. Matt Salmon's bill would give the axe to the Popular Romance Project, a program that studies the influence of romance on cultures throughout history. And in case any other agency was getting ideas, Salmon's bill would ban "any similar project relating to love or romance."
3% — Snarky bill names were not confined to the House of Representatives. Sen. Tom Coburn proposed the Let Me Google That For You Act, which would eliminate an obscure document-keeping agency. Its purpose, Coburn argued, has been largely made redundant by the availability of records on the Internet.
4% — Finally, Stockman makes this list twice with his self-named bill to disprove global warming. Intent on etching his name into law, the representative's Stockman Effect Act is his last attempt at disproving global warming. The bill directs scientists to study the Earth's magnetic field, which, if given more scrutiny, will apparently displace global warming as the culprit for most weather changes. Sadly for connoisseurs of such legislation, Stockman won't be back in the 114th Congress. But perhaps his ideas will live on.The Antarctic Sun is an online newspaper with "News about the USAP, the Ice, and the People." It is funded by the National Science Foundation (contract no. NSFDACS1219442) by its prime civilian contractor, Lockheed Martin Antarctic Support Contract.[1]
The online publication has been covering cutting edge science for the National Science Foundation since 1997–1998 austral summer, though it can trace its history back to the 1950s when the U.S. Navy ran logistics for the USAP.[2] From the austral summer of 1997-98 to 2006-07, The Antarctic Sun was produced at McMurdo Station between the months of October and February. Since October 2007, it has been a year-round news website managed out of the Denver, Colorado area.[2]
The website covers both science and features. The former includes biology, glaciology, geology, astrophysics and oceanography, among others. Features include USAP operations, Antarctic history, and profiles on people.
Antarctic Sun Journalists [ edit ]
In order of tenure, from most recent:
Mike Lucibella
Peter Rejcek
Steven Profaizer
Steve Martaindale
Emily Stone
Brien Barnett
Kris Kuenning
Melanie Conner
Mark Sabbatini
Kristan Hutchison
Beth Minneci
Jeff Inglis
Josh Landis
Aaron Spitzer
Ginny Figlar
Alexander ColhounThe regular season is about the team. The preseason is about the individual. This is the month for rookies and running backs. It's about position battles and injuries. The next four weeks are a pale imitation of the real thing, but you can still learn plenty if you know what to look for.
Below, you'll find my watchability rankings for the preseason, powered by science and analytics. During the regular season, this column will detail the teams and players that are most intriguing in a given week. The qualifications are much different in the preseason.
Information matters more than results. We'll look for clues on player usage and traits while understanding that August is a mirage usually conjured up by thirsty football takesmen. Teams don't truly game-plan in the preseason, which makes it a different sport. Stable teams take a backseat for now; the preseason won't tell us much about the Panthers and Packers. This month is all about the players and teams we don't know.
Quarterbacks battling
1) Denver Broncos
2) Los Angeles Rams
3) San Francisco 49ers
4) Philadelphia Eagles
Quarterback curiosity trumps all in the preseason. Three of the teams I want to watch most over the next month have open starting jobs, with No. 2 overall pick Carson Wentz's Eagles thrown in.
This entire Broncos quarterback situation is unprecedented. The 2001 Ravens are the only other defending champions to replace their top two quarterbacks, but they didn't hold an open competition in camp. Baltimore simply handed the job to Elvis Grbac, a decision that proved even the best general managers make big mistakes. John Elway hoped to avoid that in Denver by trading for veteran Mark Sanchez (who is signed to a modest deal) while drafting Paxton Lynch in the first round. Lynch isn't believed to be a candidate to start due to an erratic camp, although a red-hot preseason could always change the picture. Sanchez will start Denver's preseason opener, with Trevor Siemian very much in the mix.
It's a terrible sign for Sanchez that he has failed to gain any separation in practice against Siemian, a second-year pro drafted in the seventh round in 2015. The tie should go to the younger player. It is all reminiscent of 2013 in New York, when Sanchez struggled to beat out then-rookie Geno Smith. The difference here: Siemian's careful playing personality makes him less likely than Sanchez to commit a game-crushing mistake. Perhaps that's all Denver coach Gary Kubiak wants. The Broncos have the biggest range of potential outcomes of any team in football this year. They could repeat as champs or finish under.500 -- nothing would surprise. That makes them a must-watch team, even in August. (Rookie safety Justin Simmons and rookie running back Devontae Booker are also players to keep an eye on.)
August is Chip Kelly season. Sam Bradford threw roughly 10 well-placed passes last year around this time under Kelly in Philly, and suddenly the Eagles became a trendy playoff pick. Now, of course, Kelly is in San Francisco, and the coach indicated the preseason will largely decide the battle between Colin Kaepernick and Blaine Gabbert, which has looked tight in practice. It has also inspired actual headlines like: "Kap vs Gabbert: 49ers fans will likely hate the winner and loser."
Put aside the cynicism for a minute, and you'll see two quarterbacks with raw skill and a coach unafraid to be aggressive. The 49ers are such a strange team, but Kelly makes them fascinating. The defensive front seven is better than you think, especially if rookie DeForest Buckner makes good on his camp buzz. Two of the three starting receiver jobs are open, as is the tight end job. The football dork in me loves it all.
Bradford, meanwhile, remains in Philadelphia. He's the Eagles' starter after a solid camp, so the team's placement in this tier is all about Wentz. Since the rookie won't get many practice snaps during the regular season, this month will likely comprise Wentz's resume for 2016. The job he's applying for: November starting quarterback when the natives get restless in Philly.
Unlike Wentz, Jared Goff was not always expected to sit as a rookie in Los Angeles. His "plug-and-play" potential was one reason the Rams took him No. 1 overall. All reports, not to mention the first episode of "Hard Knocks," indicate Goff's progress is coming along slowly.
This is hardly cause for alarm. It has happened to rookie quarterbacks from Aaron Rodgers to Eli Manning to Alex Smith. It is a surprise, however -- no matter what kind of spin comes out of L.A. about veteran Case Keenum's "proven ability" to beat the Seahawks. Other recent Rams starters to beat the Seahawks: Austin Davis and Nick Foles. The Rams should take their time with Goff if he's not ready, but this has never been about Keenum. It's Goff vs. Goff, and we get four games to watch his progress. Bonus points for this tier: The Rams and 49ers both play Denver this month.
Plenty of intrigue
5) Cleveland Browns
6) New England Patriots
7) Tennessee Titans
8) Dallas Cowboys
Robert Griffin III was signed by Cleveland on March 24, more than two weeks after he was released by the Redskins. It was hard to imagine him starting for any team as he languished on the free agent market, much less having a job locked down before the preseason starts. That takes some juice out of the Browns' preseason, but not much. We still want to see how RGIII looks against a live pass rush. We want to see if first-round pick Corey Coleman can live up to those Steve Smith comparisons, and whether Terrelle Pryor can finish his improbable journey from college quarterback to starting NFL wide receiver. We want to see running back Duke Johnson begin to make the leap. Browns homers can also enjoy open starting jobs up for grabs across the defense, but this preseason will be all about new coach Hue Jackson's offense. Are the Browns sneaky exciting?
Jimmy Garoppolo's test drive as a starting quarterback would put the Patriots higher on this list if we hadn't seen it before. He should prove to be solid, but September is his month now. The team's open questions at running back (could LeGarrette Blount be cut, and when will Dion Lewis be back?) and the development of rookie receiver Malcolm Mitchell are just as interesting. It will also be fun to see Tom Brady treat these games like the regular season, taking down third-string cornerbacks while Boston radio stations lose their minds after Brady plays three quarters in the fourth preseason game.
Marcus Mariota amps up the preseason curiosity factor for the Titans despite that gnawing suspicion coach Mike Mularkey could ruin everything by turning back the clock to 1991. Rookie running back Derrick Henry is one to watch after a strong showing in camp, and it would be great to see juice back in veteran DeMarco Murray's legs. Fifth-round pick receiver Tajae Sharpe is looking to cement his starting receiver job, while second-year pro Dorial Green-Beckham and veteran Andre Johnson battle just to earn snaps in a deep fight at the position.
Before he pulled his hamstring, fourth overall pick Ezekiel Elliott's burst and propensity for making linebackers look foolish at Cowboys camp was something to behold. He makes Dallas appointment viewing once he recovers, while Tony Romo's mobility is something to watch. There should be some level of concern that Romo's back stiffness seems to require him to take so many days off at camp. The Cowboys also still need to figure out both starting defensive ends this month.
Catch them weekly
9) New Orleans Saints
10) Jacksonville Jaguars
11) Seattle Seahawks
12) Baltimore Ravens
13) Houston Texans
The Saints feel strangely fresh for a team that has had the same coach and quarterback for a decade. They finally rebuilt their offense with fun young talent around Drew Brees. Michael Thomas has made more noise than any rookie receiver this year. I've fallen for the hype in Saints camp that competent coaching and improvements through the defensive line and secondary could make this defense respectable. At running back, C.J. Spiller could earn the backup spot over Tim Hightower or get released, based on how he looks in the preseason.... The Jaguars made news for their free agency splashes, but we'll be watching their rookies more closely this month. At least four defenders -- Jalen Ramsey, Myles Jack, Sheldon Day and Yannick Ngakoue -- have a chance to have big roles right away.
Stable teams rank low on this list -- and the Ravens are as unstable as they've been in awhile. Five key starters are coming back from injury. Starting jobs at running back, wideout, tight end, defensive end, inside linebacker and safety are open this month. Everyone is just assuming 37-year-old veteran receiver Steve Smith is still Steve Smith coming off an Achilles injury. There's a lot that could go wrong.... Houston is similarly in flux. The Texans have up to nine new offensive starters, including quarterback Brock Osweiler and first-round receiver Will Fuller.
Seattle is the exception to the rule when it comes to established teams ranking low. Just watch one of the Seahawks' games. They often play so hard in the preseason that it feels like a real game. Their backfield should be among the most fun to watch this month, with Christine Michael teasing fantasy writers again. They also drafted three running backs trying to make an impact while Thomas Rawls returns from a broken ankle.
Middle of the pack
14) New York Giants
15) Pittsburgh Steelers
16) Tampa Bay Buccaneers
17) Chicago Bears
18) Miami Dolphins
19) New York Jets
20) Indianapolis Colts
21) Atlanta Falcons
22) San Diego Chargers
23) Buffalo Bills
The Giants' preseason isn't about rookie receiver Sterling Shepard vs. veteran Victor Cruz -- that battle is over; Shepard has won. The battle is Cruz vs. his old explosiveness, with the waiver wire a possible destination for Cruz. (And that battle will distract everyone from what's happening at linebacker for New York.)... Atlanta has been threatening to start up to four defensive rookies, including first-round pick Keanu Neal, and the preseason will show how serious coach Dan Quinn is about turning over his group.... The Steelers were ranked low in this exercise until I realized how much I wanted to see Sammie Coates and slot receiver Eli Rogers build on their camp hype. Pittsburgh coaches are also hoping outside linebackers Bud Dupree and Jarvis Jones finally establish themselves as clear starters, while they work in two rookies (first-round pick Artie Burns and second-round pick Sean Davis) in the secondary. These aren't former defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau's "wait and develop" Steelers.
There isn't a ton at stake with the Colts this month, but an angry Andrew Luck coming off a disastrous season can't be ranked low. The same reasoning applies for the Buccaneers' Jameis Winston, who is going to my one of my favorite weekly watches when the real games start. Look to see if he feeds unheralded tight end Cameron Brate to help Brate win the starting job.... This is a big month for Bears receiver Kevin White. Early reports in camp indicate that last year's No. 7 overall pick is coming along slowly after losing all of 2015 to injury. Fantasy drafters assuming that second-year pro Jeremy Langford will just dominate carries in the Chicago backfield also need to watch out for how rookie Jordan Howard and veterans Jacquizz Rodgers and Ka'Deem Carey are used.... The Chargers are one of the teams we're most anxious to see in the regular season, but they don't offer a ton of intrigue this month. Keep an eye on whether second-year pro Melvin Gordon looks all the way back at running back after reportedly undergoing microfracture surgery on his knee in January. His hesitant preseason a year ago started his rookie campaign going the wrong way.
The Jets have a roster of established stars for whom the preseason doesn't matter much. We don't expect to see a ton of Matt Forte, even when he gets healthy. They only rank this high on the off chance Geno Smith plays like Joe Namath and makes my heart sing. Second-round pick Christian Hackenberg hasn't seen many snaps in camp and might not even be ready for preseason action. The Jets definitely have the most compelling battle for a No. 3 quarterback job, with 2015 fourth-rounder Bryce Petty hoping to show progress. He says he plans to "Brett Favre it" in the team's first preseason game. We just want to see what that means.... The Bills would have been a lot more interesting this month before losing their top two rookies (Shaq Lawson and Reggie Ragland) to injury. Former Olympic hopeful Marquise Goodwin is making believers (again) in Buffalo camp, and he has a solid chance to start if he shows out in August....... Arian Foster will sit out the preseason opener for the Dolphins. It's worth watching how he and Jay Ajayi look this month, and if both can escape August healthy.
Lower stakes
24) Green Bay Packers
25) Arizona Cardinals
26) Carolina Panthers
27) Oakland Raiders
These four teams range from good to potentially great, yet we're unlikely to learn a lot new about them in the preseason. Raiders fans have to be thrilled that they have such a stable, young offense that returns nearly all its starters. Rookie DeAndre Washington is a player to watch -- can he establish himself as a true threat to Latavius Murray?
Carolina is set to give three rookie cornerbacks major snaps, barring an August meltdown. No. 1 receiver Kelvin Benjamin's return from his ACL injury is just as important. Second-year receiver Devin Funchess and running back Cameron Artis-Payne also want to solidify their strong training camps.
Aaron Rodgers is a treat any time of year, and he'll want to re-establish connections with Jordy Nelson and his No. 3 receiver to be named later, which currently figures to be Davante Adams. Like the Packers, the Cardinals are a team we know well. They'd be better off just fast-forwarding a month, because only injuries could mess with this squad.
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28) Minnesota Vikings
29) Detroit Lions
30) Washington Redskins
31) Cincinnati Bengals
32) Kansas City Chiefs
Fans of the five teams above should mostly see landing in this tier as a compliment, so save the emails. They just aren't generating many high-stakes storylines this preseason to capture the casual fan. Minnesota's best player (Adrian Peterson) will barely play, if at all. However, their two most recent first-round picks -- receiver Laquon Treadwell (2016) and cornerback Trae Waynes (2015) -- could use big months to earn regular playing time.
The Lions will take a massive breath before the preseason starts, then exhale in a month if running back Ameer Abdullah's shoulder goes unscathed. The Bengals similarly can't handle more skill-position injuries; with their stacked roster, they don't truly need many of their young players to step up. Even Redskins beat writers admit camp this year is boring, which is a nice change of pace for them. Washington's first-round receiver Josh Doctson may not make it back on the field in time to play in the preseason, although we'll keep an eye on buzzy rookie runner Keith Marshall and second-year pro Matt Jones, who already wowed us in the preseason once. The Chiefs have a mostly veteran roster with intrigue at backup running back (Spencer Ware vs. Charcandrick West) and watching Chris Conley as the team's new starting wideout.
There will be a moment during this preseason when we all just want to move forward to the fun stuff. This is not that moment. Addicts that make it this far down a "Preseason Watchability" column have a football problem. We complain about the preseason, but we watch it. We are grateful to have any live tackling and actual scores back in our lives. Now there are just 26 weeks left until it goes away once again.By Printus LeBlanc
In early February, five employees of the House of Representatives were banned from the House IT network. The five former House employees are the subject of a criminal investigation by the Capitol Hill Police. They are accused of stealing equipment and accessing House IT systems without lawmakers’ knowledge. The former employees were “shared” IT employees. “Shared” means they worked for several offices, performing IT functions.
The five employees worked for over 20 members, to include members from the Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees and former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz (D-Fla.). You may remember Wasserman-Shultz has had IT issues in the past when she was chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
The salaries of the employees should have been the first clue something was not right. Anyone that has worked on Capitol Hill will tell you, the salaries are not great. Most staffers can expect to start in the $30-40,000 range, not a lot for one of the most expensive cities in America. However, at least three of the staffers in question were making over $160,000 per year, three times the average IT staffer salary. To put that number into perspective, Chiefs of Staff, with dozens of years on the Hill, rarely make that much.
The story gets worse from there. All five employees are related, three of them were brothers, Jamal, Imran, and Abid Awan, with Hina Alvi being married to Imran, and Natalia Sova being married to one of the other brothers. Hina has apparently fled the country with her children, to Pakistan, where her family reportedly has significant assets and VIP protection.
The strangeness of the case does not end there. The brothers also had a car dealership, Cars International A (CIA) they used for supplemental income. The dealership was not doing so well, and fell behind in payments to their vendors. One vendor, Rao Abbas, threatened to sue them, and suddenly he received a paycheck from U.S. Rep. Theodore Deutch (D-Fla.). That payment has yet to be explained.
The brothers then took out a $100,000 loan from Dr. Ali Al-Attar. The brothers were unable to repay that loan, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem, because Dr. Attar is a fugitive from U.S. authorities. Attar was indicted on tax fraud charges after the IRS and FBI discovered he used multiple bank accounts to hide income, in March 2012. The doctor is also believed to have ties to Hezbollah, the terrorist group. Al-Attar has since fled to Iraq.
As the investigation continued, it kept getting worse. Several offices hired new IT staff, and found some of the computers were sending data to an offsite server. It is unknown what type of data or where the server is located yet, but several IT professionals on the Hill now believe members could be subject to blackmail because of the data theft. The violations were so bad, one staffer said, “There’s no question about it: If I was accused of a tenth of what these guys are accused of, they’d take me out in handcuffs that same day, and I’d never work again.”
The case took another turn in a committee hearing on the Capitol Hill Police budget last week. Wasserman-Shultz took the opportunity to confront the Capitol Hill Police Chief about evidence in possession of the police. The Congresswoman wants a laptop computer back that is currently considered evidence by the Capitol Hill Police. The laptop allegedly was assigned to Imran Awan, the ringleader of the group. The laptop was found hidden in a different building from the one Wasserman-Shultz works in. The Congresswoman has an office in the Longworth building, but the laptop was found “hidden in an unused crevice of the Rayburn House Office Building.” The Capitol Police seized it and are treating it as evidence in their ongoing criminal investigation.
While at the committee hearing, Wasserman-Shultz berated the Chief of Capitol Hill Police about procedures for getting the laptop back. The Chief explained what the procedures are, but the procedure changes if the laptop is evidence in a criminal investigation. The Congresswoman did not like that answer, and continued to ask the same question over and over. To his credit, the Chief answered the same way over and over. Finally, the Congresswoman threatened “consequences” for not returning her equipment. The video can be seen here, the exchange begins at 1:24:25.
This brings us to a question being asked a lot in Washington D.C. lately. What is obstruction of justice? The phrase seems to be the latest buzzword of the D.C. establishment since James Comey was fired earlier this month. Did Wasserman-Shultz attempt to “obstruct justice” by demanding the investigating authority hand over evidence in a criminal matter, or suffer “consequences”? Remember, the Congresswoman is on the committee that controls the budget of the very person she threatened “consequences”.
The Congresswoman was singing a different tune earlier this month about “obstruction”. Wasserman-Shultz commented about the Comey firing, saying “If President Trump pressured then-FBI Director Comey to close down an investigation into former National Security Advisor Flynn, it would represent an egregious corrosion of the rule of law.” Does this mean the Congresswoman is representing an “egregious corrosion of the rule of law”, her words not mine?
This latest incident with Wasserman-Shultz has created more questions than answers. Why would the Congresswoman risk “obstruction of justice” to get this computer back? What is Wasserman-Shultz trying to hide? If there was a potential breach of IT security on Capitol Hill, wouldn’t the Congresswoman want that cleared up?
We have a legitimate security breach and a potential blackmail situation occurring on Capitol Hill, but the press is focused on a Russia story still with no evidence. We have an offsite server sucking up Congressional data, with criminal suspects fleeing to Pakistan for protection, but the press wants to focus on a special counsel with no apparent crime to investigate. We have a member of Congress pressuring the Capitol Hill Police on camera, but the press wants to talk about a memo no one has seen.
Where is the call for a special counsel on this scandal? Could it be Congress was breached by a foreign intelligence service, and no one wants to admit it, or did Congress get ripped off by a family of scammers? We need to find out the truth, no matter how unpleasant.
Printus LeBlanc is a contributing reporter at Americans for Limited Government.The news that Al Gore is suing Al Jazeera America for millions of dollars owed him from the purchase of his Current TV network rocked the media world last week. After all, who knew Al Jazeera America still existed?
But AJA is still there (probably), snug in the old Current TV channel slot on your cable guide. It’s just that you’re not watching. Neither is anyone else.
Al Jazeera America went live exactly one year ago, on Aug. 20, 2013, powered by an initial $500 million in oil money from the emir of Qatar, plus millions spent hiring topflight broadcast journalism talent (including NBC veterans Randall Pinkston and John Seigenthaler, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien and Al Velshi, ABC’s Antonio Mora and CBS veteran Joie Chen and more) and establishing 12 news bureaus across the U.S. The network hoped to succeed in the U.S. market where Al Jazeera English had failed.
It seemed like a good idea at The New York Times, where Brian Stelter rhapsodized that “Al Jazeera is coming to America to supply old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground news coverage to a country that doesn’t have enough of it.” Elites like Stelter couldn’t be bothered with AJA’s provenance – a parent bankrolled by the same people as Hamas, that acted as Al Qaeda’s PR arm during the Iraq War, completely ignored the public sexual assault on CBS’s Lara Logan and actually held a birthday/prisoner exchange party for a murdering Lebanese terrorist.
Whether the American public knows or cares about any of that isn’t certain, but it certainly hasn’t shared Stelter’s enthusiasm for yet another left-of-center news organization in the U.S. market.
On Aug. 11, AP cited Neilson ratings, noting, “So far this year, Al-Jazeera America has averaged 17,000 viewers in prime time, ticking up to 23,000 during the first week of fighting in Gaza.”
And you thought MSNBC had definitively answered that old hypothetical question, “What if we built a network and nobody watched?”
In April, AJA laid off dozens of journalists, and another round of lay-offs is in the works. The network is putting up a brave face. According to the Aug. 8 New York Daily News, AJA chief Ehab Al Shihabi told employees in an anniversary memo, “I know there has been a lot of talk about ratings. Let’s put things in perspective. Other cable news networks have been on television for decades — we’re a year old. We’re still growing our brand awareness as well as our distribution, which is a little more than half of all U.S. cable homes.” But that equates to about 60 million homes. You do the math.
Of course, AJA is backed by nearly unlimited petro-dollars, and you can be sure the emir et al are taking the long view about influencing American opinion. But that raises another problem.
While AJA has won awards for its reporting, it’s hard to think of any story or issue on which the network has made a real impact in the last year. Except maybe for getting sued by Al Gore.Modern airplanes are basically a giant computer, and the latest reminder of that fact came Friday.
The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a warning about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner's computer system, which has a software counter that could periodically shut down all electrical power and "result in loss of control of the airplane." To prevent that, airlines must completely power down the electrical systems on the plane at least once every 248 days.
The directive applies to all 787 model airplanes.
Globally, 258 of the aircraft are currently in use by airlines, with more than 800 more ordered for future delivery.
Boeing reported the issue — which it said was found during laboratory testing — to the FAA, which issued an airworthiness directive (AD) on Friday:
This AD requires a repetitive maintenance task for electrical power deactivation on Model 787 airplanes. This AD was prompted by the determination that a Model 787 airplane that has been powered continuously for 248 days can lose all alternating current (AC) electrical power due to the generator control units (GCUs) simultaneously going into failsafe mode. This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane.
In addition to the turn-it-off, turn-it-on solution, Boeing is also working on a software fix that will address the issue in a more permanent way. The directive is a temporary measure until that fix is in place.
Since its introduction in 2007, the Dreamliner has had more than its fair share of problems. In 2013, all 787s were grounded because of the potential for battery fires. Sparking that directive was an incident at Logan Airport in Boston, where an unoccupied Japan Airlines 787 caught fire after a nonstop flight from Tokyo.
Boeing is still betting heavily on the 787 as a profit engine, along with its other popular twin-jet aircraft such as the 777 line and 737 series. In recent months, airlines have been rolling out a stretched version of the 787, known as the 787-900.Today, Elon Musk revealed his ambitious multi-decade roadmap for human colonization of Mars, including the Interplanetary Transport System he believes will get us there. But while the event was full of technical detail on the new rocket and ship, it appears the crafts have yet to be named.
"We're thinking about names," Musk told the crowd. "The first ship that goes to Mars, my current favorite for it is Heart of Gold from The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy."
The Heart of Gold is one of the ships at the center of Douglas Adams' 1978 radio play and subsequent book, stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox at the ship's official launch and later used to rescue the story's protagonists. It's also the first ship to use the Inifinite Improbability Drive, a detail that was particularly appealing to Musk. "I like the fact that it's driven by infinite improbability," Musk said, referring to the because I think our ship is also extremely improbable."
"The acronym is not the best," Musk conceded.
SpaceX trip to Mars simulationHawaiian ‘Ukulele and Guitar will open a new location in Hilo in July 2017, kicking off with a reception on Tuesday, July 4.
Hawaiian artist Ali‘i Keana‘aina‘a will provide free entertainment; pūpū will be served.
Doors will open at 4:30 p.m.
The new store is located on the Hilo Bayfront in the S. Hata Building on 76 Kamehameha Ave. next to Cafe Pesto.
Owner and musician Robert Yates is proud to open his third location to better serve Big Island. Yates, more fondly referred to as “Uncle ‘Uke,” offers essentials for both professional and aspiring musicians.
Hawaiian Ukulele and Guitar is a distributor of KANILE‘A ‘ukulele on the Big Island. KANILE‘A are masterpiece instruments made in Hawai‘i.
Hawaiian ‘Ukulele and Guitar is also located at |
leftists groups?
KAF We do not have any relationships with other leftist groups.
What has been the influence of Iraq's war in Turkey/Kurdistan? Has political repression risen? Has the Kurdish autonomy in Iraq [virtually independence] improved the desire for the independence of Kurds in Turkey?
KAF The Iraq war period was probably not a good time for the PKK. During this particular period, all the PKK’s enemies, including the USA, Western countries, Iraqi and Kurdish main parties (PUK & PDK) and their forces, got together and controlled the territories as they were happy to fight the PKK if it was necessary. In fact, the PKK was surrounded by all the forces mentioned above. At the same time Turkey was in a good position to fight the PKK without fear from USA. America was happy to support this dirty war and closed its eyes to it and its victims as long as Turkey let the big powers use its land as a base for the occupation of Iraq.
We do not think that during the Iraqi war the repression & suppression was beyond its normal levels. This was because the PKK kept a low profile and stopped any major operations or attacks.
The spirit for Kurdish independence in Iraq might have increased with the setting up of Kurdish self-rule in Iraqi’s Kurdistan but did not help or support the Kurdish question in Turkey for two reasons:
The Kurdish Self-rule in Iraqi’s Kurdistan, as before, has always been very much in a compromised position with the Turkish government for political, trade and economic reasons. so that they did not mind to sacrifice all Kurdish and their cause in Turkey for their own safety and survival.
By setting up Kurdish self-rule in Iraq it meant Iran, Syria and Turkey became very close as there is a ethnic Kurdish minority in each of their countries. With an alliance between the three of them the PKK became a major enemy, and this squeezed the PKK movement in Turkey. Further, Turkey managed to force the leaders of Kurds self- rule in Iraq to cooperate with them in fighting against the PKK although most of the time the Kurds would fight them alone, but with the military support of Turkey especially By Fighter Planes.
How is the economic situation there? Is there any kind of labour resistance / radical unionism in Kurdistan?
KAF The economic situation for Kurdish self-rule, until the war, was very bad. But, since the collapse of Saddam Hussein it has been getting much better. The USA have spent a lot of money there to bribe people and also to isolate Islamic terrorist groups and the PKK as well.
After the uprising in 1991 many organisations emerged and most of them were leftist - from women’s movement, union, student – and they tried to unite. In addition to this a strong worker movement emerged at the factory level which they organise themselves. There was also very good links between them and the unemployed organisation (Unemployed Trade Union in Kurdistan). These groups could never overcome their leftist influences, and their methods of struggle, organising tactics and their strategies were exactly the same as the Bolshevik and Social Democrat parties who were gradually getting smaller and smaller until they completed disappeared.
You have talked about the Uprising in 1991. Could give us more information about what have happened?
KAF To answer this question we need a brief explanation of the Iraq situation before the Uprising in general and Kurdistan in particular. There was no doubt that Iraq-Iran war brought a disaster on Iraqi and Iranian people and at the same time it weakened the regime in Iraq. Both governments in Iraq and Iran have had their motivation to go to war and for different reasons while both of them were in a big crisis.
During the Iraq-Iran war there was a feeling that the Iraqi regime had lost power over its own people. This was to some extent was right when people in Iraq saw their life had got worse, things had got very expensive and we had to wait in a long queue to get it, every day hundreds or more dead bodies returned to the parent and relatives, the hospital, schools, the rest of the offices, factories, companies with many more of offices or the administration were getting empty either because they had been called by the regime to join the military service or because many of them refused to join the military service and had gone underground or had been transferred to protect the streets, public places in case of riots or uprising. In addition to this people were very well aware of the propaganda machine about the war, aim of the war, the future of the war that all was a pure lie.
The regime on one hand tried to bribe those families who had lost their son, daughters, parent in the front lines of the war, on the other hand tried to suppress and oppress any opposition voice by using a very heavy hand.
In Kurdistan, because of the existing Kurdish movement, although it was becoming very week and many of them had abandoned their struggles by moving to the neighbouring countries or Europe, USA or Canada, the regime has used a few different tactics from what he used it in south and middle of Iraq, like: using chemical weapons, the Campaign of Anfal(1) and moving all the far villages from the town to a concentration camps and destroyed all the original villages and the people’s belongs even their cattle, animals whatever they had in the villages.
The situation in both parts of Iraq, south and north became intolerable and pushed people to make complaints, small protests in different areas.
When the war finished the regime in Iraq became weaker and its crisis was getting deeper and deeper. So Saddam Hussein tried to find a way to get out of these crises. So the only way to get out of this was launching another war in the gulf. Of course this happened with approval and the support from America, CIA. The consequence of the war was terrible as thousands and thousands of soldiers and ordinary people were killed and made the situation unbearable.
By the time when the war ended the situation were getting ripe for emerging so many different organisations against the regime in south, middle and north of Iraq, particularly in north, Kurdistan. The Iraqi forces have already evacuated in many places and have lost control over the distance Areas from the main towns. At this time the whole Kurdish movement became very week and was almost about abandoning its entire army struggles.
By 1991 the time had arrived for uprising, A few months before March 91 some of the lefties organisation prepared themselves for something like, later called Uprising by contacting most of the rest of the origination and the individuals, collecting weapons and bringing them to the big towns, publicity preparation and the starting points with the starting places. In the end the uprising happened and almost whoever was able to get out of home has taken a part in it. In a matter of a couple of days most of the small towns and a couple of big towns had fell under the control of people. The people had used revenges against the regime agent and spy and people from the Intelligence organisation (Istkhbarat) in a barbaric way by killing and executing so many of them that people thought they had a contact with the regime and have blood on their hands without trial, court or any thing.
When the people realised that the regime’s force completely defeated then the Soviets ” Shura”(2) in the neighbourhood, school, hospital and the rest of places of work have been set up by the workers, student, the local people and the member of the lefties, communist organisations to carry out the necessary work in the community. The situation was getting serious and dangerous for the high class, the bosses because this experience was about to spread in everywhere in Kurdistan and even in Iraq. The US, Briton and the regions especially the neighbouring countries have observed and examined the situation very closely and seriously. So they tried to abort the Uprising before completely succeed and spread in elsewhere. The first step was to revive their agents in Kurdistan in getting close to whole organisation and fraction that involved in Kurdish movement while at the time of uprising and before that they almost disappeared especially in the army way. Then they intervened directly to send their own spy and agents and give advice to the forces that were in the opposition against the uprising because they have already lost control and influences among people. Many of the individuals who have already left Kurdistan went back and gradually with the support and help of CIA and MI6 took control on almost every administration. At the same time they created a situation and persuaded people or at least did not mind when people had taken whatever was valuable including most of the equipments in hospitals, schools, universities and the rest of the government’s building. To stop this disorder, they organised the police and soldiers forces. At the same time they tried to weaken the Shuras by using various propaganda against them, taking over their buildings, asking the organisation to register themselves with the government and getting permission for protests, rallies and demonstrations.
This new administration by 1992 became stable and almost was in control everywhere with the entire support of US, Briton and Europe. There was the first election in May 1992 for Kurdish self-rule parliament. The election was fake and both major originations PUK (Kurdish united patriotic) and KDP (Kurdish Democratic Party) between themselves decided they won the election by 50% each of them and they set up their own government. By 1994 when the Kurdish self-rule was completely established with the support of west and USA, the Shuras had been disappeared and the trace of Uprising you could only find in the history museum. And now it was the time for the internal war between PUK and PDK over money, power and influences. This war lasted until 1998 and ended under the threat of USA.
Of course there was another factor for defeating the people’s movement and its Uprising. The threat of the lefty’s organisation to the Shuras was no less danger than the USA & the rest as they used this threat in a different way. The struggles between themselves to control the people’s movement and its achievement, the Shura, were a great threat and badly damaged the movement by making it very week. They all were happy to sacrifice the Uprising to their politics.
(1) Anfal: It was a campaign was launched by the government against Kurdish people in 198os (the first Anfal was in 1982 and second Anfal was 1988) in this campaign the regime evacuated the entire people for the far villages, the number estimated by 180,000 people who are completely disappeared.
(2) ” Shura” Soviets, The Council of the worker
What is your opinion on the so-called revolt in Iran? Is it possible that from that reformist’s fighter could arise a solid anarchist faction?
It might not be realistic for us to be so optimistic to expect from current revolt a solid Anarchist movement will be emerged. But before we are coming to that conclusion we need to remind ourselves that the CIA and the West brought Ayatollah Khomeini and his party to power in a reluctant way. We say in a reluctant way because almost everybody in Iran was involved in the Uprising, therefore USA and the West was between couples of choices: Ayatollah Khomeini or people’s power. In other words between a minor enemy and a major enemy, so they have gone for the minor enemy. In the same time they thought it will be easy to control the Mullah s power or tame them especially after involving Iran in a long war with Iraq. They knew that the war given them a great benefits and advantage as first the war is the best weapons to defeat the powerful resistance that had existed there before the uprising. Secondly the war makes both regimes in Iran and Iraq very week and through this they can play a big role in controlling the situation and finally bringing back the USA & the West forces, their politics into the region, in addition to achieve financial gain.
And now 30 years is too long and USA could not have big influences over the regime to achieve what they wanted in the first place. In the same time people have had enough with the regime. People’s life in respect of freedom, economic has not got better and certainly their Social life has got worse, this is apart form that almost every family in Iran lost one of its beloved during the long war between Iran and Iraq that lasted for 8 years.
This situation is getting worse day by day and people lives in a big fair there when they hear that the so called “ international community” using sanction against them or the idiot regime may involve them in another long war.
We can say that the people were looking for some sort of crisis that can be happened and opens a door for them to protest against the regime. We believe that the election was a perfect pretext for people especially when some powerful people with the support of USA and some countries in the west could be seen supporting the protest. However, the protest has become very bloody but surely no everybody is on the side of the “Green revolution”. As we said above the majority of people in Iran have been fed up with the regime and the situation and they want changes. The demonstration and the protest were emerged from every section of the Society. We believe the vast majority of the protests are nothing to do with Mossawi or his supporters, but while the regime is very brutal as we saw it in oppressing the protester, it was difficult for people to come up independently and in obvious way demanding the regime change. They need to express there unsatisfaction and their hatter against the system through or under umbrella of the powerful people that who are a part of the System because of a couple of reasons: 1- if they came out without connecting themselves to the main stream of the protester they would have been faced a savage, brutal; suppression that cause so many death. 2- Again if they came out as independent groups there was a possibility for Moussawi and the rest of the powerful people who supported the protest to reconcile with the government. This could be happened because both of them, the government and the opposition, would face a very serious danger that threats the entire regime and their politics.
However, we think the protest will be continuing, stronger and goes forward that may some major changes take place by the end of the year. We are aware of that the Anarchist movement in Iran is strong but we are not sure whether they can organise themselves against the authoritarian, the power to achieve what they have been struggled for in the past and also whether they have got a lesion from the past.
We have noticed that some Kurdish Social movements are more and more fed up with those Maoists parties, leftist political groups and their practices and they are being progressively substituted by an anarchist/ grassroots practice. Is this affirmation?
That is true. People are fed up with them and from their experience they realised that these originations have already bankrupted but as we mentioned in our answers to your previous questions we have not seen the Anarchists movement neither in Kurdistan nor in Iraq. While everybody is fed up and wants changes, a huge number of the population has organised themselves in the movement called “Changes, movement for changes”. This has not yet formed it selves in the party or a proper organisation yet. They are not really different from the old organisation or the current one that is leading the Kurdish Self-rule. We believe that this like the many before will be a failure experience as well.
Whether later on people substituted by anarchist/ grassroots practice? It is difficult to be optimistic about this. But we are very much sure the grassroots movement in the nearest future will organise themselves and may form some Anarchist or libertarian origination. Please refer to our answer to your previous question for as to why we believe there is a ground for emerging Anarchist movement.
Do you think anarchists ideas can develop well in Kurdistan? Are there some communitarian traditions similar to the anarchist practice? [In some places this situation happens; Kropotkin put it well in Mutual Aid]
KAF We definitely believe anarchist ideas could develop in Kurdistan. It is not just that we believe in anarchism. Anarchism is the right struggle and will be a very strong movement in the near future because:
All the old ways of struggles from guerrilla war, to sham voting, to relying on the various kinds of leftist organisations from PUK, KDP, Communist party, all Islamic groups, liberals and Communist Worker Party have all been shown to be bankrupt and cannot escape from complete defeat as they lose the confidence and trust amongst poor and ordinary people.
There are many, many basic rights that have already been won in the Western, US, Canada and Scandinavian, but in Iraq or Kurdistan these basics are still a main or daily demand among the ordinary people. Again the corruption that infected every level of administration from the bottom of society to the very top (like Parliament) has recently become a major issue and has become the top priority of the list of demands that people are struggling for.
The relationship between individual people within the community is still extremely strong and this makes it very easy to trust each other and have collective action or struggles.
Final words... you can say what you want …
KAF We are trying to do our best to write on different Kurdish websites to persuade people of our politics, going to Kurdish Seminars, and translating old Anarchist texts and articles. We are also making people there aware of what is going on in the rest of the world.When learning last night that the Panthers are investigating Panthers owner Jerry Richardson for allegations of workplace misconduct, my first thought was this: Why isn’t the NFL doing this?
I’m not alone. As one league source explained it, other teams wouldn’t have the luxury of conducting their own investigation. And few, if any, team personnel other than owners would ever get that level of consideration.
Part of the problem is that, as PFT reported last night, the Panthers told the NFL about the situation only after the Panthers started their own investigation, ultimately overseen by someone who owns part of the team — and thus is a PARTNER of the person who is the subject of the probe. And so the NFL has been caught flat-footed by what only can be perceived as an effort by the team to control the investigation, to manage the fallout, and to engineer the preferred outcome.
The breadth of the Personal Conduct Policy, and the league’s history of aggressively taking action against anyone and everyone ensnared by it, makes the failure to do anything as to Richardson even more conspicuous, and inconsistent. Only five days ago, the NFL immediately suspended three NFL Network on-air employees (Marshall Faulk, Heath Evans, Ike Taylor) based on allegations made in a sexual harassment lawsuit... pending an investigation.
Yes, pending an investigation. That same kind of investigation that the Panthers have decided to conduct regarding the person who owns the bulk of the Panthers, overseen by a person who owns part of the Panthers.
This doesn’t mean the NFL will continue to do nothing. But don’t be surprised if that’s what the NFL does; Richardson, after all, was one of the two owners who led the search for a Commissioner in 2006 — and one of the two owners who personally delivered the good news to the man who won the $200 million so far/$200 million to go (and maybe more) job on the fifth ballot.
Whatever it was that prompted the team owned by Richardson to mobilize an investigation against Richardson should prompt the NFL to do the same thing, and to treat Richardson the same way any other person connected to the NFL would be treated.ASHEVILLE, NC (WYFF) - A 33-year-old mother accused of killing her two young daughters with a hatchet and then trying to kill herself told investigators that a ghost killed her children, according to a warrant.
The murder warrant against Naiyana Patel also said that she has said she does not want to live and she did not want surgery for her head injuries.
On Saturday, Patel's husband, Lalji Patel, returned home from work to find his daughters, 7-year-old Jiya and 4-year-old Piya, dead and their mother seriously injured.
Police said Naiyana Patel struck herself in the head repeatedly with the hatchet after she killed the girls.
Relatives said Naiyana was being treated for depression after a pregnancy she did not carry to full term, and, at some point she switched medication because the initial prescription did not seem to help.
Investigators removed the medication from the home during the investigation.
Relatives said the children's funeral is planned Thursday.
After undergoing surgery, Naiyana was listed in serious but stable condition at Mission Hospital.
Police said she was transferred from the intensive care unit to a regular room. They're waiting to find out when she will be released from the hospital before deciding how to proceed.
Lt. Wallace Welch said it depends on how forthcoming Patel is with information. Welch said there is a possibility she could go straight from the hospital to the jail.
A memorial service for the family only is set for Thursday at the Groce Funeral Home from noon until 2 p.m.
A community event will be set for Thursday at 6 p.m. in the ball field behind Oakley Elementary School, the school Jiya attended.
Welch said the public event will celebrate the lives of Jiya and her sister, Piya.
Relatives of the Patels said Lalji Patel, who goes by Lalu, will stay with them while they plan the funeral and clean up the family's home.
"We don't want Lalu to have to think about any of this," Shelly Patel told WYFF. "We are trying to think for him."
Related story
Police: Mother kills daughters, hacks self with hatchet
Copyright 2011 WIS. All rights reserved.Vaccines, Kasabian and Hurts also take home gongs at tonight's (February 29) ceremony
Florence And The Machine, The Horrors and Arctic Monkeys were the big winners at the 2012 NME Awards tonight (February 29) at London’s O2 Academy Brixton.
Florence And The Machine won two awards, taking home the prizes for Best Solo Artist and Best Track for ‘Shake It Out’. Accepting the award for Best Solo Artist, Florence Welch said that although she was aware it was “still unknown” whether she was part of a band or a solo artist, she would not be giving the award back.
She also said she was delighted to receive the award for Best Track and thanked her bandmates and her management when accepting the gong. She had earlier performed a stripped down version of ‘Shake It Out’ and then duetted with The Horrors on a new rendition of their single ‘Still Life’.
The Horrors themselves were awarded Best Album, with bassist Rhys Webb thanking their management as they accepted the award for their third album ‘Skying’.
Kasabian won Best British Band and dedicated their award to Davy Jones, singer with The Monkees, who passed away earlier this evening. Frontman Tom Meighan sang a large chunk of the band’s classic single ‘(Theme From) The Monkees’ in tribute to Jones.
The Vaccines won Best New Band, with frontman Justin Young telling the crowd that he was glad the fact that “entertainment was just as important as progression in rock ‘n’ roll had been recognised”.
Hurts picked up Best Video for ‘Sunday’ and dedicated the award to the people of Romania, Carl Barat and Noel Gallagher, while Katy B won Best Dancefloor Anthem for her single ‘Broken Record’, revealing that this was the first award she had ever won.
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Glastonbury was awarded Best Festival, with Michael Eavis promising that the event would return with a strong line-up in 2013, shouting: “Can we do it in 2013? Of course we can.”
Arctic Monkeys won Best Live Band and accepted the award by video, while Azealia Banks, who won the Philip Hall Radar Award, was unable to attend due to illness.
Pulp were awarded with the Teenage Cancer Trust Outstanding Contribution To Music and also performed their hits ‘Babies’ and ‘Mis-Shapes’. Jarvis Cocker dedicated the award to “anyone who came to see us last summer” and also thanked their record label, management and all those who “were still interested”.
Johnny Marr accepted the award for Best Reissue on behalf of The Smiths, telling the crowd that he was “really happy people still liked listening to the songs as he really enjoyed making them”. He also dedicated the awards to his former bandmates Morrissey, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke.
Finally, Noel Gallagher picked up the award for Godlike Genius, accepting the gong after seeing a video in which The Kinks’ Ray Davies, The Who’s Roger Daltrey, Paul Weller, Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, Brandon Flowers, Guy Garvey, Russell Brand and Bobby Gillespie all spoke of their admiration for him.
Picking up the award from Johnny Marr, Gallagher told the applauding crowd: “To all the bands who have been influenced by me. You are welcome.” Gallagher then played a seven-song set, which ended with ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’.
Other awards winners, who did not receive their awards on the night, include Muse, Lady Gaga, Paramore’s Hayley Williams and 30 Seconds To Mars’ Jared Leto. The Vaccines, The Maccabees and Kasabian also performed at the ceremony.
To watch the 2012 NME Awards in full, tune in to Channel 4 on Saturday night (March 3) at 11.55pm (GMT). Half an hour of highlights will be shown on T4 at 9.25am (GMT) the same day.
To read all about the awards and all the shenanigans from the night, pick up next week’s issue of NME, which is on UK newsstands next Wednesday (March 7) or available digitally.
NME Awards – as it happened
NME Awards in photos
The winners of the 2012 NME Awards are as follows:
Best British Band (supported by Sonos)
Winner: Kasabian
Best International Band (supported by T4)
Winner: Foo Fighters
Best Solo Artist (supported by Rekorderlig)
Winner: Florence + The Machine
Best New Band (supported by Boxfresh)
Winner: The Vaccines
Best Live Band (supported by Carling)
Winner: Arctic Monkeys
Best Album (supported by HMV)
Winner: The Horrors – ‘Skying’
Best Track (supported by Fender)
Winner: Florence + The Machine – ‘Shake It Out’
Dancefloor Anthem (supported by NME Radio)
Winner: Katy B – ‘Broken Record’
Best Video (supported by NMEVideo.com)
Winner: Hurts – ‘Sunday’
Best TV Show
Winner: ‘Fresh Meat’
Best Festival
Winner: Glastonbury
Best Film
Winner: ‘Submarine’
Best Music Film
Winner: ‘Back And Forth’ – Foo Fighters
Greatest Music Moment Of The Year
Winner: The Stone Roses reunite
Best Reissue
Winner: The Smiths – ‘Complete Reissues’
Best Book
Winner: Noel Fielding – ‘The Scribblings Of A Madcap Shambleton’
Hero Of The Year
Winner: Matt Bellamy
Villain Of The Year
Winner: Justin Bieber
Worst Album
Winner: Justin Bieber – ‘Under The Mistletoe’
Worst Band
Winner: One Direction
Best Album Artwork
Winner: Friendly Fires – ‘Pala’
Best Band Blog Or Twitter
Winner: @LadyGaga
Best Small Festival
Winner: RockNess
Most Dedicated Fans
Winner: Muse
Hottest Male
Winner: Jared Leto, 30 Seconds To Mars
Hottest Female
Winner: Hayley Williams, ParamoreThe Bronze Star Medal, unofficially the Bronze Star, is a United States decoration awarded to members of the United States Armed Forces for either heroic achievement, heroic service, meritorious achievement, or meritorious service in a combat zone.
When the medal is awarded by the Army and Air Force for acts of valor in combat, the "V" Device is authorized for wear on the medal. When the medal is awarded by the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard for acts of valor or meritorious service in combat, the Combat "V" is authorized for wear on the medal.
Officers from the other Uniformed Services of the United States are eligible to receive this award, as are foreign soldiers who have served with or alongside a service branch of the United States Armed Forces.[5][6]
Civilians serving with U.S. military forces in combat are also eligible for the award. For example, UPI reporter Joe Galloway was awarded the Bronze Star with "V" Device during the Vietnam War for rescuing a badly wounded soldier under fire in the Battle of la Drang, in 1965.[7][8] Another civilian recipient was writer Ernest Hemingway.
General information [ edit ]
The Bronze Star Medal was established by Executive Order 9419, 4 February 1944 (superseded by Executive Order 11046, 24 August 1962, as amended by Executive Order 13286, 28 February 2003).[9] The Bronze Star Medal may be awarded by the Secretary of a military department or the Secretary of Homeland Security with regard to the Coast Guard when not operating as a service in the Navy, or by such military commanders, or other appropriate officers as the Secretary concerned may designate, to any person who, while serving in any capacity in or with the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, or Coast Guard of the United States, after 6 December 1941, distinguishes, or has distinguished, herself or himself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service, not involving participation in aerial flight—
(a) while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States; (b) while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or (c) while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party.
The acts of heroism are of a lesser degree than required for the award of the Silver Star. The acts of merit or acts of valor must be less than that required for the Legion of Merit but must nevertheless have been meritorious and accomplished with distinction. The Bronze Star Medal is awarded only to service members in combat zones who are receiving imminent danger pay.
The Bronze Star Medal (without the "V" device) may be awarded to each member of the Armed Forces of the United States who, after 6 December 1941, was cited in orders or awarded a certificate for exemplary conduct in ground combat against an armed enemy between 7 December 1941 and 2 September 1945. For this purpose, the US Army's Combat Infantryman Badge or Combat Medical Badge award is considered as a citation in orders. Documents executed since 4 August 1944 in connection with recommendations for the award of decorations of higher degree than the Bronze Star Medal cannot be used as the basis for an award under this paragraph.
Effective 11 September 2001, the Meritorious Service Medal may also be bestowed in lieu of the Bronze Star Medal (without Combat "V" device) for meritorious achievement in a designated combat theater.[10]
Appearance [ edit ]
The Bronze Star Medal was designed by Rudolf Freund (1878–1960) of the jewelry firm Bailey, Banks & Biddle.[11] (Freund also designed the Silver Star.[12])
The medal is a bronze star 1 1⁄ 2 inches (38 mm) in circumscribing diameter. In the center is a 3⁄ 16 inch (4.8 mm) diameter superimposed bronze star, the center line of all rays of both stars coinciding. The reverse bears the inscription "HEROIC OR MERITORIOUS ACHIEVEMENT" with a space for the name of the recipient to be engraved. The star hangs from its ribbon by a rectangular metal loop with rounded corners. The suspension ribbon is 1 3⁄ 8 inches (35 mm) wide and consists of the following stripes: 1⁄ 32 inch (0.79 mm) white 67101; 9⁄ 16 inch (14 mm) scarlet 67111; 1⁄ 32 inch (0.79 mm) white; center stripe 1⁄ 8 inch (3.2 mm) ultramarine blue 67118; 1⁄ 32 inch (0.79 mm) white; 9⁄ 16 inch (14 mm) scarlet; and 1⁄ 32 inch (0.79 mm) white.[13]
Authorized devices [ edit ]
The Bronze Star Medal with the "V" device to denote heroism is the fourth highest military decoration for valor. Although a service member may be cited for heroism in combat and be awarded more than one Bronze Star authorizing the "V" device, only one "V" may be worn on each suspension and service ribbon of the medal.[14][15] The following ribbon devices must be specifically authorized in the award citation in order to be worn on the Bronze Star Medal, the criteria for and wear of the devices vary between the services:
History [ edit ]
An example of an army Bronze Star Medal citation, given for combat valor.
Colonel Russell P. "Red" Reeder conceived the idea of the Bronze Star Medal in 1943; he believed it would aid morale if captains of companies or of batteries could award a medal to deserving people serving under them. Reeder felt another medal was needed as a ground equivalent of the Air Medal, and suggested calling the proposed new award the "Ground Medal".[18] The idea eventually rose through the military bureaucracy and gained supporters. General George C. Marshall, in a memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt dated 3 February 1944, wrote
The fact that the ground troops, Infantry in particular, lead miserable lives of extreme discomfort and are the ones who must close in personal combat with the enemy, makes the maintenance of their morale of great importance. The award of the Air Medal has had an adverse reaction on the ground troops, particularly the Infantry Riflemen who are now suffering the heaviest losses, air or ground, in the Army, and enduring the greatest hardships.
The Air Medal had been adopted two years earlier to raise airmen's morale. President Roosevelt authorized the Bronze Star Medal by Executive Order 9419 dated 4 February 1944, retroactive to 7 December 1941. This authorization was announced in War Department Bulletin No. 3, dated 10 February 1944.
President John F. Kennedy amended Executive Order 9419 per Executive Order 11046 dated 24 August 1962 to expand the authorization to include those serving with friendly forces. This allowed for awards where US service members become involved in an armed conflict where the United States was not a belligerent. At the time of the Executive Order, for example, the US was not a belligerent in Vietnam, so US advisers serving with the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces would not have been eligible for the award.
Since the award criteria state that the Bronze Star Medal may be awarded to "any person... while serving in any capacity in or with" the US Armed Forces, awards to members of foreign armed services serving with the United States are permitted. Thus, a number of Allied soldiers received the Bronze Star Medal in World War II, as well as U.N. soldiers in the Korean War, Vietnamese and allied forces in the Vietnam War, and coalition forces in recent military operations such as the Persian Gulf War, War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War. A number of Bronze Star Medals with the "V" device were awarded to veterans of the Battle of Mogadishu.
World War II infantry award [ edit ]
As a result of a study conducted in 1947, the policy was implemented that authorized the retroactive award of the Bronze Star Medal (without the "V" device) to all soldiers who had received the Combat Infantryman Badge or the Combat Medical Badge during World War II. The basis for doing this was that the badges were awarded only to soldiers who had borne the hardships which resulted in General Marshall's support of the Bronze Star Medal. Both badges required a recommendation by the commander and a citation in orders.[13]
U.S. Air Force criteria controversy [ edit ]
In 2012, two U.S. airmen were allegedly subjected to cyber-bullying after receiving Bronze Star Medals for meritorious non-combat service. The two airmen, who had received the medals in March 2012, had been finance NCOICs in medical units deployed to the War in Afghanistan. The awards sparked a debate as to whether or not the Air Force was awarding too many medals to its members, and whether the Bronze Star should be awarded for non-combat service.[19] This prompted the Air Force to take down stories of the two posted to the internet, and to clarify its criteria for awarding medals. The Air Force contended that meritorious service awards of the Bronze Star outnumber valor awards, and that it views awards on a case-by-case basis to maintain the integrity of the award.[20]
This is not the first time that the USAF has been criticized for offering this award. The Department of Defense investigated the award of the Bronze Star Medal (BSM) by the USAF to some 246 individuals after operations in Kosovo in 1999. All but 60 were awarded to officers, and only 16 of those awarded were actually in the combat zone. At least five were awarded to officers who never left Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. During this campaign, the Navy had awarded 69 BSMs, and the Army with 5,000 troops in neighboring Albania (considered part of the combat zone) awarded none.[21][22] In the end, there was a Pentagon review and decision by Congress in 2001 to stop the awarding of Bronze Stars to personnel outside the combat zone.[23]
References [ edit ]
Media related to Bronze Star Medal at Wikimedia Commons
For more information: http://www.bronzestarmedal.org/ Bronze Star Medal Recipients Assc. https://www.linkedin.com/groups/756367/A former Pasadena middle school teacher who's accused of having sex with four students has turned herself into authorities.
LaShawn Simmons posted $60,000 total bond Wednesday on felony charges of sexual assault of a child, online solicitation of a minor and possession of child pornography. All four victims -- two minors and two adults -- currently attend Dobie High School.
We learned Wednesday that Simmons has retained legal counsel.
The two-month investigation began when a parent allegedly found inappropriate Facebook messages between the teacher and her son. Court documents state Simmons allegedly took some of the students back to her apartment and had sex with them.
Last month, Simmons, 41, resigned from her teaching position at Beverly Hills Intermediate School after 14 years with the district.
Anyone who has other information related to this case are asked to contact Trae Morris, detective with the Pasadena ISD Police Department, at 713-740-0063.
___________________________________________________________
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Download our free apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices(AP) — The European Union says it expects to finish allocating this year all of the 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) it has pledged to Turkey to help the country accommodate the nearly 3 million Syrian refugees living there.
Senior European Commission official Myriam Ferran told EU lawmakers Thursday that “we consider we are on track. The deadline should be met.”
Ferran said more than two-thirds of the money already has been |
And Pennsylvania is one such state. The Blaze, Vocativ, and Trib Total Media (a local west Pennsylvania publication) wrote important reports on this story. Pulling from Vocativ:
[su_quote]After being regularly shoved and tripped, and nearly burned with a cigarette lighter, a tormented special-needs student in Pennsylvania decided to take matters into his own hands. He secretly recorded the abuse on his school-issued iPad, and his mother eventually submitted the evidence to the school’s principal.
But instead of punishing the teenage tyrants caught on tape, administrators decided to call the police, who threatened the 15-year-old boy with felony wiretapping, but later reduced the charge to disorderly conduct. He was found guilty on March 19.[/su_quote]
The article from The Blaze also mentions that the administration coerced the boy into deleting the recordings. And we can’t say they did this to save the boy and his family from a potential lawsuit despite “doing the right thing” because they were the ones who called the police on the abused boy.
How classy of them.
Oh and by the way, the school never punished the bullies. No doubt, however, that if some other pervasively bullied kid decides one day that he has had enough and decides to beat up his tormentors, or – god forbid – brings a gun to school, the administration will claim they “did everything they could” to address bullying.
It’s pervasive mentality among school staff which I witnessed when I was a schoolboy back in the 90s: they cut off all peaceful means of resolution because they just can’t be bothered, and then they wonder why shit happens. Not all of them are like that, of course. But too many are.
[su_quote]This isn’t the first time that developmentally disabled kids have covertly recorded bullying on school grounds, but it’s the first case where the victim has been criminally convicted for doing so. At least nine such incidents occurred across the country between 2003 and 2013, often resulting in the firing of school employees, the expulsion of students and legal settlements worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And while it shouldn’t make much of a difference, previous incidents have mostly involved parents slipping discreet spyware into their children’s pockets, rather than the child taking action.[/su_quote]
Indeed. And here is a video of a parent from New Jersey using recording devices effectively in such a case.
[su_quote]The Pennsylvania student, a sophomore who remained unnamed in a report on BenSwann.com, was previously diagnosed with comprehension-delay disorder, anxiety disorder and ADHD. In his testimony, he claimed that he decided to record the incident in order to show his mother that he “wasn’t lying” about the ongoing abuse.
“I was really having things like books slammed upside my head,” he said. “I wanted it to stop. I just felt like nothing was being done.”[/su_quote]
Sometimes recording laws do serve a purpose. But too often people – education administrators especially – hide behind privacy laws (including the Family Education Rights & Privacy Act, or FERPA) as a means of silencing those who wish to expose the abuse that goes on under their watch.
I believe a soapbox is appropriate for this occasion.
What kinds of lessons are the actions of the South Fayette High School administration teaching the kids around them? Nothing less than the importance of not trusting those in authority. The next time someone asks you “what’s wrong with kids today,” remind them of cases like this. Remind them of the “zero tolerance” attitude among adults in academia that jettisons common sense, discretion, and human decency.
Don’t ever let anyone ask “what’s wrong with kids today” (or boys today, for that matter) and get away with it. By and large, kids today are alright.
It’s the adults who are messed up.
The student and his family plan to appeal the ruling on April 29.
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Enter Legal Database(man, even though I'm not an english major or anything that title makes me cry a little.. oh well)
This was the first year my original Secret Santa flaked. Guess I was due for it. Fortunately my rematched Secret Santa pulled through and from the UK no less!
When I first saw the package I knew it was a book so immediately I was wondering if I kept my amazon wishlist up to date, was I going to get something I already have or no longer interested in? Low and behold it was not one but TWO books.
I mentioned somewhere that I had an interest in psychology and physics even though I never took them in college. So these books fit perfectly. Just scanning through them and both had some stuff I wasn't familiar with so were great picks and unexpected. Thanks again whoever you are (aside from real first name I don't know who it is)
Of course, gratuitous cat pictures included. Thanks again Secret Santa Rematch!
Books included:The old OPEC is no more, and its future existence is inextricably linked with the struggle between leading energy states to expand their influence.
More than two months have passed since then, and the breakdown of the talks in Doha proved that the premature optimism was likely based on the desire of market players to overcome their "unlucky streak", rather than on any real shifts in the oil and gas sector. Despite the fact that a final document was signed – a document that is thin in terms of setting stringent conditions, but has nevertheless helped calm market panic – Saudi Arabia called a halt to the negotiations, citing Iran's refusal to take part in the Doha process. OPEC has once again proven ineffective after the Persian Gulf states started to act in defence of their own interests, paying no heed to what the other members of the "oil club" were doing.In December 2015, without too much ado in the global media, Indonesia rejoined OPEC ; its membership was suspended in 2009 due to its inability to meet production quotas. Indonesia is a net oil importing country since the 850,000 barrels of oil it produces daily constitute only half of its required daily norm.China trade performance in rapid decline as imports and exports fall, renminbi depreciates
Updated
China's trade performance has continued to deteriorate with both imports and exports falling much more rapidly than forecast.
In terms of the local currency, the renminbi imports fell 16 per cent in October, compared to the same time last year.
In September they were down 18 per cent.
Imports have now fallen for 12 consecutive months, reflecting an ongoing weakness in the domestic economy.
Exports weakened again, falling 3.6 per cent in October, following another fall in September.
With imports falling faster than exports, the total trade surplus has tumbled by 8 per cent in the first 10 months this year compared to official target of 6 per cent growth.
But China's overall trade surplus still remained at a robust $US61.6 billion.
Exports to the US and Australia have been growth areas — up 5.8 per cent and 3.7 per cent respectively over the year to date — while exports to key markets in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong have all fallen.
'Savage' trade performance in Australian-dominated commodities
ANZ chief economist in China Li-Gang Liu said the figures showed China's export sector would continue to face significant headwinds.
Dr Liu pointed out while the renminbi had depreciated by more than 2 per cent since August, China's nominal effective exchange rate remained strong, damaging export competitiveness.
"A moderate economic recovery in advanced economies could lend some support to global final demand, but this is unlikely to help China's exports much because of large devaluation of other emerging market currencies," Dr Liu said.
Some of the most savage declines have been in commodities dominated by Australian exporters.
Coal imports are down almost 30 per cent in volume, and 40 per cent in value in the year to date.
The weakening trade performance followed China's economic growth in the September quarter falling below 7 per cent for the first time since the GFC, and the Communist Party lowering it growth target to 6.5 per cent over the next five years.
Dr Liu said the large trade surplus could offset capital outflow and curb the expected depreciation of the renimbi.
While the expected move by the US Federal Reserve to start raising interest rates later this year may put the renminbi under pressure, Dr Liu said Chinese authorities were likely to support their currency in the short term as it lobbies to be included in the IMF's basket of international currencies.
The next key Chinese economic figures on inflation will be released on Tuesday, while a batch of data including retail sales, industrial production and fixed asset investment will be out on Wednesday.
Topics: business-economics-and-finance, mining-industry, mining-rural, trade, australia
First postedNo matter where you live in this great world of ours, winter is about to get a whole lot colder. That’s because we recently announced our intricate, true-to-the-show Cold Gun Prop Replica. If you’re a fan of The CW’s The Flash, or even just a fan of Captain Cold and his gang of Rogues, you’re going to want to own this beauty. It measures 18” long x 8” tall x 3” wide, and boasts some pretty impressive LED lighting effects.
While we left out the cyclotron so you won’t be able to freeze your boss or the annoying neighbor down the road (don’t pretend you haven’t thought about it!), we’re very pleased with this new replica and we thought we’d show it off with a Collectible Close-Up. Check out the images below, and don’t forget that you can click on any of the photos in the gallery to zoom in. Plus, as an added bonus, you can also click on the blueprint above to download a printable PDF.
The Flash: Cold Gun Prop Replica will be available at your favorite comic book shop, specialty store or online retailer in May, 2016. That should be just in time for The Flash’s season finale, so make sure you get those pre-orders in now.In grammar, a frequentative form (abbreviated FREQ or FR) of a word is one that indicates repeated action, but is not to be confused with iterative aspect.[1] The frequentative form can be considered a separate but not completely independent word called a frequentative. The frequentative is no longer productive in English, but still is in some language groups, such as Finno-Ugric, Balto-Slavic, Turkic, etc.
English [ edit ]
English has -le and -er as frequentative suffixes. Some frequentative verbs surviving in English and their parent verbs are listed below. Additionally, some frequentative verbs are formed by reduplication of a monosyllable (e.g., coo-cooing, cf. Latin murmur). Frequentative nouns are often formed by combining two different vowel grades of the same word (as in teeter-totter, pitter-patter, chitchat, etc.)
frequentative original suffix batter bat -er blabber blab -er bobble bob -le clamber climb -er clutter clot -er crackle crack -le crumble crumb -le curdle curd -le dabble dab -le dribble drip -le dazzle daze -le flitter flit -le flutter float -er fondle fond -le glimmer gleam -er gobble gob -le gruntle grunt -le haggle hag = hew, hack -le jiggle jig -le jostle joust -le muddle mud -le nestle nest -le nuzzle nose -le paddle pad -le patter pat -er prattle prate -le prickle prick -le pucker pock, poke -er putter put -er scuffle scuff -le scuttle scud -le slither slide -er sniffle sniff -le snuffle snuff -le snuggle snug -le sparkle spark -le spatter spit -er speckle speck -le straddle stride -le suckle suck -le swaddle swathe -le swagger swag -er swindle swindan (Old English cognate, 'to waste away') -le tickle tick -le topple top -le tousle tease (apart) -le trample tramp -le toggle tug -le tumble tumben (Middle English) -le twinkle twink -le waddle wade -le waggle wag -le wrangle wring -le wrestle wrest -le
The present tense in English usually has a frequentative meaning. For example, "I walk to work." means "I walk to work most days.", and would be true even if the speaker was not on their way to work there at the time.
Finnish [ edit ]
In Finnish, a frequentative verb signifies a single action repeated, "around the place" both spatially and temporally. The complete translation would be "go — around aimlessly". There is a large array of different frequentatives, indicated by lexical agglutinative markers. In general, one frequentative is -:i-, and another -ele-, but it is almost always combined with something else. Some forms:
sataa — sa del la — sat ele e "to rain — to rain occasionally — it rains occasionally"
"to rain — to rain occasionally — it rains occasionally" ampua — ammu skella — ammu skele n "to shoot — go shooting around — I go shooting around"
"to shoot — go shooting around — I go shooting around" juosta — juokse nnella — juokse ntele n "to run — to run around (to and fro) — I run around"
"to run — to run around (to and fro) — I run around" kirjoittaa — kirjoi tella — kirjoi ttele n "to write — to write (something short) occasionally — I write "around""
"to write — to write (something short) occasionally — I write "around"" järjestää — järje stellä — järje stele n "to put in order — to arrange continuously, to play around — I play around (with them) in order to put them in order"
"to put in order — to arrange continuously, to play around — I play around (with them) in order to put them in order" heittää — heitt elehti ä — heitt elehdi t "to throw — to swerve — you swerve"
"to throw — to swerve — you swerve" loikata — loik ki a — loik i n "to jump once — to jump (again and again) — I jump (again and again)"
"to jump once — to jump (again and again) — I jump (again and again)" istua — istu ksi a — istu ksi t "to sit — to sit (randomly somewhere), loiter — you loiter there by sitting"
There are several frequentative morphemes, underlined above; these are affected by consonant gradation as indicated. Their meanings are slightly different; see the list, arranged infinitive~personal:
-ella ~ -ele- : bare frequentative.
~ : bare frequentative. -skella ~ -skele- : frequentative unergative verb, where the action is wanton (arbitrary)
~ : frequentative unergative verb, where the action is wanton (arbitrary) -stella ~ -stele- : frequentative causative, where the subject causes something indicated in the root, as "order" vs. "to continuously try to put something in order".
~ : frequentative causative, where the subject causes something indicated in the root, as "order" vs. "to continuously try to put something in order". -nnella ~ -ntele- : a frequentative, where an actor is required. The marker -nt- indicates a continuing effort, therefore -ntele- indicates a series of such efforts.
~ : a frequentative, where an actor is required. The marker indicates a continuing effort, therefore indicates a series of such efforts. -elehtia ~ -elehdi- : movement that is random and compulsive, as in under pain, e.g. vääntelehtiä "writhe in pain", or heittelehtiä "to swerve"
~ : movement that is random and compulsive, as in under pain, e.g. "writhe in pain", or "to swerve" -:ia- ~ -i- : a continuing action definitely at a point in time, where the action or effort is repeated.
~ : a continuing action definitely at a point in time, where the action or effort is repeated. -ksia~-ksi-: same as -i-, but wanton, cf. -skella
Frequentatives may be combined with momentanes, that is, to indicate the repetition of a short, sudden action. The momentane -ahta- can be prefixed with the frequentative -ele- to produce the morpheme -ahtele-, as in täristä "to shake (continuously)" → tärähtää "to shake suddenly once" → tärähdellä "to shake, such that a single, sudden shaking is repeated". For example, the contrast between these is that ground shakes (maa tärisee) continuously when a large truck goes by, the ground shakes once (maa tärähtää) when a cannon fires, and the ground shakes suddenly but repeatedly (maa tärähtelee) when a battery of cannons is firing.
Since the frequentative is a lexical, not a grammatical contrast, considerable semantic drift may have occurred.
For a list of different real and hypothetical forms, see: [1].
Loanwords are put into the frequentative form, if the action is such. If the action can be nothing else but frequentative, the "basic form" doesn't even exist, such as with "to go shopping".
surffata — surffailla "to surf — to surf (around in the net)"
"to surf — to surf (around in the net)" *shopata — shoppailla "*to shop once — to go shopping"
Adjectives can similarly receive frequentative markers: iso — isotella "big — to talk big", or feikkailla < English fake "to be fake, blatantly and consistently".
Greek [ edit ]
In Homer and Herodotus, there is a past frequentative, usually called "past iterative", formed like the imperfect, but with an additional -sk- suffix before the endings.[2]
ékhe-sk-on "I used to have" (imperfect ékh-on)
The same suffix is used in inchoative verbs in both Ancient Greek and Latin.
Hungarian [ edit ]
In Hungarian it is quite common and everyday to use frequentative.
Frequentative verbs are formed with the suffix –gat (–get after a front vowel; see vowel harmony). Also there is a so-called Template rule which force an other vowel in between the base verb and the affix to result in a word containing at least three syllables. Verbal prefixes (coverbs) do not count as a syllable.
Some verbs' frequentative forms have acquired an independent non-frequentative meaning. In these cases the three syllables rule is not applied as the form is not considered a frequentative. These words can be affixed with –gat again to create a frequentative meaning.
In rare cases non-verbs can be affixed by –gat to give them similar modification in meaning as to verbs. In most cases these non-verbs are obviously related to some actions, like a typical outcome or object. The resulting word basically has the same meaning as if the related verb were affixed with –gat.
The change in meaning of a frequentative compared to the base can be different depending on the base: The –gat affix can modify the occurrences or the intensity or both of an action. Occasionally it produces a specific meaning which is related but distinct from the original form's.
Examples:
frequentative root translation of root translation of –gat form explanation fizetget fizet to pay paying for a longer period with probably less intensity the vowel harmony forced -GAT to take form of -get kéreget kér to ask begging for a living because the resulting word must be at least three syllables long a new vowel is added to the word: kér-e-get kiütöget (ki)üt hit (out) hit out sg. multiple times the prefixed coverb "ki" (out) doesn't count as a syllable so an extra vowel is added: (ki)üt-ö-get hallgatgat hallgat to listen to listen multiple times but with possibly less intensity the original verb "hallgat" (to listen) is a syntactically imperfect frequentative form of "hall" (to hear) rángat ránt to hitch to tousle this one is kind of an exception for the three syllable rule, however "rántogat" (ránt-o-gat) is uncommon but valid, and has a slightly bigger emphasis on the separate nature of each pull rather than a continuous shaking as in "rángat" jajgat jaj ouch (a shout) to shout "jaj" multiple times, probably because of pain the original word is not a verb, so the three syllable rule is not applied béget bee baa (onomatopoeia for a sheep) to shout baa multiple times same as above mosogat mos to wash to do the dishes the frequentative form (mos-o-gat) has an own non-frequentative meaning mosogatgat mosogat to do the dishes to do the dishes slowly and effortlessly as the frequentative "mosogat" has a non frequentative meaning, it can be affixed by -GAT to make it frequentative dolgozgat dolgozik to work to work with less effort and intensity, as in: "Ők fizetgetnek, én dolgozgatok" (They pretend to pay me, I pretend to work.) the "-ik" at the end of "dolgozik" is an irregular ending which is only effective in third person singular, so -GAT sticks to "dolgoz" which is the root of the word
Latin [ edit ]
In Latin, frequentative verbs show repeated or intense action. They are formed from the supine stem with -tāre/-sāre, -itāre, -titāre/-sitāre added.
ventitāre, ‘come frequently or repeatedly’ (< venio, ‘come’; see Catullus 8, l. 4)
cantāre, ‘(continue to) sing’ (< canere, ‘sing a song’)
cursāre, ‘run around’ (< currere, ‘run’)
dictāre, ‘dictate’ (< dīcere, ‘speak, say’)
āctitāre, ‘zealously agitate’ and agitāre, ‘put into motion’ (< agere, ‘do, drive’)
pulsāre, ‘push/beat around’ (< pellere, ‘push (once), beat’)
iactāre, ‘shake, disturb’ (< iacere, ‘throw, cast’)
The deponent verb minārī (‘threaten’) has frequentatives of both deponent and active form: minitārī and minitāre.
Lithuanian [ edit ]
In Lithuanian, the past iterative or frequentative signifies a single action repeated in the past.
The past iterative does not exist as a morphological tense in Latvian and in the Samogitian dialect of Lithuanian. In Latvian, the corresponding construction can be expressed periphrastically using the verb "mēgt" which is a conjugatable verb. In Samogitian, the corresponding verb is "liuobėti". Compare Latvian: Mēs mēdzām daudz lasīt, Lithuanian: Mes daug skaitydavome, Samogitian: Mes liuobiam daug skaitītė, English: We used to read a lot.
It is created from the infinitive without the infinitive suffix -ti + dav + suffix for frequentative.
For example:
dirbti — dirbau — dirb dav au "to work — to work occasionally — to work regularly (repeated action in the past)"
dirbti = to work norėti = to want skaityti = to read 1. sg. dirb-dav-au norė-dav-au skaity-dav-au 2. sg. dirb-dav-ai norė-dav-ai skaity-dav-ai 3. sg. dirb-dav-o norė-dav-o skaity-dav-o 1. pl. dirb-dav-ome norė-dav-ome skaity-dav-ome 2. pl. dirb-dav-ote norė-dav-ote skaity-dav-ote 3. pl dirb-dav-o norė-dav-o skaity-dav-o
Polish [ edit ]
In the Polish language, certain imperfective verbs ending in -ać denote repeated or habitual action.
jeść (to eat) → jadać (to eat habitually)
(to eat) → (to eat habitually) iść (to walk) → chadzać.
(to walk) →. widzieć (to see) → widywać
(to see) → pisać (to write) → pisywać
(to write) → czytać (to read) → czytywać
The interfix -yw- used to form many frequentative verbs has a different function for prefixed perfective verbs: it serves to create their imperfective equivalents. For instance, rozczytywać (to try to read something barely legible) is simply an imperfective equivalent of rozczytać (to succeed at reading something barely legible).
Russian [ edit ]
In the Russian language, the frequentative form of verbs to denote a repeated or customary action is produced by inserting the suffix -ив/-ыв, often accompanied with a change in the root of the word (vowel alternation, change of the last root consonant).
видеть (to see) → видывать (to see repeatedly)
(to see) → (to see repeatedly) сидеть (to sit) → сиживать
(to sit) → ходить (to walk) → хаживать
(to walk) → носить (to wear) → нашивать
(to wear) → гладить (to stroke) → поглаживать
(to stroke) → писать (to write) → пописывать
(to write) → An interesting example is with the word брать (to take); an archaic usage recorded among hunters, normally used in the past tense, in hunter's boasting: бирал, бирывал meaning "used to take (quite a few) trophies".
Turkish [ edit ]
Turkish also has a similar form. The 'helping verbs' ( 'yardımcı eylem' / 'yardımcı fiil' ) are used as suffixes to denote ability ( '-ebilmek' ), imminence ('-ivermek'), close miss (narrow escape) situation ('-eyazmak'), and repetition ('-egelmek' or '-edurmak').[citation needed]
anlat- (to recite) → anlatagelmek (to be reciting repetitively.)
For other helping verbs, see Helping verbs section under Turkish grammar.
Reduplication [ edit ]
The simplest way to produce a frequentative is reduplication, either of the entire word or of one of its phonemes. This is common in Austronesian languages, although reduplication also serves to pluralize and intensify nouns and adjectives. Examples in Niuean are available here.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Gildersleeve, B. L. (1895). Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar. Bolchazy-Carducci. ISBN 0-86516-477-0.Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the darling of the American left, has endorsed California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who announced her bid for retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer’s seat earlier this week. Warren is the left’s new rising star, pitching old-style liberalism to a base eager to transcend the frustrations of the Obama presidency.
Sounding the populist themes that have endeared her to the left-wing fringe, Warren wrote on her campaign blog:
California Attorney General Kamala Harris is a smart, tough, and experienced prosecutor who has consistently stood up to Wall Street. Yesterday, she announced her candidacy for the United States Senate, and I’m happy to support her campaign.
Warren also tweeted her support for Harris, citing the latter’s advocacy on behalf of homeowners against bank foreclosures.
I worked with @KamalaHarris when she stood up to the banks & fought for CA homeowners. Happy to support her campaign: http://t.co/k5YQQH5MUO — Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) January 14, 2015
Both Warren and Harris are of “Indian” descent, after a manner of speaking. Warren claims Native American ancestry (though holds no formal tribal membership and appears to have fabricated the claim), while Harris’s mother emigrated to the United States from India.
Warren’s endorsement is the first major coup of the Harris campaign, though it also signals that she will run to the left, very much in the Boxer mould. That leaves room for opponents in the center, who may be able to make use of the “jungle” primary to pull in votes from both parties.LONDON/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - As a lengthening economic slowdown bites, the antidote for the renewable energy sector may come as a surprise — a lower oil price.
Solar photovoltaic panels are seen at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada in this picture taken August 1, 2008. REUTERS/Steve Marcus
Government subsidies and record prices for competing fossil fuels have underpinned the alternative energy boom, but now they are now starting to work against the sector.
Reliance on subsidies exposes the likes of wind and solar power to the whim of governments grappling with wider voter priorities during a global economic slowdown.
As oil and energy bills have soared consumers have become less tolerant of the extra costs passed on to them by utilities for the greener option.
“Government priorities in the last five years or so have been very clearly environment, security of supply, and way down the list has been price... all of a sudden affordability has shot to the top,” said Citigroup utilities analyst Peter Atherton.
“If oil drops back to $80 then government can probably live with it (the extra cost of climate policies).”
Higher oil prices have made onshore wind competitive with natural gas, making continuing subsidies there less important, but more expensive renewable energy sectors and especially solar will be hurt by a policy pull-back.
Europe, the United States, China and India want to ramp up power production from low-carbon wind, solar and biomass to battle climate change and source more secure, domestic energy.
But goals to produce power from the sun or wind stoke energy costs because utilities pass on the higher price to consumers.
“We’ve seen a worsening more to do with economic weakness than anything else, it’s much harder to push through or in some cases even maintain support packages that push up energy costs when consumers are under pressure,” said Michael Liebreich, chairman of research firm, New Energy Finance (NEF).
“If oil comes below $100... the consumer will bear it,” Liebreich said, adding that a prospective U.S. cap and trade scheme, which would impose an extra cost on carbon emissions from industry, looked less certain now than six months ago.
Global investment in clean energy from April to June was less than the same period last year, and at $33 billion barely half the last quarter of 2007, initial NEF figures show.
Most Californians won’t support the state’s ambitious efforts to fight global warming if they raise energy costs, a survey conducted by a pro-business group found last week.
CREDIT CRUNCH
The overall result globally is less clear climate policy.
Beijing’s efforts to rein in rash lending and curb inflation are hurting wind power project financings, in a country poised to become the world’s fastest growing wind energy market, said Steve Sawyer, secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council.
An EU deal fleshing out how to get a fifth of energy from renewable sources by 2020 may now be delayed until April from expectations of agreement in December, amid horse-trading to ease targets, said Sawyer.
Britain has suggested for possible inclusion in the target technologies which trap carbon emissions from coal plants, called carbon capture and storage.
The U.S. election is delaying other measures. United Nations talks to agree a new global climate treaty are dragging as negotiators await the stance of a new U.S. president.
Extension of current U.S. tax credits in return for generation of wind, solar and geothermal power may not now meet a December 31 expiry date, after becoming embroiled in an election dispute about links to fossil fuel subsidies.
Other sources of electricity besides renewables, including gas, coal and nuclear, also get subsidies, environmentalists point out.
COST
The long-term future of renewable energy looks assured, as scientists and economists warn of catastrophic climate change if the world continues to rely on fossil fuels.
The sector has drawn big hitters, such as oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, who is building a $10 billion wind farm in Texas. Wind power this year passed a global milestone of 100 gigawatts installed power, and may be helped further by a succession of offshore wind projects planned in Europe.
And momentum could snow-ball if $148 billion clean energy investment last year spurs cost cuts which make the likes of solar power compelling energy alternatives.
But in the meantime cost concerns are paramount. The high price of solar power reflects a bottleneck in the raw material, solar grade silicon, and is threatening to choke policy support and demand, forecast to grow at 35 percent a year.
“I’d say it (policy) is a risk, but the bigger risk is raw material costs. If that doesn’t come down then the solar industry is in trouble,” said Sam Dubinsky, analyst at Oppenheimer & Co in New York.Many films have portrayed mental disorders or used them as backdrops for other themes. This is a list of some of those films, sorted by disorder, regardless of whether or not the disorder is portrayed accurately. For instance, though 50 First Dates presents a case of anterograde amnesia, the type depicted does not actually exist. Also, of the "mental disorders" listed below, "sadistic personality disorder", "self-injury", and "suicide"—while referring to undesirable behaviors—are not mental disorders recognized in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Similarly, dissociative identity disorder, formerly called "multiple identity disorder", is one of the most controversial psychiatric disorders, with no clear consensus on diagnostic criteria or treatment.[1] Most films purporting to represent dissociative identity disorder would not leave that impression.
Owing to the nature of drama, extreme and florid manifestations of any given disorder tend to prevail over the more subtle ones typical of the average case. For example, people with agoraphobia are generally portrayed in drama as recluses who never, or almost never, venture from their homes; in reality, this is rare and extreme, not typical of the agoraphobic population.
Anterograde amnesia [ edit ]
A person with anterograde amnesia is unable to form new memories.
Retrograde amnesia [ edit ]
A much-used plot device, retrograde amnesia occurs when a person forgets part or all of his or her past.
Psychogenic amnesia [ edit ]
"Psychogenic amnesia, also known as dissociative amnesia, is memory loss caused by psychological stress."
Lacunar amnesia [ edit ]
Lacunar amnesia is the loss of memory about one specific event.
Good Dick- 2008 Character of The Woman played by Marianna Palka
The Good Son-1993 Character of Henry Evans played by Macaulay Culkin
Awakenings- Character of Leonard Lowe played by Robert De Niro
Previously called "multiple personality disorder".
"Recent psychiatric classifications refer to the syndrome as shared psychotic disorder (DSM-IV) (297.3) and induced delusional disorder (F24) in the ICD-10."
Marnie - 1964
- 1964 Maid In Manhattan- 2002 Character of Marisa Ventura played by Jennifer Lopez
Sleeping with the Enemy- Character of Martin Burney played by Patrick Bergin
Firestarter - 1984 Character of Charlene "Charlie" McGee played by Drew Barrymore
- 1984 Character of Charlene "Charlie" McGee played by Drew Barrymore The Stand - 1994 Character of Trashcan Man
Love & Other Drugs- 2010 Character of Maggie Murdock played by Anne Hathaway
Father Goose 1964
"Drugs listed from most addictive, harmful or destructive to least (from most to least dangerous, based on a 2007 scientific research study."[4]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]As the fallout over the Alabama Senate race continues, the blame game is in full swing inside the White House as President Donald Trump has looked to find a scapegoat after his agenda was dealt a devastating blow with Roy Moore's loss.
Trump and the GOP have been left to pick up the pieces after the historic win by Democratic candidate Doug Jones on Tuesday night. The president threw his weight behind a disgraced Moore, as many Republicans were left without direction and torn between supporting an accused sexual predator or pleasing their boss.
Advertisement:
"This is the worst political operation in my lifetime in a White House, Republican or Democrat," A Republican close to the White House told CNN. "It's just a rudderless ship with no direction and no captain."
Trump has placed at least some of the blame for Moore's loss on his longtime ally and former chief strategist Steve Bannon, after he sold Trump a "a bill of goods" in his pressure to have the president support the historically controversial candidate, the Washington Post reported.
Leading up to Tuesday night, Trump initially groaned about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and expressed that he attempted to push out Moore prematurely, the Post reported.
Republicans are all over the map on the issue, but some have been vocal about how dangerous Trump's endorsement of Moore and Bannon politics could be.
"This guy [Steve Bannon] does not belong on the national stage. He looks like some dis |
athers: Money and power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, New York, Grove Press, P. 46.
5
Tay, S., C., (1996), Human Rights, Culture, and the Singapore Example, McGill L.J., Vol. 41, pp. 743-779.
6
Arnold, W., (2003), Singapore Goes for Biotech, The New York Times, August 26th,http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/26/business/singapore-goes-for-biotech.html
7
The CIA World Factbook – Singapore https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sn.html
8
Business Times, “GLCs shine – with or without privatisation, September 6th 2002.
9
Porter, M., E., (1990), The Competitive Advantage of Nations, New York, Free Press, P. 566.
10
Ho ching, a national university and Stanford educated electrical engineer who first joined the Ministry ofdefence and then state owned Singapore Technologies Group.
11
Extending Pathways, Temasek Review 2012, http://www.temasekreview.com.sg/documents/TR2012_Eng.pdf
12
Backman, M., (2008), Asia Future Shock: Business Crisis and Opportunity in the Coming Years, London, Palgrave MacMillan, P. 119.
13
GIC manages its investment portfolio for the long term, Ministry of Finance, 23rd September 2011,http://app.mof.gov.sg/TemNewsroomDetail.aspx?pagesid=20090924508092100125&pagemode=live&type=forum&cmpar_year=2011&news_sid=20110923697233305980&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
14
Sovereign-wealth funds: Asset backed insecurity, The Economist, 17th January 2008,http://www.economist.com/node/10533428?story_id=10533428
15
Editorial team, (2008), Sovereign Wealth Funds: Shrek or White Knight?, 27th Feb., EEO.com.cn,http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/feature/2008/02/27/92907.html
16
Business Times, “Temasek takes 10% stake in Indian logistics company”, November 24, 2004.
17
See: Studwell, J., (2007), “Asian Godfathers”, P. 46.
18
See: Corruption in the Lee Family: http://sgforums.com/forums/10/topics/127699, See also: Hoyt, C., (2010), Censored in Singapore, The New York Times, April 3rd,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/opinion/04pubed.html?_r=0
19
Backman, M., (2006), The Asian Insider: Unconventional wisdom for Asian business, London, Palgrave MacMillan, P. 16.
20
Classens, S., Djankov, S., & Lang, L., (1999), Who controls East Asian corporations?, Washington D.C, World Bank.
21
Backman, M., & Butler, C., (2007), Big in Asia, 30 strategies for business success, London Palgrave MacMillan, P. 297.
22
http://www.creative.com/corporate/investor/files/AR/fy12.pdf
23
http://popular.listedcompany.com/misc/ar2011.pdf
24
http://ir.zaobao.com.sg/thakral/doc/thakral_ar2011.pdf
25
http://www.yeos.com.sg/imagestore/userfiles/file/financial_reports/YHS_AR_2011.pdf
26
http://breadtalk.listedcompany.com/misc/ar2011.pdf
27
Chernyshenko, O. S., Gomulya, D., Phan, W. M. J., Lai, Y. Y., Ho, M. H. R., Uy, M. A., Chan, K. Y.& Bedford, O. (2012) Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2011 Singapore Report, Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, pp 12 & 19.
28
Chernyshenko, O. S., at. al., (2012), “Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2011 Singapore Report”, P. 10.
29
Chernyshenko, O. S., at. al., (2012), “Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2011 Singapore Report”, P. 22.
30
Ong, E., (2011), Why Singapore government become like that?, New Mandala, 18th December,http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2011/12/18/why-singapore-government-become-like-that/
31
http://www.edb.gov.sg/content/edb/en.html?cmpid=edb_en33
32
Report of the Remaking Singapore Committee: Changing Mindsets, Deepening Relationships, June 2003, P. 10,http://was.nl.sg/wayback/20070115030104/http://www.remakingsingapore.gov.sg/Full%20Version%20of%20Remake%20Sg.pdf
33
http://www.tremeritus.com/2012/09/11/remaking-singapore-again-no-problem-listen-only-mah/
34
Loh, A., (2012), Slaughtered sacred cows – again?, Publichouse.sg, 11th August,http://www.publichouse.sg/categories/community/item/731-slaughtering-sacred-cows-%E2%80%93-again
35
Mauzy, D., K., & Milne, R., S., (2002), Singapore Politics Under the People’s Action Party, London, Routledhe.
36
Mauzy, & Milne, R. (2002), “Singapore Politics Under the People’s Action Party”
37
Tremewan, C., (1996), The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore, London, Palgrave Macmillan.
38
Tan, N., (2009), Institutionalized Hegemonic party: The Resilience of the People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore, P. 4, http://www.mcgill.ca/files/isid/Tan.Singapore.pdf
39
Gallagher, M., & marsh, M., (1988), Candidate Selection in Comparative Perspective, London, Sage Publications, P. 265.
40
One famous case was the prosecution of the sole opposition Member of Parliament Joshua BenjaminJeyaretnam in the mid 1980s for financial fraud in connection with donations made to the Workers’ Party. On appeal to the Privy Council, which was allowed at the time, after review of the original conviction expressed deep disquiet that by a series of judgments Jeyaretnam had suffered ‘a grievous injustice’.
41
http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2004/41659.htm
42
Greenless, D., (2006), Courts in Singapore come under scrutiny, The New York Times, May 9,http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/09/business/worldbusiness/09iht-courts.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
43
This case is a dispute between Enernorth and Oakwell, where in 1997, the two companies entered into a joint venture to build and operate two barge mounted electricity generating plants in India. The project ran into trouble, where Enernorth bought Oakwell’s stake in the project for S$2.79 Million and royalties once finance was obtained. Any disputes would be settled by Singapore courts. Enernorth failed to raise the financing and defaulted on payment to Oakwell. The Singapore High Court and later Court of Appeal awarded Oakwell the disputed amounts, full costs and interest amounting to S$5.4 Million. Enernorth had no assets in Singapore, soOakwell applied to the Ontario Superior Corth to enforce the ruling in Canada. The Superior Court ruled inOakwell’s favour. Enernorth appealed the ruling with a fierce attack on the integrity of the system, claiming the standards of the Singapore legal system did not meet the standards of the Canadian legal system for rulings to be upheld in Canada.
44
Reported in: Greenless, D., (2006), Courts in Singapore come under scrutiny
45
http://en.rsf.org/spip.php?page=classement&id_rubrique=1001
46
Bland, B., (2010), Book Review: Once a Jolly hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock, Asia Sentinel, 13th August, http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2638&Itemid=396
47
Chee, S., C., (2010), A Nation Cheated, Self Published.
48
Jacabson, M., (2010), The Singapore Solution, National Geographic Magazine, January,http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/01/singapore/jacobson-text
49
Goh, J., W., (2011), Culture as Unconscious: The paradox of our social campaigns, Feb. 28th,http://blog.nus.edu.sg/dansong/2011/02/28/paradox-campaigns/
50
Ong, A., (2012), Singapore’s national conversation, New Mandala, 10th September,http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2012/09/10/singapores-national-conversation/
51
Barzilai, A., (2004), The Singapore Armed Forces (SAF): A Deep, Dark. Secret Love Affair,http://cs.uwec.edu/~tan/saf_israel.htm
52
Singapore celebrates Peace Carvin V partnership with US Air Force, Air Combat Command, November 23 2009,http://www.acc.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123178824
53
Ramesh, S., (2007), SAF remains final guarantor of Singapore’s independence, channelnewsasia.com, 1st July,http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/285586/1/.html
54
Teo, C., H., (2005), Lunch talk on “defending Singapore: Strategies for a small state” by Minister for DefenceTeo Chee Hean, MINDEF Singapore, 21st April,http://www.mindef.gov.sg/imindef/news_and_events/nr/2005/apr/21apr05_nr2.html
55
Tan, K., P., (2001), “Civic Society” and the “New Economy” in Patriarchal Singapore, Crossroads, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 95-124.
56
Regnier, P., (1992), Singapore: City-State in Southeast Asia, Kuala Lumpur, S. Abdul Majeed & Co.
57
Teh, H., F., (2005), The Soldier and the City-State: Civil-Military Relations and the case of Singapore, Pointer,Vol. 31, No. 3, http://www.mindef.gov.sg/imindef/publications/pointer/journals/2005/v31n3/features/feature4.html
58
The CIA World Factbook – Singapore, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sn.html
59
Teh, H., F., (2005), “The Soldier and the City-State”.
60
Studwell, J., (2007), “Asian Godfathers”, P. 102.
61
FMT Staff, (2013), Singapore MOF: lawyer’s Claim ‘simply false’, Free Malaysia Today, March 22nd,http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2013/03/22/singapore-mof-lawyers-claim-simply-false/
62
Hit song by Martha Reeves & The Vandellas 1965
63
Tambyah, S., K., & Tan, S., J., (2013), Happiness and Wellbeing: A Singaporean Experience, Oxford, Routledge
64
Coopers, M., (2011), Singapore’s Ruling Class Fighting Like Never Before, FMT News, August 11th,http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2011/04/30/singapore%e2%80%99s-rulers-fighting-like-never-before/
65
Coopers, M., (2013), The emerging ‘invisible’ underclass in S’pore, FMT News, March 12,http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2013/03/12/the-emerging-%e2%80%98invisible%e2%80%99-underclass-in-spore/
66
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html?countryName=Singapore&countryCode=sn®ionCode=eas&rank=29#sn
67
Wilkinson, R., G., & Pickett, K., (2009), The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London, Allen Lane.
68
Singapore’s Democracy in Progress, The Wall Street Journal, August 31st 2011,http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904332804576540230830563192.html#articleTabs%3Darticle
69
Sinpeng, A., & Walker, A., (2012), Democracy in Southeast Asia: A new generation’s take, New Mandala, 26th March, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2012/03/26/democracy-in-southeast-asia-a-new-generations-take/
70
Backman, M., (2006), “The Asian Insider”, pp. 92-93.
71
Backman, M., (2006), “The Asian Insider”, P. 92.
72
Backman, M., (2008), Asia Future Shock: Business Crisis and Opportunity in the Coming Years, London, Palgrave MacMillan, P. 101.
73
Walsh, B., (2012), In the shadow of strongmen, New Mandala, 2nd November,http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2012/11/02/in-the-shadow-of-strongmen/
74
George, C., (2013), The PAP: can it remake itself?, Air-conditioned Nation,http://www.airconditionednation.com/2013/01/03/the-pap-2/
75
The cadre system our biggest obstacle to democracy, Rethinking the Rice Bowl, http://sonofadud.com/stories-from-the-stairwell/the-cadre-system-our-biggest-obstacle-to-democracy/
76
Business Times, “PM Goh: Ho Ching appointed for the greater good”, June 18 2002.
77
Barr, M., (2012), Splits in the Singapore elite, New Mandala, 2nd November,http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2012/11/02/splits-in-the-singapore-elite/The butt of much public mockery when Sky’s cameras captured assorted well-heeled corporate clients peering through its walls of two‑way glass last Monday night, Manchester City’s Tunnel Club is the most amusing but not necessarily most interesting renovation to have been undertaken at the Etihad Stadium during the close season. Moving on from the well fed and watered supporters staring in slack-jawed wonder at the exhibits as they prepared for battle, the cameras also gave us a glimpse of an inner sanctum that, for the time being at least, remains closed to prying eyes on match days.
The stadium’s home dressing room is as opulent as you might expect for such a wealthy club, but it is its sheer roundness that is most striking. Returning for his early plunge in the state-of-the-art hydrotherapy pool after being sent off on his home debut, Kyle Walker will no doubt have been struck by the rotational symmetry of his surroundings as he angrily flung his shin pads into one of the corners that aren’t there, before being enveloped in the life-affirming chi that feng shui experts tell us a 360-degree dwelling space provides.
Harmonising his players with their surroundings may not have been uppermost in Pep Guardiola’s mind when he signed off on the summer redesign of the home dressing room, but the decision to make it circular was a very conscious one. Much like the knights who convened around the famous table of Arthurian legend, all men who sit in Guardiola’s similarly shaped sanctuary enjoy equal status and the Spaniard is understood to have encouraged the design as a way of discouraging that most pernicious and malign of influences on team morale: the dressing room clique.
Manchester City’s Tunnel Club player aquarium leaves the mind swimming | Marina Hyde Read more
Far from exclusive to football and regularly held up as one of the root causes for the poor performances of sports teams who fail to live up to the sum of their parts, these exclusive close-knit groups within groups are the bane of managers whose desperation to eliminate them in the interests of team or squad harmony occasionally extends to actually fretting over meal-time seating arrangements for grown adults like a bride and groom meticulously plotting to minimise the potential for internecine strife at their wedding reception.
England’s football squad has long been renowned for its cliquishness and as the players gather for the first international break of the season, we can only speculate as to how damaging division among the ranks has been for morale in a national team that has consistently come up short since 1990. It would be naive to assume more inclusive England squads might have enjoyed greater success at international tournaments, or to imagine more successful teams – hello France, Germany and Spain – have not also been adversely affected by internal divides. For all that, the ease with which England habitually qualify for major tournaments compared with the horror show that invariably unfolds once the players have been confined to barracks for five or six weeks does little to dispel the notion that the more time they spend cloistered together, the less cohesive their performances tend to be.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gareth Southgate will not want his England squad to be united or divided by those that are just friends or club team-mates. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images
In a newspaper column he wrote before England’s doomed Euro 2016 campaign, Rio Ferdinand mentioned the cliques which were immediately apparent upon his introduction to the England squad as a teenager. “You had [Alan] Shearer’s table and all his mates,” he said. “You had the Liverpool table and all the dregs like a couple of Arsenal and a couple of West Ham like me. Then there was the United table.”
His description of a squad divided was more or less confirmed by his fellow West Ham alumnus Dean Ashton, who seemed genuinely baffled by arrangements when he was called up by Steve McClaren in 2006. “I was warned beforehand that it [the squad] could be a bit cliquey – with the Liverpool boys sticking together, Manchester United, Chelsea and it very much was like that,” he recalled. “There was very much a feeling of when you first go into a classroom and no one really wants to talk to you. I mean, I was there for a few days, and there were some senior players that didn’t speak to me for the whole time I was there, which I just found totally bizarre.”
In an interview published in the Guardian last year, the former England rugby team psychologist Jeremy Snape cited Leicester City’s unlikely march to the Premier League title as the very antithesis of a team suffering from the adverse affects of a tribe being rent asunder by internal cliquishness. “The excitement of doing something special would have galvanised their individual differences, focused their minds on strategies and roles, and maintained their physical training until the very end of the season,” he said, before warning that future difficulties would lie in “maintaining that hunger and selflessness when so much in their lives will have changed”. Sure enough, shortly into the following season the cracks began to appear.
A thoughtful man and manager, Gareth Southgate will be aware of the need to abolish cliques in his squad while simultaneously treating his players like the grown men they are. In 2015 as head of the England youth team set-up, he was forced to deny allegations of racial divisions in the under-20 squad in the face of fairly incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. In photos published by several newspapers, either through accident or design the boys in question happened to be dining at a couple of round tables. All equal as squad members, the white players were seated together around one of them while their black team-mates occupied the other.Fortunately, someone at Mojang heard the numerous questions and has an answer. Windows 10 edition and Pocket Edition are the same.
Windows Phone, or rather, Windows 10 Mobile (as will be the case here), fans have been causing a bit of a stir this weekend ever since Mojang announced an all-new Windows 10 Edition of Minecraft. The beta will launch in the Windows Store on July 29, but the biggest question has been what it will mean for phones.
"That means that MCPE is going to get a lot of features, and that Win10 and MCPE players will be able to play together :)"
"I'm going to say this because the drama is already too much: Windows 10 Edition is MCPE, and will always be updated together with it!"
So, worry ye not. If you already have Minecraft: Pocket Edition, it's going to get a whole lot more awesome after July 29. If you want to play on Windows 10 PC you'll still need to download Windows 10 Edition, either for free or $10 depending on whether you currently play or not.
Those guys and gals at Mojang are alright.
Update: Since it still seems to be confusing some folks, being the same doesn't mean they're a Universal App for Windows 10. PC players will need to get Windows 10 Edition either by free upgrade if they currently play Minecraft on PC or buy it for $10 if they're new. The above tweets confirm that Pocket Edition players will get updates to bring it in line with the Windows 10 Edition thus creating the same game on mobile. It will still be a separate purchase as is indicated at this time. Minecraft: Pocket Edition is also available on Android and iOS and it's safe to assume these versions will also become on par with the Windows 10 Edition.
via WindowsPhoneApps.esThe Canadian Press
OTTAWA -- The federal government will give apologies and compensation to three Canadians who were tortured in Syria.
The Canadian Press has independently confirmed a Toronto Star report that the government will settle lawsuits filed by the men over the federal role in their ordeals.
In October 2008, an inquiry led by former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci found Canadian officials contributed to the torture of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin by sharing information with foreign agencies.
Iacobucci concluded the men were brutalized in Syrian custody and, in the case of El Maati, in Egypt as well.
The former judge cited the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Foreign Affairs for mistakes in the cases.
All three men deny involvement in terrorism and none has ever been charged.
Their legal actions have been grinding slowly through the courts for years. The three are seeking compensation for experiences they say shattered their reputations and left them physically and psychologically battered.
In statements of defence filed in the cases, the government said that if mistreatment did occur, responsibility rests with Syrian and Egyptian authorities.
There was no immediate word about when the settlements would be announced, or about the financial compensation involved.
Maher Arar, another Arab-Canadian who was abused in a Syrian prison, received an apology and $10.5 million from the federal government.
In June 2009, the House of Commons public safety committee recommended apologies and compensation for Almalki, El Maati and Nureddin.
The government rejected the call, saying it would be inappropriate to do so because the men were suing federal agencies.
The MPs also urged the government to do "everything necessary" to remove false allegations about the men and their families in records held by national security agencies.
Almalki, an Ottawa electronics engineer, was detained in Syria in 2002 and held for 22 months.
El Maati, a former truck driver, was arrested in November 2001 upon flying to Syria to celebrate his wedding -- nuptials that did not take place.
Nureddin, a Toronto geologist, was detained by Syrian officials in December 2003 as he crossed the border from Iraq, where he was visiting family. He was held for 34 days in Syria in late 2003 and early 2004.Get the biggest daily 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
THE Aston Villa players who return to pre-season training tomorrow are more likely to have sported baseball caps than brandished baseball bats during their summer break.
Yet the close season activities of some of their predecessors more than a century ago were not so much Premier League as Major League, according to a fascinating new history book.
‘What about the Villa? Forgotten figures from Britain’s pro baseball league of 1890’ is Joe Gray’s record of a unique achievement during the club’s late 19th century glory years, pictured right.
For, just three years before the claret and blues became the “greatest football club in the world”, Villa were the only ever winners of a professional national baseball league in England.
After embarking on the exhaustive task of chronicling the historic title win Gray, a Villa fan at heart and statistician by trade, has unearthed a forgotten chapter of Villa history.
Villa were in danger of dropping out of the First Division when American entrepreneur Albert Spalding took Major League baseball players on a world tour which stopped off in Britain.
Spalding, a sports equipment manufacturer who wanted to globalise baseball, formed a committee with English sport’s main movers and shakers, including Villa legend William McGregor.
Football, rugby, athletics and even lacrosse teams across the country were invited to join a professional league with the aim of keeping players fit during the summer months.
In the end a four-club competition was formed with Villa competing alongside Preston North End, Stoke City and Derby.
Back then Derby was the only baseball team not already affiliated to a football club – the soccer came later with Derby County FC also inheriting the purpose built Baseball Ground.
Villa’s nine-man team was made up of three specialist baseball players, imported from America, a cricketer and three former Villa footballers, Fred Dawson, Joey Simmonds and Arthur Brown.
The other two members were James Cowan a Scottish defender just starting out with the football club, and forward John Devey, who would become a baseball star and Villa’s most successful football captain.
“Devey’s first exposure as an Aston Villa player was actually on the baseball field, not on the football field, and this was a guy who went on to captain Aston Villa during the 1890s when they won five league titles and two FA Cups,’’ says Gray.
“He was the captain when they won the double in 1897. He was one of the all-time Aston Villa greats, who actually played baseball for them first.
‘‘It’s worth adding, on John Devey, he was a brilliant baseball player, who led the statistical categories at the end of the year, including being the league’s batting champion.”
Devey played a key part in helping Villa to the baseball title which they clinched in the penultimate match, but by then the end was already nigh for the one-season-wonder league.
The traditional British weather rained on the league’s parade with crowds at the Perry Barr ground shared with the football club fluctuating between 100 and 1,000 depending on the elements.
League organisers, including McGregor, who is believed to have made a loss, were forced to halve the 6d admission because it was deemed unfair to charge as much for a new sport as for football.
However, the ultimate death knell was the withdrawal of leaders Derby a month before the end following a dispute over whether they could continue to play an all-conquering America pitcher.
Derby’s departure led to the competition being mercilessly mocked in the Press, although Villa weren’t complaining after holding off a late challenge from Preston to lift the one and only title.
There have since been regional professional leagues in Britain and national amateur leagues, but Villa remain England’s only ever champions of a professional league with a nationwide reach.
Whether the football club’s subsequent resurgence to the pinnacle of was purely coincidental or not, Gray likes to think that the baseball team pitched in with an exclusive slice of sporting success. “I think the football club was actually in danger of dropping down a division, but three years after the baseball glory, they won the league and then the purple patch started,” added the author. “I think it’s pretty safe to say they were the greatest football club in the world in the 1890s, so it’s quite nice they were playing baseball right at the start of that decade. It must have helped a little bit with bonding players and fitness, and for bringing John Devey to the club.”
n What about the Villa? Forgotten figures from Britain’s pro baseball league of £18.90 is available to buy for £15.90 from the publisher’s website at www.fineleaf.co.ukImage caption So-called "insider attacks" accounted for a growing proportion of Isaf casualties last year
Two US soldiers in Afghanistan have been shot dead in a so-called insider attack, US and Afghan sources say.
A number of Afghan troops also died in the shooting at a remote military base in Wardak province, not far from Kabul.
The US military called the attack a "betrayal". The killer - a member of the Afghan security forces - was shot dead at the scene.
Last year more than 60 Nato troops were killed by Afghan security personnel or insurgents posing as them.
The gunman - a member of the Afghan army or police - opened fire as US special forces and Afghan commandos held an early morning meeting.
Another 10 US troops were wounded, the US military said. The number of Afghan casualties has not been made public.
The attacker was also killed and the US-led special operations task force said the area had been secured.
Wardak province is the scene of particular tension between the Afghan authorities and US troops fighting Taliban militants.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai had ordered US special forces to leave the province by the middle of this month because of allegations of torture and disappearances carried out by Afghan troops working with them.
Tension
Earlier on Monday, police in Kabul said two civilian lorry drivers were killed and one wounded when they were fired on by an Isaf convoy.
The international security force Isaf said soldiers had opened fire to protect themselves when the two drivers failed to comply with a warning.
The latest deaths come amid continuing tension between the Afghan government and the US, as Nato troops prepare to end combat operations next year.
President Karzai has been strongly critical of US and allied forces for causing civilian casualties.
So-called "insider attacks" by members of the Afghan security forces, or Taliban infiltrators posing as them, have accounted for a growing proportion of Isaf casualties.Winston Sardine reads through the notes he wrote after his prostate surgery last May.
"The operating room experience was somewhat brief, just enough time to look at the multi-armed equipment as they were securing me onto the operating table and getting me hooked up to the anesthetic and then, lights out," wrote the 71-year-old from Hagersville.
Sardine's surgical experience at Hamilton's St Joseph's Healthcare was a unique one, which is clear to him looking back at those notes. He laughs before he read about the "multi-armed equipment" that performed his procedure.
He is one of over a hundred patients who underwent surgery in the last year with the da Vinci Surgical robot system, one of the most advanced surgical tools in the world and the only one in the local health network.
But with the initial funding running out there is uncertainty about where the money will come from to keep it operating. Dr. Bobby Shayegan, uro oncologist and chair of the robotic program at St. Joseph's said it is so successful that the hospital will find a way, including asking for private donations.
"For a physician its much more accurate technology. I have a range of movements that a human hand would not have, so what I can do with a small, narrow male pelvis is more than I can ever do with my own hand," said Dr. Shayegan.
Shayegan helped bring the da Vinci to the Hamilton hospital in late 2011 before putting it into use a few months later in 2012. He uses the robot primarily for urological surgeries, like removal of the prostate, but it can also perform gynecological, cardiac, thoracic and oral procedures with a trained surgeon, Shayegan said.
After Sardine was diagnosed with prostate cancer and met with Shayegan about surgery, he researched the da Vinci robot, watching procedures posted online. Noting that the robotic surgery seemed "less intrusive," he chose that option over a traditional procedure.
"I've had absolutely zero problems [post-surgery]," Sardine said. "I understand from a number of people, including my doctor and my wife's doctor, that this is unusual."
Sardine said its typical of patients who have their prostate removed to experience incontinence for up to six weeks after surgery, but it didn't happen to him. Shayegan performed Sardine's prostate surgery on May 7 of last year, and he was back at home on May 9.
"There is not doubt in my mind that it improves outcomes for patients, recovery of urinary control is faster, blood loss is very very small, they're not in hospital very long, " Shayegan said. "It's a vast leap for patients."
But now St. Joe's is dealing with a funding issue. The da Vinci came to Hamilton with a philanthropic donation of $2.3 million, but now it's but up to the hospital to maintain. With the exception of Alberta, no Canadian provincial or territorial government helps with the cost of surgical robots.
Shayegan said it costs about $3500 more per surgery compared to a traditional procedure. He alone has done over a hundred surgeries with the robot since it came to the hospital, totaling to at least $350,000. On top of that is a $180,000 annual maintenance cost.
"So far, we've had 100 per cent patient satisfaction," Shayegan said. "I hope we can translate that into some funding."Sometimes the most innocuous of foodstuffs contain constituents whose origins are less than appetizing. Such is the case with JELL-O, a dessert that has graced millions of dinner tables since its 1897 debut.
Underneath JELL-O’s jiggly wholesomeness lurks a secret many consumers are disconcerted to learn: JELL-O is made from gelatin, an animal product rendered from the hides and bones of animals, typically pork skins, pork, horses, cattle bones, and split cattle hides.
The production of gelatin starts with the boiling of bones, skins, and hides of cows and pigs, a process that releases the protein-rich collagen from animal tissues. The collagen is boiled and filtered numerous times, dried, and ground to a powder. Because the collagen is processed extensively, the final product is not categorized as a meat or animal product by the federal government. Very strict vegetarians avoid gelatin entirely, but more permissive vegetarians have no problem including JELL-O in their diets.
JELL-O products account for about 80 percent of the gelatin market.“Who is the ‘pip’ with pizzazz? Who is all ginger and jazz?” Anyone familiar with Broadway’s 1964 ‘magnum opus’ “Funny Girl” already knows the answer! Based on the life and early career of pioneering comedienne Fanny Brice, the show skyrocketed its then-unknown star–a young actress by the name of “Barbra Streisand”, into the stratosphere of show business success (eventually earning her an Oscar for the blockbuster film adaptation along the way.) Now “The Conundrum Theatre Company” is presenting this time-honored and much-loved musical as their inaugural, fully-staged offering at “The Colony Theatre” in Pasadena California. The production is also a joint partnership with “The Friends of the Rialto”—an organization helping to restore that historic 90-year old theatre located in the heart of Pasadena California. Having opened on what would have been Fanny Brice’s 125th Birthday, ‘first-nighters” were even treated to a celebratory “Birthday Cake” to commemorate this momentous occasion.
“The Conundrum Theatre Company” has breathed an invigorating new life into this classic many ‘thought’ they knew! Figuratively ‘set’ within the backstage enclaves and rehearsal halls of Fanny’s memory, we are taken to a simpler, bygone era as the young Miss Brice dreams of making a name for herself in “Show Biz”. Sure, she’s talented and certainly eager enough, but as her mother’s friend–the local ‘busy-body’, “Mrs. Strakosh” reminds her: “For average, you’re a pleasure; but when people pay good money in the theater—especially the ‘male element’—they want something to look at!” There are a significant amount of tears behind the significant laughs (–of which there are lots too,) as the story takes “Fanny” from a gangly nineteen-year-old chorus girl with a flair for comedy at “Keeney’s Music Hall”, through to her rise as a “Superstar” of “The Ziegfeld Follies”. Yet all this merely serves as a backdrop for her romance and marriage to gambler “Nick Arnstein”. Told in ‘flashback”, Fanny makes her first entrance through the auditorium’s center aisle, ascending the stage and into her “dressing room” anxiously awaiting her estranged husband’s “return”. When asked if she’s nervous about their reunion, Fanny replies “Nervous, happy, scared, excited—you name it, I am it!” “Too bad you got a show to do,” her assistant reminds her; “Thank GAWD I got a show to do!” she replies. True, it takes a lot of ‘try’ to triumph, and sometimes you gotta start small, but by the time the curtain-calls roll around, you will be amused, |
.
Shuttleworth also said This is not about an Ubuntu phone. This is about changing the innovation dynamic." That's also true, and it's a key point.
Canonical is far from the first company to talk about a hybrid all-in-one computing device. It's the first I know of that had an operating system, Ubuntu, and an interface, Unity that can run across smartphones, tablets, and PCs.
As ZDNet's Jason Perlow said recently, " For Shuttleworth's vision to become a reality, you need platform unification. In other words, the smartphone, tablet and desktop OS need to become the same operating system, the same developer target and ultimately, the same device."
I think that's exactly where our technology is going. Even if the Ubuntu Edge doesn't happen, Canonical has positioned itself as a visionary company in this new form of computing.
Someone, and soon, will start building these all-in-one devices. I strongly suspect Canonical will be involved in these projects even if they don't lead them. Then, as the mashup of smartphone/PC hybrids starts to take hold in both consumer and IT computing, Canonical will reap the benefits of its early moves.
So win, lose, or draw on Ubuntu Edge, Canonical is now positioned with the Linux community, the larger public, and potential partners as the company that thinks big about computing's future. That's a good place to be.
Related Stories:Tyra Banks Needs a Diaper
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You probably don’t know who Fabian Basabe is, which is good, but in case you care, he’s one of those spoiled New York socialite brats who you’ll find on shows like “Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive” and quite possibly in public restrooms having anonymous sex with other men. Anyway, heterosexual and married Fabian is reporting for Paper magazine on fashion week which he says is, “by far my favorite assignment.” and the only reason I’m posting about this is because he said Tyra Banks thinks her clothes are a toilet.
…i arranged to do it backstage at the tents in the w suite. Just when I start getting comfortable and ready, a group of madmen and madwomen storm in and take possession of the suite because… ready?… Tyra Banks messed herself and needed to change. Now, let’s break this down: messing oneself should not happen if you are older that 5 or younger than 90. if it happens and in fact you are older than 5 or younger that 90, then it should be one, single, very unfortunate episode which will bound you to be made fun of forever and you can’t complain about it. Now I would like to bring to your attention that Tyra’s people carried a change of clothes for her at NYC fashion week. Hmmmh… could it be that Tyra messed herself before? or just that her entourage is so organized that in case tyra would ever, maybe, possibly mess herself that one time, they have a change of clothes? I don’t know…”
In case you need a translation, Tyra soiled herself, and her entourage reacted as though they’re so used to Tyra’s accidents that they were very well prepared for the clean-up and wardrobe change. All I can picture is Steve Martin as “Ruprecht” filling his pants at the dinner table as he maintained a thoroughly retarded and relieved look on his face. I like to think that’s how it went down with Tyra. Now all she’s missing is an eye patch and a tire swing.
Thanks to Michelle for the heads up!Image copyright Getty Images Image caption There are estimated to be about 500,000 air weapons in Scotland
Anyone who owns an airgun will need a licence under new measures proposed by the Scottish government.
The licensing system is included in a new bill that has been laid with the Scottish Parliament to impose tighter controls on air weapons.
The proposals follow a long-running campaign by the Scottish government to crack down on the misuse of airguns.
It followed the death of two-year-old Andrew Morton, who was shot in the head with an airgun in Glasgow in 2005.
Mark Bonini was later convicted of murdering the toddler.
The Air Weapons and Licensing (Scotland) Bill laid before Holyrood seeks to introduce strict licensing measures for the estimated 500,000 air weapons in Scotland.
Under the proposed new scheme, anyone wanting to own an air gun would need to demonstrate they had a legitimate reason for doing so.
Image copyright PA Image caption Andrew Morton was killed after being shot in the head by an airgun in 2005
These reasons may include pest control, sporting target shooting, or being a collector.
The bill creates a number of new offences related to possession, use and acquisition of air weapons by people who do not hold a licence, or who do not act in accordance with the licensing regime.
It also sets out the framework through which Police Scotland may grant an air weapon licence to appropriate individuals.
Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill stressed that the legislation would not ban airguns outright, and said the proposals would not prevent people using them for legitimate reasons.
Every day police and animal welfare groups have to deal with the results of air weapons being misused Kenny MacAskill, Justice secretary
Mr MacAskill said he had recently met the mother of Andrew Morton, close to what would have been the boy's 12th birthday.
He added: "To see and hear the continued pain his family has gone through only serves to make me even more determined to ensure we have robust legislation to prevent future tragedies.
"Such tragic incidents are, thankfully, very rare, but every day police and animal welfare groups have to deal with the results of air weapons being misused.
"As well as causing daily anti-social behaviour and vandalism they can also cause horrific injuries to wildlife and family pets by those who maliciously target animals."
The justice secretary said the licensing regime for air weapons represented an "important first step" towards devolving all powers on firearms to Holyrood, something the Scottish government has been pressing the UK government for.
Bringing in this legislation will not deter those who are already determined to break the law Dr Colin Shedden, Basc Scotland
The Scottish government carried out a consultation on setting up a licensing system for air weapons in 2012.
An overwhelming majority - 87% - of those who responded to the consultation opposed the plan, with some describing it as "draconian" and "heavy-handed".
But the proposals were welcomed by police and victim groups.
Figures released by the Scottish government in November showed the total number of firearms offences recorded in Scotland fell by a third in the past year, from 535 to 365.
Of these, almost half - 171 - involved air weapons.
The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (Basc) described the licensing system as a "unnecessary, costly and impractical".
It said the legislation would place unnecessary burdens on police time and budgets, would only be taken up by already law-abiding airgun users, and would have little effect on criminal misuse.
Dr Colin Shedden, director of Basc Scotland, said: "Offences involving air weapons in Scotland have fallen by 75% in recent years. In 2006-07 there was a ten-year-peak of 683 air weapon offences. In 2012-13, after six years of steady decline, there were 171 offences.
"In addition, all firearms offences are now at the lowest level since records began. Airguns are already extensively regulated by law, with more than thirty offences on the statute books. Bringing in this legislation will not deter those who are already determined to break the law."
Holyrood was given powers over air weapons as part of changes made to devolution in the Scotland Act.
The bill will also bring in tighter licensing for scrap metal dealers in a bid to curb metal theft, including new rules that will ban dealers from making cash payments.
It will also create new offences aimed at tackling under-age drinking, and a new licensing regime for lap dancing venues which will give greater local control over their numbers.Unity Editor Download Assistant
Component Installers Windows
Component Installers Mac
We are happy to announce Unity 2017.1.2p3. The release notes and the corresponding issue tracker link for issues fixed in this release are as shown below.
As always, patch releases are recommended only for users affected by those bugs fixed in that patch.
Improvements
Apple TV: Added support for attitude data coming from new Apple TV remote.
Android - Improved error messages from android sdk tools.
iOS - Added player setting to specify which device edges defer system gestures to the second swipe.
iOS - Added player setting to specify whether the home button should be hidden on iPhone X.
iOS - Added support for iPhone X launch images.
Graphics - Improved documentation for graphics hardware tiers.
Shaders - Concatenated matrix macros (e.g. UNITY_MATRIX_MVP) are now changed to static variables to avoid repeated calculations.
Fixes
(944118) - Android: Fixed player crash when profiler with GPU profiling is enabled and graphics API was not OpenGL ES 3.
(776875) - Android: Fixed realtime HDR reflection probes being black on older Android devices.
(956658) - Android: Fixed android build failing with target SDKs 21-23.
(934782) - Android: Fixed crash when killing the application during permission request.
(931038) - Android: Fixed stuttering with android video player multithreaded rendering.
(934841) - Android: Fixed android video player playback starting to lag after activating input field.
(959867) - Apple TV: Fixed icon asset catalog setup when certain multi-layer icons are missing.
(946958) - Editor: Fixed crash while processing input during destruction.
(913869) - Editor: Reduced size of LightingDataAsset when baking light probes with multiple scenes loaded.
(926559) - Editor: Fixed an issue where lightmaps are generated even though the scene does not contain any baked light contribution.
(930408) - Graphics: Fixed lights on animated rigs thorwing errors and potentially crashing.
(955082) - Graphics: Fixed an issue where performing an undo on a Static Lightmap Object causes an error related to transforms to be reported.
(944413) - Graphics: Fixed crash when creating sprite with unsupported texture format.
(949574)GI: Progressive Lightmapper crashes with transparent shader.
(None) - Graphics: Fixed GL_INVALID_ENUM error with OpenGL ES when using point primitives.
(942563) - Graphics: Fixed crash when certain variables of CustomRenderTexture are used in script.
(952403) - IL2CPP: Fixed crash when calling Socket.GetSocketOption using latest scripting runtime.
(943671) - IL2CPP: Fixed ArgumentException when accessing Socket.LocalEndPoint on.NET 4.6.
(951089) (949036) - iOS: Fixed support for fonts of Tibetan, Armenian, Braille, Georgian and Thai languages in iOS 10 and iOS 11.
(887019) - Lighting: Fixed issue where Progressive Lightmapper was not transmitting indirect rays through translucent objects.
(963866) - OSX: Fixed Editor crash when using GLCore on High Sierra with Intel 6xxx series GPU.
(963060) - OSX Metal: Fixed hang when using MSAA on OSX 10.11 on Nvidia GPUs.
(957899) - Particles: Fixed mesh particles being rendered upside-down when using view-space.
(957427) - Particles: Fixed crash when emitting from script and using a Size module.
(946356) - Physics: Fixed cloth pointer not being set to NULL when deactivating SkinnedMeshRenderer.
(922684) - Physics: Updated physics documentation to better explain how friction and bounciness are combined.
(916451) - Physics: Fixed TerrainData.SetHeights not updating the terrain collider properly at run-time.
(960775) - Prefabs: Fixed issue where resetting SerializedProperty.prefabOverride for one property could incorrectly reset other properties in some - circumstances.
(963350) - Terrain: Fixed crash when a splat texture only has a normal map.
(952802) - UI: Fixed tabbing between input fields not properly giving editing focus.
(954117) (924562)- Video: Video Clip is not played when loading it from an Asset Bundle on Windows.
(964785) (854484) - Video: Muting Game View does not mute video audio.
(964789) (937173) - Video: Fixed inspector preview not cropping video files name.
(946124) - Web: UnityWebRequest: Fixed POST key/value dictionary containing very long values.
(949038) - Web: Fixed WWW.responseHeaders returning NULL.
(892084) - XR: Fixed camera aspect ratio not being preserved when switching from VR to non-VR.
(962253) - XR: Fixed Podfile not reporting the correct version.
Revision: 249a06fbaf10Mumbai: Automation and the new US administration were the big unknowns at the Indian tech sector's annual shindig this week, with machines threatening to take away thousands of jobs and concerns over possible visa rule changes in the key American market.
But senior executives from the $150 billion industry, which rose to prominence at the turn of the century by helping Western firms solve the "Y2K" bug, said companies with skilled English-speaking staff and low costs could not be written off yet.
The sector, led by Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Ltd and Wipro Ltd, is lobbying hard as the new US administration under President Donald Trump considers putting in place visa restrictions.
The administration may also raise salaries paid to H1-B visa holders, a move that could significantly increase costs for IT companies that are already facing pressure on margins.
The longer-term challenge and opportunity for the sector was automation, executives said, as global corporations from plane-makers to consumer firms bet on the use of machines to further cut costs and boost efficiency.
That threatens lower-end software services and outsourcing jobs in a sector which employs more than 3.5 million people.
Also Read: ‘Whimsical Donald Trump’ presents exciting opportunity: Anand Mahindra
Summing up the mood at the three-day NASSCOM leadership event in Mumbai ending on Friday, Malcolm Frank, chief strategy officer at Cognizant which has most of its operations in India, spoke of "fear and optimism."
Even top IT executives were "fearing the machines", he said.
Some Indian executives, including Infosys' chief operating officer Pravin Rao, said that greater automation was expected to help engineers and developers shed repetitive jobs for more creative roles.
"Some part of the work we'll be automating 100%, you don't require people to do that kind of work," Rao told Reuters. "But there are always newer things, where we will be able to re-purpose employees who are released from those areas."
Moving up food chain
With rapidly changing technology, Indian IT firms are emphasising the need for retraining their workforce, in many cases setting up experience centres and learning zones on their sprawling campuses.
Some companies are partnering with universities to design and fund education programmes, while staff members spoke of employers laying on training and webinars to help develop skills in automation and cloud computing.
Also Read: H1-B visa worries ‘hyped up’, says TCS boss N. Chandrasekaran
"The threat from automation killing jobs is more than Trump's anticipated visa rule changes," a general manager-level employee at a top Indian IT firm said.
NASSCOM chairman and Tech Mahindra CEO C.P. Gurnani said technology would create new roles where "man will manage machines," even if a fourth of Indian IT jobs were to be replaced by machines over the next four years.
Hiring patterns may also change, with unconventional, high-value graduates likely to be more attractive, to the possible detriment of hiring from India's engineering colleges.
Infosys, which traditionally recruited only engineering graduates, is considering hiring people educated in liberal arts to add creative skills to its workforce, COO Rao said.
In a first, NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies), the leading Indian IT lobby group, delayed its initial growth forecast for fiscal 2017/18, citing market uncertainty.
NASSCOM officials said it had deferred its predictions by three months to give it time to gauge policy announcements in the United States which could make immigration rules tougher.
The industry body aims to announce a firmer growth forecast after the quarter to March when IT companies report annual earnings and give guidance for the next fiscal year.
"A certain level of... uncertainty will continue over the medium-term," said NASSCOM president R. Chandrashekhar. "And businesses therefore have to take essential decisions on new technology in the face of a certain degree of uncertainty." ReutersVIRGINIA BEACH – After the fifth annual College Beach Weekend was held at the Oceanfront over the past weekend, City Manager Dave Hansen released a statement on Monday afternoon expressing his disappointment in the behavior of some.
“It was so disheartening to see the amount of destruction on the boardwalk this year, from overturned trash cans to trampled landscaping,” Hansen said.
Hansen said that nearly 40,000 people descended upon the city throughout the weekend, but the actions of a few left destruction in the area.
“The weather was perfect for a weekend,” police chief Jim Cervera said. “There are 1.6 million people living within a 45-minute drive of Virginia Beach.”
“Tourism is a cornerstone of the local economy and we welcome everyone to our city,” Hansen said in the statement. “At the same time, we expect people to respect each other, our property and our laws.”
The event is not hosted or sanctioned by the city Hansen said, and the “incidents of violence, heavy traffic, litter and rude behavior have cast a negative view” over the event.
“First and foremost, colleges, beaches and students coming together happen all over the East Coast,” Deputy City Manager Steve Cover said. “I know that it’s an unfortunate event, and it’s a shame, in my opinion, that one or two incidents throughout this entire weekend can shed such a negative light on what Virginia Beach is all about.”
In weeks leading up to the weekend, Cervera said police made an effort to reach out to venues hosting events.
“There are no event organizers. Some of the clubs have special nights,” Cervera said. “Once we find out about them on social media, we contact those particular venues.
Cervera said police then have a discussion with those venues about a security safety plan.
Working with the state police, the city’s police responded to more than 370 calls for service and 200 traffic stops. Many of the calls, Hansen said, involved “large crowds of people running, screaming and seeking to instigate police officers to engage them.”
“Our officers remained disciplined and monitored the crowds,” Hansen said, “managing
the flow of the pedestrians to open spaces, and taking measured action as required.”
By the end of the weekend, Cervera said there were 16 charges against 10 people, 119 misdemeanor charges and about 40 traffic tickets written at the Oceanfront.
“We recovered weapons off of people, we did break up assaults and wide-scale fights,” Cervera said.
While making arrests on Friday night, two officers were assaulted. Hansen said the each of the suspects was charged with assault on a law enforcement officer.
“In these particular cases the individuals decided that they did not want to submit to an arrest when the officers approached them and had to go hands-on, they were assaulted,” Cervera said. “The assaults, fortunately, did not require any hospitalization.”
On Saturday night, two shootings were reported to police. Four people were injured and taken to a local hospital with minor injuries.
Cervera said hundreds of people on 18th Street stampeded westbound, northbound and southbound on Atlantic Avenue.
“We worked from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. on Friday and Saturday night,” Cervera said. “I can tell you that the vast majority of the young folks who were out were cooperative and respectful to everything police needed to be done.”
Hansen said that public works crews were quickly working to clean up the Oceanfront and should be done by Monday evening.
Over the weekend, an online petition surfaced calling for the city to put a stop to future College Beach Weekend events in the city. On Monday afternoon, the petition had nearly 10,000 signatures.
“It’s not falling on deaf ears,” Cervera said. “We understand how some citizens get frustrated.”
Looking ahead to next year, the city can’t officially ban the weekend from taking place at the Oceanfront, according to Cover, but there are steps it can take to better prepare.
“What we can do is we can take a look at what transpired this year [and] weigh that against what has happened and occurred in years passed,” Cover said.
“We’re an open society, we’re a welcoming city, tourism is a large part of what Virginia Beach is about and we want people to come here and visit.”Experienced cooks know that a sharp knife not only makes prep work easier and the final product more attractive, but is much safer, too. A dull blade requires more pressure to cut into food, which can easily cause your knife to slip and cut your hand.
Home cooks should sharpen their knives at least twice a year, and much more frequently if they use them every day. But when do you know it's time, and how do you do it?
The first step is understanding how knives get dull, which can happen one of two ways. Either your blade gets pushed out of alignment (meaning it looks more like a wavy line than a straight edge) or the edge simply wears down with regular use.
One of these things will happen to your knives eventually, but you can prolong the inevitable by practicing good habits.
1. Never use your knives on glass or marble cutting boards. Unlike wood or plastic, these materials grind down your blade, causing it to dull more quickly.
2. Avoid scraping your knife across your cutting board to move food around. Dragging your blade from side to side can throw it out of alignment and dull the knife.
3. Hand-wash and fully dry your knives after each use. Putting them in the dishwasher, leaving them in the sink, or storing them wet can cause rust and scratches, leading to a dull blade.
4. Always store your knives in a countertop knife block or an in-drawer organizer. If they're kept loose in a drawer, they'll bang up against other tools, getting nicked and dinged in the process.
The second key to lasting knives is knowing what to do when they finally get dull. If your blade is out of alignment, you can simply run your knife over a honing rod to straighten the edge. If it's worn down, though, you'll need to actually sharpen it, which you can do several ways.
Sending your knives out to a professional can be expensive, and they typically use grinding stones, which take more material than necessary from your blade. Doing it yourself with a sharpening stone is cheaper and more effective, but, while whetstones remove less material than grinding stones, they take a lot of know-how to use correctly, and the process is extremely labor-intensive.
For a fail-safe way to sharpen knives, savvy cooks turn to Work Sharp Culinary. With a passion for elevating the home-chef experience, the company offers knife-sharpening systems that use the same technology as manufacturers, but in a convenient countertop design. By allowing you to sharpen your knives the same way they're made, Work Sharp Culinary sets itself apart from other sharpening systems, which often use harsh grinding wheels or carbide rippers. The company's proven technology, backed by more than 40 years of innovation, makes the sharpening process fast, rewarding, and even fun (!), ensuring you'll actually use it to keep your knives cutting like new.
Work Sharp Culinary's premier system, the E5 sharpener, uses a flexible belt that's long-lasting, gentle on knives, and designed to sharpen even the most high-tech steels. The One Touch Programming feature eliminates guesswork with pre-programmed, timed sharpening cycles, and Work Sharp Culinary's exclusive MicroForge technology creates a durable, more controlled edge on any knife. Leather-lined sharpening guides ensure consistent edge geometry along the entire blade, and a ceramic honing rod keeps your knife in top shape long after sharpening. Extremely user-friendly, the E5 will help you keep your knives sharp all the time, ensuring clean and effortless cuts no matter what you're making.
Work Sharp Culinary also offers the manual M3 sharpening system. Along with the same MicroForge technology and sharpening guides featured in the E5, the M3 comes with interchangeable diamond and ceramic rods, which allow you to shape, sharpen, and hone in one package. Repair your knife's blade with the 320-grit diamond rod, then follow with the dual-surface ceramic honing rod to create a razor-sharp edge. The entire system can be stored in your knife block, or pulled apart and kept in a drawer, ensuring easy access when it's time to sharpen.
Whichever system works best for your cooking chops, one thing's for sure—use Work Sharp Culinary and dull knives will never slow down your cooking again.
This post may contain links to Amazon or other partners; your purchases via these links can benefit Serious Eats. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.A medical ethicist hopes a damning report that outlines how Indigenous women in Saskatoon were coerced into being sterilized is a "teaching moment" for doctors and hospitals across the country.
"It's egregious, it's blatant, it's clearly racist and it's very unlikely it was confined to one or two health authorities or confined to a few First Nations women," said Arthur Schafer, a bioethicist and director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba.
Schafer says the report released this week should be read by doctors and health-care professionals not just in Saskatchewan but across Canada.
The 57-page report released this week outlines how at least seven Indigenous women in Saskatoon were coerced into having tubal ligation surgery after giving birth. It details how they often felt racism and degradation during their hospital visit, have mistrusted the medical system, and felt "invisible, profiled and powerless."
Indigenous women coerced into tubal ligation felt 'invisible, profiled and powerless' according to an external report. 0:58
Schafer said while the report was about Saskatoon hospitals (specifically Royal University Hospital), it has implications for doctors and hospitals elsewhere.
"Every hospital, every health-care faculty in Canada should be studying what happened in Saskatchewan and learning from it and dedicating ourselves to preventing it from happening again, anywhere, ever," he said.
Report provides historical context
The report says sterilization of Indigenous women in nothing new in Canada.
"Historically, Canada's sterilization policies have had great detrimental effects on Indigenous women," the report said.
"Large numbers of Aboriginal women and men were sterilized for being'mentally unfit' – when in reality, for various cultural and historical reasons they did not fit in with the Eurocentric dominant society's definition of 'fit.'"
The report said Saskatchewan did not participate in sterilization policies that were enacted in Alberta and British Columbia, but it does say the "sterilization legislation legacy remains intact through imprints in not only Saskatchewan but all of Canada's health care system."
Schafer said the fact this happened recently and not in the distant past should come as a shock to Canadians.It’s that time of year where the first cold wind sends me running for my long johns and I start thumbing through the LL Bean catalog and mixing hot toddies. Every year I get a bit of a fascination with flannel, fleece, denim and thermal knit. This year I’ve been thinking about the one pair of jeans I own. I’ve had them a year and while I love the design and the fit, they’re starting to look a little worse for the wear. The knees have gone baggy, they’ve started to fade and I wouldn’t be too surprised if they started developing holes. In general, if I buy something new and in style I’ll opt for something that isn’t too expensive. This leaves me with many things that aren’t as well made or long lasting as I’d like. I got the idea to make new pants. I wanted something that styled like a work pant (wide enough to fit over boots, roomy with big pockets) but would be warmer than any pants I’ve had.
I started by making a mock up over the course of a week. I hadn’t made pants since high school, about 2007 when low-rise jeans were still popular. The only pattern I had for jeans was one with a very slim fit and low waist. I changed the pattern a lot, making the pockets bigger, the rise higher and the legs roomier. I ended up omitting the waistband in favor of a large yoke to which I’d attach the flannel lining. I didn’t want to spend much (as I didn’t know how these would turn out), so all I bought new was denim (a 98% cotton 2% spandex dark wash from Hancock’s) and a spool of heavy duty gray thread for top stitching. The flannel, zipper and button I already had. I would like to make these pants again and match the zipper and button better and add rivets.
The denim I bought wasn’t very thick but the flannel is extra cozy. I started sewing the legs together and top-stitching everything. This part was pretty easy. The hard part about making pants is the dreaded fly. The only 2 other pairs of pants I made ended up with a fly that didn’t close right and just screamed “Hey look at this poorly constructed crotch!”. So I took my time and spent several hours on the fly and front yoke/waistband. I made the flannel lining out of just the leg pieces and sewed them to an inside yoke made of denim. I joined the lining and pants at the top seam and stuffed the lining inside. I stitched the two together at the bottom with a top-stitched seam and hand stitched the two raw edges left by the inside fly.
They turned out better than I thought they might. They’re big enough that I can wear them over wool tights and leg warmers, but they’re also form fitting where it counts. There’s a tiny gap at the back waist but I’m not sure if I mind enough to take them apart and fix them. The front fly came together well, but the zipper is still a bit visible. I probably shouldn’t have chosen such a bulky zipper, but again, I didn’t want to buy a new one. I’ll be saving the revised pattern I made with these and will probably try the project again in the spring, aiming to fix some of what I didn’t like about these.
AdvertisementsPercy Harvin will miss at least three months after he has surgery for a torn labrum in his hip. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) Percy Harvin will miss at least three months after he has surgery for a torn labrum in his hip. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
After seeking out a second opinion on his injured hip, Percy Harvin announced Tuesday that he will undergo surgery later this week. That decision means that the Seahawks will be without their new, high-priced wide receiver for at least the first several weeks of the season, leaving them with... well, basically, the same offense that helped them go 11-5 last season, give or take a few pieces.
Make no mistake, this one stings for a Seattle team with Super Bowl aspirations. When the opportunity to land Harvin presented itself this offseason, the Seahawks packaged multiple draft picks (including their 2013 first-rounder) to pull Harvin from Minnesota. They then turned around and handed Harvin a six-year, $67 million contract.
The Seahawks believed that Harvin might put them over the top and form part of their nucleus for years to come.
He still may do both those things. With surgery looming, however, Harvin is certain to open the 2013 season on the PUP list, meaning he will miss at least six games. That's a conservative estimate, too -- the early prognosis is for a three- or four-month recovery, which could put Harvin back on the field around November.
That's more or less the timetable that San Francisco wide receiver Michael Crabtree is shooting for, by the way, so the NFC West race could come down to which team gets its injured receiver back soonest.
It is also very possible that both San Francisco and Seattle thrive in spite of those setbacks. In Seattle's case, the focus will turn now to Sidney Rice, who led the team in receptions last season with 50 but who also, according to Pete Carroll, is in Switzerland receiving treatment on his knee. Having him in the lineup for the start of the regular season is close to a must now, with Harvin sidelined.
But if he's there, Seattle could start the regular season with its top eight pass-catchers from 2012 still on the roster. That list includes Rice, Golden Tate, Doug Baldwin, Zach Miller, Anthony McCoy, Robert Turbin, Michael Robinson and, of course, Marshawn Lynch.
The Seahawks were going to lean on Lynch, Harvin or no Harvin. Lynch racked up 315 carries last season, as the Seattle offense morphed into a top-10 unit with the exciting Russell Wilson at quarterback. Lynch and Wilson will have even more help in the backfield, too, thanks to Seattle's draft selection of versatile back Christine Michael.
Michael is one of the few new faces now in the mix, along with rookie WR Chris Harper or rookie tight end Luke Willson.
Aside from those bit players, the Seahawks essentially are back to their 2012 starting lineup everywhere else on offense. That's the same group that averaged a staggering 42.5 points over the Seahawks' final four regular-season games and came within one defensive stop of advancing to the NFC title game.
In other words, the sky is not quite falling in Seattle.
If anything, the Seahawks are no doubt feeling more frustration than desolation right now. They gambled on Harvin earlier this offseason, and now have to be having at least some second thoughts.
Harvin could erase those doubts by returning late in 2013 and proving to be the game-changing player Seattle thought it had acquired. Still, even if he cannot do that, even if he's slow to come back and misses all of 2013, this is still a Seahawks team capable of contending in the NFC.According to the table of right ascensions of the Handy Tables, the midheaven corresponding to � H = 159° 5' is Gemini 10° 44'. Unfortunately all that one can be sure of from the papyrus is that the whole number part of the midheaven’s longitude was 10° or greater, and that the number of minutes had two digits. ⬈ #p91
From the oblique ascension tables of the Handy Tables we find the data given in Table 2. The circumstance that the calculations for the latitude of Syene lead to exactly 7 seasonal hours strongly suggests that we have reconstructed the basis on which the ascendant was computed. This result implies (1) that the assumed time and place of the nativity were 319 November 19, end of the 7th hour of night, on the parallel through Syene, (2) that the ascension tables were essentially the same as those of the Handy Tables, and (3) that the longitude of the Sun was assumed to be exactly Scorpio 25° 0', either because this was the actual longitude calculated for the date or because the longitude was close enough to a whole number that the computer did not bother to interpolate in the table but merely read of the tabulated value for the nearest whole degree. (If we take the Sun’s stated longitude at the preceding full Moon and add the Sun’s progress between that moment and that of the nativity according to the Almagest, we get approximately Scorpio 25° 8'.) ⬈ #p90
With an approximate value for the Sun’s longitude, we can use the ascendant to get a more accurate estimate of the time of the nativity as well as the terrestrial latitude for which the horoscope was computed, on the hypotheses that the time was a whole number of seasonal hours past sunset and that trigonometrical tables comparable to Ptolemy’s were used to determine the cardines. For a chosen latitude, we find the oblique ascensions of the ascendant (� H ) and of the point diametrically opposite the Sun (� 180°– ☉ ) as well as the number of degrees of ascension corresponding to one seasonal hour of night (χ). The ascensional difference divided by χ gives the number of seasonal hours past midnight corresponding to the ascendant for the chosen latitude; if it is close to an integer, this is likely to be the correct latitude. ⬈ #p89
The data provided for the preceding full Moon provide us with another check on the solar and lunar longitudes. According to the papyrus, the exact opposition took place on Hathyr 17 (November 14) at the 7th seasonal hour—undoubtedly of day, though the indication of this is illegible—with the Sun at Scorpio 20° 30' and the Moon at Taurus 20° 30'. Since the nativity was roughly four and a half days later, the Sun’s longitude at the nativity should have been within a few minutes of Scorpio 25° 0', and (adding the known elongation) the Moon’s should have been within a few minutes of Cancer 26° 22'. ⬈ #p88
The Moon’s dodekatemorion fell in Gemini, so that the whole number part of its longitude was either 26° or 27°. Even at the beginning of this range this would imply an equation greater than +1° 57' where the Almagest gives +1° 41', so we may assume that the longitude was not much greater than Cancer 26°. ⬈ #p87
In the case of Jupiter, the stated longitude, Virgo 7° 40', conflicts with Mercury as the terms ruler (valid in Virgo only for longitudes less than or equal to 6°) and with Jupiter as ruler of the monomoiria (valid for 3° + 7 i < λ ≤ 4° + 7 i, i = 0, 1, 2, or 3). From the formula for the Lot of Victory for a nocturnal nativity, ⬈ #p84
Further refinements and corrections are possible. Saturn’s dodekatemorion is stated to be in Taurus; this could only be true for a longitude whose whole number part is 3° or 4°. The precise longitude can be determined as Aries 3° 43' from the formula for the Lot of Nemesis for a nocturnal nativity: ⬈ #p82
This gives us the |
ach said her dad always had a police scanner on and she was fascinated by it.
Kovach is one of Virginia Beach Police Scanner’s moderators, and she said that her police scanner is on all day. She doesn’t post every call, but over the year’s she’s heard police officers get injured in the line of duty and SWAT teams successfully resolve dangerous situations.
Kovach said she believes the scanner page is important to the Virginia Beach community because it “makes people aware of their surroundings.”
Although well intended, police say the scanner page has been problematic in the past. Information that is being presented over a police scanner is initial and coming from a third party. More often than not, it doesn’t reveal the whole story unraveling at a police scene, Kuehn wrote.
“That information cannot be verified until first responders actually arrive on the scene and evaluate the situation,” Kuehn wrote. “Often times the circumstances of a case may be very different than what was originally broadcast, or it may be completely wrong. Much of that information may or may not be relayed back over the air so the person who is monitoring a scanner would not be aware of that.”
McCallion said that he and other scanner moderators are aware that the information they post will not always be accurate. To protect officers who are in high-stress situations, McCallion has a policy that doesn’t allow anyone to post information about dangerous situations as they are being reported in real time on the scanner.
“The cops don’t want you doing anything that’s going to jeopardize them,” he said. “I don’t really think we’re risking a lot of officer safety. I think we’re bringing a lot of awareness and appreciation.”
Posts on the page can also instigate serious discussions and arguments about touchy subjects, like race.
When talking about the scanner page, McCallion doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that he includes people’s race when he’s posting about scanner-related crime. He said he includes that information for the safety of the public who may be in an area where someone is shooting or committing other violent crimes.
“A lot of times people will get offended and say … ‘Why do you have to point out the race of this person?'” he said. “The way I see it, that’s factual. That’s why you want to know the race of the person, because if it’s close to you … you want to know who to avoid. Race is just another way of helping you avoid the problem at the time.”
And when it comes to disagreements on the scanner page, McCallion’s rules are simple: Respect one another.
“That’s who you want to help — is the people who want to help each other,” he said. “You don’t have to know them, you don’t have to be their friends, you do what is right.”
Send news tips to adrinne.m@southsidedaily.com.Okay, but who’s playing Nick?
Answering the riddle “who could convincingly make an actress like Constance Wu uncomfortable with her mere presence?” Michelle Yeoh has joined the cast of Crazy Rich Asians. Directed by Jon M. Chu and based on Kevin Kwan’s novel, the film stars Wu as Rachel Chu, an American-born economics professor who goes to her boyfriend Nick’s friend’s wedding in Singapore and meets his crazy rich family. Yeoh, best known for her role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, will play Nick’s mother Eleanor Young, who is very powerful and doesn’t take kindly to Rachel. Yeoh recently appeared in Netflix’s Crouching Tiger sequel and season two of Marco Polo, and has booked a role as a starship captain in Star Trek: Discovery. Let the Yeohaissance begin.Washington (CNN) Attorney General Loretta Lynch says she regrets not recognizing that her meeting with Bill Clinton over the summer would turn out to be problematic, saying it was "painful" that it called into question the integrity of the Justice Department.
The meeting -- coming right before the FBI was set to announce the findings of its investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server -- would eventually cast doubt on the Justice Department's impartiality in the matter, as the FBI is an agency of the DOJ.
"I do regret sitting down and having a conversation with him, because it did give people concern," she told CNN's Jake Tapper in an interview that aired Sunday on "State of the Union." "And as I said, my greatest concern has always been making sure that people understand that the Department of Justice works in a way that is independent and looks at everybody equally."
"And when you do something that gives people a reason to think differently, that's a problem," Lynch added. "It was a problem for me. It was painful for me, and so I felt it was important to clarify it as quickly and as clearly and as cleanly as possible."
Meeting with Bill Clinton
In June, Lynch and Clinton met privately in Phoenix after the former president realized he was on the same tarmac as the attorney general. The encounter became a major issue in the campaign considering it took place days before FBI Director James Comey announced that he would not press charges against Hillary Clinton over the server.
"I wish I had seen around that corner and not had that discussion with the former president, as innocuous as it was, because it did give people concern," Lynch said. "It did make people wonder is it going to affect the investigation that's going on, and that's not something that was an unreasonable question for anyone to ask."
Lynch originally told journalists at a press conference that in addition to discussing golf and grandchildren, she and the former president talked about "current news of the day, the Brexit decision and what it would mean."
"Brexit was the news of the day. There had just been a vote there," she told Tapper. "And as I indicated, we were told that President Clinton just wanted to say hello."
The conversation lasted about 45 minutes, which Lynch said was longer than she expected.
"It was just going to be hello, how are you, and everyone was going to go on about their evening, as far as we were concerned," she said.
But Lynch insists that there was nothing inappropriate about her time with Clinton.
"It was a very cordial discussion, as I said. Didn't have anything to do with the investigation or how it was going to be resolved, and in fact, we resolved it in the way that we discussed," she said.
Comey's decision
Lynch also discussed Comey's decision to notify Congress it was reviewing emails that could have been pertinent to the FBI's investigation of her personal server. Many in the Clinton campaign believe the FBI's decision, coming less than two weeks before the election, swung the momentum to Donald Trump.
"People are very close to this issue right now, and certainly the Clinton campaign is going to be closer than anyone to this issue, so they're going to have strong feelings and strong views about that," Lynch said. "As I said, you know I allow people to have those feelings and to express them as they choose. That's their right."
But Lynch rejects the idea that her department handled the situation inappropriately.
"What we've said here is that you know we've handled the investigation in a way that was consistent with the way all investigations were handled. Unusual circumstances developed," she said. "The FBI director has spoken about why he made a decision to go in a particular route and how he made that decision. So I'm going to let that stand as it is."
Although Comey decided to deliver the letter to Congress, Lynch made it clear that she was not supportive of the idea and said it was one of a host of factors that may have influenced the results of the 2016 election. At the time, law enforcement officials told CNN that Lynch and her deputy, Sally Yates, disagreed with Comey's decision to notify Congress, but that fallout over Bill Clinton's meeting with Lynch tied their hands.
"Discussions were had at the highest levels of the department. My views were made known, they were communicated to him," Lynch told Tapper.
"I think we're all going to be looking at that for a long time," she added.Just a quick one today: My recently completed bike-mounted librarian conversion. As always, Dark Angels.
Conversion
The bike is mostly the bike from the old bike-mounted chaplain kit. Which in turn was just a normal bike with a few metal bits added on: A fancier front guard, some items on the back and holstered boltgun. I removed the skull helmet from the rear stowage, but other than that it’s mostly stock.
For the Librarian itself, I started with a classic metal librarian model. I used the Epistolary with a sword, as he has a nice compact pose that fits well with a biker in motion. Using a hacksaw, I cut off the legs and replaced them with the normal biker legs. I used some putty to repair any belt-items that were damaged or halved in the sawing process.
Add in a biker left arm and a fancy Deathwing shoulder pad and done. I cut off part of the seat on the bike to make room for his backpack, as his ‘arm-backwards’ post meant it was further backwards than on normal bikers.
Painting
As you can see, I went for normal Dark Angels green on the bike. Librarians aren’t part of a company, so putting him on a Ravenwing bike would be silly. This is also the reason I didn’t use the fancy metal Ravenwing legs I’ve used on all my other bikes.
It also gave me a chance to paint a bike in a different colour for a change, which was nice. For the rest I mostly stuck to the paint colours I’ve used throughout the rest of my army. Finish of with some decals, put it on one my resin bases and done.PATNA: “But why didn’t the CM Sir throw out the proposal of your transfer? He must be in the know of your hard work which was contributing to the maintenance of CM Sir’s ‘sushasan’...” asked one from the mob of collegians who thronged the official residence of Patna’s SP (city) Shivdeep Waman Lande on Wednesday, a day after the Nitish Kumar government notified his transfer on the state police HQ’s recommendation within ten months of the posting of the 2006-batch officer as Patna’s SP (city).Lande did not reply to the question. The officer, however, obliged almost every youth, hundreds of them, who visited him with a request for an autograph.Referring to the story of Lande’s Yuvak Sangathan in Akola, published in this newspaper on Wednesday, a movie buff among the girls said, “You are our ‘Singham’ (the officer played by Ajay Devgan in the Bollywood blockbuster).” Another asked, “Who will save us from molesters?” Lande looked at her and said smilingly, “Araria-Patna is 8-hour journey.”To MBA professional Neelima Gupta of Ara Garden, the transfer was shocking. “My illness deteriorated due to spurious drugs as spurious druglords were having a field day in the state capital before Lande launched the crackdown,” she told TOI. Nodded Suman Kumar, an accountant. “Milawatkhoro ki phir se chandi ho jayegi,” he said.“Now I won’t feel as safe as I used to with Lande as the SP,” rued the Magadh Mahila College (MMC) girl Reena Kumari (name changed) on whom a molestation attempt was made and whose father was assaulted for resisting the bid near a liquor shop at the I-T roundabout in broad daylight a few weeks back. Thankfully, the girl had the SP (city)’s number in her cellphone and Lande had come rushing to rescue her within minutes of getting a call. The molesters absconded, but police hunted them down.“I won’t say girls would feel unsafe now. But this is a fact that Lande’s style of policing was good, rather striking,” MMC principal Dolly Sinha said. According to her, Lande did not only police but also appeared to be policing Patna and, as such, created a sense of confidence among girls.Lande’s exit has many parents worried, albeit for a different reason. “The cybercafes, restaurants and parlours, which facilitated illegal activities and spoilt youths, may reopen their shutters,” said a parent.A former Bihar DGP said Lande was excellent and outstanding as SP (city). “The kind of operations he helmed was never seen in Patna town earlier. Lande’s mission is incomplete and his transfer premature,” he said. He also pooh-poohed the reported claims of the police HQ that Lande’s transfer to Araria was actually his elevation in that he would be the kingpin of the district police. “It would have been a promotion had he been sent to a divisional town,” he said.Many of the traffic constables were also in a state of bewilderment. “He had almost stopped ‘laheriya’-cut biking in the city,” a constable said.Not only citizens, netizens were also upset. “Everyone in our family is feeling bad about unwarranted transfer. He was one of the Best we have seen,” Neelesh Sinha from New York wrote on a site.Back home, activists of All India Students’ Federation said it burned an effigy of the government on Boring Road in protest against the transfer. A candlelight procession was also taken out in the evening, demanding cancellation of the transfer notification.Basketball is give and take, and it has far less to do with pedigree as it does performance. In both the game and the real world, everything is driven by results—and that’s what matters first, last and always.
I say all that to illustrate how beautiful a plan is when it comes together. Allow me to introduce you to Darrun Hilliard, an ambidextrous, intelligent, wing position player for the Detroit Pistons. Hilliard took the road less traveled to the NBA; nonetheless, he is here and puts in the effort to get better every week. He is from the small steel town of Bethlehem, about an hour drive north of Philadelphia. I asked him about his hometown, and he stated, “Being from Bethlehem is everything to me. That’s the reason I wear the number 6, because of my area code 610. I have Bethlehem Steel tattooed on my back. I know where I came from, and I want to change the whole mindset of the people in Bethlehem.”
For starters, he played for his local high school Liberty, a lesser-known AAU program, and when Coach Jay Wright offered a scholarship, he accepted and attended Villanova. What he did next might seem uncommon, however, he stayed for four years, earned his degree, and was selected as a second round pick, 38th overall. When asked about his path to the League, he reflects saying, “It was different than most…I didn’t go to a big time prep school. I just stayed home at the local public school, and did it from there. I was in the gym before school, before practice, and after practice. Just because I knew I was automatically a step behind because I was never on the radar…and I got to ‘Nova through AAU. I didn’t play for a big time program, but it was a good program, and it fit for me. It was my only option. Coach Wright saw me play in Orlando, and it was history from there.”
The first time I saw Darrun play was during his junior year of college. What stood out most was his great scoring ability inside and out and how I had a hard time figuring out which hand he was because I saw him score and shoot with either one. Still, I didn’t think he was a pro until the summer before his senior season. I watched him play without fear or hesitation during the Kevin Durant Skills Academy.
I was there to see Derrick Jones, the high-flying high school junior, but I quickly noticed a few other people who were standing out that day. Darrun Hilliard surprised me a lot. He played like he belonged amongst his elite peers. Ronde Hollis-Jefferson, whom I expected to play well…lived up to the buzz around his name, and a high school player Jaylen Brown, played against KD effortlessly in the offense-to-defense drills.
I walked away feeling very confident they would play in the NBA, and that Brown was ready that day straight out of high school. Hilliard says of that experience, “I learned how to be professional. You see KD in the gym before camp even starts and he’s getting millions…and he’s there early, still putting the work in to stay on top.”
Fast forward to the present day. Hilliard is earning some valuable minutes in Van Gundy’s 10-man rotation, good enough for 3.0 ppg. Hollis-Jefferson is in the Nets’ starting five, but has unfortunately broken his ankle (get well soon), and Brown is a freshman for the Cal Bears, giving his team solid numbers with 14.3 ppg, and 5.3 rpg.
Hilliard sat the bench at first, and has recently begun to learn his way around and feel comfortable on both ends of the floor. The Pistons’ first round pick Stanley Johnson helped along the journey, and they seem to be more like brothers instead of NBA rookies. Johnson is very supportive of Hilliard and vice versa. Stanley Johnson was the first person on Twitter singing his teammates praises two weeks ago as Darrun was sent to the D-League for a day to get some extended playing time. When it was all said and done, Hilliard’s Grand Rapids Drive got the win, and he added a team high 31 points and 5 rebounds.
Everyone has his or her idea of what it takes to be great. As for Darrun, he stays grounded in his upbringing and hard work ethic. He knows what is required of him, and he has been learning as best he can to make adjustments and apply them where needed. He expressed after the win in Philadelphia, that “everyone is just like me…just because I’m from a small town doesn’t make anyone better than me. My whole life, I will have to work my way into stardom. It has never been handed to me, but if I put in the work, anything is possible.”
There was once a Detroit Piston from a small Pennsylvania steel town named Richard Hamilton. As a basketball fan, I would love to see history repeat itself, and with some hard work and patience, I think it most certainly will.More than one-third of Americans do not know that foods with no genetically modified ingredients contain genes, according to the new nationally representative Food Literacy and Engagement Poll we recently conducted at Michigan State University. For the record, all foods contain genes, and so do all people.
The majority of respondents who answered this question incorrectly were young and affluent, and also more likely than their peers to describe themselves as having a higher-than-average understanding of the global food system. The full survey revealed that much of the U.S. public remains disengaged or misinformed about food. These findings are problematic because food shapes our lives on a personal level, while consumer choices and agricultural practices set the course for our collective future in a number of ways, from food production impacts to public health.
Informing food discussions
The Food Literacy and Engagement Poll, which we plan to conduct annually, is part of Food@MSU, a new initiative based in Michigan State University’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Food@MSU’s mission is to listen to consumers, promote dialogue and help the public make more informed choices about food.
Many factors make those decisions challenging for today’s consumers. Rapid scientific innovation has made it possible to engineer crops that can grow without fertilizer, survive flooding and supply vital nutrients to communities in the developing world. But further progress may be limited without public awareness and support for research on urgent food and agriculture challenges.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of online content with conflicting messages makes it hard for Americans to separate valid nutritional information from fads and fraud. Influential multinational corporations push ideas that aren’t always based in science, but rather intended to promote their own products.
Our inaugural poll reveals that the public lags far behind current scientific understanding when it comes to food. Equally troubling, Americans aren’t turning to scientists for answers.
Disconnected from farms
Today fewer than 2 percent of Americans live on farms. As the U.S. population continues to shift away from rural areas into cities and suburbs, we are ever more removed from the agricultural practices that sustain us.
We sampled over 1,000 Americans age 18 and over online. Results were weighted to reflect U.S. census demographics for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region and household income to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Our survey revealed that 48 percent of Americans say they never or rarely seek information about where their food was grown or how it was produced.
As we grapple with energy and resource conservation challenges in the United States and around the world, it is more important than ever to recognize how we use limited resources – and what we waste along the way. Agriculture is a major source of pollutants that produce algae blooms and dead zones in the Great Lakes, Gulf of Mexico and other water bodies. Large livestock farms generate air pollution that can be hazardous to human health. More than half of respondents in our survey (51 percent) were willing to pay higher prices for foods with a less damaging impact on the environment, but consumers need to know how food is produced before they can take action.
Food safety
Half of respondents in the poll (50 percent) expressed concern over the safety of food available for purchase in their community. This included 56 percent of those earning an annual household income of US$75,000 or more and 46 percent of those earning less than $75,000.
They are right to be worried. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 48 million Americans become sick from food-borne illnesses every year. These events lead to 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths from viruses such as hepatitis A and norovirus, and bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter. The more we understand about how these bugs are transmitted, and how to store and handle food safely, the better we can protect our families and ourselves.
Global food security
The United Nations currently projects that the world’s population will rise from 7.5 billion today to 9.7 billion people by 2050. If food production fails to keep pace with anticipated growth, billions of people will go hungry. The biggest 21st-century agricultural challenge we face will be to produce more grains, fruits and vegetables on less land with fewer resources in the face of climate change.
The vast majority of scientists agree that one tool for meeting growing global food demand will be developing genetically modified crops that can survive with less fertilizer or water, promote disease resistance, improve yield or add vitamins for malnourished communities in the developing world.
Unfortunately, the poll found that much of the public does not embrace the promise of transgenic agriculture. Although genetically modified organisms are currently found in over 75 percent of packaged food in the United States, and we encounter them daily in corn, sugar and soy, most Americans remain unaware of their potential. Forty-six percent of poll respondents either don’t know whether they consume GMOs or believe they rarely or never do.
While the Food and Drug Administration has said that genetically modified foods are safe, large and vocal advocacy groups continue to stoke public fears and influence consumer choices away from their adoption. The result is widespread misinformation and mistrust, which ultimately sets back progress toward allowing the technology to meet its full potential domestically and internationally.
Mistrustful of experts
When it comes to food, many Americans do not trust experts. Just 59 percent of respondents in our survey said that they trusted information from academic scientists on nutrition and food safety. Less than half (49 percent) trusted government scientists, and only one-third (33 percent) trusted industry scientists.
Instead, consumers wade through conflicting recommendations from friends, relatives and celebrities that compete with fake news online for attention. Meanwhile, advertisements and talking heads argue over the health benefits of staples like chocolate and coffee. This may explain why a 2016 Morning Consult/New York Times survey found that nutritionists and Americans have vastly different ideas about what kinds of foods can be called “healthy.”
Consumers face the exhausting task of sifting through the noise for reliable and accurate information on food. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to find objective experts to listen to their concerns and provide answers that are grounded in science and easy to understand and put into practice.
Food for thought, and conversation
Our Food Literacy and Engagement Poll is intended to provide baseline data for what Americans know about a variety of food topics. A centerpiece of Food@MSU, called Our Table, will bring scientists, farmers, consumers and policy experts together to explore issues ranging from organic farming and health to GM crops and sustainability. Over time, the poll will track public attitudes to guide research, as well as allow us to listen to consumers in order to help them make informed decisions about food.On today’s podcast, acclaimed luthiers Linda Manzer, David Wren and Tony Duggan-Smith gather around Manzer’s kitchen table to talk to us about their new Group of Seven guitar project.
The Group of Seven consisted of Canadian landscape painters Lawren Harris, J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Franklin Carmichael, Frank Johnston, F.H. Varley and A.Y. Jackson. These seven artist friends were prolific through the 1920s and early ’30s and are now considered highly influential.
Manzer saw similarities between the bond these seven legendary artists had and the one she shares with fellow luthiers and friends who studied under Jean Larrivée, decades ago. She decided to pay homage by having seven guitars built. Each luthier would focus on a different Group of Seven member.
The luthiers participating include Manzer, Sergi de Jonge, Duggan-Smith, Wren, George Gray, Grit Laskin and Jean Larrivée. The luthiers also built an eighth guitar as a group to pay tribute to painter Tom Thomson.
The project launches May 6, 2017 at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection outside of Toronto and the guitars will be on display through October in a room right next to the art that inspired them. Click here for details.
This episode is sponsored by our friends at Retrofret and Dying Breed Music.According to L’Express newspaper the order was made in a note from the PM's office, which was handed to ministries after the summer break.
In the letter dated August 19th, a senior member of Ayrault’s staff, Christopher Chantepy, listed a number of points ministers and their staff needed to take heed of in the future.
One of the demands that stood out was a request to ministers to stop using their smartphones for any sensitive communications, unless they were equipped with approved security devices.
The memo also told ministers to avoid sending text messages to each other.
To justify the measure, the circular pointed to the recent “security threats” in recent months, which is believed to be a reference to the American NSA's spying programme PRISM.
"The recent security breaches of information systems had led to us issuing a reminder of the basic rules," Ayrault's office said.
The NSA was alleged to have bugged diplomatic offices belonging to both France and the EU in New York and Washington.
Those allegations drew an angry response from Paris.
"We cannot accept this kind of behaviour between partners and allies," said the French president François Hollande, calling for it to “stop immediately”.
Even if the furore has died down somewhat in recent weeks, the French government is not taking any chances, it seems.
From now on any highly classified information must only be transmitted over specially encrypted telephones and all electronic documents can only be transferred using the government’s secure ISIS system, the French PM has ordered.
Although most documents will not be classified, the note from the PM warns: “they could harm individuals or the nation and efforts should be made to protect them.”
According to L’Express, which has published the note from the PM, the Interior Ministry has obeyed the instructions, with most members of staff using encrypted Samsung phones on which it is not possible to install applications and geo-tagging cannot be enabled.
However, several ministers and their staff are still opting to use their normal smartphones, l’Express reports.
In his note, the French PM has also warned staff not to insert a USB key unless they know exactly where it came from and that it is safe and not to click on any attachments in messages without checking them first.
Last month a French court opened a formal investigation into the PRISM program of electronic surveillance run by the US National Security Agency.Aaron McNeilly tells STV News William McNeilly had safety of country in mind when releasing damning Trident report.
The brother of the Royal Navy whistleblower who branded the Trident nuclear programme a "disaster waiting to happen" says he is proud of his younger sibling.
Aaron McNeilly has told STV News that able seaman William McNeilly had the safety of the country in mind when he released his 18-page dossier.
The nuclear submarine engineer went Awol this month after producing a damning report containing a series of allegations about the Trident submarines based at Faslane.
A post on a Facebook profile apparently belonging to Mr McNeilly said that he had "moved between countries, changed location almost every day".
He handed himself into the Ministry of Defence police in Scotland in Monday May 18.
The older brother of Mr McNeilly, from Newtownabbey, County Antrim, said the family had no advance warning that he was about to release the secret Trident dossier online.
He also revealed they have no idea where the 25-year-old sailor is being held or if he is to be punished but that they fully supported his actions.
He told STV News: "It's been very nerve wracking not knowing what's happening and stuff but I'm very proud of my brother for what he has done.
"My brother is not in this for glory or anything, he is doing it for the right thing, he is not a liar.
"He is basically protecting us and coming forward and saying look there are issues here and they need to be looked at.
"He'll do anything for anybody. He's very worried about it and was thinking about the safety of the country and that's why he has done it."
The whistleblower hit the headlines when he branded Trident submarines a "disaster waiting to happen" and alleged 30 safety and security flaws.
The Ministry of Defence deny the seaman's allegations and have said that they take the operation of submarines and the safety of personnel very seriously.
On Thursday a debate on McNeilly's allegations will be held in the House of Commons.
Mr McNeilly's family say that he is highly ambitious and would not have potentially ruined his career with the navy.
The Ministry of Defence has remained tight-lipped about whether he will be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act.
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Updates: Would you like STV’s latest news update in your inbox every morning? Choose from our range of regular e-newsletters hereSEATTLE — Two United Methodist ministers recently ‘wed’ each other in a ceremony in Seattle, Washington despite the possibility that they could face disciplinary action for violating Church law.
Joanne Carlson Brown, 60, of Tibbetts United Methodist Church and Christie Newbill, 65, of Woodland Park United Methodist Church tied the knot at a ceremony at Brown’s church on December 7th. District Superintendent Patricia Simpson officiated the ceremony, which was attended by approximately 300 supporters.
“Our marriage is our statement for declaring to our friends and family, in the presence of God, our love and commitment for one another,” Brown told the United Methodist News Service. “I never considered this as [a statement] against the United Methodist Church.”
Simpson said that she prayed about officiating the ceremony before she agreed to perform the union.
“We don’t do these things casually,” she told local television station KING 5. “I believe it was a faithful decision.”
However, the Book of Discipline outlines that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching” and that “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” may not be ordained as ministers in the denomination. It also forbids ministers from hosting or participating in “ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions.”
Consequently, Brown and Newbill—as well as Simpson—could be disciplined or defrocked for violating Church doctrine.
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“[This could lead] to losing my ordination, which could pain me to no end,” Brown acknowledged.
She told reporters that she doesn’t see her relationship as being sinful.
“I approach the Discipline the way I approach the Bible,” Brown stated. “My hermeneutic coming both to the Scriptures and the Discipline is that the Gospel is a Gospel of radical love and liberation, and anything that does not speak the word of radical love and liberation is not of God.”
But Newbill advised that she viewed her decision as being more important than upholding the Book of Discipline.
“Living my life true to myself and to God—and authentically with everyone else—I think that is the most important thing,” she said.
As previously reported, just last week, a United Methodist Minister in Pennsylvania who officiated his son’s same-sex “wedding” was defrocked after refusing to voluntarily give up his credentials. Frank Schaefer, 51, who led Zion United Methodist Church of Iona in Lebanon, was found guilty in November of “conducting a ceremony that celebrates same-sex unions” and “disobedience to order and discipline of the Methodist Church.”
In 2007, he traveled to Massachusetts to officiate a ceremony between his son Tim and Tim’s homosexual partner.
“The love for my son took over the fear of losing my job with the United Methodist Church,” Schaefer told the Lebanon Daily News. “It was a tough decision in some sense, but I just knew I had to make it. I had to follow my heart.”
When he refused to repent, and even wore a rainbow stole to show his advocacy for homosexuality, he was ordered to repent within 30 days or hand in his credentials. He refused to do either, and was officially defrocked on Thursday.
“This episode highlights the importance of churches in all traditions protecting themselves and the cause of Christ by carefully screening would-be pastors for biblical grounding and moral character, and having effective means of accountability,” John Lomperis, director of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, told Religion News Service. “He was not the first United Methodist minister to be defrocked for crossing these lines and will not be the last.”
Photo: King 5The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday in favor of the American government’s seizure of a large number of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s overseas assets.
In the US civil forfeiture case, which was brought 18 months after the initial criminal charges brought against Dotcom and Megaupload, prosecutors outlined why the New Zealand seizure of Dotcom’s assets on behalf of the American government was valid. Seized items include millions of dollars in various seized bank accounts in Hong Kong and New Zealand, multiple cars, four jet skis, the Dotcom mansion, several luxury cars, two 108-inch TVs, three 82-inch TVs, a $10,000 watch, and a photograph by Olaf Mueller worth over $100,000.
Good that I'll never get extradited to the land of corrupt politicians & rigged courts. New Zealand Appeal Judges will apply the law. I win. — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) August 11, 2016
After years of delay, in December 2015, Dotcom was finally ordered to be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges. But his appeal is set to be heard before the High Court in Auckland on August 29. Dotcom could conceivably appeal to the New Zealand Court of Appeals and to the Supreme Court of New Zealand (if it agrees to hear the case), a process that could take many more years.
Under American law, authorities can seize cash and items of value if they are believed to be ill-gotten, even without filing any criminal charges.
In its court filings, prosecutors argued that because Dotcom had not appeared to face the charges against him in the United States, he is therefore susceptible to “fugitive disentitlement.” That legal theory posits that if a defendant has fled the country to evade prosecution, he or she cannot make a claim to the assets that the government wants to seize under civil forfeiture. But as the Dotcom legal team claimed, the US can neither use its legal system to seize assets abroad nor can Dotcom be considered a fugitive if he has never set foot in the United States.
“The [Department of Justice] in our view is trying to abuse the Fugitive Disentitlement Doctrine by modifying it into an offensive weapon of asset forfeiture to punish those who fight extradition under lawful treaties and a provocation for international discord,” Dotcom’s chief global counsel, Ira Rothken, wrote in July 2015.
However, the 4th Circuit disagreed:
Because the statute must apply to people with no reason to come to the United States other than to face charges, a “sole” or “principal” purpose test cannot stand. The principal reason such a person remains outside the United States will typically be that they live elsewhere. A criminal indictment gives such a person a reason to make the journey, and the statute is aimed at those who resist nevertheless.
On Friday afternoon, Rothken told Ars that he and his client have not yet decided whether they will appeal to a full panel of the 4th Circuit, known as an en banc appeal, or to the US Supreme Court.
“This opinion has the effect of eviscerating Kim Dotcom's US-NZ treaty rights by saying if you lawfully oppose extradition we will still call you a fugitive and take all of your assets, so if you ever arrive in the US you will not have your own funds to use to mount a fair defense in the largest criminal copyright case in history,” Rothken wrote by text message.In case Hillary Clinton is wondering why she lost…. part of the reason is because of her political correctness problem.
The day after Americans celebrated Christmas, Hillary sent out a tweet, in which she vaguely mentioned the “holidays” because obviously, she doesn’t want to offend anyone.
Take a look at her politically correct, social justice tweet:
The holidays are a time to be thankful for our blessings. Let's rejoice in this season & look forward with renewed hope & determination. -H — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) December 26, 2016
Trending: CNN Told By South Korean Official |
right below.
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[b]So what are the maps?[/b]
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[*] [url=http://www.teamfortress.tv/35544/koth-bagel]koth_bagel_rc2a[/url]
[*] [url= http://www.teamfortress.tv/43001/cp-propaganda-5cp]cp_propaganda_a11[/url]
[*] [url=http://www.teamfortress.tv/23574/cp-granary-pro]cp_granary_pro_rc8[/url]
[/list]
[b]What's the format?[/b]
[list]
[*] 16 teams single elimination with the maps for each round decided beforehand.
[/list]
[b]Bro, where's muh Swelan at?[/b]
[list]
[*] We're working out the last details, we want to make sure that when we go public with information we provide you guys with the correct info.
[/list]
Remember to follow us on [url=https://twitter.com/TF2Essentials]Twitter[/url] and [url=https://www.twitch.tv/essentialstf]Twitch [/url]for all the latest news and to catch all the live action from our tournaments and online cups.Each week in the 2017 campaign, former No. 1 overall pick and NFL Network analyst David Carr will take a look at all offensive players and rank his top 15. Rankings are based solely on this season's efforts. Now, let's get to it -- the Week 10 pecking order is below.
NOTE: Arrows reflect changes from last week's rankings.
RANK 1 Tom Brady, QB, Patriots The first three players on my list had a bye last weekend. Even without playing Sunday, Brady still leads the league in passing yards and ranks close to the top of nearly every major QB category. Next up: Von Miller and the Broncos.
RANK 2 Antonio Brown, WR, Steelers Heading into their Week 9 bye, Brown and the Steelers' offense looked like the unit we all expected from the beginning. This week against the Colts, expect Brown to top his single-game season high in receiving yards (182).
RANK 3 Le'Veon Bell, RB, Steelers After a slow September, Bell dominated October. In the five games the Steelers played in that month, he totaled 580 rushing yards and 743 yards from scrimmage. If this trend continues, I wonder what November looks like.
RANK 4 Drew Brees, QB, Saints 1 The Saints are averaging 269.8 passing yards, which is their lowest mark since Brees joined the team in 2006, but the 39-year-old quarterback is as efficient as ever. On Sunday, Brees completed over 80 percent of his passes for the second straight game, becoming the first QB to do that since Peyton Manning and Philip Rivers in Weeks 3-4 of the 2013 season. Brees also made history in his home stadium, throwing his 225th touchdown pass at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome -- that's the most by a quarterback in one stadium in NFL history. He has the 6-2 Saints' offense rolling and in good position heading into the second half of the season.
RANK 5 Carson Wentz, QB, Eagles 1 I was curious to see how Wentz would perform against the league's top defense, and he wasn't fazed... at all. He became the first quarterback with at least four touchdown passes vs. Denver since Week 9 of 2014. Wentz, who leads the league with 23 touchdown passes, has been so impressive over the last five games, posting a 17:3 touchdown-to-interception ratio in that span. More impressive is how he's performed on third down this season (10 TDs, two INTs and a 125.1 passer rating). Philly's going as far as Wentz takes them this season. That could mean February.
RANK 6 Todd Gurley, RB, Rams 2 Bucky Brooks recently wrote that Gurley is having himself an MVP-caliber campaign in Year 3, and he's not wrong. In eight games, Gurley has 161 carries for 686 yards and seven rushing TDs, including 18 runs for at least 10 yards. In the Rams' blowout victory over the New York Giants on Sunday, Gurley finished with 16 carries for 59 yards and two touchdowns on the ground and added two receptions on three targets for 45 yards. Sean McVay is using him in creative ways, and Gurley's numbers are proving it.
RANK 7 Alex Smith, QB, Chiefs It finally happened: Smith threw his first interception of the season Sunday, on his 29th pass attempt against the Cowboys. But before the pick, Smith put himself in the record books as the QB with the most consecutive pass attempts without an INT (287) to begin a season in NFL history, surpassing Cleveland's Bernie Kosar (286 in 1991). Smith and the passing game weren't the issue in Sunday's loss, as the Chiefs only rushed for 68 yards all game. Though it wasn't enough to beat Dallas, he's still putting together the best and most productive season of his career.
RANK 8 Kareem Hunt, RB, Chiefs 4 For the second consecutive game, Hunt failed to record 100 or more yards from scrimmage, collecting just 37 rushing yards on nine carries and 24 receiving yards on four catches (five targets) against Dallas. Hunt's production has declined the last few weeks, or since the Steelers provided a blueprint for stalling the Chiefs' dynamic offense in Week 6. Defenses have quit trying to key on and stop all of their playmakers and instead have played traditional zone defense. From that loss to the Steelers onward, Kansas City has averaged 318.8 offensive yards per game -- almost 100 fewer than its per-game mark in the first five games (414.2). The Chiefs, Hunt included on the ground, haven't been the same as we saw early on.
RANK 9 Russell Wilson, QB, Seahawks Even with the addition of left tackle Duane Brown, the Seahawks allowed 12 pressures on the left side of the line against Washington on Sunday. Wilson kept plays alive with his legs and ultimately threw nearly one-fourth of his passes from outside the pocket. Of his 11 attempts from outside the pocket, he completed seven for 73 yards, a touchdown and a 113.1 passer rating. He's everything to this team -- leading in rushing yards (77) for the second straight week -- and will always have the Seahawks in the game at the end.
RANK 10 DeAndre Hopkins, WR, Texans Having caught touchdown passes from 10 different quarterbacks in his career, Hopkins continues to prove his greatness. With Tom Savage under center on Sunday, Hopkins had just six receptions on 16 targets (in large part due to Savage's inaccuracy) for 86 yards and a TD, extending his TD reception streak to five straight games. Hopkins has carried the Texans' offense for much of his five-year career, and it looks like he'll continue to shoulder the load with Deshaun Watson going down last week.
RANK 11 Jared Goff, QB, Rams 3 Sean McVay has led the most surprising turnaround since last season, revitalizing the Rams' offense. The Rams have scored 263 points through eight games this season after putting up 224 in all of 2016. Goff's improvement in Year 2 has also been instrumental to the Rams 6-2 start. He had a career-best performance Sunday against the Giants, with four passing touchdowns in just 22 attempts and a 146.8 passer rating. There's a night-and-day difference between his play last season and this season; he's going through progressions and making good decisions, week in and week out.
RANK 12 Rob Gronkowski, TE, Patriots The Patriots didn't play last week, and Gronk is healthy. He stays put.
RANK 13 Julio Jones, WR, Falcons Julio finished with six receptions on 12 targets for a season-high 118 receiving yards in Sunday's loss. But I know of one target he'd like to get back. Sure, it was a bad drop -- at a bad time, fourth-and-7 with 8:20 left in the game and Atlanta trailing 20-10 -- but he makes that play 99 times out of 100. The Falcons have involved their best player more over the last three weeks, and if they continue to give him the ball, they're bound to see more success.
RANK 14 T.Y. Hilton, WR, Colts NR Quarterback Jacoby Brissett is looking more comfortable in this offense, and Hilton's reaping the benefits. Hilton made huge plays in a must-win game for the Colts, finishing with five catches on nine targets for 175 yards and two TDs -- one for 45 yards and this 80-yarder. Indy would be smart to keep targeting Hilton, because his stats directly reflect the team's wins and losses. In wins this season, Hilton averages almost three targets, four receptions and 135.5 reception yards more per game than in losses. It's a no-brainer. Keep him involved.
RANK 15 Alvin Kamara, RB, Saints NR My colleague Heath Evans said back in May that the Saints would likely use Kamara like they did Reggie Bush. And that's exactly what Kamara's been -- only he's been more effective than Bush as a rookie. Kamara has totaled more rushing, receiving and scrimmage yards than Bush did in his first eight games in New Orleans. On Sunday, Kamara had 152 scrimmage yards, the most by any Saints player in a game this season, and it was his first NFL game with multiple touchdowns. He's becoming a huge component of Sean Payton's offense and is a mismatch for most defenders.
Dropped out: Deshaun Watson, QB, Houston Texans (previously No. 11); LeSean McCoy, RB, Buffalo Bills (No. 15).
JUST OUTSIDE THE TOP 15:
Dak Prescott, QB, Dallas Cowboys: The Cowboys proved they are a team to beat in the NFC on Sunday. Prescott, who threw for two TDs and ran for another in the win, has improved since the Week 6 bye and led his team to three straight wins.
Travis Kelce, TE, Kansas City Chiefs: Alex Smith's favorite target, Kelce hauled in seven receptions on nine targets for 73 yards and a touchdown Sunday. Kelce's doing his part, but the ground game needs to get going if K.C. wants to keep its lead in the AFC West.
Ezekiel Elliott, RB, Dallas Cowboys: Zeke continues to come on strong as the season progresses, totaling 27 carries for 93 yards and a touchdown in Sunday's win. Again, the only thing keeping him down here is the question of his availability going forward.
Follow David Carr on Twitter @DCarr8.I’m a big fan of standing desks. Although their direct benefits over sitting are somewhat iffy, they encourage you to move around and be just a little more active.
And yet, even though I’ve spent most of my work hours standing for about a year now, I still sometimes need to sit down when writing a longer post, and other times I’m even more productive from the comfort of my own bed.
Basically, I work better in different positions depending on what I’m doing, but it’s inconvenient having to constantly switch my desk height and chair position.
Now a company called Altwork is looking to make it convenient to comfortably work in pretty much any position you like with the Altwork Station, which electronically switches between standing, sitting and – the best part – a floating reclining ‘focus’ mode that feels ripped straight out of a sci-fi movie.
I was able to go hands-on (back-on? butt-on?) with the Station, and though I couldn’t test it out for an extended period of time in an actual work environment, it kind of blew my mind with its comfort and adjustability in the brief period I did spend with it.
In the sitting mode, it’s a nifty desk and chair combination. It provided great lumbar and neck support, and the back angle and footrest are adjustable via a control panel on the left of the desk. You can both position and angle the desk and monitor at any height you like simply by moving them manually, including angling them outwards to collaborate with a coworker.
Press a switch on the control panel, and the desk will transition into a standing mode, positioning the monitor and desk higher than before. You fold out the desk, and are able to use it as you would any other standing desk.
The really cool part, however, comes with the ‘focus’ mode. Press the appropriate button, and the chair will start to lean back while raising your feet. Meanwhile, you monitor and desk are rotated and automatically angled towards you.
Impressively, Altwork says it maintains the same monitor distance and angle from your eyes throughout all of the Station’s position.
It’s a little jarring the first time you try it out – I’m not used to my chair being the one moving me – but it basically ends up feeling like you’re floating in mid-air. It’s supremely comfortable, and the ‘focus’ title immediately makes sense’ – your eyes are angled away from distractions, and you’re extremely comfortable throughout.
There are a lot of other neat touches showing the though that went into it. For example, in any position, you can adjust the back and foot rest angle to your liking, and then save your preferences onto the control panel. Also, when you angle the desk, your keyboard and mouse are held on the table by surprisingly sturdy magnets, and you can even mount two separate monitors if that’s your thing.
Oh, and there are various color options too.
Throughout the entire process, the Station felt like the most comfortable chair I’d ever worked in, and the transitions between positions happened in just a few seconds. It all fits within a relatively compact 18 ft square radius, and its easy to move around with lockable wheels.
All this comes for a price: $3900 for early adopters, and $5900 for final retail when it launches in mid-2016. That may seem a lot for someone to spend on a desk and chair, but people already spend thousands of dollars on weird ergonomic setups (looking at you, Silicon Valley).
Unlike other ergonomic solutions, Altwork’s Station has the advantage of being actually being able to dynamically switch between various configurations that all make sense in their own way. I could easily see myself using it each of the positions: standing for general work, sitting for longer pieces, and focus for time-crunched features… and maybe a little gaming too.
If you’re someone that spends several hours doing high-intensity work in front of a computer and has the budget, it’s definitely worth looking into. You can can pre-order or find out more at Altwork’s website below.
➤ AltworkMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Andrew North reports from Madhya Pradesh
Deshraj reaches out for his mother's breast as she balances him on her knees, sitting outside her low, mud-walled home.
The little boy cries, but with no strength.
Deshraj is two years old but barely larger than a newborn and crazed by hunger.
His hair is patchy, his eyes are sunken and his legs like twigs - he is so weak he can't even walk.
But his mother turns him away; she has nothing left to give.
"We can't get him to eat bread," she says in an irritated tone, clearly annoyed at being asked questions, and walks away.
Deshraj is one of millions of Indian children suffering severe malnutrition, an enduring problem Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called a "national shame".
Sometimes the mothers don't know how best to look after their children Health worker
Yet despite supposedly spending billions of rupees on poverty and food-relief programmes - and during a period of sustained economic growth - the government has made only a dent in the problem.
It is estimated that one in four of the world's malnourished children is in India, more even than in sub-Saharan Africa.
Weakened by hunger, they are more vulnerable to disease, with tens of thousands dying every year. Millions more will be physically and mentally stunted for life because they don't get enough to eat in their crucial early years.
'Hunger belt'
India has fallen in child development rankings, putting it behind poorer countries such as neighbouring Bangladesh or the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a new study by the Save the Children charity.
So when UK Prime Minister David Cameron hosts a summit this weekend on child malnutrition worldwide, India is one of the countries of greatest concern.
Yet this is hardly a new problem. India has been arguing over what to do about hunger and the poverty that underpins it for years - while its farms produce ever more food.
Image caption The feeding centre in Markheda village is empty apart from a few sacks of emergency food
On paper there is already a multi-billion dollar network in place to look after children like Deshraj.
But too often, corruption and mismanagement mean it doesn't work.
Deep in the so-called "hunger belt" of central India, Deshraj's village, Markheda, has a government-subsidised food shop funded by the Public Distribution System (PDS).
It entitles every family living below the official poverty line to 35kg of grain or rice a month.
His extreme case is known too: he has been identified as one of 19 "dangerously malnourished" children in the village, making him eligible for emergency help from the local "nutrition rehabilitation centre" in the nearby town of Shivpuri.
But here it gets even more complicated.
"His family won't agree to send him," complains one of the health workers who suddenly arrive in the village while the BBC is there.
It is true that Deshraj's mother does not appear overly concerned about his condition. Like most people here, she's illiterate and doesn't seem to understand many of the questions she is asked before walking away.
"I can't remember when we last saw someone from the government here Markheda villager
"Sometimes the mothers don't know how best to look after their children," says the health worker.
There are other boys and girls in this settlement of about 600 families who appear in better, although far from perfect, health.
Bottom rung
But it's questionable too how committed the local authorities are to helping remote villages like this.
Markheda's residents are all tribals, on the bottom rung of India's complicated social ladder and largely out of sight. No one would find this place by accident, a half-hour drive through scrub and forest from the nearest road.
Villagers say the government PDS store is usually closed. It just happens to be open when the BBC visits, but inside it is empty apart from a few small sacks of emergency food left in one corner.
"I can't remember when we last saw someone from the government here," says one villager.
And Om Prakash, the government team leader, admits they came to the village because "we wanted to see what you were doing".
In another hut, Dineshi and her husband Brijmohan are still mourning their four-year-old son, Kalua, who died a few weeks ago.
Image caption Brijmohan's four-year-old son died due to lack of medical care
"He got sick and stopped eating," says Brijmohan.
"We'd taken him to the doctor once before but we couldn't afford to go again and he got weaker and weaker."
There is no doctor nearby, and they have no transport. The family's only income is from selling baskets Brijmohan makes from tree saplings.
Blades of light pierce the gloom through holes in the thatched roof, catching their three-month-old son Mukesh as his mother Dineshi rocks him in a small hammock to relieve the thick summer heat.
He is still being breast-fed: the problems for children usually begin after six months, once they should start on solids.
The family gets food from the government PDS store, but sometimes "there's not enough, or it's bad quality".
"We're often hungry," Brijmohan says.
But there are plenty of people committed to tackling the problem.
At the nutrition rehabilitation centre in Shivpuri, Dr Raj Kumar is checking on a two-year-old girl called Anjini, brought in about a week earlier weighing just 3.8kg.
Many children are born heavier than that. Anjini has also picked up TB and pneumonia - common conditions among malnourished kids.
She is still in a dire state, barely able to lift her stick-thin limbs, but with constant feeding at the centre she has put on weight.
Dr Kumar says she will survive, but "she will be stunted for life".
'Left to rot'
Under pressure, India's ruling coalition introduced a Food Security bill last year, supposed to enshrine the right to food for all. But no one is betting on when it will be passed amid the country's current political deadlock.
And some critics say there is still not enough political will to tackle the hunger problem.
Other more free-market oriented voices argue that the whole approach of subsidising food and providing guarantees is wrong, simply creating a dependency culture.
Image caption India has had yet another record harvest
What is really needed, suggests Arti Tivari from the nutrition centre, is for existing programmes to be "implemented properly and for people to do their jobs properly" - a polite way of saying that graft and corruption still infect the system.
It is a simple fact that no Indian child needs to go hungry.
A short drive from the nutrition centre is a massive grain warehouse, sacks of wheat piled nearly to the ceiling - part of a network of government food stores across the country.
For years now, India has been producing more food than it needs. Yet every year large quantities simply rot in these warehouses.
The situation is much better than a decade ago, insists government minister Sachin Pilot, whose portfolio is officially telecoms but who has become closely involved in food policy.
But he admits "it's unacceptable having so many children with pot bellies and stick legs".
India still has a very young population, and politicians often talk of this future "demographic dividend".
But there will not be much of a dividend if so many Indian children continue to be held back and stunted in their first years of life.Fionna and Cake are back! On June 26, Cartoon Network’s hit fantasy romp Adventure Time will once again feature gender-swapped versions of main characters Finn and Jake. Madeleine Martin and Roz Ryan are set to reprise their alterna-universe lead roles as girl-with-cool-hat Fionna and stretchy-cat Cake on June 26.
The episode focuses on Lumpy Space Prince, the mustached, XY-chromosomed version of Lumpy Space Princess. EW is excited to exclusively share the first clip of the episode, complete with an impressive new voice for everyone’s favorite purple ball of fluff.
Can you guess the guest-star behind Lumpy Space Prince? Hint: He’s British. Double hint: He’s been in British things.
That’s Peter Serafinowicz, comedian and voiceover-guy extraordinaire! Things you’ve seen/heard him do recently: play Lord Covington on Parks & Recreation; say the funny line in the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer; voice a character in Dark Souls II. (If you think about it, Adventure Time is sort of like Dark Souls, except the complete opposite.)
The third Fionna and Cake episode airs on June 26, which coincidentally is the same date that people will start asking for a fourth Fionna and Cake episode.(Dec. 4, 2015) The Portland Bureau of Transportation’s Maintenance and Operations Group (PBOT) has partnered with GovDeals to offer a wide range of surplus property to the public. Items for auction include street signs that have been taken out of service, metal shelving and lockers, TVs, microwaves, power and mechanical tools, bricks, concrete garbage cans and many other goods.
The auction will start on Monday, Dec. 7, with additional and updated offerings to follow monthly until all surplus material has been sold.
To see the full range of items currently available for sale, please visit www.govdeals.com/PBOT. You can also register to bid at that time.
GovDeals is an experienced web-based auction service that helps public agencies sell surplus property. GovDeals has worked with various City of Portland bureaus, including the Portland Police Bureau, as well as with other government agencies throughout Oregon.
Proceeds from all sales will be deposited into PBOT’s general transportation revenues, which provides for basic operations and maintenance.
Photography credit: Felicity J. Mackay, Portland Bureau of Transportation
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The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) is the steward of the City’s transportation system, and a community partner in shaping a livable city. We plan, build, manage and maintain an effective and safe transportation system that provides access and mobility. www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation— A housekeeper with a sweet tooth reportedly got extremely high Monday when he indulged in a chocolate bar left behind in a condo.
The 18-year-old man told police he did not know the foil-wrapped chocolate was infused with marijuana.
“He decided to eat the entire chocolate bar,” Steamboat Springs Police Department Sgt. Scott Middleton said. “Within five minutes, he was very affected by it.”
The man started feeling funny, and co-workers at the vacation condo complex in the 1400 block of Pine Grove Road called for an ambulance.
He was taken to Yampa Valley Medical Center and treated for an overdose, Middleton said.
Middleton said the candy bar wrapper had “very fine print” that said the product contained tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC.
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While it still is illegal for people younger than 21 to consume marijuana for recreational use, Middleton said charges were not pursued because the man claimed he mistakenly ingested it.
Middleton noted the potency of infused marijuana products can be quite high. Some infused chocolate bars sold for recreational use in Steamboat can contain 100 mg of THC.
To reach Matt Stensland, call 970-871-4247, email mstensland@SteamboatToday.com or follow him on Twitter @SBTStenslandPresident Barack Obama lights a traditional oil lamp as Sri Narayanachar Digalakote, Hindu Priest from the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in Maryland, chants in observance of Diwali, or the 'Festival of Lights.'
Devna Shukla
AC360° Staff
As a first-generation Indian American, I am inevitably faced with many interesting cultural experiences.
Growing up in a small town in the Midwest, I often felt as if I lived two parallel lives; I was an American in school and Indian at home. I was truly conflicted and felt unable to share my Indian heritage during my elementary school years, despite my attempts to share the meaning and traditions with others.
My favorite holiday? The festival of Diwali, also known as the Hindu New Year.
Diwali is such a bright, colorful holiday celebrating the epic triumph of good over evil. This holiday is filled with sweets, vibrant clothing, and spending time with families. Not being able to share this with friends and colleagues was similar to a hypothetical situation where Christmas and Chanukah were ignored at schools, department stores, and at work.
Fast forward many years to 2006 when all of a sudden I was faced with a lot of Diwali questions. “When is Diwali this year?” I remember a teacher asking me. Shocked, I had no idea what prompted this newfound cultural awareness. A few days later it dawned on me: the hit NBC sitcom “The Office” actually filmed an entire episode devoted to Diwali.
At first, I was reluctant to watch. I’m so used to the typical “Apu” jokes from “The Simpsons” and wasn’t sure if “The Office” was going to be laughing at or with the Indian culture. Safe to say, the creative team at “The Office” laughed with us, creating one of my favorite television episodes ever made. The buzz about Diwali eventually faded a bit after memories of this episode withered away.
Imagine my surprise as an email landed in my inbox. “Subject: White House Celebrates Diwali.”
The White House, led by President Obama, lit the traditional diya (oil lamp) to celebrate Diwali. This is the first time the White House celebrated Diwali with the full attention of the president, as past presidents had not attended the ceremony.
While this news may have been lost to others more concerned with health care and the economy, it struck a chord with many around the world. I hope that small steps, such as celebrating important holidays around the world, will help to raise cultural consciousness and awareness, if only the slightest bit.
Although at first I was unsure of the impact of this gesture by the Obama Administration, minutes later I received another email from a co-worker with two simple – yet heartfelt – words:
“Happy Diwali.”
I’m not sure who to necessarily thank, but I think both President Obama and (the fictional) Michael Scott had something to do with it.
Follow Devna on Twitter @CNNDevnaWant to know when the Anthropocene started exactly? It will only cost an entirely revamped scientific effort in archaeology, ecology and paleontology, among other disciplines, at an unprecedented planetary scale, according to a new paper calling for such a scheme.
The putative start date for what scientists have begun to call the Anthropocene—a newly defined epoch in which humanity is the dominant force on the planet—ranges widely. Some argue that humans began changing the global environment about 50,000 years back, in the Pleistocene epoch, helping along if not outright causing the mass extinctions of megafauna, from mammoths to giant kangaroos, on most continents. Others date it to the emergence of agriculture some 7,000 years ago. The most definitive cases to be made coincide with the start of the industrial revolution and the dawn of the atomic age. The beginnings of burning fossil fuels to power machines in the 19th century initiated a change in the mix of atmospheric gases, and the first nuclear weapon test on July 16, 1945, spread unique isotopes across the globe.
There is little doubt from the archaeological record that humans have been altering ecosystems on a local scale for at least 50,000 years if not longer, but the extent of that alteration remains unknown. Recent work by ecologist Erle Ellis of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and others suggests that for at least 3,000 years hunting, farming and burning have shaped most landscapes on the planet, based on computer models.
To definitively prove that with field evidence would require the kind of archaeological and ecological effort the world has never seen, a scheme Ellis and co-authors lay out in a paper in the inaugural issue of the new open-access journal Elementa, devoted to the Anthropocene. That plan, they say, would have to be global in scale—to eliminate the bias in current research toward the most accessible archaeological sites—as well as unusually open. Few scientific disciplines are as secretive as archaeology, paleontology and paleoecology, given that careers are made (or not) based on access to specimens.
The payoff would be a true historical baseline for what is "natural" for the first time, complementing efforts like the Long Term Ecological Research Network and the new National Ecological Observatory Network, among others. "What is a natural system has a cultural history as part of its constitution," says archaeologist Dorian Fuller of University College London, a co-author of the paper and a supporter of "Big Archaeology," who notes that the ecosystems of Amazonia, Europe and even the western U.S. are all products of at least millennia of human activity.
Prospects for such a global effort are, admittedly, dim, not least because it is unclear who would fund such work. But a global, synthetic effort is the only way to answer the question: How long have humans been terraforming? "This is great scientific work that can be done and needs to be done," Ellis argues. "It will help us define the role of humans in shaping the Anthropocene and will mark a scientific triumph for humanity: a full empirical account of our rise to global stewardship of the biosphere."*Update* Three UK Suffer Major Data Breach – 133,827 Customers Have Details Stolen
Major UK carrier Three which is responsible for 37% of all UK Mobile data has admitted Thursday evening that their customer database was breached using an employee’s login. Up to six million of the company’s nine million customers could be at risk and that the data accessed included names, phone numbers, addresses and dates of birth, they also stated that no financial information was accessed.
UPDATE: CEO, Dave Dyson has given a statement on the breach which can be found here:
“As you may already know, we recently became aware of suspicious activity on the system we use to upgrade existing customers to new devices and I wanted to update all our customers on what happened and what we have done. I understand that our customers will be concerned about this issue and I would like to apologise for this and any inconvenience this has caused. Once we became aware of the suspicious activity, we took immediate steps to block it and add additional layers of security to the system while we investigated the issue. On 17th November we were able to confirm that 8 customers had been unlawfully upgraded to a new device by fraudsters who intended to intercept and sell on those devices.
I can now confirm that the people carrying out this activity were also able to obtain some customer information. In total, information from 133,827 customer accounts was obtained but no bank details, passwords, pin numbers, payment information or credit/debit card information are stored on the upgrade system in question. We believe the primary purpose of this was not to steal customer information but was criminal activity to acquire new handsets fraudulently. We are contacting all of these customers today to individually confirm what information has been accessed and directly answer any questions they have. As an additional precaution we have put in place increased security for all these customer accounts. We have been working closely with law enforcement agencies on this matter and three arrests have been made. I understand that this will have caused some concern and inconvenience for our customers and for that I sincerely apologise.“
Original article:
A spokesman for Three told The Telegraph:
“Over the last four weeks Three has seen an increasing level of attempted handset fraud. This has been visible through higher levels of burglaries of retail stores and attempts to unlawfully intercept upgrade devices. We’ve been working closely with the Police and relevant authorities. To date, we have confirmed approximately 400 high value handsets have been stolen through burglaries and eight devices have been illegally obtained through the upgrade activity. The investigation is ongoing and we have taken a number of steps to further strengthen our controls. In order to commit this type of upgrade handset fraud, the perpetrators used authorised logins to Three’s upgrade system. This upgrade system does not include any customer payment, card information or bank account information.“
The company has since said that it has strengthened data security and will be contacting the eight victims of handset fraud. The National Crime Agency has reported that a 35 year old male from Manchester has been arrested on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice, while a 48 year old male from Kent and a 39 year old male from Manchester have been arrested under suspicion of computer misuse offences. All three have since been released on bail pending further investigation.
Any customers that are concerned about their account or data can contact Three by calling 333 from a Three mobile or on 0333 338 1001 from any other phone to enquire if their details were accessed. All customers should pay particular attention to potential phishing attacks, as stolen details can be used to make it appear as though an email or phone call is from a business such as a bank that you would normally trust. It is also advisable to change the online password for your Three account and any other website or service that uses the same password.
The legal repercussions of this breach are still unclear however, it is possible that the Information Commissioner’s Office will give Three a fine of up to £500,000. The largest fine issued by the ICO so far has been £400,000 to ISP TalkTalk after a data breach affecting 157,000 customers.
This article will continue to be updated as we learn moreA customer at a Houston McDonald’s was caught on tape attacking another customer who was holding a child because she was “tired of being called the names she was being called.”
The unnamed woman is seen dumping a cup of ice on another female customer, Carla Deleon’s head in a video recorded by Dexter Kennedy.
Kennedy told ABC13, "I heard the female say she was tired of being called the names she was being called. She came over there with a cup that she had and poured it on the lady that was calling her names."
FANS CALL FOR MCDONALD'S 'BOYCOTT' FOLLOWING SZECHUAN SAUCE SNAFU
The Mirror reports that DeLeon had called the woman a “stupid a—.” The woman demands a cup from the staff behind the counter and then leaves, hurling insults at DeLeon who is standing next to her child waiting for their food.
WARNING: This video contains strong language.
DeLeon keeps calling the unidentified woman a “ghetto a—b----,” while the woman fills the drink and retorts with insults of her own.
The woman then pours a drink on DeLeon while she has her child in her arms, which begins the brawl. DeLeon reaches out to grab the woman and the woman punches her.
The fight continues until a man, identified as another McDonald’s worker, comes between the women and tries to break it up.
Since the video was uploaded, it has been seen millions of times.
"People have their feelings," Kennedy said. "You don't know what type of mood someone is in when you're talking to them in an inappropriate way. I'm sure it's not something they want to do again."
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DeLeon – who is pregnant in the video with her fifth child – is pressing charges against the woman for hitting both her and her 3-year-old daughter, who she said suffered a swollen cheek and a scratch from the violent altercation.
"How sad is it that you're going to hit somebody with a baby in their arms and I already stated I was pregnant on top of that?" DeLeon asked ABC13.
DeLeon said the woman was the aggressor and that she was just protecting her daughter.
"She was scared, and I turned around to look and the woman said, 'What are you looking at (expletive)?' I said I just wonder what my daughter's looking at. That's it," DeLeon said.
Despite the injuries, the Houston Police Department said they were not called out to McDonald’s that day.
UPDATE: This article has been updated to show that the fight took place between two customers. It was initially incorrectly reported that a |
in 1943 in The Saturday Evening Post, the narrator drunkenly attacks and eventually kills his pet cat, who subsequently haunts him in the form of a second cat. The film adaptation appeared alongside two others horror stories in the 1962 film Tales of Terror, directed by Roger Corman. In that particular version of the story, Peter Lorre played the narrator, and Vincent Price played a wine taster who gets Lorre's character drunk and then seduces his wife.
Black cats got a bad rap for being unlucky in the Middle Ages, as rumors began to spread that witches would use cats, often black ones, as familiars. Some believed that a witch could turn herself into a black cat, and according to American Folklore, some of those people ended up coming to America, bringing the superstition with them. Hence, black cats have often been featured in horror stories and Halloween decor. These cats all seem pretty cute, though.
Many black cats. (Photo by Ralph Crane, The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
(Photo by Ralph Crane, The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)The study of social identity and crowd psychology looks at how and why individual people change their behaviour in response to others. Within a group, a new behaviour can emerge first in a few individuals before it spreads rapidly to all other members. A number of mathematical models have been hypothesized to describe these social contagion phenomena, but these models remain largely untested against empirical data. We used Bayesian model selection to test between various hypotheses about the spread of a simple social behaviour, applause after an academic presentation. Individuals' probability of starting clapping increased in proportion to the number of other audience members already ‘infected’ by this social contagion, regardless of their spatial proximity. The cessation of applause is similarly socially mediated, but is to a lesser degree controlled by the reluctance of individuals to clap too many times. We also found consistent differences between individuals in their willingness to start and stop clapping. The social contagion model arising from our analysis predicts that the time the audience spends clapping can vary considerably, even in the absence of any differences in the quality of the presentations they have heard.
1. Introduction
Mathematical models of social contagion have been suggested for everything from pop songs and fashion to divorce and suicide [1–3]. Each social contagion model has its own set of assumptions about how individuals are ‘infected’ by others [4]. In general, these assumptions have not been tested experimentally, leaving several key empirical questions unanswered about how humans respond to each other [5]. For example, does the probability of social infection increase in proportion to the number already infected, as it does in most models of disease epidemics? Or is there a tipping point at which infection takes off? Do fashions die out because they have been around for too long or is there a socially mediated ‘recovery’? Are local neighbours or the proportion of the total population who are infected most important in spreading ideas?
Recent work has begun to quantify social contagion in, for example, joining of social networks [6] and gaze following [7]. However, human social dynamics remain notoriously difficult to quantify [8–10] and new methods are required to identify which cues people are responding to. One natural group setting, where it is relatively easy to quantify collective behaviour of humans is in audience applause, where previous studies have empirically investigated the emergence of self-organized rhythmical patterns [11,12]. Here, we quantify the role of social contagion in the start and stopping of applause. In an applause setting, each clap produced by an individual provides us with a time point at which he or she remains ‘infected’ by appreciation, and cessation of clapping denotes ‘recovery’. This type of datum allows us to apply a Bayesian model selection approach to determine the dynamics of how social cues spread through group members. Although, as with any other statistical method, we cannot conclusively rule out the influence of unobserved confounding variables, our approach allows us to accurately select which of the observed cues are the most probable cause of the social contagion and avoid identifying spurious but statistically significant correlations to confounding variables when multiple observed cues are correlated with each other.
2. Results
We filmed the response of groups of 13–20 university students to an oral presentation. Six different groups (consisting of a total of 107 students) listened to two presentations each (see §4 for details). A group's clapping can be ordered in terms of starting clapping (figure 1, black line) and stopping clapping (figure 1, red line). After the presentation was completed, the mean duration for the first person to begin clapping was 2.1 s (±s.e.: 0.62 s). The mean interval from the first person to start clapping, to the last person to start was 2.93 s (±s.e.: 0.33 s). The mean applause length (from the first person to start clapping to the last person to stop) was 6.1 s (±s.e.: 0.27 s). The mean duration for the first person to stop clapping was 5.56 s (±s.e.: 0.74 s), and the mean duration from the first person to stop clapping, to the last person to stop was 2.6 s (±s.e.: 0.3 s). Figure 1. Experimental results. The plot shows the median proportion of individuals in the audience who have started clapping (black line), stopped clapping (red line) and are currently clapping (green line), aggregated over the 12 experimental presentations. For the starting and stopping proportions, the shaded area represents the interquartile range, illustrating the variation across experiments.
Both the onset and the cessation of clapping follow a sigmoidal curve, with an initially slow uptake of the new behaviour followed by a phase of rapid change and eventual saturation (figure 1). Such sigmoidal growth and decay resemble the pattern of infection typically seen in the spread of diseases, both empirically and in epidemiology models, supporting the possibility of social contagion in clapping. We used a Bayesian methodology to test models for starting and stopping clapping [13–15]. We construct models that specify the probability that an individual will start or stop clapping (figure 2). These probabilities are conditioned on the state of the group (see the listed group characteristics below). By iterating over all observed events (starting/not starting; stopping/not stopping) and multiplying the probabilities of those events specified by a given model, we determine the likelihood of the data conditioned on any specific values of the model's adjustable parameters. Further summing over a range of possible parameter values by integration, we fairly assess the relative probabilities of the models (see §4). Figure 2. Model schematic. Individuals progress from an initially ‘susceptible’ state (S), before they have started clapping, to an ‘infected’ state (I) while clapping and eventually to a ‘recovered’ state (R) once they stop clapping. The probability of moving from S to I is given by the starting probability per second, P start. Once the individuals have started clapping, they either stop or continue after each successive clap, stopping with probability P stop or continuing with probability 1 − P start. These probabilities are determined by the proportion of individuals and direct neighbours who have started and stopped clapping and the number of claps each individual has already performed according to the models described in the text.
For starting clapping, we tested five alternative models. (M 1 ) independent: the probability of starting clapping is a constant rate, independent of the clapping of others; (M 2 ) linear response: the rate to start clapping depends on the proportion of audience, ρ clapping, who are already clapping; (M 3 ) quadratic response: the rate to start clapping depends on providing a threshold above which the probability of clapping significantly increases; (M 4 ) nearest neighbours: the rate to start clapping increases when your immediate neighbours start clapping; (M G ) first clap reaction: individuals wait for the first clap then start clapping with a normally distributed response time. The last four of these models are consistent with the sigmoidal increase in clapping seen in the data. We combined the models (1) to (4) into a single equation for the probability of starting, with adjustable parameters λ i, such that
2.1
1
3
2.2
2
4
G
From this general equation, any combination of models (1) to (4) can be constructed by definitively setting a subset of theparameters to be zero, while allowing others to vary and be inferred from the data. For example, by setting= 0 and= 0, we specify a model where each individual can respond to the total proportion of clappers in the audience, and more strongly to those who are their nearest neighbours:Thus, each potential model can be identified by specifying which elements remain active, in this example () and (). Model () specifies that the time to start clapping should be Normally distributed. The probability of starting during any specified time period is therefore given in terms of the cumulative Normal probability distribution,), whereandare the mean and standard deviation of the distribution of starting times.
The marginal likelihood was highest for the model involving a purely linear response (see the electronic supplementary material, figure S1a), i.e. model (M 2 ). The rate at which new individuals begin clapping, after the first clap is made, is proportional to how many are already clapping, with an inferred value of λ 2 = 2.15 ± 0.15 per second. The addition of any effect other than (M 2 ) made the data less probable, indicating that these other cues were not involved in the decision to begin clapping. Further evidence for the importance of (M 2 ) is demonstrated by the fact that all top six models include this term.
For the cessation of clapping we tested four models. (M 1 ) independent (as above); (M 2 ) linear response: the rate to stop clapping depends on the proportion of audience, ρ stopped, who have stopped clapping (not including those who have not started yet); (M 3 ) increasing with clap number: the rate to stop clapping increases with the number of claps, n claps, already performed by the individual (in proportion to the maximum number of claps observed in experiments); (M 4 ) nearest neighbours: the rate to stop clapping increases in proportion to the number of your immediate neighbours that stop clapping; (M G ) preferred clap duration: individuals clap a normally distributed number of times independent of others in the group. Again, we also compared combinations of models M 1 − M 4, which can be combined to a single form:
2.3
G
Similar to the case of the starting models, we can set any subset of theparameters to be zero to define a range of mixed cue models to test. Model () has a form equivalent to the respective starting model, with mean number of clapsand standard deviation
The four models which fit the data best all involve a term γ 2 > 0 for linear response, similar to the models for starting clapping. However, the best model combines (M 2 ) with an increased cessation with clap number, i.e. γ 3 > 0 (see the electronic supplementary material, figure S1c). The relative size of the parameters (the best fit γ 2 = 0.63 is over 10 times as large as γ 3 = 0.05) suggests that social contagion is a more important factor in stopping than the number of claps performed. Note that in this analysis a model with only (M 2 ) is not possible, since at least one individual must stop clapping when no others have done so. Performing a similar analysis on a restricted subset of the data, after at least one audience member has stopped clapping, identifies a purely social model as the most probable (see the electronic supplementary material, figure S1e). This suggests that the non-social element relating to the number of claps performed serves to regulate the initiation of stopping, which is then mediated through a social process. It was not possible to identify precisely when each presentation was completed, so our analysis of starting behaviour begins after the first clap is performed.
Rules of interaction between individuals in groups that are inferred from fine scale measurements of individual behaviour should be confirmed by demonstrating their ability to reproduce group level effects [15–17]. To further investigate the dynamics of applause, we implemented a simulation model based on the combination of the most probable starting and most probable stopping models (see §4). This model reproduces the type of dynamics seen in the experiment (figure 3a). In particular, the model accurately reproduces the form of the sigmoidal starting and stopping patterns seen in the data and the approximately symmetric growth of decay of the infection. To test our hypothesis that clapping contagion is a linear process, we also performed simulations of a model with a quadratic infection term (M 3 in the starting models), using the best-fit parameters for that model (λ 3 = 4.0 per second). The results of these simulations (figure 3b) show that such a model is inconsistent with the large-scale pattern of infection seen in the data (figure 1). In particular, infection occurs too rapidly, and there is a sustained period where all individuals are clapping, whereas in the data and in the linear simulations some individuals typically stop clapping before the whole audience is infected. Figure 3. Simulation results. The plot shows the median proportion of individuals in the audience who have started clapping (black line), stopped clapping (red line) and are currently clapping (green line), aggregated over 10 000 simulations. Results are shown for (a) the optimal linear contagion model and (b) an alternative quadratic contagion model. For the starting and stopping proportions, the shaded area represents the interquartile range, illustrating the variation across simulations. The simulation has three behavioural states: susceptible (S is the proportion of individuals in this state); clapping (I) and recovered (R). The time taken to go from susceptible to clapping is exponentially distributed with rate constant λ 2 (I + R). After the nth clap an individual will either recover (stop clapping) with probability γ 2 R + γ 3 n/n max or wait a time distributed N(0.28 s, 0.09 s) (matched to observed clap intervals). This process continues until all individuals have recovered.
An intriguing model prediction is that the length of time the audience spends clapping varies considerably (figure 4). Running the simulation multiple times, we see a large variability in the average number of claps across trials. While the majority of clapping bouts involve only 9–15 claps per person, some bouts can last over 30 claps. Compared with a Poisson distribution, the distribution arising from the simulation is more skewed towards both short and long bouts. This variability does not arise from any difference in the stimulus (i.e. the parameter values are the same for each simulation) but is rather a property of the social interaction involved in clapping and the variability in when stopping is initiated by through the non-social aspect of the model. The mean number of claps performed in each experimental presentation, indicated by black stars, all lie within the central 95 per cent of the simulated distribution. Figure 4. Distribution over 10 000 simulation runs of average number of claps performed per individual, shown with grey bars. All parameter values are the same as in figure 3a. The simulation is run 10 000 times and the average number of claps performed is recorded for each run. The figure is then a proportional distribution over all outcomes. Black stars indicate the mean number of claps performed per individual in each experimental presentation. The dashed line shows a Poisson distribution matched to the same mean as the simulated distribution, showing that shorter and longer bouts are more common in the simulation than expected under a Poisson model. (Online version in colour.)
We did not observe any difference in the type of response made to talk 1 and talk 2 (see the electronic supplementary material, figure S2 and the text therein for test details). We did, however, find a significant correlation between the order that particular individuals started clapping (N individuals = 104; N group = 6; median ρ = 0.53; p < 0.0001, randomized-ordering bootstrap on Spearman rank correlation coefficient) and stopped clapping (N individuals = 104; N group = 6; median ρ = 0.37; p < 0.0008) between the first and second presentations they listened to. This result indicates that the willingness to clap is characteristic of individuals.
3. Discussion
Unlike studies focused on visual information, where local transmission of information is between local neighbours [18–20], we find in our experiments that spatial proximity is not important. This is probably the result of attention to a less localized acoustic cue (i.e. the volume of clapping) instead of the behaviour of local neighbours. While the individuals were found to be increasingly likely to stop clapping as their clapping duration increased, we find that overall, global social influences appear to be more important than internal information in the decision to stop clapping. Because of the relatively weak but necessary effect of the individual duration of clapping upon probability of stopping, we suggest that this serves to regulate when stopping is initiated at the group level, with the stronger social effect subsequently mediating the rate of stopping after initiation. This interpretation is supported by the superior performance of a purely social model when considering the stopping process after the first person stops clapping.
While an analogy to disease spread is the starting point for describing social contagion, our study reveals important differences between biological and social processes. As in the standard Susceptible, Infected and Recovered (SIR) model for the spread of a disease [21], and in contrast to models based on tipping points or quorums [22,23], clapping increases linearly with the proportion of individuals already involved in it. This linear response is similar to that seen in movement decisions in monkeys [24] and in gaze-following by humans [7]. However, unlike the SIR model, ‘recovered’ individuals (those who have stopped clapping) increase the recovery rate of those who are clapping. This is consistent with an early model by Daley & Kendall [25] of fads and fashions. Figure 5 shows a phase plane for a differential equation version of our clapping model, in which the effect of number of claps on the probability of stopping is ignored. Unlike the SIR model, clapping always spreads even when the starting rate λ 2 is small. The point at which most people are infected with clapping is near to the point at which there remain very few susceptibles, similar to both the experimental results (figure 1) and the stochastic simulations (figure 3). As seen in the experimental results (figure 1), the model predicts that even before everyone has started clapping, some individuals will usually have recovered and stopped. Figure 5. Ignoring the effect of number of claps on the probability of stopping, the clapping model can be expressed in terms of mean-field differential equations (4.4) and (4.5). The model parameters are set from the best model fit when ignoring clap number-dependent stopping (i.e. γ 3 = 0), with stopping parameters adjusted from per clap values to per second values using the average clap interval of 0.28 s, yielding γ 2 = 2.15 per second, γ 1 = 0.0011 per second and γ 2 = 0.094 per second. (a) Change of susceptible and infected individuals through time when S(0) = 0.95 and I(0) = 0.05. (b) Phase plane of susceptible versus infected. When (indicated by the blue dotted line) clapping reaches a maximum. The red arrowed line shows the time integration from figure 5a.
Here, we have established a particular empirical form for social contagion in clapping. While we expect other social activities may have different functional forms, it is striking how well a simple model fits the data. The dynamic nature of clapping data and the model comparison method we have adopted here has allowed us to further determine the relative weights of internal cues (how long I have clapped) and external cues (how many others are still clapping) in the cessation of an activity. We believe that our methodology can be equally applied to other social contagion data. In psychological, economical and sociological phenomena, the confounding of many potential causes for given effect gives rise to statistical difficulties in inferring what proportion of the observed behaviour can be attributed to a given cue [26–29]. For example, the rate at which individuals leave social networks or online groups is likely to be a function of both how long a focal individual has been a member and the engagement of other members [2,30]. The methods presented here could be used to find the relative weighting of these internal and external cues and predict how long particular online fads will last. Under the Bayesian method, for any set of potential cues, the relative model likelihoods show which cue or combinations of cues best explain the data. Multiple cues must be sufficiently strong and independent to warrant their inclusion in the model [31, ch. 4 and 20].
Sociological phenomena that appear well understood on the level of the individual can be highly sensitive to stochasticity in individual responses, producing different patterns at the group level [32]. Similar phenomena are observed in collective animal behaviour, where fitting a model at the level of the individual does not immediately imply an understanding of global dynamics [15–17]. To address these potential problems, we tested the group level implications of the ‘rules of interaction’ we had inferred between individuals by simulation, and found that these gave rise to bouts of applause with a similar mean duration to the real talks, with a similar sigmoidal profile for both the initiation and cessation of clapping. Stochasticity in the individual responses led to variation in the total applause duration which mirrors the results of our experiments.
In our experiment, different talks did not cause differences in the length of clapping bouts. Our model suggests that variation in the length of applause can arise even for talks which are equally appreciated by the audience (figure 4). Randomness in the audience interactions can sometimes result in unusually strong or weak levels of appreciation, independent of the quality of the presentation. Groups must coordinate the cessation of clapping and on different occasions this can take longer or shorter periods of time to achieve. The social problem an audience must solve after an academic presentation is not how and when to start a round of applause, but it is rather how to coordinate its end.
4. Methods and material
4.1. Experiment
Experiments took place at the University of Leeds during March 2009. We observed the behaviour of participants in an audience in response to an oral presentation. We used 107 participants. The participants were university students and prior to the experiment we requested permission to video their behaviour. We also used six presenters who were undergraduate (but not in the same year as the audience participants) or postgraduate students. Participants and presenters were naive as to the purpose of the investigation.
Experiments took place in a small seminar room (10 × 12 m). A presenter stood at one end of the room in front of a large screen, and the audience was instructed to sit, facing the presenter, in three rows.
Participants were organized into six groups (three groups comprised 20 individuals, and a further three groups comprised 18, 16 and 13 individuals). Each group was assigned (at random) to attend two presentations by different presenters. The participants were told to observe and record the body language of the presenter, so that their attention was on the presenter and therefore they were less likely to consider that their clapping behaviour was under investigation. They were also told that they should applaud the presenter at the end of the presentation because the presenters were performing the presentation voluntarily.
For each of 12 presentations (two by each presenter), the presenter performed a 7 min oral Powerpoint presentation on a biological study. The end of the presentation was defined as when the speaker completed their final statement, such as ‘thank you’ or ‘any questions?’.
We observed the time at which participants in the audience started and stopped clapping from video footage. Clapping was defined as when an individual struck a part of their body with one of their hands in a repetitive manner (this was usually their other hand but in some cases it was their arm or their shoulder). An individual was considered to have started to clap at the point where their hands met for the first time during a clapping bout, and was considered to have stopped clapping when their hands met for the final time.
One hundred and four out of the 107 participants started to clap after the presentation.
4.2. Model comparison
We take a Bayesian model comparison approach to identifying the causes of both starting and stopping clapping, following the methodology of Mann et al. [15]. This means that we propose various hypotheses about how clapping starts and stops in the form of models. These specify the probability of an individual either starting and stopping clapping, as a function of the potential cues of interest such as the number of other clappers, number of clappers who have stopped and the length of time the individual has been clapping. Since the effect of those cues is unknown, the influence of each upon the starting or stopping probability is modulated by a set of free parameters, ϕ. By multiplying over the sets of all events 𝒳 (either time steps or claps), all individuals ℐ, and all experiments ℰ, each of these hypotheses, or models, M i thus specifies the probability of the complete data, D, conditional on the model and the parameter values,
4.1
i
4.2
Different hypotheses use a different set and number of terms to represent different cues, and the sensitivity to the exact parameter values varies between models. To account for this, we integrate over the unknown parameters, using a reasonable (see below) prior probability distribution,|M), to find the probability of the data conditioned only on the model.By a ‘reasonable’ prior distribution, we mean one that has significant probability mass across a broad range of possible parameter values and which does not either specify strong knowledge about any specific parameter value or favour one model over another by design. See the electronic supplementary material for details of the precise prior distributions used for each parameter.
We select among possible hypotheses by asking which is most probable in the light of the data. Assuming all models to be equally probable a priori this means that we select the model with the greatest marginal likelihood, argmax i P(D|M i ). To evaluate the integral in equation (4.2), we use importance sampling Monte Carlo (see standard texts [33]). We draw N random samples,, from the prior distribution of the parameters. The integral is then approximated as
4.3
4.3. The simulation model
The uncertainty in this estimate scales asand we repeat the calculation eight times (for an eight processor computer), finding the mean and standard error and then increasing the number of parameter samples if the uncertainty is too great to distinguish between models.
In the simulation model each of N = 20 individuals are assumed to be in one of three states: susceptible (S is the proportion of individuals in this state); clapping (I) and recovered (R). Susceptibles have not started clapping yet, while recovered means that the individual has already clapped. The simulation is made in two stages: starting and stopping.
At time t(1) = 0, one randomly selected individual starts clapping. We then generate an exponentially distributed random variable, T, with rate constant λ 2 S(t)(I(t) + R(t)). T is the time at which the next individual will start clapping. At t(1) = 0, I(0) + R(0) = 1/N, S(0) = 1 − 1/N and the rate constant is λ 2 (1/N − 1/N2). We then set t(1) = t(0) + T, let I(t) + R(t) = 2/N, S(t) = 1 − 2/N and generate a new exponentially distributed random variable, T. This process continues until S(t(N)) = 0. The values t(i) give the times of the first clap of each of the individuals, i = 1, …, N.
To calculate stopping clapping we start at time t(1) when the first individual clapped. This individual has performed one clap and will stop clapping with probability
or wait a time(0.28, 0.09) seconds until the next clap. We update(1) =(1) +to be the time of the next clap by individual 1 and set claps(1) = 2. For all subsequent simulation steps, we find the individual i with the next clap, i.e.for which) is minimized. Individualwill then stop clapping with probabilityor continue to clap again at a time(0.28, 0.09) seconds. If she continues clapping we update) =) +to be the time of the next clap by individual 1 and set claps) =) + 1. The simulation stops when all individuals have stopped clapping.
Ignoring the effect of number of claps on the probability of stopping, the above clapping model can be expressed in terms of mean-field differential equations
4.4
4.5
1
2
1
2
Acknowledgements This work was funded by the European Research Council grant IDCAB 220/104702003, The Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and UK National Environment Research Council grant NE/D01 1035/1.
Footnotes
andHere, we assume that the per individual rate of starting clapping is proportional to the proportion of those who are either infected or recovered. This is the same as in the simulation model. The main adjustment in the differential equation model is that, since we cannot account directly for the number of claps each individual has done, we instead use the rateper individual of stopping clapping. The fitted parameters= 0.008 per clap and= 0.66 per clap are the best model fit when ignoring clap number dependent stopping, i.e. models (1 and 2).Songs We Love: Thelonious Monk, 'Pannonica (Quartet)'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Arnaud Boubet - Private collection Courtesy of Arnaud Boubet - Private collection
This Saturday is Record Store Day, and one of its many offerings is an unreleased film soundtrack by Thelonious Monk. We celebrate that release and Monk's centennial with one of his ballads.
Provocative, controlled, erratic, lyrical, grating — and, above all else, original. These are just a few of the terms one can use to describe Thelonious Monk — both the man and his music. A pioneer of bebop in the 1940s and both a giant of hard bop and a forerunner of post-bop in the 1950s, Monk never fit neatly into existing musical vernaculars. He employed complex, chromatic harmonies that could border on atonality and melodies that sounded as if they were being twisted by pain; yet he brought those discordant elements together in compositions of sublime beauty and aching lyricism.
As multi-faceted as he was, Monk lent his talents as a performer and arranger to the film world only once, providing parts of the score for Roger Vadim's 1959 film adaptation of the 18th-century French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Monk and his then working quartet — Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, Sam Jones on bass and Art Taylor on drums — did not record a proper score, per se; rather, they recorded full-length takes of songs in their regular repertoire, tailored to fit the emotional sentiment of the film.
One of those numbers is "Pannonica," a Monk ballad that first appeared on his 1957 LP Brilliant Corners. That version is a work of delicate beauty, underpinned by Monk appearing on the lullaby-like celeste instead of his usual piano. It speaks of a quiet love, an intimacy that is conveyed in hushed tones and hidden corners. The quartet version that appears on the Les Liaisons Dangereuses soundtrack (Monk also recorded a pair of meditative, searching solo-piano versions) still breathes an air of romance, but is permeated by much darker tones.
The film centers around Valmont and Juliette de Merteuil, a married couple who aid each other in pursuing extramarital affairs. "Pannonica" scores the scene in which Valmont first meets Cécile, the young woman who becomes his newest pursuit. As their eyes meet, the music enters. While Monk's dissonant blue notes suggest Valmont's darker character, saxophonist Charlie Rouse truly sets the tone for the song, tapping into his tenor's reedier sonorities to underscore Valmont's seedy intentions. "Pannonica" hints at the delight and despair to come, as Monk's twisting blend of bitter melancholy and sweet romance sets the tone for the rest of the film and the rest of the score.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses comes out May 19 via SAM Records (digital), with a double-CD release on June 16. Vinyl comes out on Record Store Day (April 22) from participating stores.Julian Assange is expected to be cleared of three sexual assault claims next week after spending so long in hiding in Britain that the allegations have expired, it has emerged.
The Wikileaks founder has been seeking refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than three years at a cost to the taxpayer of around £12 million.
He is avoiding extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over the alleged crimes, which include violent sexual assault.
Within a week, three of the four claims he faces will have reached their five year expiry date under Sweden’s statute of limitations.
As a result Mr Assange, 44, is due to be cleared, Swedish prosecutors told the Times.
Photo: Lewis Whyld/PA
Mr Assange, who denies the sex claims, fears that he will be extradited on to the US to face charges relating to the huge leaks of sensitive data.
• Why is Julian Assange still inside the embassy of Ecuador?
Hugo Swire, the FCO minster, told The Times that the situation was “deeply unsatisfactory and costly”.MOSCOW — Amid increasingly tense relations with the United States over Syria, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia took advantage of a routine meeting in Istanbul on Monday to advance the Kremlin’s reconciliation with Turkey, including an agreement to revive a suspended natural-gas pipeline project.
The new pipeline, known as the Turkish Stream, would run under the Black Sea to Turkey and then the Greek border, allowing Russian gas to reach Western markets without using Russia’s existing export pipelines through Eastern Europe.
The pipeline would make it much easier for Russia to cut off gas supplies to neighboring countries like Ukraine without disrupting sales to countries farther west like Italy or Austria. Russia has been trying for years to establish such an export route.
Mr. Putin’s appearance at an international energy conference was his first visit to Turkey since a crisis in relations between the countries after Turkey’s downing of a Russian fighter jet along the border with Syria in November 2015, in which a Russian pilot was killed. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, nominally an ally of the United States in Syria, patched things up with a letter of apology and a trip to St. Petersburg in August.Catherine Gilon and Jayanthi Somasundaram By
In a dark and stormy night, a dark knight rises, silhouetted against a moonless sky. Gods prepare for war a few thousand years in the mystical past. A goddess manifests herself in a young woman who has been raped and takes revenge. In the more recent past and in the now, history is retold through nostalgic strips of art. Sholay and Shivaay splatter across four-colour pages.
But the one that everyone’s waiting for is yet to come. S S Rajamouli’s breathtaking world of Baahubali promises to change India’s perception of graphic novels forever.
These heroes are not guardians of Gotham City, Metropolis or New York. They are in our own Indian backyard, spawning out of graphic novels, embedding themselves in the hearts of those who grew up with Batman, Superman, Spider-man and their league of super heroes. Artful pictures that tell tales of valour, humour, sex, gossip, introspection, despair, darkness and light—graphic novels are making a bold and in-your-face impression on paper in four colours.
Girija Jhunjhunwala, Publisher Pic: Shekhar Yadav
A mix of photographs, drawings and text bound together in a slim book brought out the colours and darkness in the lives of three men in Delhi in 2004 in Corridor, which leapfrogged its author Sarnath Banerjee and the rise of the graphic novel movement in India. It took Sarnath three-and-a-half years to complete the story set in the corridors of Connaught Place and Kolkata, capturing the essence of urban lives in all its madness.
V K Karthika, who was then senior editor at Penguin Books, took a huge risk by accepting his manuscript. “There was no commercially available graphic novel available in India at that time. She must have spent hours trying to convince marketing. Today, most publishers want to do graphic novels,” says the 44-year-old artist, whose work represents the rapidly-changing Indian lifestyle.
But graphic novels are not new to India. What is new is the themes they depict. With the success of events such as Comic Con 2016, people have come to view the genre of graphic novels in a different light. Visually strung-together powerful stories by 14 women in Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back, published by Zubaan Books last year, reiterate that the realm of sequential art and graphic storytelling is here to stay.
“Amar Chitra Katha presented mythological tales in an illustrated format to readers all over India,” explains S Vijayan, the 49-year-old editor of Lion Comics, a pioneer in regional comics in Tamil Nadu. “Today, there are some young Indian comic book publishers who give an imaginative twist to our mythology for the English and Hindi audience. We need to keep pace with and embrace the changing times. That is why more space is now being created for graphic novels in other Indian languages as well.”
S Vijayan, Publisher. Pic : K K SUNDAR
The term ‘graphic novel’ was coined in 1964, and the Amar Chitra Katha comics were launched in India in 1967. The country welcomed the world of comics with open arms. Initially, they focused on retelling the epics, the Mahabharata and Ramay |
in Afghanistan. We risked everything to do this job and we are glad that the British government has recognised our service and the sacrifices we made for them. Our friends did not abandon us to be persecuted by the Taliban. The British government has given us the chance to live once more in peace and prosperity. I would like to thank all our supporters and the British media from the bottom of my heart. They have supported us to get a peaceful life. Afghan interpreters: 'No life for us here'
Under the plans, those allowed into the UK on a five-year visa will then be able to apply for indefinite leave.
The Border Agency will approve how many close family members they are allowed to bring.
Interpreters who choose to stay in Afghanistan will be allowed to sign up for fully-funded training and education for five years, or instead be paid at their current rate for a further 18 months.
Under the new plan, some other locals who had helped British soldiers in non-front-line roles, such as cooks and security guards, will also be given the choice of training and education, or further payments.
After the Iraq war, Britain gave Iraqi interpreters either one-off financial assistance or exceptional indefinite leave to remain in the UK with help to relocate, or the opportunity to resettle through the UK's Gateway programme run in partnership with the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees.A make-up artist wants to remove his genitals to achieve his dream of looking like an alien – but plastic surgeons have said it may be impossible.
LA-based Vinny Ohh, 23, has already spent $60,000 transforming himself into a “genderless alien.”
However, the surgery he wants next is his most extreme yet – getting his genitalia removed entirely so he is neither male nor female.
He’s now been told by plastic surgeons that he may never be able to have the operation – which would be a world-first.
Renowned plastic surgery Dr. Simoni, who runs a practice in Beverly Hills, said such a procedure is highly controversial since doctors are unsure what effect the removal would have on the body’s biochemistry.
He said: “The experimental nature of the procedure means it is highly risky and it could also impact on basic bodily functions such as Vinny’s ability to urinate.
“This procedure has not been done yet, it’s totally new territory.
“This would be a brand new procedure and if something happens or there are complications, we don’t have any idea how to address it.
“Also, the sexual organ is also a tool to urinate, there are muscles that hold the urethra and prevents not only the urine flowing out, but also the bacteria going back up.
“My main problem with this procedure is what is he going to think about it in ten or 15 years time?
“Because all the bridges are gone. There is no way to come back to female or male. It’s a done deal. And he is young and now he has to live with it until he is 80 or 90 years old.”
The wannabe extraterrestrial grew up in a small town in Oregon, where he says he never quite felt like he belonged.
So far Vinny has had three surgeries and 110 procedures to achieve his current look, including two rhinoplasties and 35 body and face laser treatments.
He also regularly sports large black contact lenses and strikingly colored hair, which complete his jaw-dropping look.
He said: “My goal in regards to my look is to become an exact, scientifically proportioned, sexless human being.
“People talk about ‘gender reassignment’ but I’m looking to have ‘gender unassignment’. I’m looking to change my genitals so there is nothing there. There will just be a hole to pee out of.
“I want my genitals removed because life would be easier, plus I’m also celibate.”
There may also be legal obstacles to such an operation.
Surgeons have suggested Vinny transition to female as a first, safe step towards his goal, but he has his heart set on being left with a doll-like genital region.
Vinny said: “I don’t want to become a woman, I just want to have nothing.”
Asked about his reasons for identifying as alien and wanting such a drastic surgery, Vinny is clear that he sees himself as a pioneer.
He said: “For me LA was always about sex appeal, whereas when I think of alien I think of ugly. Aliens don’t really have a gender, in my eyes anyway.
“I connected with it and felt like, ‘I want to be that’.”
Doctors have raised the fact that the surgery would leave Vinny unable to father children of his own, but Vinny says his plan has always been to adopt.
He said: “When I was younger I identified as a gay man and I had already planned to adopt three kids. My mindset hasn’t really changed.
“Just because I remove my genitals I will still be adopting children.”
While his plastic surgery goals may seem shocking to some, Vinny has the support of his sister Daniella and manager Marcela.
Daniella said: “My biggest concern is just his safety. I really have the concerns about cyber bullying and real bullying during his everyday life.
“I do worry that he’ll change his mind about surgery later in life but the more we talk about it, the more it actually feels like this is actually truly what he needs and wants to be more authentically him.”
Vinny’s manager Marcela added: “I personally love Vinny’s look because I always like people who don’t look normal, or at least what society says is normal.
“I support Vinny’s transformation into becoming a genderless human. If he is ready to do it, and the doctors approve the surgery legally, I will by with him by his side.”
And despite the warnings Vinny has received from medical professionals, he is adamant that he will go ahead with it, saying that he needs it in order to become his true self.
Vinny said: “I am so happy and proud for the way I am living my life.
“People think I am crazy for the way I look but I think I am doing something good by pushing boundaries and changing the way people think.”
Vinny Ohh previously appeared on This Morning to reveal his plans to have his nipples, bellybutton and genitals removed in order to become a “blank canvas.”Fluctuations of serotonin levels in the brain, which often occur when someone hasn’t eaten or is stressed, affects brain regions that enable people to regulate anger, new research from the University of Cambridge has shown.
Although reduced serotonin levels have previously been implicated in aggression, this is the first study which has shown how this chemical helps regulate behaviour in the brain as well as why some individuals may be more prone to aggression. The research findings were published today, 15 September, in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
For the study, healthy volunteers’ serotonin levels were altered by manipulating their diet. On the serotonin depletion day, they were given a mixture of amino acids that lacked tryptophan, the building block for serotonin. On the placebo day, they were given the same mixture but with a normal amount of tryptophan.
The researchers then scanned the volunteers’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they viewed faces with angry, sad, and neutral expressions. Using the fMRI, they were able to measure how different brain regions reacted and communicated with one another when the volunteers viewed angry faces, as opposed to sad or neutral faces.
The research revealed that low brain serotonin made communications between specific brain regions of the emotional limbic system of the brain (a structure called the amygdala) and the frontal lobes weaker compared to those present under normal levels of serotonin. The findings suggest that when serotonin levels are low, it may be more difficult for the prefrontal cortex to control emotional responses to anger that are generated within the amygdala.
Using a personality questionnaire, they also determined which individuals have a natural tendency to behave aggressively. In these individuals, the communications between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex was even weaker following serotonin depletion. 'Weak' communications means that it is more difficult for the prefrontal cortex to control the feelings of anger that are generated within the amygdala when the levels of serotonin are low. As a result, those individuals who might be predisposed to aggression were the most sensitive to changes in serotonin depletion.
Dr Molly Crockett, co-first author who worked on the research while a PhD student at Cambridge’s Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (and currently based at the University of Zurich) said: “We've known for decades that serotonin plays a key role in aggression, but it's only very recently that we've had the technology to look into the brain and examine just how serotonin helps us regulate our emotional impulses. By combining a long tradition in behavioral research with new technology, we were finally able to uncover a mechanism for how serotonin might influence aggression.”
Dr Luca Passamonti, co-first author who worked on the research while a visiting scientist at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge (and currently based at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Unità di Ricerca Neuroimmagini, Catanzaro), said: “Although these results came from healthy volunteers, they are also relevant for a broad range of psychiatric disorders in which violence is a common problem. For example, these results may help to explain the brain mechanisms of a psychiatric disorder known as intermittent explosive disorder (IED). Individuals with IED typically show intense, extreme and uncontrollable outbursts of violence which may be triggered by cues of provocation such as a facial expression of anger.
“We are hopeful that our research will lead to improved diagnostics as well as better treatments for this and other conditions.”With avian influenza spreading beyond North Jeolla, the government yesterday imposed a 12-hour ban on the movement of poultry farmers and their vehicles, prohibiting them from leaving their farms in the Chungcheong regions and Gyeonggi.The measure, which was effective from 6 a.m. through 6 p.m. yesterday, came amid growing fears over the spread of the deadly animal virus, which now has hit South Chungcheong, North and South Jeolla and Gyeonggi.The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs confirmed yesterday that ducks at a poultry farm in Cheonan, South Chungcheong, were infected with the AI virus. Cheonan is only about 92 kilometers (57 miles) from Seoul.The authorities are now verifying the strain of virus in the ducks in Cheonan. They assume it is H5N8, the strain that has swept the southern parts of the country since Jan. 16.The H5N8 strain has no history of infecting humans, according to the government.With the confirmation of the AI outbreak in Cheonan, quarantine authorities are going to cull 9,500 ducks and chickens from the infected farm and 51,700 birds at farms in a 3-kilometer radius as a preventive measure.The confirmation of the AI infection in Cheonan came a day after chickens at a poultry farm in Buyeo County, South Chungcheong, were confirmed to have been infected, heightening government worries that the disease has spread to chickens.The authorities yesterday dispatched military servicemen and public servants to Buyeo to conduct quarantine and sterilization efforts, culling 118,000 chickens at two farms located within a 3-kilometer radius of the infected farm.The news of the chickens’ infection in South Chungcheong put chicken farmers in adjacent southern province of Gyeonggi on high alert. Over 15 million chickens are raised at 422 farms in Pyeongtaek, Anseong and Hwaseong in southern Gyeonggi.Choi Kil-young, 64, who farms 80,000 chickens in Hwaseong, said he is not letting anyone enter his farm.“If my farm gets infected, it’s not only me who will bear the brunt of it,” he said. “It could also devastate other farms in nearby areas.”Under the government directive on disease control, a poultry farm is subject to culling if it is located within a 3-kilometer radius of an infected farm.“We compensate 100 percent of the market price for slaughtered animals if it is verified they have not contracted bird flu,” said an official at the disease control center. Compensation is 80 percent for infected birds.As of yesterday, the Rural Affairs Ministry said 644,000 chickens and ducks were slaughtered from 43 farms in the current AI outbreak. In addition, about 813,000 animals from 27 farms are expected to be culled in the coming days.BY KANG JIN-KYU [jkkang2@joongang.co.kr]This article is from the archive of our partner.
Weird Uncle Joe Biden showed up to campaign for Barack Obama in Florida today, and man, was he on top of his weird uncle game. "I'm being a good Biden today," he said.
How good? Well first, it being Florida and really sunny, Uncle Joe wore his signature aviators to speak at rallies—a perfect look for a Biden-licious day.
He also talked about running for office...four years from now. At an unscheduled stop in Sarasota at old-timey restaurant Station 400, Uncle Joe was feeling good, hugging "aging groupies," as Los Angeles Times' Michael A. Memoli observed. One woman, after snagging a photo with the VP, said she couldn't wait to share the photo with her Republican brother. But why wait? In warm Uncle Joe fashion, he said he'd call the brother up right now. So he did, and the brother got talking about health care, and Joe really wanted to get into it but those darn aids pulled him back. “Look, I’m not trying to talk you into voting for me, I just wanted to say hi to you,” Biden told the brother. “And after it's all over, when your insurance rates go down, then you’ll vote for me in 2016.”
He said "whole load," hehe. Uncle Joe has been super frustrated by Republican statements recently and just wants to let it all out. So of course, to illustrate this, he uses a metaphor that the kid's table would snicker at: "As they say in my business," he told a rally, "I'm going to give you the whole load today."Fury FC barely broke a sweat before FC Edmonton stuck a dagger in Ottawa’s chances of advancing to the semi-finals of the Amway Canadian Championship.
The Eddies jumped out to a 2-0 lead within the first 15 minutes of Wednesday’s second leg in Edmonton and Ottawa couldn’t recover, dropping the match 3-1 and losing 6-2 on aggregate. It was already an unlikely climb after Ottawa dropped the first leg 3-1 in the capitala week ago, but the early goals and yet another questionable non-call made it an almost impossible mission.
After Tomi Ameobi and Sainey Nyassi scored for Edmonton, Ottawa striker Andrew Wiedeman scored his first goal in Fury colours to cut the lead in half. Wiedeman broke in alone before halftime and look poised to score his second of the game but was clipped by Albert Watson before getting a shot off. There was no foul called on the play.
Daryl Fordyce scored on a penalty kick in the second half.
Without coach Marc Dos Santos, who was serving a one-game suspension, a few alterations were made to the Fury lineup for Wednesday’s clash with the Eddies. Defender Mason Trafford made his season debut at centreback next to Colin Falvey, while Drew Beckie drew into central midfield as Ottawa reverted to a 4-3-3 formation. Brandon Poltronieri returned from injury to line up at left back and Andrew Wiedeman started up top, though he was soon joined by striker Tommy Heinemann as Ottawa looked to add some offensive support.
Fury returns to action Saturday as the club travels to New York to face the Cosmos.On the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts, a California teenager is calling for a boycott of the organization’s famous cookies. Her complaint: the Girl Scouts admitted a 7-year-old transgender child to a Colorado troop in November.
“Taylor” urges a national boycott of Girl Scout cookies. (YouTube)
It is not the first time the issue has garnered complaints. Three Girl Scout troops at a Christian school in Louisiana disbanded in protest in December, the Christian Post reports.
Identified only as Taylor, 14, from Ventura County, Calif., the teenager appears in a YouTube video in which she charges the Girl Scouts with spending money from cookie sales in “promoting the desires of a small handful of people.”
“Right now, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.... is not being honest with us girls, its troops, its leaders, its parents or the American public,” Taylor, who wears a Girl Scout sash, says in the video. “Girl Scouts describes itself as an all-girl experience. With that label, families trust that the girls will be in an environment that is not only nurturing and sensitive to girls' needs, but also safe for girls.”
The video was released by a Houston-based group made up of Girl Scout volunteers called the “Honest Girl Scouts,” which also sent out a press release to religious publications and pro-family groups, according to The Christian Post.
In an e-mail to The Washington Post Wednesday, Michelle Tompkins, a national Girl Scouts spokeswoman, said the organization “prided itself on being an inclusive organization serving girls from all walks of life”
“We handle cases involving transgender children on a case by case basis with a focus on ensuring the welfare and best interests of the child in question and the other girls in the troop as our highest priority,” she said. The spokeswoman also said that the Girl Scout Cookie Program’s proceeds “stay in the local market and are used to fund programs for girls.”By Lucy Costa in Toronto, Ontario Canada.
This post was originally printed in the CS/info Centre Bulletin. The CS/Info Centre is an information resource centre providing assistance and referral to Consumer/Survivors and others in the Greater Toronto area (Canada). All staff and volunteers are consumer/survivors of mental health and/or addiction systems. They have been providing support and publishing the bulletin since 1992.
From September 9th – 11th, 2014 Lancaster University in the UK held a Disability Studies conference with a stream that focussed specifically on Mad Studies. This is very important and it signifies a step forward in our history, community organising and hope for a more inclusive future especially for our next generation. Canada has some classes that do teach, “Mad Peoples History” but we need more commitment for an educational structure that supports learning, exploration and critical thinking in universities, colleges, and learning centres of all kinds. Given that for the last four decades lip service has been paid to inclusion, participation and rights for consumers/psychiatric survivors, it is reasonable to request that a morsel of funding be given to develop this area of study so we can build on the great work of our previous consumer/survivor leaders, and mentors.
What is Mad Studies?
Mad Studies is an area of education, scholarship, and analysis about the experiences, history, culture, political organising, narratives, writings and most importantly, the PEOPLE who identify as: Mad; psychiatric survivors; consumers; service users; mentally ill; patients, neuro-diverse; inmates; disabled -to name a few of the “identity labels” our community may choose to use. Mad Studies has grown out of the long history of consumer/survivor movements organised both locally and internationally. The methods, and approaches for research are drawn from other educational fields such as women’s studies, queer studies, critical race studies, legal studies, ethnography, auto-ethnography (again, just to name a few). But, Mad Studies, right here, right now is breaking new ground. Together, we can cultivate our own theories/ models/ concepts/ principles/ hypotheses/ and values about how we understand ourselves, or our experiences in relationship to mental health system(s), research and politics. No one person, or school, or group owns Mad Studies or defines its borders. As explained in the book, Mad Matters, Mad Studies is a, “project of inquiry, knowledge production and political action”.[1] Presently, (and as discussed at the Lancaster conference) we need more action. All we have available as a “progressive” theory to us now is the “recovery model.” Yup, the recovery model is important but it’s not enough to understand who we are, or what is needed especially in the current budget-cuts climate that favours business plans and wealthy professionals’ opinions. More to the point, “recovery” has been co-opted by the mental health system. The money that is being invested into the system right now ain’t about recovery, it’s about efficiencies and outcomes and dishing out services cheaper and faster. There will be some people who will inevitably criticise or feel threatened by the idea of “Mad Studies,” but the reality is that there is huge potential for trailblazing and innovative ideas. Think of what a difference feminist studies made in the lives of women, or what queer studies has done for the LGBTQ community or critical race studies to our understanding of how race and law intersect. Why shouldn’t we have a Mad Studies??
Why should you care about Mad Studies?
1. What you don’t know, actually can hurt you.
When you do not have the words, to name something that is oppressive, illegal or destructive then you do not have the knowledge or power to change it. Words matter. Ideas matters. Truth matters. Mad Studies is about getting to truths, asking more questions and finding more words. Education is knowledge, and knowledge empowers us.
2. We have something valuable to teach other areas of study:
And here, I don’t mean that we should be invited to a committee to review or offer feedback on already developed project. I also do not mean sending consumer/ survivors off by themselves so that they can tell their individual story or become a token poster child in projects with complex, deeply entrenched structural problems. I mean, that we are capable of teaching and offering deeper analysis that integrates critical thinking into what is going on, and how things are done. United we stand, divided we fall. We would have a lot to offer the study of art, law, social work or ethics. For example, perhaps all projects that have to do with mental health should meet with some ethical standards as developed by the consumer/survivor community. I bet we could offer a lot to businesses that wanted to learn more about creating a “psychosis friendly” kind of place. I bet we could teach people who organise rallies and forums how to be more inclusive. I bet we could even teach astronaut Chris Hadfield a thing or two.
3.Flip the micro-scope
Perhaps it’s time to flip the scope. Let’s stop studying mentally ill people and start studying sane people, normals, well-adjusted, balanced and secure people. What do their brains look like? Why do they get the kinds of haircuts that they do? How do they behave in workplaces, at cottages in the banks? What’s it like to be really rich and debt free? Let’s not talk about this newly popularised notion of, “patients as teachers” and instead, discuss, “psychiatrists as bad learners.” Flip the questions. Question the questioners. How many times have you been asked to participate or give your feedback on how to make the system better? Flip the scope— maybe it’s time we stop answering those questions and have Mad Studies develop our own questions and research agendas.
4. We Are Not Alone
Way back in the 1940s, a group of ex-patients founded, We Are Not Alone (W.A.N.A) in order to remind people of just that point. It was an early support group and yes, it’s part of our Mad Studies history like many other things we can hopefully house in a Mad Studies museum one day. We have evidence of our organsing, art, writing, thinking and endeavours to make the world a better place. For example look at the www.psychiatricsurvivorarchives.com or the Survivors’ histories website, http://studymore.org.uk/mpu.htm or the first support group in Vancouver called the Mental Patients Association: http://historyofmadness.ca/the-inmates-are-running-the-asylum/
5. Mad Studies is about you!
Finally, and this may be the most important point; your ideas matter. It’s not about how much school you’ve had, or credentials and it’s not about your pocket book. It’s about joining conversations. If you don’t share your thoughts, opinions and knowledge, then you impact nothing and no one. And hey, the next generation of consumer/survivors are going to push us forward BIG TIME. There are some very serious issues and debates impacting the lives of service users and we have to help each other to speak up. We need to be thoughtful, smarter and more strategic about what we say and what we do. That will require everyone. It requires you.
[1] Brenda LaFrancois, Robert Menzies and Geoff Reaume (eds.) Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2013) at pg. 13.
AdvertisementsSource: Suretly
Suretly, an international fintech startup that offers crowd-sourced guarantees for micro-loans, secured its minimum funding of $1.5 million USD in a matter of hours.
By the end of the campaign, the total amount of funds raised equalled $2.8 million at market rates. SUR tokens issued by the company will be accepted in Suretly’s mobile application as a guarantee of loan vouching.
‘We want to thank all the participants from the cryptocurrency community who have joined the project. Entering new markets, in particular the USA, will be the next stage of the company’s development. I should note that we began our crowdfunding campaign in less than favourable conditions: a major market correction began that day, and there was a significant fall in price for many cryptocurrencies. Under these circumstances, trust and interest from the market for the idea became even more important for us, and the results were reassuring indeed. Tokens will be integrated into Suretly’s business model, and their turnover will grow as the company develops,’ explained Eugene Lobachev, founder and CEO of Suretly.
The idea of using blockchain technology in this business and organizing a token sale was born during Starta acceleration program in New York. In the spring of 2017, the startup organized a pre-token-sale and raised $350K. "We believe in the prospective blockchain technology and help tech startups integrate it into the business, - says the director and co-founder of Starta Accelerator Ekaterina Dorozhkina. - Currently, several startups, that went through our accelerator in New York, are planning the launch of tokenization. Also, we are prepping a special acceleration program for blockchain startups, which will be announced in the next few days".
Crowdvouching
Dubbed ‘Tinder for loans’, Suretly is a micro-guarantee exchange, or crowdvouching platform. The exchange helps individuals to obtain to loans at lower interest rates, provided they receive guarantees from a large number of users. The loans themselves are provided by service partners - microfinancing institutions - rather than by Suretly or its tokenholders. Suretly users therefore act as a collective mind, which makes a joint decision on whether to grant or deny a loan.
The Suretly startup is a product of the business incubator developed by the Higher School of Economics, National Research University. Developers of the online exchange for micro-guarantees passed the GenerationS Start-up Accelerator and the Starta Accelerator International Accelerator Program in New York in 2017, having received investments from the accelerator in exchange for 7% of the company. Among the graduates of Starta Accelerator are such start-ups as E-Contenta, Сindicator, Anryze, Navigine, GeoCV, SendPulse, Agrieye and others. The participants of 4th accelerator batch will be announced next week.
The Suretly app is available for download in AppStore and Google Play.Getty Images
John Harbaugh was told there would be no math.
But that doesn’t apply to Ravens guard John Urschel, their resident mathematician, who had his own way of gauging his progress from a recent concussion.
Urschel, who has published a high-level math paper (“A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians,” I was just reading it last night, never did find X) has more at stake with his brain injury than some might.
So it’s no surprise that he took a different approach than some players, or his coach.
“You’re told when you get a concussion not to listen to certain things, not to read certain things, not to study certain things, not to do some certain things that might hurt the concussion part of the brain there,” Harbaugh said, via Jon Meoli of the Baltimore Sun. “So, my man goes out the second day afterwards and does high-level math problems just to see where he’s at.
“I’m going to tell the guys tonight in the meeting, ‘Listen, guys, for all you guys that may get a little concussion issue,... You want to go out and do the high-level math? You want to do those trigonomic [sic], algebraic equations? We’re putting an end to that right now on our team. We’ll have no more of that.’”
That’s probably not going to affect many of them, but Urschel has always been outside the norm in that regard. He’s become something of a math ambassador, appearing at numerous events to promote the confluence of brains and brawn.
And to be honest, while the independent neurological exam will determine whether he’s ready to get back on the field, it’s not like Harbaugh’s going to check his work.I’ve been using the new iPhone SE for a couple days now, after having a 6s for a while, and I have to be honest: going back to using a small phone feels weird. I’m convinced that Apple has to be aiming this new phone at people who either love small phones or want a reasonably-priced upgrade from a three-year-old iPhone.
Let’s face it, a new iPhone is tempting. It’s a new iPhone! But if you’ve already graduated to a bigger phone, this phone might not be for you.
I say "going back" because a few years ago I got a lot of mileage out of a smaller smartphone — quite literally, since I was able to carry the thing in hand or strap it to my arm during long outdoor runs and it never felt ridiculous. We had some good times, me and the iPhone 5s. It was nice and light, but its carved edges made it feel durable. It fit easily in my back pocket when I was carrying grocery bags, out shooting photos, or doing just about anything else that required manual dexterity.
We had some good times, me and iPhone 5s
Back then, I made fun of phablets. Hard. I wrote a breakup letter to the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 using the phone’s stylus, and said that another 6.6-inch smartphone would probably need to be transported in a flatbed truck. Even a 5.2-inch LG G2 felt too big for me. Who needs a phone this big?
Then things changed. It’s hard to say whether it was just the phones themselves that changed or if it was my own eventual acceptance of them; likely it was both. Overbearingly large phones have reached an elegance in design and level of technical prowess that weren’t there a couple years ago. Case in point: Samsung's Galaxy S7 Edge. "Phablets," with their long-lasting batteries and better cameras, are now widely accepted, while phones with 4.7-inch displays have become the new normal.
That’s why switching to the new iPhone SE, with its 4-inch display, feels so strange, both conceptually and practically. Size does matter for some people. In today’s culture we are imbued with the principle that "bigger" is better, and "thinner" is better, but "smaller" might not be.
When I first picked up the iPhone SE the other day and started emailing and iMessaging, I noticed a few things. First, this looks just like the iPhone 5s! Also, I could text with one hand again! And finally, I really do suck at touchscreen typing. Typing on a small keyboard again felt awkward and it took me four tries to correctly enter a password or even just send a quick response to someone. Tweeting felt… risky? All of my apps or app buckets were now squeezed into five rows per page rather than six, pushing some of them over onto the next page.
Oh, and my eyesight has gotten worse. If my recently-adjusted prescription wasn’t enough proof, the iPhone SE is, because I strained to see everything from messages to Maps to photos. (I mistook a photo of someone wearing a VR headset for someone else entirely.)
To that point, big phones are great for media consumption. I regularly watch videos, and read breaking news updates, saved Instapaper articles, and Kindle books on my 4.7-inch phone. But I'm not sure I’ll be reading books on the iPhone SE. Swiping through photos and social media on the iPhone SE was fine, but reading super-long emails on a small screen felt like I was reading them on an actual scroll.
With a large phone you can do so much, which means you are always doing so much
But maybe that has actually been the best part of going back to a small phone: I don’t feel as immersed in it as I do with a larger phone. With a large phone you can do so much, which means you are always doing so much. Yesterday, during a five-minute cab ride, I took a breather, because doing any kind of "meaningful" work on a tiny phone would be annoying anyway.
This isn’t meant to be full review of the new iPhone SE, because as I said, I still think that the people who will be most interested in this are first-time iPhone users or those who are already using a 4s or 5s. There’s still a lot more to say about the iPhone SE beyond, "It’s hard to go back." This is just my experience switching to the new iPhone SE from a larger phone, and personally, I'm likely to go back to a larger phone. But a small screen really makes you feel like you’re not quite as committed to it — and for some people, maybe that will be the point.
Photos by Vjeran Pavic
Read next: Our iPhone SE reviewHere's a little something that hit close to home for me personally. Alain Philippon, 38, of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec who arrived at Halifax's Stanfield International Airport from Puerto Plata has been charged under section 153.1 (b) of the Customs Act for hindering or preventing border officers from performing their role under the act based on his refusal to provide his BlackBerry password to Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers upon his arrival.
Although Philippon has been let out on bail, he has lost access to his now seized phone and has to appear in court on May 12th to face charges where the minimum fine for the offence is $1,000, with a maximum fine of $25,000 and the possibility of a year in jail. Canada Border Services Agency declined to comment on why Philippon was chosen for his additional screening of his smartphone but in an email to CBC, a border services spokesperson noted:
"Officers are trained in examination, investigative and questioning techniques. To divulge our approach may render our techniques ineffective. Officers are trained to look for indicators of deception and use a risk management approach in determining which goods may warrant a closer look."
Philippon has noted he would fight the charges, claiming that he refused to provide the password because his smartphone data is "personal." Rob Currie, director of the Law and Technology Institute at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax highlighted the fact that border officials have broad authority to search travellers and their belongings but the issue of whether a traveller must reveal a password to an electronic device at the border hasn't been tested by the courts.
"This is a question that has not been litigated in Canada, whether they can actually demand you to hand over your password to allow them to unlock the device," he said. "[It's] one thing for them to inspect it, another thing for them to compel you to help them." "Under the Customs Act, customs officers are allowed to inspect things that you have, that you're bringing into the country," he told CBC News."The term used in the act is 'goods,' but that certainly extends to your cellphone, to your tablet, to your computer, pretty much anything you have."25th Golden Raspberry Awards Date February 26, 2005 Site Ivar Theatre, Hollywood, California Highlights Worst Picture Catwoman Most awards Catwoman / Fahrenheit 9/11 (4) Most nominations Catwoman (7)
The 25th Golden Raspberry Awards, or Razzies, were held on February 26, 2005 at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood, California to honor the worst films the film industry had to offer in 2004. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Golden Raspberry Awards, four special categories—Worst Razzie Loser of Our First 25 Years, Worst "Comedy" of Our First 25 Years, Worst "Drama" of Our First 25 Years, and Worst "Musical" of Our First 25 Years—were created.
This edition of the Razzies was the first to give nominations to a movie that was neither a critical nor a box office bomb: the Palme d'Or winner Fahrenheit 9/11. It received nominations not because the movie itself was of poor quality, but because the film depicted political figures' mishandling of the September 11 attacks and the Iraq War. The Razzies, which had previously steered clear of politics, received criticism from some quarters for nominating the performances of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice.[1][2][3][4] (The former two won their awards while Britney Spears won the Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress over Rice; her role in Fahrenheit 9/11 is just fifteen seconds long.[5])
Leading the pack was a tie between the late summer film Catwoman and Fahrenheit 9/11, each of which won four Razzies, even though the latter was not nominated for Worst Picture. Catwoman received the greatest number of nominations (seven), followed by Alexander with six nominations.
The Ivar Theatre was rented using proceeds from an auction of Ben Affleck's broken trophy from the previous year, which Affleck smashed during an appearance on Larry King Live.
Halle Berry collected her award in person. She was the first to do so since 2001, when Tom Green arrived to receive his five Razzies for Freddy Got Fingered. Berry was quoted as saying "If you aren't able to be a good loser you're not |
calling. But now here is Hill, the only NBA coach he felt truly understood him, and the opportunity is promising. A Princeton grad-turned-hedge-fund manager bought the Tokyo Apache and is going all out. Elite coach. American-style cheerleaders and frills. Another NBA talent, Jeremy Tyler.
There’s a problem, though: Swift is pushing three and a half bills. The first month in Tokyo is brutal, but he plays himself into shape, alternately battling and mentoring Tyler, a raw, cocky kid who assistant coach Casey Hill—Bob’s son—remembers as “a Great Dane puppy.” Meanwhile, Casey befriends Swift, who strikes him as a lonely young man, quick to trust and generous to a fault, invariably picking up the tab even if his NBA fortune is dwindling. When Swift’s fiancée—who he met after things didn’t work out with Tabatha—breaks it off, Casey provides comfort.
Eventually, Swift drops 70 pounds and regains his spring. Hill empowers him to shoot threes. He has a 22-point, 18-rebound game, then goes for 21 and 16 the next. And then, on March 11, Swift is in his bedroom when the earth buckles and his apartment sways. In the chaotic days to come, after the Great East Japan earthquake decimates the country, no one thinks about basketball.
The American ownership disband the Apache. Back in the U.S., teams call Swift, intrigued. New York, Boston. In April, the Trail Blazers arrange a tryout. Swift is told he’s made the team. He’s older, smarter. He’ll be more patient this time. Then a Portland staffer breaks the news. Sorry, we went in another direction. Swift is angry. Disappointed. In July, the NBA lockout begins. He decides he’s done, with basketball and all the rest. This time, when the wolves come, he won’t try to run.
Sam Forencich/Getty Images
Every heroin addict’s story is different, but in at least one regard they’re all the same. No one sets out to be a junkie. Swift is sure he can control it, snorting the drug only once a week at first so he won’t get hooked, and then just as a way to counterbalance the rush and jitters from the meth and cocaine he’s begun taking. And he never shoots up. Too dangerous.
His chosen trio of drugs acts in synergy to produce both a glorious, sustained high—and a greatly increased risk of fatal overdose. The heroin acts as a sedative, as do the beers Swift is still pounding, bringing his breathing rate perilously low during his stupors.
Still, it is the heroin that does him in. As with all opiates, users have to take more over time to get the same high. And addiction can take hold within a matter of months, or even weeks. It’s also increasingly prevalent; according to a report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, usage rates continue to climb, to 828,000 Americans at last count. By 2013—and this is where dates and times slip away for Rob in the retelling, when months sometimes feel like years—Swift is firmly among them.
Occasionally he tries to take a break or his supply runs out, and that’s when the symptoms kick in. Think of the worst flu you’ve endured. Now double it. That’s what opiate withdrawal feels like. And the magical part, which is also the most messed-up part: all it takes to make it go away—the fever and headaches and thudding joint pain and dry heaving—is one hit. It’s instantaneous, like pulling up the blinds to reveal a glorious sunny day.
By 2014, Swift is using daily. He goes three or four nights without sleep, never leaving the house, rarely eating. When his body can’t function any longer he crashes into a dreamless slumber. Sometimes he wakes up in a bed. Other times on a lawn chair in the living room.
Rarely if ever does he think about how he’s arrived at this point. No, better to stay in his haze, watching MMA documentaries on YouTube and writing in his journals, telling himself that the drugs make him productive, trying to rationalize using. In his fog, he doesn’t have to think about the child support payments he’s neglected, just as he’s neglected his friends and family. Or about that day in January 2013 when the cops showed up at his old house—the one he was living in with a crew of people who always seemed ready to party but never wanted to pick up a bill. The bank had sold it for $750,001 to a pair of real estate developers. At first, Swift wouldn’t leave. When he finally did, the new owners were shocked by what they found. Bullet holes in the walls. Live ammunition lying around. Maggots in the sink. A pile of dog crap a foot high. More than 100 pizza boxes and over a thousand liquor bottles, including Dom Perignon, Crystal and Louis XIII Cognac, which costs $1,500. A sign attached to the front door that read, DANGER, MEN DRINKING.
The tabloids rushed in, lamenting "the heartbreaking downfall of NBA star who fled filthy foreclosed home.” But Swift was too far gone to care. He would open his first beer around 9 a.m., then end up at bars, stumbling off the stool. Long just a drinker, he tried weed, but it just made him depressed so, at some point—he’s not sure when, he says—he’d turned to harder stuff. Friends worried about him. Someone sponsored his page on basketball-reference.com for a period of time, writing: “Robert has limited funds, he needs our help. Sure basketball players make a lot of money, but they spend a lot of money. Please give generously. Donate today.”
Finally, Swift disappears altogether. Jayson Jenks, a reporter from The Seattle Times, spends months trying to track him down. In May 2014, Jenks finally concludes, “What’s clear is that Robert Swift doesn’t want to be found.”
With good reason. After crashing with one friend after another, Swift decides to do the worst thing imaginable: He moves in with his dealer. As Swift recalls it, Trigg had introduced him to heroin when Swift complained of back pain one afternoon and Trigg offered something to take the edge off, something all his friends were doing. In return Swift agrees to help Trigg. People don’t mess with 7-footers trained in MMA, after all. Though he’s sold most of his prized collection, Swift still has half a dozen guns, including the 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun that he keeps under his bed. At one point, Trigg asks for backup confronting a dealer who owes him two grand. Swift accompanies him, armed, but only, as he later tells the police, “to keep the peace.”
Courtesy of Redmond Police Department
It gets worse. Men waving guns on the street. Bomb scares. Occasionally, Swift wonders about Trigg, and how an intelligent, 54-year-old former aviation engineer with two grown kids became a dealer. They have a weird bond: The two smartest men in rooms full of junkies, having conversations no one else can understand. And yet Swift doesn’t trust any of them. He takes the handle off his back bedroom door, installs a deadbolt to which only he has a key. And then comes the raid, planned on a Saturday morning so the students at Helen Keller Elementary School wouldn’t be around. Once Swift shakes Trigg awake, the dealer frantically tries to throw his needles in the fireplace. “It’s too late for that,” Swift says.
The police take Trigg to the station, grill him. “I should just die,” he says, according to court records. “My life is over, there’s no reason to keep going.” The police ask about Swift. Trigg tells them Swift is “a good guy.” He says Swift had “nothing to do with the drug dealing” and “was actually trying to just clean the place up” and “keep all the bad people out.”
In the end Trigg is sentenced to four years in federal prison. Swift? He is interviewed by police and then set free, pending a court date.
Chris Ballard/SI
The water and power go first.
With nowhere else to go, Swift returns to Trigg’s house, but he has little money and a dwindling supply of dope, pulled from the stashes the police missed. So he walks next door and asks if he can plug in an extension cord. The woman living there, Sophie Roman, is a 78-year-old widow. She’s been in the neighborhood almost 50 years and has stopped sitting on her front porch, lest she get caught in crossfire. But there is something about Swift she likes. Trusts. He uses the extension cord to run a waffle maker. With no cable or Wi-Fi, he watches Transformers: Age of Extinction 16 times in a row on DVD. He also comes by Roman’s house with a signed ball and jersey, as a thank you. To the horror of her friends, she invites him for dinner. But isn’t this why God put her on the earth, she counters, to help those in need? Swift is good company. He clears his dishes, a gesture that sticks with her. “He was a nice fella, very respectful,” she says, standing on her porch on a recent afternoon. “He just seemed sad, because he had no support. I felt bad for him.”
Swift keeps plummeting. Eventually, he moves in with another dealer, Trigg’s supplier, sleeping in a chair, his possessions bundled in a sheet hung over a ceiling beam. On the days he can’t get heroin, he takes what he calls now, without irony, “unhealthy amounts of meth.” He reads in the paper that a warrant is out for his arrest. He missed his court date and is wanted for unlawful possession of a short-barreled shotgun, stemming from the raid. (The grenade launcher found at Trigg’s was also Swift’s, as were three other guns.) Swift hunkers down, determined to disappear. He doesn’t go outside for months.
Then, in January 2015, he is found and picked up by the Snohomish County sheriff’s office. Swift, squished in the backseat, high, likely has no idea what’s going on. He’s taken to King County Jail in Seattle and placed in a medium-level security cell with 22 other prisoners, with bail set at $20,000. Heroin addicts are usually treated with a tapering program: low-dosage opiates to wean them off the drug. It can take months to years. Swift is afforded no such cushion. He is dosed with muscle relaxants. The rest is up to him.
All he remembers of the first dozen or so days is lying on his metal cot, curled up to fit on the frame, head under his single sheet. Vomit rises in his throat every few minutes. He shivers. He sleeps as much as he can.
Eventually he comes out of it. He compares the moment with a scene from The Last Samurai, when Tom Cruise’s character sobers up to realize all he’s done. Other prisoners begin to recognize him. Some ask about the NBA. Others give him candy to help with the withdrawal. A thick-chested man with prison tats named Peter, in on a warrant from Oregon, hands him a Bible. “Everything you need will be in here,” he says.
It’s been a long time since Swift opened the book. He grew up attending Calvary Church—one of his first tattoos was a giant cross on his back—but he lapsed. Now it comforts him to read the passages. He asks for pencil and a paper, and begins to write. The first page is jumbled, a cascade of thoughts and regrets and aspirations. The second page gains order. In small, neat writing Swift draws a series of unchecked boxes, each followed by a goal. “Child support papers returned,” “Church every Sunday.” “Inventory everything,” “keep studying Japanese.” Then he copies out Psalms 23. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will be not afraid.
Meanwhile, he surveys his new reality. He has yet to meet his public defender. No friends or family have visited. He doesn’t even know where his son lives.
He feels a powerful surge of remorse. He knows what he needs to do.
Robert Beck/SI
It sounds crazy, Swift’s plan.
But Alex watches his brother, and he is shocked. Dude doesn’t touch a basketball for years, destroys his body and spends a month in prison. And yet here he is, in a church gym in Seattle in the spring of 2015, effortlessly draining shots.
Truth be told, it annoys Alex. Sure, he benefited from Rob’s success. He also lived in his shadow, quitting basketball as a high school senior to escape expectations he knew he’d never meet as a 6'1" forward. Now, the brothers have different interests, different personalities. Still, they are blood, exchanging letters during Rob’s incarceration.
Even so, Alex was surprised when Rob called on Jan. 27. He had been released from prison the day before, agreeing to enter a treatment program in lieu of posting bail. Now he was asking for a ride downtown so he could find a park to sleep in. Alex looked at his wife, Jenny. She didn’t hesitate. Bring him home. He’ll stay with us in the upstairs bedroom.
Rob arrived with a small canvas bag holding his notes, a shirt and some beef jerky. He wore jail shoes and shorts, and was so thin that his ribs were visible through his shirt. That night, he ate Alex’s one-pound Fatburger, finished the second half of Jenny’s, then gratefully raided their fridge. He’d been told he was five pounds above the malnutrition line in prison, making him ineligible for extra rations. Now, he gorged.
The first few days Rob kept hugging Alex, thanking him. At five every morning the brothers would leave together, Alex to his job as a FedEx driver, Rob to ride the bus to the Community Center for Alternative Programs, an alternative to jail time for nonviolent offenders. There he takes the first college-eligible courses of his life—on life skills and finances—and loves them. But when the treatment phase begins, Rob balks, not wanting to be around peers whose primary goal is getting out so they can start using again. He doesn’t report for five days. A bench warrant follows. On Feb. 25, Swift returns to jail for six more days, at which point his uncle, Scott Shaull, decides to post the bail, allowing Rob to return to his brother’s house.
With his case in limbo and no money, driver’s license or immediate purpose, Rob spends a month weeding Alex and Jenny’s overgrown backyard. Soon enough, he’s hanging out with Jenny’s family for Sunday dinner and going to church—in his flannel and Wranglers, his only nice-ish clothes—and mowing the Adams’s lawn. The neighbors are freaked out by the giant, tattooed man they’ve heard about on the news, but K. Adams, Jenny’s dad, says to talk to the young man before they judge. That he’s got a gentle soul. Besides, Rob is one hell of a gardener. He installs a trellis, tends the petunias, organizes the garage. In exchange K. lets him crash at the house, buys him protein powder and slips him $100 on occasion. Slowly, Rob returns to a healthy weight. And soon enough K. and Craig, Jenny’s brother, are bringing Rob to their regular game at the LDS temple court. Rob stays on the perimeter, shooting jumpers, but still dominates. His plan no longer sounds so outlandish. Return to the NBA? Why not?
All the while, Alex and Jenny watch for signs that Rob is backsliding. The relapse rate for heroin addicts is as high as 97% in some studies, after all. His joints lock up on occasion. His hands shake. He drinks—a bottle of wine with an ex-girlfriend one night, tequila another. But he never appears high. It is, Jenny reasons, a Swift family trait. They’re all so damn stubborn that once they decide on something, they just do it. That’s how Alex stopped smoking. And now it’s how Rob is kicking heroin. Not that they don’t clash. Alex doesn’t want Rob drinking in his house. Rob feels like he’s imposing, especially with Alex and Jenny’s first child due in late September. But the lawyer keeps filing continuations.
Finally, on Sept. 16, 2015, under the guidance of a new public defender, Katharine Edwards, Swift accepts a deal for a felony charge. No more time, no probation, a $600 fine. Sure, he might have stood a chance at trial, but it would likely come at the expense of many months and a swarm of media trucks. In a quiet moment he tells Alex that, after years of the little brother emulating the big, the situation is reversed. Rob’s new goal is what Alex has: a house, a wife, a family.
Rob sells off the last of his gun collection. He joins Jenny’s family for one final Sunday dinner. Then an old friend, his MMA coach, arrives from California to pick him up, having promised to let Swift crash with him. Swift loads two camo duffle bags and they pull onto I-5 South. He doesn’t have much of a plan. All he knows is that he needs to start anew.
What happened to you? Maybe that’s the wrong question.
It is late July 2016 and I’m sitting across from Swift, who’s wedged into a booth at an Asian bistro in Roseville, half an hour east of Sacramento. He’s wearing cargo shorts and a black T-shirt. His hair is shorn. Add a wispy chin-strap beard and he resembles a giant, inked-up leprechaun. Tats cover his arms and legs: tribal symbols, phrases, the image of a wolf emerging from flames. Some are only visible in black light. Swift is back up to 275 pounds, much of it muscle, but he moves like a man trying to stay out of the way, hunching his shoulders and thumbing the loops of his shorts when standing. He orders three entrees but eats little, getting them boxed to take home. In April, he spoke to a reporter at the Japan Times, Ed Odeven, but this is the first time he's spoken to a US publication in years. He's both wary and nervous, his leg tap-tap-tapping. He is O.K. talking about the future. He’s not sure about the past. “There are still moments where it’s tough, thinking about everything that’s happened, what I would have done different,” he says. “But then I gotta remember that there’s nothing I can do about it now. I gotta move forward.”
He chose Roseville, a hot, flat city full of malls, churches, McMansions and liquor stores, because it’s familiar. His grandmother once lived in an apartment here. Shaull, his uncle, is here now. Most important, the basketball scene is strong. He tells me he’s played 14 league games in the last 16 days, that his team won the Woo Pro-Am League, that he hasn’t moved this well in 10 years.
During the first of his two games on this night, at a fitness club, Swift towers over his teammates, who include former overseas players and a young woman with a deadeye shot. His primary defender is a 6'5" man whose graying hair and ample gut make him look older than his 43 years. The man does what many might: Fouls the crap out of Swift.
Annoyed, Swift takes him outside. He hits 15-footers and bank shots. Drains a long three. Rises for follow dunks. Extinguishes layups on the backboard. More impressive, he shows on high pick-and-rolls, switches onto guards and talks constantly on D. He makes a pair of beautiful passes to cutters out of the high post. High basketball IQ. “D-League?” I scribble in my notebook. “Overseas for sure.”
Two days prior, Casey Hill offered a gauge of Swift’s progress. “He’s a warrior so you won’t see it during plays,” Hill said. “But watch during free throws and timeouts. If he’s grabbing his shorts that means he’s taking pressure off his back.” On this night, Swift never does, despite playing all 40 minutes. He is, however, wearing a neoprene knee brace. Only, on closer inspection it’s just a hole in his worn leggings. Similarly, his shoes are scuffed and dirty.
After the game he exchanges bro hug, ribs opponents, laughs, heads outside to take a hit off his vaporizer, proud he’s slowly reduced the nicotine level, from 22 mg to 12 and now to six. His mood only changes when a buddy invites him to a fair that weekend: “Eat lots of food, take my kids on rides.” Swift shakes his head. “That’s a lot of people,” he says of the crowd.
Two hours later, in the second game, Swift wears the same sweat-soaked undershirt. His teammates ignore him and jack threes, even though Swift is guarded by a 6'3" dude. The team loses. Afterward, Swift is pissed. At the refs. At not getting the ball. “I’m done with this league,” he says. “I only played in it as a favor anyway.”
He trudges out to the parking lot to his 1996 Ford Explorer and hangs his shirt on the driver’s side door to dry. It is late on a Wednesday night at a health club outside Sacramento. This is the reality of the road back.
“Robert Swift? I think about him all the time” says Bob Myers, Swift’s former agent and now the GM of the Warriors. Like most everyone I talk to, Myers wants to know how Swift is doing. Not in basketball but in life.
“I feel bad I couldn’t help him,” says Voigt. “I hope somebody can.”
“He caught the bad side of the business,” says Casey Hill, now the coach of the Santa Cruz (Calif.) Warriors of the D-League. “An NBA athlete who has a lot of money who’s 18 or 19, with parents who’ve taken advantage of him... ” He trails off.
“How much pain was he in?” wonders Sherman Alexie, the author, poet, and a key figure in the save the Sonics campaign in Seattle. “How much pain did he carry into the league? Was he doomed to fail?” Alexie, a recovering alcoholic, says he feels "total empathy and hope for his recovery.”
Others only speak off the record, or are protective, agreeing to talk only after they’ve cleared it with Swift. Some, like Davin Johnson, a pastor and the sports ministry director at Destiny Christian Church in Rocklin, Calif., have hopes for him. Johnson says he received a message from the Lord instructing him to help Swift. The two met for heart-to-hearts. At his urging, Swift began attending a men’s group on Wednesdays, even played the role of God in a dramatization of David and Goliath, though in this case the Almighty wore jeans and a white undershirt. Johnson calls Swift “an overcomer.” The next step, he says, is sharing his testimony. “It’s one thing to do it privately and another publicly,” Johnson says one morning, as Christian rock blares at the Destiny athletic facility. “But think of the difference he can make, the lives he can impact. He’s got the story, but is he ready to share it?”
Chris Ballard/SI
Two weeks pass. Swift texts. He’s ready to talk. About all of it. So here we are, in his room on the third floor of the Extended Stay America Hotel in Roseville. Outside, I-80 rushes by, just down from the credit union, 7-Eleven and Family Christian store. Plastic shelving holds Campbell’s Chunky soup, next to giant bottles of protein powder. Melatonin and supplements surround his bed. A drained sixer of Sudwerk beer rests on the floor, next to empty fast food bags. The closet is draped with hoops gear. A pile of books leans against his backpack; once interested in philosophy, the man who now uses the runic alphabet to jot private notes reads tomes like The Philosophy of the Dark Knight and a Game of Thrones companion book. He clears clean laundry off a swivel chair for me, apologizing for the mess. “I’ve clearly done nothing but go to the gym the last week or so,” he says.
Over the course of a long afternoon he relives it all, periodically taking hits off the vaporizer. He never evades questions or avoids eye contact. The restless body and nervous laughter disappear. Asked who is to blame—What happened to you?—he doesn’t hesitate. “It was my decision to do all that, no one else’s. Even if there were other people putting the wrong ideas in my head or the right people not around, it was still my decision.”
His words recall treatment mantras; whether Swift internalized the lessons during his brief exposure or figured them out on his own is hard to tell. He’s eschewed therapy since his release, believing that listening to others and not trusting his gut was what got him in trouble. He says he hasn’t thought of using in 19 months. “It was my decision to start and it was mine to quit,” he says. He hates the excuse of addiction, that it’s a disease, not a choice.
Told this might be hard for some to relate to, he nods. “I can understand and respect that but if I choose not to, then I’m not doing it. I understand not everybody can do that, but that’s how I am.”
All Swift can do is hope you believe him. He talks about how he is “older and less emotional.” How he can understand a GM’s perspective now. The “downward spiral,” as he terms it? “I was lost, angry, scared,” Swift says. “I had no goals. I was living literally minute-by-minute. And now, I’m absolutely goal-oriented, I have a long-term plan, I know what I want to do. I know what the next step is. Every decision is based off, ‘Is this going to get me to the next step?’ I do very few instant-gratification things.” He pauses. “If me of all people can make it back, I know other people can.”
Besides, he says, he has a support system now. During our conversation, he receives a text from Jordan Wilson, his phone cackling with the sound of the Joker (Swift is a huge Batman fan). A quiet 24-year-old point guard, Wilson played at William Jessup University, a Christian school in Rocklin, and then in New Zealand. He and Swift work out four or five days a week. Swift texts him daily. Says Wilson: “I know it’s just an adult league, but it’s kind of refreshing to see how serious he takes basketball.”
Then there’s Shaull, who occasionally loans him money, and insists on meeting me upon hearing I’m writing this story. (He hasn’t spoken to Rhonda, his sister, for 11 years due to a “falling out,” but he pulls me aside to ask that I take it easy on the family.) And, perhaps most prominent, Deon Taylor, a 41-year-old film director (Meet the Blacks, Supremacy). Taylor grew up in Gary, Ind., earned a scholarship to San Diego State and then played in Germany. A loud, joyful man with a thin mustache who says things like “HOW’S THE DAY GOING FOR YOU MAN?!” and namedrops Jamie Foxx and Justin Timberlake, Taylor hooped with Swift and then took him on as a project of sorts. He hooked Swift up with a lawyer, Chris Fry. Dropped off hightops. Paid for two stints at the Extended Stay. “I ended up just really caring about him,” says Taylor. “My biggest thing with Swift has been, allow basketball to put you in a place to be successful but you don’t live for basketball. If you don’t make it back to the NBA, it’s not the end of your life."
Taylor pushes Swift to think beyond the court. What’s the bigger plan? What’s next? When I pose these questions to Swift, he says he can’t afford to think that far ahead. That if he thinks basketball won’t work out, for even a minute, “it will destroy me.”
The road back is complicated. Fry, who says he’s working pro bono for the moment, describes a succession of obstacles. Swift owes a significant sum in child support; when the NBA recently released a six-figure residual check to Swift, Fry says the state of Washington froze it. Fry hopes to renegotiate the debt, and the monthly fee, now that Swift no longer has an NBA income. “It’s counterintuitive,” says Fry. “They’re taking away money so he can’t make money.”
Then there’s the job market. Some countries don’t allow felons to play, so Fry is targeting Japan—“the only country that is a pretty realistic, actual candidate.” He says he hopes to discuss the matter with the NBA. (The league office would not speculate on anything specific to Swift.) Though he’s not usually a sports litigator, Fry is hopeful. “Once they meet Rob, they’ll see,” he says. “He’s a very sweet, very honest guy.”
Swift’s friends list the positives. At 30, he’s younger than Chris Paul and LeBron James, with only 97 NBA games of wear-and-tear on his body. “He’s definitely a guy [D-League teams] would go look at,” says Myers. “It’s hard to find big guys. But you have to earn it.” Myers pauses. “It’s hard for me because I’m so biased. I want to give him a chance. It’s something I’d love to look at. Just for his life, to get back in a good place.”
A good place. The term is relative. Swift laments that he still has yet to see his son again but knows he needs to get his own life in order first. Everyone I talk to in Roseville thinks Swift is still clean, though of course no one is with him all the time. Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, says someone with Swift’s profile has factors in his favor: He began using later in life (starting in your teens leads to a greater risk of relapse);, his use was relatively short-term (years, not decades); and he lacks what Compton calls “co-occurring psychological problems.” Swift has also found a positive social environment and a larger goal (crucial for keeping momentum). Then again, Compton notes that, “alcohol is notoriously related to relapse.” Stressful situations are similarly perilous. Still, Compton is heartened: “The idea that someone can pull their life together is an important message, and whether it’s done through treatment or in unexpected ways, it’s done at great personal dedication.”
Jennifer Pottheiser/Getty Images
In Swift’s case, it’s been on his own, and with people like Taylor. “I don’t know his family,” says Taylor, “but for me, dude, your family has to be there to help you. You know, you should always have a floor to sleep on.” It is difficult to unravel Swift’s family dynamic. While Swift is open about his addiction, he doesn’t like to talk about his parents in detail. The living allowance he gave them in Seattle that I’m told ran into the tens of thousands per month? The idea that, according to one person, they “treated him like a reverse scholarship”? He says he made his own decisions. What about the opinion that his parents saw him as an NBA player first and a son second? He produces a pained grin. “That’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”
He only reopened communication over the last year and a half. It’s still a work in progress. He says of his mother, “She’s borderline senile and very, very much opinionated and if it’s not her way, it’s wrong. I might have her number, I don’t know. I only talk to her on Facebook.” On the other hand, Rob also proudly shows me photos. Of his sister, with dyed blue hair and a tattoo that reads I’M FINE, which, if seen from another direction, reads SAVE ME. Of his dad, young and with a brilliant tattoo of Rhonda, watched over by a samurai, on his upper arm. Of his grandfather, with Rob on his lap. You only get one family, after all. When I hear Rob end a phone conversation with Bruce, he says, “I love you, Dad.”
I’m also with Rob when he reads a text from Rhonda the day after he’d learned about an NBA residual check. His mom says she’s happy for him. She also says they could really use $10,000.
When I finally speak to his parents, it’s after weeks of trying and then only because Rob asks Bruce to talk. He has a new job in Las Vegas, where the couple now lives. He also filed for bankruptcy again this past June, according to public records. On the phone Bruce is cordial but wary. He describes Rob as, “a very caring guy” who is also “extremely smart and extremely stubborn.” Of Rob’s leap to the NBA, he says it was, “his decision, flat out.” Rob’s 20s? “As a parent, you can’t make decisions for him.” And: “He didn’t need me watching over him.” And: “I tried to be a parent and let him have his room.” Their hope for Rob now, he says, is “that he gets where he wants to be. That’s all I can offer now. If he wants to get back to the NBA, I hope he gets there, if that’s his desire. All I can say is, I wish the best for him.” Rhonda declines to speak.
Rob says he’s trying to maintain the relationship while holding the line. “The way I look at it now is I’m going to do what I need to do to take care of myself first and after that, if they need help, I’ll see what I can do,” he says as we walk to his car. “But until I’m back to where I need to be, that’s one thing I’m going to be a little selfish about.”
Robert Beck/SI
In the weeks to come Swift plays in various league games, proudly sending along his stat lines. A month later, in early September, I’ll watch him play in a championship game in Roseville. He’ll be named Co-MVP of the league that night, and enter the three-point contest (5 of 15, from the NBA line) and play an inspired game, passing out of double teams, protecting the rim, and finishing strong, ending with 28 points, 20 rebounds, 6 assists and 5 blocks in a blowout win.
He’ll also tell me he hasn’t eaten anything other than protein shakes for two days because he ran out of money again. He’ll drag himself up the gym stairs on account of his aching back. He’ll look winded at times, yanking on his shorts. His hotel room will be messier than before, littered with fast food bags and Coors Light cans and laundry, and this time his apology for the clutter is half-hearted. He’ll tell me he hasn’t slept much in two weeks, from the stress, and that it’s too much to worry about being broke and training and also having to be the one texting coaches and finding a place to play, and that he’s hoping to get his lawyer going on that, but that he’s not a sports guy so it’s tough. And at the end of the day I’ll feel a sadness creeping over me, because now I too am rooting for Swift, am hoping this is just a blip because he’s worked so hard. And I’ll worry about how a flame, once lit, can whisper out so quickly.
That evening I’ll buy Swift dinner twice, the second time at In-N-Out, and I’ll look through some of his old writings—he’s working on a fantasy novel—and feel a sense of relief when he learns that Taylor, who’s been busy on a movie shoot, has come through again and put up more money for his room, which he’s only still in based on the goodwill of the front desk clerk. Now it’s paid through the weekend, Swift will tell me, and he won’t have to take all his stuff and find another couch. “I’m all good now,” he will say.
And he will be. For one more night at least.Hillary Clinton — the most qualified, smartest and healthiest person ever to seek the presidency EVER! — emailed aide Huma Abedin because she was having trouble working the phone system.
The Secretary of State was attempting to call Rep. Diane Watson, who was announcing her retirement from Congress.
In an email released by Wikileaks, Clinton admitted she was having difficulty making the call.
“I’d like to call her,” Clinton wrote to Abedin on February 10, 2010.
“But right now I’m fighting w the WH operator who doesn’t believe I am who I say and wants my direct office line even tho I’m not there and I just gave him my home # and the State Dept # and told him I had no idea what my direct office # was since I didn’t call myself and I just hung up,” Clinton wrote before calling herself a “properly dependent” Secretary of State replying on her aide.
“No independent dialing allowed,” Clinton concluded.
Note she referred to the operator as a “him.”
Yet another example of male (and probably white) privilege trying to keep Hillary Clinton oppressed!Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Nov. 7, 2014, 3:22 AM GMT / Updated Nov. 7, 2014, 3:26 AM GMT
Minnesota police have released hospital security video that they say shows a man who later died in police custody chasing and attacking nurses with a metal pole. Police in Maplewood said they still didn't know why Charles Emmett Logan, 68, of St. Paul died after being handcuffed following the attack Sunday.
One nurse suffered a collapsed lung, and another fractured her wrist, NBC station KARE of Minneapolis reported. Medical staff told police that Logan was suffering from paranoia, the station reported.
Police said in a statement that officers used a Taser stun gun on Logan when they found him three |
the rules,” said Duerson, an African American, adding that he would go to get documents he needed.
VOTER ID OBSTACLES
Some critics of the laws have cited people who do not own a vehicle as a rough measure of the number of voters who may not have a driver’s license and thus face an extra burden to vote in person. According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates for the years 2006-2010, 232,628 Georgia households, or 6.7 percent, and 153,719 Indiana households, or 6.2 percent did not have a vehicle.
In Georgia, one way to meet the ID requirement is to get a free photo ID from the state. Officials said 28,648 cards have been issued for voting since 2006.
In Indiana, where state IDs have been used for decades, the government does not keep track of how many are for voting purposes. The BMV said it had issued almost 1.1 million new, amended or duplicate free state photo IDs since it began keeping records in 2007, not including driver’s licenses.
Reuters reporters did find some cases of people with unusual circumstances who encountered voter ID obstacles.
World War II veteran William S. Benford, 93, of Atlanta said he went to a Georgia Department of Driver Services office in 2008 to get a free voter ID card with his Social Security card, Army discharge papers and local transit card but was told he needed a birth certificate. He was misinformed, as a birth certificate is not required.
Benford, who was born in rural Georgia and raised by foster parents, does not have a birth certificate and has never had a driver’s license. Although he is a longtime registered voter and tried to vote absentee, his ballot was returned inexplicably.
Betty Lockett, 103 and blind from cataracts, moved from Illinois to Hammond, Indiana this year and wanted to vote. Relatives helped her apply, but state officials would not accept her Illinois ID, asking for a passport or birth certificate. She was born in Mississippi in 1909 before the state began providing birth certificates.
“The first time I voted in Illinois was the first time I ever voted without being afraid I was going to get lynched. In Mississippi often we wouldn’t even look at a polling station for fear of getting caught,” Lockett said.
Her relatives pieced together an identity for her using Medicaid documents and paperwork related to her husband’s railroad pension, and Lockett has voted.
Renee Snead, a director at Central Outreach and Advocacy Center for the homeless in Atlanta, said there is confusion among some voters over the ID requirements.
“People give up,” Snead said. “They just move on to things that are higher priority.”
ABSENTEE LOOPHOLE?
Indiana’s absentee voting rules require that voters state why they cannot appear at the polls.
Georgia has relaxed its absentee voter requirements to allow anyone to get a ballot without a reason.
“In Georgia, if people disagree (with the photo ID law) or they don’t want to participate, they can vote by mail,” said Secretary of State Kemp.
Kemp acknowledged that most of the state’s voter fraud now involves absentee ballots rather than in-person voting. Georgia officials could not point to a single documented instance of voter impersonation before or after the law took effect.
Slideshow (2 Images)
The most prominent recent case of voter fraud in Indiana is not the type of fraud contemplated by politicians writing the laws. In February, Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White, a Republican who oversaw elections in the state, was required to leave office after he was convicted of offenses including voter fraud for giving a false address of residence while serving on a town council and receiving a government stipend.
“They have created a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist,” Jim Wieser, a Democratic, and Lake County, Indiana Election Board attorney, said of the fraud argument often cited by Republicans.Winnipeg MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette is withdrawing his name from the list of possible candidates for Speaker of the House after controversial remarks he made about the position.
On Saturday at a town hall meeting with his constituents, Ouellette explained why he thought running for the position was a good idea.
Mistakes have consequences, and I accept them. - Robert-Falcon Ouellette
"I've talked to other Speakers who have been in the position before," Ouellette said in the speech.
"They said, actually, it's a position of great influence because if I have an issue in my riding where I need some funds or I need something to happen... I would call over the prime minister to my chair," he continued.
"This is what other Speakers have said and perhaps what people don't think about, but you can actually use that influence that you have in the House, because you do control the debate and the prime minister wants to keep you happy."
Regrets remarks
"I suggested that the Speaker has the ability to call over a minister or the prime minister, I at no time intended to convey that there was any suggestion of quid pro quo," Oullette wrote in an apology he posted on Facebook Sunday.
Ouellette goes on to say that he regrets any impression his remarks gave of the role of the Speaker.
"While I never intended to imply anything other than that the Speaker, as MP, still has the capacity to bring constituents' concerns to the attention of government, I must take responsibility for my clumsiness in the way I expressed myself."
The newly-elected Winnipeg Centre MP also noted that in order for the government to move forward with a fresh start in Parliament, standards must be raised and he is "no exception."
"Mistakes have consequences, and I accept them," he wrote.
Two hours after the post was published, there were more than 50 comments, many of which were supportive and positive.
"Wow, Robert. You are so classy and your humbleness and willingness to admit to fault … I hope you are still considered for Speaker of the House! You are a great person of good character and honest resolve," wrote Cherish Lynn Rose.
"Well, Robert, I will be speaking to our MP and strongly suggesting to him that he puts your name forward for the Speaker's position. I will also e-mail as many other MPs as I can asking them to do the same," read a comment written by Andrew Gilmour.
Ouellette refused to provide CBC Manitoba with a response to the comments he made at the town hall.
MPs from across Canada will vote on their next speaker on Dec. 3.
Robert-Falcon Ouellette's statement in full:
With heavy heart, I am withdrawing my name from consideration for the Speaker of the House of Commons.
At a Town Hall with my constituents, I suggested that the Speaker has the ability to call over a Minister or the Prime Minister, I at no time intended to convey that there was any suggestion of quid pro quo.
I deeply regret any impression I gave of the Speaker's role. While I never intended to imply anything other than that the Speaker, as MP, still has the capacity to bring constituents' concerns to the attention of government, I must take responsibility for my clumsiness in the way I expressed myself.
If we are truly to move forward with a fresh start in this parliament, we do have to raise standards, and I am no exception. Mistakes have consequences, and I accept them. I apologize unreservedly to the House and my fellow parliamentarians and withdraw my name from consideration.A Nigerian professor has claimed to have solved a maths conundrum that had stumped scholars for more than 150 years.
Dr Opeyemi Enoch, from the Federal University in the ancient city of Oye Ekiti, believes he has solved one of the seven millennium problems in mathematics.
The professor says he was able to find a solution to the Riemann Hypothesis first proposed by German mathematician Bernhard Riemann in 1859, which could earn him a $1m prize, in an interview with the BBC.
However is solution to the problem has not yet been revealed.
"Dr Enoch first investigated and then established the claims of Riemann," said a statement from the university where he teaches.
"He went on to consider and to correct the misconceptions that were communicated by mathematicians in the past generations, thus paving way for his solutions and proofs to be established.
"He also showed how other problems of this kind can be formulated and obtained the matrix that Hilbert and Poly predicted will give these undiscovered solutions. He revealed how these solutions are applicable in cryptography, quantum information science and in quantum computers."
via GIPHY
Dr Enoch has reportedly previously worked on mathematical models for generating electricity from sound, thunder and ocean bodies.
According to software engineer Robert Elder, the complex Riemann conundrum "is based on an observation Riemann made about the equation: Every value of the equation that makes it go to zero seems to lie on the exact same line."
The seven millennium problems are set out by the Massachusetts-based Clay Mathematical Institute (CMI) as being the "most difficult" to solve.
A spokesperson for the CMI said: "As a matter of policy, the CMI does not comment on solutions to the Millennium Problems"
Explaining the hypothesis they state: "The prime number theorem determines the average distribution of the primes.
"The Riemann Hypothesis tells us about the deviation from the average. Formulated in Riemann's 1859 paper, it asserts that all the 'non-obvious' zeros of the zeta function are complex numbers with real part 1/2."
The Clay Mathematical Institute says its aim is to increase mathematical knowledge, encourage gifted student to pursue maths careers and recognise extraordinary maths achievements.
Earlier this month Wellington Jighere, a Nigerian man who graduated from university at 32, became the first African to win the English-Language World Scrabble Championships after beating his British rival in what he described as “a battle between one man and a whole continent”.
Jighere won four straight games in a best-of-seven final round against Lewis MacKay, 30, from Cambridge, who is ranked 19th by the body’s players’ association, on whose website Jighere doesn’t even feature.
• Can you solve the 50 cent maths exam question that is dividing the internet?The NBC logo and Comcast are displayed on 30 Rockefeller Plaza, formerly known as the GE building, in midtown Manhattan in New York July 23, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
(Reuters) - Comcast Corp has reached a $33 million settlement with California over allegations that the cable company posted personal details of customers online, state Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a statement on Thursday.
As part of the agreement with the California Department of Justice and the California Public Utilities Commission, Comcast must pay $25 million in penalties and investigative costs to the to the two departments, the statement said.
Comcast will also pay about $8 million in additional restitution to customers whose numbers were improperly disclosed.
“This settlement provides meaningful relief to victims (and) brings greater transparency to Comcast’s privacy practices,” Harris said.
The departments alleged that Comcast had posted names, phone numbers and addresses of “tens of thousands” of customers who had paid for unlisted voice over internet protocol (VOIP) phone service.
Comcast will refund all fees paid for unlisted service to about 75,000 customers whose information was disclosed over a two-year period. The company will also pay each of these customers an additional $100, the statement said.
As part of the judgment filed in the Alameda Superior Court, Comcast has agreed to a permanent injunction that requires it strengthen restrictions placed on its vendors’ use of personal information about customers, the statement said.
The settlement also provides for further monetary relief to individuals who have identified personal safety concerns related to the disclosure of their personal information.ESPN personality, Terps athletics supporter and noted fan base evaluator Scott Van Pelt was in College Park on Saturday for Maryland’s 27-26 win over Virginia. He was happy with the result, of course. He was not happy with the small swath of students who saw it. Starting at the 35:30 mark of Monday’s “SVP and Russillo” broadcast, you can hear his rant on what it means to be a fan, and why Saturday’s 41,077 attendance figure was such a disappointment. Or you can read the transcript below:
Van Pelt: I’m probably going to get in trouble back in College Park for this one, but some things need to be said. When I was a kid, I used to go to Byrd Stadium to see Maryland football games with my dad, and one thing I always used to look forward to the most was the student section. It was packed, it was raucous. Sometimes, they would chant things that I didn’t understand. Sometimes, they would hold up signs that I didn’t understand — I do now. They were naughty. But the students were great. They were passionate. And when I went to remember, when I went to Maryland, rather, I remembered nearly suffering a heat stroke sitting in the student section as a sophomore, the Terps fumbled away a game late and lost to Penn State — again. I think I was wearing Jams. They were so sweet.
Russillo: They were.
Van Pelt: Sweet Jams. Saturday, I wanted to puke. As the Terps were fighting desperately to hang on to beat Virignia, a rival they were playing for the last time, the Cavaliers were driving into the teeth of the student section that was, I don’t know, three-quarters empty, maybe half-empty. Whatever it was, empty seats outnumbered students. First game against Florida International, the student section was packed, but it was a blowout, and it was hot, so in the second half, it was crickets. This Saturday, it was raining for a little while. Heavens, no! Raining! I don’t know why they left, but by the end of the game, the student section is mostly empty. I don’t get it. You get four years to be young. Now some of us took a little longer to get done, but we’re talking about six Saturdays a year. It’s a three-hour investment of your time to cheer for your team. It’s not a burden. You shouldn’t have to be bribed with hot dogs to stay in the second half. There are two halves of a freakin’ game. Like, if you went to a movie, would you leave halfway through? Like, hey, was it a good movie? Yeah, it was really good, and then I left. Why?
Russillo: What if you could leave the movie and talk to girls and drink? Or if you knew you would do that?
Van Pelt: You could watch the movie later. Now this might be old-fashioned, but I’d like to think that even if your team’s lousy, that it’s part of the collegiate experience at a school as big as Maryland — admittedly, the last two years were something of a struggle — but this year, the Terps are actually doing well. They’re 5-1. Students can help create a home-field advantage. Instead, it’s like home-field indifference at the end of a home game that the team won by a point. You have the rest of your life to be in a big, fat hurry, to be jaded about stuff, but you’re young. Just slow down, enjoy it. And don’t hit me with the studying part, because even back in the day, we used to have tests and stuff, too, and we figured out a way. Tests aren’t new. We just found room six Saturdays a year to go to Byrd Stadium.
Van Pelt then used Saturday’s showing as a jumping-off point for the larger crisis of dwindling fan support at college football outposts like Georgia, Oregon, even Alabama. Maybe, Van Pelt suggested, "It’s different now."
Van Pelt: It’s so ultracompetitive to get into college that the types of students who are fighting to get in, the types of students that colleges are fighting for, are more focused, they’re more driven, they’re more accomplished than I ever was or dreamt of being. Maybe these students just see it as a waste of time, and they can only budget a certain amount of time in their busy schedules. I don’t know. But there’s an old line from a song, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.” Have fun! Go to games! They’re fun! And if you go, then stay! If it’s a close game against a rival, you might actually remember it fondly some day.
[UPDATE: Maryland football players reacted to Van Pelt's comments during the team's media availability Tuesday. Click to read more.]
jshaffer@baltsun.com
twitter.com/jonas_shafferLeith Townshend can't fly his toy helicopter unless he registers his flight path with Airways NZ.
Up to five days warning is needed to fly a toy aircraft in Wellington.
New rules governing remote control aircraft came into effect earlier this month so when lawyer Leith Townshend got a remote control helicopter from his partner for his birthday, he thought he better play safe.
He emailed Wellington City Council asking what he needed to do to fly his helicopter within the rules.
He was told he had to file his flight on Airways NZ's Airshare website.
Airways require a complete flight plan of his toy, including latitude, longitude, the intended radius, the height of his flight above sea level, the height of his launch pad above sea level, and whether he had a certified transponder.
He also needed to refer to the Civil Aviation Act, supply a written description of the operating area, how long he intended his flight to take, and describe his emergency procedure.
His helicopter weighed less than 1kg.
"I understand why the rules are important for large drones. For some of the smaller stuff it seems crazy - to get children to fill flight plans," Townshend said.
Townshend managed to fill all the information ou but Airways NZ said it could take five days to process his flight plan.
Under aviation rules, all of Wellington City, parts of Lower Hutt, and Porirua are controlled air space. This means flight plans are needed five days in advance of a flight.
But within 4km of aerodromes - which covers most of central Wellington - Civil Aviation Authority rules apply and only people licensed by CAA-approved organisations can fly there - with some minor exceptions.
Model Flying New Zealand is currently the only approved organisation.
Airways NZ product development manager Justine Whitfield said the details asked for on flight plans was important for aviation safety.
"If someone wants to operate in a part of the airspace that is used as an approach path for commercial jets for instance, it makes sense that we need to know exactly where they want to fly, how high and for how long.
"This information allows air traffic controllers to carefully consider the risks to other aircraft in the area and means we can work with the UAV operator to safely incorporate their operation into the airspace."
Council by-laws allow remote controlled planes on the basis they do not interfere with or restrict other users of areas or cause health and safety problems. However the council's stance is now overruled by CAA regulations, which requires hobbyist and professional remote flyers alike to submit a flight plan.
CAA General Manager of general aviation Steve Moore said in a statement on Monday a recent change to the rules had enabled greater flexibility for people who wanted to fly toy aircraft in controlled airspace or within four kilometres of an aerodrome.
"The change means that under a shielded operation, where an aircraft is flown below the height of and within 100 metres of a natural or man-made object such as a house, building or trees, approval from air traffic control is no longer required," he said.
Moore encouraged anyone who wished to fly unmanned aircraft to familiarise themselves with the requirements before they launched their crafts.
The CAA website at www.caa.govt.nz or the Airways website at www.airshare.co.nz were the best places to find the information.There have been a number of star midfielders to sign with MLS over the past eight months, including Miguel Almiron, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Jonathan dos Santos and Paul Arriola, but one who came with a lot less fanfare should be drawing your attention.
Blerim Dzemaili arrived in Montreal before the end of the primary transfer window, playing in his first game on May 13. This was a boon to Mauro Biello's team as the Swiss international originally intended to join the Impact once the secondary transfer window opened on July 10. With Bologna safe from relegation, Dzemaili was allowed to make his move to Montreal in time to appear in 25 games instead of just 17.
His production since his arrival has been outstanding. Among players who have played at least 800 minutes this season, only three have averaged more non-penalty goals plus assists per 90 minutes.
That kind of end product wasn't necessarily expected when Dzemaili arrived. More known as a box-to-box midfielder, the 31-year-old had 11 goals and five assists in two seasons in the Serie A with Bologna. With the Impact he plays in a more advanced role, more often than not playing as an attacking midfielder in either a 4-2-3-1 or 4-3-3.
"I'm more of a box-to-box player, but I'm a player that likes [a lot] of the ball," Dzemaili told MLSsoccer.com when asked what he sees as his role on the field with the Impact.
Playing in this role, he's a lot to drift into spaces between opponents' lines and his touch almost never lets him down when he receives the ball. Once that happens, he's able to pick his head up and find any one of the attackers in front of him or open up to score himself.
"It's a guy that has a lot of experience at the highest levels. He did very well for Bologna in Serie A and at one point they were talking about [him] as one of the top performing midfielders in the league in terms of his performances," Biello told MLSsoccer.com this week when asked about Dzemaili.
"I think for sure he's arguably one of the best midfielders in the league. He's been here for 10, 12 games and has put up numbers. He's starting to get the attention of opposing teams because now [they need] to keep an eye out on him and try to limit his space."
Dzemaili's influence is not only measured by his boxscore stats, you can also see it when looking at his shot and chance creation figures. His combined figure of 5.57 shots and chances created per 90 minute is the sixth-highest average in MLS behind only David Villa, Sebastian Giovinco, Joao Plata, Clint Dempsey and Romain Alessandrini.
"If you give him too much space, he's got this tremendous shot, so he can hurt you from distance. If you try and close that off, he can try to beat you with his pass. There are those qualities that he has that makes it difficult for teams to manage."
That kind of ability is evident in all of his highlights that you can see above and his ability in transition situation was on display last Saturday night, when his slipped pass through to Anthony Jackson-Hamel ended in a game-winner in a match the Impact sorely needed to win.
With the Impact among a tight pack vying for the last playoff spot in the East, Dzemaili's continued excellence will be crucial if Montreal hopes to make another run in the playoffs.Download raw source
MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.25.207.149 with HTTP; Thu, 14 May 2015 19:12:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.25.207.149 with HTTP; Thu, 14 May 2015 19:12:38 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <63337464-B505-48BF-A142-D57903F3A031@comcast.net> References: <570843526.1885738.1430451563187.JavaMail.zimbra@comcast.net> <CAE6FiQ_DTUU81+9prVtHo3rpT3t9EOUufCr6j+GAW7MtcXxmXA@mail.gmail.com> <63337464-B505-48BF-A142-D57903F3A031@comcast.net> Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 22:12:38 -0400 Delivered-To: john.podesta@gmail.com Message-ID: <CAE6FiQ8N984jCuiCnvWHsbmJOUeJiNhykito0mGWgSUM2N-_8A@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Re: Today From: John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com> To: Frank White <fwj77@comcast.net> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a113491c6d43a0a05161560a1 --001a113491c6d43a0a05161560a1 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Of course I got upended by a flight cancellation to NYC. Sorry to miss you. On May 14, 2015 9:15 PM, "Frank White" <fwj77@comcast.net> wrote: > Hey John, I'm just getting back from the finance meeting in NY. It was > great to see all the new Hillstarters! Folks are ready to roll=E2=80=A6 > > I wanted to follow up on my request to get some time on your calendar to > sit with a group of business guys in NY some time in June. I'm happy to > send you a list of names and bios. Would you be available and agree to se= nd > me a few dates when you might be in NYC? > > Thanks > > Frank > > > On Apr 30, 2015, at 11:40 PM, John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com> wrote= : > > For sure. > > On Thursday, April 30, 2015, <fwj77@comcast.net> wrote: > >> Syl and I had a great time doing it. Looking forward to a chance to do i= t >> again. >> >> By the way, I have a group of good supporters in NY that I think we >> should have lunch with in the near future. If you're ok with that, let m= e >> know, I will follow up later. >> >> Thanks >> >> >> >> >> Sent from XFINITY Connect Mobile App >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> >> From: john.podesta@gmail.com >> To: fwj77@comcast.net >> Cc: >> Sent: 2015-04-30 23:31:03 GMT >> Subject: Today >> >> heard the event was great. Thanks. >> >> > --001a113491c6d43a0a05161560a1 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <p dir=3D"ltr">Of course<br> I got upended by a flight cancellation to NYC.=C2=A0 Sorry to miss you. </p= > <div class=3D"gmail_quote">On May 14, 2015 9:15 PM, "Frank White"= <<a href=3D"mailto:fwj77@comcast.net">fwj77@comcast.net</a>> wrote:<= br type=3D"attribution"><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0= 0 0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style=3D"word-w= rap:break-word">Hey John, I'm just getting back from the finance meetin= g in NY. It was great to see all the new Hillstarters!=C2=A0 Folks are read= y to roll=E2=80=A6<div><br></div><div>I wanted to follow up on my request t= o get some time on your calendar to sit with a group of business guys in NY= some time in June. I'm happy to send you a list of names and bios. Wou= ld you be available and agree to send me a few dates when you might be in N= YC?</div><div><br></div><div>Thanks</div><div><br></div><div>Frank</div><di= v><br></div><div><br><div><div><div>On Apr 30, 2015, at 11:40 PM, John Pode= sta <<a href=3D"mailto:john.podesta@gmail.com" target=3D"_blank">john.po= desta@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br><blockquote type=3D"cite">For sure.= <br><br>On Thursday, April 30, 2015, <<a href=3D"mailto:fwj77@comcast.n= et" target=3D"_blank">fwj77@comcast.net</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class= =3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin:0 0 0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padd= ing-left:1ex">Syl and I had a great time doing it. Looking forward to a cha= nce to do it again. <br><br>By the way, I have a group of good supporters i= n NY that I think we should have lunch with in the near future. If you'= re ok with that, let me know, I will follow up later.<br><br>Thanks<br><br>= <br><br><br>Sent from XFINITY Connect Mobile App<br><br><br>-----Original M= essage-----<br><br>From: <a>john.podesta@gmail.com</a><br>To: <a>fwj77@comc= ast.net</a><br>Cc: <br>Sent: 2015-04-30 23:31:03 GMT<br>Subject: Today<br><= br>heard the event was great. Thanks. <br><br></blockquote> </blockquote></div><br></div></div></div></blockquote></div> --001a113491c6d43a0a05161560a1--Their music can inspire … and break your heart. It is gloomy … and uplifting.
Frightened Rabbit lives on an emotional rollercoaster.
Fans of The National will relate. Even more so with Frightened Rabbit’s new album, “Painting of a Panic Attack,” because it’s produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner (also co-curator of the Eaux Claires Festival).
This afternoon, the Scottish band played a live Studio:Milwaukee session at 88Nine for invited Radio Milwaukee members. (Become a member.) Tonight, they’ll play at the Pabst, on their first American tour in three years.
The music on this record, the band’s fifth, “is more longing and subtler than anything we’ve done before,” says frontman Scott Hutchinson. “It’s a step forward without losing who we are.”
Stream the Studio:Milwaukee session and interview with Frightened Rabbit below:Spintires is very much a niche game. It's about driving rough, rugged, Soviet-era vehicles through mud deep enough to drown a giraffe. And that's really about it. Even so, it found enough of an audience to sell 100,000 copies in relatively short order, making it a legitimate indie hit, but things seemed to turn sour late last year when developer Pavel Zagrebelnyj said publisher Oovee had made off with the money and frozen him out of his own creation.
But in a statement posted today, Tony Fellas of Oovees blamed most of the trouble on "communications issues," with both customers and Zagrebelnyj, which have now been cleared up. "We openly admit that communications between Oovee and our customers have been weak over the last few months. Our customer base grew far beyond what we initially expected and we needed to cater for that quickly—the development plans became sketchy and before we knew it we had a runaway train. Please accept our apologies," he wrote.
A small bug-fix update to Spintires is currently in testing, while a larger one expected in April will incorporate mod support. A DLC release is expected to come out in the summer, and plans for a proper sequel are also being kicked around.
"How can we possibly talk about the next iteration of Spintires when we still haven’t finished improving the current version of Spintires? Well to be fair, software is never finished and we understand that. But with the huge success of the Spintires release, it’s kind of a no-brainer but to continue the franchise and create an even better game with a larger team and a larger budget," Fellas wrote. "So with great pleasure we can confirm that planning has commenced for the next iteration of Spintires, whatever form it may come in."
In a follow-up post, Zagrebelnyj said images of a Skype chat in which he reportedly made disparaging comments about Oovee were faked. "I was pissed with our situation but I never said anything like it… Thanks to Tony our "communication" problems are now in the past, so expect new cool stuff for Spintires soon!"A group of atheists unveiled a monument to their nonbelief in God on Saturday to sit alongside a granite slab that lists the Ten Commandments in front of the Bradford County courthouse.
As a small group of protesters blasted Christian country music and waved ‘‘Honk for Jesus’’ signs, the atheists celebrated what they believe is the first atheist monument allowed on government property in the United States.
‘‘When you look at this monument, the first thing you will notice is that it has a function. Atheists are about the real and the physical, so we selected to place this monument in the form of a bench,’’ said David Silverman, president of American Atheists.
It also serves another function — a counter to the religious monument that the New Jersey-based group wanted removed. It’s a case of if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
American Atheists sued to try to have the stone slab with the Ten Commandments taken away from the courthouse lawn in this rural, conservative north Florida town best known for the prison that confines death row inmates. The Community Men’s Fellowship erected the monument in what’s described as a free speech zone. During mediation on the case, the atheist group was told it could have its own monument, too.
‘‘We’re not going to let them do it without a counterpoint,’’ Silverman said. ‘‘If we do it without a counterpoint, it’s going to appear very strongly that the government actually endorses one religion over another, or — I should say — religion in general over non-religion.’’
About 200 people attended the unveiling. Most were supportive, though there were protesters, including a group from Florida League of the South that had signs that said ‘‘Yankees Go Home.’’
‘‘We reject outsiders coming to Florida — especially from outside what we refer to as the Bible Belt — and trying to remake us in their own image,’’ said Michael Tubbs, state chairman of the Florida League of the South. ‘‘We do feel like it’s a stick in the eye to the Christian people of Florida to have these outsiders come down here with their money and their leadership and promote their outside values here.’’
After a cover was taken off the 1,500-pound granite bench Saturday, people rushed to have their pictures taken on it. The bench has quotes from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the founder of American Atheists. It also has a list of Old Testament punishments for violating the Ten Commandments, including death and stoning.
‘‘Some people think it’s an attack simply by us exerting our existence. They put a monument on a public lawn that, if you put it in context, says atheists should be killed,’’ Silverman said. ‘‘It is an attack, but it’s an attack on Christian privilege, not an attack on Christians themselves, and not so much an attack on Christianity.’’
At one point someone in a car driving by tossed a toilet seat and a roll of toilet paper at the crowd. Neither struck anyone. At another point, Eric Hovind, 35, of Pensacola jumped atop the peak of the monument and shouted his thanks to the atheists for giving him a platform to declare Jesus is real. Atheists shouted at him, and he stepped down after about a minute. One man yelled that religion is a fairy tale.
‘‘The problem is it’s not a fairy tale,’’ Hovind said. ‘‘We definitely have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.’’
Hovind and Tubbs did say they respect the right of the group to install the monument, even if they disagree with the message behind it.
And the atheists said they expected protesters.
‘‘There always are,’’ said Rick Wingrove, the director of a Washington D.C.-area office of American Atheists. ‘‘We protests their events, they protests our events. As long as everybody’s cordial and let people speak. This is our day, not theirs. We’re fine with them being here.’’
A call to the group that sponsored the Ten Commandments monument, the Community Men’s Fellowship, wasn’t returned. But the group gave Facebook updates on the legal battle with the American Atheists and praised the compromise that allowed them to keep their monument.
‘‘We want you all to remember that this issue was won on the basis of this being a free speech issue, so don’t be alarmed when the American Atheists want to erect their own sign or monument. It’s their right. As for us, we will continue to honor the Lord and that’s what matters,’’ the group posted.
While Silverman said he believes religion is wrong and teachings in the Bible are violent, he said he welcomes non-Christian religions to follow the atheists’ example and put in their own monuments in free-speech zones.
‘‘I will back them because it will be their right,’’ he said. ‘‘This is one of the tricks that Christians have used, because they go up and call it a free-speech zone and then they’re unopposed. They get their government legitimization because nobody else calls their bluff and puts something in.’’The French car manufacturer has struggled for pace on the first year of its works comeback, Magnussen scoring Renault’s only points of the 2016 campaign so far with his seventh place finish at Sochi.
Magnussen’s future at the team is not yet secure as Renault evaluates its options for the forthcoming campaign, with the likes of Sergio |
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More Info on AppCoins Main Sale ICO
The $1.8 Million in initial pre ICO funding will allow the team to secure a realistic roadmap for technical development, strategic partnerships, and further marketing initiatives, building up to the main sale ICO taking place very soon.
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AppCoins Pre-Sale & ICO Tokens
Initial supply: 450,000,000 tokens
Sale supply: 180,000,000 tokens
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Soft cap: $2.5M USD
Hard cap: $15.3M USD
The funds collected during our pre-sale will be untouched until we reach the soft cap of $2.5 Million USD to develop and implement the world’s first blockchain-based cryptocurrency to be used by users, developers and partners alike to enable a transition towards a circular economy where the value that was previously drained by intermediaries, stays in the system. The ERC20 compatible tokens are created over the Ethereum protocol, and can be used as a means of payment on app stores that adopt the protocol.
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With AppCoins, users can earn tokens through engaging with app advertising and then spend this currency on in-app purchases (such as game items).
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AppCoins’ potential extends beyond the Aptoide platform, as the tokens will be made compatible for all app stores. With that in mind, an App Store Foundation will be created to coordinate the development of the protocol and reference implementation under an open governance model.
Learn more about AppCoins at: https://appcoins.io
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See our code and follow the developements of the Protocol: https://github.com/Aptoide/AppCoins-ethereumj
Join the discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppcoinsProtocol/At the climax of the episode, the show revealed a twist twenty years in the making: Jon Snow is not Ned Stark’s bastard, but the son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen.
The former name ought not to be unrecognisable even to casual show watchers. Bran Stark’s season six plot has traversed time to show us the history of the siblings Stark, pulling us back to the days when Eddard roamed Winterfell alongside his elder brother Brandon and younger sister Lyanna. Were it not for these flashbacks, Lyanna could have easily been lost in the shuffle of present day characters; her most notable mention can be found in season one, as Cersei speaks her name with utter loathing. Lyanna’s named continued to be dropped sporadically at best, but still without a face to place alongside it. The flashbacks established her as an important character, preparing the viewer for her pivotal appearance at the Tower of Joy.
The day after the finale, the internet was rife with the Great Snow Debate. How incredible was it that Jon was the son of Lyanna Stark and the Mad King Aerys Targaryen? But no - surely Jon was the result of the incestuous union between Ned and Lyanna, in the vein of dynamic duo Jaime and Cersei? Or was Jon actually Robert’s son all along, making him the true Baratheon heir? It is a lively debate that continues to this day, despite its existence being entirely unwarranted and unnecessary.
Throughout A Song of Ice and Fire, the powerful character of Rhaegar Targaryen makes itself known. His personality shines through the words of others as Jaime, Ned, Barristan, Robert, Littlefinger, and Cersei, among others, share their memories of him. His sole physical appearance is that of a vision to sister Daenerys in the House of the Undying, and yet he feels as present as any main player.
This is one of the virtues of the written word, where narration and dialogue intermingle and no conversation can be lost to an accent or background noise. Although Rhaegar has received a namedrop or two over the television show’s six year run, he does not stand out as a particularly fascinating individual. Even the memory of his father the Mad King proved to be more relevant when Cersei used his abandoned wildfire catches to annihilate her enemies.
While it is not stated unequivocally in Bran’s flashback, Rhaegar is indeed the father of Jon Snow. In addition to GoT’s brief descriptions of Lyanna’s kidnapping and rape at his hands, the novels delve into the interactions between the pair, giving rise to a prominent theory that the incident was less an abduction and more an elopement. Speculation aside, Rhaegar’s unquestionable status as Jon Snow’s parent makes him one of the most significant characters in both novels and show. And yet, the majority of show watchers do not even know his name.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Saturday, June 11, 2016, at a private hanger at Greater Pittsburgh International Airport in Moon, Pa. (Photo: Keith Srakocic, AP)
MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — The presumptive 2016 Republican presidential nominee hit a couple of potential swing states Saturday to strike back at his critics — including the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.
In travels to Florida and Pennsylvania, Donald Trump attacked Mitt Romney and others who say the businessman's "trickle-down racism" and harsh comments about women will drag the GOP down to defeat in the November election against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Romney "choked like a dog" in his 2012 loss to President Obama, Trump told supporters at the airport near Pittsburgh, and is now attacking him unfairly. Earlier in the day, in Tampa, Fla., Trump called Romney "a stone cold loser."
The attacks came a day after Romney echoed his refusal to endorse Trump, saying he lacks the temperament to be commander-in-chief.
“I don’t want to see a president of the United State saying things which change the character of the generations of Americans that are following,” Romney said on CNN. “Presidents have an impact on the nature of our nation, and trickle down racism and trickle down bigotry and trickle down misogyny — all of these things are extraordinarily dangerous to the heart and character of America.”
The nominee-in-waiting is under attack from a variety of Republican lawmakers, particularly over his claim that a federal judge's "Mexican heritage" makes him biased in a fraud case involving the now-defunct Trump University.
Trump has vowed not to discuss the judge again, and stuck to that pledge Saturday, though he did criticize "politically correct" public officials who criticize some of the things he says.
"It's like a bunch of babies," Trump said, "a bunch of dumb babies."
It's very unusual for a previous presidential nominee to criticize a current nominee, and vice-versa. It probably hasn't happened to this extent in the Republican Party since 1912, when ex-President Theodore Roosevelt ran against successor William Howard Taft on a third-party ticket, helping elect Democrat Woodrow Wilson that year.
Romney has ruled out a third-party bid in 2016 but told attendees at a conference he sponsored Saturday that he is saddened by how many Republicans have rallied behind Trump. He said the GOP's troubles are "breaking my heart."
Trump also attacked Romney via social media, tweeting Saturday that Romney "had his chance to beat a failed president but he choked like a dog. Now he calls me racist — but I am least racist person there is."
The New York businessman said his emphasis on jobs will unify the country, telling supporters at the airport in Pittsburgh: "White, black... we're going to bring everybody together."
Trump also paid tribute to the voters in Florida and Pennsylvania, states that may be essential to his efforts to defeat Clinton in November.
Florida is a must-win state for any Republican candidate. Trump is also hoping to break through in Democratic-leaning states like Pennsylvania, which the Republicans haven't carried in a presidential election since 1988.
Trump is in the midst of a weeklong national tour that also includes potential swing states like New Hampshire, Nevada, and Arizona.
The schedule includes a Monday speech in New Hampshire attacking the current Democratic candidate as well as ex-President Bill Clinton.
Trump also turns 70 years old on Tuesday, a fact noted Saturday by supporters in Pennsylvania and Florida who shouted "Happy birthday" at him.
"I don't want to hear about it," Trump joked in Tampa, though he added that "I feel like I'm 35. That's the good news."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1tjHBRrRoland Jefferson was no more than 7 or 8 when his father told him and his brother, “Tomorrow, I’m going to take you boys to show you something very special.”
Any time with their father, Edward Jefferson, was special. Edward worked at the veterans agency, where he’d started as a messenger, about the only job a black man could get with the federal government in the 1920s. When he’d finish there, he’d go to his second job, as a waiter.
But on Saturdays, he had a half-day off. And on that particular Saturday, Roland walked with his father and brother from their house near LeDroit Park to the streetcar stop. They got out at the Mall and walked the rest of the way. And then they saw it: a pink cloud floating just above the ground and reflected in the Tidal Basin. The cherry blossoms.
Roland had never seen anything so beautiful.
“My father tried, when he could, to make an annual trip to see them,” Roland remembered when I reached him by phone this week in Hawaii, where he lives now. “That lingered with me, even until today. I’m 88 years old now, and I still remember those trips.”
Roland Jefferson, the first African American botanist to work for the Department of Agriculture, with Tadashi Furusho, mayor of the section of Tokyo from which Washington's original cherry trees came. (Courtesy of National Arboretum)
He remembers, too, his father’s garden, the zinnias, marigolds and snapdragons that were the pride of the neighborhood.
“I was very fascinated with what was happening,” Roland said. “One week, a seed would go in the ground, the next week little sprouts would be growing. My father sowed the seeds of plants in the ground, but he also sowed the interest in plants in me.”
Roland graduated from Dunbar High, served stateside in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and then enrolled at Howard University on the GI Bill. He majored in botany and graduated in 1950. It took him six years to find a job that used his skills, and even then, it was truly entry-level. “It was a little different for certain minority people to get work,” Roland said.
A friend told him about a place that was full of plants and seemed to be part of the federal government. Roland went to take a look. It was the National Arboretum. Arboretum officials didn’t have an opening for a botanist, but they offered him a job making plant labels.
Roland said he’d take it. “I thought this was a foot in the door.”
And so he made the little informational labels attached to the plants. The arboretum used plastic labels, but Roland noticed that within a year, they would fade and crack. He came up with a new method, using a type of metal he’d seen attached to the underside of airplanes.
“That was my first thing I did that got recognized,” he said. “Crab apples were second.”
The arboretum’s crab apple collection was a mishmash, with many specimens incorrectly labeled. Roland painstakingly pored through the records and teased out which ones had been propagated from understock and which were original growth.
In 1957, he was promoted to botanist, the first African American botanist at the National Arboretum. In 1972, he turned his attention to the beloved trees of his youth: the cherries in Potomac Park. He gathered 12 boxes of research material and in 1977 co-authored with Alan Fusonie a book recounting how the cherry trees came to Washington.
He became an international authority on flowering cherries, circling the globe on collecting expeditions — he met his wife, Keiko, in Japan— and eventually gathered almost a half-million seeds. Roland retired from the arboretum in 1987. Today he and Keiko live in Honolulu. It’s the perfect place for a botanist, like living in an arboretum.
I asked Roland if, when he closed his eyes, he saw in his mind the garden he worked with his father. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I can see the garden. I can see him walking through the cherry trees with me, too. He didn’t know much about the history of the trees. He didn’t have a high-powered job. But he still enjoyed those beauties. Even if a millionaire walked through those trees, they couldn’t have enjoyed it more than he did.”
Tail tales
My second annual Squirrel Week kicks off April 8. Send squirrel-related questions to kellyj@washpost.com. Put “Squirrel Query” in the subject line.
To read previous columns by John Kelly, got to washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.A mother in the Steinbach area is dealing with backlash after she asked for same-sex relationships to be part of the school's lessons around family diversity. CBC is not naming the town where she lives to protect the identity of her child.
Last week Michelle McHale made a request to the Hanover School Division board of trustees that it abandon rules preventing teachers in grades five to eight from talking about homosexuality in the classroom.
Over the weekend McHale received messages of support from the community, but others have been threatening.
"I knew there would be backlash. I am perhaps surprised how impassioned people got, and so soon," said McHale.
The most shocking of the online comments came from Facebook where one person posted "Can we just kill her please?"
McHale reported the comment to police, but said she feels the risk to her is low because the man who posted it lives in the United States. However, other negative online comments are coming from her community, she said.
"There are some arguments being put forward that are completely absurd, like that somehow [talking about] same-sex relationships, sexual orientation or identity will open the floodgates for pedophilia or bestiality to be discussed in schools too," said McHale.
Focusing on the positive
Other online comments have been hurtful and false, but McHale said she is focusing on the positive.
"There have been so many in support of this. One beautifully diverse group from rural [Manitoba] sent the most beautiful picture and stated their support. I have received support from people across the country," she said.
A community member near Steinbach posted an online photo that depicts families that stand in solidarity with Michelle McHale. The mom wants the Hanover School Division to remove policies that prevent teachers from talking about families with same-sex parents in the classroom. (Ken McDonald)
Personal messages have also been uplifting, said McHale.
Michelle McHale said she is receiving messages of support from around the world. (Courtesy of Michelle McHale)
Several church leaders in the area have also reached out to her and offered their support, she said.
"Overall, people are coming forward with stories of struggle in the school system as people who identify as LGBTTQ*," said McHale.
"They feel hopeful that the school environments can be changed and that we will have safer spaces for kids."
In an email to CBC Manitoba, Hanover School Division said it is considering McHale's request but declined to provide further information at this time.Today marks the one year anniversary of the horrific Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash that took the lives of 44 of the 45 people on board including the Lokomotiv hockey team. It may be forever known as the darkest day in the history of the sport of hockey and came as a total shock to the hockey world community.
Now, a full year later, charges have just been made to Vadim Timofeev who was the former deputy director of Yak Service Airlines. The claims are that Vadim Timofeev had violated the rules of air traffic safety and air transport operation by letting pilots Andrey Solomentsev and Igor Zhevelov fly with falsified documents.
From Russia Today:
According to the investigators, the official was in charge of flight operations at Yak Service, with control of the pilots’ qualification being his direct responsibility. “By putting the crew in the air Timofeev broke the rules of air transport operations. At the moment of the disaster, that crew wasn’t entitled to fly,” [Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir] Markin stressed. “Timofeev had allowed the captain to fly based on falsified documents, and the co-pilot hadn’t finished his training on the Yak-42 plane and had no right to be in air.”
From Sov Sport:
Investigators are certain that the catastrophe could have been avoided if it wasn’t for a number of violations committed by Timofeev, who was responsible for company’s flight organization work. According to an Markin [Prosecutor’s Office representative], on the day of the crash the flight crew was supposed to attend re-education sessions for the permit to fly Yak-42 [aircraft], and not to fly.
However it doesn’t end there…
Another source had reported that investigators back in December found a “banned drug” in the co-pilot’s blood, a drug they said that was used to treat a neurological disorder that causes weakness in both the hands and feet.
It’s still heart-breaking now to think how easily such a tragedy could have been avoided after being presented these facts.
As someone who was born in Belarus and followed many of these players including my all-time favorite Rusty (Ruslan Salei), this incident put me into tears when I first learned of the news a year ago. So I would like to take the time to properly give remembrance to all those players that were on board and share some video highlights:
D Mikhail Balandin
D Vitali Anikeyenko
D Robert Dietrich
D Marat Kalimulin
D Karel Rachunek
D Ruslan Salei
F Gennadi Churilov
F Pavol Demitra
F Alexander Galimov
F Alexander Kalyanin
F Andrei Kiryukhin
F Nikita Klyukin
F Jan Marek
F Sergei Ostapchuk
F Danill Sobchenko
F Ivan Tkachenko
F Josef Vasicek
F Alexander Vasyunov
F Artem Yarchuk
F Danil Yerdakov
Assistant coach: Igor Korolev Assistant coach: Alexander Karpotsev Head coach: Brad McCrimmon
On a final note, the re-built team was back on the ice for its opener in the 2012-13 KHL season, defeating Sibir Novosibirsk 5-2 on Thursday. (Video Highlights Below)Is Your Olive Oil Really Olive Oil? By Mark Sisson
For thousands of years, humans have been picking, prizing, and pressing the fatty drupes found among the oblong leaves of the gnarled, twisted olive tree into rich, green-gold extra virgin olive oil. And for almost as many thousands of years, humans have been coming up with ways to fake it, to pass off cheaper, less delicious, less nutritious oils as the real thing. The earliest known written mention of olive oil – from Syria, 24 BC – describes how court-appointed inspectors would tour olive oil processing facilities to ensure quality, purity, and the absence of fraud. In ancient Rome, the vessels containing olive oil bore detailed information about the contents, including varietal of fruit used, place of origin, name of producer, the weight and quality of the oil, the name of the importer, plus the name of the official who inspected it and confirmed the previously mentioned data. Let’s just say they really, really liked their olive oil, and that olive oil adulteration has always been an issue.
It continues today, of course, and studies are bearing out the fact that extra virgin olive oil is often adulterated with cheaper, more refined, deodorized olive oils, oils from olives deemed unfit for human consumption, and/or random nut, seed, and vegetable oils spiked with chlorophyll and beta-carotene to replicate the authentic color. An Australian study found that over half the supermarket EVOO was anything but, even the supposedly legit stuff from the Mediterranean countries; New Zealand researchers had similar results with Mediterranean imports into their country. Last year, a University of California at Davis study (PDF) found that 69% of imported extra virgin olive oils failed to meet international standards, while 90% of California EVOO tested passed (the study was partially financed by major California olive oil producers, and producers of some of the failed imports are crying foul). Similar adulteration is taking place in China, where imported olive oil is mixed with cheap seed oils. In 2007, the New Yorker published a harrowing account of widespread and longstanding fraud in the Italian olive oil industry (“Profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks”), and more recently, a study found that four out of five Italian olive oils were “debased.”
I’ve spent the last few years recommending that you eat extra virgin olive oil, and now it appears as if the fraud is pervasive enough to throw everything you thought you knew into a state of confusion. So what are you supposed to do? How do you know if your olive oil is actually olive oil?
The Fridge Test
By now, you’ve probably all heard about it: to test the legitimacy of a supposed olive oil, stick it in the fridge for a day or two. If it begins to solidify, you’ve got yourself a bottle of true extra virgin olive oil. Does it hold true?
Kinda.
Pure monounsaturated fat, also known as oleic acid, solidifies at 39 degrees F. Since olive oil is primarily oleic acid (about 70-85 percent, generally), sticking a bottle of real olive oil in the fridge should elicit solidification. The original olive oil adulterants, sunflower oil and safflower oil, were mostly polyunsaturated, so adulterating olive oil used to be easy to spot. Now, with high-oleic sunflower oil, high-oleic safflower oil, and high-oleic canola oil on the scene, adulterated olive oil can still solidify in the fridge. Thus, the fridge test is still a necessary, but not sufficient, test for the legitimacy of your extra virgin olive oil. It’s really a test for the degree of monounsaturation in the oils. It’s important (toss any oils that fail the test), but it’s not the full story.
The Taste Test
Good olive oil is often bitter, pungent, spicy, and slightly abrasive. It’s not always smooth and easy going. In fact, the “off-notes,” the intense flavors that make the uninitiated screw up their face actually indicate the presence of high levels of polyphenols, those antioxidant plant compounds which make olive oil so good for you. If the olive oil you taste burns the back of your throat and tastes funny to you, chances are you’ve been using and are used to adulterated (or at least non-virgin) oil.
To my knowledge, olive oil adulteration hasn’t progressed to the point where scammers are able to simulate the flavor of true EVOO. If they were to do it, I’d imagine they’d have to add polyphenols or olive extracts to the vegetable oils, and that can’t be cheap. And even if they did add olive extracts and synthetic polyphenols, it’d be better than having none at all.
Does It Matter?
Aside from being cheated out of your money for a disgustingly disappointing mix of soybean and canola oils, can any real health issues arise from consuming adulterated olive oils?
There are allergy concerns, of course, if the adulterant contains an allergen, like peanut oil. Owing to the similarity of its fatty acids to olive oil’s, hazelnut oil is another popular adulterant as well as a fairly common allergen, and one study even showed that people with hazelnut allergies could identify olive oil spiked with hazelnut oil because they suffered symptoms after eating it.
Another health issue that can arise from using adulterated olive oil is the one caused by excessive intake of omega-6 fats from the soybean, sunflower, safflower, canola, or any other cheap high-PUFA oil being added: generation of inflammatory eicosanoids, systemic inflammation, and oxidized blood lipids. Luckily, the fridge test is sufficient to ferret out PUFA-rich “olive oil” and prevent this from harming you.
Depending on the source and age of the adulterants (year old soybean oil, five month canola, etc), the once robust polyphenol profile of the starter extra virgin olive oil will have been severely diluted. And since the healthful, anti-inflammatory effects of olive oil can mostly be attributed to the polyphenols, olive oil adulterated with inferior, polyphenol-less oils will be less stable, more rancid, and more prone to oxidation. Oxidized oils are not very good for us; here’s why.
I’d say it does matter, and not just because of taste (as if “taste” isn’t reason enough). Here are my roughly recommended guidelines for choosing a good, real EVOO:
My best results have come with domestics – wherever I am. My favorite olive oil here in California is a California olive oil. The best Italian olive oil I ever had was in Italy. Same for Spanish olive oil. In all those studies referenced above, domestics seemed to win out. The NZ and Australian studies found that local oils bested the imports, just as the California study found that the top oils were from California. I’d imagine Italians like Italian olive oil and Spaniards like Spanish olive oil and so on and so forth because they’re not getting the imported, adulterated dregs.
You might have to spend a little money. Sure, I’ve made some good, affordable finds at Trader Joe’s in my day (including a $15 a liter bottle of spicy, unfiltered to the point of clogging the spout, lime green EVOO from Italy that appeared on the shelves for a month or two last year only to disappear before I could grab another bottle), but generally, I’ve gotten what I’ve paid for.
Do some tastings. Look for specialty shops or farmer’s market stands that allow and even encourage tastings of their olive oils. Take at least an ounce (the quarter teaspoon some places try to offer is way too meager to get an accurate reading), slurp it up, and swirl it around in your mouth like you’re trying to make a saliva-EVOO emulsification. Be obnoxious about it, even. But as you swallow the oil, relax and be ready to note the peppery polyphenol kick at the end, usually experienced at the back of your throat. Good EVOO should linger pleasantly in the mouth, even after it’s been swallowed.
Do the fridge test. Even though it won’t prove that your oil is pure, you’ll at least know that your EVOO wasn’t cut with PUFA-rich oils.
Avoid clear bottles. Although I’ve bought some fantastic olive oil from dedicated small-time producers that was stored in random glass jars, I usually opt for EVOO that comes in dark bottles or stainless steel containers. First reason being, light exposure oxidizes olive oil and degrades the polyphenol content. Second reason, most quality olive oil producers care about their product enough to ship it in suitable vessels.
Buy a winner. I always keep up with the latest winners of the Los Angeles International Extra Virgin Olive Oil Competition. Whenever I’ve tried one from the list of winners, I haven’t been disappointed. Here are some other lauded competitions.
Talk to people who know good olive oil. Talk to olive farmers at the farmers’ market who grow and pick and press and sell the stuff, talk to the mustachioed olive oil aficionado who owns the olive oil shop that you’ve never stopped in to see, talk to your friends who know about this sort of thing and splurge on olive oil all the time.
Ultimately, absent a team of sensory experts, access to gas chromatography equipment, and the ability to astrally project your soul backward through time to the time and place of the oil’s production, there’s no one way to tell, no grand, all knowing test. The closer you are to the proximate producer of the oil (buy “close to the mill”), the fewer times it changes hands before reaching yours, the “feeling” you get from sniffing the herbaceous fragrance, tasting the piquant fruitiness, the enjoyment you derive from it – this is how you determine the worth of your oil. It’s more art than science.
Thanks for reading, folks. Be sure to drop a link or reference to your personal favorite (or favorites) extra virgin olive oil, preferably one that’s widely available or available online, as well as your tips for finding a good brand.
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If you'd like to add an avatar to all of your comments click here!Author: Marshall Schott
Back in December 2014, I sent out a brief survey to homebrewers, the results of which became an article titled A Portrait of the Modern Homebrewer, and realized I’d made a terrible mistake– I didn’t ask enough questions! Sure, it was interesting to read what nearly 900 homebrewers thought about certain homebrewing topics, but it was 10 measly questions, I was left hungry for more. This hunger was the impetus for a new, much more detailed survey consisting of quite a few more questions, many of which aren’t related to homebrewing at all. In addition, there were a few more participants this time around: 2,173.
This type of data doesn’t necessarily lend itself to pictures, and graphs for each question would only serve to increase page load times, which everyone hates. For these reasons, this article is text based and a tad longer than usual, but I trust it will satiate some of the curiosity you might have about your brewing peers the way it did for me.
A final word before getting into it: these results aren’t necessarily scientific, I didn’t poll a random sample of the population, but rather used forums and social media to ask bored homebrewers to complete it. The purpose of this was to provide interesting information with a touch of entertainment value, not prove anything about homebrewers. Please don’t use this information for anything shitty. Thanks.
2015 General Homebrewer Survey
While the majority of responses came from homebrewers residing in the United States, folks from as far away as Latvia, Israel, Brazil, and so many more places around the world were represented as well. Let’s see what we collectively look like, shall we?
| DEMOGRAPHICS |
Of all respondents, a mere 1.9% (41) were female, a reminder that homebrewing seems to cater more to men, though perhaps more positively, an indication of an area of potential growth for the hobby. At the risk of coming across a bit controversial, I must say there is 1 area women just can’t compete with those of the opposite persuasion: the brewer’s beard.
Whether left untamed or exquisitely coiffed, many believe this ubiquitous symbol of masculinity fantasized about by every pre-adolescent boy is proudly sported by many a homebrewer. And they’re not wrong! Wholly 49% of male respondents reported keeping a short or long beard with an additional 9.9% wearing a mustache or goatee. That leaves only 41.2% of homebrewers without facial hair, a number I imagine will steadily dwindle as newbies progress in the craft.
In terms of age, 79.6% of respondents fall within the 21-39 year range, with the next largest swath being 40-49 year olds. Predictably, there aren’t many homebrewers out there under the age of 21 (0.9%), a finding I assume is inversely correlated with PBR sales among that age group. I was initially a bit surprised by the fact only 6.1% of respondents reported having been on this planet for 50 years or more, though it’s possible this number was impacted by the survey method and/or the avenues I used to promote it.
When I started brewing in 2003, I lived in a small rental apartment, which according to this data would have placed me among only 20.8% of my beer making peers. By and large, modern homebrewers make their beer in the comfort of the homes they own with 56% and 4% reporting owning either a house or condo/apartment, respectively. Another 17.3% live in a rental house, 1.3% endorsed “Other” (i.e., live with parents), and a miniscule 0.4% reside in a dormitory setting. Homebrewers also seem to value commitment with nearly 68% reporting they’re either currently married or in a domestic partnership. The next largest segment were single folks who have never been married at 29% of the sample, while only 2.8% reported being divorced or widowed.
The previous statistics may lead to speculation that homebrewers are a relatively well-off lot, what with most of us owning our own places, an assumption that doesn’t appear to be misplaced. A rather low 2.6% of respondents reported being unemployed at the time of taking the survey while 20.7% said they make an annual income of $100,000 or more. My word! Additionally, 32.5% reported earning between $60,000-$100,000 per year, 23.3% earn $40,000-$60,000 per year, and 20.4% have an annual income of less than $40,000.
Where does all this dough come from? I’ve heard rumors most homebrewers have a background in either engineering or science, but even when added together, these folks only comprise 25.7% (17% engineer, 8.7% science) of modern homebrewers. The most endorsed career, clocking in at 23.9%, was computer science. Health & human services, education, and sales/retail were each selected by less than 7%, while “other” was chosen by 30%, an indication of the shittiness of this question. My bad.
Finally, a question about everyone’s favorite subject, something I’ve a deep personal interest in– religion. I was pretty shocked to discover that homebrewers are disproportionately non-believers, with 63.5% endorsing None/Humanism/Atheism/Agnosticism. The next largest selections were Protestant at 10.8%, Catholic at 9.4%, Other Christian at 7.8%, and Other at 6.8%. The least represented groups were Jewish people at 0.8%, natural spiritualists at 0.8 %, and finally Mormons and Muslims, each selected by only 1 person.
Summing this all up and generalizing just a bit, the typical modern homebrewer is a bearded 30-ish year-old married dude who believes we all came from nothing and makes beer in his own home he paid for with the $60k+ annual salary he earns as a computer scientist (maybe engineer). Interesting!
| BREWING BEHAVIOR |
What follows is my attempt to present responses to a ton of questions as cohesively as possible. I think it worked okay, though some may find it jumps around a bit. Sorry about that. If you have any specific questions, ask and I’ll try to help out.
Ever hear about the boom homebrewing has experienced over the last few years? It would appear to be real considering 86.5% of survey respondents reported they’ve been homebrewing for 6 years or less. A closer look reveals 18.6% started homebrewing within a year of taking the survey, which is higher than the combined responses of those who reported brewing for 7-10 years (6%) and 10+ years (7.5%). The combined percentage of everyone who reported brewing for 3 years or less (66.7 |
giving residents choices. If a consumer wants access to a service, then that provider should be able to get into the building, subject to reasonable technical limitations. (After I interviewed Barr, Webpass was acquired by Google Fiber.)
Webpass and other competitive ISPs are seeing routine demands by developers and landlords for revenue sharing agreements and “door fees”: many Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) won’t let you in the door unless you agree to share revenue with them. There’s a whole layer of intermediaries out there who have developers or REITs as clients and aggressively market “opportunities” for buildings to make additional revenue streams stemming from de facto exclusive Internet access agreements, and manage and drive arrangements in the residential real estate market. Completely unprincipled and potentially unlimited demands for paybacks are the result. Here’s an example of a graduated revenue sharing arrangement Comcast pitched in Philadelphia that provides a property owner with increased rewards based on the number of subscriptions in the building.
Slide from presentation to landlords detailing loot they can get from pushing Comcast to tenants.(On the commercial real estate side, it’s the same deal: landlords, their interests aggregated and managed by third-party intermediaries, all have their hands out when it comes to Internet access service. This “riser management” is a huge problem for the great city of New York; it’s why commercial tenants in NYC pay through the nose for awful Internet access service in the fanciest of commercial buildings.)
Now, the FCC has tried to encourage competition in MDU buildings, Eight years ago, FCC clearly said landlords can’t have exclusive agreements with Internet access providers. The FCC recognized the problem:
‘Incumbent providers commonly engage in a flurry of activity to lock up MDUs and other real estate developments in exclusive arrangements as soon as it becomes clear that a new entrant will be coming to town.’ Sometimes these clauses are inserted in fine print, in “legalese,” and without adequate notice to the MDU owner.
But the Commission has been completely out-maneuvered by the incumbents. Sure, a landlord can’t enter into an exclusive agreement granting just one ISP the right to provide Internet access service to an MDU, but a landlord can refuse to sign agreements with anyone other than Big Company X, in exchange for payments labeled in any one of a zillion ways. Exclusivity by any other name still feels just as abusive.
Here’s Barr: “The FCC’s rule is nonsensical. They’re saying you can’t have exclusive agreements, but, at the same time, a landlord gets to say yes or no to anyone coming into the building, and you have to have the landlord’s permission. So, a landlord certainly can sign an agreement with one company and say ‘No’ to everybody else, thereby creating an exclusive agreement. So that’s what they do. They’re under no obligation to let everyone in, so they’ll extract a rent payment from one provider.”
Here’s another colorful workaround exploited by the incumbents. Even though exclusive agreements are a no-no, marketing exclusivity is apparently permitted. So AT&T and Comcast and others will sign deals with buildings that require that only their flyers are displayed in the leasing office. No one else is allowed to distribute any competing material — and no events (think wine and cheese party for tenants) can be held by any competing provider on the premises. Here’s a recent letter from Comcast to property owners “reminding” them of “their exclusive marketing arrangements with Comcast/Xfinity in the wake of an effort by Google Fiber to hand out donuts and coffee to tenants.
Drop that Google donut! Comcast’s “exclusive marketing arrangements” with building management bans rivals from contacting tenants or leaving materials on the property.Another common, more serious, exploit: Even though exclusive agreements with buildings are totally illegal, the carriers will nonetheless insert clauses requiring exclusivity in their agreements with MDUs. And then they’ll add little clauses saying “if any part of this agreement turns out to be illegal, you can cut out that portion of the agreement and the rest of it will stand.” (Lawyers call these “severability” clauses.) If you’re a property manager, you’ll read that contract, see that it’s been signed by someone higher up the food chain than you, and then enforce the exclusivity it appears to require. “Property managers don’t know,” Barr points out. “They’re not experts in Internet law. They’re experts in how to run a property, and they will do what these agreements say. What property manager wants to be the guy to take on Comcast? Not too many.”
How about this one: FCC long ago created “inside wiring” rules giving power to MDU owners, under certain circumstances, to take ownership of wires run by cable companies inside their buildings. The commission recognized that the wiring infrastructure inside an MDU gives the incumbent an unbeatable advantage, and wanted to open up that infrastructure to competition. But those rules were based on the (apparently naive) assumption that, initially, the cable/telco company owned the wires. Clever Time Warner Cable lawyers and many others have worked around this by deeding ownership to their inside wires to the building owner, and then getting an exclusive license back from the owner to use those wires.
This tricky Time Warner deeding switchback apparently satisfies the law while still blocking competition.See? No one said the OWNER couldn’t agree to license its wires to a single player. Got to take your lawyerly hats off to these guys — they’re good.
Shenanigans are everywhere. The Internet should be really mad about this.
But after we get mad — and we should — let’s fix this.
For new buildings, every city should do what Stockholm, Paris, Brentwood, CA, and Loma Linda, CA do. Require those new buildings to be fiber-ready so any competing provider can get in there without asking permission.
For existing buildings, stop companies from being able to sign contractual provisions limiting access to inside wiring. Make it illegal for landlords to get any form of side payment whatsoever for cutting off our choice of ISPs.
And do as much as possible to get dark fiber as deep as possible into neighborhoods, available for lease at reasonable prices, and connected to a common one-stop-shop interface so that all competing cellular wireless and WiFi services can share that dark fiber.
Get on it, AGs of America, national leaders, mayors, and citizens. It’s payola. It’s pernicious. And we’re all paying for it.NEW YORK CITY – Big Data is all around us. It’s in the way we shop, do our finances, and tweet. What does Big Data even mean, you ask?
To some, it’s more information than your laptop can handle. Others define it as melding data from different sources and seeing what patterns emerge.
“I’m a photographer, so that [explanation] didn’t mean much to me,” said Rick Smolan Oct. 15 here at the inaugural Wired Health Conference in New York.
Then the Against All Odds Productions CEO ran into Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer. She described Big Data, he said, as “watching the planet develop a nervous system.”
And that nervous system of data is developing at tremendous rates thanks to growth factors like social media, gadgets that record how much electricity each appliance in your house eats up, consumer genomics, and personal trackers like Fitbit, Zeo or the Nike fuel bracelet (a favorite among Wired staff, according to executive editor Thomas Goetz).
“The challenge is... how do you make it something [people] care about?” asked Smolan. As the popularity of Instagram indicates, often, the answer is pictures. So through the Human Face of Big Data, Smolan aims to morph abstract data points into something visceral, emotional and tangible. The crowd-sourced venture capitalizes “on humanity’s new ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data, in real time,” according to the project’s website.
And as self-quantifiers Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf mentioned in a later session at the conference, people are measuring everything from their sleeping patterns to how fast their toenails grow.
They’re using devices as varied as smartphones, headbands, cars that track their own health and the health of their driver, and carpets that monitor a person’s balance and gait.
“If she hasn’t touched the carpet, the system sends me a message. No cameras, no invasion of privacy,” said Smolan about the experimental “magic carpet.”
These kinds of personal tracking devices begin to address the “big challenge [of] expanding the scope of big data in healthcare to encompass an individual’s environment outside the walls of the clinic or hospital,” wrote Joel Dudley, director of biomedical informatics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, in an email to Wired.
They also give ordinary people the opportunity to craft scientific and health-related questions, not just provide answers, said Quantified Self Co-Founder Gary Wolf.
Or as Quantified Self adviser and self-care app developer Rajiv Mehta put it online, personal tracking is doing to healthcare what the PC did to computing: It liberated it “from the province of an elite few to a tool for the masses.”
These data-hungry gadgets also harness “the power of connecting people with their own data and getting them to see how that could change their lives,” said Goetz.
With the deluge of data they provide, however, comes other challenges, including how that data is analyzed and interpreted.
“We don’t have really good drag-and-drop statistical analysis tools,” Kelly said. “To do something meaningful with [the data], to extract out some kind pattern... is very difficult.”
As any frustrated graduate student will tell you, without the proper analysis even good data loses its zing.
Wired Health speaker Stephen Wolfram, for example, has been collecting personal data for more than two decades, but not until recently did he "finally try taking a look – and to use [himself] as an experimental subject for studying what one might call “personal analytics,” he wrote on his blog. But Wolfram, who earned his PhD in theoretical physics at 20, is a whiz. The rest of us might need some help.
The federal government has acknowledged this predicament and recently set aside more than $200 million to fund big data initiatives. Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded about $15 million to fund eight big data research projects.
The awards will “ultimately help accelerate research to improve health – by developing methods for extracting important, biomedically relevant information from large amounts of complex data,” said NIH Director Francis Collins in a press release.
Other researchers are mining social media data to monitor the adverse effects of certain medications, and the NIH has also put the data from the 1000 Genomes Project in the cloud for other scientists to use.
As tracking becomes even more mainstream, the issue of privacy will pop up. While Smolan doesn’t think big data equals Big Brother, others may disagree.
“The conversation on privacy will need to change dramatically in the near future. It will not be long before you will be able to take a picture of someone with your phone camera and have software that can impute regions of that person's genomic DNA, which could tell you about their risk for disease,” Dudley wrote in an email.
There’s also the question of who owns the data, the patient, healthcare providers, or the app developers that tell you want it means.
Self-trackers “want to use these sensors... to give us new senses, to equip us with new ways to hear our bodies,” Kelly says, but with those senses comes a lot of responsibility, too.Everything you are about to read works across modern browsers, because Dart compiles to JavaScript.
Intro
The MDV behavior of Dart Web UI (hereafter referred to as Web UI) helps you bind your data and models to the view in a declarative manner. Binding usually means "when the data changes in one location, change it in another." Typically, web frameworks can wire together the necessary callbacks to keep the view (any text or input fields) in sync with the models (the Dart objects that contain the state of the application).
If you're new to Dart Web Components, you might want to read my Your First Web Component with Dart post, or the Dart Web Components article. Just like Dart Web Components, for MDV to work you need to get the web_components package, which contains the dwc compiler. The compiler is what converts the MVC and WC code into vanilla Dart and HTML. You can use dart2js to convert the Dart into JavaScript and run these samples across all major browsers.
Sample code
Let's look at a simple example that takes some data from Dart and displays it on a web page. We also add a button that, when clicked, updates the data which in turn updates the data on the page. Binding in action!
Note the {{ superlative }} is a placeholder for data, to be populated by the MDV code. The name superlative is the name of a variable in Dart code.
The on-click="changeIt()" is an attribute that tells MDV to run the changeIt method whenever the button is clicked. The name changeIt is the name of a top-level function in Dart code.
import 'dart:math'; String superlative; List<String> alternatives = const ['wicked cool','sweet', 'fantastic']; Random random; main() { superlative = 'awesome'; random = new Random(); } changeIt() => superlative = alternatives[random.nextInt(alternatives.length)];
Here is the Dart code:
Note the top-level variable named superlative, which is initially set to 'awesome' in main. When the page is first displayed, you will see:
(If you can't see the embedded demo above, you can try the live demo.)
How cool is that?! Here we see simple data binding in action.
When the button is clicked, the changeIt function is run. A random alternative is chosen and assigned to the variable superlative. After the button is clicked, the view is updated.
The MDV code takes care of all the bindings and updating. The Dart code doesn't contain any code or logic to update the view when a value changed.Germany faces a “growing threat” from left-wing extremism, warns Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of the country’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV). This intelligence assessment comes little more than a week after the leftist protests against the G20 summit in Hamburg turned into — what some European commentators described as — an embarrassment for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Around 500 police officers were injured during those protests.
According to the German intelligence agency (BfV), there are an estimated 8,500 leftist extremists in Germany that are “violence-orientated.” The country is also home to over 10,000 Islamists that BfV classifies as dangerous. Those numbers have been on a sharp rise since Chancellor Merkel opened the EU borders to millions of migrants from Arab and Muslim countries in the autumn of 2015.
The German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reports:
Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of the domestic security agency Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), warned of the growing threat posed by Germany’s left-wing extremist scene. “We have in Germany a very strong left-wing extremist scene, made up of about 28,000 people, of whom 8,500 are prone to violence,” Maassen told local media.
According to the report, the government is considering the introduction of ankle tags to track known leftist offenders:
Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, has outlined proposals designed to control potential rioters and prevent a repeat of the chaos and destruction seen on the streets of Hamburg during last week’s G20 summit. De Maiziere told Germany’s Funke media group that those found guilty of rioting could be made to follow strict orders to regularly report themselves to authorities, especially before and during rallies. They could also be made to wear electronic tags.
In a separate report published by the broadcaster, a conservative German MP demanded the Merkel government to “systematically” shut down leftist bastions in major cites like Berlin and Hamburg:
Other politicians are weighing in by calling for well-known leftist housing projects and cultural centers around the country to be “shut down.” The latest voice to offer this idea came from Armin Schuster, a Bundestag member for Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a former policeman, who told the Berliner Kurier newspaper on Monday that “left-wing centers like Rote Flora in Hamburg, or Rigaer Strasse in Berlin, need to be systematically closed down.”
Germany’s left-wing parties were quick to lay the blame squarely on the police. It is the task of the police “to enable and ensure peaceful protests, instead of treating the demonstrators in general as the enemies of the state,” complained Germany’s Green party spokeswoman Irene Mihalic. The Green Party may very well end up joining Merkel’s next coalition governments following the September general elections.
German authorities have initiated 35 investigations against police officers for allegedly using ‘excessive force’ against the rioters during the protests against the G20. The leftist groups that caused massive property damage have not been made accountable for the losses.
The most notorious among these groups is Antifa, or the so called ‘Anti-Fascist Action Movement,’ a collective of anarchists and socialists who justify the use of violence to silence their opponents to achieve their ideological aims. Antifa and its affiliates use the rhetoric rooted in the historic anti-fascist struggle to conceal their Leninist tactics devised to sabotage the Western societies from within.
Earlier this month, Antifa and other far-left groups took to the streets of Hamburg as part of their “Welcome to Hell” protest action. Private property worth tens of millions of Euros was gutted or looted as part of their ‘resistance’ against capitalism.
Both Antifa and Islamist groups employ the same tactic of infiltrating aggrieved groups in the U.S. and Europe to channel their respective rage and anger against the Western civilisation. Be it the ecological movement or ‘Black Lives Matter’, for the leftists and the Muslim radicals these are mere battering rams to be used in their war against the West.
Raw footage: Leftist riots during G20 in Hamburg
[Cover image via YouTube]A consistently cold and snowy winter led to some of the heftiest bills for salt and overtime in the history of the cities of Delaware and Powell.
A consistently cold and snowy winter led to some of the heftiest bills for salt and overtime in the history of the cities of Delaware and Powell.
The city of Delaware used 4,159 tons of a salt-and-grit mix during the snow season and spent $50,911 on overtime for workers responding to 21 snow and ice events.
"All are record amounts dating back at least 10 years," Delaware spokesman Lee Yoakum said, adding that it's likely last winter broke all-time records for the city.
The cost of the mixture of salt and grit that Delaware used this season was almost $147,000.
Workers spread 1,487 tons of salt while attempting to fight off ice and snow in the city of Powell over the winter.
Powell spokeswoman Megan Canavan said that's the most salt the city has used since the winter of 2009-10.
"Those have been the two biggest seasons since we started collecting data in 1995," she said.
The city spent about $16,000 on overtime for plow drivers and almost $98,000 on salt this season.
The harsh winter depleted the salt reserves of many local governments, including Delaware and Powell. Supply problems had Powell on the verge of attempting to borrow from neighbors at one point, and led Delaware to test a sugar-beet juice solution as a means of extending its salt supply.
City workers began testing the solution in January as temperatures routinely dipped well below freezing.
The sugar-beet solution acts as a kind of primer for the salt, keeping the road wet so the salt reacts better with the ice. Yoakum said the solution works better than traditional brine solutions as temperatures approach 0 degrees.
The solution also is used to keep salt in place on the roadway, so less of it is kicked onto nearby sidewalks or into yards by passing vehicles.
Yoakum said city residents can expect to see more of the brown beet solution when the temperatures drop next winter.
"We were very pleased with the results that we saw," he said.
Now that the cycle of freezes and thaws seems to have stopped until next winter, the cities' service departments can shift their focus to the damage left behind.
Yoakum said Delaware city streets have more potholes than usual thanks to the extreme temperatures of this winter. While the city has received fewer than 10 pothole complaints via its website, he said officials know of many problem areas.
Yoakum said city workers currently are targeting problem areas on Glenn, Houk, Slack and Troy roads, Moore Street, Pittsburgh Drive and U.S. Route 37 East.
Canavan said city of Powell public-service workers already have been out to patch problem areas this year.
While the city has received no complaints via its Android app or website, she said the city has received multiple calls about potholes recently. The majority, she said, were about streets outside of city limits.By Ruth Holmes
PARIS, Jan 18, 2013 (AFP)
A French national says he hid under his bed for 40 hours during the hostage-taking before being rescued by soldiers during an assault that involved heavy exchanges of gunfire.
Alexandre Berceaux, an employee of CIS Catering at the desert gas complex who was evacuated to another nearby site, also told Europe 1 radio that the initial attack on the site was a surprise as the base was heavily guarded.
He said “there were intervals of heavy gunfire” when Algerian forces stormed the base Thursday, adding: “There are terrorists who are dead, expatriates, locals”.
“I heard an enormous amount of gunfire. The alarm telling us to stay where we were was going off. I didn’t know if it was a drill or if it was real.”
1025 GMT: As pressure mounts on Algeria over its handling of the situation, new details have emerged about the Algerian rescue operation — including reports that hostages had explosives strapped to them.
Irish foreign minister Eamon Gilmore says some of the hostages came under fire as Algerian authorities intervened when the al Qaeda-linked kidnappers attempted to move their captives. He was speaking after 36-year-old father of two, Stephen McFaul, from Belfast in Northern Ireland escaped from the facility.
“I have been told at the stage where they were being transported explosives were strapped to them,? Gilmore told CNN after speaking to McFaul’s wife Angela by phone.
“The information that I have is that there were five vehicles involved; four of those vehicles were hit. The vehicle in which Stephen McFaul was not hit and he managed to get away, but as I said it?s still at a very early stage and we?re still assembling the information.”
1013 GMT: DEATH TOLL GIVEN BY HOSTAGE-TAKERS ‘FANTASY’: SECURITY SOURCE.
1008 GMT: Some Islamist gunmen are still holed up at the remote Algerian gas field, a security source says.
“There is still a group holed up” at the In Amenas gas production complex in the southeast desert, the source tells AFP, adding that it was “difficult to discuss an ongoing operation.”
1000: GMT: SOME ALGERIA HOSTAGE-TAKERS ‘STILL HOLED UP’ IN GAS COMPLEX: SECURITY SOURCE.
0956 GMT: Eight Norwegians are still unaccounted for in the siege at the BP-operated facility, while one appears to have escaped, Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide says.
“At this moment we have eight hostages, eight people who are unaccounted for in the situation,” Eide told BBC radio.
“This morning we got news that the ninth person is actually free and is at a local hospital in In Amenas.”
Four other Norwegian nationals had “got out at an early stage”, he added.
0949 GMT: Some 34 Filipinos working at the gas field have been flown out of the country, a Philippine government spokesman says.
Another Filipino worker escaped on his own along with a Japanese national, Foreign Undersecretary Raul Hernandez said. Of those evacuated and flown to London on Thursday, one had suffered a gunshot wound, he added, declining to confirm reports that at least two Filipinos were among those killed in the Algerian rescue operation.
“The Algerians admitted that there were some deaths and injuries on the side of the hostages following the operation undertaken by the Algerian military forces but no details were released,” Hernandez said.
0941 GMT: Several world leaders made changes to their schedules today, reflecting their growing concern about the hostages’ fate. Prime Minister David Cameron has cancelled a key speech on Britain’s relationship with the EU in the Netherlands while Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cut short a visit to Indonesia.
Japanese plant builder JGC has confirmed the safety of three of its Japanese staff and one Filipino employee, but the whereabouts of 74 other staff, 14 of them Japanese, remain unknown.
0934 GMT: The Islamist kidnappers say 34 captives have died in the assault, but this is impossible to confirm. So far only the British government has announced a casualty, though it is feared that the toll could be considerably higher.
The militants told Mauritanian news agency ANI they would “kill all the hostages if the Algerian forces succeed in entering the complex”.
0924 GMT: Algeria is coming under mounting international criticism over the crisis as dozens of foreign hostages remain unaccounted for, with many feared dead, despite an Algerian military rescue bid.
Japan’s foreign ministry has today summoned the Algerian ambassador, demanding answers over the rescue operation. The plant employs workers from Japan, Britain, France, Italy, Norway and the United States.
Japanese senior vice foreign minister Shunichi Suzuki told ambassador Sid Ali Ketrandji that Japan was disturbed by the way the ground and air assault had been carried out, a foreign ministry statement said.
“From the view point of protecting the lives of the hostages, Japan is deeply worried that the government of Algeria conducted the military operation to rescue hostages,” Suzuki told Ketrandji, according to the statement.
0918 GMT: While only one British person has been confirmed dead, media reports said as many as 20 Britons may be unaccounted for at the BP-operated In Amenas plant.
One man from Northern Ireland meanwhile managed to escape from the facility and is expected to be returning home to Belfast Friday.
0911 GMT: Britain’s Foreign Office says the “terrorist incident” in Algeria is ongoing and confirmed that one Britain had been killed.
Prime Minister David Cameron will later hold a meeting of Britain’s COBRA emergency committee after warning of the likelihood of more bad news to come.
“The terrorist incident in Algeria remains ongoing,” said a Foreign Office spokeswoman. “As the prime minister and foreign secretary have said, to the best of our knowledge on the information given to us by the Algerian government one British national has sadly been killed.
“We are not in a position to give further information at this time. But the prime minister has advised we should be prepared for bad news.”
WELCOME TO AFP’S LIVE REPORT on the Algeria hostage crisis as it enters its third day. Western governments have voiced alarm over the fate of dozens of foreigners seized by Islamists at the In Amenas gas plant in the Algerian desert after several hostages were killed in a dramatic rescue operation.
Here are some of the latest key developments in what Britain described early Friday as an ongoing “terrorist incident”.
— An Algerian military operation aimed at freeing the hostages has left “several people” killed or wounded but freed a “large number” of hostages, an Algerian minister said.
— Special forces have taken control of a residential compound at the complex wherehundreds of hostages are being held after Islamist militants took control of the gas plant on Wednesday.
— Algerian soldiers continue to surround the site’s main gas facility which they have so far failed to secure in an air and ground assault. Some 600 local workers were however freed Thursday, including two from Britain, one from France and one from Pakistan.Today marks just two days until the school year is officially complete. It’s hard to believe that I’m rounding out my fourth year as a school psychologist. The past four years have moved more quickly than ever, and it feels like just yesterday I was walking into my office with new-job jitters. In the blink of an eye, I’ve watched an entire group of students transform from nervous freshmen to brave seniors.
I’m stepping into this summer filled (mostly) with excitement but also with a small, nagging bit of anxiety. The latter of which has been building over the last two weeks as I’ve been outlining the specifics of a lengthy summer to-do list for the book. Seeing this list of action items grow has left me battling the most pesky self-talk of all: a case of the “What Ifs”.
What if my photography isn’t good enough? What if my recipes aren’t creative enough? What if I don’t know what to write for the introduction? What if my writing is too guarded? But what if it’s too vulnerable?
And the most unsettling “what if” of all…
What if I’m not good enough?
That very question yanked me from sleep this morning, and it was accompanied by a gnawing sensation in my gut. I allowed the unwanted query to consume me while I moved through my morning routine, indulging it more than challenging it. By the time I opened my car door to head to work, I was exhausted. My morning tango with ruminative self-doubt had worn me out before I had even started the day. As I pulled out of our carport (who needs a garage??), I decided that I had two choices: I could continue to engage with my What Ifs and fight a losing battle or I could acknowledge their presence without entangling myself with them, thereby mitigating their power. The latter is a method I’ve learned to lean on when I’m having a surge of naysayer thoughts. It offers the emotional space to observe without judgment and allows doubts to pass like clouds in the sky.
I know you came here for cherries, chocolate, and chia pudding, so I won’t ramble for much longer (and I certainly won’t pretend that this recipe is somehow connected to the above musings). But I sat down to write this post last night, and I just stared at the screen. Even an attempt to strictly adhere to describing the recipe felt forced, and I’ve learned that writer’s block is usually the first sign that I’ve accumulated a bit of emotional grime. The quickest way out is to walk right on through it. So, here’s to clearing the grime and knowing that each of us is enough just as we are in this moment.
For real now, let’s talk about this decadent elephant in the room: chocolate cherry chia pudding.
Antioxidant-rich chocolate chia pudding and cherry jam are layered, one after the other. The chocolate chia pudding comes together with just four ingredients and a patience-demanding 8 hours of chill time. The cherry chia jam requires just three ingredients: sweet cherries, pure maple syrup, and chia seeds, and it’s from this recipe I posted last summer. Although I haven’t tried making the jam with frozen cherries, I’m guessing it would work out just fine. BUT if you can get your hands on some fresh sweet cherries, I definitely recommend going that route.
These parfaits can be enjoyed for breakfast or dessert. If you pursue the breakfast path, I suggest preparing everything at the start of the week and layering the pudding and jam in four separate jars. That way, you can sprinkle on a few toppings each morning and head out the door with a fun breakfast in hand.
Self-empowerment and a chocolaty breakfast all wrapped up into one lengthy post. Take that, Monday.The SOD1:c.118G > A mutation, associated with CDM, was originally identified in a genome-wide association study and characterised by sequence-based typing [13]. Recent studies have used conventional and real-time PCR techniques to develop more rapid and cost-effective methods of genotyping dogs for this particular mutation [14–16]. The present study employed PCR followed by RFLP analysis, utilising the Eco571 enzyme, demonstrating that this technique allows rapid and simple genotyping dogs for the SOD1:c.118G > A mutation.
There was no significant difference in allele or genotype frequencies comparing young GSDs (n = 50) with those over 8 years of age (n = 100) in the sample population from a large tertiary veterinary hospital. In dogs over 8 years of age, homozygosity for the SOD1:c.118A allele was strongly associated with those affected with pelvic limb ataxia, compared to those referred with non-neurological disease. None of the 50 dogs with non-neurological conditions were of the A/A genotype, compared with 21 of 50 dogs with neurological signs being homozygous for this mutation. This is a lower proportion of homozygous A/A mutant dogs than that identified in the American GSD CDM case population examined by Awano and colleagues [13], where 4 of 5 dogs were homozygous for the A allele, but similar to that found in an Italian study, where 3 of 10 GSD in their case population were homozygous A/A [15]. This might represent genetic variability, due to geographical differences in the gene pool of GSD populations studied, but more likely results from differences in selection criteria used for identifying the case populations. In both the current and the Italian study, selection of the case population was based on a broad phenotype, relating to neurological signs (such lower limb ataxia in this study), compared with the study of dogs in the USA, where a more definite diagnosis of CDM was made following post-mortem histopathology or MRI studies. Thus, although CDM cases would be included in our case population, this is a relatively heterogeneous group, with other causes of pelvic limb ataxia also likely to be represented.
Use of SOD1 genotyping in a clinical setting is now considered to be a useful component of the diagnostic panel, with dogs showing consistent clinical signs and being homozygous for the mutation, raising the index of suspicion of CDM, whereas those with heterozygous or homozygous wild-type genotypes considered more likely to be affected by other disease processes. As management of CDM is problematic, with the disease often rapidly progressing, the results of such a genetic test may influence the treatment the dog receives, particularly in those dog with co-morbidities, whereby it may not be appropriate to consider surgical intervention for concurrent spinal conditions, in a dog that is homozygous for the SOD1:c.118G > A mutation, but to opt instead for physiotherapy which has been shown to prolong life in dogs with CDM [17].
Although CDM appears to be inherited in an autosomal recessive manner, with incomplete penetrance [13], in our study of UK GSDs, all dogs over 8 years of age that expressed the A/A genotype were showing clinical signs of ataxia, with none of the ‘neurologically healthy’ dogs expressing this genotype. This suggests that, in the UK at least, penetrance is relatively high if not complete.
We also assessed the prevalence of the SOD1:c.118G > A mutation in a cross-sectional study of relatively young GSDs, which would be unbiased with respect to CDM susceptibility because they are too young to show clinical signs. The prevalence of the SOD1:c.118A allele in this population was estimated to be 0.35, with 8 of 50 dogs (16%) being homozygous for the A allele. Other studies [13, 15] using limited numbers of dogs have estimated the prevalence of the SOD1:c.118A allele in GSDs to be 0.17-0.21 with 4–6% being AA homozygous. However, these GSD populations were from different geographical locations and included dogs aged 0 to 14 years with and without evidence of neurological disease, and therefore do not necessarily represent the GSD population as a whole. A much larger study [16], where over 6000 GSDs were genotyped for the SOD1:c.118G > A mutation, revealed a frequency of 0.37 for the SOD1:c.118A allele with 22% being AA homozygotes, which is similar to the results from the present study. Follow up on the eight A/A homozygous dogs identified in the present study revealed that one dog had been euthanased due to clinical signs consistent with CDM, four dogs had been euthanased before reaching 7 years of age for other conditions such as neoplasia and liver disease, and three dogs currently remain disease free at 8 years of age, although they might still develop CDM in the future.
It has been suggested that genetic screening of dogs for the SOD1:c.118G > A mutation in breeds known to be susceptible to CDM might be used to influence breeding programs [3]. Genetic testing and identification of heterozygous or homozygous mutant dogs, alongside a strategy for ensuring that they are only bred to homozygous wild-type dogs, would reduce the prevalence of the SOD1 mutation in the population over several generations. A more radical approach, based on selection against all carriers of the mutation for breeding purposes, could pose a problem in terms of restricting genetic diversity, particularly in a breed such as the GSD, where the prevalence of the A allele is relatively high. In breeds such as the Boxer and Pembroke Welsh Corgi, where the prevalence of the A allele is even higher (A allele frequency is estimated to be over 0.7 in some studies [13]), breeding programs to select against dogs carrying the mutant A allele would likely have a major impact on the overall genetic health of these breeds, thus eliminating desirable qualities or unintentionally selecting for other genetic mutations.Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariota won the Heisman Trophy on Saturday night, taking home the award in a landslide over Wisconsin running back Melvin Gordon and Alabama wide receiver Amari Cooper.
With that, we figured now was as good a time as any to look ahead to next year’s Heisman Trophy race.
All three of this year’s finalists were juniors and it is believed all three of them will forego their senior seasons to enter the upcoming NFL draft. Gordon has already announced his intention to leave.
Other top underclassmen around college football will declare for the draft in the coming weeks, and it's impossible to know who will stay and who will go at this point.
Below we list 15 top candidates for the 2015 Heisman, assuming players like the three finalists and others like Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston and Indiana running back Tevin Coleman will be gone as well.
Heisman Trophy: 15 names for 2015
15. Corey Clement, RB, Wisconsin – Clement is next in a long line of Wisconsin running backs that have had to wait their turn to be the No. 1 option. Montee Ball, James White and Melvin Gordon were all excellent for the Badgers. Clement has 844 yards and nine touchdowns this season, and averaged |
RX rounds.
“My initial plan was to do the British and European championships. The British championship means a lot to both me and my sponsors so it was a deciding factor, and although I haven’t quite got the budget to do both right now, I’ll be working hard to top up the calendar with some Euro RX races.
A recent announcement from the British series means that the events will now be run in a similar fashion to the FIA World Rallycross Championship, this is something that Grint agrees with.
“It looks like it will be a very fair and professional championship this season, and bringing it into line with the format of World RX, plus having Tim Whittington as race director should make the events run perfectly. Although I’m still a relative newcomer to rallycross compared to the rest of the supercar drivers in Britain, I think with the Albatec car being as fast as it is I should be a championship contender for sure.”
Andy Scott, Team Principal Albatec Racing is happy to have Grint back in the team for the new season, “I’m delighted to welcome James back into the team for a second season” he said. “There’s no doubt that consistency is important for both team and driver, and I’m certain there’s a lot more to come from him. He proved last season that he could mix it with the front runners, gaining three semi-final places in Europe, as well as putting on a pretty impressive show in his very first event at Pembrey.
“His previous rally experience meant he was very quickly up to speed on the gravel aspect of rallycross tracks, and he’s done some driving this year which he feels will help him on the tarmac sections too, so car and driver look a good prospect for a potential title-winning combination.”Beignet
The media were fed beignets at the press conference annoucning the new Beignet Fest. (Photo by Todd A. Price, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
New Orleans, according to Scott Hutcheson from the Mayor's Office of Cultural Economy, has 132 festivals. In October, we'll get a new festival dedicated to a classic dish: the beignet. The first Beignet Fest will be held Oct. 8 in Lafayette Square.
Hutcheson was part of a press conference introducing Beignet Fest on Tuesday morning (Aug. 9) at Urban South Brewery, a festival sponsor.
Amy and Sherwood Collins organized Beignet Fest to benefit the Tres Doux Foundation, which supports children with autism in the New Orleans area. The couple's oldest son was diagnosed with autism when he was 3 years old.
The Beignet Fest will feature savory and sweet beignets from area restaurants. Coffee will be sold, and so will beer. Urban South will have its two flagship beers, Charming Wit and Holy Roller IPA, along with its new Oktoberfest seasonal. For the festival, Urban South will also debut its Rectify coffee porter, which will be the brewery's winter seasonal.
The musical lineup includes Big Sam's Funky Nation, John Papa Gros Band and Los Po-Boy-Citos. Ochsner Hospital for Children will sponsor a kid's area at the festival.
For more information, visit www.beignetfest.com.
The new Beignet Fest was announced on Aug. 9, 2016, by (from left to right), Urban South co-founder Kyle Huling, Dr. William Lennarz of Ochsner Hospital for Children, District B councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, festival co-founders Amy and Sherwood Collins and Scott Hutcheson from the Mayor's office for Cultural Economy. (Photo by Todd A. Price, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
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Got a tip? Know some restaurant news? Email Todd A. Price at TPrice@NOLA.com or call 504.826.3445. Follow him on Twitter (@TPrice504), Facebook (ToddAPriceEatsDrinks) or Instagram (@tprice504).Differential gene expression wordcloud of azacytidine treated AML3 cells treated with azacytidine. The left panel shows the up-regulated genes and the right panel shows the down-regulated genes. Font size is proportional to the exponent of the p-value.
Script used to process data
awk '$6<0 && $8<0.05 {print $1,$8}' DESeq.xls \
| awk '{printf "%4.3e\t%s
", $3, $2}' \
| sed's/e-/@/' | cut -d '@' -f2- | awk '{print $2":"$1}' > dns.txt
You have probably seen word clouds before - but have you tried with gene expression data?I used the following bash script to process a DESeq spreadsheet from a a previous RNA-seq post. The script extracts the gene name and p-value of the genes with differential expression. I used awk to separate the up and down regulated genes into different files. The score used to inform the font size is the exponent of the p-value. So this works best when there are a lot of statistically significant genes p-values. The data looks like this:AC011899.9:60CAMK1D:54GNG4:44CGNL1:41APCDD1:37HSD11B1:33Now go to the "advanced" tab of the Wordle page and paste in the data. Experiment, with the colours, layouts and be sure to increase the "maximum words" to get a real appreciation for the number of changes in your experiment. Here is an example I made using both the up and down regulated gene sets showing the effect of azacytidine on AML3 cells. The result is pretty amazing.awk '$6>0 && $8<0.05 {print $1,$8}' DESeq.xls \| awk '{printf "%4.3e\t%s
", $3, $2}' \| sed's/e-/@/' | cut -d '@' -f2- | awk '{print $2":"$1}' > ups.txtAccording to a Defense Department-approved “sexism course,” the Bible, the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence all contribute to modern sexism.
Those three cherished texts all count as “historical influences that allow sexism to continue,” according to a presentation prepared by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, whose mission is to give a “world-class human relations education.”
According to the course, the Bible has “quotes” which can be interpreted as sexist by readers.
The Declaration of Independence is also an historical cause of sexism, as the document refers only to “all men”–not “men and women.”
And the Constitution, the Pentagon argues, is an historical source of sexism because “slaves and women were not included until later in history.”
Of course, members of the Armed Forces take an oath to defend the Constitution–which is, according to the DEOMI course, an “historical influence that allows sexism to continue.”
“The content of the lesson is provided to generate academic discussion concerning how these historical documents have been included in discussions about the topic of sexism,” Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen, a Defense Department spokesman, told The Daily Caller.
But following TheDC’s request for comment, the sexism course–as well as two other courses listed on DEOMI’s website, entitled “Prejudice & Discrimination” and “Racism”–were taken offline.
“This course is currently offline and under revision,” a notice says under all three courses.
Asked about the sudden update, Christensen replied, “DEOMI online materials are periodically pulled to review to ensure accuracy and relevance. The racism, sexism and Prejudice & Discrimination are currently undergoing that review process.”
{snip}
Original Article
Share ThisTEMPE, Ariz. -- Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Matt Garza said Wednesday that his spring numbers that show him with a 19.06 ERA don't mean anything.
"I'll be ready when the bell rings," said Garza, who allowed 10 runs, six earned, and nine hits in a Los Angeles Angels' split-squad's 12-2 win over the Brewers.
David Freese had three hits and Albert Pujols had two for Los Angeles.
Los Angeles starter Hector Santiago continued his solid spring. He allowed five hits and two earned runs in 4 1/3 innings with six strikeouts in his third spring outing.
Santiago, who came to the Angels in a three-way deal that sent Mark Trumbo to Arizona, went 4-7 with a 3.56 ERA with the Chicago White Sox in 2013.
Editor's Picks More From ESPN.com A lot has changed in a relatively short time in Milwaukee, and that shift includes a big bet on Matt Garza, who signed a four-year, $50 million deal in January, Jerry Crasnick writes.
The Brewers committed two errors in an eight-run Angels' second.
Garza reportedly rejected more money from the Angels to sign a four-year, $50 million contract with Milwaukee.
"They put the ball on the ground and what happened, happened," Garza said. "That's the way it broke down. Thank God, it's spring training."
Garza signed a four-year, $50 million contract with the Brewers after going a combined 10-6 with a 3.82 ERA over 24 games with the Chicago Cubs and Texas in 2013.
"He's not spotting balls as he usually does," Milwaukee manager Ron Roenicke said. "He had no rhythm. And, of course, we didn't help him out."
Garza said he had to grind it out.
"I could only say 'keep pitching,' " Garza said. "It's more about me showing the guys what I can do."
Roenicke would like to see that soon.
"I would like the next one to be better," said Roenicke, who when asked, said he's keep putting Garza into 'A' games to get him straightened out. "He's got three more starts. I'm not concerned about (only) three starts."
Santiago had to get loosened up again as he went out for the third inning after the big Angels' inning. He told reporters that he pitched against a net in the tunnel.
Santiago is in competition for one of two open spots in the back end of the Angels' rotation with Joe Blanton, who fired five shutout innings in a split-squad Angels' win Wednesday.
The Brewers' defense left a lot to be desired in an eight-run Angels' second and Garza deserved a much better fate.
First, Rickie Weeks was unable to come up with Hank Conger's hard double play ball at second for an error. Matt Long followed with a bouncer up the middle that went under shortstop Jean Segura's glove for a hit. Kole Calhoun then scored from first on Mike Trout's ground single to left as third base coach Keith Johnson aggressively waved Calhoun around third as the throw came into second and Weeks' throw home was late.
Later, Segura was unable to handle a relay throw that allowed Albert Pujols to slide in safely at third.Image caption The Danish company's decision has been criticised in Greece
The world's leading supplier of insulin for diabetics is withdrawing a state-of-the-art medication from Greece.
Novo Nordisk, a Danish company, objects to a government decree ordering a 25% price cut in all medicines.
A campaign group has condemned the move as "brutal capitalist blackmail".
More than 50,000 Greeks with diabetes use Novo Nordisk's product, which is injected via an easy-to-use fountain pen-like device.
A spokesman for the Danish pharmaceutical company said it was withdrawing the pen injection product from the Greek market because the price cut would force its business in Greece to run at a loss.
The company was also concerned that the compulsory 25% reduction would have a knock-on effect, because other countries use Greece as a key reference point for setting drug prices.
Novo Nordisk says it will continue to supply insulin in vials at the reduced price. Insulin, a hormone normally released by the pancreas, helps control blood sugar levels.
'Insensitive'
Greece wants to slash its enormous medical bill as part of its effort to reduce the country's crippling debt.
International pharmaceutical companies are owed billions in unpaid bills. Novo Nordisk claims it is owed $36m (£24.9m) dollars by the Greek state.
Pavlos Panayotacos, whose 10-year-old daughter Nephele has diabetes, has written to Novo Nordisk's chairman to criticise the move.
"As an economist I realise the importance of making a profit, but healthcare is more than just the bottom line," he wrote.
"As you well may know, Greece is presently in dire economic and social straits, and you could not have acted in a more insensitive manner at a more inopportune time."
The Greek diabetes association was more robust, describing the Danes' actions as "brutal blackmail" and "a violation of corporate social responsibility".
The Danish chairman, Lars Sorensen, wrote to Mr Panayotacos stressing that it was "the irresponsible management of finances by the Greek government which puts both you and our company in this difficult position".
People with diabetes in Greece have warned that some could die as a result of this action.
But a spokesman for Novo Nordisk said this issue was not about killing people. By way of compensation, he said the company would make available another product, called Glucagen, free of charge.
Glucagen is administered to patients with very low blood sugar levels.Unknown Miocene mystery where CO2 didn’t fit models, *Solved*
Strap yourself down – a puzzle you never knew existed has finally been solved!
Solved yesterday, settled today! That’s a rapid fire consensus… (they actually use the word “settled” in the title of the paper)
Finally poor Miocene researchers can sigh with relief as the first study in years shows what they *knew* was the right answer and now they can issue press releases, rest their weary minds, and stop trying to think of excuses as to why their results didn’t fit with The Climate Model Testaments.
Who knew there were large discrepancies and carbon dioxide did not fit the temperature theory for a million years or so? Not the public.
Where were the press releases telling us there was a mystery to solve?
Research Shows A High Temperature World Had Nothing To Do With CO2
Study shows temperatures fell dramatically, CO2 stayed the same
Study shows models have no freaking clue what controls the climate
Exactly, never.
The mystery they are talking about is the one marked Mi-1, 22 million years ago. This graph comes from Zachos 2008, a graph that is vying to become my new hot favorite since it has 40 million years of non-stop paradigm-busting mysteries. Watch CO2 control the climate while it stays steady for twenty million years and temperatures fall, rise, fall, spike, crash and slump into the modern Ages of Ice. This kind of climate sensitivity defies numerical analysis. If CO2 controls the climate with this kind of fickle unpredictability, it is more of a God than just a molecule, and we don’t need carbon reduction — we need places of worship. Maybe human sacrifices.
Years ago in my ninth ever post I pointed out that sometimes the only place that Experts admit that their results were ballsed up and the models didn’t work was in the introduction of a paper where they think they’ve solved it. So it was with the missing Hot Spot which people never said was missing except in a paper where they had just found it.
Here we find periods where the carbon theory fails, but are not called failures or mysteries (until after they are solved). Instead they are known as periods of decoupling:
Furthermore, we aim to address the question of decoupling between atmospheric [CO2]atm and global temperature change during this time interval, particularly evident in the marine realm (Pagani et al., 2005; Henderiks and Pagani, 2007; Plancq et al., 2012), a question that clearly has profound implications for 21st-century climates.
In the normal world CO2 either controls the climate or it doesn’t. In the climate religion, CO2 either controls the climate or it is decoupled. There is no option for “does not control the climate”.
Here’s the graph from the new paper where a new variation on modeling of stromatal leaf changes. This time (joy) the CO2 rises from ~390 ppm in the late Oligocene to ~870 ppm at the “right” time. Did it lead the temperature spike or follow it? Yes. Definitely one or the other.
Assuming they are right this time, all they have achieved in the climate debate is just to stop the models being proved wrong at that point. The thing that matters is whether CO2 rose before temperature or after it, and since we can’t find clear signals about that in 2017, it’s no surprise that we can’t figure that out in 22 million BC either. I note table 1 says that the CO2 readings at Mush Valley are 21.73 Million years ± 30,000 years. In modern equivalent terms it’s like we are assessing the whole global climate and CO2 levels since the Neanderthals with one dot on a graph.
The climate religion is evident throughout this paper: (the paper is more use as a sociological study)
Although the absolute amount of global temperature change between the late Oligocene and early Miocene is not known precisely, warming was likely on the same order of magnitude (~2 °C) as expected for the 21st century (Hansen et al., 2013; IPCC, 2014), and the expectation is that it was associated with an increase in atmospheric [CO2]atm. Nevertheless, previous studies documenting [CO2]atm for the cooler part of the late Oligocene and the relatively warmer early Miocene provide inconsistent and often counterintuitive results, possibly due to the use of different proxies or imprecisely dated strata.
Another word for failure is counterintuitive.
Below: that’s quite a lot of spread in those new happy CO2 results at the place called Mush (Fig 3 below). I see CO2 levels of 800ppm, 1200ppm. Isn’t that disastrous? Did we miss that mass extinction?
Here’s a wicked thought. What if there is a wide range of CO2 levels all over the world in many ages? If we dig enough holes and do enough proxies, we will solve all the “mystery periods” sooner or later, as long as we stop looking after we’ve found the “right” answer.
(And since when was Mush, Ethiopia, representative of The World anyway?)
For background, and if you like watching scientists tap dance around their gremlins, this paper by Zhang in 2013 explains more about the significance of the Miocene Mysteries:
A 40-million-year history of atmospheric CO 2
Yi Ge Zhang, Mark Pagani, Zhonghui Liu, Steven M. Bohaty, Robert DeConto
Published 16 September 2013.DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2013.0096
The Miocene Epoch (23 – 5 million years ago) is one of the most enigmatic times of the recent history of the Earth’s climate. The middle Miocene climatic optimum is one of the warmest intervals of the current icehouse period, being the culmination of several million years of warming from the beginning of the Miocene (Figure 1). Evidence suggests that the climate fundamentally changed during the middle Miocene transition, particularly on East Antarctica where a much reduced ice sheet with a vegetated landscape changed to a cold polar climate, potentially with ice sheets as large as today (Sandroni and Talarico, 2011).
Another apparent decoupling between CO 2 and climate occurs near the Oligocene–Miocene boundary (approx. 23 Ma), represented by a transient, positive benthic foraminiferal δ18O excursion (greater than 1‰) interpreted as a period of substantial glaciation (known as the Mi-1 event) [76]. Our records suggest invariant CO 2 concentrations during this apparent glaciation/deglaciation, defying our current understanding of the necessary forcing required to drive Antarctic ice sheet variability.
Assuming approximately 2°C of cooling in the deep sea [77], approximately 0.5‰ of the 1‰ δ18O shift at Mi-1 must have been driven by an increase in ice volume. If continental ice on Antarctica had an average isotopic composition of −40‰, as indicated by isotopic modelling [71], then more than 22×106 km3 of ice—roughly equivalent to the entire present-day East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS)—must have accumulated within 400 000 years. However, CO 2 levels during the Oligocene appear low enough to have already maintained a fully glaciated Antarctica according to ice sheet simulations [78]. Moreover, the recovery phase of Mi-1 is even more enigmatic because models require substantially higher CO 2 levels—at least two times higher than the formation threshold of the EAIS (approx. 1500 ppm) to cause substantial ice sheet retreat [71,78].
Which all explains why we havent heard much about the Miocene in the climate propaganda in the last twenty years.
H/t Lance W Thank you.
On the Miocene, warmists say yes,
Which is really no more than a guess,
That its long climate changes,
Through great temperature ranges,
Were CO2 caused, more or less.
— Ruairi
References
Tesfamichael et al (2017) Settling the issue of “decoupling” between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature: [CO2]atm reconstructions across the warming Paleogene-Neogene divide, Geology, November 2017; v. 45; no. 11; p. 999–1002 | Data Repository item 2017337 | doi:10.1130/G39048.1 |
Kürschner et al., 2007. The impact of Miocene atmospheric carbon dioxide fluctuations on climate and the evolution of terrestrial ecosystems. PNAS, 105: 449-453.
LaRiviere et al., 2012. Late Miocene decoupling of oceanic warmth and atmospheric carbon dioxide forcing. Nature, 486: 97-100.
Pagani et al., 2005. Marked decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during the Paleogene. Science, 309: 600-603.
Zachos et al., 2001. Trends, rhythms and aberrations in global climate 65 Ma to present. Science, 292: 686-693.
Zachos JC, Dickens GR, Zeebe RE. 2008 An Early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics. Nature 451, 279–283. (doi:10.1038/nature06588)
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please wait... Rating: 9.4/10 (72 votes cast)An article from 1947 by Amadeo Bordiga in which he discusses the debate over the constitution of the new Italian republic, the role of religion and secularism in Italian history, the opportunism of the Communist Party, “conformism” in Italian politics, the incompatibility of religion and socialism, the idolatry of the “sacred and inviolable” rights of the “Individual”, the fraud of political decentralization (which he correctly saw as opening the door of politics to the Mafia), the “demagogic appeal to labor” in modern “totalitarian” ideologies (the goal of the workers movement is “a society founded not on labor, but on consumption”), the illusion of self-management, etc.
Down with the Bourgeois Republic! Down with Its Constitution! – Amadeo Bordiga
Introductory Note
The following text was written by Amadeo Bordiga and was first published anonymously in Prometeo, the newspaper of the International Communist Party, in 1947. It was originally written in response to the debate over the form of the constitution and the legislature in Italy after the fall of fascism and the proclamation of the Republic and Italian democracy. We think it is a very interesting text for many reasons. One analogy with our situation, in the light of 15M and the crisis of the regime that was born in 1978 in Spain, is the rise of illusions concerning proposals oriented around a “constituent assembly” and “an assault on the institutions”. With his usual mastery Bordiga demolishes the idea that we, the exploited and oppressed, must beg for a place and recognition in the institutions of the oppressors, the bourgeoisie and capital. With respect to this question, see his analysis of Article 1 of the Italian Constitution—“Italy is a democratic republic based on labor”—which is simply masterful; we are inspired as we follow with rapt attention the reasoning and the logic of the Neapolitan communist. Another aspect of his analysis is directly associated with the specific objective that we have as proletarians in the struggle for our liberation: our negation as an exploited class, the negation of class society. And we are also interested in the indivisible unity that Bordiga establishes between principles and practice for those of us who aspire to radically transform this decomposing world. For us, unlike bourgeois politicians and the monks and priests of all religions, a dualistic split between theory and practice, between dogma and life, is not permitted. And we are also interested in his reflections on secularism and the religious question, which are so strikingly pertinent if we consider the current wave of Islamophobia or the recent debates raging around the hijab worn by Moslem women in public places in France. At a time when it would appear that the defense of the principles of secularism of the bourgeois revolutions is the most radical demand that can be expressed, we uphold the really up-to-date idea of communism.
Colectivo Germinal
***
Down with the Bourgeois Republic! Down with Its Constitution!
The debate on the Constitution of the Italian Republic has been defined as a compromise between different, opposed ideologies. Nitti, with his subtle malignance, has distributed among the majority of his comrades, many of whom are much younger than he is, an authoritative license of stupidity, clowning around with a combination of Christian morality and Marxist dialectic. Obviously we are always being told that politics is only the art of compromise, that the problem today is nothing but politics—politics d’abord —and that questions of principle were fashionable thirty years ago, but today all those who make politics their profession consider such questions to be old-fashioned, and we constantly hear the old left-wing militants ask with long faces: Won’t you consider debating questions of theory among the masses?
Let us set doctrinal matters, and the clear-cut position that religious doctrine and socialist doctrine are incompatible, aside for the moment. We shall mention only one factor that indisputably constitutes an advantage for the Christians and the believers, which they can throw in the faces of the obstinate Marxists. Anyone who follows a religious system is a dualist, that is, he puts things of the spirit and things of the material world on two different planes and two different worlds. He does not allow any compromises with respect to the dogmas that are the object of his faith, and he is perfectly capable of keeping them safe in a spiritual and theoretical domain, while he traffics in the ordinary realm of practical actions, facts and material interests. This advantage is one of the foundations of the great historical power of the Church, which is adaptable and mercurial in its policies and its social activity, but absolutely rigid when it comes to the cornerstones of theology. Hence the Christian, who, as a political militant, mixes up contradictory directives in questions of the terrestrial State and relations between classes and parties, does not betray his principles, or at least is not obliged to admit that he has subordinated his respect to matters that are hardly appropriate.
But such is not the case for Marxists, whose system is based on the direct derivation of ideologies from the very same material world in which the facts, and the relations of interests that become real forces, arise. They do not possess a convenient vault where their doctrine can be preserved intact, while they traffic in practical affairs with their enemies in the real world. But when the delegates of opposed parties and of opposed classes chaffer among themselves and converge on compromise agreements between their party positions, anyone who follows or says he follows historical materialism has no right to contest the fact that the “compromise of principles” that Marx and Engels accused the social democratic programs of engaging in is actually happening now, since practice, in the effective mechanism of collaboration, can only correspond in the minds of men with an equal contamination and mixture of opinions.
***
Let us now examine some of the most noteworthy questions that are being debated with regard to the new constitution, without adding anything new to what is being said in the texts emitted from the ongoing compromise negotiations, or more accurately, the maneuvers, which are now from the theoretical point of view simply pious wishes in substance as well as in form; let us therefore attend to the concrete relations and to the play of historical forces.
Let us first address the question of the secular nature of the State, which has been reduced to the subtle but fallacious argument over whether or not the Pact between Italy and the Pope engineered by Mussolini will be mentioned in the Constitution, although everyone agrees that it will be respected.
Nothing is more correct than to consider the Roman Question to be historically defunct, and nothing is more vain and sterile than to want to use this stale issue to resuscitate the old battle between the anti-clerical blocs, a practice that the Marxist socialists had already liquidated before 1914 by breaking with the ideologies and politics of the Masonic bourgeoisie. In this sense, both socialist parties have demonstrated the same vacuity and the same authentically reactionary, extremely right-wing, content of this position, which they share with the little republican groups and their ilk, and with one or another liberal cadaver.
The question has been historically superseded on a social scale, if one considers the general evolution of capitalism and of Church policy; and especially if we consider the vicissitudes of the Italian State.
The bourgeois revolution which first established the democracy encountered in the Church an obstacle and an adversary of the first order, given its organization, its hierarchical regimentation, and its wide-ranging economic function due to the fact that it constituted a united bloc with the aristocratic feudal regime. The bitter economic and social struggle between these forces was reflected in an ideological struggle, since bourgeois philosophy was anti-religious and the politics of the victorious young capitalist class was anti-clerical. Attempts to restore the old regime enjoyed the support of the Church, and this is why all the measures implemented by the bourgeoisie to reinforce their own class conquests were resolutely anti-clerical. However, when the clergy understood that it was no longer socially possible to prevent the victory of capitalism, it stopped excommunicating its partisans and accommodated itself, in a more or less complicated process with respect to the details, with the new privileged order. The theoretical contrast between religion and the foundations of bourgeois economics and politics was at first a somewhat disturbing factor but later disappeared, as a reflection of the alliance between the general staffs of capital and the Church. But this is not the place for an in-depth demonstration of the fact that there is no contradiction at all between capitalist right and ethics and a religious view of these matters.
The working class, the revolutionary ally of the nascent bourgeoisie, yielded for many years to the temptation to indulge in literary and rhetorical Jacobinism, and the essence of the policy of the Freemasons was to use this anti-clerical obsession to lead the proletarian movement astray from the class struggle and to obscure the real goal of proletarian politics, once the proletariat had emerged from its childhood and acquired a historically independent movement, which consisted in the principle of the crushing of economic and social privilege.
In Italy this process unfolded in the ways with which we are all familiar. The national State was not formed in the pre-bourgeois period, and among the causes for this one must mention the fact that Italy was where the Church with the most extensive worldwide reach had its headquarters. The young united bourgeoisie was tremendously anti-papal and anti-Catholic: in 1848 it had no qualms about expelling the Pope from Rome and in 1870 it did what everyone knows.
The Catholic Church in Italy was therefore obliged to scale back the pace of its general historical maneuver of blessing the advent of the capitalist regime and coming to terms with it. From Cavour to Mussolini, however, the process finally concluded in just the same way it concluded everywhere else.
The nature of the Catholic method was illustrated yet again. Fascism, with its dubious ideological characteristics was unacceptable for Catholic doctrine because of its attempt to replace religious values with new myths, with its mysticism of the nation and the State, a project that was carried out much more radically in Germany. But the practical policy of fascism offered an opportunity to consolidate the influence of ecclesiastical regimentation and the Church rapidly took advantage of the new regime. The mechanisms of fascism and the Catholic Church in the social-economic order converged in a single conservative praxis, and this was what really mattered.
This status is not at all disturbing for today’s little republic, whose reformism and progressivism actually began their history by following the same road.
But how could today’s Italian government, without any effective sovereignty and entirely lacking material force, more or less delegated or tolerated by the great powers of the world, be permitted to introduce novelties and engage in initiatives on this terrain? Evidently, in the new historical climate following the two world wars, in which the ruling institutions of the Italian bourgeoisie were confronted with the prospect of seeing their goose cooked for good, it was not long before Italy had an international Law of Guarantees, similar to the national law of 1871 that arose from the joint regulation of relations between the various Catholic States and regions of the Peninsula and the Vatican. The latter only asserted its rights as an equal party in a contract with Italy, as in the puerile fiction of the famous Article 7, but on a higher level.
In the modern, totalitarian phase of capitalism it is easy to predict that there will be worldwide planned regulation, and that it will include the religious factor. Alongside the UN we will probably see a UC (United Churches).
The Church of Rome does not control the majority of the believers in the most powerful nations of the world: the United States, England, Russia. It can only aspire to a unitary Christian function. In its political action it takes the form of parties with names like “Christian Democrats”, “Social Christians”, “People’s”, but never “Catholic”. It does not thereby compromise its doctrine, since the Reformation was a question of dogma and rituals, but the social ethic can be the same for all Christians, even for all religious peoples, when the attempts that took place after the previous war in favor of a united Church were repeated in a new form. Now there is talk of a Christian International. A major country with a predominantly Catholic population, France, which would seem to have been won over to militant atheism for decades, has seen a powerful Catholic party rise from out of nowhere.
In our Marxist view we consider that the reformed churches arose in conformance with an anticipated adherence to the belief system of the nascent bourgeois world, and today the Roman Church, reconciling itself with the world regime of Capital, has placed itself on the same level as its predecessors in this regard. The latest episode of this historical about-face was the Lateran Accords. It would be naive to express surprise that the Statute of the Republic should be bound to the Vatican even more closely than in the case of the Monarchy. The question is idle, and in this respect Togliatti is right.
The liberal slogan of secularism is a joke. One may speak of secular individuals when all of society was controlled by a religious hierarchy and the clergy were in power, not only exercising censorship over political and juridical decisions but also scholastic and cultural matters, monopolizing these functions through a stable and crystallized formal organization. By trying to act outside of these rigid frameworks and overcoming their ferocious conformism, figures like Dante, the humanists of the Renaissance, Galileo, Vico, Bruno, Telesio and Campanella performed truly secular tasks, even though some of them were monks. The first secular figure in the Western World was Christ, who opposed the priestly cabals of the scribes and the Pharisees. Cavour and the Albertine State had to be secular, since they had no choice but to fight to break the resistance of the powers of divine right on the peninsula, the investitures of Rome and the landed estates in “dead hands”.
Now that the Syllabus is no longer strictly applied to the official capitalist economy and Napoleonic-Roman law, all those who, even if they boast of their vague reformist and progressive initiatives, do not take a stand in an institutional struggle from the outside to assault and overthrow the authorities and hierarchies of the established order, all huddle under the same umbrella.
The very fact that one hundred deputies could draft a constitution is a symptom of this stage of conformism. When, historically, constitutions had a purpose and a content, they followed in the wake of revolutionary struggles and were their reflections, and they were written in haste, impelled by the flames of action. They endorsed in the form of handbills the declarations of a new victorious class, whose principles stood in stark contrast with the past, and a homogeneous group affirmed them and proclaimed them in the form of ideologies with distinct contours. In a subsequent epoch the constitutions that made concessions with respect to principles merely recognized irrevocable revolutionary situations, even when the struggles were not as clear-cut or even victorious.
Today, all the signori of Montecitorio are equally conformist: priests one and all. None of them are voices of “secularism” in the historical sense. A complicity worthy of a religious conclave binds them together, amidst all their conflicts, intrigues and plots.
The worst thing about the attitude of the “communists” in the Constituent assembly is therefore not the fact that they have discarded the thesis according to which a bourgeois and democratic-parliamentary State like this poor Italietta might one day find itself under the wings of the Church, a historical confirmation of the bridge created between the capitalist regime and religion. The worst thing is their claim to have created a somewhat different kind of bridge that connects the socialist proletarian regimes and religious belief. In this respect their disavowal of Marxism is repeated and once again confirmed.
We shall provide just one historical example, Russia. Not only has it allowed Freedom of religious conscience (what place is occupied in dialectical materialism by terms like “freedom”, “conscience” and their correlates?), but the Church itself, having renounced the defense of the old Czarist regime with which it was allied, is today recognized by the State, and its propagandists collaborated with the national propaganda program during the war, and helped to |
rewrite history and rewrite reality as part of a sustained political campaign against the State of Israel and the Jewish people.“This resolution was an utterly irresponsible intervention in one of the most complex places in the Middle East. UNES-CO prides itself on promoting tolerance, interfaith and inter-cultural dialogue, yet it passes resolutions which erase the Jewish people from the historical narrative,” Lapid said.He warned that the UNESCO resolution feeds the type of incitement that fueled the violence that began around the time of the Jewish New Year.“The decision by UNESCO feeds this incitement and so contributes to the wave of terrorism. It will lead directly to more attacks against innocent Israeli civilians and you cannot avoid responsibility for that,” Lapid said.“This latest one-sided resolution is a stain on the United Nations,” he wrote, urging Bokova to publicly declare her opposition to it.“You must not allow UNESCO to be hijacked as part of the campaign to delegitimize Israel and isolate the Jewish people,” he said.The broad-ranging resolution UNESCO’s Executive Board adopted in Paris on Friday condemns Israeli actions in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but focus in large part on Israeli actions with regard to the Temple Mount and Western Wall Plaza.Judaism, Christianity and Islam all consider the Temple Mount to be a holy site, but the UNESCO Resolution referred to the area solely as al-Aksa Mosque/al-Ha-ram al Sharif, except for two references to the Western Wall Plaza that were put in parenthesis. The text also referred to the plaza area by the Western Wall as al-Buraq Plaza.In October, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization backed away from reclassifying the Western Wall as solely a Muslim holy site, but is now using language that almost solely refers to it as such.April’s resolution reaffirmed that the Mughrabi Ascent, which starts at the Western Wall Plaza, is an integral and inseparable part of al-Aksa Mosque/al-Ha-ram al-Sharif.The resolution calls on Israel to restore the status of the Temple Mount to what it was prior to September 2000 when the second intifada broke out. At that time, according to the resolution, the Jordan Wakf had full control of al-Aksa Mosque/ al-Haram al Sharif including maintenance and restoration work and regulating access.The site currently is under the full authority, but not full control, of the Islamic Wakf. Only Muslims are allowed to pray at the Aksa complex, but Jews and members of other faiths are allowed to visit.Israel controls the access to the site, and has persistently rejected all claims that the status quo at the site has been changed.UNESCO called on Israel not to restrict Muslim worshipers from accessing the al-Aksa Mosque site and condemned the violence that occurred there in the fall, but focused solely on Israeli actions in those incidents and not the violence of the Muslim rioters.It condemned Israeli plans to build a prayer space for Women of the Wall by Robinson’s Arch, although it did not mention the group by name.The resolution also charged that Israel had placed “Jewish fake graves” in other Muslim cemeteries located on Wakf property east and south of the al-Aksa mosque.Aside from its condemnations with regard to Jerusalem, the resolution deplored the “new cycle of violence, since October 2015, in the context of the constant aggressions by the Israeli settlers and other extremist groups against Palestinian residents including schoolchildren, and asks Israel, the Israeli authorities to pre-vent such aggressions.” It did not mention the 34 fatalities from Palestinian attacks.UNESCO also said it regretted Israel’s failure to comply with its request to remove from its National Heritage list the Cave of the Patriarch/Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb/Bilal bin Rabah mosque in Bethlehem.The 58-member board approved resolution 19 with 33 votes in favor, six against and 17 abstentions. Ghana and Turkmenistan were absent all together.Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, Nether-lands, the United Kingdom and the Unit-ed States opposed the resolution outright, while France, Spain, Sweden and Slovenia were among those who supported it.A second resolution that more globally condemned Israeli actions, passed with 45 votes in favor, one vote against – the United States – and 11 abstentions.Herb Keinon contributed to this report.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>The left has been pushing the notion that masculinity is “toxic” and must be rooted out. Classes of college students are propagandized to this point of view, often mandatorily imposed. “Feminist“ speakers and books for young girls promote it and women’s magazines are full of such drivel. This week it’s apparent that it’s this kind of nonsense that’s toxic, not masculinity. Often it’s a cover for jealousy and a corrupt search for power.
Beginning with the less overtly significant, we have the Stiletto war. When stunningly gorgeous Melania Trump headed off for Texas to comfort the residents beset by Harvey, she boarded AF1 in high heels and beginning with Vogue Magazine, the harpies of the fem press -- including the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan -- dumped on her. Noting that Melania had changed into sneakers when AF1 landed, Givhan sniped: ”Still, her Corpus Christi ensemble was more akin to what one might have expected her to wear for the Hurricane Harvey briefing. Its simplicity and practicality were in sync with the president’s khakis and boots. It was optically optimal. But the chance to tell an uninterrupted narrative of care and concern had already been missed. This was just a costume change for another fashion moment.”
Unfortunately, for the toxic feminists we got to see what the lead critic, Lynn Yaeger, actually looks like. She’s a clownish, bizarrely made up and garbed frump. We now know to a certainty that the magazine that peddles leftist propaganda in between countless pages of ads for fifteen thousand dollar handbags and expensive furs dyed to look like mangy skunk is written by strange women promoting often-gay designers who would dress men as women and women as prepubescent boys. Game’s up for fashion’s leftist advance androgyny guard.
Ben Shapiro explained the effort to emasculate men.
...the Left has pushed emasculation as a solution. While they champion the notion that women can do anything they set their minds to (true!), they simultaneously castigate men as the barriers to progress and masculinity as a condition to be avoided. The goal of the Left, therefore, becomes to train boys not to become men. Instead, boys should be feminized; they should never be encouraged to “be a man.” That’s too pressure-filled, too nasty, too mean.
Once again, Vogue comes through to make the point, featuring this month transgendered Chelsea Manning in a swimsuit.
Sarsour Caught Out
Linda Sarsour (“nothing is more monstrous than Zionism”), was incomprehensibly the pro-sharia Islamist front gal for the Women’s March. These puerile nitwits having a temper tantrum that the crooked Hillary lost the election, marched with Sarsour, who has been revealed as even more monstrous than ever. Under the guise of soliciting for Harvey relief she was collecting donations for left-wing community organizers.
This is not the first time that Sarsour has been connected with charities. In March, Sarsour partnered with Tarek El-Messidi, founder of the Celebrate Mercy nonprofit, to launch a crowdfunding effort for Muslims to help fix vandalized Jewish cemeteries. However, despite a total of $162,468 being raised, only $50,000 of the money went to toward Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis, Chicago, and Rochester, while the rest of the money remains unaccounted for. Sarsour, who describes herself as a feminist despite being an advocate for Sharia Law, has also previously declared “jihad” against the Trump administration, and has called on Muslims in the United States to actively not assimilate into American society, but instead act “to please Allah and only Allah.”
Did you march on the White House with this toxic fraud? Maybe it’s time to rethink how toxic she is to you and this country.
Rape Culture Myth and the Real Outrage Against Male Students
Using the myth that we are in a “rape culture” the prior administration set up regulations that a far too complaisant academia adopted to deprive men of their right to due process. As these cases wind their way through the courts, the schools that went along with this are losing.
In 2011, the department's Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter that urged institutions to better investigate and adjudicate cases of campus sexual assault. The letter clarified how the department interprets Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, instructing institutions to avoid using mediation when resolving complaints of sexual assault and to use the preponderance of evidence standard of proof when determining if a student is responsible for sexual misconduct. “The more the schools shift to policies that on their face are fundamentally unfair, the more obvious it will be to courts that they need to step in,” Cohn said. “More and more courts are recognizing the flaws in unprofessional tribunals deciding these cases in an environment that is highly politicized. And the more extreme pressure that campuses feel to expel accused students, the more you’re going to see successful cases brought by accused students.”
One publication, Rolling Stone, bought into this hysteria and promoted it. A female administrator successfully sued it because of the false reporting by a female reporter promoting a patent slander by a female student.
The settlement essentially brings to an end the legal issues facing Rolling Stone over the 9,000-word article published in November 2014. In April, the magazine and the writer of the article, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, settled a suit brought by a University of Virginia administrator, Nicole P. Eramo, who said the article defamed her and portrayed her as the “chief villain” of the story. (A federal jury had awarded Ms. Eramo $3 million in damages in November 2016.) A third lawsuit, filed by three former fraternity members, was dismissed last June, though that decision is being appealed. The article, “A Rape on Campus,” was retracted in April 2015 after a Columbia Journalism School report that said the magazine failed to take basic journalistic steps to verify the account of a woman, identified only as Jackie, who said she was the victim of a gang rape. It was an embarrassing episode for a magazine that has long prided itself on its journalistic accomplishments.
The extent to which campus promotion of “toxic masculinity,” a corollary of the fake rape culture, prejudges men as predators cannot be overstated. Here’s a report on such a program at Princeton.
The College Fix reports that the storied university has created the office of an “interpersonal violence clinician and men’s engagement manager” and has sent out a help-wanted alert. The men’s manager will work to eradicate cases of sexual harassment, stalking and other forms of sexual aggression that the university claims affected 25 percent of female students in the last academic year. Whomever is chosen to occupy the position will be expected to combat “gender stereotypes” though re-education programs while using the existing Men’s Allied Voices For a Respectful and Inclusive Community that was formed to eradicate the supposed scourge of “toxic masculinity” that is believed to be pervasive on campus. As the employment criterion makes quite clear, in the sexual matrix, females are always the victims and males the aggressors. While seeking to monitor the supposedly bad behavior for males on campus, the men’s manager will consider appropriate remedial measures for offenders, including an “accountability program for students accused of sexual misconduct…”
Houston Rescuers
As these jealous harpies and phony humanists peddle their lies, real men are showing that chivalry survives these calumnies. Scroll through these pictures of men working hard in impossible conditions to save lives. The heroic work of thousands of men from all over Louisiana and Texas show how important and selfless men are, even in the face of a culture that overwhelmingly derides what Glenn Reynolds calls “burly men” and glamorizes emasculation.
Rather puts pay to the lie of “toxic masculinity,” something corrupt toxic demagogues like Hillary Clinton have ridden to death. I think her day may be coming to a close as this week’s developments in the masquerade Comey investigation of her misuse of classified intelligence reveal.By BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
http://thevillager.com/2017/04/28/this-is-lunacy-radical-attorney-on-protest-vs-theatre-80-political-panel/
| Radical attorney Stanley Cohen is a veteran of the East Village’s anarchic squatter battles versus the police. And he proudly notes that his mouth was bloodied for the first time when he was 16 and was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in an anti-war march.
So the threat by some “antifa” (anti-fascist) protesters to disrupt Sunday evening’s panel discussion at Theatre 80 St. Mark’s isn’t going to stop him from participating, he vowed.
“This is the first time I will cross a picket line,” Cohen told The Villager, “because I believe the picket line is nothing short of a fascist attempt to censor.”
Cohen is one of four panelists who will talk at the event. However, it’s another one of the speakers, Gilad Atzmon — a jazz sax-playing “Holocaust revisionist” and alleged Jewish anti-Semite — who the antifa activists will be protesting against.
“I disagree with Gilad on a lot of things,” Cohen said. “And I will debate Gilad. But I believe the essence of resistance is speech. There are people on that panel that are going to challenge him.”
The event is titled, “The Post-Political Condition: Trump, Brexit, the Middle East…What Next?”
According to a description on Atzmon’s Web site, the panelists will “elaborate on the collapse of identity politics, the crisis within new Left thinking and the future of liberal and progressive thought.”
Cohen, the first scheduled speaker, will hold forth on “The Insular View of the American Left.”
“That’s exactly what this is about,” the attorney said of the planned demonstration. “Identity politics and politically correct is so nonsense.”
For his part, Atzmon will expound on “The Tyranny of Correctness — Deconstructing Identity Politics and Understanding Its Origin.”
Cohen said Atzmon’s views on Israel were clearly shaped by his time serving as medic in the Israel Defense Forces.
“It was a life-changing situation for him,” Cohen said.
“I think his last book drove people nuts: ‘The Wandering Who?’ This is a very intelligent guy.”
Cohen is, frankly, shocked at the attempt to shut down the event.
“This is lunacy,” he said. “This is Theatre 80 St. Mark’s in the East Village.”
Cohen, whose past clients include Hamas and Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, admits that he, too, like Atzmon, has been branded a self-hating Jew.
As for what he plans to talk about Sunday, Cohen noted, “I am probably going to beat up [Julian] Assange and WikiLeaks in public. I think they’re becoming partisan. Trump is going after him right now because it’s convenient. There is zero chance that Julian Assange or WikiLeaks — which is him — is going to wind up in an American courtroom.”
Bottom line, Cohen said, he won’t be stopped from doing the event.
“I am a purist when it comes to speech and the First Amendment,” he stated. “I am not going to be intimidated from participating in a discussion of the issues in the East Village in 2017.”
Cohen said, however, that he is worried that “Canadian J.D.L.” types will show up and instigate violence, as happened last month at the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) convention in Washington, D.C. In that incident, members of the Jewish Defense League from north of the border beat up a middle-aged Palestinian teacher.
“I have some friends coming with me to this event,” Cohen said. “They’re Palestinian and they’re women. If anything happens to them, the s— is going to hit the fan — and I’m not talking about violence.”
Legal action, then?
“Absolutely,” he assured. “Absolutely.”
The other two panelists are Michael Lesher, author of “Sexual Abuse, ‘Shonda’ and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities,” who will speak on “Jewish Identity vs. Jewish Religion,” and Professor Norton Mezvinsky, who will discuss “The Quagmire of Current Political Terminology in U.S. Society.”
The discussion, at 80 St. Mark’s Place, will be in two two-hour halves, running from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., including a one-hour Q & A, and finally an hour-long jazz concert by Atzmon. Suggested admission is $10, according to Atzmon’s Web page.Since its discovery in 2004, the carbon-based material known as graphene has revealed a stream of attractive properties. Now, researchers in the US have shown that a two-layer version can deliver yet another: a wide, tunable bandgap. The discovery paves the way for new electronic devices, from lasers that change colour to electronic circuits that rearrange themselves.
Graphene is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, with a structure that resembles chicken wire. Single sheets of the material have proved to have record-breaking strength, high conductivity and high transparency. But recently some scientists have come to suspect that the most interesting properties might arise in two parallel sheets, or so-called bilayer graphene.
Feng Wang and others at the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have investigated the properties of bilayer graphene when it is performing within a field-effect transistor. Such transistors work using an electric field to control a semiconductor’s conductivity, which in turn controls charge flow. In Wang and colleagues’ device, however, there is a segment of bilayer graphene sandwiched between the transistor’s ’source’ and ’drain’ electrodes, and the electric field serves to pull apart the graphene’s highest valence band and the lowest conduction band.
To witness this effect, the researchers used infrared microscopy and monitored the absorption spectrum. Peaks in the spectrum revealed the crucial bandgap, which the electric field could tune from zero to over 250 meV.
Wang told Chemistry World that the tunable bandgap, which generally determines a material’s transport and optical properties, will enable ’flexibility and optimisation’ of electronics and photonics. He says it could be used to control the colour emitted from lasers and other light sources. Moreover, because it can make insulators turn into semiconductors, and vice versa, he believes it might lead to electronic circuits that can be programmed in the field.
Yu-Ming Lin, a graphene scientist at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in New York, said the wide bandgap in bilayer graphene will allow the creation of high-speed digital switches. ’I think this paper is very interesting and the results are definitely important to the field,’ he added.
However, Antonio Castro-Neto, a researcher at Boston University who has also studied tunable bandgaps in bilayer graphene, thinks there is still much more to be learned. He notes that bilayer graphene’s density of states -- that is, the number of energy states available for occupation -- is finite, which indicates there should be complex, many-body effects. ’These systems may be able to show magnetic or superconducting properties that have not been explored yet,’ he said.
Jon CartwrightKABUL, Afghanistan — A NATO airstrike in Kunar province that may have caused as many as 67 civilian casualties has led to renewed tensions between the Afghan government and the U.S. forces. The dispute has been further aggravated by what many saw as offensive remarks by military officials suggesting that Afghan parents may have harmed their own children to inflate the figures.
NATO has denied that civilians were injured in the Ghazi Abad district of Kunar, and insists that their operational footage indicates that only insurgents were in the area.
But GlobalPost has learned that U.S. military officials detained two Al Jazeera journalists who were covering the incident, temporarily confiscated their equipment and, according to the journalists, subjected them to humiliating treatment and lengthy interrogations.
“When I was coming back from Ghazi Abad ISAF stopped me,” said Abdullah Nizami, a stringer for Al Jazeera Arabic service. “They made me stay with them, they took my warm clothing, and then transported me in a helicopter to their base. After several hours of interrogation they let me sleep. They released me after 28 hours.”
None of the material on his camera was damaged, said Nizami, and the equipment was eventually returned.
Samer Alawi, the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Kabul, confirmed the incident, and added that Nizami had been detained along with Saeedullah Sahel, who works for Al Jazeera English service.
“They were interrogated, and asked why only Al Jazeera got into these places,” said Alawi. “The U.S. forces saw their pictures and then confiscated their equipment. They took their warm clothes and made them stand outside in the snow. It was midnight. Then they took them by helicopter to their base.”
This version conflicts radically with what the U.S. forces say happened. The military does not deny that they stopped the journalists, but they absolutely refute the details. They also say that the journalists were in custody for less than 24 hours.
“They had no credentials,” said Lt. Col. Patrick Seiber, of Public Affairs Director of Regional Command East. “We were not sure they were journalists. They could have been insurgents. And they were not detained. They were held.”
Seiber acknowledges that the journalists had television cameras with them, but, he added, “They could have been insurgents with cameras.”
He confirmed that the journalists were transported to the base camp, but denies Nizami’s claim that helicopters played a role. “There were vehicles,” he said. “The camp was not that far away.”
Alawi maintains that the journalists were properly accredited, had identification with them, and furthermore had coordinated their movements with both the local government and the foreign forces.
“They had received permission from the governor to go into the villages where these airstrikes occurred,” he said. “They had footage.”
Seiber insists that the journalists were provided with proper food and shelter; the journalists earlier told two Afghan media outlets — Benawa and Pajhwok, that they had not been mistreated.
“[The foreign forces] did not misbehave with us,” Nizami told Pajhwok.
But Alawi says that their accounts of being stripped of their outer clothing amounts are true.
“They may not have been mistreated,” he said. “They were not beaten, but they were humiliated.”
In Alwai’s estimation, the aim of the detention was to keep the journalists from reporting on what actually happened in Ghazi Abad on the night of Feb. 19.
According to Provincial Governor Fazlullah Wahidi, more than 64 civilians were killed, including 29 children and 23 women. An Afghan delegation sent by President Hamid Karzai largely confirmed the figures on Monday, but more detailed studies by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and the United Nations will take some time.
According to a report by The Washington Post, Gen. David Petraeus, in a high-level meeting that included President Hamid Karzai, suggested that, if children were burned or injured, in Kunar, it could have been done by their own parents.
Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, attempting to explain Petraeus’ remarks, may have inadvertently made things worse.
“Gen. Petraeus never said that children’s hands and feet were purposely burned by their families in order to create a CIVCAS [civilian casualty] event,” Smith told the Associated Press. “Rather, he said that the injuries to the children appeared inconsistent with the types of munitions used and that the burns to their hands and feet may have been the result of discipline sometimes handed out to Afghan children. Regrettably this is customary among some Afghan fathers as a way of dealing with children who misbehave.”
These remarks were deemed “outrageous, insulting and racist,” by presidential spokesman Waheed Omar, who is demanding an explanation.
The fracas has added fuel to an already raging fire. Civilian casualties are an extremely sensitive issue in the strained relations between the international forces and the Afghan government. While U.N. figures show that the overwhelming majority of civilian casualties are caused by insurgents, it is the incidents where U.S. or other foreign forces kill or injure non-combatants that seem to inflame local passions.
The Ghazi Abad attacks come in a particularly difficult week in Afghanistan, with up to 40 civilians killed in an insurgent attack in Jalalabad city, and another 31 dead in a similar hit in Kunduz province.
But it is Ghazi Abad and the row that followed that have claimed the angriest headlines.
If substantiated, the Ghazi Abad strike could be one of the largest single incidents of civilian deaths since an airstrike in Herat province killed more than 90, in 2008.
It also closely follows a sharp rise in air strikes by U.S. forces. In January, the Air Force flew close to 300 sorties — double the number registered in the same month last year.
It was an over-reliance on airstrikes and the concomitant civilian deaths that prompted Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, to drastically curtail air operations in 2009.
But with McChrystal’s replacement by Petraeus in June 2010, the brakes came off.
NATO officials have not backed down on Ghazi Abad. While they say they will launch an investigation into possible casualties, they dismiss reports of large numbers of non-combatant deaths.
But Nizami insists that he has proof. In an interview with a journalist from Mahaal, an Afghan radio news service, he told of his investigations:
“The local people said more than 60 people were killed and most of them were women and children, I saw and have video footage of the incident which shows women, children, dead bodies and injured people. I saw mass graves as well where seven or eight women and children were buried together.
“Later on when I listed those killed it reached to 67; there were 29 children, most of whom were between 6 and 18 years old. There were 23 women. The rest were men of various ages.”
It was this footage, says Alawi, that caused the journalists’ detention.
Seiber rejects this out of hand. He does not deny that the U.S. forces took the journalists’ cameras, but says that this was done in the interests of security.
“They could have been trying to film our operations,” he said. “They had pictures of our interpreters, which could have put the interpreters in danger if they got into the wrong hands.
“But I can tell you, there were no pictures of civilian casualties on those cameras.”
Nizami told Mahaal that he had been invited to the Presidential Palace, called the Arg, to share his materials with Karzai.
“Today I am going to meet President Karzai and share all that I saw and heard and all the materials I have,” he said on Monday. “I will tell him what the reality is.”Everyone remembers the cartoons they loved to watch as a child. With characters like Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, and Felix the Cat, anything was possible. Realism was never the aim when it came to talking plants, dancing buildings, and the sun appearing over the horizon wearing sunglasses. Studio MDHR has worked to capture what made those cartoons appealing to the eyes and the ears with Cuphead. Anyone who looks at it will immediately recognize the style, what people won’t expect is the difficulty that comes with it.
After disobeying Elder Kettle by going to the casino, Cuphead has luck on his side as he keeps winning more and more money. Floor manager King Dice introduces them to the owner, the Devil. The Devil offers him all the casino’s riches if he’d wager his soul on a single roll of the dice. Cuphead took the bet but lost it all, pleading for a way to get out of their deal, and the Devil proposes a workaround. Since the prince of darkness has a long list of those who haven’t paid up their souls, he tasks Cuphead with the job of collecting them.
The plot takes inspiration from classic platformers like Contra and Mega Man by being relatively bare-bones. You only get enough context for who you are, what the world is like, and what your goal is before setting off on your adventure. While this may have worked well for retro games, Cuphead’s world is filled with interesting characters I wish I knew more about like Ribby and Croaks the boxing frogs and Hilda Berg the Betty Boop-like airplane. It almost seems like there is some missing context. You already know that each of these bosses had some run in with the devil, but all you ever know then as is the next larger than life villain. In fact, since Cuphead is working for the Devil, it might even be seen that you’re the villain in the situation.
Cuphead is primarily a Boss Rush experience as you travel around reclaiming souls. Each of the boss encounters will fit in with the theme of the overworld, with locations including a coastal town and a forest inhabited with hostile flowers and a blue slime. As you launch into each of these fights, you must attempt to survive while also paying careful attention to your opponents to learn each of their tells. You will die over and over, but each death will teach you more about your opponent. Every boss fight has built in phases that progress as you damage the enemy, but there’s no health bar, so the best indication you have for your own progression is whether you reached the next stage of the fight. Upon death, you’re able to see a progress bar showing how many stages there are in a fight, as well as how close you were. There’s nothing worse than getting killed by a stray bullet only to have it revealed to you that you were only a few shots away from finally defeating them.
If you’re sick and tired of getting bested over and over again by a boss, you can also try your hand at one of the platforming stages. While there aren’t many of these, they offer a refreshing change to the repetition of grinding a difficult fight. Your goal is to get to the flag at the end of the level, collect five optional coins, and take out enemies as you go. It isn’t just about standard platforming, as new concepts are continually added such as trampolines that walk under you or the need to reverse gravity to avoid obstacles. As a Boss Rush title, it’s understandable that there are so few of these stages but it also works in Cuphead’s favor. It allows each level to really focus on their individually introduced mechanics. Even if you get extremely good at swapping gravity at the right time, don’t expect to ever see it used again. The coins that you collect from these stages can be used to purchase a variety of weapons and skills that might just come in handy when you go back to the boss gauntlet.
At the beginning of Cuphead, your character only has a basic peashooter style projectile, a dodge, a parry, and three health points. Upon opening your equipment screen, you’ll see room for two weapons types at a time, different super attacks, and a charm. It’s easy to look at each weapon’s description and pick the one with the best range or damage, but what really counts in a game like this is knowing where you’ll be able to capitalize on these abilities. If you find you’re having a difficult time fighting a boss that you need to be constantly moving away from, using homing bullets or bullets that spin behind you might be what the doctor ordered. Taking a strategic mind to your charms is also extremely important. Some of the abilities granted, like a fourth health point, might seem like an offer too good to be true but there are other abilities that could allow you to resist damage completely. Through boss fights and the platforming stages, you’ll notice a variety of pink enemies, objects, and projectiles. Parrying these will allow you to gain some extra height while also charging your super meter faster. Of course, these opportunities can be dangerous, so you’ll need to use your quick wit to decide in the moment whether you should even bother making an attempt for them.
Cuphead‘s challenging gameplay will keep you hooked over time, but what will immediately draw you in is the incredible art style based off early 1930’s and 1940’s cartoons. You’re never sure what to expect as you move around the overworld, seeing all kinds of interesting sights from the NPC’s to the obviously interactable elements. While the world looks flat, you’ll be able to easily recognize where your next fight is in the same way that you can tell which book was about to be moved while watching classic Scooby-Doo. While Cuphead would still be a fun game without this retro aesthetic, its inclusion adds familiarity for the players and works to remove any expectation on reality. It would only be in a world like this that a fight between you and two frogs could conclude with them combining into a giant slot machine. You never know what to expect next and it’s always a surprise to see how wrong your guesses were. To cap it off, there is even a film grain effect on the entire game. It’s barely noticeable while playing, but pausing the gameplay shows how well that cartoon aesthetic is captured.
Last and certainly not least, the incredible soundtrack continues to fit into Studio MDHR’s 1930’s theme for Cuphead. Each piece not only sounds like something right out of the Silly Symphonies but has a snappy tempo to ensure you’re moving. Some of the truly spectacular pieces are on the opening title screen and when you decide to quit the game as a barbershop quartet explains the story or recommends you take a break and maybe go read a book. It’s not just the soundtrack that retains a 30s appeal, as character voices have a distorted effect as if they were recorded on extremely old equipment. Every shot fired, landed attack, and thrown punch has their own distinct audio. It’s not just enough to be paying attention to where you are and where you’re shooting, you also need to be listening to know what to expect from your opponent.
While Cuphead looks like it shouldn’t be too difficult of a game on the surface, don’t let its looks deceive you. Cuphead will have you tearing out your hair while leaving you smiling and tapping your toes to the beat. After putting in all the effort and learn each fight like the back of your hand, the rush of defeating a boss in palpable. For those who enjoy a good shoot-em-up that forces you to pay attention to all of your surroundings while also dealing damage to larger than life foes, Cuphead may be just what you’re looking for. If you want to give it a try for the presentation alone, it’s still worth a shot, even if the easier difficulty may be more your speed.
Our Cuphead review was conducted on Xbox One with a code provided by the publisher. It is also available on PC via Steam and GOG, and Windows 10 via Xbox Play Anywhere.
8.0 Great Summary Cuphead combines challenging and unforgiving gameplay with the over the top animations of the 1930's in this fun adventure. While difficult at times, the sense of reward that you'll get after each fight will have you continually coming back for more. Pros Addictive Gameplay
Beautiful Art Style
Jazz Beats Cons Story Depth
Share Have a tip for us? Awesome! Shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll take a look!KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan’s intelligence agency said on Wednesday it had thwarted a plot to assassinate President Hamid Karzai after arresting a bodyguard and five people with links to the Haqqani network and al Qaeda.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai waves before addressing a group of students who will be sent to India and Turkey for educational purposes, at the presidential palace in Kabul August 14, 2011. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood
The plotters, who included university students and a medical professor, had been trained to launch attacks in the capital Kabul and had recruited one of Karzai’s bodyguards to kill the president, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) said.
“A dangerous and educated group including teachers and students wanted to assassinate President Hamid Karzai,” spokesman Lutfullah Mashal told a news conference.
“Unfortunately they infiltrated the presidential protection system and recruited one of the president’s bodyguards.”
Mashal said those detained had ties with three men, including an Egyptian and a Bangladeshi, who were all members of al Qaeda and the Haqqani network which is based in Pakistan’s tribal region of North Waziristan, bordering Afghanistan.
Those arrested were part of a “most sophisticated” group who confessed to having been trained to use guns, rockets and suicide attacks, he said, with top government officials among the targets.
They also said they had received $150,000 to fund their activities, and planned to kill Karzai during one of his trips outside the capital, Mashal added.
PRIME TARGET
Karzai has been the target of at least three assassination attempts since becoming Afghan leader in 2002, most notably in April 2008, when insurgents fired guns and rockets at a military parade he attended near the presidential palace in Kabul.
Mashal said the bodyguard, Mohebullah Ahmadi, was from Kazai’s home village of Karz in southern Kandahar province, and he had been shown al Qaeda and Haqqani video propaganda to persuade him to take part in the assassination plot.
The Haqqanis are one of three Taliban-allied insurgent factions fighting in Afghanistan. Perhaps the most feared, they are thought to have introduced suicide bombing to the country, and to be behind many high-profile attacks.
They have sworn allegiance to the Taliban, but have long been suspected of also having ties to Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate.
NATO-led forces fighting in Afghanistan said on Wednesday that an airstrike had killed a senior Haqqani commander and two of his associates in eastern Khost province, near the Pakistani border.
Dilawar, known by only one name, was a “principal subordinate” to Haji Mali Khan, who was captured by NATO last week and said at the time to be the top Haqqani commander for Afghanistan.
Dilawar’s death is “another significant loss for the insurgent group,” the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement that described his responsibilities as including coordinating attacks on Afghan forces, and arranging weapons deliveries.Metro Blue Line riders take |
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