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the man jumped behind a car, sobbing. She tried to comfort him. She turned on Periscope for a moment to report what she heard and what she knew. She ended the livestream and headed for her car.
Inside, she called her boyfriend and cried. These were people her age. This was her town.
After a few moments, she headed back out again.
HUGE law enforcement presence at Pulse nightclub. Fire trucks and more than a dozen patrol vehicles pic.twitter.com/l8TTKE0adE — Christal Hayes (@Journo_Christal) June 12, 2016
READY
Roger Simmons and Cianci watched Sunday as journalists just showed up around town and in the newsroom.
Everyone wanted to help.
Cianci tried to send Hayes home to get some sleep, but “everyone wants to be here. Everyone wants to be involved.”
On Sunday, the Orlando Sentinel published 30 videos and 40 stories about the shooting online, plus an eight page print section. They were ready, Managing Editor John Cutter said, because they’d prepared to use digital tools to follow the news: They knew the importance of homepage presence during breaking news, they knew how to use Scribble Live and Facebook Live and reporters knew to take their own photos and shoot their own videos.
While big stories such as hurricanes and trials tend to have a buildup period and are ongoing, they know that whatever the story, they’re competing for their audience not just locally, but nationally.
“I think we’ve gotten very good at figuring out how to parse all the information you have into different things that make sense for readers,” Cutter said.
They used those tools and skills on Sunday, including getting an interactive timeline up right away.
“Three years ago, we wouldn’t have,” Cutter said. “We didn’t have somebody here who could very quickly build an interactive.”
Now, they do.
They’ve learned some lessons about other ways they’d like to be ready in the future, too. They’re limited to a one-camera shot on Facebook Live, Cutter said, even though they have the equipment to offer b-roll and multi-camera shots. They don’t have the software to make that equipment work.
“We could have updated live more,” he said. “That’s the next level we need to get to.”
They also waited too long to get in a helicopter and get visuals from the air, he said.
Still, they had stories up quickly, reporters at the hospital watching to see if bodies were being removed from the club, lookouts at the hotel where family members were told to go, people ready to interview and help translate in Spanish. They corralled the chaos with a daily budget on Google Docs and identified opportunities for stories that would have a big impact — including a press release that blood donations were needed.
“The main thing I think was everyone’s willing to shift gears when we need them to shift gears,” Cianci said.
HER FIFTH DAY
Sunday was Janet Brindle Reddick’s fifth day back in the newsroom after five years working outside of daily newspapers.
She missed the buzz.
When Reddick, breaking news editor, got Hayes’ call about the shooting, she went back to work until about 8 a.m. When she went to bed Sunday morning, 20 people were dead.
“I woke up five hours later, and it was 50 dead.”
Then, she got a safety check-in alert from Facebook.
“I sort of realized, this is our Boston,” Reddick said, referring to the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013. “This is our time to have to cover this for this city and put everything else aside.”
She listened to President Obama’s speech as she pulled into the Sentinel’s parking lot that afternoon. She sat there, in her car, until the end. Then, she took another 30 seconds to collect herself and her thoughts.
The Sentinel is not the story here, Reddick said.
“This isn’t about us or how tired we are. It’s about what it’s done to the victims, and the impact it’s going to have on our city,” she said. “This will forever be tied to Orlando and, unfortunately, those families will have to live with this forever.”
THE COMPANY
Tribune Publishing has made a lot of news lately with its ongoing battle with Gannett and a corporate rebranding. But the network of journalists that exists aside from that drama mobilized on Sunday.
The Los Angeles Times, the Sentinel’s corporate cousin on the West Coast, shared the HTML code for the victim remembrance page it created after the San Bernardino shooting. The Baltimore Sun shared what it learned from starting a pop-up newsletter to cover the Freddie Gray story, and the Sentinel has started its own.
Tribune’s Washington bureau sent along sources from the Justice Department.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel sent reporters to the shooter’s hometown.
Many sister publications offered staff, which may be necessary as people here near burnout.
“That’s what I think is really good about our company,” Simmons said, “and we stay focused on that. We’ll let the corporate folks figure out who owns us.”
They’ll keep reporting the news, he said.
“That’s what we’re here for.”
STILL GOING
Hayes went home, took a shower, slept for about an hour.
But she wanted to be working.
“I got some sleep, so I’m good,” she said. “I think all of are us are like, we don’t want to go home knowing this is happening. We just want to help.”
Editors keep telling them this isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. But Hayes didn’t want to leave. She went to cover one of the vigils Sunday night. Here’s some of what she wrote.
Many of those who attended, including Michael Erwin, 29, knew someone who was shot or died at Pulse. Erwin worked at Universal Studios with 22-year-old Luis S. Vielma, who was killed. “Coming together like this was good for our community. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, straight, black, white. We are all victims of this,” he said. “We are not going to break because of this. We are strong.” Attendees donned white ribbons as a sign of mourning and rainbow ribbons to show solidarity with the LGBT community. Many broke down in tears after lighting candles and hugged others for support. A message on a table made out of paper and portions of candles read “Feel Ur Pulse.”
The gay community in #Orlando is mourning at Parliament House in #Orlando after the mass shooting pic.twitter.com/MRiHxpeWts — Christal Hayes (@Journo_Christal) June 12, 2016
FIRST RUN
Just before midnight, the first run of Monday’s paper began. On the front page: an editorial that focused on solidarity in the community. As the presses spun and spat out the printed record of what happened Sunday in Orlando, Editor and Publisher Avido Khahaifa looked in from a window.
“You know what’s sad?” he said to Simmons, “I can remember a time when this place would have been full of people.”
A few editors took their copies of the paper back to the newsroom. But Khahaifa stayed, his arms stretched out, leaning against a wooden bar below the window as he watched the papers print.
He wanted to grab a final copy, he said, and see what they’d done.
Before Sunday, Cianci feared the newsroom’s ability to cover major breaking news with a staff much smaller than it once was.
“Today just showed me that it doesn’t matter,” Cianci said. “We can do it.”
A newsroom is a newsroom is a newsroom, she said. When it was time, everyone jumped in to do what they needed to. Journalists went to the scene without being asked. Cianci even got an email from an editor who took the buyout in December to see if he could help out.
They covered one of the biggest breaking news stories to come to Orlando on a single day. And they kept it together.
“A week from now,” she said, voice wavering, “I don’t know.”
At midnight, many people still sat at their desks in the newsroom.
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PrintSunhouse is a new kind of music tech company.
Founded by musician brothers Tlacael & Tenoch Esparza, Sunhouse uses the latest advances in sensor and signal technology to reinvigorate live performance and expand the sonic possibilities of music making. Our operation is based in New York City and all of our technology is designed and manufactured in the US.
Join us in our quest to break down the barriers between digital sound and musical performance.
Sensory Percussion is a modern take on electronic drums that captures the true expressive nature of drumming. While standard trigger systems turn your drum into little more than an on/off button, Sensory Percussion listens and reacts, responding to the essence of your performance in real time.
The Sensory Percussion system is an overlay onto acoustic drums. It’s a hardware sensor that clamps to the side of a drum (snare, tom or kick) and connects to our Mac/PC software via a standard audio interface.
Sensory Percussion understands where and how you hit the drum. It not only lets you map different parts of the drum to any sound desired (from samples and synthesizers to digital audio effects), it also lets you control those sounds in an intuitive, expressive way. Sounds follow your playing in real-time—so rather than twiddle knobs and push buttons, you can control the experience simply by playing the drums.
The result is a new instrument that let’s you control electronic sounds in a way never before possible: with the drumsticks and drums you already own and love.
Beyond being the first on the block to have Sensory Percussion, the first real evolution in digital drums in decades? You will be part of the Sunhouse family. And we mean that. Our supporters here on Kickstarter will not only be integral in how the product takes shape, but will be part of a special cohort of early backers with awesome perks.
For starters, everyone who pledges at a level that includes an SP Sensor will become a member of our Sunhouse Artists, which includes:
Free access to Sunhouse premium sound packs for two years (estimated at over $500)
Early access to beta software updates and new features!
We’ll tweet out the first time you use SP at a show
Future discounts on new Sunhouse products
Invites to future Sunhouse events and shows
Sensory Percussion will ship with awesome presets, but soon after, we’ll start releasing premium sound packs designed and curated by some of the best drummers, producers and electronic musicians. We’ve already started working with some incredible artists to design sound kits that take advantage of our system’s unique capabilities. If you join our Kickstarter family, you’ll have access to all of those for free!
But more importantly, our early backers are supporting something new and innovative. We’re not Roland or Yamaha, we’re a group of musicians with a vision. We need your contribution and support to make this happen!
Sensory Percussion doesn’t work like the usual e-drums and triggers.
Sensory Percussion uses a combination of software and hardware to create an overlay on acoustic drums that turns your kit into an expressive controller for digital sounds. SP does trigger sounds—but it can also do so much more:
1. Assign sounds to different parts of the drum or even different drum strokes. Use the entire surface of the drum—rim shots, cross-sticks, different parts of the head and rim—for a flexible, fully responsive playing experience.
2. Blend smoothly between two or more samples. Play between samples mapped to different regions—the system knows where you’re hitting and can blend between the sounds, erasing the sonic borders common to e-drums and sample pads.
3. Apply effects to different parts of the drum. Map effects to follow your strokes—no more knobs and sliders, no more buttons and pads. You control the effects and parameters in a completely new and intuitive way… by playing the drums.
4. Apply effects controls across multiple drums to achieve higher levels of sound control. Pitch shift the entire kit, control filters to drop the bass... or use reverb and delays to make a full-fledged dub kit.
5. Use smart cross-talk cancellation to maintain high sensitivity in the presence of loud ambient noise (i.e. kick drum vibrating the snare drum).
And this is really just scratching the surface of Sensory Percussion's capabilities. Once you've mastered the basics, Sensory Percussion becomes an open platform for creativity—the possibilities are literally endless.
Sensory Percussion uses a combination of sensors to directly capture the vibrations of your drum. There is one sensor for the head of the drum and one for the rim/shell and volume controls for each on-board. It is designed to isolate your drum from ambient noise so you can use it on stage and in loud environments. Though it has multiple sensors, it operates like a traditional phantom-powered mono microphone and uses standard XLR connectors.
Sensory Percussion’s software analyzes the signal from the sensor and can tell where and how you are hitting the drum using our proprietary algorithms. The software supports one to four sensors at a time.
The SP Sensor
Sensory Percussion uses a combination of custom hardware and software.
A prototype of the SP software interface.
We’ve been working on Sensory Percussion for well over a year, and have partnered with some serious experts in audio electronics, music software, and industrial design. Sensory Percussion is a hardware-plus-software system. So let’s breakdown where we are:
Hardware sensor: The hardware design is in final phases. Our sensor is state-of-the-art, and is the first drum sensor (that we know of) that fits both snare and bass drums. It's built stage-tough. Our designs are ready for manufacturing and our suppliers are lined up. We’re continuing to test the design and will be placing our first order this summer.
Software: The core algorithms that make Sensory Percussion unique are still being refined, but are working great and already being used on stage. We’re currently in the process of building out our own Sunhouse Drum Synth and Sampler engines so that users won’t need any other software. We’re also working on refining our user interface. We expect the V1 software to be complete this fall, which will give us some time to seriously test the system before shipping.
Over the last few months we’ve been meeting with many drummers for live demos of the system. Though it’s still under development, we've had a tremendously positive response from the drummers who have played it. In our development, we’ve tackled all the new and hard problems first, and though we’re still making adjustments and improvements, the system works amazingly well. What’s left to do is completing the user interface development and standard audio software features that we’re confident we can complete on time.
The Sensory Percussion hardware and software are patent pending.
Software: Big Tick Audio Software
Industrial Design: Design Compendium
Electrical Engineering: ReFactory
Electrical Engineering: Osmisys LLC
Graphic Design: Todd Goldstein
Video Design: The Urchins
Branding: River + Wolf
Publicity: Sabrina Dax
Strategy: New York's Next Top Makers / NYCEDC / NYU Entrepreneurial Institute
We’d like to thank everyone who has helped us make Sensory Percussion a reality over the last year and a half: our team of talented engineers and designers, the mentors and supporters at the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute and Next Top Makers, all the drummers who have given us advice and encouragement, and especially our family and friends. There is no way this would exist without all of you.
Props to all the musicians who helped us with this Kickstarter, including: Ian Chang, Kiran Gandhi, Joe Stickney, Nicholas Ley, Matt Duckworth, Sterling Campbell, Dave Harrington, Spencer Zahn, and Nicolas Jaar.
Some very special folks helped us put together the Kickstarter, they are: Todd Goldstein, Jordan Doig, Stephanie Gould, and Paul Damian Hogan.
Extra special shout out to our family for sustaining us in every way imaginable: Ashley Reeb; Jonathan Galassi; Tonantzin, Tonatiuh, Moctesuma and Esperanza Esparza; and our company mascot, Suki the Chi.
** Product photos credit: Design Compendium
*** For media inquiries, please contact Sabrina Dax: sabrina@sabrinadax.comNathan Beaulieu has a skill set that most Montreal Canadiens fans have been very excited about since he was the team’s first-round pick in 2011, and the team has taken its time to move him into a regular role.
Last year was his second straight year of 64 NHL games played, but he would have sailed past that if not for injuries. He missed 10 games with a lower-body injury and his season ended prematurely after he broke his thumb on March 31 against the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Beaulieu set career highs in goals (two) and assists (17) last season, and also raised his average time on ice by over 1:30 per game.
Votes
Beaulieu was mostly slotted in at either third or fourth on the ballots. He had nine fourth-place votes and six nods for third. The others were two fifth- and two sixth-place votes. Beaulieu was actually tied for third when factoring in all 19 votes, but when we removed the high and low vote for those players, it resigned Beaulieu to fourth. The split between the average rank of Beaulieu and player #3 was a minuscule 0.18 (3.94 to 3.76) with that adjustment.
Top 25 Under 25 History
Beaulieu has now been in every spot in the T25U25 from positions three to six. He was fifth in 2011 and 2012, dropped to sixth in 2013 when he was passed by Brendan Gallagher, and moved up to third in 2014 and 2015 before dropping one spot this year to fourth.
Strengths
Beaulieu’s biggest strength is his play with the puck. His point totals don’t do justice to the way he has influenced the transition game in his NHL career to date.
He showed his talent when he made his first appearance in the 2014 Eastern Conference Semi-Final. In the place of Douglas Murray, Beaulieu launched a pass to Max Pacioretty who put in the goal.
He has the ability to drive the offence from the left side, and that is one of his biggest strengths along with his skating, which kind of goes hand in hand.
He looks like a player that should put up a lot more points than he has, and maybe that will come once he gets increased responsibilities. He is probably now the Habs best defenceman at controlling possession with his skating abilities, and it will be interesting to see if he will trust that part of his game more.
Beaulieu has been at his best when he has played with guys like P.K. Subban, Jeff Petry, and Mark Barberio. It seems that if his defence partner can keep up to his pace, he is at his most effective. And this despite playing against better competition with those players.
His game is better when he’s skating up and down the ice and playing a high-tempo game, and given more responsibilities than those of a bottom-pairing defender.
Weaknesses
On the opposite side of the coin, when Beaulieu has played with Alexei Emelin, Tom Gilbert, and Greg Pateryn — players more aligned with the defensive side of the game — his numbers crater. And before you think this means he is reliant on his partner’s skill, it’s not the case. Even against worse competition, he struggled when he has had to slow his game down and back up his partner on defence.
His production is also a point of concern. His possession skill will help him stick in the NHL, but his numbers will need to pick up. He only has three goals in his time with the Habs, but has been sporting horrific shooting percentages, and that part of his game should come around.
He’s also not great in his own zone. His skill on defence is merely serviceable, and he doesn’t seem to use his skating abilities to his advantage when trying to prevent opposition forwards from getting close to the net. He could be a strong asset at both ends of the ice if he can incorporate his skills into a defensive-zone strategy.
Despite his skill set, he also hasn’t been relied on to be on the power play except for some spot duty on the second unit. He has played mostly on his strong side under the Therrien regime’s board-play approach to the man-advantage, limitinging his ability to use his skills to their potential. That may be rectified with Kirk Muller taking over power-play coaching duties this season.
Projection
Beaulieu should start the season firmly in place in the Canadiens top four, and will likely play with either Shea Weber or Jeff Petry. That is likely where he will be at his best, as well.
He looks to be the best fit next to Weber. Using his skating abilities to get the puck into the offensive zone means that Weber will get ample opportunity to unleash his shot. Consider Beaulieu as the chauffeur getting Weber where he needs to be.
With Andrei Markov getting older, eventually he will need to play a lesser role in the Habs lineup, and without Subban to play with, it should open up time for Beaulieu to get an increased role in the Habs lineup in what will be his third full season at the NHL level.
Beaulieu is still only 23 years old, and has established himself as a solid NHL defenceman. At a very modest cap hit of $1 million this season, he will provide surplus value to the Canadiens regardless of his role. But it is in the team’s best interest to use him where he is best, and that is with increased responsibility.
He is a restricted free agent at the end of the year, and this season will play a key role into what kind of contract he will get going forward.VIENNA, July 27 (Reuters) - Austria's Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim leaders united in defence of circumcision on Friday, condemning calls from two provincial leaders to limit the practice as an attack on religion and demanding that the government clarify its legality.
The row follows weeks of emotional debate and outrage in Germany where a regional court in Cologne banned the procedure on June 27 as physical abuse.
The Justice Ministry in Vienna has expressed surprise that a German verdict should be thought to have any relevance in Austria, and the health minister has played down the importance of what he called an overhyped debate imported from Germany.
Peter Schipka, general secretary of the Roman Catholic Austrian Bishops' Conference, told journalists on Friday: "We are concerned about all attempts to exploit the debate that has been triggered by the Cologne verdict to promote a hostile attitude in Austria towards Judaism, Islam or religion in general."
Protestant leader Michael Buenker noted there had been no similar attacks on other practices that were also physical interventions on children, such as ear piercing or vaccinations.
The right to religious freedom is protected in the Austrian constitution and can only be changed in law by a two-thirds majority in parliament.
Those seeking to ban circumcision argue a competing right to freedom from physical harm should take precedence, and that infants are unable to consent to being circumcised.
The four leaders called on the government to make a clear statement in defence of religious freedom and the lawfulness of male circumcision - an obligation in both Judaism and Islam.
Oskar Deutsch, leader of Austria's Jewish communities, said the law was clear that parents had a right to bring up their children in accordance with their faith.
"Nonetheless, the government is asked here very clearly to repeat this once more and to clarify that this will not be challenged in this country," he said.
A spokesman for Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann was not immediately available for comment.
Germany's lower house of parliament moved quickly to pass a motion protecting the religious circumcision of infant boys last week after the Cologne court verdict.
But an Austrian provincial chief nonetheless advised state-run hospitals this week to stop circumcisions, saying the legal position in Austria needed to be clarified, and the far-right governor of another province called for a federal ban.
According to the CIRCS organisation, which collects global published data on circumcision, 37 percent of all males are circumcised. Few circumcisions are carried out in hospitals.
The four religious leaders said on Friday it was impossible to live in Austria as a Muslim or a Jew without the ability to practice traditions that were fundamental to religious identity.
Austria's Jewish community has shrunk to just 9,000, or about 1 percent of the population, from about 200,000 before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. A debate still simmers over whether the country was Hitler's first victim or a willing accomplice.A 1,500-strong force of EU troops was on manoeuvres in Britain last week – despite Armed Forces Minister Penny Mordaunt warning that plans for a 'Euro army' hatched in Brussels and Berlin are a 'huge concern'.
Ms Mordaunt only had to look as far as Salisbury Plain, Britain's largest military training ground, to see that their tanks and vehicles – some emblazoned with the EU flag – are already on our lawn, as our exclusive photographs show.
They were taking part in what is thought to be the biggest EU military exercise in the UK. And in a move that might cause further concern for Brexiteer Ms Mordaunt, the joint war games played out by an 'EU Battle Group' represent a stepping up of plans to mount a European force capable of rapid deployment to foreign shores.
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Penny Mordaunt only had to look as far as Salisbury Plain, Britain's largest military training ground, to see that 'Euro army' tanks and vehicles are already on our lawn
EUBG: The European Union Battle Groups consist of three 1,500-troop rapid reaction forces, directed by the EU's Council of Ministers, and designed to respond to security crises
Even as the columns of troops from Sweden, Latvia, Finland, Lithuania and Ireland rumbled across the English countryside, the Government was forced to reiterate David Cameron's opposition to a European army.
'The Prime Minister has repeatedly made clear that the UK will never be a part of an EU army,' said a spokesman.
SO WHAT ARE THE EUROPEAN UNION BATTLE GROUPS? Three 1,500-troop rapid reaction forces, directed by the EU's Council of Ministers, and designed to respond to security crises. Austrian Lieutenant General Wolfgang Wosolsobe is in command.
'We will oppose any measures which would undermine member states' military forces.'
That will come as no comfort to Eurosceptics suspicious of the German government's revived enthusiasm for a European army, to be set out in July.
The publication of the plans – which outlines steps to 'gradually co-ordinate Europe's patchwork of national militaries' – was postponed until after the EU referendum on June 23.
The 1,500-strong EU Battle Group on Salisbury Plain was joined by troops from 2nd Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment, and 4th Infantry Brigade, as they planned and executed a 'fictitious peace support operation'.
Troops were involved in rapid movements, maintaining public order and peacekeeping in rural and urban environments.
While a British Brigadier is in charge of the force during the UK's period of command, he takes his orders from Brussels, not from the UK's operational headquarters.
Tactical decisions, such as the rules of engagement for the EU Battle Group, are decided by the Foreign Affairs and Security Council of the European Union.
The EU has three Battle Groups and the one deployed to the UK is a 'light force' – using armoured patrol vehicles such as Humvees and the RG-32M 'Scout'.
Don't panic: A British solider manning a machine-gun keeps a close eye on the EU Battle Group operation
Ms Mordaunt reacted furiously earlier this month to a call from Joseph Daul, the French president of the centre-Right European People's Party, to form a Euro army.
Mr Daul said in a speech: 'Today more than ever, the peace of our continent cannot be safeguarded without a common and functional security union, including a European army.'
Miss Mordaunt said: 'This is proof of the European Union's plan to create a Euro army – and it is dishonest for the In campaign to claim otherwise.
'The prospect of having our security policy dictated by Brussels is a huge concern – and makes a mockery of the claim Britain is stronger in the EU.'A groundhog has been making weather predictions in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, since 1886, but we've only been calling him "Phil" since 1961. Before that, the critter was usually just called the "Br'er Groundhog" or "The Punxsutawney Groundhog." Most sources (including the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club) say he eventually earned the moniker "Phil" as homage to "King Philip," but that explanation is as dubious as it is vague.
The problem is that they never specify which King Philip. The tradition of foretelling the weather with a marmot's shadow has its origins in Germany, but Deutschland hasn't seen a "King Philip" for more than eight centuries. France, Greece, Spain, and even the Wampanoag people of New England have all had a King Philip, but it's very unlikely that a small Germanic Pennsylvania community would ever name their beloved groundhog after any of these kings, either.
Rather, the name might actually refer to a prince—and it may have gotten its start thanks a pair of heinous murders and some good old-fashioned small-town competition.
In 1953, Punxsutawney sent two baby groundhogs to Los Angeles's Griffith Park Zoo. The critters had been named after Britain's new reigning couple, Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, the future Prince (not King!) Philip. While the zoo gladly welcomed Liz and Phil with open arms, the state of California did not. The California Department of Agriculture declared the baby groundhogs "agricultural pests" and demanded they be "destroyed." The animals were summarily killed.
Back in Pennsylvania, people were deeply insulted. (The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club went so far to say that the groundhogs had been "executed.") The head of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, who worried that the killings could spark an international incident, told the Los Angeles Times, "I'm going to ask [my Congressman] to take the matter up with the State Department so we won't get into complications with England. Killing these groundhogs was an insult to the royal family." Indeed, a congressional representative would issue a statement criticizing California. The two groundhogs were eventually buried back home.
Eight years later, the name "Punxsutawney Phil" first appeared in newspapers. It's possible that this new moniker was a shout-out to one of the dearly deceased royal groundhogs. (That, however, is a matter of speculation.)
Regardless, the new name was also a necessity. Multiple Pennsylvania towns—such as Quarryville and Pine Grove—also had their own prognosticating woodchucks, and the towns were stuck in a vicious debate over who was home to the real sage. Adopting a new name was not only good branding, but also a practical way to help differentiate the different groundhogs. (The competitors would also get unique names: Octoraro Orphie and Grover.)
Eventually, Punxsutawney would get a huge PR boost from the 1993 movie Groundhog Day—though it was always home to the leading marmot. On Groundhog Day in 1904, the Pittsburg Press reported, "The ticket-sellers in the various railroad offices noticed a surprising increase in receipts this morning. First-class rates to Punxsutawney went so fast that the advisability of raising the price was considered. All the cold weather interests were off to the lair of the groundhog to see him see his shadow."Well, my friends, another one of my hellish trips to my beloved Ukraine is over, and it’s time to draw breath and sum it up. Right after this, I probably won’t go back to this nightmare of a topic for a very long while.
I’ll say right away that it’s going to be a long piece, and just like last time, these are just my observations and impressions; there has never been and never will be any external influence on my opinion. I fully realize that some will agree with me and some won’t, but this is how I, a person for whom Ukraine isn’t just another assignment, saw and felt everything happening in Kiev and in the country.
So I want to ask you not to take offense, since everyone is so sensitive about this subject right now. I’m not trying to impose my opinion or take sides. These are, again, just my observations. As they say, FYI.
I’ll start with the previously undisclosed details of the “Black Thursday” of February 20, when so much blood was spilled on the streets of Kiev (you have already doubtless seen my video from the battleground).
I was leaving Maidan on Wednesday night at about 1am (that is, the side of the barricades where the police were; for the first time in one and a half months, we got there almost without any obstacles), and both the police and Berkut tried to tell me in various ways to be careful on my way from the Ukraine Hotel to the Dnipro Hotel. I was genuinely confused, and they told me, “There’s gunfire from Maidan.” It was just over an hour since the “truce” between the opposition and the president had been declared.
The “truce” was questionable even then, even without the police talking about gunfire. We were reporting near the “frontlines” opposite the Khreschatyk Hotel when someone threw several Molotov cocktails from the windows of the almost completely burnt-out Trade Unions Building. We could hear petards and stun grenades going off and see bottles and stones flying from Maidan. “Truce”? No damn way, I thought. I was scheduled to go live from the parking lot near the Ukraine Hotel at 9am. I woke up at 8am, and, catching up on the news while brushing my teeth, saw that the situation seemed to be calm. So I relaxed.
How wrong I was!
A gloomy traffic police officer stopped our car on the corner of Lipska and Institutska St. and said, “I won’t let you drive any further, they’ll burn your car.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “There’s a truce.” With a smirk, the officer pointed at a burnt carcass of a car flipped over on the sidewalk. “A truce? They burnt this car during the night, and there’s another one over there. Walk on, but at your own risk.”
I started walking, of course, because what risk could there be? 150m ahead, just past the corner with Bankova St, there was a Berkut cordon. It was Berkut, not the police or the internal troops. The commanding officer refused to let me through for a long time, harping on that phrase again, “There’s gunfire.” Neither my press card, nor promises to go only as far as the Ukraine Hotel building helped convince him. What swayed him was the guest pass of a hotel resident that I had borrowed from my colleagues the day before.
Mayhem in Maidan
When they finally let me through, the first thing I saw was a Berkut soldier on a stretcher, covered in blood, his face ruined and his arm barely attached to his body. Yes, that’s exactly what I mean – his arm was almost completely blown off. I still want to know what happened to him, whether he survived or not, because his wounds were very serious. I didn’t have time to consider what could possibly have caused this much damage to a soldier wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet, and off I went for my broadcast. Several minutes before I had to go on air, I was standing in front of the camera and my connection with Moscow was ready. Then all hell broke loose about 50 meters behind me.
I really want to find the recording of that live broadcast and post it here. I was live on air, talking about (and showing) the gunfire, obviously live ammo, and Maidan protesters launching an attack. In the middle of my reporting a group of protesters started running my way. There was no time to think about their intentions, and I don’t believe they meant me any harm – they were probably just going for the hotel’s entrance – but I noticed a grenade flying out of the bushes in my peripheral vision. I needed to get off the air instantly and hide. The stun grenade went off next to the parking lot right in front of the entrance, that is, about 15 meters from where I was. You know what happened next, and not only from me – our ill-fated live broadcast when we were shot at by a police sniper, unarmed protesters killed, and the president running away.
In a separate paragraph, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Andrey Levin and Anton Borodavka, friends that took risks and saved us from starving to death and losing our minds in that heated situation. Guys, I appreciate that so much.
I told you all this so that no one harbors any delusions: there are no saints in this war (not to be confused with Russia’s actions in the Crimea that everyone refers to as “war” – I am talking about the conflict within Ukrainian society that I voiced MY OWN opinion on earlier). A week after these events, I was invited to BBC World radio and described what happened to Andriy Shevchenko, a member of the oppositional Batkivshchyna party. He replied, “Yes, I knew WE (he meant the Maidan activists, of course) had a lot of ammo, but we never considered actually using it. It’s a fact that the first bullet was fired from the Maidan side, and it surprised me immensely. I still don’t understand who gave the order or sent those people in without shields to die.” As a former journalist, he was shocked to hear about us almost getting “shot by the police by accident.”
I’m convinced that we’ll never know the whole truth behind the events in Kiev, and people will come up with a variety of opinions and assessments. Of course, it’s important that all the murderers are found and punished – those who fired at the guys with shields, those who ordered it and those who killed policemen both in Maidan and outside it. Although, in the latter case, I very much doubt that it will ever happen, despite (sorry for the pathos) the fact that every human life is priceless and those who take it away must be punished. But more importantly, neither Ukraine, nor we, who took part in these events and saw them with our own eyes, will ever be |
critical infrastructure," which allowed states to request top level help shoring up their networks.
Leslie Bellamy, director of the Arkansas Elections Division, told NBC News there was confusion about what that designation means.
Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin listens to questions as he testifies during the second day of the 10th public hearing on the performance of law enforcement and the intelligence community prior to 9/11 attacks before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States April 14, 2004 in Washington, DC. Alex Wong / Getty Images file
What they really need, she said, is more money from Washington to upgrade their computer systems.
"We always have concerns for our IT infrastructure. Our office has been pushing for upgrading the voting equipment."
It's a nationwide problem, said Caitlin Durkovich, who was assistant secretary for infrastructure protection under the Obama administration.
"My biggest concern from all of this is that our election infrastructure is incredibly antiquated and is in need of modernization."
Miller, Jefferson and other experts say Russia and other nation-states have shown themselves fully capable of manipulating actual votes.
"It was and is within the technical capacity of Russia and other nation states to interfere with our elections and to change votes, " said Edward Felton, a Princeton computer scientist who served as deputy chief technology officer in the Obama administration. "We're fortunate that they chose not to do it."
Related: The Election Is Over, But Russia Is Still Hacking
J. Alex Halderman, professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, told a Senate hearing this week that he and his team demonstrated the ability to reprogram voting machines "to invisibly cause any candidate to win. We also created malicious software — vote-stealing code — that could spread from machine to machine like a computer virus, and silently change the election outcome."
Even the best election cyber defenses can't defend against human error, however — the kind that happens when a government employee clicks on a malicious link in a spearphishing email. That happened in at least two state election systems in 2016, officials say, amid at least 21 Russian hack attempts.
For that reason, U.S. intelligence officials say, it has to be made clear to the Russians or any other nation that there is a price to be paid for hacking an American election.
So far, beyond some modest sanctions implemented in the waning days of the Obama administration, so such message has been sent, experts say.
John McLaughlin, a former acting CIA director, said he had seen no indication that President Trump and his team have "weighed in with Russians or made clear to the Russians our determination to stop this."
Vickers, who led key operations against the Soviet Union, added, "You've got to restore some measure of deterrence. You hit 'em back, punish 'em in some ways, which I don't think has been done by the last administration or this one. They are kind of on the offense, and we're not pushing back."The deposed president was given a life sentence after he was found responsible for the deaths of protestors in last years mass demonstrations. But his closest lieutenants were cleared, with five of the six security officials released from detention last night.
The state prosecutor’s office said he had begun the start of an appeals procedure against the sentenced in the trial, but did not clarify whether all the verdicts or just the acquittals would be appealed. Mubarak’s defence has also said it would appeal.
For the first time in months crowds of mostly young activists started converging on the square in central Cairo just hours after sentence
Leading activists called for more protests this week to culminate in a million-strong demonstration on Friday.
“This was not a fair verdict and there is mass rejection of the judge’s ruling,” said a protester called Amr Magdy. “Tahrir will fill up again with protesters. In Egypt the only way you can get any justice is by protesting because all the institutions are still controlled by Mubarak figures.”
Near an effigy of the former president that hung from street lights, firebrands promised to re-start the revolution.
Many of the young activists who have been at the heart of Egypt’s revolution fear that he will quickly be released on appeal. The accused were hated for their role in the slaughter of January last year when 850 died, mostly shot or beaten to death by security forces. Clashes between activists and riot police broke out almost as soon as the verdict was announced.
“The verdict was bad, a terrible disappointment,” said Sara Hamouda, 26, a student who joined last year’s protests. She returned to Tahrir Square yesterday. “Mubarak killed thousands during 30 years, yet as soon as he appeals this sentence he will be free. God willing there will be demonstrations again. We are sure this judge took a bribe — we are demonstrating for a free trial in front of an independent judiciary.” As she was speaking a man with close-cropped grey hair interrupted.
“We should have done as the Libyans did and killed our dictator!” Miss Hamouda agreed.
A year and a half after the high point of the Arab Spring the activists cause had lost momentum and energy, while Egypt has been ruled by a military caretaker regime which many of them believe is determined to quietly reinstate the old regime.
The Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, immediately sought to make political capital out of the mood of anger by visiting Tahrir Square and promising that if he is elected he will put Mubarak back on trial. His rival in the runoff vote, Mubarak’s last prime minister and his former protégé Ahmed Shafiq, warned that the Muslim Brotherhood would threaten civil liberties in other spheres if elected.
“I represent transparency and light. Everyone knows me,” Shafik said in a televised news conference. “The Brotherhood represents darkness and secrets. No one knows who they are and what they do.”
Some demonstrators tore billboards bearing the image of Mr Shafiq, who, like his mentor Mubarak, was a career air force officer.
Mr Shafiq has won over voters who crave a return to stability, but he is hated by protesters who regard him as a throwback to the old regime and who fear he will attempt to reinstate it.
One of his party headquarters south of Cairo was reportedly invaded and set on fire by a mob hours after the verdict was announced.
As Hosni Mubarak’s physical and mental decline became more obvious during the last years of his rule, the power and wealth grew of his two sons Gamal, 49 and Alaa, 50.
In particular Gamal, the more ambitious of the brothers, became prominent in Mubarak’s NDP party and was clearly being groomed to take over the presidency.
Fear of him taking over — and extending Mubarak rule for another generation — played a big role in last year’s toppling of the family firm, which exposed the epic nature of their corruption that had enriched it.
Their enemies fear that, as they did on Saturday, the sons may again escape justice. “Their acquittal showed it was a bad prosecution case,” said Wael Mawara, a political activist. “We are not sure now whether we are seeing real justice in these trials, or stunts and the whole thing is manipulated.”Donald Trump refuses to set deadline for withdrawing from Afghanistan, door open for troop increase
Updated
United States President Donald Trump has opened the door to an increase in troops in Afghanistan as part of a retooled strategy for the region, overcoming his own doubts about America's longest war and vowing "a fight to win".
Key points: Donald Trump says safe havens for terrorists in Pakistan to become a focus
President says he won't reveal details about when US will launch attacks
Defence Secretary has plans to send about 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan
In a prime-time televised address to the nation at Fort Myer in Virginia, Mr Trump said his new approach was aimed at preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for Islamist militants bent on attacking the US.
The President refused to set a deadline for pulling out of Afghanistan, saying a detailed timeline gives too much information to America's enemies.
"I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will," Mr Trump said.
"We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities.
"Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on."
The President said Pakistan and the safe havens there for terrorists would become a focus of US efforts to end the war in Afghanistan.
"We can no longer be silent about Pakistan's safe havens for terrorist groups," Mr Trump said.
Mattis plans for 4,000 extra troops
Mr Trump left open the door to an increase in US troop numbers in Afghanistan as part of a new strategy for the region.
He did not say how many troops would be sent, but Defence Secretary James Mattis has plans on the table to send about 4,000 more to add to the 8,400 already deployed there.
"I have directed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make preparations to carry out the President's strategy," General Mattis said in a statement.
"I will be in consultation with the secretary-general of NATO and our allies — several of which have also committed to increasing their troop numbers."
Australian Defence Minister Marise Payne noted after the speech that in May, the ADF agreed to increase its train, advise and assist mission in Afghanistan, bringing the total number of personnel to about 300.
"We will examine the President's statement, consider any expectations of counterpart nations and engage in discussion with the US on those matters," she said.
Mr Trump said the US must seek an honourable and enduring outcome in Afghanistan worthy of the sacrifices that had been made.
"Our troops will fight to win," he said.
The speech, devoid of a lot of specifics, came after a months-long review of US policy in which Mr Trump frequently debated the future of US involvement in Afghanistan, where Taliban insurgents have been making territorial gains.
Afghan Ambassador to the US, Hamdullah Mohib, told AP the speech and the strategy outlined in it was "10 out of 10" and that Afghans heard "exactly what we needed to".
Mr Mohib said critiques of the speech for failing to disclose troop numbers were misguided and the focus on numbers detracts from the "real focus" on conditions and support needed for Afghanistan to succeed and achieve peace.
Mr Trump has long been sceptical of how the US is fighting the war in Afghanistan, which was launched by president George W Bush in October 2001 after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
US troop numbers in Afghanistan November 2001: 1,300 US troops arrive in Afghanistan
December 2001: The US force grows to 2,500 as troops hunt for Osama bin Laden
March 2002: 7,200 US troops are in Afghanistan as the US lead the largest ground assault of the war to date
December 2003: Year ends with about 13,100 US troops in Afghanistan
February 17, 2009: There are about 38,000 US troops serving in Afghanistan
December 1, 2009: Obama announces troop increase, taking the US total to almost 100,000
June 22, 2011: Barack Obama announces all of the additional US forces deployed in December 2009 will return home within 15 months
Today: There are about 8,400 US troops in Afghanistan
Reuters/AP
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, donald-trump, terrorism, afghanistan, united-states
First postedBreaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
June 15, 2016, 1:04 AM GMT / Updated June 15, 2016, 9:09 AM GMT By Alex Seitz-Wald
Speaking 250 miles apart Tuesday, but as if reading from the same hymnal, President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton delivered simultaneous withering critiques of Donald Trump’s response to the Orlando terror attack.
The seemingly coordinated salvo from the Democratic Party’s two biggest heavyweights is a preview of the months to come, when Clinton will have at her disposal at least two popular presidents, the vice president, her Democratic primary opponent, and a slew of other high-profile Democrats.
Clinton’s campaign would not comment specifically on whether the two speeches were coordinated, but spokesperson Nick Merrill said, "Obviously we speak regularly with the White House.”
As the Clinton campaign musters a coordinated communications strategy, Trump has been left more or less to defend himself, with few high-profile surrogates to back him up.
“At this point, Trump is like an army column advancing with no armor on either side of him," said Robert Shrum, a former top strategist to two Democratic presidential campaigns. "He put himself in a very vulnerable position."
Related: Angry President Tears into Trump Like Never Before
In its response to Obama’s evisceration Tuesday, the Republican National Committee, which Trump has leaned on to supplement his under-developed campaign, made no effort to defend its presumptive nominee. The committee’s press release criticized Obama’s terror strategy and linked it to Clinton without even mentioning Trump.
The disparity between the two sides has been especially noteworthy since the Orlando mass shooting upended the campaign script.
During Trump’s speech in New Hampshire on Monday, when he expanded his call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S., the state’s top Republican officials did not attend -- the audience was filled instead with people invited by Republican operatives.
None of the North Carolina GOP congressional delegation was expected to attend Trump’s campaign event Tuesday night in Greensboro, NC, either, citing congressional business, according to an NBC News survey.
The tandem rebuke of the Republican on Tuesday by former rivals Obama and Clinton, regardless of whether the White House and the campaign coordinated directly, worked together to reinforce the party line.
Obama in Washington, mocked Trump’s fixation with Democrats’ refusal to say the words “radical Islam,” which has become a key argument against Obama and Clinton in their approach to terrorism.
“There's no magic to the phrase 'radical Islam.' It's a political talking point,” Obama said. "Not once has an advisor said, 'Man, if we only used that phrase, we'd really turn this thing around.' "
Related: Republicans Run From Donald Trump's Orlando Response
Clinton, at a union hall in Pittsburgh, echoed the sentiment. “Is Donald Trump saying that somehow there are magic words that once uttered will stop terrorists from coming after us?” she asked.
Obama also knocked "yapping" from "politicians who tweet” — Twitter being one of Trump’s primary means of communication — adding that “loose talk and sloppiness” is dangerous.
Clinton, for her part, slammed Trump’s response to the Orlando shooting as reckless and lacking substance. “He went on TV and suggested that President Obama is on the side of the terrorists. Now just think about that for a second," she said. "Even in a time of divided politics, this is way beyond anything that should be said by someone running for President of the United States."
Obama criticized Trump’s “dangerous” proposal to ban Muslims. "Where does this stop?" the president asked. "Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? Place them under special surveillance? Discriminate against them because of their faith? Do Republican officials actually agree with this? Because that's not the America we want. It doesn't reflect our ideals."
Clinton called the Muslim ban “a recruiting tool for ISIS to help them increase its ranks of people willing to do what we saw in Orlando.” Clinton also said the idea wouldn’t even work, since the Orlando shooter “was born in Queens, New York just like Donald was himself.”
The speeches dominated cable news Tuesday and provoked a blistering Trump response. "I watched President Obama today, and he was more angry at me than he was at the shooter,” Trump said in North Carolina.
Soon, however, along with President Obama and Hillary Clinton, Trump will have to contend with Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and likely Bernie Sanders, each holding events in different places across the country, and all setting their sites on Trump.
A Biden aide said the vice president's office is already working with the Clinton campaign on scheduling, and hopes to have a date for his deployment soon.
Each of those figures can dominate local news coverage wherever they are, and it will be difficult for Trump to keep up, even as he continues to draw national attention.
Trump has proven he can command enough attention to drown out opponents on their own, but he hasn’t faced this kind of sustained and coordinated attack from highest levels of an entire political party.
“It's clear that neither the President nor Secretary Clinton are going to allow Donald Trump to dominate the headlines unanswered,” said Ben Labolt, a former Obama spokesperson. “Republicans didn't succeed during the primary because either ignored him, or mimicked him, or responded with a scattershot message. Today was a good indicator that the one man monologue is over for Mr. Trump.”SAF LAUNCHES NATIONAL TV CAMPAIGN CHALLENGING ‘OBAMA LIES’ ABOUT GUNS
BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation today is launching a national television campaign challenging lies told by President Barack Obama about guns and crime, and is urging viewers to call a toll-free number and express their opinion about the president’s efforts to push his gun control agenda. The television spot may be viewed here.
“We’re fed up with the president’s repeated exploitation of tragedies to promote a failed agenda of public disarmament,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “Law-abiding gun owners are not the problem, nor is their right to keep and bear arms, and Obama knows it. But true to the left wing principle of never letting a tragedy go to waste, the president and other anti-gunners have launched a massive attack on the Second Amendment.
“We’re asking one million Americans to call our toll-free number at (800) 292-9044 and simply press ‘1’ if they think the president is lying to push gun control,” he said.
“The president has argued that states with the toughest gun control policies experience less violent crime,” he continued. “Apparently he thinks Chicago and Baltimore are no longer part of the United States, much less Washington, D.C., New York or Los Angeles.
“He has referred to Australia’s gun laws,” Gottlieb added, “without mentioning that the cornerstone of that country’s effort was a massive and mandatory surrender of privately-owned firearms. That suggests to us that his agenda just might include gun confiscations if people don’t meekly turn them in.
“He claims that more guns in the hands of honest citizens, and the elimination of gun-free zones would not reduce gun-related crime,” he observed. “You never see mass shootings at gun stores or shooting ranges, but only places like schools, churches and shopping malls where firearms are forbidden.
“With our video, we’re asking a simple question,” Gottlieb said. “Do you think Obama is lying to push his gun control agenda? Just call our toll-free telephone number and cast your vote.”
SAF’s special toll-free telephone line is (800) 292-9044.Image caption RIM's Playbook has suffered from poor sales
Blackberry-maker Research in Motion (RIM) has said it plans to refocus its business back onto corporate customers.
The announcement came as RIM reported a quarterly loss, as revenues fell due to sharply lower smartphone sales.
The Canadian company made a net loss for the three months to 3 March of $125m (£78m), compared with a profit of $934m a year earlier.
It has lost ground as its traditional business clients have switched staff to iPhones or Android smartphones.
RIM also announced the resignation of former co-chief executive Jim Balsillie.
Chief technology officer David Yacht will also be standing down.
Shipments of Blackberry smartphones in the quarter fell to 11.1 million, down 21% from the previous three-month period.
Analysis It's been a disastrous couple of years for Research in Motion, the Canadian firm whose Blackberry device became the must-have gadget for ambitious professionals. The arrival of Apple's iPhone and then Android phones using Google software left the Blackberry looking old-fashioned - profits suffered and the men at the top resigned. Now, after unveiling another big loss, the new chief executive Thorsten Heins, has announced that the firm return to a focus on business customers. The free BBM messenger service has made the Blackberry popular with teenagers - it was even blamed by some for helping co-ordinate riots in London last year. But Thorsten Heins said the firm could not succeed if it tried to be everybody's darling, and would now return to its roots.
Shipments of the company's Playbook tablet hit 500,000, largely due to substantial discounting.
For the full financial year, the RIM made a net profit of $1.2bn, down from $3.4bn in the previous year.
The results were worse than analysts had expected and shares in the company fell as much as 9% in after-hours trading in New York. They have fallen by 80% over the past year.
Corporate focus
Once heralded as one of the fastest-growing companies in the world, RIM has struggled to keep up with rivals in the smartphone market, such as Apple's iPhone and handsets running on Google's Android operating system.
It has also struggled to gain a foothold in the tablet market.
"RIM has only sold 5% of the smartphones sold in the US in the past three months, Apple have 43%" said CNET analyst Larry Magid. "
"They may be doing well in some of the developing countries but clearly in the developed world they are not doing well, both Apple and Google are doing much better," he told BBC News.
Just three months after his appointment, chief executive Thorsten Heins said the company would now focus on its traditional core market of corporate customers rather than on individual consumers as part of a strategy to turn the business around.
"We plan to refocus on the enterprise business and capitalise on our leading position in this segment," he said.
"We believe that Blackberry cannot succeed if we tried to be everybody's darling and all things to all people. Therefore, we plan to build on our strength."
'Bread and butter'
Blackberry is popular amongst young people in the UK for its Messenger service and because it is cheaper than many of its smartphone rivals, which means they don't bring in serious revenue.
"Teenagers are not their main market. They don't want to spend money catering to that business.
"Their bread and butter is the big corporations, big government agencies who buy them by the thousands," Mr Magid said, explaining the reason behind the shift in focus.
RIM was keen to stress that it was not withdrawing from the individual consumer market entirely.
Blackberry will focus on the cheaper end of the consumer market, rather than trying to provide the kind of services offered by Apple's iPhone, the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones says.
As well as increasing subscriber numbers, the company said it is also keen to increase the amount existing customers spend.
"We have new BlackBerry 7 devices scheduled to come out in the next few months to reinvigorate our position in the key entry-level smartphone segment, to support our efforts to continue growing our subscriber base by upgrading feature phone customers to smartphones," the company said in a statement.
The launch of Blackberry 10, expected later this year, and a much-delayed new operating system, are expected to be crucial to its turnaround plan.I didn’t think much about it at the time: I was appearing in a short television segment and had quickly brushed my hair, then slapped on some concealer. I figured my glasses would cover the circles under my eyes.
Only later did I behold what I looked like — and it was terrifying. It wasn’t that I was disheveled; it was the actual face that looked back at me in the frozen screen shot.
My mouth curled slightly downward, my brows were furrowed, my lips were a little pursed. My eyes aimed forward in a deadpan stare. I looked simultaneously bored, mad and skeptical. I was basically saying to the newscaster: Die.
In that moment, I joined the ranks of a tribe of women who suffer from the scourge known as “resting bitch face” or, increasingly, just RBF.It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that waltzes are the pop-music of the Classical genre (the dance music before Dance music!). There’s something about them that effortlessly catches the ear and makes them easy to like. Maybe it’s the soaring melodies or the trademark OOM-pah-pah, but a waltz done well has a characteristic sensation of movement that’s addicting and catchy. And given anime music’s proclivities when it comes to incorporating diverse genres in its body, waltzes pop up too. The ten tracks below (in no particular order of preference) are selections that have especially stuck out to me throughout the anime I’ve watched and the soundtracks I’ve listened to and are definitely worth sharing.
The first waltz hails from an unexpected source – original mecha anime Mazinger Z. If you were to attempt to characterize oversized machines beating each other up with a piece of music, this piece wouldn’t be too far off. Extravagantly grandiose, the music immediately smacks you upside the head with a powerful fanfare. A fearless melody is quickly picked up by the strings as they are peppered relentlessly by bursts of bombast from the percussion and brass. The battle ends in a crashing finale as the waltz draws out an overly theatrical ending. Excessively affected in every way, “God Scrander’s” enthusiasm is a great track to start off this particular listening exercise.
God Scrander
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Contrasting with “God Scrander’s” straightforward grandiosity, “Waltz #5” from Ashita no Nadja takes a subtler approach. With the grandeur of the earlier waltz still reverberating in the air, it takes a moment to even realize that this waltz has started. The music takes its time to diffuse into the atmosphere – distant echoes of a harp haunt the air as the strings filter in like a slowly shifting mist. The ephemeral wisps gradually gain substance as they coalesce into a more tangible entity with the addition of more voices. Nevertheless, it feels like attempting to reach out for the airy notes would still scatter the fragile melody. As much as I would have loved to experience the dream for longer, it dissipates back into silence, leaving a strange feeling of having experienced something that wasn’t quite there.
Waltz #5
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Indeed, I’ve always found it to be fascinating that pieces which capture such different sentiments could all fall under the same category. Hunter x Hunter’s “Ginpatsu no Shounen”, while remaining a waltz, has a distinctly different flavor than the previous two. A piano leads the ensemble, performing an elegant solo that soars over waves of rolling swells. Imbued with a graceful purpose, the piece unerringly voyages forward as countless landscapes slide past. The placid journey is briefly interrupted by a moment of exultant brass which quickly fades as the adventure begins anew and the music resumes its meanderings.
Ginpatsu no Shounen
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It speaks to the versatility of the waltz as a musical genre when you realize that most of the waltzes presented so far aren’t really the stereotypical type you’d dance to. “Akari, Waltz, Odoru”, from Battle Athletes finally brings about an upbeat and cheerful atmosphere more typical of archetypal waltz (besides, it’s got ‘dance’ in its name!). The piece opts for a more whimsical atmosphere, beginning with the dreamy tinkling of bells and piano keys. The melody has the storybook childish warmth, featuring a flute that skips from place to place, blithely bathed in warm sunshine and flowers. The flute takes a moment to frolic with a sprightly violin before commencing with a playful back and forth between the flute and a sluggishly stolid section of French horns. Wearied from the day at last, the instruments settle down for a night of rest.
Akari, Waltz, Odoru
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The next selection remains one of my favorite tracks of all time. “Rekishi wa Kataru”, from Simoun, establishes a provocatively unsettling mood like no other piece. Starting off on a minor key, the violins immediately evoke a tense atmosphere with a precarious motif that is periodically punctuated by ominous strokes from the lower strings. The thick uneasiness is cut by a saxophone that introduces a treacherous yet entrancing melody. As the brave saxophone waltzes perilously close to the ensemble, the agitated atmosphere is abruptly interrupted by a glorious trumpet call, spurring the instruments to a frenzied rush with our solo saxophone leading the way. The moment of triumph is nevertheless brought to an end – the piece ends on a sinister note as the solo saxophone is drowned by the heavy crashing of trumpets from which only the strings emerge, gradually dying on a grim note.
Rekishi wa Kataru
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Speaking of favorites, what’s a waltz post without a mention of one of the most famous anime waltzes of all time? The main theme of Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle is, in fact, a waltz. It’s practically impossible to miss – the tune surfaces in the BGM for at least a third of the movie. That said, I ended up choosing “Stroll through the Sky” as the track to include, mostly because it captures the waltz nature of the theme particularly well. The piece begins rather unassumingly (as unassuming as Hisaishi conducting the New Japan Philharmonic can be), with pizzicato that is unpretentious to the point of being shy. The modesty of the pizzicato undergoes an uncanny metamorphosis as the piece takes an ominous turn, unsettled by the strange, scurrying calls of woodwinds. Nevertheless, the music takes another unexpected turn after a circus-esque drumroll, where the piece decides to break out in grandeur. Unlike the first segment, the theme now embodies everything extravagant, capturing the soaring whirls of multi-colored dancers.
Stroll through the Sky
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Ghibli aside, anime music is prone to having gems show up in unexpected places. While a good soundtrack can always be expected from Ghibli’s high-budget movies, not everyone has the studio’s budget. Sometimes a piece will get extra bonus points if I didn’t expect it to be good given the circumstances. “Youjinshou no Asa”, from Otome Youkai Zakuro, is one example, coming from a standard-looking seinen anime with a composer I’d never heard of before. Despite its humble origins, the piece is extremely pretty, setting the mood with an ensemble of shimmering strings. As the bass playfully traipses along, it evokes a delightful promenade through a sunshine-bathed garden. The relaxed pace works well to set the mood, instilling a pleasant feeling of sedately refined cheer.
Youjinshou no Asa
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Things turn from the mundane towards the eccentric with the next track. “Mawaru Karakuri Tokei” from the xxxHolic movie, is weird, but uniquely so. It features only bells (perhaps they’re mallet instruments; I’m not very good at identifying percussion) playing a tune one would expect to hear in an amusement park on a merry-go-round. The entire time, chromatic scales undulate through the piece in a haphazard fashion, giving the whole piece an intricately off-kilter atmosphere. Due to the incongruity between the childish melody and the dissonant scales, the whole thing becomes rather creepy. It’s as if the piece were just a veneer of innocence thinly veiling something twisted and sinister.
Mawaru Karakuri Tokei
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“Sequentia”, from Meine Liebe, also opts for an eerie sound. At first glance, the piece is a cultivated and stately waltz – the sort that would accompany an old fashioned upper-crust party. However, if one listens closely, woodwinds can be heard furtively bubbling in the shadows of the string theme. Instilled with subterfuge and spiteful gossip, they watch on from the darkness. The scheming is momentarily silenced by the dignified entrance of an esteemed sovereign, arriving in the form of an uplifting interlude. Nevertheless, the machinations of the court inevitably resume from the darkness, bringing the music to a head with an almost circus-like finish as cymbals crash and the scheming rises to a flustered pitch
Sequentia
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The last waltz is one I hold dearly to my heart for nostalgic reasons. Long before I had come across any of the tracks I’ve already mentioned, I watched The Cat Returns. Out of the rest of BGM (which is also excellent, might I add), one particular track attracted my attention. “Waltz Katzen Blut” stuck with me long after I watched the film, prompting some of my earliest attempts to find music to use as standalone entertainment. The music begins unassumingly with a pair of accordions that introduce the theme with their own little duet. The scope abruptly zooms out from the duo as the ensemble joins in. A whole ballroom of dancers suddenly appears as the enchanting theme blossoms into a majestic dance of grand proportion. While perhaps the most standard of all the selections so far, “Waltz Katzen Blut” is pulled off beautifully, establishing itself as an iconic example of the waltz as a genre.
Waltz Katzen Blut
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Waltzes are catchy and easy to like, making them a great choice to share with others. As such, I’m hoping that these ten waltzes worked to stir up some interest in the related OSTs and in waltzes in general. Of course, if I missed anything beyond say… Ouran, feel free to share in the comments!
Like this: Like Loading...Beginning in childhood, our developing imagination allows us to transport ourselves to different places and scenarios. While the ways we use our imaginations change throughout our lives, daydreaming is overwhelmingly common throughout adulthood. We often let our minds wander while reading a book, sitting in a meeting, or driving home. Researchers have recently begun to examine the benefits and potential consequences of daydreaming in our daily lives.
Recent research has found that the content of our daydreams often includes information that is important in our day-to-day lives, and can allow people to simulate social experiences and emotions. Is it possible that our daydreams can change our emotions and feelings towards others? How is this influenced by the quality of our relationships with others?
A recent study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition examines the link between our daydreams, emotions, and relationships with others. Specifically, the researchers, “sought out to explore whether social daydreams would be associated with increased social feelings by choosing to focus on feelings of love and connection,” the authors said in the article.
This study used a technique called experience sampling, sending text messages to participants randomly throughout the day. Whenever the participants received a text message, they were asked to record their daydreams that were happening immediately before.
Participants who reported a lower mood before daydreaming (i.e. less happiness, love, and connection) actually showed an improved mood after daydreaming. Results showed that social, but not non-social, daydreams were linked to increased feelings of love, happiness, and connection with their partner. This supports the idea that social daydreaming helps simulate social interactions and emotions.
In addition, the vast majority of daydreams included the participants’ significant others, and the change in participants’ mood through daydreaming was influenced by their relationship quality. Participants’ mood increased only when the daydreamer and their significant other had a high quality relationship. The authors concluded that this may be because, “imagining close others may serve the current emotional needs of daydreamers by increasing positive feelings towards themselves and others.”
The authors suggested that ultimately, we may use daydreams to act as a temporary substitute for social interactions during times when we cannot interact with others whom we care about. For example, we may have a tendency to daydream when we are homesick or particularly lonely. These daydreams appear to act as a way to simulate a real social experience, and can help people improve their mood.Image copyright Getty Images
Bestselling author Richard Dawkins tried to rank types of rape on Twitter - and created a mini-firestorm.
He embraces controversy. His 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, re-examined Darwinian theory. One of his bestselling books is called, simply, The God Delusion. But Richard Dawkins is in the news this week because he wrote about rape on Twitter while trying to explain the nature of a logical argument.
On Tuesday BBC Trending reached him in Oxford and asked if he had anything to say about social media. He was concise on the phone.
"Bye-bye," he said - and hung up. He was more expansive on Twitter.
In a recent tweet, he wrote: "Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse." He added: "If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think."
Not everybody agreed.
One of |
-O-Blog
I would suggest that you save up as much money as you can before making the jump. This will help you have something to fall back on in case all hell breaks loose. :)
Brian Hoff of TheDesignCubicle
Make sure the time is right and you have all ends covered. Prior to taking the freelance plunge get yourself and your business organized! When I started freelancing more and was working my way towards full time freelance, I wanted to create invoice templates, contracts, etc. that way I could spend more time on things of more importance, such as marketing, networking and, of course, designing.
Walter Apai’ of WebDesignerDepot
You need to have a strong discipline to be a freelancer. Set your work times and stick to them. It’s easy to let work overflow into your daily life and work shouldn’t become your life. Make a clear cut separation between your career and your personal life. Also, be proactive and stay on top of your game by constantly learning new things and evolving. Finally, sit down and think really hard if this is what you really want and what your reasons are for this. Are they valid, do they make sense and are they achievable?
Steve Snell of VandelayDesign
My advice would be to start part-time while working a full-time job if at all possible. That way you’ll be able to get a good feel for what freelancing is like and if it’s something that you really want to do full-time. There’s much less risk involved because you can start to build up a client base before making the plunge so by the time you go full-time it won’t be so hard to stay busy. Another piece of advice is to save everything that you’re making from freelancing part-time. If you have a full-time job you can most likely live on that income. If you can save all of your profit from part-time freelancing it will be a safety cushion for when you go full-time. If it takes a few months to find much work it won’t be a big deal if you have that extra money. Plus, you won’t get used to living on an income that consists of a full-time job and part-time freelancing. That income will be difficult to replace for a while, so avoid getting comfortable on that income. Another thing that helped me was to diversify your income. Things like freelance writing for design blogs or managing your own websites can provide other income that supplements what you make on client work.
Garth Humbert of IAmGarth
Before you take the plunge, make sure you’ve got some clients and projects lined up. It’s a big step and depending on what you need to make, you’re gonna need to buckle down and work hard. The other thing that’s been really helpful for me is surrounding myself with other designers. Twitter has been amazing at providing a steady stream of links, resources, witty comments, inspiration, and is a great sounding board.
Liz Andrade of CMDshiftDesign
I wrote a post about this a while back called “Ditching your 9to5 to be Freelance & Fancy Free”, and that post was in response to the emails I get from those of you thinking about making the leap and asking for advise.
Calvin Lee of MayhemStudios
Learn the business side of running a business from your day job, before going on your own: contracts, invoicing, billing, estimates, working with print shops, preparing print ready files, working with clients and file management.
Networking and making connections within/outside of your industry before going solo is very important in finding work, clients and projects. It makes it a lot easier when you’re on your own, since you’ve already built trust working with them on your day job.
Self-promotion is equally important. It doesn’t matter how talented you are. If nobody knows you’re out there and available for projects. Sign up for social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Bizik and the many portfolio sites to get your name and work out there. I’ve had the most success with Twitter as a way to network and connect with potential clients.
3. If you could change any one thing about working independently what would it be?
Liam McKay of WeFunction
It would probably be where I work, I definitely need to mix it up a little. I’m currently working from a desk in my room. But ideally I’d like to have my own office, and set myself some office hours, just to give myself some more structure and reality. Another thing I’m hoping to do is get a laptop and start working remotely, take my laptop somewhere nice when days in the office are getting a bit dull. I think as a freelancer you have a lot more freedom, but I feel at the moment i feel I’m not taking advantage of that.
Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks
One thing I wish is that there was awesomly fast wireless internet that saturated the globe. One day I’d love to live in a remote Alaskan village, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live with out fast reliable internet =)
Elliot Jay Stocks of ElliotJayStocks
My plan is to do less client work and more ‘product’ work (i.e: things I can sell), so I guess that’s something I’d like to change, and hopefully I’ll achieve it. But in general, there’s very little I’d change about my current freelance way of life.
Brian Hoff of TheDesignCubicle
I’ve always considered myself a people’s person and enjoy interacting and socializing with people in a work environment, so if I could have some random people just sitting behind me while I work from home that would be fantastic! Any takers? I pay with good conversation and stories. :)
Walter Apai’ of WebDesignerDepot
Ease up on the pressure. Even though I don’t have to report to anyone, self-pressure to excel and do well can be very taxing if not managed properly.
Garth Humbert of IAmGarth
Be available. Artists and designers have a notorious rap for being flaky. Surprise your clients by answering the phone, responding to emails quickly, and delivering on time. Take care of your clients and they’ll take care of you.
Liz Andrade of CMDshiftDesign
If I could change one thing today, it would be to have a special room in my home for my office. Right now I work out of a nook in my living space but I dream of one day moving up to have a real room with a door! :)
Calvin Lee of MayhemStudios
The worst is the isolation working alone, independently with no real human contact, not able to bounce ideas off someone. Even though there is instant messenger and Twitter. It’s not the same as communicating with people “In Real Life.”
I don’t know if there is a solution for this. I guess that is just part of freelancing. That is why I try to get out to networking events/design meetups as much as possible, to reconnect.
How do you find the right balance between working independently, and making time for non-work related activities (i.e. family, friends, recreation)?
Steve Snell of VandelayDesign
That’s something that I still struggle with. My tendencany is to work as much as I can and the other stuff often takes a back seat. One of the things I’ve learned that really helps me is to have a set ending time for the day. If I don’t know how long I’ll be working for the day, I usually wind up working almost from the time I get up till the time I go to bed. But if I have a set time when I know my work day is over, it helps me to stay focused, get things done, and still have time for personal stuff.
So there you have it, a lot of great input from top web designers, If you found any of this info helpful or related to their answers drop them a line, and let them know.First published at The Daily Impact January 12, 2014
Plato asked us to imagine a group of people chained to a wall in a cave in such a way that they could not see what was going on around them, only reflections cast on the cave wall opposite them by firelight. He invited us to consider how skewed the prisoners’ understanding of the world would become over time, and to value the contributions of philosophers who go out into the sunlight and see things as they really are. It’s easy for us Americans of 2015 to grasp the first part of his allegory, because it’s a perfect description of us watching TV (remarkable that he nailed that prediction 2,000 years ago, don’t you think?). It’s the second part that mystifies: what would a philosopher, stumbling out of the cave of shadows on the wall, make of our realities?
The shadows on the cave wall are dancing in eternal, unrelieved, twitching ecstasy: gas prices are down, the government-calculated unemployment rate is down, job creation is up, the stock market is setting altitude records, and because of the happiness of the shadows on the wall, the prisoners chained to the wall are feeling better about their futures than ever.
So, prisoners. What’s really out there? The philosopher has returned from a brief sojourn, wherein he found that the American Dream has become a nightmare.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics — the agency responsible for the “good news” that America has created 605,000 low-paying jobs in the last two months, reported at the same time that the total number of American employed was in December only 182,000 more than the October total. So where are the other 423,000 jobs that were “created?” Shadows on the wall.
in the last two months, reported at the same time that the total number of American employed was in December more than the October total. So where are the other 423,000 jobs that were “created?” Shadows on the wall. Also note that in December alone, 451,000 people left the labor market — they joined the 93 million adult Americans who have given up and stopped looking for work (and thus are not counted when the “unemployment rate” is calculated). Quick, another chorus of “Happy Days are Here Again.”
Since the last time America was doing okay, 2007, we have added 16 million people to our adult population, and we have subtracted 2 million full-time jobs. Thus we have a situation that (to hear the shadows on the wall tell it) has improved every year for seven years but is now worse than it was seven years ago.
Two recent surveys have found that well over half of adult Americans have no savings – none — and do not have enough cash in their possession to cover a sudden expense ($400 in one survey, $1,000 in the other).
In contrast to the shadow land where there is no inflation, the philosopher finds that real Americans are struggling with an inflation rate for food of more that 20%. Ground beef has just hit a national average price of $3.88 per pound, an all-time record high. But food prices are not included in the government’s calculation of the rate of inflation. More than 50 million American households — not people, households full of people – last year experienced what is politely referred to as “food insecurity”. That’s the term the shadows use, out in the sunlight we call it “hunger.”
46 million Americans are on food stamps, 20 million more than were enrolled in 2007, before the Great Recession started. And in nearly three-quarters of large American cities, requests for emergency food aid were up sharply in 2014 and are expected to skyrocket in 2015.
So out here in the sunlight, we see rising hunger, poverty, unemployment, sea levels, desertification and collapsing energy and stock markets. Who can blame us for preferring the cave, where at least somebody sees to it that the fire is kept burning?Recently, I posted about the IP 80.82.65.66 and the DoS attacks I observed in my syslog. I presumed the reverse DNS record (PTR record) pointing to no-reverse-dns-configured.com was just a one-time fake. However, further investigation blew that theory out of the water.
Upon review of the top three networks in my all-time dropped packets list, I saw 93.174.93.136 which is also managed by Quasi Networks LTD and has a PTR record, you guessed it, going to no-reverse-dns-configured.com. At that point I figured further investigation into this domain name was needed.
IBM X-Force Exchange is reporting the DNS name no-reverse-dns-configured.com has 245 associated DNS records of which 244 are PTR records from IP addresses managed by Quasi Networks LTD. Many of the IP addresses shown have been blacklisted by IBM.
A little further down the page shows no-reverse-dns- configured.com was flagged as malware 673 times, mostly for a phishing attack in December 2016.
Threatcrowd.org is also reporting no-reverse- dns-configured.com as malicous, including a link to a post on MalwareMustDie.org. In the post on MMD, no-reverse- dns-configured.com is shown as being used in a DDoS attack in February 2016, referred to as “MMD-0052-2016 – Overview of “SkidDDoS” ELF++ IRC Botnet.”
no-reverse-dns-configured.com is invoked yet again on DigitalOcean’s community forum back in February 2016 where a user reported, “Strang [sic] activity at auth.log (POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT)” from an IP address with a PTR record going to no-reverse-dns-configured.com.
So what is the ownership history of the no-reverse- dns-configured.com domain name? According a ThreatMiner.org lookup, the domain name was owned in 2016 by world famous domain name squatter Milen Radumilo. Milen is credited with almost 100,000 registered domain names on DomainTools.
Milen Radumilo lost a notable domain name dispute against Energizer Brands, LLC for saidenergizer.com. The complaint notes that Milen used the domain name in bad faith, going so far to impersonate the Energizer Bunny to profit from links to third-party websites. Milen was also involved in at least five previous domain name dispute proceedings, each of which resulted in him forfeiting the squatted domain name.
Milen was also exposed in the Flexytalk WordPress plugin incident when he scooped two expired domains and subsequently injected popup scams into the websites using the plugin.
Sometime around March 10, 2017 the domain name ownership of no-reverse-dns-configured.com was transferred from Milen Radumilo to Dmitry Vasilev. Similar Quasi Networks Ltd, Dimitry also has an address in Seychelles.
Dmitry is also a prolific domain name squatter, with over 18,000 domains associated to him, mostly under the organization “Kineticdomains Ltd” A prior domain name dispute Dmitry was involved in references his company as “Elmaco Ltd” but no further information is found for either company.
I contacted RIPE NCC regarding the malicious traffic from Quasi Networks and informed them of the of the numerous PTR records pointing to no-reverse-dns-configured.com. I received a response from RIPC NCC Customer Services that, “In order to have a reverse delagation [sic] PTR records are not a must and therefor [sic] any can create PTR records with false information.” I followed up with further documentation of the malicious activity Quasi Networks and will update this post with their response.Image caption Some government critics agree that protests are becoming more violent
After months of dropping oblique hints that Iran was in some way behind the unrest in Bahrain, the government there has openly accused Iran's Revolutionary Guards of setting up a militant cell to carry out attacks and assassinations.
Late on Tuesday Bahrain's head of public security, Major General Tariq Al-Hassan, said the targets included Bahrain's International Airport and the Ministry of Interior and that electronic evidence had been collected in the form of computers, flash cards and bank transactions.
On 14 February a 2kg bomb was discovered on the causeway bridge linking Bahrain with neighbouring Saudi Arabia, and three days later the authorities announced they had arrested eight suspects with links to Iran, Iraq and the Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah.
Western officials have said they believe the claims to be credible, but opposition figures have immediately dismissed them.
Ali al-Aswad, a former MP from the opposition party al-Wefaq, told the BBC: "Its not the first time the Bahraini government has linked the unrest to Hezbollah. Without independent bodies to investigate we cannot trust what this government says."
Another critic of the government who asked not to be named said street protests were definitely becoming more violent - two people were killed during last week's anniversary of the 2011 uprising - but he said home-grown groups, rather than outsiders, were developing their own arsenals of makeshift weapons.
'Eight-man cell'
At about 13:00 on 14 February, while anti-government protests were gathering pace in Shia districts, the government says a Bangladeshi cleaner discovered a bomb on the Saudi-Bahraini causeway comprising a nine-litre pressure cooker, nearly 2kg of explosives, wires and a mobile phone.
Image caption The government released pictures of what it said was an improvised bomb
It says the device, which was defused by the anti-terrorist explosive team, was intended to target visitors coming across from Saudi Arabia.
Since then, the government says a joint Bahrain-Oman intelligence operation has uncovered what it says is an eight-man cell masterminded by an Iranian Revolutionary Guards member codenamed Abu Nasser, who it says supplied the group with $80,000 (£52,000) to gather information, recruit volunteers and find places to store weapons in Bahrain.
Government officials say the group attended training camps in both Iran and Iraq and that four more suspects are still being sought. It has released photographs of the accused men.
Critics of the government in Bahrain are highly sceptical.
They believe that the idea of a terrorist plot, supposedly financed and directed from Iran, is a convenient distraction from the painfully slow progress towards democracy and equal rights for the country's restive Shia majority.
'Mistaken path'
A National Dialogue on reforms is now under way but is still at such an early stage that it has been described as "talks about talks".
One commentator cast doubt on the name of the alleged Iranian cell leader, saying "Abu Nasser" was an unlikely name for an Iranian agent.
On Monday Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman reacted to reports of the arrests by saying Bahraini officials were "following a mistaken path", adding "they imagine that in this way they can solve the problem they are encountering".
But whatever Iran's alleged involvement in Bahrain's unrest, one thing is clear: there are entrenched, hard-line factions on both sides - government and opposition - who believe they have much to lose if reconciliation talks ever look like succeeding.
Within the ruling Sunni al-Khalifa family there are those elements who believe they have effectively defeated the Shia protest movement, and need give up few, if any, of their longstanding privileges.
There is also an increasingly violent, radical wing of the opposition that has no time for political concessions or peace talks with the government.
They too would be most likely left out of the equation if a lasting deal on power-sharing were ever to be struck between the government and the mainstream political opposition.Every year, more than 3000 Kiwis are diagnosed with bowel cancer.
Many of the risks of getting bowel cancer could be avoided simply by eating more healthily and exercising more, a new study suggests.
An article in the New Zealand Medical Journal highlights six lifestyle risk factors: obesity, alcohol consumption, insufficient physical activity, smoking, eating red meat, and eating processed meat.
More than 3000 people are diagnosed with colorectal cancer each year in New Zealand, giving it one of the highest rates in the world.
123RF Choosing a healthier lifestyle could cut your chances of developing bowel cancer.
The study, published on Friday, estimates as many as 9 per cent of those cases are caused by obesity, and 7 per cent by alcohol.
READ MORE:
* New mum diagnosed with bowel cancer
* Mapping New Zealand's prostate cancer rates
* Where are more Kiwi women dying of breast cancer?
* Lung cancer - which parts of New Zealand can breathe easy?
* Understanding our national cancer hotspots
However, changes in diet and exercise regimes can reduce the risk of exposure to bowel cancer, as well as to other cancers, heart disease and diabetes, according to researcher Ann Richardson, of the University of Canterbury.
The study findings were backed by Wellington dietitian Sarah Elliot, who advised people to have at least two alcohol-free days a week, as well as eating more fibre and vitamin C.
Fruits, vegetables and whole grains were all good to protect bowels, she said. "Don't neglect fish and lentils."
Red meat twice a week was OK, but no more. And those who liked processed meats, such as bacon and salami, should balance it with foods high in vitamin C, such as tomatoes and kiwifruit.
The study says: "These findings have considerable public health relevance, since they suggest that it is possible to prevent an appreciable proportion of colorectal cancer by changing a few selected lifestyle factors.
"In addition to reducing the incidence of colorectal cancer, a reduction in obesity, alcohol consumption and smoking, and an increase in physical activity, would also reduce the incidence of other cancers, cardiovascular disease and diabetes in New Zealand."
It found the risk factors were 9 per cent for obesity, 7 per cent for alcohol, 4 per cent for insufficient physical activity, 3 per cent for smoking, 5 per cent for eating red meat, and 3 per cent for processed meat.
A national bowel screening programme, starting in the Hutt Valley and Wairarapa, will be rolled out progressively in 2017.
The programme will offer bowel screening every two years to eligible people aged 60 to 74 years.by Adrian Mouat
Most Docker users are aware of the docker inspect command which is used to get metadata on a container or image, and may have used the -f argument to pull out some specific data, for example using docker inspect -f {{.IPAddress}} to get a container’s IP Address. However, a lot of users seem confused by the syntax of this feature and very few people take full advantage of it (most people seem to pipe the output through grep, which is effective but messy). In this post, I’ll look into how the -f argument works and show some examples of how to use it.
Put simply, the -f argument takes a Go template as input and runs it against the metadata for the given containers or images. The first problem is the phrase “Go template” is rather nebulous, at least to anyone inexperienced in Go — my first feeling was atavistic fear from the memory of C++ templates. Thankfully, Go templates has nothing in common with C++ templates or generics, and is in fact a template engine that takes a data source and a template pattern and combines the two to produce an output document. This idea should be very familiar to most web developers and common examples of template engines include Jinga2 (commonly used with Python and Flask), Mustache and JavaServer Pages. The concept is perhaps best explained by a simple example:
$ docker inspect -f 'Hello from container {{.Name}}' jenkins Hello from container /jenkins 1 2 $ docker inspect - f 'Hello from container {{.Name}}' jenkins Hello from container / jenkins
As we can see, the argument to -f is a simple pattern (or template) that we want to apply to the metadata of container. In fact, we don’t even have to do anything with the metadata:
$ docker inspect -f "This is a bit pointless" jenkins This is a bit pointless 1 2 $ docker inspect - f "This is a bit pointless" jenkins This is a bit pointless
But, if we learn a bit of Go templating magic, things that were once tricky become much simpler. For example, to find the names of all containers with a non-zero exit code:
$ docker inspect -f '{{if ne 0.0.State.ExitCode }}{{.Name}} {{.State.ExitCode}}{{ end }}' $(docker ps -aq) /tender_colden 1 /clever_mcclintock 126 /grave_bartik 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 $ docker inspect - f '{{if ne 0.0.State.ExitCode }}{{.Name}} {{.State.ExitCode}}{{ end }}' $ ( docker ps - aq ) / tender _ colden 1 / clever _ mcclintock 126 / grave _ bartik 1
(Unfortunately Docker prints a new-line for each container, whether it matches the if or not).
Or to find the host directory for the volume /var/jenkins_home in my jenkins-data container:
docker inspect -f '{{index.Volumes "/var/jenkins_home"}}' jenkins-data /var/lib/docker/vfs/dir/5a6f7b306b96af38723fc4d31def1cc515a0d75c785f3462482f60b730533b1a 1 2 docker inspect - f '{{index.Volumes "/var/jenkins_home"}}' jenkins - data / var / lib / docker / vfs / dir / 5a6f7b306b96af38723fc4d31def1cc515a0d75c785f3462482f60b730533b1a
At the moment, both of these examples are probably a little hard to parse. There are a few basics you need to understand before you can get started with your own templates.
Directives
The {{ }} syntax is used for processing directives. Anything outside of the curly brackets will be output literally.
The. Context
A “.” stands for the “current context”. Most of the time this is the whole data structure for the metadata of the container, but it can be rebound in certain cirumstances, including using the with action:
$ docker inspect -f '{{.State.Pid}}' jenkins 6331 $ docker inspect -f '{{with.State}} {{.Pid}} {{end}}' jenkins 6331 1 2 3 4 $ docker inspect - f '{{.State.Pid}}' jenkins 6331 $ docker inspect - f '{{with.State}} {{.Pid}} {{end}}' jenkins 6331
You can always get the root context by using $. e.g.
$ docker inspect -f '{{with.State}} {{$.Name}} has pid {{.Pid}} {{end}}' jenkins /jenkins has pid 6331 1 2 $ docker inspect - f '{{with.State}} {{$.Name}} has pid {{.Pid}} {{end}}' jenkins / jenkins has pid 6331
Note that it is perfectly valid to use a “.” by itself, the following will just output the full data completely unformatted:
$ docker inspect -f '{{.}}' jenkins... 1 2 $ docker inspect - f '{{.}}' jenkins...
Data Types
The inspect data seems to consist of floats, strings and booleans. These can be tested and compared using various functions. At the moment, it seems that all numbers are floats, although Go templates do support integers, which would seem to be more appropriate in most cases (I’ve submitted an issue about this). Use double quotes when working with strings.
Values which appear as “null” appear to be not present in the data at all, and can’t be compared:
$ docker inspect -f '{{.ExecIDs}}' jenkins <no value> $ docker inspect -f '{{eq.ExecIDs.ExecIDs}}' jenkins FATA[0000] template: :1:2: executing "" at <eq.ExecIDs.ExecIDs>: error calling eq: invalid type for comparison 1 2 3 4 $ docker inspect - f '{{.ExecIDs}}' jenkins & lt ; no value & gt ; $ docker inspect - f '{{eq.ExecIDs.ExecIDs}}' jenkins FATA [ 0000 ] template : : 1 : 2 : executing "" at & lt ; eq. ExecIDs. ExecIDs & gt ; : error calling eq : invalid type for comparison
Data Structures
The inspect data uses maps and arrays. Maps are normally easy, you can just chain stuff together to access inner maps as we’ve seen already:
$ docker inspect -f '{{.State.ExitCode}}' jenkins 0 1 2 $ docker inspect - f '{{.State.ExitCode}}' jenkins 0
However, this isn’t possible if the key for the map isn’t in a suitable format (for example, if it uses a non alphanumeric character). If that’s the case, you can use the index function as we did in the volumes example:
docker inspect -f '{{index.Volumes "/var/jenkins_home"}}' jenkins-data /var/lib/docker/vfs/dir/5a6f7b306b96af38723fc4d31def1cc515a0d75c785f3462482f60b730533b1a 1 2 docker inspect - f '{{index.Volumes "/var/jenkins_home"}}' jenkins - data / var / lib / docker / vfs / dir / 5a6f7b306b96af38723fc4d31def1cc515a0d75c785f3462482f60b730533b1a
You can also use index to get an array entry by number:
$ docker inspect -f '{{.HostConfig.Binds}}' jenkins [/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock /usr/bin/docker:/usr/bin/docker] $ docker inspect -f '{{index.HostConfig.Binds 1}}' jenkins /usr/bin/docker:/usr/bin/docker 1 2 3 4 $ docker inspect - f '{{.HostConfig.Binds}}' jenkins [ / var / run / docker. sock : / var / run / docker. sock / usr / bin / docker : / usr / bin / docker ] $ docker inspect - f '{{index.HostConfig.Binds 1}}' jenkins / usr / bin / docker : / usr / bin / docker
Functions
Apart from index, there are a few more functions that are likely to be useful. The logical functions and, or and not are available and operate largely as expected, returning a boolean result. Note that as they are functions, they cannot be used infix i.e:
$ docker inspect -f '{{and true true}}' jenkins true 1 2 $ docker inspect - f '{{and true true}}' jenkins true
Not:
$ docker inspect -f '{{true and true}}' jenkins FATA[0000] template: :1:2: executing "" at <true>: can't give argument to non-function true 1 2 $ docker inspect - f '{{true and true}}' jenkins FATA [ 0000 ] template : : 1 : 2 : executing "" at & lt ; true & gt ; : can't give argument to non - function true
The following comparison functions are available:
eq (equals)
ne (not eqaul)
lt (less than)
le (less than or equal to)
gt (greater than)
ge (greater than or equal to)
They can compare strings, floats or integers:
$ docker inspect -f '{{eq "abc" "abc"}}' jenkins true $ docker inspect -f '{{ge 1 -1}}' jenkins true $ docker inspect -f '{{lt 4.5 4.6}}' jenkins true $ docker inspect -f '{{ne 4.5 4.5}}' jenkins false 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 $ docker inspect - f '{{eq "abc" "abc"}}' jenkins true $ docker inspect - f '{{ge 1 -1}}' jenkins true $ docker inspect - f '{{lt 4.5 4.6}}' jenkins true $ docker inspect - f '{{ne 4.5 4.5}}' jenkins false
But note that output types have to match, and numbers in Docker seem to be all floats, despite how they are printed:
$ docker inspect -f '{{eq "4.5" 4.5}}' jenkins FATA[0000] template: :1:2: executing "" at <eq "4.5" 4.5>: error calling eq: incompatible types for comparison $ docker inspect -f '{{gt.State.Pid 1}}' jenkins FATA[0000] template: :1:2: executing "" at <gt.State.Pid 1>: error calling gt: incompatible types for comparison $ docker inspect -f '{{gt.State.Pid 1.0}}' jenkins true 1 2 3 4 5 6 $ docker inspect - f '{{eq "4.5" 4.5}}' jenkins FATA [ 0000 ] template : : 1 : 2 : executing "" at & lt ; eq "4.5" 4.5 & gt ; : error calling eq : incompatible types for comparison $ docker inspect - f '{{gt.State.Pid 1}}' jenkins FATA [ 0000 ] template : : 1 : 2 : executing "" at & lt ; gt. State. Pid 1 & gt ; : error calling gt : incompatible types for comparison $ docker inspect - f '{{gt.State.Pid 1.0}}' jenkins true
UPDATE: This seems to have been fixed; now both integers and floats will work correctly e.g:
$ docker inspect -f '{{gt.State.Pid 1}}' redis true $ docker inspect -f '{{gt.State.Pid 1.0}}' redis true 1 2 3 4 $ docker inspect - f '{{gt.State.Pid 1}}' redis true $ docker inspect - f '{{gt.State.Pid 1.0}}' redis true
(This was tested in Docker 1.7).
There is also a json function for generating JSON:
$ docker inspect -f '{{json.NetworkSettings.Ports}}' jenkins {"50000/tcp":null,"8080/tcp":[{"HostIp":"0.0.0.0","HostPort":"8080"}]} 1 2 $ docker inspect - f '{{json.NetworkSettings.Ports}}' jenkins { "50000/tcp" : null, "8080/tcp" : [ { "HostIp" : "0.0.0.0", "HostPort" : "8080" } ] }
So you can combine templates with the jq tool, which you may be more familiar with:
$ docker inspect -f '{{json.State}}' jenkins-data | jq '.StartedAt' "2015-03-15T20:26:30.526796706Z" 1 2 3 4 $ docker inspect - f '{{json.State}}' jenkins - data | jq '.StartedAt' "2015-03-15T20:26:30.526796706Z"
Of course, the default output of docker inspect is also JSON, so this also works:
$ docker inspect jenkins-data | jq '.[] |.State.StartedAt' "2015-03-15T20:26:30.526796706Z" 1 2 3 4 $ docker inspect jenkins - data | jq '.[] |.State.StartedAt' "2015-03-15T20:26:30.526796706Z"
There are a few more functions listed in the official Go documentation, but it weirdly seems to be missing the json function (which I learnt from Nathan LeClaire’s blog) — if someone knows the reason for this, please let me know!
If Statements
Conditional statements can be handled with an if statement and normally use one of the previous comparison functions:
$ docker inspect -f '{{if eq.State.ExitCode 0.0}} Normal Exit {{else if eq.State.ExitCode 1.0}} Not a Normal Exit {{else}} Still Not a Normal Exit {{end}}' jenkins Normal Exit 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 $ docker inspect - f '{{if eq.State.ExitCode 0.0}} Normal Exit {{else if eq.State.ExitCode 1.0}} Not a Normal Exit {{else}} Still Not a Normal Exit {{end}}' jenkins Normal Exit
Note the {{end}} statement is required to terminate the if. The else if and else parts are optional.
Conclusion
I think this covers most of the stuff you are likely to need when using templates with docker inspect, but there are more features available, such as using range to iterate over data, defining your own functions and using pipes.
I have yet to find a good, complete reference to using Go templates. The best I have found so far is a chapter from a the free e-book “Network programming with Go” by Jan Newmarch.
There is also the official Go documentation, but it is little terse and hard to follow, especially if you’re not a Go programmer.Get the biggest Sunderland AFC 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
On Wednesday night, a barely half-full Wembley witnessed a disinterested England in a war of attrition with a dreadfully unambitious Norway.
The exact crowd was a shade over 40,000 – the lowest England have attracted since Wembley opened its doors after being expensively re-fitted in 2009. It was painted as a combination of poor opposition, post-World Cup depression and a Three Lions side without the star name or playing style to capture the headlines.
It was put to Roy Hodgson that his team’s style might be causing the flat-lining attendances and the England manager bit at the questioner. “I think you’ll find we’ll find it hard to bring attendances back to very high levels because of the opponents we’re playing, they won’t be exciting the public,” he said.
“They’re not the teams that normally attract full houses. But if the team works as hard as they did on Wednesday, show the appetite and desire, and the aggression in the defending, show the exciting moves that were there for all to see, they’ll come back.”
Leaving aside for a minute the question of whether Hodgson was watching the same moribund display as the rest of us, he misses a key point in the collapse of support for the England team.
Long before Hodgson took the reins, England had alienated a large area that was once a natural territory for the Three Lions. And no club has greater cause for complaint than Sunderland, the |
'top' faces among blocks :)
[14:07:22] <Riven_> fancyness(vertex shader) > fancyness(VBO)
[14:07:31] <Notch> hehe
[14:08:10] <Riven_> i think however, that we're doing some premature optimisation...?
[14:08:16] <Dragonene> I'll be off.
[14:08:19] <Dragonene> No, wait!
[14:08:20] <Riven_> have fun!
[14:08:21] <Notch> aww Dragonene!
[14:08:22] <Dragonene> First I shall ask something
[14:08:26] <Dragonene> is Riven_ Riven on JGO?
[14:08:37] <Dragonene> because well, if you are, I haven't seen you on here much
[14:08:40] <Riven_> yeah... i'm that bastard
[14:08:44] <Dragonene> Well I haven't seen you much here anyway
[14:08:46] <Notch> Riven_: 100 ms lag spikes make the game unplayable right now, and they happen every time a block changes.. soo.. :-\
[14:09:09] <Dragonene> Nah, Riven_, you made all sorts of good posts in the 4k forums :D
[14:09:12] <Riven_> with VA, you won't get spikes, unless the spikes are caused by java code, that is
[14:09:17] <Dragonene> (I only know people who post in the 4k forums.)
[14:09:21] <Dragonene> (Mostly.)
[14:09:45] <Notch> ok, i'll toy around some more to see if it's the java code, then I'll start looking at how to manage the data
[14:09:46] <Riven_> my reputation is such a burden on me!
[14:09:51] <Dragonene> Anyway, I've gotta shower, just came back from playing frisbee
[14:09:52] <Dragonene> Ciao.
[14:09:57] <Riven_> just System.nanoTime the darn thing
[14:10:06] <Riven_> have fun, bring your dog!
[14:10:06] <Notch> I could do fancy stuff like limiting ram use so that once the scene gets complex, you only see stuff near the player.
[14:10:07] <Dragonene> Hah
[14:10:12] <Dragonene> System.currentTimeMillis will do fine
[14:10:16] <Dragonene> Don't give in to nanoTime!
[14:10:19] <Dragonene> It's a 100 ms spike dammit
[14:10:24] <Dragonene> you don't need millisecond precision!
[14:10:29] <Riven_> you do!
[14:10:33] <Dragonene> you don't!
[14:10:34] <Notch> nanotime is awesome, but every now and then I forget a 0 or two and get a heart attack
[14:10:40] <Dragonene> haha
[14:11:07] <Notch> considering I want it to run in 1 ms, I do need nanotime. ;)
[14:11:10] <Dragonene> Notch: Also knowns as "Level of detail"... :P
[14:11:14] <Riven_> yeah... that happens like... once every 5 years... as I put that in a utility method :p
[14:11:15] <Dragonene> known*
[14:11:27] <Riven_> you really need a shower, boy!
[14:11:31] <Dragonene> Yeah
[14:11:32] <Dragonene> I do.
[14:11:33] <Dragonene> :D
[14:11:33] *** Schnitter has joined #lwjgl
[14:11:36] * Dragonene is off.
[14:11:38] <Riven_> bye
[14:11:51] <Schnitter> hi :>
[14:11:51] <Notch> not using the large texture sheet would allow me to join adjacent quads of the same type
[14:12:07] <Notch> and that's a potentially MASSIVE speedup for simple scenes
[14:12:11] <Riven_> yeah... 1 texture restricts you pretty bad
[14:12:38] <Notch> but texture switches don't work too well with many polys.. is there some trick you know of?
[14:13:31] <Riven_> you just have to think about it like this: you can remove the bottlenecks, everywhere that it aint restricting you. if the'scene' prohibits you from using the 'fast' path, no need to rollback to the slow path for your whole scene, just the part that requires it
[14:13:37] *** jonkri has quit IRC
[14:14:07] <Riven_> like... calculate the'strategy' for each chunk
[14:14:37] <Schnitter> MatthiasM: you here?
[14:15:16] <Notch> this is true
[14:15:41] <Notch> I focus too much on the worst case. It's just that I can't stop thining "but what if some crazy person checkerboards the entire level?"
[14:16:07] <Riven_> add a 'checkerboard strategy' :p
[14:16:16] <Riven_> i'm sure there are ways to optimize
[14:16:22] <Notch> haha
[14:16:30] <Notch> hum, you might be right. =D
[14:16:36] * Notch finds himself thinking in new lines
[14:16:40] <Notch> along?
[14:17:05] * Riven_ doesn't know
[14:17:16] <Notch> thanks for the insights, Riven_ =)
[14:17:56] <Riven_> as gouessej says, 'english is not my mother tongue'
[14:18:07] <Riven_> Notch, don't forget, you're smarter :p
[14:18:13] <Notch> haha =D
[14:18:26] <Riven_> gotta redo that darn test
[14:18:33] <Notch> you know about these things than I do, though. =D
[14:18:56] <Riven_> you know what the thing is... last lines of OpenGL i've written are more than 3 years ago
[14:19:07] <Riven_> i've never programmed a game, only Poker4K
[14:19:10] <Jvlaple> wtf
[14:19:20] <Jvlaple> w/c
[14:19:23] <Jvlaple> :$
[14:19:37] <Notch> game making is fun!
[14:19:38] <Riven_> so most of my advice is from totally different work, like... building administration software
[14:19:43] <Riven_> yeah... no time :(
[14:19:50] <Notch> ack
[14:20:15] <Riven_> i'm in the process of developing a server cluster with my own datamining software
[14:20:25] <Riven_> very fun too... with my own darn database
[14:20:43] <Riven_> that's how i know what to optimize :p
[14:20:51] <Riven_> anyway, enough about me..
[14:20:54] <Notch> you wrote your own db? =D
[14:20:57] <Riven_> yeah
[14:21:06] <Riven_> it completely blasts MySQL out of the water
[14:21:08] * Notch awards five nerdpoints
[14:21:11] <Notch> awesome
[14:21:33] <Riven_> i can join tables in nearly 0ms :p
[14:21:41] <Riven_> (okay, that's not true)
[14:21:51] <Notch> what's it called?
[14:22:04] * Riven_ collects Notch's nerdpoints
[14:22:11] <Riven_> it's not called anything, it's closed source
[14:22:25] <Riven_> and i'm the only employee at the company i work for
[14:22:37] <Notch> you still have to name it!
[14:22:46] <Notch> what's the package name?
[14:22:48] *** kappaTwo has quit IRC
[14:22:50] <Riven_> my boss has no idea what i'm doing... he is only happens when it works
[14:23:04] <Riven_> tt.db2
[14:23:12] <Notch> so there's your name!
[14:23:17] <Riven_> happens = happy (darn fingers)
[14:23:18] <Notch> not very sexy, but it works
[14:23:28] <Riven_> it is an improvement over tt.db
[14:23:40] <Notch> so that's what the 2 is about. :D
[14:23:52] <Riven_> yeah, it took me really lonng to come up with that
[14:24:19] <Notch> haha. Sounds like you've got a pretty good job
[14:24:33] <Riven_> it certainly SOUNDS like it, yes
[14:24:49] <Riven_> but there is little money for advertising, so that's where it all crashes down
[14:25:06] <Riven_> my product is superious (by far!) to the competition, but who's gonna know
[14:25:07] <Notch> but you get to design your own db!!
[14:25:22] <Riven_> shh, my boss doesn't know
[14:25:39] <Riven_> it's only another item on my todo list
[14:25:50] <Riven_> eh... 'in progress' list
[14:26:14] <Notch> haha
[14:26:19] <Notch> awesome euphemism
[14:26:22] <Riven_> it handles gigabytes of data each day... my stresstest is to put the JAR on the live server
[14:26:43] <Notch> ack!
[14:27:01] <Riven_> not really, but my point was that the server is stressed
[14:27:39] <Notch> sounds like there are customers already then
[14:27:51] <Riven_> but it's really weird to do a binary search on a RandomAccessFile :)
[14:28:26] <Riven_> ofcourse! customers means $$, and every $ we got, is put in advertising...
[14:28:39] <Notch> what's the product?
[14:28:53] <Riven_> GoogleAnalytics, but thenMUCH more info
[14:29:03] <Riven_> it tracks every mouse movement
[14:29:12] *** jonkri has joined #lwjgl
[14:29:17] <Riven_> and not just renders 'clickmaps''
[14:29:21] <Notch> woo
[14:29:36] <Riven_> it really does fancy stuff, with programmable filters
[14:30:06] <Riven_> best of all: the frontend is a desktop app
[14:30:22] <Riven_> so you can really burn some CPU cycles (and have to deal with compatibility)
[14:31:05] <Riven_> so I also have to compress the data that is gathered, and stream it to the clients
[14:31:17] <Riven_> that have their own DB
[14:31:29] <Riven_> so there are a dozen big projects, in this product
[14:31:39] <Notch> still sounds like a great job to me. =D
[14:32:00] <Riven_> believe me... my boss has no clue, so can't really appreciate, so it's only an ego trip
[14:32:35] <Notch> and you get nerd respect on irc
[14:32:51] <Riven_> yeah... that's what it is all about :)
[14:32:54] <Notch> which, I guess, isn't worth much at the end of the day. ;)
[14:33:18] <Riven_> i can dream about it, for 8 hrs a day, pretty good investment
[14:33:18] <kbotnen> hi. how do you guys handle different material / textures with rendering with VBO? Ive sorted my indices by material and render one vbo pr.material, doing materialstatechange inbetween the "batches". But this get horribly slow when materialnr goes up.
[14:33:39] <kbotnen> it works, but its slow.
[14:33:46] *** keisangi has quit IRC
[14:33:58] <kbotnen> but whats worse its that whhen going to wireframe mode its even slower :/
[14:34:09] <Riven_> wireframe is always slower
[14:34:11] <Notch> wireframe has always been slow for me
[14:34:40] <Notch> In my most recent project, I've got a large texture map containing all textures in the game, and then offset the u,v values for each primitive
[14:34:51] <NoobFukaire> sounds like you're either doing something wrong elsewhere or you're having some kind of driver problem
[14:34:53] <kbotnen> ok. thanks for the information about wireframe speed (or lack of) :)
[14:34:53] <Notch> this reduces the texture switching a lot, but means I can't have repeating textures
[14:35:20] <NoobFukaire> we atlas our textures and our geometry
[14:35:22] <Notch> noobFukaire: Why do you say that?
[14:35:38] <kbotnen> Hmm. I dont have any knowledge about what textures and models arrives to the application (user load it) thus I cannot create atlases and similar on beforehand.
[14:35:50] <NoobFukaire> What kind of textures are you using? Are they huge?
[14:35:55] <kbotnen> Or If I do I have to create a separate "preprocess" app for that.
[14:36:10] <Riven_> well, if you really need different materials, then you really have to split up your data, like you're doing now... HOWEVER... if most of your scene is 'fairly' static (not changing for a few frames), then just group some VBOs of a certain material, and just merge it. like putting multiple totally distinct objects in one VBO
[14:36:14] <Notch> oh wow, that's what that is called. Atlas. =D
[14:36:16] <kbotnen> Right now its no texture present, 32 different materials, thus 32 batches of vbo.
[14:36:40] <NoobFukaire> shaders then or just color?
[14:37:13] <kbotnen> its not shaders. not yet. I suppose thats the next step, but not for this version of the app.
[14:37:22] <Riven_> what kinds of stuff are you rendering
[14:37:36] <kbotnen> right now I render a house with interior.
[14:37:59] <Riven_> i jused to render completely buildings using VBOs of simgle bricks... then merged, and merged, and merged, and in the end i only got a handfull of VBOs for a whole street
[14:38:52] <Notch> haha
[14:39:10] <Riven_> blazing fast too... so don't make your VBOs bound to the items you're going to render, make them more abstract, and in... what do i want to render, instead of what items to i want to show
[14:39:13] <Notch> perhaps I could try one VBO per block.. :D
[14:39:33] <Riven_> only VBO per material (or.. texture)
[14:39:36] <NoobFukaire> we have a kind of "virtual memory" system
[14:39:43] <Riven_> you can freely interchange VBOs and VAs
[14:39:47] <NoobFukaire> where you allocate a buffer from our graphics api
[14:40:00] <NoobFukaire> it's in reality part of a bigger "super" vbo
[14:40:09] <NoobFukaire> and then the graphics api can decide which vbo to put it into
[14:40:19] <NoobFukaire> i.e. spatial sorting in an octree, etc
[14:40:44] <Notch> Riven_: But what about space partitioning?
[14:40:48] <kbotnen> hmm..
[14:40:58] <Notch> you don't want to render the 70% of the scene that isn't even on screen
[14:41:27] <Riven_> you can render sub ranges of VBOs
[14:41:49] <kbotnen> so maybe I should put all indices into one VBo, create subranges for each material.
[14:41:50] <NoobFukaire> yeah but you still need to watch it
[14:42:02] <NoobFukaire> because binding the vbo can be expensive
[14:42:25] <Riven_> just put your groups of indices (grouped by spatial parti.) in the tree, and then just render the visible groups
[14:42:28] <kbotnen> ok. because now, with 32 materials I got 32 bindings pr frame.
[14:42:53] <Riven_> you only have to bind the VBO once, then you can render different ranges
[14:43:31] <Notch> for chaging geometry, there will be fragmentation, though
[14:43:43] <Riven_> that's why i used it for buildings
[14:43:53] <Riven_> not much happening, geometry wise
[14:44:02] <Notch> then again, if each block in my game has a maximum of 8 quads, I can just "allocate" space in 8*4 vertex slots
[14:44:32] <Notch> wait, since I group per material, it's even easier. One quad at a time
[14:44:43] <Notch> if one vanishes, move the last one to its place
[14:45:18] <Notch> this could actually work!
[14:45:23] <Riven_> yeah, the standard'remove by overwriting with last item, then shrink size' algorithm :)
[14:45:48] <Notch> if I bake lighting into the textures (which are tiny anyway), I can probably get away with this
[14:45:58] <Riven_> go girl!
[14:46:04] <Riven_> but...
[14:46:09] <Notch> noooo! no buts!
[14:46:11] <kbotnen> Ok. I have to create some sort of space partitioning (culling right?) scheme. and put everything in one VBO, and render ranges for each materialstate I guess. at least for now, until I get more skilled in this game, hehe.
[14:46:33] <Riven_> lighting in LINEAR sampled textures kinda looks ugly, of you have gradients, that is
[14:47:31] <Riven_> just make those 16x16 pixels the same light intensity, and you're done
[14:48:22] <Notch> it's flat shaded. =)
[14:48:37] <Riven_> kbotnen: spatial partitioning is not really trivial to implement, so don't give up if you struggle a bit
[14:48:57] <Riven_> raytrace the darn thing, for ultimate leetness
[14:49:26] <Riven_> it's trivial to raytrace a grid... i even did that in that cloud renderer (sorry..)
[14:49:46] <kbotnen> Riven_, thanks for that advice :) Ill close this version of the app with material/texturing working, but slow, and partitioning, culling, etc goes for the next version. Deadline in 7 days, so better be realistic, hehe.
[14:50:12] <Riven_> yeah, and for an interiour renderer, you don't exactly need 100fps
[14:50:34] *** jonkri_ has joined #lwjgl
[14:51:10] <kbotnen> the second picture. 55-60fps. good enough. thats when outside, faster when inside.
[14:51:25] <Riven_> seems like you have the greatest gains in LODing
[14:51:43] <Riven_> looks like you have multiple triangles per pixel, in certain areas
[14:52:57] <Dragonene> where is tmccrary these days btw?
[14:53:02] <Dragonene>!seen tmccrary
[14:53:02] <lwjglbot> Dragonene: tmccrary was last seen in #lwjgl 13 weeks, 4 days, 11 hours, 6 minutes, and 42 seconds ago: <tmccrary> Using it is like torture
[14:53:08] <Dragonene> :S
[14:53:13] *** jonkri has quit IRC
[14:53:16] <Schnitter> tmccrary = noobfukaire
[14:53:21] <kbotnen> hmm.. That might be correct. But just a quickie. Partiotioning, culling and LOD does almost the same (reduce amount of rendered information).?
[14:53:38] <Dragonene> oh really?
[14:53:42] <Dragonene> I didn't know that
[14:53:48] <Dragonene> then I talked to him just yesterday
[14:53:52] <Schnitter> really :)
[14:53:55] <Dragonene> NoobFukaire: Stop being so stealthy with your nicks!
[14:54:08] <Schnitter> also curious for me :x
[14:54:08] <Dragonene> what about void, he hasn't been here for ages
[14:54:11] <Dragonene> :(
[14:54:26] <Schnitter> isn't he only here at night?
[14:54:45] <Dragonene>!seen void256
[14:54:45] <lwjglbot> Dragonene: void256 was last seen in #lwjgl 1 day, 7 hours, 54 minutes, and 9 seconds ago: <void256> \o/
[14:54:47] <Dragonene> Not lately.
[14:54:51] <Dragonene> oh what
[14:54:55] <Dragonene> oh no
[14:54:57] <Dragonene> that's not him
[14:55:04] <Dragonene> that's NoobFukaire who changed his nick to imitate void
[14:55:09] <Dragonene> he was really here like 4-5 weeks ago last
[14:55:27] <Schnitter> wow
[14:56:26] <Schnitter> last twitter update 25 days ago
[14:57:25] <Riven_> default hovermap with clicks added
[14:57:27] <Notch> I love how the scrollbar shows up
[14:57:39] <Notch> clicks are the white areas?
[14:57:40] <Riven_> yeah, not everybody uses that scrollwheel
[14:58:04] <Riven_> yeah... they are dynamically faded, so that the highest intensity is always white
[14:58:24] <Riven_> so with few clicks, you get very obvious white dots
[14:58:42] <Notch> looks great. And as usual, the ads to the right are cooold, as is everything below the fold
[14:58:50] <Riven_> i actually had to compensate for the scrollbars, as about 20% of all clicks end up there
[15:00:12] <Riven_> with filters, you can specify your own 'groups' and give them a different color, like red dots
[15:00:36] <Notch> gathered via javascript, I assume?
[15:00:40] <Riven_> what you see is aggregate data of 27000 hits
[15:01:00] <Riven_> yeah... i hate javascript
[15:01:05] <Notch> haha
[15:01:06] <Dragonene> hey that's cool Riven_
[15:01:35] <Riven_> my boss is responsible for the website... it's horrible
[15:01:46] <Riven_> only for that it will never be a success
[15:03:57] *** Jvlaple is now known as orsiris
[15:04:09] *** orsiris is now known as orisis
[15:05:05] *** orisis is now known as OdinMS
[15:05:12] <Riven_> identify crisis
[15:05:18] *** OdinMS is now known as Orisis
[15:05:42] *** Orisis is now known as Jvlaple
Last one, I promise, it's just a pretty picture: http://www.indiespot.net/files/20090513_150923/index.html [15:08:08]
[15:08:41] <Riven_> hovermap, clickmap, flowmap (scroll down)
[15:08:50] <Notch> oh nice! a vector field =D haha
[15:09:16] <Schnitter> I can only see a coloured picture site? O_o
[15:09:21] <Riven_> 16.000 visits rendered in 3 seconds, and you have all kinds of sliders and checboxes to modify it
[15:10:26] <Riven_> nah, you can uncheck the hovermap, and you'll see the site in original colors, it will still show the clicks and flow
[15:11:28] <Schnitter> the source code is only a table with <img> tags?
[15:11:48] <Riven_> this is an exported 'presentation'... another feature!
[15:12:21] <Riven_> it's not a webservice, it's generated by a desktop app
[15:15:24] <Riven_> next thing you know I'm selling you all very expensive accounts...
[15:15:28] * Riven_ dreams on
[15:16:32] <Notch> I'll get two!
[15:17:03] <Dragonene> I'm off for TV
[15:17:04] <Dragonene> later.
[15:17:07] <Riven_> cya
[15:17:10] <Notch> toodles
[15:17:21] *** kappaOne has joined #lwjgl
[15:17:23] <Riven_> how's that chunk packing algorithm coming along?
[15:17:43] <Riven_> already determined the bottleneck?
[15:18:00] <Notch> I can't until I get home. =)
[15:18:04] *** Schnitter has quit IRC
[15:18:56] <Riven_> so, you're saying your boss wouldn't benefit of you working on a personal project??
[15:19:27] <Riven_> can't you streamline it right onto your webservice, as an easteregg?
[15:19:39] <Riven_> surely your boss would understand
[15:20:38] <Notch> haha
some pretty cool java snippets http://viralpatel.net/blogs/2009/05/20-useful-java-code-snippets-for-java-developers.html [15:23:27]
[15:23:33] <kappaOne> didn't know about the fast file copy
[15:24:21] <Riven_> DMA operation... zero copy
[15:24:40] <Notch> "Get name of current method in Java"
[15:24:42] <Notch> lol, what?
[15:24:48] *** betel has quit IRC
[15:24:49] <kappaOne> hehe
[15:25:08] <kappaOne> still cool to know, even though it'll probably never be used
[15:25:14] <Riven_> haven't you used that in your own logging API? :p (I do)
[15:26:16] <Riven_> the thing is that it behaves differently in Java 1.5 and 1.6
[15:26:33] <Riven_> you have to lookup another index in your stacktrace
[15:26:38] <Notch> it's also slow since it creates a new stacktrace.
[15:27:11] <Riven_> ofcourse it's slow! but very handy when debugging
[15:27:13] *** do0han has joined #lwjgl
[15:27:22] <Notch> yes. =)
[15:27:57] <Notch> wait, if you only do it once per class, it's not slow any more
[15:28:05] <Riven_> I have this Logger.printHere() method, i rarely use it, but it's worth it when it trouble
[15:28:17] <Riven_> in* trouble
[15:28:20] <Notch> like private Logger logger = new Logger() once per class, then the logger constructor checks the calling class's name
[15:28:31] <Notch> i have to start doing that
[15:28:52] <kappaOne> is there anyway to grab the contents of the java console after an app has crashed?
[15:28:55] <Riven_> you still woudln't get the method name... then
[15:28:58] <Notch> that singleton example looks wrong to me
[15:29:03] <kappaOne> say like when you catch the exception
[15:29:06] <Notch> it's not thread safe, for one
[15:29:34] <kappaOne> or do you have to set the app to catch Syste
[15:29:41] <kappaOne> *System.out
[15:29:46] <Notch> and it won't compile since singleInstance isn't static..
[15:29:46] <kappaOne> from the begining
[15:29:52] <Notch> private SimpleSingleton singleInstance = null;
[15:29:54] <Notch> should be
[15:30:04] <Notch> private static SimpleSingleton singleInstance = new SimpleSingleton();
[15:30:28] <Riven_> "is there anyway to grab the contents of the java console after an app has crashed?" - sure, just start the process with Runtime.exec() to get yourself a Process instance, and then listen on the stdout/stderr
[15:30:57] <kappaOne> hmm difficult if its an applet :)
[15:31:01] <Riven_> that way you can even catch VM messages, like when something totally crashes
[15:31:59] <kappaOne> signed applet that is
[15:32:19] <Riven_> Notch, you actually pinpoint some feature in the JVM that is little known. The JVM must use quite a few tricks there to sync that properly
[15:32:35] <Notch> yeps. =)
[15:32:47] <Riven_> why am i telling you..
[15:32:53] <Riven_> :)
[15:33:50] <Riven_> then just implement your own OutputStream, that forwards all bytes to multiple OutputStreams...
[15:34:22] <Riven_> System.setOut(new MultiOutputStream(System.out, new Socket(myServer).getOutputStream))
[15:34:39] *** monty_hall has joined #lwjgl
[15:34:52] <Notch> I've written a couple of those. The first one was buuuggy, hehe
[15:35:15] <Notch> wurm uses one for its console
[15:35:23] <Riven_> I remove all streams that throw IOEs from the list, and only rethrow them, once the list is empty
[15:35:53] <Notch> so you could get a very outdated IOE? =D
[15:35:56] <Riven_> so it loses functionality silently ;)
[15:36:17] <Riven_> nah, retrow the last once, that caused the last stream to fail (i was a bit vague, yes)
[15:36:46] <Riven_> if anything, it would be worth as much as the ancient IOE, though
[15:38:43] <Notch> ahh
[15:39:18] <Riven_> I also have this TraceOutputStream, that looks for "
" and inserts the current method (like Logger.printHere)... it's very nice to find those System.out.println()s that you forgot in your code
[15:39:22] <Notch> you could have an IoeListener interface as well, I guess
[15:39:33] <Notch> oh, that's an awesome idea!
[15:39:34] <Riven_> yeah, but i thought... would i ever make an impl.
[15:39:43] <Notch> then again, search all files should find most
[15:40:07] <Riven_> I can use it on any OutputStream
[15:40:18] <Notch> true. Never add code you don't use, unless it's part of somethiing someone else will use :D
[15:40:38] <Notch> I was just thinking about solutions to that problem. As long as I know there is a solution, I'm happy. ;)
[15:40:40] <Riven_> it's also extremely nice when you're tracing down a single threaded problem
[15:40:46] <Notch> that means I CAN fix it if it turns out I have to
[15:40:59] <Riven_> yeah... dirty solutions are just fine
[15:41:10] <Notch> as long as you don't end up in a dead end in the code, yes
[15:41:24] <Riven_> there is a nasty sideeffect though
[15:41:30] <Notch> oh?
[15:41:47] <Riven_> in multithreaded code, most raceconditions simply down happen if you have a dogslow logger in your inner loop
[15:41:53] <Riven_> down = don't
[15:42:03] <Notch> haha, yes. I've seen that
[15:42:05] <Notch> heisenbug. =)
[15:42:15] * Riven_ googles
[15:42:32] <Riven_> ah
[15:42:55] <Riven_> the JIT is a massive heigenbug
[15:43:08] <Riven_> it's not even deterministic in single threaded code
[15:43:17] <Riven_> but i think i rambled enough |
Corrected post
On his visit to Los Angeles next week, President Obama will deliver remarks on the economy at a visit to DreamWorks Animation in Glendale, a White House official said on Thursday.
Obama will speak on Nov. 26.
“The motion picture and television industry is a growing industry, and continues to create thousands of jobs across the country,” the White House official said.
In his previous visit to Los Angeles, Obama had dinner with DreamWorks Animation chieftain Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of his top donors and fundraisers.
The DreamWorks visit is part of a swing through Los Angeles that includes events to raise money for House and Senate Democratic campaign committees. On the evening of Nov. 25, Obama is scheduled to attend fundraisers at the home of Magic Johnson and Haim Saban. He also is scheduled for a fundraiser the next morning, Nov. 26, at the home of “Friends” co-creator Marta Kauffman, at an event to raise money for the Democratic National Committee.
Update: A previous version of this post misidentified the dates of fundraisers Obama is attending during his Los Angeles visit.Stewart immigration detention centre is situated on the outskirts of Lumpkin, Georgia, a ghost town seven days a week. Visitors and detainees arriving at the centre – capacity: 2,000, all male – are greeted by a huge painted sign on a water tank: “CCA: America’s Leader in Partnership Corrections.”
I toured the centre, with the exception of the isolation ward, when I visited Georgia in August. Five men followed me everywhere: one from the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the centre operator, and the rest from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It felt like overkill. They looked nervous the entire time, worried about my questions, worried something unexpected could happen and worried that I’d see something that would embarrass them. Down a long hallway, lit brightly with neon lights and smelling of paint and detergent, lines of inmates walked past me – some smiling, some waving and some looking forlorn.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Since October last year, ICE has removed more than 100,000 people from the US.’ Photograph: Antony Loewenstein
Despite the White House this year describing the surge of immigrants as an “urgent situation”, and privatised detention centres opening across America, Barack Obama continues to postpone his long-awaited immigration reforms, leaving many feeling betrayed. Since October last year, ICE has removed more than 100,000 people from the US. They are mostly Guatemalans, Hondurans and El Salvadorans who were in the US unlawfully – the three countries comprise roughly 29% of ICE removals federally. Just this year 70,000 children will arrive alone on America’s border, fleeing poverty and the US-led drug war in Central America.
The average inmate stay at Stewart is only 38 days, far less than most prisons. It’s virtually impossible for the detainees to establish any sense of permanence. It’s positive that long-term detention is largely avoided, unlike in detention centres in Britain, Greece and Australia, but inmates are often moved from one facility to another while others with deep roots in America are deported back to their country of origin without transparency. They are numbers to be processed.
Many inmates live in large, barred pods, with a maximum occupancy of 62. Others live in smaller rooms or the segregation unit. I spotted a few female CCA staff inside the pods with the male inmates. A sign next to one of the rooms read, “Upon Entering Detainee Pod All CCA Female Staff Will Announce Female in POD.”
Another pod had its lights dimmed because the inmates started working in the kitchen at 5am and were resting. CCA pays US$4 per day for inmates to perform kitchen duties, and less for other jobs (barbers receive $2, for example). ICE was proud to tell me that the law only mandates the state paying $1 per day, so CCA is doing a fine job.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Keep Detention Safe: ICE has zero tolerance for sexual abuse and assault.’ Photograph: Antony Loewenstein
Men in a different, brightly lit pod were laying on their bunk beds under blankets and sheets. A microwave, cable TV, sink, Playstation and Wii were inside. One man was wearing headphones to listen to the TV in front of him. Basins and toilets were behind a curtain. Metal tables and seats were fixed to the floor. “I’m not saying it’s like the Hilton here”, an ICE manager said. Signs in English and Spanish read, “Keep Detention Safe: ICE has zero tolerance for sexual abuse and assault”.
A notice listed a phone number for inmates to call if they needed assistance. Telephones are available for inmates to call lawyers, embassies and friends, but the cost is exorbitant because of price gouging from companies making a fortune selling phone cards to inmates. It’s a hugely profitable business, just one of many markets to be exploited inside America’s incarceration system.
The library was stocked with countless Bibles and romance novels. Detainees played soccer and basketball, both inside and outside under the bright, blue sky. They have two hours daily to enjoy the outdoors. In the medical centre I saw an inmate in an orange jumpsuit and orange Crocs shoes hooked up to a drip. The medical offer refused to tell me about his condition. I wondered if it’s sickness or something worse; a few months before my arrival detainees went on hunger strike after complaints about rotten food. As soon as I see him we’re moved on.
I then passed a guard staring into a darkened cell. He was looking through a small window at an inmate sitting, looking straight ahead, with eyes wide open. He wasn’t handcuffed, but sat perfectly still in a flame retardant suicide smock, like a straitjacket. What exactly could he use to light himself when locked in a cell on his own, with the guard watching him like a hawk? The medical officer said that suicide watch wasn’t always necessary, but with the high rate of removals from Stewart a detainee’s state of mind was often fragile.
Another door led to the centre’s own court, where claims by immigrants who wish to remain in the country were assessed. The courts are under the executive, not the judicial branch of government, and serious questions exist over their lack of accountability. Many decisions aren’t even written down, hearings are secretive and access to lawyers is difficult. Almost every immigrant brought before the court is issued a deportation order.
Unlike America’s prison population, where drug and alcohol use and abuse are common, ICE told me that these problems don’t exist at Stewart. Throughout the visit I never saw any abuse, violence or racism. It was the ideal tour. My hosts were friendly and attentive, and dismissed the numerous inmate claims. One detainee I spoke to told me of racist taunting and abuse by guards, and boredom. He had heard about maggots in the food from a fellow detainee but hadn’t seen it himself. His own story was troubling, a migrant from Guyana in the 1970s facing deportation to a nation he hadn’t seen in 40 years.
Although both CCA and ICE claim the facility isn’t run like a private prison, in reality it operates like one. But according to Silky Shah, co-director of Detention Watch Network, CCA and other operating companies have only so much power. “They don’t have complete control,” she says. “Decisions are being made by politicians.” She is campaigning against a Congress-mandated quota that dictates 34,000 immigrants must be imprisoned in ICE centres nightly; CCA is effective at lobbying to ensure ongoing contracts.
A report released recently by some of America’s leading advocacy organisations found that ICE arrests in Georgia increased by “at least 953%” between the 2007 and 2013 financial years. Georgia’s rate of imprisoning immigrants was directly related to the colour of their skin: over that same period of time, only 1.6% of those detained by ICE were of “fair or light complexion”.
Huge numbers of families have also been separated, including individuals who had been living in Georgia since at least 2003. On the day I arrived at Stewart, 1,766 detainees were behind bars, the vast majority from El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala, with 60 other countries represented.
Shah’s organisation believes that “private interests should not be involved” in the detention business. But privatised incarceration is only one profitable area of commerce. She worries that companies selling ankle monitoring and surveillance will benefit if Obama even moderately reduces the number of people in detention.
“We believe in abolishing all detention centres in US”, Shah says. “At the moment, the burden is on the detainee to prove why they should stay but the burden should be on the government to justify expulsion. They should assess if the immigrant has community support.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘CCA’s strong financial performance never arrived in Lumpkin.’ Photograph: Antony Loewenstein
Out in Lumpkin, the streets were deserted. The shops on Main Street were mostly empty, paint fraying on the window panes. A taxidermy outlet was one of the few open businesses. The town, in one of America’s poorest counties, is all but unknown to most Americans. Its population barely breaks 1,000.
I met a man in his 20s, either high or drunk, who was hanging out at a petrol station with his friends. He had a tattoo on his bare chest: “Me Against The World.” He told me he’s been living in Miami. “It’s so much better there,” he said. He was only there for a short visit.
The town’s dwindling youth population are leaving for greener pastures in bigger cities nearby. CCA started building Stewart in 2004, and sold the idea to ICE and the local community years later as both an economic benefit for local residents and a deterrent in a state traditionally hostile to immigrants.
Although the company’s 2014 financial results were strong, the benefits never arrived in Lumpkin. Many staff members don’t live in the town, but commute from more viable cities. Lumpkin reminds me of crumbling towns next to other detention facilities I’ve seen in Australia, Britain and Greece. The same failed promises from the same centre companies and state authorities were made in those nations too. The economic promise of a local detention centre is usually a lie.
Even in the detention centre itself CCA’s own employees struggle financially. I met one guard who was selling potato crisps, bottled water and chocolates to raise money from staff to support struggling CCA employees around the country. Although it’s admirable that people want to help, it’s revealing that the company doesn’t raise wages, but instead facilitates the sale of junk food.
In tough circumstances this kind of charity is often all people have. In Lumpkin, a small, Christian-run volunteer group, El Refugio, supports the visitors and families of detainees coming to the town. They operate a house over weekends very close to Stewart detention centre and offer free meals, accommodation, clothes and shoes – and comfort.
When I pay a visit one Saturday, a few days before my official tour inside Stewart, people from Atlanta and Columbus are providing a compassionate ear to an inmate. The conversation goes on for around an hour, with some hearing horrific stories. One man, Greg, tells me that “many Americans think anyone who enters America ‘illegally’ should be deported but we want to show a different side of people.” One of the group’s founders, Katie Beno Valencia, says El Refugio remains committed to shutting down any facility that makes money from misery.
This kind of humanity is sorely missing from America’s immigration debate, defined by toxic rhetoric from many Republicans and timidity from Democrats. Adelina Nicholls, executive director of Georgia Latino Alliance For Human Rights, doesn’t believe America wants to solve its immigration issues. “US people often care more about hunger in Ethiopia then poor Guatemalans here”, she told me at her office on the outskirts of Atlanta.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The economic promise of a local detention centre is usually a lie.’ Photograph: Antony Loewenstein
As a key representative of the large Latino community in Georgia, Nicholls sees the effect immigration detention has on individuals and families. “Stewart detention centre hurts us deeply and many detainees inside have been in the US for years,” she says. “They ask, ‘Why are gringos doing this to us?’ These workers have been employed for years in farms and restaurants and anger is growing. We are trying to mobilise resistance and civil disobedience.”
Her organisation receives at least 600 calls a month on its hotline, mostly Latinos asking for help. “It’s hard getting effective pro-bono lawyers here”, she tells me. “There are overly high bails for our clients... it’s a racist mindset [in Georgia]. It’s white supremacy with its concerns over brown people. It’s more profitable to behave this way.”
I saw just how profitable the industry can be when I visited the American Correctional Association conference in Salt Lake City in August. The five-day event brings America’s prison industry, wardens, county officials and lobbyists under one roof. As America shifts slowly but noticeably away from mass incarceration towards privatised probation, half-way houses and surveillance, new markets emerge. CCA’s CEO, Damon Hininger, has noted that his company is “well-positioned for growth opportunities”.
At Salt Lake City everything is on show: surveillance devices, Swat team uniforms, weapons, plastic e-cigarettes for inmates, drug-testing kits and prisoner-made furniture. Green prison designers and service contractors offer their services to public officials eager to spend tax dollars.
These are people who look at America’s prison and immigration system and see dollar signs. One night at an outdoor rooftop party I spoke to a man who works at GTL, a provider of communication and technology to prisons. The company’s website describes itself as a “corrections innovation leader”. He said he loves his job because he embraces new technology and revels in the chance to promote it.
“This industry hasn’t changed for over 100 years because of men who didn’t see any need to do so”, he said. “But new technology is forcing these shifts and my generation is at the forefront of it.”British Airways is considering ditching free food in economy class on short-haul flights in response to changing consumer habits – and even the free long-haul meal could be up for review.
Passengers would instead have the option of paying for a better quality meal, the new BA chief executive, Alex Cruz, is considering. Cruz, who took over in April, was formerly at BA’s codeshare partner Vueling, a Spanish budget carrier.
IAG revises growth plan after Brussels attacks affect demand for flights Read more
Charging for meals would remove one of the last onboard differences between BA and its budget rivals, but help the national carrier compete on fares. BA has already added charges for checking in bags, brought in under the guise of discounts for hand-luggage-only fares.
The other airlines owned by BA’s parent company IAG – Vueling, Iberia and Aer Lingus – already charge for food, and passengers on budget carriers have become accustomed to buying food from shops in airport departure lounges prior to boarding.
BA said reports of imminent meal charges, including a possible tie-in with suppliers such as Waitrose, were “pure speculation”. However, John Strickland, a leading airline consultant, said the move would be no surprise, and could save the airline unnecessary wastage as well as raising revenue. He said: “In business class, passengers are still getting a very nice product offer. But it’s inconsistent in economy. People are used to going onboard loaded with food from shops at the moment because they don’t know what to expect on BA – a full meal, or a wrap and a packet of crisps. BA is in a no-man’s land at the moment. It needs to bring some clarity to better meet or manage customer expectations.”
Long-haul passengers may not be immune to the developments. A new “enhanced meal” option on long-haul flights has recently been introduced by BA, where passengers pre-pay for a menu of their choice.
Cruz’s boss, Willie Walsh, the chief executive of IAG, recently told the Guardian that he was an admirer of low-cost, long-haul operator Norwegian, which charges transatlantic passengers £28 for a pre-ordered meal service or £10-11 for fresh food from the trolley. “There appears to be consumer acceptance of that... that if you want a meal on a long-haul flight, you’re going to have to pay for it. We’ll see what happens.”
A BA spokesman said: “We are constantly reviewing every element of the experience our customers receive, including the in-flight catering, to ensure we’re delivering what they want. Everything we do is with our customers in mind and we will make changes that reflect their feedback.”OAKLAND — Joe Lacob and Draymond Green are clear about this, even clearer than they usually are, and these are two guys who find it practically impossible to hide their truest, rawest emotions, anyway.
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Warriors 121, Hornets 110: Warriors’ DeMarcus Cousins makes more progress Lacob, the owner of the Warriors, and Draymond Green, the team’s starting power forward and centrifugal emotional force, might be the two most similarly-wired members of this franchise, and together they’re the team’s thrumming competitive engine.
They know this. They understand it about each other and themselves. And it’s a large part of who the Warriors have been, are, and will continue to be, as they get set for Game 1 of the NBA Finals — and the advent of their third consecutive ultimate meeting with Cleveland — on Thursday.
On this multi-layered team, general manager Bob Myers and coach Steve Kerr are the thoughtful, mindful architects; Stephen Curry and Andre Iguodala are the calm locker-room authorities and counselors; Kevin Durant is the new and vital ingredient.
And Green and Lacob are the Warriors’ heart-on-sleeve litigators, instigators and full-throttle fire-starters.
Which is why, now, a year after Green’s series-turning suspension in Game 5 of the Finals against Cleveland, Lacob doesn’t hesitate to maintain his 100-percent support of Green’s actions back then.
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“It never even crossed my mind to be mad at him,” Lacob said last week of Green’s flick at LeBron James in Game 4 last year that earned him his fourth Flagrant Foul point and an automatic one-game suspension.
“He’s a tremendous competitor. I just love the guy. He’s just a fantastic competitor, plays so hard, just a great smart player and I support him.”
The Warriors, of course, were up 3-1 in the series before Green was suspended, then lost Game 5 at Oracle Arena with Green watching with Myers from a suite at the Coliseum next-door, and lost Games 6 and 7 with Green back in action.
As a tribute to Green, Lacob famously wore Green’s jersey while sitting courtside during Game 5… a gesture that this year was copied by Wizards owner Ted Leonsis when forward Kelly Oubre was serving a playoff suspension.
“I didn’t really think about it at the time, just was obvious I should do that,” Lacob said of donning Green’s jersey at such a controversial time.
Green and Lacob were close before that game–often texting each other motivational messages and sharing the bond of two people whose lives started out far from where they are now.
But that game, and the rumbling aftermath, absolutely tied Green and Lacob, and also Green and Myers, together in a profound way.
You want to know why Warriors management supports Green through the occasional bump and controversy? Because they know he fights for them on the court, with everything he has, and because Lacob and Myers understand and depend on that.
“To get suspended from Game 5 and Joe wears my jersey? How many owners are doing that?” Green said. “That goes a long way.
“To be suspended, go next door, (Myers) comes sits with me the entire game? That stuff goes a long way.
“But our relationship has definitely evolved over the years. No. 1, you figure out how similar personalities you have and you identify more and more with each other.”
Lacob is still bothered by the circumstances and timing of Green’s suspension and–very Draymond-like–isn’t bashful about saying so.
Most especially Lacob points out that Green was not called for a foul when he tapped James’ groin late in Game 4, but was retroactively given a Flagrant-1 by league discipline czar Kiki Vandeweghe when everybody knew that one more point would trigger the suspension.
“I certainly was not happy about him being assessed a flagrant foul by the league after the fact, a day after he was not even assessed a common foul by the referees on the floor,” Lacob said.
“I have a problem with that. And the league knows that. And I did and I still do. I don’t agree with that particular rule or ability for the league to do that.”
In the moments after clinching the West finals over San Antonio, Lacob said he thought the Warriors were the better team in last year’s Finals. Does Lacob think the Warriors lost the series because of the suspension?
“Well, I’d rather not go there,” Lacob said. “Certainly it contributed, it enabled to happen what did happen. But the Cavaliers certainly deserved to win the series.
“I never meant to imply otherwise. They came back from 3-1, all credit to them and they are the champions.”
But you wanted the Cavaliers…
“What I said… I didn’t really care who we played truthfully just wanted to get there, for the opportunity to win a championship,” said Lacob, noting that he previously was a minority owner of the Celtics and would’ve had interest in playing the Celtics in these Finals, too.
“And I really don’t want to speak for our players or anybody else, or coaches, just me personally, I guess I slightly would’ve preferred playing the Cavaliers only because I feel we lost to them last year and I personally feel like it’d be nice to have the opportunity to get it back from them.”
Lacob’s son, Kirk, a Warriors assistant GM, jokingly calls his father “the Draymond” of team management, and Joe Lacob considers that a large compliment.
Competitive. Edgy. Demanding. Occasionally misunderstood. Maybe sometimes a little annoying.
Yeah, Draymond gets all of that.
“My relationship with Joe is great,” Green said. “You know, obviously it’s evolved over the years. I think we’ve got that same kind of fire, same type of passion.
“Bob’s the same way–Bob just is not as outspoken as Joe and I, but he’s the same way. Just that same type of burning desire to be the best, to win every game, to be right on every single play.
“Joe and I are a lot more outspoken than Bob, but when you really to know him, he’s the exact same way.”
Green is the kid from Saginaw, Mich., who worked his way to become a star at Michigan State then Green’s raw athletic skills didn’t measure with many in his draft class, so he slipped to the 35th overall pick of the 2012 draft. The Warriors are very thankful of that.
Lacob was a middle-class kid who built his fortune taking some great risks in the venture capital world, won the bidding to the Warriors right from under Larry Ellison, and declared immediately that the Warriors would win titles, when they were, at the time, one of the worst franchises in sports.
“In my case, I’m not the most athletic player, I don’t have the greatest jump shot,” Green said. “I don’t have the greatest ball-handling. Like I don’t have Steph’s jumpshot or KD’s length and athleticism and ability to score or Steph and Kyrie (Irving)’s handle or Steph and Klay (Thompson)’s jumpshot.
“I don’t have those things. But a part of what’s made me good is my desire, just my burning desire to win and to be great.
“And when you look at that with Joe, not to say Joe’s not smart, he’s very smart. But mores o than his smarts what has gotten him over the edge is his burning desire to be great, and so his burning desire to be great at everything he’s done is what’s gotten him over the top.
“There’s a lot of smart people. He’s smart. But that’s what not got him over the top — it’s being smart plus having the desire that not many other people have.”
Green sees that in Lacob, Lacob sees that in Green, and if you’re looking for either man to critique the other for a rabid competitive streak, you will be waiting a long, long time.send this article to a friend
Saving Our Young Men
By Marty Nemko
This year, almost twice as many women as men will earn bachelor’s degrees.
For the same work, women typically earn at least as much as men.
Yet society continues to do more for girls and women, usually at men’s expense.
By Marty Nemko
Twenty years ago, when I began career counseling, my male and female clients were equally upbeat about their future. Today, for the most part, the girls and women are confident, feeling the world is their oyster, while the boys and men more often are despondent, scared, or angry. The phrase that best defines my male clients is “beaten down.”
What happened? Most of the guys can’t put their finger on the cause, but having had 2,800 clients over 20 years, I believe I’ve pieced it together.
Starting in elementary school, boys are made to feel inferior. Take Your Daughter to Work Day implied to boys that they count less. Endless lessons highlighting the contributions of women (from Pocahontas to Rosa Parks to Hillary Clinton) and the evils of men (from Hannibal to Hitler to McCarthy) make boys feel inferior. That inferiority is reinforced when they come home from school and see TV shows and movies with Doofus Dads or Scuzzball Sams being put in their place by Wise Women. In the effort to boost girls’ self-esteem, boys’ are destroyed.
When boys start to look into college, the very first thing they see are the colleges’ brochures and websites, with far more pictures of women and minorities; the subliminal message: we don’t care about white males. Application essays often ask students to describe a hardship they overcame. “Hardship” is often code for “overcoming the disadvantage of being a woman or a minority.” Many white males, if only unconsciously, feel this is just one more thing discouraging them from applying.
If and when they arrive at college, young men find the anti-white-male juggernaut continues, from the very first day. At orientation, they hear of endless clubs, mentoring programs, and other opportunities for women and minorities, almost none for men, let alone for white men. In the classroom, the denigration of white men accelerates. Lysistrata often replaces Lear, The Doll House displaces Homer, with the writings of dead white European males disproportionately used as whipping boys, deconstructed in anti-male ways. More broadly, the “white male hegemony” is presented as society’s worst cancer, one which must be extirpated at all cost, with constant vigilance required to stamp out any area in which men are ‘overrepresented.” Yet, it’s ignored or even extolled when women are overrepresented. For example, women dominate the highly influential book publishing world, putting out an endless stream of pro-woman/anti-male bestsellers such as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? and Dee Dee Myers’ just-published, Why Women Should Rule the World.
So, far fewer men are going to college, and those that do, drop out at much higher rates. In the 2007 college graduation class, 58% were women, 42% men, a dramatic reversal from just two decades ago. Today, with a bachelor’s degree being the minimum requirement for most decent jobs, this is a disaster for men. And a disaster for half of our population is a disaster for us all.
When young men apply for jobs, they immediately see the anti-white-male bias continue: the want ads so frequently feature an EEOC statement encouraging women and minorities (but never white males) to apply. They see the photos on employers’ websites disproportionately highlighting women and minorities.
If a white male gets hired, he’ll likely quickly learn that women’s approaches to work-- collaborative, team-oriented, exploratory of feelings--is viewed as superior to men’s competitive goal-orientedness. If a man dare says, “Enough of this processing of feelings, let’s just get on with it,” he’ll usually be viewed as Neanderthal if not fired for “not fitting in” or for not being “a team player.” White men hear of mentorship programs created for women and minorities, but not for them. And they’ll soon find out about reverse discrimination promotions that occur because of the organization’s diversity committee pressures, because the employer fears a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton running to the media claiming the organization is racist, or because the only group not an EEOC-protected class is young white men.
And dare a white man object, even if he doesn’t get censured or fired, he will likely receive either or both of two invalid and invalidating refutations:
-- Women earn 79 cents on the dollar. This statistic is terribly misleading. According to the book, Why Men Earn More, based on a decade of research using government statistics, for the same work, women earn at least as much as men do.
-- Fewer women than men are in top positions. That implies that the reason is sexism, a glass ceiling. The far more frequent reason is that many more women than men care more about work/life balance and/or want to be more involved with their children. (Ironically, we genuflect to women’s rights to work less so they can raise children at the same time as we worry about global warming--and environmentalists agree that the greatest threat to the environment is overpopulation.) Getting promoted to a senior position usually requires willingness to work evenings or weekends, to spend discretionary time doing professional activities, and to move family across the country, Women may wisely not want to do all that, but cannot legitimately claim they’re not being promoted because they have two x chromosomes.
A final assault on men’s self-efficacy is that that they’re made to feel like the disposable sex. They see an endless array of pink ribbons to fight breast cancer. But where are the ribbons for prostate cancer or for early heart attack, which kills, early, many more men? Men die 5 1/2 years younger than women and live their last decade in worse health, yet only pink ribbons proliferate. And the heart disease ads I’ve seen are all about women and heart disease.
So millions of young men have become depressed, insecure, and scared. They’re rarely angry--they’ve been told so long that they’re inferior, they just blame themselves. So, they return to their parents’ sofas, sleeping late, playing video games during the day and getting wasted at night.
What’s the answer? It reduces to one word: fairness. In our attempt to lift up girls and women, we have destroyed boys and men. Just as we are assiduous to avoid unfair treatment of women and minorities, we must do the same for boys and men: in school curriculum, television and movie programming, college admissions and programming, hiring, promotion, and workplace culture, and health research funding and outreach.
Until then, guys, the advice is the same as so many Black parents have given their kids: “No use complaining. You simply gotta be twice as good to get half as far. Eventually, the pendulum will swing back into balance.” Maybe.
Dr. Nemko is co-president of the National Organization for Men, which educates the media to bring about fair treatment of males and females in schools, colleges, the media, employment, family law, and health care. www.orgformen.org. mnemko@comcast.net.
.Image zoom Girl Scouts
Forget the holidays, the best time of the year is now here — Girl Scouts are officially selling cookies.
To celebrate the only way we know how, we had the (scout’s) honor of trying the newest additions to their lineup: S’mores-flavored cookies.
Girl Scouts revealed the news of the two new cookies back in August and our mouths have been watering ever since. Now that the Girl Scout cookie selling season has commenced — marking the 100th year since the first known sale (!) — it was time to get our hands on the highly-anticipated treats.
The first of the two s’mores flavors is a crispy graham cookie dipped in a thin layer of crème icing, and then in a layer of creamy chocolate. One staffer described it as having a “very subtle s’mores flavor, but pretty good.”
WATCH THIS: How to Make Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Skillet Cookie
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He favored it over the second cookie, which is sandwich-style with graham cracker cookies surrounding a layer of marshmallow and a layer of chocolate. A staffer says this one had a “strong marshmallow flavor” while another says “it’d be perfect for dipping in a glass of milk.”
If you’re not a fan of s’mores in general, don’t fret. Girl Scouts also have 10 more of their best-selling flavors to offer while Pillsbury recently released baking mixes and General Mills released cereal to cover all of your cookie season needs.
The diet starts next month.The Startling Plight of China’s Leftover Ladies
The Spicy Love Doctor was running late. A well-heeled crowd one recent Sunday afternoon had packed into the second-floor lounge of Beijing’s Trends Building — home to the publishing offices of several glossy magazines, including the Chinese editions of Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar — to hear Wu Di, a contributor to China’s Cosmopolitan and author of an alluring new book, I Know Why You’re Left. The poised, professional crowd, outfitted in black blazers, leather boots, and trendy thick-framed glasses, was composed mostly of women in their mid-20s to mid-30s — prime Cosmo readers and all there waiting patiently to hear Wu, who typically charges $160 an hour for "private romance counseling," explain their surprising plight: being single women in a country with a startling excess of men.
When at last she sauntered to the front of the room, microphone in hand, Wu, a pert, married 43-year-old who resembles a brunette Suze Orman (and whose chief advertised credential, it turns out, is an MBA from the University of Houston), surveyed her audience. Then she broke out into a practiced grin and, in the relentlessly chipper staccato common to Chinese public speakers, launched into her talk: a mix of sisterly homily, lovemaking tips, and economics lecture. It’s unrealistic to expect that you will be madly in love with one person forever, she warned, or even that passion can be the right guide to marriage. Her authority? No less than the wandering eye of Bill Clinton, which, she told her solemnly attentive audience, "proves that there is no method to sustain feverish lust between long-married couples."
The majority of her talk was devoted not to such timeless aphorisms, but to describing a new conundrum in China: the plight of its sheng nu, or "leftover ladies." In popular parlance, sheng nu refers to women above a certain age — some say 27, others 30 — who are unmarried and presumably "left over," too old to be desirable. Increasingly, sheng nu are a topic of alternating humor and alarm for Chinese newspaper columnists, TV sitcoms, reality dating shows, and studies by government bodies like the All-China Women’s Federation; according to its 2010 survey, more than 90 percent of male respondents agreed that women should marry before age 27 or risk being forever undesired.
What’s most startling about this national obsession with China’s Bridget Joneses is that sheer numbers would seem to say it couldn’t possibly be so. China has far too few women, not too many. This is a country where 118 boys were born for every 100 girls in 2010, and by 2020 the number of men unable to find partners is expected to reach 24 million. So how could any women possibly be left over?
As science journalist Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection, and numerous scholars have documented, a confluence of factors has led to this deeply male-skewed national sex ratio. For centuries, Chinese families preferred male children because girls were obliged to leave home eventually and move into their husband’s household rather than stay and take care of their parents; the advent of the one-child policy in 1980 only increased the stakes. Over the next decade and a half, the newly widespread availability of ultrasound scans led to a dramatic uptick in sex-selective abortions — banned since 1995 but still easy enough to arrange. The upshot is that by the 2020s, an estimated 15 to 20 percent of Chinese men of marriageable age will lack potential brides, according to Jiang Quanbao of Xi’an Jiaotong University. You might think this would create a sense of entitled ease among China’s single ladies, but the reality is rather more complicated, as the attentive supplicants to the Spicy Love Doctor attest.
"Why do sheng nu happen now in China?" Wu asked. After a dramatic pause, she answered her own question: "It is a result of high GDP growth." At this point, several women in the audience fidgeted, wary of an economics sermon, but Wu continued. "In the past, there was no such word as sheng nu. But today women have more wealth and education — they have better jobs, and higher requirements for men." She reflected: "Now you want to find a man you have deep feelings for who also has a house and a car. You won’t all find that."
She wasn’t telling the women they should want less, exactly. What she was really pointing out was just how much better today’s Chinese women have it. Thirty years ago, a marriage certificate was a passport into adulthood. "Until you married, there were no basic human rights. No right to have sex before marriage. No house allocated by your danwei [government work unit] before marriage." Today those barriers have crumbled, with rising sexual freedom and a booming private real estate market. Why marry unless you find someone just right? "The future is different," Wu |
sc: 15 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +4 Def: +2 Mgk: +3 MDf: +3 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: -1 Stat Growth Rate HP: C Luc: A Mgk: C Def: F Skl: B MDf: A Spd: A Stat Expectations (Valkyuria Lv 20) HP: 34 Def: 7 Mgk: 15 MDf: 25 Skl: 22 Luc: 30 Spd: 25 Supporting Characters Rutgar, Claine, Dieck, Dorothy, Lance Comments 9/10 Clarine will max Speed, Magic Defense, and Luck very quickly, making her a very effective wall. Only the most accurate of units such as Heroes, Swordmasters, and Snipers will have a chance to hit her. Anything else will have 0% accuracy against her. She is also a great rescuer/healer who can reach people far away and get them out of harm's way or heal them. Her only drawback is her pathetically low Magic. She'll do fine against melee units, but she will have a lot of trouble damaging enemies like Druids or Bishops that have high magic defense. 16. Rutgar ルトガー Joins At: Chapter 4: Speak with Clarine Class: Myrmidom >> Swordmaster Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Sword After Promotion: Sword Initial Statistics (Lv 4) HP: 22 Def: 5 Str: 7 MDf: 0 Skl: 12 Mov: 5 Spd: 13 Con: 7 Luc: 2 Rsc: 6 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +5 Def: +3 Str: +2 MDf: +2 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +1 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: +1 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: C Str: C Def: D Skl: B MDf: D Spd: B Stat Expectations (Swordmaster Lv 20) HP: 55 Def: 15 Str: 20 MDf: 9 Skl: 29 Luc: 12 Spd: 30 Supporting Characters Clarine, Dieck, Fir, Karel, Dayan Comments 8/10 Quite possibly the most overrated character in the game. Rutgar indeed does get impressive gains in Skill and Speed, but his other stats aren't that great. The other Myrmidom, Fir, is in fact better because she gets higher Luck, allowing her to dodge more attacks. Don't get me wrong; Rutgar is a great unit to have, but I just think Fir is better. Using both is an option, but Swordmasters aren't my favorite class, so one is enough for me, and it's usually Fir. Rutgar gets Hard Mode stat bonuses. 17. Saul サウル Joins At: Chapter 6: Start of battle Class: Cleric >> Bishop Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Staff After Promotion: Staff, Light Magic Initial Statistics (Lv 5) HP: 20 Def: 2 Mgk: 4 MDf: 5 Skl: 6 Mov: 5 Spd: 10 Con: 6 Luc: 2 Rsc: 5 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +3 Def: +2 Mgk: +3 MDf: +3 Skl: +3 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: +1 Stat Growth Rate HP: B Luc: F Mgk: C Def: F Skl: B MDf: B Spd: B Stat Expectations (Bishop Lv 20) HP: 43 Def: 9 Mgk: 20 MDf: 25 Skl: 24 Luc: 7 Spd: 25 Supporting Characters Dorothy, Cecilia, Igraine, Ellen, Yodel Comments 8/10 His horrible Luck causes him to be susceptible to critical hits, which means he would be in grave danger if he gets targeted by Swordmasters. Other than that, however, his stats are nice. He's slightly more durable than Ellen, but he's frail all the same, so it doesn't really matter who you use. 18. Dorothy ドロシー Joins At: Chapter 6: Start of battle Class: Archer >> Sniper Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Bow After Promotion: Bow Initial Statistics (Lv 3) HP: 19 Def: 4 Str: 5 MDf: 2 Skl: 6 Mov: 5 Spd: 6 Con: 7 Luc: 3 Rsc: 6 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +2 Def: +2 Str: +3 MDf: +3 Skl: +3 Mov: +1 Spd: +3 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: +1 Stat Growth Rate HP: B Luc: C Str: B Def: D Skl: B MDf: D Spd: B Stat Expectations (Sniper Lv 20) HP: 51 Def: 11 Str: 23 MDf: 10 Skl: 26 Luc: 15 Spd: 26 Supporting Characters Saul, Percival, Clarine, Shin, Yodel Comments 10/10 Probably the best bow-user in the game, Dorothy is like Rebecca from FE7 stat wise. Once you get her going, she becomes unstoppable with her high Strength, Skill, and Speed. You might be worried about her defense area, but her Speed allows her to dodge most attacks, so it won't matter. 19. Sue スー Joins At: Chapter 6: Speak with Roy Class: Nomad >> Nomadic Trooper Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Bow After Promotion: Bow, Sword Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 18 Def: 5 Str: 5 MDf: 0 Skl: 7 Mov: 7 Spd: 8 Con: 5 Luc: 4 Rsc: 15 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +6 Def: +2 Str: +2 MDf: +4 Skl: +1 Mov: +1 Spd: +1 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: -1 Stat Growth Rate HP: B Luc: B Str: C Def: F Skl: A MDf: F Spd: A Stat Expectations (Nomadic Trooper Lv 20) HP: 44 Def: 10 Str: 18 MDf: 9 Skl: 27 Luc: 22 Spd: 30 Supporting Characters Shin, Roy, Dayan, Fae, Wolt Comments 8/10 She's extremely fast and accurate, and she has high Luck, making her an impressive dodger. However, again that low Strength gets in the way. She will have trouble damaging things in later chapters because enemies generally tend to have more Defense than Magic Defense. Shin has higher Strength, so he's better to have. 20. Zealot ゼロット Joins At: Chapter 7: Speak with Roy Class: Paladin Usable Weapons: Sword, Spear, Axe Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 35 Def: 11 Str: 10 MDf: 7 Skl: 12 Mov: 8 Spd: 13 Con: 11 Luc: 5 Rsc: 14 Promotion Stat Additions (Already promoted) Stat Growth Rate HP: C Luc: F Str: D Def: D Skl: D MDf: F Spd: F Stat Expectations (Paladin Lv 20) HP: 48 Def: 15 Str: 13 MDf: 8 Skl: 15 Luc: 7 Spd: 16 Supporting Characters Treck, Noah, Yuno, Thito, Thany Comments 2/10 This is Marcus number two. Zealot has virtually the same stat growth rates and ends up with about the same stats as Marcus. Pretty useless. Doesn't even make a good benchwarmer. 21. Treck トレック Joins At: Chapter 7: Speak with Roy/Zealot Class: Social Knight >> Paladin Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Sword, Spear After Promotion: Sword, Spear, Axe Initial Statistics (Lv 3) HP: 25 Def: 8 Str: 8 MDf: 0 Skl: 6 Mov: 7 Spd: 7 Con: 9 Luc: 5 Rsc: 16 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +3 Def: +2 Str: +2 MDf: +3 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +2 Luc: +0 Rsc: -2 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: A Str: B Def: B Skl: C MDf: F Spd: C Stat Expectations (Paladin Lv 20) HP: 58 Def: 21 Str: 24 MDf: 5 Skl: 20 Luc: 25 Spd: 21 Supporting Characters Noah, Zealot, Miledy, Gonzales, Yuno Comments 9/10 With great Luck and Defense, Treck is a natural tank against units who don't use spells. He can soak up vast amounts of damage and his high Luck prevents critical hits as well. He's also a pretty good fighter because his Strength gets fairly high. I may be the only one, but I think he's better than Allen/Lance. 22. Noah ノア Joins At: Chapter 7: Speak with Roy/Zealot Class: Social Knight >> Paladin Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Sword, Spear After Promotion: Sword, Spear, Axe Initial Statistics (Lv 4) HP: 27 Def: 7 Str: 8 MDf: 1 Skl: 7 Mov: 7 Spd: 9 Con: 9 Luc: 6 Rsc: 16 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +3 Def: +2 Str: +2 MDf: +3 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +2 Luc: +0 Rsc: -2 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: B Str: C Def: C Skl: B MDf: D Spd: C Stat Expectations (Paladin Lv 20) HP: 55 Def: 19 Str: 20 MDf: 7 Skl: 25 Luc: 20 Spd: 22 Supporting Characters Treck, Zealot, Yuno, Fir, Karel Comments 9/10 He's pretty much the same as Treck except he has less Strength and better Skill. You can use both in the same way. You can pair him with Fir to make a devastating team. 23. Asthor アストール Joins At: Chapter 8: Start of battle Class: Thief Usable Weapons: Sword Initial Statistics (Lv 10) HP: 25 Def: 7 Str: 7 MDf: 3 Skl: 8 Mov: 6 Spd: 15 Con: 8 Luc: 11 Rsc: 7 Promotion Stat Additions (none) Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: F Str: C Def: D Skl: B MDf: D Spd: B Stat Expectations (Thief Lv 20) HP: 34 Def: 9 Str: 10 MDf: 5 Skl: 12 Luc: 13 Spd: 20 Supporting Characters Lilina, Bors, Barth, Igraine, Wendy Comments 6/10 Asthor isn't that useful because he barely maxes Speed and the other two Thieves will do so far before Asthor does. This isn't good for Asthor because stealing depends on high Speed. Stick to Chad/Cath for Thieves. 24. Lilina リリーナ Joins At: Chapter 8: Start of battle Class: Mage >> Sage Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Anima Magic After Promotion: Anima Magic, Staff Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 16 Def: 2 Mgk: 5 MDf: 7 Skl: 5 Mov: 5 Spd: 4 Con: 4 Luc: 4 Rsc: 3 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +3 Def: +1 Mgk: +3 MDf: +2 Skl: +3 Mov: +1 Spd: +3 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: +1 Stat Growth Rate HP: C Luc: B Mgk: A Def: F Skl: D MDf: B Spd: C Stat Expectations (Sage Lv 20) HP: 36 Def: 7 Mgk: 30 MDf: 22 Skl: 15 Luc: 22 Spd: 19 Supporting Characters Roy, Oujay, Bors, Barth, Wendy, Asthor, Gonzales, Garret Comments 8/10 She'll max Magic, period. But her Skill and Speed suffer greatly instead. She won't stand a chance against powerful melee enemies because of her low defense and speed. However, she'll be a wall against spellcasters. She's the perfect unit to kill Mamkutes without wasting your Divine Weapons, but if you're going to use her, you'll need to use lots of Secret Books and Pegasus Feathers to boost her Skill/Speed. 25. Wendy ウェンディ Joins At: Chapter 8: Automatically at 6th turn Class: Armor Knight >> General Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Spear After Promotion: Spear, Axe Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 19 Def: 8 Str: 4 MDf: 1 Skl: 3 Mov: 4 Spd: 3 Con: 10 Luc: 6 Rsc: 9 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +4 Def: +3 Str: +4 MDf: +3 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +4 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: +1 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: B Str: B Def: B Skl: B MDf: D Spd: B Stat Expectations (General Lv 20) HP: 55 Def: 22 Str: 23 MDf: 9 Skl: 23 Luc: 23 Spd: 22 Supporting Characters Bors, Barth, Asthor, Oujay, Lilina Comments 9/10 A great unit with high, well balanced stats all around. It may be difficult at first to get her up to par, but it's definitely worth it. She'd be perfect if not for that low Magic Defense... Pair her up with another useful unit like Oujay or Lilina to bring out her maximum potential. 26. Barth バース Joins At: Chapter 8: Automatically at 6th turn Class: Armor Knight >> General Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Spear After Promotion: Spear, Axe Initial Statistics (Lv 9) HP: 25 Def: 14 Str: 10 MDf: 1 Skl: 6 Mov: 4 Spd: 5 Con: 16 Luc: 2 Rsc: 15 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +4 Def: +4 Str: +3 MDf: +3 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +3 Con: +2 Luc: +0 Rsc: +2 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: D Str: A Def: C Skl: D MDf: F Spd: D Stat Expectations (General Lv 20) HP: 59 Def: 30 Str: 27 MDf: 4 Skl: 14 Luc: 8 Spd: 14 Supporting Characters Wendy, Bors, Asthor, Oujay, Lilina Comments 6/10 The worst of three Triangle Attack Generals. His Skill and Speed are just pathetic, and even though he'll max out Strength and Defense, there isn't much point if he always misses and can't do double attacks. If you just want to use him as a wall, however, he's your choice (but not against spellcasters). 27. Oujay オージェ Joins At: Chapter 8: Automatically at 6th turn Class: Mercenary >> Hero Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Sword After Promotion: Sword, Axe Initial Statistics (Lv 5) HP: 24 Def: 4 Str: 7 MDf: 0 Skl: 10 Mov: 5 Spd: 9 Con: 8 Luc: 6 Rsc: 7 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +4 Def: +4 Str: +2 MDf: +2 Skl: +1 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: +1 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: A Str: B Def: D Skl: B MDf: D Spd: A Stat Expectations (Hero Lv 20) HP: 58 Def: 13 Str: 24 MDf: 8 Skl: 24 Luc: 25 Spd: 26 Supporting Characters Wendy, Bors, Barth, Lilina, Lalam Comments 10/10 This is the best Hero in the game, and downright the best CHARACTER in the game IMO. He dodges all oncoming attacks with his high Speed and Luck, and he makes accurate, high-damaging dual attacks no matter what he's up against. He is by far the best candidate for the Durandal. 28. Fir フィル Joins At: Chapter 9: Speak with Noah Class: Myrmidom >> Swordmaster Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Sword After Promotion: Sword Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 19 Def: 3 Str: 6 MDf: 1 Skl: 9 Mov: 5 Spd: 10 Con: 5 Luc: 3 Rsc: 4 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +4 Def: +3 Str: +3 MDf: +2 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: +1 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: A Str: C Def: D Skl: B MDf: D Spd: B Stat Expectations (Swordmaster Lv 20) HP: 51 Def: 10 Str: 19 MDf: 12 Skl: 29 Luc: 22 Spd: 30 Supporting Characters Noah, Rutgar, Bartre, Karel, Shin Comments 9/10 High Luck gives her greater evasion rates, making her more effective than Rutgar. Her lack of Strength can be compensated with a good support. Her critical hit rate will go crazy after promotion, allowing her kill just about anything in one turn. She could easily take out her own father ;) Fir's stats will start out higher in Hard Mode. 29. Shin シン Joins At: Chapter 9: Speak with Fir Class: Nomad >> Nomadic Trooper Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Bow After Promotion: Bow, Sword Initial Statistics (Lv 5) HP: 24 Def: 7 Str: 7 MDf: 0 Skl: 8 Mov: 7 Spd: 10 Con: 7 Luc: 6 Rsc: 18 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +5 Def: +2 Str: +2 MDf: +3 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: -1 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: D Str: B Def: F Skl: B MDf: F Spd: B Stat Expectations (Nomadic Trooper Lv 20) HP: 54 Def: 12 Str: 24 MDf: 9 Skl: 27 Luc: 15 Spd: 28 Supporting Characters Dayan, Sue, Fir, Dorothy, Zeiss Comments 9/10 Much more reliable Strength makes Shin better than Sue. However, compared to other bow-users both Shin and Sue lose out stat wise. I never thought that Nomads were worth using because I have enough Archers already, and I never liked Nomads to begin with. If you plan on using a Nomad, choose Shin over Sue. Shin's stats get Hard Mode bonuses. 30. Gonzales ゴンザレス Joins At: Chapter 10: Speak with Lilina Class: Bandit >> Berserker Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Axe After Promotion: Axe Initial Statistics (Lv 5 or Lv 12 depending on which route you take) HP: 36 Def: 6 Str: 12 MDf: 0 Skl: 5 Mov: 5 Spd: 9 Con: 15 Luc: 5 Rsc: 14 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +4 Def: +3 Str: +2 MDf: +0 Skl: +5 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: +1 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: C Str: A Def: C Skl: F MDf: F Spd: A Stat Expectations (Berserker Lv 20) HP: 60 Def: 18 Str: 30 MDf: 0 Skl: 15 Luc: 17 Spd: 28 Supporting Characters Lilina, Echidna, Bartre, Garret, Dayan, Treck Comments 9/10 In terms of raw strength and power, nobody will be better than Gonzales. He'll max HP and Strength very quickly, and his other stats grow nicely as well, with the exception of Skill and Magic Defense. His low Skill can be fixed by giving him loads of Secret Books, but nothing can be done about having ABSOLUTE ZERO for Magic Defense. Just have him stay away from spellcasters and he'll be a natural tank/killing machine. The critical hit bonus is also nice. What's more, he gets Hard Mode stat bonuses as well. 31. Geese ギース Joins At: Chapter 10A/11B: Speak with Roy Class: Pirate >> Berserker Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Axe After Promotion: Axe Initial Statistics (Lv 10) HP: 33 Def: 8 Str: 10 MDf: 0 Skl: 9 Mov: 5 Spd: 9 Con: 11 Luc: 9 Rsc: 10 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +5 Def: +3 Str: +3 MDf: +0 Skl: +4 Mov: +1 Spd: +1 Con: +3 Luc: +0 Rsc: +3 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: B Str: B Def: C Skl: C MDf: F Spd: B Stat Expectations (Berserker Lv 20) HP: 60 Def: 16 Str: 27 MDf: 2 Skl: 21 Luc: 20 Spd: 21 Supporting Characters Cath, Echidna, Douglas, Garret, Lalam Comments 9/10 Geese doesn't have as much power as Gonzales, but he'll get more balanced stat gains. Geese and Gonzales sort of cancel each other's disadvantages out, so it's best to use them both. These two are always in my team because Berserkers are my favorite class and because nobody (except magicians) can stand in their path and survive. Too bad they can't support each other; then they would have been truly invincible. 32. Claine クレイン Joins At: Chapter 10B or Chapter 11A: Speak with Roy/Clarine Class: Sniper Usable Weapons: Bow Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 27 Def: 8 Str: 13 MDf: 6 Skl: 13 Mov: 6 Spd: 11 Con: 7 Luc: 10 Rsc: 6 Promotion Stat Additions (Already promoted) Stat Growth Rate HP: C Luc: A Str: C Def: D Skl: B MDf: C Spd: B Stat Expectations (Sniper Lv 20) HP: 38 Def: 10 Str: 20 MDf: 10 Skl: 21 Luc: 20 Spd: 20 Supporting Characters Clarine, Thito, Percival, Dieck, Elphin Comments 7/10 Claine's selling point is that his stats start out high and that his stat gains are good for an already promoted character. If you don't feel like going through the effort of building up Wolt or Dorothy, then Claine is for you. Still, he won't come close to Wolt/Dorothy stat-wise, so I would still recommend that you stick to them. Also, Claine gets stat bonuses in Hard Mode. 33. Thito ティト Joins At: Chapter 10B/11A: Speak with Claine Class: Pegasus Knight >> Falcon Knight Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Spear After Promotion: Spear, Sword Initial Statistics (Lv 8) HP: 22 Def: 7 Str: 6 MDf: 6 Skl: 8 Mov: 7 Spd: 11 Con: 5 Luc: 3 Rsc: 15 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +6 Def: +2 Str: +2 MDf: +2 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: -1 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: B Str: B Def: D Skl: B MDf: D Spd: A Stat Expectations (Falcon Knight Lv 20) HP: 47 Def: 14 Str: 21 MDf: 14 Skl: 24 Luc: 16 Spd: 28 Supporting Characters Claine, Allen, Thany, Yuno, Zealot Comments 9/10 This is the best of the three Pegasus Knights. Thito's not made of glass like Thany, and she's better than Yuno (no explanation necessary). Her defense area might still seem a little weak, but her Speed and Strength make up for it. Thito also won't have trouble damaging things while Thany can barely scratch them. Also, Thito will get Hard Mode stat bonuses. 34. Lalam ララム Joins At: Chapter 11A: Start of battle Class: Dancer Usable Weapons: None Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 14 Def: 2 Str: 1 MDf: 4 Skl: 2 Mov: 5 Spd: 11 Con: 4 Luc: 9 Rsc: 3 Promotion Stat Additions (none) Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: A Str: F Def: C Skl: F MDf: C Spd: A Stat Expectations (Dancer Lv 20) HP: 27 Def: 5 Str: 2 MDf: 9 Skl: 3 Luc: 24 Spd: 20 Supporting Characters Geese, Garret, Roy, Douglas, Oujay, Echidna, Percival Comments 7/10 She could be either very useful or downright useless depending on your playing style. If you think having one character be able to move again for each turn is good to have, then Lalam is crucial. If you think otherwise, there isn't much point in including her. 35. Echidna エキドナ Joins At: Chapter 11A: Speak with Lalam Class: Hero Usable Weapons: Sword, Axe Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 35 Def: 8 Str: 13 MDf: 7 Skl: 19 Mov: 6 Spd: 18 Con: 9 Luc: 6 Rsc: 8 Promotion Stat Additions (already promoted) Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: F Str: D Def: F Skl: D MDf: F Spd: D Stat Expectations (Hero Lv 20) HP: 49 Def: 10 Str: 18 MDf: 9 Skl: 22 Luc: 9 Spd: 22 Supporting Characters Geese, Gonzales, Lalam, Ward, Lott Comments 6/10 She would have been average if not for her low Strength. However, her weakness stands out when she's fighting alongside your other units. Her other stats aren't too bad, but for me having high Strength is critical. 36. Elphin エルフィン Joins At: Chapter 11B: Start of battle Class: Bard Usable Weapons: None Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 15 Def: 4 Str: 1 MDf: 1 Skl: 3 Mov: 5 Spd: 10 Con: 6 Luc: 11 Rsc: 5 Promotion Stat Additions (none) Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: A Str: F Def: C Skl: F MDf: A Spd: A Stat Expectations (Bard Lv 20) HP: 30 Def: 8 Str: 2 MDf: 11 Skl: 4 Luc: 23 Spd: 20 Supporting Characters Douglas, Percival, Fae, Claine, Cecilia Comments 7/10 (See 34. Lalam) 37. Bartre バアトル Joins At: Chapter 11B: Speak with Roy/Fir Class: Warrior Usable Weapons: Axe, Bow Initial Statistics (Lv 2) HP: 48 Def: 10 Str: 22 MDf: 3 Skl: 11 Mov: 6 Spd: 10 Con: 14 Luc: 14 Rsc: 13 Promotion Stat Additions (already promoted) Stat Growth Rate HP: B Luc: D Str: B Def: D Skl: D MDf: F Spd: D Stat Expectations (Warrior Lv 20) HP: 60 Def: 14 Str: 29 MDf: 4 Skl: 14 Luc: 16 Spd: 14 Supporting Characters Fir, Gonzales, Cath, Karel, Zeiss Comments 4/10 Impressive Strength/HP and crap everything else. His high-damaging attacks don't make a difference if they don't hit in the first place. Looks like his prime was in his youth, like so many other characters in this game. Thankfully, his daughter is a very useful unit, so we can praise him for that, though. 38. Ray レイ Joins At: Chapter 12: Speak with Lou Class: Shaman >> Druid Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Dark Magic After Promotion: Dark Magic, Staff Initial Statistics (Lv 10) HP: 23 Def: 5 Mgk: 12 MDf: 10 Skl: 9 Mov: 5 Spd: 9 Con: 4 Luc: 6 Rsc: 3 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +3 Def: +2 Mgk: +4 MDf: +2 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: +1 Stat Growth Rate HP: B Luc: F Mgk: B Def: F Skl: B MDf: C Spd: B Stat Expectations (Druid Lv 20) HP: 41 Def: 10 Mgk: 28 MDf: 21 Skl: 24 Luc: 10 Spd: 21 Supporting Characters Lou, Chad, Sophia, Hugh, Niime Comments 10/10 A great Shaman, Ray lines right up with his brother in terms of usefulness. He has one minor drawback of having terrible Luck, but that can be compensated with a support that increases evasion. He's quite fast and accurate for a Shaman, and he has great Magic as well, making him a great spellcaster. After promotion, he can use staves as well, adding on to his usefulness. He also gets Hard Mode stat bonuses. 39. Cath キャス Joins At: Chapter 12/16/20/22: Speak with Roy. She'll join if it's the 3rd time Roy has spoken to her. Class: Thief Usable Weapons: Sword Initial Statistics (Lv 5) HP: 16 Def: 2 Str: 3 MDf: 1 Skl: 7 Mov: 6 Spd: 11 Con: 5 Luc: 8 Rsc: 4 Promotion Stat Additions (none) Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: A Str: B Def: F Skl: B MDf: D Spd: A Stat Expectations (Thief Lv 20) HP: 31 Def: 5 Str: 11 MDf: 5 Skl: 16 Luc: 17 Spd: 20 Supporting Characters Chad, Hugh, Geese, Garret, Bartre Comments 9/10 Cath will max Speed faster than Chad, and she has higher Luck, making her a bit more useful. However, she's still frail, so watch over her if you're sending her off on her own. I always use her because she's one of my favorite characters personality/storyline wise. I would have liked to see her as an Assassin. Oh well. Cath gets Hard Mode stat bonuses. 40. Miledy ミレディ Joins At: Chapter 13: Automatically at 3rd turn Class: Dragon Knight >> Dragon Master Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Spear After Promotion: Spear, Sword Initial Statistics (Lv 10) HP: 30 Def: 13 Str: 12 MDf: 3 Skl: 11 Mov: 7 Spd: 10 Con: 8 Luc: 5 Rsc: 12 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +5 Def: +2 Str: +2 MDf: +2 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +2 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: -1 Stat Growth Rate HP: A Luc: D Str: B Def: D Skl: B MDf: F Spd: B Stat Expectations (Dragon Master Lv 20) HP: 56 Def: 21 Str: 25 MDf: 5 Skl: 26 Luc: 12 Spd: 23 Supporting Characters Zeiss, Treck, Lou, Ellen, Yodel Comments 10/10 Simply put, awesome. She'll max Strength, Speed, and Skill, and her Defense will become high as well. After her promotion she can uses swords, allowing her to charge head-on into just about any melee enemy without losing the weapon triangle (and even if she does have the disadvantage with the weapon triangle, it doesn't really matter because her stats are so high). Miledy is a definite candidate for your team. 41. Percival パーシバル Joins At: Chapter 13 or Chapter 15: Speak with Elphin/Lalam Class: Paladin Usable Weapons: Sword, Spear, Axe Initial Statistics (Lv 5) HP: 43 Def: 14 Str: 17 MDf: 11 Skl: 13 Mov: 8 Spd: 18 Con: 12 Luc: 12 Rsc: 13 Promotion Stat Additions (Already promoted) Stat Growth Rate HP: B Luc: D Str: C Def: D Skl: C MDf: D Spd: C Stat Expectations (Paladin Lv 20) HP: 54 Def: 17 Str: 21 MDf: 12 Skl: 17 Luc: 14 Spd: 23 Supporting Characters Cecilia, Douglas, Lalam, Elphin, Dorothy, Claine Comments 7/10 He starts with mediocre stats, and his stat gains are better than Marcus and Zealot, making him much more useful. Still, he's nothing compared to Allen/Lance or Treck/Noah. You might want to use him if you're lacking in Paladins and don't want to start building up the Social Knights. His stats start out higher in Hard Mode. 42. Cecilia セシリア Joins At: Chapter 14: Start of battle Class: Valkyuria Usable Weapons: Staff, Anima Magic Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 30 Def: 7 Mgk: 11 MDf: 13 Skl: 7 Mov: 8 Spd: 10 Con: 6 Luc: 10 Rsc: 14 Promotion Stat Additions (already promoted) Stat Growth Rate HP: B Luc: D Mgk: C Def: D Skl: B MDf: D Spd: D Stat Expectations (Valkyuria Lv 20) HP: 40 Def: 10 Mgk: 17 MDf: 17 Skl: 15 Luc: 15 Spd: 15 Supporting Characters Roy, Percival, Douglas, Saul, Elphin, Lilina Comments 4/10 Though not as bad as Marcus/Zealot, Cecilia's stats are still pretty sad. When I first got her, I thought that she might become strong because her stats start out so low. But I was wrong; her stats start out low and will remain low throughout the game. I know some people who think she's good, but I have yet to understand why. 43. Sophia ソフィーヤ Joins At: Chapter 14: Start of battle Class: Shaman >> Druid Usable Weapons Before Promotion: Dark Magic After Promotion: Dark Magic, Staff Initial Statistics (Lv 1) HP: 15 Def: 1 Mgk: 6 MDf: 8 Skl: 2 Mov: 5 Spd: 4 Con: 3 Luc: 3 Rsc: 2 Promotion Stat Additions HP: +2 Def: +2 Mgk: +4 MDf: +2 Skl: +2 Mov: +1 Spd: +3 Con: +1 Luc: +0 Rsc: +1 Stat Growth Rate HP: B Luc: D Mgk: A Def: D Skl: C MDf: B Spd: C Stat Expectations (Druid Lv 20) HP: 39 Def: 10 Mgk: 29 MDf: 29 Skl: 19 Luc: 10 Spd: 18 Supporting Characters Roy, Fae, Igraine, Ray, Niime Comments 9/10 Building up Sophia is a really painful process because she starts out with practically no Speed or Skill. Once she's up to par and promoted, she'll start doing her job properly. However, her Skill and Speed will remain low throughout the game, so if you want to use her, make sure you use stat boosting items. You probably wouldn't |
can get a write-in candidate. Lisa Murkowski did it in Alaska. She was elected. I think she’s urging somebody down there to do that.” He had no problem saying flat-out that “this is not acceptable.”
Compare that with the response on “Face the Nation” from Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who sounded tethered to a mindless script:
SCOTT: Well, certainly, the allegations are very, very strong. The denial was not as strong as the allegations. I think, if the allegations are true, there’s no doubt that he should step aside, and not for the party, but for the American people. We have to find a way to restore trust and confidence in our elected officials, in our government. And this goes in the wrong direction. JOHN DICKERSON: In this case, though, if the allegations are true, he’s denying them. How do you find proof? What seemed interesting about what Mitt Romney said and [Sens. Mike] Lee and [Steve] Daines have said is, they have looked at the case as presented by The Washington Post, and that was sufficient evidence for them. SCOTT: Yes, there’s no doubt that the case is compelling. The judge and the jury in this case will be the people of Alabama, the voters of Alabama. They will have an opportunity to weigh in very clearly and decisively and very shortly. DICKERSON: Do you — what’s your reaction to some of the supporters in Alabama, Republicans, who have said, even if this is true, they still support Moore? That’s the voters of Alabama having their say, but does that have any effect on the larger Republican Party? SCOTT: Well, certainly, I think the reality of it, the voters will be heard.
Scott sounds as though he knows the women are telling the truth, but he cannot find the gumption to say so. Who will look like the more principled and decent leader in a possible 2020 run — Scott or Kasich? It’s not even close.
Perhaps Kasich and a few daring Republicans have gotten through to leadership. The Associated Press reports that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) now says he believes the women and that Moore should step aside. Strenuously backing a write-in candidate and vowing to expel Moore would be an indication that the GOP finally grasps the gravity of the situation. McConnell’s statement now makes equivocators such as Scott look even worse.
Kasich was also asked about Trump’s remarks in Asia, where he disparaged our intelligence services and put confidence in the word of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I couldn’t believe it. I was sort of incredulous at what the president was saying,” Kasich said. “Now, apparently, he’s walked back his comments to some degree. There’s no question what Russia did. They Russia meddled in our election. They support a butcher over in Syria. They invaded Ukraine. I mean, the whole thing is just crazy.” He went on: “And, look, I just — I just don’t understand it. And I don’t know why he’s saying those things. I would just tell you that Putin is a — is a former KGB agent. This is not a guy you can trust or a guy you can really have any confidence in.”
No “what-aboutism” and no claim that the reports of what Trump said were “fake news.” The GOP president sounds nutty — period. Who will sound more decisive and responsible — Kasich or someone like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who was eager to side with the White House when it came to giving code-word intelligence to the Russians in the Oval Office, defended the firing of former FBI director James B. Comey (and played Trump’s defense attorney at the hearing) and has been a willing spinner for the White House? It’s not even close.
Likewise, Kasich is ready to take on Trump’s deference to China (“You now have 11 countries agreeing that they’re going to get together and be involved in trade. You have China rising with their economic program, trying to influence the world, and we’re, like, coming home. We’re staying home. And it doesn’t make any sense, both from an economic point of view, but also from a geopolitical point of view. The United States matters. We need to have influence in the world.”) Who will sound like a more robust defender of American interests — Kasich or silent Republicans who would have been enraged if President Barack Obama had behaved as deferential to China’s president as Trump did on his trip? It’s not even close.
Kasich is now considered some kind of liberal sellout by the right-wing media. In fact, he’s showing moral clarity and voicing traditional center-right views. (“Look, the Republican Party has just gotten smaller here, you know, [being] anti-trade, anti-immigrant, trying to take health care away from folks. This is not going to work.”) He recognizes that the GOP may be in the process of blowing itself up. “The millennials and the Gen Xers are going to equal the baby boomers in 2018. And the millennials and the Gen Xers are coming. They’re pro-environment, pro-trade, comfortable with America’s place in the world,” he said. He cautioned that if “the Democrats [are] moving farther and farther to the left, [and] the Republicans [are] worried about everything on the extreme right, playing to their base, if this continues, these — these millennials and Gen Xers are totally up for grabs.” That’s a good thing, he says.
Whether or not the GOP implodes, who is going to look better in 2020 to the American people — Kasich or Tim Scott, Tom Cotton and the rest of the Trump enablers? The Ohio governor who wouldn’t endorse an unfit candidate in the 2016 race, or the GOP tribalists who made excuses for him? Will Kasich seem more prepared to lead, or will it be the people who wouldn’t defend our intelligence services against Trump, wouldn’t admonish the White House for being weak on Russia and China and wouldn’t reject a Senate candidate against whom there was ample evidence of child sexual predation? It’s not even close.NPL has developed a new portable radiation detector that can assess the safety of potentially contaminated areas far quicker than current methods. The prototype was inspired by the aftermath of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London 2006.
Litvinenko's death was due to radiation poisoning from polonium-210. It prompted wide-scale work to assess radiation levels at almost 50 premises in London that he had been prior to his death before opening them up again to the public, costing the Health Protection Agency £2 million.
The clean up process took an extended period of time as scintillation counters were used to detect alpha particles and therefore measure the radiation levels. Alpha particles only have a range of about 2 cm and can be suppressed by surface moisture and roughness. Geiger counters also require a skilled operator to work, making it a painstaking and laborious process to scan wide areas very close to the surface.
NPL has developed a prototype device which can detect the optical photons generated by alpha particles in air, thus having a far greater range.
Alpha particles can cause ionisation of nitrogen in air, which in turn produces fluorescence photons that show up as discrete spectral lines in the UV band of the electromagnetic spectrum. These photons can travel much further than alpha particles and are not hindered by surface particles or roughness and can be transmitted through any UV transparent material such as plastic or glass. This means an area could be made safe before a contamination assessment is carried out.
NPL has developed a portable device for low-level monitoring in normal lighting conditions. Laboratory tests have shown that the prototype is capable of detecting alpha induced nitrogen fluorescence at distances greater than the range of alpha particles (2 centimetres). The prototype has demonstrated detection up to 20 centimetres, limited currently by the optics on the device. However, the principle is completely scaleable with small devices having a range of centimetres and non-portable devices reaching kilometres.
Ray Chegwin, Business Development Manager at NPL, said:
"NPL has a strong heritage of using world class measurement science to benefit society and industry in the UK and beyond. By producing a prototype that can measure radiation up to ten times further away than current methods we can greatly improve the time it takes to safely assess any suspected radioactive areas. Our prototype could have saved the time it took to monitor the areas relevant to the Litvinenko case, and cut the costs of such an essential operation. Of course, the detector could be used to support radiation safety and decommissioning operations in the nuclear industry, amongst others, and we're currently investigating these."
The NPL Alpha Detector - technical information
The spectral range of the fluorescence photons emitted due to alpha ionisation of nitrogen are located in the predominantly UV range (300 - 490 nm) of the optical spectrum. Tests have been carried out to eliminate any possibility of the detected signal coming from beta or gamma radiation.
The device can operate in a sodium lamp room. In this environment, the light levels are similar to normal room light levels (lights on). The filtered detector is entirely blind to the wavelength of light emitted by sodium lights. The detector is also capable of detecting the fluorescence signal through any UV transparent material.
The optical housing has been designed so that any 1-inch optics can be inserted to select particular wavelengths. The device is modular; adapters could be made for larger optics, larger area detectors can also be used. Custom electronics have been designed and implemented to make the device portable. A lithium ion battery provides up to eight hours of usage in field-based applications.
Find out more about NPL's work in Few Photon Science
Find out more about NPL's work in Radioactivity
For more information, please contact usIt must be nice to be a limousine liberal blowhard — you can say anything you want and no one ever holds you to a word of it.
That means you can oppose a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border but surround your Hollywood mansion in a gated community with a massive barricade. And no one in the mainstream media will cry "hypocrite!"
Well, we will. Take George Clooney. He's been a fierce critic of President Donald Trump and his plan to build a border wall. But the actor has decided to move his wife Amal and their newborn twins Ella and Alexander back to Los Angeles because of security concerns at his England estate, according to a report in Life & Style magazine.
The 56-year-old Oscar-winner will move back to his mansion in Studio City, California — which features a nice big wall. Some of his security advisers decided his 17th century mansion in Sonning, England, was not secure enough.
Life & Style has exclusively learned that George Clooney has recently made plans to move back to LA, for the safety of his family, after the latest spate of terror attacks in England. “He doesn’t feel like Amal and the twins are safe living in the English countryside,” an insider says. “He’s determined to move his family to LA, where he feels much more secure.” George’s safety concerns had been growing for years. The Oscar winner “has been subject to very serious threats in the past,” reveals the source, because of his humanitarian efforts in Darfur, Sudan. And Amal’s work as an international human rights lawyer, along with her public pleas for foreign governments to prosecute terrorists, has made her a potential target. When George learned that he was going to be a father, those concerns went into overdrive. “As soon as Amal found out she was pregnant, he hired former Secret Service agents to assess all his properties and make recommendations for improvement,” the insider adds. “His mansion in Studio City [Calif.] was deemed the most secure, and it’s within minutes of an LAPD station.” “He’s waited so long for this family,” the insider continues. “He’ll do whatever it takes to keep them safe."
Clooney and his Hollywood brethren have been preaching love and tolerance for Muslim immigrants, but England has been the site of devastating terror attacks in recent weeks. Twenty-two people were killed in a terrorist bombing at a concert by pop singer Ariana Grande in Manchester in June, and eight more died the same month when terrorists drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge.
But it gets worse. British officials divulged in May that some 23,000 known jihadi terrorists are now in Britain — and that's just the "known" terrorists.
Meanwhile, Clooney has decried the Trump presidency and, along with his wife, advocates open borders and the free flow of refugees. He has praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her acceptance of hundreds of thousands of refugees while calling Trump a "xenophobic fascist."
But, see, none of that matters, because now, a Hollywood star is going to say one thing, and do an entirely 'nother thing.
And the MSM won't say a word.You may have missed it - almost everyone missed it - but Bill Clinton was on Rush Limbaugh's show the day of the Texas primary. You can hear the radio here. Limbaugh himself was sick that day, apparently, but he had already urged Republicans to cross over to keep Hillary Clinton in the race. Bill saw an opening - and went there.
Now just wrap your mind around this: the Clintons were happy to support a cynical, partisan Republican campaign to wound the Democratic front-runner, and they were brazen enough to go on the Limbaugh show to do so.
There also seems little doubt that Republican mischief played a real role in affecting the results. And they call Obama's call for them to release their tax returns a tactic worthy of Ken Starr. I repeat: the chutzpah and the cynicism just leave you speechless. And as you find it impossible to do much but splutter, the Clintons plow on with new self-serving lies.
You know how I realized this? I saw first hand the way they dealt with gay issues in their first term. They didn't just wimp out on our push for marriage equality, they actively pivoted off homophobia to get a few points (ask Dick Morris; it's one of the things he's actually ashamed of in retrospect). The Clintons even put anti-gay ads on Christianist radio stations in the South to build support for the 1996 re-election. And they continue to show up at gay events claiming to be avatars for our civil rights. And the stupid gays still believe them!
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.Edwin Ochienowho, known as DJ Edu to his fans, recently went on a continental search for Africa's best nightclub. But it wasn't just for the music: He was on a mission to learn how a new generation of Africans is spending its money, and whether improving economic conditions in parts of Africa are reflected in its club scene.
For this BBC project, he travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to party with the Society for Ambience-makers and Elegant People, where the men dress beautifully in designer clothes and are loved by people in the region. In Morocco's Marrakech, he found a modern club scene contrasting with traditional Berber music in the central square. Johannesburg in South Africa give him a look at the country's thriving contemporary African musicians.
Contrast that with Gaborone in Botswana, where the government has been enforcing an early closing time for nightclubs and putting a tax on alcohol. "While nightclubs are shutting down, young people are creating huge parties in car parks where they dance until dawn under the stars," DJ Edu says.
He also found signs of prosperity in Nairobi, Kenya's capital and his own hometown. "Places that used to be — I would refer to them as the hood — have really transformed," he says. "I mean, these were places I would never go to, but I was really comfortable there now. And the nightlife in Nairobi is different, because they party from Monday to Monday."
DJ Edu, who hosts a radio program on the BBC's urban music station 1xtra, says it's hard to say which of Africa's nightclubs is best.
"Every little country has its own way of saying 'Yes, this is our party scene. We love it. Come and enjoy it,'" he says. "You leave with an experience everywhere you go."
From PRI's The World ©2015 Public Radio InternationalPhysicist Stephen Hawking has warned humanity that we probably only have about 1,000 years left on Earth, and the only thing that could save us from certain extinction is setting up colonies elsewhere in the Solar System.
"[W]e must... continue to go into space for the future of humanity," Hawking said in a lecture at the University of Cambridge this week. "I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet."
The fate of humanity appears to have been weighing heavily on Hawking of late - he’s also recently cautioned that artificial intelligence (AI) will be "either the best, or the worst, thing ever to happen to humanity".
Given that humans are prone to making the same mistakes over and over again - even though we’re obsessed with our own history and should know better - Hawking suspects that "powerful autonomous weapons” could have serious consequences for humanity.
As Heather Saul from The Independent reports, Hawking has estimated that self-sustaining human colonies on Mars are not going to be a viable option for another 100 years or so, which means we need to be "very careful" in the coming decades.
Without even taking into account the potentially devastating effects of climate change, global pandemics brought on by antibiotic resistance, and nuclear capabilities of warring nations, we could soon be sparring with the kinds of enemies we’re not even close to knowing how to deal with.
Late last year, Hawking added his name to a coalition of more than 20,000 researchers and experts, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Noam Chomsky, calling for a ban on anyone developing autonomous weapons that can fire on targets without human intervention.
As the founders of OpenAI, Musk’s new research initiative dedicated to the ethics of artificial intelligence, said last year, our robots are perfectly submissive now, but what happens when we remove one too many restrictions?
What happens when you make them so perfect, they’re just like humans, but better, just like we've always wanted?
"AI systems today have impressive but narrow capabilities," the founders said.
"It seems that we'll keep whittling away at their constraints, and in the extreme case they will reach human performance on virtually every intellectual task. It's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it's equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly."
And that’s not even the half of it.
Imagine we’re dealing with unruly robots that are so much smarter and so much stronger than us, and suddenly, we get the announcement - aliens have picked up on the signals we’ve been blasting out into the Universe and made contract.
Great news, right? Well, think about it for a minute. In the coming decades, Earth and humanity isn’t going to look so crash-hot.
We’ll be struggling to mitigate the effects of climate change, which means we'll be running out of land to grow crops, our coasts will be disappearing, and anything edible in the sea is probably being cooked by the rapidly rising temperatures.
If the aliens are aggressive, they’ll see a weakened enemy with a habitable planet that’s ripe for the taking. And even if they’re non-aggressive, we humans certainly are, so we’ll probably try to get a share of what they’ve got, and oops: alien wars.
As Hawking says in his new online film, Stephen Hawking’s Favourite Places, "I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone," but if the aliens are finding us, "they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria".
Clearly, we need a back-up plan, which is why Hawking's 1,000-year deadline to destruction comes with a caveat - we might be able to survive our mistakes if we have somewhere else in the Solar System to jettison ourselves to.
That all might sound pretty dire, but Hawking says we still have a whole lot to feel optimistic about, describing 2016 as a "glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical physics".
While John Oliver might disagree that there's anything good about 2016 at all, Hawking says we need to "Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet."
"Try to make sense of what you see, wonder about what makes the Universe exist. Be curious," he told students at the Cambridge lecture. "However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up."Political commentators are accusing Senate Republicans of hypocrisy — and even outright support of rape — after thirty of them voted against a measure to de-fund military contractors who prevent rape victims from seeking justice.
Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) introduced an amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would prevent the federal government from funding contractors whose employee contracts prevent workers from pursuing allegations of rape against co-workers.
The measure passed the Senate by a vote of 68 to 30, with all 30 ‘no’ votes being cast by Republicans. Notably, 10 Senate Republicans voted for the measure, including all four female Republican senators.
Franken was inspired to push the amendment by the story of Jamie Leigh Jones, who was an employee of KBR — at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton — working in Baghdad’s Green Zone when she was allegedly gang-raped by other KBR workers.
In a harrowing expose, ABC News recounted how Jones was locked in a shipping container, denied access to communication with the outside world, and told she would lose her job if she left Iraq or sought medical attention.
As RAW STORY reported last month, Jones recently won the right to sue KBR over her ordeal.
Until 2007, KBR was a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company run by Dick Cheney until he resigned as CEO to become vice-president of the United States. It was that connection to partisan politics that evidently led a majority of Senate Republicans to vote against the measure.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, called Franken’s measure “a political attack directed at Halliburton.”
Indeed, Franken’s amendment names Halliburton and KBR directly, but also states the regulation applies to “any other contracting party.”
But that has not stopped political commentators from attacking Senate Republicans for what they see as a vote for rape, and against justice for women.
At his DailyKos blog, Markos Moulitsas writes:
This is interesting. According to Republicans, a fake pimp and ho, reported to the police, was apparently so beyond the pale that they’ve worked to strip ACORN of all federal funding. But denying employees actual redress from gang rapes is no big deal?
Will the GOP soon introduce a new Constitution Amendment that reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting the ability of corporations to gang rape their employees”? Is support for corporate gang rape already in the GOP platform, or does it need to be added at their next meeting? Is there a huge corporate gang rape lobby that is funneling millions into GOP pockets, or did they vote this way out of personal conviction?
Laura Clawson, also writing at DailyKos, states:
To summarize the Republican position: As women, we are not “average Americans,” and gang rape is not a “serious” issue. As women, no matter how powerful we become on our own merits, the Republican establishment will still be hoping for a man to come along and put us in our place. You don’t have to go very far beneath the Republican surface claims of equality-but-not-really to get to the rock-bottom sense that women just don’t count, that our rights and our wellbeing are always subordinate to whatever interest of men they might conflict with. When it comes to it, even the (themselves sexist) notions of chivalry and protecting women come behind protecting the right of corporations to imprison their female employees to shield their male employees from rape charges and still get government contracts.
For her part, Jamie Leigh Jones seems pleased that Franken’s amendment passed, regardless of who voted against it.
“It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it,” she said on Tuesday outside the Senate chamber, after hugging Sen. Franken and telling him: “Way to go.”On February 15, 2013, people near Chelyabinsk, Russia felt the ground shake, smelled the sour stench of sulfur, heard windows shatter into sprays of glass and had to look away from a fireball in the sky so bright it hurt their eyes. The meteor that caused all this havoc largely dissolved into a cloud of dust during its passage through Earth’s atmosphere, so scientists are turning to clues on the ground and the memories of eyewitnesses to piece together what happened that day. Around 1,500 people were injured, although no one was killed. In the city of Chelyabinsk alone, more than 3,500 buildings were damaged, and the researchers found shockwave destruction as far as 100 kilometers away from the impact site.
Based on testimony from people near the impact zone as well as the copious video footage caught by residents’ dashboard cameras and security video feeds, scientists have calculated the precise trajectory of the inbound Chelyabinsk meteor, as well as the power of the atmospheric explosion and the dynamics of its shockwave. The findings are detailed in three papers published this week in Nature and Science. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
A team led by Olga Popova of the Russian Academy of Sciences visited 50 villages surrounding the blast area in the month after the event to speak to residents and photograph the broken windows and other damage from the meteor. “Typically we’d go into a village and first find out where the local grocery market is, and we’d talk to the people behind the counter because they’d just listened for the past three weeks to what other people had experienced,” says research team member Peter Jenniskens of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “They’d summarize for us, and then we’d go into the streets and talk to people. Everybody had a story to tell.” The scientists met people who were blown off their feet by the meteor’s shockwave, and others who were sunburned by ultraviolet light from the fireball. “There was one person who said his skin even flaked afterward,” Jenniskens says. The team found that it was often the village schools, which tended to have the biggest windows, that suffered the most window damage. The scientists compiled the data from their visits and interviews, as well as from an online survey of residents, to calculate damage and injury patterns around the Chelyabinsk area.
Both Popova’s team and a second group, led by Jirí Borovicka of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario, used video footage to calculate the meteor’s trajectory. (Popova’s findings were reported in Science and Borovicka and Brown each led papers published in Nature). The researchers visited the locations where amateur videos had been filmed, and photographed the stars in the sky to calibrate the meteor’s precise location and the path it took through the atmosphere. Both calculations agree well with a trajectory computed from satellite images of the meteor by Colorado State University meteorologist Steven Miller and his colleagues, which was published October 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It was nice to see that confirmation,” Miller says.
Borovicka and Brown’s team found that the rock started out about 19 meters wide, and broke into small pieces as it descended from 45 to 30 kilometers over Earth. The meteor's airburst packed an energy equivalent to 500 kilotons of TNT, they calculated. The relatively small asteroid had escaped detection prior to impact, but by computing the meteor’s original velocity and direction of flight, the scientists were able to deduce the rock’s orbit around the sun, which proved to be markedly similar to the orbit of a known, much larger asteroid—a two-kilometer-wide object called 86039 (1999 NC43).
“After statistical analysis we found it’s very unlikely that the proximity of the orbits is only by chance,” Borovicka says. “So we cannot prove it, but we suggest this Chelyabinsk asteroid and this big asteroid were one time in the past part of the same body.” If an earlier collision broke the two apart, their orbits probably would have diverged over time, so such a break-up would have to have occurred relatively recently, says Nick Gorkavyi of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who was not involved in the new studies. “It’s an interesting possibility, but of course right now it’s just a hypothesis,” he says. NASA planetary scientist Don Yeomans of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory agrees that the idea is “quite possible” but notes that researchers must now look for compositional similarities between the two objects. “I would say the jury is still out … until the asteroid's spectral characteristics can be matched with the Chelyabinsk meteorites,” he says.
The new analyses also suggest that events like Chelyabinsk might be more common than had been assumed. Based on telescopic observations of asteroids, researchers had previously estimated that a Chelyabinsk-scale impact took place every 150 years, on average. But after analyzing various historic surveys and the new information about the February meteor, Brown’s team estimates that such objects might smack Earth as often as once every few decades. “There may be more of these airburst-type events, things like Chelyabinsk, than we previously thought,” Brown says. Even though most impacts of this size do not cause serious damage, and the vast majority will hit over ocean rather than land, the finding is nonetheless sobering. “We may well in our lifetime see another one like Chelyabinsk,” Brown warns.Story highlights DACA was Obama's chief legacy item on immigration
Obama had said he would speak out if DACA was revoked
Joe Biden calls move "Cruel. Not America."
Washington (CNN) Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday bashed his successor's decision to rescind an immigration order shielding some children of undocumented immigrants from deportation, calling the move "cruel" and "self-defeating."
"To target these young people is wrong -- because they have done nothing wrong," Obama wrote in a post on Facebook hours after the decision was announced by President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. "It is self-defeating -- because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love. And it is cruel."
The lengthy statement is among Obama's most forceful since departing office. Though he didn't mention Trump by name, he sharply criticized the President's motives and insisted rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was not legally required.
"It's a political decision, and a moral question," Obama wrote. "Whatever concerns or complaints Americans may have about immigration in general, we shouldn't threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own, who pose no threat, who are not taking away anything from the rest of us."
Obama said he hoped lawmakers pass a bill allowing those eligible for the DACA program to remain in the United States. And he framed the decision as a question of "basic decency."
Read MoreFor a second there, it looked as if Congress was about to fix the country’s dysfunctional patent system. The House passed a bipartisan bill in December, supported by the White House and a coalition of retail and tech giants, that would have stopped the legal and economic mayhem wrought by so-called patent trolls. The Senate was racing to do the same — and then pfffftttt. Progress ground to a halt in committee last month.
Patent reform is now on life support, and time is running out before Congress decamps for the midterm campaign season. So what happened? According to people close to the process, a new lobbying push by the troll camp and old-guard patent companies has led Senate Democrats to get cold feet, which has set the table for the second major failure for patent reform in the past three years.
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Bottled up
As the National Journal reported on Tuesday, patent reform legislation promised a rare bipartisan “feel-good moment” for a fractious Congress, but suddenly the wheels came off. The culprit is the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had originally scheduled a vote for March that would have led the bill to go the Senate floor, then on to mark-up and on to President Obama’s desk.
Instead of taking place in March, though, the vote has been postponed multiple times. Sources say the earliest day for a vote is now next Thursday, at which point Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) could introduce a long-awaited Manager’s Amendment that would consolidate the latest proposals and spring the bill from committee. But based on previous delays, Leahy appears more likely to sit on his hands and let the bill languish until it dies.
Staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who did not want to be named, said by phone that the hold up is due to disagreements over two new points of contention: a provision that would require patent plaintiffs to provide detailed descriptions of alleged infringement in the pleadings they file, and one that would alter the legal process known as discovery (in which each side has to produce documents and witnesses). The latter reform is important because patent trolls rely on the economic asymmetries of patent litigation — especially the threat of discovery, which is extremely time-consuming and expensive — to force their victims into settlements.
These proposed pleading and discovery reforms have until now been uncontroversial. Instead, the main points of contention had been over so-called “covered business methods” (which makes certain patents eligible for a quick out-of-court challenge) and fee-shifting, which would make it easier for targets of abusive patent suits to recoup legal costs. The “business method” reform is now considered dead, however, while the committee members have reportedly overcome the fee-shifting logjam.
So why the new delays? It may be the result of renewed lobbying pressure on a pivotal Senator.
Bipartisan support not enough
At a time of extreme gridlock in Washington, patent reform appeared to be one of the few areas on which Republicans and Democrats could come together. The House bill led by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) passed by a wide margin and, in the Senate, the companion measure has influential champions; conservative Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) supports it as a means to curb abusive lawsuits, while liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has hailed patent reform as way to protect startups and his state’s emerging tech industry.
Chairman Leahy, too, has been a longtime champion of patent reform, especially when patent trolls mauled the small businesses and nonprofit groups in his home state of Vermont. Recently, though, he has sounded more ambivalent. Speaking to Politico Pro (sub req’d) this week, Leahy cautioned that proposed reform must avoid “unintended consequences” — a favorite talking point of patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures, which regularly invoke it in hopes of thwarting reforms that threaten their business model.
According to a tech industry source, Leahy has changed his position in part as a result of pressure from the Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform, a lobbying group whose law firm Akin Gump recently hired Leahy’s long time chief-of-staff. The source added that Leahy is prepared to let the reform bill founder, and then draw political cover by casting blame for the failure on committee members’ inability to produce a suitable compromise. Meanwhile, the bill’s momentum has also been sputtering as a result of the trial lawyer bar pressuring other Senate Democrats to slow the bill.
This account of the Senate patent bill’s slow death is consistent with a source cited by Reuters, who said “It’s somewhere between sinking like a rock and air going out of it, like a balloon,”
Judiciary Committee staff reached by phone angrily denied, however, the suggestion that the fix is in, claiming the Senator’s Leahy’s office is working nights and weekends to ensure the bill gets passed. Meanwhile, another tech industry source claimed the bill could still make it to the Senate by June.
Failure is an option
Those familiar with the patent debate will recall how the last grand attempt at reform proved a bust. In 2011, President Obama signed the America Invents Act, but the reform law did little to solve the ongoing wave of questionable patent lawsuits (including nearly 200 of them filed in one day in April).
The outcome was expected to be different this time around, in part because of growing awareness over the patent problem, and because reform is no longer regarded as just a parochial concern of the tech industry.
Now, however, the clock has almost run out. If Sen. Leahy fails to spring the bill soon, companies large and small can look forward to paying the trolls (who filed a record number of suits last year) for years to come — and passing the costs along to their customers.Full disclosure: I am not your average gamer. I'm a geeky 48-year-old wife and mom who just happens to love video games. I've never been the *best* player out there, it sometimes takes me a while to master some play skills and I get my @ss kicked frequently. I don't have a lot of time to play, and my propensity to stop and look at practically every pixel in a game (no door unopened, no stone unturned) it takes me for-freakin'-EVER to get through a game. I spent 15 months playing Bioshock Infinite - to be fair it only took me 4 months to beat it the first time, the rest was re-play and DLC, DAMN that's a fun game! And I just spent over a year working my way through all the Assassin's Creeds available for PS3 (though to be fair I quit the Revolutionary America one because watching mold grow is more fun than that game).
Santa's supposed to bring me a PS4 for Christmas so I looked around for games with a reputation for being short. Dishonored kept popping up. I'd seen it around but something about the cover art just turned me completely off, I thought it looked like some military revenge porn thing I wouldn't play in a million years (I know, I know, books and covers...). Then I read something about it somewhere that made me take a look at it. I read reviews and watched a couple of youtube videos, discovered this game was far closer to my interests than I thought and went out on a limb and I bought it.
This game is AMAZEBALLS and I FREAKIN' LOVE IT. At first it was a complete bitch for me to play, I'd spent years playing games where basically you kill everything that blinks at you as fast as you can. I really liked the game and the world, but I walked away from it three times before I decided it wasn't going to get the better of me and I |
took Edwards to the hospital for his gunshot wounds.
The Columbia Police Department said it found evidence of marijuana distribution inside the residence at 920 W. Texas Ave.(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
(CNSNews.com) - The United States has now gone a record 10 straight years without 3 percent growth in real Gross Domestic Product, according to data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The BEA has calculated GDP for each year going back to 1929 and it has calculated the inflation-adjusted annual change in GDP (in constant 2009 dollars) from 1930 forward.
In the 85 years for which BEA has calculated the annual change in real GDP there is only one ten-year stretch—2006 through 2015—when the annual growth in real GDP never hit 3 percent. During the last ten years, real annual growth in GDP peaked in 2006 at 2.7 percent. It has never been that high again, according to the BEA.
The last recession ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. In the six full calendar years since then (2010-2015), real annual GDP growth has never exceeded the 2.5 percent it hit in 2010.
“The average growth rate for economic recoveries since the 1960s is 3.9 percent ranking the Obama recovery, with an average GDP growth rate of just 2.1 percent, among the slowest in history,” said Sen. Dan Coats (R.-Ind,), who chairs the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.
Before this period, the longest stretch of years when real GDP did not grow by at least 3.0 percent, as calculatd by the BEA, was the four-year stretch from 1930 to 1933—during the Great Depression.
In addition to that four-stretch from 1930-1933, there have also been four three-year stretches where the real annual growth in GDP did not go as high as 3.0 percent. Those periods were 1945-1947 (in the immediate aftermath of World War II); 1956-1958; 1980-1982; and 2001-2003.
The longest consecutive stretch of years in which the United State saw real GDP grow by 3.0 percent or better was the seven year period from 1983-1989, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
The second longest stretch of years in which the U.S. saw real GDP grow by 3.0 percent or better was the six-year period from 1939 through 1944. (World War II started in Europe in 1939 and the U.S. entered the war in December 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.)
In the last two years, annual growth in real GDP hit a plateau of 2.4 percent.
“Real GDP increase by 2.4 percent in 2015 (that is, from the 2014 annual level to the 2015 annual level), the same rate as in 2014,” the BEA said in the press release it put out today when it published its revised estimate for GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2015.
In that quarter, according to today’s revised estimate, GDP increased at an annual rate of 1.0 percent.
In the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers that President Obama sent to Congress this week, the administration noted that it is projecting real GDP to grow by only 2.7 percent this year and by less than that in the following two years.
“Real GDP is projected to grow 2.7, 2.5, and 2.4 percent during the four quarters of 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively,” said the report.
Next week, the Joint Economic Committee will be holding a hearing on the president's economic report.
“Whether it is burdensome regulations, a broken tax code or a ballooning national debt, the Obama Administration’s policies are a dead weight on the economy,” said Sen. Coats. “Under this president, we continue to see stubbornly low workforce participation and historically high long-term unemployment rates.
“In order to boost GDP, we need to overhaul our tax code and strip away unnecessary government regulations to give employers the confidence they need grow their businesses and create new jobs. Congress can take action to help grow our economy, but we need a willing partner in the White House,” said Coats.
“On Wednesday,” said Coats, “I am chairing a JEC hearing on the President’s economic assessment, and we’ll hear from the Chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors, Jason Furman, on ways we can work together to improve economic growth.”Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has been pursuing health care cost reforms in his state. (Faith Ninivaggi/Washington Post)
Right now, Massachusetts’s premiums are among the highest in the nation. One way to fix that is to bring down the cost of medical care by requiring some providers, who charge a lot for health care now, to charge less. In a report this past spring, the state found that some Massachusetts doctors charge six or seven times as much as their colleagues for the exact same procedures. Across the board, a three-fold variation in prices was pretty standard.
There’s a pretty simple explanation for all the price variation: hospitals negotiate specific rates for specific insurance companies. They gauge the size of the insurance company and how many patients it would be expected to bring in, and then set a price. Insurers and hospitals alike closely guard those pricing agreements as proprietary information, with neither party wanting to see their pricing agreement undercut by a competitor.
Massachusetts wants to do away with all of that. In a proposal released Wednesday, the Massachusetts Special Commission on Provider Price Reform recommends allowing a panel of state regulators to reject rates charged by hospitals and providers if they’re too high. The report, which you can read here, also proposes the creation of a claims database, which would allow the public to see how much their health care actually costs.
That would be a really big shift from where we are now, where price negotiations are usually a private matter between insurers and providers, and it’s nearly impossible to figure out how much a given procedure costs. A recent Government Accountability Organization report really hit home on this. The agency called up 17 hospitals at random to ask how much a knee replacement would cost. Not a single one of them could name a price for one of the country’s most common surgeries.
Hospitals are not fans of government involvement in setting their prices. It’s telling that, among the 10-person commission that wrote the new report, the only member voting against was a representative of the Massachusetts Hospitals Association. And, right now, the report is still just a recommendation. No board exists yet. But if it does come to fruition, it could mark an important new chapter in the Massachusetts health reform experiment.Steven Horwitz
In today's New York Times, we get this from Paul Krugman:
Specifically, in early 2010 austerity economics — the insistence that governments should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment — became all the rage in European capitals. The doctrine asserted that the direct negative effects of spending cuts on employment would be offset by changes in “confidence,” that savage spending cuts would lead to a surge in consumer and business spending, while nations failing to make such cuts would see capital flight and soaring interest rates. If this sounds to you like something Herbert Hoover might have said, you’re right: It does and he did.
Actually Kruggie, that doesn't sound like Hoover, that sounds like a big pile of bullshit.
I have documented the reality of the Hoover Administration's pro-spending and pro-deficit policies rather thoroughly in this Cato paper. The relevant highlights:
The 1929 budget was $3.1 billion, and Hoover’s first budget in 1930 had $3.3 billion in spending, followed by $3.6 billion, $4.7 billion, and $4.6 billion over the following three years. In nominal terms, he increased spending 48 percent over the last budget of the previous administration. However, this period was one of significant deflation, so if we adjust for the approximately 10 percent per year fall in prices over that period, the real size of government spending in 1933 was almost double that of 1929. The budget deficits of 1931 and 1932 represented 52.5 percent and 43.3 percent of total federal expenditures. No year between 1933 and 1941 under Roosevelt had a deficit that large.8 It is hard to reconcile those data with the claim that Hoover was a defender of “austerity” and “budget cutting” in the name of laissez faire.
Most of these policies continued, and many expanded, throughout 1931, with the economy worsening each month. By the end of the year, Hoover decided more drastic action was necessary and, on December 8th, he addressed Congress and offered a set of proposals that historian David Kennedy refers to as “Hoover’s second program” and that has also been called “The Hoover New Deal.” The list of items he proposed included:
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend tax dollars to banks, firms, and other institutions in need.
A Home Loan Bank to provide government help to the construction sector.
Congressional legalization of Hoover’s executive order that had blocked immigration.
Direct loans to state governments for spending on relief for the unemployed.
More aid to Federal Land Banks.
Creating a Public Works Administration that would both better coordinate Federal public works and expand them.
More vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws to end “destructive competition” in a variety of industries, as well as support for work-sharing programs that would supposedly reduce unemployment.
On top of those spending proposals, most of which were approved in one form or another, Hoover proposed, and Congress approved, the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. The Revenue Act of 1932 increased personal income taxes dramatically, but also brought back a variety of excise taxes that had been used during World War I. The higher income taxes involved an increase of the standard rate from a range of 1.5–5 percent to the 4–8 percent range. On top of that increase, the act placed a large surtax on higher-income earners, leading to a total tax rate of anywhere from 25 to 63 percent. The act also raised the corporate income tax along with several taxes on other forms of income and wealth.
And keep in mind Hoover's description of what his administration had done:
"We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private business and the Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. These programs, unparalleled in the history of depressions of any country and in any time, to care for distress, to provide employment, to aid agriculture, to maintain the financial stability of the country, to safeguard the savings of the people, to protect their homes, are not in the past tense—they are in action.... No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such time."
Finally, consider what FDR's own advisors had to say:
Rexford G. Tugwell, one of the academics at the center of FDR’s “brains trust” said: “When it was all over, I once made a list of New Deal ventures begun during Hoover’s years as Secretary of
Commerce and then as president.... The New Deal owed much to what he had begun.”
Another member of the brains trust, Raymond Moley, wrote of that period:
"When we all burst into Washington... we found every essential idea [of the New Deal] enacted in the 100- day Congress in the Hoover administration itself. The essentials of the NRA, the PWA, the emergency relief setup were all there. Even the AAA was known to the Department of Agriculture. Only the TVA and the Securities Act was drawn from other sources. The RFC, probably the greatest recovery agency, was of course a Hoover measure, passed long before the inauguration."
Late in both of their lives, Tugwell wrote to Moley and said of Hoover, “we were too hard on a man who really invented most of the devices we used.” Roosevelt’s inner circle would have every reason to disassociate themselves with the policies of their predecessor, yet two of them recognized quite clearly Hoover’s role as the father of the New Deal.
All of this information is very easy to find for anyone who wants to look it up, even if they, like Kruggie, take pride in refusing to read anything by people they disagree with. At some point, this is no longer about laziness but about an intentional attempt to obfuscate and deceive, and to use propaganda to score ideological points. Kruggie has become a master of the genre.Farming Simulator 17 Platinum Edition announced
Farming Simulator 17 Platinum Edition will release on November 14 and promises to be the most complete experience for Farming Simulator players. In addition to the huge content brought by Farming Simulator 17, the Platinum Expansion will offer a load of new features enriching the gaming experience on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC/Mac.
With the Platinum Expansion, discover a new South American playground, and its authentic landscapes, unique vegetation, railway network, local cows and sugarcane fields offering a total change of scenery and more gameplay possibilities! Enjoy even more choice in how you want to develop your farming enterprise, as sugar canes are added to the existing variety of crop types wait to be harvested by the CASE IH A8800 MR sugar cane harvester. In addition to this machine from CASE IH Austoft®, world leader in cane-harvesting technology, famous brands from South America, Poland and Australia have also been added, including Stara, Doble TT, Bizon and Gessner Industries for the first time in the series, bringing the number of vehicles and tools present in the game to over 275 authentic farming vehicles and equipment from more than 80 manufacturers!
To enjoy this new content on PC and consoles, you have multiple solutions:
For PC/Mac players of Farming Simulator 17, the Platinum Expansion will be available on November 14 in retail stores (PC) and for download (PC/Mac), adding this new content to your game. If you’re a new PC/Mac player, it will also be available as a full Farming Simulator 17 Platinum Edition game, available in a boxed version (PC) and for download (PC/Mac).
, the Platinum Expansion will be available on November 14 in retail stores (PC) and for download (PC/Mac), adding this new content to your game., it will also be available as a full Farming Simulator 17 Platinum Edition game, available in a boxed version (PC) and for download (PC/Mac). PS4 and Xbox One players of Farming Simulator 17 will be able to download the Platinum Expansion from their consoles from November 14. Seasons Pass owners will be able to download the Platinum Expansion from their consoles, as part of the Seasons Pass content. If you’re a new PS4 and Xbox One player, it will also be available as a full Farming Simulator 17 Platinum Edition game.
Farming Simulator 17 Platinum Edition, and the Platinum Expansion will be available November 14th 2017 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC/Mac.In this scenario, we will assume that you credit card has a very average interest rate of 18.9% and that you will pay $150 per month. Your $5,000 balance becomes over $10,000! Over the duration of time that you are paying down the balance on your card, you will end up paying more than twice the amount that you originally spent. And on top of that, it will take you over 17 years to pay down a very small debt of $5,000, and this assumes that you immediately stop using your credit card.
Perhaps even more alarming than the fact that it will take you nearly two decades to pay off $5,000 is the fact that most of the debt won't go away until the end of the 17 years. This is because of something known as loan amortization. Basically, toward the beginning of the loan, most of your payments go toward the interest on the loan, not the debt itself. Each subsequent payment shifts toward paying a little less interest and a little more of the loan itself. Your loan payment shown in a graph actually looks a little bit like this. After 13 years of paying off your debt, you will still owe more than half of the total.A/N: Bioware owns Mass Effect and everything in it, I'm just hoping to improve my writing. I left Javik's fate an open ending in Better Angels because I didn't quite know what I wanted to happen to him. Happy ever after does not suit him, but even so, the thought of cutting him down in the street like a common grunt did not sit well with me. So I offer this little tale to resolve the mystery. It's... somewhat different from my usual tone.
Much credit and much gratitude (thank you, you rock!) to BA Tanglepaw for reading the first draft and providing some badly-needed perspective and constructive crit.
Content warning for suicidal themes, adult themes including non-consensual, and, to a lesser extent, language. Please do not read this if such content will distress you.
I sit on a pile of rubble, a crude barricade on a broken, dust-choked street, watching the first free sunrise I have ever known. The first sunrise I have ever, in my long and bloody life, taken the time to simply sit and watch. Duty is an unyielding master, and I have ever been an obedient son of the Empire. My dedication to the Adamant Throne is unsurpassed among my peers; I am an Avatar, the chosen instrument of our vengeance. Commander of armies, leader of warriors, scion of gods and generals. Heir to an Empire. Even had I had the inclination, I have never had time to waste watching the sunrise... until now.
It is over.
The war is over.
The Reapers... are defeated.
The red fire swept across the battlefield, immolating, cleansing, and every last one of them fell, perfectly choreographed, into death. I didn't believe it. I couldn't. I am still uncertain, if I am honest. To see them end so suddenly... it could not be true. I checked dozens, hundreds, depleting the charge in my particle rifle, making sure. Making sure. The Reapers have ever been cunning enemies, insidious and destructive as jealousy or treason; they must be given no opportunity to deceive us.
The humans watched me from a prudent distance, their stares incredulous, even pitying. I care not. They cannot possibly comprehend my just fear. This war, no, this skirmish they have fought has taken no time at all, the blink of an eye. They have not seen what I have; the slow death of planets and civilisations wrought by deceit and trickery, the turning of lover against lover, brother against sister, parent against child. The grinding attrition of surrendering worlds and systems stripped of all resources and population, year after year, decade after decade. They do not know the full extent of our enemy's duplicity. But in spite of myself, after hours of walking among the dead thralls, I began to feel that perhaps... perhaps... my caution was unwarranted, that perhaps this time... this time... they are truly gone.
Perhaps this time...
Perhaps Commander Shepard has kept her word to end it.
The irony of that hope makes me bark a laugh. A human, barely evolved into a sentient, achieving what the might of the Prothean Empire could not. If I did not know the Commander, I would deem it a fantasy, a bad joke shared around the sentry post in the deepest watches of the night, a farce to light a candle against the darkness: "Did you hear about the human who defeated the Reapers?"
But I do know Shepard.
The human is irritating and ignorant, but she is strong and stubborn, brave and fierce - a good leader, a soldier without equal in this primitive cycle. (Though the turian pushes her very close. Either of them could have served adequately under my command as auxiliary troopers. I might even have made them centurions; they could never be true officers of the Empire, but authority over other vassals would have been permissible.)
She is also lucky. Many of my peers, the cream of the Prothean general staff, would scoff at the superstitious bent of that thought, but I have fought long enough, as a soldier and as a strategist, to know that sometimes, there is no other deciding factor than blind chance. Maybe Shepard's luck, skills, and stubbornness have combined in a perfect storm to permit her to rid the galaxy of the Reapers. Using Prothean technology, of course. The Crucible was not of this cycle's design; it is a firearm wielded by cave-dwellers, one they are lucky has not backfired and killed them all. They know nothing, the races of this cycle; they are selfish, petty, too concerned with the needs of the individual.
I recall the first real inkling I gleaned of this cycle's moral weakness, its complete failure to grasp the immutable truth of the galaxy, that evolution must be served, that perfection and the harmony that stems from it must be striven for, bled for, sacrificed for. That the universe is stronger when it speaks with one voice; that the need to believe all are created equal, that individual rights are sacrosanct, is a dangerous fallacy.
Shepard had stopped by my crude living space to talk to me, an annoying habit I could never break her of, no matter how rudely I tried. It was early in the morning, ship time, and as Shepard had approached, I had noticed her scent was different. Blended. As though...
"You and the asari... you are joined?" I blurt out in surprise.
Shepard glares at me; apparently I have violated some ridiculous social taboo. "You could say that," she concedes icily.
"I don't. Your pheromones do." Standing this close, the human reeks of the asari; it is a slap in the face to my sensitive olfactory system.
The human cocks her head to one side, considering. "Yes," she relents, tone still chilly. "Liara is my lover. What of it?"
I am amazed; outraged. Shepard commands the ship; for her to take sexual gratification from among her crew is shameful, doubly so to fornicate with a mate from another species. Illegal, in my time, in my Empire, on both counts. But the look of bridled anger on the human's face forestalls my outburst. "Nothing. It does not matter," I say carelessly, biting down on my true feelings. "I was merely surprised. But should you someday have to make a choice regarding the asari's life, remember your morality and friendship do not matter any longer - your allies are simply resources to use against the Reapers. If copulating with the asari helps manage your stress, there is benefit in it; she is an asset to you. By all means, use her as you must. But attachment is for the weak. Do not fool yourself into confusing physical release with idiotic sentiment; you must not let emotion make you less."
Shepard shakes her head in disgust and walks away. "My emotions make me more," she shoots over her shoulder as she leaves. Stupid human.
Shepard did not, or more likely did not want to, understand; the strong grow stronger through conflict, and the weak, those who cannot or will not adapt, have no right to life. There are no inalienable rights to survival. Extinction is the natural order of the universe, written for all to see in the failed species that litter every life-bearing planet, snuffed out before ever achieving sentience. And yet, these primitives cling to their superstitious fantasies, castrating their resolve to do what must be done before they can even conceive of the necessity.
Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honour matters.
I asked Shepard that question once, determined to provoke her into a reaction, curious to see how wedded to her primitive code of ethics she was. She hadn't reacted, had dodged the issue by letting her pretty pet of an asari loose on me with her questions. And ancestors have mercy, there were so many questions; science, politics, strategy, culture - there was no topic off-limits to her impertinent nosiness. I complained to Shepard, not long after arriving aboard the ship, after a debriefing session in which I was sure the asari's droning inquisitiveness was about to drive me mad. "Your Liara asari asks many questions."
The human simply laughed and replied, "Welcome to the Normandy, Javik."
I had expected Shepard to tell the asari to desist, but she did not. Liara's infantile curiosity is insatiable. Giving offence, I discovered eventually, was the only way to silence her. It is an unbecoming trait her shipmates are far too tolerant of; they dread being caught in her web, but do nothing to correct her behaviour, and when one among their number is snared, it is cause for much hilarity. Truly, I will never understand these primitives.
Shepard did eventually answer my question, albeit obliquely, by stating that she believed it the duty of the strong to protect the weak. "Everyone has something to offer," she asserts.
"Yes. Even if only as cannon fodder, like these krogan," I retort contemptuously. "They are strong in body, but they are weak in mind - stupid, reckless, little better than animals. They should have been put down as the rachni were. In the Empire, they would have been purged. There is no universal right to survival, human. As a soldier, you must know this."
"As a soldier, I know my job is to defend those who cannot defend themselves."
"Your job is to kill the enemy," I correct her bluntly. Her idealistic view of her chosen profession holds her back as a fighter. She could be so much more if she could accept this truth. "You are a paid killer, Shepard, nothing more. Your leaders tell you to fight, and you do. Your leaders tell you to kill, and you do. Should your leaders tell you to die, no doubt you would do that too. These mercenaries you have secured from this Aria asari – you are no different to them, except that they will run rather than die at their post - which simply makes them smarter." I had previously made this assertion to James Vega in a similar conversation, and the brainless oaf was close to attacking me, stalking away in a fit of barely controlled rage. Shepard has better self-control, and she is far more intelligent; she does not become visibly angry, though she does tense.
"In broad terms, I can accept that," she concedes, as though I need to hear her acceptance of such an obvious truth. "I get paid to kill people, so do they. So do you. But let me ask you this, Javik – what makes you right? If we're all just here to kill the enemy, what does it matter what I think, as long as the job gets done?"
"It matters because it makes you inefficient," I insist. "It makes you less effective, less able. The war against the Reapers is the only thing that should concern you. Victory, no matter the cost, should be your only goal, conflict should be your way of life. Those who cannot assist in achieving that goal should be cast aside."
"For the greater good, yeah, Javik, I've heard that before. But it doesn't work, does it?" Shepard counters, her expression troubled but her eyes determined. "You said it yourself. You fought the Reapers as an Empire, it was the all-consuming objective for the Prothean race's very survival. In the application of that logic, you cast aside billions as useless, designating them simple cannon-fodder, surrendering the worlds and systems of those you deemed weak as a delaying tactic. And all you achieved was to make the enemy stronger, denying yourself territorial advantage and handing the Reapers billions of reinforcements. You made the fight unwinnable with your slavish dedication to your cosmic imperative. Your Empire failed, Javik, so I ask again – what makes you right and me wrong?" Damn her, she has an infuriatingly valid point. I know I am right, but as I flounder for an appropriate response, she pushes off from where she's leaning against the bulkhead, hands shoved in her pockets. "Until you have a better answer than sacrificing allies for the greater good, we're done with this conversation. And if you ever compare me to those mercenary scum again, you'll be top of my list come the next dance night."
I had to resort to asking the turncoat, Williams, what a dance night was, since Vega was avoiding me; she is another problem aboard this ship, with her disobedience and her insolence. I would have shot her on the Citadel; she is a liability with her constant questioning of Shepard's orders. Shepard should not tolerate her. I would not, were it my command; I would have had her tongue torn out for her first offence, spaced her for the second, but Shepard is soft-hearted, accepting of a degree of insubordination from all of her crew that no Prothean officer would ever countenance. The Lieutenant Commander, still in possession of her tongue, delighted in explaining and then informing me that I would top most people's lists for a partner. She meant it as an insult, but I was pleased by the notion - I am not here to make friends, I am here to fight Reapers. If the others were angry with me, perhaps it was because I was imparting harsh truths to them. They will thank me, one day. They could not afford to be weak, and anger made them stronger. I have seen this time and time again. Anger, correctly channelled and applied, can drive mere mortals to acts of greatness. Williams of all people should appreciate this; the faithless, impudent bitch is angry almost all the time, but she lacks the control necessary to apply her rage, and so she burns friend and foe alike with her wrath.
Anger turned Shepard from a soldier to a force of nature on Thessia; it was the only time I saw the human stop fighting her animal nature and let her instincts drive her. For a brief time, I saw her reach her full potential as a warrior, and she was magnificent, but it was ruined as the asari broke into her flow, forced her back into the restrictions of her misguided beliefs.
Irritation stirs as I recall the aftermath of our failure to prevent the theft of data by the Cerberus assassin, Kai Leng (one of the few humans I had respect for, in spite of his flawed cause - he understood that one must commit wholeheartedly to one's chosen fights. Leng is perhaps the most Prothean being I have encountered in my time with these primitives). Liara had stormed into my cabin, trembling with uncharacteristic rage, all pretence of patience and tolerance finally stripped from her. I could see her fury boiling, and it pleased me to know that I could provoke such emotion within her, that she could be roused to such primal passions. She threw accusations of lies in my face, desperate in her desire to avoid facing the truth, and I almost laughed in her face. I do not lie, and the insult to my honour was grave, but I could forgive it in the face of such a rare opportunity to get through to her, break past the straitjacket of her hopelessly romantic ideals. Continuing to taunt her while I revelled in imparting the cold truth, I watched in amusement as her biotics began to flare. I was entirely ready to defend myself, ready to defend the truth, eager even. In a brief moment of exultation as she hurled irrational, unfounded accusations at me, the sweet fulfilment of breaking the asari's infuriating holier-than-thou naiveté was the only thing I cared about; likely the experience would irreparably damage her, but I wanted to see her so-called understanding deconstructed. Only then could it be rebuilt, giving her new purpose, new focus. War is our sculptor, but other hands may sometimes assist in shaping the stone.
And then Shepard had ruined the moment, stalking through the door just as the asari was building to fever pitch. The effect on Liara was instantaneous. Her rage remained, but she complied immediately with Shepard's quick order to desist, quelled by the commander's word alone. I was disappointed, determined at first to refuel the confrontation, but something about Shepard's demeanour warned me not to push, so I reluctantly backed down, offering the final piece of the puzzle to the asari, the final piece of truth, as a bolster to her confidence rather than as the blade to sever the final threads. I close my eyes, the better to recollect...
Shepard watches the asari go, then turns to me, surprise clear in her expression. "That was unexpected," she says softly, gratefully. "Thank you."
"We still need her talents," I shrug dismissively. I do not need, or want, Shepard's juvenile gratitude. For all her weakness in battle, the asari's gifts in intelligence gathering and analysis are a precious resource we can ill afford to have squandered. If I am not to have the chance to remould her world view, I must make do with the tools I have to hand."If grief overcomes her, she will be lost to us."
Irritation settles around Shepard like a swarm of tiny insects. "So did you actually mean what you said?"
I snort derisively."Does it matter?" The human's pheromones are pathetically easy to read.
Shepard's jaw tightens. "Liara means a great deal to me... so yes. It matters."
"Then I will tell you what you want to hear," I sneer dismissively, disappointed in the human in spite of myself. She is better than this, or so I had hoped, to be so vulnerable to the asari's emotions. I warned her this would happen if she persisted in fraternizing. "I meant what I said."
As I start to turn away Shepard steps in closer, her expression cold and hard, but flames of fury burning in her sharp glare. "You listen to me, Javik, and you listen well. I've had enough of your bullshit. You could be one hell of an asset to this crew. You are damn near peerless as a soldier and a tactician, but you are a lousy comrade-in-arms, a drain on morale, and a constant threat to my team cohesion." Ah, so the anger that drove her in battle today is still present, bubbling beneath the surface. Good. "That stops, right now. Y'know, I get that you're angry, I get that you're lonely, I get that you're disconnected - I have some experience of that, though nothing like on the same scale - but you don't damn well take it out on other people, especially those who rely on you in the field." She steps closer, deliberately planting one hand on my chest; instantly I feel her burning, righteous fury, product of a blend of distinct emotions: the bright, burnished wrath of the warrior defeated; the frost-rimed steel of the officer disobeyed; the brute, predatory rage of the lover affronted. "Your conduct today was a disgrace. Maybe you'd better think good and hard about leaving the ship the next time we stop at the Citadel, because if you fuck with one of your teammates in combat like that again, I'll shoot you myself. I will not tolerate with what happened today a second time. Am I making myself crystal-fucking-clear?"
I regard the human coolly, grudgingly impressed. Perhaps she is learning, after all. Perhaps she may even have learned enough. For all the irritation these fools present, it is clear from our missions and actions that this ship is the vanguard of the assault against the Reapers. To be removed from the heart of the fight is not acceptable. I must be mindful of my goals. "You are," I confirm reluctantly.
"Good." Shepard holds my gaze for a moment longer, then nods, shoulders bowing slightly as her burdens re-assert themselves in the wake of her anger. "I'd hate to lose you, Javik, but you are fast becoming a luxury I can't afford. Think about it."
As she reaches the door, I call after her, "Do not concern yourself with Thessia's fate, Commander. The loss of a planet is insignificant next to the loss of the galaxy." It is as much of a platitude as I am able to offer. She pauses for a moment, then steps out, doubtless going straight to the asari's cabin.
The asari.
The asari, always the asari.
Damn her anyway, with her questions, her ignorance, her useless compassion. Her fawning over her human mate and protector, her weakness in the face of the enemy. Damn her for pitying me - I do not need pity; I do not ask for charity of any kind. And damn her, above all else, damn her for her beauty. Arousal washes through me suddenly, carrying with it the predictable snarl of tangled emotions and desires that thinking of Liara T'Soni's physical charms inflicts upon me at every opportunity. I imagine the soft curves of her body, remember her delicate scent. The desire to possess her, dominate her, consumes my thoughts suddenly, as it has done so often since I met her.
Too often.
Lust stirs as I imagine stripping her naked, tearing her clothing from her with biotics, watching apprehension war with arousal in her glorious eyes. I imagine her, mine to command, broken to my will, abasing herself before me if not willingly, then obediently. A groan escapes me as I envision her writhing beneath me, her movements begging me for her pleasure, her words begging me to stop, mind and body deliciously at odds. In moments such as this, the need to possess her is an ache in my fingers, in my groin, in my mind.
And then, inevitably, guilt rears its head, the constant companion to my lust. My desire for her is my greatest shame, my greatest weakness. She is not Prothean; to even contemplate such a union disgraces me. Succumbing to my base instincts, the urge to rut like |
. As part of the investigation, which began last year, officials demanded that Coinbase turn over information for every one of its accounts.
The letter opposing this move is actually pretty good:
We strongly question whether the IRS has actually established a reasonable basis to support the mass production of records for half of a million people, the vast majority of whom appear to not be conducting the volume of transactions needed to report them to the IRS. Based on the information before us, this summons seems overly broad, extremely burdensome, and highly intrusive to a large population of individuals. The IRS's actions in this case also set a dangerous precedent for companies facilitating virtual currency transactions that could be subject to a similar summons.
Few innovations have been met with such incredulity from the outset through the rise and development periods. Now Bitcoin is firmly rooted in modern finance, and is poised to be a leader in the future of currency and payment systems. No matter what government does now, Bitcoin has a brilliant future.
The Need Is There
It operates on its own just fine.We need a nongovernment, global currency that is reliable, secure, universally available, unmediated by financial authority, and tied to real ownership. We didn’t entirely know that we needed this – and we didn't know it was technically possible to do this entirely in a digital realm – until Bitcoin came along. Now we do and there is no going back.
It operates on its own just fine. All government can do – now just as in the past – is slow the growth and keep the future from happening as quickly as it should.
To be sure, many stakeholders in the Bitcoin space favor some government involvement, if only to end the legal uncertainty that continues to hold back the innovation and the infrastructure behind it. This is tragic but understandable in times when all human activity is either mandated or prohibited. Here’s to hoping that cryptocurrency itself makes strides in changing that presumption.
N.B.: FEE has been on the cutting edge of commentary on this important topic since the early days, and FEE's work surely could use donations in this currency.Islamist gunmen killed at least 32 soldiers today when they stormed a military position in southern Yemen where militants control broad swathes of territory, a military official said.
Yemen has a seen a surge in violence in the south since President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi took office in February. The government has responded with air strikes and the United States has repeatedly used drones to kill militants.
The attack todaycame hours after a suspected US drone strike killed two men in a neighbouring province, including one the government described as a senior member of al Qaeda.
The military official told Reuters that gunmen attacked Yemeni troops outside the city of Zinjibar, capital of Abyan province, killing at least 32 servicemen. He said they captured a number of soldiers and made off with weapons and ammunition.
At least 40 soldiers were wounded in the attack, the official and medical sources said. A spokesman for Ansar al-Sharia, an al Qaeda-linked group that took Zinjibar last year, said his side captured 28 soldiers and a tank in the raid.
In a similar attack in March, militants killed about 100 troops in Zinjibar after Hadi took office.
Yemen's government and an al Qaeda-linked group active in the south both said the missile strike hours earlier in neighbouring Shabwa province killed Fahd al-Qasaa, who had been convicted of involvement in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole warship in Yemen's southern port of Aden.
Residents of Shabwa and the militant group, Ansar al-Sharia, said the missile was fired from a US drone. A drone strike last year killed a U.S. citizen who US officials subsequently claimed had helped plan a failed attack on a US airliner.
The use of drones has angered the public in Yemen as it has in other countries such as Pakistan, where Washington also uses unmanned aircraft to kill militants.
Washington has backed a power transfer that saw President Ali Abdullah Saleh replaced by his deputy in February, after a year of mass protests against Saleh. The United States now wants Mr Hadi to unify the fragmented army and turn it against militants.
ReutersSave the odd blast on the stadium megaphone, Columbus Crew SC frontman Ola Kamara doesn’t tend to chase too much unnecessary noise. Nevertheless, the Norwegian international’s sublime finishing repertoire has meant the hits have been raining down in audible fashion since he arrived Stateside last year.
The sound of Ola Kamara’s boot making a deft connection with the ball, a net rippling, and a beaten keeper looking on in dejection. The details may differ ever so slightly but that is the storyboard Major League Soccer observers have become largely accustomed to since the Oslo-born livewire was handed a starring role at Columbus Crew SC a couple of months into last season.
For a significant portion of Ola’s youth back home, it would be alpine skis and not a ball he’d see when he glanced toward the ground, and perhaps it wouldn’t be wildly off-piste to draw from that pastime when describing his MLS career to date. Although there was initial frustration as he waited to be set free down the slope, there can be little denying it’s been fluid and exhilarating motion ever since for the one-time Strømsgodset standout.
It was a subpar 2016 for Crew SC, as the previous year’s MLS Cup finalists missed the playoffs by six points, although 16-goal Ola had at least been a success story, with only four players across the league hitting the mark with greater regularity. Fast-forward to the present and the outlook is rosier for ‘The Black & Gold’, who sit a couple of points and spots above the postseason redline after 18 games, while their sharpshooting Scandinavian hasn’t yet ground to a halt on his scoring slalom.
Gregg Berhalter’s team made a terrific return to MAPFRE Stadium last Saturday (June 24th) after almost a month without a home fixture, sweeping Montreal Impact aside with a 4-1 win in which Ola struck his ninth of the campaign and threw a backheel assist the way of Kekuta Manneh. Shortly before his U.S. voyage began, Ola became a father for the first time and the 27-year-old feels very much in tune with both the smooth pace in Columbus and America’s general fervour for expression.
Whether it’s at home or a road venue, his backstage preparation before the main show includes visual reminders of what he does best, and the right sounds to set the senses sparking.
“Pre-game, I like to watch some old videos of myself scoring goals, just getting in that groove,” Ola explained. “Then I like to listen to my headphones, either in the car or the bus.”
“When I’m in the locker room, it’s music in the background and I’m doing my physical preparation.”
While the well-travelled performer has been the kind of go-to scorer all teams long for, in amongst the variety of finishes has been flashes of crowd-pleasing flair. The classic poacher’s efforts have been there, as well as volleys and lightning-quick body-shape adjustments to pounce.
The wonderful improvisation he came up with to hit a flying close-range volley home from Ethan Finlay’s cross at Philadelphia Union last June was a prime example. Ola had a pretty respectable grounding in that regard, though, with showmanship to a world-class degree put before him way before he started lighting up soccer games.
“I was always a big, big Michael Jackson fan when I was smaller. I always bought his videos, his albums and I was always trying to dance like him when I was younger.”
In fact, music can be described as one of the fundamentals for Ola, who was born in the Norwegian capital and represented Frigg as a youth player in the Oslo neighbourhood of Majorstuen. When it comes to his rhythmic sway, it’s lyrically and electronically-charged in equal measure.
“I’m mostly a hip-hop and r&b man, so right now I’m really enjoying the new Kendrick Lamar album (‘DAMN.’), but coming from Norway, we listen a lot to EDM. It’s a mix of that for me.
“I think especially for me, the car rides or the bus rides to the games are when I’m always getting pumped up with music; that’s a big preparation thing. We use music for everything these days.
“When I was younger, I was always dancing and I’m still doing that, and I have a small one now who also likes to dance!”
A debutant in Norway’s top-tier Tippeligaen for Stabæk at just 16, Ola netted a treble to sink Real Salt Lake 4-3 last May and became Columbus’ first hat-trick scorer in almost 12 years (Edson Buddle struck four against the MetroStars in September 2004). That was only his third start for the club and after stop-offs in the Austrian and German game on his way to Ohio, he is flourishing in The Buckeye State.
Every frontman needs the band in time with him, and Ola describes how as well as on the field, Crew SC have some club mainstays setting the locker-room tone when game day rolls around.
“I think Hector Jiménez is usually controlling the music, together with Will Trapp. It’s been a mix between hip-hop and r&b, and if (Federico) Higuaín gets to choose, it’s rock.
“With the national team, I think it’s been between Stefan Johansen and Joshua King. That’s also a mix between EDM and hip-hop.”
Ola and Argentine playmaker ‘Pipa’ Higuaín have led the way with Crew SC’s goals this year, notching nine apiece so far, but Ola remembers a time when he was there to see two others running the show.
“I think my first concert was actually at Oslo Spektrum and it was Justin Timberlake and Timbaland – that was fantastic. That ‘FutureSex/LoveSounds’ album.”
As has been referenced often since Ola rose to the fore in Columbus, his opportunity really came following the departure of namesake Kei Kamara to New England Revolution in a May 2016 trade. Although the 32-year-old was the one starting games, Ola had got on well with the prolific forward and had been at his house for dinner not too long before he left the club.
The two have Sierra Leonean heritage in common, with Kei representing them at international level, while Ola’s father originally hailed from the West African nation before he arrived in Norway. There is still very much an African pulse to the behind-the-scenes atmosphere at the club according to Ola.
“In our locker room, we have some Africans and they always like to play more African beats and you’re always dancing to it. Harrison Afful, Jonathan Mensah, they’re always dancing.
“At my former clubs, let’s see. Etzaz Hussain – he has fantastic dance moves, so everybody was always watching this guy doing incredible stuff.”
Ola was with former Manchester United youth and one-time Norwegian Under-21 midfielder Hussain at Molde in 2015. That was where Ola scored a hatful while on loan from Austria Vienna, returning to a league he had first won as a teenager at Stabæk in 2008.
He lifted the Tippeligaen title as a much more central figure in 2013 with Strømsgodset, but there was no repeat in that Molde loan two years ago, as they came 6th. After that most recent spell back home, America and MLS lay in wait in 2016.
Although he was signed in February that year, he wasn’t involved when Columbus took on a player he knows well in the season opener with the Portland Timbers at Providence Park. Keeper Adam Larsen Kwarasey was a starter for Strømsgodset when Ola struck the opener for them in the 2010 Norwegian Cup final victory over Follo at the national stadium (Ullevaal Stadion) in Oslo and they remain friends today.
Kwarasey left Portland last July and has won a Norwegian title with Rosenborg, moved to Danish club Brøndby, and back to Norway with Vålerenga since then. Although Ola had to dance and perform for the team for initiation at Stabæk as a teen, he didn’t actually have to sing when he joined Columbus.
As Crew SC fan Tony Galiffo recently found out when he sang a post-game ‘Happy Birthday’ to him over the MAPFRE Stadium megaphone, Ola isn’t completely shy of letting his vocals be heard. If, however, he had to go the whole hog and record a song with a teammate from his career to date, he would get Norwegian-born Ghana stopper Kwarasey in the studio for a reunion.
However, a few professional touches to sharpen the sound might be required!
“I think I would do that with Adam and I think it would be a mix between my rapping and his singing. I think it would sound terrible!”
Speaking of old friends from home with an MLS narrative, U.S. midfielder Mix Diskerud has been in Sweden with IFK Göteborg recently, officially on loan from New York City FC. Many people come and go within a player’s time in football, even those they enjoyed a strong connection with, but the 26-year-old has been much more of a constant in Ola’s odyssey, even if they haven’t been teammates for close to a decade now.
“Oh, I mean I played with Mix since I was five years old. So I played with him until I was 14/15 years old and then he went to Stabæk, a year before me.
“We played together for three years there. We want to play together on the same team in MLS and then go back to Norway and play on the same team; that’s our hope and dream.
“I spoke to him before I came here and he said Columbus is a very good team and they play very good football, so he thought I was going to fit in. I think he said I was going to really enjoy it in MLS, because he knows me from my youth and how I am.
“It was good to talk to him because he knows what kind of player I am and what kind of guy I am. Moving to another country is always hard, so him saying those things made it easier.”
If we put Diskerud in the friend category and open the floor to any other player from all-time, who would Ola choose to hit the practice field one-on-one with? He says it would be a retired Brazilian set-piece maestro he would go for.
That description doesn’t really narrow it down all that much, given the amount of samba stars who’ve been majestically accomplished from dead balls, so probably best to let Ola tell you exactly who.
“I think I would do it with Juninho (Pernambucano) because I would love to have his free-kicks. The one who played in Lyon.”
Continuing on the theme of spectacular flair, Newcastle United’s ‘entertainers’ team of the mid-90s inspired a young Ola as he watched the Premier League on TV. The eccentric but unquestionably gifted Colombian forward Faustino Asprilla was the Magpies player he looked up to most, as well as former England captain Alan Shearer, who was the world’s most expensive footballer between the summers of 1996 and 1997.
Soccer wasn’t the only activity for Ola back then, as he explains, but it was always the most outstanding candidate.
“It’s always been number one. I’ve always answered that I wanted to be a soccer player and when you’re younger, people always smile and laugh a little bit about it because that’s maybe everybody’s dream in Norway at that age.
“I also did a little bit of downhill skiing, but when I was 12, I chose to commit 100 percent to football and that’s been the only choice since then, the whole time.”
Just before he joined up with Columbus, Ola and girlfriend Sandra welcomed their firstborn son Willian. Ola flew to Arizona to meet up with the team, having been given time by head coach Berhalter to be there for the birth and the first week of the new Kamara’s life.
To go along with the winter sports popular in his homeland, Ola is also an NBA and LeBron James fan, although that’s far from the only reason Ohio and the U.S. in general is the place for him.
“For me and my family, it’s a safe place; it’s a calm and easy life here and that’s what I enjoy. Just spending time with family right now is big, since I have a small one; he’s only 16 months.
“I think on the field, when you fit into the team and you play well, it’s always easier. I enjoy going a lot of places, seeing the whole country with the team.
“It’s amazing how as a soccer player I can travel and see maybe the whole of the U.S. and the best of it also. On vacation, I really enjoyed being in San Diego; that was fantastic and I was there with Mix Diskerud.
“That was like five years ago, so that’s probably my favourite spot.”
Making the transition to MLS player can be quite the eye-opening experience for many overseas players, with a high number of English names in the league in recent years noting their surprise at media presence in the team’s locker room after a game, as just one example. Indeed, American soccer coverage has its unique subtleties to get to know, while time zone changes, travel, trades and so much more all contribute to presenting newcomers from afar with somewhat of a learning curve.
Style of play apart, what has been most apparent to Ola when you hold the U.S. game’s culture up against what he has known in Norway, Austria and Germany?
“I think you have more characters in the U.S. In Europe, you always go out in the same clothes but here you see people coming to games with different styles and showing a little bit more personality.
“That’s maybe the difference outside the sport; that it’s more personality. Playing, I think the heat and the humidity is very different.”
Norway took their place in a showpiece checkpoint of U.S. soccer history back in the 1994 FIFA World Cup. That era saw the nation appear at three major tournaments in six years and we got used to seeing them amongst the elite, although Euro 2000 was the most recent occasion in which their red, white and blue was given such a platform.
Veteran of many competitions as Sweden coach and the man who presided over Iceland’s famous European Championship adventure last year, Lars Lagerbäck is charged with leading Norway back out of the international wilderness. The 68-year-old has his work cut out to salvage anything at all from the current qualification campaign (for next year’s World Cup), as the 87th-ranked side in the world sit behind Germany, Northern Ireland, Czech Republic and Azerbaijan in their group after six of the ten games.
Ola’s name has understandably been pushed by plenty for a recall in recent times, with the last of his seven caps to date earned in 2014, while Per-Mathias Høgmo was still the coach. Cap one came in an October 2013 qualifier for the World Cup against Slovenia, and he struck his solitary goal thus far in a January 2014 friendly win over Moldova.
Ola wants to play a part in a resurgence for the national team and he places getting the chance from Lagerbäck to make a lasting return to the picture high on his agenda. At 27 and producing some of his best-ever form, he highlighted that target as he considered what a career spent in four different countries has taught him the most.
“For me, it’s been what you take from the ups and downs and how you tackle the obstacles. When it’s not going that well, you can always break down and kind of lose your confidence, lose your path, but I was always sure I was going to make it and play good, score goals, so I just kept going the whole time.
“I’ve been in different clubs and always had that belief and now I’m in Columbus and scoring goals, so that’s good, and hopefully I can get back into the national team and score goals there. I mean I’m living my dream so I’m happy.”
His form certainly hasn’t switched, but Ola did change his jersey number this year, from 17 to 11. It was the number he liked most growing up and it also now represents the date his son was born (February 11th).
Willian likes to play with the hat-trick ball Ola earned in that aforementioned RSL game last year, though it might be a little while before he gets a shot at emulating his dad. For now, his presence alone helps take Ola’s mind off any lingering thoughts of in-game moments that didn’t quite work out.
If Kamara Jr. does pursue the beautiful game then Ola will have plenty to share, but what if he could now offer advice to the younger version of himself? Perhaps the Ola who was preparing to venture away from Norway for the first time?
“Maybe just have some more confidence in my ability and don’t listen to everybody else the whole time. Just work hard and improve the things that are your strengths; that’s the most important, I think.”
With his agent in conversation with Crew SC as far back as 2014, Ola spurned offers from France and Germany to head for the Black & Gold. He has found surroundings and a system he fits, as the valuable final piece in the predominantly 4-2-3-1 puzzle, showing in no uncertain terms what he’s all about.
There have been smart and incisive runs, sharp link-ups, and finishes ranging from the routine to the ridiculously impressive. He’s surely had a lot of fun, too, which is the kind of road we take it down as we wrap up our conversation here.
The setting is open to the reader’s interpretation, so it could be an indoor arena, the training field, a street court, or even a beach. The only rules are we need Ola to pinpoint four of his current or former teammates to fill the rest of a fantasy 5-a-side team in which he’ll also start.
Egos out there can be a touch on the delicate side so it’s important to say that each interviewee on here is not asked for the outright best they’ve worked with when they answer this! Any reasons at all are acceptable, although with the competitive fire pro players have in common, nobody’s going to earn a place if they don’t bring some ability with them.
As Ola tried hard to think on his feet and pull together a quartet from the many he’s shared a locker room with, he made a team selection comprising a mix of reflexes, razor-sharp artistry, robustness and a little more besides.
“I would have (Adam) Kwarasey Larsen, because he’s a good leader, he’s a fun guy and he’s a good goalie. Then I would put (midfielder and ex-1860 Munich teammate) Moritz Stoppelkamp – he’s a very good one-against-one player.
“I would pick (Federico) Higuaín – the way that he runs and positions himself, with the skill, he makes our play tick, you know? He’s like our engine, offensively; how he moves, how he handles the ball and draws opponents to make everyone else some space.
“These kinds of small things matter and he’s always looking for you out of the corner of his eye, so that’s always a good feeling for a striker. I need a defender?
“Lukas Rotpuller – he plays for Austria Vienna – just because he’s fast and his tackling makes some of the other players a little bit scared! He’s also a fun guy, so I’d have him in there.”
To catch each of these interviews, you can follow me: @chris_brookes
You can also like the Facebook page and stay up to dateYou should come to Jounieh. It’s a beautiful place.
It is on the Mediterranean, between Beirut and Tripoli, and it’s where I live with my family. When we first moved to Lebanon, we lived in Hadchit, about five kilometres from the Cedars of God. But Jounieh is home now. We run a gym, Raw Fitness, just off the Jounieh-Tripoli Highway.
The water, the souk, the Telefrique Harissa gondola up to Sayyidat Lubnān (Our Lady of Lebanon) who looks down over us … like I said, you really should come and see it.
I have been proud to be the only player in Lebanon’s 24-man squad at the World Cup who lives and plays there in the domestic league. So many of the experiences I’ve picked up over the last few months I can take home and use to improve the game.
In just a few months I have gone from watching NRL games on cable television in Jounieh – the night games in Australia are on just before lunchtime in Lebanon – to training alongside guys like Robbie Farah, Tim Mannah, Mitchell Moses and more.
It’s been a dream come true in so many ways. Let me tell you about it.
‘JOUNIEH IS WHERE MY HEART IS’
My parents were born and raised in Lebanon. They moved to Australia, like so many, because of the war. They started from nothing and worked really hard to give us a chance in life.
They always had in their minds that they would return to Lebanon to reunite with all our grandparents, aunts and uncles. Every year my Dad, Simon, would tell me we were moving there. But I was 14 and we were still in Sydney.
Then in 2011 he said to me, ‘We’re going to Lebanon this year.’ I thought, ‘Sure, I’ve literally heard this from you every year.’
Three weeks before the actual flight, he said, ‘Start packing your bags.’ It was the first time I realised he was serious about the move.
I told my parents at the time that I would refuse to move to Lebanon unless they found me a footy team to play in over there. I loved league, especially Parramatta. My Mum, Madeleine, did her research before we moved and made some calls. She found me a team so I was good to go!
In just a few months I have gone from watching NRL games on cable television in Jounieh – the night games in Australia are on just before lunchtime in Lebanon – to training alongside guys like Robbie Farah, Tim Mannah, Mitchell Moses and more.
I started with Jounieh Predators but a few years ago I moved to Lycans. It used to be a union team and it changed to league.
At first, I found the move to Lebanon hard. It was a different culture and I needed to improve my Arabic. The education system is much more advanced in Lebanon, too. You start biology, physics and chemistry in Year 7. In Australia, you just study science very broadly. I had to catch up quickly.
Rugby league was really important in helping me integrate. I was pretty small, only about 60 kilos, when I first got there and Jounieh is an all-age team. It was a bit nerve wracking at first, because I was a 14-year-old playing against grown men and I had to prove myself.
I remember arriving at my first training sessions and the players all looked at me and said, ‘But you’re a little kid, you won’t be able to play with us.’ I replied, ‘Let me train with you guys and if I’m good enough you can play me.’
Our first game was against Wolves. They said they would put me on the bench. After about 60 minutes we were winning by quite a lot so they put me on the wing. I made an impact straight away. Ever since then I have played 80 minutes every game.
Now that I’m back in Sydney, my city of birth, for this World Cup, I can honestly say that home for me is Lebanon. Jounieh is where my heart is.
FOOTY IN LEBANON
I cannot overstate how big this World Cup is for rugby league in Lebanon.
I have been posting about my experiences on Instagram a couple of times a week and so many people – people I’ve never met – have reached out to me to say how proud they are of this team, the Cedars.
There has been a lot of local media attention. My Mum and Sister, Chimene, are back home in Jounieh looking after the gym and they tell me they have never heard so much talk about rugby league, particularly after the win against France.
It all started with players in universities and in the army about 15 years ago. There were only enough players to fill one or two teams. Now we have ten university teams, division one and division two. We have around ten school teams and a few from outside the education system as well.
Rugby league in Lebanon is not like it is in Australia. The fields aren’t as nice. They don’t care about the grounds as much. We play on fields with soccer goals and put posts above them for every game.
But we love the game and we don’t take it for granted. It’s a struggle for us to play. We pay for our strapping, our gear, everything. We invest in ourselves to be able to play. We don’t get a living out of it. We play for the passion of it.
I have been posting about my experiences on Instagram a couple of times a week and so many people – people I’ve never met – have reached out to me to say how proud they are of this team, the Cedars.
For me, I had to make some sacrifices to come to this World Cup. I had to leave the gym for a few months and give away some clients. Also, I’m still at university studying physical education. Because I have missed so many courses this year to train with the squad, I will have to extend my studies for another year.
But I wouldn’t change it for anything. I love that Australians are learning more about my country.
Tim Mannah wrote here that he had heard there was a Parramatta Road in Lebanon. It’s true! It’s in Kfarsghab, a small village of less than 1,000 people, which is not far from the village where we originally lived. Parramatta Road in Sydney is crazy. Parramatta Road in Lebanon is empty. It’s towards the mountains, not in the city area. I like the Lebanon version much better.
More seriously, though, Lebanon often is portrayed negatively in the Australian media. This World Cup has been so positive for the Lebanese community here and shown everyone else what our country is really like.
ROBBIE’S BEAUTIFUL GESTURE
There were five players from the local league in Lebanon in the original 40-man squad, but only one of us was going to make it through to the final 24.
It was a bit surreal for all of us when we first arrived in Australia. We weren’t sure what to make of it all.
Then one day, out of the blue, Robbie Farah called us and invited us to a gym session in Camperdown. When we finished, he took us all out to lunch and then to Bondi Beach. It shows the kind of character he has.
He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t know who the five of us were. Some people haven’t been too kind to him in the media after he left the Tigers, but I’m 100 percent sure these people don’t know the real Robbie Farah.
I have gone from watching him on the TV in my gym with a few friends to training alongside him. It’s been incredible. It’s the same with guys like Mitchell Moses and Tim Mannah, because I support Parramatta. I was following the Moses signing from Jounieh. I was really glad when he came to the Eels. He switched to another gear and so did the team.
They’re all really humble people to meet. They’ve taken a lot of time to speak to me and get to know me. I look up to them.
Then one day, out of the blue, Robbie Farah called us and invited us to a gym session in Camperdown. When we finished, he took us all out to lunch and then to Bondi Beach. It shows the kind of character he has.
A lot of the boys have been asking me about footy in Lebanon. I’ve told them all about it. Robbie has come over to Lebanon a couple of times so he knows what it’s like. But the rest of the boys have asked a lot about the differences between rugby league in Lebanon and Australia.
It’s the speed of the game, I tell them. It’s much faster here.
The energy of the crowds at our games has been amazing. The Lebanese community in Australia are so happy to be part of the World Cup as is my Dad, who flew over a couple of weeks ago.
The experience of being in camp ahead of the Test against the Kangaroos this weekend has been incredible, too. These are the best players in the world. I will soak up every minute of it.
There have been quite a few times when someone from the community will message Robbie or one of the other NRL players saying, ‘Bring the team down to our restaurant. We’d love to have them. It’s on us.’ We’ve taken them up on the offer a few times.
I’ll never forget it.
TAKING FITTLER’S LESSONS BACK HOME
I have tried really hard to make the 17-man squad but it hasn’t quite worked out. There were times when I was a bit down about that, but I have learned to be grateful and thankful for this experience.
There are a lot of people who would love to be in my shoes.
I have seen how the game is played in Australia and learned from some excellent players and a coach like Brad Fittler. The way he analyses the opposition and goes through the game plan – and even little things like making sure we turn off our phones when we’re together so we can develop team chemistry – that’s not how we do things at home.
I can take all these experiences back to Lebanon and pass them on.
For anyone reading this, especially back in Lebanon, I want them to follow their dreams. This is a dream for me. I have always wanted to play in the NRL and I have now had this chance to learn from the best and improve my game.
Not only will I improve as a player, but so will all of rugby league in Lebanon from the lessons I have learned at the World Cup that I can now share with all the players and coaches.
Hopefully, the Cedars can return in four years’ time and go even further.Demonstrators fill the streets on Jan. 21 during the Women’s March in Washington. (Oliver Contreras for The Washington Post)
Opinion writer
For a year now, we’ve heard that President Trump has “gotten away with” all sorts of unacceptable behavior — equating neo-Nazis with opposing protesters, attacking the free press, launching a mean-spirited and counterproductive vendetta against so-called sanctuary cities, maligning women, vilifying dissenting Republicans and embracing totalitarian dictators. But has he gotten away with anything?
After all, we are not yet at the point of impeachment hearings. His chance at reelection, if he remains in office, is almost three years away, and for now, he has GOP House and Senate majorities to run interference for him. Nevertheless, the bill for his racism, dishonesty and incivility is coming due.
Try as he might to avoid the association with GOP wipe-outs, Trump was effectively on the ballot in Virginia and Alabama, triggering a huge backlash among nonwhite voters and women, segments of the electorate whom he has most consistently insulted. They got mad — and then turned out to vote. The Post reported in November:
African Americans [in Virginia] accounted for 21 percent of voters, according to exit poll results, identical to their share in last year’s presidential election and one point higher than in 2013. In total, nonwhite voters made up 33 percent of the electorate, the same as last year but up from 28 percent in the previous governor’s race. Black voters favored [Democrat Ralph] Northam over [Republican Ed] Gillespie by a 73-point margin, while Hispanic voters favored Northam by 33 points. Democrats had worked feverishly in recent weeks to court African American voters, and former president Barack Obama held a rally with the ticket in Richmond last month. Obama also recorded a robo-call that went out Monday and Tuesday to encourage people to vote.
Likewise in Alabama, CNN reported:
African-American turnout played an important role in [Democrat Doug] Jones’ victory. Of the 20 counties that saw their turnout rise in comparison to the 2014 midterm elections in Alabama, an election comparable in size to the Senate special election, half were rural counties in the state’s agricultural “Black Belt” where African Americans make up between 59% of registered voters (Hale) to 82% (Greene). Based on unofficial but complete returns in those counties, Jones received between 69% of the vote (Hale) to 88% (Greene and Macon).
Trump isn’t getting away with anything as far as African American voters are concerned.
The same backlash against the Trump GOP is seen among women voters — starting with the Women’s March the day after the inauguration, continuing with record numbers of women running for office and culminating in big wins for Democrats in Virginia and Alabama. Virginia Gov.-elect Northam got 61 percent of the women’s vote, five points more than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. He also did seven points better among white women than Clinton did. And he did eight points better than Clinton did among white, college-educated women. That’s the #MeToo phenomenon in action.
Likewise in Alabama, NBC News reported:
Fifty-eight percent of Alabama women voted for … Jones, including 35 percent of white women, according to exit polling. While that latter figure might not sound like much, it’s more than twice the 16 percent of white Alabama women who voted for President Barack Obama in 2012, the last presidential race in which exit polling was conducted. … White women who typically support Republican candidates were a key factor in the outcome. Some crossed party lines to vote for Jones and many others simply declined to go to the polls.
It seems that the deep-seated anger over the election of someone who bragged about sexual assault and routinely ridiculed women (often on the basis of their appearance) has found its expression at the ballot box.
That revulsion against Trump among women voters is seen in national polling as well. The most recent Monmouth University poll finds: “The gender gap in the president’s rating crosses party lines. Republican women (67%) are somewhat less likely than Republican men (78%) to give Trump a positive rating. These results are down by 9 points among GOP women |
is something we could look at down the track," he said.
Police allegedly found four imitation pistols, two air pistols, computer equipment and two 3D printers at Sun's property.
A magistrate granted him bail on the condition he surrender his Chinese and Australian passports, stay away from international airports, and pay a $3000 surety.
He's due to face court again in April.
© AAP 2019Recently, I’ve come across a really nice Tamagotchi project on Instructables.
Tamagotchies are virtual pets in little devices (later on also apps, etc) that the user has to feed, clean up after and play with. They are a nice addition in my thinking on social robotics. Also while still collecting knowledge for the 68k computer, I learned that I want to start with a stripped down Arduino, not a Nano I usually work with. So this is an ideal little weekend project to learn a few things.
Pure Arduino chip:
spec of the atmega328p allows for up to 5.5v operating voltage, i.e. the output of a usb-chargeable battery pack with 5.1v is absolutely suitable.
I built a minimal Arduino setup following The Shrimp. I used my UART/USB converter and set the Arduino IDE to the “Arduino Uno” board, et voilá:
OLED display:
In the instructables, the guy is using 2×2 8×8 LED displays (i.e. 16×16 pixels resolution) that are controlled by additional chips, for me this is out of scope and I had an OLED with a 128×64 display floating around, so the idea is to use this. it’s also much smaller than the LED matrices.
to run the OLED display, we need the two Adafruit libraries:
had to set the right display in the “Adafruit_SSD1306.h” file to: #define SSD1306_128_64 and also change the I2C address from 0x3D to 0x3B then it worked (here as a “unit test” with the Nano).
One of the things that frighten me a bit is that the whole adafruit software seems to take up quite a lot of memory:
I then moved on to display the graphics from the Instructables (for the 16×16 LED) to be displayed on the OLED, the adafruit example had a byte array example included already, so that was not too complicated. I learned a bit about the nice PROGMEM feature storing data on the flash part of the Arduino.
Real Time Clock
I had one battery buffered clock in my drawer, so that was the next thing to add to the circuit. The Instructables is talking about the DS1302 RTC (a chip), I have the DS3231 (breakout board). Seems like the 3231 is more accurate and also I2C, not SPI so it will simplify my design. Otherwise, they seem to be equivalent.
One thing i noticed in the code in the Instructables is that the author seems to be writing data (or storing) on the RTC which seems strange to me. Interestingly, my RTC breakout has an Atmel332 AT24C32 on board which is a two-wire 32K EEPROM.
So, the next “unit test” for hardware is to connect the RTC to the Nano and display the time on the OLED.
I installed this library for the 3231, as it can also handle the read and write commands to store data. And you also need the Arduino Time library for basic functions afaiu.
Sound
I had a little speaker floating around and did some experiments with the tone() command in Arduino, which works nicely. The only thing is that you need to set the digital pin to “input” afterwards to really silence the speaker after the sound.
Final breadboard setup
This is the setup with all the software bits working essentially, including buttons, RTC, OLED and the speaker:
The next two posts will discuss the build on perf boards + LiPo and the adaptation of the software.Eli Roth, best known for his horror flick Hostel, which was executive produced by Quentin Tarantino, has a plum role in the innovative director’s World War II reimagineering Inglourious Basterds. He plays Boston-native Donny Donowitz, a member of Lt. Aldo Raine’s (Brad Pitt) team of Jewish-American soldiers gathered together to do one thing – kill Nazis, in order to spread fear of revenge through the German army. Donowitz is the man who does it the best, and who spreads terror with a baseball bat. He becomes known in frightened whispers as “The Bear Jew,” a moniker that makes its way to the ears of Adolf Hitler himself. Roth, who also played a small part in Tarantino’s Death Proof, had plenty to say about how he relished tackling this pivotal role, how Miley Cyrus helped him focus, and how much fun he had messing with Brad’s mind.
“The only role for me was The Bear Jew,” Roth said. “This is it, to be a Jewish guy from Boston that beats Nazis to death with a baseball bat. I have been training my whole life for that part. There as no other role. There are other actors he’s worked with that felt ‘now that I’ve been in a Tarantino movie I can do anything.’ But for us, this was endgame. The ultimate dream for all of us is to be in a Tarantino movie – and we know there is no such thing as a small part in a Tarantino film. You can be Floyd in True Romance or Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction. Every part is a chance to create a classic cinema moment and everybody is going for it. I felt so lucky.”
Funny he mentions Floyd – the highly memorable stoner dude that Pitt played back in 1993. Roth and Tarantino, pals and cinephiles extraordinaire, says they had a lot of fun bringing Brad into their rabid movie fandom. “It was great to bring to Brad Pitt down to our level of grindhouse cinema and cinephelia,” Roth says, grinning. “The first day, we were talking how much we loved Floyd and how cool it was that Pineapple Express is a whole movie made out of Floyd, and how he’s become the new Spicoli [Fast Times at Ridgemont High]. My generation grew up on Spicoli as the stoner and now everybody knows Floyd. I love Sean Penn, he’s the greatest. The utmost respect for Spicoli, but Floyd is brilliant. And he’s like, ‘You guys you watch Wonder Pets? I got kids, that’s what I watch.’ He watched Wonder Pets.”
“So Quentin and I got into discussion the first day about Zombie vs Shark,” he continues. “And Brad’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Zombie vs Shark! The zombie falls off a boat and is walking under water and then a shark bites him and then the zombie fights the shark. Brad’s just looking at us, and Diane Kruger and everyone is like, ‘what are you talking about?’ Quentin and I go, ‘dude, this is the greatest scene ever.’ It’s low budget, so you know it is really a real shark. How do you put a guy with a real shark? They did it! It was 1979, there were no rules, so they just shot it. Zombie fights a shark. The effects guys are like ‘oh yeah, Zombie vs. Shark, I have a t-shirt.’ Quentin got his print and we showed it in the reel and Brad says ‘this is the greatest movie ever!'”
Not all of their movie choices went over that well with Brad, though – especially Roth’s own horror work. “We were in this bar,” he relates, “and they were showing Hostel and he says ‘nice casting, Eli. I gotta see this.’ Then he came in the next day and he says “Man, you bastard! I was alone in my house last night when I watched that thing and it freaked the shit out of me. That was disgusting!’ It was great to take our love of cinema and infect Brad Pitt with it.”
Roth had his own moments of freaking out on the set – he had to, because it was part of his character. He’s a madman that really has to strike fear into the hearts of these Nazis to spread the word of this vengeful squad of bastards. “We did it a number of times,” he says of the gruesome scene where Donowitz first makes his mark on the audience by beating an uncooperative Nazi to death. “We spent I think five or six days shooting it, and it was the first thing we shot. I was back in this cave just working myself up, ready to kill, and Quentin would be like, ‘And that’s a cut. Let’s wrap for the day.’ I’d go ‘ugh!’ and then Brad would say to me ‘easy tiger, easy tiger.’ For days, I was just working myself up and then Quentin would say ‘that’s a wrap.’ We’d never get to it! I worked myself up to tears and then never get to shoot it. I said ‘Quentin, your blue-balling me every day!’ but he’d do it on purpose. Finally, we got to the scene and I was just ready to explode. I just unloaded on the guy, and it was great to finally beat him and do it over and over and over and over. I completely blew out my voice and then we had to film the reactions of the guys, cheering me on. Quentin said, ‘you know how these guys gotta be loving this and they gotta be laughing.’ So I just started f**king the dummy – like 69ing it, like skull-f**king it. That’s what I was willing to do for my fellow Basterds.”
What was involved in the process of ‘working himself up’ for this scene? You might be surprised. “I didn’t want to be to actory and try to get all emotional,” he offers, “but I was listening to heavy metal to psych myself up to kill, like Iron Maiden, Misfits and Guns N’ Roses, Dead Kennedys, punk rock. And then my girlfriend at the time had put Hannah Montana on my Mac as a joke and I was like ‘duh do duh, Everybody Makes Mistakes.’ I was f**king singing Hannah Montana and then I thought ‘what if Brad Pitt came back and said ‘what the f**k are you listening to?’ What if Quentin said, ‘what are you doing? You’re listening to Hannah Montana?’ She put this on as a joke, but now I’m kind of enjoying it. Now I’m secretly embarrassed about that and that just made me go crazy. I had total Hannah Montana shame! So if I really wanted to instantly go to my psycho place, I would just put on Hannah Montana. I thought ‘what if I was at a concert and I had a bat? Would I just go nuts and start wiping the place out? Then what if I was Hannah Montana, how would I pull that off? I don’t even look like I’m in college, let alone high school. Would I be a teacher who is also a pop star? Oh, gotta film the scene!’ Quentin’s saying ‘man, you’re so intense. You’re so in the zone.’ And I’m thinking ‘what if I was Hannah Montana?’ You never know what takes you to a place of insanity.”
[iframe http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/movies/Inglourious-Basterds/150306/1218307409/Inglourious-Basterds%3A-Trailer-4/embed 580 476]
How much of Donowitz is insanity, and how much is just being from Beantown? “I grew up in Boston and let me tell you, you use your baseball bat off the field more than you use it on the field in Boston,” Roth states matter-of-factly. “I mean everybody had baseball bats in their cars in Boston. That was just a big thing. I remember in high school we were getting drunk on a Wednesday in this girl’s basement and some kid came down, with his nose broken, this kid Matt Casey. We were seniors and they were juniors and they said ‘the juniors f**ked up Casey and we’re like ‘kill the juniors.’ Everybody had bats like within seconds, and the juniors showed up to finish the fight and everyone’s just smashing these kids, crushing their car with bats. I remember I was staying back and I was watching and this kid jumped in the car next to me and I was like ‘I can’t believe you did that for Matt Casey’ and he goes, ‘who is Matt Casey?’ That exemplified Boston. Everybody just wanted an excuse to smash something.”
The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Comcast.The movement for a shorter working day was the first to unite workers internationally against industrial capitalism. Karl Marx had pointed out that within the United States, as long as slavery existed any attempt to build a labor movement was paralyzed; but that “The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours agitation.”
In 1867 the Republican Party passed the Reconstruction Acts to uphold the rights of freed slaves in the former Confederacy, and they also passed laws limiting the working day to eight hours. Black workers in the South were to find themselves betrayed as soon as the Republicans had broken the political power of the Confederacy, and that betrayal led to the horrors of Jim Crow. The eight-hour campaigners in the North, while their situation cannot be compared to that of the freed slaves, also found that the laws they had fought for would not be enforced except by themselves. Winning the eight-hour day would require decades of struggle.
May 1, 1886 was declared by a national union, predecessor to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to be the day when workers nationally would cease to work more than eight hours. Hundreds of thousands went on strike and marched nationwide. The biggest march was in Chicago, and the response of the city’s ruling class was a murderous police attack on unarmed strikers. The next day, a protest meeting in a spot known as Haymarket Square was also attacked by armed police and this time, an unknown person threw a bomb. This bomb was the pretext for mass arrests and the trial of the movement’s leaders, who were executed the following year despite massive national and international protests.
In 1888, the AFL defiantly called for another eight-hour strike, and they sent a delegate to the founding conference of the Second (Socialist) International in 1889 calling for international action. It was this conference that organized the first ever simultaneous international workers’ demonstration on May Day 1890.
The Power of May Day Revisited
Just twelve years ago, between December 2005 and May 2006, immigrant communities rose up in a way that still reverberates today. The impetus for the wave of marches was the proposed federal legislation known as HR 4437 which would have increased penalties for “illegal” immigration and classified undocumented immigrants as “aggravated felons,” along with anyone who helped them enter or remain in the U.S.
Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin sponsored the House bill approved in December 2005 which was scheduled for a Senate vote in March 2006.This created a season of protest.
The demands of the immigrant rights movement were legalization for all, full equality, an end to raids and deportations, and a visa procedure that would grant immigrant workers full labor rights.
The demonstrations that followed brought out hundreds of thousands of people at a time coast to coast. These people came from all different immigrant communities and spoke multiple languages but mostly were from the Latino community.This culminated with the May Day demonstration May 1, 2006 which drew over 1.5 million into the streets nationwide in one of the largest days of protest in U.S. history. The mega-marches doomed HR4437.
Sensenbrenner’s criminalization bill never even came to a vote in the Senate. Neither the House nor the Senate version won enough support in the other chamber to become law.
In 2012, Occupy Wall Street brought new life to May Day as well.
These are the traditions of working class organizing and internationalism on which May Day was built.Eight men now control as much wealth as the world's poorest 3.6 billion people, according to a new report from Oxfam International.
The men -- Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Amancio Ortega, Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg -- are collectively worth $426 billion, the anti-poverty group said on Sunday.
"Such dramatic inequality is trapping millions in poverty, fracturing our societies, and poisoning our politics," said Paul O'Brien, Oxfam America's Vice President for Policy and Campaigns.
The release of the group's annual inequality report coincides with the World Economic Forum in Davos. The annual meeting in the Swiss mountain resort brings together political and financial leaders and some of the wealthiest people in the world.
The Oxfam report said that the richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet since 2015. In the U.S., the richest 1% control 42% of the wealth.
Related: The world is becoming a very scary place
The study draws from Forbes' annual list of billionaires and Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Databook.
It has been four years since the WEF identified rising economic inequality as a major threat to social stability. But Oxfam said the problem is just getting worse.
"Despite world leaders signing up to a global goal to reduce inequality, the gap between the rich and the rest has widened," it said.
Global wage calculator: Compare your salary
The report said that seven out of 10 people live in a country where inequality has worsened over the past three decades. And over the past 25 years, the top 1% has gained more income than the bottom 50% put together.
"Far from trickling down, income and wealth are being sucked upwards at an alarming rate," the report said.
There's also a big gender disparity. Of the 1,810 dollar billionaires around the world, 89% are men.GOP frontrunner Donald Trump collected his first win on Super Tuesday from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
Just in, big news- I have been declared the winner of the CNMI Rep Caucus with 72.8% of the vote! Thank you! #SuperTuesday #VoteTrump — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2016
According to a press release from the Republican Party of the Northern Mariana Islands Association, 471 voters cast their ballots, and out of those, 343 voted for Trump, roughly 73 percent of all votes cast.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) came in second with 24 percent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich ranked third with 2 percent of the vote, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) took last place with 1 percent of the vote.
The Northern Mariana Islands is winner-take-all, so Trump wins all nine delegates.
“I encouraged CNMI GOP voters to come out and exercise their right and vote for their preferred presidential nominee. I am overwhelmed by the turnout and their support for my endorsement of Mr. Donald Trump. I thank all the voters for participating in this important process. The attention the CNMI has received this presidential cycle from all the candidates has truly shown that our votes matter,” Governor Ralph DLG Torres stated.This is where we stand as we mark World AIDS Day today: The Philippines is now one of seven countries burdened with an alarming increase in the rate of HIV/AIDS infection.
From a “low and slow” prevalence rate in the early 2000s, the rate of infection is now “fast and furious,” with 26 new HIV cases reported daily. Given the stigma attached to this pandemic, it is safe to assume that the number of unreported cases could be much more.
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In fact, according to the Department of Health’s HIV/AIDS and ART (anti-retroviral therapy) Registry of the Philippines (HARP), from January 1984 (when the first HIV case in the country was reported) to June 2016, a total of 34,999 cases were reported, most of them asymptomatic.
The biggest number of reported cases are from the National Capital Region, with Calabarzon a close second. Sexual contact remains the most common mode of transmission, followed by injecting drug use. Of infections transmitted through sexual contact, 89 percent are among males who have sex with males (MSM).
Particularly worrisome is that the cases have been getting younger through the years. Between 2001 and 2005, the age group with the biggest proportion of cases was 35-49 years; from 2006, it has become 25-34. The proportion of HIV cases in the 15-24 age group increased from 25 percent in 2006-2010, to 28 percent in 2011-2016. In this last group, 94 percent were male, with 96 percent of them infected through sexual contact. That most of the cases involved MSM isn’t surprising; at that age, most males are adventurous and reckless.
It’s a risk and reality that could have been addressed with sex education in schools where young people make for a captive audience, had the Supreme Court not blocked the full implementation of the Reproductive Health Law. Among the issues that could have been addressed by age-appropriate sex education as provided for by the RH Law is safe sex, as well as the ABCD of HIV/AIDS prevention: abstinence, being faithful, condom use, drug use prevention, and so on. These are basic information that the young, who feel invincible, are not likely to seek out on their own.
The Catholic Church shares the responsibility for abetting the HIV/AIDS crisis, with its continued condemnation of condom use—because, as its bishops have said repeatedly, the prophylactic might be used by couples as a contraceptive device.
It has now been left largely to private groups and NGOs to keep the virus at bay with continuing education, information campaigns and peer counseling, while the DOH and its satellite treatment centers offer free anti-retroviral drugs and free HIV/AIDS testing that—it can’t be stressed enough—is crucial to detect the infection early and tame it with proper treatment.
Fortunately, at an earlier press briefing, the private sector launched an initiative that could help HIV patients comply with their treatment regimen, failure of which could lead to the virus becoming drug-resistant. Called “Connect for Life,” the texted reminder system launched by the SHIP Clinic, Johnson & Johnson and other partners, addresses major challenges in managing HIV/AIDS, including the Philippines’ diverse geography that limits patients’ access to healthcare services. There are also the lingering stigma and sense of shame that make AIDS patients withdraw instead of reaching out to their doctors more often.
Patients can register with SHIP or call J&J, and choose how they want to be reminded or contacted for timely health and fitness tips, consultation, medical advice, and other services they may need in managing the virus. Doctors for their part get a more accurate and updated clinical information system to further engage with their patients. Offered free to HIV patients, the service maintains privacy and confidentiality between patient and health provider through a PIN number that allows only the patient to see the messages. Best of all, the medium used—the mobile phone—is most appropriate, being the ubiquitous device of this age.
It’s community efforts like these that make the HIV+ feel more positive about the future.
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MOST READA German woman has been killed fighting alongside Kurdish militias against Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria.
The woman, named as 19-year old Ivana Hoffmann, is the first female foreign fighter to be reported killed fighting the extremist group.
Journalist and analyst Wladimir van Wilgenburg, who reports on Kurdish affairs, tweeted a photograph of Hoffmann on March 8 and said she had been killed on March 7 near the town of Tal Tamer in Hasakah Province, around 60 kilometers from Kobani.
Kurdish news outlet Basnews reported that Hoffmann had been a member of the Turkish Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP) which had announced her death. The MLKP reportedly said that Hoffmann, to whom it referred by the nickname Avasin Tekosin Gunes, was "immortal." According to Basnews, the MLKP has sent a number of fighters to Syria to join the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia, five of whom have been killed in clashes in Hasakah and Kobani.
Hoffmann had been involved in clashes between IS militants and the Kurdish YPG over a cluster of Assyrian Christian villages near Tal Tamer.
Kurdish forces managed to repel a fresh offensive by IS militants on the Christian villages over the weekend, according to The Wall Street Journal. Local residents and officials have said the attacks on Christian villages in Hasakah Province, which began on February 23, are retaliation for recent battlefield setbacks.
A video uploaded to YouTube on March 8 shows a young German-speaking woman whose face is covered, but who is identified as Hoffmann.
The woman says that she is there to "fight for humanity" and to "fight for freedom" according to a translation by the German website Thelocal.de.The date the video was shot is not known, though the woman says that she has been in the vicinity for a week. Thelocal.de reported that Hoffmann had been fighting with the YPG in Syria for about six months.
The Lions of Rojava Facebook page, which is run by Western volunteers in the YPG, did not mention Hoffmann's death, though it has reported on the deaths of two other Western fighters in the Kurdish militia.
Westerners Fighting For YPG
Though Hoffmann is the first female foreign fighter reported killed fighting alongside the YPG against IS militants, she is not the first Westerner to have been killed in recent clashes.
An Australian man, 28-year-old Ashley Kent Johnston, was reported killed in clashes between YPG and IS on February 26.
A former U.K. Royal Marine, Konstandinos Erik Scurfield from Barnsley, is believed to have died from mortar fire while fighting IS militants in northern Syria last week.
An estimated 100 Westerners are thought to be fighting alongside the YPG in Syria. Britain-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says these 100 Westerners are from Britain, France, Spain, Austria, Australia, Denmark, the United States, and Canada. Around 10 of the 100 are thought to be U.S. Army veterans.
The Kurdish YPG includes female fighters and though most of the Western fighters in the YPG are male veterans, there have been reports that Western women have also joined the Kurdish militia.
Reports emerged last year that a Canadian woman, Gill Rosenberg, had joined the YPG. Rosenberg, aged 31, is a native of Vancouver who moved to Israel in 2006. According to her Facebook page, Rosenberg served in the Israeli Defense Forces Home Front Command in a noncombat role. Since Rosenberg moved to Israel after the age of 20, she would not have been required to undertake mandatory army service, but was eligible to request to volunteer for at least 12 months.
The General Command of the YPG Women's Defense Units issued a statement on March 8 to mark International Women's Day, stating that women had "broke[n] the chains on their body, spirit and lands" in the fight against the IS group.
-- Joanna Paraszczuk110 SHARES Facebook Twitter Linkedin Reddit
Dexta’s exoskeleton glove is a haptic input system which is designed to give users a sense of touch in VR. These new videos which show how the company’s ‘Dextarity Interaction Engine’ gives developers the tools they need to get the virtual world to push back.
The subtleties of a our sense of touch is taken for granted most of the time, you’re unlikely to have given much thought as to just how much information can be passed on through infinitely subtle interactions our fingers and hands have with real world objections. Dexta’s Dexmo exoskeleton gloves are designed to emulate those subtleties, to help add not only immersion to virtual reality experiences, but to give the user that naturalistic, human, tactile guiding force we take for granted in reality, but miss horribly when it’s gone in VR.
We wrote recently on Dexmo’s exoskeleton gloves, quizzing Dexta Robotic’s CEO Aler Gu on what makes Dexmo tick from a hardware perspective, briefly touching upon development APIs. Now, Dexta have released two new videos which demonstrate what they’re calling ‘Dextarity Interaction Engine’ (DexIE for short), an extended set of developers tools and algorithms which define a sort of haptic language for which devs can communicate events, interactions and help to build a virtual physical interface of sorts.
One of the bigger issues when your mind is immersed in a virtual space, and with your hands actions faithfully reproduced, it’s jarring when you’re virtual avatar passes through objects that have no physicality on the virtual plane. DexIE provides options for developers to give solidity to those objects, by ‘preventing’ your fingers physical position penetrating the mesh of a polygonal object.
Dexta CEO Aler Gu, speaking to us via email says “The guiding principle in hand interaction is that the mesh of hands and objects shouldn’t penetrate each other. Once our brain observe that, it will immediately know it’s not real. And that really breaks the immersion,” adding, “There are also a lot of the problems which only appear when you have the right hardware for it. For example, when you are using the Vive controller to pick something up, there is no physics. You are basically ‘sticking’ the object using 2 sets of 3d coordinates.”
With Dexmo however, Dexta thinks their device makes all the difference, Gu tells me that “There are multiple contact points that actually performs physical interaction with 3d objects, which is why “switch between hands interaction” is actually very difficult to implement. Fortunately our engineers found a way to solve that problem after all. We also have an “Object selection indicator” and “Invalid interaction Indicator” to help further improve the user experience.”
Dexmo gloves are, naturally, limited in that they can only enact opposing force to your hand’s digits and only within a certain range. But Dexta believe that their “complex algorithms” go a long way to give VR users that instant hand-object collision notification.
Elsewhere the haptic events are more subtle; Emulating the physical ‘click’ of a button or switch, or conveying the weight of an object playfully flipped by your fingers for example. Then there’s the downright useful tactile sizing of objects interacted with, for example picking up a screw, sensing its dimensions before fitting it to a nearby table.
Gu tells us what they aimed to convey with the above video:
This is a parallel comparison between Vive and Dexmo for certain common tasks in VR. The user is requested to pull a lever, turn a knob, and press some buttons. Dexmo can simulate the physical presence of the lever, knob and the different layers of stiffness for the buttons. When the force feedback is combined with the sound, graphics, it really leaps to the next level of immersion.
We have had a total of 40 volunteers trying out this demo, and 100% of them agreed that Dexmo provides a more immersive VR experience. Another thing we have observed during our user studies is that, when people are using the Vive, we have to teach them how to use Vive controllers to operate the widgets; With Dexmo, it is very natural and intuitive. People reach out their hands and it just works. we don’t have to say anything. So that was a really encouraging feedback for us.
The demo you are seeing in the video is actually made by one of our software engineers who spent only 3 month playing with Unity. You can imagine the magical experience that developers with 5 years of experiences can pull out with this Device!
It’s undeniably all very cool. However we still have questions over cost, tracking and availability to market. Some which we touched upon in our recent interview with Aler Gu. It’s also another example of a peripheral that will require specific software integration in order to reach its potential, which is why these videos are important of course – proving to potential developer partners that Dexta have already done a lot of hard work for them.The man, 42, who was a mathematics teacher, was stabbed after he confonted 21-year-old Anton Lundin Petterson, a far-right sympathiser who walked into the Kronan school in western Sweden on October 22nd.
His death was confirmed by police speaking to Swedish media, including the TT news agency and the Expressen tabloid who reported that the man had died from his injuries at around 7pm on Thursday.
The lead investigator in the case, Thord Haraldsson, told TT on Friday that his team had only spoken to the teacher on Wednesday.
"We held a meeting and it went well. It was the first time we had had contact with him," he said.
"It is a terrible tragedy that it came to this," he added.
The teacher's wife gave an interview last month suggesting that her husband was on the mend, a month after losing consciousness following the attack.
"He was able to say a few words when he woke up. I asked him to say my name and he did," his wife, named only as Samira, told the Aftonbladet tabloid last month.
She said that her husband Nazir had been receiving plenty of flowers and get-well messages from pupils.
"Yes, he is very popular. I tell him every time somebody gets in touch."
Samira said that Nazir had been stabbed "in the bile duct, just a millimetre from the liver" and suggested that this had saved his life.
READ ALSO: 'We can't go out without our mums and dads now'
Thousands attended last month's funerals for teaching assistant Lavin Eskandar, 20, and Ahmed Hassan, 15, who were also killed in the school attack, the first in Sweden since the 1960s.
One other pupil was also hurt, but was was able to return home from hospital in November.
Police classified the attack as a hate crime after CCTV footage showed that Lundin Pettersson, who was shot by officers arriving at the scene, had selected his victims on the basis of their skin colour.NEW YORK – The World Jewish Congress has denounced the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa’s “disgraceful and deplorable” move to celebrate nationalist leader Symon Petliura, whose Ukrainian People’s Republic killed tens of thousands of Jews in programs under his watch in 1918-1921, and urged the local authorities to pull a monument unveiled over the weekend in his honor.
WJC CEO and Executive Vice President Robert Singer said in a statement:
“The World Jewish Congress is distressed by the Vinnitsa municipality’s disgraceful and regrettable decision to celebrate the anti-Semitic nationalist leader Symon Petliura as a ‘Defender of Ukraine’ and by Vinnitsa Regional Chairman Valery Korovy’s description of him as an ‘honest man.’
“Petilura was anything but an honest man. He was a cruel barbarian, indisputably responsible for pogroms in which 35,000-40,000 Jews were murdered.
“He and his Ukrainian People’s Republic were more than just Ukrainian nationalists - they were also avowed and brutal anti-Semites, intoxicated by the thrill of carrying out unimaginably vicious and inhumane crimes against innocent people.
“It is inconceivable that a man, who today we would not hesitate to call a terrorist, should be honored in the very same city in which he and his regime tried to wipe out a rooted and strong Jewish population.
“We have witnessed a significant revival of Jewish life in Ukraine over the last 25 years, with hundreds of synagogues, and dozens of school and cultural institutions established with the support of all Ukrainian national governments since the 1990s.
“The erection of a statue of Petliura in one of the historical centers of Jewish life in Ukraine sends the wrong message to the Ukrainian people and to future generations, and undermines the critical process of democracy and tolerance.
“The celebration of anti-Semites – including so-called nationalist ‘heroes’ – cannot and should not be abided. We urge the local Vinnitsa authorities to retract their celebration and take all possible steps to have the Petliura monument removed.”The Quebec government is about to limit the province's free in vitro fertilization program and change the way it offers financial support.
Health Minister Gaétan Barrette is planning to present an overhaul of the plan in the coming weeks.
The previous Liberal government started the program in 2010.
Quebec was the first province in Canada to fully fund IVF treatments.
Too popular and too expensive
But the program became so popular that it ran over budget.
In his previous job as head of the Quebec’s Federation of Medical Specialists, Barrette criticized the program,.
He called it an "open bar" and said it was not an essential service.
According to Radio-Canada, Barrette is looking at limiting the program to infertile couples, with financial aid in the form of tax credits.
That would exclude others from the program, including single mothers and gay and lesbian couples.
The decision to limit aid to infertile couples would have to be studied in a National Assembly committee to make sure it does not run afoul of Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.
Mona Greenbaum, director of the LGBT Family Coalition, said the government should expect a fight in court if it makes drastic changes.
"The phone has been ringing off the hook this morning with single lesbians and lesbian couples who are very worried about this and feel specifically targeted," Greenbaum said.
Thursday in Quebec City, Barrette would not confirm which changes are on the way.
"Changes will be inspired from Health and Welfare Commissioner's report that addressed many issues we are taking into consideration," said Barrette.Cajsa Nordlund, an artist from Sweden, became a Mormon when she got married to one at a young age. But by age 27, she had resigned from the Church and left her husband. It was a relief in many ways.
She just published a comic book called Becoming an Ex-Mormon all about her journey out of the LDS Church.
She told me she hopes her comic will help others realize there’s an alternative to Mormonism:
I hope that people that read my comic will laugh and just have fun for a while, but also [I hope they] feel that they are not alone… if they have had a hard time because they left the Mormon Church, I want them to feel better.
For readers in the U.S., the book is approximately $16.
(This post has been edited since initially going up)For some of us, death is something we've only seen on television or on the silver screen. Our perceptions of dying have been shaped by actors gunning for awards in dramatic deathbed scenes or bad guys getting their just |
gorge session. It's just that more often than not he's eating right, staying hydrated and (somehow) keeping up on sleep.
Two years ago, then SDSU defensive lineman Josiah Fitzsimmons conducted for a class a test of lean-muscle retention during the course of a football season. The average Jacks player lost four pounds of muscle; Zenner gained one. Early in his junior season, he matched a career high with 295 yards in a win at North Dakota. The next day, he did squats on his own so as to not miss a workout because of a class conflict. On Monday nights, he does a stretching routine after team meetings, yoga mat in tow.
The extra efforts have helped him stay healthy. He's never missed a college game, while totaling 987 touches during the past three seasons.
Do friends and foes give Zenner a hard time about his stringent style? Absolutely. But they acknowledge the effectiveness of it, too. Redshirt freshman running back Brady Mengarelli has decided to do whatever Zenner does in terms of training. True freshman running back Isaac Wallace – another aspiring doctor – came to SDSU in part because of his admiration for Zenner.
"I hate when people say, 'Well, he's a freak' or 'He's superhuman.' That's a discredit to his work ethic, to his effort," Jacks strength and condition director Nate Moe said. "Is everybody going to have the level of success he had? No. But can everybody work at that level and be much better than they are? Yeah. That's what people should look at."
That work ethic isn't exclusive to athletics. In March, Zenner went to Jamaica to do mission work and build homes. He's a member of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee and active in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. This week, even as the Jacks are prepping for the playoffs, he's helping line up holiday donations for a local family.
Zenner is in the running for (at least) three national awards for his combination of skill, smarts and service. He's a candidate for the Walter Payton Award (the best player in the FCS) and the William V. Campbell Trophy (the academic Heisman) and already has been named to the AFCA Good Works Team.
He stands out even in an off-campus household of current and former football players that boast high GPAs and challenging majors. Recently, he passed on playing video games, roommate and receiver Jason Schneider said, because he had some homework due – in a couple weeks.
"What?" the pharmacy major Schneider said with a smile. "He's just always on top of things. He always does the right thing."
For that, Zenner credits his parents and his faith. He didn't create this path; he's merely following it. The next stop might be the NFL – he hopes it will be. Every team has sent at least one rep to Brookings this fall, and most have sent more.
"I sound phony when I'm talking about Zach Zenner," SDSU receivers coach Josh Davis said, "because I start talking about how accountable he is, how great his work ethic is and how he's been for us for four and a half years. I fear that a lot of the NFL scouts are questioning my credibility as a liaison."
So they ask around. The head coach, the strength coach, the equipment guy – somebody has to have a less-than-glowing report on Zenner. The funny thing is that won't really matter at the next level – Zenner will make it or not based on his ability.
As for his time at SDSU, it's transcended football.
"He makes it look easy," Jacks athletic director Justin Sell said. "If all of us could figure out that essence, it would be really hard to measure greatness because it would even it all out."
The Zach Zenner file
Year/position: Senior running back
Hometown: Eagan, Minn.
Benchmarks: Fourth in FCS history for career rushing yards (6,163) and career all-purpose yards (7,751). Finalist for the Walter Payton Award and the William V. Campbell Trophy. Two-time All-American.
Grading out: Two-time academic All-American. Has a 3.87 GPA while majoring in biology/pre-medicine and has been accepted to medical school. Aspires to become a surgeon.Endangered Species Condoms Win Ad Award; Take Action Against Overpopulation
Our wildly popular Endangered Species Condoms are getting some additional love. This week we found out the colorfully packaged condoms, part of our campaign highlighting the connection between overpopulation and species extinction, won the American Advertising Federation's gold ADDY Award in Tucson in the "public service" category. In case you haven't seen them, the nifty condom packages feature illustrations of six different endangered species, along with catchy slogans like "Cover your tweedle, save the burying beetle" and "Wear a jimmy hat, save the big cat." The Center handed out 350,0000 condoms last year and hopes to send more out soon to draw attention to this crucial issue. Through the empowerment of women, education of all people and universal access to birth control, we can curb our population to an ecologically safe level.
But some members of Congress are making that very hard. In fact, the House has just passed a bill to cut government funding for critical programs like women's health clinics -- which for millions of people provide the only available access to reproductive services, family planning and birth control. With this February marking Global Population Speak Out month, it's time to tell our elected representatives they should be expanding those programs, not cutting them -- for the sake of our planet and the public.
Once upon a time, Arise could get all the condoms we needed by calling the Mass. Dept. of Public Health and asking them to send us some. But last year, when we put in that call, we were told that because of budget cuts, DPH would only send condoms to those programs which had contracts with them. Penny wise, pound foolish, of course, but that's par for the course these days, right?Then we found out that the Center for Biological Diversity was giving away endangered species condoms to qualifying groups! We've received two batches, both of which went quickly-- but they were fun to have around.From the Center:That’s starting to change, however, as Google’s Chromebook partners are beginning to embrace the larger Chromebook. Last year, one of the most popular models on the market was HP’s Chromebook 14, an arguably terrible option with poor build quality and a lousy display whose only saving grace was that it was big. Now Acer is launching the Chromebook 15, the first Chromebook with an even bigger 15.6-inch display. It goes right for the heart of the cheap Windows laptop market: the giant hulks of laptops priced around $400–$500 that fill Best Buy and Walmart’s shelves.
But the reality of the matter is that most people looking for a cheap laptop don’t want an 11- or 12-inch model. The vast majority of computers purchased in the $400–$600 range have big 15.6-inch displays. And they run Windows. Even though Chromebooks have long been billed as the computers for “everybody,” they haven’t been the computers for most people.
Say the word “Chromebook,” and the image that comes to mind for most people is a small, cheap, basic computer. That’s exactly what most Chromebooks are. The best Chromebooks you can buy have 11- or 12-inch displays, are priced well under $400, and do basic web browsing and not much more.
The Chromebook 15 actually starts at $249, a significantly lower price than most Windows laptops. But that rock bottom price comes with a low-res 1366 x 768 pixel display, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been using the $349.99 model, which steps up to a 1080p display, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. It’s powered by a dual-core Intel Celeron processor — a real laptop chip, as opposed to the lower-power mobile processors used in other Chromebooks. I strongly recommend ponying up for the more expensive model; the increased screen resolution and added RAM make for a much better experience. And even with those upgrades, the Chromebook 15 still falls under the price of the average entry level Windows notebook. The Chromebook 15's most defining feature is its most obvious The Chromebook 15’s most defining feature is its most obvious: it’s big! In fact, it’s bigger than the 15-inch MacBook Pro I use as my daily workhorse. It’s kind of clunky, kind of chunky, pretty ugly, and the white textured finish on my review unit doesn’t do any favors to hide its bulky dimensions. (Acer is also selling a black model, which is definitely more pleasing on the eyes.) That makes it difficult to use on the go: it barely fit on my lap during my commute on the train to the office, and forget about fitting this thing on the seatback tray of an economy seat on an airplane. The all-plastic Chromebook 15 also weighs nearly five pounds, which is practically an anvil in the Chromebook world and is even heavier than my aluminum MacBook Pro. But none of those things really matter if your computer sits on a desk for the majority of its life. Instead, the big dimensions of the Chromebook 15 prove to be an asset here: the screen is 27 percent larger than a 13.3-inch Chromebook, the keyboard is full-sized and spacious, the trackpad is the biggest you can get on a Chromebook, and there are two big, loud speakers on the deck that pump tunes straight up, instead of to the side or off of another surface. It doesn’t skimp on ports or connectivity either: there’s a USB 3.0 port, a USB 2.0 port, an HDMI port, a full-size SD card slot, a headphone jack, and support for 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi networks. For someone that’s going to buy a basic computer for simple tasks and leave it on a desk the vast majority of the time, those are all attractive features. The 1080p display won’t impress anyone used to the color-rich, high-res panels on MacBook Pros or high-end Windows ultrabooks. But it’s adequately bright, has acceptable viewing angles, and has a matte finish with virtually no glare, which is really easy on the eyes. It also doesn’t suffer from the graininess or harsh colors often seen on other Chromebooks. Aziz Ansari’s latest Netflix special didn’t look great — his black suit and the dark backgrounds on the stage were various shades of dark grey instead of black — but the jokes were no less funny on the Chromebook 15 than they were when I watched it on my plasma TV. The extra screen real estate afforded by the 1080p resolution also lets me put two browser windows side by side, proving that you can actually multitask with a Chromebook. It lacks a touchscreen, but Chrome OS’ support for touch is still nascent, and I don’t miss having one.
The chiclet keyboard is quiet and comfortable to type on, as opposed to the slippery and noisy keyboards on other Chromebooks I’ve used. Its travel is shallower than my MacBook Pro’s, which isn’t much of a surprise, but it isn’t fatiguing to use. The only thing it’s missing is backlighting, but you’ll have to step up to the thousand-dollar Chromebook Pixel to get that on a Chrome OS computer. The trackpad is far better than what you expect from a $350 computer Like the keyboard, the spacious trackpad is actually a joy to use. For some reason (Google says it’s thanks to the Pixel), Chromebooks have been racing ahead of their Windows counterparts in trackpad performance, and the Chromebook 15’s trackpad is fast, responsive, and arguably the best trackpad you’ll find on a computer in this price range. It’s got just the right amount of friction to make multi-touch gestures like two-finger scrolling work effortlessly, and it never caused my cursor to jump around erratically. Its low-cost roots are betrayed by the cheap clacking sound it makes when you depress it, but that didn’t hinder its functionality in any meaningful way. To beat this trackpad, you pretty much have to step up to a MacBook Air (or the aforementioned Chromebook Pixel). It’s that good.
The worst part of most cheap computers is their laggy, slow performance when you’re just trying to check Facebook or pay a bill. A lot of Windows laptops and a number of other Chromebooks (especially models with fanless, mobile processors) are frustrating in this regard. The Chromebook 15 doesn’t have this problem: as I’m typing this review, I have 22 tabs open across two windows, plus another window running the Sunrise calendar Chrome app, and it’s not breaking a sweat — the fans aren’t even on. It’s actually disheartening to say that Chrome OS on this $350 computer runs as well as the Chrome browser does on my $2,500 MacBook Pro, but performance has not been an issue the entire time I’ve been using the Chromebook 15. (It also demonstrates how badly Chrome runs on OS X, but that’s a complaint for another time.) Pages load quickly, scrolling is smooth even on resource-heavy sites like ESPN’s front page, and there’s no lag when moving windows or tabs around. Chrome OS is still mostly just a browser, but it sure feels like more than that when I think of all the things I’ve been able to get done on the Chromebook 15. It’s obvious that the Chromebook 15’s main purpose is to sit on a desk and stay there, but if you do need to move it around and work unplugged, the battery life is actually pretty great. It lasted 11 hours and 32 minutes on our rundown test — significantly more than the 9 hours that Acer claims. In real-world use, it consistently goes for 7 to 8 hours between charges, which is well above the usual 3 to 4 hours you get from entry level Windows laptops.The Laconia incident was a series of events surrounding the sinking of a British troopship in the Atlantic Ocean on 12 September 1942 during World War II, and an attack on the subsequent rescue attempts. RMS Laconia, carrying some 2,732 crew, passengers, soldiers and prisoners of war (POWs), was torpedoed and sunk by U-156, a German U-boat, off the West African coast. Operating partly under the dictates of the old prize rules, the U-boat commander, Korvettenkapitän Werner Hartenstein, immediately commenced rescue operations. U-156 broadcast their position on open radio channels to all Allied forces in the area, and were joined by the crews of several other U-boats in the vicinity.
After surfacing and picking up survivors, who were accommodated on the foredeck, U-156 headed on the surface under Red Cross banners to rendezvous with Vichy French ships and transfer the survivors. En route, the U-boat was spotted by a B-24 Liberator bomber of the US Army Air Forces. The aircrew, having reported the U-boat's location, intentions, and the presence of survivors, were then ordered to attack the sub. The B-24 killed dozens of Laconia's survivors with bombs and strafing attacks, forcing U-156 to cast their remaining survivors into the sea and crash dive to avoid being destroyed.
Rescue operations were continued by other vessels. Another U-boat, U-506, was also attacked by US aircraft and forced to dive. A total of 1,113 survivors were rescued, however, 1,619 were killed – mostly Italian POWs. The event changed the general attitude of Germany's naval personnel towards rescuing stranded Allied seamen. The commanders of the Kriegsmarine were shortly issued the Laconia Order by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, which specifically forbade any such attempt and ushered in unrestricted submarine warfare for the remainder of the war.
The B-24 pilots mistakenly reported they had sunk U-156, and were awarded medals for their "bravery". Neither the US pilots nor their commander were punished or investigated, and the matter was quietly forgotten by the US military. During the later Nuremberg Trials, a prosecutor attempted to cite the Laconia Order as proof of war crimes by Dönitz and his submariners. The ploy backfired and caused much embarrassment to the United States after the incident's full report had emerged.
RMS Laconia [ edit ]
RMS Laconia was built in 1921 as a civilian ocean liner. During the Second World War she was requisitioned for the war effort, and by 1942 had been converted into a troopship. At the time of the incident she was transporting mostly Italian prisoners of war from Cape Town to Freetown, under the command of Captain Rudolph Sharp. The ship was carrying 463 officers and crew, 87 civilians, 286 British soldiers, 1,793 Italian prisoners and 103 Polish soldiers acting as guards of the prisoners.
Sharp had previously commanded RMS Lancastria, which had been sunk by German bombs on 17 June 1940 off the French port of Saint-Nazaire while taking part in Operation Ariel, the evacuation of British nationals and troops from France, two weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation.
Events [ edit ]
Attack on Laconia [ edit ]
At 10 p.m. on 12 September 1942, U-156 was patrolling off the coast of West Africa midway between Liberia and Ascension Island. The submarine's commanding officer, Korvettenkapitän Hartenstein, spotted the large British ship sailing alone and attacked it. Ships armed with guns (which most merchantmen and troop transports were) fell outside the protection from attack without warning, therefore the Laconia was regarded as a legitimate target. At 10:22 p.m., Laconia transmitted the following message on the 600-metre band: "SSS SSS 0434 South / 1125 West Laconia torpedoed." "SSS" was the code signifying "under attack by submarine". Despite further messages being sent, there is no record that any were received by any station or vessel.
Although there were sufficient lifeboats for the entire ship's complement, including the POWs, heavy listing prevented half from being launched until the vessel had settled. The Italian POWs were left locked in the cargo holds as the ship sank, but most escaped by breaking down hatches or climbing up the ventilation shafts. Several were shot when a group of POWs rushed a lifeboat station, and a large number were bayoneted to death in attempts to prevent them boarding the few lifeboats available. Although the Polish guards were armed with rifles with fixed bayonets, they were not loaded and the guards carried no ammunition. Witnesses indicate that few of the POWs were shot, instead most of the casualties were bayoneted.[5]
[5] "Sharks darted among us. Grabbing an arm, biting a leg. Other larger beasts swallowed entire bodies." – Corporal Dino Monte, POW
By the time the last lifeboats were launched most survivors had already entered the water, so some lifeboats had few passengers. Only one life raft left the ship with POWs on board; the rest jumped into the ocean. Survivors later recounted how Italians in the water were either shot or had their hands severed by axes if they tried to climb into a lifeboat. The blood soon attracted sharks.[6] As Laconia began to sink, U-156 surfaced in order to capture the ship's surviving senior officers. To their surprise, the Germans saw over two thousand people struggling in the water.
Rescue operation [ edit ]
Realising that the passengers were primarily POWs and civilians, Hartenstein immediately began rescue operations whilst flying the Red Cross flag. Laconia sank at 11:23 p.m., over an hour after the attack. At 1:25 a.m. on 13 September, Hartenstein sent a coded radio message to Befehlshaber der U-Boote alerting them to the situation. It read: "Sunk by Hartenstein British "Laconia". Grid FF 7721 310 degrees. Unfortunately with 1,500 Italian prisoners of war. So far 90 fished. 157 cubic metres [of oil]. 19 [torpedoes], trade wind 3, request orders."
The head of submarine operations, Admiral Dönitz, immediately ordered seven U-boats from the Eisbär group, which had been gathering to take part in a planned surprise attack on Cape Town to divert to the scene to pick up survivors. Dönitz then informed Berlin of the situation and actions he had taken. Hitler was furious and ordered that the rescue be abandoned. Admiral Erich Raeder ordered Dönitz to disengage the Eisbär boats, which included Hartenstein's U-156, and send them to Cape Town as per the original plan.
Raeder then ordered U-506, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Erich Würdemann, U-507, under Korvettenkapitän Harro Schacht, and the Italian submarine Comandante Cappellini to intercept Hartenstein to take on his survivors and then to proceed to the Laconia site and rescue any Italians they could find. Raeder also requested the Vichy French to send warships from Dakar and Côte d'Ivoire to collect the Italian survivors from the three submarines.
The Vichy French, in response, sent the 7,600-ton cruiser Gloire from Dakar, and two sloops, the fast 660-ton Annamite and the slower 2,000-ton Dumont-d'Urville, from Conakry, French Guinea, and Cotonou, Dahomey, respectively. Dönitz disengaged the Eisbär boats and informed Hartenstein of Raeder's orders, but he substituted Kapitänleutnant Helmut Witte's U-159 for U-156 in the Eisbär group and sent the order: "All boats, including Hartenstein, only take as many men into the boat as will allow it to be fully ready for action when submerged."
U-156 was soon crammed above and below decks with nearly 200 survivors, including five women, and had another 200 in tow aboard four lifeboats. At 6 a.m. on 13 September, Hartenstein broadcast a message on the 25-metre (82 ft) band in English (and not in code) to all shipping in the area, giving his position, requesting assistance with the rescue effort, and promising not to attack. It read: "If any ship will assist the shipwrecked Laconia crew I will not attack her, providing I am not being attacked by ship or air force. I picked up 193 men. 4°-53" South, 11°-26" West. ― German submarine."
The British in Freetown intercepted this message but, believing it might be a ruse of war, refused to credit it. Two days later, on 15 September, a message was passed to the Americans that Laconia had been torpedoed and the British merchant ship Empire Haven was en route to pick up survivors. The "poorly composed message" implied that Laconia had only been sunk that day and made no mention that the Germans were involved in a rescue attempt under a cease-fire or that neutral French ships were also en route.
U-156 remained on the surface at the scene for the next two and a half days. At 11:30 a.m. on 15 September, she was joined by U-506, and a few hours later by both U-507 and the Comandante Cappellini. The four submarines, with lifeboats in tow and hundreds of survivors standing on their decks, headed for the African coastline and a rendezvous with the Vichy French surface warships that had set out from Senegal and Dahomey.[11]
First American attack [ edit ]
During the night the submarines became separated. On 16 September at 11:25 a.m., U-156 was spotted by an American B-24 Liberator bomber flying from a secret airbase on Ascension Island. The submarine was travelling with a Red Cross flag draped across her gun deck. Hartenstein signalled to the pilot in both Morse code and English requesting assistance. A British officer also messaged the aircraft: "RAF officer speaking from German submarine, Laconia survivors on board, soldiers, civilians, women, children."
Lieutenant James D. Harden of the US Army Air Forces did not respond to the messages, and turned away and notified his base of the situation. The senior officer on duty that day, Captain Robert C. Richardson III, who claimed that he did not know that this was a Red Cross-sanctioned German rescue operation, ordered the B-24 to "sink the sub". He later claimed:
He believed that the rules of war, at the time, did not permit a combat ship to fly Red Cross flags. He feared that the German submarine would attack the two Allied freighters diverted by the British to the site. He assumed that the German submarine was rescuing only the Italian POWs. In his tactical assessment, he believed that the submarine might discover and shell the secret Ascension airfield and fuel tanks, thus cutting off a critical Allied resupply air route to British forces in Egypt and Soviet forces in Russia.
"The sub rolled over and was last seen bottom up. Crew had abandoned ship and taken to surrounding lifeboats." – Lieutenant James D. Harden
Harden flew back to the scene of the rescue effort, and at 12:32 p.m., attacked with bombs and depth charges. One landed among the lifeboats in tow behind U-156, killing dozens of survivors, while others straddled the submarine itself causing minor damage. Hartenstein cast adrift those lifeboats still afloat and ordered the survivors on his deck into the water. The submarine submerged slowly to give those still on the deck a chance to get into the water and escape. According to Harden's report, he made four runs at the submarine. On the first three the depth charges and bombs failed to release, on the fourth he dropped two bombs. The crew of the Liberator were later awarded medals for the alleged sinking of U-156, when they had in fact only sunk two lifeboats.
Ignoring "Commander" Hartenstein's request that they stay in the area to be rescued by the Vichy French, two lifeboats decided to head for Africa. One, which began the journey with 68 people on board, reached the African coast 27 days later with only 16 survivors. The other was rescued by a British trawler after 40 days at sea. Only four of its 52 occupants were still alive.[15]
Unaware of the attack, U-507, U-506, and Cappellini continued to pick up survivors. The following morning Commander Revedin of Cappellini found that he was rescuing survivors who had been set adrift by U-156. At 11:30 a.m. Revedin received the following message: "Bordeaux to Cappellini: Reporting attack already undergone by other submarines. Be ready to submerge for action against the enemy. Put shipwrecked on rafts except women, children, and Italians, and make for minor grid-square 56 of grid-square 0971 where you will land remainder shipwrecked on to French ships. Keep British prisoners. Keep strictest watch enemy planes and submarines. End of message."
U-507 and U-506 received confirmation from headquarters of the attack on U-156 and were asked for the number of survivors rescued. Commander Schacht of U-507 replied that he had 491, of which 15 were women and 16 were children. Commander Wurdemann of U-506 confirmed 151, including nine women and children. The next message from headquarters ordered them to cast adrift all the British and Polish survivors, mark their positions and instruct them to remain exactly where they were and proceed with all haste to the rescue rendezvous. The respective commanders chose not to cast any survivors adrift.
The order given by Richardson has been called a prima facie war crime. Under the conventions of war at sea ships, including submarines, engaged in rescue operations are held immune from attack.
Second American attack [ edit ]
Five B-25s from Ascension's permanent squadron and Hardin's B-24 continued to search for submarines from dawn till dusk. On 17 September, one B-25 sighted Laconia's lifeboats and informed Empire Haven of their position. Hardin's B-24 sighted U-506, which had 151 survivors on board including nine women and children, and attacked. On the first run the bombs failed to drop, U-506 crash dived and on the second run the B-24 dropped two 500 lb (227 kg) bombs and two 350 lb (159 kg) depth charges but they caused no damage.
Rescued British Sailors, Soldiers, Airmen and Merchant Seamen – on the French warship Gloire by by Edward Bawden
That same day, the British at Freetown sent an ambiguous message to Ascension informing them that three French ships from Dakar were en route. Captain Richardson assumed the French intended to invade Ascension so the submarine hunting was cancelled in order to prepare for an invasion.
The French cruiser Gloire picked up 52 survivors, all British, while still 60 miles (97 km) from the rendezvous point. Gloire then met with the sloop Annamite with both meeting U-507 and U-506 at the rendezvous point at a little after 2 p.m. on 17 September. With the exception of two British officers kept aboard U-507, the survivors were all transferred to the rescue ships. Gloire sailed off on her own and within four hours rescued another 11 lifeboats. At 10 p.m., Gloire found another lifeboat and proceeded to a planned rendezvous with Annamite.
At 1 a.m., a lookout spotted a light on the horizon, which was investigated despite this meaning Gloire would not be able to make the rendezvous, and a further 84 survivors were rescued. A new rendezvous was arranged, the ships meeting at 9:30 a.m. with Annamite transferring her survivors to Gloire. A count was then taken: 373 Italians, 70 Poles and 597 British who included 48 women and children. Gloire arrived at Dakar on 21 September to resupply before sailing for Casablanca, arriving there on 25 September. On arrival, Colonel Baldwin, on behalf of all the British survivors, presented the captain of Cappellini with a letter that read as follows:
We the undersigned officers of His Majesty’s Navy, Army and Air Force and of the Merchant Navy, and also on behalf of the Polish detachment, the prisoners of war, the women and children, wish to express to you our deepest and sincerest gratitude for all you have done, at the cost of very great difficulties for your ship and her crew, in welcoming us, the survivors of His Majesty’s transport-ship, the Laconia.
The submarine Cappellini had been unable to find the French warships so radioed for instructions and awaited a response. The French sloop Dumont-d’Urville was sent to rendezvous with Cappellini and by chance rescued a lifeboat from the British cargo ship Trevilley, which had been torpedoed on 12 September. After searching for other Trevilley survivors without luck, Dumont-d’Urville met Cappellini on 20 September. With the exception of six Italians and two British officers, the remaining survivors were transferred to Dumont-d’Urville, which later transferred the Italians to Annamite, which transported them to Dakar on 24 September. Of Laconia’s original complement of 2,732, only 1,113 survived. Of the 1,619 who died, 1,420 were Italian POWs.[21]
Conclusion [ edit ]
From Casablanca, most of the survivors were taken to Mediouna to await transport to a prison camp in Germany. On 8 November, the Allied invasion of North Africa began liberating the survivors, who were taken aboard the ship Anton which landed them in the United States.[22]
One of the survivors, Gladys Foster, wrote a detailed description of the sinking, the rescue and then subsequent two-month internment in Africa. Gladys was the wife of Chaplain to the Forces the Rev. Denis Beauchamp Lisle Foster, who was stationed in Malta. She was on board the ship with her 14-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Barbara Foster, travelling back to Britain. During the mayhem of the sinking the two were separated and it was not until days later that Gladys discovered her daughter had survived and was on another raft. She was urged to write her recollection not long after landing back in London. Elizabeth married Major Peter Charles Crichton Gobourn in 1953. She died in Cheltenham in January 2010, aged 82, and was survived by her three children and seven grandchildren.
Doris Hawkins, a missionary nurse who survived the Laconia incident and spent 27 days adrift in lifeboat nine, finally coming ashore on the coast of Liberia. She was returning to England after five years in Palestine, with 14-month-old Sally Kay Readman, who was lost to the sea as they were transferred into the lifeboat.
Doris Hawkins wrote a pamphlet entitled "Atlantic Torpedo" after her eventual return to England, published by Victor Gollancz in 1943. In it she writes of the moments when Sally was lost: "We found ourselves on top of the arms and legs of a panic-stricken mass of humanity. The lifeboat, filled to capacity with men, women and children, was leaking badly and rapidly filling with water; at the same time it was crashing against the ship’s side. Just as Sally was passed over to me, the boat filled completely and capsized, flinging us all into the water. I lost her. I did not hear her cry even then, and I am sure that God took her immediately to Himself without suffering. I never saw her again."
Doris Hawkins was one of 16 survivors (out of 69 in the lifeboat when it was cast adrift from the U-boat). She spent the remaining war years personally visiting the families of people who perished in the lifeboat, returning mementos entrusted to her by them in their dying moments. In Doris's words, "It is impossible to imagine why I should have been chosen to survive when so many did not. I have been reluctant to write the story of our experiences, but in answer to many requests I have done so; and if it strengthens someone’s faith, if it is an inspiration to any, if it brings home to others, hitherto untouched, all that 'those who go down to the sea in ships' face for our sakes, hour by hour, day by day, year in and year out – it will not have been written in vain".
Survivor Jim McLoughlin states in One Common Enemy that after the incident Hartenstein asked him if he was in the Royal Navy, which he was, and then asked why a passenger ship was armed, stating, "If it wasn't armed, I would not have attacked." McLoughlin believes this indicates Hartenstein had thought it was a troop transport rather than a passenger ship; by signalling to the Royal Navy, Laconia was acting as a de facto naval auxiliary.
Aftermath [ edit ]
The Laconia incident had far-reaching consequences. Up until that point, it was common for U-boats to assist torpedoed survivors with food, water, simple medical care for the wounded, and a compass bearing to the nearest landmass. It was extremely rare for survivors to be brought on board as space on a U-boat was barely enough for its own crew. On 17 September 1942, in response to the incident, Admiral Dönitz issued an order named Triton Null, later known as the Laconia Order. In it, Dönitz prohibited U-boat crews from attempting rescues; survivors were to be left in the sea. Even afterwards, U-boats still occasionally provided aid for survivors.
At the Nuremberg Trials held by the Allies in 1946, Dönitz was indicted for war crimes. The issuance of the Laconia Order was the centrepiece of the prosecution case, a decision that backfired badly. Its introduction allowed the defence to recount at length the numerous instances in which German submariners acted with humanity where in similar situations the Allies behaved callously. Dönitz pointed out that the order itself was a direct result of this callousness and the attack on a rescue operation by US aircraft.
The Americans had also practised unrestricted submarine warfare, under their own equivalent to the Laconia Order, which had been in force since they entered the war.[29] Fleet Admiral Nimitz, the wartime commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, provided unapologetic written testimony on Dönitz's behalf at his trial that the US Navy had waged unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific from the very first day the United States entered the war.
The prosecution has introduced much evidence surrounding two orders of Dönitz, War Order No. 154, issued in 1939, and the so-called Laconia Order of 1942. The defence argues that these orders and the evidence supporting them do not show such a policy and introduced much evidence to the contrary. The Tribunal is of the opinion that the evidence does not establish with the certainty required that Dönitz deliberately ordered the killing of shipwrecked survivors. The orders were undoubtedly ambiguous and deserve the strongest censure. The evidence further shows that the rescue provisions were not carried out and that the defendant ordered that they should not be carried out. The argument of the defence is that the security of the submarine is, as the first rule of the sea, paramount to rescue and that the development of aircraft made rescue impossible. This may be so, but the Protocol is explicit. If the commander cannot rescue, then under its terms he cannot sink a merchant vessel and should allow it to pass harmless before his periscope. The orders, then, prove Dönitz is guilty of a violation of the Protocol. In view of all the facts proved and in particular of an order of the British Admiralty announced on 8 May 1940, according to which all vessels should be sunk on sight in the Skagerrak, and the answers to interrogatories by Admiral Chester Nimitz stating unrestricted submarine warfare was carried on in the Pacific Ocean by the United States from the first day of the Pacific War, the sentence of Dönitz is not assessed on the ground of his breaches of the international law of submarine warfare.[30]
The Naval War College journal, International Law Studies |
It was never Target's intention to offend our customers with this item."An adage warns that failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Transmission experts say system planners may be doing just that.
As the U.S. moves toward a power mix with more renewable resources and flexible generation, transmission will be a key element in enabling the grid to handle the transition. As both Southwest Power Pool CEO Nick Brown and California Independent System Operator Steve Berberich recently pointed out to Utility Dive, recent record-breaking renewable energy penetrations in each of their service areas would have been impossible without aggressive transmission building in recent years.
But building transmission lines is one of the most arduous, time-consuming tasks in the power sector, and so even as demand for a more diverse power mix intensifies, transmission buildout struggles to keep pace.
A recently-released report from the Brattle Group illustrates many of the difficulties, warning that transmission planners are failing to prepare to meet the challenge of the transforming generation mix.
Successful planning, however, could save $30 to $70 billion in generation and transmission investments through 2030, researchers said. And a well-planned system could net U.S. ratepayers as much as $47 billion in savings annually.
“Most of the planning processes are not yet capturing the benefits when evaluating potential transmission upgrades,” said Brattle Group Principle Judy Chang. “The planning is still focused on shorter term reliability needs and more local needs.”
Three reasons to plan
The report, commissioned by the WIRES Group, a transmission advocate, maps out three reasons why better regional and interregional transmission planning processes are urgently needed:
The long lead time in planning transmission lines means planning should start immediately to meet the evolving power mix and regulatory goals from 2020 to 2030; The current use of reliability as the primary measure of transmission value leads to a segmented grid, deficient in the flexibility needed to manage the emerging generation mix. That focus will "lead to piecemeal projects instead of developing integrated and flexible transmission solutions that enable the system to meet public policy goals more cost effectively;" And the current transmission investment cycle is the first opportunity in a half-century to streamline the Balkanized system while controlling costs and environmental impacts.
Another factor is the role the Clean Power Plan has played in transmission building. Despite the litigation delaying the Clean Power Plan (CPP), existing factors are driving a transition in the generation mix, Chang said.
While it’s unlikely the fate of the CPP will be determined by the election, it’s clear the transition to a new generation mix is already underway, said former FERC Chair and WIRES Counsel Jim Hoecker. For the transmission that will be needed, “planning is out of sync with what is happening in the real world and should have started yesterday.”
But "old habits die hard,” Hoecker added. “It’s easier to focus largely on reliability needs, or to limit planning to incremental grid additions, or to wait and see what transpires at the generation level of the system.”
The trouble with failing to plan for future infrastructure needs is that it limits access to innovation, Hoecker said. Planning shows how opportunities like electric transportation and remotely developed, low-cost resources can be seized. Planning also illustrates the costs and benefits of seizing them.
“Transmission investment is about preserving options and delivering value, long-term,” he said.
Barriers to transmission buildout
Building “a robust and flexible regional and interregional transmission infrastructure” will be critical to meeting U.S. environmental and energy policies over the next 15 years, the Brattle paper reports.
But coordinating regional efforts can often be the most difficult part of transmission planning. States and regions finding ways to collaborate for joint planning and cost sharing of interregional transmission infrastructure is one significant barrier, Brattle pointed out.
The collaboration must begin with the requirements in the landmark FERC Order 1000 that opened the potential of regional and interregional planning, the paper argues.
The order stipulated that transmission projects in states must be built if they meet certain criteria for delivering benefits to the grid and customers, but there is no such mandate for interstate transmission projects, something SPP’s Brown said was one of his biggest challenges in his transition to a cleaner grid.
“The regional and interregional part of Order 1000 is not a mandate, it is a proposal, and it does not appear to be performing as expected,” said Hoecker, who was at the commission in the 1990s when other early efforts were initiated that later led to Order 1000. “It has not relieved the difficulties of getting multiple approvals and multiple siting orders from a succession of states. Planners are not making a strong enough case.”
Brattle Group Principle and paper co-author Johannes Pfeifenberger agreed.
“It is possible to spend a lot on transmission and not achieve the cost reductions we are talking about,” he said. “Simply building by reacting to what is in the queue and what has been proposed is not planning. With the current planning process, it would be impossible to get to a CREZ or a Tehachapi or an MVP.”
But, he added, it is not simply a failure of transmission system planners. “They take their cues from state regulators. Those projects only happened because policymakers asked system operators to make them happen.”
The narrow focus from regulators is another barrier, Chang pointed out. “Many, due mostly to a lack of understanding, are taking a pretty hard line on not paying for anything that does not meet immediate state needs.”
Some states limit regulators’ decision-making “to keeping the rates as low as possible for their state’s ratepayers,” Hoecker added.
Breaking the standoff
One of the biggest challenges for transmission in recent years has been a standoff, so to speak, between renewables developers and transmission builders, according to the report.
In many regions, the sides played a game of power planning chicken. Little was done while transmission builders waited for renewables developers to site projects and renewables developers waited for transmission builders to plan lines.
“We need policymakers to use the CPP as a target and urge regional planners to look forward and think about what a system would look like to comply with CPP or other regional policies or meeting a system’s cleaner and/or higher renewables objectives,” Chang said.
Only a regional initiative led by California Independent System Operator, and driven by the state’s 50% by 2030 mandate, represents that kind of “forward-thinking planning,” Chang said. “The California ISO planners realized meeting the mandate could be cheaper with lower cost wind, solar, and possibly geothermal, outside the state. They are asking what transmission across the West would be needed to bring in those resources.”
The initial planning study shows CAISO's ambition to turn the West's 38 balancing authorities into a full wholesale market structure could save California electricity users $1 to $1.5 billion in 2030, Pfeifenberger said.
“That may not be enough savings for state policymakers if they have a strong preference for the benefits of in-state compliance,” he said. “But without planning for alternatives, nobody knows what the cost differences will be. Policymakers should want to know that before they make a decision.”
Planning at the ISO level
The system operators say they are moving ahead. California’s regionalization initiative is the kind of planning the paper’s authors would like to see replicated.
There are several other examples of California planning, according to the ISO's Senior Public Information Officer Steven Greenlee.
First, the system operator has continually improved its planning process and market design to support the state’s investor-owned utilities in meeting their Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS) obligations, he said.
Second, the ISO is part of the California Public Utilities Commission Long-Term Procurement Plan and the California Energy Commission Integrated Energy Policy Report, Greenlee added. “Our transmission plan is an important input into the CPUC proceeding and regulators are active in our transmission planning process.”
Another key advance that enabled utilities to meet the state’s 33% RPS was a revision that added "policy driven" to the ISO’s “reliability and economic” market design criteria, Greenlee said. “Now a project that meets energy policies can be approved on its merits, just as can projects that meet reliability needs and projects that reduce costs.”
Fourth, the ISO is now working on planning to meet real-time ramping needs with a flexible ramping product intended to help system operators better manage renewables, he said.
MISO’s work with stakeholders to create its MVP portfolio demonstrated it is “an innovator in transmission planning to address public policy goals,” Spokesperson Andy Schonert said.
That work was “a case study” in planning transmission projects to meet reliability, economic, and public policy needs and its ongoing MTEP17 “uses assumptions developed through our Clean Power Plan modeling to help guide our transmission planning,” Schonert added.
MISO is also coordinating on CPP analysis with PJM and SPP “to provide more information to guide the process,” he said.
SPP’s planning process, according to its Value of Transmission Report, resulted in transmission upgrades that integrated higher levels of renewables while meeting reliability, economic, and public policy goals, said SPP Vice President of Engineering Lanny Nickell. Those upgrades will ultimately provide benefits “3.5 times higher than their costs.”
As part of SPP's ongoing effort to anticipate and solve future needs, its stakeholders are reviewing the current planning process, he added.
The SPP Regional State Committee, made of regulators from states in its footprint, “plays a critical role,” Nickell said. “We work diligently to both educate those policymakers and ensure their views are heard and considered.”
These system operator responses underscore the point from the Brattle report that when policymakers give direction, planning gets done. But too often, Chang said, “state leaders are focused on state policy, system operators are waiting for direction on regional planning policy, and nothing is happening.”
An ‘insurance policy’ for the grid
As new policies lead to a new generation mix and the bulk power system “transforms itself,” a well-planned, flexible transmission infrastructure provides an “insurance policy” against the risk of significant cost increases for customers, the paper concludes.
Deciding on the specifics of that insurance policy “is what planners are supposed do,” Hoecker said. Lawmakers are not likely to drive change in that regard.
“It would take a different Congress that was looking at needs nationally and not just protecting the authority of the states,” Hoecker added. “The appropriate source of ideas for regional and interregional planning is planners and there is a great deal of urgency here. We can’t wait for the future to arrive and quickly decide how to accommodate it, especially given the time cycle for transmission development.”
Merchant transmission planners like Clean Line Energy Partners may be pointing the way for planners because “it is their business to find the most cost-effective potential solutions,” Chang said.
But the difficulties from multiple state regulatory regimes, finding customers, and making a business model work that is based solely on node to node price differentials demonstrates why transmission is ultimately a utility business, she said. “It is a cost that needs to be shared by all those who benefit from the infrastructure."Seth Mitchell will tell you he isn't the savior of heavyweight American boxing. It's not how he thinks of himself. He doesn't use words like that to describe himself. If the media or boxing fans wish to describe him as much, that's their choice.
Notably, though, Mitchell won't say they're wrong.
At least, he won't say they're wrong in terms of what he is capable of doing within the ropes of a ring. Savior or not, he does believe he'll earn a shot at the best heavyweight boxing has to offer. He is also comfortably self-assured that when such an opportunity presents itself, he'll be in a position to take advantage.
He also acknowledges he has some work to do.
Tomorrow he'll take another step towards that (inevitable?) end when he takes on his toughest fight to date with Johnathon Banks in the HBO co-main event of the Adrien Broner vs. Antonio DeMarco card in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Banks presents a set of challenges Mitchell has arguably not faced before. If the former Michigan State Spartan is to become what others say he may already be, solving the puzzle Banks presents is positively critical.
In this interview with Bad Left Hook, Mitchell opens up about the advantages Banks possesses over him, what nearly cost him the fight against Chazz Witherspoon, the perils of watching tape in boxing, why his star is rising and his outlook for the future.
Full audio and partial transcription below:
Luke Thomas: Do you ever get tired from talking about the Klitschko's in your interviews?
Seth Mitchell: (laughs) I mean, a little bit. Sometimes a lot of the interviews are redundant, but it's a part of the business, nature of the beast. That's what I'm ultimately trying to accomplish and that's to face whomever has the belts. It looks like the Klitschkos will still have the belts.
I think my team and I, we're going a good job. Hopefully I can get an opportunity at the end of 2013.
Luke Thomas: Do you ever think about yourself in the terms the media talks about you in? As the guy who could resurrect or save or restore heavyweight American boxing?
Seth Mitchell: I really don't. If you follow me, if you know me, I'm a very humble guy. I believe in myself and I believe in my ability. And I know when I step into the ring I bring a lot of excitement. My style resonates to the fans, but I just try to go out there and do my bes to compete and I let the media and everybody else give me all of those accolades. I just continue to work hard.
Luke Thomas: You suffered a hand injury. Give us an update: how is the hand and more specifically, what were the steps you took during the time off in terms of physical rehabilitation to heal it? Seth Mitchell: The hand's fine, to answer your question. The hand is fine. I tore my MCL in my middle finger - my third metacarpal [sic]. My middle finger knuckle, I tore the MCL. The doctor said it didn't require surgery, it just required six to eight weeks of rest. Because the fight kept getting postponed, I actually had the opportunity to rest it for about eleven weeks instead of six to eight weeks. I got a lot of rest on it. I stayed in the gym throughout the whole time just working on my left hand. Over the last three months I've been sparring and hitting the heavy bag and have no ill effects with my right hand. That's 100 percent, thank god for that. I just rested it and put my hand in rice and squeeze that, do little weight things, get a massage, things of that nature. Just allow it to heal, but I did stay off of it for about three months.
Luke Thomas: Boxing can cause wear and tear, but was there anything specifically that caused it? Seth Mitchell: I believe it was one of those things that kind of happens. That was my first time having an injury in my boxing career that allowed me to have to pull out of a fight. Everybody has knicks and bruises. I have a saying: as an athlete you're never 100 percent; if you're 85 percent you're a 100 percent. This was the first time I had to pull out and I think it was the right hand I hit Chazz [Witherspoon] with in the third round right before the ref stopped it. That's when I believe I hurt my knuckle.
Luke Thomas: Absent sparring or heavy bags, was adding new skills or tools a part of the plan for maximizing the time off? Seth Mitchell: Absolutely, absolutely. My trainer and I, whenever a fight is over we go back to the fundamentals. We go back to the basics. We go back throwing the jab and not leaving your head in the same spot for more than two or three seconds. We're religious in that aspect of not thinking that I know everything, going back and trying to sharpen all of my fundamentals; working on things such as feints, creating more space, not falling on your punches. Those are a lot of things my trainer and I worked on throughout this time off. Hopefully you can see that on the 17th because I've definitely been working extremely hard and I'm excited to get in the ring and show what I've been working on.
Luke Thomas: Let's circle back to the Chazz Witherspoon fight. It went your way, but there was a moment where it got a little hairy. From your vantage point, why did he have some success? Seth Mitchell: He did a good job with his jab. Not that he was picking me apart with his jab, but he was throwing his jab out there, keeping the right space. He was feinting off of his jab, short little steps that he would do with his foot that would throw my timing off and - thinking that a shot was coming - it made me bend at my waist instead of bending at my knees. My hands were actually up, but when I was bent at my waist and I was a sitting duck, he was able to come over with the chopping right hand. He caught me with that about three or four times in that first round that got my legs a little wobbly, spaghetti legs. I was able to overcome it, but those are some of the things we worked on. Sometimes you're going to get caught out of position, but when I got caught out of position I should've used my legs to get out of range from his right hand. Those are just some of the things that we've done with studying tape and just trying to correct some of the things I did wrong in that fight. But that's why he was able to have success.
Luke Thomas: Among other talents, two things saved you. Power was one. Recovery instincts was the other. I'm sure you knew you had those instincts, but you'd never been put in a position in a fight where you had to use them, at least not to that extent. What did you learn about your ability to come back? Seth Mitchell: It was pretty cool. That's what you saw, the emotions after the fight. It was how I came back. Like you said, I'd never been in that position before. Until you get put in that position, you really don't know. For me to pull through like I did, it was just amazing. Actually, it was even better when I went back and watched it on tape. It did take me a couple of rounds to get my whereabouts together. I went back to that corner after the first round and said, "Let's go." And I went in there and got it done. It was pretty amazing for me to come back, but I trust my training. I trust my training and I trust my conditioning and I trust my trainers. I knew I was able even after being hurt. I came back in the second round and threw 80-something punches because I'm not worried about getting tired. I trust my training.
Luke Thomas: Banks has more experience than you, both as an amateur and has had longer fights than you in professional ranks. Is there a part of you that wishes that with Jonathan or another opponent, that you could go the full twelve, ten rounds? Is there some part of you that would want that experience to add to your resume? Seth Mitchell: Not really. I believe that my style resonates to the public. I believe I'm on these HBO cards and I'm on this high level because of what I've been doing in the ring. If I were 25-0-1 with 11 knockouts, I probably wouldn't be talking to you and I probably wouldn't be co-main event on HBO almost to the level to where I'm going to headline my own card. I'm prepared to go one round of twelve rounds when I step into the ring. I know a lot of people question that because I haven't been passed eight since 2010, but fatigue and getting taken into deep waters, that's the last thing that's on my mind. I've prepared very hard. Believe it or not, I actually get stronger in the latter part of the rounds. If I have to go twelve, I'll be ready to go twelve. But no, if I never go the full distance again it wouldn't bother me at all.
Luke Thomas: Banks has one notable loss to his record, a cruiserweight loss to Tomasz Adamek. In your mind, why did he lose that fight? What did he technically do wrong? Seth Mitchell: He didn't necessarily do technically anything wrong. Jonathan likes to fight at his pace and Adamek is a good pressure fighter, throws punches in bunches and he keeps the press on. That's what ultimately got him in that fight. He got caught up, but it was a straight up even fight up until that point. Give and take by both fighters, but Adamek, I think his pressure just got to him and wore him down. He got caught, but it was the pressure I think.
Luke Thomas: Banks has the experience edge in some important respects and could arguably want to pressure you. Do you think Banks can work in that kind of zone? Seth Mitchell: I hope he does. I hope he tries to put pressure on me. I know I can fight. I have decent power in both of my hands. I have a pretty good jab. I let my hands go. The more he opens himself up for punches, the more he's going to allow himself to be hit. I know if I keep touching my opponents, I don't think that there's heavyweight that can last ten, twelve rounds with me as long as I'm touching them. I'll be surprised if Jonathan comes out and tries to apply a lot of pressure to me. I think he's going to do what he does and try to be a counterpuncher and try to set traps and things of that nature. If he does [put pressure on], we have three or four game plans that we've got in the bag for this fight. Whatever he comes to the table with, we'll be able to adjust.
Luke Thomas: He and the entire boxing world recently lost Emmanuel Steward. What way do you expect he'll respond: to mourn and use it for extra motivation or to mourn and let it be a distraction? Either would be understandable. Seth Mitchell: I'm really not sure. Hopefully, it'll motivate him even more. I was expecting the best Jonathan Banks before the tragic loss of Emmanuel Steward. If it motivates him more, that'll make for a better fight for the public. I'm excited. I'm going to be ready. I'm looking forward to nothing less than a victory.
Luke Thomas: Correct me if I'm wrong. Is it true you don't watch tape on opponents? Seth Mitchell: Very seldom. Very seldom do I watch tape on my opponents. I watch a little bit of tape just to get a glimpse: about four or five fights. I'll watch just to see their style is. If they an aggressive fighter, if they're a counterpuncher, if they run a lot, if they have real good power. I leave that up to my trainer. I read that, too. Someone said that I never watch tape. of my opponents. That's not true. I don't watch a lot, though. Unlike football where I would religiously go over hours of tape, it's not like that with boxing. I don't watch my opponents that much.
Luke Thomas: What is the difference? In football, you can't win at the highest level without tape. Why is boxing different? Seth Mitchell: I think boxing is more mental. For me, I think it's more mental and each fight is different. You can watch a fight and styles make fights. A fighter might fight a certain way in this fight and then in the next fight he fights totally different. If you watch a couple of fights and you say, 'Ok, he only can do this' and then you get into the ring and it's totally different whereas in football or in team sports, they have a certain scheme that they run. 85 percent of the time when they line up in this formation, you're going to get one or two plays. If you know that, you can pretty much guess what the play is. When I played football, 75 percent of the time I knew what the play was before they was going to run it because of studying and the formations that they line up in. They're only going to run two or three plays out of 'this' formation. That's why I don't watch too much film on boxing. Anything can happen. If someone watched film on me, they might say, 'Oh, all he can do is go forward and be a bull'. I don't have to fight that way. That's all I've had to fight that way because that's what I've had to do to win. If I had to switch it up, I could. That's just my personal opinion. Somebody else might give you a different answer. I just think every fight is different.No one needs to be reminded of the Washington Capitals' porous defense last season (or last season as a whole, really), but among their myriad problems was an inability to limit shots against.
As a refresher, the Capitals allowed 33.5 shots per game, 27th in the NHL, and 31.3 shots per 60 minutes at 5-on-5, 26th. That was seemingly alright by former coach Adam Oates and then-general manager George McPhee, the latter of whom told former colleague Katie Carrera that "We play a system where teams get probably more shots the way we play but most of them are from the outside, we’ll allow those."
Coach Barry Trotz, however, does not subscribe to that particular ideology, which is reflected in his team's statistics through five games:
Shots Against Per Game
Shots Against Per 60 Minutes 5-on-5
Blocked Shots Per Game
2013-14: 14.7
2014-15: 17.2
Corsi Percentage 5-on-5
(A proxy for puck possession totaling shots on goal, missed shots and blocked shots)
Limited sample size aside, early returns are encouraging. In three of Trotz's first five games, the Capitals have allowed 25 or fewer shots. In 130 regular-season games under Oates, they did so 12 times.
There are a few reasons for that significant improvement. Trotz encourages his players to block shots, something Oates dissuaded them from doing. A stabilized defensive corps, made so by the offseason acquisitions of Matt Niskanen and Brooks Orpik, has also helped.
“Nisky’s better than ever I thought he was defensively," forward Jason Chimera said. "His stick is one of the best sticks I’ve seen for a long time. And Orpi, everyone knows Orpik blocks shots. We’ve been pretty solid right now.”
Another is the Capitals, as Trotz presented Monday, "don’t spend particularly a lot of time in our end." A simple eye test proved that Washington struggled to break out effectively last season, with sloppy execution leading to prolonged shifts chasing the puck in the defensive zone. An emphasis on controlled zone exits has led to smoother transitions up ice.
"When we get into the zone, we’re communicating better with each other and we’re finding the open lanes and we’re finding a way to get out of the zone as opposed to previous years where we got it, we just tried to rim it up the boards or tried to force plays," said forward Eric Fehr, one of Washington's best skaters at exiting the zone last season. "We do a good job of communicating with each other and finding outlets.”
As a result, less of a burden has been placed upon the goaltenders, who are no longer forced to make several game-preserving saves.
"How we’re playing is the right way," goaltender Braden Holtby said. "It gives everyone a certain job. We know what the group expects out of us as goaltenders that we’re going to have those two or three saves a game that we need to make and it’s not seven or eight of them. It’s a controlled number because everyone’s doing their role so well that we’re keeping our shot totals down, we’re keeping those chances-against down and developing offense through it. What we’ve done on the defensive end is the reason why our record is what it is.”
In describing what his "five, five, five" on-ice philosophy looks like when working at optimum efficiency, Trotz has offered the visual of five red jerseys playing in all three zones at once. The adjustment is ongoing, but the Capitals are already seeing the benefits.
“That’s a hard part of the game because it’s simple but very difficult to train your mind to go hard in those areas, especially the wingers to get back that extra five feet, take those extra two strides when you don’t think that they mean anything when they do," Holtby said. "The centers to get low, the D-men to get back quick for their partner when sometimes you let up naturally, it's those parts of the game that are extremely tough and people don’t notice and I think we’ve done an outstanding job of it so far.
"It’s those little things that Barry wants to implement and that’s what’s going to make us successful.”
Follow Adam on Twitter @AdamVingan and e-mail your story ideas to adamvingan (at) gmail.com.Our KickStarter Campaign has ended but you can still place an order by clicking on the Button below. You will be taken to our Web Store.
Concept for My N3RD Industrial Design
What is My N3RD?
My N3RD (Pronounced Nerd) Network Enabled Relay Device turns your smartphone into a remote control for every gadget, vehicle and appliance you own. It works with the My N3RD app to upgrade ANY switch into a wireless controlled, programmable, and automatic smart switch, updating all of your devices into intelligent connected ones.
Connect and control devices directly. No internet connection or router required.
Works with DC and mobile applications such as Cars, RVs, and boats. With My N3RD, you aren’t just limited to home appliances.
Connects to any switch, enabling you to upgrade virtually anything— not just simple appliances like fans and lights.
Simple setup. You only need to configure functions in the App once, and you can reuse them again and again.
My N3RD is equipped with two relays and two inputs that can be used with external switches and physical switches to create a wide variety of uses.
My N3RD is smart. You can program My N3RD to act without your intervention. Use the app to set timers for appliances and electronics.
Although My N3RD has direct connect capability, it can also be connected through your home WiFi so you can control your devices from anywhere. Upgrade anything to an Internet of Things device.
Car Door Locks
Coffee Maker
Boat Electronics
Winch... Camper Top
Sample Uses:
Garage Door: Open it, close it, and monitor it from anywhere
Electric Gates
Boat-lifts
Winches, Pumps, Motors
Electric Start Generator
Heaters
Hot Tub
Sprinklers
Lighting
Oven... Did you forget to turn it off?
Dishwasher... Turn it on when your not home (or asleep).
Speaker Zone Control
Auto Accessories (after market sound system, lighting, etc..)
RV accessories (canopy, lights, etc..)
Remote Computer Re-Booter
Agriculture (Hydroponic Control)
Modem /Router Re-Booter. ** Monitors the internet and automatically reboots your equipment in sequential order when it cannot reach a selected website
Door Locks in your car... On-Star without the Monthly Fees
Alarm System: Monitor your home or vehicle remotely
Christmas lights
Fireplace: turn your electrically controlled fireplace on and off, set it to a timer
Coffee Maker: Start your coffee maker with your phone
Window Unit Air Conditioners
Mechanicals at a vacation home (electric water heater, etc..)
How Do You Connect to My N3RD?
Wi-Fi Connect: Controlling My N3RD through the Internet (A) and controlling My N3RD through your local Wi-Fi network (B)
Direct Connect: Controlling My N3RD through direct Wi-Fi (AP mode) connection with no router or internet.
Do you need a Smartphone to control My N3RD?
You only need your smartphone to configure the initial settings of My N3RD. Once My N3RD has been configured, it can be used as a standalone device without any interaction from your phone. My N3RD provides two inputs for connecting your own switches or sensors and controlling My N3RD. In addition, you can use the app to program My N3RD. Its simple logic switches allow you to perform many tasks and interact with the inputs in different ways. Once programmed, My N3RD stores functions into its non-volatile memory and performs them even when it’s not connected to your phone.
What Smart Phones are compatible with My N3RD?
There is a My N3RD iOS app developed and available for download. We are currently working on an Android Version and will have it available with the Production releases of My N3RD. A Web-Interface for all other devices will be part of our first Stretch Goal if it is met.
Screen images of the actual My N3RD App.
Why wouldn't I just use a Raspberry Pi?
A lot of people have suggested that there are cheaper alternatives... We disagree, a lot of the Maker Type DIY products are great and we see ourselves as more of an addition than the competition. Below is a quick comparison of the hardware needed in order to have similar capabilities to My N3RD. Keep in mind, that you still need to write all the code with these options as well as develop an App if you want to have Smart Phone capabilities.
How Do you Connect to My N3RD?
How will you use My N3RD? Here are just a few examples of things we’ve done with My N3RD:
We did this demonstration nearly three years ago with one of our early prototypes. We’ve learned a lot since then, but that same unit is still on my garage door and working perfectly!
This video showcases a special Garage Door version of the My N3RD App. that we developed that added some specific features to My N3RD such as the ability to monitor and alert you if the Garage door was left open. We are now working on adding a "Geo Fence" that will automatically detect your position and open/close your Garage Door accordingly based off your current GPS coordinates.
Here is a demonstration of My N3RD’s amazing ability to connect directly to your phone. As you can see, My N3RD unlocks unlimited possibilities for mobile control.
My N3RD can even be used to upgrade the winch on a Jeep.
We effortlessly connected My N3RD to a fireplace with an electric start. This upgrade has been very useful, especially on cold winter mornings. Now I can just turn on my fireplace as I get out of bed—no more cold feet when I go downstairs.
Current Prototype:
This is our Sixth and Final iteration of the PCB. Unless our Beta Backers come up with some changes, we anticipate the Final Production units to be of this design.
Check out Beta My N3RDs Proudly being produced in the U.S.A.
See how the My N3RD electronics evolved from the initial prototype to the current design.
We have begun prototyping the housing but haven’t finalized the design yet.
We are exploring concepts for future wire management accessories, additional functionality through the use of an expansion port, and the ability to get into the enclosure without the use of fasteners. Take a look at some of the concepts below.
Enclosure Concept
Stacking Concept
Production Plans:
My N3RD production will begin immediately after funding is successful and the "Beta Backers" can expect to begin to receive their prototype units within weeks... no time will be wasted. Here is our timeline:
February 23rd: Reach funding goal!
Reach funding goal! February: Finalize enclosure design and begin tooling.
Finalize enclosure design and begin tooling. March: Ship My N3RD prototypes to Beta Backers and N3RD Herd decals to Founding Members.
Beta Tester Units getting ready to Ship to Backers.
April: Review first “off tool” enclosure samples. Procure BOM parts and receive production inventory.
Review first “off tool” enclosure samples. Procure BOM parts and receive production inventory. May: Finalize tooling and begin enclosure production.
Finalize tooling and begin enclosure production. June: Begin Mass Production!
Begin Mass Production! July: Ship My N3RD Modules to all Backers.
Ship My N3RD Modules to all Backers. August: Submit OEM Development Backers’ App to the App Store.
Submit OEM Development Backers’ App to the App Store. September: Deliver Turnkey Custom My N3RDs to Advanced OEM Backers.
STRETCH GOALS!
$50K: We committed to providing an Android App by Production release.***REACHED!
$75K: Web Interface, and New iOS App Features***REACHED!
We will release a My N3RD web interface accessible from any browser. We will also add some exciting enhancements to our iOS app, such as multiple My N3RD capability, a calendar feature, and repeatable timing function control.
$100K: Cloud Integration***REACHED!
What if My N3RD could react to events and data on the web? Cloud integration enhances My N3RD capabilities by allowing web interaction. Turn a device on/off when you get tagged on Facebook or tweeted. Program My N3RD to check the weather and make decisions based on current conditions. (Close the door if it’s raining. Turn on the AC unit if it’s hot.) The possibilities are endless! My N3RD will be fully compatible with IFTTT; we have already discussed bringing My N3RD online.
As My N3RD evolves, we will continue to offer new features and advanced functions. We have only just begun to think of all the amazing things that My N3RD can do, and we know that our backers will have plenty of ideas. Thinking ahead, we developed My N3RD so that any and all new features can be updated wirelessly through its WiFi connection. This includes a complete re-flash of the microprocessor firmware and the 802.11 radio configuration. My N3RD won’t become obsolete because it will always be updatable and supported.
Specialized Apps:
Here is a sample of My N3RD technology at work in a successful consumer product. AccuAir is a leader in their field, and we were honored when they approached us to develop AccuAir iLevel.
Accuair iLevel with My N3RD technology
Our Design Team:
Rob Dorrell, EE/Creator and Head N3RD
Eric Coatney, Electrical Engineer, Hardware Design, iOS App Development, and WiFi Firmware.
Breck Ricketts, Software Engineer, Microprocessor Firmware and OTA (over the air) update schemes.
John Adzema, Production Manager, BOM procurement and Production Management.
Steven Ore, Technician, Beta Tester and Programming.
Derick Schweppe, Industrial Designer, Design and Mechanical construction.
Jeremy Smith, Electrical Engineer, Electrical Design Management |
year as a reserve along the defensive front. Ray registered five tackles, 2.5 tackles for loss and one sack.
Ray saw his first game action against Ole Miss when he provided defensive line depth in place of injured senior Da'Shawn Hand, who luckily for Alabama, has returned to the field.
A native of Madison, Ala., Ray was the No. 15 overall player and No. 1 player in the state of Alabama during the 2017 recruiting cycle, according to the 247Sports Composite.
Contact Charlie Potter by 247Sports' personal messaging or on Twitter (@Charlie_Potter).SK Simone Kafruni
Ferrovia Norte-Sul (em Santa Helena-GO), entre Palmas, Tocantins, e Anápolis (Goiás) (foto: Divulgação)
Leia as últimas notícias de Economia Com muitos gargalos em infraestrutura, o Brasil oferece oportunidades nas áreas de logística e transportes, energia, telecomunicações, saneamento e petróleo e gás. É nisso que aposta o governo para concretizar a retomada do investimento, fundamental para o crescimento sustentável do país. Não à toa, o Programa Avançar Parcerias, que já promoveu 70 concessões e privatizações que garantirão aporte de capital privado da ordem de R$ 142 bilhões nas próximas décadas, elenca outros 75 projetos que poderão representar mais R$ 132,7 bilhões em investimentos em infraestrutura. Especialistas alertam, contudo, que, por 2018 ser um ano eleitoral, muita coisa corre o risco de ficar para 2019.
O ministro Wellington Moreira Franco, secretário-geral da Presidência da República e responsável pelo Programa de Parcerias de Investimentos (PPI), agora chamado Avançar Parcerias, garante que o projeto se mostrou, no curto espaço de tempo de 18 meses, um dos pilares para a retomada do crescimento econômico. “Já realizamos entregas importantes, de aeroportos, portos, óleo e gás e energia. Em 2018, vamos focar em ferrovias, porque precisamos dar condições para o setor do agronegócio crescer sem perder competitividade”, promete.
O índice de realização das concessões é celebrado pelo secretário especial do PPI, Adalberto Vasconcelos. “O desafio é grande. Mas nosso foco é fazer tudo o que foi prometido, ou seja, entregar todos os empreendimentos que foram qualificados no programa. Para 2018, o objetivo é priorizar as licitações de ferrovias. Teremos, já no primeiro trimestre, a Ferrovia Norte-Sul. A consulta pública da Ferrogrão foi estendida um pouco, mas vai sair, assim como a Fiol”, garante (veja os projetos previstos pelo PPI no quadro ao lado).
Vasconcelos ressalta que, em 2017, as concessões do setor portuário deslancharam. “O TCU (Tribunal de Contas da União) aprovou mais seis blocos, que vão sair no primeiro trimestre de 2018”, diz. O secretário conta que os leilões da área de energia mostraram que o Brasil recuperou a credibilidade. “O índice de realização no caso de linhas de transmissão era abaixo de 30%. No penúltimo leilão, foi de 97% e, no mais recente, de 100%”, diz.
Apesar de destacar o sucesso no setor de energia em 2017, Vasconcelos reconhece que o maior desafio ficou para 2018: a privatização da Eletrobras. “O processo está sendo bem conduzido pelos ministros Dyogo (Oliveira, do Planejamento) e Fernando (Coelho Filho, de Minas e Energia). Não podemos repassar todas as ações para a sociedade a todo momento, mas vamos avançar”, assegura.
O secretário aponta que o governo Temer deixará para o próximo ocupante do Palácio do Planalto uma boa governança e coordenação eficiente no setor de infraestrutura. “Independentemente de quem venha a ser o próximo presidente, está claro que o país não tem mais recursos para investir em infraestrutura. O governo tem que focar em educação, saúde e segurança. Precisamos da iniciativa privada para tornar o Brasil competitivo”, diz. “O principal legado é que é possível fazer concessões importantes sem grandes empreiteiras”, sentencia.
Na opinião de Wagner Cardoso, gerente executivo de Infraestrutura da Confederação Nacional da Indústria (CNI), o Brasil avançou no setor, com a mudança de marcos legais que tornaram as concessões mais atrativas. “O destaque é a reativação do setor de petróleo e gás. Já houve bons leilões e teremos outras rodadas em março e junho”, destaca. “O que é licitado hoje vai gerar óleo em sete anos, mas antes disso ocorrem investimentos. Esse setor tem enorme capacidade de alavancar recursos”, pondera.
Expectativas
Cardoso assinala que 2018 vai trazer à tona uma discussão muito importante na área. “Há um projeto do governo, que deve ser discutido pelo Congresso, para ampliar a participação do gás natural na matriz energética, quebrar monopólio, compartilhar dutos, expandir importação. O setor privado precisa disso”, destaca.
O especialista da CNI admite que a privatização da Eletrobras talvez não ocorra em 2018. “Já avançamos só de colocar isso na mesa. E a privatização de seis distribuidoras da Eletrobras que dão prejuízo está garantida. São altamente ineficientes e sofrem com intervenção política. Sem as subsidiárias, o grupo fica mais atrativo”, opina. No entanto, Cardoso alerta para a necessidade de o governo enviar o novo modelo do setor elétrico ao Congresso. “Se quiser celeridade, precisa mandar no início do ano, no máximo, até abril. Depois disso, os parlamentares saem para fazer campanha”, afirma.
Transporte e saneamento básico são os patinhos feios da infraestrutura, brinca Cardoso. “Há apenas três estradas que devem ser concedidas pelo PPI. Há previsão de antecipar a prorrogação de concessões ferroviárias, mas as obras só vão gerar emprego em 2019”, estima. O atraso deve ocorrer por conta de decisões do TCU que já foram contrárias às antecipações. “É preciso, primeiro, regulamentar o direito de passagem, para depois assinar as prorrogações.”
Para o Brasil ganhar competitividade nas exportações, precisa de portos. “Em termos de eficiência, os terminais operados pela iniciativa privada são excelentes. Os públicos, arrendados, estão em nível mundial. O que precisa melhorar é a administração portuária, porque é pública”, lamenta o gerente de Infraestrutura da CNI. Neste aspecto, o governo avançou ao sinalizar com a primeira privatização de uma Companhia Doca, no Espírito Santo. “Vitória vai ser o embrião, mas temos 37 portos que sofrem interferência política. Isso é um problema, porque é preciso pensar a infraestrutura para 40 anos e não para o período de um governo. Quando o síndico é público e vai sair em dois anos, não se preocupa de resolver gargalos”, avalia.
Hoje, o Brasil não tem capacidade de receber os navios mais modernos, de 19 mil TEUs (Twenty Foot Equivalent Unid, unidade equivalente de transporte, na sigla em inglês). Como faltam dragagem para aumentar a profundidade, comprimento de cais e acesso marítimo para grandes embarcações nos portos, o país está limitado a receber navios de 9 mil TEUs. “Por enquanto, foram feitos apenas arrendamentos de terminais de uso privado, que já são eficientes”, comenta Cardoso.Pressed in a grey/white splatter edition of 300 copies from Battleground Records, the new split 7″ between Arizona’s Fuzz Evil and fellow Southwesterners Chiefs is available as of today. With just over five minutes of music from each band — Fuzz Evil presenting “Glitterbones” and Chiefs “Stone Bull” — it’s a platter rife with easily-dug vibes and riff-heavy groove broken into sides F and G for a bit of alphabetical fun to coincide with the laid back, steady roll throughout. Chiefs have some demos under their belt, but for Fuzz Evil, which features guitarist/vocalist Wayne Rudell and bassist/vocalist Joey Rudell of Powered Wig Machine along with drummer Marlin Tuttle, it’s their recorded debut, and they’re off to a solid start.
Of course, for the Rudells, who with Powered Wig Machine released the Supa-Collider full-length (review here) earlier this year, it’s not really a start at all, but as Fuzz Evil and with Tuttle, they do explore different ground within the overarching sphere of heavy rock. “Glitterbones” as a swagger and hook reminiscent of early Queens of the Stone Age, played up with some falsetto vocals, and true to their name, some vicious fuzz. Less bluesy overall than Powered Wig Machine, they still find room as Fuzz Evil to reference Clutch in the lyrics — asking what the dollar’s for — and enact a stonerly nod in the track as they march toward the solo-topped apex given further breadth and classic feel from some deeply mixed organ following the central bruiser of a riff.
For Chiefs‘ part, the Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego-based trio start out “Stone Bull” with slower riffery but open up to a chugging verse and well-placed clean vocals buried Goatsnake-style under the mountainous tones of guitarist Paul Valle and bassist Jeff Podeszwik, both of whom sing while Kevin Michel holds down the drums. Big riffs get bigger as “Stone Bull” plays out, and though an overblown solo is teased in peppered lead lines, one never materializes, and Chiefs continue their forward push with a turn past the four-minute mark that marks the beginning of the song’s final movement, ending with a riffout that, were it not for the physical limitation of the medium on which it’s pressed, could probably keep going for considerably longer. Perhaps live it does.
Speaking of live shows, Fuzz Evil have a couple release gigs planned for the 7″, the first of which is tonight. That info is included under the player below, on which you can stream the split with Chiefs in its entirety.
Please enjoy:
The Battleground Records roster continues to rapidly expand, with another new release on the horizon for October, in the form of a split 7? from FUZZ EVIL and CHIEFS.
Battleground will release the FUZZ EVIL / CHIEFS split 7? on October 21st. Limited to 300 copies, the heavy grey vinyl with white splatters is cut at 45 RPM and features artwork by David Paul Seymour. For a limited time, every preorder via Battleground receives an entry to win a test pressing of the 7? – place orders HERE.
With new live shows expected to be confirmed from both FUZZ EVIL and CHIEFS over the coming weeks, FUZZ EVIL has already confirmed several new Fall gigs including release shows for the 7? in both their hometown of Sierra Vista as well as Tucson.
FUZZ EVIL shows:
10/21/2014 JR’s – Sierra Vista, AZ – 7? release show
11/07/2014 Flycatcher – Tucson, AZ – 7? release show
11/08/2014 Superbrawler – Benson, AZ
Fuzz Evil on Thee Facebooks
Chiefs on Thee Facebooks
Battleground RecordsCousin marriage doubles the risk of passing on recessive genes The tradition of marrying a cousin is becoming more entrenched among British-born Pakistanis living in Bradford than it was a generation ago, writes Winifred Robinson. This has been the surprise finding of the Born in Bradford research project. It's a huge long-term study of 14,000 mothers and babies in the city, the largest ever undertaken in the UK. Half of the families in the project are Asian. Cousin marriage has important implications for health because marrying a cousin increases the risks of passing on genetic disorders. Bradford has three times the national rate among children for disabilities including deafness and blindness. Globally, cousin marriage is practised by an estimated billion people, according to Professor John Wright, who is leading the Born in Bradford research project. It yields considerable social benefits - particularly in ethnic groups, where it is traditional for women to live with their in-laws. "People marry cousins because it means you are coming into a family where everybody loves you," Professor Wright says, "and there are economic benefits of keeping land or other assets in the family". We've nearly all been married to cousins in our family and we didn't know this condition existed.
Ruba, whose son has I-cell disease Most of the people of Asian origin in Bradford come from the rural villages of Mirpur in Pakistan. Families in Bradford are still arranging marriages and choosing brides and grooms among their extended family back home - one in four children in the study had a parent brought over for marriage. The problem with cousin marriage is that it doubles the risk of passing on the recessive genes that lead to abnormalities. Cystic fibrosis is the one we all know about, where two healthy parents carry a recessive gene for the condition. "If a cousin has a genetic variant that causes a disease and marries a cousin with the same genetic variant, then there is a one in four chance that the children will have that disease," Professor Wright explains. On the face of it the risk is not great - a 4% risk of having a child with an abnormality if you marry a cousin, compared with 2% among the general population. But with repeated cousin marriage, the risks stack up in families with sometimes devastating results. We met Ruba who is 23. She has two children Alishbah, aged two and Hassam, aged four. Ruba was 18 when she married her second cousin. Her children have I-cell disease, a rare disorder which has prevented them growing and developing as they should, from the start. "It was a real shock to me when he was diagnosed," she says, "I didn't even know what it was, we've nearly all been married to cousins in our family and we didn't know this condition existed. I was looking at him thinking he's still my son and whatever he's got I'm going to love him. Globally, cousin marriage is practised by an estimated billion people "He's delayed in development mentally and physically, he can't walk or sit up on his own. He is prone to chest infections and all his bones are abnormal, they're not the right shape. He's got narrow air ways and so it's difficult for him to breathe and he's on oxygen at night - last night I had to get up three times for my daughter and nearly every hour for my son. It's getting harder and harder to look after both of them." Ruba has been told her children's life expectancy is short - seven to eight years. She met another woman in Bradford with a son who died at nine months from the same disease there was another child born with the condition when her daughter was born. The Born in Bradford researchers are determined that theirs should be an applied health research study with results leading to better services. "Everything we do gets translated into practice so that our work on congenital anomalies has led to a city register for these children and also a Yorkshire register," Professor Wright insists. Professionals working with couples like Ruba and her husband hope that in the future they wlll be able to provide better genetic screening and advice for couples who want it. Get in touch with Today via email, Twitter or Facebook or text us on 84844.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionAs Billboard wraps up Chorus Week, we're looking at the classic, stupid-catchy and often mind-blowing melodies that have defined the Korean pop world in the 21st century. K-pop listeners know that the right hook can create a viral sensation (just ask PSY), and the following 10 choruses not only got stuck in listeners' minds and hearts, but did so by bringing refrains that were progressive and undeniable to the scene.
Read on to see the full list of the top 10 K-pop choruses of the 21st century (referring to 2000 and beyond) and skip right to the chorus of each entry in the embedded YouTube link.
10. EXO, "Growl"
The sensational EXO has provided some of K-pop's greatest modern-day choruses (2015's "Call Me Baby" and last year's "Monster" were all contenders for this list), but it's nearly impossible to deny their breakout hit "Growl." The refrain opens with a boy-band sound that brings to mind a modern-day *NSYNC, but becomes EXO's own by the end with its eccentric "I growl, growl, growl" hook that illustrates why it's always worthwhile to experiment in K-pop.
9. Brown Eyes, "Already One Year"
A standout track from the male duo's self-titled debut album, the band crafted a chorus that curled into listeners' hearts. They crooned in English and Korean, "I believe in you / I believe in your mind... / Even after a year or a year after that / I will wait for you," setting a new standard for ultimate devotion for Korean ballads.
8. Orange Caramel, "Catallena"
A representative song of how twistedly brilliant K-pop choruses can be, the quirky female trio sing about being captivated by the mysterious "Catallena" woman over a mix of Bollywood-inspired disco beats, funk guitar and a sample of a traditional Punjabi wedding folk song "Jutti Meri Jandiye." The girls' melodious, baby-coo deliveries and queer-leaning lyrics are almost an afterthought when you consider this jarring-yet-genius chorus.
7. Wonder Girls, "Tell Me"
One of the first K-pop songs to define what it meant to go viral, "Tell Me" was one of Wonder Girls' early breakout hits with a chorus that anyone could sing. The repetitive "tell me, tell me" lines were the gateway drugs to letting oneself belt along to the more vocally challenging sections, making this a K-pop karaoke classic.
6. Super Junior, "Sorry Sorry"
Super Junior's super-successful hit parlayed into one of K-pop's most recognizable dance moves (the shuffling of one's hands on the chorus, as seen by the members in the music video). Despite being extremely repetitive, "Sorry Sorry" still kept a sense of slickness and sophistication. With its release in 2009, it's now become a bit of a badge of honor among international K-pop fans who can judge how deep someone's ingrained in the scene if they can recognize the "Sorry Sorry" dance. Like "Growl," this came from Korea's biggest pop supplier, SM Entertainment.
5. Big Mama, "Betrayal"
While Big Mama may have initially stood out for being bigger than most Korean singers, what has kept their legacy alive is their stunning vocals that parlay into heart-wrenching choruses. Their 2007 single "Betrayal" is an emotional confessional from a woman who's done her lover wrong, marking a chorus that as difficult to swallow as it to correctly sing. Nevertheless, it's a stunning standout in the K-pop world.
4. Park Jiyoon, "Adult Ceremony"
In today's K-pop scene, "Adult Ceremony" is a song that stars perform to prove they can pull off mature performances (see Twice or BTS). But when this track dropped at the turn of the 21st century, it was one a defining anthem with Park Jiyoon declaring she wasn't a little girl anymore. The track boasted a truly chewy bubblegum chorus, but the syncopated vocal rhythm gives it additional sense of mystery making it all the more superbly sexy. Years later, Brown Eyed Girls would also create another equally unforgettable sexual empowerment anthem with 2009's "Abracadabra," but you can't deny "Adult Ceremony."
3. BIGBANG, "Lies"
While the phenoms have created some of K-pop's most recognizable hits, when it comes to strictly choruses, BIGBANG's "Lies" is the true standout. The blend of boy-band harmonies and hip-hop chants marked something fresh for the scene in 2007, and situated the song's writer and producer G-Dragon as a true mainstream force.
2. DJ Doc, "Run to You"
One of the earliest indicators of the potential of K-pop's universal appeal, DJ Doc's megahit from 2000 blended a high-energy hip-hop sound with a simple, melodic refrain that got into all of South Korea's head. The success of this track, and its undeniable chorus, was all the more remarkable given rap had yet to be truly accepted in the Korean mainstream. The trio not only solidified the burgeoning potential of hip-hop in K-pop, but also signified the importance of genre-blending for mass appeal, which would be a cornerstone in Korean music's international expansion.
1. Girls' Generation, "Gee"
Arguably every section of Girls' Generation's sensational 2009 single could be an excellent chorus, making its official one all the more impressive and important to explore. Before it hits, the listener has been submerged in GG's world of "Gee" (see what they're doing here?) with the repetitive "gee gee gee gee, baby baby" hook peppered through the verses, all leading up to a saccharine explosion that kicks off the chorus. A powerful blast of synthesizers welcomes us into the refrain, seemingly signaling how big this section will, guiding us through though the ladies singing and chanting lines about being unexpectedly in love.
Before "Gangnam Style" mania, "Gee" was the top-viewed K-pop video on YouTube and a major part of that addiction was its centerpiece of a chorus that captured the heart of a new generation of fans that were either enamored with the adorable ninesome or wholly intrigued by something that felt both refreshing and a wink to pop's simpler, bubblegum past.English actor, producer and musical performer
For the footballer, see Tom Huddlestone
Thomas William Hiddleston (born 9 February 1981) is an English actor, film producer and musician. At the beginning of his career, he appeared in West End theatre productions of Cymbeline (2007) and Ivanov (2008). He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Newcomer in a Play for his role in Cymbeline and was also nominated for the same award for his role as Cassio in Othello.
He came to wider public attention when cast as Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in Thor (2011), The Avengers (2012), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018). In 2011, he won the Empire Award for Best Male Newcomer and was nominated for the BAFTA Rising Star Award. Hiddleston has also appeared in Steven Spielberg's War Horse (2011), The Deep Blue Sea (2011), Woody Allen's romantic comedy Midnight in Paris (2011), the 2012 BBC series Henry IV and Henry V, and the romantic vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
In late 2013 and early 2014, Hiddleston starred as the title character in the Donmar Warehouse production of Coriolanus, winning the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actor. In 2015, he starred in Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, Ben Wheatley's High Rise, and played the troubled country music singer Hank Williams in the biopic I Saw The Light.
In 2016, he starred in and was an executive producer of the AMC / BBC limited series The Night Manager, for which he received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie and Outstanding Limited Series, and won his first Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film.
Early life
Thomas William Hiddleston was born on 9 February 1981 in Westminster, London,[1] the son of Diana Patricia (née Servaes) Hiddleston, an arts administrator and former stage manager, and James Norman Hiddleston, a physical chemist.[2] His father is from Greenock, Scotland[3] and his mother is from Suffolk.[4] His younger sister, Emma, is also an actress, whilst his older sister, Sarah, is a journalist in India.[5] Through his mother, he is a great-grandson of Vice Admiral Reginald Servaes and a great-great-grandson of food producer Sir Edmund Vestey.[6]
Hiddleston was raised in Wimbledon in his early years, and later moved to a village near Oxford.[4] He started boarding at Windlesham House School at the age of seven, moving to the Dragon School in Oxford a year later.[7][8] His parents divorced when he was 12.[9] When discussing his parents' divorce in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he stated: "I like to think it made me more compassionate in my understanding of human frailty."[10]
At the age of 13, Hiddleston started at Eton College, again as a boarder. He continued on to Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge, where he earned a double first in Classics.[3][11][12] During his second term at Cambridge, he was seen in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire by talent agent Lorraine Hamilton of Hamilton Hodell.[13] He proceeded to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, from which he graduated in 2005.[14]
Career
2001–2010: Early work
While still doing student plays, Hiddleston began appearing on television, landing parts in Stephen Whittaker's adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby (2001) for ITV,[13] the BBC/HBO co-production Conspiracy (2001), and as Randolph Churchill, the son of Winston Churchill, in the BBC/HBO drama The Gathering Storm (2002).[15]
Upon graduating from RADA, Hiddleston was cast in his first film role, playing Oakley in Joanna Hogg's first feature film, Unrelated (2006). His sister Emma also appeared in the film as Badge. Casting director, Lucy Bevan, who cast him in the film said "there was just a fantastic confidence about him". Hiddleston had leading roles in Declan Donnellan's company Cheek by Jowl's productions The Changeling (2006), and Cymbeline (2007). For the latter he won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Newcomer in a Play.[16] His Donmar Warehouse credits include Cassio in Michael Grandage's production of Shakespeare's Othello (2008) alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor,[17][18] and Lvov in the West End revival of Chekhov's Ivanov (2008) with Kenneth Branagh.[13]
Hiddleston was the voiceover for BBC's documentary on the Galapagos Island in 2006.[19] He also narrated the audiobook The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner in 2007,[20] Hiddleston played the leading role of Edward in Hogg's second feature, Archipelago (2010).[21] His TV credits include Magnus Martinsson in the BBC detective drama Wallander (2008), Bill Hazledine in Suburban Shootout (2006), John Plumptre in the BBC costume drama TV film Miss Austen Regrets (2008) and William Buxton in the BBC drama series Return to Cranford (2009). In 2007, he joined a list of British actors, including Kate Winslet and Orlando Bloom, to have guest starred in the long-running medical drama Casualty.[22]
2011–2014: Career breakthrough
Hiddleston is well known for his portrayal of Loki in the 2011 Marvel Studios film Thor. He was invited to audition by Kenneth Branagh, the film's director, after having previously worked with Branagh on Ivanov and Wallander. Hiddleston said of Branagh, "Ken has had a life-changing effect. He was able to say to the executives, 'Trust me on this, you can cast Tom and he will deliver'. It was massive and it's completely changed the course of what is available to me to do. Ken gave me my break."[23] In the beginning, he originally auditioned for the part of Thor. "I initially auditioned to play Thor. That was what I was being considered for, because I'm tall and blonde and classically trained, and that seemed to be the mold for what Thor was, he was to be a classical character. And it was in my auditions. I owe this entirely to Marvel and their open-mindedness, they saw something that they thought was interesting. They saw some temperament that they liked."[24] The casting director gave Hiddleston six weeks to bulk up, so he went on a strict diet and gained twenty pounds of muscle.[25] In the end, Branagh decided he was more suitable as the antagonist and cast him as Loki. The film magazine Empire ranked Hiddleston's portrayal as Loki the 19th Greatest Movie Character of All Time.[26]
In November 2010, Hiddleston appeared with Benedict Cumberbatch, Gemma Arterton, Eddie Redmayne and Rose Byrne among others in Danny Boyle's one time production of The Children's Monologues, in which he played Prudence, a young girl upset with her mother for her father leaving and excited for her birthday. The play was a one time event of adapted stories of children's first-hand experiences in South Africa being re-interpreted by and performed by various actors.[27]
In 2011, Hiddleston portrayed novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in writer-director Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. He then played the noble Captain Nicholls in War Horse, a film based on the 1982 novel by Michael Morpurgo, directed by Steven Spielberg. The same year he starred as Freddie Page, a RAF pilot in the drama The Deep Blue Sea, alongside Rachel Weisz. In 2012, he reprised his role as the supervillain Loki in The Avengers. While filming a scene with Chris Hemsworth, who plays Thor, the film's director, Joss Whedon told the fighting duo that the scene did not look real enough, so Hiddleston told Hemsworth to really hit him for the fight scene. "I said to Chris, 'Dude, just hit me. Just hit me because I'm protected here and it's fine.' He's like, 'Are you sure?' I was like, 'Yeah, it will look great. Just go for it.'"[28] He provided the voiceover the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead in 2011 and poetry for iF Poems and The Love Book on iTunes in 2012.[29][30]
On television in 2012, Hiddleston appeared in the BBC Two series The Hollow Crown, portraying Prince Hal opposite Jeremy Irons as Henry IV in the adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I and Part II. He later appeared as King Henry V in the television film Henry V.[31] In 2013, Hiddleston played Loki again in Thor: The Dark World,[32] following which he played a vampire in Jim Jarmusch's film Only Lovers Left Alive with Tilda Swinton and Mia Wasikowska.[33]
From December 2013 to February 2014, Hiddleston played the title character in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden directed by Josie Rourke. It was also aired live internationally on 30 January 2014.[34][35] David Benedict of Variety praised a "scorching" performance.[36] He had a cameo in the 2014 film Muppets Most Wanted, as the Great Escapo.[22]
2015–present: varied roles
Hiddleston replaced Benedict Cumberbatch in the gothic horror film Crimson Peak, directed by Guillermo del Toro.[37] The film started filming in Toronto in February 2014, and was released in October 2015.[38][39] He starred as Robert Laing in High-Rise (2015), based on J. G. Ballard's novel of the same name and directed by Ben Wheatley.[40][41][42]
In January 2014, Hiddleston became a spokesperson for Jaguar Cars in their "Good to be Bad" ad campaign featuring British actors in villain-themed commercials to promote Jaguars new models.[43] The first commercial of the campaign, titled "Rendezvous", first aired during the 2014 Super Bowl and featured Hiddleston along with Mark Strong and Ben Kingsley.[44][45]
In April 2014, Hiddleston starred in another commercial in the campaign, titled "The Art of Villainy". It was released on YouTube, promoting the F-Type coupe. However, the Advertising Standards Authority received complaints about the video "encouraging irresponsible driving". Jaguar Land Rover said that in the ad, when the car did leave the car park, it "accelerated briefly" and that police were present at filming to confirm the speed limit was not breached but the ASA ruled against it and banned the commercial.[46]
It was announced in June 2014 that Hiddleston would play country music singer Hank Williams in the 2015 biopic I Saw the Light, based on the 1994 biography. The film was directed by Marc Abraham, and was first shown in the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.[47] The film was released on March 25, 2016, by Sony Pictures Classics.
Hiddleston was one of the narrators in the 2015 documentary Unity directed by Shaun Monson.[49] Hiddleston appeared as Jonathan Pine in the 2016 television mini-series The Night Manager based on the espionage and detective novel of the same name by John le Carré. The series started filming in Spring 2015 and aired on BBC and AMC with Hugh Laurie also starring.[50][51]
In 2017, Hiddleston starred in Legendary Pictures' King Kong film, Kong: Skull Island.[52] It was released on 10 March, and was directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts.[53] He reprised his role as Loki in Thor: Ragnarok, released on 3 November 2017,[54] and also appeared in Avengers: Infinity War (2018). He is expected to appear in Avengers: Endgame, which is scheduled for 2019.[55] From 5 March to 1 June 2019 he will star as Robert in a revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal at the Harold Pinter Theatre, directed by Jamie Lloyd.[56]
Upcoming projects
On November 8, 2018, it was announced that Hiddleston would be reprising his role as Loki in a new Marvel limited series centred on the character which will air on Disney's upcoming streaming service, Disney+.[57] He is also in talks to reprise his leading role in a second series of The Night Manager.[58] He is attached to star in a Ben Wheatley's adaptation of Frank Miller's comic book mini-series Hard Boiled produced by Warner Bros and in a James Ivory's adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard II as the eponymous character.[59][60]
Personal life, charity work and media image
Hiddleston lives in the Belsize Park area of north-west London.[61][62] He was one of the celebrities (alongside Benedict Cumberbatch, E. L. James and Rachel Riley, among others) to design and sign his own card for the UK-based charity the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children. The campaign was launched by crafting company Stampin' Up! UK and the cards were auctioned off on eBay during May 2014.[63] He is a UK ambassador of the humanitarian and developmental assistance fund group UNICEF. He travelled to Guinea in early 2013 to help women and children and raise awareness about hunger and malnutrition,[64] and to South Sudan in early 2015 and late 2016 to report the results of the ongoing civil war on the lives of vast numbers of children across the country.[65] Hiddleston is a self-described feminist.[66] In February 2018 he was named as one of the donators by Justice and Equality Fund, the UK version of Time's Up movement.[67] He is also an ambassador of the Illuminating BAFTA campaign, an action which aims to provide opportunities to those who otherwise wouldn’t have been given a chance in the film, games and television industries.[68]
Hiddleston was previously in a relationship with actress Susannah Fielding, who appeared with him in an episode of Wallander in 2008. Their relationship ended in late 2011.[69][70][71] In 2016, Hiddleston dated singer Taylor Swift for several months.[72]
Hiddleston won the light-hearted UK award Rear of the Year 2016, in which the public nominate the male and female UK-based celebrities that they think should win the titular award.[73] In 2015 he was named British Film Institute's first official founding ambassador.[74] One of the highest profile actors in contemporary British popular |
like the GTI.
Rally-reps, like the Mitsubishi Evo or Subaru WRX.
Big-money cruiser droptops, like the Bentley Azure, recent-generation Mercedes SL, or Lexus SC430.
The Honda CRX or anything else that was meant to be a copy of the Honda CRX.
The Mustang, Camaro, Firebird, Challenger, Cougar, Javelin, Barracuda, Genesis Coupe, Accord Coupe, Mazda RX-8, or Mercedes-Benz CLK63 Black Series.
That last one seems to be where most of the confusion occurs. The Mustang is a sedan. Don't like it? Take it up with the Sports Car Club of America, which classifies the Mustang in the "American Sedan" class. The Mustang was always a sedan. It has always been a sedan. It always will be a sedan, unless it changes significantly. If the word "sedan" offends you, then choose the term "pony car," which is also fine and respects the Mustang's unique role in history as a sporting sedan variant of a non-sporting sedan, in this case the Ford Falcon.
Don't call a Mustang a sports car. It's not a sports car. The word "sports car" doesn't mean "car that I like and think is really cool." Were that the case, then I would call the Rolls-Royce Wraith a "sports car," because I really like the Rolls-Royce Wraith and I think it's just the bee's knees, old boy. Come to think of it, I also like the Phantom Drophead, which is also not a sports car by any sane estimation.
Dean Smith, Matt Tierney & Andrew Trahan
What's the harm in calling a Mustang a sports car? Why, Sir, the evidence is all around you. True sports cars are almost gone from showrooms nowadays, simply because we've used the phrase and its attendant social baggage so carelessly. If everything is a sports car, then nothing is a sports car. If people who are not self-taught car experts decide in middle age or retirement that they've finally earned the right to have a "sports car," and that search leads them to an Audi SQ5 or Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro because nobody is willing to draw that line in the sand between things that are sports cars and things that are not, then why would any automaker bother to build a sports car?
Therefore, I beg of you, dear reader: start using the term "sports car" to apply to things that are truly sports cars, or close to them. The Miata. The Porsche 718 Boxster (not the 718 Cayman). Stuff like that. In the end, the life you save could be your own, because who wants to live in a world where the smallest and most nimble "sports car" for sale is a Mustang, no matter how excellent said Mustang might be?Bitcoin zoomed past $11,000 US on Wednesday and then just as quickly dropped to $9,000, stoking concerns that a rapidly swelling bubble could be set to burst in spectacular fashion.
The price of a bitcoin — a cryptocurrency that has ballooned in value this year — fluctuates depending on the exchange where it is being purchased, but a little after 9 a.m. ET Wednesday on Coinbase, the price topped out at $11,395 per bitcoin, an all-time high.
By 2:30 p.m. ET, however, the currency had lost more than $2,000, bottoming out at around $8,600 per coin before recovering back up to near the $10,000 level again.
Even after Wednesday's seesaw day, the value of bitcoin has gained more than 1,000 per cent this year, a rapid ascent that led to countless warnings that it has reached bubble territory.
But the warnings have had little effect, with dozens of new crypto-hedge funds entering the market and retail investors piling in.
Coinbase, the world's largest provider of digital wallets to store cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, said earlier this week that it had 300,000 new members sign up for a wallet on the service over the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. All in all, the site now has 13 million different active bitcoin wallets.
British-based website Blockchain.info said it added 100,000 new customers on Tuesday alone, bringing its own tally to 19 million people.
Most evidence suggests that few people piling into bitcoins are using it as a currency, and most are simply using it as a hot investment.
"What's happening right now has nothing to do with bitcoin's functionality as a currency — this is pure mania that's taken hold," said Garrick Hileman, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School.
"This is very much a bubble that will very much correct itself at some point and people need to be very careful."
Bitcoin, which was invented in 2008 by an anonymous computer programmer, allows people to transfer money to each other via a secure and anonymous ledger. That ledger is known as a blockchain, and people who contribute to it by doing energy and labour-intensive computer calculations are known as bitcoin miners.
Proponents of bitcoin love the technology because its value cannot be artificially influenced by governments the way other currencies can. But wild swings in its price are common.
Japanese investment bank Nomura noted in a recent report on bitcoin that less than one per cent of all bitcoin miners in the world control 88 per cent of all the bitcoins in existence so far.
"The bitcoin price is easily manipulated," the bank said in a report last week.
But warnings like that aren't stopping major investment names from piling into the space. Reuters reported Wednesday that the Nasdaq was planning on launching a bitcoin futures contract in the first half of 2018. That will allow investors to buy and speculate on the value of bitcoin without actually having to own it themselves, a development that's likely to add to its prevalence.
"It's got all the shapings of your tulip bubble chart [but] that tells you nothing about where that price line could go depending on the number of people who wish to own it," Standard Life's head of investment strategy Andrew Milligan said on Wednesday.
"Who is to say it doesn't reach $100,000?"
Technology pioneer John McAfee famously predicted in 2014 that bitcoin — then worth around $500 — would be worth $5,000 by the end of 2017, a figure it has already doubled with one month to go. On Wednesday, he predicted on Twitter that the price of a bitcoin would hit $1 million by 2020.
In some emerging markets, bitcoin is worth even more than it is on the main trading exchanges. In Zimbabwe, where currencies are notoriously volatile and hard to come by, bitcoin traded at $17,875 on Monday.
Wednesday's bitcoin movements are a reminder to many that volatility is the norm with the cryptocurrency.
"As many seasoned traders know all too well, anything that rockets higher, tends to fall down faster when the time comes, and the time will come," James Hughes, chief market analyst at FX broker AxiTrader, said.The Wisconsin State Capitol. (Photo: Keegan Kyle/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)
Madison — A judge serving as a Democratic member of the Wisconsin Ethics Commission has resigned in disgust, saying the newly created agency is ill-suited to its mission of ensuring clean government in the state.
Robert Kinney, a reserve judge in the state, was one of the panel's six commissioners — three Republicans and three Democrats — appointed by Gov. Scott Walker and legislative leaders of both parties. The commission was created this year after GOP lawmakers and Walker scrapped the former state Government Accountability Board in favor of ethics and election commissions.
Kinney said that the commission has already declined to take action in a private session on a complaint that he believed merited it.
"If financial or ethical improprieties are leveled, or allegations of quid pro quo corruption are made, they must be thoroughly and timely investigated, and, if warranted, aggressively prosecuted. Sadly, it appears we have created a system which almost guarantees that this will not occur," Kinney said in a statement Monday.
Reserve Judge Robert Kinney (Photo: Wisconsin Courts System)
Kinney did not say what complaint the commission declined to act on.
But in October, Democrats filed an ethics complaint against the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee because it had not submitted a report on its fundraising and spending in September. Those reports let the public know how much political groups are raising and where they are getting their money.
A spokeswoman for the Republican Assembly committee had no comment.
Peg Lautenschlager, the Democratic chairwoman of the Ethics Commission and a former attorney general, and Katie McCallum, a former state Republican Party spokeswoman and daughter-in-law of former Gov. Scott McCallum, released a joint statement thanking Kinney for his service, pledging to replace him and declining to comment further.
In a brief interview, Lautenschlager would say only that she regretted Kinney's departure.
"We are losing a very committed and thoughtful member of the commission," she said.
The Government Accountability Board, which had a board of nonpartisan judges, was dismantled by Republicans this year after the board undertook an investigation of Walker's campaign during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections. The Wisconsin Supreme Court halted the investigation for good after finding that Walker did nothing wrong.
The board was replaced with partisan boards equally split along party lines.
Since the board was broken up, the state Elections Commission has gotten most of the public attention, successfully running a presidential election and a statewide recount with relatively few hiccups.
In his statement, Kinney, the reserve judge, said that the agency's commissioners are not listening to knowledgeable staff and that the public is shut out of the commission's work.
"At the October 10, 2016, public meeting of the Commission, incredibly, three members — one-half of the Commission’s membership — voted to strike from the (draft agency) mission statement the aspirational language, 'furthering Wisconsin’s tradition of clean and open government.' The handwriting was on the wall," Kinney said.
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Two Republican commissioners, McCallum and former judge Mac Davis, and one Democratic commissioner, David Halbrooks, voted to change the language. Two Democrats, Lautenschlager and Kinney, and one Republican, former state lawmaker Pat Strachota, voted against changing the language, so the proposal failed to gather the four votes needed to pass.
At a news conference Monday, Walker told reporters he'd like to find out more about why Kinney resigned and his concerns about how the Ethics Commission is running.
"I'd love to sit down and talk with him about that," Walker said.
Read or Share this story: http://on.jsonl.in/2gsWA5fMarcel Hilzinger
Dell now provides its 10" Mini 10 netbook with Ubuntu in the U.S. and Canada, with the rest of the world to follow shortly.
The Mini 10 netbook has been around with Windows XP for two months and now comes with Ubuntu at least in the U.S. and Canada, according to DELL-Anne C in Dell's community blog. The Ubuntu version costs $400, while the XP model is steeper at $500. The Linux version provides a further benefit: because the netbook isn't bound by Microsoft's requirements for Windows XP, the Mini 10 comes with a 32-GByte ($75) and even 64-GByte ($125) solid state disk (SSD) option. The 6-cell battery option ($30) gives the netbook an 8-hour battery life compared to the 3 hours or so for the standard battery, and a mid-range 3-cell option with 28 WHrs and just under 4 hours battery life is also available for $15. Last but not least, the Mini 10 provides an edge-to-edge HD display option ($35) at a 1366 x 768 resolution.
Ubuntu as the operating system of choice on Dell Mini 10.
The Inspiron Minis run on the Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) version, although Dell spiffed up the graphical interface somewhat and expanded the original 8.04 with NetworkManager. The Community blog page includes a short video on the Mini 10 from Doug Anson, Dell's Linux technology strategist.
Along with the built-in ATSC tuner, Dell promises that the Mini 10 will also make its appearance soon in Europe with a DVB-T tuner.More than 1.1 million Americans signed up for an insurance plan through the federal health-care marketplace during its initial enrollment period, with more than 975,000 enrolling in December alone, the Obama administration announced Sunday.
The new figures, which came as the administration reworked its computer system to extend the deadline for an extra day, until midnight on Dec. 24, suggest that federal officials are making up some ground after glitches and processing errors made HealthCare.gov difficult to access and navigate during its first two months of operation.
So far, nearly 2 million Americans — who were either uninsured or had to change coverage after their existing plans were canceled — have signed up under the new health-care law on state and federal marketplaces. Roughly 850,000 people have enrolled through the state-run exchanges, according to Charles Gaba, a Web designer tracking enrollment numbers.
The administration is still far short of the enrollment targets it set just before the system was launched Oct. 1. The Department of Health and Human Services had anticipated that 3.3 million people would have signed up by now, according to a Sept. 5 agency memo.
Still, officials celebrated the end-of-year results.
“We are in the middle of a sustained, six-month open enrollment period that we expect to see enrollment ramp up over time, much like other historic implementation efforts we’ve seen in Massachusetts and Medicare Part D,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid administrator Marilyn Tavenner wrote on the HHS blog, referring to the nation’s first health-insurance exchange under Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), in 2006, and the prescription drug coverage expansion enacted during President George W. Bush’s administration. “In part, this was because we met our marks on improving HealthCare.gov: the site supported 83,000 concurrent users on December 23rd alone.”
The next critical deadline for enrollment is March 31, after which individuals face a tax penalty if they remain uninsured.
Some experts on health-care policy say the December surge increases the possibility that the law could meet federal projections of 7 million enrollments by March 31, 2014.
“It is starting to track with what people, particularly the Congressional Budget Office, projected originally,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “December is the first month where federal sign-ups have kept up with state sign-ups, too.”
Senior administration officials have said they expected enrollment to start slowly after the Web site’s October launch and remain relatively low in November, before accelerating in December as many Americans sought out plans that would take effect Jan. 1.
That pattern materialized, although at a much lower level than officials initially expected. As of Dec. 22, 890,000 Americans had enrolled on the federal exchange, according to government figures that had not been made public, meaning that more than 200,000 people chose health plans on Dec. 23 or 24. By contrast, roughly 137,000 people signed up through the federal system in its first two months of operation.
Delayed by glitches
At least some of the late-
December shoppers didn’t mean to procrastinate, but technical issues thwarted their earlier attempts to sign up for coverage.
Anita Pinser, 62, tried to buy coverage Oct. 1 but finally enrolled in a plan Dec. 22.
“I kept trying and trying,” said Pinser, a former human resources professional who lives just outside Charlotte and who was laid off in 2008. “I called the 800 number and found out everyone was having problems.”
When she saw a posting on Twitter Dec. 22 about the impending deadline, she decided it was time to give it a final try. “I had my account set up, so all I really had to do was click on the coverage that I wanted,” she said. “It was really easy. The only bad experiences I had were the first month, when no one could sign up.”
But others are still experiencing serious problems with the Web site. David and Karen Hart live in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., and both are self-employed. Their existing Blue Cross Blue Shield policy was canceled in the fall and then reinstated, but they picked a new plan on HealthCare.gov and paid for it on Dec. 19.
When he noticed that their payment hadn’t been deducted from their bank account, David Hart called Florida Blue on Dec. 27; he was told that the government’s computer system had canceled their plan. His wife spent more than four hours on a federal hotline Saturday, at which point she was told the insurer had jettisoned their policy.
“I’m a 56-year-old, and I have had health insurance my entire life. It’s just astounding that we’ve had to go through this,” David Hart, an artist, said in an interview. He noted that he and his wife support the new law but have been dismayed by how federal officials are implementing it. “We think it’s good policy, but what they’re doing is atrocious.”
By Sunday afternoon, CMS officials were investigating the Harts’ complaint.
America’s Health Insurance Plans spokesman Robert Zirkelbach, whose group represents insurers, said firms “are working around the clock to process the high volume of enrollments that they have received from the exchanges. While there are still some ongoing challenges with the back-end systems, including so-called ‘orphan records’ where the enrollment files are never received, health plans are working with CMS to resolve those issues as quickly as possible so that consumers’ coverage can begin in January.”
The CMS did not release any demographic information about who has enrolled, including the age breakdown. Those numbers are important, since insurers need a well-distributed risk pool in the exchanges to keep premium prices in check.
Outreach efforts
The administration is gearing up to preempt any health-care access problems that may crop up starting next month, publishing online guides on how to determine which doctor visits and prescription drugs are covered under the new system.
In a statement Sunday, the CVS pharmacy chain said that its employees “will provide information to help patients contact the appropriate health plan or insurance exchange,” and work with insurers and government agencies to “help minimize disruptions to care whenever possible.”
“In some circumstances and based on clinical considerations, we may also assist patients with a transitional supply of a prescription to a patient experiencing a temporary disruption in coverage to support their continuity of care,” CVS said.
Officials also plan to intensify their outreach to young adults, Latinos, African Americans, women and other key groups after Jan. 1, they said, through intermediaries including celebrities, local activists, provider networks, nurses, doctors, churches, mosques and synagogues.
“We are eager to assist millions more Americans gain the health security offered by the Affordable Care Act in the weeks and months ahead,” Tavenner wrote.
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) said on “Fox News Sunday” that despite the problems of getting young people to sign up, he was confident that President Obama’s health-care law would be “running a lot more smoothly” by March.
The former Democratic National Committee chairman, who is also a doctor, accused critics of overstating the problems. “I think the first year is going to be more successful than most people think,” he said.
Emily Wax contributed to this report.The Tour and Germany have had a rocky relationship over the past two decades. During the mid-2000’s a string of high-profile doping offences, the exit of German teams like Telekom and the cancellation of the Tour of Germany resulted in German TV dropping the Tour from programming schedules. However, during this current decade, a new generation of stars have reinvigorated the sport and restored the credibility of German cycling. Riders like Tony Martin, André Greipel, John Degenkolb and Marcel Kittel, who in 2015 went to speak to TV executives to persuade them to revive broadcasting of the Tour and in 2016, ten years after it was last shown on German television, it was restored to the programming schedules. This opening stage is Martin’s reward for that diplomatic work, with the three sprinters chance of a win on home soil coming on Stage 2.
It’s too long to be classed as a prologue, but not long enough for any real time gaps between the GC contenders to appear. The course is similar to that of the opening stage of the 2015 edition in Utrecht, but the winner on that day Rohan Dennis isn’t on the start list for 2017.
The profile is flat, the two lumps representing the bridges across the Rhine. This is an all out power-fest with some technical cornering to slow the pace. The riders head south-east along the Rhine, and cross it for the first time at 4km after a very severe corner. Once they reach the other side of the river, there is a Sa Colobra like loop around and under the bridge, a short section of road, before they cross back over the Rhine and begin the 5km run home, with five 90 degree bends along the way to test their handling and braking techniques.
Martin is the overwhelming favourite and the pressure will be on him to take the first yellow jersey in front of his home crowd, but this shouldn’t worry the current TT world champ. Current Spanish TT champ, Castroviejo, would prefer a few more hills, but he could run the German close. Micheal Matthews surprised everyone by taking last year’s Paris-Nice prologue and could do so again here. The Sky super domestique’s Kwiatkowski and Kiryienka, will likely have been told to conserve their energy in support of Froome, but they should still post a competitive time, but not one that will ultimately challenge. Van Embden and Cummings (who will be resplendent in his Brittish TT champs kit) should also be in the mix for a Top 5 finish. But it’s Van Embden’s teammate, and GC hopeful, Roglic, who could spoil Martin’s day. He’d been strong in prologues and short TT this year, winning the stages at Tour de Romandie, Pais Vasco and Ster ZLM. This could be a fantastic start to his GC ambitions. In regards to the main GC hopefuls, Porte should finish top of this group but his main rivals Froome, Contador, Quintana and co won’t finish too far behind.
Stage Podium PredictionThis article is over 3 years old
Several other people remain sick in remote Achuar villages in Amazon region as authorities rush to Morona river basin to vaccinate people
At least 12 indigenous Peruvians dead after contracting rabies from bats
At least 12 people in remote indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon have died from rabies in recent months and several more remain sick after catching the disease from bats, a local governor said on Wednesday.
Authorities were rushing to vaccinate people in native Achuar villages near the Morona river basin where the deaths have surged, said Fernando Meléndez, the governor of the Loreto region.
Three children were among the 12 dead, said Meléndez.
“The death of even one child is grave,” Meléndez said. “Today the people of Loreto are living a tragedy.”
Peru’s central government was preparing a state of emergency to free up funds for additional vaccines and fly them into affected communities, which are far from roads, said the deputy health minister, Percy Minaya.
Rabies deaths from bat bites are rare in Peru, where native Amazonian tribes tend to lack access to basic healthcare and emergencies can go unattended for days.Share. Kill Bill, Hateful Eight Director talks about his future. Kill Bill, Hateful Eight Director talks about his future.
In the past, director Quentin Tarantino has said he would retire from movies after making 10 films. But that might not be the case.
"I might say to hell with that and make it to 15. We'll see.” Tarantino said, during a crowded San Diego Comic-Con panel.
Tarantino told Playboy in 2012 “directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end.” He then felt 10 films would be enough for his career.
Regardless of the inevitable decision, Tarantino remained adamant that he wanted to continue his career shooting on film. Because if he's going to get stuck shooting on digital, then he'll just go and shoot for TV miniseries instead.
IGN will have more news from The Hateful Eight panel and San Diego Comic-Con.
Jose Otero is an Editor at IGN and host of Nintendo Voice Chat. You can follow him on Twitter.Microsoft plans next month to roll out the first major update to its Windows Vista operating system, which was introduced in January 2007. There have been a number of smaller patches to Vista, but this one, called Service Pack 1, is pretty large, a 65-megabyte download, and includes hundreds of small fixes and improvements, including some performance gains.
The arrival of a large update like this isn’t a sign of trouble, or even unusual. Microsoft has routinely issued these large “service packs” periodically for Windows. And just this week, its competitor, Apple, unleashed an even larger update for its new operating system, Leopard.
Even though they can take a long time to download and install, such updates are generally a good thing for consumers. Microsoft will automatically deliver SP1, as the company calls it, through its normal updating mechanism, built into Windows. The update is free.
However, based on my tests of Vista SP1, I believe that for most average consumers, it will likely be a nonevent, and for others it will be disappointing. Many of its benefits are aimed at corporations and power users, or are under-the-hood fixes that are hard to discern. For mainstream users, it adds no significant, visible features to Vista, and changes little or nothing about the way the operating system looks and works.
Also, SP1 doesn’t resolve some of the most annoying flaws in Vista, including slow start-ups and reboots, and a security system that nags you too much and requires add-on anti-virus software. I guess these problems will either never be fixed fully or will have to wait for SP2.
While Vista SP1 does deliver some performance improvements in certain scenarios, it can actually temporarily degrade performance — including making reboots even slower — because of a quirk in the update process. This slowdown should go away in a few days, the company says.
On balance, the update is probably worth installing, especially since Microsoft will deliver it automatically. But I wouldn’t rush to grab it and I wouldn’t expect much from it. One note: you can’t install SP1 until you have installed a couple of other patches first. These will also be distributed automatically.
I installed Vista SP1 on two computers that had come with the original Vista preinstalled: a 10-month-old Sony Vaio SZ laptop and a two-month-old Dell XPS One desktop. Because the automatic download distribution isn’t yet in place, Microsoft sent me the update on a disk, which also included the prerequisite patches. In each case, the upgrade took a little over an hour and went smoothly. During the process, the computers rebooted multiple times, but it was all automatic and didn’t require user intervention.
After the installation, the computers functioned normally. I tested three of the performance improvements Microsoft claims for SP1. The first involved speeding up the copying of hefty folders containing large numbers of files. On both machines, copying a folder containing over 700 files totaling almost 700 megabytes took less than half as long with SP1 as it had with the original Vista.
I also tested how long it took both machines to awaken from a hibernation or sleep state and be ready for work. For these tests, I began with each machine running Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook and the Firefox Web browser, then I forced them into sleep and hibernation mode.
By my definition, “ready for work” means that Vista’s circular delay indicator has gone away, the software that loads at start-up has finished launching and the computer has fully reconnected to its wired or wireless network. On both of my test machines, SP1 improved the recovery time from sleep or hibernation, shaving one to 10 seconds from the procedures.
Microsoft doesn’t claim SP1 will improve the speed of cold starts and reboots under Vista, but I tested these anyway. To my horror, I found that SP1 actually made rebooting — already slower than on comparable Windows XP computers or Macintoshes — even slower.
Microsoft explained that this was due to the fact that installing SP1 erases certain data used by Vista to speed up program launching. It takes the system a few days to build this data back up, the company says. Until then, it says, overall performance, including reboots, can be slower under SP1 than under original Vista.
Microsoft provided me with a method that would rebuild this program-launching data more quickly, at least for the common programs I was using in my tests. Once I followed that method, rebooting time returned to its former state — still too slow for my taste, but at least not worse.
In briefing me on SP1, Microsoft made a big point of saying that great progress had been made in the past year in making Vista work properly with add-on devices, such as printers. I tried my 2003-vintage Hewlett-Packard printer, which hadn’t worked properly with the original Vista. It still didn’t work well with SP1.
So, Vista SP1 is a step forward, at least after a few days of use. But it’s not a big step.
Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.NEW YORK (AP) — Asked to characterize "Shut Up and Play the Hits," a concert film that documents LCD Soundsystem's final, oft-mythologized show at Madison Square Garden, James Murphy deadpans a television promo.
"Middle-age guy stops band. Pictures at 11."
The film, which plays in theaters for one night Wednesday, is a kind of "The Last Waltz" for a new generation: an adored band going out with a self-induced, possibly premature bang. But it's also, as the filmmakers Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace say, "a character study" of Murphy, whose decision to end LCD Soundsystem is as curious to the man who made it as it is to anybody.
"I still don't know if it's the right decision," says Murphy. "I felt like it was the right decision for the moment and you only have that. And I'm OK with that. I regret it sometimes. I don't know if I regret it, but I'm sad sometimes. I'm like, 'Oh, it would be fun to play with those guys.' Or I see a band that stinks and I'm like, 'Let's go wipe them off, stop them from playing.'"
The movie is an occasion not only to lead new ears to LCD Soundsystem and let their fans relive a concert that seemed to define an era of New York music, but a chance to unpack LCD Soundsystem — an alternatively ironic and sincere groove-based outfit that made cerebral electronic dance music with pristine production and propulsive rhythms.
"We did a bunch of things that I'm only figuring out now," Murphy says. "We were cooler than I thought we were. But we didn't rest on it because I didn't think we were cool. So I don't feel like we sold out too bad."
In a recent interview at his newly purchased Williamsburg loft, Murphy, a kickboxing enthusiast, had the restlessness of a fighter without a bout on the horizon. "I'm not retired," he says, feigning a golf swing. But a kind of post-LCD limbo has taken hold. Recalling the day's decisions, he says, "I forgot to eat. Should I make a juice or should I fry an egg? I don't have eggs. Should I rent a Zip car?"
"That's kind of what's going on now," says Murphy, laughing.
The thinly-bearded, outwardly-placid 42-year-old's colorful conversation often resembles his lyrics: layers of self-deprecation, self-aware analysis and musical references that dot from Harry Nilsson to the Smiths to OutKast.
But, like a bank robber turned clean, he's missing the juice — the thrill of pushing further, sounding better and rocking harder than the band next door. LCD Soundsystem, he says, was motivated to improve by great live bands like Arcade Fire and the Flaming Lips, and, alternatively, would relish blowing away weaker, less-driven competition. "Have some pride, man," he says, disgusted. "Go fight."
Yet stopping LCD Soundsystem was partly a gesture of surrender. After three acclaimed albums that concluded with 2010's "This Is Happening," the band was only gaining in popularity and had built a crystal-clear, pulsating live act on par with "Stop Making Sense"-era Talking Heads.
When Murphy — a punk band veteran and co-founder of DFA Records who was already 35 when the group debuted — gazed at his future, he saw never-ending three-year cycles of writing, recording and touring. He feared continual life on the road would carry him through middle age and propel him into a more public lifestyle.
"I don't want to be a famous person," he says. "That's what's next. That's the next step, especially with an American band. Just make the same record seven times and then you're huge."
But the recalibration hasn't worked the way Murphy hoped. He still doesn't want to reconstitute LCD Soundsystem, but his plan for leisure and professional freedom has been bedeviled by other encroachments.
Murphy, a detail-oriented obsessive (he's shown in the film managing the backstage wristbands at MSG), became heavily involved in the post-production of the documentary, particularly the audio mix for concert footage. He also helped cut a 3 ½ hr., music-only version.
Murphy has also spent a lot of time DJing around the world and seen his calendar constantly fill up. Though he wanted to return to producing, his work with other acts (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Klaxons, Julie Ruin) has been limited to short sessions of a track or two.
"I'm not doing different things yet," says Murphy. "Making a movie takes forever. Making two movies takes double forever."
"Shut Up and Play the Hits" is punctuated by an interview of Murphy by author and music journalist Chuck Klosterman. The filmmakers turned to Klosterman, who had previously profiled Murphy for the British newspaper The Guardian, to essentially replicate the experience — which Klosterman says was "sort of like acting but the character was myself."
And, certainly, hyper self-consciousness is pervasive in "Shut Up and Play the Hits."
"If (Murphy) has a problem that's also a strength, it is the intensity of his self-awareness to the point where it's almost paralyzing for him," says Klosterman. "It's very difficult for him to make any decision without sort of pre-imagining how that decision will be perceived or how it will make him feel later."
Murphy has continued to write music on a daily basis, but he hasn't been putting tracks to tape. Though doctor visits are another thing he hasn't had time for yet, he says he permanently stripped his voice during one of the shows leading up the MSG concert (which sold out in under an hour).
"I'm excited to do some stuff," he says, mentioning a desire to do another uninterrupted album like LCD Soundsystem's "45:33" and an impulse to make "more synthy stuff" like the band's "I Can Change." ''I'm terrified in a lot of ways. I don't know if anyone's going to care. I don't know what's going to happen, which is kind of exciting."
But as what? Murphy was always the sole creative force and songwriter of LCD Soundsystem, which toured as a seven-piece. He's unsure if his next album will simply be as himself: "It just seems kind of arbitrary to be like: This is a James Murphy record, not an LCD Soundsystem record."
He's planning to open a store below his apartment, make his own espresso blend (coffee is one of his greatest passions), and set up a studio at his home since the DFA studio is now often rented to other bands.
Meanwhile, the post-LCD Soundsystem life Murphy envisioned awaits.
"I don't see that happening for a little while, at least through the summer," he says. "Then I'm going to Asia in September. So... next year."
JAKE COYLE, AP Entertainment WriterWhile the Delhi-based diplomatic community has been complaining of air pollution privately, the Costa Rican ambassador to India, Mariela Cruz Alvarez, who has developed respiratory illness, is the first to publicly say that Delhi’s air is “unbreathable”, and that she has had to move to Bengaluru to recover.
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In a scathing blog post, Alvarez, a yoga practitioner and an ardent follower of Art of Living, said, “I am sick in South India with a serious upper respiratory infection due to New Delhi’s unbreatheable air. My tropical lungs couldn’t take the toll. I will be recovering and resting… It is not funny to see your lungs expelling a dark residue as if I was a smoker — which i am not. I work to bring awareness about climate change and now I feel the personal impact of our global lack of awareness. We need to wake up fast. India I love you and it hurts me to see you drowning in loads of plastic and toxic air. Where is the leadership? Clean air and water are basic human rights.”
The Indian Express recently reported that the diplomatic community has been struggling to cope with Delhi’s air.
On Tuesday, Alvarez posted a video message saying she has taken her medicines and is feeling better, as she is recuperating in the lush green surroundings in south India. “I’m a living proof that our planet is dying, coughing as I write with my Indian bronchitis,” she wrote in a blog Tuesday. She was appointed Costa Rican envoy to India in May this year.
“The pollution comes from a blue planet that is crying: factories expelling poison into her in exchange for money and conveniently forgetting about their environmental responsibility. Those who charge us with their profits in exchange for our healths and well being, brainwashing us into futile needs that are superficial and empty. Those who |
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Strategy Guide/Tips [ edit ]Bernie Sanders surprised Stephen Colbert Monday, a day before the West Virginia Democratic primary, with a simple message: He is not giving up.
During the cold open of CBS' "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," Colbert had just gotten his hand stuck in a vending machine — trying to retrieve a 100 Grand candy bar — when Sanders walked in. The Vermont senator helped Colbert with his candy, which he dubbed a "contested confection," while explaining that his continuing campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, despite the delegate count largely favoring Hillary Clinton, is not a "lost cause."
“I don’t take money from billionaires, but I do check every vending machine change slot,” Sanders said, showing up unannounced.
The conversation soon shifted to the West Virginia primary Tuesday, where Colbert pointed out that Sanders faces big odds. “Even if you do well tomorrow, the delegate math is against you,” Colbert challenged.
“It’s a narrow shot,” Sander admitted. “But we still have a chance to win a majority of the pledged delegates. We’re going to fight for every last vote; and at the end of the day, I hope and believe that we are going to win this.”
Sanders also helped Colbert retrieve his stuck 100 Grand bar, but the comedian was disappointed to find that Sanders hoped Colbert would share his candy. "I knew it!" exclaimed the host, mocking Sanders' democratic socialist policies.
Sanders currently trails Hillary Clinton in the pledged delegate count. Clinton has secured 1,705 delegates to Sanders' 1,415 delegates. However, Sanders does have a chance to win big in West Virginia.
“We’re going to stay in until the last vote is counted, and that will be in the [June 14] primary in Washington, D.C.,” Sanders said in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep last week. “We’re going to fight in West Virginia. I think we’ve got a shot to win there — we’ve got a good shot to win in Oregon, and I think we’ve got a good shot to win in some other states... We’re in this race till the last vote is counted.”
The latest polls from West Virginia show him leading by as many as seven points, and the state favors the Vermont senator demographically.Journalist Mai Bei, (Yahoo News) is reminding America of its recent dark past vis-à-vis that longtime rogue agency the CIA’s global torture operations during that rogue regime of the Bush administration.
The plot thickens with the Senate Intelligence Committee strongly in favor of declassifying its five years in the making, 6,700 page report bringing to light in graphic criminal detail the plethora of Geneva Convention and international law violations committed by overzealous CIA henchmen in their quest to torture information out of thousands of detainees the world over “fighting” America’s so called war on terror. Today’s article attempts to create high drama Washington-style by hyping up anticipation of an executive-legislative showdown between how much of the CIA’s dastardly deeds should be disclosed to the waiting American public.
Pressure is mounting on our current beleaguered president known for his disastrous foreign policy on the heels of the exact same disastrous foreign policy launched by the war criminal neocons before him.As a recent backdrop leading to this latest theatrical release of government-gone-bad is the back and forth sniping charges between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA, both accusing the other of illegal spying.
Committee Chair Diane Feinstein (D-CA) had long been cozy with protecting CIA secrecy and criminality right until she learned that Director John Brennan’s CIA was busily violating her committee’s privacy. She had no problem with the American public’s privacy constantly violated in act after unconstitutional act or for that matter any world citizen’s right to life being destroyed in the name of national security. But her ire was hypocritically provoked when the CIA no doubt got up too close and personal on her naked body politic and she did not like it one bit.
Then lest we forget we had President Obama campaigning on the promise once Bush was gone to be the most open, honest and transparent presidency in US history. What does he do? He proceeds to become the most secretive president in US history, racking up more cover-up scandals, more charges of espionage, more press harassment and more denials of Freedom of Information Act requests than all previous presidents combined! A Time Magazine article earlier this year noted:
“The administration cited national security concerns a record 8,496 times as an excuse for withholding information from the public, a 57% increase from the year before.”
Barrack Obama has given a whole new meaning to the expression “double-speak,” raising it to rarefied heights even his court jesting predecessor filled with his bumbling rendition of boldface lies and deception could never outdo. The man that raised not just America’s hopes but the entire world has the record of a proven imposter and fraudulent traitor to the American people.
But then his oligarch puppet masters are not just pulling his strings but all three treasonous branches of government as well. The joke of a corrupt and oligarch owned two party system lining its greedy pockets with the three ring circus of shadowy, shady lobbyists, Congress and think tank provocateurs, slithering amorally in and out of public life all to ensure that their puppet masters are fully obeyed and loyalty to them at all cost is maintained. The ideological dogma-quagmire of Republicans versus Democrats’ buffoonery is mere slight of hand, carefully orchestrated design. Meanwhile, the cherry picked judicial branch from the Supreme Court on down ensures every key decision pays homage to their masters as well.
So with everything so stacked against the lowly public citizens whose Constitution they lied under oath to protect, every branch of US government holds Americans in bold, in-our-face contempt. Why is there even a question being raised by a mainstream press insider about disclosure of criminal CIA behavior when even a half awake public already knows the score – secrecy in the name of national security rules the world. Theft in the name of national security rules the world. And death and destruction all around the world in the name of American Empire security.
The pretense of intergovernmental conflict over throwing a bone of reality to a truth-starved public is an affront to Americans’ intelligence. And even more insulting is the implicit reasoning that would have us citizens concluding that just because illicit torture never even worked as far as providing any relevant or useful information that helped the US “win” its war on terror, the biggest lie is asserting that torture because it was so against the law no longer is even happening just because our President says so.
Then this so called issue of invoking Senate Resolution 400 passed in 1976 creating the Senate Intel Committee has only been feebly threatened in the past to finagle grandstanding leverage against former presidents to nudge them a little closer toward honesty with the public. But not once has this little known provision been formally used and implemented to out a president on any real full and honest disclosure. It afforded the Senate the power to declassify information without the president’s approval. Though the stage is being set to send mainstream media into fulltime speculation spin, with such statements from today’s article as:
“If the president didn’t object in writing within five days, the full Senate would then weigh the report in closed session and vote on whether to unilaterally declassify it.”
But of course full declassification is precisely what is always avoided at all cost. Beyond the veneer of superficial appearance, the executive and legislative branches have always covertly worked their shady backroom deals out privately amongst themselves, far removed from the public eye of awareness, much less accountability, and that’s of course how it will stay.
Again Bai’s article makes reference that Obama will most likely reveal his heavily censored version of a generalized, ultra-brief summary that the CIA during the neocon regime engaged in some distasteful behaviors, slipping it by Americans busily “tanning themselves at the beach this summer.” What is most certain is Obama’s loyal deference to more secrecy in the name of national security ad nauseum.
And as such, those 6700 pages of colorful twisted accounts of such criminal barbarism as water boarding victims to death by drowning, ripping out their fingernails, electrocuting their gonads, those kind of unsavory details will in good taste be conveniently omitted. One more sure thing prediction to come out of all this when our psychopathic president does finally go through the motions of public disclosure. He will promise (which in double-speak means lie) that no US agency now resorts to such inhumane internationally outlawed practices of torture under his clean-cut watch.
Please Mr. President, spare us, for we know better. You are enshrouded in deceit up to your ears, and so is your entire government enshrouded in deceit as the American public is on to you like never before.
So as the apartheid US Empire allows its apartheid Israeli ally to genocide Palestinians in Gaza while trumping up another false flag with Putin and his east Ukrainian cronies downing that Malaysian flight, we are all reminded of the false flag evoked nearly a year ago when you Mr. President and your three blind henchman Kerry, Hagel and Dempsey fell on your faces trying to convince the world that Syria’s Assad launched that gas attack in the Damascus suburb.
We saw through your lies then and will see through them again. You have no credibility left with the American public, much less the world. Your ploy to obediently ignite World War III per oligarch order to get to Iran through Syria on your way past Russia and China is the only thing transparent about your presidency.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing.Before Veronica R. went under the knife for a labiaplasty procedure, the 28-year-old Manhattanite joked around with plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Swift about the anticipated results.
“Make me look like Barbie!” she told him, with a laugh.
The striking model, who asked for her last name not to be used for professional reasons, underwent the surgery in September, because she was self-conscious about the size of the labia minora (inner lips) of her vagina.
She is among a growing number of women signing up for labiaplasty to reduce the size and “enhance the appearance” of their private parts, especially when they’re wearing tight-fitting clothes such as workout gear.
According to the American Society for Aesthetic Surgery (ASAPS,) there has been a significant increase in the number of these tissue removal and restructuring procedures — an astonishing 48 percent rise in 2014 from 2013.
“More women are pursuing labiaplasty to correct labia-related issues that are interfering with their ability to perform sexually, to perform daily tasks such as exercise, or are merely causing discomfort,” says Dr. Michael Edwards of ASAPS.
On New York’s Upper East Side, Swift reports that a large number of his clients are motivated by wanting to look sleeker in so-called “athleisure wear,” made from Lycra-like fabrics which often compress the area.
They are keen to avoid so-called “camel toe” or internal “twisting” when they’re working out at top exercise venues such as SoulCycle, Barry’s Bootcamp and the Fhitting Room.
One of my patients was particularly self-conscious doing Pilates in a leotard — so much so that she was afraid to do certain moves. - Dr. Richard Swift
“The ubiquitous yoga pants that everyone is wearing are playing a big part in this trend,” says Swift, who performs between three and five labiaplasties per week at the cost of between $5,500 to $7,500 each.
“For those whose labia are enlarged, they can make them feel uncomfortable and exposed,” adds Swift. “One of my patients was particularly self-conscious doing Pilates in a leotard — so much so that she was afraid to do certain moves.”
Another factor is women’s growing desire to groom the more intimate areas of their body.
“If they are getting a Brazilian wax or laser hair removal, they can feel self-conscious about the look or size of their [labias],”says Swift.
As for Veronica, she now feels more relaxed when she wears tight workout gear. “I often used to get caught up inside myself and it hurt,” she explains. “But I never like wearing exercise outfits [that] are too loose.”
She says her boyfriend approves of her new look, which was achieved during an hour-long operation under local anesthetic and required around three days of convalescence.
“I did this for myself, not anyone else,” insists Veronica, who hit the gym again around three weeks after the procedure. “I’m about the happiest you can be.”
Meanwhile, 40-year-old Maria T., another of Swift’s labiaplasty patients, who also asked for anonymity, claims that self-consciousness about her pelvic region used to impact what she wore — especially for exercise.
Now, eight years since she had the op, she’s happy to wear trendy Lululemon pants to her yoga class.
“I am very happy with the result,” says the Manhattan-dwelling mother of two. “When it comes to that part of my body, it’s a definite case of ‘less is more.’ ”Ten men were sentenced to prison terms of up to two years by Zhejiang province's Songyang county court after being found guilty of defrauding more than 11,500 World of Warcraft accounts via online transactions, Zhejiang Online reports.
The instigator of the group, named Chen, organised a small workspace as a base of operations for his team to flip WoW accounts. Chen and group would purchase stolen WoW accounts for approximately $1 each, gut them and sell the account's the gold and gear for roughly $3 per account. An investigation found that the group had pilfered in excess of $10,800 in profit from more than 11,500 WoW accounts.
While the majority of the group were sentenced to under two years and fined around $1,000, Chen received two years in jail and fined $8,000. Hardware used for the group's nefarious activities and funds gained were confiscated by authorities.
Earlier this year, Zhejiang province resident Zou faced punishment after forging government documents to attempt regain access to his online account for MOBA game Dream Three Kingdoms Online.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Fire Officer Denis Keedy: "We suspect that the fire started in one unit and spread to the second one"
Ten people, including a number of children, have died in a fire at a travellers' site in the Republic of Ireland.
Emergency services were called to the Glenamuck Road in Carrickmines, County Dublin, at about 04:00 local time on Saturday.
Among those who died were a husband, wife and their five children. The children were all under 10 years old.
Police said one child who died was a six-month-old baby girl.
Image copyright RTÉ Image caption Firefighters said they believed the fire had spread quickly between two buildings
One of the children died in hospital.
Risked
It is understood that most, if not all, of the victims were members of two families.
Two adults injured in the blaze are being treated in hospital for the effects of breathing in smoke.
Dublin Fire Brigade said early indications suggest the blaze broke out at a pre-fabricated building and quickly spread.
Image copyright RTÉ Image caption A full investigation into the cause of the fire is being carried out by police and fire officers
Six fire appliances from several areas had been sent to the scene.
The fire service said paramedics had risked their lives to rescue children from the fire.
Generations
Police said there was nothing to suggest arson at this stage, but the area has been sealed off for a forensic examination.
One travellers' rights group said it was concerned that overcrowding at the site may have been a factor in the incident.
Image copyright RTÉ Image caption One travellers' support group said the community had been left "in a state of shock"
Another organisation, the Southside Traveller Action Group, said the families had been living on the site for about eight years.
In a statement, it said: "The traveller community in south Dublin [is] in a state of shock at the devastating loss of lives."
It is understood three generations of one family were living on the site.
Numbness
Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, said he gave sympathies on behalf of the Irish people to the friends and relatives of those who died.
Image copyright PA Image caption The deaths had been a "most dreadful tragedy", Irish President Michael D Higgins said
"It's such an unspeakable tragedy to have an entire family wiped out in a horrific inferno," he added.
Irish President Michael D Higgins said the deaths in the blaze had been "a most dreadful tragedy".
"My thoughts at this time are with the families and friends of those who have lost their lives and those who have been injured," he added.
Independent parliamentarian Shane Ross, who lives close to where the fire happened, said there was a "numbness and silence" at the scene.
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams said the deaths had been "horrific news to wake to".Budapest, October 2 (MTI) – Bela Biszku, Hungary’s interior minister in communist times, pleaded not guilty in a second trial to charges of committing war crimes after the anti-Soviet uprising in 1956.
In June, a municipal appeals court annulled a lower court ruling handed down in 2014 declaring Biszku guilty of instigation and complicity to homicide, and ordered a new trial.
The primary court sentenced the now 94-year-old Biszku to five years and six months in prison.
Legal historian Tibor Zinner and war historian Miklos Horvath told the court that there were no existing documents proving that Biszku had a direct role in the government’s retaliation after the revolution. They added, however, that under the dictatorship, commanders did not even need instructions from their superiors, as they knew what was expected of them.
Photo: MTI
Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-mattersAbstract Mass loss from the West Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers has been linked to basal melt by ocean heat flux. The Totten Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, which buttresses a marine-based ice sheet with a volume equivalent to at least 3.5 m of global sea-level rise, also experiences rapid basal melt, but the role of ocean forcing was not known because of a lack of observations near the ice shelf. Observations from the Totten calving front confirm that (0.22 ± 0.07) × 106 m3 s−1 of warm water enters the cavity through a newly discovered deep channel. The ocean heat transport into the cavity is sufficient to support the large basal melt rates inferred from glaciological observations. Change in ocean heat flux is a plausible physical mechanism to explain past and projected changes in this sector of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and its contribution to sea level.
Keywords
ocean-ice shelf interaction
Totten Glacier
East Antarctica
basal melt
sea level
INTRODUCTION Ice shelves form where the Antarctic Ice Sheet reaches the ocean and begins to float. Back stress produced by the interaction of the floating ice shelf with side walls and topographic rises buttresses the grounded ice sheet and inhibits the flow of ice into the ocean (1). The thinning or weakening of ice shelves reduces the back stress, increasing the discharge of grounded ice into the ocean and raising sea levels. The thinning of Antarctic ice shelves has been attributed to basal melt by ocean heat flux (2, 3), with the most rapid thinning, grounding line retreat, and acceleration of glacial flow observed in the Bellingshausen Sea and the Amundsen Sea (3, 4). Much of the ice sheet in that sector of Antarctica rests on bedrock below sea level that deepens upstream, a potentially unstable configuration that may result in rapid glacial retreat and mass loss to the ocean (5, 6). Models and observations suggest that increased ocean heat flux may have already initiated the unstable retreat of some West Antarctic glaciers (4, 7, 8). Therefore, the future evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is tightly linked to change in the surrounding ocean. Warm ocean waters make their closest approach to the Antarctic continent in the Bellingshausen Sea/Amundsen Sea sector (2, 9), and the most rapid warming of continental shelf bottom waters has occurred there (10), helping to explain the rapid mass loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The WAIS has long been marine-based and susceptible to unstable retreat, whereas the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) was assumed to be more stable as a result of its bedrock configuration and isolation from warm ocean waters. However, global sea-level rise in excess of 10 m during past warm climate epochs requires a substantial contribution from East Antarctica (11, 12). New observations have shown that large regions of the EAIS, including the Aurora Basin drained primarily by the Totten Glacier, are marine-based, with basal morphology (13) and sediment erosion records (14) that indicate repeated, large-scale advance and retreat of the ice sheet. The Totten Glacier drains more ice than any other glacier in the EAIS and contains a volume of marine-based ice above flotation equivalent to at least 3.5 m of global sea-level rise (15), comparable to that of the WAIS. The glacier occupies a deep fjord that connects to inland regions of retrograde bed slope, conducive to rapid retreat, although the bed is flat or rises upstream immediately inland of the grounding line (16). Satellite altimetry and gravity measurements show that parts of the grounded portion of the EAIS have thinned in recent decades, with the most rapid changes observed at the Totten Glacier (17, 18). Evidence for recent change in the Totten Ice Shelf (TIS) is mixed: Laser altimetry indicated thinning from 2003 to 2008 (2), radar altimetry showed large temporal variability with no significant net volume loss between 1994 and 2012 (3), and a recent study found that the inferred mean basal melt rate for the period 2005–2011 was about one-third larger than the steady-state melt rate required to balance mass (19). Models suggest a substantial contribution to future sea-level rise from both the Wilkes Subglacial Basin and the Aurora Subglacial Basin in East Antarctica if greenhouse gas emissions remain high (20, 21). The modeled retreat of the Totten Glacier is initiated by simulated or assumed increases in ocean temperature, but the processes transporting ocean heat to ice shelf cavities are not well represented in coarse-resolution climate models. To date, no oceanographic measurements from the Totten ice front have been available to test the hypothesis that warm ocean waters can reach the ice shelf cavity and drive basal melt.
RESULTS We collected oceanographic profiles and bathymetry data from the calving front of the TIS in January 2015 (Fig. 1; Materials and Methods). The heavy sea ice conditions that had prevented previous expeditions from reaching the ice front relaxed briefly during a period of southwest winds, allowing for access through a narrow and short-lived shore lead. Fast ice prevented access to the western 30 km of the ice front, where geophysical data (15) indicate shallower seafloor depths (Fig. 1A). Temperature, salinity, and oxygen were measured from the sea surface to within 8 m of the seafloor at 10 stations along the calving front and fast ice edge. Fig. 1 Bathymetry, ice shelf draft, sea ice conditions, and ocean station locations near the Totten Glacier. (A) Seafloor bathymetry and elevation of the ice-rock interface, in meters above sea level, from airborne geophysical data (15). Dots indicate the locations of stations used in Fig. 2; red dots indicate stations where mCDW was detected; the grounding line shown in black was derived from interpretation of satellite data (34) updated with airborne radar data to indicate ocean access to the eastern part of the ice shelf (15). The coastline was derived from satellite radar imagery in 2004 (35). (B) Sea ice conditions on 7 January 2015 from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (36). The outlines of the TIS, Moscow University Ice Shelf, and Antarctic continent are indicated by thin black lines. The continental shelf break is indicated by the heavy black line. Fast ice (FI) is present in front of the western and eastern limits of the TIS. The shipboard bathymetry data reveal a deep trough in front of the western TIS cavity, with a maximum depth of 1097 m and a maximum width of 10 km at a depth of 600 m (Fig. 2A). Below 600 m, the trough narrows to form two deep channels with widths of 2 to 4 km. These narrow channels are much deeper than the BEDMAP2 estimate of bottom depth at the ice front [<350 m (22)]. Inversion of airborne geophysical data identified a trough in the same location as observed by the ship (Fig. 1A) but with a shallower maximum depth (<680 ± 190 m) as a result of smoothing by the inversion procedure (15). The geophysical data indicate that the trough extends well south of the calving front and connects to the deep cavity beneath the TIS (Fig. 1A). Fig. 2 Ocean properties along the TIS calving front. (A) Section of potential temperature (in degrees Celsius, color) and observed seafloor bathymetry (black) running from west (left) to east (right) along the calving front. The yellow line indicates the BEDMAP2 bathymetry (22); the magenta line shows the seafloor depth inferred from airborne geophysical measurements (15). (B) Salinity. (C) Oxygen (in micromolar). Warm modified Circumpolar Deep Water (mCDW) reaches the TIS cavity through these deep troughs (Fig. 2A). The warmest water is found at the seafloor at stations 34 and 35 [potential temperature (θ) = −0.405°C], with slightly cooler water (θ = −0.569°C) in the deepest channel at station 36. A temperature maximum is also observed near the seafloor in a narrow channel further east (station 41), but the mCDW is much cooler there (maximum of −1.147°C) than that observed in the deep channel at stations 35 and 36. The channel at station 41 and that between stations 41 and 42 connects to the eastern trough identified by Greenbaum et al. (15) (Fig. 1A), representing the probable conduits for ocean heat to reach this eastward extension of the TIS. The warm water in the deep trough is saline and low in oxygen, characteristic signatures of mCDW (Fig. 2, B and C). The Winter Water (WW) overlying the mCDW is cooler, fresher, and higher in oxygen. However, the salinity and oxygen of WW are lower (by >0.03 and >10 μM, respectively) in front of the western ice shelf than those observed further east, consistent with outflow from the ice shelf cavity of a mixture of low-oxygen mCDW and fresh glacial meltwater. Additional meltwater outflow may occur in the inaccessible area west of station 34. The temperature of the mCDW near the seafloor in the deep trough exceeds the in situ freezing point by more than 2.2°C (the in situ freezing point decreases with increasing pressure) (Fig. 3A). If this warm water can access the grounding line at a depth of 2300 m (15), the temperature would exceed the local freezing point at the grounding line by 3.2°C. Velocity measurements collected by a lowered acoustic Doppler current profiler (LADCP) confirm that the warm water at the bottom of stations 35 and 36 flows strongly (>0.2 m s−1) into the sub–ice shelf cavity (Fig. 3B). The velocity profile is highly sheared, with weak flow in the cold water above the thermocline near 600 m depth and maximum inflow near the seafloor, where the warmest water is found. The deep flow in the eastern trough (station 41) also flows into the cavity but is substantially weaker (Fig. 3B). Fig. 3 Temperature above freezing and along-trough velocity. (A) Temperature elevation above the in situ freezing point at stations 34 to 37 (western trough) and 41 (eastern trough). (B) Velocity from the LADCP rotated in the along-trough direction [35° east of north for the western trough (stations 34 to 37) and 0° for the eastern trough (station 41) (15)]. Integration of the along-trough velocity gives an inflow of 0.22 ± 0.07 Sv of warm (θ > −1.0°C) water at stations 34 to 36 (Materials and Methods). The LADCP provides a synoptic snapshot of the velocity field and may be aliased by tides or other motions; the error bar represents the uncertainty in the synoptic snapshot assuming a ±0.05 m s−1 barotropic tide (Materials and Methods). Although the representativeness of the LADCP-based transports cannot be assessed from direct observations, estimates of net basal melt inferred from glaciological measurements can be combined with temperature measured at the ice front to provide an independent estimate of the exchange rate [Materials and Methods (23)]. Glaciological estimates of basal melt at the Totten range from 63.2 ± 4 gigatons (Gt) year−1 (24) to 80 ± 5 Gt year−1 (19), the largest (24, 25) or the second largest [after the Amery (19)] basal melt rate for East Antarctic ice shelves with an area >1000 km2. On an area-averaged basis, the Totten melt rate [10.5 ± 0.7 m year−1 in the study of Rignot et al. (24) and 9.89 ± 1.92 m year−1 in the work of Depoorter et al. (25)] is higher than that of any other East Antarctic ice shelf larger than 1000 km2. Using the temperature of the inflow and outflow layers observed at the ice front, an overturning exchange flow of 0.16 ± 0.03 sverdrup is required to provide sufficient heat to support the inferred basal melt rate (Materials and Methods). The agreement within errors of the two independent transport estimates (0.22 ± 0.07 sverdrup from instantaneous velocity measurements and 0.16 ± 0.03 sverdrup from the multiyear mean basal melt rate), despite the different time periods and assumptions made, demonstrates that the observed water properties and circulation are consistent with high basal melt rates inferred from satellite data. Although ocean heat transport to the cavity likely varies in response to local and remote forcing (26, 27), the fact that the observed ocean heat flux is sufficient to support the multiyear mean basal melt rate derived from glaciological observations suggests that the conditions measured during the voyage were representative.
CONCLUSION Therefore, several lines of evidence support the conclusion that rapid basal melt of the TIS (19, 24, 25) is driven by the flux of warm mCDW into the cavity: the presence of warm water at the ice front, the existence of a deep trough providing access of this warm water to the cavity, direct measurements of mass and heat transport into the cavity, the signature of glacial meltwater in the outflow, and exchange rates inferred from the heat budget and satellite-derived basal melt rates. Observations of recent change in some East Antarctic glaciers and ice shelves (16–19) and studies of past (12–14, 28, 29) and future (20, 21) sea levels support the hypothesis of a dynamic EAIS. Our observations confirm the existence of a pathway allowing for communication of ocean anomalies to the TIS cavity, highlighting variation in ocean-driven basal melt as a plausible mechanism to explain past and projected changes in the TIS and the ice sheet it buttresses.
Materials and Methods Observations Oceanographic profiles of temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen were collected using a Seabird 911 CTD with dual temperature and conductivity sensors and calibrated against bottle samples analyzed for salinity and oxygen. Velocity profiles were obtained with upward- and downward-looking LADCPs mounted on the CTD frame and an ADCP mounted in the hull of the ship. The LADCP data were processed using the inversion method of Visbeck (30) and Thurnherr (31). The LADCP velocity estimates were referenced using constraints from bottom-tracking, shipboard ADCP, and Global Positioning System position information. The inversion provided formal error bars (shown in Fig. 3); Thurnherr (32) argued that these formal error bars were often overly conservative. The shipboard ADCP was processed using the CODAS software package developed at the University of Hawaii (http://currents.soest.hawaii.edu/docs/adcp_doc/index.html). Calculation of synoptic volume and heat transports The transport of warm mCDW into the cavity was calculated by multiplying the LADCP velocity, rotated into the along-trough direction [35° east of north (15)], by the width of the channel in each 8-m-deep velocity bin and summing over the layer warmer than −1.0°C. [The −1.0°C isotherm lay roughly in the middle of the thermocline separating mCDW from WW; because the thermocline was sharp (~1.0°C/60 m), the transport integral was not sensitive to the temperature threshold chosen.] The LADCP measurements were potentially aliased by tides and other motions that were not resolved by the snapshot obtained by a single voyage. The tidal model of Padman et al. (33) suggested barotropic tidal velocities of less than ±0.015 m s−1 in this region, but tidal models are highly uncertain in this region of poorly known bathymetry. As a rough measure of uncertainty, we estimated the transport change resulting from a ±0.05 m s−1 barotropic tide and used this as an error bar on the volume transport. Heat transport into the cavity was estimated by multiplying the transport by the mean potential temperature in each 8-m-deep bin. Multiyear fast ice prevented the ship from reaching the coast on the western end of the calving front. Airborne geophysical data indicated the seafloor shoals further west (15), suggesting that we have resolved the major inflows of warm mCDW. However, we likely missed some of the shallow outflow of glacial meltwater on the western end of the section. Hence, rather than directly integrating the LADCP velocity to calculate the outflow, we assumed that mass was conserved and that the total outflow must equal the total inflow plus meltwater input. (Note that we did not assume that the outflow and inflow were in the same vertical plane.) We estimated the heat transport out of the cavity by multiplying the total outflow by the mean potential temperature in the layer with salinity less than 34.3 at stations 34 to 37. The difference between the ocean heat transport into and out of the cavity was the heat flux used to melt the base of the ice shelf. The heat flux estimated in this way was sufficient to produce 2.8 ± 0.9 mSv of meltwater. Exchange estimated from satellite-derived basal melt The transport calculation was based on a synoptic survey and may not represent the long-term mean exchange of volume and heat. The observed temperatures of the inflow and outflow layers could be used to provide an estimate of the volume exchange with the cavity that is independent of the velocity measurements. Following the study of Wilson and Straneo (23), we assumed a two-layer estuarine circulation in which warm water enters the cavity and drives basal melt, and a mixture of meltwater and mCDW leaves the cavity. Given a known basal melt rate and the temperature of the inflow and outflow, the heat budget can be used to estimate the exchange rate. Several approaches have been used to estimate basal melt rates at the Totten Glacier. Flux gate calculations using satellite data indicated steady-state net basal melt rates of 63.2 ± 4 Gt year−1 (24) and 64 ± 12 Gt year−1 (25), equivalent to area-average melt rates of 10.5 ± 0.7 and 9.89 ± 1.92 m year−1, respectively. The calculations were based on a number of data sets spanning different time periods and, thus, were best thought of as a multiyear average rather than an estimate for a particular time interval. Liu et al. (19) used a similar method, but did not assume a steady-state calving front as in the previous studies, and found a melt rate of 80 ± 5 Gt year−1 during the period 2005–2011. Numerical models gave net basal melt rates similar to these values [for example, 7 to 15 m year−1 (26) and 9.1 m year−1 with an interannual range of 5.7 m year−1 (27)]. We used the values from the study of Depoorter et al. (25) to estimate the exchange rate [Rignot (24) gave a similar value, with smaller error bars; using the melt rate of Liu et al. (19) would give a larger exchange rate, closer to our synoptic estimate]. The exchange rate is given by M = L f M melt /c w (T in − T out ), where M is the exchange rate, L f is the latent heat of fusion (334 kJ kg−1), c w is the specific heat capacity of seawater (3.985 kJ kg−1 K−1), M melt is the flux of meltwater, and T in and T out are the potential temperatures of the inflow and outflow, respectively. A basal melt rate of 64 ± 12 Gt year−1 (25) corresponds to a meltwater flux M melt of 2 ± 0.4 mSv. T in is set to the transport-weighted temperature of the inflowing mCDW (−0.81°C). T out is the mean temperature of the outflow layer at the calving front (−1.88 |
said, indicates that the killer came to Canby, set the bomb and slipped away without a trace.
-- Les Zaitz
NEXT: Rise and fall of an Oregon kingpin
Under the curse of cartels
An Oregonian Special Report
Violence in the NW
A kingpin's rise & fall
A former insider speaks
Cops on the defensive
A young man lost to heroinThe Paleolithic age: Six people went to hunt down the mammoth so that the tribe could eat, three people discovered fire, four invented language and hearing the first few words, two people immediately turned their backs and sat facing the cave wall because they were offended. Not much has changed.
A great man that fought for the freedom of this country said: ‘Civilization is the encouragement of differences.’ And I wonder how from a race of tolerant people who even won their freedom in a non-reactive manner, we have changed to a country that has decided to be offended by arbitrary things; but being Indian, let me also join my fellow men for a minute, in listing down what may or may not offend me.
We have passed a proposal for building a 182-metre-tall Statue of Unity project that will cost Rs 2,979 crore, and are now trying to construct yet another statue in the Arabian Sea which is budgeted at around Rs 1,900 crore even though only 10% of our children have access to education beyond higher secondary schooling. Instead of spending money on education, that these are our priorities offends me a bit.
In my heart my city will always be Bombay because that is what I have known it as, and it does not antagonize me that a political party decided that it needs to be changed to Mumbai because according to them it was a legacy of the British rule, but a few weeks ago even the word Bombay was bleeped from poor Mihir Joshi’s song and I have not been able to wrap my head around that.
In the last few months, we have been offended by Obama’s chewing gum, Modi’s suit, Kiran Bedi for various reasons and, of course, by the infamous roast.
If I had to be offended by a live show I would rather be offended by Arnab who invites people on his show and then doesn’t let them speak. I saw an episode where he is asking the education minister a question and then screaming over her answers.
Now that’s just bad manners, at least in the AIB roast they called guests over, let them say their bit, people laughed and went home. But we still have to get outraged even though they had made it clear that the show is for adults only.
We now also have an assortment of people up in arms about the gags made on a person’s sexuality but shouldn’t we be more offended by the fact that homosexuality is considered illegal in India and that Section 377 still exists?
The jokes about dark skin offend us because deep down, some of us idiotically think that having dark skin is a shortcoming. Would we be as offended if jokes were made about having fair skin like, ‘You are so fair that you were thrown out of the Nirma washing powder commercial for being whiter than the washed shirt.’?
Yes, I wish the AIB had made astute, layered gags and jibes but to be so offended as to lynch them over a bunch of wisecracks?
Shouldn’t we save our strength to protest against things that really matter — like gangs of men still killing and raping women as they did again in Rohtak; that we spend $38.35 billion on warfare but are slashing our health care budget by 20% despite being a country whose public spending on health is already among the lowest in the world; that a bunch of us have been called ‘haramzade’ on a political platform from a member of the party that governs us and not from a standup comedian but no FIR is filed against the politician but is filed against the AIB comedians instead.
So, should we sullenly keep staring at the cave wall or spend our time productively hunting down the big woolly mammoths because freedom of choice is also about choosing which battles are worth fighting after all.Billed as the "last chance" summit to contain the escalating euro crisis, the meeting of EU leaders produces measures to relieve short-term financial pressures on vulnerable members, and lay the framework for significant budgetary and banking integration.
Thierry Tronnel / Thierry Monasse / Corbis Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti (L) talks with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel (R) during a family photo session during a meeting of European Union leaders for the EU summit at EU's headquarters in Brussels, capital of Belgium, on June 28, 2012
When it comes to confronting the crisis threatening the euro’s very existence, nothing ever seems to come easy for European Union leaders—even a mutually sought agreement. That was demonstrated Friday at the E.U. summit in Brussels, where it took all-night haggling to approve growth stimulus measures that Italy and Spain had blocked until they obtained a softening of rules on bailouts that they’re likely to eventually seek. Only in the madness of the euro crisis can taking yourself hostage become an effective bargaining tool.
Yet, despite what were described as tense and grinding negotiations, decisions announced early Friday morning appear to represent important steps towards the survival of the embattled euro zone—and in both the short- and long-term context of the crisis. “(We took) a very ambitious decision that shows once again the commitment of the member states,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told reporters. “The irreversibility of the euro… will be recognized by all.”
At least once they wake up in the afternoon. Before the sleep-deprived leaders of the 17-member euro group broke their huddle at around 5 a.m. Friday, they adopted three significant concrete measures to confront the major factors in the crisis. The first involves allowing E.U. bailout funds to be paid directly to swamped euro-zone banks, rather than funneled through national governments. The old structure—designed to hold governments accountable for E.U. taxpayer rescue money—had the consequence of increasing the already crushing debt loads recipients were struggling to simultaneously finance and reduce. The change had been a demand Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy called vital in light of Spain’s pending $125 billion bank bailout request.
(MORE: Why Thursday’s Euro Summit Really Is a Make-or-Break Moment. Really.)
“It’s vital we break the vicious circle in which financially troubled banks get E.U. rescue aid from national governments whose debt level increases in the process,” said an advisor to French President François Hollande before the summit, explaining the logic behind the switch to direct aid. “Swamped banks hold enormous stores of their government’s debt. Those bonds start looking like even riskier investments to markets when the government has to take on additional debt to hand banks E.U. funding. The negative impact on increased sovereign debt undermines the intended benefit to banks, so everyone loses.”
The second summit agreement was to deploy $149 billion in existing emergency reserves as economic growth stimulus. That will soon start funding infrastructure projects, business development in strategic areas such as sustainable energy and youth employment programs.
(MORE: Why the New Egyptian President’s Biggest Worry Could Be the Economy)
The third decision—taken at the insistence of Italian premier Mario Monti—will create more flexible conditions under which struggling euro-zone members can appeal for funding to counter the market forces driving up their borrowing costs. That means countries like Italy and Spain—which have recently seen interest rates on new bond issues rise to untenably high levels despite having undertaken considerable austerity measures and reforms—can turn to E.U. institutions for aid without fearing the same harsh cost-cutting requirements imposed earlier in the crisis.
“We are opening the possibilities for countries that are well-behaving to make use of financial stability instruments… in order to reassure markets and get again some stability around some of the sovereign bonds of our member states,” E.U. President Herman Van Rompuy declared.
Viewed collectively, these moves appear to signal progress by E.U. leaders who had begun challenging the strict fiscal discipline championed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Hollande initiated the anti-austerity drive during his campaign for the French presidency earlier this year, with arguments that excessive spending cuts by national governments to lower debt levels had strangled already shrinking growth across Europe. While acknowledging that deficit and debt problems must be remedied, the Socialist Hollande—who since his election in May has formed a de facto alliance with like-minded Monti and Rajoy—argues the short-term focus must be on restoring economic growth, reducing unemployment and nurturing revenue-generating activities that will allow states to finance and reduce their debt loads. The $149 billion euro-zone stimulus funds he pushed for reflected that belief.
(MORE: Anxious Europeans Could Decide U.S. Presidency)
“François Hollande was described as totally isolated when he defended these pragmatic and effective positions on stimulus and flexibility to overcome short-term threats and open the road to long-term solutions,” said the Elysée official. “A majority of euro-zone leaders—including some at first hostile to his view—are now calling for the same policies.”
Yet, despite these moves, it would be unwise to view the summit as the worm turning against the long-defiant Merkel. The measures agreed to in Brussels suggest that Merkel may be advancing her long-term objectives by bending a bit on details that won’t cost her much now that most of her austerity prescriptions are in place.
For example, all the funds involved in the new plans had already been established under previous E.U. responses to the crisis, and are now largely being activated or re-directed. Similarly, the concession that Monti and Rajoy won on nominally lenient aid conditions will require proof that applicants are already playing by the existing crisis-resolution rules Merkel had orchestrated. That means any signs of slippage will result in loan rejection or additional tightening of the screws.
But perhaps most importantly, the funding changes under the summit agreement won’t kick in until centralized European overview structures are in place later this year. That monitoring capacity is part of what now appears to be irreversible movement towards budgetary and fiscal integration, and a banking union across the euro zone. Indeed, the currency crisis has become so acute that most members now seem resigned to shifting a significant degree of regulation and decision-making power from national capitals to Brussels. E.U. officials will now prepare what they laid out earlier in the week as a virtual integration “road map” for the next summit in October.
“Will the French parliament’s final authority and control over budgets be sacrificed? No, because that’s parliament’s legal responsibility under the constitution,” says the Hollande adviser, who acknowledges the historical reluctance of otherwise pro-European France to surrender any authority to Brussels. “But the common organization and structure attentive to both short- and long-term objectives, and which balances social and human concerns with fiscal restraints now being proposed goes in the same general direction as French philosophy.”
That’s a major change that no declaration or document coming out of Brussels on Friday will stipulate—and it may not be enough to save members like Greece from dropping out of the group. But it does suggest that progress and convergence is possible among euro members—even if it never comes easily.
MORE: The Euro Crisis: Why Greece’s Election Doesn’t MatterThe End of the Great American Fantasy
Through all of my life there has been an odd and persistent bias on the part of otherwise honest Americans:
What America does overseas is always good and right. We do not speak against it.
The protests against the Vietnam War were an exception to this, of course, but that break from tradition involved less than half the country. Those people were quickly brought back into the mainstream, And they have supported more or less all subsequent US wars.
This belief – that US foreign actions are always good – is falling apart as we watch. I take this as a good thing, as one should not believe in Santa Claus forever.
The Polarization Trick
But before I explain how this great American fantasy is failing, let me explain the trick that has kept it going:
There is a polar opposite to the fantasy of angelic foreign affairs – the demonization of US soldiers. Americans generally see in polar opposites: Either the military is sacred, or else it is wholly evil.
Once you get people strongly polarized, they’ll stay that way – always opposing the other side and never seeing the truth in the middle.
So, nothing I say here today should be taken as an indictment of individual American soldiers. As with any group of people, some are better and some are worse. Some became soldiers with good motives (to protect people). Some few joined with bad motives (to kill and dominate). But the majority joined for a mundane reason: They needed a job. And more or less all of them joined when they were quite young.
So, aside from a few monsters, I am not going after soldiers. They’ve got plenty to deal with on their own and I’m not interested in making things harder for them.
It’s time to step away from this false polarization and to start looking for the truth. And, as I say, I think the great American fantasy is falling apart. Here are my reasons:
Reason #1: The military-industrial complex is too troubling to ignore.
Americans still remember that President Eisenhower warned them about the military-industrial complex killing their freedoms. And while many of us try not to think about it, we all know.
The US government has troops in most of the countries in the world. Very few of us, myself included, can name all of the wars we are currently involved with. On top of that, we know that the military – and hundreds of private companies that work for them – are spying on all of us at all times. We may try to pass it off with cheap slogans, but we know the truth.
To cap it off, the US government has now given itself the right to permanently jail and even kill US citizens, without a trial, so long as they first call them terrorists.
Reason #2: We’ve seen the government start wars.
Those of us old enough will remember that the State Department suckered Saddam Hussein into the first Gulf War. I won’t recount all the details, but they used a diplomat named April Glaspie to set it up. The story has been confused since then (four versions of the crucial transcript now exist), but lots of us saw it in real time.
We know from WikiLeaks revelations that that there were US Special Forces in Syria a year or more before last year’s almost-war, arming the rebels and training them to fight.
There can be no question that the US stands behind the current troubles in the Ukraine. If this YouTube recording is to be believed, we have US diplomats deciding who should be in power after the takeover… a takeover they staged during the Olympics when Putin would be restrained.
This is no defense of Putin, of course, but it is obvious that the US Department of State is setting up and tearing down governments. That’s a very dangerous line of work.
Reason #3: The Intimidator State lives among us.
The line between military and police in America is all but gone. Police departments sport military equipment and are filled with former soldiers. They use military tactics.
The public increasingly sees cops as dangers, not as friends. A young man recently commented to me, “Cops are bullies,” and he had good reason to think so. Being assaulted by a cop erases a thousand episodes of cop-worship TV.
A few honest and helpful police officers do still exist, but they are steadily disappearing, at least in my field of view. Police=Threat is reality to a huge number of Americans, and not without cause. Merge that with the military, and the image of the soldier-saint fails.
In The End…
I think we have to admit that foreigners are not crazy to see the US government as a threat. Some of them may be stuck in the polarization trick, but they are not wrong to think that our political class is dangerous. We think that too.
Paul Rosenberg
FreemansPerspective.comI had a disquieting thought while gaming the other night. I had started to play Secret of Mana, a Christmas gift from a friend determined to catch me up on old-school cartridge classics (I was a PC kid). Secret of Mana is not an easy game, but the story is kid-friendly fare, and the cutesy, cartoonish monsters wouldn’t be out of place in a Pokémon lineup. I was digging it — hard — but after I gleefully called to my partner that the game world used a cannon-based transportation system, the thought appeared. See, for months, I’ve been immersed in commentary on why games have yet to gain mainstream recognition as an important, culturally relevant, adult medium. Yet there I sat, bloodlessly whacking chubby yellow bunnies with my pixelated sword.
And I wondered: do I need to grow up?
It’s a question I’ve never seriously asked myself, but it’s a familiar one to geeks of all stripes. Into comics? You need to grow up. Collect action figures? You need to grow up. Like cartoons or Disney movies? You need to grow up. This is perhaps the most persistent criticism we receive from those who don’t share our interests, and we argue against it by pointing out that games and comics are just forms of media, and that an awful lot of the material created therein isn’t meant for kids at all. If I were to compile a rough list of my favorite games, I wouldn’t let anybody under sixteen play most of them. The comics on my shelf are definitely not for the juice-box-and-little-league crowd. These are not stories I would’ve appreciated as a child. Many would have scared me, or worse, bored me. But my life is more complex now, and that means I need stories to match.
So then why do I still like the kid stuff so much? If adult-oriented stories satisfy my needs more completely (as they often do), then why am I as excited for the next season of The Legend of Korra as I am for Game of Thrones? Why does my Steam wishlist include Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed alongside DLC packs for Skyrim and Dishonored? The easy response would be to say that these things are fun, and so long as my bills are paid and my home is clean and my vegetables are eaten, then how I enjoy my free time has no bearing on my right to claim adulthood. But as I sat there in front of the TV, the joy of my monster-slaying adventures somewhat dimmed by that moment of insecurity, I felt the need to sort it out.
As I’ve said before, I play games for two primary reasons: to undergo a challenge, and to experience a story. In the context of challenge, it becomes obvious that there are two different types of kids’ games. There are games designed specifically for kids, and there are games that kids can play. In the former camp, you’ve got things like the educational games of my grade school years — Word Munchers, Reader Rabbit, Math Blaster. These are games meant to help kids acquire elementary skills. There’s no appeal for me to play them now, because they’re too easy. Secret of Mana, on the other hand, is not for the faint of heart. Right out the gate, you’re faced with monsters that can poison you, or knock you out, or casually do away with a third of your HP in a single hit. You can’t spam attacks, because the effectiveness of your weapon depends how long you’ve spent charging it up. This means that every fight becomes a delicate matter of timing and patience. Death is swift, and unforgiving. This game may have been wrapped in a bright, non-threatening package, but it’s a satisfying challenge for folks of any age.
Taking part in that seems like a rather ordinary sort of behavior. Kids and adults have been sharing games for thousands of years. We wouldn’t accuse adults of being childlike for continuing to play chess, or charades, or soccer, even though these are games that we usually learn as kids. Human beings have been critical of emergent media ever since media emerged in the first place, so it’s no surprise that our society has yet to fully equate games on a screen with those on a table or a field. That said, it’s important to remember that video games tap into the exact same need for challenge that we exercise elsewhere. It’s just a new way for us to do so.
I’d be a liar if I said the only reason I was enjoying Secret of Mana was because of the gameplay. I’m a sucker for adventure stories, no matter how simple. I know this is why I also enjoy cartoons and the occasional YA novel. What can I say? I like heroes and monsters. But though this affinity has remained unchanged for me since childhood, my approach to these stories is fundamentally different than when I was a kid. Kids need make-believe in the same way that they need real-life role models. Playing out fantasies is a vital part of what helps kids develop a healthy understanding of how reality works. Without testing the boundaries, they never learn what their limits are. They also have to learn basic morality and cultural rules, which fairy tales and adventure stories provide in ample supply.
Adults are expected to know these things by heart, and rightly so. An adult who doesn’t understand social norms, or who can’t differentiate between fantasy and reality, is a potential danger. In that, I can understand why some might look at the stories that teach these things and assume that any adults enjoying them are stuck in some earlier developmental stage. That we are, in the most literal sense, immature.
But that assumption wrongly implies that social and cognitive development are the only benefits to a children’s story. At the core, those stories do the same things that adult stories do. They share ideas, fuel imagination, and provide perspective. They reassert the most essential principles needed for getting through life successfully, the same messages that adult stories tell us as well. Be brave. Be kind. Be clever. Make friends. Face your monsters. Don’t give up. Do we ever need to stop hearing those things? Are those messages less valid if they come from a big-eyed animation, rather than something scarred and photo-realistic? If we laugh or cry over a story that doesn’t include sex, death, violence, or deep moral quandaries, does it count for less?
Here’s what it comes down to: The world is a scary, confusing, difficult place, no matter what age you are. Sometimes we need to face it head on, but sometimes it’s just as useful to explore it within the more manageable realm of fiction. And when we’re seeking fictional inspiration or guidance, we don’t always know where we’ll find it. By opening ourselves up to all stories, to all challenges, we’re acknowledging that life is complicated, and that in order to get through it, we need to nurture as many facets as ourselves as possible. Of course, you don’t have to consume kid-friendly media to be a well-rounded individual. But there’s no harm in it, either. In my experience, sometimes it’s exactly what I need.
As I continued through Secret of Mana, I said to myself, “I would’ve loved this when I was a kid.” In hindsight, I know that sentiment was more introspective than nostalgic. I was remembering how I saw the world when I was younger. I was thinking of how I’ve changed since then, and wondering how I’ll change down the road. I was getting to know myself a little better. I was contemplating, quietly, all the ways in which I’ve grown up.
Becky Chambers is a freelance writer and a full-time geek. She blogs over at Other Scribbles and can always be found on Twitter.That's the best I could come up with...
The Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle characters and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic are the property of Lauren Faust and/or Hasbro and/or others.
Thanks to MyLittlePinkieDash for feedback while I was creating this image.
Rainbow Dash, captain of the Wonderbolts and Twilight Sparkle, ambassador of Princesses Celestia and Luna, meet for the first time in many months. NightmareMoonS won our TwiDash vs. TwiLuna competition, so the prize was for me to draw a TwiDash image for him. I hope you like it!It's probably obvious where Twilight came from. I tried to draw Rainbow without just copy-paste-flipping Twilight though. Somehow Rainbow came out looking smaller than Twilight. The costumes were an attempt at adding a little more variety to the image.And Inkscape, seriously, is it really that difficult to export mitres properly?You areallowed to reuse this image.After serving a tour in the sticky rice and fruit fields of northeast Thailand for the Peace Corps, Leanne Spaulding landed a job at a Virginia-based trade association, working her way to a master’s degree from Duke University in environmental management.
Now Ms. Spaulding is in New York, where she was recently hired by the city’s Sanitation Department.
Her duties, naturally, involve garbage, but not in the traditional sense: Ms. Spaulding is trying to help sell residents of the nation’s largest city on its ambitious composting effort. In that respect, her job is like thousands of others added in recent years that are slowly changing the day-to-day face of government service.
There are now nearly 294,000 full-time city employees, more than at any point in the city’s history. The growth under Mayor Bill de Blasio comes at a time of record revenues in a booming city, and has been across the board; nearly every city agency now employs more workers than it did in 2014, when the mayor took office.
The hiring has allowed the de Blasio administration to restaff agencies that were cut back by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg after the economic downturn of 2008. But Mr. de Blasio has gone far further, expanding the work force beyond its pre-recession peak, a costly investment that is not without risk: the city could be vulnerable to an economic downturn.Scripting the Vim editor, Part 3
Built-in lists
Explore Vimscript's support for lists and arrays
Content series: This content is part # of # in the series: Scripting the Vim editor, Part 3 Stay tuned for additional content in this series. This content is part of the series: Scripting the Vim editor, Part 3 Stay tuned for additional content in this series.
The heart of all programming is the creation and manipulation of data structures. So far in this series, we’ve considered only Vimscript’s scalar data types (strings, numbers, and booleans) and the scalar variables that store them. But the true power of programming Vim becomes apparent when its scripts can operate on entire collections of related data at once: reformatting lists of text lines, accessing multidimensional tables of configuration data, filtering sequences of filenames, and sorting sets of line numbers.
In this article, we’ll explore Vimscript’s excellent support for lists and the arrays that store them, as well as the language's many built-in functions that make using lists so easy, efficient, and maintainable.
Lists in Vimscript
In Vimscript, a list is a sequence of scalar values: strings, numbers, references, or any mixture thereof.
Vimscript lists are arguably misnamed. In most languages, a "list" is a value (rather than a container), an immutable ordered sequence of simpler values. In contrast, lists in Vimscript are mutable and in many ways far more like (references to) anonymous-array data structures. A Vimscript variable that is storing a list is, for most purposes, an array.
You create a list by placing a comma-separated sequence of scalar values inside a pair of square brackets. List elements are indexed from zero, and are accessed and modified via the usual notation: postfix square brackets with the index inside them:
Listing 1. Creating a list
let data = [1,2,3,4,5,6,"seven"] echo data[0] |" echoes: 1 let data[1] = 42 |" [1,42,3,4,5,6,"seven"] let data[2] += 99 |" [1,42,102,4,5,6,"seven"] let data[6].='samurai' |" [1,42,102,4,5,6,"seven samurai"]
You can also use indices less than zero, which then count backward from the end of the list. So the final statement of the previous example could also be written like so:
let data[-1].='samurai'
As in most other dynamic languages, Vimscript lists require no explicit memory management: they automatically grow or shrink to accommodate the elements they’re asked to store, and they’re automatically garbage-collected when the program no longer requires them.
Nested lists
In addition to storing strings or numbers, a list can also store other lists. As in C, C++, or Perl, if a list contains other lists, it acts like a multidimensional array. For example:
Listing 2. Creating a nested list
let pow = [ \ [ 1, 0, 0, 0 ], \ [ 1, 1, 1, 1 ], \ [ 1, 2, 4, 8 ], \ [ 1, 3, 9, 27 ], \] " and later... echo pow[x][y]
Here, the first indexing operation ( pow[x] ) returns one of the elements of the list in pow. That element is itself a list, so the second indexing ( [y] ) returns one of the nested list’s elements.
List assignments and aliasing
When you assign any list to a variable, you’re really assigning a pointer or reference to the list. So, assigning from one list variable to another causes them to both point at or refer to the same underlying list. This usually leads to unpleasant action-at-a-distance surprises like the one you see here:
Listing 3. Assign with caution
let old_suffixes = ['.c', '.h', '.py'] let new_suffixes = old_suffixes let new_suffixes[2] = '.js' echo old_suffixes |" echoes: ['.c', '.h', '.js'] echo new_suffixes |" echoes: ['.c', '.h', '.js']
To avoid this aliasing effect, you need to call the built-in copy() function to duplicate the list, and then assign the copy instead:
Listing 4. Copying a list
let old_suffixes = ['.c', '.h', '.py'] let new_suffixes = copy(old_suffixes) let new_suffixes[2] = '.js' echo old_suffixes |" echoes: ['.c', '.h', '.py'] echo new_suffixes |" echoes: ['.c', '.h', '.js']
Note, however, that copy() only duplicates the top level of the list. If any of those values is itself a nested list, it’s really a pointer/reference to some separate external list. In that case, copy() will duplicate that pointer/reference, and the nested list will still be shared by both the original and the copy, as shown here:
Listing 5. Shallow copy
let pedantic_pow = copy(pow) let pedantic_pow[0][0] = 'indeterminate' " also changes pow[0][0] due to shared nested list
If that’s not what you want (and it’s almost always not what you want), then you can use the built-in deepcopy() function instead, which duplicates any nested data structure "all the way down":
Listing 6. Deep copy
let pedantic_pow = deepcopy(pow) let pedantic_pow[0][0] = 'indeterminate' " pow[0][0] now unaffected; no nested list is shared
Basic list operations
Most of Vim’s list operations are provided via built-in functions. The functions usually take a list and return some property of it:
Listing 7. Finding size, range, and indexes
" Size of list... let list_length = len(a_list) let list_is_empty = empty(a_list) " same as: len(a_list) == 0" Numeric minima and maxima... let greatest_elem = max(list_of_numbers) let least_elem = min(list_of_numbers) " Index of first occurrence of value or pattern in list... let value_found_at = index(list, value) " uses == comparison let pat_matched_at = match(list, pattern) " uses =~ comparison
The range() function can be used to generate a list of integers. If called with a single-integer argument, it generates a list from zero to one less than that argument. Called with two arguments, it generates an inclusive list from the first to the second. With three arguments, it again generates an inclusive list, but increments each successive element by the third argument:
Listing 8. Generating a list using the range() function
let sequence_of_ints = range(max) " 0...max-1 let sequence_of_ints = range(min, max) " min...max let sequence_of_ints = range(min, max, step) " min, min+step,...max
You can also generate a list by splitting a string into a sequence of "words":
Listing 9. Generating a list by splitting text
let words = split(str) " split on whitespace let words = split(str, delimiter_pat) " split where pattern matches
To reverse that, you can join the list back together:
Listing 10. Joining the elements of a list
let str = join(list) " use a single space char to join let str = join(list, delimiter) " use delimiter string to join
Other list-related procedures
You can explore the many other list-related functions by typing :help function-list in any Vim session, then scrolling down to " List manipulation "). Most of these functions are actually procedures, however, because they modify their list argument in-place.
For example, to insert a single extra element into a list, you can use insert() or add() :
Listing 11. Adding a value to a list
call insert(list, newval) " insert new value at start of list call insert(list, newval, idx) " insert new value before index idx call add(list, newval) " append new value to end of list
You can insert a list of values with extend() :
Listing 12. Adding a set of values to a list
call extend(list, newvals) " append new values to end of list call extend(list, newvals, idx) " insert new values before index idx
Or remove specified elements from a list:
Listing 13. Removing elements
call remove(list, idx) " remove element at index idx call remove(list, from, to) " remove elements in range of indices
Or sort or reverse a list:
Listing 14. Sorting or reversing a list
call sort(list) " re-order the elements of list alphabetically call reverse(list) " reverse order of elements in list
A common mistake with list procedures
Note that all list-related procedures also return the list they’ve just modified, so you could write:
let sorted_list = reverse(sort(unsorted_list))
Doing so would almost always be a serious mistake, however, because even when their return values are used in this way, list-related functions still modify their original argument. So, in the previous example, the list in unsorted_list would also be sorted and reversed. Moreover, unsorted_list and sorted_list would now be aliased to the same sorted-and-reversed list (as described under "List assignments and aliasing").
This is highly counterintuitive for most programmers, who typically expect functions like sort and reverse to return modified copies of the original data, without changing the original itself.
Vimscript lists simply don’t work that way, so it’s important to cultivate good coding habits that will help you avoid nasty surprises. One such habit is to only ever call sort(), reverse(), and the like, as pure functions, and to always pass a copy of the data to be modified. You can use the built-in copy() function for this purpose:
let sorted_list = reverse(sort(copy(unsorted_list)))
Filtering and transforming lists
Two particularly useful procedural list functions are filter() and map(). The filter() function takes a list and removes those elements that fail to meet some specified criterion:
let filtered_list = filter(copy(list), criterion_as_str)
The call to filter() converts the string that is passed as its second argument to a piece of code, which it then applies to each element of the list that is passed as its first argument. In other words, it repeatedly performs an eval() on its second argument. For each evaluation, it passes the next element of its first argument to the code, via the special variable v:val. If the result of the evaluated code is zero (that is, false), the corresponding element is removed from the list.
For example, to remove any negative numbers from a list, type:
let positive_only = filter(copy(list_of_numbers), 'v:val >= 0')
To remove any names from a list that contain the pattern /.*nix/, type:
let non_starnix = filter(copy(list_of_systems), 'v:val!~ ".*nix"')
The map() function
The map() function is similar to filter(), except that instead of removing some elements, it replaces every element with a user-specified transformation of its original value. The syntax is:
let transformed_list = map(copy(list), transformation_as_str)
Like filter(), map() evaluates the string passed as its second argument, passing each list element in turn, via v:val. But, unlike filter(), a map() always keeps every element of a list, replacing each value with the result of evaluating the code on that value.
For example, to increase every number in a list by 10, type:
let increased_numbers = map(copy(list_of_numbers), 'v:val + 10')
Or to capitalize each word in a list: type:
let LIST_OF_WORDS = map(copy(list_of_words), 'toupper(v:val)')
Once again, remember that filter() and map() modify their first argument in-place. A very common error when using them is to write something like:
let squared_values = map(values, 'v:val * v:val')
instead of:
let squared_values = map(copy(values), 'v:val * v:val')
List concatenation
You can concatenate lists with the + and += operators, like so:
Listing 15. Concatenating lists
let activities = ['sleep', 'eat'] + ['game', 'drink'] let activities += ['code']
Remember that both sides must be lists. Don’t think of += as " append "; you can’t use it to add a single value directly to the end of a list:
Listing 16. Concatenation needs two lists
let activities += 'code' " Error: Wrong variable type for +=
Sublists
You can extract part of a list by specifying a colon-separated range in the square brackets of an indexing operation. The limits of the range can be constants, variables with numeric values, or any numeric expression:
Listing 17. Extracting parts of a list
let week = ['Sun','Mon','Tue','Wed','Thu','Fri','Sat'] let weekdays = week[1:5] let freedays = week[firstfree : lastfree-2]
If you |
botham 2001 ). The magnitudes of the coefficients indicate that race-ethnicity and lacking paid employment most strongly distinguished steadily working and pulled back mothers.
We first evaluate Hypotheses 1a and 1b, testing the role of selection in shaping mothers’ workforce pathways. Semi-standardized variables listed in the top portion of Table 2 are entered into a first-stage selection equation predicting mothers’ likelihood to enter into a pulled back, interrupted, or stay-at-home workforce pathway relative to steady work. We standardize all independent variables prior to entering them into the model so that statistically significant coefficients of greater magnitude more strongly predict selection into work. The second stage equation regresses physical health at age 40 on work pathways, adjusting for selection. In the appendix we do the same for mental health, and results are nearly identical.
Descriptive statistics in Table 1 indicate that steadily working mothers were fairly advantaged relative to other mothers both prior to and following a first birth. Steadily working mothers were more likely to grow up with two married parents, to have mothers who completed high school, to have been married when their first child was born, and to delay a first birth and were less likely to be black or Hispanic. By age 40, steadily working mothers were more likely to be married, to have completed additional schooling, reported higher net worth, and were more likely to possess health insurance than mothers on other work pathways. Moreover, steadily working mothers reported significantly better mental and physical health than mothers on other work pathways. In sum, steadily working mothers not only reported better mental and physical health, these mothers also enjoyed other advantages related to socioeconomic standing, family of origin, and at-birth characteristics, suggesting they benefited from cumulating advantages across the life course and reiterating the need to disentangle health benefits associated with work pathway from health benefits associated with pre-birth or demographic characteristics as well as contextual variables at age 40.
Discussion and Conclusion Section: Choose Top of page Abstract Background Data and Methods Results Discussion and Conclusion << References CITING ARTICLES
Life course scholars have long argued that the disadvantages that individuals face early in life compound over time, often with deleterious effects on health and well-being (Elder et al. 2003; Willson et al. 2007). Some of these disadvantages appear to be gendered phenomena that link women’s work trajectories after childbirth to mental and physical well-being in middle age (Moen 2001). This article adds several unique contributions to research on the relationships between gender, work, and health by using longitudinal, theoretically driven models that focus on mothers’ diverse work pathways and adjusting for unequal selection into these pathways. Our examination of prospective data spanning the years between a mother’s first birth and age 40 finds that the greatest physical and mental health benefits of work are associated with working steadily full-time during the years following a first birth. Mothers who “pull back” from full-time employment by cutting hours or delaying entry into the full-time workforce report worse physical health (but not mental health) at age 40 relative to steadily working mothers after adjusting for pre-pregnancy and at-birth characteristics and accounting for selection, but better physical health than their interrupted and stay-at-home peers. This suggests that part-time work may provide important benefits to women. However, even after adding mechanisms at age 40 associated with the resources that steady work provides, mothers who follow interrupted pathways continued to report significantly worse physical and mental health relative to steadily working mothers.
We find that work pathways are not randomly distributed in a population. Rather, pre-pregnancy employment, race-ethnicity, cognitive ability, and age at first birth structure mothers’ likelihood to experience a steady work trajectory. Adjusting for the unequal likelihood to engage in steady work is particularly important given that we find that the mothers most in need of the health and economic benefits of full time work—specifically, mothers from disadvantaged backgrounds, younger mothers, or black and Hispanic mothers—are the least likely to have access to steady work. These selection results are added evidence that early life course disadvantages accumulate over time, as the most disadvantaged women are less likely to experience the work pathways associated with the greatest health benefits at age 40.
Yet variables such as pre-pregnancy work experience, cognitive skill, and single parenthood do not simply select women into work. Instead, these early disadvantages set in motion later life events that have serious repercussions for health. Moreover, some of these variables—notably, single parenthood and race-ethnicity—not only influence work pathways, they also retain an independent association with mothers’ health at middle age, demonstrating the ongoing nature of these relationships.
Why is pulled back work associated with worse physical health than steady work, even after adding controls and adjusting for selection? Supplemental analyses indicate that pulled back workers averaged significantly more weeks per year voluntarily out of the workforce than their steadily working peers. Part-time workers “generally have lower pay, less skilled jobs, poor chances of promotion, less job security, inferior benefits... and lower status” (Mishel, Bernstein, and Boushey 2007:259), each of which is associated with poorer health (Ferrie et al. 1998; Kim et al. 2008). Yet part-time work does provide important protections, as pulled back workers reported mental health scores similar to those of their steadily working peers after accounting for compositional differences in these groups (see Model 2 of Table 3). These mental health resources may narrow the physical health gaps between steady and pulled back work, as mental health and physical health are strongly related (Read and Gorman 2009).
The health strains associated with interrupted work are consistent across models and are not explained by our adjustments for selection or control variables. Unstable work is associated with significantly worse self-rated health, poorer health behaviors, psychological distress, and interrupted sleep (Ferrie et al. 1998; Kim et al. 2008). Job instability comes with a high economic and social price, as displaced workers experience difficulty finding new work, lower average wages when work is found, and often a loss of health benefits (Mishel et al. 2007). Moreover, the women who followed interrupted work pathways were the most disadvantaged group prior to becoming pregnant and might be particularly vulnerable to social stressors such as unemployment (Thoits 1995:4).
Like interrupted work, stay-at-home mothering was significantly associated with worse physical and mental health, and this relationship is partially driven by the financial and social resources associated with employment at age 40. Women who stay at home may face reduced social networks, financial dependence, and greater social isolation (Stone 2007), all of which may place a strain on health. Additionally, the differential rewards for paid work outside the home and unpaid work done in the home (Moen 2001) may reduce the self-esteem of mothers who stay a home, placing them at increased financial risk and creating uncertainty, which may strain health.
The relationships between work pathways and health were generally consistent across physical health and mental health, but operated less strongly for mental health. Both mental and physical health are reliant upon strong social networks, financial security, and access to health care, variables included in our models and associated with work pathways and (albeit to a lesser degree) health at age 40. However, variables associated with the timing and conditions of first birth—marital status at birth, age at first birth, and educational attainment at birth—appeared to matter more consistently for physical health than mental health, which may indicate that physical health is more vulnerable to cumulative disadvantage than is mental health. Moreover, our study also supports the widely held finding that black women report better mental health than white women (Bratter and Eschbach 2005), which may explain a portion of the inconsistency across outcomes, as race is one of our strongest predictors of selection into work. Our findings suggest that mental and physical aspects of health are interrelated, but not equally reliant upon work pathways and context for women over time.Supreet Kaur was presenting a news bulletin when a reporter phoned in live with details of an accident which killed three people, including her husband.
RAIPUR, India: An Indian television presenter has been praised for her calmness and bravery after reading out a breaking news report of a road accident which killed her husband.
Supreet Kaur was presenting a news bulletin on the IBC-24 news channel in Chhattisgarh state on Saturday (Apr 8) when a reporter phoned in live with details of an accident which killed three of the five people travelling in an SUV.
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The report did not name the victims. But Kaur, 28, realised her husband was probably among those killed as he was travelling on the same route and at the same time with four others, the channel's news chief Anshuman Sharma told AFP.
"When the reporter said all the victims were from Bhilai and were travelling in a Renault Duster, she immediately had a hunch her husband had died in the crash."
Kaur nevertheless kept her composure. Only when the bulletin was over did she rush from the studio to confirm her fears.
"She is an extremely brave woman. She has been with us for the last nine years. We are really proud of her," said Sharma of Kaur, who was married two years ago.
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Social media users heaped praise on Kaur, calling her a hero.
"Salute Supreet's strength in dealing with her husband's demise with extraordinary bravery & professionalism," tweeted the state chief minister Raman Singh.
Salute Supreet's strength in dealing with her husband's demise with extraordinary bravery & professionalism.May departed soul rest in peace — Dr Raman Singh (@drramansingh) April 8, 2017
"Supreet Kaur: Salute. And deepest sympathies," author and commentator Shobha De wrote on Twitter.
Tweet: Shobha DeIt’s been an open secret for 20 years, but at last everybody’s favourite leather-clad warrior is out and proud. Does it mark a step-change in the way women are portrayed on television?
In news as surprising as reports that Fozzie Bear probably has a Miles Davis poster on his bedroom wall, we can reveal that Xena Warrior Princess is gay. Or at least she will be when the series gets a reboot later this year.
In a recent Tumblr Q&A, the screenwriter and executive producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who is working with Rob Tapert and Sam “Spiderman” Raimi to bring Xena back to our screens, wrote: “There is no reason to bring back Xena if it is not there for the purpose of fully exploring a relationship that could only be shown subtextually in first-run syndication in the 1990s.”
The relationship to which he is alluding is the leather-studded “companionship” between Xena (played, much to the delight of New Zealanders everywhere, by Lucy Lawless) and Gabrielle (played by Renee O’Connor). It might have taken over 20 years to get there, but the girls are finally ready to make it official. This, explained Grillo-Marxauch, is because the show “will also express my view of the world – which is only further informed by what is happening right now – and is not too difficult to know what that is if you do some digging”. Unlike in 1995, gay marriage is now on the statute books or at least high on the news agenda in most countries where Xena will be syndicated. Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Mad Max: Fury Road have shown that multi-million dollar global franchises can bear the weight of speaking female characters. So a gay female lead character isn’t just a fun idea, but a viable proposition.
Of course, gay women are hardly a rarity in sci-fi, both on our screens and watching from our sofas. Gillian Anderson has had a huge gay following since she strode on to our televisions as Special Agent Dana Scully back in 1993; in 1995 Jadzia Dax in Deep Space Nine had her first lesbian kiss (albeit in a wormhole between the alpha and gamma quadrants of the galaxy); Admiral Helena Cain, played by heartthrob Michelle Forbes had a girlfriend in Battlestar Galactica and, more recently, Doctor Who’s Madame Vastra and Jenny Flint shared the show’s first lesbian kiss (yes, one of them is a lizard-woman but it still counts).
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The lesbian gaze often overlaps with the heterosexual male one’ … Xena in action. Photograph: Channel 5
Television producers have always been happy to include lesbian storylines in their shows, with the minor proviso that any relationship between women is either happening in another galaxy far far away, or that any sapphic antics take place in actual space, or that one of the women is wearing a rubber reptile costume. Just like socialism, multiculturalism, feminism and most other isms you care to mention, lesbian relationships have often been found in popular culture disguised through the alien, zero-gravity, intergalactic lens of science fiction because that is the easiest way to sneak them into public consciousness. And, for the thousands of young women and girls who have rewound and rewatched those few fleeting moments of lesbian lizard kissing or space admiral affection, sci-fi has acted as a catalyst – helping them to place their sexuality in a recognisable cultural context.
When it comes to Xena, there is also the obvious plus that the lesbian gaze often overlaps with the heterosexual male gaze. So, for male screenwriters, producers and directors, it isn’t a huge leap of imagination to create a character that appeals to a lesbian audience. To put it bluntly, you put a woman in a leather-strapped shiny-tit shield, send her jogging over a hill – and literally everybody’s happy.
So, while the makers of Xena: Warrior Princess should be applauded for finally writing an overt gay relationship, is it really breaking new ground? Or is the reboot just pulling at some low-hanging fruit? Well, to quote the show’s opening, “In a time of ancient Gods, Warlords and Kings, a land in turmoil cried out for a hero... She was Xena.” So, you know, fingers crossed.BOSTON (CBS) — The Red Wings will be without their regular-season leading scorer for Tuesday night’s Game 3 against the Boston Bruins.
Daniel Alfredsson, whose 18 goals and 31 assists in 68 games tied him for the team lead in points this season, will not play on Tuesday night due to a back injury, according to reports out of Detroit.
Alfredsson, 41, has been hampered by the injury for the past few weeks, but he was able to play in the first two games of the series. He’s decidedly been a non-factor in those games, failing to even register a shot on net in his 29 total minutes on the ice.
Joakim Andersson will skate in Alfredsson’s place for Game 3. Andersson, 25, played in 14 playoff games last year, scoring a goal and registering four assists. He has 11 goals and 14 assists in 108 regular-season NHL games, including 8-9-17 totals in 65 games this year.
Andersson confirms he is playing tonight on line with Helm and Jurco. Alfredsson is out (back). — Ansar Khan (@AnsarKhanMLive) April 22, 2014
https://twitter.com/HeleneStJames/status/458621313670598656
The Red Wings are still without their captain, Henrik Zetterberg, who underwent surgery in February and is working toward a return. That return, however, is not expected to come until the second round, should the Red Wings be able to get that far.
The series is tied 1-1, with the Red Wings winning 1-0 in Game 1 and the Bruins winning 4-1 on Easter Sunday.
This is Alfredsson’s first season with the Red Wings after he spent the first 17 years of his career with the Ottawa Senators.
MORE SPORTS COVERAGE FROM CBS BOSTONMay the 4th (be with you) has become a day to celebrate Star Wars, the cinematic saga of an interplanetary civilization’s struggles with galactic war and tyranny. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Our own times are threatened by global warfare driven by a planetary empire gradually becoming more of a militarized police state. So today would be a good time to review the lessons to be found in the first two Star Wars trilogies concerning the road to universal serfdom and how to keep off it.
The story of how the Galactic Empire arose is told in the prequels trilogy. The whole process is orchestrated from within the Galactic Republic by Palpatine, a seemingly benign politician who is secretly Darth Sidious, grand master of the Sith, a power hungry order of mystic warriors wielding the dark side of the Force. The Sith are a dark reflection of the Jedi Knights, who use the Force to protect life and in service to the Republic.
The Sith can be seen as an analogy for the Deep State.
The Phantom Menace Is the Deep State
Sidious is the “phantom menace” who, aided by his apprentice Darth Maul, covertly manipulates the galaxy’s republican government to progressively increase his own power, steadily advancing toward a total Sith coup. Just as with real life democracies, the Galactic Republic masks the machinations of the true wielders of power with the facade of “representative government” and drapes their seizures of still greater power with the sanctifying mantle of “popular sovereignty.” The Sith can be seen as an analogy for the Deep State.
Sidious’s implement of choice for accumulating power is war. His modus operandi is as follows. He first manufactures an interplanetary conflict and crisis, manipulating one side as Palpatine and commanding the other side as Sidious. He then engineers enhancements of his own power over the Republic, justifying them as regrettably necessary for decisively dealing with that crisis.
In Episode 1, as Darth Sidious, he commands the Trade Federation to blockade and occupy the planet of Naboo. Then as Senator Palpatine, he convinces Naboo’s elected queen Padme Amidala to call for a vote of no confidence against the Republic’s Chancellor after he and the Galactic Senate fail to come to the aid of her people. This paves the way for Palpatine’s own election to the Chancellorship.
In Episode 2, as Darth Sidious, he organizes a secessionist movement and directs the separatist Confederacy of Independent Systems to build a massive droid army. Meanwhile, he also oversees the spawning of a vast army of clone troopers, bio-engineered to be just as obedient as a drone.
Standing Armies of Perfect Soldiers
The Republic had been hesitant to raise an army to confront the secessionists. But after news breaks of the Confederacy’s droid build-up, the Senate grants Chancellor Palpatine emergency powers, enabling him to enlist and deploy the clone troopers as the Grand Army of the Republic. Palpatine assures the Senators:
“It is with great reluctance that I have agreed to this calling. I love democracy! I love the Republic! Once this crisis has abated, I will lay down the powers you have given me.”
In Episode 3, the fielding of the clone and droid armies has engulfed the galaxy in all-out war between the Confederacy and the Republic, with the Jedi leading the clone troopers into battle. This presents the opportunity for Sidious to issue Order 66, which activates the clones’ bio-programmed “Protocol 66,” under which they turn on and kill their Jedi commanders. (I will cover Anakin Skywalker’s role in all this later in the essay.)
Finally, unhampered by the Jedi, wreathed with emergency powers, and backed by a perfectly obedient standing army, Palpatine declares himself Emperor with the following address to the Senate:
“In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society.”
Star Wars Is the Health of Galactic Empire
All the steps in the Dark Lord’s rise to total power were enabled by the crises of wars that he himself engineered. The overriding theme of the first trilogy is that the star wars engendered galactic tyranny. This is a perfectly realistic narrative motif, because it is merely an interstellar extrapolation of Randolph Bourne’s insight that war is the health of the State. The emergency-propelled rise of the Sith also fits with Robert Higgs’s broader insight that crisis is the health of Leviathan.
Indeed, throughout history, rulers, regimes, and power cliques (just like Sidious and the Sith) have dragged their countries into wars in order to acquire, shore up, and enhance their power. This power play almost always works, because war activates in indoctrinated adherents of a State what Randolph Bourne called the “herd mind”: a sort of statist Protocol 66.
Terrorized by the menaces of war, and aroused by its prizes, State citizens react like a spooked herd or a ravenous pack. They become as docile as sheep or dogs (or Sith-bred clones) to their shepherds and masters in government, swarming to their feet and granting them sweeping emergency authority, just as the war-spooked Galactic Senate repeatedly empowered Palpatine. They yield their liberties, even to the point of renouncing their individuality (like how the imperial troopers were all clones of a single man). Under the exigencies of war, the people, as Bourne put it:
“…proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men.”
As Higgs detailed, the expansions of state size and power that occur during a war or other emergency are generally scaled back after the crisis passes, but never all the way down to the pre-crisis level. Thus, the power of the state ratchets up with every war.
This is why governments pursue war, and why war eventually leads to tyranny, and ultimately to totalitarianism.
Empires are so enamored with the empowering effects of war, that they will often try to maximize the clash by, like Palpatine, deliberately provoking (or fabricating) attacks, arming future enemies, and aiding both sides in a conflict. Especially egregious in this regard has been the US empire.
The casus belli of the Mexican-American War (the Thornton Affair), the Spanish-American War (the USS Maine), World War I (the Lusitania and the Zimmerman telegram), World War II (Pearl Harbor), and the Vietnam War (Gulf of Tonkin) all involved engineered conflicts, deliberate provocation and baiting, feigned ignorance, deception, or outright fabrication on the part of the US.
Padme then decides that Anakin is teasing her, and, sitting in a meadow with the future Fuhrer, laughs it off.
The US armed the Soviets against the Nazis in the Second World War, then armed international jihadis against the Soviets in the Cold War, and is now devastating the Greater Middle East under the pretext of fighting international jihadis in the Terror War.
The US sold weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for use in invading Iran, while secretly selling arms to Iran at the same time.
To provoke a crisis which led to the first war on Iraq, the US green-lit Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait over an oil rights dispute, just as Sidious greenlit the Trade Federation’s invasion of Naboo over a trade taxation dispute.
After having sold WMDs to Saddam, the US invaded Iraq again years later over then non-existent WMDs, as well as non-existent ties to the international jihadi movement that the US first built up.
And now the US is arming the new Iraq government to fight the jihadis of ISIS, while also arming the jihadis fighting alongside ISIS in Syria.
And Washington has used every single war and crisis it has concocted to expand its global empire and justify the accumulation of greater power over its domestic subjects. Are you getting the picture yet?
The Road to Galactic Serfdom and Dictatorship
What especially accelerated Palpatine’s accumulation of autocratic power was general frustration over the fractious Galactic Senate’s inability to come to a decisive agreement over how to deal with the Sith-generated crises. This was most fully expressed in an intimate interlude between Padme Amidala and the young Jedi apprentice Anakin Skywalker (who later becomes the evil Darth Vader), following a romantic romp through the countryside.
ANAKIN: I don’t think the system works. PADME: How would you have it work? ANAKIN: We need a system where the politicians sit down and discuss the problems, agree what’s in the best interests of all the people, and then do it. PADME: That is exactly what we do. The trouble is that people don’t always agree. In fact, they hardly ever do. ANAKIN: Then they should be made to. PADME: By whom? Who’s going to make them? (…) ANAKIN: Someone wise. PADME: That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me. ANAKIN: Well, if it works…
Padme then decides that Anakin is teasing her, and, sitting in a meadow with the future Fuhrer, laughs it off. “You’re so bad!” she playfully chides him, as if to say, “Oh, Adolph…!”
As F.A. Hayek explained in The Road to Serfdom, such an impulse toward dictatorship among those “impatient with the impotence of democracy,” as he put it, occurs frequently. He argued that it is a function of citizens giving their republics too expansive a mandate for addressing the ills of society through central planning. As Hayek put it:
“…agreement that planning is necessary, together with the inability of democratic assemblies to produce a plan, will evoke stronger and stronger demands that the government or some single individual should be given powers to act on their own responsibility. The belief is becoming more and more widespread that, if things are to get done, the responsible authorities must be freed from the fetters of democratic procedure.”
For example, Hayek argued that Weimar Germany’s embrace of planning paved the way for the rise of Adolph Hitler:
“In Germany, even before Hitler came into power, the movement had already progressed much further. It is important to remember that for some time before 1933 Germany had reached a stage in which it had, in effect, had to be governed dictatorially. Nobody could then doubt that for the time being democracy had broken down... Hitler did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested Hitler, he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done.”
When dictators come to power, it is generally because many in the public are clamoring for it, yearning for an Alexander who will cut the Gordian knot of parliamentary discord, and who will use unchecked power to finally deliver all the good things tat they believe can only flow from the State. As Padme remarked upon Palpatine’s declaration of the Empire, “So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause.”
Anakin Surrenders to Terror
The Jedi suspect that Anakin is the prophesied “chosen one” who will restore balance to the Force. Yet his turn to the dark side is also anticipated. When Anakin is brought before Yoda as a child, the Jedi Master senses much fear in the boy: specifically fear of losing his mother.
“What has that got to do with anything?” Anakin objects. “Everything!” Yoda answers, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
This echoes the 12th century Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who wrote:
“Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hate, and hate leads to violence. This is the equation.”
Years later, after Anakin does turn, becoming Darth Vader, Yoda warns his son Luke Skywalker not to follow in Vader’s footsteps:
“Yes, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did [Darth Vader].”
Yoda later clarifies that:
“A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.”
Yoda’s references to “aggression” and “attack,” as opposed to “defense” invite a libertarian interpretation of what the dark side of the Force is. Indeed a fundamental libertarian concept is the “Non-Aggression Principle” (NAP). According to the NAP, violence is unjust (crosses over to the dark side) when it is aggression: that is, violence initiated against another. Violence, as Yoda would say, is only justified in defense against aggression (which, according to libertarians, includes violence to reclaim stolen property or restitution).
With this massacre, Anakin starts down the “dark path,” and from then on it “dominates his destiny.”
What about the “path to the dark side” that Yoda spelled out? It is difficult to believe that anger and fear never serve a good function.
However, if instead of “anger,” we stress Yoda’s and Ibn Rushd’s reference to “hate,” it makes more sense. We can define “hate” as anger that is so overwhelming that it leads one to commit aggression against the target of that anger, as well as to indiscriminately attack those lumped in with that target.
Similarly, we might substitute “terror” for “fear,” defining “terror” as fear that is so overwhelming that it drives one into hate, and thus into aggression.
Terror is the path to the dark side. Terror leads to hate. Hate leads to aggression. Aggression leads to suffering.
Especially with these refinements, we can see Yoda’s warning about Anakin being vindicated throughout the prequels trilogy. The terror Anakin feels over losing his mother, which Yoda identifies in Episode 1, emerges again in Episode 2, as he begins having dreams about her suffering.
Later, after his mother is killed by Tusken Raiders, the terrorized Anakin slips into hateful indiscriminate vengeance: into aggression, the dark side. As he later confesses to Padme, he massacres the entire camp of “Sand People”, including even innocent children and babies.
With this massacre, Anakin starts down the “dark path,” and from then on it “dominates his destiny.” He takes another step down that path at the beginning of Episode 3, when he again yields to hate and executes a surrendered prisoner under the prodding of Palpatine.
But Luke assures Yoda, “I’m not afraid,” marking out the fundamental difference between himself and his father: freedom from terror.
He also begins having premonitions of his beloved Padme suffering. And so terror of losing his mother is replaced by terror of losing his wife. This leads to his final turn, after Palpatine offers to teach Anakin how to use the dark side of the Force to stave off Padme’s death. After helping Palpatine kill a Jedi Knight, Anakin swears himself to the Sith, taking on the name Darth Vader. When his new master activates Protocol 66, Vader participates in that Night of Long Knives, even massacring young children in a Jedi temple school.
Nonetheless, his terror of losing Padme ensures that he does lose her. Thinking she had turned against him, he lashes out using the Force and wounds her. Despondent over her husband’s dark turn, she soon after dies giving birth to Luke and his sister Leia. As Yoda warned, the path to the Dark Side only leads to suffering.
Anakin then takes his station beside the new Emperor in the “benevolent” ironfisted dictatorship that he had dreamed of years ago.
Luke Triumphs Over the Dark Side
Throughout the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke faces challenges similar to those of his father. In Episode 5, Yoda has misgivings about Luke as well, complaining that his new apprentice is too impatient and impetuous. But Luke assures Yoda, “I’m not afraid,” marking out the fundamental difference between himself and his father: freedom from terror.
Yoda is dubious, especially when Luke, like his father, begins having his own premonitions about people close to him suffering: in his case, Leia and Han Solo. Terrified of losing his friends, Luke insists on breaking off his training with Yoda to go help them. Yoda worries that this is Luke’s own start down the same dark path that his father followed.
And Luke indeed is faced with temptations to join the Dark Side, especially after learning he is Vader’s son, and upon his father’s invitation to help him rule the galaxy. But Luke rejects the offer, choosing to jump to his own possible death instead.
Far from turning to the dark side, Luke is determined to turn his father away from it. To this end, he allows himself to be captured by the Empire in Episode 6. This leads to a duel with his father, during which Vader terrorizes Luke by threatening to turn Leia to the dark side. This drives the young Jedi into hate, causing him to temporarily lose control, and to grievously injure and incapacitate Vader.
The Emperor is also present, and urges Luke to complete his turn to the dark side by striking his helpless father down:
“Good! Your hate has made you powerful. Now, fulfill your destiny and take your father’s place at my side!”
But Luke catches and calms himself, breaks the spell of terror and hate, casts his lightsaber away, and refuses to commit aggression against his father, a defeated opponent. He says:
“Never. I’ll never turn to the Dark Side. You have failed, Your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”
Enraged by failure, the Emperor tries to kill Luke. Seeing his son about to be slain by his master, Anakin finally turns back against the dark side and against the Sith. In defense of his boy, he incurs mortal injury by hurling the Dark Lord into the Death Star’s reactor.
As Anakin lay dying, his son pleads with him, “No, you’re coming with me. I won’t leave you here. I’ve got to save you!”
His father answers, “You already have, Luke.”
Shortly after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney said on television, “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will.”
The libertarian spin on the path to the dark side has many lessons for our country.
As a result of decades of foreign wars and intervention, on 9/11, we were struck by terrorists and allowed ourselves to be stricken with terror. This terror drove us into irrational, broad-brush hatred toward Muslims in general. That hatred provided cover for a war of aggression in Iraq which has resulted in over a million dead, followed by over a decade of wreaking havoc throughout the Muslim world, which has left over four million dead. Having suffered the massacre of our innocents, like Anakin after the murder of his mother, we ourselves allowed for the massacre of innocents, and in far greater numbers.
Shortly after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney said on television, “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will.” And, stricken with terror and indulging in hate, America did embrace the dark side, accepting torture, indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, assassination, perpetual illegal wars, and mass civilian casualties.
Terror led to hate, hate led to aggression, and aggression has led to suffering, not only for the direct victims of the wars, but for Westerners at home, as we find ourselves afflicted by blowback in the form of a refugee crisis and terrorist attacks.
This blowback has, in turn, provoked a fresh bout of Islamophobic terror and hate, driving calls for still more aggression in the form of more foreign militancy as well as domestic oppression against Muslims. This too will only lead to suffering, both in the form of further blowback, and in the form of an oppressive militarized garrison state that will not stop at persecuting only Muslims. As Yoda warned: “If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will…”
A New Hope
But it need not dominate our destiny literally forever. As difficult as it may be, we can always choose to turn away from the dark side.
It will help if we recognize that our giving in to the dark side is precisely what the terrorists want. They are, like the Sith, striving to terrorize us into hatred and aggression. They want us to sink ourselves into military quagmires, where we can be “bled to bankruptcy,” as Osama bin Laden put it. They also want our indiscriminate violence to radicalize Muslims in order to boost their recruitment.
If we would but be similarly inspired, America could be redeemed as well. And we would finally step off the dark path.
Also like the Sith, the terrorists want to breed antagonism. As ISIS proclaimed in its own official magazine, the strategy of its terrorism is to polarize the whole world into two warring camps (Islamists and Crusaders) locked in a black-and-white clash of civilizations, with no “gray zone” in between. “If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy,” said Anakin after he turned, echoing a sentiment expressed by President Bush, and explicitly seconded by Osama bin Laden. “Only a Sith deals in absolutes,” responded Anakin’s former master Obi Wan.
We must also realize that the ultimate source of most of our terror and suffering is our own government. It has always been so and always will be. As discussed above, the Sith-like State accumulates power by making enemy menaces (terror), cultivating nationalistic furor (hatred), and instigating foreign wars (aggression).
Indeed the very essence of the State is regularized aggression, which it terrorizes the populace into accepting as the only possible way of providing security. And the modern democratic State wins loyalty and revenue by stimulating mutual hatred and fear among its citizens, and then brokering the mutual aggression that results.
The dark side is the health of the State. But it is the sickness of civilization.
Luke Skywalker’s heroic victory was that he resisted terror, renounced hate, and rejected aggression. Inspred by his son’s example, Anakin finally turned back from the dark side, and so was redeemed.
If we would but be similarly inspired, America could be redeemed as |
indromes in. This is always the same per recursion PALINDROME : The palindrome, i.e. the substring inside of a word. This changes per recursion
: The palindrome, i.e. the substring inside of a word. This changes per recursion START : The start character index from which we started fanning out. This is always the same per recursion
: The start character index from which we started fanning out. This is always the same per recursion LENGTH : The palindrome length. This increases by 2 per recursion
Let’s look at the result for “floccinaucinihilipilification”:
flo CC inaucinihilipilification floccinauc INI hilipilification floccinaucin IHI lipilification floccinaucinih ILI p ILI fication floccinaucinih ILIPILI fication floccinaucinihi LIPIL ification floccinaucinihil IPI lification floccinaucinihilipil IFI cation
There are a total of 8 distinct palindromes contained in this word (and believe it or not, the word exists, too. Pronunciation is another thing).
Let’s “debug” the algorithm to get to this list (remember, SQL indexes are 1 based):
Start 1-4: No palindromes Start 5: Even palindrome [4:5] flo CC inaucinihilipilification Start 6-11: No palindromes (I wont' repeat this further down) Start 12: Odd palindrome [11:13] floccinauc INI hilipilification Start 14: Odd palindrome [13:15] floccinaucin IHI lipilification Start 16: Odd palindrome [15:17] floccinaucinih ILI p ILI fication Start 18: Odd palindrome [17:19], [16:20], [15:21] (Fanning out 3 times) floccinaucinihil IPI lification floccinaucinihi LIPIL ification floccinaucinih ILIPILI fication Start 20: Odd palindrome [19:17] (already found this) floccinaucinih ILI p ILI fication Start 22: Odd palindrome [21:23] floccinaucinihilipil IFI cation
The IPI, LIPIL, ILIPILI chain is the most interesting. We’ve succeeded to fan out 3 times adding new characters from WORD on both sides of the initial character.
When do we stop fanning out? Whenever one of these conditions hold true:
WHERE start - length / 2 > 0 AND start + (length - 1) / 2 <= length(word) AND substring(palindrome, 1, 1) = substring(palindrome, length(palindrome), 1)
I.e.
When we’ve reached the beginning of WORD (no more characters to the left)
When we’ve reached the end of WORD (no more characters to the right)
When the letter to the left of the palindrome of the previous recursion doesn’t match the letter to the right of the palindrome
That last predicate could also simply read:
AND palindrome = reverse(palindrome)
But that might be a bit slower as it compares something that we’ve already proven to be true in the previous recursion.
Finally, formatting the result
The final part isn’t too interesting anymore:
SELECT DISTINCT word, trim(replace(word, palindrome,'' || upper(palindrome) ||'')) AS palindromes FROM palindromes WHERE length(palindrome) > 1 ORDER BY 2
We’ll simply:
Select DISTINCT results only, as palindromes might appear several times in a word
results only, as palindromes might appear several times in a word Replace the palindrome substring by its upper case version and add some whitespace to better visualise it. That’s totally optional, of course
Remove the trivial palindromes of length 0 and 1
And we’re done! Again, feel free to play around with this on SQLFiddle, or, much better, provide a cool palindrome algorithm implementation in your favourite language in the comments section, or on Twitter:
More beautiful SQL in these articles here:Tuesday, 9th May, 2017 10:11pm
A 12 PUBS of Christmas in Dunmanway ended up with seven local women appearing in court to face charges of assault, counter assault and trespassing, in three separate incidents, in what was described by Judge James McNulty as a ‘funny old case.’
At a sitting of Clonakilty District Court this week, Judge McNulty told the six defendants – one of them did not appear in court – that the court is used to seeing ‘aggressive, intemperate, drunk males’ but that this was a first for seven women to face these charges.
‘There was a television series before called Men Behaving Badly but this is Women Behaving Badly. This case also reminds me of De Valera’s vision of “comely maidens” and these aren’t comely maidens. Clearly, we have moved on,’ said Judge McNulty.
Six defendants appeared in court and they were represented by five different solicitors. The defendants, all from Dunmanway, were Nisha Hayden of Nedineagh; Pamela Murray of Market Sq; Gemma Fuller of Main St; Emma Carroll of 7 Tonafora, Bantry Rd; Holly O’Dwyer of Chapel St; Mary Russell of Chapel St, and absent from court was Katie O’Donovan of Market Sq, who is currently in Australia.
Supt Ger O’Mahony told the court that on December 13th 2015 Holly O’Dwyer alleged she was assaulted by Nisha Hayden in Gatsby’s nightclub in Dunmanway, when she got a punch in the mouth.
Following the assault, Holly went home and called to Dunmanway garda station to report the assault, but there was no-one there. Ms O’Dwyer then told her mother Mary Russell, what had happened, and they went to the garda station again to report the incident, but again there was no-one there.
While driving near the nightclub, Ms Russell saw Ms Hayden outside Gatsby’s and confronted her about the assault on her daughter, which she denied.
Supt O’Mahony added that Nisha Hayden was then assaulted by Holly O’Dwyer on the street while Mary Russell tried to separate them as they pulled each other’s hair on the ground.
The court was then told that when Ms Hayden told her friends about the assault on her, four of them – Katie O’Donovan, Pamela Murray, Gemma Fuller and Emma Carroll – got a lift to Mary Russell’s house on Chapel St from Megan O’Flynn, as they wanted to find out why Ms Hayden was assaulted.
What followed were allegations of assault and counter assault, as well as trespassing, as a fracas took place inside and outside the home of Mary Russell, until parties on both sides called the gardaí.
Judge McNulty convicted Nisha Hayden of the assault on Holly O’Dwyer in Gatsby’s nightclub, having heard the evidence and watched CCTV footage, but he cleared her of the assault on Ms O’Dwyer in Market Sq. However, Judge McNulty said he was satisfied that Ms O’Dwyer did assault Ms Hayden in Market Sq and she was found guilty on that charge. Judge McNulty also said the cases of assault and trespassing regarding the five other defendants were proven by the prosecution.
Judge McNulty said this case was ‘not a thing of nothing’ as it required full prosecution with assaults on the streets, blood spilled, and the invasion of the home of two citizens.
The court was told that all, bar one of the defendants, have no previous convictions, with only Katie O’Donovan recording convictions for road traffic offences.
Solicitor Jim Brooks, who represented Katie O’Donovan said all these women were local, and interlinked with friendship and neighbourliness, and ‘that it was a tragedy to see them all in court.’
Judge McNulty said the court would try an ‘innovative approach’ and deal with this case differently.
Judge McNulty said Gemma Fuller and Emma Carroll were not the protagonists or ringleaders on the night, and invited each of them to donate €500 to the West Cork Women Against Violence project and adjourned their cases until December 19th for proof of payment.
Judge McNulty said the other five defendants’ cases were more serious and, as well as ordering them to pay €500 each to the West Cork Women Against Violence project, he also required them to come back on December 19th with a plan outlining their intentions to carry out voluntary work in Dunmanway.
‘I’d be slow to call them Ireland’s finest as they haven’t brought honour or distinction on the town of Dunmanway,’ added Judge McNulty.NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The wait for McDonald’s’ special Big Mac sauce is finally over—sort of.
McDonald’s Corp. MCD, +0.33% is offering a limited supply of its famed Big Mac sauce, a move that some diehard fans have likely been waiting for since the burger’s debut in 1967. There’s just two catches: it can only be bought in little 25ml containers at 950 locations, and those locations are all in Australia.
This limited offering of 600 small tubs per store for 50 cents a piece will run through February. McDonald’s spokesmen did not respond to requests for comment or to questions about whether the offer could be extended to other countries or even to grocery stores.
The fast-food chain, struggling of late with minimum wage debates, a CEO change and dismal earnings, is also auctioning off a 500ml bottle of the sauce on eBay EBAY, +0.11% but again, that is only open to those in Australia. The highest bid for the coveted bottle was at AU $23,100 as of Monday morning. Proceeds will go to help the Ronald McDonald House Charities.
Read: McDonald’s, already struggling, now has to fight the government
The 500ml bottle is No. 1 of 200 being produced worldwide.
Want news about Asia delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Asia Daily newsletter. Sign up here.The horrifying aftermath of a truck plowing into a crowd in Nice during a Bastille Day celebration was captured on video following the rampage in which dozens of people were killed.
People were seen grabbing their children and running as sirens echoed in the background in one video.
Maledetti dopo averti attaccato ti obbligano per la paura a non soccorrere i feriti Terror attack in #Nice -. pic.twitter.com/1xXAPVfR4o” — Matteo67 (@Matteo67) July 14, 2016
Crowds of tourists had gathered for the holiday to watch fireworks as the truck rammed into people, causing panic and mayhem on the streets.
In another video, hundreds of people screamed and panicked as they ran from the scene of the attack.
Other mobile footage captured crowds of people rushing to safety, with one woman pushing a baby’s pram while she moved.
jss dans nice y'a des mouvements de foule de mutant on sait pas pk pic.twitter.com/ByXnaig0Qk — yannick (@yvnnick) July 14, 2016
Witness Oymou Diallo, who was on the promenade at the time of the attack, told RT how the panic unraveled. She didn’t hear the sound of explosion or gunfire, as she was too scared for her life to pay attention to what was going on around her.
“We were just at the promenade looking for the fireworks for the 14th of July and then people just began to run, we don’t know why. So we began to run too and people said it may it’s a bomb or maybe it is terrorism, so we were just afraid and began to run too.”
Read more
“We [didn’t] really see anything, because we began running into the town.”
Police at the scene have not shared much information about the incident, she added.
“They just gave us advice that we have to stay home, we are just looking at the other information and watching TV.”
“It’s the scariest moment of my life, but I didn’t realize it even, I was just running with people and when I even started running I didn’t know what was going on in the moment,” she said, adding that she was still expecting more information from the authorities.
Graphic photos and videos also showed dozens of dead bodies strewed across the road as onlookers helplessly tried to attend to those injured.
In a matter of minutes, the hashtags #PrayForNice and #Nice06 were trending, with people from across the world sending their thoughts and prayers for the victims of the attack.
READ MORE: Dozens reported dead as truck plows into crowd in Nice, France (GRAPHIC IMAGES)
Thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved in someway to what has happened in Nice. #ViveLaFrance#PrayForNice — James Phelps (@James_Phelps) July 14, 2016
May the world one day live in peace #PrayForNicepic.twitter.com/KanXsEESfZ — ScouseScene (@scousescene) July 14, 2016Page 1 of 9
It’s crazy that it was all the way back in 2014 when Sapphire first introduced their R9 285 ITX Compact. That that time we were excited because Ed from Sapphire had been taking a lot of notes at our LANs on builds like our LunchBox 3 and we finally saw why. The 285 ITX Compact blew me away by standing above all of the other ITX cards on the market both in gaming performance but also in cooling performance. In fact, I know a few of the LanOC staff swapped to the card in their LAN rigs. Well I still have it in the LunchBox 3 but I’ve been itching to build a new LAN rig and the first thing I need is a compact ITX card to put in it. As luck would have it Sapphire just refreshed their R9 380 ITX Compact with 4 gigs of ram so today I’m going to put it through the ringer and find out how it performs.
Product Name: Sapphire R9 380 ITX Compact 4GB
Review Sample Provided by: Sapphire
Written by: Wes
Pictures by: Wes
Amazon Link: HEREWith the dollar tanking and Canada's economic growth looking bleak, the timing might not be worse for U.S. luxury retailers opening up their high-end stores north of the border.
And while the current economic climate will certainly have an effect on sales, the retailers' success or failure will also rely on their ability to compete in an already-crowded upscale market.
"Can we support this much luxury retail? My gut tells me with the current headwinds in the economy, we probably can't," said Doug Stephens, retail analyst and founder of RetailProphet.com. "And I think one of these chains is going to be on the losing end of this equation."
Saks Fifth Avenue opened up in downtown Toronto on Thursday — the first location in Canada for the high-end retailer and one of six it plans to eventually open across the country. Meanwhile, Nordstrom has already established roots here, opening up in Calgary, Ottawa and Vancouver over the past couple of years, with plans to open two locations in Toronto this year and another in 2017.
Marc Metrick, president of Saks Fifth Avenue, at the company's new store in downtown Toronto. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)
Add to that mix the already-dominant Holt Renfrew and expansion plans for Quebec-based Simons, and the now "crowded market" will, in just a couple of years, have gone from a dozen luxury department store locations to 30 or 40, Stephens said.
"Ultimately it will come down to who can provide the customer experience which is most in keeping with their brand.
Holt Renfrew has built a very storied reputation for delivering on that promise. We'll see if Saks Fifth Avenue can."
Some of the U.S.-based luxury retail chains are likely feeling a degree of remorse that they're setting up and/or expanding in these precarious times, Stephens said. Only five years ago, Canada's economic outlook looked pretty rosy, particularly when contrasted against the U.S.
They may also be stinging at the fact that other U.S. retailers have failed here, most notably Target, which closed 133 stores in 2014 after less than two years.
Yet despite the downturn in provinces like Alberta, looming deficits and small economic growth, many of the fundamentals in Canada are solid, he said. Canada has healthy population growth and, in places like Vancouver, attracts substantial amounts of tourism from Asian consumers, many of whom have developed a reputation as luxury buyers.
"You can imagine that a Saks and Nordstrom in Vancouver and Toronto are going to be buoyed somewhat by that."
As well, incomes at the upper end of the income spectrum — the very clientele these retailers are hoping to attract — have been growing disproportionately.
"So there are some things that bode well for them but certainly this is not the fertile market that they had hoped for," Stephens said.
Women's shoes are shown inside Saks Fifth Avenue's downtown Toronto store, which is entering an already-crowded luxury retail marketplace. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)
Obviously the timing isn't ideal, said Maureen Atkinson, a senior partner at global retail-consulting firm J.C. Williams Group. But a company like Saks has an "underestimated advantage" of being owned by the Hudson's Bay Company. The established operation can provide valuable resources, including customer research and logistics, to its subsidiary and help offset some of the costs.
As for the effect of the economic downturn, many of these high-end retailers are partially insulated, Atkinson said.
"There's the market segment that's the sort of permanently rich, and for them it doesn't really matter. Life goes on. They buy or don't buy," she said.
But there others — those who aren't regular customers but might be looking to buy something nice on rare occasions — who could be deterred.
"I think this will affect some of their marketplace but there certainly are people who just have money and it really doesn't matter what the market is like."
Mark Cohen, the former CEO of Sears Canada Inc., said timing is always a challenge as it takes a couple of years to launch a store.
Among Saks' major competitors is Holt Renfrew, which already has exclusive relationships with many top luxury brands. (CBC)
"And you never know whether the economy, which you hope would be booming when you made the decision, will continue to be good," said Cohen, now director of retail studies at New York-based Columbia Business School.
"So the decision is a mid- to longer-term decision. And if the cycle is going the wrong way, you just have to hang in there and wait it out."
But a more critical issue in Canada, he suggested, is the size of the country's marketplace and how much share is available for luxury players.
"And I would submit that there are not a lot of high-end Canadian consumers relative to the marketplace in total, just like there's not a lot of high-end consumers in the U.S.," he said. "So how many more entries at this level of fashion and price will the marketplace be able to absorb?"
Cohen was also skeptical about the downtown Toronto location for Saks's flagship store, at the Toronto Eaton Centre, questioning whether it will attract the upscale traffic it needs.
Saks will also have a difficult time competing against Holt Renfrew, which he said has a long-standing lock on quite a few of the most relevant luxury brands. This will mean Saks will have to find a way to get distribution in Canada in face of Holt Renfrew's exclusive relationships with these brands.
"I think Saks is a shot in the dark and is not likely to be successful," he said.
However, Cohen was more optimistic on the prospects of Nordstrom, which offers very fashionable but lower-priced merchandise compared to Saks and Holt's, and is not at the "top of the sphere in terms of luxury."
"Because of how excellent they are, they will not screw up the way Target did and they will acquire a loyal and faithful customer base," he suggested.
"I believe the attributes that have made them famous, they will establish in Canada in an excellent way."Basil Borutski’s ex-wife says he went to extraordinary lengths to manipulate the court system and avoid penalties for repeated incidents of domestic assault.
Borutski faced a judge on three separate occasions to answer charges of assaulting Mary Ann Mask during their 26-year relationship, which began in 1982.
Each time, Borutski walked out of court a free man. Twice he was acquitted at trial, and once the charges were withdrawn after he agreed to sign a peace bond.
The criminal charges spanned three decades — Borutski was charged in 1985, 1994 and 2008 — and marked the infancy, middle and end of what a judge once described as their “wretched marital relationship.”
Mask lived in fear of her husband for years, and was terrified on Tuesday when she learned that police were pursuing a gunman across the Ottawa Valley. The gunman left three women dead in his wake.
Basil Joseph Borutski, 57, faces three charges of first-degree murder in connection with those killings. All of the victims formed relationships with Borutski in the years after his marriage to Mask permanently collapsed.
Mary Ann Mask was driving to a doctor’s appointment in Barry’s Bay on Tuesday morning when the Ontario Provincial Police contacted her on a cellphone and told her to get to a safe place, her brother told the Citizen. She immediately drove to Bonnechere Provincial Park and stayed in the park office until police told her it was safe to leave.
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“She was very terrified that day and so was the rest of the family,” said Arthur Mask, who lives in Round Lake Centre, north of Wilno.
“Mary Ann is doing OK now. She’s obviously shook up — and real sad for the women killed that day. She’s very tough, but in pretty frail shape. She needs a bit of rest.”
Mask, 53, is a breast cancer survivor and has permanent hearing loss from a stroke. She also suffers from fibromyalgia, a chronic condition that leaves her in pain and fatigued.
Arthur Mask described his sister as a “kind and giving person” who has spent years of her life in a state of fear. “She was always nervous, looking around, looking over her shoulder,” he said.
Mask suffered through a long and volatile relationship with Borutski. She told a judge in 2011 that Borutski “destroyed her spirit by relentless threats and abuse.”
Although they grew up in the same small town — Round Lake Centre, about 180 kilometres west of Ottawa — Borutski and Mask first connected in Kitchener, where they were both working in the early 1980s. They lived there for the first eight years of their relationship.
Mask first alleged domestic assault in 1985 — the year before their daughter, Amanda, was born. Borutski spent $20,000 on legal fees and successfully defended himself against the charges.
The common-law couple moved back to Round Lake Centre, but separated in December 1993. Three months later, Borutski was again charged with assaulting Mask.
During a 2011 hearing to settle their divorce, Mask told Ontario Superior Court that Borutski had stalked her and pestered her to recant what she had told police in February 1994. No one would believe her in court, he said, given his previous acquittal.
Mask eventually capitulated and the two resumed their relationship. She told court that she believes Borutski married her in June 1994, and conceived a child with her a month later, as part of an elaborate strategy to defeat the domestic assault charges.
Borutski was acquitted of those charges in August 1994. Their second daughter, Sahra, was born the next year, by which time the couple had again separated.
“She (Mary Ann) states that the marriage and Sahra’s conception were Basil’s strategies to manipulate the court,” Justice Rick Leroy wrote in a December 2011 judgment that recounted her evidence.
“His mission was to marry and conceive another child, thinking that no judge would send a married, expectant father to jail — particularly when the wife was in support. Mary Ann’s mantra throughout her testimony was that she did what she was told because the underlying message was that no one would believe her and the threat that if she disappointed, he would take the children.”
For his part, Borutski maintained that he was the innocent victim of false allegations from a wife who was vindictive and mentally ill.
Mask told court that Borutski coerced her into copying out and signing a marriage contract that he wrote as part of their 1994 reconciliation. In the contract, Mask gives full custody of her children and control of all of her finances to Borutski because of what’s described as a dissociative identity disorder.
“I’ve tried to take the children from him (Borutski), not allowing any access whatsoever,” the contract reads. “I have made false statements about him to convince authorities he should not have custody. I have destroyed the children’s lives unknowingly …
“I want to make sure my husband has the right to take care of the children and all financial decisions. I believe he’s the only person that I can trust to do what is right and fair for everyone concerned. I am doing this on my own free will and I am not being coerced or threatened.”
Borutski would later rely on the document in court to assert that he did not owe his ex-wife an equalization payment, but the judge said the contract did not hold water.
The couple separated in December 1994, then reconciled four years later. They split for the final time in August 2008 after an incident that resulted in a third set of domestic assault charges against Borutski.
The couple’s daughter, Amanda, told court that her mother came home “bloodied and dirty” after the incident. Borutski told court that Mask’s injuries were self-inflicted.
Charges of assault and uttering death threats were eventually withdrawn when Borutski signed a peace bond.
Mask’s brother, Arthur, said his sister was always afraid of what would happen if she testified against Borutski since he would not be in jail for long, even if convicted. “That’s our court system around here,” he said.
Today, Mary Ann Mask can feel safe for the first time in years. “I think she feels a lot better about her situation, yeah,” her brother said.
aduffy@ottawacitizen.comWASHINGTON -- The Communications Workers of America labor union, a lead group in the Fix the Senate Now coalition, is launching an advertising campaign aimed at shaping the final stages of the filibuster reform debate.
The effort includes more than $300,000 in advertising, beginning with cable TV ads that will run throughout the week of Jan. 14. The 30-second spot, "The U.S. Senate Is Broken -- But We Can Fix It," calls on the Senate to eliminate the silent filibuster and implement "common sense" rules reforms.
"As climate change threatens the world we leave to our children, and good U.S. jobs move overseas, time in the Senate ticks by," a narrator says in the ad. “As women earn less than men for the same jobs, time in the Senate ticks by. It keeps ticking by with no results, because the system is broken."
The ad will also air during the Jan. 20 Sunday talk show circuit between morning broadcasts of ABC's "This Week," CBS's "Face the Nation," and NBC's "Meet the Press."
The rest of the CWA campaign will escalate online advertising to support Senate rules reform. Beginning on Jan. 17, the labor union will run online ads that will employ an interactive tool to highlight how the silent filibuster may block issues such as immigration reform, climate change and job creation. The ads will culminate in an online petition, a sample of which can be seen here.
A source familiar with the campaign said the CWA also plans action in certain targeted states. The union says it has more than 700,000 members and is among more than 50 organizations that make up the Fix the Senate Now coalition, which endorses the filibuster reform proposal introduced by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.).
The Merkley-Udall plan still allows the filibuster of legislation, but would require members to do so by actually standing and speaking on the floor. On the other side of the debate is a scaled-back bipartisan plan introduced by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), which leaves the silent filibuster in place, but would allow amendments to be adopted by a simple majority vote.
Shane Larson, a lobbyist with the CWA, recently told The Huffington Post that he and his allies are concerned with the amendment provision under the McCain-Levin counterproposal.
"We think it is one of several major flaws in the Levin proposal, but it by far is the one that gives the most away to the Republicans, politically, than it would gain for functionality of the Senate," Larson said. "If Senator Levin and Republicans support allowing amendments to clear with 51 votes, they should then be in favor of all legislation passing with 51 votes."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has reiterated his commitment to passing filibuster reform and extended the first legislative day of the new Congress in order to maintain his ability to reform the Senate’s filibuster rules later this month. Reid has been negotiating with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on rules reform without resorting to the constitutional option. But Merkley and Udall have tried to keep momentum on their side by stating that they would have the 51 votes necessary to pass reform in the absence of an agreement, using what opponents call the "nuclear option."
The two senators even issued a petition of their own on Monday, along with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and the Daily Kos community, to drum up support for their proposal and maintain pressure on ending the silent filibuster.Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, has shared extensive thoughts about his recent trip to North Korea which he attended alongside former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and others. Schmidt had already told media that the country and its economy is suffering from its lack of Internet, but now he’s published more thoughts on the topic.
Schmidt states that the current Internet system North Korea has isn’t sufficient to help the country stay connected with the rest of the world. In fact, its strict policies on who can access the Internet has caused it to lag behind everyone else:
Once the internet starts in any country, citizens in that country can certainly build on top of it, but the government has to do one thing: open up the Internet first. They have to make it possible for people to use the Internet, which the government of North Korea has not yet done. It is their choice now, and in my view, it’s time for them to start, or they will remain behind.
While he was in the country, he got to experience their software and technology and says it’s based on open source running mostly Linux and that Internet access was limited to only the government, the military, and universities. The public has been left out. So what are the privileged groups getting to use?
There is a 3G network that is a joint venture with an Egyptian company called Orascom. It is a 2100 Megahertz SMS-based technology network, that does not, for example, allow users to have a data connection and use smart phones. It would be very easy for them to turn the Internet on for this 3G network. Estimates are that are about a million and a half phones in the DPRK with some growth planned in the near future.
Because North Korea has limited its technology access, this has raised concerns from Schmidt who finds North Korea’s decision to prevent its citizens from connecting with the rest of the world using the Internet to be a very bad move. He believes that its virtual isolation is “very much going to affect their physical world and their economic growth. It will make it harder for them to catch up economically.”
The Google executive traveled to North Korea earlier this month and it was reported that he had a productive time there. Governor Richardson told news organizations that Schmidt was “like a rock star” and that he spoke to many about the importance of a free Internet. Despite the criticism he received from the United States government, he still went and became, as TNW’s Alex Wilhelm described it, as “one of the most public figures of a company that has broken down the walls between information and the average person” — a walking contradiction to North Korea’s policies.
Schmidt is a vocal proponent of spreading Internet access. As we reported earlier, in June 2012, he stated that “the World Wide Web has yet to live up to its name.” With Google, he believes that it was born “with its goal of making information accessible to the masses.” Clearly, Schmidt isn’t one to match up with the ideals of North Korea.
Photo credit: WANG ZHAO/AFP/Getty Images
North Korea photo: Eric Schmidt/Google+ post
Read next: There was no startup scene in Jordan four years ago, but now it's thriving. Here's why...Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Protests over plans to redevelop Taksim Square and Gezi Park mushroomed into wider unrest
Turkish riot police have been using tear gas and water cannon to disperse protesters trying to enter a park cordoned off by police in Istanbul.
Thousands have converged on Gezi Park, near the city's Taksim Square - which was a focus of unrest last month.
Protests against plans to redevelop the park grew into nationwide rallies against PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
On 15 June police expelled protesters occupying the park. A recent court ruling annulled the redevelopment plan.
The administrative court said the government's plan to replace Gezi Park with a replica of an Ottoman-era military barracks would not serve the public.
It is not clear yet whether the government will appeal against the ruling.
Activists had called for a march on Saturday to enter the park, which is sealed off. The governor of Istanbul had warned that they would be confronted by police.
Five people died and thousands were injured in last month's wave of protests across Turkey - the worst unrest the country had seen in 10 years of rule by Mr Erdogan.
Protesters have accused him of becoming increasingly authoritarian and trying to impose conservative Islamic values on a secular state.Then Mr. Boehner shot back at Mr. Obama. “Mr. President, we do a lot of politics in this town but we are committed to working together in areas where we agree to get the American people back to work,” he said.
Administration aides did not dispute the Republicans’ account, but said the meeting was never confrontational and in fact was a constructive exchange of views.
“I think politics has clearly played a role” in their united opposition to the economic recovery plan, the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, told reporters afterward.
Mr. Gibbs added that the president’s main proposals this week — for business tax breaks and infrastructure projects —have typically received bipartisan support in Congress.
Mark Zandi, the economist who formerly advised Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival in the 2008 election, has vouched for the effectiveness of the stimulus policies, Mr. Gibbs added.
Republican lawmakers said they told Mr. Obama that his ambitious agenda of changes in health care, financial regulation and energy policies was unnerving many employers and causing “a hiring freeze,” as Mr. Boehner put it.
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When Representative Dave Camp, a Republican from Michigan, called it “a job-killing agenda,” the president complained that Republicans were “trying to scare the American people” about his proposals. More than once, he challenged them to produce an economist who shares their idea that the government should cut spending before the economy has fully recovered. “We will address deficits next year,” he said.
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Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, said he did not see the president’s opening remarks or others as unduly political.
“He went around the table and everyone who was there got to say their piece,” said Mr. Gregg, who initially accepted a cabinet post but decided to remain in the Senate, where he has often been critical of the administration.
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“A couple people made fairly strong statements,” he added, “and the president responded in a very cordial and thoughtful way.”
The president’s pique at Republicans was evident before Wednesday’s meeting, after 10 months in which they have opposed all of his major initiatives to address the problems he inherited. In his speech on Tuesday at the Brookings Institution outlining his latest economic recovery plans, Mr. Obama reviewed administration actions, said they had helped rekindle growth, and said that Republicans had basically stayed on the sidelines.
“We were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve,” he said in his address.
Despite persistent high unemployment, the president and his aides lately have been buoyed by nonpartisan assessments that administration policies — chiefly the stimulus plan and the financial bailout program — are working, if not so well as originally advertised.
An independent five-member panel that Congress created to oversee the $700 billion bailout program issued a year-end report on Wednesday. It concluded that despite lingering problems, the program “can be credited with stopping an economic panic.”
Also on Wednesday, the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, told Congress that he was extending the Troubled Asset Relief Program beyond its Dec. 31 expiration date, until Oct. 3. The law that created the program in 2008, at the end of the Bush administration during the worst days of the financial free fall, empowered the Treasury secretary to extend it if needed.
“We want to see the capital base of our financial system return to private hands as quickly as possible,” Mr. Geithner wrote to Congressional leaders. But, he said, “History suggests that exiting prematurely from policies designed to contain a financial crisis can significantly prolong an economic downturn.”
Mr. Geithner said the Treasury probably would not make more loans to |
anasopoulos says that, “We should never concede to a system that favors only the wealthiest or most politically connected.” That quote is the perfect example of a political talking point that is totally unrelated to the issue being argued. It’s called a red herring.
If there was any relevance to this empty rhetoric, George would have to somehow show that politically unaffiliated voters are wealthier and more politically connected. Logic implies that Mr. Athanasopoulos is either deliberately misleading people over the issue(s) at stake, or he is just talking about things that he doesn’t understand. And if he was truly concerned about the less politically connected, it’s curious that he would want to keep the unaffiliated from having any voice in the primary process.
Either way, sounds like a partisan politician to me.
Unaffiliated voters now comprise the largest voting bloc in Colorado, and the voters made the decision last November to let those independent voices have a say at the all-important primary stage.
Athanasopoulos has made no valid claim as to why they should remain silenced.
What he does argue, however, is that the State of Colorado and its taxpayers should fund and administer an election that serves the exclusive and private benefit of only those voters who join a major political party.
That doesn’t sound very Republican to me. Or very American.
Image Source: shutterstock.com / NiyazzBoth the literary and science fiction worlds have come out in the past few weeks with poignant tributes and accolades for recently deceased Scottish writer Iain Banks. The remembrances from both quarters are very well deserved, and very rare. Banks was an unusual kind of artist; he maintained a highly respected presence as both a writer of realist literary fiction (as Iain Banks) and superbly well-crafted, highly imaginative science fiction (as Iain M. Banks). In the brief video interview above, you can hear Banks recount the origin of the two names and make an impassioned case for science fiction as “the most important genre” of fiction.
Banks’ accomplishments are all the more extraordinary given that so-called literary fiction and so-called genre writing—sci-fi, horror, romance, etc.—have for so long occupied entirely different cultural spheres, worlds, to use the words of Thomas Pynchon, as different as “the hothouse and the street.” There were the obvious exceptions—the work of Franz Kafka, Dracula and Frankenstein, 1984, Fahrenheit 451—that slipped through the gates, grandfathered in as legacy cases or exemplars of “Speculative Fiction,” the respectable term for genre writing deemed “serious” by academics and the literati. Literary scholar Frederic Jameson has long been a fan of sci-fi. Critical theorist Felix Guatari once wrote a science fiction film script. Again, more exceptions.
All of this has changed. After the success of popular culture studies programs in the freewheeling postmodern 90s, even the most traditional departments have begun turning toward genre fiction—the current popular obsession with vampires and zombies, for example—as a means of re-invigorating the liberal arts and reclaiming relevance. (I myself once helped an academic press acquire and publish a fun collection called Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human.)
Is this a cynical piece of strategy to market struggling humanities programs to increasingly business- and science-minded students? A generational turnover in the professorate? An attempt to expand the market share of the humanities in the overall picture of university funding? In a recent article in the New Republic, science editor Judith Shulevitz argues, like Banks, that sci-fi is a genre of fiction that the academy should take more and more seriously on practical grounds—sci-fi writers show us the future of technology more accurately than any technologist. Shulavitz also writes that doing so will raise the profile, and funding, of humanities programs.
As you can see from the charts above, the arts and sciences have reached a dire funding asymmetry. Shulevitz quotes Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote, “There is no science without fancy and no art without fact” as part of her case for the importance of literature to the “practical arts” and vice-versa. I don’t know if I’m entirely convinced, but Shulevitz’s argument is worthy of consideration, unless you believe, with Oscar Wilde, that “all art is quite useless” and in no need of an apologetics or a defense to bureaucrats.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagnessRussia 'up to no good' with its meddling: UK's Johnson
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Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland says Canadians should be "prepared" for Russian attempts to destabilize the country's political system like those directed at the United States.
At a press conference with Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, where the government announced it is At a press conference with Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, where the government announced it is extending its training mission with Ukraine until 2019, Freeland was asked about a series of articles on pro-Russian websites alleging one of her grandparents was a Nazi sympathizer.
The Globe and Mail's Robert Fife asked Freeland, who has been banned from entering Russia, if she saw this as a campaign by the Russians to "smear and discredit" her.
Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said Canadians should be "prepared" for Russian efforts to destabilize Canada's political system. (Photo: Getty Images)
"Let me start, Rob, by saying that I don't think all Russians dislike me," Freeland said. "I have many close and good Russian friends and I very much enjoyed living and working in Moscow as a foreign correspondent.
"I think that it is also public knowledge that there have been efforts, as U.S. intelligence forces have said, by Russia to destabilize the U.S. political system. I think that Canadians and indeed other western countries should be prepared for similar efforts to be directed at us."
Those attempts were highlighted in an Those attempts were highlighted in an intelligence report, prepared by the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency, that said Russian President Vladimir Putin directed efforts to intervene in the U.S. election.
“Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations,” the three agencies concluded in the January report.
Freeland said she is confident in Canada's democracy and that "we can stand up to and see through those efforts."
Ukraine mission a'message of deterrence'
By extending its training mission, Sajjan said Canada is showing it stands by Ukraine and sending a'very strong' message of deterrence to Russia.
Conservative foreign affairs critic Peter Kent criticized the Liberals' "bare-bones" mission extension in question period Monday, saying it fell far short of what was needed, given the new surge in violence.
"Our worst concerns have been realized today with a bare-bones extension of Operation Unifier, which doesn't recognize the very changed situation in eastern Ukraine," he said. "We are disappointed."
Canada first deployed about 200 troops to Ukraine in the summer of 2015 to help train government forces after Russia annexed Crimea and began supporting separatist forces in Ukraine's Donbass region.
National Defence says 3,200 Ukrainian troops have been trained by the Canadians in the basics of soldiering since the mission began.
With files from Althia Raj and The Canadian PressWashington quarterbacks Colt McCoy, left, Robert Griffin III, center, and Kirk Cousins take part in drills during a June practice. John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
It’s minicamp week, and that means that the Washington Redskins over the course of the next three days will hold their final offseason practices. After Thursday, players will scatter to their offseason homes, rest up and prepare themselves for training camp, which kicks off on July 30.
But first, Jay Gruden & Co. will do a bit more chiseling and hammering away at this thing this week.
Meanwhile, we’ve got plenty of questions to tackle in today’s mailbag. We take a look at the safety position, running backs, outside linebackers, and of course, Robert Griffin III.
Thanks as always for taking part, and keep the questions coming. E-mail me your Redskins questions at mike.jones@washpost.com with the subject line of “Mailbag question,” and we’ll tackle them next Tuesday.
It’s a little early, but how many safeties do you think the Redskins keep when they make final cuts? And which players (safeties) do you see making the final cut?
– Justin Nicely
Safety Dashon Goldson seems guaranteed to start at free safety, but not much else is set in stone. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
I’d expect them to take around four safeties. Dashon Goldson and either Jeron Johnson or Duke Ihenacho seem to lead the way, and then veterans Trenton Robinson, Akeem Davis and Phillip Thomas, and rookie Kyshoen Jarrett (sixth round) will probably battle it out for the final spot or two. It’s way too early to say who comes out on top, but whomever the coaches and general manager Scot McCloughan settle on, that player must have good versatility, and an ability to stand out on special teams. Davis and Robinson both excel on special teams, and Robinson has the most game experience on defense, which could help his chances. Thomas, based on the paltry practice reps he has gotten so far, appears to be the furthest behind.
Given the versatility of both Alfred Morris and Matt Jones, how often might we see both of them lined up in the same backfield on first and second down instead of alternating as a solo back?
– Barry Krakow
I suppose you never can say never, but thus far, there haven’t been any such instances during offseason practices where they both line up in the backfield. If things hold true throughout training camp, then I’d expect to see Morris continue as the workhorse back. Coaches will most likely use Jones to give Morris a breather here in there, or both on short-yardage situations, and on third downs.
In the June 9 Washington Post, there is an article by Liz Clarke [headlined] “Gruden expects Trent Murphy to make biggest strides among second-year Redskins.” If the thrust of that article is correct, shouldn’t the Redskins have used the second-round pick in this year’s draft to pick a player other than Preston Smith who will compete with Trent Murphy for his position on defense?
– Al Ezrin, Murrells Inlet, S.C.
That’s Gruden’s hope, and based on early indications, Murphy does indeed appear to be bigger and stronger, and he has better understanding of the concepts. But even if he does have a very good year, that doesn’t mean all of Washington’s pass-rushing issues are solved. You can never have too many talented pass rushers. At times, Joe Barry will likely put Ryan Kerrigan, Preston Smith and Trent Murphy on the field together. And then there’s always the risk of injury. If one of those three pass-rushers gets hurt, you want to have another player to plug into the starting lineup. Lastly, this is the final year of Ryan Kerrigan’s contract. The team hopes to re-sign him, but what if they can’t? At least an improved Murphy and promising Smith would remain on the roster. So, I really don’t have a problem with the selection of Preston Smith.
Even though there’s mistakes here and there in the OTAs, does RGIII look like he knows the whole offense/playbook and knows what he’s doing from your observations?
– Omneya Abbas
Griffin definitely appears to know the offense. That’s never been an issue, even his rookie season, and his first year with Jay Gruden. The problem has been Griffin’s internal clock, in-game recognition when everything’s happening at high speed, and his confidence. Griffin is working to get better at scanning the field at a faster pace, and making up his mind to pull up the trigger without hesitation. He needs see everything while taking his three- and five-step drops, make up his mind and then get rid of the ball right away. If he holds onto the ball, questions himself, worries about making a mistake and in turn paralyzes himself, then he’ll never make it. It’s still early, but he has at times seemed to settle into good rhythms and get the ball out of his hands quickly. But then there have been other times where he hesitates and hurts the offense. We’ll see how things go this week during minicamp, and at training camp. Hopefully, for Griffin and the Redskins’ sake, by the preseason, when opponents are coming after him, Griffin’s timing and decision making will have improved.
If the Redskins hadn’t given up such a ransom to get RGIII, would he realistically still be on the team? Let’s say they had traded two 2s, and swapped a one, would he be given this (presumably, final) chance? Or would they have already decided to go another route? Which direction would they go in the event that he does fail? Look for another young QB with potential that fits what they want to do (Zach Mettenberger, Ryan Mallett, etc.) or draft?
– Jey Willis
The promise that Griffin showed in 2012 stands out as the biggest reason why team officials haven’t wanted to pull the plug on the Griffin experiment. He had one of the greatest statistical seasons for a rookie quarterback in league history. He struck fear into the hearts of defensive players, and kept defensive coordinators up at night. He took a long-suffering team to first place in the division and to the playoffs. Those accomplishments still burn brightly in the memories of Daniel Snyder and Bruce Allen. Yes, they gave up a lot to get Griffin. But he was a bonafide star. They don’t think that season and success happened by accident, and even Mike Shanahan agrees on that point. And so, that’s why they will give him another chance this season. Had Griffin had a rookie season that resembled 2013, and then followed that up with similar campaigns the next two years, the team definitely would have moved on by now. And it’s far too early to predict their direction at quarterback if Griffin doesn’t succeed. Kirk Cousins or Colt McCoy could take over and have a good year, prompting the team to ride with one of them for another season. Or, they could keep one of those veterans and draft a quarterback to groom. But they’re not even close to having an idea on the way to go yet.
I think a lot of fans are wondering about the Jay Gruden hire before last season. It seems to be more and more peculiar as time goes by (with the RG3/offensive philosophy noise, etc.). Even Coach Gruden’s demeanor seems to be distant and that he really doesn’t want to be here. Your thoughts on the coaching hire thought process before last season?
– Allen Norris
Jay Gruden, left, watches his three quarterbacks. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
When they hired Gruden in January of 2014, it seemed like a positive decision from an Xs and Os standpoint. His offensive philosophies and football pedigree are well respected around the league. He had done well working with a young quarterback in Andy Dalton. The one aspect, however, that seemed curious to me was the fact that Gruden had been on record saying he would rather have a pocket passer rather than a dual-threat quarterback. But, because Griffin and Snyder both wanted someone to help him transition to more of traditional style, that part made sense. The questions that also stood out at the time were the concerns people who had worked with him in the past had about whether or not Gruden was organized enough, or enough of a disciplinarian to succeed as an NFL head coach.
However, Gruden is an intelligent coach, and he appears to be learning as he goes. So, even despite the 4-12 rookie campaign, it’s too early to say that it was a bad hire. If Griffin can turn things around and the team begins to compete again, then Gruden deserves a lot of credit. Even if Griffin doesn’t, and Kirk Cousins or Colt McCoy blossoms, and the team looks much improved, you have to give Gruden credit. It would be unfortunate that the selection of Griffin, and all the picks sent to St. Louis to obtain him, didn’t pay off. But that wouldn’t mean the Redskins didn’t get it right by hiring Gruden, if he wins with one of the other two quarterbacks.
The Redskins have proven unable to develop first-round QBs over the last handful of years. Assuming the team finishes close to the bottom of the standings again this season, what’s to say guys like Michigan’s Connor Cook or Penn State’s Christian Hackenberg stand a chance in D.C. in 2016?
– Brandon Katz
I think the one big difference now is that for the first time in a long time, Washington has a true team architect, who believes in the importance of building a strong foundation across the board rather than thinking that one home run draft pick or free-agent signing is going to magically transform the team into Super Bowl champions. So, if the Redskins did have to go in a different direction at quarterback, and if they took another high in the draft, then Scot McCloughan would work to ensure that all of the pieces surrounding that quarterback would help him succeed.
Your co-worker Jason Reid says Jay and some staff members don’t believe in Griffin. Assuming that is true, do you think Griffin can succeed without belief from the head coach and other members of the coaching staff? If Jay doesn’t believe in Griffin then isn’t this whole show of support a sham?
– Kofi Shaw-Taylor
First, while J. Reid is still my buddy, he’s not my co-worker anymore. He moved from The Post to ESPN back in March. But, it’s true that Gruden has had his doubts about Griffin’s capabilities.
However, since McCloughan has arrived, and the two have studied film, talked for hours on end about the quarterback position and the roster as a whole, the two are in agreement that they needed to do more to position Griffin for success. That’s why they brought in a quarterbacks coach, hired a new offensive line coach, drafted to improve the offensive line and made moves in free agency to improve the defense, so Griffin and the offense have better support. Now, they’re trying to position Griffin for a rebound year.
Does that mean that Gruden is completely sold on Griffin? Not entirely. Regardless of the quarterback, those areas needed to be addressed. But Griffin does indeed get another chance. How long of a chance? Hard to say. I expect a rather short leash, especially because of the risk of injury, and the fifth-year option becoming fully guaranteed. Can Griffin succeed if Gruden doesn’t really believe in him? It will be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Gruden doesn’t have a problem with Griffin to the point where he doesn’t want to see him succeed. He’d like to be proven wrong. But, if his confidence in the quarterback is shaky at best, he’ll be far less inclined to give second or third chances this season.
E-mail a Redskins question to mike.jones@washpost.com, with the subject “Mailbag question,” and it might be answered Tuesday in the Mailbag.
More from The Post:
Five story lines to follow during minicamp this week
Outsider: A fresh look at the Redskins’ offense vs. the Titans
Bog: Murphy says Redskins will ‘bully some people’ this season
Two veterans explain why offseason practices matter
More NFL: Home page | Sports Bog | Early Lead | Fancy Stats | OTAs
Follow: @MikeJonesWaPo | @lizclarketweet | @InsiderGeorges St. Pierre is one of the greatest fighters in the brief history of mixed martial arts. He'd established himself as the sport's biggest draw before he decided to step away from the cage and vacate his title following a split decision win over Johny Hendricks last year at UFC 167.
In the time since announcing his hiatus in the cage following the fight, St. Pierre has cited issues with performance enhancing drugs in the sport and the UFC's lack of support in helping his efforts to "clean up the sport" as contributing factors in his decision.
I was given the opportunity to interview St. Pierre after being contacted by NOS energy drink. A schedule snafu rendered a phone interview by deadline impossible, so we settled on doing it by e-mail where St. Pierre gave some thoughts on his return, the "super fight" with Anderson Silva that never happened, fighters "unionizing" and more.
Bloody Elbow: NOS was great in helping facilitate this interview. You're currently working with NOS on a video series where you answer fan questions every couple weeks. Does any question from the series to date stand out as one you found especially interesting?
Georges St. Pierre: I have been partners with NOS for about three years now, and it’s been great. We’ve been through a lot, including two ACL surgeries and several big championship fights. The brand is all about living life to the fullest, which is what I try to do as well. NOS and I are doing a Facebook video series called "Resurrection." Each week we give fans a topic to ask me questions about and I choose one to answer. A few weeks ago, someone asked me about overcoming fear and taking control in the octagon. I told him that you never overcome fear and you’re never in control. Control is an illusion—a fight can turn so quickly that you’re never really in control.
That’s why I’m always scared when I fight. But that fear is what keeps me more alert and more focused. It’s good to have fear. It’s a pretty cool video series, and I encourage fans to go to the NOS Energy Drink Facebook page and ask me their questions.
BE: A few questions of a somewhat "what if?" nature up top. First of all, for years the most discussed bout in mixed martial arts was GSP against Anderson Silva. There were obviously legitimate reasons for that fight not happening at the time, but with you currently out of MMA and Anderson seemingly in the final stages of his career, do you look back on the situation now and wish that the fight had happened? What do you feel was the primary reason that it never worked out?
GSP: That difference in weight at the time of stepping into the octagon is a significant issue, and we were always very busy in our respective divisions for many years. So it seems like there was never that perfect timing to make it happen.
BE: In talking to some executives from Showtime and Strikeforce in the past, it was suggested that there would have been a pretty massive deal on the table had you been a free agent during the promotion's time as an independent entity. Given your rare status as a major draw, do you have any regrets that you never had the opportunity to test out the market as a free agent? There were mentions of things that more closely mirror boxer contracts with networks than the standard MMA deals, meaning millions of dollars in guarantees and 50% PPV revenue cuts. Does that sting a little? Or do you feel that your value was always maximized during your time with the UFC?
GSP: I cannot change the past and the context in which I fought in professional MMA. I feel that I made the most of it, and I also do feel bad for some of the other fighters who have made the same sacrifices as myself for many years and still ended up with not much in their pockets.
BE: You've obviously been vocal about performance enhancing drugs in the UFC. Another Tristar guy, Mark Bocek, recently retired and cited not wanting to compete against guys who are on PEDs any longer, so the situation is impacting some other fighters and their willingness to continue to compete. Obviously the VADA thing fell through from the Hendricks side in your last fight, but it seemed like you were wanting to push toward a place where your fights were as heavily tested as you could get them. Were you to return to the UFC, would you consider some sort of condition that you would only compete with expanded testing for you and your opponent through an organization like VADA or USADA?
GSP: I will never fight again in MMA without my opponent and myself being thoroughly tested for the most advanced PEDs by a credible independent anti-doping organization like VADA or USADA under the strictest standards of the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) Code.
BE: What are your thoughts on Vitor Belfort being granted a title shot despite a failed drug test pushing him out of the originally planned title shot?
GSP: I like Vitor as a person and training partner. Everyone knows my stance on PEDs but I’m not going to comment on who deserves a title shot or not. If he’s eligible for a title shot under a certain set of rules and he gets it, then I’m happy for him.
BE: Your name invariably comes up whenever other fighters are asked about the idea of creating a fighter association (or union). It seems like the common statement is "it would take someone like GSP leading the charge." Is there any pressure knowing that you're viewed in that kind of role by people who haven't attained your level of success? And, is there any way you could see yourself embracing that sort of role in any future effort to organize, given that it could give the leverage needed to accomplish the kind of goals you had set for "cleaning up the sport?"
GSP: I’m not aware of any professional athlete union that did not improve the working conditions and increase the paychecks of its members. I believe it will come someday in MMA, not because things are bad right now but because it’s just part of the normal evolution of all major sports. I’m not a "politician" and people know that I’m not a confrontational person or someone who likes to be in front, so it would be hard for me to lead that kind of initiative. But I will never be against something that is good for the fighters.
BE: Last questions. What do you view as the most positive trend in the UFC and MMA as a whole? And, conversely, what do you view as the most negative trend?
GSP: Positive: The talent and skills of new fighters coming into the sport is simply amazing.
Negative: The use of PEDs in the sport. A true martial artist must respect his opponent and fight clean.Bob Arum of Top Rank says that the incoming bids from Showtime and HBO for the November 12 fight between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez are unlike anything he's seen before. From Lem Satterfield:
"... I must say, that there is a frenzy. It's unbelievable. They're offering for the promotion an incredible amount of support. Like I've never seen before. We estimate that CBS, that their support was worth about $10 million on the open market for the last fight [Pacquiao-Mosley.] And both HBO and CBS/Showtime are way above that now," Arum told BoxingScene.com. This time around, Arum believes the proposals will be worth around $15 million - based on early estimations.... "We're in the process now of making a decision within the next week. HBO blew us over last night with its proposal. We're not dealing with the sports department. We're dealing directly with the chief executives. I never believed that they would come up with anything like this."
This is big, big stuff, even given that Arum is known to exaggerate and overestimate. HBO is rolling out the red carpet for the Mayweather vs Ortiz fight on September 17, and have the available money and resources to lock down the other "big event" fight this fall, which is of course the Pacquiao fight. HBO was stung by losing Pacquiao's last fight to Showtime earlier this year, a move that stunned most in and around boxing, as Showtime had not put on a major PPV boxing event in years. The experiment was a success, but in the end it could simply result in HBO upping the ante and knocking Showtime back down a peg.
The network battle has kicked up in a big way in 2011, and doesn't appear to be ending any time soon. Expect Showtime to come up with a serious offer that will go as far as possible to rival what HBO is offering for the fight, as without fights of this magnitude, Showtime reverts back to being a clear and fairly distant No. 2 as far as U.S. boxing networks go.
And yes, this could, in theory, wind up with Showtime and CBS guaranteeing a network TV fight at some point if HBO is really bringing an unheard-of type of offer to the table. Not for Pacquiao vs Marquez, but a guarantee to Top Rank that somewhere down the line in 2012, they can give boxing a network TV spot. That would be the biggest possible card to lay down, I suspect.It’s Friday the 13th for the second time in 2 months. As Ohio is still in the thralls of winter, the threat of Jason stalking me is minimal. However, if fans get their way, the next Friday the 13th film just may be a winter themed classic. I understand the aesthetic appeal of a winter F13, but what is it really going to add to the series (except instead of a twig snapping…we’ll hear snow crunching!!!)? Of course, anything will be better than the rumored found footage route that was and is still being touted by studio execs.
A bout of insomnia woke me up early today, and it just felt like a Freddy vs Jason day. FvJ seems to be one of the most contentious films in either character’s series. Some fans love it. Some hate it. But most fans can agree on one thing: It emotes a strong reaction one way or the other. I happen to come out on “Love It” side, and I have to ask…Why such hate for Freddy vs Jason?
Freddy vs Jason was a mere dream of fans in the 1990s, and a complete nightmare for studios in the 1980s. The Nightmare on Elm Street series concluded on a sour note in 1991. While horror fans mourned, the rest of the world agreed the series had gone stale. In fact, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare was horribly acted, written, and left the audience wondering how such a larger than life character could meet such a horrible finale (Freddy was killed by being pulled from a dream into reality…a concept explored in the original). The Dream Master and The Dream Child had completely diffused this option as Freddy hunted in reality and dreams in both of those films. It seemed like the lines were already being blurred between the two states by some force, so why go back to the original? Why not go into some realm where the residents of Springwood were in a perpetual nightmare area? Yeah…it would have felt like an episode of Buffy probably, but that show proved that thinking outside the box can really be memorable….just look at Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
Jason met a similar fate in 1993. When fans showed up to see Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, they nearly choked on their popcorn when Jason’s body was completely torn apart by an FBI grenade…before the credits were five minutes old. We were subjected to watch forced heart transfusions through mouths while Jason was delegated to appearances in the mirror (while some actor did his/her best impression of copying his movements and demeanor). It, too, was not warmly received…but it’s ending scene was: A dog uncovers Jason’s trademark mask and Freddy’s glove pulls it down to hell!
Now, let’s rewind a bit: New Line and Paramount had been trying to make a Freddy vs Jason movie as early as 1987. However, both studios wanted creative control with characters so negotiations kept faltering. Due to the box office flop of Jason Takes Manhattan, film rights went back to its original producers (who promptly sold them to New Line). But Wes Craven,by making New Nightmare, pushed everything back. Had Craven not made New Nightmare, Jason Goes to Hell may never have been made. New Line did it to retain rights on the franchise. As production continued to be stalled, Jason X was commissioned to bide time as well.
It took 15 years for the studio to finally start production on Freddy vs Jason. Because of the box office failure regarding Jason X, the President of Production resigned and the franchise was considered dead. But like the slasher villain, you just can’t keep him down…
If you really want to have some fun this Friday the 13th, go back and read some of the script drafts for Freddy vs. Jason. (You can find many here.). Jason was always the character more fans identified yet. In most versions, Jason is almost given a pass for his past transgressions. What is most prominent in all of these scripts, however, is the complete misunderstanding of canon…for either franchise. Luckily, that is when writers Mark Swift and Damian Shannon came up with theirs.
Let’s take a look at what we got in Freddy vs Jason:
FvJ ignores the “finale” films and sets up both characters in believable fashion: Freddy has been forgotten. Jason is lying in a bank of Crystal Lake (sleeping). In fact, the entire set up and reason the two end up fighting it out makes sense.
ignores the “finale” films and sets up both characters in believable fashion: Freddy has been forgotten. Jason is lying in a bank of Crystal Lake (sleeping). In fact, the entire set up and reason the two end up fighting it out makes sense. One of Jason’s most memorable kills happens right out of the gate: Trey is folded in half after being repeatedly stabbed. And then…Jason just goes on a killing spree for the first half of the movie. His body count is higher in Freddy vs Jason than any other F13 film.
than any other F13 film. Freddy has been reimagined into a more demon-like being. While he only gets credited for one kill, he chews up screen time while reverting back to the “not-too-over the top” Freddy we loved earlier in franchise. He’s more cunning, and lives for the kill.
We get a dream fight and we get a real world fight. Both are just about everything we wanted and dreamed about. Freddy gets to wield Jason’s machete, while Jason wields Freddy’s arm. It’s appropriate, and well appreciated.
Now, while I do love the film and find it to be one of the most re-watchable films in the series, it does have it flaws:
CGI- Ugh. Everything is CGI. It’s distracting. I understand it for the dream sequences, but blood spatter should ALWAYS be real.
Freddy gets one kill, and it’s CGI! I understand the idea behind the shot, but I want to see Freddy slashing and a shot of the body afterward.
Freddy’s powers are inconsistent. He pulls off Kia’s nose in a dream but the nose is still there in reality. However, when he attacks Blake moments before, his hand passes through him without effect. He may be getting stronger, but Mia’s nose scene feels out of place.
No Kane Hodder. Jason was replaced for this film due to Kane’s height, but it was reported he was given an initial draft of the script before Ronny Yu cast Ken Kirzinger.
Check out Chewie’s review of FvJ – Freddy Vs. Jason (2003) – Horror Icons Face OffInvestors with PAY token fever rushed TenX’s token offering during a seven-minute sale.
TenX held a token offering over the weekend, which went live June 24, 2017. It reported receiving a total of 245,832 Ether, converted from ERC20 and altcoins, which was exchanged for PAY tokens at a rate of 350 PAY tokens per 1 Ether plus a 20 percent bonus. At the time of press, this was valued at roughly $58 million.
Investors had mere minutes to submit their transactions to TenX's token offering address. The offering opened on June 24 at 1:00 p.m. GMT, and contract closure took place at 1:07 p.m. GMT. TenX reports that a total of 2,892 Ether and 1,112 Altcoins were successfully received and deposited.
In total, TenX received a range of ERC20 tokens; Aragon (ANT), Augur (REP), Basic Attention (BAT), Blockchain Capital (BCAP), DigixDAO (DGD), First Blood (1ST), Gnosis (GNO), Golem (GNT), HumanIQ (HMQ), Iconomi (ICN), iExec RLC (RLC), Matchpool (GUP), Melonport (MLN), SingularDTV (SNGLS), Swarm City (SWT), Tokencard (TKN), WeTrust (TRST), and Wings (WINGS) were sent to the token offering address in exchange for PAY tokens. Dash, bitcoin, and Litecoin were also accepted.
TenX had held a presale 10 days prior to the token offering, during which it raised 100,000 Ether from investors who were willing to put in the minimum amount of 125 Ether. Presale investors also received an additional 20 percent bonus for their participation. The presale was done in an effort to keep "whale investors" from pushing smaller individuals out of the token offering, by which TenX believes it achieved a level of success.
TenX took precautions to keep the burden low on the Ethereum network during the offering. By keeping the address unpublished until 15 minutes prior to the sale, TenX reduced unnecessary spamming of transactions on the front end. Transaction limits were not induced since such limits favor those who know how to circumvent them. According to TenX, this "self-regulatory option" allowed over 4,000 people (including pools from China and Europe) to obtain PAY tokens, many of whom contributed less than 10 Ether.
TenX gathered 45,000 more Ether than it originally planned to receive, according to its white paper. Rather than refunding this excess, TenX has instead agreed to honor all contributions. TenX also stated, "We will not withdraw the extra 45,000 ETH but rather leave them for additional liquidity in the crypto ecosystem to support a decentralised TenX as outlined in our whitepaper. This is actually a WIN-WIN for token holders AND the company." This conclusion was arrived at after estimations showed that in order to refund the excess 45,000 Ether, close to 3,000 people would see their tokens canceled – a move TenX did not want for its community. TenX invites anyone unhappy with this arrangement to reach out prior to Tuesday, June 27, 2017, to receive |
their few vacation days in the nation's capital watching grown men and women, with their six-figure salaries and tailored finery, yell incoherently at each other.What kind of entitled, petulant, ignorant nonsense is this? Anyone who thinks the president should apologize for merely repeating in simplified terms something that's actually in the law needs to seriously re-evaluate their priorities, especially if they've either wittingly or unwittingly danced in the "Obamacare Horror Story" disinformation conga-line.
During an interview with NBC News' Chuck Todd, President Obama apologized to Americans who are receiving cancellation notices from their health insurance providers. I suppose it's the grown-up thing to do or something like that, but two things here: 1) Like the tea party, Fox News and talk radio, the people who are truly pissed off at the president will continue to be pissed off irrespective of anything he says or does because he's, you know, Barack Obama, and 2) He really didn't have to apologize.
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Additional apologies should come from the health insurance companies that are actively bilking customers to the tune of thousands upon thousands of dollars. It's the ascendancy of Obama to the presidency and his against-his-own-advisers effort to pass comprehensive healthcare reform that's given us a chance to have better, more affordable insurance policies, loaded with consumer protections and relatively inexpensive medical care, in spite of the nefarious deeds of the pre-ACA health insurance industry. You might not love everything this president has accomplished during his first five years -- hell, you might not have voted for him in either election. But if you're getting better health insurance, guaranteeing that you won't go bankrupt (or anything resembling it) when you're sick or injured, you should be thanking the president and the Democrats who made the Affordable Care Act possible -- not demanding an apology.
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Seriously, who are we? What kind of entitled, petulant, ignorant nonsense is this? Anyone who thinks the president should apologize for merely repeating in simplified terms something that's actually in the law needs to seriously re-evaluate their priorities, especially if they've either wittingly or unwittingly danced in the "Obamacare Horror Story" disinformation conga-line.
And what about these so-called horror story victims? Media Matters' Justin Berrier summarized several of the cases and determined that while complaining about the president's alleged "lie" regarding "keeping your plan if you like it," these victims were far from honest about their own predicaments.
--Edie Sundby, who I wrote about the other day, claimed the ACA was responsible for her policy cancellation. It wasn't. UnitedHealthcare made a business decision to get out of the individual market in order to pad its profit margin.
--On Hannity, business owners Paul and Michelle Cox said they'd have to cut back on fulltime employees because of Obamacare. That's a lie. Eric Stern from Salon.com discovered that the couple's business only employed four people. Four! That's 46 employees below the 50 employee threshold for the ACA mandate. They could hire 45 more fulltime employees and still remain below the floor of the mandate.
--Also on Hannity, Allison and Curt De Nijs said their policy was canceled and their new ACA premiums would double. Another lie. Allison and Curt never even looked at the ACA premiums, which, in reality, will provide better coverage at a considerable 60 percent savings!
--Once again, Sean Hannity hosted Robbie and Tina Robinson who said their premiums would increase by upwards of 72 percent. Lie. The Robinsons will pay 63 percent less with a comparable ACA policy.
--During a segment of CBS' This Morning, Florida resident Dianne Barette's junk policy with its $54 monthly premium was being canceled. But she never mentioned, nor did CBS report, that her policy didn't cover hospitalization. In other words, one serious injury or illness would've bankrupted Barette. On the other hand, Joshua Holland discovered that Barette could sign up for a $97 bronze plan via the ACA that covers hospitalization and much more.
--Mediaite's Tommy Christopher debunked a CNN Newsroom report claiming that low-income residents of Wisconsin were having trouble finding affordable ACA coverage. Not mentioned in the CNN's report was Governor Scott Walker's refusal to expand Medicaid per the ACA, while tossing thousands out of the existing Medicaid program there. And CNN also failed to note that one of its case studies, a mother of three children, could attain a policy from Healthcare.gov for as low as $32 per month.
If the president has to apologize, there ought to be a line of people behind him prepared to 'fess up.
For every griping, scowling guest on Hannity, making vague, specious claims about their personal horror story, there were hundreds of actual horror stories prior to the ACA -- stories that can't happen any more due to the this law. And many of the people receiving cancellation notices were paying for insurance plans that reflected what the pre-ACA landscape looked like. These are policies festooned with awfulness like lifetime and annual limits, no protections against unfair premium hikes, punitively high deductibles and no protections from arbitrary cancellations due to typographical errors and the like.
Not unlike our contradictory incumbent problem whereby too many voters bitch and howl about politicians and then turn around and re-elect the same gang of doofs every two years, these people, who are paying through the nose for junk policies, are desperately clinging to their crapola insurance like comfy but totally useless security blankets.
Bob Cesca is the managing editor for The Daily Banter, the editor of BobCesca.com, the host of the Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show podcast and a Huffington Post contributor.Description: Cheatle rages about Decius and the EoX.
Our outposts are under attack all around Phaeros
We have been able to hold them for a few days.
But we are losing the will to fight.
I am not sure we can sustain this level of PVP
with our legion of carebears.
We must continue the fight
we are the soul of the community.
Cheatle
Decius
Decius has gone off the deep end again.
Most people see him as deranged.
Every one leave, Tamlin, nihimon, and thorgrim remain,
I told you to shut him up!
His shit posting is ruining us!
His tin foil hat conspiracy's are ruining our image!
What is he thinking?
We must stop him.
Before he ruins us all.
Think of something you hopeless idiots.
I am sick of dealing with his shit!
Cheatle there is nothing we can do!
There has to be something.
Cheatle, he is completly unhinged and is just typing what ever pops in to his brain.
He can not be foolish enough to belive what he is saying.
He must see reason.
Remind him of why we founded the EBA
Remind him that we where not suppose to be toxic greifers
We where suppose to stop them.
He has become the most toxic person in the community and he is on our side!
What a fool!
Can he not see what he has become?
The EoX does't have to deal with deranged member posts. I wish we could run the EBA more like Phyllain runs the EoX.
Shrine camping
Logging out to avoid death
Swapping companies to dodge feuds.
Why would Decius think these things are ok?
I do not understand him at all.
We where suppose to be the good guys.
Instead
One of our top leaders
Has become everything we stand against.
It's ok Memory EoX will take you when we fail cascade.
This past week has been pathetic.
There is to much pvp.
There is nothing we can do.
We could surrender and accept terms from the Empire.
But then we would have to admit that we had lost.
I will uninstall before I admit that.
The Devs must save us.An employee at the Korea Customs Service shows various hidden-cameras illegally imported into Korea in this September file photo. / Korea Times file
A documentary director visiting the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) has told police a hidden camera photographed her in the shower, Yonhap reported Wednesday.
She posted the incident on her Facebook page early Tuesday.
The director was taking a shower at BIFF-organized accommodation when the window behind the ventilation fan opened, revealing a cell phone. The sound of a photo being taken followed.
The facility had closed-circuit television (CCTV) but it was too old to provide definitive images of a possible culprit.
The director reported the incident to police while the facility said it will replace the outdated CCTV and revamp security.
BIFF, Asia's top film fest, runs through Oct. 10.SECOND CAPTAINS have unveiled major plans to change their model and expand with the introduction of a paywall.
The team — made up of Eoin McDevitt, Ken Early, Ciaran Murphy, Mark Horgan and Simon Hick — have been producing Ireland’s most popular online sports shows since departing Newstalk’s Off The Ball and linking up with The Irish Times in 2013.
However, it was today announced they are cutting ties with their main partner and launching The Second Captains World Service, “a member-led, completely independent online station which gives you the chance to listen to all your favourite Second Captains podcasts everyday of the week”, from next Monday, 13 February.
The two free shows on Monday will remain, but in place of Thursday’s double bill, they will instead put out one daily podcast between Tuesday and Friday.
Regular guest Richie Sadlier is set to present one of the new programmes, while they have promised to announce further additions.
The extra podcasts will come at a small cost as there is a monthly subscription fee of €5 to listen on secondcaptains.com. All the details are in today’s show (embedded above).
The42 is on Instagram! Tap the button below on your phone to follow us!Each weight class is broken down with a money line on the top two or three individuals (usually by seed). Then the remaining wrestlers, or the field, are given a collective money line to win.
For clarity purposes each line uses a base amount of $100. So if the line is +150, that means you risk $100 to profit $150. Likewise, if the line is -150, you risk $150 to profit $100.
A few numbers for thought before we break down the weight classes (all data is since the 2003 NCAA tournament):
1. The No. 1 seed at the NCAA wrestling tournament has won almost exactly 50% of the time.
2. A wrestler seeded third or lower has won approximately 30%.
3. A wrestler seeded fourth or lower has won approximately 20%.
4. The field comes in on average twice a year.
5. All NCAA champions in 2013 came from either the No. 1 or No. 2 seed. That hadn't happened previously since a few years before David Taylor was born.
The "powers to be" shied away from offering too many field bets last year. Steve Bosak's Cinderella run in 2012 most likely played a part in that. We're hoping to see the range of lines back to normal for this year's tournament.
On to the breakdown of this year's weight classes and my personal (pre-official lines):
125: Jesse Delgado of Illinois is your returning NCAA champion and top seed. His newfound defensive style has come under scrutiny as of late, but he did sneak away with his second Big Ten title, despite the noise. We will see if he finds his offense again for the big dance. Nahshon Garrett of Cornell and Nico Megaludis of Penn State are likely facing off for the third time this season in the lower half of the bracket for a ticket to the finals. Iowa's Cory Clark comes in the No. 8 seed, but is probably Delgado's biggest threat in the top half of the bracket.
The Lines: Delgado even, Garrett +150, Megaludis +220, Field +600
The Play: Megaludis is a two-time NCAAA finalist so a big line would be tempting. However, Garrett has shown the ability to separate in their first two matchups and this weekend should be no different. Even if Megaludis solves that riddle he still needs to find a way to beat his nemesis in the final. Delgado found a different cylinder at NCAAs last year. He may not need to perform at quite as high of a level this time around since it looks like he's the only wrestler in the nation to figure out Garrett, his probable finals opponent. Stay away from the field as this is a three-horse race. I like Delgado to silence the critics and repeat for even money.
133: Joe Colon of Northern Iowa and A.J. Schopp of Edinboro come in as the two longshot top seeds here by virtue of their respective wins over third-seeded Tony Ramos of Iowa. Three-time All-American Tyler Graff of Wisconsin and fourth-seeded Jon Morrison of Oklahoma State headline the field.
The Lines: Ramos +120, Colon +155, Field +350
The Play: Most expected Tony Ramos to walk through this weight class in the beginning of the season. I certainly did. However, losses to Colon and Schopp have pumped the breaks on that line of thought. Ramos is still the slight favorite and Colon has a tough road, but never underestimate the deadly combo of sporting a serious mustache with Doug Schwab in your corner. I like Colon if he comes in +150 or better and/or the field +350.
141: Two-time NCAA champion Logan Stieber of Ohio State falls to the No. 2 seed after a rare loss to super frosh Zain Retherford, which he avenged at the Big Tens. Devin Carter of Virginia Tech has seemingly willed his way back to health and a third ACC title six months ahead of schedule after an early season injury. He joins the other undefeated wrestler in the bracket, Edinboro's Mitchell Port, on the top half.
The Lines: Stieber -230, Port +135, Carter +300, Field +550
The Play: Carter is a great story and the big wild card here. I think he poses problems for Port in that semifinal matchup but has never figured out Stieber in their previous meetings. I expect Retherford to fight through a brutal early road back to Stieber and make it very interesting in their third installment. The Buckeye is still too much though and we should be looking at the third of four titles. Lay the odds.
149: Drake Houdashelt of Missouri earns the top seed here, but it comes with few rewards as he's handed NCAA champion Kendric Maple of Oklahoma and Big Ten champion Jason Tsirtsis of Northwestern on his side of the bracket. Nick Dardanes of Minnesota and Chris Villalonga of Cornell round out the top-five seeds.
The Lines: Houdashelt +140, Maple +180, Tsirtsis +250, Field +400
The Play: This bracket is top heavy in a big way, and I like whoever emerges from that half. Houdashelt has taken a loss this year and there are few wrestlers talented enough to keep him from the top of the podium. Many thought Maple would be JO 2.0 with his jump up in weight this year, but the transition hasn't been nearly as smooth. I do still like him to finish with his second title with it all on the line. Take him +180 or better. The field is hungry and talented, but one level below.
157: We arrive at the most fun and anticipated weight class of the tournament. James Green of Nebraska enjoyed a dominant Big Ten with yet another win over returning champ DSJ of Iowa as well as the always-dangerous Dylan "Honey Badger" Ness of Minnesota. The talented Cowboy Alex Dieringer is sitting with one loss on the year and grabs the No. 3 seed. Isaac Jordan of Wisconsin, Ian Miller of Kent State, Dylan Alton of Penn State are some big names in a scrappy field.
The Lines: Green +120, DSJ +160, Dieringer +200, Field +350
The Play: "Mean" James Green is my pick (again) here and not just because he's a Burroughs-esque New Jersey native. However, this field is too deep and too talented to ignore. Isaac Jordan has wins over both Green and DSJ. Dylan Ness and Ian Miller can pin anyone in the weight class, while Penn State might just need Alton to come to wrestle to gain a fourth straight title. I think you get the idea. Let's take our first chance on the field.
165: In news that shocks nobody, David Taylor of Penn State is your overwhelming top seed. Tyler Caldwell of Oklahoma State and Nick Sulzer of Virginia come in at No. 2 and No. 3 respectively.
The Lines: DT -600, Caldwell +350, Field +1350
The Play: In a year that saw Ed Ruth and Logan Stieber take losses anything can happen, right? Nah. The only thing to contemplate here is how many falls we see. Sulzer, Caldwell and Monk may be able to keep it close but this is the lock of the tournament. That being said, laying money on DT would be too expensive with little payoff. Stay away and enjoy the ending to a magical career. I'll take over 2.5 falls.
174: Chris Perry of Oklahoma State is your returning NCAA champion and avenged his only loss with a controversial win over Andrew Howe of Oklahoma a week ago. The next tier down includes a gritty and deep field of wrestlers who will try to play spoiler to a trilogy meeting between the two top dogs.
The Lines: Howe even, Perry +160, Kokesh +300, Field +450
The Play: This weight class wants to be 157 pounds, but in reality I think Howe and Perry have shown separation from the pack. Howe will be hungry and it's tough to imagine anyone in the bottom bracket contesting his place on the elevated mat. Perry's road will be much more interesting, but in the end I think we find another meeting between the two former champs. Howe will find redemption and a second title via more collar tie snaps than we knew existed. I'd take him for even money or better.
184: Jimmy Sheptock of Maryland is your top seed here. Take a moment. Jimmy Sheptock is seeded above two-time NCAA champion... untouchable for two-and-a-half years... never lost in the Big Ten... best cradle in the "biz"... Ed "The Truth" Ruth. He earns that distinction following an undefeated season, while Ruth took the season's most surprising loss to giant killer Gabe Dean of Cornell. Kevin Steinhaus of Minnesota is worth mentioning in the field.
The Lines: Ruth -300, Dean +225, Sheptock +210, Field +750
The Play: Let's all bow our heads collectively and hope that the actual lines are based on the seeds here. Gabe Dean is Jimmy Sheptock's new best friend for the time being as he hopes he can duplicate his "miracle on the mat" from the Southern Scuffle. Ruth does have the toughest road as he will have to go through Steinhaus, Dean and Sheptock potentially. No doubt that Dean is an animal and I don't think his win in January was any sort of fluke. I also don't think it will be repeated. Lay the odds on Ruuuuuuuth if they are within reason and enjoy the winning chants of his name one last time.
197: Strange seeding here as Kyven Gadson of Iowa State falls to the No. 5 seed after arguably the season's most impressive body of work. He comes in behind top seed and Big Ten champion Nick Heflin of Ohio State. J'den Cox of Missouri and Morgan McIntosh of Penn State will battle it out below as the No. 2 and No. 3 seeds. Scott Schiller of Minnesota is the No. 4 seed and spent a healthy amount of time ranked No. 1 this season before some recent losses.
The Lines: Heflin +170, Cox +175, Gadson +200, Field +400
The Play: Nobody could fault you for taking the field if the odds are right. No wrestler here has been able to hold the top spot for long and it has changed hands a few times. McIntosh was my preseason pick, but I've jumped ship to J'den Cox. I like his chances even more with Gadson on the opposite side and as a freshman you should be able to get some good value betting on him. There will be room for a few more stars in the sport with Taylor and Ruth gone. Cox is ready to fill the void.
285: Have we seen a heavyweight bracket this exciting and wide open? Not since Bloodsport. Minnesota's Tony Nelson is the No. 1 seed and two-time returning NCAA champion. He also has losses to four of the five wrestlers seeded directly below him.
The Lines: Nelson +165, Gwiz +220, Chalfant +230, Field +265
The Play: This weight class is as wide open as we can hope for. Nelson rebounded nicely at the Big Tens and has two previous titles, so he's still your frontrunner. But this is as unpredictable as they come. Field. All the way.
Official lines should be available at your online sportsbook midweek (Wednesday) and individual lines are posted before the finals in case you would like to hedge your bets or double up on Saturday. Good luck and enjoy the winnings!
Every fan knows that college wrestling is a sport like no other. Small differences can often separate winners from losers and greats from also-rans. Tight matches are often determined by borderline takedowns, riding time, back points and, increasingly, referees' interpretations.Betting on college wrestling requires a formula that predicts small actions. For example, a late and meaningless stall point against Kyle Dake, combined with missed back points against Logan Stieber can mean the difference between enjoying a lucrative NCAA finals and taking the early flight back home to Chicago. I was on the wrong side of those small differences last year, but luckily Steve Bosak's win in 2012 is still paying for my morning bagel.With that in mind, it's once again the time of year when we find out who has all the angles, and who has the stones to play 'em!As the NCAA wrestling tournament gains more coverage and fans each year, the lines offered by online sportsbooks also tightened. This year will be no different, and there aren't likely to be major flubs.However, the 2014 wrestling season was one of the most unpredictable in recent memory. That, along with terrible seeding, could mean some big bets are available.And remember, I'm in no way responsible for what you bet, or if you bet. Think twice before laying your mortgage on the field at 165 pounds. This is for giggles so if you can't afford to lose it, don't bet it.For the newcomers, here's how it usually works:Offices 365 Refreshes Its Protection Capabilities
Information rights management (IRM) has been available for on-premises deployments for years, yet relatively few companies use the technology to protect confidential material. Cost and complexity are often reasons cited for why companies avoid IRM. Both are less of an issue inside Office 365 as IRM (or Azure Rights Management) is part of the E3 and E5 plans and Microsoft does the heavy lifting to configure and run the service.
At Ignite 2017, Microsoft shared details of how they have improved rights management for Exchange Online with a new simplified setup that makes it easier for users and tenants to protect email. Smarter clients create and consume protected messages and the Office 365 Message Encryption service gets a refresh. It’s all good stuff.
Templates
Rights management uses protection templates to define a set of rights that a recipient has for a file or message. When you enable rights management for a tenant, three default templates are available: Do Not Forward, Confidential, and Confidential – View Only. For instance, if you receive a message stamped as Confidential, you cannot print or copy its content. IRM also protects attachments, if they are in a format that supports IRM (like Word, PowerPoint, or Excel).
You can create custom templates to meet different business needs, including templates scoped to certain users or groups. For example, you could have a template designed to protect ultra-confidential information belonging to those working on a specific project. If they are authorized in the template, external recipients can read protected messages, even if they use a consumer email system like Outlook.com or Gmail.
Users apply protection templates to individual messages with Outlook or OWA. In addition, a tenant can configure transport rules to protect outgoing messages based on any of the criteria supported by rules. For instance, a rule might apply a template to all email to a domain belonging to a partner. Because all email flows through the transport system, you can be certain that Exchange processes any message meeting rule criteria.
Configuring Exchange Online
Even if you used IRM with Exchange Online in the past, you must refresh the configuration to switchover to the new stack. Previously, code running inside Exchange did most IRM processing. The new configuration means that Exchange interacts with the Azure Information Protection service to process protected messages. Apart from anything else, this means that Exchange Online now fully supports Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK), a feature needed by tenants who want end-to-end control over encryption keys.
To configure IRM, install the Azure Information Protection module for PowerShell and then connect a PowerShell session to Exchange Online to run the commands below.
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 [ PS ] C : \ > Connect-AadrmService #Activate the service Enable-Aadrm #Get the configuration information needed for message protection. $rmsConfig = Get-AadrmConfiguration $licenseUri = $rmsConfig. LicensingIntranetDistributionPointUrl #Collect IRM configuration for Office 365. $irmConfig = Get-IRMConfiguration $list = $irmConfig. LicensingLocation if (! $list ) { $list = @ ( ) } if (! $list. Contains ( $licenseUri ) ) { $list += $licenseUri } #Enable message protection for Office 365. Set -IRMConfiguration -LicensingLocation $list Set -IRMConfiguration -AzureRMSLicensingEnabled $True -InternalLicensingEnabled $true #Enable new Protect button in Outlook on the Web Set -IRMConfiguration -SimplifiedClientAccessEnabled $true Afterwards, to test that the IRM configuration is good, run the Test-IRMConfiguration cmdlet for a user in your tenant : [ PS ] C : \ > Test-IRMConfiguration -Sender Tony. Redmond @ Office365itpros. com Results : Acquiring RMS Templates... - PASS : RMS Templates acquired. Templates available : Redmond & Associates - Confidential View Only, Redmond & Associates - Confidential, Do Not Forward. Verifying encryption... - PASS : Encryption verified successfully. Verifying decryption... - PASS : Decryption verified successfully. Verifying IRM is enabled... - PASS : IRM verified successfully. OVERALL RESULT : PASS
At Ignite 2017, Microsoft announced that they will soon enable rights management automatically for Exchange Online for new Office 365 tenants. When this happens, you won’t have to perform the steps outlined above
Inline Reading for Clients
Part of the upgrade is to improve the client experience to make it easier for users to read protected messages. Outlook desktop (Windows and Mac), OWA, and the Outlook iOS and Android clients support inline reading, meaning that protected messages appear as normal, even if the message comes from another Office 365 tenant. The only sign that anything is different is the Permissions label (Figure 1).
Different clients use different visual indicators to remind users about protected messages. Apart from highlighting the template name and permissions when reading email, OWA displays padlock icons for protected items in folders while Outlook uses various icons to show their status.
OWA’s New Protect Button
After you configure IRM, OWA includes Protect in the options for the New Message window. By default, clicking Protect applies the Do Not Forward template to a message. The Do Not Forward template is special because it exists in every Office 365 tenant. As such, you can use this template to protect messages to any Office 365 recipient. If you use a different template to protect messages that you send outside your tenant, the recipients will not be able to read the content unless their account receives permissions in the template.
You can click Change Permissions to select a different template (Figure 2) or Remove to unprotect the message.
Outlook desktop clients continue to work as before. You create a message, select Options, Permissions, and select the template you want to use to protect a message.
Messages carry the template for their entire lifetime. Any replies to messages inherit the same template to protect the complete conversation.
Dealing with the iOS Mail App
As obvious when the Apple iOS mail app ran into problems at the launch of iOS 11, many people use the mail app instead of Outlook to connect to Exchange Online. Forcing those users to go to the OME portal to read protected messages might not be the experience that you want to deliver.
If you are willing to compromise message security, you can force Exchange to apply server-side decryption for messages delivered to these “unenlightened” clients. The downside is that decrypted copies of messages exist on those devices. The mail app will not apply the permissions given to the user, so they can copy or print the message. However, Exchange Online knows that the original message is protected and if the user attempts to do something without permission that involves the server, like forwarding the message, the action is blocked when the server processes that message.
To enable server-side decryption for “unenlightened” apps (those who do not use the rights management API), run this command:
1 [ PS ] C : \ > Set -ActiveSyncOrganizationSettings – AllowRMSSupportForUnenlightenedApps $True
External Recipients
Recipients outside Office 365 obviously have no knowledge of rights management. To solve the problem of how to give external recipients access protected to messages, Exchange notifies the recipient to go to the Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) portal to view the protected content there (Figure 3). If the recipient has a Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo! Account, they can sign in with their identity provider. If not, they can get a one-time code. This approach works for all non-Office 365 email systems.
Protected Email to Groups, Teams, and Yammer
You can include a mixture of internal and external recipients, including those who do not use-Office 365. You can send protected messages to Office 365 Groups. However, Teams does not have the ability to read protected message in the client and therefore the message appears in the target channel like it appears to a non-Office 365 recipient. If you send protected email to a Yammer group, Yammer responds via email to ask whether you really want to post the message. If you do, Yammer decrypts the message and posts the content as text or a PDF file.
Encrypting Outbound Messages with Rules
Microsoft introduced Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) in mid-2015. Once a standalone function, OME is now tightly integrated with IRM. Microsoft’s focus for protecting email sent outside the tenant is simplified as templates are now the only answer.
To create a transport rule with OME, go to the Mail Flow section of EAC, and select Rules. You can use any available predicate to set the conditions for the rule to fire and then select Add rights protection to the message as the action (Figure 4) and select the template you want to use for protection. After you save the rule, it takes a little while before it is effective because Exchange caches transport rules for performance. Once the rule is active, Exchange protects any message meeting the criteria set in the rule. The notifications delivered to recipients tell them how to access the content.
The older form of OME protection (V1) uses the Apply Office 365 Message Encryption action and this action is still available. However, Microsoft recommends that you upgrade any transport rules using this action to use protection templates instead. Indeed, “Microsoft no longer supports setting up new deployments of OME without the new capabilities,” which means that you should use templates if you want to run a supported configuration.
Customizing the OME Configuration
You can customize the OME configuration using the Set-OMEConfiguration cmdlet to change in notifications and the OME portal seen by those who receive encrypted messages. For example, you can add a disclaimer or a corporate logo.
Support for Compliance
Protecting messages with encryption is great, but will protection hide user activities from compliance? In the earlier generation, you could find protected messages with eDiscovery searches, but you could not decrypt them. Now, Exchange Online makes protected messages fully available to compliance features such as content searches, eDiscovery cases, and supervision policies.
Protection for All
Protecting email is easier in Exchange Online than ever before. There is no reason why you should not use rights management within your Office 365 tenant. What have you got to lose?
Follow Tony on Twitter @12Knocksinna.
Want to know more about how to manage Office 365? Find what you need to know in “Office 365 for IT Pros”, the most comprehensive eBook covering all aspects of Office 365. Available in PDF and EPUB formats (suitable for iBooks) or for Amazon Kindle.Aiming to be the Zipcar of electric scooters, Scoot Networks has officially launched in San Francisco after months of beta testing. Ideal for areas with problematic parking, the Chinese-made scooters are 100 percent electric with a 20Ah SLA battery each, and there's even a dock built into the dash to charge most Android or iPhone models. With a screaming top speed of 30 miles per hour, they're obviously meant for short trips and not for the highway. It costs $10 to sign up, $5 per month, then $5 per hour. You can also get a $10 per day deal or a $19 per month option that includes three workdays or overnights. Even though you don't need a motorcycle license to rent one, the company does offer tutorials to get newbies comfortable with the vehicles. If you do have a license, you can opt for the $185 a month plan that lets you get your own personal scooter. A potential issue is that the battery on the electric scooter only lasts around 20 to 30 miles, but San Francisco might have enough EV-friendly parking spots to make that less of a problem. You can watch the company's promo video after the break.Aaron Ekblad, Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews…Nolan Patrick?
The 2017 NHL Draft is drawing near and for the first time in many years there is some question as to who will be picked first overall on June 23 in Chicago.
The favourite to go No. 1 remains Nolan Patrick, centre for the WHL’s Brandon Wheat Kings, who has held that distinction for more than a year. A couple players have challenged that ranking ever since, but Patrick heads into the end of the season as the top-ranked player in 2017.
A Winnipeg native, Patrick has spent the past three seasons in the WHL, although this season he was slowed by injuries, which has been the main knock against him. In 33 games with the Wheat Kings in 2016-17, Patrick scored 20 goals and 46 points, but he missed Brandon’s quick four-game playoff exit with another injury.
Here’s what you need to know about Patrick…
Team: Brandon Wheat Kings
From: Winnipeg, Man.
Height: 6-foot-3
Weight: 203 pounds
Position: Centre
Twitter: @nolan_patrick19
HIS ONLY FULL WHL SEASON WAS A HUGE ONE
Patrick played 72 regular season games in 2015-16 and finished fifth in WHL scoring with 41 goals and 102 points, which were much higher totals than the first two forwards from that league taken in the 2016 NHL Draft, Brett Howden (64 points, 27th overall) and Sam Steel (70 points, 30th overall).
Taking it a step further, Patrick was an integral part of Brandon’s run through the 2016 WHL playoffs. The Wheat Kings lost just five games in four rounds as they cruised to a league championship and a Memorial Cup berth and with 30 points in 21 games, the 17-year-old Patrick earned playoff MVP honours.
He wasn’t as productive in the 2016 Memorial Cup, posting just one assist in three losses. But that tournament is generally a place where older players shine, so that slowdown in production shouldn’t be viewed as a knock on the then-17-year-old.
The year before, in 2014-15, Patrick scored 30 goals and 56 points in 55 games and was named WHL Rookie of the Year.
This season, however, was a little less impressive…
HOW WILL INJURIES IMPACT HIS DRAFT STOCK?
To begin, if Patrick does fall out of the top spot in the draft, don’t expect him to drop too far in the order. In fact, if he doesn’t go No. 1, odds are he’ll go No. 2.
But in his draft year, Patrick missed a few big events, from Canada’s summer world junior camp, to December’s World Junior Championship and Brandon’s short playoff life. He missed the summer camp because of surgery he had for a sports hernia in mid-July and although he was back for the start of the WHL season, he played just five games (scoring eight points) before he was out again with an upper-body injury. That injury forced Patrick out of the WJC and he didn’t get back in Brandon’s lineup until mid-January.
Meanwhile, Nico Hischier was turning heads with a terrific WJC and by finishing top 10 in QMJHL scoring. Patrick played just 33 regular season games for the Wheat Kings and his point-per-game total dropped slightly from 1.42 in 2015-16 to 1.39 in 2016-17. That may not seem large, but for a top-ranked prospect, it’s a little odd.
How much will his injuries affect him on draft day?
“Nolan’s situation is part of the game and for NHL clubs it’s a talking point in draft deliberations,” said Dan Marr, director of NHL Central Scouting. “And from many recent discussions with NHL personnel it will have absolutely no negative implications or bearing on Nolan’s draft status.”
The Hockey News’ Ryan Kennedy moved Hischier past Patrick as the top-ranked prospect in the 2017 Draft, largely because of the injuries, but also because of the tremendously productive season from the Swiss forward. One executive told |
bureaucrat.
He's analysed the economics of Adani's planned Carmichael mine.
E.A.S. SARMA: My assessment is that by the time the Adani coal leaves the Australian coast the cost of it will be roughly about 90 dollars per tonne.
We cannot afford that, it is so expensive.
My assessment is it will not be possible for the Indian consumer, the Indian market to absorb Adani coal.
STEPHEN LONG: Adani's Mundra power plant is meant to take coal from the Australian mine.
But it's haemorrhaging money.
Adani's trying to offload it - for next to nothing.
TIM BUCKLEY: The Mundra power plant has been put up for sale by Adani powers management, this year for 1 Rupee.
They've acknowledged the power plant is financially distressed, its loss making, it's been losing money for six years and the power plant is unviable and Adani management have acknowledged that.
STEPHEN LONG: That's two cents, 1 Rupee is two cents.
TIM BUCKLEY: Two cents, a $US5 billion power plant, and it is the largest import coal fired power plant in the world and it is clearly unviable.
STEPHEN LONG: Adani's Abbot Point Coal Terminal in Queensland is also facing serious financial challenges.
Its saddled with extreme debt - more than Adani paid for the terminal.
TIM BUCKLEY: I've never seen a corporate structure like this in 30 years of financial analysis, so both the port and the mine have massive negative equity, I've never seen a corporate structure so focussed on debt with so little equity or in fact negative equity everywhere you look.
STEPHEN LONG: In the next year, Adani needs to refinance $1.4 billion in debt for the port - and more than $2 billion by 2020.
It's struggling.
Adani's Carmichael mine has been shunned for finance by banks worldwide.
Unless Adani can make the mine happen, it's entire Australian foray may be a house of cards.
TIM BUCKLEY: Adani has damaged the value of its port in trying to free up port capacity for the mine.
So, if the mine does not go ahead, Abbott Point is actual collateral damage and the damage is very significant.
ADAM WALTERS: Absolutely.
It's a reciprocal relationship.
If the mine doesn't go ahead, the port can't be refinanced and the mine can't go ahead without the port.
And this explains, I believe, why we are seeing such a personal connection to the Australian projects and such intense lobbying from the chairman of the Adani group for the Australian projects to go ahead, because he is personally financially dependent upon those projects, and indeed if they do go ahead, he stands to make potentially billions of dollars of profits in Caribbean tax havens from them doing so.
STEPHEN LONG: In far outback Queensland, this small exploration camp is the only sign, so far, of Adani's Carmichael mine.
STEPHEN LONG: It might not look like much now but Adani reckons that work on the giant mine here is going to begin within weeks.
The extraordinary thing is that despite the evidence of bribery and corruption, the shell companies linked to tax havens, the allegations of fraud and money laundering, state and federal governments are bending over backwards to accommodate Adani's every need.
STEVE CIOBO shakes hands with GAUTAM ADANI: Good to see you again Gautam
STEPHEN LONG: Australia's trade minister Steve Ciobo met Gautam Adani in Delhi in August.
STEVE CIOBO: My starting point with respect to opportunities around collaboration and the importance of certainty for investment is critical.
STEPHEN LONG: Within weeks, he announced a rule change that for the first time lets a government agency, the Export Finance Investment Corporation or EFIC, fund domestic mining projects.
STEVE CIOBO: Make no mistake I am absolutely committed to broadening and deepening the trade and investment relationship between India and Australia.
STEPHEN LONG: The change opens the way for the government to make EFIC either partly bankroll Adani, or guarantee loans from private banks.
TIM BUCKLEY: I think this is an act of desperation by our federal government.
Adani's Carmichael project is not bankable by private financial institutions, we've seen every major bank in Australia rule out financing, we've seen major insurance companies rule out financing, we've seen offshore banks rule out financing, it will only get financed if the federal government provides a massive taxpayer subsidy.
STEPHEN LONG: Watching on from Delhi, India's former Environment Minister can't believe what he is seeing.
JAIRAM RAMESH: Ultimately, it's the sovereign decision of the Australian Government, the federal government and the state government.
But public money is involved, and more than public money, natural resources are involved.
I'm very, very surprised that the Australian government, uh, for whatever reason, uh, has uh, seen it fit, uh, to all along handhold Mr. Adani.
So, my message to the Australian Government would certainly be, uh, please demonstrate that you have done more homework than has been the case so far.
SARAH FERGUSON: 4 Corners has been requesting an interview with the Adani group for several weeks.
We received no response until late last week when head office sent a statement denying all allegations of wrongdoing - and saying, "Adani group is an absolute and religiously law-abiding organization."
The statement is on our website. And next week, we investigate the unfolding scandal over the chemical contamination of water supplies in Australian communities. See you then.By New Year’s Day, there will be 500 airport full-body scanners in use nationwide. The naked truth about scanners
On the day after Christmas, readers of The Washington Post were given a real treat: pictures of naked men.
The men in the pictures were fully clothed, but they were naked nonetheless, because the pictures came from airport full-body scanners.
Story Continued Below
The machines provided graphic pictures of the male anatomy. True, they were no more graphic than Michelangelo’s David or Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (that’s the naked guy with his arms and legs stuck out), but both of those were depictions, not actual people trying to heft their wheelie bags on the conveyor belt, take off their shoes and jackets, remove their laptops, take out their baggies full of fluids no more than 3 ounces in size, take the metal out of their pockets and somehow get through security before their planes take off.
According to the Post, by New Year’s Day, there will be 500 such machines in use nationwide and 1,000 by the end of 2011, or roughly one machine for every two security lanes in every airport in the land.
If the machines offend your sense of modesty or decency for yourself or your children, then you can request a pat-down where your naughty bits may be touched by a Transportation Security Administration screener rather than projected on a video screen.
Officials say 98 percent of people go through the machines rather than request a pat-down, which is not surprising: First, who likes to be touched by a stranger? And second, going through the machines is faster, and flying has becomes such a cumbersome and aggravating experience that most people will do anything to get it over with.
(There is a company called Flying Pasties, which claims to have a product that you slip inside your clothing to screen your private parts. “It’s simply not against the law to keep your private parts private,” the company says.)
Some parties are suing the government over the new machines, claiming an unreasonable invasion of privacy, while others claim the machines expose people to too much radiation, which the government denies.
Most people, however, accept it as just another agony associated with flying (along with fees to check baggage and crowded luggage bins).
And, after all, the machines are worth it because they detect explosives.
Except they don’t. As it turns out, the machines don’t detect explosives at all. They detect images on your body that shouldn’t belong on your body.The Philippines should have stronger ties with Russia and China, as Western nations are only interested in double talk and disregard Philippines interests, President Rodrigo Duterte told RT and other Russian media ahead of his visit to Moscow.
The Philippines leader is due to arrive for a five-day visit on May 22.
Read more
Duterte said that while he has nothing personal against Washington, his country needs a change in its foreign policy to separate it from American interests.
“I have nothing against America, [US President Donald] Trump is my friend. But my foreign policy has shifted. I want to deal with China and Russia. Because in Western world, it’s double talk,” he said.
“You treat me as if I’m your colony still. You must be kidding! We’re an independent country. I want my country to be treated with dignity,” he added.
Duterte has repeatedly expressed his desire to have countries such as China and Russia provide military hardware for the Philippines.
This week, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana signed a letter of intent with Chinese state-owned arms manufacturer Poly Technologies on future purchases.
Next week, Duterte is expected to sign a similar agreement in Russia on his visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Speaking to Russian media ahead of the visit, Duterte said he will not leave Philippines national security dependent on Washington.
“If my country collapses, who will bring it back? The US? We need weapons,” he said.
“Russia sells weapons, no conditions. With the US it’s a different story. They make conditions. But I’m not gonna stand on bended knees.”
Beijing threatens war if Philippines drills for oil in South China Sea – Duterte https://t.co/oJ4RSOPSJQpic.twitter.com/i3vjs4LXoT — RT (@RT_com) May 20, 2017
The Philippines is a former US colony which has a military alliance with its former master. For decades, three-fourths of its arms purchases came from US suppliers.
Duterte says he does not want his country dragged into a potential US confrontation with China.
“They want me to fight China. With what? Do I have cruise missiles? It’s gonna be a massacre! And then what? We’ll sit at the bargaining table and be like – I want this, and they say I want that. Do I look stupid?” he said.So remember back in March, when Brian “Head” Welch speculated that the Deftones don’t wanna tour with Korn ever again? Well, as it turns out, he wasn’t just being paranoid.
In a new interview with the recently resuscitated Metal Hammer, Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno validates Head’s theory, stating:
“We did make a very conscious choice of who we were going to play shows with. It was hard to be this young band and having to turn down tours. I can’t remember how many times I turned down Korn! And they got pissed at us. Jonathan [Davis] would say, ‘Why do you hate us?’ and I didn’t know what to say. “I’d tell him, ‘Dude, I don’t hate you. I love you guys, you’re my friends. But I don’t want to tour with you. I don’t want to be on the Family Values with you and Limp Bizkit.’ The name of the genre was nü metal, so anything that is new is one day going to be old. And I didn’t to be old with it.”
The bad news is, the Deftones in no way, shape, or form escaped being labeled as ‘nu-metal.’ The good news is, even the most hard-boiled of Bizkit bashers cite the Deftones as the rare example of ‘good nu-metal.’ How much of that has to do with their decision to not tour with Korn, I dunno. I’m sure their fans would like to think the quality of their work has something to do with it, too.
In any case, I think Moreno’s statement is a very kind way of publicly admitting that the Deftones do not want to tour with Korn. Still, if you’re Korn, it’s gotta sting a little, right? Remember, this isn’t the first time Moreno has dissed Korn in an interview. From a 2003 chat with Revolver:
“Old Korn records had so much intensity. As they go on, it’s the same thing — bad childhoods and mean moms. It gets old after awhile. How old is Jonathan? Thirty years old? [Davis was actually thirty-two at the time. -Ed.] How long has it been since he lived with his parents? Try to go somewhere else. If you’re genuine and write about whatever is drawing the emotion now, you can’t be fucked with.”
Oh well. At least there won’t be any awkward encounters on tour.
[via The PRP]A female suicide bomber has blown herself up at a college in northern Nigeria, killing at least three people, witnesses say.
The explosion went off outside a packed lecture hall at the college in Kontagora town, the witnesses added.
Casualty figures are unclear, but lecturer Andrew Randa told the BBC he had seen four bodies.
This is the second suicide attack on a school this week - on Monday, 46 boys were killed in Yobe State.
Militant Islamist group Boko Haram is waging an insurgency in Nigeria.
It has not commented on the blast in Kontagora, some 240km (150 miles) from the capital, Abuja.
The group has declared a caliphate, or Islamic state, in areas it controls in the north-east.
It has carried out a spate of bombings and assassinations in northern Nigeria since launching its campaign in 2009.
Who are Boko Haram?
Image copyright AP Image caption Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau is the most wanted man in Nigeria
Founded in 2002
Initially focused on opposing Western education - Boko Haram means "Western education is forbidden" in the Hausa language
Launched military operations in 2009 to create Islamic state
Thousands killed, mostly in north-eastern Nigeria - also attacked police and UN headquarters in capital, Abuja
Some three million people affected
Declared terrorist group by US in 2013
Nigeria's female bombers strike
What now after ceasefire fiasco?
Mr Randa said he heard a deafening blast and then there was pandemonium as people ran away from the scene.
Soldiers rushed to the college and sealed off the area, he said.
BBC Nigeria analyst Isa Sanusi says this is the first time Boko Haram has been blamed for an attack in Kontagora, a major town in Nigeria's Niger state.
If it is confirmed that the group carried out the attack, it would suggest that it has extended its reach to a new area, he says.
The bomb seemed to have exploded prematurely, as the bomber was still trying to gain entry into the lecture hall when it detonated, one witness told the BBC Hausa service.
Three of the four bodies he had seen were those of women, and some had been decapitated, Mr Randa added.
Other witnesses said the bomber died in the blast, and there were many casualties.
At least seven people were wounded and rushed to hospital, they said.
Boko Haram is opposed to Western education, and believes that Muslim boys and girls should only receive an Islamic education.Jazz, Blues & Soul Vocalist
San Francisco Bay Area vocalist, Rhonda Benin has earned a reputation for not just a good voice but showmanship, magnetic stage personality, humor, and of course her great dancing. Rhonda’s impressive resume includes performances at SF Jazz, Yoshi’s, MOAD, The Healdsburg, Sonoma, Burlingame, Sausalito, Filmore, and Calistoga Jazz Festivals.
In addition to singing, Rhonda is producer and founder of the Women’s History Month’s show “Just Like A Woman” a tribute to Bay Area Women In Music. Benin is a 22 year member of The GRAMMY nominated vocal ensemble Linda Tillery and The Cultural Heritage.
Rhonda is on the teaching staff of Healdsburg Jazz ‘s Operation Jazz Band, San Francisco Arts Project, LEAP, Cal Performances, Youth In Arts and conducts her own school assemblies and workshops, “The Voice, The Hands The Feet” “Twist and Shout” and “Love Letters Make Me Misty Blue”.WASHINGTON – Ben Olsen winced as he ambled over to speak to a few members of the media at the close of a D.C. United training session last week.
The decade-long litany of debilitating ankle injuries that forced him to evolve from a flying winger to a cagey holding midfielder, and eventually ended his playing career altogether, still trouble the 38-year-old today. Though on this occasion, he has himself to blame for more soreness than usual.
Olsen had pedaled his bike on a loop through the city the night before, he explained, and stumbled onto a pickup game in D.C.'s Adams Morgan neighborhood. Even after nine surgeries on those troublesome ankles, he still craves a chance to play, and so he waded into the action among a multinational group that is typical for this diverse global capital – and when the game's intensity “escalated,” in his words, he was always going to feel the consequences the next day.
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“I just needed to get out of the house,” said United's head coach with a trademark wry grin. “I just needed to take a bike ride. And sometimes I find myself in bizarre circumstances in this city.”
The former U.S. international also finds himself in an awkward moment in his coaching career as his tenure in charge of his beloved club moves into its sixth year in 2016.
When United's front office lost patience with first-year head coach Curt Onalfo in the depths of a brutal 2010 season, they turned to Olsen as an interim figurehead because of the respect he'd earned from fans and colleagues as a player. Plunked into the hot seat barely half a year after his retirement, Olsen and his superiors freely admitted he was unqualified for the position, yet he wound up keeping it. In the process, he became a poster child for a uniquely MLS trend: hiring iconic players as coaches and asking them to learn on the job.
Directed to keep D.C. competitive during an extended period of fiscal austerity brought on by a cost-cutting ownership group and a never-ending wait for a new stadium, Olsen has met that challenge, winning the 2013 U.S. Open Cup and leading United into the MLS Cup Playoffs in three of his five full seasons in charge, including the last two. He sculpted a team in his own gritty image, collecting bargain castoffs from other MLS clubs in a sort of soccer version of “The Expendables” and arranging them in a tenacious, defense-first system.
“I go into games with the idea of, 'how do we win today?' That's my focus. How do we win this game?” Olsen told reporters at United's season kickoff event in February. “If I have a team that can out-possess a team 70-30 [percent] and still get results, great. If we view on that day it's going to be a 60-40 – they're going to have the ball 60 [percent] – and we can win this game, I'm OK with that too.”
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But in the rapidly evolving – and increasingly cash-flush – environment of Major League Soccer, that may not be enough to reach the summit anymore. Nor does it offer a particularly compelling consumer product for Washington D.C.'s large and internationally-minded soccer market, especially in the decaying confines of old RFK Stadium.
Harsh reality checks were delivered in the 2014 and 2015 playoffs, where United were defeated by New York Red Bulls teams with more resources and more dynamism up front. Last year's matchup in particular exposed the limitations of Olsen's approach. D.C. went bruisingly direct against their high-pressing rivals and set a 2016 MLS record for lowest pass completion rate (a woeful 54.5 percent), keeping the scoreline close but never really threatening the favored Red Bulls' goal over two legs.
“We were just trying to slug it out in the playoffs.” D.C. assistant coach Amos Magee told FourFourTwo this week. “We made a series of it, but it certainly wasn't stylistically what we wanted it to be.
“We know it wasn't good enough, and we know that teams that won the [last two] championships, LA and Portland, were doing a better job of keeping possession and getting more chances and being a handful in the attacking third. That comes from possession, that comes from some special players.”
Recognizing weaknesses
So this winter, United quietly set about augmenting their squad's technical quality and attacking diversity, flush with the league's new TAM (“targeted allocation money”) funds, MLS' new effort to encourage clubs to build out their rosters with elite talent one rung below the “Designated Player” status usually reserved for marquee acquisitions.
“We all wanted to continue to build on the resiliency and toughness, but also with a little bit more stylistic aplomb,” said Magee, noting that the process began immediately after the postseason exit in November. “We don't want to throw out everything that we've been about and that's been successful, but we want to get better. The league's getting better and we want to evolve.”
Skillful Argentine playmaker Luciano Acosta arrived on loan from Boca Juniors; Antonio Nocerino was aggressively pursued, only for Eastern Conference counterparts Orlando City to nip in and snare the Italian midfielder, reportedly breaking MLS tampering rules in the process.
Closer to home, D.C. picked up Marcelo Sarvas, Lamar Neagle and Patrick Nyarko, technical players with strong MLS pedigrees who were ready to leave their clubs in Colorado, Seattle and Chicago, respectively. Wide midfielder Nick DeLeon has moved centrally in an attempt to make fuller use of his traits.
Luciano Acosta injection represents DCU's attempted shift in style. (Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports)
To a significant degree, United's hand was forced: They lost their engine room when ironman Perry Kitchen played out his contract and departed for Europe in the hopes of improving his U.S. national team chances, and post-concussion symptoms drove veteran Davy Arnaud into retirement. But fresh blood was prioritized, and ample TAM remains: D.C. are prepared to spend on further attacking reinforcements this summer if the opportunities present themselves. TAM is criticized for its deeply MLS-ian nature – complex, non-transparent, centrally-run. Yet it nonetheless represents a marked step forward in ambition, and it demands much the same of those who have been empowered to spend it.
Can homegrown coaches like Olsen come to grips with the new challenges, the larger and increasingly cultured talent pool that the league's new spending is designed to cultivate? Can an MLS lifer produce the managerial sophistication required to bring a utilitarian side up to championship-caliber tempo?
Some observers have mocked Olsen for what they view as tactical simplicity. However, Magee – who served under respected Portland Timbers boss Caleb Porter before moving to D.C. – sees it differently.
“I've been astounded at how instinctual he is, in terms of managing people and managing games,” he said of Olsen. “One of his great strengths is, he doesn't think he knows everything. He empowers people who he feels do a good job.
“His ability to sniff out when guys are heading down a wrong path or when their confidence needs a boost or when they need a kick in the ass – I think he's incredible at that. That's not something you can teach; it's a way that you know people and you sense people and you figure out what they need. And he's as good as anybody at that, that I've been around.”
Olsen downplays the idea that 2016 calls for a dramatically different approach.
“It's still about evaluating your team: What are we capable of? And I think this team is capable of more possessions, more buildup,” he said last week. “This isn't a philosophical change. I'm always pragmatic. I'm always going to size up my group and see what we're capable of. How can we win games?
Early returns on United's process are inconclusive. They missed an inviting opportunity in CONCACAF Champions League that probably arrived too soon in this process, falling 3-1 on aggregate to Mexico's Queretaro in the quarterfinals of that tournament. Then they played the vaunted LA Galaxy off their own park for the first 45 minutes of their MLS season opener, only for the five-time champions to blow them away with four unanswered second-half goals – two via set pieces, a cardinal sin in Olsen's eyes – in a 4-1 final result.
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Last weekend's trip to New England featured the old D.C. resilience, as the Revolution outpaced them in nearly every statistical category but could not finish their chances in a 0-0 draw.
Olsen's most useful tool may well be his own evolution in the craft, most of it gained via trial by fire. Where he once gave in to the temptation to jump into small-sided games alongside his charges, now he usually stalks the training ground with the detachment of a European-style manager. He believes his players are the ones best-suited to find the solutions to the challenges ahead.
“It's a long season. They get tired of hearing you,” said Olsen. “Bark and bitch all day long every day, they'll tune you out by May. So it's a balance and sometimes you've got to let them talk, sometimes you've got to let them solve it.
“That's the one constant in this: Every season is completely different, and all the problem solving is based on similar things, but each circumstance is different. It's always changing, and the game's changing and evolving. That's part of the intrigue and fun of this job.”
More features every day at FourFourTwo.com/us/Across much of the English-speaking world, a struggle is raging over control of education. The good news is that politicians, the people we elect to make decisions on our behalf, seem to be winning.
The pattern is remarkably consistent. Governments, both of the Left and the Right, are wresting control back from teachers' organisations. They have realised that education is too important to be left in the hands of teachers.
Julia Gillard, now prime minister of Australia, made her name as a reformist education minister. In that capacity she launched My School, a website that provides access to information on achievement standards in nearly 10,000 Australian schools. (Within hours, the website crashed because it couldn't cope with the demand.)
Needless to say, Australian teachers opposed My School. They raised the bogey - all too familiar here - of “league tables” which would enable parents to compare schools. Nothing seems to terrify teachers' unions more than the thought of parents and taxpayers being given information about how schools are performing.
The launch of My School was preceded by the introduction of national literary and numeracy tests, also vehemently opposed by teachers and academics.
More recently, Ms Gillard took the first step toward introducing performance pay for teachers, another initiative bitterly resisted by teachers' unions. Payment on merit supposedly undermines the sacred principle of “collegiality”, because teachers argue it has the potential to sow discord in the staffroom. Diddums, as Helen Clark might have said.
The parallels with New Zealand are obvious, except that we're several years behind. The arguments are exactly the same here as in Australia. What's noteworthy is that the Australian reforms were instituted by a Labor government, which might normally be expected to take the teachers' side. That Ms Gillard was prepared to bulldoze teacher opposition aside indicates that education reform was seen as too vital to delay any longer, regardless of teachers' protests.
Similar scenarios have been played out elsewhere. In 2001 the United States Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, a critical component of which is standards-based education reform. Sound familiar? It's based on the premise that measurable goals - such as our national standards - can improve outcomes in education.
American teachers fought the changes and continue to oppose attempts to impose greater accountability. A key issue in a recent Chicago teachers' strike was a requirement that schools introduce an evaluation system in which a teacher's rating depends partly on student test scores. But as The New York Times commented in an editorial, teacher evaluation is increasingly popular across the US and is unlikely to be rolled back.
As in Australia, agreement on the need for education reform transcends normal political divides. The Obama Administration supports merit pay, charter schools (another idea that induces apoplexy in teachers' union leaders) and teacher assessment systems.
In Britain, the Conservative-Liberal coalition government passed legislation in 2010 allowing parents, teachers, charities and businesses to set up their own version of charter schools, known as free schools (so called because no fees are charged).
Funded by the taxpayer but outside the control of local authorities, free schools were introduced in the face of almost hysterical opposition from the National Union of Teachers. The NUT also fought the “academies” programme instituted by Tony Blair's Labour government in 2000, under which schools enjoy a high degree of autonomy but remain publicly funded.
“Academies” were an innovative attempt to deal with the problem of entrenched failure within schools with a record of low academic achievement. You'd think the teachers' union would applaud such an initiative, but no; academies were seen as a threat to centralised control of education, which in turn is a threat to union power.
The common theme across all these countries is that governments, dissatisfied not only with performance in the education sector but also the lack of transparency and accountability, are forcing through changes in the face of determined opposition from teachers' organisations which are understandably reluctant to relinquish their power.
Politicians, the representatives of the people, are quite properly reclaiming the right to decide how schools should be run. This ranges from demanding better information for parents (in other words, accountability) to providing options beyond the narrow ones available under the status quo (in other words, choice - the ultimate dirty word in the teachers' union lexicon).
This process is much further advanced elsewhere than in New Zealand, where both National and Labour governments have allowed themselves to be bullied and intimidated by belligerent teachers' organisations. (Remember National's feeble attempt to allow schools a degree of autonomy by introducing bulk funding in the 1990s, and how the initiative was sabotaged by teacher defiance?)
What we are now seeing played out are the opening skirmishes in a battle for the control of education. And while Education Minister Hekia Parata may lack the experience and political skill for such a challenging job (her performance so far has been of the bull-in-a-china-shop variety), she must stand her ground.
Before anyone accuses me of teacher-bashing, I acknowledge that my four children have had some admirable and dedicated teachers to whom I will always be grateful. The problem lies not with individual teachers but with the collectivist mindset of their unions, which have called the shots for so long that they genuinely believe they have the right to determine education policy.
But teachers and academics no longer control the debate and I sense public opinion is shifting. New Zealand is at last having a vigorous public discussion about important education issues.
The response to Fairfax Media's recent release of information about individual school performance has been huge. Parents have had a tiny taste of how things might be in an education sector where schools are no longer, in Ms Parata's words, “a secret society”.Faced with a dwindling population and severe labor shortage, Japan aims to attract more foreign workers, but a rapidly depreciating yen and lack of rights stand in the way.
"Japan needs to compete for foreign workers against other developed Asian nations – the weakening yen won't make the country any more attractive" said Cesar V. Santoyo, a former priest who worked with migrants in Hong Kong before founding SOLS, a non-profit organization that retrains Filipino women living in Japan as English teaching assistants.
The yen has been in a downward spiral since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe introduced a series of fiscal and monetary stimulus measures to spur the economy in 2013. The U.S. dollar is near a seven-year high against the yen, up around 40 percent since Abe took office in December 2012.
Read more: New repair manual needed for Japan's broken economy
A weaker yen makes yen-based wages less attractive to workers that plan to make remittances to family members back home.
Only while we need them
Two large publicly-financed construction projects – the ongoing reconstruction of the northeast region hit by the 2011 earthquake and the construction of venues for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics – have brought the issue into focus. Japan's construction industry faces a shortfall of 230,000 workers in 2015, government statistics show.
Japan's ageing population and low birth rates further underscore the need for labor. The population shrank for the third straight year in 2013, according to the Internal Affairs Ministry, and is projected to shrink by a third by 2060, increasing the need to import caretakers for children and the elderly, especially if housewives – traditionally caretakers in Japan – are expected to join the workforce.
Read more: Betting on social change in Japan
But voters find immigration unpalatable. Just 12 percent of respondents in the most recent government survey feel there should be more foreign workers.
As a result, Abe's ruling party insists there is "no immigration policy," just a plan to "expand the utilization of foreign talent," in its manifesto for this Sunday's national elections.The THR contributing editor interviewed more than 200 people including the president and senior staff to chronicle the first nine months of this administration.
The Hollywood Reporter contributing editor Michael Wolff is publishing an inside account of the current White House. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House comes out Jan. 9, 2018, publisher Henry Holt announced.
Wolff had what the publisher calls “extraordinary access” to President Trump’s administration, and the resulting book is based on more than 200 interviews with the president, “most” senior staffers and their confidantes. Holt promises that the book “offers a shocking fly-on-the-wall view” of the first nine months of the presidency.
The release announcing the book adds, “Wolff shows how Trump and his team careened from one crisis to the next during the administration’s first nine months. Many of Trump’s closest advisers were politically inexperienced and untested; from the start, bitter rivalries if not open warfare paralyzed the new presidency. And at the center of the White House was Trump himself: impulsive, fiery, and wholly new to the world of politics, he consistently broke the mold of presidential character, purpose, and precedent.”
In the statement Wolff says, “The United States is in the midst of the most intense political storm since Watergate, and my aim in reporting and writing this book was to see life inside White House through the eyes of the people who are closest to the center of this hurricane. Perhaps not since the Tudors has palace intrigue been so corrosive and lethal, nor the king so volatile and so in need of instant gratification.”
Wolff is the author of six previous books, including Rupert Murdoch biography The Man Who Owns the News. He’s won two National Magazine Awards and in addition to THR he’s written for Vanity Fair, New York and USA Today.
President and publisher Stephen Rubin acquired the book for Holt. Wolff was represented by Andrew Wylie of The Wylie Agency.Nearly four decades ago, the NBA took its first steps on Chinese soil with a visit from the Washington Bullets. The team played exhibition games in Beijing and Shanghai in 1979, and, as it turned out, offered a glimpse of the future of basketball in China.
One of the players on the Shanghai team that opposed the Bullets was a center named Yao Zhiyuan, whose son provided a tipping point for explosive NBA growth in China when he was drafted No. 1 overall in 2002 by the Houston Rockets. Yao Ming would become one of the most influential players in the game's history, ultimately earning eight All-Star selections and membership in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
The NBA has since grown into a sports juggernaut among Chinese fans, both domestic and abroad.
Houston Rockets Chinese New Year jersey. Courtesy NBA
To wit, the league announced details Wednesday of its sixth annual NBA Chinese New Year Celebration event, revealing commemorative uniforms to be worn by the Rockets, Golden State Warriors, Toronto Raptors and Washington Wizards. Those teams and several others will host activities during the celebration, which runs from Jan. 27 to Feb. 12.
Perhaps the biggest highlight will be the retirement of Yao's No. 11 jersey by the Rockets at halftime of their Feb. 3 game against the Chicago Bulls. Additionally, the league produced a commercial featuring star players Stephen Curry, Anthony Davis, James Harden and Jeremy Lin to mark the event, which will feature a record 60 game broadcasts across myriad networks in China.
As the league prepares to observe the Year of the Rooster, it offers an opportunity to survey the current state of the NBA in China.
Basketball was quietly introduced to China in the 1890s by missionaries from the YMCA. But there is nothing modest about the number of people consuming the sport there now. More than 760 million people watched at least one NBA game on television in China last year, according to the league. The NBA has played 22 preseason games in China over the years, and all have been sellouts.
Washington Wizards Chinese New Year jersey. Courtesy NBA
"I chalk up our current business success and popularity to being authentic and genuine with our fans," NBA China CEO David Shoemaker said by phone from Hong Kong. "When we play our games in China, it's very important to our fans that we bring an authentic NBA basketball experience -- the teams, the dance teams, the dunk teams, the video boards and the DJs -- to the point that if you didn't know better, if you were sitting in the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, you might think you were in the Staples Center in Los Angeles."
Shoemaker said the NBA intends to continue staging exhibition games annually in China, but there are no current plans to contest regular-season games there.
Golden State Warriors Chinese New Year jersey. Courtesy NBA
"We get asked frequently about whether we have plans to do that, and there are certainly some logistical hurdles to it," Shoemaker said. "But more importantly, I worry more about a regular-season game because it's all business during the regular season. During the preseason, the teams come over and they have such a great attitude to experiencing the culture, to giving back to the community, to participating in fan events and partner events. We get a ton out of it, and the teams get a ton out of it."
Shoemaker leads a staff of more than 100 NBA employees in Beijing and approximately 75 more based in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei. The Canada native |
to get every night.”
Casspi played a variety of roles under Malone, Tyrone Corbin and George Karl. But each of the Kings three coaches asked him to provide a spark, regardless of whether he started or came off the bench.
“He’s always just a huge energy guy -- a bundle of energy,” Reynolds said. “Now he’s channeling that a little bit. I think he’s become a very productive player.”
It’s not hard to see the difference in Casspi’s game from his first stint in Sacramento until now. Even his demeanor on the court has improved greatly as he’s matured as a player.
“He used to be really hard on himself to a point that I thought it was detrimental, because he’s a perfectionist,” Napear said. “You want that, but I don’t think he channeled it the right way. At times, when things weren’t going well, he was so hard on himself that became more difficult to dig out of a hole.”
GROWING UP IN THE NBA
Casspi doesn’t dig holes for himself anymore. In fact, he has developed into a team leader and voice of reason both on and off the floor for Sacramento. In seven seasons, he has gone from a young man looking to please everyone to a veteran willing to do anything to help the team win.
“He was a wild boy when he first came in,” DeMarcus Cousins said. “Just to see him grow as a professional, as a man, he’s one of my good friends as well. If there’s one guy I know I can go into battle with, it’s Omri.”
That is high praise from Cousins. The two were close as young players, but they are even closer now. Cousins joined his friend and teammate on a trip to Israel this summer and the bond they share runs deep.
“It just opens your eyes,” Cousins said of his journey to Israel with Casspi. “Problems throughout the world, other cultures -- it’s a beautiful thing. I’m glad I could experience that.”
Cousins lived through the early years of Casspi’s career, but the secondary commitments of his teammate were likely lost on the All-Star big man. The Israel visit helped add perspective.
“He’s an icon to many people over there,” Cousins said. “The way he carries himself -- true professional. He carries himself like a grown man, the way I want to carry myself and the way a lot of people should carry themselves.”
Casspi and Cousins share an agent, and according to the big man, he lobbied both sides to ensure the forward’s return. The result was a two-year, $6-million deal this summer to remain in Sacramento, a place where he would love to finish his career.
“He’s going to bring it every night, he’s going to play hard every possession, he’s going to leave it all on the floor,” Cousins said. “I respect those types of players.
It’s been a journey and Casspi is just 27-years-old. From Sacramento to Cleveland to Houston and back to Sacramento, this is the life of an NBA player.
“There are a lot of ups and downs,” Casspi said. “I learned a lot about yourself, my family, my close circle. I’m happy to survive through the waves and be in a position now to help this team.”
He is comfortable in his own skin. When asked whether he would prefer to come off the bench or start, he just lays back in his chair and says: “Whatever helps the team win is fine with me.”
The ego of a young man is gone. The confidence of a mature adult is obvious.
Casspi has grown up in the NBA. Under an even brighter light than the typical player, he has survived a league that has chewed up and spit out plenty.
He has found a place to settle down and to make roots. He is engaged and plans to marry next summer after the season ends.
“I used to move around from apartment to apartment, and now I have a house, a home, pictures all over, a family,” Casspi said. “My fiance is with me, someone to talk about whatever, whenever -- somebody to go to the movies with. You can just really focus on what you need to do. I feel like my fiance really helped me to grow my game.”
Seldom does a player have a career come full circle like Casspi’s has. He still has plenty of time to leave his stamp on the game, but he is appreciative of everything he has lived through in his seven seasons in the league.
“Every day that goes by I’m fortunate to be in this position,” Casspi said. “Every time I step on that court, I play my heart out, not because of the money, not because of whatever. It’s because of my teammates, it’s because I love this game, and I’m really blessed to be in a position to play in the NBA.”He remembered his father, the Valkar of years ago, teaching him from a great star-chart on the wall of the ruined palace. “The yellow sun that neighbors the triple-star just beyond the last rim of the Darkness only to be approached from zenith or the drift will riddle you –” THE SUN SMASHER: A PULP MAGAZINE SPACE OPERA CLASSIC (sic)
Yes, as an escape from the current sadness-of-the-canines, I’ve been reading Edmond Hamilton. Ironic really, since Hamilton’s an author with rockets on the cover, square jawed heroes within, and solutions worked out through — mostly — superior guts backed up by awesome Harrington-grade firepower.
Actually, Hamilton’s politics evolved with the century.
His early books are all about paternalistic bureaucracies and mighty empires. His later books are more questioning, with bureaucrats as antagonists, and Imperialism something one might sensibly turn one’s back on.
(I’m torn here, because I want to say more, cite examples, but I don’t want to spoiler the books for you. If you like vintage SF, and haven’t read Hamilton, then you’re in for a treat. Imagine if EE Doc Smith could actually write. )
All that said, reading Hamilton for politics is like listening to Hendrix for theme and variation — it’s there if you insist on looking for it, but the visceral impact is much greater.
I think of Edmond Hamilton as Hubble Telescope fanfiction.
Finally the cruisers decelerated. Orion Nebula was now a glow in the starry heavens far behind them. Close ahead lay the shining cluster of suns of the Pleiades. And near the Pleiades’ famous beacon group there stretched a far-flung echelon of tiny sparks. The sparks were ships. Warships of the Mid-Galactic Empire’s great navy cruising here off the Pleiades, one of the many mighty squadrons watching and warding the Empire’s boundaries. The Star Kings [The Two Thousand Centuries]
Yes, throughout his books, the science of space travel is not only dodgy, it’s hand-wavy. However, whether in the 1930s or 1960s. the science of space itself seems mostly up-to-date.
Hamilton wants to lean out of the window and look at the passing red giant, before weaving through a dust cloud — he always calls them “drift” — and plunging at 5C towards an ancient solar system, the hyperspace radar showing a massive fleet several light years to starboard. It’s all a bit like Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey but with space battles.
As Douglas Adams put it:
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
That’s what you get from Hamilton, but without the laugh track.
Hamilton and Lovecraft were a half generation apart (born 1904 versus 1890), but I think their imaginations both resulted from the same intellectual Big Bang.
As Charles Stross put it:
…the universe H. P. Lovecraft was born into consisted of a single galaxy containing about a million stars, and our own star was less than 100 million years old….The universe Lovecraft died in was very different…vastly larger… with over a hundred million stars in our own galaxy, and many tens or hundreds of millions of other galaxies estimated, and the upper limit on the sun’s age raised to five billion years, the universe had expanded by two orders of magnitude in age and nine orders of magnitude in size (as measured by the number of stars) during Lovecraft’s life. That’s eleven orders of magnitude in just over four decades. What Scared HP Lovecraft
Whereas Lovecraft saw the wider universe, blinked, then succumbed to Cosmic Horror (cosmic agoraphobia, cosmic xenophobia, cosmic paranoia…), Hamilton dived right in and revelled in the wild sea of stars, a happy literary porpoise riding Astronomy’s bow wave.
The effect is odd but pleasing, because in other ways his books are always “of their time”.
His first two series, Interstellar Patrol and Captain Future are so reminiscent of the old 1930s movie serials that I actually gave in and read the while listening to a playlist inspired by the original Flash Gordon soundtrack! However, you find yourself reading in black and white, with wobbly special effects, then out of the blue proper Science Fiction turns everything technicolor:
Snake-vines hanging from the tall trunks swayed blindly toward the quartet as they sped past. Sucker-flies swarmed around them, and deadly brain-ticks were visible on leaves. Somewhere off in the jungle, a siren-bird was charming its prey with weird song. Now and then a tree-octopus flitted hastily through the fronds above like a white ghost. Captain Future Omnibus #1.
Or hits you with realistic non-humanoid aliens:
They were globes, globes of pink, unhealthy-looking flesh more than a yard in diameter, each upheld by six slender, insect like legs, not more than twelve inches long, and each possessing two similar short, thin limbs which served them as arms and which projected at opposite points from their pink, globular bodies. And between those arms, set directly in the side of the round body itself, were the only features—two round black eyes of large size, browless and pupilless, and a circle of pale skin which beat quickly in and out with their breathing. Crashing Suns (Baen, not on Amazon btw).
It’s as if Buster Crabbe and his cast-mates had wandered into a modern SF novel!
Post World War Two, Hamilton churns out novellas and short stories. Some of these, especially the Star Kings sequence belong to what one editor plausibly calls the “Two Thousand Centuries”, a well worked out chronology reminiscent of Robert E Howard’s Hyborian Age:
The Era of Interplanetary Exploration and Colonization – 1971-2011. The Era of Interplanetary Frontiers – 2011-2247. The Era of Interplanetary Secession – 2247-2621. The Era of Interstellar Exploration – 2300-2621. The Era of Interstellar Colonization – 2621-62,339. The Era of the Federation and United Worlds – 62,339-129,999. The Era of the Star Kings – 130,000-202,115. BATTLE FOR THE STARS [THE TWO THOUSAND CENTURIES]
The feel is often Dune-meets-Star Wars, with princesses and emperors and super science. If these books didn’t influence Simon R Green’s (spectacularly everything but the kitchen sink with added debauchery) Deathstalker, then they should have done!
This is the point where his career overlaps with that of Arthur C Clarke, and our action heroes wander into more modern SFnal settings, such as in the Haunted Stars, where we discover our descent from a lost empire, and a Vorlon-like guardian race that forbids us Galactic empire. The theme plus the real-world political setting makes it sit well next to Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood’s End, and 2001.
Finally, in the late 60s, we come to Starwolf, three MilSF novels with a hint of Hammer’s Slammers. Apart from the usual problems with retro futures, these would pass muster today, so much so that Baen publishes them.
In case you hadn’t realised by now, if Hamilton didn’t invent all the tropes, he was an early adopter and enhancer of them, so much so that I strongly suspect he was Douglas — “never read beyond page 10” — Adams’s unacknowledged primer for the genre.
Hamilton’s career was also long. His first short story hit the pulps in 1928, when he was 24. His last novel went out in the late 1960s. He began as a good writer, with a clear prose style and little urge to ornament (though his Captain Future novels, being aimed at older kids, are an As You Know Bob-fest). His writing if anything became better as he aged — no going off the ball for this writer.
He was also — which is why I started reading him — married to Leigh Brackett. Though they were quite different writers, I think they shared some sensibilities;
The gusty red torchlight was almost lost in that vast, ruined gloom. But through the great rent in the ceiling, two ghost-like ocher moons now shed a faint low. By the uncertain light, Banning followed Sohmsei to the black stone seat. It was uncarved, stark – its very lack of ornament speaking a pride too great for show. Banning took his seat upon it, and a great whispering sigh went up from the Arraki. THE SUN SMASHER: A PULP MAGAZINE SPACE OPERA CLASSIC.
M Harold Page (www.mharoldpage.com) is a full-time author. Buy his action-packed Dark Age adventure, Shieldwall: Barbarians! from Amazon. You can also learn how to plan and write your novels using his Storyteller Tools: Outline from vision to finished novel without losing the magic.Prepare for trouble!
And make it double!
Now this post is about a deck archetype that I’ve playtested the last month – but we’ll start with defining the meta which is the reason behind it all.
Defining Meta
Meta is what we define what people play most. The strongest things we’ll see a lot of. What we think we’ll meet the next time we play so we can prepare against it now. But how does one go about defining and defeating meta? When there is a meta, there will be anti-meta to defeat it. This means that the actual meta is the anti-meta in which case there is an anti-anti-meta to defeat the anti-meta. To play around this we need anti-anti-anti-meta. But this gets too complex in the end and we can never actually KNOW for sure what we’ll face so any attempt at countering meta could just be called anti-meta and we assume that we understand the concept of trying to defeat what we think the best, most probably and most competitive cards available.
While incredibly complex to counter every popular card, we can make things easier by blanketing effects and generalize card types to make it easier to calculate what’s good against it. We don’t have to think about how to counter every single card in the entire game either but only the most annoying and meta-defining effects and picking things that don’t have too many glaring weaknesses. These different FF TCG cards/combos/archetypes are what I’d call current meta:
Midrange [higher cost curve, some early cards survive transition to mid and late game well]
Rush [low cost curve, haste, unblockable, tempospells]
Snow/Shiva/Chemist/Laguna/Jihl
Removal [Bounce]
Removal [Break]
Burn
Minwu + ~8-9k+ bodies
Passive control: Terra/Juja/Summoner/Time-Mage and more
These are the things every deck must clear right now because these are what mechanics I call “Meta” at the moment. With these assumptions made one must consider what anti-meta would be. The most consistent way to get around most of these while not leaving too many glaring holes in the armour.
Consistency
Sephiroth is a perfect example of a card that counters many things, he has a great on-play effect and is strong overall. But Sephiroth is often a terrible choice anyway. He’s an amazing card that can really shut people down completely and end the game in your favor by just making his appearance. And killing Minwu while at it for bonus points. Great. But then the opponent could have Leviathan, Yuna Ex, Shiva, Mustadio, Odin, Alexander and all sorts of cards that just makes Sephiroth and the 8 cost investment vanish before he can even block an attack. Can’t even discard him for CP. Hence Sephiroth is usually an inconsistent play. But wow, isn’t he just amazingly powerful? Sure, as long as you can discard him if you need. Perfect if you have more backup removal as well to easily win a war of attrition! Maybe this isn’t the way to win, but for some decks it might be a great tool if this is just what’s missing. A sudden sharp edge.
But on topic, Sephiroth is a big risk with many weaknesses. Not exactly what I’m aiming for here. To more carefully define what we ARE looking for here I want cards that avoid most risks.
Defining our consistency goals is difficult but is about generalizing what a card should be in my head.
Easy to play, shouldn’t require finding a lot of stuff to work nor too many synergies that creates weaknesses
Low enough cost curve to have a plethora of early game options
Good transition to mid and late game.
Being able to make many reactive plays that messes with their attacks and defenses so they are scared. The feeling that we can do more changes in this subphase.
Should be able to sometimes counter big plays like Omnislash & Odin, but not rely completely on it
So ~3ish costed cards, with decent/great abilities with preferably relevant powerlevels like 7k-10k range. Without big drawbacks or requirements. Sounds easy… X(
Anti-Meta
So with Meta and a few consistency goals in mind. Here are some examples of what I’d call Anti-Meta summarized as tactical or strategic choices.
Problem/Meta Counter/antimeta Removal (7cost Odin/Alexander/Gilgamesh/Omnislash) Low cost or great on play effects reduce effectiveness of removal Bounce/Leviathan Low cost or great on play effects reduce effectiveness of removal Loads of removal aimed at forwards Spending more on backups that strengthens your hold of the game makes sense Dull/freeze Reactivates are amazing! But brave can help somewhat too. Multiple cards > few expensive cards Minwu To combat Minwu we need a way to deal with Backups. Preferably a way to deal with certain 3-4 cost ones aswell. Rush decks Rush decks revolve around using the big portion of start resources for attack. Stabilize by playing 2-3 cheap forwards. As rush often use dull, reactivates are key. Superfriends 9k+ All decks must be able to handle 9k drops. While preferably being cheaper. Squall and many 9k+ characters aswell as sylph assists a lot with this, while freeze/dull often help us deal with what we can’t deal with. Unblockable cards like Zidane/Yuffie/red mage A bunch of 2-3 cost units and it’s normally very easy. Lann is more difficult!
So how about we stack power on cheap units? This way we have a low cost curve for a good early game and a great midgame because of the powerspikes and synergies. Keep a near monocolor for consistency in type of cards drawn. And great cost efficience in transition to the late game! With wind as backup we also have a really great counter to both Ice decks and most big removals and several other plays as a base to found our decks on.
Putting theories into practise
Freeze & dull is the most common meta atm
Double buffing and then sylph adds ridiculous power to 2-4 cost creatures – they are easily 8-10k and with great effects.
In the mid and late game your 2-4costs matches your opponents 4-6 costs.
With low cost curve, but great mid and late game viability, cheap forwards really are flexible.
Wind provides several great outs that each of them destroy Snow
On a lower cost curve deck, removals are not as effective
Most amazing (S) effects and removals can be countered by Aerith. For literally one card. And it also reactivates all forwards. It’s also free to play.
Huge power on cheap creatures is kind of broken
Spending resources on our backrow is great as meta usually isn’t about destroying all of our backups. Note that even if they’d do, they’d have to remove 7-8 of them to shut us down, which isn’t realistic atm unless earth/wind with dark Sephiroth. With 6x +1k boosters the opponent will be hard pressed to even remove half of those.
Near mono-color for consistency
Will be stronger and stronger in the future because of better more in-colour cards
So we get strong units for cheap. What’s the downside? Well it’s that Opus one doesn’t really have a whole lot of each color so we have to pick a few a bit too vanilla cards. All the same, being vanilla means power is high! And that is consistency. I mean. 3 cost for 9k? Delita is jeallous of us right now, having to kill a break a friend for that kind of power.
The interesting here is that this strategy really works with all colours, except for wind for obvious reasons. I’ve playtested it against all types of meta lists and they perform consistently. They don’t always win but just using the same concept feels powerful and it’s relatively difficult to deal with for all meta matchups. Superfriends types of decks are the most difficult to deal with, but the lost cost curve usually let’s us stay ahead. But each colour is very different. Note that we usually play out the matches like a midrange type of deck. We are strong late game, and ramp up early. The low cost curve makes sure we do not lose to agression. And all characters should be playable from any game turn if needed – so like 1-2x 5-6cost drops at the most is preferred. The midrange part comes from all cards getting their power during mid game and keep that power for the late game.
List ideas
Note that these aren’t all well tried and true, but thoroughly thought through each one to give each one of them win conditions on top of a very consistent base. These are skeletons to prove as examples of what could be done. All decks have to be adapted to local meta aswell. So they aren’t final, perfect nor amazing. But I’ve playtested them all and really enjoyed playing with this archetype of deck – knowing that it’ll only become stronger once the cardpool is bigger so we don’t have to run non-top tier cards.
Imagine a deck with +2k power boost where all cards were like Firion, Squall L, Cloud (L), Gilgamesh, Terra or Kuja. That is terrifying indeed. And it’ll happen in a set or two. For now we’ll have to settle with for example 9k knight for 3cost, or 8k Leila with on-hit draw. Or why not Knight (1) with potential of being 8k with first strike? 9k with Sylph. They are just here to fill out – but still present a clear opportunity. So many hillarious possibilities if we push this to the limits.
What kind of fun deck would you make with this type of monochromatic abberation? 😀645X363 - No Companion - Full Sharing - Additional videos are suggested - Policy/Regulation/Blogs
An employee of a Utah-based solar power company unwittingly attended a small roundtable discussion with President Obama.
Marvin Lance Futch, who works for Lehi, Utah-based Vivint Solar Inc., volunteered last week to attend an event that Vivint believed would be a news conference during which Futch would sit in the audience, he told The Associated Press.
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Instead, Futch ended up wearing a white polo shirt to a small meeting with Obama, Sen. Orrin Hatch Orrin Grant HatchThe FDA crackdown on dietary supplements is inadequate Orrin Hatch Foundation seeking million in taxpayer money to fund new center in his honor Mitch McConnell has shown the nation his version of power grab MORE (R), Rep. Rob Bishop Robert (Rob) William BishopAddressing repair backlog at national parks can give Congress a big win Senate votes to extend key funding mechanism for parks Republicans push back at first climate hearings MORE (R) and Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker (D), among others.
Futch, a solar cell designer, went to the event because the White House had asked Vivint to send someone with military experience. He serves in the Utah Air National Guard, and the event took place at Hill Air Force Base.
“If I had known it was my commander in chief, I definitely would have been wearing my blues,” Futch told AP, referring to the Air National Guard’s dress uniform.
Obama headed to Utah to roll out a program to train military veterans and outgoing service members to work in the solar power industry, including through sales and installation of solar panels.
Obama asked Futch at the meeting about what Vivint does and how solar jobs could benefit veterans. Futch told AP that he said the industry is growing and can provide a stable career after military service.
A Reddit user who said he is Futch’s co-worker first reported Futch’s involvement Wednesday. The user said Vivint officials probably would not have sent Futch if they knew the nature of the event.
But Vivint has nonetheless highlighted Futch’s work. The company tweeted a photo of the meeting, writing that Futch was “repping the everyday solar guy … like a boss.”Walk into Gary and Michelle Hogue’s downtown Portland micro-loft, and you’re immediately standing in the kitchen, living room and bedroom. It’s like a studio apartment, only smaller.
At 288 square feet, the place is less than a quarter the size of their last apartment in the same neighborhood.
The Hogues liquidated most of their belongings leading up to the big move in February: The couch, La-Z-Boy, bed, extra clothes, shoes, and kitchen appliances.
“We just got rid of everything,” said Michelle Hogue, who has her own hair-styling business. “We went through all our stuff little by little. We sold things on Craigslist and in an apartment sale. The people in the apartments across the hall came and bought our stuff.”
They made a dozen trips to Goodwill to donate other things that wouldn’t fit into the new space, and they bought ottomans to replace their bigger chairs and couches.
“It was hard because all our comfort went out the window,” Michelle said. “I’m kind of getting used to it, but there’s no backs on our chairs to lean against.”
They bought a bed that folds up into a couch, built a closet to organize their linens and clothes, and hung curtains to separate their bedroom from the rest of the apartment.
The Hogues had decided they wanted to downsize mostly to save money, but they thought they’d have to move to Milwaukie to find the right place. Then they discovered micro-lofts.
“We’re living three blocks from where we were living,” said Gary Hogue, who works as an independent animator. “And we’re saving about $500 a month.”
Micro-lofts in Vancouver, B.C., have been dubbed “shrinking condos” and “luxury shantytowns for hipsters.”
They’ve been done up with “murphy everything” – tables that fold out from fold-up beds – and they’ve been dressed down, with microwaves replacing ovens.
The Hogues got rid of all their baking gear and have found a way to make three-minute kale chips in their microwave.
“We’ve had to learn some new ways to eat, but it’s been pretty cool becaue we’ve figured it out,” he said. “We’ve learned how to prepare vegetables tons of different ways in the microwave.”
The owners of the Everett Micro-Lofts, Rudy Munzel and Gary Owca, scooped up the vacant Everett Hotel at NW Everett and Broadway a few years ago despite the fact that rain flowed right through the roof.
They turned the old hotel rooms into 18 rental units that still have many features of the 1914 building. It’s not LEED certified, said Munzel. But it’s pretty sustainable.
“We took every piece of wood, every piece of trim. We took it down, and we saved it,” he said. “We pulled all the nails and we reused all of it. We reused the old closets and the old medicine cabinets.”
Munzel and Owca are targeting a demographic they say is underserved and growing: People with $35,000-$40,000 incomes who want to live downtown.
“They want to be where the action is,” said Munzel. “They believe in sustainability. They want to work, live, shop right downtown, and how is that possible with the cost of everything going up? The only answer, historically, is to make smaller units so they’re more affordable.”
Gary Hogue said eventually he and his wife would like to buy a place, and he’s learned that he’s willing to trade space for the downtown location.
“We like being in the city. We definitely decided that,” he said. “Being in this small a space helped me realize I wouldn’t mind a smaller condo at all.”
Michelle Hogue said the micro-loft is small enough that it’s easy to keep clean and fun to show off. But it’s still big enough for her dog to have places to sit, sleep and play.
“I sometimes miss having a couch and being able to kick my feet up, but I like that we get outside a lot. We’re one block from the Park Blocks and bars and everything,” she said. “I think we’ll buy some different chairs with backs and then we’ll be fine.”
More From EcotropeWhen it comes to devolution, be careful what you wish for. Angelo Salento explains how it went wrong in Italy.
We Italians tend to be believe our politics and history are unique. But there is a clear parallel between Italy’s experience of devolution and the description by Carol Craig of what happened in the Scottish referendum debate. She argued the Scottish debate was built on a misleading opposition and a false choice between optimism and pessimism. This is not a peculiarity of the Scottish situation, because much the same can be said about Italy’s experience.
In principle, decentralisation projects encourage optimism amongst democrats and progressives. Devolution protects local identities based on differences, while promoting the kind of autonomy and self-reliance that underpins progressive conceptions of social and economic development.
What is local can feel more authentic, less artificial. It can build participation, because what is centralised is by definition hierarchical. Local space is defined, grounded and democratic. We may lose faith in the idea of national utopias, but we retain our hopes for the local utopias.
So, progressives have a bias towards federalism. A well intended federal project can float on an optimism of the will. Against this, the disappointing experience of federalism produces a pessimism of the intellect. This is the case in Italy when we review the outcome of the constitutional reform that started in 1997 and which gave Italian regions unprecedented powers. Nearly 20 years later, the outcomes are unhappily different from what progressives hoped for.
One effect of the reforms has been to butress the claims for independence in the richest North Italian regions. The ‘federalist’ turn has justified the idea that North Italy is a victim of South Italy – that the rich are victims of the poor.
How could a progressive constitutional reform become perverted into such coarse reasoning? Part of the answer is that Italy devolved power in the 1990s when all across Europe the intellectual climate was changing so that Europe became a continent of competing territories. The imperative of competition – and more recently its companion, austerity – has become the basis of policy. Social cohesion has suffered as a result.
Consequently, the Italian reforms have exacerbated the divide between North and South. The reform devolved major functions to the regions – including those which affect the fundamental rights of citizens, like education, environment and health care. The result, especially since the 2008 crisis, has been that differences in regional resources and variable budget constraints have produced gross inequalities in social spending and quality of provision. Public spending on social services is over €200 per capita in some Northern regions, but less than €50 per capita in some parts of the South. This is simultaneously devolution to the South and secession by the North.
The nature and detail of the reforms was never made clear under Italy’s decentralisation reforms. This lack of clarity boosted the confidence, indeed megalomania, of the regional political class. This in turn produced institutional conflicts and endless litigation. In the last decade, and particularly since the crisis, Italy’s Constitutional Court has had to settle a growing number of disputes between the central state and regions. The increase in cases – from 52 in 2007 to 220 in 2012 – has created a demanding new workload for the Court.
The disputes relate to political struggles between central and regional elites. Ministries fiercely defend their prerogatives. The presidents of the regions, in turn, have gained excessive power and are now called ‘governors’ in journalistic jargon. Since 1999 regional presidents have been directly elected by citizens and have an absolute power over the executive, since the president (not the legislative assembly) directly appoints an executive committee. Under the banner of devolution, the regions have built a ‘post-democratic’ structure rather than a renewed democracy. The point is proved by the decline in turnout in regional elections: in Puglia, for example, voters’ turnout declined from about 85% in 1990 to 51% in 2015.
Twenty years after 1990s devolution, Italy should now be a national state, with 20 regions benefiting from enhanced political and economic autonomy. In fact, the result is 20 principalities, without an adequate national state. The crisis has affected all the principalities; many of the poorer ones are in a miserable condition. But there is limited scope to put this right: for several important functions there is no longer a unitary state requirement. Italians in principle have equal rights, but these are denied by the quasi-democratic or post-democratic institutions of devolved power. Even the equality of political rights is compromised, because every region establishes its own electoral law. Some have a party representation threshold of 3%, another at 5%, while others have a threshold at 8%. This suggests some regions feel uncomfortable with democracy.
What are the lessons of Italian devolution? The ideal of autonomy and self-determination in a Europe of territories is as valuable as ever. But Italy shows how the pursuit of regional autonomy can go wrong. It can boost political egos, chauvinism, the victim complex and a demand to put right the supposed wrongs of a long distant past.
Localism needs to be rethought because it should not produce a reckless plunge into national and international competition, nor a closed economy. Europe should abandon the neo-liberal obsession for competition and instead strengthen its foundational economy, build the infrastructure of social life and create the conditions for a full social citizenship.WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force has no immediate plans to put its nuclear-capable B-52 bombers back on 24-hour alert, although officials have acknowledged the service is making improvements to facilities that could support a change in status should U.S. Strategic Command make that decision.
In an Oct. 22 story, Defense One reported that the Air Force was preparing to put the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress back on 24-alert for the first time ever since 1991. The story, based on an interview with Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein, noted that an alert order had not been given by STRATCOM head Gen. John Hyten.
The report ignited a firestorm of media attention from mainstream publications that interpreted the return to alert status as a foregone conclusion, not as a possibility, and questioned whether this was yet another sign of increasing tension with North Korea.
In a statement, Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek clarified that a return to alert status is not imminent. However, she acknowledged there are preparations happening — albeit of a more mundane sort — that would support a future decision to return B-52s to a 24-hour alert should combatant commanders decide to do so down the line.
“Preparations like updating base infrastructure,” such as improvements to alert facilities, munitions storage and dining facilities; “conducting exercises; and modernizing equipment are necessary to maintain a baseline level of readiness,” she said. “We do this routinely as part of our organize, train and equip mission so our forces are ready to respond when called upon.”
B-21 cost info to stay secret despite new Air Force leadership The Air Force chief of staff reviews the B-21 program every few months to see whether new details can be released, but it will be “some time” before the service divulges more cost information, the Air Force undersecretary says.
Up until 1991, bombers equipped with nuclear weapons sat on the runway on “strip alert,” and pilots — temporarily housed in alert facilities — would prepare to grab their gear and take off if a contingency should arise.
That stopped after the fall of the Berlin Wall, said Brig. Gen. Ed Thomas, the Air Force‘s public affairs director, although the service maintains a continuous bomber presence in Guam.
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Part of the confusion likely stems from the convoluted chain of command involving the nation’s nuclear enterprise. It’s the responsibility of the Air Force chief of staff to ensure the service is manned, trained and equipped to respond to any contingency — basically to make certain that its bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles are ready to go.
“This is yet one more step in ensuring that we’re prepared,” Goldfein told Defense One during a six-day tour of Barksdale and other Air Force bases that support the nuclear mission. “I look at it more as not planning for any specific event, but more for the reality of the global situation we find ourselves in and how we ensure we’re prepared going forward.”
However, it’s up to the |
rides have fiercer endings. The mill chute is considered the predecessor to the modern-day log flume.
Notable installations [ edit ]
In popular culture [ edit ]
In the 1928 film The Crowd, a tunnel of love is featured in which the sides are voyeuristically pulled down at a place where couples are likely to be kissing. The 1951 Alfred Hitchcock film Strangers on a Train features a tunnel of love ride that becomes the scene of a murder.[5]
The tunnel of love was a favorite source of amusing scenes in Hanna-Barbera television series such as The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo, among others, often in a chase sequence gag in which rivals or combatants are shown entering the ride, then exiting in a romantic embrace. The tunnel of love has also been used in Disney cartoons, mainly a jealous Donald Duck storming the tunnel by foot and ruining the ride for a rival suitor and Daisy Duck.
In 1980, Dire Straits released a single entitled "Tunnel of Love" from their album Making Movies. Bruce Springsteen recorded an album called Tunnel of Love in 1987 and a song of the same name.[6]
A 1990 episode of the TV series 21 Jump Street was called "Tunnel of Love".
A tunnel of love is seen in a 1996 episode of Hey Arnold! called Operation Ruthless. A tunnel of love is also seen in a 2008 episode of The Simpsons called Love, Springfieldian Style and in a 2010 episode of the show American Dad! called "May the Best Stan Win".
In the graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, an alternative future story published in 1986 that features the Batman, super-villain Joker fights with Batman in a tunnel of love and manages, after putting the superhero into a fit of rage, to frame Batman for murder of the Joker.
Gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]This year's keynote speaker at the annual All Things Open conference is Red Hat's DeLisa Alexander, executive VP and head of Red Hat's human resources operations. DeLisa is not only in a professional position to comment on gender and diversity in open source and tech but has also personally campaigned for inclusiveness in the workplace to produce better outcomes for everybody.
DeLisa will also be moderating a panel on women in technology and open source at the conference.
In this interview we discuss how she came to work in open source, what companies can do to improve inclusiveness, and why gender diversity benefits everyone, not just women.
How did you come to work for Red Hat? Did you have much experience with open source beforehand?
My background is in law, and I joined Red Hat in 2001 as an assistant general counsel with our Legal team. I was hired to negotiate licenses and revenue deals, serving as a consultant and adviser to our business teams. I didn't know much about open source, but was intrigued by the idea of using copyright law to enforce sharing of code. It was the early stages of business development around open source, and we were figuring it out as we went along. Red Hat has always been a company with a strong sense of shared purpose and a unique culture, and that appealed to me from the very beginning. I feel fortunate to have joined Red Hat in those early years, because my position gave me a front-row seat to watch and contribute as open source evolved into a revolutionary force and ultimately something that most now consider mainstream.
You've been very vocal about using your elevated position to help other women in tech. What have been some of your major successes so far?
I've been so pleased with the momentum that's building around this topic. A few years ago at Red Hat, we launched a Women's Leadership Community. We wanted to connect women within our company, offer educational and networking opportunities, and ultimately, better support each other at every stage of our careers and lives. We started with a North America chapter and since then, the Women's Leadership Community has grown globally. One big win for the Women's Leadership Community at Red Hat has been bringing together women from different departments, from the corporate functions to women in engineering and sales. At our Women's Leadership Community events, you meet people from beyond your own team. We also post interesting articles and spark conversations on our global email list. These discussions show us how much we have in common, whether you work remotely or in an office, whether your team has more men or more women, whether you're in the United States or India. I'm also proud that Red Hat launched the Women in Open Source Award, which goes beyond helping women in technology. It's dedicated to bringing more women into open source and shining a spotlight on their contributions. Nominations open on October 13, and we're so excited to announce our first winner next June at the Red Hat Summit.
Do you think open source is more or less a welcoming environment for women? I've heard arguments on both sides, so I'm interested to hear your point of view as both a human resources leader and a woman in tech.
That depends greatly on the environment a particular open source community fosters. We've seen some great examples of open source communities that are welcoming to women and outreach efforts that inspire more women to get involved. The work of groups like Ada Initiative, the Outreach Program for Women, and OpenHatch speaks volumes about the potential of open source communities to be empowering places for women. But there are stories of the opposite as well. What I think gives women a great opportunity in open source is that most open source communities greatly value personal freedom and meritocracy. On a community's best days, these elements create a highly innovative, productive environment that's inspiring to be a part of and renders projects immune to many of the daily challenges and frustrations that plague bureaucratic organizations.
Why do you think that tech companies, including Red Hat, struggle with diversity? What are some of the things Red Hat is doing to address the gender imbalance?
Fundamentally, it's a problem in the pipeline. If you look at the United States, for example, things were going pretty well for women in technology up until the mid 1980s. They were steadily earning a bigger share of the computer and information science degrees each year, peaking at 37% in 1984. That number has been declining ever since. Last year, women earned just 12% of all U.S. computer and information science degrees. Meanwhile, women's share of bachelor's degrees overall continues to rise every year, and we're not seeing the same kind of downward trend in many other sciences. To improve our numbers, we need to see industry-wide investments in technology education. Not just for technology literacy, but also for technology creation. We know that this is needed for women worldwide, and it's also important for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. It's here that Red Hat sees a real advantage for open source: as an alternative path to the technology industry for individuals who do not have a computer science degree or a background in tech. There's a fairly low barrier to entry; anyone who is interested in coding can become an open source contributor. You quickly learn from the feedback you get, gain experience, and can figure out whether you like working with technology, without having to spend years in school just to get started. As such, Red Hat sponsors many newbie hackathons and coding workshops, particularly with groups that target women.
To what extent do you think company culture impacts the gender divide? What about open source community culture?
The culture and environment in an open source community makes a big difference, and the same is true for company cultures. A lot has been written about this issue elsewhere, and you can find some great examples of how this happens on the Geek Feminism Wiki FLOSS webpage. In open source communities and at Red Hat, there's a strong desire for meritocracy—letting the best ideas win, regardless of their source. But diversity is a crucial component of meritocracy. How can we be confident that we have access to the very best ideas, if we are missing the perspectives of distinct groups of the population? Including people from many different backgrounds and cultures leads to greater diversity of thought and ideas. Research indicates that diverse groups are more innovative and make better decisions. For the technology industry and for open source communities, the lack of women is particularly concerning, because women represent half of the global population and workforce. In the past few years, I've also become increasingly interested in the role of unconscious bias and how it impacts the job application and interview process. Our human tendency is to instinctively prefer and value people who send unconscious signals that they're one of us—that they share our beliefs, background, or other social interests. It's easy for us to overlook the contributions of someone who comes from a different gender or culture. We don't even realize that we're doing it, and we construct explanations for our preferences that seem rational. Unconscious bias is a fascinating topic, and plenty has been written about it, so I encourage everyone to seek out that information and put it to good use. It's something that Red Hat now educates our associates on, as part of our job interviewer training. I think it's equally relevant when it comes to cultural norms within open source communities.
You're delivering the keynote speech for All Things Open this year. Can you give us an idea of what you'll be covering?
I will be speaking on many of the same topics that you've asked about today: women in open source and technology, and what the research shows us about the value of diversity for organizations. I plan to share some ways that anyone can make a difference and help bring more women into open source.
See the full series of All Things Open 2014 speaker interviews.Originally published Wednesday, April 30, 2014 at 3:14 PM
Imperial Troppers and other characters are on the march in Tunisia where the original movie was filmed.
TUNIS, Tunisia — Two dozen white-clad Imperial Troopers and other Star Wars characters marched Wednesday down a stately, tree-lined avenue in Tunis — a site where activists once fought riot police during the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions.
The empire was not striking back against the poster child for Arab democracy — just an innovative campaign to encourage tourists to return to this sunny desert-and-beach nation in North Africa.
“We came here to Tunis to help save the Star Wars sites in Matmata and Tozeur and convince people to return to Tunisia,” said Ingo Kaiser, head of a Star Wars fan club in Europe, referring to the movie sets that are slowly being covered up by sand in the Tunisian desert.
He wore the khaki overalls and large helmet of the two-legged AT-ST machines that battled rebels in the forest of Endor in the 1983 film “Return of the Jedi.”
A huge screen broadcast scenes from the Star Wars films as the thronging crowds snapped photos of the costumed Star Wars characters.
“It’s the first time such an even has happened in Tunis, it’s really impressive,” said Asma Souissi, a 19-year-old student. “It opens up new horizons for Tunisia.”
After longtime President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown in 2011, Tunisia was rocked by labor unrest, terrorist attacks and political assassinations. That devastated Tunisia’s key tourism sector, which contributes 7 percent to the country’s GDP and employs 400,000 people.
So the Tunisian National Office for Tourism teamed up with the country’s new Star Wars fan club to stage the country’s its first Star Wars encounter. Fan clubs from Europe took part in Wednesday’s parade and screenings of the Star Wars films will take place at the desert movie sets over the next few days.
“We did this campaign to take advantage of these sets, which are unique in the world — the only sites from the movies remaining,” said Zied Chargui, director of the National Office of Tunisian Tourism.
The campaign began with Tunisia’s own video of Pharrell Williams’ popular “Happy” song featuring Star Wars characters dancing around Tunisian tourist sites and the movie sets. The video has been viewed 1.7 million times since it was posted in March — and was tweeted by Williams himself.
“It created a global buzz, which makes us very happy,” said Chargui.
The original 1977 Star Wars was filmed in Tunisia, with protagonist Luke Skywalker’s home planet borrowing its name of the nearby town of Tatouine. Tourists can even stay in the Sidi Driss hotel in Matmata where Skywalker grew up.
New sets were built for the 1999 “Phantom Menace” film as well as its 2002 sequel. The seventh episode in the Star Wars franchise is expected next year but it is not filming in Tunisia, apparently due to concerns about stability. Some scenes are now being shot in Abu Dhabi and the cast was announced to great fanfare on Tuesday.
The Tunisian tourism industry nearly collapsed in 2011. In the past few months, there has been a return to stability and a renewed effort to bring back tourists, but the 6.2 million arrivals in 2013 are still 9 percent less than 2010.
“This event will give a boost that Tunisian tourism really needs — it is something new and a sign of opening up to the outside,” said travel agent Rene Trabelsi, who is involved in the annual Jewish pilgrimage to the Tunisian island of Djerba. Restrictions were recently eased on Israelis seeking to make the trip.
“It’s our first convention and we will see if we can make it annual,” said Ameur Abderrahman, director of Tunisia’s year-and-a-half-old Star Wars fan club.
The campaign also involves an effort to save one of the sets, which is being engulfed by a sand dune. A crowdsourcing website seeks to raise $188,000 to clear away the dune and restore the fictional settlement of Mos Espa from the 1999 film.
Chargui, the head of the tourism office, said Wednesday’s march was only the first in a series of new promotions.
“There are many young Tunisians with many ideas — and when we finish with Star Wars, then you will see others,” he said.
Four weeks for 99 cents of unlimited digital access to The Seattle Times. Try it now!Embattled ex-pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli showed up outside of Chelsea Clinton's New York City apartment Sunday to taunt Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE about her health.
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The Democratic presidential nominee left a 9/11 memorial ceremony early Sunday after becoming "overheated," aides said.
After resting at her daughter's apartment, she emerged, telling reporters she felt great.
Shkreli stood outside yelling and telling her to drop out of the presidential race.
"Do you need pharma bro's help?" Shkreli yelled at Clinton, according to a video he posted on YouTube.
"Why are you so sick?" he also said, according to The New York Post.
"Get well soon bae!" he added on Twitter.
I enjoyed screaming "why are you so sick" and "go trump" at @HillaryClinton. Get well soon bae! — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) September 11, 2016
Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised ire when he hiked the price vital pills manufactured by his company. He's now being investigated over unrelated allegations, including fraud charges.Chris Hadfield On Going Viral In Space
Chris Hadfield became a star as commander of the International Space Station, reaching out via social media to offer the public entertaining glimpses into life in orbit. Shortly after his return from the ISS, Hadfield announced his retirement from the Canadian Space Agency. Linda Wertheimer talks with Hadfield about his efforts to keep the public interested in space travel.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
By the time the last three shuttle mission returned to Earth two years ago, the image of a crew blasting off through the clouds and then landing again was still fascinating, if a touch routine. As for what the astronauts did up there, most did not really have a clear idea.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SPACE ODDITY")
COMMANDER CHRIS HADFIELD: (Singing) Ground control to Major Tom - seven, six. Commencing countdown, engines on.
WERTHEIMER: Enter Chris Hadfield. The veteran Canadian astronaut retired earlier this year, after returning from a tour as the commander of the International Space Station. This is Hadfield performing a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" from space.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SPACE ODDITY")
WERTHEIMER: That video has been viewed more than 16 million times, a total viral hit. There were dozens of videos posted on YouTube from Hadfield's final mission. Often, Hadfield would show mundane tasks that are kind of tricky without gravity. Here is cooking dried spinach in a packet.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
WERTHEIMER: Of course, after you eat the spinach, you need to brush your teeth. But spitting out toothpaste in space can be messy.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
WERTHEIMER: Hadfield also made a big impact on Twitter, constantly posting photos from his unique perch of the beauty and destruction around the globe.
When we sat down with Commander Hadfield recently at the Canadian Embassy here in Washington, he explained that the technology that allowed him to share his experiences with folks back home was unheard of when he first left the planet in 1995.
HADFIELD: My first flight, the way that I talked to the ground was through ham radio, you know, it was very limited communication. And I'd take a photograph up there, it was on film. I had to wait till I landed, get it processed and then do a big film review and look through, see if I saw a nice picture. And if I found a nice picture of the outback, well, there I am six weeks after landing, now what do I do with it? I can't, like, mail it to everybody in Australia. Now, with the Internet and with digital photography and with social media, I could take a beautiful picture or a scary picture of the fires in the outback, and within minutes, I could let the people that that was affecting see it directly and talk about it, and open up a dialogue. And so it allowed me to do what I'd always wanted to do, and that was share the ride.
WERTHEIMER: And that was the combination that made it work the way it did?
HADFIELD: Yeah, the fact that if I didn't get it right on this pass, I could try again tomorrow. It was sort of like being an art hunter. You know, I'm waiting for this beautiful doe to walk into the clearing, just so that I can try and capture it, and it was just a wonderful privilege. We were busy up there doing all the work and all the science and fixing problems as they arose, but at the same time, just a straight, wondrous, human opportunity of being there and seeing the world that way and sharing with everybody became an absolute imperative, also.
WERTHEIMER: I think a lot of us wondered, you know, you were having way too much fun.
(LAUGHTER)
WERTHEIMER: But you also have to work.
(LAUGHTER)
HADFIELD: Yeah.
WERTHEIMER: What was the work that you were doing?
HADFIELD: We - the Space Station is typically running about 130 different experiments, everything from looking with special cameras at changes to the surface of the Earth - so we're watching for disasters, as well as climate change; looking out to the universe, we're collecting dark matter and dark energy from the universe on a Noble Prize-level type experiment called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. And then all sorts of experiments inside that you can't do on Earth, because up there, basically, we're freed from gravity, so studying how the flames propagate, how fluid behaves.
There's all sorts of applications when you could see how capillary flow happens. The human body, studying the rapid aging, the osteoporosis that I experienced, why we get it, and then when I get back to Earth, why does it reverse, trying to understand the body's control mechanisms. And also using the Space Station to help design spaceships. When we leave Earth, which we're going to do, go further, we need the stuff that works. We need materials that you can count on, toilets you can count on. You know, what food do you need? How do you keep the crew from going nuts? All those things, we're inventing how to do all that on the Space Station.
WERTHEIMER: Do you think that's important for the future of the program, to try to make a big extra effort to engage people, when we're all so concerned about how much it all costs?
HADFIELD: You know, you can't support the Space Station if you don't know it exists. People have to know it exists, and see that it serves us at a lot of different levels, everything from understanding how to extinguish flame inside a wall, to the fact that you can record a David Bowie video in weightlessness and thrill, you know, tens of millions of people. All of that is possible up there. You need to make an effort to engage people in it and show them that this is, of all the things that we're choosing to do with our tax dollars, this is one of the really cool, interesting things. And then they can make their own decision as to whether we should support it or not.
WERTHEIMER: The science has always been interesting, of course, but the thing that I think most people on Earth think about is not going to the Space Station, but going past the Space Station, traveling in space.
HADFIELD: For thousands of years, people sailed in rivers and up and down the coast. And only after they had invented so many things - navigation, food supply, really good sails, ships they could count on - did they turn away from shore and go over the horizon. They had to invent a lot of things first. There may have been people that went over the horizon, but they probably didn't come back, because they didn't know enough stuff yet.
And we are, right now, sailing within the sight of shore. We're trying to figure out all those things as we go around the world, so that when you do fire your engines and go 40 percent faster and leave the Earth, and it's been really hard to turn around and come back, that you can count on your sailing ship, that it's going to keep you alive and get you where you want to go. And that's what the Space Station is. It is the crucible where we're learning and testing and figuring out all those things so that we can go further, which is inevitably what we're going to do.
WERTHEIMER: So are you the ambassador from space now? Is that your new job?
HADFIELD: Ever since I was nine years old and I watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, I have felt passionately that this is an interesting human adventure. This is one of the things we're doing that is really fundamentally important, as we leave our home planet, but also exciting. And so I've been that space ambassador since my 10th birthday, and I've just been lucky enough to command a spaceship and now I have even more things to talk about.
WERTHEIMER: Commander Chris Hadfield, thank you very much.
HADFIELD: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to meet you in person and have a chance to talk with you.
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Related: Pai Issues Net-Neutrality 'Facts'
The docket already had over 22 million comments, and now is pushing toward 23 million, with more than a half million in the last month, many of those just since the order was circulated on Nov. 22.
"Don't let the FCC make a terrible mistake that would allow broadband providers to tilt the playing field by blocking or throttling their competitors, prioritizing their offerings, or otherwise unreasonably interfering with lawful content," wrote Sen. Kamala Harris in a plea for signatures on her petition to block Pai's prioposal.
Related: Sen. Harris Seeks Sign-ups for Pai Proposal Pushback
All the major ISPs have pledged not to block or throttle, and under the Pai plan the Federal Trade Commission could enforce those pledges under its authority over false and deceptive conducts. In addition, the Justice Department could crack down on anticompetitive conduct.
But activists have long been concerned that such an ex post facto enforcement regime is not sufficient to check conduct that might be difficult to identify, time-consuming to combat if/when it was identified, and is insufficiently nimble to keep up with the pace of technological change.In an attempt to lift the state out of the hard times of the Great Depression, the Nevada state legislature votes to legalize gambling.
Located in the Great Basin desert, few settlers chose to live in Nevada after the United States acquired the territory at the end of the Mexican War in 1848. In 1859, the discovery of the “Comstock Lode” of gold and silver spurred the first substantial number of settlers into Nevada to exploit the territory’s mining opportunities. Five years later, during the Civil War, Nevada was hastily made the 36th state in order to strengthen the Union.
At the beginning of the Depression, Nevada’s mines were in decline, and its economy was in shambles. In March 1931, Nevada’s state legislature responded to population flight by taking the drastic measure of legalizing gambling and, later in the year, divorce. Established in 1905, Las Vegas, Nevada, has since become the gambling and entertainment capital of the world, famous for its casinos, nightclubs, and sporting events. In the first few decades after the legalization of gambling, organized crime flourished in Las Vegas. Today, state gambling taxes account for the lion’s share of Nevada’s overall tax revenues.If you're not already familiar with file syncing service Dropbox, you should be. The easiest way to describe Dropbox is that it acts as a type of online storage that gives you access to your files wherever you go, no matter which computer you're on, what OS you're using, and where you are in the world. No need to use a DVD, USB drive, or e-mail to transfer important files. However, Dropbox is really much more than that: you can access and work on files even when you're offline, share folders with friends and coworkers, and most importantly (for this writeup, anyway), sync settings for numerous applications without having to fork over any cash.
Why is this good? If there are multiple computers in your life—like a work machine and a home machine, or a desktop and a laptop, or all of the above—you probably use many of the same programs. Some of those programs might have their own built-in syncing services to keep things like your bookmarks or passwords up-to-date, but many do not. That's where Dropbox comes in—the free account offers 2GB of space (up to 100GB for paying customers) for you to do whatever you please. And since we like telling you how we use things, here are a few of our favorite Dropbox uses.
Sync your 1Password database
1Password is a password manager and auto-form-filler for the Mac that has been a hit among the Ars staff and readers alike. It's much more secure than the built-in OS X Keychain and lets you store tons of data, including credit cards, frequent flyer miles, addresses, phone numbers—you name it, 1Password can store it. Then, with a simple keyboard command in most major browsers (command+ ), you can instantly log into any website or fill out any form without having to remember thousands of data snippets.
One problem some of us began running into when we started using 1Password, though, was the fact that it lets you create very complex passwords and store them without memorizing them. This means that when you're using another computer, you're a little bit screwed if you want to, say, log into your bank's website from your laptop when you created a 15-character hexadecimal password through 1Password at home. This is where Dropbox comes in—you can sync your 1Password database across multiple computers so that you always have access to it and can always save to it, no matter what computer you're using.
In order to do this, you must first have the latest version of 1Password installed on all your Macs (make sure you have the licenses to do this, of course!). Make sure you have Agile Keychain enabled (as opposed to "OS X Keychain Format") by going into the 1Password Preferences > Keychain tab—Agile Keychain has enabled by default for some time now, so you shouldn't have to do anything here if you're running the latest software. Then, change the location where your 1Password database is syncing from somewhere on your hard drive to your Dropbox folder by clicking the "More..." button underneath the location path.
Once you save it to a Dropbox path, you can navigate to it using the same method on your other computer and choose the 1Password file you have saved in Dropbox. Voila! You are now synced over Dropbox.
Sync MacJournal entries
MacJournal is a journaling/blog software package that has gained popularity thanks to its easy-to-use interface and relatively clean HTML output, something that is important to us here at Ars. I like to compose my articles in MacJournal and then copy the HTML over to paste into our CMS (unfortunately, our CMS still leaves something to be desired when it comes to hooking up third-party software to save directly into it). I use a desktop machine as my main computer when I write, but I also travel and move around the house/city a lot on my laptop. This is inconvenient when I have a half-finished article saved in MacJournal at home and need to pick up where I left off while I'm on the road.
Again, Dropbox comes to the rescue by allowing me to sync my article database and access it from both of my machines. Once again, you must make sure to have the software installed on the computers you plan to use. Navigate on your computer to your home folder > Library > Application Support > MacJournal, and make a copy of your "MacJournal Data" file on your Dropbox folder. Then on the computers you plan to sync, go into the MacJournal preferences > Advanced. In the drop-down where it says "Open documents," pull down to "Open other."
Here, you will be able to navigate to your Dropbox folder and select the file you want to use. Do this on both computers so you're working off the same file.
The one downside to this method is that you must make sure to quit MacJournal every time you're done using it from either machine. If you don't do this, your entries may not be properly synced when you switch to the other computer, though I've had some mixed luck with this. If you make sure to quit every time you walk away to switch machines, though, you should be golden.
Sync Yojimbo
Yojimbo is a popular "information organizer" for the Mac that lets you keep track of all manner of information, from serial numbers and bookmarks to images and notes—and everything in between. Once again, you might find yourself hooked on using Yojimbo to keep track of your life, only to realize that you need some of that information while you're away from the computer that you saved it on. Yojimbo has built-in syncing over MobileMe, but if you're not keen on giving Apple $99 every year, you can easily set up Yojimbo to sync over Dropbox for free.
A method posted to the Yojimbo Talk mailing list was suggested by some of our readers, but don't worry if you don't speak Terminal-ese. The basic gist is to quit the app, make a copy of your Yojimbo library for backup, and turn off MobileMe syncing within Yojimbo on all computers involved. Then, just like in our MacJournal example, go into your home folder > Library > Application Support and move the entire Yojimbo folder over to your Dropbox directory. Once you do that, make an alias of the Yojimbo folder, now located on Dropbox, and put it back into your Application Support folder (make sure to remove the "alias" part of the folder name).
Once you confirm that Yojimbo is working and able to read your library from Dropbox, quit the app and perform the same steps on your other computer to create an alias from the Dropbox folder of your Yojimbo library. Open up Yojimbo to make sure it's reading from the right place, and you're good to go.
Network share for the virtual office
We realize that this one is an odd fit for this article since it's about syncing all manner of files instead of just settings, but since this is one of the main ways we use Dropbox here at the Orbiting HQ, we wanted to share it. At most IT-related jobs, there's a network share or five that can be accessed by all employees who need to share files—Photoshop files, supporting materials, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, etc. But as more and more people start working from home, the idea of the network share is sort of disappearing, along with its helpful functionality.
Not so with Dropbox! Since you can share whole folders with other people, you can designate a specific Dropbox folder to act as your network share for the virtual office. For example, when I'm in San Francisco or Cupertino covering an Apple event, I have a script that automatically saves the pictures from my camera into a shared Dropbox folder. Then, someone on the other side who has access to that folder gets Growl notifications when new photos are added, allowing that person to choose the right photos to drop into our liveblog. It's like having a whole team there without all the travel costs!
In order to do this, you must create a new directory in your Dropbox and then go to the website to share it with others. You can either create and share a folder all at once (click the "Share a folder" button), or you can share an existing folder.
From there, you can add collaborators by entering their e-mail addresses and a custom message if you prefer. If your collaborators are also using Dropbox, all they have to do is click the link in the invitation e-mail and your shared folder will show up in their Dropbox (if they're not using Dropbox, they are prompted to sign up for a free account). Even if you use the wrong e-mail and it goes to an account that your friend or coworker doesn't use with Dropbox, the site will let that person use an existing login to access your folder.
Turn your iPhone into an e-book reader
Sure, there are a handful of ways to read e-books on your iPhone, but not every one is ideal. The Kindle app only works for people who have Kindle/Amazon accounts, and the Kindle-compatible book selection at Amazon is limited. Sending e-mails to yourself with PDFs attached works, until you forget to send that e-mail. But if you sync your e-book (or really any) PDFs to a folder on Dropbox, you can use the free Dropbox app on the iPhone or iPod touch to access them anytime.
One way to do this automatically without requiring you to futz around with files is to set up a Hazel rule to automatically transfer all PDFs to a certain directory within Dropbox. Then, just pop open the app and navigate to that folder to read all the PDFs and e-books you want—no e-mailing or Kindling required.
What do you like to sync?
Do you have any unique uses for Dropbox that we haven't thought of? There are millions of things to sync across computers—bookmarks, AIM logs, fonts—and we want to know what you use it for most often.The thought of forming a “European Republic” used to be merely a federalist fantasy. But it has now become more of a reality after gaining Mr Macron’s backing - much to the chagrin of the German Chancellor, often dubbed 'the mother of Europe'. Political scientist Ulrike Guérot, founder of Berlin’s European Democracy Lab, says Mrs Merkel has been “evasive” on whether she supported the move. The Chancellor’s instinct might be to back her ally Mr Macron, but she is hesitant, fearing how German voters will react, Ms Guérot claimed.
GETTY Macron and Merkel are at a stand-off over Europe's future
The pair are now in a stand-off over the future of the EU. However the French premier could now be able to influence Mrs Merkel through her coalition partners. SPD leader Martin Schulz, who could go into coalition with Mrs Merkel in the coming months, publicly backed a “United States of Europe” in his speech to the party conference. The French President now hopes to influence Mrs Merkel through the SPD, and has the ear of its leader.
Ms Guérot said: “Having not yet received a concrete answer, Macron is working towards a Grand Coalition in Germany by talking to Martin Schulz. The SPD would have an open ear for his plans.” She expects Mrs Merkel will become more and more reluctant to form that Grand Coalition if the SPD’s support for full European political union continues. Ms Guérot said: “To now shake Macron's hand would equal a stab-in-the-back legend. Like a betrayal. Every handshake in favour of Macron means three percent more for the AfD. “Because some are beginning to understand this, forming a coalition is so difficult.” “The Europe-issue is secretly on the table and everyone is afraid to give a European answer.
Getty SPD leader Martin Schulz has backed a 'United States of Europe'Mark Tully ponders why the beauty he sees in the traditional architecture of his home city, New Delhi, is not apparent in the spate of modern buildings now being built.
Read by: Emma Fielding and Peter Guinness
Mark Tully ponders why the beauty he sees in the traditional architecture of his home city, New Delhi, is not apparent in the spate of modern buildings now being built. He despairs that the new can never match the magnificence of the old.
But to prevent himself sliding into a state of complete reminiscence and nostalgia, he spends a day with the |
before 1944 (see below).
The discontinuation of red, plus the general changes in society due to the United States' participation in World War II, caused a slump in sales of the larger serving pieces from the early 1940s. Prior to this reduction in the number of shapes offered, only one or two very specialized shapes had been discontinued and those by 1938. These early discontinued items, such as covered onion soup bowls in turquoise glaze and mixing bowl covers in any color, are today quite rare.
By 1950, home decorating styles and colors had changed. The Homer Laughlin Company discontinued some original glaze colors and replaced them with four new colors. The original Blue (cobalt), the original Green (light green), and the original Old Ivory (yellowish cream) were discontinued, replaced by Rose (dark pink), Gray (medium), Forest (dark green), and Chartreuse (bright yellowish green). Two existing glaze colors, Yellow and Turquoise, were retained, allowing the company to offer six colors through the 1950s.
By the end of the 1950s, sales had again dropped. The company reduced its offering of items and changed the glaze colors. By 1959 the United States government had released its block on uranium, which enabled the Homer Laughlin Company to produce the original bright orange-red glaze again (see below). The company discontinued the four new glazes of the previous decade in favor of a new green color and the re-introduced original bright orange-red color, which along with the yellow and turquoise colors made up the four glaze colors offered from 1959 through 1969.
Although the company always referred to the new color simply as Green in its brochures, collectors later called it Medium Green, to distinguish it from other green glazes which the company had produced. The Medium Green is a bright, almost Kelly green. Some have described it as a "John Deere Tractor" green. Beginning in 1959, Fiesta was available in the following colors: Red (original orange red), Green (new Medium green), Yellow (original golden), and Turquoise (original robin's egg blue).
Although this color assortment was available and sold for ten years (1959–1969), the popularity of Fiesta had fallen. The newest shade of green is in very short supply on the secondary market relative to the other glaze colors. It has gained almost mythical status and, for certain pieces in this glaze, commands astronomical prices wholly disproportionate to the rest of the line.
The Yellow glaze is the one glaze that was in production throughout the life of vintage Fiesta. Turquoise, while not strictly an original color (having been introduced about a year into Fiesta's production) was otherwise also in continuous production until the end of the original vintage era in 1969. Red, while an original color at the line's introduction, was removed from the market before 1944 (see below). Although it was brought back into production from 1959 to 1969, this was after most of the unusual serving pieces had long been discontinued. Red pieces also usually command a premium price in the secondary market, both for its vibrancy in the mix of colors and for its scarcity due to limited years of production. While many collectors love all the colors, some only want those of the "Original 6" or "Fifties Colors".
Radioactive glazes [ edit ]
Geiger counter (kit without housing) audibly reacting to an orange Fiestaware shard.
Brilliant red Fiesta (and indeed the red glazes produced by all U.S. potteries of the era) is known for having a detectable amount of uranium oxide in its glaze, which produced the orange-red color. During World War II, the government took control of uranium for development of the atom bomb, and confiscated the company's stocks.[6] Homer Laughlin discontinued Fiesta red in 1944. The company reintroduced Fiesta red in 1959 using depleted uranium (rather than the original natural uranium), after the Atomic Energy Commission relaxed its restrictions on uranium oxide. In addition to pottery glazing, Uranium oxide was used even more extensively in the tiling industry, producing Uranium tile.
Red is not the only color of vintage ceramic glaze that is radioactive; it is detectable from other colors, including ivory.[7] The level of radioactivity of vintage fiestaware has been published and is available online.[7][8]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warns consumers not to use radioactive glazed ceramics for food or drink use.[9] Others recommend against using such pieces for food storage due to the possibility of leaching of uranium or other heavy metals (often present in some colored glazes) into food, especially acidic foods.[citation needed]
On March 16, 2011, the Homer Laughlin Company posted this statement on its website, in response to a Good Morning America broadcast about radioactivity in the home:[10]
Included in the report was a product that has not been sold in the market for nearly 40 years, Antique/Vintage Fiesta dinnerware. The anchor narrating the segment passes a radiation measuring tool over several products including the Antique/Vintage Fiesta plate that was produced nearly 70 years ago. The narrator also stated that it was taken off the market because when people heard about the uranium in the glaze, they did not want to buy the product. In fact, The Homer Laughlin China Company stopped manufacturing all Fiestaware in 1972 because of low sales. The product that was used within the segment has been discontinued and has not available for close to 40 years time. Fiesta today is frequently tested by federally licensed independent laboratories and is lead free, microwave/dishwasher safe, oven proof and made in the USA... Prior to World War II, it was common practice for manufacturers of ceramic dinnerware to use uranium oxide in color glazes. The Homer Laughlin China Company was no exception, using this material in the original "Fiesta Red" glaze, among others. In 1943, the U.S. Government stopped all civilian use of uranium oxide because available supplies were needed for the war effort. Homer Laughlin stopped producing the red glaze color at that time and for that reason. Nonetheless, this interruption in production is believed to be the source of the rumor that Fiesta's red glaze was removed from the market because it was radioactive. In truth, the red glaze emitted far less radiation than some other consumer products. Following the lifting of wartime restrictions, Homer Laughlin again began producing the red glaze in the 1950s, using a depleted grade of uranium oxide. Homer Laughlin stopped all use of depleted uranium oxide in 1972 and it is not used in Fiesta Dinnerware which is produced today.
By 1969 home decorating tastes had again changed. The company restyled the shapes of Fiesta to try to modernize it. Finials on covers, handles on cups, bowl contours and shapes, were all modified to give Fiesta a more contemporary appearance. The glaze colors were also changed, with the choices being limited to three colors for the place-setting pieces, and one color for the five major serving pieces. These were the remainder of the 64-piece assortment of shapes. Although essentially the same Red glaze as had then been available since 1959, it was renamed Mango Red. Replacing Yellow, Turquoise, and Medium Green, were two new glaze colors. One was Turf Green, which nearly matched the popular Avocado color of the day. The second color was Antique Gold, a brownish-yellow which nearly matched the popular Harvest Gold of the era. The line's name was changed to "Fiesta Ironstone". The shape redesigns and color changes did not restore Fiesta's popularity, and in January 1973 the company discontinued the Fiesta line.
Decaled and decorated Fiesta shapes [ edit ]
As is common with many dinnerware shapes, the manufacturers add different decals to the shapes and give them new names. Throughout its long life (1936–1973), the item shapes of Fiesta were often decorated with decals and marketed under other names, or a name variation. One example was "Fiesta Casuals", which consisted of two patterns, one with yellow and brown florals and accented with solid color Fiesta yellow items, the other with turquoise and brown florals and accented with solid color Fiesta turquoise items.
As another example, in the late 1960s, the shapes of Fiesta were glazed in a dark 'bean-pot' brown, flat pieces were given an underglaze 'Mediterranean-style' geometric decal in black, and the line was marketed as "Amberstone" in a supermarket promotion. Later these shapes were glazed in Antique Gold, with a different stylized pattern under the glaze. This line was dubbed "Casualstone" for another supermarket promotion.
Collectors and the secondary market [ edit ]
fundraiser. Fiesta ware being sold at a charity
During the 1970s, a new appreciation for Art Deco designs from the 1920s and 1930s flourished. Along with this, the baby boomers were establishing their own households. They made Fiesta popular once again. Almost immediately after Fiesta was discontinued in January 1973, collectors began buying heavily in second-hand shops and the newly popular garage sales. Another avenue for acquiring pieces, and sometimes entire collections, was through local auctions. Due to the enormous popularity of Fiesta in the secondary market, its prices skyrocketed. By the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, Fiesta items once costing pennies were commanding nearly a hundred U.S. dollars for scarcer items. By the mid-1980s, prices had climbed higher. Certain pieces and colors were being traded for hundreds of dollars.
Contemporary Fiesta from 1986 [ edit ]
The Homer Laughlin China Company noticed the activity on the secondary market. After a production lapse of 13 years, in 1986 the company marked the 50th anniversary of Fiesta by its reintroduction. Prior to mass production and promotion, Laughlin used the original semi-vitreous clay body on shapes taken mostly from the last incarnation of vintage Fiesta (1969–1973). The company then changed the body to a fully vitrified clay, to enable marketing to the restaurant and service industry, as this clay was more durable. Many original shapes required a redesign because of shrinkage associated with the new clay. Although old and new runs appear similar, direct comparison demonstrates the newer pieces (made with the fully vitrified clay body) are noticeably smaller. In addition to redesigns, new shapes were added to the line.
In 1986, Laughlin offered five colors:
Rose (pink) (1986–2005) [This color changed significantly in the post-2000 firings but was still considered the same Rose],
Black (black) (1986–2015),
Cobalt (dark navy blue) (1986–),
White (bright stark white) (1986–),
Apricot (pale pinkish tan) (1986–1998).
The glaze texture on this new Fiesta is very smooth, hard and much shinier than the original Fiesta. Since its introduction, new Fiesta has remained popular. In addition, it has increased collector interest in all the lines. Many people are collecting vintage pieces, as well as purchasing new items from department stores and catalog retailers. Fiesta collectors often add this new ware to existing collections of vintage Fiesta, while others concentrate on buying from the new assortment. Early in Fiesta's second incarnation, the Homer Laughlin Company marketed it as a new collectible. The manufacturer has maintained interest in Fiesta and manipulated the collectors' market over the past 20 years by discontinuing glaze colors, and by limiting production quantities on some items, or controlling production time frames. Similar techniques have been used by numerous other housewares, china, silver, toy, ornament, etc. companies.[11]
Laughlin has produced new Fiesta in a total of 34 glaze colors, none of which matches exactly any of the thirteen colors of vintage Fiesta. As of early 2008, many Fiesta shapes exist in a total of 39 color glazes. In addition to the first five glazes, the names of the new color glazes, in order of introduction, are:
Yellow (pale custard/butter) (1987–2002),
Turquoise (more greenish than vintage Turquoise) (1988–),
Periwinkle (slightly lavenderish-blue) (1989–2006),
Sea Mist (pale mint green) (1991–2005),
Lilac (soft purple) (1993–1995),
Persimmon (pinkish-orange) (1995–2008),
Sapphire (medium bright blue) (Bloomingdale's exclusive 1996–1997),
Chartreuse (brighter and greener than vintage Chartreuse) (1997–1999),
Pearl Gray (light gray) (1999–2001),
Juniper (dark bluish-green) (1999–2001),
Cinnabar (brownish-burgundy) (2000–2010),
Sunflower (bright yellow) (2001–),
Plum (dark purple) (2002–2016),
Shamrock (bright deep green) (2002–),
Tangerine (bright orange) (2003–2018),
Scarlet (deep true red) (2004–),
Peacock (bright blue) (2005–2015),
Heather (dark reddish-purple) (2006–2009),
Evergreen (dark green) (2007–2009), [12]
Ivory (egg shell/off white) (2008–), [13]
Chocolate (brown) (2008–2012), [14]
Lemongrass (yellowish chartreuse) (2009–), [15]
Paprika (dark rust) (2010–2017), [16]
Marigold (yellowish-orange), HLC's 75th Anniversary Fiesta color - limited 75-week run (2011–2012) [17]
Flamingo (light salmon pink) (2012–2013), [18]
Lapis (denim blue) (2013–), announced March 2, 2013 [19]
Poppy (bright reddish-orange) (2014–), announced March 15, 2014 [20]
Sage (earthy green) (2015–2019), announced March 7, 2015 [21]
Slate (charcoal gray) (2015–), announced March 7, 2015 [21]
Claret (red wine) (2016–2018), announced March 5, 2016 [21]
Daffodil (vibrant golden yellow) (2017–), announced January 10, 2017 [21]
Mulberry (deep purple) (2018–), announced January 9, 2018 [22]
Meadow (deep mint green) (2019–), announced January 8, 2019[21]
Special edition colors [ edit ]
Since the reintroduction of Fiesta in 1986, Homer Laughlin has introduced three colors that were available for two years: Lilac (1993–1995), Chartreuse (1997–1999) and Juniper (1999–2001). Sapphire was sold exclusively at Bloomingdale's from 1996 to 1997. In November 2008, Homer Laughlin released the limited-edition color, Chocolate. The color of milk chocolate, the new shade adds a second neutral tone to Fiesta's color palette. It was available for a limited period of time and in a limited number of pieces.
In 1997, 500 limited-edition presentation bowls in an exclusive Raspberry (reddish maroon) colored glaze were made to commemorate the production of the 500 millionth piece of dinnerware carrying the name Fiesta produced by the Homer Laughlin China Company since 1936. In anticipation of Fiesta's 75th anniversary in 2011, Homer Laughlin announced its 75th anniversary color: Marigold. In addition, it introduced the first of a line of specially backstamped annual anniversary items, a set of three baking bowls, at the 2008 International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago, Illinois. This was followed by the introduction of a large serving platter in 2009 and a numbered soup tureen. Dinnerware and accessories were available in 2011–2012, with each introduction marketed for 75 weeks, beginning April 1, before being retired.[23]
As an indication of its influence, Fiestaware was featured in a design exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City in 1988.
New Fiestaware at Macy's in East Wenatchee, Washington
Square Fiesta dinnerware [ edit ]
In 2009, a new line of square Fiesta dinnerware was introduced. Square is available as dinner, luncheon and salad plates, 19 oz. bowls and mugs, four-piece place settings, as well as a full line of accessories. Despite square silhouettes, pieces maintain a strong relationship to the company's established 'round' deco offering; coupe shape and height remain the same, along with the brand's signature concentric rings.
In October 2016, Fiesta announced the discontinuation of the square bowl (992) and the square mug (923). [24]
In popular culture [ edit ]
American Fiesta, a one-man play written and performed by Steven Tomlinsoni, refers to the central character's obsession with collecting vintage Fiesta dinnerware.[25]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]SEATTLE – For the third time in program history, the Washington Huskies are the champions of the Pac-12 conference, and UW did not feel like sharing. A sweep of rival Washington State was the perfect way to cap an incredible 26-2 regular season, with an 18-2 mark in conference play, as the Huskies finished one game ahead of last year's champion Stanford. The 25-21, 25-21, 25-14 win in front of 3,811 fans still buzzing after an Apple Cup football win was made all the sweeter as it came on Senior Night, and all four Husky seniors played huge roles.
Fifth-ranked Washington honored seniors Kylin Muñoz, Jenni Nogueras, Jenna Orlandini, and Gabbi Parker after the match, going from a celebration with the Pac-12 trophy on midcourt of Alaska Airlines Arena, straight into senior ceremonies. Parker punctuated the victory with a kill on match point, on her only swing. Muñoz had four kills without an error, Orlandini had nine digs and two assists, and Nogueras had 19 assists, three digs and an ace.
The 18 conference wins is a school record, one more than the 2005 team that finished with a 17-1 mark, with two fewer conference matches in that period. Washington's two previous Pac-12 (then Pac-10) titles came in 2004 and 2005, also both led by Head Coach Jim McLaughlin, currently in his 13th year at the helm.
“I was telling the girls, they put in so many days and hours. Three-hundred and forty days a year or so, you're working hard. So the investment is so high,” McLaughlin said. “The gratification for all the hard work and the return you get is the most important lesson … And this is a big return, but there's something bigger. We start a journey now that's even bigger.
McLaughlin was referring of course to the NCAA Championships, which Washington will compete in for the 12th year in a row, and which finishes with the Final Four in Seattle at KeyArena on Dec. 19 and 21. The NCAA tourney bracket will be revealed this Sunday at 6:30 p.m. Pacific time on ESPNU. The Huskies will be expected to be one of the top seeds, and to host first and second round matches at Alaska Airlines Arena next week.
“We've done what we're supposed to do (in the regular season)” said McLaughlin. “We need to stay process driven, we've got to make a couple improvements, and now we've got to go play as hard as we can and see if we can win some matches.”
While the seniors shared the win with their families on the court, they got plenty of help from the rest of the Husky underclassmen. Junior Krista Vansant was unstoppable with 19 kills on a.457 attack percentage, adding 14 digs and two blocks. Junior Kaleigh Nelson was also deadly with 10 kills and a.444 hitting percentage, as the Huskies hit.384 as a team, their best percentage in Pac-12 play, and fourth-best mark of the year.
Sophomore Cassie Strickland was big with five kills on a.308 mark, but also had a team-high 16 digs, and three big blocks and two aces. Katy Beals had 24 assists and an ace, and Lianna Sybeldon added six kills and three blocks.
After a red-hot start from both teams, UW hit.472 in the first set and WSU hit.467, the Huskies eventually began to get a wrap on the Cougars offense. WSU hit.146 in set two and just.067 in set three, as the Huskies pulled away to close out the sweep. Kyra Holt led WSU with 12 kills and Jaicee Harris added 10, as the Cougars fell to 18-15 and 5-15 in Pac-12 play. Washington has now won nine straight against its cross-state rivals.
Nelson killed the first swing of the match, and then Wade went back and dropped an ace off the defense on UW's first serve. WSU tied it up early and the teams went back and forth, playing a very high level with few errors either way. Wade ended an incredibly long rally with a quick shot to the side for 8-7 Huskies. The Cougars bounced right back, however, with a 3-0 run to take a 10-8 lead until they missed serve. Muñoz put an Orlandini set off the blockers for a kill, and then WSU overpassed the Orlandini serve and Vansant stuffed it down for 12-12. Vansant then finished another to put the Huskies back up one, but WSU answered with a kill as the teams went back and forth again. A Nelson finish brought up the media timeout with the Huskies up, 15-14. Kyra Holt continued to produce off the UW block, and she had three kills over one span, the last of which made it 17-all, and then UW was aced up the sideline and the Huskies took timeout down 17-18. Out of the break, WSU missed serve, and then UW finally produced a WSU error, as Sybeldon and Muñoz blocked Holt for 19-18 and WSU took timeout. After that break, Strickland took a little off her serve and it rolled down for an ace. The Cougars sided out, but kills from Vansant and Muñoz got the Dawgs to 22-20 and WSU took its last timeout. WSU scored but Vansant punished another Nogueras set, and then Nelson hit in transition for set point at 24-21. Vansant served and the Cougars overpassed, with Strickland jumping up to hit it down for an eventual kill after WSU could not quite get it back in play, ending things, 25-21. The teams combined for only three errors in the set, with WSU hitting.467, but UW just outpacing them at.472. Vansant had eight kills to counter the seven of Holt.
Nogueras set up Nelson and Sybeldon for kills to start the second set, but WSU won three straight and five of six to take a 5-3 lead. The Huskies responded with five of the next six their way, with Sybeldon putting down another, and Vansant killing a Strickland set, then teaming with Wade for a block in the middle. Wade and Nelson had a stuff of Ver'Leea Hardaway in the middle for 11-9. Strickland put one inside the blockers on the left, and then Vansant had a kill in transition for 15-11 at the media timeout. WSU took two back out of the break, but Vansant stopped the run abruptly with a booming shot. Trading points, Wade got the side out twice with kills in the middle, and WSU took timeout down 16-19. But the Cougars, playing mostly clean up to that point, made consecutive errors out of the break as UW extended the lead to 21-16. Nelson put away a Nogueras set for 22-17, and Vansant took the Huskies to set point at 24-19 with another slam. The Cougars saved the first two and UW took timeout. After a short rally, Vansant used a deft tip over the block after bringing the heat all night, and it fell for the point to end it, 25-21. The Huskies outhit the Cougars,.297 to.146 in the set, as Cassie Strickland had eight digs and Vansant and Orlandini had five apiece. Vansant also added six more kills on 12 swings.
Washington started strong in set three, with a kill from Strickland and a back row spike from Vansant. Beals aced the Cougars and then Strickland posted a straight up stuff on the weak side for a 5-1 lead and a Cougars timeout. Holt had a couple big kills early to keep WSU close, but Sybeldon tipped for a kill and got another on a WSU net error for a 7-4 lead. Washington State got within one at 7-6 but Vansant put down a Beals set, and then had a solo block and WSU made another net error for 10-6. A WSU error had UW up five and then Strickland helped break it open, rising for a solo rejection of Marcelina Glab, and then after a Vansant dig, Strickland banged the set through the block for a 16-9 lead and WSU had to take time. The Cougars took two back after the break, but the Huskies responded with another 4-0 run to go up 20-11. Muñoz had two kills, one from the left pin and one from the right, and then Strickland lasered an ace off the defense and back into the seats. Two more big right arm swings from Vansant brought UW closer, and then Nogueras floated an ace for a 23-13 lead. Parker checked in late and immediately got a rejection of Jaicee Harris along with Nelson for match point. The Cougars held off one, but then Nogueras ran a back set to Parker who came around on a slide and ripped it off the blocker's hands and out to give the Huskies the 25-14 win. Washington hit.385 in the third set, holding the Cougars down to.067.Written particularly for the Charismatic Renewal in the English-speaking world, Come, Creator Spirit is a helpful guide for a better understanding of the Holy Spirit. In this detailed commentary on the famous hymn Veni Creator, sung at the beginning of every new year, ecumenical council, and priestly ordination, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa describes the Paraclete and gives praise to its glory. Progressing through the hymn line by line, he provides insights, reflections, hymnography of Christian traditions, and testimonies of the saints.
This book describes the Church's experience of the Spirit of today, as well as the past. The biblical and theological base of the hymn opens the reader to the perspectives and inspirations in this book. Its Vision of the Holy Spirit in the history of salvation emerges as the reader progresses through the reading. In the celebration of the ecumenical character of Veni Creator, this book draws from Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic traditions for all those who wish to seek a better understanding of the Holy Spirit.
Chapters are Spirit, Come!" *Creator, - *Fill with Heavenly Grace the Hearts that You Have Made, - *You Whom We Name the Paraclete, - *Most High Gift of God, - *Living Water, - *Fire, - *Love, - *Anointing for the Soul, - *Sevenfold in Your Gifts, - *Finger of God's Right Hand, - *The Father's Solemn Promise, - *Gifting Lips with the Word to Say, - *Kindle Your Light in Our Minds, - *Pour Love into Our Hearts, - *Infirmity in This Body of Ours Overcoming with Strength Secure, - *The Enemy Drive from Us Away, - *Peace Then Give without Delay, - *With You As Guide We Avoid All Cause of Harm, - *Through You May We the Father Know, - *Through You May We Know the Son As Well, - and *And You, the Spirit of Them Both, May We Always Believe. -An unemployed Lakeland man has plead guilty to trying to make fraudulent wire transfers of $7 billion from “a large nationally renowned financial institution.” Court documents reveal that the man believed Jesus wanted him to be wealthy.
John Michael Haskew was accused of instigating the wire transfers on December 9 and 10 from said national financial institution. The Florida man’s wire transfers stroked suspicion from investigators on December 12th when Haskew processed a number of transactions totaling a staggering $7 billion, according to local publication WFTV.
The unemployed man used a bank routing number, that wasn’t his, to schedule over 70 transactions from the anonymous “Bank A” as cited in the complaint. Notably, prosecutors have also revealed that Haskew was in debt with the federal government and was looking at ways to pay it off.
When agents caught up to him, Haskew stated that he was “self-taught on the banking industry” and figured out how to initiate wire transfers through experimentation.
When asked why he continued to make the wire transfers, he offered up a baffling explanation.
The criminal complaint revealed:
(He stated) that Jesus Christ created wealth for everyone. Using this scheme, Haskew believed that he could obtain the wealth that Jesus Christ created for him and that belonged to him.
Suffice to say, Haskew did not get away with the fraudulent transactions. Following his arrest on December 16, Haskew has since entered a guilty plea on Thursday last week, admitting to a charge of making false of fraudulent statement to a department or agency of the United States. No other details have been revealed. It is yet unknown if Haskew managed to siphon any money from the unknown bank.
When sentenced, Haskew faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
Image credit: Pixabay.In an unsurprising turn of events, the pro-gunners like Wayne LaPierre of the NRA have come out publicly to insist they do not like being called “Sandy Hookers”. They have also said they don’t like being called “pro-gunners”.
“Just because we feel the tragic events at Sandy Hook shouldn’t be politicized doesn’t mean you can call us Sandy Hooker,” explained Todd Halford, a Tea Party activist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
RIGHT: A photo taken of some Sandy Hookers. (Click photo to embiggen)
“And for that matter, calling us Sandy Hookers make us sound cheap and dirty, which we aren’t. Do you have any idea how much an AR15 costs?”
Gun Rights advocate and consummate Sandy Hooker Michele Bachmann spoke out against the title, we presume, when she said, “Gun rights conversation America because permanent encroachment disarms fundamental.”
Bachmann’s husband Marcus Bachmann declined an interview, but through a spokesman insisted that guns are “fabulous” and “very hetero”. He’s something of an expert, he would know.
One passerby while we were conducting an interview interjected, “Sandy Hookers? Well that’s just racist right there,” which apparently means something.
“A lot of Sandy Hookers don’t realize how uncomfortable it can be to engage in oral exchanges with them,” said John Justjohn from Newport, Rhode Island. “It’s just painful and nobody comes away satisfied.”
One Sandy Hooker we met with in Washington DC asked, “Wait, did you just call me a sandy hooker? What the hell is that supposed to mean? What’s this for anyway? You don’t have permission to record me!”A vinyl Pop! figurine in the likeness of Orlando shooting victim Luis Vielma was made to preserve his memory.
Vielma, 22, was one of the 49 people killed during the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida on June 12.
Vielma was an employee at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at the Universal Studios theme park, so the Pop! doll features Vielma in Gryffindor-house attire, wand in hand.
J.K. Rowling tweeted her feelings about Vielma's death on June 13.
Luis Vielma worked on the Harry Potter ride at Universal. He was 22 years old. I can't stop crying. #Orlando pic.twitter.com/Nz2ZCWxNsS — J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 13, 2016
The maker of the figurine, Brandon Anderson, of Colorado Springs, Colorado told The Huffington Post that he made the custom creation after reading a post on a Funko Pop! Facebook page he's on. The post suggested that someone should make a tribute figurine for Vielma. Anderson did not know Vielma personally.
The Pop! site allows anyone to order blank figurines for DIY customization. This iteration was made by Anderson solely for friends and family of Vielma as a tribute, so it won't be sold to the masses out of respect for them. He is currently attempting to get ahold of the family to give it to them.
A representative for Funko told HuffPost, "Our thoughts are with Luis, his family, and everyone touched by the tragedy in Orlando."
We won't ever forget you, Luis.This project grew out of a Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition combovid that Snoooootch was working on. Somehow it evolved from a quick collaboration between him and Lukenessmonster, into a five-minute video containing twenty elaborate combos from over seven contributors.
notes:
Many of these combos were tool-assisted via programmable controllers or input macro scripting. As usual, all of our combos follow standard meter restrictions. Absolutely no hacks, cheats, or game-altering devices were used in the making of this video.
combos by Doopliss, error1, Lukenessmonster, Maj, Pokey86, Smileymike101, and Snoooootch
edited by Snoooootch
soundtrack: MikeyG1221 – Victory Fanfare (Final Fantasy VII OST Remix)
transcript:
0:04 On the last frame before landing, Dan’s vertical j.HP hits Dhalsim’s maximum height j.LP, allowing Dan to follow it up with EX DP FADC to ultra-2.
0:20 The second hit of Seth’s c.HP puts Balrog in float state, so the first j.D+MK stomp connects for free – allowing j.MP to juggle. Delaying the next set of stomps and whiffing divekick enables EX Tanden to connect and reset the juggle counter. Seth can still FADC his SRK when the opponent is very high up, and against Rog he even has enough time connect j.MP after backdash.
0:36 Yun’s EX Palm does 375 stun on counterhit and 300 stun normally, while EX Shoulder does 250 stun – enough to dizzy E.Ryu or Akuma. Jump in fierce does above average damage for a jumping attack. Ultra-1 causes float on a standing opponent, and the second hit of Yuns EX Dragon kick maintains juggle potential, setting up Yun’s crouching target combo finish.
0:51 For some reason, it’s a lot harder to suck the opponent back in on the second rep of Sonic Boom, EX Tanden near the corner. Thankfully, Rufus’ large hitbox allows Seth to use MP Sonic Boom, which hits later and gives more time to follow up. The walljump at the end is easier than it looks – just space out the first stomp and Rufus’ bulk will keep him in range for the divekick.
1:04 Ryu can connect c.HP after s.HK on four crouching characters, and Juri happens to be one of them. After the FADC, the spacing is good enough that Ryus can do a second EX Tatsu – netting 4 hits and only just dizzying Juri. Ryu’s combo options are limited without meter though.
1:17 Dudley’s rose shortens Ken’s Hadoken recovery. LK Tatsu is used as a dash, which is followed by an EX Hadoken (which juggles twice in AE).
1:26 After the lvl2 Focus Attack, Seth’s c.HP puts Dan in float state, and j.MP maintains it while landing on the oposite side. Seth’s SRK FADC provides another side switch. Whiffing the divekick helps set up the ultra-2 finisher.
1:46 Cody’s s.HP hits meaty after the jump-in, letting him link into c.HP and dizzy E.Ryu really easily. The same thing happens after the dizzy – meaty s.HP, F+MP, meaty s.LP, ultra-2.
2:06 Trading lvl3 Focus Attack with Dhalsim’s vertical j.LP allows Bison to whiff s.LP and still connect j.MP, then whiff s.HK and kara-cancel teleport into his super for style.
2:17 Because of Abel’s high and wide hit box, Sakura is able to stretch her combo with multiple heavy punches; enough to dizzy him. She links ultra-2 after a meaty LK Tatsu by hitting Abel on the last active frame.
2:36 Pokey86 found that Seth can link close s.HK into close s.HP after Tandem against Seth, so error1 uses that link four times in this combo.
3:07 Ken juggles EX air Tatsu twice by relying on the Dhalsim j.LP setup.
3:14 Gouken’s EX Tatsumaki Gorasen was buffed in AE so that the first hit locks the opponent in place for the remaining hits. It does this even if another hit lands after it, which is why the charged Gohadoken hits once before Dhalsim is teleported into the |
significant damage and injuries but there are no injuries involved in this," he said.
"We don't believe there are any tie-ups to traffic. As a matter of fact, our officers have been told that they are not required on the train derailment."
But Hopkinson did say the derailment may be causing a visual distraction to drivers in the area.
Police received a call from Canadian Pacific Railway police about the derailment at 3:18 p.m.
CP says it has notified all of the relevant authorities about the derailment. (Michael Charles Cole/CBC)Guest Column, Interview by Misaki C. Kido
In this guest column from Kodansha Advanced Media's Misaki C. Kido, we hear from the creator of A Silent Voice, the first time mangaka Yoshitoki Oima has been interviewed in English. A Silent Voice is an Eisner Award nominee this year (see “ ICv2: The 2016 Eisner Award Nominees ”) and was also on this year’s YALSA Top Ten Graphic Novels for Teens list (see “ YALSA Top Ten Graphic Novels for Teens ”). Kodansha Comics released all seven volumes of the series over the last year, with the final volume streeting May 31.
Yoshitoki Oima was born in Gifu Prefecture, Japan in 1989. In 2008, a pilot manga of A Silent Voice won the 80th Annual Shonen Magazine Newcomer Manga Award. In 2009, she debuted as a mangaka with the manga adaptation of a novel by Tow Ubukata, Mardock Scramble. In 2013, a remake of the A Silent Voice pilot chapter ran as a one-shot manga in Weekly Shonen Magazine, which then went on to become a full series. It has been announced that A Silent Voice will be adapted into theatrical anime in September 2016.
A Silent Voice is the story of boy meets girl … except its main focus is on how difficult it is for one person to communicate with another, especially if that other person can’t hear you.
Yoshitoki Oima was only eighteen years old when she first started work on A Silent Voice. Most would-be mangaka aspire to going pro around that age, but what made Oima special was that she had a full story already in mind and the determination to tell it to the world. What led her to make that manga? Here, the creator of the Eisner-nominated manga series reveals her innermost thoughts for the first time.
When you were a child, what were you like?
Yoshitoki Oima: I was the youngest sibling in my family. So even though I wasn’t aware of it, I think I was pretty selfish [laughs]. I was a tomboy who liked to play imaginary gunfights. I was pretty active back then, although I became more of a gloomy person later.
Why is that?
A lot of stuff happened at school that made me that way. But when I was playing with friends, I was as happy as I can be.
Did you read any manga when you were growing up?
I did. I have a brother who is six years older than me, and he liked to buy and read manga. There was stacks of manga everywhere at home, so I picked up some of them and started to read it myself. But I wasn’t too deeply into it. I only read a specific series from a certain manga magazine.
I’ve been most influenced by a manga called 3x3 Eyes [by Yuzo Takada]. That was the first series I collected myself.
Why and how did you become a mangaka?
When I was spending a lot of time reading and drawing manga, the thought to be a mangaka was at the back of my mind. I was actually drawing before I was reading. But I was kind of embarrassed to tell anyone about my dream.
Why was that?
Everybody around me had more specific occupations in mind that sounded good, like becoming a florist. If I say that I want to become a mangaka, it would’ve sounded like I just wanted to goof around. A mangaka can provide entertainment, but I don’t know if it would contribute to society in any specific way.
Do you like writing stories or drawing art more?
When I was younger, I liked drawing more. But now I like making stories, or rather, it’s something I’ve been focusing on. It’s hard to say. Drawing art and writing a story are both fun and yet difficult.
How did you think of the idea for A Silent Voice?
When I used to live in Gifu, I started drawing a manga to submit to a publisher in Tokyo, where I wanted to live. But my mom was against the idea of me moving to Tokyo and asked me things like, “What are you going to do about the money?” So I thought if my manga won an award, the prize money could give me a head start to live in Tokyo. And in order to make my manga, I wanted to work with whatever materials were accessible to me at the time in Gifu. I wanted to draw something I could only draw now, while I was in Gifu. So I started to incorporate things like the scenery of Gifu in the backgrounds and the subject of people with hearing disabilities. My mom was a sign-language translator, so I could ask her and people around her about the details of sign language and the reality of hearing disability.
So you made this story with the support of your family?
Yes, for sure. And I had to work it out that way. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to survive.
Why did you decide to write this story from the perspective someone who was once a bully?
First of all, I didn’t want to write this story from the perspective of the one who was getting bullied, because I didn’t think that was interesting to me or anyone else. To me, it’s easier to get into the story from the perspective of a bully, or Shota’s point of view. I’m sure more readers can relate to Shota than to Shoko. Most people can only speculate what it feels like to be a girl with a disability who gets bullied. But the truth is, you won’t be able to know how she really feels. I thought that was the more important point to convey. So I didn’t want to reveal Shoko’s inner thoughts or her true feelings.
Do you have any personal experience with bullying or being bullied?
Bullying in real life is not very visible on the surface. Sometimes you can tell someone is talking behind your back, but I’ve never gone far enough to confirm it. So I don’t know. I wouldn’t register it as bullying, but I still get negative vibes from it. I’d just stop there.
Shoya is a simple-minded person who only thinks of things in terms of whether if something feels right or wrong. Shoko wishes she could do so much more, but in reality, nothing goes according to her will. She may think most people don’t understand her.
Do you have any models for the characters in A Silent Voice?
I can think of people who have some resemblance to the characters. For example, Naoka reminds me of a girl who was high up the social ladder of my class. Miyoko reminds me of a girl in my high school who I thought was really cool. If Tomohiro was real, I’d want to stay away from him. But his inner self is very close to mine, in the sense he clings to his friends. But for the most part, those characters consist of certain aspects of myself, but more exaggerated.
I would say Miyoko. Maybe not my favorite character per se, but I feel like I go too easy on her … like I don’t want to give her too harsh of an obstacle.
How did you come up with the interactions between these characters?
I turn them against each other in my head [laughs]. When I am drawing a character, I become that person. So I know exactly how each one of these guys feels like. Even people like Miki, Naoka, and the school teachers like Mr. Takeuchi and Ms. Kita–– a lot of readers assume I portray these characters as the “bad guys,” but that’s not true.
It’s hard to say anyone from A Silent Voice is “bad” or “evil.”
I don’t quite get why people think in such ways. When I look at people’s reactions to this manga online, it makes me wonder why certain people feel a certain way about a certain character.
Maybe it’s because it feels “too close to home.”
Yeah, maybe [laughs].
Those were purely just ideas that I had. At first, I had a vision of a classroom scene with all the classmates’ faces crossed out with X’s. Because I thought of this scene, I dug deeper into developing Shota and other characters’ personality. The scene from Shoko’s point of view, when the words in the speech bubble get cut off, the whole point is to show the world she lives in. I don’t know if this was the right way to express it. Because at the end of the day, I don’t really know what it’s like or how it feels to be in her world. But I want to know. That’s what made me struggle the most.
What does it mean that Shota sees X’s on people faces?
It means he doesn’t want to, or cannot see that person’s face. It’s like the symbolism of indifference. Or sometime you are really interested in that person, but trying not to be.
There’s many hidden truths and inner thoughts of each character that won’t be revealed until the end of this manga. Did you plan this series to be this way?
When I started making this manga, I already had a rough idea of the overall story all the way until the end. In my original idea, Shoko was going to be the one to go through what Shoya went through in the end. But my editor was against the idea. I mean, I kind of get it too. But then what? I had to think about what to do with the story when one of the main characters was suddenly “out of the picture.” That’s when I switched writing the story from Shoya’s perspective to everybody else’s. In my favorite video game, Chrono Trigger, the main character also goes out of the picture. Meanwhile, the main characters’ allies try their best to hold down the situation. I think I was influenced by that.
Mardock Scramble was based on a pre-existing novel. So I’ve read it over and over again, and every time I read it, I’ve found something new about it … It was very hard. In some sense, I completely lost my own imagination and the ability to write my own story at that time. Instead, I learned just how much story I can incorporate into one 45-page chapter each month to satisfy a reader. I was very much focused on just Mardock Scramble. It was a good training.
Is that why your storytelling was fully embraced in A Silent Voice?
I couldn’t stand the fact I hadn’t made my own manga for over three years. I didn’t care what anybody thought about my manga at that point.
It sounds like the time and effort you’ve spent on Mardock Scramble somehow lead up to the making of A Silent Voice.
It does. While I was working on Mardock Scramble, it seemed like I wasn’t making my own manga. But I had something to draw in front of me. That was what was given to me. I was constantly searching for the reason why Mardock Scramble was given to me. And I feel like found some answers. In Mardock Scramble, the main character Balot says she wants to die. As a reader, I didn’t get why … and I wanted to know why. I wanted to dig deeper. What leads a person to think in such way? I felt like it was my duty to really understand this point. The answers I got from working on Mardock Scramble carried through to A Silent Voice.
To me, it was almost miraculous I got to work on a manga about communication. A lot of things led up for me to make this manga about the difficulty of communication. I am just fascinated by the feedback that I get about this piece, from anyone. I feel so lucky to have opportunities like this interview, to talk about why I’ve made such manga. And the fact so many people recommended this manga to other people like their friends makes me feel so fortunate.
What kind of audience would you want to read A Silent Voice?
I want somebody like Shoko - who feels lonely - to read this manga.
Do you have any comments for the fans of A Silent Voice?
If you feel anything, or find anything in this manga, I would be very happy. Even if you don’t, the fact that you’ve still read this manga would make me happy.
Thank you!The other day I read this post by Oestrus over at World of Matticus called Keeping Up With The Paragons. It touched on something that I’ve been thinking about pretty much since launch. It’s easy at this point in the expansion’s life to feel as if you are getting left behind, will never accomplish what you want to accomplish – or if you do, it’ll be so long after the fact that it’s irrelevant. It’s not true. The expansion just came out – approximately yesterday! Really. You have to dive in at your own pace, not the pace of everyone around you. Not everyone is going to have server firsts, or world firsts – in fact, I think the majority of us are comfortably someplace in the middle. The guilds that are blowing through content like tissue paper are impressive, but they make sacrifices and commitments to be there. That’s not a criticism, it’s a fact. Finally, the content isn’t going to go anywhere. You still have time.
It’s okay if you aren’t raiding yet, honest.
Time Well Spent: Always Includes Cookies
The expansion has been out for twenty-eight days, or exactly four weeks. Of those days, depending on your beliefs – at least three were likely holidays. (The twenty-fourth, fifth, and first of January, for anyone keeping track). That leaves you with exactly twenty-five days that you could have been playing WoW, but I’m probably being generous there. In my case, my brother was here from out of town for Christmas. I don’t see him more than once a year – and the once is if I’m lucky – so I sure wasn’t going to be playing WoW in the evenings when he was here. Several of our guild members had other obligations; travel, family, holiday. One of them moved across the country in the middle of December, a few more went home to another state to celebrate the holidays with their families.
I’m not here making excuses. (“Oh, we absolutely would have been server-first at xyx if only we’d had the time!“) But the fact is, the expansion is still quite young. Presumably most folks had to attend to that pesky work-thing for a good chunk of December. I know that being behind the leveling curve can be frustrating. I started playing WoW pretty late in Burning Crusade, and it felt like an eternity before I could catch up to play with the “big people.” When Wrath came out, I was bound and determined not to be left behind, and I wasn’t. This time around I’ve been much more relaxed. I leveled at what I consider a reasonable pace, and my reasonable pace is probably different from yours. At least two guildies were 85 quite literally overnight. I wasn’t among them, but that’s okay. We’re all going to be raiding at the same time.
Expectations and Priorities: We can’t all be first.
Only you can know when you’re ready to raid. You should raid when you’re ready, and not a moment before. If you aren’t raiding right now, it doesn’t mean you’re lazy, or bad, or slow. It means that you made different choices. You chose (or had no choice) but to use your time in a different way. Now you’re hearing reports of all these first-kills rolling in via Twitter, or other blogs, or whispers from friends, and you start to feel panicky. “Why isn’t that me? Did I wait too long?”
Not everyone is going to be first, even though the competitive WoW culture is a bit obsessed with it. It can be nice to compare yourself to other folks to see how you measure up, and can serve as a form of recognition for the effort you’ve put into your character and the game. But it’s important to recognize that those kinds of achievements require a sacrifice. To use myself as an example, we could have pushed the guild harder to be ready on time. I could have made sure to run more heroics over the holidays instead of going out for supper (and sushi lunch!) with my brother and my family. I could have done that, but I didn’t want to. I’m not passing judgment on people who would have made a different choice – I’m not in their shoes! Maybe they don’t celebrate the holidays, or their family was out of town. I can’t possibly know that. I do know that I’ve chosen to be in a guild of people who are adults. They have children, jobs, and other obligations. We’re also a small guild (by choice) and so we have to wait for our full roster to be ready before we can dive into ten mans. I know some twenty five-sized guilds have been able to work on tens. They have a “head start” on us, and that’s fine too.
We expected to start raiding in early January, and that’s what we’re doing – right on schedule! I know a few of our members would’ve preferred for us to start sooner, but the sacrifice didn’t seem worth it. We have a great group of excellent raiders with real-life obligations that prevented us from raiding sooner, but we know that when we do raid we’ll be ready. One ill-fated Blackwing Descent evening back in mid-December proved that. Gearing, gemming, and enchanting don’t happen overnight. The only possible problem is when your expectations and those of your guild don’t match up. In most cases, I think that if you wait a month you won’t be disappointed. Everything feels very urgent right now, but raid progression will settle as we all get a chance to get to it.
Inevitable End: This, too, shall be patched.
As Wrath proved, Blizzard is firmly committed to making sure that everyone who wants to see end-game content will be able to do so. Whether your guild raids once a week for kicks, or five nights a week, you’ll get there. Even the heroics that folks have alternately lauded and complained about will become easier as people acquire raid gear and are more willing to pug. There’s no knowing when the next content patch will be. Clearing what’s available at a reasonable pace is something everyone has to decide for themselves, much like leveling. You can have raid goals even if you haven’t started raiding yet. You can meet those goals. I’m confident in our particular group’s ability to learn quickly, and I think the time spent gearing while people rested and went on vacation is better spent than if we’d tried to rush into raiding too soon. The frustration would have outweighed any imaginary benefit to be achieved from “doing things first.”
Regardless of when you start, if you have the will and the people to make it happen, your raiding will be successful. What successful means is something only you can decide for yourself, and don’t let the accomplishments of others cast a shadow on your own. Congratulate your further progressed friends (sincerely!) and rest assured that your time is coming. That tortoise knew what he was talking about.
AdvertisementsBRIDGE - CHENGDU SHUANGLIU INTL AIRPORT ZUUU P3D
Zsolt Monostori
My first Bridge scenery was ZGGG Guangzhou which I bought in 2016 and I remember how it blew my mind. I never heard of this developer before but learned their name well after Guangzhou. N-
o surprise, Chengdu was a similar mind blowing experience. I certainly had high expectations and Bridge did not disappoint me with this fantastic product, ZUUU is one of the best airport scenery add-on ever released! It deserves six stars as I could not find anything to complain about and trust me, I was trying to nitpick like crazy! The lighting, the wet runway/taxiway/-
apron effects, the great textures and ultra smooth performance all contribute towards an incredible airport experience. Everything is top notch here, Bridge truly nailed it. You better practice those low visiblity instrument approaches as the Sichuan Basin has very little annual sunshine (around 1000 hours) and fog is quite common along with air pollution - which all make the airport even more fun for the daring sim pilot. The airport has a plethora of real world flights thus realism-seekers can choose from a massive variety. You can do short and long haul cargo alike as the airport is regularly visited by many top cargo carriers. Then you've got all those passenger flights. Fly to virtually any Chinese city keeping it domestic or hop over to Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong or even as far as Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, New York or San Francisco - you can utilize almost any aircraft type without drifting too far from real life scenarios. Chengdu, this 14 million megacity is awaiting your arrival, let'see if you can spot some pandas on short final! Absol-
utely recommended! To add, I am sincerely hoping Bridge are going to update their old Guangzhou too, or release a brand new version maybe - packing it with all the goodies such as dynamic lights and SODE and everything that their Chengdu scenery has to offer.Photo via Flickr user Ryan Ozawa and Iowa Senate Republicans website.
Iowa State Senator Mark Chelgren already had a bit of a reputation as a lawmaker who loves to court controversy. But the scandal that came to light last week is probably not what he had in mind, and we have a feeling that he is none too happy about all the attention it's receiving.
Here's why: It now appears that a section on the senator's official website claiming that "he has a degree in business management from Forbco Management School and attended the University of California at Riverside majoring in astro-physics, geo-physics, and mathematics" in fact referred to the one year he spent in college before dropping out, and to a management course he took once at a Sizzler (yes, the steakhouse chain) in Torrance, California.
Mr. Chelgren did not respond to our requests for a statement and his voicemail box is (unsurprisingly) full. But in a phone interview with NBC, when pressed about Forbco—which we now know is not a school at all, but a company that operated a Sizzler franchise—Chelgren became vague, remembering only that "the school [read: Sizzler] was created by Forbco Management," and that he "got a degree in hotel restaurant management." That "degree" was, in fact, a Sizzler management certificate, and likely not even that; Chelgren has been unable to produce documentation of any kind.
READ MORE: The Idiot's Guide to Drinking at Chain Restaurants
Chelgren remembered that he completed his course "around '88 or '89," although he said that "it's going back a ways, so I don't remember."
Luckily for skeptical journalists and citizens, the Republican Party has been more forthcoming, even gleeful. Also speaking to NBC, Ed Failor, a spokesperson for the Iowa State Republicans, described Chelgren's alleged alma mater as "kind of like Hamburger University at McDonald's."
Pressed over whether the senator had a college degree at all, Failor ultimately conceded: "That's not accurate."
Listen, no one is trying to disparage the man for working in food services, or for wanting to better himself in his profession. But Sizzler? Sizzler is the safety school of fun family dining. Not everyone is Chili's material, we'll grant you, but you hope a state senator could at least manage a Ruby Tuesday.
When NBC reached Mr. Chelgren on Wednesday, he also claimed that "this was not an attempt to inflate anything," that he wasn't even previously aware these statements were on his website, and that "I didn't concern myself about this, honestly."
All mention of Forbco was promptly scrubbed from his website.
Unbelievably, it was Chelgren himself who originally drew attention to his academic background when he unveiled his latest controversy-courting, no-hope-of-passing bill proposing a hiring freeze that would put a cap on the number of Democrats universities were allowed to hire. Explaining the necessity for the bill, Chelgren cited his time as a student butting heads with liberal professors—who we know now were actually Sizzler managers.
And while this all might seem bad for his career in politics, in the current climate, we're not so sure. Sizzler is at least an institution that President Trump is familiar with. Come to think of it, no one can overcook a steak quite like Sizzler.
It pains us to say this, but with his Sizzler management certificate in hand, Chelgren might go far.Just after 1pm PDT, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 1298, which explicitly legalizes the use and testing of driverless cars in the state. California becomes the second third state in the country, after Nevada (which has already licensed Google's self-driving car) and Florida, to legalize this new technology. Video of the signing can be found here.
I previously criticized SB 1298 for being too restrictive (unlike Nevada's) -- specifically, a section that deferred to nonexistent National Highway Transportation Safety Administration regulations that likely won't be drafted and finalized for several years, and explicitly required that a licensed driver be behind the wheel.
Back in May, CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman (pictured above) and myself had the opportunity to test ride Google's self-driving car. We were very impressed. As I noted then, this new technology has the promise to be the most significant innovation in automobility since Henry Ford's mass-production assembly line. It will greatly reduce the number of crashes, and thus road injuries and fatalities, as a computer's response time is far quicker than that of a human's. It will also dramatically reduce congestion, improve air quality, offer disabled persons an unprecedented level of personal mobility, and enable new urban mobility services such as driverless ride-shares.
The liability issue sticks out as a major problem to many, but as I explained in May, this may not present an insurmountable hurdle (Google doesn't seem to think so) given the proliferation of event data recorders.
In addition to being legal in Nevada and California, a number of other states are considering adopting similar authorization laws, including Arizona, Hawaii, and Oklahoma. Legislation was also recently introduced here in the District of Columbia by Councilmember Mary Cheh. Here's to hoping good policy can be made into good politics.“ [The] Barbarossa’s most invigorating innovation [is] a nervous stroll through the minefield that was a WW2 general’s in tray. Tramping through the political swamp the developers have so skilfully evoked with his plethora of history-rich, humour-flecked decision dialogues, provides a wonderful sense of what it must have been like to sit in the turret of the German war machine in 1941” – Rock Paper Shotgun
"Operation Barbarossa in its present state represents a highlight in the progress of serious computer war gaming" - Wargamer
“You need to play this game”- Three Moves Ahead
Since its release, Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa has been considered one of the most groundbreaking wargames depicting the German invasion of Soviet Russia.
Awarded “Overall Digital Game of the Year and Digital Wargame of the Year” by the Groghead’s Readers, Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa employs an innovative gameplay mechanic, in which political affiliations and personal relations between you and your superiors (and subordinates) have a strong impact during the military operations!
Today, developer studio VR Designs is very proud to announce that Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa is marching straight to Steam with a full set of improvements and upgrades, included an elegant “War Diary” feature, which follows the diary of a German soldier, based on what is happening in the game, giving you an insight into how your progress and decisions reflect on the “ground level”!
Plus, the map artwork has been significantly improved to make the gameplay more realistic and immersive than ever!
Is your will strong enough to face both external and internal enemies?
Stay tuned for further updates! The game will be available on Steam on April, 28th!
Get more information about Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa from its official product page!Jordan Taylor Hanson (born March 14, 1983) is an American musician best known as a member of the pop rock band Hanson.[1] He was born in Jenks, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa. He sings both lead and back-up vocals, and plays keyboard, percussion (including drums, bongos and the tambourine), guitar, harmonica, and piano. He is also the lead singer of supergroup Tinted Windows.
Early life [ edit ]
Taylor was born in a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the second of seven children born to Clarke Walker Hanson and Diana Frances Hanson. His siblings are Isaac, Zac, Jessica, Avery, Mackenzie (Joshua) and Zoé.
Music career [ edit ]
Taylor sings and plays keyboard and the piano with the band Hanson. He and his older brother, Isaac, started the band with younger brother Zac in 1992, and were initially known as The Hanson Brothers (later changed to just 'Hanson'). At the time, Isaac was eleven, Taylor was nine, and Zac was six. They performed as an a cappella group outside clubs in Tulsa. On May 6, 1997, the band released their first major studio album, Middle of Nowhere, with Mercury Records. The first single, "MMMBop", made it to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. May 6 has been declared "Hanson Day" in Tulsa in honor of the release of Middle of Nowhere.
Taylor Hanson is a co-founder and co-CEO of 3CG Records, along with brothers Isaac and Zac Hanson.
It was announced in early 2009 that Taylor, along with former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos and Fountains of Wayne bassist Adam Schlesinger, formed a new band called Tinted Windows. The band played their first publicized gig at SXSW in Austin, Texas on March 20, 2009. Their first album was released on April 21, 2009.[2][3]
On November 20, 2016, Hanson performed "A Song For You" at the funeral service for fellow Tulsa native Leon Russell.[4]
Personal life [ edit ]
Taylor in concert in Madrid, 2000
In June 2002, Hanson married Natalie Anne Bryant, whom he had met in 2000.[5] The couple have six children: Jordan "Ezra" Hanson (born October 31, 2002),[6] Penelope Anne "Penny" (born April 19, 2005), River Samuel (born September 4, 2006), Viggo Moriah (born December 9, 2008), Wilhelmina Jane "Willa" (born October 2, 2012)[7] and Claude "Indiana" Emmanuel, (born December 26, 2018).[8]1994 album by Weezer
1994 studio album by Weezer
Weezer (commonly known as the Blue Album) is the eponymous debut studio album by American rock band Weezer, released on May 10, 1994 by DGC Records. It was produced by The Cars frontman Ric Ocasek and recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York City from August to September 1993.
The album reached number sixteen on the US Billboard 200, going on to achieve RIAA triple platinum status. It was supported by the singles "Undone – The Sweater Song", "Buddy Holly", and "Say It Ain't So", which brought Weezer mainstream success, helped by music videos directed by Spike Jonze. By 2009, the album had sold at least 3.3 million copies in the United States.[1]
Since its release, the band also released several other self-titled albums with similar covers and different colored backgrounds, each of which is known by the color of the album.
Background [ edit ]
Weezer was formed on February 14, 1992, in Los Angeles by Rivers Cuomo, Patrick Wilson, Matt Sharp, and Jason Cropper. At the time, they would play at clubs and other small venues around L.A. However, it took time for the band to gain popularity. Cuomo explained:
... I remember just being totally shocked at how little people responded to us, because I thought we were so good. I mean, we were playing the same songs that eventually became big hits, like 'The Sweater Song' and 'Say It Ain't So,' and we'd play 'em out in the L.A. clubs. [People] would just be like, 'Go away. We want a grunge band.' Rivers Cuomo, Rivers' Edge: The Weezer Story[2]
Weezer recorded The Kitchen Tapes as an attempt to create a buzz around L.A.[3] The band eventually attracted attention from major-label A&R reps looking for alternative rock bands while performing on the same bill as the band That Dog.[4] They were then signed to DGC Records on June 26, 1993, by Todd Sullivan, an A&R rep from Geffen Records.[5]
Recording [ edit ]
While preparing for the studio sessions, the band focused on their vocal interplay by practicing barbershop quartet-style songs, which helped both Cuomo and Sharp feel more comfortable collaborating during rehearsals. Sharp, who had never sung before joining Weezer, developed his falsetto backing vocal: "I had to sing an octave higher than Rivers. After a lot of practice, I started to get it down."[6] Fifteen songs were rehearsed for the album pre-production sessions in New York in preparation for the Electric Lady Studios recording sessions. Four songs from this rehearsal would not be attempted for the album: "Lullaby for Wayne", "I Swear It's True", "Getting Up and Leaving", and a reprise version of "In the Garage". The other song, an ode to two women who ran the Weezer fanclub called "Mykel & Carli", was attempted during the Electric Lady sessions, but was also abandoned (this recording would later be released as a digital bonus track on the 2010 Death to False Metal album). A later re-recording of "Mykel & Carli" would be featured as a B-side on the "Undone - The Sweater Song" single.[7]
The band briefly considered self-producing, but were pressured by Geffen to choose a producer. They ultimately decided on Ric Ocasek; Cuomo explained his choice: "I'd always admired the Cars and Ric Ocasek's songwriting and production skills."[8] During production, Ocasek convinced the band to change their guitar pickup from the neck pick-up to the bridge pick-up, resulting in a brighter sound.[9] During these sessions, founding guitarist Jason Cropper left the band and was replaced by current guitarist Brian Bell,[10] leading to some speculation about how much Bell contributed to the album. While Bell's vocals are clearly audible on some tracks,[11] Cuomo re-recorded all of Cropper's guitar parts.[12] According to Ocasek, all ten tracks were laid down by Cuomo in one day, each in one take.[13] However, Bell is still credited for playing guitar in the album liner notes. Cropper's writing credit on "My Name Is Jonas" is earned by his coming up with the intro to the song.[14]
Writing and composition [ edit ]
Most of the album was written by Rivers Cuomo. Exceptions are "My Name Is Jonas", which was co-written with Jason Cropper and Patrick Wilson, and "Surf Wax America" and "The World Has Turned and Left Me Here", which were composed and written by Cuomo and Wilson. Weezer touches upon various life experiences of Cuomo, including subjects such as his brother's car accident, heartbreak, jealousy, alcohol, and former girlfriends.[15] Weezer incorporates the genres emo,[16] alternative rock, power pop,[17][18] and pop rock.[19]
Many songs from the album are inspired by Cuomo's past personal experiences. "My Name is Jonas", deals with Cuomo's brother Leaves who had been seriously injured in a car accident while a student at Oberlin College and was having problem with his insurance.[15] Jason Cropper earned co-writing credit for coming up with the intro to the song.[14] Both "No One Else" and "The World Has Turned and Left Me Here" are lyrically connected, with Cuomo describing the narrator of "No One Else" as "the jealous-obsessive asshole in me freaking out on my girlfriend" and claiming that "'The World has Turned and Left Me Here' is the same asshole wondering why she's gone."[15] The second single from the Blue Album was "Buddy Holly", whose music video was also directed by Spike Jonze. It portrayed the band performing at the original Arnold's Drive-In diner from the popular 1970s television show, Happy Days. The video combined contemporary footage of the band with clips from the show. Happy Days cast member Al Molinaro made a cameo appearance in the video. The video was met with great popularity and heavy rotation on MTV.[20] The music video was also featured as an extra in the Microsoft Windows 95 Upgrade CD, along with Edie Brickell's "Good Times" music video and the movie trailer for Rob Roy. The video won four awards at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, including prizes for Breakthrough Video and Best Alternative Video.[21]
The single "Undone - The Sweater Song" was described by Cuomo as "the feeling you get when the train stops and the little guy comes knockin' on your door. It was supposed to be a sad song, but everyone thinks it's hilarious."[15] The video marks one of the early directorial efforts of Spike Jonze, whose pitch was simply "A blue stage, a steadicam, a pack of wild dogs."[22] The video became an instant hit on MTV.[23] The final single, "Say It Ain't So", was inspired by Cuomo believing his parents split up when he was four because he thought his dad was an alcoholic.[15] The music video, which was directed by Sophie |
games that I want to recommend just because, hell, it’s 3 euros, and because it’s unique. If you’re not using your gaming time to look for some new and weird experiences then you’re kind of missing the point.
On a side note, Eskil’s recent bloggings report that he’s going to be doing a beginner’s programming course around GDC next year, for folks interested in making games. “I thought I would put together a 3 day intensive course in game programming (for total beginners) that would teach you the basics of programming, and let you make a simple game. Each day would be around 3-4 hours long preferably in the evening. My plan is to try to do this in San Francisco the week before or after GDC. It would be free, and everyone would be welcome.” He needs a venue, and interested parties, so email him if you’re interested.Image caption The US Senate is expected to pass a two-year cross-party budget agreement later this week
A budget bill has passed a US Senate procedural vote, all but guaranteeing its approval this week and averting a government shutdown next month.
In a rare show of cross-party spirit, 12 Republicans joined Democrats to pass the measure 67-33, paving the way for a majority vote later this week.
The two-year budget bill was overwhelmingly approved last week by the US House of Representatives.
President Barack Obama has also backed the budget proposal.
Tuesday's vote exceeded the 60 votes required to overcome a delaying tactic known as a filibuster. It is expected to come up for a simple majority vote on Wednesday.
The Senate's top four Republican leaders - who are in the minority - voted to block consideration of the budget bill, though their opposition was mainly symbolic and they knew the bill would ultimately go forward, analysts say.
If approved, it will go to Mr Obama for his signature.
The proposal was drafted by a cross-party budget committee convened after a 16-day government shutdown in October.
'A smarter way'
Image caption Bruised by the shutdown, Republicans and Democrats seem skittish of fresh budget battles - for now
"This bipartisan bill takes the first steps toward rebuilding our broken budget process," Democratic Senator Patty Murray, co-writer of the bill, said.
"We've spent far too long here scrambling to fix artificial crises instead of working together to solve the big problems we all know we need to address."
But the Senate's top Republican hinted a separate brawl was ahead, indicating the party would demand budget cuts in exchange for raising the US government's borrowing limit next year.
"I doubt if the House, or for that matter the Senate, is willing to give the president a clean debt ceiling increase," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters.
"We'll have to see what the House insists on adding to it as a condition for passing it."
The budget deal, which sets discretionary defence and domestic spending at $1 trillion (£610bn) for the current fiscal year, aims to shave up to $23bn from the nation's $642bn annual budget deficit.
It also rolls back $63bn in military and domestic spending cuts automatically imposed in January when Democrats and Republicans failed to reach a budget compromise.
The new deal does not raise taxes but requires newly hired federal workers to make larger contributions to their pensions.
A federal airport security fee adding $5 to the cost of a typical return flight is also included.
Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, chairman of the House budget committee, said last week the budget deal "cuts spending in a smarter way".
It also helps avoid another government shutdown on 15 January when government funding would otherwise run out.
The October partial government shutdown - which halted many federal services across the country - cost the US economy $24bn, as projected by financial services company Standard & Poor's.Newly published transcripts of January phone calls between President Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Australia didn’t just give people an opportunity to see how Trump discussed matters with international leaders at the time. One conversational snippet has given the internet a primo meme opportunity.
Published Thursday by the Washington Post, the transcripts showed that Trump had a combative conversation Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull about a plan to accept hundreds of refugees from offshore detention centers near to Australia.
“I guarantee you they are bad. That is why they are in prison right now. They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people,” Trump said, seemingly a reference to the massive U.S. dairy industry.
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That milk snippet was all the internet needed to turn it into a meme full of all the dairy product-themed jokes.
The topic of cookies, another business Trump gave airtime to during the presidential debates of 2016 popped up too.
A band name was born.
Those iconic collectible milk print ads made an appearance.
Write to Ashley Hoffman at Ashley.Hoffman@time.com.Dozens of evangelical leaders have signed an open letter pressing Donald Trump to condemn the “alt-right” as “evil”.
After a car slammed into protesters decrying a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Mr Trump faced a tsunami of criticism for repeatedly equating the counter-demonstrators with neo-Nazis. While Mr Trump did later issue a statement and sign a resolution blasting bigotry and singling out groups like the KKK, detractors said he missed an opportunity to make a clear moral distinction.
The letter, endorsed by dozens of religious figures, urges Mr Trump to take a stand by specifically repudiating the “alt-right”, a term that refers to a constellation of beliefs that assail diversity and celebrate America’s white European heritage. Emboldened champions of the white nationalist movement have become more visible and vocal since Mr Trump’s rise.
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Lamenting that “our nation remains divided racially and ideologically”, the letter rejects the “alt-right” as a “white identity movement”, noting that “the majority of its members are white nationalists or white supremacists” and cautioning that “white supremacy cannot be dismissed with moral ambivalence”.
“This movement has escaped your disapproval,” the letter warns, calling on Mr Trump to “join with many other political and religious leaders to proclaim with one voice that the 'alt-right' is racist, evil, and antithetical to a well-ordered, peaceful society”.
“We fear that without moral clarity and courageous leadership that consistently denounces all forms of racism, we may lose the ground that we have gained toward the racial unity for which so many of us have fought,” the letter says.
Shape Created with Sketch. Charlottesville, Virginia Protests Show all 9 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Charlottesville, Virginia Protests 1/9 Statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee stands behind a crowd of hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' during the 'Unite the Right' rally 12 August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. They are protesting the removal of the statue from Emancipation Park in the city. Getty Images 2/9 Militia armed with assault rifles White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' with body armor and combat weapons evacuate comrades who were pepper sprayed after the 'Unite the Right' rally was declared a unlawful gathering by Virginia State Police. Militia members marched through the city earlier in the day, armed with assault rifles. Getty Images 3/9 Trump supporters at the protest A white nationalist demonstrator walks into Lee Park in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017. Hundreds of people chanted, threw punches, hurled water bottles and unleashed chemical sprays on each other Saturday after violence erupted at a white nationalist rally in Virginia. AP Photo 4/9 Racial tensions sparked the violence White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' exchange insults with counter-protesters as they attempt to guard the entrance to Lee Park during the 'Unite the Right' rally Getty 5/9 Protesters clash and several are injured White nationalist demonstrators clash with counter demonstrators at the entrance to Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. A state of emergency is declared. 6/9 A car plows through protesters A vehicle drives into a group of protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The incident resulted in multiple injuries, some life-threatening, and one death. AP Photo 7/9 State police stand ready in riot gear Virginia State Police cordon off an area around the site where a car ran into a group of protesters after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia AP Photo 8/9 Rescue personnel help injured people after a car ran into a large group of protesters after an white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia AP Photo 9/9 President Donald Trump speaks about the ongoing situation in Charlottesville, Virginia from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. He spoke about "loyalty" and "healing wounds" left by decades of racism. 1/9 Statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee stands behind a crowd of hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' during the 'Unite the Right' rally 12 August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. They are protesting the removal of the statue from Emancipation Park in the city. Getty Images 2/9 Militia armed with assault rifles White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' with body armor and combat weapons evacuate comrades who were pepper sprayed after the 'Unite the Right' rally was declared a unlawful gathering by Virginia State Police. Militia members marched through the city earlier in the day, armed with assault rifles. Getty Images 3/9 Trump supporters at the protest A white nationalist demonstrator walks into Lee Park in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017. Hundreds of people chanted, threw punches, hurled water bottles and unleashed chemical sprays on each other Saturday after violence erupted at a white nationalist rally in Virginia. AP Photo 4/9 Racial tensions sparked the violence White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the 'alt-right' exchange insults with counter-protesters as they attempt to guard the entrance to Lee Park during the 'Unite the Right' rally Getty 5/9 Protesters clash and several are injured White nationalist demonstrators clash with counter demonstrators at the entrance to Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. A state of emergency is declared. 6/9 A car plows through protesters A vehicle drives into a group of protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The incident resulted in multiple injuries, some life-threatening, and one death. AP Photo 7/9 State police stand ready in riot gear Virginia State Police cordon off an area around the site where a car ran into a group of protesters after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia AP Photo 8/9 Rescue personnel help injured people after a car ran into a large group of protesters after an white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia AP Photo 9/9 President Donald Trump speaks about the ongoing situation in Charlottesville, Virginia from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. He spoke about "loyalty" and "healing wounds" left by decades of racism.
“It concerned many of us when three people associated with the alt-right movement were given jobs in the White House,” the letter adds. It does not specifically name anyone, but former White House adviser Steve Bannon rose to prominence by running the far-right website Breitbart.
American religious institutions have been divided over how to respond to rising white nationalism. Earlier this year, the Southern Baptists agreed on a statement calling “alt-right white supremacy…antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ” after the church’s annual convention initially declined to take up a resolution addressing the matter.
Evangelical Christians, a force in American politics, have typically supported Republican presidential candidates. Mr Trump largely won their backing despite having been married three times, frequently using vulgar language and repeatedly demeaning - and boasting about harassing - women.
Some evangelicals justified their support by pointing to Mr Trump’s ability to cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court by filling a vacancy, which would help them realise a longstanding goal of restricting or outlawing abortion access.
While numerous business leaders fled councils advising Mr Trump in light of the President’s Charlottesville remarks, he did not prompt a mass exodus of evangelicals. At least one pastor did resign.
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 nowQuick: What's the best Internet stock this year?
Certainly not Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, Pandora, Demand Media and the rest of those once-red-hot IPOs. They've all been busts.
So has Yahoo.
So has Priceline, which has finally taken a breather from its decade-long sprint upwards.
LinkedIn has had a pretty good run, but it still hasn't doubled.
eBay has made a great recovery, but it hasn't doubled.
Even everyone's favorite stock, Apple, hasn't doubled.
But one Internet stock has.
In fact, one Internet stock hasn't just doubled in the past year. It has tripled.
What stock is that?
If we'd picked it as a triple a year ago, you would have called us insane.
But it just goes to show you...
The stock market never fails to surprise.
Yes, that stock is...
AOL.
We're big, big fans of comebacks around here. And we also happen to be legacy AOL shareholders. So, well done, AOL!Four American service members were killed by an Afghan policeman early today, the third attack on coalition forces in three days, bringing the death toll in the recent violence to eight.
The attacks -- two "green on blue" incidents and an assault on a coalition base by 15 Taliban fighters -- come as tensions flared across the Muslim world over an anti-Islam film that was produced in the United States.
In the latest attack, an Afghan police officer turned his gun on NATO troops at a remote checkpoint in southern Afghanistan before dawn. Four U.S. soldiers were killed before the shooter escaped, bringing the total of coalition troops killed to six in just two days.
International Security Assistance Force officials say the attacker is still at large, and noted it's unclear if there were multiple assailants. It is still unclear exactly what transpired at the checkpoint, according to Afghan officials, who say American forces responded to an attack on the checkpoint to help the Afghan police.
"The checkpoint was attacked last night. Then the police started fighting with the Americans," Ghulam Gilani, deputy police chief of Zabul province, said. "Whether they attacked the Americans willingly, we don't know."
A Taliban spokesman said the police involved were not affiliated with the Taliban insurgency.
Also today, NATO confirmed that an airstrike that killed as many as 45 insurgents also killed five to eight Afghan civilian casualties -- including women and children.
"ISAF takes full responsibility for this tragedy," the coalition said in a statement released after the strike.
The civilian casualties can only increase tensions in the country, and villagers who drove the bodies of the dead to the privincial capital, Mehterlam chanted "Death to America," Laghman provincial government spokesman Sarhadi Zewak said.
"Protecting Afghan lives is the cornerstone of our mission and it saddens us when we learn that our action might have unintentionally harmed civilians," said Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for international military in Afghanistan.
So far this year, 51 coalition troops have been killed by Afghan service members. At least 12 such attacks happened in August alone, leaving 15 dead.
News of the shooting comes after one of the biggest attacks ever on an ISAF base. On Friday, 15 Taliban attackers, dressed in U.S. Army uniforms, attacked Camp Bastion in Afghan's Helmand province.
According to the ISAF, the insurgents used automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and explosive suicide vests in the late night attack. Two U.S. Marines were killed, and nine others were wounded, including one civilian contractor.
During the attack, which officials say appeared to be well planned and rehearsed, the insurgents destroyed six Harrier fighter jets, worth about $20 million each, and damaged two others. They also damaged six hangars and destroyed three refueling stations.
The last attack in which so many U.S. aircraft were destroyed at one time is believed to have been more than 40 years ago, during the Vietnam War.
All but one of the insurgents were killed by return gunfire, and a 15th was captured. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was revenge for the controversial video made in the United States that insults the Prophet Muhammad.
Prince Harry, a member of the U.K. military in Afghanistan is based at Camp Bastion. When he was first stationed there, the Taliban said they were out to kill him, although NATO officials say he was several miles away, and was never in danger during this attack.
On Saturday, two British troops were killed in an attack in Helmand province carried out by a gunman in the uniform of a government-backed militia.
Recent months have seen a string of attacks by Afghan forces against their international counterparts, who are working towards handing over security responsibilities to the Afghans as international troops draw down.
This weekend's attacks come amid turmoil throughout the Middle East, where anti-American protests have flared up, ostensibly in response to the online video mocking the Prophet Muhammad.
An attack on the American embassy in Libya last week led to four deaths, including the American ambassador to Libya. The protests have prompted the removal of U.S. personnel from their posts in Sudan and Tunisia.Dutch artist Ramon Bruin, aka JJK Airbrush, continues to create optical illusion drawings that make animals and objects seem as though they’re popping off the page. The illustrator’s skilled visual effects transform flat surfaces into seemingly three-dimensional subjects. Bruin gives depth to the two-dimensional plane by meticulously adding shade and tone with various, common drawing instruments (pencils, acrylics, watercolors, etc).
The 30-year-old artist manages to create a believable universe filled with drawings that have come to life through his precisely mapped out anamorphic images. In fact, it can sometimes be downright difficult to decipher what element of the frame is just a drawing on paper and what’s actually real.
The self-taught artist plays tricks on the eye and the mind as he often spreads his three-dimensional drawings across multiple sheets of paper, making it all the more complex. From the right perspective, every element of his drawings are perfectly aligned to heighten the optical effect and confusion.
JJK Airbrush website
JJK Airbrush on FacebookIf you've been getting the urge to replay Baldur's Gate, you might want to wait til this fall.
The classic role-playing game will see new life on September 18, when developer Beamdog releases Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, an enhanced remake with new characters and a new adventure that the company says will take you six hours to play through.
PC and Mac versions of the game will run you $20 unless you pre-order, in which case they'll be $18. They'll come with three new playable sidekicks: half-Orc Blackguard Dorn (whose head is pictured below), half-elf Wild Mage Neera, and human monk Rasaad. Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition will also feature a new dungeon called The Black Pits, set within the Underdark, that tasks you with fighting your way through fifteen levels of arena-style battles.
The iPad version, which Beamdog is hoping to release around that same time in September, will cost $10. The interface for this version will be totally retooled so it's pleasant to play on your tablet. However, new characters Dorn and Neera will be sold separately as downloadable content for the iPad edition. Additional voice sets and portraits will also be DLC. The new Black Pits adventure is included with the game.
Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition will also come to Android. Release TBA.
This version of Baldur's Gate will also feature the classes, kits, and races that were available in Baldur's Gate II. It squashes a whole bunch of the original version's bugs and also offers cross-platform multiplayer among all versions.
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Here's how Beamdog describes The Black Pits:
"Rouse yourselves, you lice-laden layabouts. Stand and salute your new master, Baeloth the Entertainer!" Across the realms, individuals of great power and prestige receive a scroll via magical means. Unfurling it, they discover that they have been selected as one of the very few to enjoy the finest forms of entertainment in all creation... Come one, come all! Baeloth the Entertainer cordially invites you to the greatest spectacle the realms have to offer - mortal pitted against mortal in a desperate bid to survive! Thrilling combat, scintillating magic, and the grim spectre of death lurk above this, the greatest of all shows! All this and more can be enjoyed within... THE BLACK PITS! Deep within the Underdark where few dare to tread, the mad drow Baeloth has used his extensive mastery of magic to force a duergar colony into creating an entertainment complex of his own design. He has invited guests from across the realms, from Maztica to Menzoberranzan, and they will readily attend - Baeloth is known to be an excellent showman. — The Black Pits is one of the enhancements that make up Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition that allows you to create a full party and battle through fifteen hellish battles in a desperate bid to escape. Difficult challenges, unique battles, and a bizarre cast of characters await you within the Underdark! A stand-alone adventure set deep within the Underdark
Fifteen levels of arena-style combat challenges
Full control and customization of up to six party members
Over 6 hours of additional gameplay The Black Pits are your new home... enjoy your stay while you can!
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And here's how Beamdog describes new character Dorn:
"Do not annoy me with such simplistic notions of morality." Born in the Spine of the World, Dorn fled to Luskan with his human mother when a rival tribe annihilated his father's savage people. In that northern city, Dorn's ruthless strength soon won him a deadly reputation and the attentions of a band of mercenaries whose wickedness exceeded even Dorn's. Imprisoned for the crimes of the entire group, Dorn made a fiendish bargain granting him even greater power and the promise of revenge. A Blackguard of few words, Dorn is only too happy to ally himself with a child of Bhaal and cut a bloody swath across the Sword Coast with his black greatsword, as long as that path continues to lead him to the traitors he has sworn to destroy. — Dorn is a half-orc Blackguard whose otherworldly patron grants him terrible powers in the form of his black sword and unholy spells. Add him to your Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition and inflict evil to the last corpse. Dorn adds the following Enhancements to Baldur's Gate: The Blackguard Dorn II-Khan, a new NPC to join your party
Up to four hours of additional gameplay
The Blackguard kit to create your own champion of evil Betrayed by his former companions, the half-orc Dorn Il-Khan lusts for revenge and glory in equal measure.
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Beamdog's Cam Tofer has promised that an enhanced edition of Baldur's Gate II is also en route. The team has also expressed interest in remaking or revisiting other Infinity Engine-based isometric RPGs like Planescape: Torment in the near future. And one day, maybe, they'll start working on a Baldur's Gate III. Maybe.Gears of War is a video game franchise created by Epic Games, developed and managed by The Coalition, and owned and published by Xbox Game Studios. The series focuses on the conflict between humanity, the subterranean reptilian hominids known as the Locust Horde, and their mutated counterparts, the Lambent & the Swarm. The franchise consists of five third-person shooter video games, which has also been supplemented by a comic book series and five novels.
The first installment, titled Gears of War, was released on November 7, 2006 for the Xbox 360. The game follows protagonist Marcus Fenix, a soldier in the Coalition of Ordered Governments tasked to lead a last-ditch effort to destroy the Locust Horde and save humanity. Two subsequent titles, Gears of War 2 (2008) and Gears of War 3 (2011), continued Fenix and humanity's ongoing conflict with the Locust Horde and Lambent forces. In 2013, Epic Games and Microsoft released Gears of War: Judgment, a prequel to the series’ first title, which instead focuses on Damon Baird, one of Fenix's squad-mates.[1] Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was released for Microsoft Windows on March 1, 2016.[2] The series' third sequel, Gears of War 4, is set 25 years after Gears of War 3 and follows Marcus Fenix's son, JD, as he battles a new resurrected Locust Horde that once again threatens humanity.[3]
Gears of War was developed by Epic Games. Cliff Bleszinski, who has previously worked on Epic's Unreal Tournament games, served the series’ lead game designer for the first three installments. He was inspired by gameplay elements from Resident Evil 4, Kill Switch, and Bionic Commando.[4] The series was also guided by Rod Fergusson, the executive producer and director of development of Epic Games until 2012.[5][6] The first four installments of the Gears of War series used a modified version of the Unreal Engine 3 engine.[7][8] On January 27, 2014, Microsoft acquired all rights to the franchise from Epic Games. Canadian studio The Coalition developed Gears of War 4, which was released on October 11, 2016 for the Xbox One and Windows 10.[9]
Gears of War became one of the best-selling franchises for the Xbox 360.[10] The series is well known for its emphasis on cover-based combat, in which players can use objects to avoid gunfire or safely engage enemies.[11] All five installments in Gears of War featured several multiplayer modes that allowed players to compete against each other or team-up to battle AI opponents on Xbox Live. The Gears of War games have been amongst the most popular and most played titles on Xbox Live.[10][12]
Setting [ edit ]
The Gears of War series takes place on Sera, a fictional Earth-like planet. Human civilization develops on Sera and endures a millennia-long conflict that leaves humanity on the brink of extinction. Sera's leaders broker an era of peace that ushers an era of scientific advancements and a cultural renaissance. Humanity's population sporadically grows and demands more energy provided by fossil and nuclear fuels. Sera's scientists discover Imulsion, a naturally occurring substance that can be refined into a potent energy source. Imulsion solves Sera's energy crisis but ultimately creates great economic disparity. Nations with direct access to Imulsion prosper, while other nations fall into financial turmoil.
Sera's citizens balkanize into two warring factions: the Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG) and Union of Independent Republics (UIR). The ensuing 79-year strife, known as the ‘Pendulum Wars’, consumes millions of lives with both sides locked in a virtual stalemate. The UIR develops the 'Hammer of Dawn', a system of satellites capable of delivering precise and potent orbital-to-surface laser strikes. However, a contingent of COG commandos, led by Marcus Fenix, Dom Santiago, and Victor Hoffman launch a daring raid on a UIR stronghold and steal the schematics for the Hammer of Dawn. The UIR quickly surrenders after witnessing the Hammer of Dawn devastate one of their naval vessels.
Merely six weeks after the COG and UIR agreed to an armistice, the Locust Horde unexpectedly emerge from Sera's depths and begin assaulting all human cities. The Locust Horde easily overwhelms the already battleworn COG forces during this surprise attack, referred to as 'Emergence Day'. The COG retreats to the Jacinto Plateau, their last bastion, and reluctantly bombard their own cities with the Hammer of Dawn to halt the Locust Horde's offensive. The ensuing scorched earth tactic destroys much of Sera's cities and human population. The COG continues to operate out of Jacinto, while the surviving humans, known as Stranded, are left to wander through Sera's charred ruins. During the chaos of Emergence Day, Marcus led an unauthorized and failed rescue mission to save his father, Adam, from the Locust assault. The COG's leadership court martials Marcus and sentences him to life imprisonment.
The first Gears of War title is set 14 years after the Locust emerged and attacked Sera's human population. The COG forces devise a last-ditch offensive to destroy the Locust Horde with 'lightmass bombs', weaponized forms of Imulsion. Marcus Fenix, now a disgraced veteran, is reinstated into the COG army, to supplement the COG's depleted ranks. Marcus joins his best friend, Dom Santiago, on a mission to map the Locust Horde's tunnel network in preparation for the bombing. However, their unit is ambushed by Locust Ground forces and sustain heavy casualties. Fenix and Santiago regroup with two other survivors, Augustus Cole and Damon Baird, and continue their mission. Marcus ultimately prevails in not only mapping, but successfully deploying the lightmass bombs and crippling the Locust Horde.
In Gears of War 2, Myrrah, the Locust leader, regroups her remaining forces and organizes a counteroffensive. The crux of her plan revolves around using a giant worm-like creature to sink the cities around the Jacinto Plateau until the COG stronghold itself collapses. The COG Forces in-turn deploy several soldiers directly into the depths of Sera to directly battle the Locust Horde and stop Myrrah's plan. Marcus discovers that members of the Locust Horde are mutating from exposure from Imulsion into ‘Lambent’. These abominations are forcing the Locust to abandon their underground civilization to try claim the surface world as their new home. Marcus devises a plan to intentionally sink Jacinto and using the surrounding sea water to flood the Locust and Lambent tunnel network. The COG evacuate Jacinto just as the city collapses and drowns a majority of the Locust Horde.
Gears of War 3 marks the final main-line installment in the original Gears of War trilogy. Set 18 months after Marcus sinks Jacinto, the game opens to reveal the COG has disbanded and left humanity scattered across Sera. The Lambent are now a major threat to humanity's scarce population, while the surviving members of the Locust Horde retreat to settlements in Sera's wastelands. Marcus’ father, Adam, who was presumed to have been deceased, notifies the COG that he is alive on Azura, an isolated island, and possess a solution to eradicate the Locust and Lambent threats. Marcus and his allies reach Azura after Dom sacrifices himself to rescue his friends from imminent demise. Adam is rescued and releases his anti-Locust and Lambent weapon but reveals he infected himself with the Lambent contagion to develop the weapon. The weapon's energy wave destroys all Locust and Lambent forces, including Adam. Marcus personally kills Myrrah and dedicates her demise to his fallen friends, family, and comrades.
The fourth game, Gears of War: Judgment, focuses on Baird and Cole during the early days after Emergence Day. With military cadet Sofia Hendrick and Garron Paduk, a former UIR soldier, they comprise the Kilo Squad. Baird disobeys orders to use a secret weapon of mass destruction to destroy Locust forces and save survivors at Halvo Bay. Despite also killing the powerful Locust leader Karn, the squad is court-martialed because they disobeyed orders and Baird is demoted from officer to private. A separate campaign, "Aftermath", portrays Baird, Cole, and Paduk in the hours before the activation of the anti-Imulsion energy wave.
Microsoft announced Gears of War 4 at E3 2015 on June 15. The game takes place 25 years after the original Gears of War trilogy and primarily concentrates on Marcus’ son, JD Fenix.[13] The COG reestablish itself thanks to creation of robotic soldiers. Many civilians instead choose to live on the outskirts of the COG's walled cities. JD, accompanied by his friends Kait and Del conduct frequent raids on COG fortifications to acquire various supplies. The three successfully fend off a COG counterattack only to have their encampment devastated by a new foe, called the Swarm. Kait's mother, Reyna, is captured during the chaos.[13]
JD, Kate, and Del reach out to Marcus, now a disgruntled COG expatriate, who reluctantly agrees to help them. The COG, led by First Minister Jinn, pursue the group after erroneously believing they are behind a string of mass-kidnappings. The four reach a Locust mass-burial site, where they uncover evidence suggestion that Adam Fenix's lightmass weapon caused the Locust Horde to enter a cocooned metamorphosis state. Their fears are confirmed when various Locust Horde soldiers attack them in conjunction with the Swarm. The group receives assistance from Damon Baird, now a successful industrialist, along with Augustus Cole, and Samantha Byrne. They battle their way to the Swarm's hive and defeat multiple Swarm and Locust monstrosities. However, they reach the hive to learn that Swarm's hive-mind has forcefully integrated with Reyna. Kait frees her mother, knowing she will die but will no longer suffer. Reyna gives Kait a parting gift that belonged to her mother – a necklace bearing the insignia of the Locust Queen Myrrah.[13]
Gameplay [ edit ]
Marcus Fenix, the player-controlled character, takes aim from behind the cover at a Locust with the Lancer. The game uses an over-the-shoulder camera angle when displaying the targeting reticle.
Gears of War is a third-person shooter game, with its core concepts being derived from Resident Evil 4's "over the shoulder" perspective, Kill Switch's cover system, and Bionic Commando's swinging action akin to moving between points of cover.[14] The series focuses on using cover to tactically engage the enemy in battle to avoid taking damage. While behind cover, the player can fire blindly and inaccurately at their opponent, or can look around the cover and aim carefully, though exposing himself to enemy fire; the player can also slide along cover, move between nearby cover, or vault over cover to race to a new point of cover. As the player takes damage, the "Crimson Omen" appears on the HUD, becoming more defined as the player nears low health levels. The player can regenerate their health by staying out of harm's way for a short while. Should the player take too much damage, they will become incapacitated unless revived by a teammate; depending on game mode, the player may be able to recover from this state on their own, or may die after a short amount of time if not revived. When a combatant is down, a member of the other side may also attempt to execute the downed player via a "curb stomp" or other brutal methods. As well, some types of damage will immediately kill the player with no chance of revival, such as explosive damage. There are five levels on the first two games, but they are referred to as "acts" and each act is formed into a certain amount of chapters.
Players in Gears can only carry four different weapons, with the exception of the fourth game, allowing one primary weapon slot that can carry weapons which include, but are not limited to, assault rifles, a sniper rifle, grenade launchers and an explosive bow; one grenade slot, which may be filled with up to four grenades of a specific type (Fragmentation, Smoke, Ink and Incendiary), and one pistol-type weapon. Players can either obtain ammo or swap out their current weapons with any weapon dropped by a downed foe or from those scattered around the various maps. Most weapons feature the "Active Reload" ability: either after a weapon has depleted an ammo magazine or when the player starts a manual reload, a meter is shown on screen, and the player can attempt to stop the meter in a certain marked area. If the player stops the meter in the marked area, their reload will be completed faster than if they did not attempt an Active Reload, and if the player can stop the meter at a specific section of the marked area, they will gain a temporary slight damage boost with each reloaded shot and a faster reload. If the player stops the meter outside this area, their gun will become temporarily jammed and slow down the reload time. While most of the weapons are based on standard shooter archetypes, Gears's signature weapon is the Lancer, an assault rifle that has a mounted chainsaw bayonet which can be used in close quarter combat to instantly kill a standard foe. Most other weapons also can be used to bash opponents in melee, or in the case of grenades, can be stuck to a foe, exploding a few seconds later. In Gears of War 2 & 3, all four types of grenades can be planted on any reachable surface, detonating when an opponent comes close to it. If the opponent spots the grenade, he or she can detonate it from a safe distance by shooting it.
All Gears games feature a campaign mode that can be played cooperatively with one other player. The two players take the roles of two COG soldiers, Marcus Fenix and Dominic "Dom" Santiago, as they fight the Locust. In the third game the campaign allows for up to four players to play together at the same time. The campaign mode features several levels of difficulty. At various times, the campaign will offer a choice of paths the first player can select; if the second player is present, they will be forced to take the other path. The third and fourth players in Gears of War 3 will be separated between the paths of the first and second players. In these areas, all players generally have to work together to get them through the section, such as by one player providing covering fire while the second player opens a switch that allows the first player to then proceed.
The competitive multiplayer mode in Gears 1 features 8 players while in Gears 2 features up to ten players split between CO |
off, Dickey turned 38 years old in October. He’s nine months older than Alex Rodriguez, 16 months older than Lance Berkman, and to some observers that makes him suspect.
But to anyone who knows anything about knuckleball pitchers, Dickey’s age is a feature, not a bug. The knuckleball is so difficult to master that historically, knuckleballers don’t peak until their mid-to-late 30s. Yet the pitch is so easy on the arm — and it requires so little velocity — that those who throw it tend to pitch well into their mid-40s.
The most successful knuckleball pitcher of the last 25 years was Tim Wakefield. Wakefield had his best season when he was 28, his first season with the Red Sox, when he had a 2.95 ERA in 195 innings — he accumulated 4.7 bWAR (wins above replacement, as calculated by baseball-reference.com). His second-best season? It was 2005 — when he was 38 years old.
From ages 33 to 37, Wakefield was worth 10.5 bWAR. From ages 38 to 42, Wakefield was worth 12.4 bWAR. He was better at ages 41-42 than he was at ages 32-33.
Tom Candiotti is the other prominent knuckleball pitcher of the last quarter-century, but he wasn’t a strict knuckler, as he also threw a curveball a decent amount of the time. Candiotti had a pretty broad peak from ages 28 to 35, going over 4 bWAR six times in eight years, but was still effective until age 40, when he threw 201 innings with a 4.84 ERA in the height of the juiced era.
If we go back to the 1970s and 1980s, we see a lot more knuckleballers, and we see a lot more guys pitch well into their 40s. From age 38 to age 41, Phil Niekro led the NL in losses four years in a row. That doesn’t sound good — until you realize he led the league in starts all four years, in innings and complete games three times, and one year led the league in wins and losses.
In 1978, a 39-year-old Niekro went 19-18 with a 2.88 ERA in 334 innings. In 1979, he went 21-20 with a 3.39 ERA in 342 innings. It was a different era, of course, but even then his insane durability (averaging 43 starts and 336 innings a year from 1977 to 1979) stood out. In 1977, he was worth 8.6 bWAR, and in 1978 he was worth 9.6 bWAR.
Niekro would remain effective into his mid-40s. In 1985, he went 16-12 with a 4.09 ERA in 220 innings for the Yankees. He was 46 that year.
His younger brother Joe was never as good as Phil, but Joe also was effective into his 40s. Joe had the best season of his career in 1982 (2.47 ERA in 270 innings, 6.5 bWAR), when he was 37, and from 1983 to 1985 he averaged 37 starts, 246 innings, and a 3.44 ERA. In 1986, at age 41, he started to lose it.
Charlie Hough was a reliever for the first decade of his career, and didn’t start regularly until 1982, when he was 34. From 1982 through 1988, when he turned 40, Hough threw at least 228 innings with an ERA under 4 every year. He was worth at least 2.6 bWAR every year. He began a slow decline in 1989, at age 41, but as late as 1993 he was good enough to start the inaugural game in Marlins history. That year — at age 45 — Hough threw 204 innings with a 4.27 ERA.
With the exception of Candiotti, who wasn’t a pure knuckleball pitcher, every one of these guys was a well-above-average starting pitcher at least through his age-40 season. (And Dickey, keep in mind, just had his best season at 37 — Candiotti was already in decline at that point.)
And even though he wasn’t a starter for most of his career, Hoyt Wilhelm has to be mentioned. Wilhelm didn’t reach the show until he was almost 30. Then he spent 21 seasons in the majors. From ages 41 to 45 — in the heart of the pitching-dominated 1960s, granted — Wilhelm averaged 108 innings per season with a 1.74 ERA. After the 1970 season, when Wilhelm was 48, he was still pitching well enough that the Atlanta Braves traded for him.
So the next time someone tries to criticize Dickey by pointing out “he’s 38 years old!,” throw it back at them. “YES! HE’S 38 YEARS OLD!”
Based on the history of knuckleball pitchers, we should expect Dickey to remain close to this current level of effectiveness at least through age 40. Dickey’s request for a two-year extension, which would take him through his age-40 season, isn’t just reasonable — it’s a bargain.
The other main criticism of Dickey is that he’s a one-year wonder who hasn’t shown the ability to sustain this level of success. Which is wrong on two separate counts.
For one, Dickey is hardly a one-year wonder. While he has never pitched quite as well as he did in 2012 — few pitchers have — he was one of the 15 best pitchers in the NL in both 2010 and 2011. Consider this:
R.A. Dickey, 2010–2012: 91 starts, 617 IP, 2.95 ERA, 468 Ks, 150 walks
Zack Greinke, 2010–2012: 95 starts, 604 IP, 3.83 ERA, 582 Ks, 154 walks
In Greinke’s defense, he was the better pitcher in 2009. In Dickey’s defense, Greinke signed for three times as long and nearly six times as much money as Dickey requested from the Mets. To repay Dickey’s Cy Young performance this season, not only did the Mets turn down his request, they embarked on a misguided character assassination campaign against Dickey in the media. Dickey addressed his contract situation at the Mets’ holiday party? HE HAD THE AUDACITY TO ANSWER QUESTIONS FROM REPORTERS?! The nerve of that guy.
(Personally, I love this more: “Dickey issued the laughable threat that, if the Mets didn’t extend his contract, he’d bolt the organization after 2013.” Yeah, how laughable! What other team would want the NL Cy Young winner? OK, 29 of them, but how many of them can claim they finished fourth in the NL East, huh?)
Even if Dickey returns to the form he showed in 2010 and 2011, he’s worth $13 million a year. But there’s reason to believe 2012 wasn’t a fluke. Dickey struck out 14.6 percent of batters faced in 2010, and 15.3 percent in 2011, but with his power knuckleball in 2012, his strikeout rate vaulted to 24.8 percent. As a result, Dickey’s hit rate dropped significantly, but his walk and home run rates barely moved in 2012. That’s not the sign of a pitcher who’s having a lucky season; that’s the sign of a pitcher who’s making a qualitative leap forward.
The batting average against a pitcher on balls in play is the simplest gauge of whether his performance is dependent on luck. Because pitchers have minimal control over this stat, an abnormally low number would suggest a pitcher who benefited from good fortune. Over the last three seasons, Dickey’s BABIPs are as flat as Nebraska; they read.280,.285, and.280. Nothing in his statistical record screams “fluke” — or even whispers it.
The Mets’ unwillingness to offer one of the best starting pitchers in baseball a contract commensurate with that of a no. 3 starter comes down to one simple factor: Dickey throws a knuckleball. As much progress as the industry has made over the last 10 years, it still has a bias against pitchers who throw unconventionally, and none more so than knuckleballers.
Is there risk with Dickey? Of course — he’s a pitcher. He might get hurt, although knuckleball pitchers are almost immune to the sorts of injuries that often befall pitchers. (And Dickey doesn’t have an ulnar collateral ligament, so he can’t tear it! No Tommy John for him!) Plus, the fact that Dickey’s knuckleball is unique, even by the standards of other knuckleball pitchers, increases the uncertainly a bit. It’s possible that, since his knuckleball relies on velocity more than Wakefield’s or Niekro’s, Dickey might lose his effectiveness more quickly with age than they did.
On the other hand, the fact that Dickey’s knuckleball is different from theirs would explain why it’s also better. Dickey already showed in 2010 and 2011 that he could be an above-average starting pitcher with a more typical knuckleball, but by throwing his power knuckleball more in 2012, he was as effective inning-for-inning as any knuckleballer in history. (Niekro had better seasons, but that’s because he was throwing more than 300 innings a year.)
So while there’s a risk that Dickey can’t continue throwing his knuckleball as hard as he did in 2012, it’s also possible that in doing something no knuckleball pitcher had done before, Dickey unlocked the key to a pitching talisman that no one knew even existed. If that’s the case, 2012 might represent just the first year of an extended run as one of the best pitchers in the game.
Having refused Dickey’s gift of a contract extension for less than he’s worth, the Mets and general manager Sandy Alderson have salvaged the situation by trading him to the Blue Jays for an impressive package of prospects. I’ll let Jonah Keri analyze whether the Blue Jays gave up too much for Dickey, but there’s no question that in Dickey they got themselves an incredibly valuable commodity. He was already signed for 2013 at the ridiculous salary of $5 million — he’ll make roughly as much money as Luke Hochevar — so even with the extension Dickey has been asking for, the Blue Jays will have the reigning NL Cy Young winner on a three-year, $31 million contract.
The knuckleball is the victory of results over form, of statistics over scouting. The pitch is almost impossible to scout — scouts themselves will tell you that the only way they can tell the quality of a knuckleball is by how awkward the batters’ swings are. The knuckleball thumbs its nose at everything a baseball organization is taught to value in pitchers — velocity, command, predictable movement. The only thing a knuckleball does is get results.
The Mets, for whatever reason, didn’t place a priority on the results Dickey achieved for them. They were unable to appreciate the gem they had in their hands. Fortunately for Dickey, Alex Anthopoulos and the Blue Jays understand that while Dickey looks like a batting practice pitcher on the mound, he looks like Tom Seaver in the box score. His pitches look like meatballs for 58 feet — and then perform magic for the last two. For Toronto, Dickey represents the final piece of a full-scale renovation this winter, joining other new additions Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle, Jose Reyes, Melky Cabrera, Emilio Bonifacio, and Maicer Izturis. The Blue Jays have every reason to hope that their offseason makeover has finished as sublimely as one of Dickey’s knuckleballs.
This story is an updated and adapted version of a December 4 post from the Rany on the Royals website.Sharp price rises could cost average household £260 a year if UK leaves EU without a trade deal while richest will be least affected
Leaving the European Union without a trade deal would likely result in a sharp increase in prices for food and other goods, costing the average UK household £260 and hitting low-income families hardest, according to new research.
Following Theresa May’s attempt in Brussels on Monday night to unblock Brexit talks, a joint report by the Resolution Foundation thinktank and academics at Sussex University predicted that “just about managing” families in the UK’s poorer regions had most to lose from the negotiations failing.
Q&A Why is the UK keen to discuss a future trading relationship with the EU? Show Hide Britain wants to discuss its future trading relationship with the EU because 44% of UK exports go to, and 53% of imports come from, the EU 27 countries. Post-Brexit conditions of trade could, therefore, have a major effect on Britain’s economy. The World Bank estimates UK trade with the EU in goods and services could fall by 50% and 62% respectively if no trade deal is agreed after Brexit, against 12% and 16% if the UK stays in the single market through a Norway-style agreement. Clean Brexit campaigners say the shortfall can be offset through more trade with non-EU countries, but those who argue the UK must retain close links with the single market doubt this, certainly any time soon. Both groups want certainty. However, the EU27’s negotiating guidelines for the two-year Brexit talks say discussion of the “framework” of a future relationship can only take place in phase two of the talks, once “sufficient progress” has been made on the separation phase and particularly the UK’s exit bill.
The report, titled Switching Lanes, said there would significant price rises on a range of household goods if ministers stuck to their fallback plan of resorting to World Trade Organisation tariffs on EU goods in the event of a no-deal outcome.
Imposing tariffs on EU goods after Brexit would lead to an 8% increase in dairy products, a 6% rise in meat and a 5.5% jump in the cost of motor vehicles, the report found. It was published after farmers and the food industry dismissed as “tripe” a claim by the transport secretary, Chris Grayling, that the UK could become self-sufficient in food after Brexit.
Grayling's claims that UK can grow more food dismissed as 'tripe' Read more
The prime minister said on her first day in Downing Street that it was her mission to create an economy that “worked for everyone” including those who were “just about managing”. But the Resolution Foundation and Sussex University study said that hard-pressed families were most at risk from a no-deal outcome because they spend more of their budgets on food, clothing and household goods.
It found that the impact of rising prices would add 1.1% to the cost of living for the poorest 20% of households, against 0.8% for the richest 20%. Inflation is expected by the City to hit a five-year high of 3% when official figures are released on Tuesday.
Britain is seeking a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU that involves leaving the single market and the customs’ union but replicates as closely as possible the current system under which there are no tariffs between the UK and the other 27 member states.
But the Resolution Foundation and the university’s UK trade policy observatory examined the consequences of the UK exiting without a deal and imposing the same tariffs on EU goods as it does on imports from the rest of the world.
It said tariffs on dairy products would increase by 45%, those on meat products by 37% and those on clothing, footwear, drink and tobacco by 10%.
The changes would add £500 a year to the outgoings of the 3m richest households in the UK and £260 a year to the average household. The impact of tariff-induced price increases would be one-third bigger in Northern Ireland than in London, one of the least affected parts of the UK.
Some Conservative MPs have said that prices will fall rather than rise as a result of Brexit, because it will be possible for the government to unilaterally reduce all tariffs to zero so consumers can get goods at the cheapest price on the world market.
The Brexiteers’ trade fantasies are crashing down around their ears | Molly Scott Cato Read more
The report found that under these circumstances, the average household budget would be reduced by £130 a year.
It added, however, that ministers were unlikely to choose this option because it would reduce the UK’s ability to strike future trade deals and expose some industries and parts of the UK to relatively sharp competitive pressures, without other countries being obliged to open up their own markets. Farmers would be particularly at risk in the event that the UK eliminated all tariffs on imported food.
The customs bill published earlier this month ruled out a unilateral abandonment of tariffs after Brexit. It said the UK would apply the same customs duty to every country with which it did not have a trade deal or have a deal offering preferential access, such as schemes for developing countries.
Stephen Clarke, economic analyst at the Resolution Foundation, said:
“While trade may not have been the biggest issue in the referendum it is one that will affect the day-to-day living standards of every family in Britain.
“The government must rightly continue to prioritise a comprehensive new trade agreement with the EU in order to avoid households having to fork out for a ‘no deal’ outcome through higher prices and squeezed households budgets.”
Grayling was “talking tripe” and was “out of touch with farming”, farming leaders said after he claimed in a television interview that the UK could just “grow more food” to keep prices down if Britain crashed out of the EU.
The National Farmers’ Union, the Summer Berry Fruits association, and the Farmers’ Union of Wales all voiced concern about the cabinet minister’s comments on Sunday on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.
Minette Batters, the deputy president of the NFU, said hopes that Britain could become more self-sufficient in food and less reliant on imports post Brexit was “commendable” but there was a “glaring” absence of any government policy on how farmers should achieve this post Brexit.
Laurence Olins, who chairs British Summer Fruits, said: “When I saw that interview, my mouth dropped and I thought this needs to be addressed. I was just horrified. It is just indicative of the uncoordinated way the government is approaching Brexit.”
Olins added: “To hear Grayling come out with this tripe beggars belief.”Zayne winced as he forced down another bite of his godawful pizza. It was so flavorless and tough – like someone had spread tomato sauce over a piece of cardboard and sprinkled a little cheese on top. Trying a new place for dinner that night had proved to be a terrible idea. Ugh. He thought to himself as he threw the slice back into the box. Never again.
As the credits of the movie he’d been watching began to roll, Zayne began browsing through the other channels – A boring news broadcast, some lame new gameshow, a rerun of Fangs for the Memories… Zayne flipped past that one as quickly as he could. He couldn’t even look at one second of that show without thinking of Hope. With a click of the remote, he moved on to the next channel.
Zayne felt an enormous weight on his chest, pushing all the air from his lungs. Hope had warned him the day they broke up. She’d told him ahead of time “so you won’t get the wrong idea,” she’d said. But nothing could have prepared him for what it would feel like to actually see it with his own eyes.
Here he was, so pathetic, miserable, lonely… And there was Hope — his Hope — so vibrant and beautiful, melting into the arms of another man. What if that’s what she was doing at this very moment? Only not for the cameras… What if she’d already moved on and forgotten all about him?
Zayne threw the remote to the floor as he let his grief overtake him.
—————————————————
Jocelyne lifted her fist and knocked sharply against the apartment door. She was greeted with several long seconds of silence in reply.
“He’s home, isn’t he?” Her grandmother’s gravelly voice asked from beside her.
The younger woman leaned forward, peering through the dingy glass on the door. She could just barely make out the figure of her nephew, slumped forward on the couch with his shoulders shaking slightly. Jocelyne felt her heart break at the sight. “He’s crying.” She whispered in reply. “Maybe we should go.”
“We came all the way here to talk to him. We can’t leave until we do.” Mari shook her head, raising her own withered fist to knock herself. She lacked her granddaughter’s strength, but Jocelyne was fairly certain she’d still knocked loud enough to be heard.
This time, she saw movement on the other side of the glass. And though it took a bit longer than expected, Zayne finally reached the door. His surprise was apparent on his tear-stained face at the sight of his aunt and great-grandmother.
“Tante Joce? Ur-Oma?” He muttered as he quickly wiped away his tears and opened the door to let them in.
Jocelyne couldn’t help it. The moment she stepped over the threshold, she practically threw herself at him, wrapping her nephew into a tight embrace. She hadn’t seen him in over a month, ever since he broke up with Hope and moved back into the apartment. She’d missed him terribly, and it hurt so much knowing one of her babies was so heartbroken… Especially when she wasn’t there to help comfort him.
To her relief, he returned her embrace with nearly as much enthusiasm. Maybe, despite how much he’d been avoiding her, he’d missed her too.
“Hey, Tante Joce.” At last, he pulled away from her. “Hey, Ur-Oma.” Jocelyne watched as he leaned forward to give Mari a kiss on her wrinkled cheek. “What are you guys doing here?”
Mari smiled. “I just wanted to stop by and say hello to my favorite great-grandson.” She explained. “And Jocelyne was kind enough to be my chauffeur.”
“You’re lucky it was just me.” Jocelyne chimed in with a small laugh. “Your grandparents are all dying to see you, honey.” She explained gently. “They miss you so much. I think they all would have piled in the car with us if we’d let them.”
“Yeah, well I’m glad they didn’t.” Zayne muttered uncomfortably. Jocelyne did not miss the hint of anger in his voice. “And I wish you guys had warned me first or something…”
His great-grandmother shook her head. “I’m afraid we know you too well, sweetheart. If we’d told you we were coming, you’d have barricaded the door.”
Jocelyne could not help bursting into laughter at Mari’s comment, and thankfully Zayne did too.
“Damn it, you’re probably right.” He admitted, still chuckling softly. His earlier irritation seemed to have been forgotten for the time being. “Hey, why don’t you sit down, Ur-Oma?” Zayne stepped back, gesturing toward the sofa.
“Thanks, sweetie.” With a bit of difficulty, Mari made her way around the coffee table and settled herself onto the soft green couch. Jocelyne and Zayne both followed close behind.
“I’d offer you guys some pizza but… It kinda tastes like shit.” Zayne admitted with a small laugh as he settled on the couch between the two women.
Jocelyne smiled at her nephew. “Is that from DeSano’s? Your grandfather took me there once… Never again.”
“Yeah, I can see why.” Zayne laughed.
“We aren’t here to eat anyway.” Mari replied, her tone more serious than the others’. “We’re here to talk, Zayne.”
His expression darkened almost instantly, just as Jocelyne had feared. “I knew it.” Zayne shook his head slowly. “I don’t understand why you can’t leave me alone.”
“We’re just worried about you.” Jocelyne replied gently. “We want to help.”
“But I don’t need your help! This is exactly why I haven’t stopped by to see you guys. I don’t need some kind of stupid lecture or something, okay? I can handle this. I’m –”
“Don’t you dare say you’re fine!” Mari cut him off sharply. “You just had your heart broken! You’re not fine!” The old woman paused for a moment, taking a deep breath. “You won’t be for a while. And that’s exactly why we need to talk to you.”
Jocelyne had a hard time hiding her own surprise at Mari’s outburst, and Zayne’s shock was just as apparent as hers was. It seemed to take him a few moments to find his voice.
“Ur-Oma, look.” He said at last, his voice much softer than before. “I just –”
Once again, Mari didn’t let him finish. “Zayne, I’m going to tell you a story.” She said, her voice more gentle this time. “Not the whole thing… Just the parts you need to hear. But this won’t be easy for me. So please, honey… I really just need you to shut up and listen, okay?” She smiled softly at her great-grandson.
For a moment, it looked as though he wanted to say something. Instead, he simply nodded.
Jocelyne felt a sudden sinking in her stomach. She didn’t know all the details of her grandmother’s past, but she knew enough that she’d had a feeling this would come up. Biting her lip uncomfortably, she rose to her feet. “Oma, I can give you guys a little privacy, if you want.”
Mari shook her head. “Stay. He needs to hear this from more than just me.”
She hesitated for just a moment. She wasn’t entirely sure what her grandmother was expecting her to say to Zayne– it wasn’t like they’d rehearsed a script or something. In fact, Jocelyne still had no clue what she’d say to make him feel better. But she knew she had to try. Guess I’ll follow Oma’s lead… With a small nod, Jocelyne returned to her seat beside her nephew.
“It happened a long, long time ago.” Mari began, taking a slow, deep breath. “I was very young – even younger than you are now – when I had my heart broken too. We’d been best friends since we were little. We were together for years, just like you and Hope. And losing him was devastating. My entire world came crashing down.” She paused, shaking her head for a moment. “Looking back, I can see now how silly it all was. But at the time… It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.”
Zayne raised an eyebrow skeptically. “Okay…” He said slowly. “But Ur-Oma, I don’t –”
“I had a lot of… issues when I was younger. Ones I didn’t even realize I had, until I looked back years later. But that heartbreak brought out the worst of them. I blamed myself for what had happened. I internalized everything. I refused to let anyone help me. And it wasn’t long before things got…” Mari hesitated for a moment. “Self-destructive.”
“What do you mean ‘self-destructive’?” Her great-grandson asked curiously.
Mari shook her head. “Only the parts you need to hear, remember?”
Jocelyne was grateful that Zayne knew better than to ask again.
“Anyway, things got bad.” The old woman continued. “I was digging myself into this terrible hole — one I couldn’t get out of without help. But I refused. I waited so long before I let anyone help me. And I suffered terribly for it. And so did the people I loved.”
Zayne shook his head. “But Ur-Oma, I’m –” He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Jocelyne had a feeling he’d been about to say ‘I’m fine’ again. “I’m… getting by. Okay?” He said at last. “There’s no need to worry about me! I’m not in a ‘hole’, or whatever you wanna call it.”
“Oh, honey… You’ve been digging this hole for months now.” Mari almost laughed. “I was hoping you’d be able to see that for yourself before things got to this point… And I’m sorry we didn’t have this conversation sooner.” She confessed. “I just knew it would be so hard to get you to listen.”
In an instant, Zayne’s brow furrowed in anger. Oh God. Jocelyne thought miserably. Here we go…
“The point is.” She chimed-in at last before Zayne could speak. “Your Ur-Oma understands how difficult this is. And so do I.” Jocelyne explained carefully. “I went through something… well, similar. I pushed everyone I loved away when it happened – for very different reasons.” She added quickly, hoping he wouldn’t ask for details. “But the point is, I never asked for help either… And I’ve always wished I did.”
Zayne was silent for a few moments before replying. Jocelyne wished she could know what he was thinking. “This is different.” He said at last. “I’m not doing anything ‘self-destructive’.” He insisted. His narrowed gaze turned to his aunt then. “It’s not like I’m running halfway across the world to have some kind of stupid rebound relationship.”
Jocelyne winced inwardly. She hadn’t realized just how much he’d been able to piece together on his own over the years. Much as his words stung, she knew better than to argue back. It would only make things worse.
“There are so many different things you can do to hurt yourself, Zayne.” She replied gently. “It doesn’t always have to be as extreme as what I did.”
“Your Tante’s right.” Mari nodded slowly in agreement. “’Self-destructive’ doesn’t always mean doing something drastic. It could be as simple as pushing away the people you love, blaming yourself for every little thing, letting yourself feel like a victim all the time…” She looked at him significantly as she spoke. “It doesn’t matter if it’s big or small. It’s not healthy. And one it hurts the most is you.”
Without warning, Zayne practically leapt to his feet. “What are you trying to say, huh?” He snapped. “Why are you ganging up on me like this? Just get to the point! Is this some kind of ‘intervention’ or some shit? You think I need a fucking shrink or something?
Mari appeared completely unfazed by his outburst. “Maybe.” She replied with a small shrug. “Maybe not. It’s not my place to decide. But honey, you have to do something. You can’t keep going on like this… You’re doing much better than I did in your shoes, I’ll give you that.” She admitted. “But I’m worried… I don’t want things to get worse. And if nothing changes, I promise you they will. Can’t you see that?”
“Can’t you see that you should be minding your own business? This doesn’t have anything to do with you! You guys are worse than Hope!” Zayne’s cheeks had begun to grow red as his anger rose.
“And you know what? She’s not even around anymore, so what’s the point?! Sure, I could go see a shrink and learn to control my stupid temper! I could try to stop being so damn jealous all the time! I could grow a pair instead of being such a fucking pussy about this dumb restaurant! Maybe then I could finally stop being so depressed about my shitty life!” He was practically screaming now. Jocelyne had not seen him this upset since he was a child, still grieving for his parents.
“But you know what? I should have done all that MONTHS ago! I’m a total fucking screwup, okay?! I blew it! I pushed Hope away! And now none of it even matters anymore! Not without her!”
Suddenly the red in Zayne’s cheeks seemed to have taken on a whole new meaning. He fell silent rather abruptly, staring down at the floor beneath his feet. He knows he said too much. Jocelyne realized. She knew that feeling all too well. It was so easy to get carried away when emotions ran high.
It was a few moments before any of them spoke again.
“Of course it matters.” Mari said at last, her irritation apparent in her voice. “It matters because you matter. You want to get better at controlling your temper? Then do it. For you. You want to finally start this restaurant of yours? Then do it. For you. To Hell with anyone else.”
“But Hope –”
“Especially Hope.” She snapped. “When I first went to therapy, you know who I was doing it for? My kids. My parents. My sisters. Not for me. And at first, that was enough. But you know what? The day I decided to do it for myself was one of the most liberating days of my entire life. Because I finally realized that I was worth it. And it’s time for you to stop feeling sorry for yourself and figure that out too.”
Zayne said nothing. He had gone back to staring at the floor.
“I don’t know what good you think any of this has been doing you, but it’s time to cut the crap. Everyone fucks up, Zayne. Some of us more than others. But you learn from it and you move forward. And when the shit hits the fan, you don’t shut yourself away like a goddamn coward.”
Jocelyne’s eyes widened slightly at her grandmother’s words. Mari had always been famous for her temper, but Jocelyne had never heard her speak to one of the kids like this before. Still, despite her harsh tone, there was something so sincere in her voice too. Pleading, almost.
“I’m sorry you lost Hope. I know it hurts like hell. I know you blame yourself. And I know you aren’t gonna heal from this overnight. But you can’t keep harping on her like this… And you definitely can’t just sit here making the same mistakes that got you into this mess in the first place!” Mari paused for a moment, sighing. “Don’t worry about what anyone else might think of you. The only person you should give a shit about right now is yourself… But I don’t mean feeling sorry for yourself or beating yourself up. None of that stupid shit.” She shook her head.
“I mean bettering yourself. Making yourself happy. Loving yourself… But you’re not gonna get there on your own. You need help. And soon, before you fall deeper into this hole.” She paused for a moment, as though waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t. “I know it might hurt to hear it, Zayne. But it’s the truth.”
The silence that followed Mari’s words seemed deafening.
She turned to Jocelyne then, sighing softly. “Well, I’ve said what I came to say… We should probably go.”
“Okay.” Her granddaugther replied awkwardly.
Jocelyne hadn’t expected things to end so abruptly, but her grandmother was probably right – what more was there to say? Everything she’d told Zayne was true, and it was something he’d needed to hear. But it still pained her so much to leave knowing Zayne was still so miserable. But what more could she possibly do to take away his pain?
Maybe nothing. She realized. Jocelyne slowly rose to her feet while Mari did the same. “We love you, honey. We just want what’s best for you.” She said softly.
Zayne continued staring at the floor. He didn’t even say goodbye. Jocelyne and Mari headed for the door without another word. They’d barely crossed the threshold before the sound of muffled sobs reached their ears.
“Do you think you were too hard on him?” Jocelyne asked softly as soon as they were out of earshot.
Mari shrugged her hunched shoulders slightly. “Maybe a little.” She admitted. “I know I got a little carried away. He’s just so much like I used to be… I guess it struck a nerve.”
“Well, harsh or not, I really think he needed to hear it.” Jocelyne replied sincerely. “And I’m really glad it came from you, Oma… ” She smiled warmly at her grandmother for a moment. “I just hope he was listening.”
“Me too.” Mari agreed as they headed toward the elevator. “But if he’s anything like me — and let me tell you, he sure seems to be — then he was, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.” She assured her granddaughter.
“I hope so…” Jocelyne glanced over her shoulder at his apartment door as she spoke. “I’m not sure how much longer I can stand seeing him like this… I just want him to smarten up and take your advice, Oma.”
“Oh, he will.” Mari assured her. “I don’t think it’s a question of ‘if’ at this point… it’s ‘when’ that really matters.”
Jocelyne nodded in agreement. He’ll get there, she told herself. Someday.
For now, all they could do now was hope it would be sooner rather than later.
AdvertisementsIt took some time for Jrue Holiday to establish his role alongside DeMarcus Cousins and Anthony Davis, but there shouldn't be any question what the New Orleans Pelicans want from him in 2017-18.
After Cousins was traded to New Orleans this past season, Holiday found himself deferring too often to his star big men. Late in the season, Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry started playing Holiday as the shooting guard to get him to be more assertive on the offensive end and it had a positive impact on his game.
With Holiday's move off the ball, the Pelicans signed veteran point guard Rajon Rondo to a one-year deal to take over as the team's new floor general. New Orleans is hoping that Rondo's elite passing can be the missing piece that brings together an offense centered around Davis, Cousins and Holiday.
Davis spoke to reporters on Tuesday via teleconference and said |
his family the best.
Manfred Krankl is quite well-known as a long-time, serious and passionate motorcycle enthusiast. His love for motorcycles dates back years. In the Oak View, California area, where he and Elaine Krankl call home, Manfred can often be found on one of his Ducati bikes, featuring the number 62. He is also fond of racing bikes on the Laguna Seca race tracks.
Manfred Krankl, for the few of you that are not familar with him, is the best winemaker of Rhone grape varietals in America. He is also producing a stunning Chateauneuf du Pape with Philippe Cambie, “Chimere”.
What Manfred Krankl and Elaine are doing with Syrah, Grenache, Mourvedre and other Rhone varieties at Sine Qua Non is nothing short of amazing. To keep things interesting, Sine Qua Non is about to release their first Petit Sirah! If that is not enough, Manfred Krankl is putting the finishing touches on a book, featuring all the artwork he has created for the dozens of unique bottles he has produced at Sine Qua Non since their debut release in 1994.
Their wine, Sine Qua Non is now so popular, the wait list to buy their wine takes years to get a spot. For those not fortunate enough to be a customer yet, their friendly brown postcards letting people know they care is a step beyond what other wineries do. The letters that accompany the twice a year offerings are some of the best wine writing out there.
I find reporting this news to be incredibly sad and honestly, I’m truly sorry to report this. However, Elaine and Manfred Krankl touch so many people with their wine and kindness, I am sure a lot of their friends and fans will want to know.There were groups operating in London and throughout England to aid domestic servants. The most important of those were…
Established in May 1846, The General Domestic Servants’ Benevolent Institution was located at 32 Sackville Street, Piccadilly. It was under the patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. It was registered under the Friendly Societies Act, 13 & 14, Vict. c. 115. This group purpose was “to relieve honest and industrious domestic servants, of both sexes, who have been incapacitated by active duty from unavoidable misfortunes and the advance of age, with its consequent infirmities, by granting to members annual pensions, to be fixed by the committee of management for the time being, after taking into consideration the character, necessities, and especially the duration and the amount of subscription of the applicant, and to grant relief to a limited extent in cases of urgent temporary distress, provided that the members applying have subscribed upwards of three years, to be computed from the day of paying their first subscription money, and within two years of their application.” (Baylis, Thomas Henry. The Master and Mistress and Domestic Servants, London, Sampson Low, Son, and Co., 1857)
To become a member, servants had to be employed within one year of their application. They paid somewhere between 3 s. and 10 s. to become candidates for benefits offered by the institution. Those granted assistance receive 15 -20 Libra per year. The institution had some 7000 members and a permanent fund of 10000l.
The National Guardian Institute was located at 4 Bedford Row, London. It was established in 1825. It supplied families with competent domestic servants of good character. They also maintained almshouses. Almshouses for aged female servants were found in Raven Row, Mile End Road. Those residing there had to have an annual pension of 10l. Under the patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the Servants’ Royal Provident and Benevolent Society was amalgamated with the National Guardian Institute in May 1854. The Servants’ Royal Provident and Benevolent Society was located at 49 and 9A, Great Marlborough Street, St. James’s.
The Female Servants Home Society was located at 21 Nutford Place and 110 Hatton Garden. Lodging was available on Nutford Place for 1s. 9d. per week. At Hatton Garden, the cost was 1s. Medical attendants cared for those too ill to work. The society granted to servants who continued in the same employment rewards proportionate to their length of service. Those who were employed for two years received a copy of the Bible. Five years earned the servant a certificated testimonial and a suitable book. A silver medal was handed out for nine years service, and a good medal rewarded for fifteen years. The group founded homes to receive female servants who were displaced. Those in residence were given religious instruction, as well as advice on providing excellent service.
The office of the Female Aid Society was located at 27 Red Lion Square. It was established in 1836 to provide shelter and protection to servants and other unprotected young ladies of good character, and to provide asylum to fallen, but penitent females. Three distinct “Homes” were established. A Servants’ Home was established at 51 Southampton Row, Russell Square, for respectable servants who were displaced. A Penitent’s Home was located at 57 White Lion Street, Barnsbury Road, Islington. A Friendless Home for young and friendless girls of good character was found at 17 New Ormond Street, Bedford Row.
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Close your eyes and picture the scariest thing you can think of. Maybe it's a giant spider or a giant Stay Puft marshmallow man or something that's not even giant at all. Well, whatever it is, I guarantee it's not nearly as scary as the real scariest thing in the world. That's long-term unemployment.
There are two labor markets nowadays. There's the market for people who have been out of work for less than six months, and the market for people who have been out of work longer. The former is working pretty normally, and the latter is horribly dysfunctional. That was the conclusion of recent research I highlighted a few months ago by Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Fed and a PhD candidate in economics at Northeastern University, and William Dickens, a professor of economics at Northeastern University, that looked at Beveridge curves for different ages, industries, and education levels to see who the recovery is leaving behind.
Okay, so what is a Beveridge curve? Well, it just shows the relationship between job openings and unemployment. There should be a pretty stable relationship between the two, assuming the labor market isn't broken. The more openings there are, the less unemployment there should be. If that isn't true, if the Beveridge curve "shifts up" as more openings don't translate into less unemployment, then it might be a sign of "structural" unemployment. That is, the unemployed just might not have the right skills. Now, what Ghayad and Dickens found is that the Beveridge curves look normal across all ages, industries, and education levels, as long as you haven't been out of work for more than six months. But the curves shift up for everybody if you've been unemployed longer than six months. In other words, it doesn't matter whether you're young or old, a blue-collar or white-collar worker, or a high school or college grad; all that matters is how long you've been out of work.
Help Wanted -- If You've Been Out of Work for Less than Six Months
But just how bad is it for the long-term unemployed? Ghayad ran a follow-up field experiment to find out. In a new working paper, he sent out 4800 fictitious resumes to 600 job openings, with 3600 of them for fake unemployed people. Among those 3600, he varied how long they'd been out of work, how often they'd switched jobs, and whether they had any industry experience. Everything else was kept constant. The mocked-up resumes were all male, all had randomly-selected (and racially ambiguous) names, and all had similar education backgrounds. The question was which of them would get callbacks.
It turns out long-term unemployment is much scarier than you could possibly imagine.
The results are equal parts unsurprising and terrifying. Employers prefer applicants who haven't been out of work for very long, applicants who have industry experience, and applicants who haven't moved between jobs that much. But how long you've been out of work trumps those other factors. As you can see in the chart below from Ghayad's paper, people with relevant experience (red) who had been out of work for six months or longer got called back less than people without relevant experience (blue) who'd been out of work shorter.
Look at that again. As long as you've been out of work for less than six months, you can get called back even if you don't have experience. But after you've been out of work for six months, it doesn't matter what experience you have. Quite literally. There's only a 2.12 percentage point difference in callback rates for the long-term unemployed with or without industry experience. That's compared to a 7.13 and 8.95 percentage point difference for the short-and-medium-term unemployed. This is what screening out the long-term unemployed looks like. In other words, the first thing employers look at is how long you've been out of work, and that's the only thing they look at if it's been six months or longer.
This penalty for long-term unemployment is unlike any other. As you can see in the chart below, job churn is another red flag for employers, but not nearly to the same extent. Applicants who'd gone through five to six jobs but had relevant experience were still more likely to get called back than those who'd gone through three to four jobs but didn't. And they had about as good a chance as those who'd only held one or two jobs but weren't experienced. In other words, there is no job-switching cliff like there is an unemployment cliff.
Long-term unemployment is a terrifying trap. Once you've been out of work for six months, there's little you can do to find work. Employers put you at the back of the jobs line, regardless of how strong the rest of your resume is. After all, they usually don't even look at it.
Let's be clear. Ghayad's field study shows employers discriminate against the long-term unemployed. All of the fake resumes he sent out were basically identical. But firms ignored the ones from people who'd been out of work for six months or longer -- even when they had better credentials. Employers look at how long you've been unemployed as a better proxy for skills than anything else on your resume. In other words, more jobs-training probably won't help the long-term unemployed all that much. Even a stronger economy will only help them years in the future, rather than many years in the future.
It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed. Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-term unemployed. The worst possible outcome for all of us is if the long-term unemployed become unemployable. That would permanently reduce our productive capacity.
We can do better, and we need to start doing so now. We can't afford long-term thinking in either the short or the long-term.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.A$AP Ferg reveals his new album’s title and says it will drop in the first quarter of 2016.
UPDATE (10/26/15) — A$AP Ferg has now revealed some better information involving the release date. Taking to twitter, A$AP Ferg revealed the album will be dropping in the first month of 2016. Checkout his tweet below.
Album coming out Jan " always strive and prosper"!!! — FERG (@ASAPferg) October 26, 2015
Original post (10/22/15) — A$AP Ferg‘s debut album “Trap Lord” dropped back in 2013 and fans have been waiting for the follow-up. We have been hearing about the new album for a minute now but now A$AP Ferg has now revealed the album’s official title and when it will release around.
On the black carpet at the “Tidal X: 10/20” event in New York a couple nights ago, during an interview with Hot 97 A$AP Ferg revealed his new album is titled “Always Strive and Prosper” which is what A$AP in A$AP Mob stands for. Not only did he reveal the album’s title, he alway said the album will be out the first quarter of 2016. So get ready for new A$AP Ferg!
When asked about the new album, he said:
“I promise you I’m not gonna pull a Dr. Dre and take 10 years to put out an album but, you know, it’s gonna be out first quarter [of 2016].“ – A$AP Ferg
When the interviewer asked is he could say anything about the album, he said:
“I can tell you the name of the album, the name of the album is “Always Strive and Prosper”, takin’ it back to the A$AP roots where we come from, that’s what A$AP stands for.“ – A$AP Ferg
Watch the interview below, for Ferg‘s part, skip to the 3:15 mark.
For more on A$AP Ferg, click here.
By: Jacob Barnes | Twitter: @JBarnesMedia @RapDirect — [sources: youtube]Get the biggest Aston Villa FC 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
Lewis Kinsella has announced he is leaving Aston Villa after five years at the club.
The 21-year-old left-back will not be kept on when his contract expires next month and today took to Twitter to reveal the news.
Last night’s defeat against his former club Arsenal in the U21s play-off final was his last game in Villa colours and it brings an end to an action-packed time in the Midlands.
Kinsella, a whole-hearted defender and one of the popular players at Bodymoor Heath, was part of the talented team that won the NextGen Series in 2013.
His team-mates have often spoken highly of him and the general feeling is that he will be missed around the training ground because of his bubbly nature.
Although he never made a first-team appearance, he did feature in the matchday squad under Tim Sherwood and was likely to progress had the ex-manager not moved on.
A loan spell at Luton last season was unsuccessful but during a temporary switch to Kidderminster Harriers this term he quickly established himself as a fans’ favourite.
His contributions for Villa’s U21s over the past year helped the claret and blues to the Division Two play-off but the team he was a part of fell at the final hurdle following defeat the Emirates Stadium.
Kinsella has not yet decided on his next move but will have options to consider as clubs have already shown an interest in him following his impressive recent loan spell.
GRAEME BROWN ON POTENTIAL VILLA TAKEOVER:One of our favorite actors, Will Smith, just appeared on 'The Graham Norton Show' to promote his new film, 'Bright,' and the interview was great, of course!
The 49-year-old got on the topic of 'The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,' naturally, and addressed how much older he is since the show was on TV.
In fact, it's already been 27 years since the first episode aired!
When questioned about a rumored reboot, the actor said, "Man, I'd have to be Uncle Phil in that one now I'm nearly 50!"
He then went on to explain how big the show was for his career, of course, and how terrible he was in the beginning!
"If you watch the first four or five episodes you can see I'm mouthing other people's lines. It's terrible and I can't bear to watch it," he admitted.
Well, he's surely come a long way since then! Who needs this reboot in their lives?!Tre’Davious White got off to an incredible start to his career until the Buffalo Bills’ cornerback was tasked with covering A.J. Green in Week 4. After giving up two big plays in the loss, the 22-year old spent the bye week searching for answers.
Sunday against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, White was again faced with defending another one of the NFL’s premier wide receivers that present a huge size mismatch, in Mike Evans, who stands 6-foot-5, 231-pounds.
Evans hauled in seven passes for 91 receiving yards and one touchdown in Week 7. Evans’ touchdown came with just over three minutes to play. On third-down from Buffalo’s 12-yard line, White was covering Evans and Jameis Winston threw a fantastic pass to the side of the end zone. White was seemingly in perfect coverage but Evans was able to drag his feet to stay inbounds and give the Bucs a 27-20 lead.
Prior to the game, White explained that he did a lot of self-scouting and didn’t think he was playing well enough, going as far as to claim that he was costing Buffalo games.
Following the Bills’ 30-27 win, White was upset with himself once again.
,”I almost cost us the game again. Gave up another touchdown. If it weren’t for the offense we would have lost because of me again.”
When asked about how difficult to defend the touchdown was, given the nature of the throw and catch, White made no excuses, explaining that if he allows a catch, his coverage is bad – no matter what.
“They catch the ball its bad coverage no matter how great of position you’re in. He made a great throw that not many QB’s in this league can make,” White said. “I was there but he made the throw so it was bad coverage and almost cost the team again.”
White said this all, despite the fact that he forced a fumble on the Bills’ next drive, giving Buffalo the ball with fantastic field position at Tampa Bay’s 33-yard line. Tied at 27, the Bills proceeded to run down the clock before Stephen Hauschka made the game-winning field goal with 14 seconds remaining.
Tied 27-27 with 2:20 left in the 4Q, #Bucs have the ball. Tre White [@TreWhite16] forces the fumble on Humphires. 👏🏼👏🏼 pic.twitter.com/7BIVJfXX9w — Gus (@gusweinstein) October 23, 2017
White has allowed just 19 receptions on 38 targets thrown in his direction, for 336 yards (8.8 yards-per-attempt) and two touchdowns this season. He also has two interceptions and an NFL-best 11 pass breakups.
He’ll look to get his game back on track in Week 8 when the Bills host the Oakland Raiders, who feature a talented duo in wide receivers Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree.Head coach Alex Wood works with players during fall practice. (Photo: Vaughn Wilson/FAMU Athletics)
Update: 3 p.m. 8/11/2015
Alex Wood has signed an official contract with Florida A&M University, and the contract has been approved by the Board of Trustees.
The three-year deal is worth $200,000 annually, but is loaded with incentives. For example, if Wood achieves a winning season in his first year, he'll receive an extra $10,000 per year. If he achieves a nine-win season at any point during his deal, an extra year will be added on.
He'll also receive a $20,000 bonus to distribute among the coaching staff if FAMU reports a single-year APR above 950. He also has access to either a courtesy car or an extra $850 per month.
Wood will work with a recruiting budget of $75,000.
The contract also states Wood will be able to hire and fire assistant coaches with approval from both FAMU President Mangum and Athletic Director Milton Overton Jr.
Check back for more updates.
First story
Florida A&M head football coach Alex Wood is still not under contract, according to the university's Board of Trustees.
Buy Photo FAMU football coach Alex Wood speaks during a ceremony for the unveiling of a historical marker for Coach Alonzo "Jake" Gaither. (Photo: Joe Rondone/ Democrat)
Vice Chairman Kelvin Lawson said during a Tuesday meeting Wood's contract has been reviewed -- again -- and presented to the coach, who was hired Dec. 23.
Wood originally signed a contract around the time of FAMU's annual Orange and Green Game, but the contract was not approved by the Board of Trustees. His revised contract is a three-year deal worth $200,000 annually and has incentives built in, Lawson said.
The trustees and FAMU President Elmira Mangum sparred over the language of the contract during a June meeting. Mangum said she saw no issues with the contract, while the board requested the revision of a provision that allows the university to fire a coach with 60 days of notice.
"We took a step to try and make the contract more favorable to (Wood)," Lawson said.
"It had to go through a couple of different legal reviews. It needed the president's re-agreement. We're in the process of re-presenting the contract to (Wood) and we anticipate a positive outcome.
"We're trying to make it clear that we appreciate him being here and we'd like him to be here for a while."
FAMU's entire football coaching staff was fired under the provision last season. Earl Holmes, who was head coach at the time, is suing the university, seeking the remaining money on his deal.
"I am not suggesting that the clause be removed," BoT Chairman Rufus Montgomery said during the meeting on June 9.
"There is a period of rebuilding that transpires. My concern is that at a whim you can let the coach go. There should be some controls for termination.
"We don't want another lawsuit."
Lawson said he doesn't expect issues in regards to Wood's contract.Saudi Arabia announced Saturday it has broken up an Islamic State group-linked network and made more than 430 arrests, foiling new attacks on Shiite mosques and a diplomatic mission.
The IS jihadist group has claimed several deadly attacks in the Sunni-dominated kingdom.
Authorities have "managed over the past few weeks to destroy an organisation, made of a cluster of cells, which is linked to the terrorist Daesh organisation," the interior ministry announced, using the Arabic acronym for IS.
The alleged members were engaged in a "plot managed from areas of unrest abroad, with the aim of sowing sectarian sedition and spreading chaos", the ministry said.
The cells were involved in several attacks and plots, including deadly suicide bombings of Shiite mosques in the kingdom's Eastern Province, it said.
The ministry said 37 people were killed during the arrests, including security personnel and civilians, and 120 were wounded. Six "terrorists" were also killed in the operations.
Saudi security forces inspect the site of a suicide bombing that targeted the Shiite Al-Anoud mosque in the coastal city of Dammam on May 29, 2015, AFP/File
It said authorities had foiled bomb attacks plotted during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, including on a mosque used by security forces in Riyadh and other Shiite mosques in the Eastern Province.
The group also plotted to attack a diplomatic mission, the statement said without elaborating.
Among the 431 suspects so far rounded up, mostly Saudis, were 144 people accused of supporting the network by "spreading the deviant ideology on the Internet and recruiting new members".
The ministry said 97 of those arrested were linked to a cell busted earlier and to a November attack on a Shiite mosque in the town of Dalwa that killed seven people, including children.
Another 190 suspects were allegedly involved in plots following bomb attacks on Shiite mosques in Qatif and Dammam, as well as an attack on Saudi security forces.
IS, which considers Shiites to be heretics, claimed responsibility for the mosque attacks.
Saudi security forces have been on high alert over the Islamic State group, which has seized large parts of Iraq and Syria and carried out numerous atrocities and inspired attacks around the world Hamad Olayan, AFP
On successive Fridays in May, two suicide bombings at mosques of the minority Shiite community in Eastern Province killed 25 people.
The jihadist group controls swathes of neighbouring Iraq and Syria, and has claimed widespread abuses including the beheading of foreign hostages.
It has expanded its operations in the region, also claiming an unprecedented attack on a Shiite mosque in Kuwait and several attacks in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia and its Sunni Gulf neighbours last year joined a US-led military coalition bombing IS in Syria, raising concerns about possible retaliation in the kingdom.
Interior Minister Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef said at the height of the attacks in May that Saudi Arabia's security remained "under control".
"Incidents such as this will not destabilise us. We have been through bigger ones," the minister said.
He led a crackdown on Al-Qaeda which waged a campaign of shootings and bombings against foreigners and Saudi security personnel between 2003 and 2007.A black hole bomb is the name given to a physical effect utilizing how a bosonic field impinging on a rotating black hole can be amplified through superradiant scattering. An additional condition which must be met is that the field must have a rest mass different from zero. The scattered wave will then be reflected back and forth between the mass term and the black hole becoming amplified on each reflection. The growth of the field is asserted to be exponential and unstable. The mechanism by which the black hole bomb functions is called superradiant instability.
History [ edit ]
The idea that angular momentum and energy may be transferred from a rotating black hole to a particle being scattered by it was proposed by Roger Penrose in 1971. The first discussion of a runaway effect, the black hole bomb, was explored by W. H. Press and S. A. Teukolsky in 1972.[1] If such an effect were to spontaneously occur, it may point to new physics beyond the Standard Model, and showing that black holes have "hair", as pointed out by a paper from 2017, by William E. East and Frans Pretorius.[2]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
Press, William H.; Teukolsky, Saul A. (1972). "Floating Orbits, Superradiant Scattering and the Black-hole Bomb". Nature. 238 (5361): 211–212. Bibcode:1972Natur.238..211P. doi:10.1038/238211a0.
Paolo Pani, Vitor Cardoso, Leonardo Gualtieri, Emanuele Berti, Akihiro Ishibashi (27 September 2012). "Black-Hole Bombs and Photon-Mass Bounds". Physical Review Letters. arXiv: 1209.0465 Bibcode:2012PhRvL.109m1102P. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.131102.
William E. East, Frans Pretorius (24 July 2017). "Superradiant Instability and Backreaction of Massive Vector Fields around Kerr Black Holes". Physical Review Letters. American Physical Society. arXiv: 1704.04791 Bibcode:2017PhRvL.119d1101E. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.041101.A few months ago, I was talking to a startup about how individual customers wanted them to do different things. They felt trapped, because, on the one hand, they were intentionally doing things that didn’t scale. On the other, they found that meeting the varied expectations of their customers meant that they were not moving towards a coherent product and that their time to do anything other than customize their product had evaporated.
This is a natural tension for early stage companies that is surprisingly hard to get away from. I think that’s partly because the way we talk about making users happy is too black and white. There is no single thing you can build that will make all users happy, and it’s rare to hit on the exact thing that makes any users happy out of the gate. Instead, founders have to run a continuous optimization of what they can build and support against what users want.
I think about this optimization as operating along three variables: cost of customization, happiness generated, and cost to support that customization. The goal is to find a level of customization that makes as many customers as possible happy while not incurring support costs – through personnel or burn – that would kill your company. This curve is always going to be slightly different, but looks something like this:
This is hardest to figure out at the early stages of physical services businesses. Those companies generally experience the widest range of customer satisfaction because they cannot fully control the delivery of the service. This leads to very angry customers who demand expensive changes. When a company doesn’t have a lot of customers, any angry customer feels like the end of the world, which leads founders to try to make all of these users happy, which then creates unsustainable processes and product customizations. The harder thing to do is figure out which customizations you could make, weighted by the increase in happiness of the users you actually want.
Pure software businesses have to run the same decision process, but they tend to have more control over the what gets built, and they operate within a narrower band of likely cost. When thinking through how to weigh changes and cost, this is a hierarchy you can use:
System critical bugs should always be fixed. These are not customizations. Customizations that are software features are easier to build than customizations involving people processes. If you have to build a people process, build one that can be replaced with software later Customizations that require you to build new people processes are ok if those processes can later be turned into software. Customizations that require hiring people who can’t be switched to new roles rapidly are dangerous. Customizations that require large upfront capex are generally a bad idea. Customizations that require people and capex are almost never a good idea without a lot of thought and without trying alternatives first. Enterprise clients will often pay for the development and support of custom features. Ask them about this.
Founders will always make mistakes when deciding what to build to make users happy. That’s usually ok, and is part of how founders learn what their users actually want and what their product should be.
The biggest danger is committing to large costs that are hard to remove. Doing this will force a company down a path to failure or an extreme pivot. This isn’t all that different from ramping up burn, but it’s actually more dangerous because founders think they’re doing the right thing all along. “Look!” they say “I’m making users happy!” They don’t think of the cost, and one day wake up that they have happy users who are dooming the company. That’s hard to come back from because the emotional weight of disappointing happy customers is a powerful bit of inertia. The only way to avoid that fate is to recognize that your goal is to make many users happy, not just the few you happen to have today.
Notes
This is important. If you get people using your service, you will invariably get customers or users who you don’t actually want. This might because they’re abusive. It might be because they don’t want to pay you. It’s ok to decide not to serve these users, but make sure that you’re not either ignoring your real user base because you have misguided expectations, or being a jerk.↩
The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that.↩Words "BYE BYE" and drawings in oily residue on the tail of a United Airlines 747-400 prompted 13 flight attendants to refuse to fly from San Francisco to Hong Kong on July 14, 2014, until the plane was thoroughly searched for explosives. United fired the flight attendants and canceled the flight. The Flight attendants are asking the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for reinstatement, back pay and other damages. [Via MerlinFTP Drop] (Photo11: OSHA)
Thirteen flight attendants who were fired by United Airlines for refusing to fly from San Francisco to Hong Kong because of a security concern have filed a federal complaint to get their jobs back.
Before United Flight 869 took off July 14, crewmembers noticed the words "BYE BYE" and two faces drawn in oily residue on the plane's tail, according to the 26-page complaint filed Tuesday with the Labor Department. One face was smiling but the other was "devilish," the complaint said.
The graffiti was written on part of the plane 30 feet above ground, which would have required equipment to reach, and airline officials were uncertain whether it was written in San Francisco or its previous location at Incheon Airport in Seoul, South Korea, according to the complaint.
The flight attendants refused to fly unless the more than 300 passengers were taken off the Boeing 747-400 and the plane was searched thoroughly for explosives, according to the complaint. The flight was canceled for lack of crew.
United fired the flight attendants for insubordination after supervisors ordered them to fly. Christen David, a United spokeswoman, said all of the airline's and FAA's safety procedures were followed in the incident and that the plane was deemed "entirely safe to fly."
"Our flight operations, safety and maintenance teams appropriately investigated and determined there was no credible security threat," David said. "We cannot comment further on the details of this pending litigation, but we intend to defend against it vigorously."
The complaint filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration contends that the workers are protected as whistle-blowers from retaliation for reporting air safety and security threats. The flight attendants are seeking reinstatement, back pay and compensatory damages.
One of the flight attendants, Grace Lam, said the fired workers "were not willing to bow to United's pressure to ignore an unresolved security threat even though the company made clear that we risked losing our jobs."
David Marshall, who filed the complaint as a partner at Katz, Marshall & Banks, said the flight attendants with a combined 299 years of experience were worried about security threats after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March and a Transportation Security Administration warning about consumer electronics the week before the flight.
"Our clients are entitled to legal protection for doing what was right," Marshall said.
In addition to Lam, the flight attendants are Illya Bin Abdollah, Reshma Abdul Khader, Doris Chu, Sangeeta Shama Khanna, Tak Man Lai, Alison Yim Mei Ma, Sailesh Mohan Malkani, Evans Francisco Jesus Mendonica, Pauline Quak, Josephine Wai Nga Tse, Wai Lok Tsoi and Winson Yip.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1ByPwL3The Philadelphia Flyers are coming off a crushing defeat against Pekka Rinne and the Nashville Predators. Aside from one deflection shot by Andrew Macdonald, which resulted in the Flyers’ lone goal, Rinne shut the Flyers down and they lost in a way that we’re all too used to.
The shootout.
Rinne stopped 31-of-32 shots through regulation and overtime, posting a 0.969 save percentage and stopping all three shootout attempts.
After a surprising 10-game winning streak from the Orange and Black, they have now lost two games in a row, one in regulation and another in overtime. They now have a quick turnaround into a Rivalry Night game on the NBC Sports Network against Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals on Wednesday night.
The Capitals, who have won six of their last seven contests, are a point behind the Flyers in the Metropolitan Division. They do, however, have four games in hand. The Capitals lost their last contest 2-1 against the Montreal Canadiens, but are the hotter team coming into the game.
Ovechkin is 11 points from hitting the career milestone of 1000 points in his career. He has also gotten off to a slow start with 23 points, 14 goals and 9 assists in his first 30 games. The entire world knows what he is capable of. This close to a milestone, there is a chance that we are going to witness some big games from him coming up.
If the Flyers want to continue to have a hold on a playoff spot, this is a big game for them to prove that they can break out of a mini slump and get back to their winning ways.
This is the first meeting between the two clubs this season, which means that this is a revenge game for the Flyers since the Capitals bounced them out of the playoffs last year. Thirty five games into the season, it is difficult to say that the Flyers will have a “must win” or “statement game,” but if there were to be one, this would be it. They have cooled off since their 10-game winning streak and while no Flyers fans would expect them to win out, that streak set a new precedent for the rest of the year.
After being a key part of the streak, Claude Giroux has tapered off and has only registered two assists and no goals in his last five games. Against the Capitals, Giroux is over a point-per-game player with 31 in 29 games. If the Flyers want to win this game, it is going to take an extraordinary effort from their captain so that they can get back on the right track.
This is going to have to be a very hard fought game for the Flyers against last year’s Presidents Trophy winners. The Capitals have an All-Star studded lineup, with names like Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom, Evgeni Kuznetzov and Braden Holtby, the Flyers are going to have to bring their best game to get the win Wednesday night.
Not only is this a revenge game for the Flyers, but it is a chance to show the league and themselves that they can continue to overcome adversity as the season rolls along. They are currently fourth in the Metropolitan Division but that can all change tomorrow night if the Capitals come away with two points.
At 35 games into the season, this is a must-win for the Flyers on Rivalry Night.PM inaugurates 'Shri Narendra Modi Resilient Rice Field Laboratory' in Philippines
International
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By Chennabasaveshwar
PM Modi in Manila inaugurated 'Resilient Rice Field Laboratory' | Oneindia News
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday inaugurated 'Shri Narendra Modi Resilient Rice Field Laboratory' at Los Banos, in the Philippines.
PM said his visit to International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) was a great learning experience. He said, "Saw the exceptional work IRRI is doing towards mitigating poverty and hunger by improving rice cultivation. Their work benefits many |
its chairman, who persuaded the other nations to take up the issue. "And of course when there is a particular concern with regard to a category of weapons, it’s always easier to find a solution before those weapons exist."
Watching the robots stumble around the simulated disaster areas at the DARPA trials would have been reassuring to anyone worried about killer robots. Today’s robots are miracles of science compared to those from 20 years ago, but they are still seriously impaired by lousy perception, energy inefficiency, and rudimentary intelligence. The machines move agonizingly slowly and wear safety harnesses in case they fall, which happens often.
The capabilities being developed for the challenge, however, are laying the groundwork for killer robots should we ever decide to build them. "We’re part of the Defense Department," DARPA’s director, Arati Prabhakar, acknowledges. "Why do we make these investments? We make them because we think that they’re going to be important for national security." One recent report from the US Air Force notes that "by 2030 machine capabilities will have increased to the point that humans will have become the weakest component in a wide array of systems and processes."
"If we can protect innocent civilian life, I do not want to shut the door on the use of this technology."
By some logic, that might be a good thing. Robot shooters are inherently more accurate than humans, and they’re unaffected by fear, fatigue, or hatred. Machines can take on more risk in order to verify a target, loitering in an area or approaching closer to confirm there are no civilians in the way.
"If we can protect innocent civilian life, I do not want to shut the door on the use of this technology," says Ron Arkin, PhD, a roboticist and ethicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has collaborated extensively with Pentagon agencies on various robotics systems.
Arkin proposes that an "ethical governor," a set of rules that approximates an artificial conscience, could be programmed into the machines in order to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law. Autonomy in these systems, he points out, isn’t akin to free will — it’s more like automation. During the trials, DARPA deliberately sabotaged the communications links between robots and their operators in order to give an advantage to the bots that could "think" on their own. But at least for now, that means being able to process the command "take a step" versus "lift the right foot 2 inches, move it forward 6 inches, and set it down."
"When you speak to philosophers, they act as if these systems will have moral agency," Arkin says. "At some level a toaster is autonomous. You can task it to toast your bread and walk away. It doesn’t keep asking you, ‘Should I stop? Should I stop?’ That’s the kind of autonomy we’re talking about."Pathological Liars are not part of the average person’s daily life, but when we cross paths with one, it’s helps to know who they are, why they do it, and how to deal with them.
This affliction is something the medical community has researched. One study showed a biological difference in the brain tissue. A pathological liar tends to have at least 26% more fatty tissue in the brain.
So, they’re fatheads?
The medical term Pathological Liar doesn’t even stand alone as a mental illness. It is described as a defect in a person’s personality, but no one knows for sure if a PL has the ability to even control the lies he tells.
Psychotherapy is really not a good option, unless the patient agrees to be honest with his counselor. I have met the King of all Pathological Liars and I’m going to say that asking him to be honest with anyone, even someone trying to help him get healthy, is a stretch.
As far as the medical community is concerned, Pathological Lying remains a mystery. They aren’t sure why the person habitually lies and they have no real treatment that works. In fact, Pathological Lying is probably a small part of another very real mental illness such as Narcissistic,Histrionic or Anti-Social Personality Disorders. It is also a part of the mind of a Sociopath. None of these disorders can successfully be treated or controlled by the medical community.
There are essentially two kinds of Pathological Liars.
One is a person that has addictive tendencies towards drugs and alcohol. Often they lie to fulfill their habits.
The other PL is simply an attention seeker. He lies about everything and will tell you the most outrageous stories in order to get and to keep your attention. His main goal is to manipulate you and keep your rapt attention focused solely on him.
Since the medical community has no surefire way to treat a Pathological Liar, it’s up to us to figure out how to deal with one if they have to be a part of our lives.
The overall advice I found when doing research online, was to avoid them. This is exactly what I personally tend to do. Once you realize that everything they have ever told you and the rest of your friends, are lies, then put as much distance between you and this person as quickly as you can.
Warn your friends and give them examples of lies the PL has told you so they can research it on their own to determine they have been lied to. Remember that a PL is also very charming and most people under their spell do not want to believe their friend is a liar.
I remember putting undisputed truth right in front of some folks, only to have them turn on me. “I like this guy and he’s a lot of fun! Why would I believe you when to me, he’s been a great time?” Um, maybe because nothing he’s told you is true? After a few instances like that, you learn to give them the tools to research it on their own. If they care that they are caught up in a web of lies, then they’ll go look and put some distance between themselves and the PL on their own.
You should also consider that some people just don’t care if the guy is a PL. He probably takes up a minuscule place in their lives. They see him as entertainment and never have any intention of giving him more than a laugh, or two, and will never take him seriously at all. If they aren’t in danger of being hurt by his deception, then don’t press them to act.
You will also find that a PL really doesn’t care how many people exit his life because he just moves on to a new group and starts all over again. Your exit from his life is merely a bump in the road.
If you try to press him to be honest by exposing his lies to your peer group, get ready for a fight. He will tell even more lies to explain why the lies you’re exposing aren’t really lies. He will have people so confused and rattled that they won’t know what is true and what’s not.
Don’t bother defending yourself.
The people that stick with him aren’t quality people and you’re better off without them. The intelligent people will see right through him and leave him behind on their own. Either way, you’re better off once the PL is shut out of your life and that’s what counts.
But if there is a PL that you can not avoid, like a sibling or a relative, then how do you handle them?
Distance is still an option, but prepare yourself for holiday family reunions. Know that anything they tell you about their lives is always going to be peppered with lies. Don’t allow them to manipulate you into doing anything for them, or giving them money.
The best advice I found if dealing with a Pathological Liar is something you can not avoid is to not take anything personally. Their lies aren’t about you. Their lies are about them and how they feel about themselves. Lying is their way of dealing with a reality they don’t think they deserve, but won’t do anything constructive to change.
If you have enjoyed this article and would like to notified when new articles are published, please follow my blog via email or WordPress account. It’s easy to sign up using the box to your right on this page.6 years ago
Updated 3:44 p.m. ET Tuesday 6/4
(CNN) - The Internal Revenue Service spent millions of taxpayer dollars on everything from event planners' commissions to speakers' fees to guest prizes to parody videos at a 2010 conference, an audit of the agency shows.
The beleaguered agency - already snared in controversy over its targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status - spent $4.1 million on a 2010 conference in Anaheim, California, with "questionable expenses" comprising much of the budget, according to the report released Tuesday by the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration.
The audit notes that a large chunk of that money - about $3.2 million - came from unused funds allocated for hiring. This was in the same year that the IRS began to single out conservative and tea party groups that sought tax-exempt office, in part because the agency said it did not have the personnel to handle the overwhelming amount of applications pouring in that year.
"Effective cost management is especially important given the current economic environment and focus on Government efficiency," Inspector General J. Russell George said in a statement. "Certain of the IRS's expenses associated with the Anaheim conference do not appear to be a good use of taxpayer funds."
Read the audit report
The August 2010 conference, held by the Small Business/Self-Employed division, had 2,600 attendees at three hotels in Anaheim. The audit states that none of the guests were required to document their attendance at the training sessions.
While the division made 1,516 hires that year, not all of them were on board the full year, so the division used the unused money for the three-day conference. Managers also indicated the used additional training funds for the event.
The audit notes that the IRS–a stickler for record keeping–could only provide documentation for $4.1 million. The division estimated it actually spent $4,297,285, but could not source that additional amount, according to the report.
The IRS used event planners instead of IRS employees or contractors to set up the conference, giving no incentive to get lower rates and leaving the government to pay $135 per night for all rooms. Instead of working for favorable room rates, both event planners got $66,500 in commission from the hotels, according to the audit.
Other expenses included more than $135,000 on outside speakers–including a $17,000 fee for a speaker who created paintings on stage to make his point that one must free "the thought process to find creative solutions to challenges."
"The speaker created six paintings at these two keynote sessions (three at each session). These paintings consisted of the following portraits: Albert Einstein (one); Michael Jordan (one); Abraham Lincoln (one); U2 singer Bono (one); and the Statute of Liberty (two)," the audit states.
While two of the paintings were given away at the conference and three were donated, one was reported lost.
The IRS also paid $11,400 to a speaker who specializes in happiness and positive psychology. He led four 90-minute workshops.
Another speaker received $27,500 for two hour-long speeches. The speaker's fee included a $2,500 flight in first class.
The presentation was based on the speaker's published book and, according to the contract, the speaker was to "share how seemingly random combinations of ideas can drive radical innovations."
On a somewhat ironic note, one of the sessions in the programs lists a speech given by IRS speakers titled: "Political Savvy: How Not to Shoot Yourself in the Foot."
In other expenses, IRS employees doled out $35,800 on three planning trips before the conference.
Forty-five employees who lived in the local area got to stay in the hotels and received daily per diems, amounting to more than $30,000 total.
And attendees got numerous gifts and promotional items from conference organizers–totaling more than $64,000. This included imprinted bags, imprinted hard-covered journals, lanyards, travel mugs, picture frames, and various promotion items, according to the audit.
Some attendees were also given Los Angeles Angels baseball tickets as contest prizes, which the division said came as a donation from the hotels.
At the three hotels, 132 suite upgrades were provided each night of the conference, representing nearly 5% of the 2,830 rooms booked. The upgrades ranged from $299 to $1,000 per night.
The hotels provided 10 free rooms each night, which were used by paid speakers and non-IRS support staff, according to the audit. Two of the event planners were given free rooms for 19 nights.
While attendees received a daily $71 per diem, they were also given two free drink coupons, daily continental breakfasts, and beverages and snacks during breaks.
The SB/SE division spent more than $50,000 on videos for the conference. One of the videos, CNN has reported, had a Star-Trek theme, while the other was a parody on IRS employees learning how to do the Cupid Shuffle dance.
Because the IRS did not keep track of all expenses for the videos, the inspector general's office estimates that it took 62 staff hours to produce the piece at a minimum hourly rate of $50.
While the focus of the audit was on the 2010 conference, the inspector general looked at all IRS conferences between 2010 and 2012, finding that the agency held 225 conferences during that time at an estimated cost of $49 million. Nearly $38 million of that came in 2010 alone.
The inspector general's office said it made nine recommendations to the IRS for future conferences, and the agency agreed to all nine.
Responding to the report, the IRS maintained that the 2010 conference was needed to make sure managers had proper training for "significant new programs, major staff and manager turnover and a substantial increase in security threats."
The Small Business/Self-Employed division amounts to nearly one-third of the agency's total work force, and at the time of the 2010 conference, almost 30% of the division's managers had been hired in the prior two years.
However, acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, who was appointed last month after his predecessor stepped down amid scandal, said in a statement that the 2010 conference was an "unfortunate vestige from a prior era" and such a conference would not take place today.
"I will continue my efforts and ensure tight spending protocols are in place to protect the use of taxpayer dollars," he said.
According to the official IRS response, written by IRS chief financial officer Pamela LaRue, the agency had already put in place an "extensive series of procedures" and has "dramatically cut" expenses for conferences since 2010. For example, LaRue notes, all conferences must now be approved centrally rather than by individual units at the IRS.
The number of large meetings decreased by 84% and the costs for those meetings decreased by 87% by 2012, LaRue writes. The IRS predicts costs for 2013 will be even lower.
Travel and training expenses are also down by more than 80%, according to the IRS. The agency now does 90% of its training hours online–nearly double the amount from 2010.
"The IRS takes seriously our obligations to be good stewards of government resources," LaRue writes, adding that the agency has reached $1 billion in savings since 2009.
As for the use of event planners and the receipt of room upgrades noted in the audit, LaRue says those items did not involve "any additional government resources."
IRS officials will continue to make their case this week when they appear Thursday before the House Oversight and Government Reform.Earlier in the season, I used Out of the Park Baseball 2017 to answer an insane question: what would happen if Terry Francona took his usage of Bryan Shaw to the extreme and forced him to pitch every single inning?
It wasn't pretty.
Thanks to TribeGuy1997, I've realized that I didn't go nearly far enough.
We'll start with the ground rules again
Bryan Shaw and 1,199 of his clones will be the only players in the league during the season. No amateur draft. No international free agents. There will be no minor leagues to help speed the simulation up. The pool of managers, scouts, trainers, etc will remain the same. Do sabermetrics matter if every player is the same? No DH. We can't let Bryan Shaw bat for Bryan Shaw in one league and not the other! I have nicknamed the original Bryan so that we can keep track of him.
It took me about two hour to figure out exactly how to force OOTP to make every team sign nothing but Bryan Shaw clones. Finally, I found the trick: dump all the players into the free agent pool, delete all of them but Shaw, and then start cloning. Then, hold an inaugural draft with 2,048 Shaws to choose from (an artifact of the quickest way to clone).
After all of this work, I finally arrived at opening day for the Cleveland Indians
Wait. What? Is this just a total fluke? I expected pitching to dominate this league, but there have to be some more valiant offensive opening day performances out there, right?
Good god.
Bryan Shaw pitched arguably the greatest game in the history of baseball, then sat on the bench and watched as the rest of the Bryan Shaws muddled through 14.1 innings. Of the twelve games played on Indians' opening day, seven total went to extra innings. No team scored more than three runs. It looks like it's going to be a very long season for Bryan Shaw. Not to mention Bryan Shaw. Let's not forget Bryan Shaw, who jumped out to an early MVP lead with five hits.
You might think that teams would be content to stand pat and not reach into the vast free agency pool of Shaws. Some teams are a bit frisky, though. Look at the Seattle Mariners making a splash:
At the time of the signing, Shaw became the highest-paid Shaw in the league. After seeing this report, I decide to look at who else is making news:
Just to review: the Indians scout still takes the time to do an in-depth scouting report of each team before the series. Teams all over the league are scrambling to add depth through free agency. Ned Yost quickly builds 'Great Rapport' with a locker room of 25 6'1" relief pitchers, stoking the competitive fire in their identical brown eyes. Not even coffee tables are safe. And the Shaw who crashed that Maserati apparently spent his entire season's salary on it.
At this point, I'm a little bit terrified to see what the final statistics are going to look like in this league. There is no turning back: we've entered the Shaw Singularity, from which nothing can escape, not even light. It's only going to get weirder as we get deeper, and in many instances, I have absolutely no words to add. It simply stands alone.
The game itself seems to be calling out to me with this screen. "I tried to warn you," it says. "I spent two hours keeping you from creating this hellscape and I finally relented. You will share the pain that I am feeling. I will make sure of it."
I go ahead a simulate a large swath of the season. Maybe if I just churn through everything as fast as I can, OOTP will forgive me, won't resent me, won't blow out Kluber's UCL the next time I fire it up for a serious playthrough.
At the end of the regular season, here are the most interesting findings:
Correct. Only Shaw in Toronto stole a base during the season. Here's the really ridiculous thing: none of the other Shaws even tried to steal. Not even one.
The longest game played during the season is a macabre masterpiece.
The Indians battled the Rangers on September 26th. The game began at 7:08pm, with the rain blowing in at 11 mph in 46-degree weather. The game lasted for 19:11. Yes. Nineteen hours and eleven minutes. The Indians finally scored in the top of the 67th inning just after 2pm on September 27th. Both teams suited up again and played for 26 innings five hours later. This isn't the only abysmal marathon that I could find. There are at least two other games that went for at least 60 innings. Overall, the season took 77,308.2 innings to play.
The entire league hit only 97 HRs. St. Louis hit 0. The average slash line ended at.117/.121/.241. Houston led the league with 168 runs. This kind of futility is both hilarious and sad. In the previously mentioned 67 inning game, one of the Bryan Shaws struck out 22 times. Another Shaw struck out 653 times on the season.
The pitching records are all ludicrous That's a pretty phenomenal set of numbers there, don't you agree? Except for one thing: Shaw from Colorado isn't the true winner of this award. There is an even more exceptional Shaw in the league. Another Bryan Shaw on the Pirates pitched 181 innings, striking out 376 without allowing a single walk. For a moment, I wonder why the AI decided to use this Shaw only against left-handed hitters. Then it dawns on me: Bryan Shaw is a switch hitter, but throws with his right hand. The system would always prefer to have Shaw bat from the opposite side of the plate, meaning that not once in the entire season did a right-handed batter have an at-bat.
How did our friend Real Bryan Shaw fare? Well, he threw 91 strikes on 20 pitches on June 2nd according to the box score. I have absolutely no explanation for how this happened, but with a game score of 112, he not only had the best start of the season but of all time.
And Now, the Playoffs!
COME ON. SERIOUSLY?
In these playoffs, not a single Shaw hit a home run. Many of the games were a fairly boring 9-inning affair, with scores like 2-1 and 3-2. In one of the World Series games, the Pittsburg Pirates even walked off. After a long and bizarre season in which some teams didn't even have time to change before game, it all ended with a whimper.
The offseason won't be any prettier for this strange baseball world -- every single player in the league is up for arbitration, and they deserve significant compensation.The Food and Drug Administration requires randomized trials before approving new drugs, and the National Institutes of Health spend large parts of their budget conducting randomized clinical trials.
Among the other leading advocates of randomization was Sir Richard Peto, a renowned researcher at Oxford University. In an e-mail, Mr. Peto said that Dr. Meier, “perhaps more than any other U.S. statistician, was the one who influenced U.S. drug regulatory agencies, and hence clinical researchers throughout the U.S. and other countries, to insist on the central importance of randomized evidence.”
“That strategic decision half a century ago has already saved millions of lives,” Mr. Peto continued, “and those millions should be attributed to Paul.”
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Perhaps as significant to the field of medical statistics was Dr. Meier’s cooperation with Edward L. Kaplan, a researcher at the University of California Radiation Laboratory, in formulating a now widely accepted standard for estimating patient survival. (Dr. Kaplan died in 2006.)
In a paper published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in June 1958, the collaborators put forth a new, efficient method for estimating patient survival rates, taking into account the fact that some patients die during research trials while others survive beyond the trials. The method, called the Kaplan-Meier estimator, is based on a complex mathematical formula using information from those who died and those who survived to estimate (depicted in a curve) the proportion of patients alive at any point during the trial.
“If you have a patient with breast cancer receiving a particular treatment or drug, you can estimate her 5-, 10- or 15-year survival rate,” Theodore Karrison, a researcher at the University of Chicago, said Thursday. “It has become the standard tool used by medical researchers for determining the duration of survival in thousands of studies, ranging from cancer to AIDS to cardiovascular disease to diabetes, to name just a few.”
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Today, almost every medical study includes Kaplan-Meier curves. And the original paper is one of the most widely quoted in medical literature, having been cited more than 35,000 times, according to the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge, a Web site that maintains citation databases.
Born in Newark on July 24, 1924, Paul Meier was one of two sons of Frank and Clara Meier. His father was a chemist; his mother, a school principal.
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Besides his daughter Diane, Dr. Meier is survived by his wife of 63 years, the former Louise Goldstone; two other daughters, Karen Meier and Joan Meier; and five grandchildren.
Dr. Meier received his bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from Oberlin in 1945, then earned his master’s in mathematical logic in 1947 and his doctorate in statistics in 1951, both at Princeton. He taught at Lehigh from 1948 to 1952, at Johns Hopkins until 1957 and then joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he became chairman of the statistics department. He later taught at Columbia.
Researchers were not always attuned to Dr. Meier’s advocacy. “When I said ‘randomize’ in breast cancer trials,” he recalled in a 2004 interview for Clinical Trials, the publication of the Society for Clinical Trials, “I was looked at with amazement by my medical colleagues: ‘Randomize? We know that this treatment is better than that one.’ I said, ‘Not really!’ ”
On Thursday, Robert T. O’Neill, director of the Office of Biostatistics at the Federal Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said that as a member of the agency’s advisory committee, Dr. Meier “forcefully expressed the statistical principles that we follow today, particularly randomization and the follow-up of patients.”
“When Paul spoke, people listened, and few could spar with him.”On Thursday night after FC Dallas’ second practice of the day, head coach Schellas Hyndman talked about two trialists who will be joining the club later in the week. One of those, Colombian defender/midfielder Kleyner Mena, was ready for training on Friday morning, while the other, Argentine forward Nicolas Gianni won’t join the club until later this weekend.
Here’s the scoop on the two players:
Nicolas Andres Gianni
Age: 29
Home Country: Argentina
Position: Forward
Last Club: Estudiantes de Merida (Venuezela)
Hyndman’s Take: “Nicolas, has a very, very rich soccer background. He’s played many, many years with a lot of different teams. Plays anywhere up front. He’s 29-years-old. Played with Argentina Juniors. In 2008, he played with Universidad Catolica out of Chile. Then he played with Argentina Juniors. Last year he played with Estudiantes in Venezuela. I think he’s a player that we’re excited to have him in here to look at him.”
Kleyner Bejarano Mena
Age: 22
Home Country: Colombia
Position: Midfielder/Defender
Last Club: Cortulua (Colombian Second Division)
Hyndman’s Take: “He just flew in and he was feeling weak, so we pulled him out (of Friday’s morning practice). We didn’t see much of him. Mena’s a player that is coming out of Colombia. He’s playing on a second-division team not on a first-division team. There’s some reasons for that (not playing in the top division) but he’s a right-sided midfielder. He’s extremely quick, very athletic and also right fullback. He has the combination of going to both sides of the field. I think we need to find a good right-sided midfielder on our team. (Fabian) Castillo can do it (start on the right side) but Castillo could be our striker.”Mexico’s currency, the peso, tumbled again on Wednesday, hitting a new record low against the dollar after Ford cancelled plans to build a huge car-making plant in the country following criticism by President-elect Donald Trump.
In San Luis Potosi, where it was to be build, locals like Ana Rodriguez lamented the lost jobs: “We always do the work that they don’t want to do, so I want to see what will happen if he builds the factory in the United States, and see the Americans wanting to do the jobs that we were going to do, and of course it affects us a lot too because a lot of people who do not have work were going to have the opportunity, and now they no longer have that opportunity.”
Ford insisted the change of plans was based on a decline in North American demand for small cars like those that would have been made at the Mexican plant and has nothing to do with Trump’s criticism.
However Ford Chief Executive Mark Fields did tell reporters: “This is a vote of confidence for President-elect Trump and some of the policies he may be pursuing.”
The Mexico plant would have meant investment of $1.6 billion (1.53 billion euros) and would have created 2,800 jobs. Instead Ford will expand its US plant in Michigan to produce electrified and automated vehicles at a cost of $700 million (668 million euros), creating 700 jobs.
Cancellation costs
The decision to cancel the Mexico plant means it will have to compensate the local government for infrastructure spending, though no figure has been made public.
San Luis Potosi State Governor Juan Manuel Carreras said: “The state government and Ford Motor Company will proceed in accordance with the terms of the agreement in order to apply the agreed rules for early termination, which imply, in this case, a total refund by the company for all the money spent by the state government on this project to date.”
Ford’s change of heart came just hours after Trump used Twitter to attack the biggest US carmaker General Motors over its production in Mexico. He threatened to impose big taxes on cars made there and then imported into the US.
General Motors is sending Mexican made model of Chevy Cruze to U.S. car dealers-tax free across border. Make in U.S.A.or pay big border tax! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2017
He cannot actually do that under the terms of NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement -which all but eliminated tariffs on goods shipped among Canada, the US and Mexico, but Trump plans to renegotiate or even scrap NAFTA, which would likely lead to retaliation by Mexico.
GM said it sold about 190,000 Cruze cars in the United States in 2016. All of the sedan versions sold in the US, or about 185,500, were built at its plant in Lordstown, Ohio. About 4,500 hatchback versions of the Cruze were assembled in Mexico and sold in the United States.
“GM builds the Chevrolet Cruze hatchback for global markets in Mexico, with a small number sold in the US” it said in a statement posted on its website.
Contingency plans
Trump’s GM comments marked his latest broadside aimed at an American company over jobs, imports and costs before he takes office on January 20, signalling an uncommon degree of intervention for an incoming US president into corporate affairs.
James Nolt of the World Policy Institute said more companies are trying to prepare for Trump’s policy changes.
“I’ve already read that Apple, for example, has done a contingency study to see how much it would cost if they moved manufacturing back from China to the United States,” Nolt said.
“Other companies are probably doing the same sort of thing. They’re making contingency plans. What if Trump is really serious about this? How could it affect our costs? How could we reallocate production to be able to take advantage of this new environment? So, a lot of companies and people are assessing Trump to see whether he’s serious, or whether his campaign rhetoric was hollow, and I think, increasingly, the evidence is he’s serious.”Mushim Patricia Ikeda shares a small piece of Buddhist history that she’s never forgotten, and that she hopes, in this age of ICE raids and the debate about DACA, we’ll always remember too.
Here’s a true story that, I think, all U.S. Buddhists should know.
Back in 2000, I was guest editor of the “Buddhists of Asian Descent in the USA” issue of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s journal, Turning Wheel. In it was an article titled “Internment Camp Buddhism: Memoirs of Rev. Koetsu Morita,” translated by Rev. Ryuji Tamiya and my cousin, Rev. Mary Jiko Oshima Nakade.
One of the stories in that article goes like this:
Rev. Morita, a Soto Zen priest from Japan, was arrested in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese. He was relocated to numerous concentration camps—it’s good to remember that these were concentration camps, not just “internment camps”—starting out in Sand Island, Oahu, Hawaii. In that camp, there were thirty Buddhist ministers of various Buddhist sects from all over the island of Oahu.
When Buddha’s Birthday came around on April 8, Rev. Morita recalled, the ministers wanted to celebrate the traditional Hana Matsuri. Like the other ministers, he had only the clothes he was arrested in, and they were filthy. He had only one pair of pants, so he couldn’t wash them; what would he wear in the meantime? (Evidently, Rev. Morita wouldn’t get a change of clothing until his family was able to send him more pants, months after his arrest.) He had no belt, either, so he used a piece of rope from a tent on Sand Island.
In 1977, in his memoirs, Rev. Morita wrote,
But no minister had a robe with him except for Bishop Kubokawa [of the Jodo sect], who was asked to officiate because he had been arrested in his robes…. We chanted the Hannya Shingyo (Heart Sutra) and Bishop Kubokawa delivered a Dharma talk. He said, “…Your participation in those filthy clothes can be likened to the Buddha’s teaching of the lotus blooming in the mud. Let us hold on together, praying that peace arrives as soon as possible, and may we be guided by the Buddha’s teachings and life of peace.” To this day I can still hear the voice of that nearly eighty-year-old priest.
So the U.S. government arrested and put into concentration camps Japanese immigrants and U.S. citizens (the children of the immigrants) alike in World War II, including many Buddhists—and Buddhist priests were among the first to be arrested in Hawaii. They’d even arrested a priest in his robes!
As Buddhists in the U.S., I think that if we knew our own history better—that is, the history of Buddhism in the U.S.—we would understand that the ICE raids (which were going on in full force during the Obama-era) and the repeal of DACA have very, very much to do with our own dharma practice. And, because of that knowledge, we would resist—employing all of the determination and concentration we have developed through our various Buddhist practices.
And then there’s the equally valuable community-building skills that Buddhists in this country have carefully nurtured in order to provide safe and happy and welcoming places for ourselves, our families, and our dharma friends. When we foster and share these skills, we increase our resilience.
We’ll need our determination, concentration, and resilience. Because this trying era we’re in will end someday, but it’s not likely to get better very soon. We’ve got to be in this for the long haul.
Save“If you’re maximizing profit, you’re going to invest the minimum amount of money into what gets you the most benefit,” says Eric Goldwyn, a professor of urban studies at Barnard College and Hunter College. “If it happens to be a trapezoid courtyard between two buildings that no one can really use, who cares? The public agenda isn’t what they’re really looking to do, which is just to satisfy the zoning requirement.”
Trump is well versed in the dark arts of the New York mega-developer. In 1979, he got the city to approve 20 extra stories for Trump Tower by creating a fourth-floor “public garden” that is almost never open. He also replaced the lone bench in the public lobby with kiosks selling paraphernalia from his presidential campaign and The Apprentice. (Last summer, after losing a series of administrative decisions by the city, Trump returned the bench.) His now-infamous habit of stiffing contractors is common among developers. Trump has also lied to preservationists, promising to preserve the Art Deco friezes from the façade of the Bonwit Teller department store building that he demolished to make way for Trump Tower. When he realized it would take two weeks to remove them undamaged, he instead jackhammered them to pieces.
Kate Wood, president of the preservation advocacy group Landmark West, says New York developers sometimes destroy architectural features on an old building to prevent it from being subjected to landmark status. And she has seen developers understate the likely revenue of new buildings when trying to get permission to build them. Some falsely claim that certain floors will be used for community instead of commercial purposes. “It kind of comes down to ‘alternative facts,’” says Wood. “There are facts that we in the public and nonprofit advocacy sector see, and there’s how developers see the world.”
Given that real estate developers are mainly salesmen—to investors, customers, local officials, and neighborhood advocates—lying is basically their job. But even among his fellow developers, Trump excelled at misdirection. In a deposition in 2007, when Trump sued a journalist for reporting on unflattering truths about his business practices, lawyers caught Trump in 30 separate lies. He inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs, the fee he received for giving a speech, the magnitude of his past debts, the size of his stake in a partnership, the number of sales at a condo building, and the number of his employees. In real estate, as Trump knows, there’s no detail unworthy of exaggeration.
Those who enter politics from other walks of life often confront the |
Europe has extended her dominion over the other three parts – Africa, Asia, and America. Europe has grown to think that she is entitled to her role as Mistress of the World with all the rest of mankind created for her benefit. Supposedly erudite philosophers have tried to claim that the inhabitants of Europe are innately superior, whether they be dogs or human beings. Some have even claimed that all animals degenerate in America and that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed our atmosphere for a while. It is up to us to disprove these arrogant European pretensions and to vindicate the honor of the human race. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will prove their arrogance well-founded. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!
PUBLIUS
1 – “Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains.”The state of play in the League One table ensured that, from Sheffield United’s perspective at least, today’s game against Swindon Town was no ‘After the Lord Mayor’s Show.’
Eight places and nearly 20 points behind the visitors, manager Nigel Clough and his players knew this was every bit as important as last week’s titanic tussle against Spurs. Nevertheless, after a gruelling run of fixtures and a possible FA Cup tie with Manchester United up-for-grabs when Preston North End visit Bramall Lane on Tuesday evening, United made 10 changes to their starting eleven with selection of goalkeeper Iain Turner perhaps the most notable. With colleague Mark Howard nursing a slight back complaint, the former Scotland B international donned the gloves for a match which, during the first-half at least, saw Swindon huff and puff without ever breaking the United door down. They did, however, indulge in some shameful theatrics.
The Blades' two-goal hero 'Jamie Murphy celebrates. Photo: Blades Sports Photography
The inclusion of Ben Davies ensured United would benefit from having a dead-ball specialist among their number and, in the seventh minute, it nearly proved crucial when Michael Higdon, so impressive during the second-leg of a memorable double-header with Mauricio Pochettono’s men, was inches away from connecting with an inswinging free-kick.
Moments later, at the other end of the pitch, Swindon also went close with a set-piece of their own after Terry Kennedy had been harshly cautioned following Andy Williams’ triple salko and pike on the edge of the box.
Harry Toffolo beat the wall but could not find the gapo between Turner’s outstretched palm and the inside of the far post.
Kennedy recovered to prevent a looping crossfield pass from reaching Nathan Byrne soon after.
United's 'Paul Coutts and Terry Kennedy and Jonathan Obika of Swindon. Photo : Blades Sports Photography
But it was referee Paul Coote - combined with the seemingly low painhold threshold of many Swindon players - who caused United most frustration during the opening quarter-of-a-hour.
United hope to bolster the attacking options at their disposal before Monday evening’s deadline for permanent signings. However, with Jason Holt becoming Clough’s fourth signing of the winter window so far, they have already been active in the transfer market. Holt, on loan from Heart of Midlothian, is expected to complete a permanent transfer to South Yorkshire at the end of the present campaign. He was joined in Clough’s squad by fellow new arrivals John Brayford, Paul Coutts and Kieron Freeman although only three featured here.
Swindon had triumphed 5-2 during September’s corresponding fixture at the County Ground and, arriving at Bramall Lane ranked first, have been in sparkling form since. Having seen Jordan Turbull join Kennedy in the referee’s notebook, they continued to probe without ever managing to drag United’s back-four out of position.
That was until, in the 19th minute, the ball fell to Harry Swift just in front of the penalty spot.
United's 'Paul Coutts and Terry Kennedy. Photp: Blades Sports Photography
His low shot flew through a crowd odf bodies and towards United’s goal but Turner demonstrated good reactions to block. Coote, meanwhile, continued to lose the plot. Having correctly cautioned Higdon for a frustrated challenge, he awarded free-kicks that weren’t and waved play on when it should have been hauled back.
Swift should also have given Swindon a 25th minute lead but miscued badly, allowing Kennedy and Chris Basham to clear, after meeting the impressive Byrne’s centre at the far post.
Che Adams had earlier launched a menacing counter-attack but was crowded out before he could find former Ilkeston team mate Kieran Wallace on the overlap. Adams carried on regardless and, in the 29th minute, was stopped by Raphael Branco shoulder charge which brought the fouth yellow card of the game.
Swift collected the fifth soon after. But not before Nathan Thompson tried to convince Coote that Higdon deserved to collect his second of the match. He didn’t and, after a half challenge in front of the dug-outs, play carried on.
The Blades' 'Terry Kennedy and Andy Williams of Swindon. Photo: Blades Sports Photography
Adams was inches away from curling an angled drive home after exchanging passes with Louis Reed while Swift shaved the crossbar following a huge scramble in the box. Then, two minutes from the break and after another shameful piece of play acting, Higdon had to be withdrawn with Jamie Murphy entering the fray.
SHEFFIELD UNITED: Turner, Brayford, Basham, Davies, Coutts, Higdon, Reed, Freeman, Kennedy, Adams, Wallace. Substitutes: Alcock, Doyle, Murphy, Scougall, Baxter, McNulty, Long.
SWINDON TOWN: Foderingham, Branco, N Thompson, Turnbull, Byrne, Stephens, L Thompson, Toffolo, Swift, Obika, Williams. Substitutes: Smith, Barthram, Hylton, Belford, Rodgers, Marshall.
REFEREE: D Cootes (Nottinghamshire).Armada FC Public Relations | May 19, 2016
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The Jacksonville Armada will now face the United Soccer League's Charleston Battery in the third round of the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, June 1 at Southern Oak Stadium on the campus of Jacksonville University.
Armada FC season ticket members are given first priority to claim tickets to the match, which will be a bonus match in their 2016 plan. Any unclaimed tickets will be available for $10 next Wednesday, May 25.
For information on U.S. Open Cup third round tickets, call 1.844.2.ARMADA.
Following a protest from the Battery and a review by the U.S. Open Cup Adjudication and Discipline Panel, U.S. Soccer announced on Thursday evening The Villages SC was disqualified from the tournament for using an ineligible player.
The Villages, an amateur Premier Development League club in The Villages, Fla., upset the Battery 4-2 on penalty kicks after drawing 2-2 on Wednesday night in Charleston, S.C. The player in question, Paulo Vaz, had played for Boca Raton FC in the qualifying rounds, which made him ineligible to play in later rounds in the same competition year.
The Battery and Armada are no strangers of each other, facing off in three preseason contests. Charleston came out on top of two friendlies last year, defeating the Armada, 1-0, on Feb. 18, 2015, in Charleston, and winning a 2-0 contest on March 8, 2015, in Jacksonville. This season, the two sides played to a scoreless draw on March 5 in Jacksonville. The Battery is currently 4W-3D-2L in USL play.
In its 103rd edition, the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup is an annual knockout competition open to all amateur and professional soccer teams affiliated with U.S. Soccer and recognized as U.S. Soccer's national club championship.For as great of a band as Dead To Me is, they’re so immersed in style and culture that they've always seemed almost as much like an art collective as a rock and roll outfit. They draw on such disparate sonic, visual and intellectual influences as Brit rock, graffiti, Slavic prison tattoos, Midwestern punk, reggae, Day of the Dead iconography, old school hip-hop and modern American History. Dead To Me’s current incarnation finds Ian and Chicken joining forces with Ken of Enemy You/Western Addiction fame and Sam from New Mexican Disaster Squad to put forth their latest effort, Moscow Penny Ante, recorded with the handsome and talented Matt Allison at Atlas studios (Alkaline Trio, Lawrence Arms), due out on Fat Wreck Chords. As usual, it’s nothing less than the exact opposite of what you’d expect from Dead To Me.
www.deadtomesf.com
The Riverboat Gamblers have been rocking heads for the last decade. The band was formed in 1997 in the town of Denton, TX. The band features Mike Wiebe (the Rookie Sensation) on vocals, Fadi El-Assad(Freddy Castro ) on guitar, Ian MacDougall on guitar, Rob Marchant on bass, and Sam Keir on drums. The band is known for their live shows that will leave concert goers in awe. The band's energy and stage presence is second to none.
www.theriverboatgamblers.com
Blacklist Royals - Working their way up from the dingiest of clubs and barrooms sprawling in and across North America's borders to the stages of European festivals performing in front of thousands, Blacklist Royals have spent the last three years on the road supporting their debut full length Semper Liberi… chasing the often fleeting rock-n-roll dreams of youth like a siren song, and finding their own voice along the way.
www.blacklistroyals.com
The Radishes are a San Francisco based band with a sound that has been described as Nirvana meets Motorhead. Other influences include such high-energy units as The White Stripes, The Stooges, The Hives, Scratch Acid, and the Hellacopters, with hooky, angular guitar lines, ferocious vocals, and unique, darkly ironic songwriting. After working with legendary underground bassist Paul Barker (Ministry, Revolting Cocks, Lard, etc.), drummer Rey Washam (Ministry, Scratch Acid, Rapeman) and Wayne Kramer of the MC5 on the 2008 EP “Strychnine,” the band took a hiatus for several years. During that time, lead Radish Paul Stinson worked on several other projects, including Sugar Knives and, most recently, The Stripminers (with Brett A of the Donnas and DJ Bonebrake from X). But in 2011 The Radishes started playing and recording again, leading to the 2012 EP “Riot” with an all-new, rocking lineup featuring John Dumont (bass), Jason Fessel (guitar), and Randy Leasure (drums).
www.theradishes.comLa Face Records/Epic
No Reason To Pretend is a weekly column by Stephen Kearse that explores the intersection of hip-hop and pop culture.
In 1993, writer Mark Dery coined the term afrofuturism to describe art that “addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture.” Observing that black art had alternative stories to tell about technology and culture, Dery imagined afrofuturism as a way to assemble those stories and decode them. Part curation, part genealogy, part inquiry, Dery’s afrofuturism was a tool for exploring the relationship between black people and technology, in the present, in the past, and in the future.
In 2013, Martine Syms penned The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto a snarky rebuke of tropes in afrofuturist works. Modeled after The Mundane Manifesto published in 2004 by a group of sci-fi authors, Syms’ manifesto challenged afrofuturism to leave space and aliens and robots alone and come back to Earth. Syms looked out at what afrofuturism had become — a sprawling pantheon of androids, time-traveling slaves, star-crossed Egyptians, and everything else under or beyond the sun — and decided that these stories of aliens and space travel and transcendence were boof. Waving away a century’s worth of art and ideas as “Stupidities,” she called for afrofuturism to take on the humdrum.Griffith writes as part of our roundtable on Christian women’s leadership, an expert discussion featured in parallel with On Faith’s Lisa Miller’s debut column, “Evangelical women rise as new ‘feminists.’” On Faith asks, “How do modern evangelicals understand biblical teachings on women’s roles? How would a President Bachmann balance biblical submission and political leadership?” Read Christian writer Margaret Feinberg on The Proverbs 31 politician, and the Conerned Women for America’s Janice Shaw Crouse on Biblical submission and servant leadership.
“The Lord says: Be submissive, wives. You are to be submissive to your husbands,” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told a church audience in 2006. By all accounts, she means this and lives it. Which raises the question: Can a President Bachmann balance female submission with the power necessary to lead the United States of America?
To her many fans, the answer will seem obvious: of course she can. As a matter of fact, balancing subservience with authority is something that evangelical Christian women have been working on for a very long time. For those who hold theological views similar to Michele Bachmann’s, submission to the will of God--and to God’s earthly (male) representatives--is precisely the mindset that justifies the exercise of godly power on earth. And when power is “godly” (as opposed to greedy and self-focused), it may be channeled equally by men and by women, both sexes being potential vessels of Divine will.
In fact, to hear many conservative Christians tell it today, this is a moment when God has especially called women to transform the world. Cindy Jacobs, possibly the most influential neo-Pentecostal Christian woman you’ve never heard of, organized the “ Deborah Company ” after what she describes as a visitation from the angel Gabriel. In the vision, Jacobs says, “I was wearing armor and carried a sword,” as Gabriel told her that godly women across the earth were to “march across the planet, preaching the gospel, doing miracles, and transforming the nations.” Citing Psalm 68:11, Jacobs proclaims, “The Lord has shown me that there are women, both young and old, who will change the nations of the earth through following the call of God on their lives.” The group, an “apostolic network of women leaders committed to empowering others to transform nations and release kingdom of God principles into the earth,” posts on its Web site, making clear that Deborah women are ready to seize and utilize their God-given power.
Michele Bachmann receives a glowing mention in a prayer guide found on one of Cindy Jacobs’s other sites, Generals International; but more importantly, it’s clear that she is precisely the sort of Deborah woman Jacobs et al., are promoting as ideal leaders. Submission to husbands is no longer emphasized in these materials; the meaning of “submission” is, first and foremost, surrender to God’s will, for men no less than for women. And when Bachmann says, as she has on numerous occasions, “we are the head and not the tail” (a direct reference to Deuteronomy 28:13 ), this phrase clearly associates her with the power of national political leadership, a role she plainly believes God has called her to fill. Her husband, it turns out, is merely the messenger.
So long as they pay lip service to wifely submission--and so long as they balance feminine beauty with steel force--women like Michele Bachmann are now thoroughly accepted as public authorities in extremely conservative Christian circles. This is undeniably a sea change in conservative gender norms, a transformation that owes an enormous debt to the feminist movement that religious conservatives despise. Liberal feminists, of course, hardly want credit for the numerical growth of women whose politics are farther right than Phyllis Schlafly’s and whose role models look more like Barbie than Hillary. For some, it feels deeply ironic to see the political gap between conservative and liberal women wider than ever before. Many view women like Bachmann as sell-outs, or duped pawns of the patriarchal establishment. For those of us who cannot imagine any but an equal relationship with our spouse or partner, it can be very difficult to respect a woman’s ostensible choice to submit to her husband.
Success for Bachmann will depend in part on how shrewdly she balances the conflicted ideals of femininity and female toughness, compliance and resilience, vulnerability and strength, that have long permeated American culture. These remain especially difficult waters to navigate in conservative religious circles, but not only there. Word to the wise: focus on her politics, not her makeup or her clothes, her false eyelashes or her shoes. When undecideds, especially women, believe that Bachmann’s views are finally taken seriously, and find that she has been accorded respect as a woman, they can refocus their attention on her message. And-surprise, surprise-they may not like what they hear.
Marie Griffith, PhD, is director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her next book is titled, Christians, Sex and Politics: An American History.While touting their efforts to return hundreds of inmates to New Orleans, Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman and other top jail officials faced the public in a sometimes testy town hall meeting Tuesday.
The meeting, which is mandated under the jail’s court-ordered reform plan, sometimes was as much theater as information session. Gusman and other leaders tried to sell skeptical community activists on the idea that there have been improvements at the city's long-troubled jail.
Before the session began, activists chalked bodies on the pavement outside a meeting room in Central City. The crime scene-style outlines were meant to represent people who have died from suicides or drug overdoses at the jail.
Officials then started the meeting with a rapid-fire discussion of recent changes at the Orleans Justice Center. The most significant was Operation Rewind, a large-scale retraining operation for jail guards that temporarily forced the removal of hundreds of inmates to other parishes.
Michael Tidwell, the jail’s chief corrections deputy, said the number of inmates held in other parishes has dropped from a peak of 839 in April to 450 this month. He projected that only 166 inmates will be held out of the parish by next month, the lowest number in years.
After their presentation, jail officials faced questions about efforts to curb suicides at the jail, a planned 89-bed mental health facility and ways to keep contraband items out of the lockup.
Gusman said his office is working to stop suicides and to provide better education to youth inmates. In October, a 15-year-old hanged himself in a cell at the jail.
“It’s an unfortunate thing. We do our best to stop it,” Gusman said of suicides. Suicides also happen “in the community," he said. "You don’t hear a lot about it.”
Gusman refused to answer a question from Adina Marx-Arpadi of the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition about the suicide of Jamaine Johnson, who hanged himself in the jail in May although he was being watched by several deputies.
Several audience members questioned whether the jail needs to build a new facility for people with mental health problems. Bruce Reilly, deputy director of the group VOTE, pointed to the projection that only 166 inmates will be held outside the parish by next month.
“It sounds like that’s a pretty small population to deal with,” Reilly said. “Why do we need a bigger jail?”
“First of all, it’s not a bigger jail. It’s a much smaller jail,” Gusman replied. He cited a reduction in the number of inmate beds from 7,500 to 1,438 since he took office, although at one point, he had called for a 4,300-bed jail.
Gusman said the mental health facility is needed to bring back the dozens of inmates with mental problems who are being held at the state's Elayn Hunt Correctional Center and to provide better services for less troubled inmates who are now in New Orleans.
Another audience member asked Gusman about the introduction of contraband, such as drugs, into the jail — a constant problem that was highlighted by the death of an inmate from a cocaine overdose in February.
“You can’t even trust your own people to watch over them because they’re bringing drugs in there. So as a mother, I’m concerned,” said the questioner.
“The introduction of contraband is a problem at every jail and prison in the world,” Gusman responded. He said the jail has dozens of detectives and airport-style body scanners that are meant to find contraband.
“We work at it. Can we eliminate it? I sure hope we can, but it’s a reality that people will try to do it,” he said.
Some members of the public also questioned the extent of community outreach conducted before the meeting, citing the rows filled with Sheriff’s Office employees wearing pressed white shirts.
“You haven’t reached out to us,” said Alfred Marshall, an organizer for the group Stand With Dignity. “This is like a recruitment session we’re looking at here.”
Gusman said his office had conducted ample community outreach. He also defended the presence of his employees.
“These men and women from the Sheriff’s Office are from the community. They’re here on their own. They’re not on the clock. They are a part of their community. This is a community meeting,” Gusman said.A Pasadena woman reached out to me via Facebook this week about an incident at her daughter’s school.
“According to my 5-year-old,” the mom wrote, “one of her classmates grabbed her hand and forced her to pinkie promise that she would believe in God. My daughter now feels pressure to keep her promise.”
Like many parents, this mom wants her little girl to make up her own mind about what to believe— so she is loathe to pressure her in any particular direction. And yet here is a 5-year-old child trying to navigate an incredibly touchy subject — the intersection of belief and non-belief — on the kindergarten schoolyard.
What’s a parent to do?
First of all, as hard as it is to watch our kids struggling in the position of “outcast,” it’s really important that we encourage them to be honest and true to themselves whenever possible. Whether they are 5 or 15, they shouldn’t feel they have to lie about who they are, or feel ashamed for having different thoughts or feelings than other kids. Being unique is a good thing; standing up for yourself is a great thing.
If this comes up in your house, you might try role playing some various scenarios, providing kids with some potential talking points to help them through. Here are eight things secular kids can say to dispel or divert religious evangelism with their friends at school.Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement Cuba has marked the 50th anniversary of the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, creating a communist state on the United States' doorstep. President Raul Castro, who took over from Fidel last year, spoke from below the same balcony where his brother declared victory on 1 January 1959. He predicted the revolution would survive another 50 years. The festivities have been muted as Cuba struggles with big economic challenges and the aftermath of three hurricanes. Reacting to the anniversary, a White House spokesman said the US continued to seek freedom for the Cuban people. Series of concerts Addressing the nation from the south-eastern city of Santiago de Cuba, Raul Castro said the next 50 years "will also be of permanent struggle".
In pictures: Cuba anniversary "With the firm promise that in this land we can always exclaim with pride that glory to our heroes and martyrs. Long live Fidel, long live the revolution, long live free Cuba!" said President Castro. He was speaking from the very place where his elder brother proclaimed victory after the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled the country 50 years ago. He spoke proudly of the 1959 revolution that transformed the Caribbean island into a communist state 145 km (90 miles) from US shores, but warned the country should remain vigilant. "The enemy will never cease to be aggressive, treacherous and dominant," he said. "It is time to reflect on the future, on the next 50 years when we shall continue to struggle incessantly. "I'm not trying to scare anyone, this is the truth," he added. A series of free concerts had been planned across the island, but the authorities said it was not the time for lavish celebrations after the nation suffered one of the most difficult financial years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Towering presence The frail health of Fidel Castro has also dampened the mood of anniversary celebrations, says the BBC's Michael Voss in Havana. CUBAN REVOLUTION MAPPED
Follow the rebels' progress Cuba timeline The 82-year-old has not been seen in public since undergoing major surgery almost 18 months ago. There was no pre-recorded message on state television on New Year's Eve nor one of his regular newspaper editorials to mark the event. Nonetheless, he remains a towering presence in Cuba, even in the background. Raul Castro has introduced some limited reforms since he has been in charge, but many Cubans believe that as long as Fidel is alive, no meaningful political or economic change will happen, correspondents say. Fifty years on, the legacy of the revolution is complex. There is free education and health care but the state-controlled economy means wages for many Cubans are very low, on average about $20 to $25 a month. Tight restrictions The country's difficulties cannot just be blamed on the US trade embargo, in place since 1962, or global financial problems, says our correspondent. There is enormous pressure and expectation amongst Cubans for change, he adds. Over the decades since the revolution, political opposition has been crushed and hundreds of thousands of Cubans have gone into exile. "The Castro brothers have not treated their people particularly well," said White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe on the eve of the anniversary. "Many political dissidents are in jail. The economy is suffering and not free. And the United States will continue to try to seek the freedom of the people of Cuba, and support them." During his time in office, President George W Bush imposed tight restrictions on Cuban-Americans visiting the island and the amount of money they could send. However, US policy towards Cuba appears set to change. President-elect Barack Obama, who takes office on 20 January, has said he will maintain the Cuban embargo but that some restrictions could be eased. Attitudes among Cuban-Americans may also be changing. A recent poll suggested that for the first time a majority of those living in Miami, the centre of anti-Castro sentiment, favoured ending the embargo.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionhpr1398 :: Batteries Part 1 A show about batteries - Part 1 Hosted by MrX on 2013-12-11 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Tags: battery,"alkaline cells","rechargeable battery",NiMH,NiCd,Lithium-Ion,Li-Ion.
Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format. | Comments (3)
A show about batteries - Part 1 I can't take the credit for all this detailed information in my podcast, I found this fantastic website many years ago while investigating why the battery in my expensive razor prematurely failed. I tried to hunt for the site but couldn't find it. I wrote up all my notes from memory and recorded the show. It wasn't until I started working on part 2 of my batteries show that I stumbled across this long forgotten site - at least I think it's the same one as it talks about the memory effect on satellites and doctor's pagers so I guess it must be the same one. I'm indeed delighted to find it still exists, and I may very well read it again from top to bottom. It looks like it's been updated a little too. Well done ka7oei a fantastic resource right enough. Site title: "About NiMH and NiCd cells and batteries (And a little about LiIons, too...)" http://www.ka7oei.com/nicds.html A picture of my trusty Philips 5890 Shaver http://urun.gittigidiyor.com/kozmetik-kisisel-bakim/philips-philishave-5890-tras-makinasi-77027302 Memory effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect Doctor's pager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager Sansa Clip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sansa_Clip#Sansa_Clip Two Possible Chargers (For use in the UK) I found it very difficult to find a slow trickle charger, here are two possibilities, you may need to settle for a fast charger as the slow ones now seem to be like hen's teeth, (VERY HARD TO GET). This is perhaps a little slow with a charge current of only 150ma, would take about 17Hrs to charge 2100 mAh batteries. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lloytron-B046-Battery-Charger-batteries/dp/B0035SLPVW/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1381055732&sr=8-12&keywords=aa+charger The charger I use is made by the same company as this although mine is a different model. My model charges at 200ma, and takes about 13 Hrs to charge a 2100 mAh battery. I can't tell what charge current this charger deliveries, but suspect it's a simple slow charger, probably old stock, as I said slow chargers are getting like hen's teeth. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Hahnel-Powerstation-TC-Action-Charger-with-2-x-2000mAh-Batteries-/321240775553?pt=UK_ConsumerElectronics_Batteries_SM&hash=item4acb713b81 Listen Now Duration: 00:20:22 ogg: http://hackerpublicradio.org/local/hpr1398.ogg
spx: http://hackerpublicradio.org/local/hpr1398.spx
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Comments
Comment #1 posted on 2013-12-12T11:36:39Z by Mark Waters
Thanks
Just wanted to say thanks for this episode, it was well produced and very informative.
Comment #2 posted on 2013-12-19T13:19:29Z by pokey
Great Episode
I really enjoyed this episode. Some of it I already knew, and most of it was new to me. I like when I know a little something when I start. It gives me more confidence in the new information.
I have a couple of questions that I hope you wouldn't mind answering in a follow-up episode.
1.) What was learned in 2011 that completed our understanding of how batteries work?
2.) I forget my second question, but it was a good one. :(
As an aside, I have had really good results with Nickel Metal Hydride rechargeable batteries. They hold a charge for weeks and weeks with no noticeable drop in their run time, they store a good amount of energy (2200 mAh for size AA) and have a nice long runtime. I had one set of four AA batteries that I swapped back and forth in my flashlight (which takes two at a time) for almost five years. Sadly, I lost the flashlight with two of them in it, but I still have the other two in my Mintyboost, and they seem as good as ever.
Comment #3 posted on 2013-12-22T17:44:41Z by MrX
Reply
Hi Mark, very sorry for the long delay in getting back to you, finding the time sometimes can be difficult. Thanks for the kind words, glad you enjoyed the episode, am still trying to find the time to do part 2, hopefully won't be too much longer.
-----------
Hi pokey, again very sorry for the long delay in getting back to you
To answer you 1st question:-
A lead acid battery consists of lead electrode and one side and lead oxide at the other, lead oxides don't normally conduct electricity. Apparently it was only in 2011 that we figured out how it was working. When electrons travel between the electrodes the lead oxide looses oxygen transforming itself into a conductor.
Hope this answer question
Sounds like your also a bit of a battery fan, just goes to show that batteries can last for years (if you look after them). Had a look at the Mintyboost, sounds very interesting, I would imagine it will be very handy :)
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If you can't fit everything you want to say in the comment below then you really should record a response show instead.
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All comments are moderated. All links are checked by humans. We strip out all html. Feel free to record a show about yourself, or your industry, or any other topic we may find interesting. We also check shows for spam :).Should the Browns draft Malik Hooker at No. 12?
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Though Malik Hooker didn’t participate in pre-draft workouts, he’s universally regarded as the best safety prospect in the NFL Draft. He’s good. That’s not news.
The Browns clearly aren’t going to take him at No. 1 and there’s a really good chance Hooker will be off the board at No. 12 — most mock draft have him as a top-five pick — but he has been slipping in some of the more recent mocks.
If he falls to No. 12? Hmm.
In our breakdown of potential candidates for the Browns at No. 12, we're giving reasons why Cleveland should or should not take those players. Below are five reasons the Browns should draft Hooker at No. 12 if he's available. We'll also have five reasons they should not take him today at cleveland.com/browns.
By Ari Wasserman, cleveland.comTwo suicide attacks in and around the Iraqi capital on Thursday killed at least 27 people and wounded dozens, officials said.
The deadliest attack took place in a commercial area of a majority Shiite neighbourhood in Baghdad. At least 15 civilians were killed and 35 wounded, police said.
Another suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into an Iraqi army checkpoint north of Baghdad, killing at least 12 people, police said. Seven civilians and five troops were killed in the attack in the town of Taji, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of the capital, a police officer said. At least 28 people were wounded, he added.
Medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to brief the media.
In an online statement, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in the New Baghdad neighbourhood, saying it targeted Shiite militia members. It later claimed responsibility for the Taji bombing in a second online statement, saying it was targeting the Iraqi army.
The Associated Press could not verify the authenticity of the statements, but they were posted on a militant website commonly used by the extremists.
The Sunni militant group often targets Iraq’s Shiite majority, security forces and government officials. Baghdad has seen near-daily attacks in recent weeks.
The deadly attacks in the capital and beyond are seen by Iraqi officials as an attempt by the militants to distract the security forces’ attention from the front lines. The attacks came a day after Iraqi special forces pushed into the IS-held city of Fallujah in a large-scale military operation launched last month.
Fallujah, which is about 65 kilometers (40 miles) west of Baghdad, is one of the last major IS strongholds in western Iraq. The extremist group still controls territory in the country’s north and west, as well as Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city.
First Published: Jun 09, 2016 19:40 ISTNEW BRUNSWICK -- Three people with connections to suspended Rutgers wide receiver Leonte Carroo, including his mother, were charged Tuesday for their alleged role in the altercation that took place outside the university's football headquarters on Sept. 12, according to a statement from Rutgers spokesman Greg Trevor.
Lavern Carroo, the 41-year old mother of the Scarlet Knights star player, was among those charged by the Rutgers University Police Department for simple assault and disorderly conduct related to an incident.
Also charged were Maria Vega, 20, and Juan Vega, 52.
Authorities alleged that their actions included general fighting behavior, specifically hair pulling and striking a victim in the face with a hand.
PLUS: Carroo charged with simple assault in domestic violence incident
This is not the first time Lavern Carroo has been charged. According to court records, she pleaded guilty to third-degree theft by deception in Union County in 2001 and was sentenced to one year of probation.
Police have accused Leonte Carroo of slamming a woman to a concrete surface outside of the Hale Center after the team's loss to Washington State on Sept. 12, according to a complaint filed in Piscataway municipal court.
He was charged with simple assault in a domestic violence incident. A day after the altercation, Carroo was suspended indefinitely from the team and on Sept. 14 he pleaded not guilty to simple assault.
Carroo reportedly was intervening in an altercation between two women he has been romantically involved with. It's believed that Maria Vega had a romantic relationship with Carroo. Juan Vega's relationship to Maria is unclear. Both are from Fort Lee.
The alleged victim worked for the Rutgers football program as a recruiting ambassador, multiple people with knowledge of the situation told NJ Advance Media last week.
MORE: Father of Carroo's alleged victim wants daughter protected
The alleged victim's father told NJ Advance Media that his daughter did not provoke the dispute. He said his daughter has a restraining order against Carroo, and has quit her job at the athletics department.
She was taken to Saint Peter's University |
born 24 years ago, on the 24th of September 1991. Sometime in the wee hours of the 23rd, my father decided that his double stroke Leica M3 needed to be “CLA’d.” The slower shutter speeds “seemed a little tense” as he puts it, “and I suspected the shutter for a leak,” he says.
The camera was fairly used. He had bought it from his mentor in 1988 for a mere 2,000 or so Indian Rupees, about $30 USD by today’s exchange rate. It was a beautiful, alluring and shiny camera kit, complete with two lenses, a beautiful 50mm Summarit f/1.5 and a wonderful 21mm Super Angulon f/4 that he had just bought a year or so earlier.
Owning a camera — or even buying a few rolls of film, for that matter — was not very easy at that point in time. The economy had yet not been opened up in India; there were very strict import restrictions and extremely high fees and taxes.
There were mainly three or four ways of getting your hands on a camera. First, you were filthy rich, and had Bolexes, Bell and Howels, Hasselblads or Leicas handed down to you by your fathers or uncles as gifts. Second, you were somewhat well off and could request family living abroad to bring in a camera whenever they visited you next.
Third, you worked in an institution such as a foreign embassy or as photographer with the press and your organization could then afford to buy equipment, and fourth you saved up and bought from the grey market, which comprised of cameras from various sources such as the aforementioned institutions, or cameras that had been smuggled in through Nepal or via Afghanistan or had been sold off in the country by travelers before leaving.
Naturally, the problem of scarcity also extend to camera repairs as well. Camera repairs would either done by a few “expert” repairmen in the Photo-market, which was (and still is) a small 400 odd sq. ft building with at least a couple hundred small shops stocking grey market photographic equipment in the Chandani Chowk area of Old Delhi. Only a handful repairmen had built solid reputations for providing reliable services. The other alternative was to perform the repairs on your own, which my father (and few others) often chose to do, as he was (and still is) fairly technically gifted.
In those early hours of the 24th, as his worry regarding the tense shutter speeds steadily grew, he decided it was best to give the camera a cleaning and adjust the speeds. It was a procedure he was well versed with and had done before on that particular camera and on his the other Leicas. My father suffers from bit of “Leica Love” and has collected 6 over the years: three Leica IIIFs, two M3s, and a Leica CL that he got “just for fun”.
Bit by bit the screws started to come off, the main outer vulcanite covered body shell gave way; the finder, shoe mount and winding lever all came off.
“The M3 is a beautifully and logically made camera. There is no fuss inside,” I’ve heard him repeat many times. “It comes off and goes back together like a beautiful jigsaw puzzle — you can’t put a screw wrong. I’ve never come across anything like it ever again.”
As the camera was reduced to its bare bones, my mother, somewhat bewildered by the “fuss” and bothered about her health, chimed in: “I don’t feel too well. Can we go to the doctor?”
The reply was simple, stern and expected: “Don’t worry too much, the kid isn’t due for another two weeks.”
A few minutes later, as he was just checking the condition of the finder and the cloth shutter, my mother began to scream and howl in pain from labor. My father quickly sought an old film canister to store all the screws in and a plastic envelope from his bank to keep the camera in, to protect it from dust before rushing to the hospital.
A couple of hours later, I was born.
Life, work, and an expanding family ensured that that Leica was never put back together. It still sits in his desk. He just never got back to it.
“Will you ever do it?” I’ve asked him many a times.
“One day, surely,” is the standard reply.
Perhaps the fate of that Leica was sealed in the envelope in which it was kept. It’s appropriately labeled: “Long Term Deposit.”
About the author: Kshitij Nagar is an independent photographer and videographer based in New Delhi, India. He’s also the Editor in Chief of the photography blog Writing Through Light. You can follow him on Twitter at @kshitijnagar.Story highlights "I happen to be a black woman, but I'm part of the press," Ryan said
Spicer told Ryan to "stop shaking your head" at a White House briefing
(CNN) A veteran White House correspondent who engaged in a tense exchange with White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Wednesday the media is "under attack" from the Trump administration.
"We are -- the press is -- under attack. We are under attack by this administration," American Urban Radio Networks correspondent April Ryan said on CNN's "New Day." "It's about discrediting credible media."
Spicer told Ryan at Tuesday's briefing to "stop shaking your head" and accused her of being "hell-bent on trying to make sure that whatever image you want to tell about this White House stays," after she asked him about the investigation into contacts between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials
Ryan, one of the few black female journalists in the press briefing room, declined to say if she thought Spicer treated women journalists differently but did highlight another recent incident involving Spicer and another female journalist.
"I happen to be a black woman, but I'm part of the press," she said. "But this is part of a series of two women this week who have been in the news over something with the press secretary."
Read MoreWith Isis close to defeat in Mosul, its various opponents are already competing to define what will happen next
Iraqi forces have advanced to the base of the toppled minaret of Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, hours after it was destroyed by Islamic State militants, as the bitter eight-month battle to recapture the city reached a tipping point.
Destroying Great Mosque of al-Nuri 'is Isis declaring defeat' Read more
The destruction of the mosque marked a pivotal moment in the war against Isis, which declared its now withered caliphate from there three years ago. The terror group’s wanton act of sabotage was widely seen as a harbinger of its imminent defeat.
Across northern Iraq, only a portion of Mosul’s old city and a small adjoining neighbourhood remain under Isis control. The nearby towns of Tal Afar and Hweija, both of which are surrounded, make up the remainder of the group’s territory, a mere sliver of the lands over which it had lorded at the height of its power in mid-2014.
As its fortunes have turned, the group’s remaining members have fled Iraq for the deserts of Syria. So rapid has been their capitulation that plans are now being drafted for a decisive battle later this year, somewhere between the Syrian and Jordanian borders, areas far from those that Isis had coveted.
Lined up in pursuit are a range of players who had have staked claims throughout the fight with Isis, as well as parallel regional conflicts, and have waited for the time to consolidate. As the organisation crumbles, all sides have now started competing for an edge, who gets to define what emerges from the collapse of Isis is a prize bigger than winning the war itself.
Russia, Iran and the US are scrambling for supremacy, eschewing the brinkmanship that has peppered the war for direct clashes unprecedented in the region over recent decades.
As Mosul and Isis’s Syrian epicentre, Raqqa, have started to teeter, Iranian proxies and the US have squared off at least three times on the Syrian side of border. Last week, the risk of further escalation increased when a US jet downed a Syrian plane over the north of the country, drawing a warning from Russia that coalition planes should stay out of its radar range.
Washington said its fighter jet acted to defend its proxies who were moving through Isis-held areas around Raqqa. Raised over the past year to the chagrin of Syria, the anti-Assad opposition, Turkey and increasingly Russia – the mainly Kurdish force has been set the task of retaking Raqqa and nearby towns. As it has edged ahead, Russian and Syrian forces have taken more aggressive postures.
“They are running interference there,” said a senior western official. “They do not want anyone but the Syrian army, which is nearly all Iranian-backed Shia militias, taking that city. As the campaign has changed from talk to reality, they have started to act against it.”
Iran too has taken an unusually direct stance in the multilayered conflict, firing ballistic missiles from its territory, across Iraq, to the Syrian town of Mayadin, where scattered Isis leaders have regrouped.
The attacks marked the first time Tehran had launched ballistic missiles in combat since the end of the Iran-Iraq war nearly three decades ago.
The missiles were ostensibly revenge for attacks claimed by Isis earlier this month in the Iranian parliament and near the tomb of Ayatollah Khomenei, founder of the Islamic republic.
The missiles also served another purpose, regional officials believed. Iran was setting aside its preferred use of proxies for a direct stake in the conflict, just as the US had done several weeks earlier by attacking Hezbollah members who had advanced towards their own proxies close to the border area of Tanf.
Since then, US forces protecting the Syrian opposition groups it has raised in the east of the country have twice shot down approaching drones. That has not stopped Iranian backed forces, mainly comprised of Lebanese Hezbollah, from moving east toward the Iraqi border to the north of Tanf, stopping the US and its allies from advancing north toward Raqqa and preventing the Kurds from moving too far south.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Displaced Iraqi residents cross a military pontoon bridge in western Mosul. Photograph: Erik de Castro/Reuters
The bewildering movements of five state militaries – Syria, Iraq, Iran, Russia and the US – as well as their various proxies seems likely to increase the number of collisions.
Each side faces a series of calculations that have little to do with how to defeat what remains of Isis, or to deal with the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are fleeing the latest fighting - the death throes of Mosul and Raqqa – and the looming campaign in Deir ez-Zor and Mayedin, where Isis looks set to make its last stand.
The human toll of the war for Mosul continued to emerge from the ruins of the city on Thursday, as Iraqi troops escorted haggard families from narrow lanes near the ruined mosque.
More than 860,000 people have now fled the city since the war to recapture it began on 17 October last year. Thousands of residents have returned to the now liberated east, but an estimated 100,000 more are thought to remain in Mosul’s old city, where vengeful, cornered members of Isis have been using residents as human shields.
“Three more weeks and we’re done with them,” said an Iraqi special operations officer, speaking by phone on Thursday. “We will push them into the Tigris river.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Iraqis flee from Mosul. Photograph: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images
Earlier in the week, hundreds of civilians streamed past destroyed buildings and into Iraqi controlled territory, their clothes tattered and bodies covered in dust. Mothers clutched malnourished infants across their chests while men carried the elderly on their backs. Some were dragged on makeshift stretchers and others hauled on carts. One after another they collapsed in exhaustion and relief when they reached safety behind Iraqi lines.
As smoke from a recent airstrike loomed in the distance, an old woman dressed in a long black dress ran with hands outstretched toward to two young Iraqi soldiers standing alongside an army Humvee, kissing them on their cheeks. A few metres away a man stood in the middle of the street and cried while holding his young daughter. Tears flowed down his face and through his dark black beard.
“We are seeing these stories of suffering with our own eyes every day,” said the Iraqi officer. “These people have been through hell. And after [the end of Ramadan] we hope to give them their lives back. God willing this curse will soon leave Mosul.”Solving common node/io.js callback problems
ayasin Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 14, 2015
Anyone who’s written an appreciable amount of code in JavaScript has encountered callbacks. This is particularly true on the server with Node and IO.js. While callbacks have the benefit of being simple and easy to understand, they unfortunately also lend themselves to a number of issues. In this post I’ll be discussing some solutions to common issues with callbacks: Deeply nested callback stacks, inconsistent callback behavior, callback dependent code fragility, and misbehaving callbacks (ones that return multiple times).
Deeply nested callback stacks
Sometimes you need the value of a callback to call other functions that also take callbacks. This results in “nesting” callbacks. Imagine you need to stat a file to get it’s size before reading it (lets pretend that there’s not a statSync method). In order to do this you might write something like this:
var fs = require(fs);
function statRead (filename, maxRead, dataCallback) {
fs.stat(filename, function (err, stats) {
if (err) {
return dataCallback(err);
}
if (stats.size >= maxRead) {
return dataCallback('file too large');
}
fs.readFile(filename, function (err, data) {
return dataCallback(err, data);
})
});
}
Notice here that we’re already 2 “indents” in by the time we’re ready to return data. It’s not hard to imagine what happens if you have lots of dependent operations. This is commonly referred to as “callback hell”.
There are several libraries designed to patch this problem. Most are similar to the very popular async.js. Async allows you to “chain” responses together so that the response from the last function becomes the input to the next function. This flattens the callbacks into an array instead of an ‘arrow’. Lots and lots of blog posts and tutorials speak very thoroughly about async.js so I won’t repeat that here. Instead I’ll solve the problem another way: with a non-callback based framework called FRHTTP.
FRHTTP is a node framework available on npm designed to solve these types of issues using functional programming. In FRHTTP the code looks like this:
route
.when({
name:'stat file',
params: ['filename'],
produces: ['stats'],
fn: function (producer, input) {
producer.fromNodeCallback(['stats'], -1, fs.stat, null, input.filename);
}
})
.when({
name:'read file',
params: ['filename','maxSize','stats'],
produces: ['data'],
fn: function (producer, input) {
if (input.stats.size > input.maxSize) {
producer.error('file too large');
}
producer.fromNodeCallback(['data'], -1, fs.readFile, null, input.filename);
}
While this seems initially more verbose, it’s a fair bit of boiler plate and some just for easy debugging. The key line here is:
producer.fromNodeCallback(['stats'], -1, fs.stat, null, input.filename);
Once the callback returns, if successful it puts a value in ‘stats’. The system then looks for something that can run with this value. It finds our next ‘when’ block and runs that. In most situations, this won’t get any deeper than 1 level. In some edge cases it might get 1 level deeper, but you won’t see this grow to 7 or 8 deep.
Inconsistent callback behavior
As a best practice, functions that take callbacks should be consistent about how they run the callback function. They should either always do so synchronously or asyncronously. Unfortunately not everyone is aware of or always follows this advice. Lets examine some more code.
function oops() {
var cancelMe = undefined;
setTimeout(function () {
if (cancelMe) {
cancelMe();
console.log('timeout error.');
}
}, 5000);
cancelMe = misbehaving(function () {
cancelMe = undefined;
});
}
The snippet above sets a timeout to cancel the call to a misbehaving function if it takes more than 5 seconds. Unfortunately, sometimes misbehaving calls the callback asynchronously and our code works, and other times it calls the callback synchronously and our code incorrectly reports that the function timed out. It may even crash because we’re calling cancelMe on a completed operation.
FRHTTP again comes to the rescue here with ‘fromNodeCallback’. Since all fromNodeCallback can do is produce a value which then goes back into our framework, it removes this inconsistency and forces the function to always appear to behave asynchronously.
Callback dependent code fragility
In our first code example we showed a callback dependent on another callback. This is often the case, especially in web services where you may need 4 or 5 bits of interdependent data before you can produce a final result. In a callback system this leads to carefully crafted list of callbacks, some of which need to pass a bit of data they receive from the last callback on to the next without doing anything with it. Unfortunately this leads to very fragile code.
Lets imagine a situation where Alice wrote an Express route which pulled data from several Mongo documents to generate a report for end of month sales. The end product consists of 7 callbacks chained together. 3 months later, Bob, a new hire, is asked to add a few fields to the report. He needs values from callback 2, so he sticks a new callback in between 2 and 3, but forgets to forward a field (which can legitimately be null on occasion) needed by callback 5. The route is now broken but may not be broken in an obvious enough manner to detect immediately.
Resolving this type of problem with any async type library is difficult, but FRHTTP is perfect for this type of situation. In FRHTTP, Alice would have written 7 ‘when’ blocks. When Bob came along he could just add one anywhere in the list. The system will ensure that each function gets all the parameters it needs.
Misbehaving callbacks
Sometimes functions have issues that result in them calling the callback more than once (excluding functions that are designed to call the callback multiple times. In that situation you should really use events, but that’s a topic for another blog post). Again, let’s look at some code.
function boom(req, res) {
mightCallbackTwice(function (err, data) {
if (err) {
res.write(err);
res.end();
}
else {
res.write(data);
res.end();
}
});
}
If the callback gets called a second time, res.write will get called on a closed connection, resulting in a crash. This crash will be very difficult to find in production as there won’t be an obvious reason that the connection is closed.
This again is a situation where FRHTTP can be of service. The `fromNodeCallback` function ends the producer after the first response. Any further calls will call the producers value method, but since the producer was ended, no further values are actually produced.
Check it out
You can find FRHTTP on GitHub. There’s pretty detailed documentation on using it by itself as well as integrating it with an Express or other Connect style framework app. I’ve also written a tutorial series on it which you can find here on Medium (part 1, part 2, and part 3) as well as a tutorial on integrating with ExpressJS.
About me
I’m passionate about highly performant, highly scalable software. You can find me on Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, or follow me on Medium. I’m always looking for interesting problems to solve, if you have one and need help, feel free to reach out.SEATTLE -- David Ortiz didn't wait long Wednesday to notch his 1,689th hit as a designated hitter and surpass Harold Baines for the all-time lead at a position that the American League adopted in 1973.
In the second inning, Ortiz took a 3-1 offering from Mariners starter Aaron Harang and lined a double into left-center field. Ortiz received an extended standing ovation from the Seattle and Boston fans scattered around Safeco Field and eventually came around to score.
He followed in the third inning with a long two-run home run, his 19th of the season.
Ortiz already holds marks for the most runs scored, doubles, home runs, extra-base hits and RBIs by a designated hitter.
He has shredded Seattle pitching the last three games, going 8-for-10 and boosting his batting average from.313 to.331. He has reached base in 20 of his past 21 games while hitting.413 (31-for-75) with 9 doubles, 5 homers and 16 RBIs.
Asked what prompted his offensive outburst, Ortiz joked, "What you mean lately? I've been hitting.300 the whole season. What are you watching?"
"He goes out there every day and he's so consistent you almost expect it," catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia said of Ortiz's production. "You feel bad whenever he goes 0-for-4 and you're like, 'Come on man, are you kidding me?' That's how good he has been."
David Ortiz acknowledges the fans after passing Harold Baines with his 1,689th career hit as a DH. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
Ortiz spent three years (1994-96) in the Seattle farm system before beginning his decorated MLB career. On Sept. 13, 1996, the Mariners traded Ortiz to the Minnesota Twins for Dave Hollins, a career.260 hitter, in a move that still haunts Seattle fans.
"I never think about it," Ortiz said of his history with the organization. "You probably know where you're going to start at, but you never know where you are going to finish."
Not lost on Ortiz was the setting in which he achieved his latest milestone. In his 20s, he admired from a distance the hitting exploits of Mariners legend and DH pioneer Edgar Martinez.
"It's good to be mentioned with some of the greatest hitters that ever played the game," Ortiz said. "I used to love to watch Edgar. He was a wonderful hitter."
Ortiz has been nothing short of the same in visits to Seattle. In his last 16 games at Safeco Field, he has collected at least one hit on 15 occasions, going 24-for-66 (.364) with five home runs and 12 RBIs.
One key to his success of late has been the ability to recognize and barrel up pitches he wants to hit. During his recent run, pitchers simply haven't been able to operate ahead in the count because Ortiz doesn't often swing at pitches out of the strike zone.
"I'm the kind of guy that just takes what they give me," he said. "If they don't give me anything to hit, what should I do? I'll walk to first base. That's what I've been doing all season."
Mariners manager Eric Wedge can attest.
"It's tough," he said. "If you make a mistake to him, he is going to make you pay."
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.100% Pure Mermaid Tutorial
Today I’m sharing my 100% Pure Mermaid Tutorial with you featuring the Mermaid Palette. It’s perfect for hooded eyes. I swear the Mermaid Palette is an unknown gem. It’s made up of 3 eyeshadows, a blush and a highlighter. They’re all duochrome colors. I love it! It’s also 100% vegan.
100% Pure Mermaid Look
NECKLACE
Bunny Paige Intergalactic Heart
EYES
100% Pure Mermaid Palette
Urban Decay Walk of Shame, Tease
Nyx Epic Ink Liner – upper lash line
Nyx Faux White in Baby Powder – lower waterline
Makeup Geek Moon Phase – highlight
Glossier Boy Brow in Black
Colour Pop Jet Black brow pencil
FACE
100% Pure Bamboo Blur Tinted Moisturizer in Creme
mixed with Nyx Pro Mixer in White (i should have added more white)
Urban Decay TMI & Video mixed together – blush
100% Pure Siren – blush
Makeup Geek Moon Phase – highlight
LIPS
UD Rush pencil
Fairy Girl Rose Goddess lipstick
UD Litter & White Lie Special Effects Topcoat
100% Pure Mermaid Tutorial for Hooded Eyes
The 100% Pure Mermaid Tutorial is great for hooded eyes. It can also work for monolids and down-turned eyes. My eyes are hooded and slightly down-turned. The colors are flattering neutrals – plum brown with a hint of golden green, and gold with a hint of green. These shades flatter a wide variety of eye colors.
Start by applying your base shade. This should be an eyeshadow shade close to your skintone. You want to lightly dust this across the primer to make sure there are no wet spots. I used UD Walk of Shame. Using an angled eyeshadow brush, apply Star Fish to the inner and outer v. Take a fluffy brush (Sigma E25) and blend Star Fish into the smoky dome shape on the hood of the eye, leaving the center of the lid bare. With another fluffy brush (Sigma E25), use Tease as a transition shade to blend out the edges of Star Fish on the hood of the eye, softly blending towards the tail of the eyebrow. Blend Shell and Sea Glass together on a brush (UD Moondust), then pat them onto the center of the lid and the center of the lower lid. Use a big fluffy brush to lightly blend over the colors on the hood of the eye. Line the upper lashline with black eyeliner. I used Nyx Epic Black Ink liner. Line the lower waterline with Nyx Faux White liner in Baby Powder. Highlight under the brows and at the inner corner with Makeup Geek Moon Phase.
Shop Your Stash for Similar Shades
Walk of Shame – pale peachy pink matte
Star Fish – plum brown with subtle golden green duochrome
Shell – dirty gold with golden green shift and soft brown base duochrome
Sea Glass – green with gold shift
Tease – pale taupe with purple undertone matte
Moon Phase – iridescent white with teal blue to purple shift.
For this look I mixed two Urban Decay blushes together – TMI & Video – to create a deeper blush shade that I used as a draping blush. Then I put 100% Pure Siren (the highlight color) slightly above that and blended the edges of the two shades together for dimension. Finally, I highlighted with Makeup Geek Moon Phase. I feel like this gave me gorgeous looking cheeks.
I went all out with lips. I lined the edges of my lips with UD Rush pencil. Then I filled in my lips with Fairy Girl Rose Goddess liquid lipstick. I layered UD Litter on top, which picks up a lot of gold and green. Then I went back with UD White Lie to add some blue sheen.
Someone on reddit recommended Urban Decay Tease to me quite a while ago. I’m loving it as a versatile transitional shade for my pale skin. It works well with pinks, purples, plums, browns, and greys so far. It’s such a useful neutral to have on hand!
I hope you love the 100% Pure Mermaid Palette tutorial! I had a lot of fun putting it together. Any plans for the weekend? We’re supposed to play D&D, so I’m really looking forward to that.
In case you missed it, I did a Facebook Live Chat last night and live swatched all of my My Pretty Zombie eyeshadows and blushes. You can watch the replay of it.
I forgot to mention I’m part of a spring giveaway with several blogger friends. 1 winner will receive a $400 gift card for Sephora, Nordstrom or Target. Giveaway ends 4/7 at 12AM
a Rafflecopter giveaway
More to SeeSurveys of and interviews with 5,428 soldiers showed that more than 8 percent had contemplated suicide. iStockPhoto
A study of soldiers’ mental health found that 1 in 5 had some form of mental illness such as depression, panic disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder before joining the Army, the Los Angeles Times reports. The research represents the Army’s first attempt to examine soldiers' pre-enrollment as well as post-enrollment mental health and sheds light on potential flaws in the recruiting process.
Surveys of and interviews with 5,428 soldiers at Army offices across the U.S. showed that more than 8 percent had contemplated suicide and another 1.1 percent had attempted it, the Times says.
Nearly half of soldiers with a history of suicide reported that their first attempt happened before enrollment. Reporting such information would have excluded these soldiers from service, Dr. Matthew Friedman, a professor at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, wrote in an editorial that accompanied the reports.
“It is clear that this information was not disclosed at the time of enrollment," he wrote.
The findings were published in three reports in the journal JAMA Psychiatry this week. The research initiative was created by the Army and the National Institute of Mental Health with the intent of addressing the sudden increase in the military suicide rate. While soldiers historically had a lower rate of suicide than civilians, the reverse is now true.
"These studies provide knowledge on suicide risk and potentially protective factors in a military population that can also help us better understand how to prevent suicide in the public at large," National Institute of Mental Health Director Dr. Thomas R. Insel told CNN.
Much of the data was culled from the Army's STARRS (Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers) survey. A Pentagon spokeswoman told CNN the Defense Department would work to include the findings in the military's mental health procedures.
Another report published in the journal Psychological Medicine looked more closely at demographic variables to see if researchers could locate patterns that an Army commander might overlook. By looking at the data, researchers "could pinpoint little pockets of soldiers where there’s a problem and you can imagine doing something to fix it," says Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study.
Kessler and his colleagues noticed some interesting patterns. For example, first-year soldiers accounted for nearly 15 percent of suicides among deployed, enlisted soldiers in their first four years of service. Often, a recruit is sent in as a replacement for another person at the last minute and separated from his or her training group.
Suicide risk is also greater among those who in their first two years aren’t promoted on schedule or who are demoted. And although the suicide rate is higher for men, it is three times as high among women who are deployed as it is among women who were never deployed, Kessler says. Another curious finding: Married civilians have much lower suicide rates than single people or divorced people, but marriage isn’t a protective factor for soldiers.
“Having somebody at home, that seems to be protective while you’re away from home, but when you’re at home it doesn’t help,” he says.
The research is rooted in more than simple curiosity and serves a practical purpose, Kessler says.
“Our hope is in addition to doing just these big head counts, we’ll be able to discover a handful of important wrinkles like that, that if the Army went down and in a thoughtful way tried to wrestle one at a time with each of them, you’d put the whole thing together, and it really makes a substantial dent in the suicide problem,” he says.
Kessler believes the Army could benefit from providing targeted solutions and reframing the conversation of what it means to be a soldier. Ideally, the Army wouldn't use the surveys to filter out those with past mental health problems. Instead, he says they should treat improving one's mental health as just another part of training
“The Army does a very good job I think of providing treatment for soldiers after they’ve come back from war situations," Kessler says. "I don’t think they’ve really recognized how many people walk in the door with pre-existing problems and would probably profit from treatment before they go off to dangerous situations.”Hello, this is the Open Flash Chart project. Get graphs like this for free: How does it work? User browses to your web site. The browser downloads the web page which contains the Open Flash Chart. Open Flash Chart downloads the data file and displays the chart. When you add Open Flash Chart to your web page, you tell it where to find the data file. We also do pie charts. Why is that great? When the user downloads the web page, Open Flash Chart requests the chart data from the server. The server knows who the user is so it can generate a chart for that particular user showing up to the minute data. Add a bit of pizzazz to your bar charts! Is it complicated to set up? You will need to include the Open Flash Chart in your HTML, and you also need to provide the data file on the server. The data file is either a text file, or a.php, Perl, Python, Java (or another flavour of dynamic) page. For a simple chart you would just drop the data.txt file on your website and point the Open Flash Chart to this URL. But what we really want is dynamic data that is pulled from a database or calculated or something. To do this you need to create the data file when it is requested. To do this we point the Open Flash Chart to a.php page and this PHP page does your calculations and/or database lookups, then outputs the data file. To make this a bit easier there are PHP, Perl, Python and Java classes to write the data file for you. Why only these languages? Well any scripting language will do the same job. But I don’t have access to anything but PHP. If anyone wants to translate the PHP class into a different language, then email me and I’ll post your code and a link to your web site here. The link to your site will be great for your page rank! Change the style of the charts. Get started! Download Open Flash Chart, this includes the PHP class. Read the tutorial. Check out the gallery. And it’s really free?! Yes. Once upon a time I had to deal with a company who sell flash charting components, their component had a bug that I needed fixing, so I emailed them about it asking when it’d be fixed. (Remember that I had paid real money for this software.) They were so incompetent, rude and obnoxious that after three or four weeks of emails I thought to myself “I could learn Flash and Actionscript and write my own charting component, release it as Open Source, host it on sourceforge and build up a community of helpful coders faster than they can fix a single bug.” And that is what I did. And that is why it is free. I guess the moral of the lesson is: don’t piss off your customers. Want to sponsor Open Flash Chart? I am stuck with Flash 8 which is a bit naff. I would love to upgrade to Flash 9 with Actionscript 3.0 but I am skint. So if you are rich and are looking to help out with this project click here!Last week, the Gallup Organization released a poll suggesting that, on average, Americans estimate one in four people in this country to be gay or lesbian. If that number seems high, it's not just you. Calculations of the population vary, but most recent surveys place the percentage of gay and lesbian Americans at around 3.5 percent.
Neither are such wild overestimations new to the era of Lady Gaga and Glee. In 2002, Gallup asked the same question and found similar results: the average estimate then was that 21 percent of men were gay and 22 percent of women lesbian. Below are ten further surprising survey results revealing some of Americans' mistaken beliefs about their country -- and world.
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We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.FossHub, a download site that hosts free and open-source software, has pulled Google advertising from the whole of its file-sharing software section. The difficult decision was taken after Google persistently flagged the download page of the popular qBitTorrent client as "unauthorized file sharing" and went on to ban the entire FossHub site.
There are no shortage of sites on the Internet that promise free software downloads but few do so with no strings attached. Thousands bundle adware and worse with ‘free’ software, while others bombard visitors with ads.
FossHub, on the other hand, does things very differently.
FossHub only offers free software, with no adware, spyware or malware attached. It doesn’t bombard users with advertising either. In fact, its download pages only have a single ad at the top. Well, that’s the plan at least but when it comes to BitTorrent software, things haven’t been so straightforward recently.
The problem centered around qBitTorrent, the free and open-source torrent client developed as an alternative to µTorrent. FossHub makes the client available in its file-sharing section and as the image below shows, has racked up close to 18 million downloads.
Previously, when people viewed the qBitTorrent page, they were presented with a single advert, courtesy of Google. However, a couple of months ago the guys at FossHub contacted the people behind the client to say they’d had problems with AdSense persistently flagging the qBitTorrent page as “unauthorized file sharing.”
“The consequence was that it stopped generating revenue for that page for FossHub,” a member of the qBitTorrent team explains.
TorrentFreak spoke with Sam at FossHub who provided more details.
“FossHub has hosted qBittorrent and other free projects binaries for almost a decade. For qBitorrent, we hosted its files for at least three years by now. We provide all the necessary bandwidth and other things that the project might need,” Sam said.
“It was not a problem for the last three years to show the single Google Adsense ad until the beginning of last month (June 2017) when we noticed a Policy violation message appearing under our account.
“Since we didn’t have any major issues with our account, we thought it must be a false positive. We tried to get in touch with Google AdSense team, but unfortunately, we received some (at least that what we think) standard canned responses.”
Sam says that FossHub wrote to Google AdSense support several times but never got to the bottom of the problem. Then, something catastrophic happened.
During June, presumably due to the problems with the qBitTorrent page, the entire FossHub site was banned by AdSense for seven days, thereby stopping the site from generating any revenue on any of the software offered.
“We wrote on a daily basis and attempted to request another review, but there was no human so that we can talk and try |
drop a massive transfer fee for midfielder Alejandro Romero Gamarra and Kristian Dyer reporting that the team is interested in bringing back forward Amando Moreno from Tijuana and nearing deals with a pair of Homegrown players.
Argentine reporter Manu Martin tweeted on Thursday night that the Red Bulls and Argentine club Huracan have agreed to a $7 million transfer for 90 percent of the rights to Romero Gamarra. The 22-year-old winger has spent his entire career with Huracan, recording one goal and three assists in 12 appearances in their current campaign. He played three matches for Argentina at the 2015 U-20 World Cup.
AHORA | #Huracan acordó con NY Red Bull de la MLS 🇺🇸 la venta del Kaku Romero Gamarra a cambio de U$S 7M por el 90% del pase. Solo falta que el jugador se ponga de acuerdo con el club estadounidense en el tema contractual. pic.twitter.com/ByzBAmlO9O — Manu Martín (@Manumartin01) December 22, 2017
Dyer reported on Thursday that New York are interested in bringing back Moreno, who signed with the Red Bulls as a Homegrown Player in 2013 before leaving the club to join Tijuana the following year. He hasn’t broken through with Xolos, only appearing in four league matches with the Liga MX club.
Dyer also reported that New York are also interested in signing Wake Forest defender Kevin Politz and 17-year-old academy and New York Red Bulls II midfielder Ben Mines to Homegrown contracts.Post by sara albers
Babies are woven into our everyday lives. So we wanted to celebrate them with our new series, Baby Love. For the next six weeks we will be sharing our love for babies through DIY projects, recipes and wellness. Join us for some Baby Love!
Our first project for Baby Love is a DIY for hand-stamped baby leggings. We have been coveting printed leggings for some time for the sweet babes. This project is a simple and a cheaper alternative.
Supplies: baby leggings, fabric paint, sponge brush, erasers, pencils (with unused eraser top), X-Acto knife, iron, paper
First you need to create a design for the stamp. I went simple – a dot and a heart. I used the eraser top of a pencil for the dot and created my own heart stamp using a block eraser. Wash and dry the leggings before stamping.
Read more for the full tutorial
Gold Dot Leggings:
1. Dip the pencil eraser top in the gold glitter paint. Use a generous amount.
2. Press the eraser top onto the leggings. Stamp the front of leggings. Let the leggings completely dry before stamping the back. After completely dry, heat set the paint using the steam setting on your iron (do not press the iron directly on paint).
Heart Leggings:
1. Draw heart design on a clean/unused eraser.
2. Cut into the eraser along the shape using an X-Acto knife.
3. Next, cutting from the side of the eraser toward the heart shape, cut away the extra parts of the eraser.
4. Finish cutting away the eraser part outside of the heart shape until you have made yourself a stamp!
5. Cut paper to fit the inside of the leggings as a liner so that the paint will not bleed through. Using a sponge brush, add fabric paint to stamp.
6. Press the stamp firmly to the leggings. Stamp the front of leggings. Let the leggings completely dry before stamping the back. After completely dry, heat set the paint using the steam setting on your iron (do not press the iron directly on paint). Hold the iron a few inches above paint and hold for a few seconds. You can also heat set using dry setting and press the leggings with a thin dish towel in between the iron and leggings.
*I recommend letting the leggings dry overnight before heat setting.
Enjoy your hip new baby leggings!
Sara All photos by Sara for alice & lois design studios, all rights reserved.
facebook // instagram // twitter // pinterestDavid Nucifora, the former Australia hooker, is expected to be appointed as the Irish Rugby Football Union’s high performance director before Ireland ’s summer tour to Argentina.
Nucifora, who previously coached the ACT Brumbies and Auckland Blues, performed a similar role for the Wallabies as the general manager of the Australian Rugby Union’s high performance unit until December 2012.
The 52-year-old is the final key recruit in Ireland’s preparations for next year’s World Cup in England and is due to be confirmed once the new accord to secure the future of the European club competitions has been signed.
Ireland’s head coach, Joe Schmidt, who was Nucifora’s assistant coach when he was at the Blues in 2006, is thought to have ratified the appointment.
Nucifora’s remit will be to take an overview on the professional game in Ireland, improve performance standards and expand the depth of top-level talent, with the most urgent role to identify replacements for Brian O’Driscoll, who is retiring at the end of the season.
The appointment of Nucifora, who was capped twice by the Wallabies, will not affect the make-up of Schmidt’s backroom staff, with the roles of assistant coach Les Kiss and forwards specialist John Plumtree remaining unchanged.
Ireland face Argentina in Resistencia on June 7 and again in Tucuman on June 14.
In England, the Rugby Football Union has agreed to begin a trial for players aged 13 and under who have impaired vision to wear approved sport goggles in matches with immediate effect, The Telegraph has learnt.
The RFU had previously prohibited the wearing of goggles in all contact rugby at all ages.
The move follows the International Rugby Board’s decision, in conjunction with a manufacturer, to approved a model of goggles that is both safe for the wearer and other players.
It is understood RFU constituent bodies received a letter on Monday informing them that a trial would be introduced next season and children playing contact rugby at under-13 level and below would be permitted to wear sport goggles that had been dispensed under professional supervision.
However, players who conform with the conditions of the trial would be able to wear them with immediate effect.
Northampton are expected to receive an update on the shoulder injury to England hooker Dylan Hartley on Tuesday.[SSL] Grand Final Recap Text by Hyde Graphics by Hyde
It’s been quite awhile since Bisu qualified for the defunct MSL and an even longer time since he’s won an individual league title but he’s finally done it after two long grueling months. So a quick congratulations to him. While Epoxide retreats to tranquil surroundings to deeply contemplate the next Power Ranking and study for his exams, I along with the two biggest BW enthusiasts I know will be taking over to bring you this final post to conclude the SSL9.
First we have the handsome Endy who will be casting his critical eye and knowledge to bring you a
Now whether you jumped in joy or buried your head in a pillow and let out a few tears at the end of all this, the finals was absolutely amazing and so was this tournament, and in the words of kjwcj – the best is still yet to come.
As a final note I’d like to thank Epoxide and KristofferAG for the coverage they do every step of the way and a special thanks to our guest writers – 2pacalypse-, endy, JohnChoi, konodora, and Stratos. We hope you've enjoyed the ride and our coverage as much as we had fun making it. Until next time.
-- Hyde
It’s been quite awhile since Bisu qualified for the defunct MSL and an even longer time since he’s won an individual league title but he’s finally done it after two long grueling months. So a quick congratulations to him. While Epoxide retreats to tranquil surroundings to deeply contemplate the next Power Ranking and study for his exams, I along with the two biggest BW enthusiasts I know will be taking over to bring you this final post to conclude the SSL9.First we have the handsome Endy who will be casting his critical eye and knowledge to bring you a comprehensive review and grading of the games and player performances. Next we have 2pacalypse-, the big cheese of the BW department who will detail game four as a full-scale battle report jam-packed with gifs. Then we interview two TL staff members CaucasianAsian and lilsusie, who witnessed the grand event live and give us their perspective. Finally, I run through my top ten memorable moments in this tournament.Now whether you jumped in joy or buried your head in a pillow and let out a few tears at the end of all this, the finals was absolutely amazing and so was this tournament, and in the words of kjwcj – the best is still yet to come.As a final note I’d like to thank Epoxide and KristofferAG for the coverage they do every step of the way and a special thanks to our guest writers – 2pacalypse-, endy, JohnChoi, konodora, and Stratos. We hope you've enjoyed the ride and our coverage as much as we had fun making it. Until next time. Table of Contents
Grand Final Recap
The comprehensive review
A battle report
Game Four
Interview
The live experience
Top Ten Moments
The good, the bad and the funny
More info at
Liquipedia The comprehensive reviewGame FourThe live experienceThe good, the bad and the funnyMore info at
3rd place match
Movie < Circuit Breaker > Kwanro
Movie < Mist > Kwanro
Movie < Match Point> Kwanro
Movie vs Kwanro game 1 @ Circuit Breaker
Kwanro builds an overlord then a pool followed by a gas before a third base. Movie builds an early expansion. Movie sends his first zealot to harass Kwanro's third, and Kwanro's overlord notices that the natural is kept by a single cannon and a dragoon. Thus he opts for his signature zergling aggression and kills the cannon. Movie barely holds thanks to good micro and is able to build more cannons. The crucial +1 upgrade completes a fraction of second before the forge is destroyed. His uses this advantage to counter at 8 o'clock where he kills both sunken and all drones. Kwanro mutalisks are out, but Movie is safe with a sizable fleet of corsairs and an archon. Movies has complete map control and secures a fourth base at 6 o'clock. He attacks Kwanro's third base with a large army of dragoons and superior upgrades. Kwanro has only a handful of hydralisks and sunkens to defend and the base dies as he types out.
Kwanro saw an occasion to win the game outright with zerglings, and knowing that Movie was currently better at PvZ, I don't blame him for trying to exploit this opportunity. Unfortunately for him, Movie defended with minimal losses and from there Kwanro was far behind economically which made him look completely helpless the rest of the game. He should probably not have made mutalisks and instead tried to defend and macro off four bases.
Movie:
Nothing exceptional from Movie, but he did a great job defending the early zergling aggression. He kept building up his advantage with solid corsair/archon micro during the mid game, choosing carefully every engagement, and pressuring both Kwanro's natural and third base. Kwanro:Kwanro saw an occasion to win the game outright with zerglings, and knowing that Movie was currently better at PvZ, I don't blame him for trying to exploit this opportunity. Unfortunately for him, Movie defended with minimal losses and from there Kwanro was far behind economically which made him look completely helpless the rest of the game. He should probably not have made mutalisks and instead tried to defend and macro off four bases.Movie:Nothing exceptional from Movie, but he did a great job defending the early zergling aggression. He kept building up his advantage with solid corsair/archon micro during the mid game, choosing carefully every engagement, and pressuring both Kwanro's natural and third base.
Movie vs Kwanro game 2 @ Mist
Kwanro opts for an early pool. Movie chooses a standard forge, nexus, cannon. To keep Movie in the dark a few seconds longer, Kwanro blocks his ramp with a drone, but let it die miserably to the scouting probe.
Movie has the economic advantage. Kwanro makes once again an early gas, and goes for a low eco 3 hatch hydra all-in. He fails several times to catch the second scouting probe with slowlings and lets enter his main.
Movie adds a robotics as soon as he sees the hydra den, as well as 4 more cannons, with one on the high ground.
Kwanro decides to commit anyway due to his low eco. He destroys a few cannons, but Movie holds and soon a reaver is out, obliterating all hopes of busting the natural.
Movie transitions to corsair/reaver while Kwanro adds two more hatcheries to pump drones, without a lair.
The lack of spire and overlord speed make it quite difficult for Kwanro to defend harassment.
Movie drops two dark templars in the main while harassing the third and the nat with a reaver.
He scores a tons of drones and a few hydras. Kwanro attempts a final and desperate attack but Movie is ready to welcome him with storms, and the game ends in a puddle of hydralisks blood.
Movie played a good game, reacting well to the low eco hydra all-in: he skipped the corsair, and cannons were not added too early so he did not have to cut probes.
Also he showed an interesting cannon positioning with a very effective cannon on the high ground. Finally he did a good job multitasking in the end with simultaneous DT and reaver drop, putting an end to Pikachu's suffering.
Kwanro:
Denying scouting probes is probably the first chapter of "Hydralisk breaks for Dummies". Looks like he did not read it, maybe he should add it to his flowchart.
Not only Kwanro failed to catch the probe on the bridge, but he also let it go through the ramp, allowing Movie to see the hydra den and low drone count.
I would have given Kwanro a D, but I'll hand out an F for the Facepalming drone suicide at the beginning of the game. Movie:Movie played a good game, reacting well to the low eco hydra all-in: he skipped the corsair, and cannons were not added too early so he did not have to cut probes.Also he showed an interesting cannon positioning with a very effective cannon on the high ground. Finally he did a good job multitasking in the end with simultaneous DT and reaver drop, putting an end to Pikachu's suffering.Kwanro:Denying scouting probes is probably the first chapter of. Looks like he did not read it, maybe he should add it to his flowchart. http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/110336-kwanflow-chart Not only Kwanro failed to catch the probe on the bridge, but he also let it go through the ramp, allowing Movie to see the hydra den and low drone count.I would have given Kwanro a D, but I'll hand out an F for the Facepalming drone suicide at the beginning of the game.
Grand final
by.hero < Mist > Bisu
by.hero < Fighting Spirit > Bisu
by.hero < Match Point > Bisu
by.hero < Circuit Breaker > Bisu
by.hero < New Sniper Ridge > Bisu
Bisu vs hero game 1 @ Mist
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we have all been waiting for tonight! Or maybe should I say this morning as many of our American fans are alive and kicking at 5 AM to witness this historical moment of Brood War! On my left, the Protoss Revolutionist and SSL Royal Roader, Bisu! On my right, the ZvP Master and fastest-hands-of-the-scene, hero! LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE!
Bisu spawns at 3 o'clock and hero a 9 o'clock. Bisu fast expands and builds a stargate and hero takes 3 bases and makes a hydra den. Bisu showcases his multitasking skills by luring the zerglings with a probe while sneaking a zealot into hero's main. Bisu instantly responds with a robotics facility and cannons at his natural. Déjà vu, I would say, but rather than going all-in in a typical Kwanro fashion, hero is content to snipe the forge and the gateway. At the same time, he techs to lair and adds two hatcheries.
Only a reaver drop can threaten him at the moment as Bisu has almost no ground army because of the money invested in cannons. Hero is perfectly aware of the situation and dispatches hydras and scourge to defend his mineral lines. Bisu does little damage with the reaver drop in the main, and soon hero has enough hydralisks to defend his base and attack Bisu's newly built third base at 5 o'clock.
Nothing is as satisfying as seeing drones dying
Hero is now ahead economically and has complete map control. Bisu finally gets a huge stack of drone with a reaver drop, allowing him to catch up a bit. But hero takes full advantage of the long distance between Bisu's main and third base, dropping a dozen hydras at the third. He kills all cannons and almost all probes, and follows up with a drop in the main. By the time Bisu clears both drops hero has made a control groups of mutas. He uses them to snipe the high templars and the remaining reaver at Bisu's natural, leaving Bisu's dragoons army helpless against the hydralisks swarming the place. Bisu ggs.
I praised Movie for his reaction upon scouting Kwanro's 3 hatch hydra, and Bisu had exactly the same initial reaction. However, he was not able to deal any damage with the first harassing reaver, and made the questionable decision to take a third base at a location that is difficult to defend. A strong corsair/zealot/reaver push on two bases would have been better in this case against a lurker-less Zerg on three bases.
hero:
hero proved that he was extremely well prepared, using a build order that put Bisu out of his comfort zone. He easily defended the corsair/reaver aggression while building a very strong economy. His decision to drop hydralisks in Bisu's bases was not only optimal, but also a pleasure to watch. Bisu:I praised Movie for his reaction upon scouting Kwanro's 3 hatch hydra, and Bisu had exactly the same initial reaction. However, he was not able to deal any damage with the first harassing reaver, and made the questionable decision to take a third base at a location that is difficult to defend. A strong corsair/zealot/reaver push on two bases would have been better in this case against a lurker-less Zerg on three bases.hero:hero proved that he was extremely well prepared, using a build order that put Bisu out of his comfort zone. He easily defended the corsair/reaver aggression while building a very strong economy. His decision to drop hydralisks in Bisu's bases was not only optimal, but also a pleasure to watch.
Bisu vs hero game 2 @ Fighting Spirit
Bisu starts with a forge fast expand at 7 o'clock and hero with an overpool at 5 o'clock. Hero goes for a very micro oriented 4 hatch lair into 6 hatch hydras. The fast lair allows him to quickly upgrade overlord speed. Hero is ahead economically. He builds a spore at his natural and third to help protect overlords and provide detection in the case of an early DT/corsair attack.
Bisu responds with more gateways and an early robotics facility as a strong army, early observer and shuttle to harass are the best way to prevent a likely lurker/hydra/scourge containment. hero indeed techs to lurkers but instead of using them defensively to turtle on 4 or 5 bases while teching to hive or aggressively to fight for map control, he simply let them sit between his natural and his third. Bisu takes a third and both players macro for a while.
Bisu has big army of dragoons and high templars that is very strong during the mid-game but become weaker against hive tech. hero finally takes a fourth at 3 o'clock. Bisu decides that it is time to attack as defilers and cracklings will be out soon. He sends all his army to the top left corner of the map. The Zerg army is caught out of position, and instead of sending reinforcements through the center of the map to flank Bisu's army, hero hastily sends them straight into Bisu's concave.
Try not to look at the amazing storms and observe the mini-map. A large portion of hero's army is still sitting outside his natural during this crucial engagement while it should have been used to setup an ambush
Bisu now uses his army advantage to secure a fourth base and more zealots and archons to fight the hive army efficiently. hero is on the back foot and attempts a ling/defiler drop in Bisu's main. Bisu attacks the natural as he knows that many lurkers are in a defensive position at the fourth.
This is exactly how one Zerg should not position his army
Instead of spreading out his lurkers behind the bridge to minimize storms damage, hero stacks them in front where they can be easily surrounded. This is exactly what happens and Bisu breaks hero's natural as the reinforcement from the fourth are stormed as soon as they exit the nydus canal. hero types out.
After losing the first game, Bisu's mindset seemed affected and he went for a safe opening. This put him a bit behind economically. But he demonstrated flawless macro -- seriously, how does one pump so many units out of 6 gateways? -- and chose carefully where and when engagements took place. Perfect army positioning and storms eventually gave him the upper hand.
hero:
hero's strategy was a bit unusual. He choose to be passive and build a strong economy, while keeping the threat of hydra bust or drop play alive with early hydralisks and overlord speed. He also defended brilliantly all attempts of harassment, be it the DT drop or overlord hunt.
However, his passivity in the mid-game allowed Bisu to build up an efficient army composition. I believe he planned to have a strong mid-game army in order to setup a lurker contain, but Bisu's later third and relatively early observers did not give him a chance.
He also was in a position where he could have easily dropped units in Bisu's main but failed to do so until it was way too late. Bisu:After losing the first game, Bisu's mindset seemed affected and he went for a safe opening. This put him a bit behind economically. But he demonstrated flawless macro -- seriously, how does one pump so many units out of 6 gateways? -- and chose carefully where and when engagements took place. Perfect army positioning and storms eventually gave him the upper hand.hero:hero's strategy was a bit unusual. He choose to be passive and build a strong economy, while keeping the threat of hydra bust or drop play alive with early hydralisks and overlord speed. He also defended brilliantly all attempts of harassment, be it the DT drop or overlord hunt.However, his passivity in the mid-game allowed Bisu to build up an efficient army composition. I believe he planned to have a strong mid-game army in order to setup a lurker contain, but Bisu's later third and relatively early observers did not give him a chance.He also was in a position where he could have easily dropped units in Bisu's main but failed to do so until it was way too late.
Bisu vs hero game 3 @ Match Point
hero chooses yet again to open with an overpool, followed by an extractor before the third hatch. The Revolutionist finally uses what can be called Bisu build, with a fast archive and a dark templar. There is no early aggression. hero upgrades overlord speed and hydralisks. Bisu takes a third at the mineral only and hero a fourth base at 5 o'clock. Bisu takes his own fourth base while hero techs to hive.
At this point, both players have a huge army, defilers defilers and cracklings are not out yet. Bisu uses this advantage to deny hero a fifth base at 6 o'clock. Then he pushes to the high ground on hero's side. The first big battle of this game occurs and ends quite evenly. However during the battle Bisu has sneaked 5 zealots into hero's fourth bases. He kills a few drones and almost snipes the hatchery. A few seconds later, he drops two high templars and two zealots killing no less than ten drones at the natural! He tries it one more time at the fourth but hero blocks the ramp with lurkers eggs! Meanwhile Bisu and hero both try to take a fifth at 6 o'clock. hero is forced to cancel the hatchery.
It's mine! No it's mine!
hero attempts a drop in Bisu's main, but several overlords are intercepted on the way, and Bisu is able to defend the drop with minimal losses. Additionally, hero loses all his overlords. This is only a temporary setback as he destroys Bisu's new base at 6 o'clock with lurkers and defilers. But that's not enough as a split map scenario is not ideal for a Zerg. His economy has also been severely weakened by the zealot raid and the drop. hero knows it and moves his army to the center of the map, forcing Bisu to retreat to his third. The base is in danger but Bisu is able to hold. Meanwhile Bisu has secured a fifth base at 12 o'clock.
hero is in trouble as Bisu has a death ball with a lot of archons supported by two reavers in a shuttle. He tries another small drop in Bisu's main, but the latter is ready with a lot of cannons and storms. A final battle takes place in the middle of the map and hero ggs.
Bisu managed to always be a step ahead of hero in this game:
- efficient overlord hunt during the whole game that crippled hero's macro
- excellent map control which allowed him to defend his fourth where so many Protoss players get caught out of position
- zealot raids to expansions during the big engagements
- good drop defense
And as usual, Bisu showed good army positioning and multitasking, making him the clear winner of this game.
hero:
Except for his constant inability to get rid of Bisu's sairs fleet, which scored tons of overlords and scourge, hero did not make any big mistake. Bisu simply played perfectly. Bisu:Bisu managed to always be a step ahead of hero in this game:- efficient overlord hunt during the whole game that crippled hero's macro- excellent map control which allowed him to defend his fourth where so many Protoss players get caught out of position- zealot raids to expansions during the big engagements- good drop defenseAnd as usual, Bisu showed good army positioning and multitasking, making him the clear winner of this game.hero:Except for his constant inability to get rid of Bisu's sairs fleet, which scored tons of overlords and scourge, hero did not make any big mistake. Bisu simply played perfectly.
Bisu vs hero game 4 @ Circuit Breaker
This awesome game has been covered in details by -2Pacalypse in the
I will nonetheless provide a bit of analysis and give out grades to each player.
Just like in the previous games Bisu seemed to be comfortable with hero's spire-less overlord speed opening. His zealot sandwich during the hydra break attempt was brilliant, as it not only allowed him to kill a lot of hydras but also all the overlords while hydras were attacking the zealots. His complete air domination netted him more overlords when hero sent a second wave of hydras. Both his first zealot push and the DT harassment at the third were well timed.
As in the previous game, Bisu seemed to be always a step ahead of hero until the outrageous lurker drop that cost him the game. While watching the game live, I told myself, "Bisu's got this, unless hero can land a nice lurker drop". Bisu confessed in his post-game interview that he knew a lurker drop would be the only way he'd lose in that position. Knowing that, not only did Bisu skip cannons but he also panicked and subsequently let all his probes fleeing the natural die to the lurkers inside the main. The fact that Bisu lasted 10 more minutes after losing almost all his probes is a testament to how ahead Bisu was.
hero:
Surprisingly after failing to defend overlords in the previous game, hero went for hydralisks with fast overlords once again. Hero first fell behind due to Bisu's incredible defense against the first hydralisks attack, and then further more because of the constant overlord snipes. However, hero was able to deflect the second zealot attack with perfectly timed lurkers.
We can blame Bisu for not building cannons when he knew the lurker drop would cost him the game. However, it does not take any credit away from hero, who also was able to find Bisu's Achilles heel and turn the game around.
After the drop, he was in danger a few times, reminding us of JangBi vs ZerO in TVing OSL, but unlike his fellow Zerg, he was eventually able to defend Bisu's ultimate attack by the skin of his teeth. Bisu:Just like in the previous games Bisu seemed to be comfortable with hero's spire-less overlord speed opening. His zealot sandwich during the hydra break attempt was brilliant, as it not only allowed him to kill a lot of hydras but also all the overlords while hydras were attacking the zealots. His complete air domination netted him more overlords when hero sent a second wave of hydras. Both his first zealot push and the DT harassment at the third were well timed.As in the previous game, Bisu seemed to be always a step ahead of hero until the outrageous lurker drop that cost him the game. While watching the game live, I told myself, "Bisu's got this, unless hero can land a nice lurker drop". Bisu confessed in his post-game interview that he knew a lurker drop would be the only way he'd lose in that position. Knowing that, not only did Bisu skip cannons but he also panicked and subsequently let all his probes fleeing the natural die to the lurkers inside the main. The fact that Bisu lasted 10 more minutes after losing almost all his probes is a testament to how ahead Bisu was.hero:Surprisingly after failing to defend overlords in the previous game, hero went for hydralisks with fast overlords once again. Hero first fell behind due to Bisu's incredible defense against the first hydralisks attack, and then further more because of the constant overlord snipes. However, hero was able to deflect the second zealot attack with perfectly timed lurkers.We can blame Bisu for not building cannons when he knew the lurker drop would cost him the game. However, it does not take any credit away from hero, who also was able to find Bisu's Achilles heel and turn the game around.After the drop, he was in danger a few times, reminding us of JangBi vs ZerO in TVing OSL, but unlike his fellow Zerg, he was eventually able to defend Bisu's ultimate attack by the skin of his teeth.
Bisu vs hero game 5 @ New Sniper Ridge
We promised you a historic moment. Here you go.
hero spawns at 10 o'clock and opens for the fifth time in a row with an overpool and sends his overlord in the right direction. Bisu spawns a 1 o'clock and builds two gateways, confirming that recently Protoss have not felt comfortable to fast expand on this map.
Bisu sends his first two zealots to hero's natural. Another zealot and two probes are trailing not far behind. Not sure if he is overconfident in his micro, but instead of pulling back for a few seconds and attacking with three zealots and two probes, Bisu moves in and allows his two zealots to get surrounded an take a lot of damage.
He does not deal as much damage as he could have but forcing a lot of zerglings and a sunken after an overpool is enough to give him an edge.
Meanwhile, hero has made a lair and more zerglings. Bisu sneaks a zealot at the natural to look for a possible early second gas, which would indicate a two hatch mutas. Bisu techs to corsairs and expands, while hero has made a third hatch, a hydra den and two pairs of scourges to defend his overlords.
Dance!
I am not sure I understood what hero's game plan was at this point, but he took a third base at 8 o'clock that was going to be difficult to defend. Bisu moves out and threatens to attack hero's natural but only sends three zealots to hero's third while the rest of the army goes back to his natural to defend a potential counter-attack.
Hero does counter-attack. Bisu not only holds easily but also kills several overlords at hero's undefended natural. Zealot leg upgrade are finally done and Bisu attacks the natural. Corsairs kill overlords while hydralisks are kept busy by the zealots. Hero has two lurkers morphing and Bisu does not have an observer but it's too late, four zealots are already in the main and they take down the spire and a few drones. Corsairs keep wrecking havoc in the air, and I left am wondering how hero is still able to make hydralisks.
Hero is once again trying to get back in the game with a lurker drop at the natural. Meanwhile, more zealots stream in hero's main while more overlords die. The two lurkers in the mineral line kill a fair amount of probes but it is clearly not enough and soon an observer is out.
Hero attempts another lurker drop in the main but it fails. Bisu then pushes with a much larger army and destroys hero's natural, securing the SSL9 Championship!
Except for the small micro mistake at the beginning that may have allowed him to deal a little bit more damage, Bisu played once again a very solid game. Despite a 2-gate opening, his constant overlord hunt with corsairs remained the cornerstone of Bisu's strategy tonight.
hero:
1-base play was more than likely on this map yet hero looked unprepared. He seemed more behind than he should have been after a 2-gate rush, and his decision to go for a super low eco lair + spire instead of a 3-hatch hydras was questionable, just like his third base at 8 o'clock. In some cases he could have also saved a few overlord by spreading them out when they were attacked by corsairs. I think that the two lurkers at the natural were delayed because he was supplied block.
Overall, he just lacked a game plan. Sure, Bisu's execution was superior to Movie's in the semi-finals [Movie also went for a 2-gate on the same map], but it was a bit surprising to see hero choking here. A possible explanation could be that it was the fifth and final game in what was hero's first individual league finals appearance, while Bisu is veteran of high pressure games. Bisu:Except for the small micro mistake at the beginning that may have allowed him to deal a little bit more damage, Bisu played once again a very solid game. Despite a 2-gate opening, his constant overlord hunt with corsairs remained the cornerstone of Bisu's strategy tonight.hero:1-base play was more than likely on this map yet hero looked unprepared. He seemed more behind than he should have been after a 2-gate rush, and his decision to go for a super low eco lair + spire instead of a 3-hatch hydras was questionable, just like his third base at 8 o'clock. In some cases he could have also saved a few overlord by spreading them out when they were attacked by corsairs. I think that the two lurkers at the natural were delayed because he was supplied block.Overall, he just lacked a game plan. Sure, Bisu's execution was superior to Movie's in the semi-finals [Movie also went for a 2-gate on the same map], but it was a bit surprising to see hero choking here. A possible explanation could be that it was the fifth and final game in what was hero's first individual league finals appearance, while Bisu is veteran of high pressure games.
Kwanro builds an overlord then a pool followed by a gas before a third base. Movie builds an early expansion. Movie sends his first zealot to harass Kwanro's third, and Kwanro's overlord notices that the natural is kept by a single cannon and a dragoon. Thus he opts for his signature zergling aggression and kills the cannon. Movie barely holds thanks to good micro and is able to build more cannons. The crucial +1 upgrade completes a fraction of second before the forge is destroyed. His uses this advantage to counter at 8 o'clock where he kills both sunken and all drones. Kwanro mutalisks are out, but Movie is safe with a sizable fleet of corsairs and an archon. Movies has complete map control and secures a fourth base at 6 o'clock. He attacks Kwanro's third base with a large army of dragoons and superior upgrades. Kwanro has only a handful of hydralisks and sunkens to defend and the base dies as he types out.Kwanro opts for an early pool. Movie chooses a standard forge, nexus, cannon. To keep Movie in the dark a few seconds longer, Kwanro blocks his ramp with a drone, but let it die miserably to the scouting probe.Movie has the economic advantage. Kwanro makes once again an early gas, and goes for a low eco 3 hatch hydra all-in. He fails several times to catch the second scouting probe with slowlings and lets enter his main.Movie adds a robotics as soon as he sees the hydra den, as well as 4 more cannons, with one on the high ground.Kwanro decides to commit anyway due to his low eco. He destroys a few cannons, but Movie holds and soon a reaver is out, obliterating all hopes of busting the natural.Movie transitions to corsair/reaver while Kwanro adds two more hatcheries to |
artists around the Muslim world will also be invited to attend and perform. Floodlights, camera, action: The Salaam Games.
The impact would be virtually limitless on so many levels:
1. Ushering in a Futbol Revolution
Coming off the heels of an incredibly exciting and talent-revealing World Cup, the Salaam Games will be produce unprecedented benefits for the overall development of the game. For instance, Egyptian legends such as Essam Haddary and Mohamed Aboutrika played in the EPL -- the Egyptian Premier League -- or other regional clubs for the entirety of their careers. While many of these players chose to play close to home, far too many simply never got the opportunity. Now with greater exposure to the profoundly rich and largely untapped soccer talents in the Muslim world, players such as Chelsea's Mohammed Salah are rapidly being "discovered" and snapped up by elite clubs throughout Europe.
Hosting a groundbreaking exhibition match will accelerate this process by giving newcomers throughout the Muslim world a chance to play with the world's best and prove themselves. The Salaam Games will benefit coaches and scouts for the world's biggest clubs as they work to diversify and strengthen the world's elite leagues -- while developing professional soccer as a viable career option as well as opportunity to attain quality education for millions of kids dreaming of a salvation from poverty.
2. Capturing the Muslim World's Rich Tapestry
Yet this event has a deeper purpose for both nonMuslim and Muslim audiences. One of the myths that we Muslims find ourselves debunking time and again is that all Muslims are Arab or Middle Eastern, and like all Arabs/Middle Easterners are Muslim. Rather than relying on statistics or repeating this fact until we are blue in the face, why not prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt before the whole world?
By combating ignorance through myth-busting, the Salaam Games will be a powerful inoculation against the forces of bigotry, intolerance, and fear. Such a display will also produce some mind-blowing soccer for those fortunate enough to witness it in person as well as fans around the globe. Benzema, Ozil, Khedira, Nasri, Dzeko, Abidal, Yahya Toure, Dembe Ba and countless other Europe-based legends, plus homegrown players throughout the Muslim world who will know this is perhaps their best opportunity to shine. Perhaps even America's own Bilal Abdul "Bill" Hamid can represent the growing spirit of US soccer abroad while further showcasing the athletic talents of the American Muslim community at home. (Disclaimer: Proud DC United fan here)
The salivating talent on showcase is enough to make any true sports fan jettison their Islamaphobic, xenophobic, or bigoted preconceptions in order to witness the glory on the field.
3. Defeating Hatred Through Unity
Soccer players are idolized by kids ever since they learn to walk and talk. Those who make it to the highest levels in Europe become demi-gods. If adults and children alike throughout the Muslim world see their national heroes play alongside players from other sects and ethnicities, it will set an indelible impression on their mind:
"I can't possibly hate people from [insert sect, ethnicity, nationality], because my hero is playing alongside them!"
As the name implies, the model will be our Jewish cousins' Maccabiah Games. Soccer players across the Muslim world will be invited to play along with players based in Europe, Latin America, the US, and elsewhere. There should also be an accompanying junior match and/or tournament featuring local youth players and kids from all of these countries.
This event is designed to be a product of the Muslim World, including all of its ethnicities, nationalities, and religions. Indeed nonMuslim players throughout the Muslim world such as the Iranian national team's first Christian captain Andranik Teymourian will be prominently represented in order to use the power of sports to improve interfaith relations and uplift the profile of religious minorities throughout the Muslim world.
Indeed the entire theme of the event will be designed to forge unity and harmony. Teams will completely mixed with regards to the nationality, ethnicity, and religious/sectarian identities of the players. Movie stars and music artists from across the Muslim world will also be invited to perform, and the themes of their performances will incorporate ideas of respect, peace, compassion, and harmony.
The Salaam Games can defeat suspicion and hatred in an enduring way which no book, sermon, or edict ever could.
4. Creating An Immediate Humanitarian Impact
Beyond serving as a powerful symbol for peace and unity, the Salaam Games will be designed to mitigate some of the horrors of conflict. Guests of honor will include victims of sectarian, ethnic, and nationalistic conflicts around the Muslim world. Organizers and partners of the Salaam Games should also establish a compensation and assistance fund to compensate both the invited guests as well as other victims who have not already received sufficient assistance by their governments, international bodies, or NGOs.
Yet not only will the Salaam Games recognize and assist these victims, but the entire event will also be designed as a charity exhibition from its conception. All proceeds from ticket sales, advertising, merchandise, and broadcasting rights slated for a most-worthy cause: Aiding communities of Syrian, Palestinian, and Iraqi refugees. In addition to the proceeds, all partners -- from FIFA and multibillion dollar corporations as SABIC, Turkish Airlines, Etihad Airways, and NGOs such as Qatar Foundation, and Kuwait Development fund to local businesses -- will participate with the understanding that there will be a mandatory 2:1 aid-to-operational costs ratio. For every dollar spent to fund or promote the event in any way, two will be instantly earmarked for immediate disbursement to the Red Cross/Red Crescent, UNRWA, UNICEF, Islamic Relief, and other international organizations and agencies operating within Syria or any of its neighbors hosting refugees.
To check against corruption and labor issues, the Salaam Games would only be held in a city and venue which is already equipped to handle such a global event. My suggestion for the innagural event: Istanbul's storied Turk Telekom Arena.
How beautiful it would be if an event showcasing sectarian and ethnic harmony can also help mitigate some of the horrors resulting from the very lack of these concepts in a meaningful and tangible way. This project would bring together a wide variety of NGOs, corporations, businesses, and governing bodies across the Muslim world to create an unique and unprecedented multinational charity project -- yet another groundbreaking innovation made in the Muslim world.
5. Beyond Soccer: Creating a Globally Replicable Model
Perhaps the greatest beauty of this model lies in the adaptability of its simplicity. Rather than being confined in its utility and relevance to the Muslim world, or even within soccer, it can be readily adaptable and replicable in a variety of regional sporting contexts. A global cricket tournament can be held to unite South Asian nations (who have long been in conflict with and distrusted each other) along with other commonwealth cricketing nations. A baseball tournament can showcase unity amongst Canada, the US, Central America, the Caribbean, Japan, as well as Korea and China where baseball is rapidly increasing in popularity. A basketball tournament could unite countries on three different continents as the sport continues to takes off in Europe and Asia. Badminton in East Asia, Sepak Takraw in Southeast Asia... the possibilities are endless. As long as the teams are mixed, each of these tournaments would potentially yield all of the aforementioned benefits of the Salaam Games.
6. Practicing What We Preach: Inspiring Real Change
In order to affect actual change in socio-cultural attitudes, activities should be coordinated in tandem with the exhibition. Days out of the weeks leading up to, during, or even following these tournaments can include a range of activities. For instance, one day can be designated as "Visit Another Religious Sanctuary" day in which the general public is encouraged to step out of their socio-religious comfort zone and engage with others in a meaningful way. Likewise, to reinforce the emphasis on humanitarianism and community empowerment, another day can be designated as Sadaqa ("charity") Day in which everyone is encouraged to not only donate money and goods to charity, but to also offer pro bono services within their communities.
Even while witnessing every imaginable political conflict and strife, the Muslim world has produced some of the greatest discoveries and innovations in human history. It has given rise to the world's greatest civilizations, many of which are eternally preserved. In today's no-less turbulent world, the Muslim world can produce yet another spectacle for the ages-while fostering meaningful, positive changes around the world.
7. Creating a Shared Humanity
A sports tournament by itself, no matter how well intentioned, boldly conceptualized, and well-organized, cannot bring about world peace. Yet the Salaam Games can foster greater understanding between the peoples of the world. It can help mitigate some of the horrors of war through stimulating greater humanitarian aid while exorcizing its invasion of impressionable minds of our children. In the 21st century, "tolerance" is such a low-bar. We should be striving for mutual understanding, respect, and love.
By itself, nothing can work miracles. Yet the Beautiful Game may just help us get there, one heart and mind at a time.
Dedicated to Aitazaz Hassan Bangash, the 276 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, the youth of the Arab Spring, and children in underserved communities everywhere.
If you are excited at prospect of turning this vision into reality, please share via social media with the hashtag #TheSalaamGamesTo whom though and why? Do LGBT people get to live free from the violence and oppression that they suffered under half a century ago because of the sacrifice and struggle of those who came before? Does Europe get to get to live free from the violence and oppression that they suffered over half a century ago because of the sacrifice and struggle of those who came before? The answer is yes to both, but I'm sensing that you don't feel any connection to gay people of the 1970's for example but you DO feel a connection to those who were effected by the World Wars (obviously). Just think for a minute what it must have been like to be able to be fired from you job, beat up by police and have them turn a blind eye to it, unable collect or accept benefits, unable to have a spouse, unable to adopt, unable to rent an apartment, and legally being allowed to be turned away from any business or amenity available at the discretion of the owner because they think fags are icky. Isn't that the same sort of stuff that we fought fascism for?
Both groups are worthy of high praise, but if you hold that the excuse that LGBT are only 5% of the population so "why bother" celebrating is valid there really is no reason to celebrate Canadian veterans, because they are too a small group. If you think that veterans should be remembered and celebrated because of what they accomplished then it goes to reason that the LGBT community should be remembered and celebrated for what they have accomplished. If you don't think that they have accomplished anything then don't celebrate it, but don't project those ideals on to the PM who is free to justify the significance of what ever he feels is fit.Wikipedia is now the most common general reference on the internet, and the 7th most popular site overall. It is, in a way, our collective online store of human knowledge.
Wikipedia is also a wiki, which means that anyone can theoretically write and edit articles. Wikipedia has editors, however, and they manage this process, evaluating the authoritativeness and apparent motives of editors. It is not the wild west like it used to be. (We discussed this recently on the SGU – look for the interview with Tim Farley and Susan Gerbic here.)
The question remains, however – how accurate and reliable is the information on Wikipedia? There have been several comparisons of Wikipedia to traditional references, such as the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and Wikipedia compares fairly well to such sources.
How does Wikipedia do when it comes to more technical, and specifically health care, information? This is a critical question as many people use the internet and Wikipedia specifically as a source of medical information, often to guide medical decisions or self-treatment. A recent study set out to test that very question.
The authors picked the top 10 most costly medical conditions. They then assigned two physicians in training to each of the ten article, with instructions to identify every assertion in their assigned article. That means they needed to pull out every statement or implication of fact. They were instructed to then search the published literature to see if the assertion was correct. Other reviewers then compared the results of the two reviewers assigned to each article.
Finally the results were tallied. The authors essentially did a statistical analysis to see if there was a significant discordance between Wikipedia assertions and the results of up-to-date peer-reviewed research. They found a significant discordance in 9 of the 10 article examined.
If you look through table 3 of the article, you will see for each article and each reviewer the number of factual assertions and the number that were discordant with the research. It’s variable, but overall 24% of the assertions were discordant with the research.
That level of error in Wikipedia articles for common medical topics is certainly concerning. Not only patients, but medical students and even physicians admit to using Wikipedia as a source of information.
The authors acknowledge that one of the weaknesses of the study is that they did not verify that the results of literature search were themselves accurate. It is also possible that some of the assertions related to questions that are currently unanswered or controversial. So every discordance does not necessarily mean Wikipedia is wrong, but it is a reasonable approximation.
The study also did not consider errors of omission, only factual statements made within the articles.
The results of this study reinforce my overall attitude toward Wikipedia, reflected in my use of it. For general information that is not highly technical or controversial, Wikipedia is a good first stop. It’s a good way to get a quick overview of a topic and see what all the relevant issues are. I don’t rely on Wikipedia, however, as an ultimate resource. I always attempt to track back to original sources.
For highly technical issues, Wikipedia is variable. If one or more true experts have dedicated some time to an article, it may be excellent – as good as any textbook. If not, then the information can be highly incomplete, superficial, or even wrong.
You also have to be careful with any controversial topics. The Wikipedia editors are doing an excellent job of policing such articles, but still the information is only as reliable as the expertise of the authors, and is subject to all of their biases.
Conclusion
Wikipedia, for good or ill, is now by far the most popular general reference for information. The wiki format is incredibly powerful, and I think we are stuck with it in some form for the foreseeable future.
It is also evolving, and the editors of Wikipedia are dedicated to improving its quality and reliability.
We all share the responsibility for making Wikipedia the best resource possible. If you have an area of expertise, Wikipedia is an excellent way to share that expertise with the world. If you have an ideological axe to grind, don’t grind it in Wikipedia.
For users, Wikipedia is an excellent resource, but not an ultimate authoritative source of information. For important issues, you still need to find original expert references or peer-reviewed sources.A Japanese blogger named Yoppy sat himself down outside the Ginza Apple store last week to wait for the iPhone 6.
Apple hasn’t announced a release date for the iPhone 6, but it’s expected in September. Yoppy got totally screwed on the iPhone 5 when he only showed up a day early.
Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past, Yoppy settled in for the long haul.
Eventually, however, curiosity got the best of him. It’s miles easier to wait for something so long as you know when it’ll be coming. So he tried to figure out exactly when the new iPhone would be released.
Yoppy learned that a specific date had not yet been set, so he resolved to enter the store and demand an answer.
Turns out Apple hasn’t even announced the iPhone 6 yet as a concept, much less as a product scheduled to be released. Darn!
Yoppy decided to call it quits.
But hey, it looks like he’s already found something better to get excited about:
H/T TechnoBuffalo | Photos via Yoppy/Twitter and Thomas Van Der Weerd remix by Jason Reed (CC BY-SA 2.0)Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer, Zakir Hussain: Tiny Desk Concert
Set List "Bubbles" "Bahar"
"Beyond category." That's what Duke Ellington used to call musicians who were simply the best at what they do. And that's certainly the case for Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain. Individually, they're world-class masters of the banjo, the bass fiddle and the tabla, respectively. They conquered mere technical prowess long ago.
All three now are at a place where music truly becomes so intuitive that a simple rehearsal — as we got to see before this Tiny Desk Concert in the offices of NPR Music — is an exercise in wordless communication. Just before we rolled tape, the trio worked on a section of one of the songs that involved some unison playing, and I was caught off guard, thinking they didn't really nail it when they tried it three times in a row. Then, when it came time to perform for an audience, they, of course, performed it flawlessly.
Ellington had no idea that his words would eventually be applied to a banjo player, a bass fiddle player and an South Asian percussionist. But sit back and enjoy these two pieces from The Melody of Rhythm, and you'll see how right Ellington was.MUMBAI: Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray on Sunday made it clear his party will not lend unsolicited support to BJP in forming the government in Maharashtra, saying "let them make the first move.""I am sitting at my home peacefully, if somebody thinks our support is needed, they can approach us. Somebody from that side (BJP) should come to us with a proposal. How can I go about offering my support?" he told reporters as the poll threw up a hung assembly and BJP was set to form its government with surprise backing from NCP."What if I approach them and they say no and tell me we already have NCP's support," he asked.Uddhav said if BJP was okay with NCP's support, "let them go with NCP".About BJP patriarch LK Advani's comments favouring a reunion with Shiv Sena, Uddhav said," This is what I had expected. When Balasaheb (Sena founder Bal Thackeray), Atal Behari Vajpayee, Advani, Pramod Mahajan and Gopinath Munde were around, ours was not just a political alliance, but a close relationship.""We have secured 60 seats which is not a bad performance," he said, adding "nobody can corner me.""We defeated those who caused anguish to late Bal Thackeray," Uddhav said, in an apparent reference to the defeat of former Sena leaders Narayan Rane and Ganesh Naik.He also raised the issue of creation of a Vidarbha state, a cause supported by BJP and staunchly opposed by Shiv Sena, saying, "We are ready to extend support if we get an assurance that Maharashtra will remain united."House Republicans successfully passed a Farm Bill Thursday by splitting apart funding for food stamps from federal agricultural policy, a move that infuriated the White House and congressional Democrats who spent most of the day trying to delay a final vote.
Lawmakers voted 216 to 208 to make changes to federal agricultural policy and conservation programs and end direct subsidy payments to farmers. But the measure says nothing about funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, which historically constitutes about 80 percent of the funding in a Farm Bill.
No House Democrat voted for the measure. Twelve Republicans also opposed it. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) voted in favor of it, even though speakers traditionally don't vote.
The vote made clear that Republicans intend to make significant reductions in food stamp money and handed Republican leaders a much-needed victory three weeks after conservative lawmakers and rural state Democrats revolted and blocked the original version of the bill that included food stamp money.
Several Democratic lawmakers rose in opposition to the plan early Thursday as debate began, with several of them repeatedly saying that the new bill "hurts the children of America" or "increases hunger in America.
Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) mockingly made a parliamentary inquiry, saying he had just obtained a copy of the 600-page bill.
"It appears to have no nutrition title at all, is this a printing error?" Butterfield asked.
The nutrition title is the portion of the bill that sets food stamp funding.
Republicans attempted to tamp down the opposition by assuring Democrats that they will hold votes on a separate measure dealing with food stamp funding later in the month.
Current federal farm and food aid policy expires on Sept. 30 and failure to pass a new bill in time means American farmers will fall back to a 1949 law governing the industry, which could lead to steep price increases on items such as milk.
Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-Ohio), a member of the House Agriculture Committee, said moving forward Thursday makes sense in order to ensure that negotiations between the House and Senate on a final Farm Bill can begin later this summer.
GRAPHIC: Americans on food stamps
House Republican leaders rushed late Wednesday to set up Thursday's vote after securing sufficient support among rank-and-file members. The decision comes as many rural-state Republicans are facing pressure from constituents for so far failing to approve the legislation.
The White House said late Wednesday that President Obama would veto any Farm Bill that fails to comprehensively address federal farm and food aid policy. In a statement, White House officials said they had insufficient time to review the bill.
"It is apparent, though, that the bill does not contain sufficient commodity and crop insurance reforms and does not invest in renewable energy, an important source of jobs and economic growth in rural communities across the country," the statement said. "Legislation as important as a Farm Bill should be constructed in a comprehensive approach that helps strengthen all aspects of the Nation."
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) blasted Republicans for violating their own rules on waiting three days before voting on major legislation.
Hoyer called the new Farm Bill "a bill to nowhere," and said that Senate Democrats would reject the House version even if it passes. "This dead-on-arrival messaging bill only seeks to accomplish one objective: to make it appear that Republicans are moving forward with important legislation even while they continue to struggle at governing," Hoyer said.
Conservative organizations closely aligned with dozens of House Republicans also cast doubt on the new bill.
The Club for Growth said that while it supports splitting up farm and food policy, the new farm-only bill "is still loaded down with market-distorting giveaways to special interests with no path established to remove the government's involvement in the agriculture industry." The group also faulted House GOP leaders for proceeding with what it calls a "rope-a-dope exercise" that likely will result in House and Senate negotiators restoring commodity and food stamp funding opposed by Republicans.
Heritage Action said the new bill would wrongly make permanent several programs, including aid to sugar producers that would drive up costs for customers and taxpayers.
Conservative GOP lawmakers joined with Democrats last month to defeat a broad, five-year farm bill, in the latest rebuke to House GOP leaders, who have struggled to control the chamber to pass major legislation.
Conservatives objected to the bill's spending levels, while Democrats opposed a $20.5 billion cut to food stamps.
The surprise defeat signaled the difficulty congressional leaders face in the coming months in passing legislation on the budget and immigration that is expected to be debated this month and in the fall.
Follow Ed O'Keefe on Twitter: @edatpostA "nightmare," Bill Walton calls it.
He's not talking about the many blessed periods of his life. He's not talking about winning a record 88 straight games for UCLA in the early 1970s, as a carrottop 6-foot-11 revolution -- a passing, jump-shooting, rebounding, shot-blocking do-everything dream who led the Portland Trail Blazers to their only title, earning Finals MVP and NBA MVP honors in the late '70s. He's not talking about all the magical things that happened to make him, to this day, the world's tallest and loudest evangelist for the Church of Delightful Teamwork.
He's talking about what followed, the grinding injury-induced, soul-aching decline in the early '80s, when, as he says, "all those dreams came crashing down." Less than a decade removed from his heyday, Walton had devolved into a frail visage of his former self, constantly on crutches, languishing in what seemed like his final days with the god-awful Clippers. He's talking about the years when he should have been in his prime but instead was shuttling in and out of hospitals, catering to a string of foot and ankle injuries that sabotaged what could have been one of the greatest careers ever. He's talking about those years as a dad, all the years he worried that all his stress and negativity would poison Adam, Nate, Chris and Luke, who were too young to have seen their father when he worked in the embrace of selfless champions like John Wooden and Jack Ramsay.
"I'm a huge believer in early childhood education," he says, by which he means that in his personal religion -- backed by plenty of evidence he's happy to share -- there's a sacred window of time, a few early years in every life that largely shape the rest. At that point, he says a life is at its most impressionable, easily molded.
When he was around their age, he found one of the great loves of his life -- this game -- through the radio, listening to legendary Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn narrate mythical figures whipping the ball around, playing the "team game," Walton says. "That was what shaped me." He says all this in a long, beautiful setup to be sure you truly feel just how desperate, fearful and worried he was, as a father, in the mid-1980s, when that window was open for all of his sons, and, facing one of the darkest chapters of his professional life, he was in no position to show them what love looks -- no feels -- like on the basketball court.
That's what his boys needed, and he didn't have much time left to get it for them. So in the summer of 1985, he looked to the team he learned to love through the radio, believing it could rescue both him and his boys. "When I begged and pleaded and ultimately bought my way onto the Celtics, yes, it was a selfish move on my part," Walton explains, "but I also really wanted the children to know what it was like to be part of a special team. I had no idea how special it would be."
Susie Walton was outnumbered. Whenever Bill Walton's wife turned her back, her boys were stirring up trouble, such as putting all the couch cushions at the bottom of the stairs of their three-story Cambridge home and then leaping down from the second floor. "Bill, take them to practice," she'd often say, exasperated. "I need five minutes by myself." And so he'd haul them off to Hellenic College in Brookline, just outside of Boston, where then-Celtics guard Rick Carlisle remembers the Celtics had just had a new Jacuzzi installed for therapy -- a snazzy addition in those days.
"Almost from day one," Carlisle says, "nobody would get in it because there was a cloud of mud in there from those kids going in there and basically bathing in it."
They also poured grape soda in the tub -- and carried out an array of pranks on behalf of players. "We were their henchmen," Luke says. "Anything they wanted us to do, we did it. And we had no limits." Shaving cream in someone's sneakers? No sweat. Throwing their clothes into the showers? Easy. Danny Ainge preferred using the boys to help create diversions so that he could sneak Icy Hot (or its equivalent) into teammates' jockstraps. Kevin McHale and Larry Bird would send the boys on mischievous errands, then tell Bill after the fact. "Guys, please!" he'd tell them. "These kids are hard enough to manage."
They brawled because they were brothers and boys at that age, but Adam, the oldest, believes in other factors. The first: Uncle Bruce, a 6-6 ex-Dallas Cowboys lineman. "My dad said he was never scared of anyone except his brother, and that's the type of mentality that he used to put into us, where he expected us to fight as hard as him and his brother fought," Adam says. "So we were all really nice kids because our mom was so super nice that we were brought up super nice. But we used to fight like we were the meanest kids on the block."
Bill and Susie weren't strict disciplinarians, forward Scott Wedman says. They were free spirits, and so were their kids. Regardless, blood was shed, most notably at the team's charity fashion show, where they wore tuxedos but started horsing around backstage. A nose was bloodied -- various accounts dispute which nose, exactly. "Man, I can't take you guys anywhere!" Bill told them. Bill's teammates laughed. "Believe me: they were little hellions, man," McHale says.
It wasn't unusual for family to hang around the team; the Celtics encouraged it, which Susie first saw at a Christmas party, when she spotted dozens of players' and executives' children running around. "We didn't hang out with a lot of basketball people until we got to the Celtics, because when you got to Boston, it was one big family," Susie says now. "Bill found his home in Boston, and the whole Celtics group embraced the kids." Her boys sprinted down the aisles of the team bus, attended practice, and Bird says he can still picture them bouncing around the locker room. "They were everywhere," he says. "They were part of it -- as close as you can get to the team without being on the team."
The Waltons dined often at Bird's Brookline house, where the boys bounded into his basement to play Pac-Man, pinball or Nerf basketball in their socks. Nate slipped and chipped a front tooth, then bragged at school about where it happened, considering it a badge of honor. "They wouldn't damage stuff," Bird says, "but if you yelled at one of them, Luke is probably the one that would take it serious. The rest of them, 10 minutes they'd do the same thing." Though Luke was only 5, he and Bird grew as close as family, especially because Luke looked as if he could be Bird's son, with both bearing golden mops. But their personalities -- quiet, measured, funny, focused -- seemed to click, too. "As a kid, I thought we were actually friends, [like] 'Larry and I are friends.' But we had a great relationship." Luke showed up to school clad in Celtics wristbands, socks, a Celtics jacket and, always, a Larry Bird T-shirt.
Saddled with injuries, Bill played only 10 games that next season and didn't play again. After playing two seasons in Boston, the family moved back to San Diego, where they rooted for the Celtics, Red Sox, Patriots and Bruins. "Who'd have thunk a girl from Southern California would say that Boston is her favorite all-time city to live in, but it was great," Susie says. Bird visited them and told the boys bedtime stories about how he'd shoot during the winter by wearing socks on his hands. He played pickup basketball in their driveway -- Bird and Luke on one team against Bill and another Walton boy. Luke admits that his Boston experience sounds surreal, but at the time, hanging around a historically stacked roster was all he knew.
How stacked? Oh, it just featured five future Hall of Famers on the court in Bird, McHale, Walton, center Robert Parish and guard Dennis Johnson, plus another on the sideline in head coach K.C. Jones, who won eight titles as a Celtics guard. Reinforcements included a former All-Star in Wedman, a future All-Star (and NBA head coach and GM) in Ainge, as well as two future NBA coaches in Carlisle and Sam Vincent. And watching over everyone while taking drags of his customary stogie, was team president Red Auerbach, who presided over nine Celtics titles as a head coach and six as a general manager. "That Boston Celtics team," Bill says, "was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very special."
And the boys made an impression. "They all had great intellectual curiosity about basketball and life," Carlisle says. "But I could tell that Luke was the one that had the greatest interest in the game. To be a kid his age at that time and to be around a team that had five Hall of Famers is an exceptional situation to be in."
Bill indeed hoped that situation would leave an indelible mark just as his own sports background had with him. From his first coach when he was 8, a local fireman named Rocky Graciano, to an undefeated senior year at Helix High School, to winning titles for Wooden at UCLA and then a title in Portland, Walton calls his basketball life "over the top -- better than perfect." And like any parent, he wanted better for his kids. "The importance of what sports means in a young person's life, I had that," Bill says. "Every coach I ever had as a child was a John Wooden disciple and that had such an impact on me, but I'm also a huge Celtics fan of Red Auerbach and Bill Russell and the entire Celtic history -- that is what made me fall in love."
Luke would go on to be coached by Lute Olson at Arizona, then Phil Jackson in the NBA, then coach alongside Steve Kerr with the Golden State Warriors, some of the most respected names in the game's history. But, today, Luke looks back on his two years in Boston and says, "That's when I first fell in love with basketball."
For the first time, Luke hated basketball. "I hated it," he says. That feeling swept over him one summer in Los Angeles late in high school. He had been invited to play in an AAU tournament, filled with other high-profile prep players, but having never played AAU ball before, he wasn't sure what to expect. At the bare minimum, Luke believed they'd play the same style that he and his brothers believed in, the same style they'd been raised on and played at rec centers all over San Diego: one featuring ball movement and joy.
Their father had preached team basketball for years, declaring it the only way to play, and he'd reference the stars who embodied that style -- Bird, Russell, Magic Johnson, etc. "Then you're on a great team, the sense of selflessness, the sense of team, the sense of passing, the sense of we'll do whatever it takes to get this done for everybody -- that's always been my dream in life," Bill says. "That's why I love Bill Russell so much. That's why I love basketball. That's why I love John Wooden. That's why I love the team. That's why my children have so many positive experiences through sport." But when his boys were tykes, his lessons sounded like gibberish.
It was only when they moved to Boston and saw the Celtics play that everything started to click. "OK, Dad, we get it. We now know what you're talking about," they'd tell him. But it wasn't as though they believed the Celtics were special, unique. "It wasn't that we said, 'Ah, these guys are doing it better than everybody else,' " Nate says. "We said, 'Everybody else is doing it wrong compared to how the Boston Celtics play.' " From then on, the Walton boys dribbled sparingly, cut back door and measured success in double-digit assists. "It didn't matter what else you did," Adam says, "If you didn't have 10 assists, it didn't matter." So Luke's dismay, upon seeing that first AAU game, and players shooting as soon as they touched the ball? Palpable. "I've never not had fun playing until then," he says. In fact, he couldn't understand how, for the first time, the game he loved had made him feel miserable. He left the court fuming, telling himself he'd never play in AAU again.
But Luke could always find solace in Larry Bird VHS highlights, which he and his brothers watched often. Luke spent hours in the backyard, mimicking Bird. "Every move I saw him make in those videos, I would try to do," he says. "Then I'd set up the whole game in my mind, like we were playing a seven-game series and I was out there with Larry and I'd get the game-winning shot. And if I missed it, the other team won that game." Unfortunately, Luke adds, with a wry grin, he couldn't quite shoot like Bird. But there was another element to Bird's game that Luke carried into every game: Make your teammates better. A cliché ideal? Perhaps, but one that Bill preached for years -- that the ultimate measure of a player was how much he helped those around him. After games in high school, when he was good enough to pour in plenty of points, he'd ask himself, "Am I out there making my teammates better?" If he ever needed a reminder, he only needed to look around his bedroom: The walls were covered with posters of Larry Bird.
The lessons that the Celtics imprinted and set in motion carried on through Luke's decadelong NBA career and two years as an assistant with the Warriors before coming to the Lakers as the NBA's youngest head coach, at 36. "He'll be fine," Bird says. "He'll be a lifer."
Last season, when McHale was coaching the Rockets, he looked down the sideline when they faced the Warriors, he saw Luke and memories came flooding back from 30 years ago. "I followed them from that point on," McHale says of his time with the Walton kids. "Now, as hard as it is to believe, I actually cheer for the Lakers to win games, only because of Luke."
(Fear not, Lakers fans questioning Luke's loyalty in the NBA's top rivalry: his Celtics fandom faded when he was part of the Lakers team that lost to Boston in the 2008 Finals. "I got to a point where not only did I not like the Celtics," Luke says, "but I did not like the Bruins, I did not like the Patriots and I did not like the Red Sox.")
Nate returned to the Garden some years later, looked in |
the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.
Major League Baseball was established in 1869. That predates the invention of the lightbulb by a decade, and the earliest ball players would have to wait another 16 years before taking a car to the park was even a possibility. The world has changed since 1869, but one of the few things that’s remained the same is the baseball uniform. And it's not like the league doesn't have to money to upgrade their looks — these guys are getting paid up to $29 million a year. Yet they’re still trotting out in trousers and button-up shirts more formal and seemingly less functional than what the modern American now wears to the office.
It doesn’t make any sense, so I spoke with sportswear designers and sports scientists to find out what the baseball uniform would look like if we were to rebuild it from the ground up.
The first thing I was told? It will never happen. Baseball is way too traditional, and players grew up watching their heroes in these uniforms. Irving Perez, a student at University of Oregon’s sports design program who worked on a project rethinking the baseball uniform, spoke with players and found “they don't really care for a change as of now,” he tells me. “They grew up knowing that this is what it is to be playing baseball.”
The uniforms, currently made by Majestic, have changed since the mid-1800s, but barely. The biggest differences are in the materials: They’re stretchier and more breathable, but even the fabrics leave designers wanting more.
“It's not actually that we are biologically, the human race, getting better at anything, it's just that we have better equipment to help us do that.”
Soudi Masouleh, a sportswear designer who’s worked with Nike and Asics, is based in Britain, but even she knows America’s pastime is way too traditional to ever dramatically change the uniform. She thinks there’s a lot that can be done with its materials alone, though. According to Masouleh, advancements in sportswear are the reason human performance keeps peaking. Everyone may seem faster and stronger, but “it's not actually that we are biologically, the human race, getting better at anything, it's just that we have better equipment to help us do that,” Masouleh tells me. Perhaps we’re depriving ourselves of baseball’s next golden era by keeping the uniforms static.
“The first thing we normally do as sportswear designers is study the actual sport and the movements of the athlete and the environment that they compete in or play in,” Masouleh says. Working from here and just looking at the materials, Masouleh observes that with a summer sport like baseball, new fabrics can provide UV protection, compression, and even collars with a gel inside that can keep the neck cool — a trick used by long-distance runners to thermoregulate the body. The team at the NY Sports Science Lab I speak to wonders why there can’t be undergarments with a “3D biomechanical analysis component.”
Michael Greene, the lab’s head performance-enhancement specialist, speaks excitedly about how this would unlock the ability to analyze every movement of a player, from his swing to how much he’s affected by fatigue toward the end of the game. These are all half-measures, though. When I really press him for details about what a baseball uniform could look like if we treated tradition the way the MLB treated the Montreal Expos, all the responses grouped around one concept.
The experts thought less about rebuilding something completely new and more about borrowing what works in other sports. Rugby is the game that kept coming up. Rugby and baseball players have similar body types, according to Perez, and that sport is willing to experiment with more creative ideas. Masouleh talks about engineering rugby jerseys with absorbent patches of fabric so players can easily wipe dirt and sweat off their hands. Pitchers trying to pinpoint balls thrown over 90 miles per hour could benefit greatly from an addition like this.
Susan Sokolowski, the director and associate professor of the sports product design graduate program at the University of Oregon, compares baseball to shotput. “A shotputter wears a tank top,” she says. “So full mobility, no sleeves, no double layers, a base layer, and a jersey.” You can look toward soccer for a solution for all the diving and sliding. Masouleh suggests compression socks. Sokolowski explains that the construction of the baseball uniform, unlike what’s worn by players in other major sports, is still made by a sewing process where pieces of fabrics are put together. Other uniforms, like those for soccer and football, are made out of what Sokolowski calls an “engineered textile.” This allows for fewer separate pieces of fabric and better performance. It can also eliminate extra layers, like the slider shorts baseball players wear to skid across the ground.
Perez’s mocked-up uniform focuses a lot on the torso, neck, and waist of the player. His version allows for better movement in the shoulders, for throwing, and around the body, for swinging the bat. It also gets granular, taking into consideration how to best apply a logo to keep weight down.
“They still wear belts,” Perez says, and I half-expect him to shout out for Christ’s sake. “To me, that's very, very old school.”
What seems to irk these designers the most is the archaic pieces that have hung on for the ride over a century and a half. “They still wear belts,” Perez says, and I half-expect him to shout out for Christ’s sake. “To me, that's very, very old school.” Perez says that the belt is just another layer on a player’s body that can restrict running and body movement in the swing. “It's one of those things where you just don't understand why it's still in the space,” he says. Sokolowski adds that every other sport outside golf has adopted an elastic waistband with a drawcord.
And because the uniform has become largely decorative at this point, most players have to wear their activewear underneath all that polyester. “Gosh, it's really hot during baseball seasons in the summer,” Sokolowski says. “Why would you wear two layers of apparel? People are kind of suffering but don't even really acknowledge it."
Part of this comes down to the MLB’s current manufacturer of uniforms. Majestic is a Pennsylvania-based company that prides itself on making its products in the USA and has been exclusively outfitting MLB players for games since 2004. Before Majestic, companies like Rawlings and Russell provided uniforms. Sokolowski describes these companies as “smaller American brands that didn't have the resources and the ability to spend a lot of money on [research and development] and materials.”
That’ll change in 2020, when Under Armour officially takes over as the official provider of MLB uniforms. Under Armour is known for its innovation, and the team of sports scientists believe Under Armour will come in with “new technology, new fabrics, and make it possible to move in a more efficient manner,” says the lab’s sports and conditioning coach, Anthony Flask, who’s also a former strength and conditioning coach with the Milwaukee Brewers.
Under Armour declined to talk about what its uniforms will look like come 2020, and did not respond to requests for comment. However, looking at the baseball jerseys Under Armour currently offers — the brand outfits 42 Division I schools as of last October, according to The Baltimore Sun — there is technology fused in there. Fabric equipped with “moisture transport and soil release technology,” similar to what Masouleh envisioned; a mesh back to reduce weight while increasing breathability; and jerseys that eschew buttons and come in a V-neck, like Perez’s.
Under Armour will hopefully take its MLB uniforms to the next level to enhance performance potential. Flask repeatedly mentions to me that the current uniforms don’t restrict movement, but when I ask if they’re enhancing performance the way we see jerseys do in other sports, he says baseball hasn’t been able to keep up. What is apparent after talking to the experts, though, is that baseball fans are giving up better performances and players are suffering all in the name of style. That’s actually a concept I can get behind, tbh.This article is over 3 years old
In a city divided by an upcoming vote, tens of thousands are expected to join a candlelit vigil for 26th anniversary of China crushing pro-democracy protests
Tens of thousands of people are to join a candlelit vigil in Hong Kong Thursday to mark the 26th anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown, with the city deeply divided in the lead-up to a vote on how to choose its next leader.
Hong Kong is the only location where a major commemoration happens on Chinese soil. Residents were expected to gather in Victoria Park to mark the military’s brutal crushing of pro-democracy protests in central Beijing in 1989.
Hundreds – by some estimates more than a thousand – died after the Communist party sent tanks to crush demonstrations in the square at the heart of Beijing, where student-led protesters had staged a peaceful seven-week sit-in to demand democratic reforms.
“This is an ongoing struggle for justice,” said Richard Tsoi of the Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which organises the vigil.
“It’s important that Hong Kong people do not forget,” he added, predicting 150,000 would come.
Last year’s 25th anniversary saw a record 180,000 attend, according to organisers.
Tsoi said he expects the event to pass peacefully, although it comes as tensions are high just two weeks ahead of a vote on the government’s controversial election roadmap.
The anniversary also comes after huge pro-democracy protests that paralysed parts of the city for months last year.
The proposal goes before the legislature on 17 June and lays out a plan for the first public vote for Hong Kong’s chief executive.
It sticks to a stipulation from China that candidates must be screened, a ruling that triggered last year’s street rallies.
Campaigners call the proposal “fake democracy”, and opposition lawmakers have pledged to vote it down.
The split will be reflected Thursday, with pro-Beijing groups – who support the Hong Kong government’s election package – planning their own gatherings.
But there is also division within the pro-democracy camp.
Hong Kong University’s student union, which has taken part in all previous 4 June vigils and took a leading role in last year’s demonstrations, said it wants to “provide an alternative” on its campus this year, with 1,000 expected.
Organisers said they did not agree with the alliance’s premise that democratisation of China should be the prerequisite for democracy in Hong Kong.
“We would like to provide a different event so we can discuss Hong Kong’s future as Hong Kong people,” said the union’s president, Billy Fung.
The city is largely self-governed and has far greater civil liberties than on the mainland, where public discussion of Tiananmen is forbidden.
The Hong Kong Federation of Students also said it would not participate in the main event as an organisation because members could not reach a consensus on whether to attend.
“We respect that this year some people will have other activities,” Tsoi said, “but we are confident that many people, including the new generation, will join our vigil.”
Police will cordon off roads near the park and said there would be sufficient officers to handle “any unpredictable incident”.
Local media reported that 7,000 officers would be on standby.EXCLUSIVE: As it begins to dawn on everyone in Hollywood the reality that Sony Pictures was the victim of a cyberterrorist act perpetrated by a hostile foreign nation on American soil, questions will be asked about how and why it happened, ending with Sony cancelling the theatrical release of the satirical comedy The Interview because of its depiction of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. One of those issues will be this: Why didn’t anybody speak out while Sony Pictures chiefs Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton were embarrassed by emails served up by the media, bolstering the credibility of hackers for when they attached as a cover letter to Lynton’s emails a threat to blow up theaters if The Interview was released?
George Clooney has the answer. The most powerful people in Hollywood were so fearful to place themselves in the cross hairs of hackers that they all refused to sign a simple petition of support that Clooney and his agent, CAA’s Bryan Lourd, circulated to the top people in film, TV, records and other areas. Not a single person would sign. Here, Clooney discusses the petition and how it is just part of many frightening ramifications that we are all just coming to grips with.
DEADLINE: How could this have happened, that terrorists achieved their aim of cancelling a major studio film? We watched it unfold, but how many people realized that Sony legitimately was under attack?
GEORGE CLOONEY: A good portion of the press abdicated its real duty. They played the fiddle while Rome burned. There was a real story going on. With just a little bit of work, you could have found out that it wasn’t just probably North Korea; it was North Korea. The Guardians of Peace is a phrase that Nixon used when he visited China. When asked why he was helping South Korea, he said it was because we are the Guardians of Peace. Here, we’re talking about an actual country deciding what content we’re going to have. This affects not just movies, this affects every part of business that we have. That’s the truth. What happens if a newsroom decides to go with a story, and a country or an individual or corporation decides they don’t like it? Forget the hacking part of it. You have someone threaten to blow up buildings, and all of a sudden everybody has to bow down. Sony didn’t pull the movie because they were scared; they pulled the movie because all the theaters said they were not going to run it. And they said they were not going to run it because they talked to their lawyers and those lawyers said if somebody dies in one of these, then you’re going to be responsible.
We have a new paradigm, a new reality, and we’re going to have to come to real terms with it all the way down the line. This was a dumb comedy that was about to come out. With the First Amendment, you’re never protecting Jefferson; it’s usually protecting some guy who’s burning a flag or doing something stupid. This is a silly comedy, but the truth is, what it now says about us is a whole lot. We have a responsibility to stand up against this. That’s not just Sony, but all of us, including my good friends in the press who have the responsibility to be asking themselves: What was important? What was the important story to be covering here? The hacking is terrible because of the damage they did to all those people. Their medical records, that is a horrible thing, their Social Security numbers. Then, to turn around and threaten to blow people up and kill people, and just by that threat alone we change what we do for a living, that’s the actual definition of terrorism.
DEADLINE: I’ve been chasing the story of the petition you were circulating for a week now. Where is it, and how were these terrorists able to isolate Sony from the herd and make them so vulnerable?
CLOONEY: Here’s the brilliant thing they did. You embarrass them first, so that no one gets on your side. After the Obama joke, no one was going to get on the side of Amy, and so suddenly, everyone ran for the hills. Look, I can’t make an excuse for that joke, it is what it is, a terrible mistake. Having said that, it was used as a weapon of fear, not only for everyone to disassociate themselves from Amy but also to feel the fear themselves. They know what they themselves have written in their emails, and they’re afraid.
DEADLINE: What happened when you sent the petition, and who did you ask to sign it?
CLOONEY: It was a large number of people. It was sent to basically the heads of every place. They told Bryan Lourd, “I can’t sign this.” What? How can you not sign this? I’m not going to name anyone, that’s not what I’m here to do, but nobody signed the letter, which I’ll read to you right now.
On November 24 of this year, Sony Pictures was notified that it was the victim of a cyber attack, the effects of which is the most chilling and devastating of any cyber attack in the history of our country. Personal information including Social Security numbers, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers and the full texts of emails of tens of thousands of Sony employees was leaked online in an effort to scare and terrorize these workers. The hackers have made both demands and threats. The demand that Sony halt the release of its upcoming comedy The Interview, a satirical film about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Their threats vary from personal—you better behave wisely—to threatening physical harm—not only you but your family is in danger. North Korea has not claimed credit for the attack but has praised the act, calling it a righteous deed and promising merciless measures if the film is released. Meanwhile the hackers insist in their statement that what they’ve done so far is only a small part of our further plan. This is not just an attack on Sony. It involves every studio, every network, every business and every individual in this country. That is why we fully support Sony’s decision not to submit to these hackers’ demands. We know that to give in to these criminals now will open the door for any group that would threaten freedom of expression, privacy and personal liberty. We hope these hackers are brought to justice but until they are, we will not stand in fear. We will stand together.
DEADLINE: That doesn’t sound like a hard paper to sign.
CLOONEY: All that it is basically saying is, we’re not going to give in to a ransom. As we watched one group be completely vilified, nobody stood up. Nobody took that stand. Now, I say this is a situation we are going to have to come to terms with, a new paradigm and a new way of handling our business. Because this could happen to an electric company, a car company, a newsroom. It could happen to anybody.
DEADLINE: You said you won’t name names, but how many people were asked and refused to sign?
CLOONEY: It was a fairly large number. Having put together telethons where you have to get all the networks on board to do the telethon at the same time, the truth is once you get one or two, then everybody gets on board. It is a natural progression. So here, you get the first couple of people to sign it and … well, nobody wanted to be the first to sign on. Now, this isn’t finger-pointing on that. This is just where we are right now, how scared this industry has been made. Quite honestly, this would happen in any industry. I don’t know what the answer is, but what happened here is part of a much larger deal. A huge deal. And people are still talking about dumb emails. Understand what is going on right now, because the world just changed on your watch, and you weren’t even paying attention.
DEADLINE: What kind of constraints will this put on storytellers that want to shine a critical light on a place like Russia, for instance, with something like a movie about the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the KGB officer who left and became an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin?
CLOONEY: What’s going to happen is, you’re going to have trouble finding distribution. In general, when you’re doing films like that, the ones that are critical, those aren’t going to be studio films anyway. Most of the movies that got us in trouble, we started out by raising the money independently. But to distribute, you’ve got to go to a studio, because they’re the ones that distribute movies. The truth is, you’re going to have a much harder time finding distribution now. And that’s a chilling effect. We should be in the position right now of going on offense with this. I just talked to Amy an hour ago. She wants to put that movie out. What do I do? My partner Grant Heslov and I had the conversation with her this morning. Bryan and I had the conversation with her last night. Stick it online. Do whatever you can to get this movie out. Not because everybody has to see the movie, but because I’m not going to be told we can’t see the movie. That’s the most important part. We cannot be told we can’t see something by Kim Jong-un, of all f*cking people.
DEADLINE: Some have pointed fingers at the media that feasted on these tawdry emails. Were they culpable in giving the terrorists a foothold, as Aaron Sorkin has said?
CLOONEY: I do know something about the news world. I was sitting on the floors of newsrooms since I was seven years old, and I’ve been around them my whole life. I understand that someone looks at a story with famous people in it and you want to put it out. OK. It’s a drag, and it’s lame. But there’s not much you can do about it. You can’t legislate good taste. The problem is that what happened was, while all of that was going on, there was a huge news story that no one was really tracking. They were just enjoying all the salacious sh*t instead of saying, “Wait a minute, is this really North Korea? And if it is, are we really going to bow to that?” You could point fingers at Sony pulling the film, but they didn’t have any theaters, they all pulled out. By the way, the other studios were probably very happy because they had movies of their own going in for Christmas at the same cineplexes. There’s this constant circle, this feeding frenzy. What I’m concerned about is content. I’m concerned that content now is constantly going to be judged on a different level. And that’s a terrible thing to do. What we don’t need happening in any of our industries is censorship. The FBI guys said this could have happened to our government. That’s how good these guys were. It’s a serious moment in time that needs to be addressed seriously, as opposed to frivolously. That’s what is most important here.
DEADLINE: As Amy and Michael took their turn in the barrel because of these emails, some questioned why they’d approve a movie that ends with the death of a standing dictator in a hostile foreign country. Others have said she should be able to make any film she wants. It’s a satire. What do you think?
CLOONEY: The South Park guys did it. They blew up his father’s head. The truth of the matter is, of course you should be able to make any movie you want. And, you should take the ramifications for it. Meaning, people can boycott the movie and not go see your film. They can say they’ll never see a Sony movie again. That’s all fine. That’s the risk you take for the decision you make. But to say we’re going to make you pull it. We’re going to censor you. That’s a whole other game. That is playing in some serious waters and it’s a very dangerous pool.
DEADLINE: You mentioned Team America. Some theaters wanted to show it on Christmas after The Interview was pulled as a show of defiance and Paramount pulled it back. They too are afraid of being in the hacker cross hairs.
CLOONEY: Everybody is looking at this from self interest and they are right in this sense. I’m a movie theater and I say, “OK, there’s been a threat. Not really a credible threat, but there’s a threat, and my lawyers call and tell me, “Well, you run the movie and you could be liable.” And all the other movies around it are going to have their business hurt. I understand that, and it makes complete sense. But that’s where we really need to figure what the real response should be. I don’t know what that is yet. We should be talking about that and not pointing fingers at people right now. Right now, it’s not just our community but a lot of communities. We need to figure out, what are we going to do now — when we know the cyberattacks are real, and they’re state-sponsored.
DEADLINE: Knowing what we do now, what does the government owe Sony?
CLOONEY: I’ve seen statements they’ve put out and what the president said and what the response is. The truth is, it’s all new territory and nobody knows how to handle it. I don’t think anyone was prepared for it. So now we’ll be prepared for it, hopefully. Everybody was doing their jobs, but somehow, we have allowed North Korea to dictate content, and that is just insane.
DEADLINE: You said everyone acts based on self interest. What’s yours?
CLOONEY: I wanted to have the conversation because I’m worried about content. Frankly, I’m at an age where I’m not doing action films or romantic comedies. The movies we make are the ones with challenging content, and I don’t want to see it all just be superhero movies. Nothing wrong with them, but it’s nice for people to have other films out there.Hilary Benn has ruled out running for Labour leader in the wake of his dramatic speech on Syria and spoken of his regret at people using his father’s memory to attack his position in favour of airstrikes.
The shadow foreign secretary, son of the late antiwar Labour grandee Tony Benn, condemned former SNP first minister Alex Salmond’s comment that his father would be “burling in his grave” at his speech advocating bombing during the House of Commons debate on Syria.
“I agree with his fellow SNP MP who described it as repulsive. I thought, ‘Well, pretty cheap,’” he told the Guardian.
While he won respect for sticking to his views and speaking from the frontbench against Jeremy Corbyn, others accused him of betraying his leader and his father. Benn revealed he had replied to the many emails he had received since, even abusive ones.
“I’ve said, I’m sorry you’ve decided to use my father’s death as a way of trying to attack me. It’s interesting that some people feel they can use him to bash me over the head, like they own him and his memory, and that somehow I have dishonoured his memory, and that I have some responsibility to think entirely like him. I replied to a woman the night before last, ‘Can I just gently point out, with great respect, you have absolutely no idea what my parents would have thought of me?’”
After his speech, which moved some MPs to tears and applause and polarised opinion within his party, the odds on Benn succeeding Corbyn as Labour leader abruptly shortened. But while he acknowledged that Labour was going through a difficult time and compared it to the internal struggles of the 1980s, he insisted he had no desire ever to lead the party.
Emily Benn tells Alex Salmond: take back your comments about my grandfather Tony Read more
“I can look you in the eye and say, no, no, no,” he said. “I have absolutely no interest in leading the Labour party. And that is the truth. It’s a very difficult and challenging job. And I don’t want to do it.”
Benn denied that speaking out against Corbyn was a betrayal but acknowledged there was a “bit of tension” and they were “in an awkward situation”.
“I didn’t betray anybody. How could standing up for what you think is the right thing to do in these circumstances ever be betrayal?” he said.
Asked whether he thought he would be sacked, Benn said: “I didn’t make the speech because I wanted to go out with a bang. Of course, you take the consequence. But I never thought perhaps I shouldn’t say this because I might lose my job.”
Following the reshuffle, it emerged that Corbyn and Benn had agreed there would be no repeat of the Syria situation in which both men spoke from the frontbench with opposing views. But it is clear that Benn still intends to speak his mind on the remaining big point of contention within Labour – whether to support the replacement of Trident nuclear submarines.
“Look, Syria is done. That’s over. The Commons has taken its decision,” he said. “We’ve got the deterrent coming up, and Jeremy knows there are people in the shadow cabinet who agree we should maintain it, and those who think we should get rid of it. People are entitled to express their view on that subject. And on the rest, we’re going to work together.”
Benn said of his own politics that he believes in “a compromise between the purity of the ideal and being able to help people”.
“You can be completely happy with your beliefs – but if you don’t win, you can’t help anybody,” he said.
Asked whether he thinks Corbyn is too wedded to the ideal, Benn said: “Jeremy is a good, decent, honest, principled man. He won a huge victory. I’m serving in the shadow cabinet because I want to support him and I want Labour to win the next election. I would just say you have to balance these things.”Hiya guys. Due to the terrible weather, I had no work yet again today. Hooray for short work-weeks! I was not expecting it whatsoever, but it ended up being a nice surprise when I woke up this morning. It's Tuesday today and that only means one thing around here... Pretty Little Liars time. I know some of you guys aren't a fan of the show, but who isn't a fan of red manis? Got to love the sleek classic shade. I actually was having a hard time coming up with something to do for today's mani, until I noticed this beauty sitting on my desk by its lonesome. Say hello to Gemma by Bliss Polish.I ended up winning this beauty in a nail art contest hosted by the sweetest Patty Collins on Instagram about a month ago. Even though I didn't win the main prize, she decided to give the runner up and myself a polish of our choice. I had heard nothing, but amazing things about this particular polish so I had to add it to my collection.It looks stunning from any angle and compliments my skin tone so well. I couldn't just leave this stunner alone, so I decided to get out some of my new plates. I was really feeling flowers for some reason and using Bristol from Bundle Monster's Downtown Collection I stamped using my Pueen plate 93.Did I forget to mention that Gemma is actually a thermal? Yes! It transitions from burgundy when cold to a bright red when warm.You are probably thinking something along the lines of "uhhh... where's the stamping" at this point. I actually would like to call this the disappearing stamp trick, haha.What would you like to see next Red Coat Tuesday? Any ladies tuning in to the new episode of Pretty Little Liars tonight?Don't forget to check out the other ladies participating in today's weekly challenge. And, as always, if you happen to be wearing red don't hesitate to join us.86 Revolutions - New Live Album Out Now!
Introducing 86 Revolutions - a 14-track collection of live recordings from our 2017 Tour.
Available now to stream/purchase on Bandcamp: https://lotusvibes.bandcamp.com/
And at all digital retailers including iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/album/id1231615956?ls=1&app=itunes
A post shared by Lotus (@lotusinstagram) on May 3, 2017 at 11:02am PDT
Lotus just wrapped up a lengthy tour that took the band to sold-out theaters across the country. Now, they have released a 14-track collection of recordings from the tour titled 86 Revolutions which features songs from their most recent album, Eat the Light, as well music written in the earliest days of the band.
The album title refers to the number of days between the first and last show of the tour. Selected tracks include the second song from the first show of the tour as well as the closing song of the final show, “Umbilical Moonrise,” the first song the band ever wrote and a fan-favorite rarity.
Jesse Miller (bassist) selected the tracks and mixed the album. “We had a new soundboard for this tour, and the multi-track sources sounded great,” he says. “We release all of our shows, but this was an opportunity for me to spend extra time mixing to expose all the layers that build the Lotus sound.”
The collection features several tracks not released on any studio albums including “Expired Slang” and “The Opus” as well as covers of Lindstrøm's “Rà-àkõ-st” and the Talking Head's “Moon Rocks.” There is a healthy dose of the group improvisation Lotus is known for.
“After all these years playing improvised music with Lotus there are still moments that surprise me - completely unplanned turns in the music that all five of us make simultaneously,” said Miller.Richmond police are investigating a shooting by a homeowner of a suspected robber, who is in critical condition, police said.Lt. Andre Hill said police responded to a report of shots fired in the area of 43rd Street and Roosevelt Avenue at 6:15 p.m. on Saturday.As officers were responding, dispatchers told police that there might have been a robbery or theft that occurred in connection to the shooting, Hill said.Once officers arrived on scene, Hill said police found one black man who had been shot in his upper torso area and was in critical condition.The shooting victim was transported to John Muir Hospital, where Hill said his status is still listed as critical.Hill said police have not positively identified the man.Police believe the homeowner confronted the man who was in the process of taking or had taken some items from the house or yard, Hill said.The homeowner is cooperating fully with detectives on the scene, Hill said.Hill said police also believe a second suspect may have been involved in stealing items from the house or yard. That suspect fled the scene and is still at large, Hill said.There is no description of the second suspect available at this time.Hill said the investigation is in the very preliminary stages and officers are still trying to determine exactly what happened.ATM skimmers, the miniature devices that stealthily help fraudsters capture your credit and debit card data, are getting smaller and harder to detect. Skimmers have always been designed to blend in with any ATM they're attached to, but for years a discerning eye or tug of the card reader were often enough to uncover them. That's not the case anymore. Krebs on Security has been researching a number of devices recovered in Europe this year, and several of them were small enough to fit inside the ATM card slot itself. The ultra-thin profile of these "insert skimmers" makes them far less obvious to your average person making a quick stop at the cash machine.
This translucent card skimmer sits right inside the card slot of an ATM machine. (Krebs on Security)
And thieves often pair them with hidden spy cameras that are equally difficult to spot; many victims never realize their banking data has been compromised until fraudulent charges begin showing up. Other modern skimmers include mobile chips capable of sending off your credit card data in a text message, so the perpetrator can avoid the risk of returning to the host ATM and picking up the device.
The United States and its snail-like pace to adopting chip and PIN debit / credit cards can be blamed for the growing skimmer problem. Until the US is fully on board, international banks have little choice but to keep manufacturing cards with the vulnerable magnetic stripe. For now, the best protection is covering an ATM's keypad when entering your PIN — and keeping your eyes open for card slots that show signs of tampering.Congress plunged another spike into freedom. On September 12, the House passed HR 5949: FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2012. The measure carried 301 – 118. Seventy-four Democrats joined 227 Republicans.
Nancy Pelosi voted Yea. So did Steny Hoyer, Howard Berman, Brad Sherman, Gary Ackerman, Nita Lowey, and Marcy Kaptur.
On December 28, the Senate followed suit. With little debate, it overwhelmingly renewed warrantless spying 73 – 23. Thirty Democrats and Independent Joe Lieberman joined 42 Republicans.
Congressional profiles in courage don’t exist. America’s Secretary of State designee, John Kerry, voted Yea. So did Democrats Reid, Levin, Conrad, Cardin, Mikulski, Feinstein, Stabenow, and Schumer.
Perhaps before yearend, Obama will sign it into law. He may have already done so quietly. He calls the measure a national security priority.
New Year’s eve enactment would repeat last year’s December 31 disgrace. Indefinite detention harshness became law. US citizens and permanent residents are as vulnerable as others.
Unpopular measures slip under the radar when few notice. Weekends and holiday breaks conceal blows to freedom.
Warrantless spying is extended another five years. Overseas phone calls, emails, and other communications of US citizens and permanent residents may be monitored without court authorization.
Probable cause isn’t needed. Electronic eavesdropping will look for “foreign intelligence information.” Virtually anything qualifies. Vague language is all-embracing.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked why is warrantless domestic spying important? Key FISA Amendments Act provisions were challenged before the Supreme Court (Clapper v. Amnesty International).
Months after 9/11, Bush secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans lawlessly. Sweeping surveillance followed without court-approved warrants. Doing so violates core constitutional protections. Conditions now are worse than then.
On October 29, High Court oral arguments were heard. Justices will decide if lawyers, journalists, labor, media, human rights organizations, and others may challenge the constitutionality of warrantless spying.
In March 2011, the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled they and others the law affects have legal standing to challenge. ACLU spokeswoman Rachel Myers called it “a really big victory.”
It means potentially affected parties “don’t have to prove (they’ve) been spied on to challenge an unlawful spy act.”
The Court overruled a |
he intended to reform immigration until other priorities took his energy. Libya was certainly not high on his 2008 agenda.
And that is why — third point — we don’t elect agendas, we don’t elect platforms, we don’t even elect parties to the presidency. This is not a referendum or a ballot initiative. Indeed, we are skeptical of agendas. If either candidate had announced in his final weeks some grandiose initiative of the kind the pundits prescribe, we’d have mocked it as October-surprise gimmickry, a sign of desperation. We elect the human being we trust to have our best interests in mind. We choose a direction, a disposition, a set of instincts and convictions and competencies.
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When voters tell pundits, and pundits tell us, that they are frustrated that the candidates lack an agenda, they are just saying they wish we could foretell the future. If we could do that, a lot of pundits would be out of business.
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Footnote 1: The most familiar example of withholding details, of course, is Romney’s refusal to identify which tax breaks he would eliminate to offset the revenues lost by reducing income tax rates. He knows perfectly well that tax deductions for things like home mortgages and charitable donations are popular and well defended by lobbyists. But lost in that whole discussion was one of the more interesting ideas of the campaign season.
Romney said that rather than abolish popular tax breaks, he would cap deductions at a fixed amount; at various times he tossed out $17,000, $25,000 and $50,000 as possible limits.
The inescapable problem with Romney’s plan, as the impartial Tax Policy Center calculated, is that the math doesn’t work. Even if you eliminate all personal deductions, you recoup less than half of the $4 trillion to $5 trillion cost of his plan to lower income tax rates by 20 percent. Capping deductions recoups even less.
But that doesn’t mean capping deductions is a bad idea. It is a lot easier than taking on the constituencies and lobbyists defending each specific tax break. It’s simple, politically doable and highly progressive. In short, as the Tax Policy Center’s Roberton Williams and Howard Gleckman have explained on the center’s blog, while it doesn’t raise the amount Romney needs to make his math work, it’s an excellent way to raise revenues. Obama should think about grabbing it.
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Footnote 2: If I had to bet which candidate was more likely to launch airstrikes against Iran or to up the military ante in Syria, I’d be inclined to give a slight edge to Obama. He has already crossed the daunting psychological threshold of dispensing death: surge troops, drone strikes, the Bin Laden raid. Romney talks tough, but has never had to make the hard decision to use force, which is easier said than done.The FBI arrested a Georgia-based federal government contractor at her home this weekend, and on Monday announced she is being charged with “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.” The leaker is identified in the criminal complaint as 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, an employee of the contractor Pluribus International Corporation who held a top secret clearance. The Justice Department alleged that Winner admitted taking the classified intelligence document and mailing it to a news outlet.
Though the court document does not identify which agency she works for, it says she removed “classified national defense information” and was based in Augusta, Georgia, which is the site of an NSA “Cryptologic Center.”
Reports quickly emerged following the Justice Department’s issuance of a press release in the case that Winner is allegedly the source of a leaked NSA report published Monday afternoon by The Intercept documenting Russian military intelligence attempts to hack a U.S. voter registration software company and more than 100 local election officials. The NSA document is dated May 5, 2017, and the affidavit for Winner’s arrest alleges she “printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information and was dated on or about May 5, 2017.” The DOJ’s affidavit also cites “pages of the intelligence reporting [that] appeared to be folded and/or creased, suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space.” Creases of that nature are visible in the NSA document published by the Intercept.
A spokesperson for The Intercept told TPM that they have “no knowledge of the identity of the source” of the document because it was provided to them anonymously.
TPM identified a Facebook account that appears to belong to Winner (pictured above) with check-ins in Augusta, Georgia and with pictures from a recent trip to Belize. The search warrant application filed with the U.S District Court for the Southern District of Georgia notes that “on May 27 to 29, 2017, WINNER traveled outside the United States to Belize.”
Read the affidavit by the FBI agent in the case, seeking a warrant for Winner’s arrest:When Glenn Greenwald and Andy McCarthy agree on something, it’s perhaps worth taking notice. Both are now on record with severe doubts about whether the Khorasan terror-group in Syria – the one we were just informed had been bombed – actually exists. Glenn wants to argue that it was a pretext to justify bombing Syria on more defensible grounds than fighting ISIS, which officials have noted does not pose a threat to the US, while we were told that Khorasan did. McCarthy wants to argue that it’s simply a new name given to an al Qaeda off-shoot, cynically designed to hide the fact that al Qaeda is alive and well and on the offense in the Middle East. Both have ideological biases – Glenn believing that much of the war on terror is based on fantasy, McCarthy believing that we need to return to torture and aggressive war to fight a new totalitarianism the “left” is too weak to name and shame. I don’t share either assumption, but I do worry about wars against “a more direct and imminent threat” that turns out, after the fact, not to be imminent, wars which find new enemies and dire plots every day, and in which the public simply has to trust the CIA and the Pentagon and the president as to the truth of it all, while we are encouraged to “go shopping.”
And the narrative about Khorasan turns out to have been a classic bait-and-switch. In the beginning of the new war, this group was named as planning imminent threats against the US with innovative explosive devices designed to bring down airplanes. Glenn has an exhaustive account of how the US media – from the NYT to NBC – simply repeated this argument from the administration (with scary graphics and scarier rhetoric). One example from CIA-sourced Eli Lake:
American analysts had pieced together detailed information on a pending attack from an outfit that informally called itself ‘the Khorasan Group’ to use hard-to-detect explosives on American and European airliners.
So at that point, this new and lethal al Qaeda branch had a “pending” threat to US aviation.
It was only after the attack had taken place that the story evolved a little. Last week we noted a Foreign Policy story that concluded that the group was no more capable of launching an attack on the US than ISIS – which is to say, none at all. Then this classic AP account:
Senior U.S. officials offered a more nuanced picture Thursday of the threat they believe is posed by an al-Qaida cell in Syria targeted in military strikes this week, even as they defended the decision to attack the militants. James Comey, the FBI director, and Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, each acknowledged that the U.S. did not have precise intelligence about where or when the cell, known as the Khorasan Group, would attempt to strike a Western target.... Kirby, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, said, “I don’t know that we can pin that down to a day or month or week or six months … We can have this debate about whether it was valid to hit them or not, or whether it was too soon or too late…We hit them. And I don’t think we need to throw up a dossier here to prove that these are bad dudes.”
The same could be said for ISIS. They pose no threat to the US, according to all the intelligence sources as well as the president. But hey, who needs “to throw up a dossier here to prove that these are bad dudes”? Yeah, that’s how far we’ve come. Remember the “dodgy dossier” that the Blair government fabricated to justify the war in Iraq? It tells you something that our protectors don’t even feel the need to fake such a dossier any more. The standard for new wars is now merely the existence of “bad dudes” which the media can be relied upon to amplify into scary monsters. The strikes take place; we do not know if they were successful; and we subsequently find the “threat” was not imminent at all.
My point is simply that a) we have no idea if these multiple, metastasizing wars are actually justified by national security; and b) even when the CIA and White House say they’re not a threat to the US, we bomb them anyway. So we’re at a point when actual debate about what the threats really are to us has no real relationship to new wars. Those wars are pre-emptive now as a matter of course. The only justification is that they are “bad guys.”
Remember when we used to debate pre-emptive war? Now it’s simply routine – and that very debate has evaporated. Obama is running several undeclared, pre-emptive wars against threats the public has no way of judging, and the CIA has an institutional interest in hyping.
At this point, we simply have to trust our rulers on all this. But how can we at this point? The key officials who are supposed to command our trust – James Clapper and John Brennan – are proven, public, bald-faced liars, contemptuous of the Congress and the public. Brennan’s most recent attempt to claim he was not lying earlier this year when he claimed that CIA officials would never look into the Senate Committee’s computers merely underlines how utterly slippery he is. He should have been fired a very long time ago. That he remains in place and that Clapper can lie to the Congress and suffer no sanction tells you all you need to know about who really calls the shots on national security. Clapper told a clear lie to the Congress and has suffered no consequences.
And our role? To cheer each war and to wait until they come back to haunt us still further. Which, given the experience of the last few months, will merely empower the CIA and the Pentagon even more. Maybe you still believe that Obama can keep a lid on the worst of this. But even if you did, can you not see that the extraordinarily permissive standards for new pre-emptive wars all over the world is a standing invitation for a Clinton or a Cruz or a Rubio to do whatever the CIA tells them? The standards under which we are now operating are light years from anything we once considered rational. Has the world really changed so much – or have we?As an MMO hopper, MMO sampler, and MMO juggler of yore, I acknowledge that I’ll never truly know the ins and outs of a particular game the way someone will who plays that single title extensively. So there’s always more to learn, but even so I have to admit to being really puzzled by Guild Wars 2’s dungeons.
I’ve been doing a couple of these every night since my re-entry a few weeks ago, and I am still mystified as to their purpose and design. Unlike every other MMO I’ve played, it seems as though the group consensus is to avoid mobs at all cost, using speed to dash by them and terrain tricks to get them to reset, so that we can blast right to the boss. Then most of the bosses are attacked with another set of tricks and terrain quirks, such as hiding in this corner or jumping up on that ledge. Then there’s the “everyone stand on the exact same spot so we look like an unholy abomination of arms and legs and buffs” tactic too. We get loot and gold — which is nice — and leave. And I walk out of these dungeons just wondering what I’m supposed to be getting out of them.
There’s a lot to be said commending what I’ve seen ArenaNet do here. Each dungeon has two major modes and several paths that the group can vote on, although almost all my groups choose a tried-and-proven path of least resistance. The design is cool and I love the idea of flexible dungeon runs. Some of the boss fights that we aren’t tricking are pretty engaging and the battles can be nailbiting as we try to keep everyone up and fighting. I love my Ranger’s spirit of nature pet, since it can do an instant-rez of anyone nearby.
But I can’t shake the feeling that either the playerbase or the design team or both have conspired to create runs that teach us to be cowards. Run. Flee. Avoid. Trick. Loot. If I stop to attack anything, I get told to cut that out and get running again. It seems as though we pass up waves of mobs (and their associated bags of XP and loot) just to get it over with already.
When I’ve mentioned or joked about this to guildmates or party members, pretty much everyone ignores me. I guess it’s what we’re all supposed to be used to by now — I’m not giving a brilliant new observation.
It’s not even a new thing to the devs, who more or less defend the right to go ahead and skip mobs. So… why throw in trash mobs to begin with? Why deliberately design a dungeon that encourages such behavior instead of creating a dungeon that’s just boss fights and nothing but? Works for plenty of TSW instances and it wouldn’t make the dungeons come across as a failed experiment.
I’m not a huge fan of plowing through trash mobs, but I don’t feel much like a hero for avoiding them, either. Maybe I don’t get what the community already understands, and maybe it’s the lack of dedicated roles that turn these dungeons into blitz fests, but… I’m stumped.Jerusalem (CNN) A Jerusalem synagogue turned from peaceful sanctuary to house of horrors within moments Tuesday when two Palestinian cousins wielding a gun and butcher knives attacked during morning prayers -- a terror attack that Israel's leader characterized as "blood libel" fanned by Palestinian leaders.
Even as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said he was "glad" but insisted it "is not enough."
Addressing reporters Tuesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for national unity against "those human animals who committed this massacre" and against those -- singling out Hamas, the Islamic movement and the Palestinian Authority -- who he claims "disseminate libels against the state of Israel."
"There are those who wish to uproot us from the capital, from our land," he said, referring to Jerusalem. "They will not be successful... We have to unify forces."
Netanyahu spoke hours after the latest act of violence to afflict the region, this time at a synagogue in West Jerusalem's Har Nof area.
Photos taken inside the Jewish house of worship, and released by Israeli officials, painted a grim scene -- from lifeless bodies sprawled on a floor to a shattered pair of glasses to blood seemingly everywhere, drenching holy books, prayer shawls and walls.
Three dual U.S.-Israeli citizens and a British-Israeli citizen died in the attack before police shot and killed the two assailants.
The terror attack -- the deadliest in Jerusalem since a man with an automatic weapon killed eight seminary students in March 2008 -- came at a particularly tense time in that city and the region at large. It follows a series of recent deadly stabbings and vehicle incidents that, while not the large-scale suicide bombings that defined last decade's second intifada or the rocket attacks from Gaza earlier this year, have left Jerusalem on edge.
Netanyahu blasts 'incitement' by Palestinian leaders
The answer to what's next came quickly, as Israeli authorities moved into the slain attackers' East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber to demolish their homes on Netanyahu's order. The Palestinians' official WAFA news agency reported 13 people were arrested, including an al-Aqsa Mosque guard.
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat -- whose city is about two-thirds Jewish and one-third Arab -- said the attack were incited by Hamas and terror organizations who use "rumor and misfacts" about Palestinians are treated in the city.
Mark Regev, Netanyahu's spokesman, said that authorities were also beefing up security around Jerusalem.
"The goal is to make sure that there are not copycat attacks," Regev said.
The war of words between the two sides, meanwhile, continued.
"(Abbas) does not send out terrorists, he doesn't directly encourage acts of terror, and this is good," the Netanyahu said, echoing an assessment by an Israeli security chief. "On the other hand, the incitement of the Palestinian Authority -- and he heads the Palestinian Authority -- and even some things he says... encourage terrorism, in terms of incitement (of) tensions that run high."
There was no such equivocation about Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza. It's been at odds with Israel and also with Abbas' Fatah movement, which controls the West Bank.
Hamas did not claim responsibility for the synagogue attack, though it didn't back away from it either. Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the group, instead linked the attack to the discovery Sunday of an Palestinian bus driver hanged in his bus not far from where Tuesday's attack occurred. (For his part, Netanyahu said that claims the bus driver was killed were lies and that his death was ruled a suicide.)
Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad predicted to Al Jazeera International that "there will be more revolution in Jerusalem, and more uprising."
"Hamas in general supports action against the occupation," Hamad said. "Hamas supports any military action against the occupation anywhere it can be carried out."
Four rabbis killed
The latest example of such an action came at 7 a.m. Tuesday, when two Palestinian men entered a synagogue in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, where about 30 worshipers in prayer shawls and phylacteries were doing their morning prayers.
"They began attacking worshipers, stabbing them before opening fire," Israel's foreign ministry said.
The four killed were all rabbis: Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, 58; Aryeh Kupinsky, 43; Moshe Twersky, 59; and Kalman Levine, 55. Goldberg was a dual British-Israeli citizen, and the other three were U.S.-Israeli citizens -- which is why the FBI is investigating the attack, according to a U.S. law enforcement official.
"When four great men, wonderful men, wise in Torah study, are slaughtered while praying in public, there is no public grieving greater than that," said a rabbi who eulogized the men later Tuesday, before their burial.
Eight others were wounded, including three who were seriously hurt and a policeman who was critically wounded, according to the foreign ministry.
Officials overseas such as British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond strongly condemned the killings, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro called them "a barbaric new low in the sad and outrageous history of such attacks."
"Tragically, this is not the first loss of life that we have seen in recent months," U.S. President Barack Obama said after condemning "in the strongest terms" attacks he said were "a tragedy" for Israel and the United States. "Too many Israelis have died, too many Palestinians have died. And at this difficult time, I think it's important for both Palestinians and Israelis to work together to lower tensions and reject violence."
While no group claimed responsibility for the attack, Israeli officials say the attackers came from East Jerusalem, where Palestinians can move more freely about the city than those living in Gaza, who must pass through stringent checkpoints.
Ma'an, a Palestinian news agency, identified the two men as Ghassan Abu Jamal and his cousin, Udayy.
Whether their actions were part of a coordinated campaign or a spontaneous reprisal, Tuesday's attack raises the specter of yet more violence against civilians.
The latest wave began earlier this year with the kidnapping of three Israeli teens, who were later found dead. Reprisal attacks, rocket fire and retaliatory airstrikes followed that incident, with more than 2,000 Palestinians and 67 Israelis reportedly killed after weeks of heavy fighting.
Much of the most recent unrest has been centered around Jerusalem. That includes the discovery of the body of Palestinian bus driver Yousuf al-Ramouni on Sunday, the same day an Israeli was stabbed with a screwdriver near central JerusalemHello guys,andyy here.I don't usually post a lot on hltv.org, but will read it now and then. I am a programmer and use to host my own gameservers, as well as owning London LYNX (currently inactive).Now, my mission, since I don't have enough time to compete anymore (not that I was any good!) is to code systems and help build, manage and sustain systems to help improve the CS:GO scene.Hosted #mentalboost in the past, which was a success until we had to shut it down because of DDoS attacks on our servers.What we have for everyone today:A Match Making system that is hosted on irc, tracking stats and with an integrated ELO system. The CS:GO servers are high performance 128-tick servers. The irc servers are on a cloud server, securing any IP / DNS information.We are inviting everyone to take part in the public channels.Prizes given to the top player of each month. (will announce soon what the prize is).What will come in the future:- More prizes- A stream to watch the top games.- An anti-cheat solution.- Private channels for top players.Where to go to get more information:If you have any questions, feel free to ask here.Thanks for your time.andyy.To dismiss Tequila Avion as the “Entourage tequila” would be a huge mistake. Although the tequila was the centerpiece of the final seasons of the hit HBO show, Tequila Avion is much more than a TV show prop. In fact, Tequila Avion is one of the few premium tequilas that has a solid shot at really taking on Patron.
Tequila Avion is different from many other tequilas on the market. Many blanco or silver tequilas (like Patron) deliver a pepper kick in the mid palate. This blast of pepper spice defines most of these tequilas. Avion goes about things a bit differently: rather than a blast of pepper, you get a pepper ramp. The spice builds gradually, steadily, and progressively as you drink it.
Avion is also an incredibly clean tequila. While it can get spicy, it never burns. This is thanks to a patented filtering process which, along with a unique barreling process, really defines Avion. Tequila Avion is available in three different forms: Silver, Reposado, and Anejo. Each of these has something interesting and unique to offer.
Tequila Avion Silver has clear aromas of fresh agave with an undercurrent of black pepper and a hint of hot pepper. The entry is soft and slightly sweet with a superb mouthfeel which is neither too thick nor too thin. Instead of a pepper kick in the mid palate, Avion has a pepper ramp with intensifying black and hot pepper. Things get a little spicy at the end of the mid palate with a hint of grapefruit rind. The finish is nice, long, and super clean.
Tequila Avion Reposado is aged six months in Jack Daniel’s Barrels which helps give it a sweet nose, and adds vanilla and caramel to the mix along with fresh agave and clear soft oak. The entry takes on a subtle influence from the bourbon barrel with vanilla and caramel right off the bat. These notes mix extremely well with the fresh agave. Things ramp up in the mid palate, and the pepper and oak come together in perfect union. The finish is wonderfully spicy and much longer than the silver. It also has a superb cool quality to the finish. This is an exceptional reposado.
Tequila Avion Anejo is aged two years in ex-bourbon barrels. Oak spice dominates the nose but it’s balanced out with fantastic agave and caramel notes. The entry shows off the oak well but not intensely. The oak is immediately balanced by agave, vanilla, and caramel. The pepper starts off soft and builds sublimely. Black pepper, agave, vanilla, caramel, and oak are joined toward the end of the mid palate by cinnamon and maple. No heat, no bite, and a long, soft, peppery but cool finish. This is not an aggressive anejo. The goal here is clearly balance and it achieves it superbly.
Clean and flavorful, Tequila Avion delivers a superb tequila experience that is a clear alternative to Patron.Society | 04.03.14 | 20:24 Expert: Turkey strengthened by power-play in Crimea Photo: www.razm.info
The representative of Zorakn foundation, involved in raising public awareness on army, military and strategic-political issues, views Russia’s behavior in relation to the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in Ukraine as natural. “The fact that Russia is trying to preserve its active presence in the Black Sea and that its primary target is Crimea stems from the overall geopolitical situation.”
Vrtanesyan points out also that in the Black Sea basin Russia’s position against Turkey is not that strong.
“Today the military balance between Russia and Turkey in the Black Sea is frail as it is, and I wouldn’t say Russia has any advantages, quite the opposite, the Turkish fleet is much better equipped excelling that of Russia by some criteria, for example, Turkey has 14 submarines, while Russia has two, one of them non-functional,” says Vrtanesyan.
Since late last week Moscow established de-facto military control over Crimea, an autonomous republic in the south of Ukraine with a predominantly ethnic Russian population. The Russian parliament has also empowered President Vladimir Putin to use troops to defend the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population elsewhere in the territory of Ukraine. Moscow says it is reacting to the formation of an ultranationalist government in Kiev that threatens the country’s Russian-speaking minority. Meanwhile, the United States and the European Union have condemned Russia’s aggressive designs, threatening economic sanctions against Moscow.
The biggest ethnic community of the peninsula with more that 2 million population is Russian, followed by the Ukrainian – 24 percent, and Muslim Tatars – 12 percent; about 0.5 percent of the population is Armenian who have declared a neutral position in the conflict supporting neither Russians, nor Ukrainians nor Tatars.
“I wouldn’t say Russia’s position in the Black Sea is too strong, and Crimea’s loss would aggravate the situation, which can become a problem for us. Of course, not in non-combat conditions, but if the Armenian-Azeri conflict gets more tense, there might be issues in terms of supplies to the Georgian ports – Turkey can effortlessly place ships there, inspect ours and turn them back/deny passage,” says Vrtanesyan.
Expert in Turkish studies Gevorg Petrosyan, editor of razm.info website, reminds that Turkey and Russia have been fighting for Crimea for ages, because of the peninsula’s strategic geopolitical position. Petrosyan says Turkey’s claims for Crimea should be viewed as quite feasible.
“The geopolitical situation is changing so rapidly that it cannot be ruled out, considering the fact that Turkey is one of the two major players in the Black Sea, the withdrawal of Russian forces from Crimea is absolutely in Turkey’s interest,” says the expert.
The loss of Russia’s most important military base in the Black Sea basin – the Sevastopol base in Crimea – will shift the balance in Turkey’s favor, which may become the only strong power in the area, says Zorakn Foundation board trustee Karen Vrtanesyan. This circumstance might cause more challenges for Armenia, which has an unresolved military conflict with Azerbaijan, should tensions escalate between the two countries.The representative of Zorakn foundation, involved in raising public awareness on army, military and strategic-political issues, views Russia’s behavior in relation to the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in Ukraine as natural. “The fact that Russia is trying to preserve its active presence in the Black Sea and that its primary target is Crimea stems from the overall geopolitical situation.”Vrtanesyan points out also that in the Black Sea basin Russia’s position against Turkey is not that strong.“Today the military balance between Russia and Turkey in the Black Sea is frail as it is, and I wouldn’t say Russia has any advantages, quite the opposite, the Turkish fleet is much better equipped excelling that of Russia by some criteria, for example, Turkey has 14 submarines, while Russia has two, one of them non-functional,” says Vrtanesyan.Since late last week Moscow established de-facto military control over Crimea, an autonomous republic in the south of Ukraine with a predominantly ethnic Russian population. The Russian parliament has also empowered President Vladimir Putin to use troops to defend the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population elsewhere in the territory of Ukraine. Moscow says it is reacting to the formation of an ultranationalist government in Kiev that threatens the country’s Russian-speaking minority. Meanwhile, the United States and the European Union have condemned Russia’s aggressive designs, threatening economic sanctions against Moscow.The biggest ethnic community of the peninsula with more that 2 million population is Russian, followed by the Ukrainian – 24 percent, and Muslim Tatars – 12 percent; about 0.5 percent of the population is Armenian who have declared a neutral position in the conflict supporting neither Russians, nor Ukrainians nor Tatars.“I wouldn’t say Russia’s position in the Black Sea is too strong, and Crimea’s loss would aggravate the situation, which can become a problem for us. Of course, not in non-combat conditions, but if the Armenian-Azeri conflict gets more tense, there might be issues in terms of supplies to the Georgian ports – Turkey can effortlessly place ships there, inspect ours and turn them back/deny passage,” says Vrtanesyan.Expert in Turkish studies Gevorg Petrosyan, editor of razm.info website, reminds that Turkey and Russia have been fighting for Crimea for ages, because of the peninsula’s strategic geopolitical position. Petrosyan says Turkey’s claims for Crimea should be viewed as quite feasible.“The geopolitical situation is changing so rapidly that it cannot be ruled out, considering the fact that Turkey is one of the two major players in the Black Sea, the withdrawal of Russian forces from Crimea is absolutely in Turkey’s interest,” says the expert.PROVO — A former private school instructor and coach accused of having sexual relationships with two female students has pleaded guilty to reduced charges.
Broch Clyde DeGraff, 28, pleaded guilty to six counts of attempted forcible sexual abuse, which was amended from a second-degree felony to a third-degree felony, in 4th District Court Tuesday. The man was originally facing a total of 10 charges, including forcible sodomy, a first-degree felony, and three counts of forcible sexual abuse, a second-degree felony.
Those four charges were dismissed in exchange for DeGraff's plea.
DeGraff was teaching kindergarten and coaching boys and girls soccer at Liahona Preparatory Academy when the allegations were reported to Pleasant Grove police. The relationships apparently started with text messages and escalated to late-night meetings, police said.
Police say DeGraff fondled and sexually abused the two 16-year-old girls during separate relationships he carried on, one after the other, between October 2011 and June 2012. Some of the sexual acts occurred at Liahona Preparatory Academy and property adjacent to the school, while others took place at DeGraff's home in Pleasant Grove, according to a police affidavit.
DeGraff was fired by Liahona Preparatory Academy, a private school for students in kindergarten through 12th grade that bases its curriculum on values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in light of the allegations, school officials said.
DeGraff's father, Brent, owns the school.
Sentencing in the case has been set for April 16.
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Released in August 2002, Kill the Moonlight is Spoon’s second independent release via Merge Records. The album put the band’s disastrous major-label tenure at Elektra Records firmly in the rearview mirror, scoring them their first real (if untraditional) hit with “The Way We Get By.” In lieu of wall-to-wall radio play, the song was licensed to a variety of TV shows and films — including The O.C., Shameless, Stranger Than Fiction, Mean Creek, The Puffy Chair, and Hustle — significantly growing the band’s fanbase while validating their in-through-the-back-door mentality. Kill the Moonlight was featured on “Best of the 2000s” lists from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Rhapsody as well as Blender’s “100 Greatest Indie Albums” list.
Why I’ve Been Avoiding It
Discovery fatigue. When I first got into Spoon, I got into them HARD, mainlining Girls Can Tell, Gimme Fiction, and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga within a week, then listening to pretty much nothing else for the next month. It was one badass month, but at the end of it, the last thing I wanted in my ears was more Spoon. They Want My Soul got me jonesing again, but I just never got around to Kill the Moonlight. Now, with the band’s new album, Hot Thoughts, right around the corner, I’m finally ready to cross this one off my list.
Review
First things first, if you do not listen to this record with a good stereo setup, be it headphones or speakers with a lot of separation, you are not doing it right. Bandmembers Britt Daniel and Jim Eno, along with co-producer Mike McCarthy, get up to some seriously experimental stuff when it comes to the album’s mix. Take “Don’t Let It Get You Down.” In mono, the song comes off as a fairly standard slice of early-2000s alt-rock. But put your headphones on, and you’ll find that the vocals and piano are isolated entirely on the left channel while the guitar is isolated entirely on the right. The technique elevates the song by ramping up its tension, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere in which the listener never quite knows where the next sound will come from.
The band doubles down on this concept on some of the record’s highlights, often offering a hypnotic element for listeners to focus on while other instruments and effects pummel them from all sides. In “Paper Tiger,” that hypnotic element is the clicking of drum sticks, while “Stay Don’t Go” is anchored by an endlessly looped beat-boxing sample and “Small Stakes” is steadied by a mechanically precise keyboard riff. The effect draws in listeners to an uncomfortable degree, with anything that deviates from that rhythm causing a shock to the system. In “Small Stakes,” distant drum and cymbal crashes make it sound as if someone knocked over all the equipment in the studio, while “Paper Tiger” puts the listener squarely in the middle of a horror-movie soundtrack during its jammy mid-section, in which swelling strings and keyboards sneak up from all angles. It all primes the audience for a catharsis that never arrives, driving the tension through the roof. It’s the band’s handling of that tension, and its eventual release, that comes to define Kill the Moonlight.
Kicking off with “Small Stakes,” the album knocks your feet out from under you right off the bat, establishing an atmosphere in which everything is slightly askew. But it’s followed by “The Way We Get By,” a Ben Folds-style piano-pop track with a major hook and an actual climax that is made even more epic by its lead-in. Spoon then takes it to the next level with “Jonathan Fisk,” a full-on rocker that reaches huge heights thanks to Eno’s masterful drumming and a few well-placed horns. Again, the track hits even harder thanks to its lead-in, “Stay Don’t Go,” which expertly bottles up its tension to prime the explosion of “Fisk.” “Paper Tiger” then builds up the dread once more, putting us back on uneasy footing as we head into the album’s second half. The result is enthralling, with the album’s more experimental tracks building up a wall of tension that its more traditional crowd-pleasers then smash through to rousing effect.
Final Verdict
Spoon manages to draw attention to the art of recording itself with Kill the Moonlight’s nontraditional mix, taking listeners far outside of their comfort zone and forcing them to stay on their toes as their conception of what recorded music should sound like is challenged at every turn. The band then scatters its tent-pole tracks like breadcrumbs throughout the record, ensuring that they all hit with maximum force. It’s expertly sequenced, precisely produced, and strikingly intimate. By the time “Vittorio E.” ushers us out of the studio with its gently crescendoing pianos, drums, and celestial backing vocals, you’ll want to dive back in and experience it again.
Standout Tracks
“The Way We Get By”
“Jonathan Fisk”
“Paper Tiger”
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SpotifyMr. Cruz, a decorated college debater with a contentious streak, clearly loved his time in a workplace rife with ideological differences. In the glass-encased room of the cafeteria where clerks could discuss cases in confidence, he sharpened his arguments. Playing basketball in the building’s “highest court in the land,” he said “my bad” to the colleagues he elbowed wildly on his way to the hoop. He organized a poker game with conservative clerks, and in the courtyard, he participated in the weekly happy hour, with alternating chambers taking on catering duties. (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s clerks impressed with fajitas. Justice Thomas’s clerks did not with cereal.)
Neal Katyal, a clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer who went on to become the principal deputy and later acting solicitor general of the United States under President Obama, said he had befriended Mr. Cruz on their first day at the cafeteria. He said that it was “superfun” debating politics and law with Mr. Cruz, and that they had also hit the library with legal pads together and discussed life, love and “who we wanted to spend our lives with.”
But Mr. Cruz mostly had time for Chief Justice Rehnquist. Mr. Cruz and he played croquet together, and on |
wanker in general? Yes. Why is this even a question? No. I don’t think we should ban people because we don’t get cuddley feelings from them. Just stay away from me. I don’t want to even see your avatar you repulsive individual.”
Mungoman expressed similar sentiments, writing…
“I dislike working with Smokey in this project (though I have had little to no issues with him offtopic). However, I do not think that “kys” is a bannable offense. It’s terrible behavior, but still not worth being banned over.”
Pokemon Sage now hobbles along.
After the situation involving the bans and the arguments, some others have departed due to the open hostility exhibited by some members.
Will Pokemon Sage ever release? It’s up in the air. However, in-fighting and bringing sociopolitical differences to the table was a recipe for disaster. Adding the extra elements of Social Justice Warrior elements such as tone policing and forcing people to adopt certain “progressive” views only made things worse. It’s a real shame because people likely would have loved to have played the game… assuming it will ever be released.
[Update:] Following the publication of this article, a member of the development team did reach out, claiming that much of what “The Writer” stated regarding some things were “wrong”. I did request their side of the story to amend or elaborate on sections of the piece, but it was stated…
“If you yourself feel like you need to make alterations to your story knowing the whole thing might be false then feel free.”
[Update #2:] Another member of Pokemon Sage‘s development team, going by the handle of Orange Moose, decided to clarify points of the article and/or provide refutation to some claims. In accordance with our Right of Reply policy, their statements are below, unedited.
They were focusing on using Generation 4 mechanics, and relying on Flash animation for the characters and combat.
Gen 5 battle mechanics mixed with some mechanics from other Generations and some original stuff, and there is no flash animation anywhere in the project. Flash was used once in the compositing of the title animation, that’s it.
The project had started just before the official Generation 6 launched back in 2013.
The project was started in October 2012, almost exactly a year before the release date of Pokemon X and Y to start the 6th generation.
the great 4chan exodus occurred, further dwindling the amount of people contributing to the project.
The people contributing before, during and after that time didn’t change as a result of GG at all. The exodus had nothing to do with GG. It was initiated due to bureaucracy stagnating development by needlessly involving non contributors in the decision making process.
so only those who were dedicated to contributing to Pokemon Sage were allowed in the Skype group.
Anyone can join at any point even if all they want to do is dick around in off-topic.This has always been the case and Sage is still an open project. A couple people have joined since [redacted] left even.
[NOTE: The project is segmented into a series of chats. “Off-topic” refers to a chat that has nothing to do with Pokemon Sage and only partially overlaps with its dev team as a place to discuss all manner of things, including politics. The rest of the chats are referred to as “On-topic”, as they are where development happens.]
“The Writer”, who was in charge of the plot of the game
One of the people in charge of the plot.
What was the problem? Politics.
Aside from the drama that happened, the game has been progressing at the same pace it has been for the past few months. The political drama didn’t actually slow down anything but maybe plot.
hoping to avoid being pulled into the fray and simply wanted to make progress with designing the game, which was barely edging along at this point.
the game is progressing at the pace we expect it to, it’s not our faults people think fan games can be popped out like AAA games
Things further escalated into 2017, where the progress on the plot of Pokemon Sage had nearly ground to a screeching halt.
Again untrue in the sense that it had anything related to this drama. A few of the staff were moving or had stuff they needed to sort out in their lives.
And during the Christmas month/months most people are busy relaxing with family anyway so little gets done at that time of the year every single year.
Since the writing group hadn’t moved forward much and many errors were spotted, the brunt of the blame fell on “The Writer”, and he was given an ultimatum.
As one of the people who regularly gives plot shit for what I feel isn’t what could best reflect the game I think I can safely say from the outside looking in that nobody blamed “The writer” for the failings of plot but he was blamed for the misinformation he was spreading to people outside of plot. Which is why the final drama started.
as he vented after being kicked from the team.
He was attacking people in ways that I would certainly not call “venting”.
Not everyone was fond of Carson and Smokey taking it to such a personal level, but Carson and Smokey didn’t stop there.
Both sides took it to a personal level.
the council reconvened again to discuss banning people for not tone policing themselves.
One person made threads on the forums in response to what carson and smokey had said but it wasn’t in any way about tone policing.
Pokemon Sage now hobbles along.
It’s the same as it was before if not slightly faster with the addition of another member.
Adding the extra elements of Social Justice Warrior elements such as tone policing and forcing people to adopt certain “progressive” views only made things worse.
As someone who sits in the center of the liberal/conservative spectrum I can say that the only person who has ever given me shit, falsely accusing me of being “alt-right” is smokey. And it’s very easy to just ignore him or tell him to fuck off.
It’s a real shame because people likely would have loved to have played the game… assuming it will ever be released.
If you let political agenda prevent you from enjoying things then you’re only letting yourself down.In our 157th episode, we got to chat with Dr. Michael Habib, Assistant Professor in the Keck School of Medicine of USC and a Research Associate in the Dinosaur Institute at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. He is a paleontologist and biomechanist, who studies prehistoric animals and how they moved. He’s known for his work on pterosaurs, feathered dinosaurs, and the origin of flight in birds. Follow him on Twitter @aeroevo.
Episode 157 is also about Amargasaurus, a sauropod with spines on its neck and back.
Big thank you to all our patrons! For the dinosaur enthusiasts out there, check out our Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/iknowdino
You can listen to our free podcast, with all our episodes, on iTunes at:
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In this episode, we discuss:
News:
The dinosaur of the day: Amargasaurus
Sauropod that lived in the Early Cretaceous in what is now Argentina (La Amarga Formation)
Name means “La Amarga lizard”, or “bitter lizard”
In Spanish, the word amarga means “bitter”
La Amarga is the name of a nearby town and the formation where it was found
Guillermo Rougier found Amargasaurus in 1984, during an expedition led by José Bonaparte (it was the 8th expedition of the “Jurassic and Cretaceous Terrestrial Vertebrates of South America” project)
Only one skeleton was found, and it’s mostly complete (includes a fragmentary skull)
Described in 1991 by Leonardo Salgado and José Bonaparte
Only species is Amargasaurus cazaui
Species name is in honor of Luis Cazau, a geologist at the YPF oil company, which was state-owned at the time (Cazau told Bonaparte and his team about the formation in 1983, which led to the discovery)
First unofficially mentioned in 1984 in the Italian book Sulle Orme dei Dinosauria, by Bonaparte (called Amargasaurus groeberi, though the species name changed)
Small for a sauropod (30-33 ft, or 9-10m long)
Weighed about 3 short tons
Had a short neck, compared to other sauropods
Part of the family Dicraeosauridae, which includes Dicraeosaurus, Brachytrachelopan, Suuwassea (had shorter necks and were smaller than other sauropods); Dicraeosauridae is part of Diplodocoidea
Had two rows of tall spines on its neck and back
Spines from the second to last dorsal vertebra to the first tail vertebrae were really long, but were in a single row and paddle-shaped
Salgado and Bonaparte first suggested that the spines were used for defense; in 1999 Salgado said the spines may have supported a keratinous sheath; Gregory Paul said in 2000 that if the spines had a keratinous sheath, they could have been used to fight against predators and other Amargasaurus, and it may have been able to point its spines forward by bending its neck, and Amargasaurus could shake its neck to make sounds with the spines; Mark Hallett and Mathew Wedel said in 2016 that the spines that were backward-directed may have been able to skewer predators, when the neck is abruptly pulled back in an attack (similar to what a giant sable antelope and Arabian oryx can do to defend themselves against lions)
Jack Bailey said in 1997 that Amargasaurus may have had a sail, since the spines were similar to Dimetrodon, which had a sail. Since there were two rows of spines, it doesn’t seem likely it had two parallel sails. Bailey said the spine may have been like a scaffold that was covered in skin
Not everyone agrees, and Gregory Paul said the sails could reduce neck flexibility, and that the spines were circular in cross-section and not flattened, like in other animals with sails
In 2007, Daniela Schwarz and others said that the spines on diplodocids and dicraeosaurids enclosed an air sac, which would be connected to the lungs and part of the respiratory system. But in Amargasaurus, the upper two-thirds of the spines would have been covered by keratin, which would mean the air sac could only be in the lower one-third of the spines
Bailey said the paddle-shaped spines at the tail end were like modern humped ungulates like bison, which may mean Amargasaurus had a fleshy hump above its hips (Bailey has also said other dinosaurs may have had humps, like Spinosaurus and Ouranosaurus)
Spines may also have been used for display, or to show dominance
Spines meant Amargasaurus couldn’t raise its neck vertically
Salgado said in 1999 that Amargasaurus may have had its head in a nearly vertical orientation
May not have had a great sense of hearing (based on a 2014 study by Carbajal and others who CT-scanned the skull)
Carbajal and others said that, based on their 3D model of the inner ear (the orientation of the semicircuar canal which helps with balance), Amargasaurus snout faced downward, and the neck was gently sloping downwards, and it may not have been able to raise its neck more than 9 ft (3m)
Probably had a broad snout and pencil-like teeth
Quadrupedal, but probably couldn’t rear up on its hind legs
Amargasaurus probably ate food at mid-level height
Other sauropods that lived around the same time and place included Zapalasaurus, Amargatitanis, and unnamed basal titanosauriforms
Amargasaurus probably ate food at 9 ft high, while Zapalasaurus, a rebbachisaurid, ate at ground level, and Amargatitanis, a titanosaur, ate at higher levels
Other dinosaurs, in addition to sauropods, included the stegosaur Amargasetgos, the ceratosaur Ligabueino, and some sort of large tetanuran
Other animals included the mammal Vincelestes and the crocodylomorph Amargasuchus
Forelimbs were shorter than hindlimbs
Had a wide pelvic region
Had five digits on its hands and feet
Salgado and Bonaparte said in 1991 that Amargasaurus was a slow walker, because it had proportionally short forearms and hindlegs, but in 1999 Gerardo Mazzetta and Richard Fariña said that Amargasaurus could do rapid locomotion (legs were more sturdy than a rhinoceros, which can gallop)
Skeleton is stored in the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires
Amargasaurus was considered for Disney’s Dinosaur movie in 2000 (Ricardo Delgado made a concept design with giraffe-like spots), but it was cut
Can see an Amargasaurus replica, named Margie, at the Melbourne Museum
Can also see an Amargasaurus replica at the Mind Museum in the Philippines as part of “Dinosaurs Around the World – Passport to Pangea,” which runs until March 2 of next year
Fun Fact:
Volcanoes can cause large expulsions of sulfur similar to the Chicxulub impact. Krakatoa released about 20 Megatons of sulfur and dropped global temperatures by about 1.2 °C (2.2 °F) for 5 years.
Sponsor:
This episode is brought to you in part by TRX Dinosaurs, which makes beautiful and realistic dinosaur sculptures, puppets, and exhibits. You can see some amazing examples and works in progress on Instagram @trxdinosaurs
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EmailWhite House officials were said to be furious today after Trump supporters burned a cross on the South Lawn last night.
The BBQ, which was part of a series of cultural events showcasing the rich ethnic, religious and cultural diversity of the United States, featured a hog roast, a mock lynching, a hoedown and a twelve fingered Appalachian banjo player.
The event was hosted by the US Senate hopeful Dr David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and TV evangelist Kevin Swanson, who famously advocated drowning children rather than letting them read, who released a joint statement saying that things got “a little out of hand when we polished off the last of the moonshine. We’re not sure who brought the cross or who lit it, but it was a magical moment.”
A White House official told our US political correspondent Scott McCracknee;
“Well, obviously we shall have to cut out that entire section of lawn and re-sod it. We’ll water it two to three times daily and feed it regularly. In the fall, we’ll hollow-tine the whole area and brush in a good quality top dressing. Next summer it should be as good as new.”
Donald Trump said in response to the news;
“Political correctness has gone mad. It’s great to see white culture and American history being celebrated in this way. Together we can make America great again. I was planning to cover the South Lawn in marble anyway. Nobody covers stuff in marble like me. I’m the best at covering stuff in marble.”We have accidentally created a barrier around our planet, and while it might not be a futuristic force field, it is still damn cool.
NASA researchers have discovered that certain radio communications, known as VLF (very low frequency), are capable of interacting with particles in space, moving them in certain directions. We know we can affect the space weather around our planet, but this discovery might lead to ways that we could actually manipulate it. The study is published in Space Science Reviews.
“A number of experiments and observations have figured out that, under the right conditions, radio communications signals in the VLF frequency range can in fact affect the properties of the high-energy radiation environment around the Earth,” said co-author Phil Erickson, assistant director at the MIT Haystack Observatory, in a statement.
The study is a comprehensive review on the human effects around our planet. It discusses the impact of high-altitude nuclear tests, chemical release experiments, and high-frequency wave heating in the ionosphere. The review goes into the physics behind all those events and reveals the latest analysis of the VLF interaction.
Earth is surrounded by regions filled with charged particles, known as the Van Allen Belts. It was traditionally assumed that there were two such regions, but it turns out that the picture is a lot more complex. They are a consequence of Earth’s magnetic field and act as an almost impenetrable barrier, keeping the most energetic electrons from reaching our planet.
Using data from NASA’s Van Allen Probe, the researchers have discovered that the VLF-induced bubble extends up to the inner edge of the Van Allen Belt and not further. The team speculate that the VLF bubble is pushing the Van Allen Belt outwards.
This idea is strengthened by data from the 1960s, which shows the Van Allen Belt to be much closer to our planet than it currently is. Back then, VLF transmissions were a lot more limited, which could explain the difference. The researchers speculate that if there were no VLF, the boundary would stretch closer to Earth.
The team suggests that with further study, we might discover if we can remove excess particles from lower Earth’s orbit. This might help during extreme space weather events that might damage satellites and other instruments.
There are already plans in place to test VLF from higher in the atmosphere to see exactly what we can achieve with them.Elderly Couple Stopped In Nebraska With 60 Pounds Of Weed 'For Christmas Presents'
Enlarge this image toggle caption York County Sheriff's Department York County Sheriff's Department
Sheriff's deputies in York County, Neb., stopped a pickup truck on Tuesday when they noticed it driving over the center line and the driver failing to signal.
During the traffic stop, deputies noticed a strong smell of raw marijuana, the sheriff's department says.
Patrick Jiron, 80, and Barbara Jiron, 83, said they were from northern California and were en route to Boston and Vermont.
Deputies asked the driver, Patrick Jiron, about the odor, and he admitted to having contraband in the truck and consented to a search of the vehicle.
With the help of the county's canine unit, deputies searched the Toyota Tacoma. When they looked under the pickup topper, deputies found 60 pounds of marijuana, as well as multiple containers of concentrated THC.
Health Seniors Turn To Medical Marijuana For What Ails Them Seniors Turn To Medical Marijuana For What Ails Them Listen · 5:31 5:31
"They said the marijuana was for Christmas presents," Lt. Paul Vrbka told the York News-Times. The department estimated the street value of the pot at over $300,000.
The Jirons now face felony charges of possession of marijuana with the intent to deliver and no drug tax stamp. (Nebraska law requires marijuana dealers to purchase drug tax stamp from its Department of Revenue as evidence that the state's drug tax has been paid.)
For the friends and family in New England who expected a bag of weed in their stocking this year, it looks like it won't be a green Christmas, after all.Ta Ra Rum Pum is a 2007 Indian sports-drama film. The film stars Saif Ali Khan, Rani Mukerji, Angelina Idani, Ali Haji and Javed Jaffrey. This is the second time the lead pair worked together after the success of their last film, Hum Tum (2004). It was directed by Siddharth Anand, who directed 2005's Salaam Namaste (Also starring Khan), and also wrote Hum Tum. The film was a hit at the box office in India and was one of the highest-grossing films of 2007. Ta Ra Rum Pum marks the final commercial success in a romance film of Rani Mukerji, who was the highest-paid actress in Bollywood during the 2000s. It is inspired by Top Gun (1986).
Plot [ edit ]
Rajveer Singh (Saif Ali Khan) has an immense passion for car racing and dreams of making it big on the race course. After being discovered by his manager Harry (Jaaved Jaffrey), he meets Radhika 'Shona' Shekar Rai Banerjee (Rani Mukerji) and instantly falls for her. He joins Speeding Saddles, a failing race team, and transforms from Rajveer Singh to RV the race car driver. He wins his first race and keeps winning, making him quite wealthy.
As the months pass, what started as innocent love blossoms into a serious relationship. Radhika is a great pianist, majoring in music at Columbia University, whereas Rajveer has no degree or any education background. His lack of education and planning earns the disapproval of Radhika's father, Subho Shekar Rai Banerjee (Victor Banerjee). However, Radhika leaves her father and marries RV, whom she loves immensely. She forgets about her degree and takes on her job as a wealthy housewife, therefore Radhika Shekar Rai Banerjee turns into Shona. Their family is complete with the birth of two beautiful children, Priya a.k.a. Princess (Angelina Idnani) and Ranveer a.k.a. Champ (Ali Haji). Luck follows RV and he has soon proclaimed the number one race car driver in the USA.
However, tragedy strikes during his 51st race. His rival in profession Rusty, quite jealous of his name and fame, crashes his car into RV's whilst racing, getting him hospitalized for a few months. When RV gets out, he heads straight to the track to race again but soon learns that he's scared of going fast because he doesn't want to crash and get hurt again. His old accident haunts him to his nerves and he comes last in every race he participates in. Exasperated, his manager fires RV and finds someone else. Angry, RV tells Harry that he doesn't need him anyway and that he can find some better another manager easily. This results at the end of their friendship.
Now a year has gone by and neither RV nor Shona have jobs. They try their best to find work but no one will hire them because none of them have degrees, making them regret Shona's father's words. RV and Shonaa are unable to pay their loans and bills so everything they own in their house is sold. Princess and Champ who are not told much, start to worry that they're becoming poor and RV covers up the truth by telling them they're actually on a reality show, Don't Worry, Be Happy. This lets them rest but then they suffer more. With only about $2,000 left, RV and family leave their big house and find a less expensive one.
They move into a one-bedroom apartment, and the children become worried again. RV and Shona tell them this is all part of the game and the kids believe them. They still go to their favorite school while their parents try to find jobs. A few days later, Harry comes to meet RV and Shona and offers RV a job of a cab driver. RV thinks he's insulting him of his poverty and lack of his racing talent which results in a heated argument between the two and RV asks him to leave. Days pass and Shona gets a job as a piano player and RV becomes a taxi driver, after lots of arguing.
One day when RV and Shona start fighting, Princess overhears them and learns the truth that they actually are in trouble with money and that there's no reality show. She wants to take things in her own hands and then plans to save up the money she and Champ use are given for lunch. The kids don't eat, and Princess manages but Champ begins to starve. He takes food from the garbage bin without his sister knowing and eats it outside of school on a bench. He keeps eating from the garbage while Princess keeps saving up money. Princess makes Champ promise not to tell their parents a single thing, knowing they'll get mad.
RV gets a customer who needs to get to the airport soon. He takes this chance to test his racing skills if they're still there. RV starts off doing great and moves in elegant speed until he gets a terrible flashback of his nightmarish accident. He so then learns that he could probably never race again because of being scared of getting hurt.
In the meantime, Champ gets a piece of glass inside his stomach from eating something taken from the bin. RV, Shona, and Princess run to the hospital where Princess tells her parents the plan she made Champ follow. The doctor tells RV and Shona that they need $65,000. The couple has no idea how they are going to get the money and only have two days to get it. RV decides to enter a race for his son's sake. Harry learns about Champ's condition and reconciles with RV and together they set up their own team with new members. RV meets his old nemesis and he starts remembering the flashbacks. But that doesn't stop him from the love of his son. He wins the most tensed race ever in his career, while apparently killing Rusty by crashing his car during the race in the same way as he did by pushing him off the track. In the end, the family is living a happy and fun life, portraying the moral fear of losing someone you love overcomes your fears.
Cast [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
Production began in May 2006 and the film was released on 27 April 2007.[3] The working title was "Ta Ra Rum Pum Pum."[4] The film was shot almost entirely in the United States of America, with a few scenes shot in a studio in Mumbai. Portions were filmed in Rockingham, North Carolina at the Rockingham Speedway and at West Allis, Wisconsin at The Milwaukee Mile. Ali Haji had to go through three auditions and Angelina Idnani was called in for her fourth audition before they were finalised. The plot is combined with that of Tom Cruise's Days of Thunder and Will Ferrell's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby — the protagonist meets with an accident while racing and than makes a comeback destroying his nemesis race driver – and Will Smith's The Pursuit of Happyness, where a father and son have to move out of their house, due to the loss of a job.
The cars used in racing scenes were provided by Andy Hillenburg, who purchased Rockingham Speedway months after its release and provided the stunt drivers, as many ARCA Re/Max Series drivers participated in the filming (ARCA Re/Max Series stickers can be found on the cars in the movie; Hillenberg trained stunt drivers, along with letting some film stars take turns driving).[5] Some cars that can be seen in Ta Ra Rum Pum display high resemblance to cars specifically created for Will Ferrell's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (except featuring modified sponsorship decals) as Hillenburg provided cars for that movie as well.
Music [ edit ]
The music[6] was conducted by the duo Vishal-Shekhar and Javed Akhtar penned the lyrics. Ta Ra Rum Pum contains seven songs. According to the Indian trade website Box Office India, with around 10,00,000 units sold, this film's soundtrack album was the year's fifteenth highest-selling.[7]
Response [ edit ]
Box office [ edit ]
Ta Ra Rum Pum opened to an average response, where collections were reported to be as low as 50%. However, the film saw a good opening of 90%-95% in the big cities such as Mumbai and Delhi; the smaller cinemas received an average response of 50%–70%.[8] Though the film opened to an average response the next two days saw a huge jump in collections. The collections dropped on Monday by about 55%–70%.[9] In its first week the film collected an impressive 43.7 million in Mumbai,[10] and did well at the multiplexes but not at the single screens.[11] The overall gross for the first week in India stands at Rs. 114,392,260.[12] The release of Spider-Man 3 caused a drop in collections, but the film has continued to do well in Mumbai and Delhi.[13] Ta Ra Rum Pum became the 9th highest-grossing film of 2007 so far, with box office figures of Rs. 362.0 million.
The three main markets overseas – the UK, USA and Australia – saw a similar opening. Ta Ra Rum Pum collected during the weekend and debuted at number nine on the UK film chart which was a good opening.[14] In the United States, the film collected $425,102 which was a fair opening. In Australia it collected $90,000.[15] Though the weekend figures are good, the collections are below expectations for a Yash Raj film.[16][17] The film was given an above-average status in the United States and was a hit in the United Kingdom.[18]
In its sixth week, the film had collected 377.0 million and was declared a semi-hit in India.[19] Overseas the film has collected $2000000 in the United Kingdom.[20]
Tie-in with Walt Disney Studios [ edit ]
The title song of Ta Ra Rum Pum is a four-minute animated endeavour with all the main characters of the movie and four other animated characters. This song was executed by Walt Disney Studios as part of their three-film deal with Yash Raj Films.
Reviews [ edit ]
The film opened from above-average to very positive reviews.[21] Taran Adarsh of Indiafm.com gave Ta Ra Rum Pum a rating of 3.5 out of 5. The two lead actors got good feedback with Adarsh saying "Saif is extremely likable. He conveys the varied emotions with complete understanding. Rani enacts the role of the mother/wife proficiently".[22]
Awards [ edit ]
Sabsey Favourite Kaun Awards [ edit ]
Won – Sabsey Favourite Heroine – Rani Mukerji
See also [ edit ]Opposite the pedestrian-friendly Winlow Westheimer shopping center at the corner of Westheimer and Hazard St. that includes the recently de-Firkinized Phoenix bar, a new Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers fast-food joint is about to go up — on a 35,000-sq.-ft. lot that’s been vacant since the 2-story pushed-to-the-street building once home to Martha Turner Properties was torn down on the site almost 6 years ago. The reader who sent in the photo above reports that a construction supervisor on site claimed the new chicken joint will be alive and kicking within 3 or 4 months.
***
Unless any other relatives open up before then, the spot at 1900 Westheimer will be the the first inside-the-Loop location of the Louisiana-born chain (and its 12th in the greater Houston area) but the third Raising Cane’s on Westheimer. The others are just west of Hillcroft (pictured at right) and in a Galleria food court.
Photos: Swamplot inbox (construction), LoopNet (Raising Cane’s at 12201 Westheimer Rd.)
Montrose Drive-ThruI recently started a new job, so I have less time to cook/experiment in the kitchen. I’ve turned to faster, keto friendly snacks and meals. This is a small twist on a staple party food; cream cheese rolled up in salami. Instead of just plain cream cheese, I found a recipe for an easy garlic dip. When rolled up in salami, you have a very tasty snack/lunch!
Here is the original garlic dip recipe (http://tinyurl.com/amn3ypn). I’ve only changed a little bit; cream instead of milk and less Worcestershire sauce. Both modifications were to cut down on the carbs (although there is hardly any to begin with).
The dip is also excellent with cheese chips (http://tinyurl.com/b3fpumy) or veggies!
-1 package of cream cheese (8 oz)
-1/2 C sour cream
-1 tbsp cream
-1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
-3 garlic cloves, minced (3 tsp minced garlic)
-1/4 tsp salt
-1/8 tsp pepper
Mix all of the ingredients together, cool in the fridge for 1 hour. Spread it onto salami, roll it up, enjoy!
AdvertisementsBritain’s Got Talent: Susan Boyle sings Memory from Cats (video)
Internet sensation Susan Boyle once again wowed the world with her soaring voice as she took to the stage and performed Memory from Cats on the semifinals of Britain’s Got Talent.
The 48-year-old from Scotland looked glamorous but retained her down to earth looks the world has fallen in love with as she sang the song made popular by her idol Elaine Paige.
“I thought you sang beautifully, thank you Susan,” Piers Morgan said. “You nailed that performance, I am so proud of you,” Amanda Holden added.
And with that amazing performance, Susan has gone through to the final of Britain’s Got Talent!
Since appearing on the talent competition, her performance of I Dreamed a Dream has been viewed almost 60 million times on YouTube, and the Scot has been praised by celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Demi Moore.
The winner will perform at the Royal Variety Show and receive a check for 100,000 pounds.
Here’s the video of Susan singing Memory on Britain’s Got Talent (May 24)
You can also watch the video here.The last 10 years have been tough for Cyberpunk gamers.
FASA closed their doors in 2001, meaning that Shadowrun seemed to be dead. Guardians of Order, publishers of the Tri-Stat Cyberpunk game Ex Machina, went out of business in 2006. And after four years of silence, R. Talsorian Games, publishers of the classic Cyberpunk 2020, came back with Cyberpunk v3, which was fairly widely acknowledged to be “not a good thing” by genre devotees.
It’s not all bad. The Shadowrun property went from FASA to FanPro and then on to Catalyst, and now the game has a fourth edition out. Both d20 Modern and GURPS have had “cyber” themed supplements released, and there’s an interesting fan conversion of the original Cyberpunk system floating around the internet called Interlock Unlimited.
But recently, something’s changed. Spotted on the website of publisher Cubicle 7 for pre-order, there is a new Cyberpunk game, due out this June, called Genesis Descent. Genesis Descent licenses Interlock, the original Cyberpunk 2020 system, for a new setting using the same themes of corporate greed, political unrest, and high technology. This may be just the thing for people who like the Cyberpunk system, but think the setting’s too dated, or people who just need a change of pace from the elves and dragons in Shadowrun. The site doesn’t provide any information as to whether the game is indeed completely standalone (though at 256 pages, it’s certainly a possibility) or just a setting, but regardless, it will be the first material commercially released using the Interlock system in at least 7 years.
It’s completely unclear how this will turn out, but Cubicle 7, current publishers of the Fuzion-based Victoriana as well as SLA Industries, probably has enough background in the genre to know what they’re doing. The only thing Cyberpunk fans can do is sit on their hands until June, and hope that Genesis Descent doesn’t fall on its face like Cyberpunk v3 did.
From the Cubicle 7 Site:
Genesis Descent is a brand new setting using R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk Interlock system. Life on Earth in 2054 is tough for many. Climate change and natural disasters have not only torn many from their usual way of life, but have also prompted conflict over scarce resources such as water in some areas. Meanwhile, technology brings more and more comfort to the privileged. Political and civil unrest, as well as outright war in some areas, has seen the geo-political landscape change. The empires of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are falling as new countries take advantage of the upheaval to assert their dominance. Amongst this turmoil, corporations have seized the initiative. In many areas, where governments don’t have the resources or stability to protect, treat or feed their citizens, corporations are the sole providers of law and infrastructure. America may have been the first country to send a man to the Moon, but it was a corporation that sent the first man to Mars.
Genesis Descent has three levels of play: Street, Company and Agent. Allowing players and Gamemasters to tailor the type of campaign they wish to play. From the ghettos and organized crime of shattered Los Angeles or London, through the halls of corporate-controlled states and their near orbit control centres, to UNIS Agents working tirelessly to assist governments and keep corporate power in check.
Genesis Descent is a dark, stark techno-thriller near-future setting where the world is falling apart as mankind reaches out to claim the stars…
Cyberpunk and the Interlock system are licensed from R. Talsorian Games, Inc
[tags]cyberpunk, Role Playing Games[/tags]Byline Investigates Big News Part 22: Trevor Kavanagh used stolen phone bills for P1 story on MP's private life - later attacked police for lawfully searching out corrupt journalists
RUPERT Murdoch's top political journalist Trevor Kavanagh outed an MP as gay by using illegal phone billing data bought from Britain's biggest data theft operation, the High Court has heard.
It is not known whether Kavanagh, who serves on the press regulator IPSO, knew that the story tip he was working on was allegedly derived from an unlawful private detective.
"(Kavanagh)... had evidence about his private sex life, and offering him an opportunity to co-operate in a story about his sexuality, under threat of the newspaper ‘outing’ him through the publication of this highly private information," ~ barrister David Sherborne
The revelation came out during a High Court hearing in which 58 claimants are suing The Sun for phone hacking.
Target: former MP Simon Hughes
Claimants' barrister David Sherborne told the court The Sun had targeted Simon Hughes, Liberal Democrat MP for Bermondsey and leading candidate in the 2006 Liberal Democrat party leadership contest.
In a court document, Mr Sherborne stated: “It is clear… that Mr Hughes was targeted by a |
on Farmers Market. Want to lend a hand? We are always looking for volunteers!
Are you a Washington State Farmer or make food products using locally sourced ingredients? We want to hear from you! Check out our vendor page for more info.
Are you a local business owner? Show your customers you care about providing local, healthy foods to your community by becoming a sponsor of the Renton Farmers Market.
Food Trucks at Market West
A Food Trucks will be at Market West every market day selling delicious food
Stop by and check it out!
Buy One, Donate One
Did you know? Each week we collect donations for the local Renton Food Bank at our market. Most of the donations come from our generous farmers - now we are asking our shoppers if they would consider helping out, too. Buying an apple? Consider buying another apple and donating it to the Renton Food Bank. See our donation station at the Market Manager booth for more information.
Farm Fresh Recipes
Watermelon Agua Fresca - September 11
2 1/4 pounds seedless watermelon
1 cup cold water
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice or lime juice
1 1/2 tablespoon honey (optional)
Pinch of salt
Directions:
Rinse the outside of the watermelon and cut the watermelon flesh away from the rind. Cut the watermelon into chunks.
Put the watermelon chunks, water, lime juice, salt, and honey (if using) in the blender. Put the top on tightly.
Turn the blender to medium and blend until the mixture is smooth. Turn the machine off. Taste and add a little bit more lime juice or honey as desired and blend again. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate up to 4 hours. If you do this, give the drink a quick stir before serving.
See great farm fresh recipes & recipe hacks using foods sold at the Renton Farmers Market.
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Harvest Calendar
What’s in season? Check out this helpful Harvest Calendar from our friends at Puget Sound Fresh!Lenovo's new ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an extremely high-quality and well-built business notebook. It is clearly focused on the mobility, because the 14-inch system is very portable at little more than just 1.1 kg. The Chinese manufacturer was also able to reduce the footprint even further compared to the previous model.
The new chassis is also equipped with new ports. Lenovo not only implements two Thunderbolt 3 ports (USB-C jack), but also regular connectors like UBS-A or HDMI. This means the flagship device is future-proof without the constant need for an adapter. The input devices were further improved as well. The key travel is now on par with the larger T-series models; we even like the new keyboard a bit better thanks to the higher stability and the richer feedback. The glass touchpad also left a very good impression.
The Full HD panel of our test model manages decent results, but some consumer models show that there is still room for improvements. The optional WQHD panel will probably be available mid 2017, but the matte FHD IPS screen is certainly not a bad choice.
The new ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a very good business notebook and a great choice if you are looking for a very portable and versatile system. But the compact chassis also has drawbacks. You will have to live with high surface temperatures and a clearly audible fan when you really stress the system.
The performance leaves mixed impressions. The X1 Carbon 2017 is very fast in practice thanks to the Core i7 and the PCIe-SSD, but the cooling quickly struggles under sustained workloads. The Core i7 will drop below the performance potential of a Core i5 in this case and you will have to live with high surface temperatures as well as a quickly reacting fan.
X1 Carbon 2017 SKUs with the Core i5 might be the better choice when you consider all these aspects. The lower clocks should result in more headroom for the cooling solution and the temperatures should be lower as well. We will check this with a corresponding test model soon.
We really don't like the limitation for the LTE module. You have to know whether you need LTE or not before you buy the machine. The X1 Carbon 2017 has to be ordered with LTE or you will not be able to upgrade it afterwards due to the missing antennas. The microSD-reader is not very useful in our opinion, either. The slot is tricky to access and the usability of microSD-cards is limited, so you will probably have to use an external card reader anyway.
The combination of high-quality chassis, large screen, excellent input devices, comprehensive port selection, long battery runtimes and the high mobility still results in an extremely compelling and currently almost rivaled package, despite the mentioned drawbacks.They tell me it's utterly impossible and I'm full of shit. And those are the comments fit to print.
The concept of adding up to an inch on your arms in a single day sounds like a myth as big as Moby Dick. However, although there's no scientific literature backing up the protocol, I've personally helped hardcore lifters looking for a challenge use this method to annihilate the status quo on arm day.
Conventional methods yield conventional results. The question is, are you willing to try the unconventional? And even if you're willing to try it, do you think you have what it takes to survive?
What's In An Inch?
I made believers out of dozens of athletes when I started running "Inch-on-Your-Arm Clinics" a number of years back. Granted, not everyone gains a full inch—only a select few cross that threshold—but most people I took through the program gained between one-half and two-thirds of an inch. It's a ridiculous-sounding protocol, but one that stretches the tape measure like never before.
Be forewarned: To get results like these, you'll have to cram a month's worth of arm work into one outrageously grueling day.
Be forewarned: To get results like these, you'll have to cram a month's worth of arm work into one outrageously grueling day.
Muscle growth occurs in a number of ways, including cell volumization, fascial stretching and release, and increasing the size of each contractile protein. The first mechanism is all about getting a ludicrous muscle pump, while the last is brought about by traditional strength-training principles. We're really focusing on the first mechanism of growth here, although this routine certainly includes elements of all three.
This workout routine is so intense it will literally force your arms to grow in a single day. It will be a day of Armageddon, but I encourage you to measure your arms—both before starting and a week later—to determine exactly just how much new raw size you've added.
Chances are you'll never have felt muscle soreness like this before. In fact, because of the degree of DOMS created, this approach is not recommended for beginning or intermediate lifters.
Get Ready To Grow
Your journey to bigger arms starts a week before Armageddon. Overcompensating on nutrients and rest are the best ways to set your body up for growth. For a full seven days before you try this workout, you're going to up your caloric intake by roughly 33 percent.
For some people who eat clean, this may not be too difficult; for others already taking in an abundance of calories, this can be more challenging. Increasing your food intake by a third may seem like you're at the dinner table 24/7.
Overcompensating on nutrients and rest are the best ways to set your body up for growth.
Here are a few guidelines to help ensure you consume what you need in preparation for the upcoming 10-hour arm workout.
Make sure your daily protein intake is at 1.5 rams per pound of body weight each day. A 200-pound individual should be consuming 300 grams of protein for the week beforehand.
Ensure your carbohydrate intake is at least 2.0 grams per pound of body weight each day. That same 200-pound man would consume 400 grams of carbs for the full week.
Take in at least 18 calories per pound of body weight daily. For example if you weigh 200 pounds, you should be getting at least 3,600 calories per day the week leading up to arm day.
The balance of your calories should be from dietary fats. That's 800 calories for the 200 pounder, or just less than 100 grams.
Your Armageddon Schedule
Before starting the workout, you'll want to have an early breakfast, about 1-2 hours before you train, to get you primed and ready for your workout.
6:30 A.M.
6:30AM: Breakfast Eggs 4 Scrambled Eggs (Egg whites) 4-6 Potato (Baked) 1 large Sour Cream (Light) to taste Banana (Medium) 2 Water (or Juice or Gatorade G2) Ample amount
Noon: Meal 2 Chicken (8 oz. if under 130 lbs., 12 oz. If over) 8 oz. Pasta ((or rice) 1-1/2 cups if under 130 pounds, 2 cups if over) 1 1/2 cups
2:30PM: Meal 3 Ground Beef (8 oz. If under 130 lbs., 12 oz. If over) 8 oz. Pasta ((or rice) 1-1/2 cups if under 130 pounds, 2 cups if over) 1 1/2 cups
4PM: Meal 4 iSatori Hyper-Gro (If your body weight is less than 130 pounds, use 1 scoop; if over, use 2) 1 shake
6PM: Meal 5 Eggs 4 Scrambled Eggs (Egg whites) 4-6 Potato (Baked) 1 large Sour Cream (Light) to taste Banana (Medium) 2 Water (or juice or Gatorade G2) Ample amount
7:30 A.M.
Arrive at the gym and take your pre-workout supplement. You're going to do short workouts every 30 minutes, so bring along some items to pass the time—cell phone, charger, lap top, or books.
In your gym bag, pack chalk, straps or gloves, towel, extra shirt, two shaker cups, a mass gainer—I recommend Hyper-Gro because it's fortified with Bio-Gro—your favorite pre-workout, and two bags of rice cakes.
8:00 A.M.
8AM: Workout 1 Alternate these 2 exercises. Rest 90 sec. between each set. Not supersets. Print 1 Seated Dumbbell Curl 3 sets, 12 Reps 2 Triceps Pushdown 3 sets, 12 Reps
Seated Dumbbell Curl/Cable Push-down
8:30 A.M.
8:30AM: Workout 2 Alternate these 2 exercises. Rest 90 sec. between each set. Not supersets. Print 1 Barbell Curl 4 sets, 8 Reps 2 Lying Triceps Press 4 sets, 8 Reps
Note: Consume your first Hyper-Gro shake (if your body weight is less than 130 pounds, use one scoop; if over, use two).
9:00 A.M.
9AM: Workout 3 Alternate these 2 exercises. Rest 90 sec. between each set. Not supersets. Print 1 Seated Dumbbell Curl 3 sets, 12 Reps 2 Triceps Pushdown 3 sets, 12 Reps
9:30 A.M.
9:30AM: Workout 4 Alternate these 2 exercises. Rest 90 sec. between each set. Not supersets. Print 1 Barbell Curl 4 sets, 8 Reps 2 Lying Triceps Press 4 sets, 8 Reps
Skullcrusher
10:00 A.M.
10AM: Workout 5 Alternate these 2 exercises. Rest 90 sec. between each set. Not supersets. Print 1 Incline Dumbbell Curl 3 sets, 12 Reps 2 Seated Triceps Press 3 sets, 12 Reps
10:30 A.M.
Note: Consume a Hyper-Gro shake. If your body weight is less than 130 pounds, use one scoop; if over, use two.
11:00 A.M.
11AM: Workout 7 Alternate these 2 exercises. Rest 90 sec. between each set. Not supersets. Print 1 Incline Dumbbell Curl 3 sets, 12 Reps 2 Seated Triceps Press 3 sets, 12 Reps
Incline Dumbbell Curl
11:30 A.M.
Noon
6:30AM: Breakfast Eggs 4 Scrambled Eggs (Egg whites) 4-6 Potato (Baked) 1 large Sour Cream (Light) to taste Banana (Medium) 2 Water (or Juice or Gatorade G2) Ample amount
Noon: Meal 2 Chicken (8 oz. if under 130 lbs., 12 oz. If over) 8 oz. Pasta ((or rice) 1-1/2 cups if under 130 pounds, 2 cups if over) 1 1/2 cups
2:30PM: Meal 3 Ground Beef (8 oz. If under 130 lbs., 12 oz. If over) 8 oz. Pasta ((or rice) 1-1/2 cups if under 130 pounds, 2 cups if over) 1 1/2 cups
4PM: Meal 4 iSatori Hyper-Gro (If your body weight is less than 130 pounds, use 1 scoop; if over, use 2) 1 shake
6PM: Meal 5 Eggs 4 Scrambled Eggs (Egg whites) 4-6 Potato (Baked) 1 large Sour Cream (Light) to taste Banana (Medium) 2 Water (or juice or Gatorade G2) Ample amount
Note: Take a pre-workout—I love Pre-Gro—if desired.
12:30 P.M.
12:30PM: Workout 9 Alternate these 2 exercises. Rest 90 sec. between each set. Not supersets. Print 1 Seated Dumbbell Curl 3 sets, 12 Reps 2 Triceps Pushdown 3 sets, 12 Reps
1:00 P.M.
1PM: Workout 10 Alternate these 2 exercises. Rest 90 sec. between each set. Not supersets. Print 1 Barbell Curl 4 sets, 8 Reps 2 Lying Triceps Press 4 sets, 8 Reps
Standing Barbell Curl
1:30 P.M.
Note: Consume a Hyper-Gro shake. If your body weight is less than 130 pounds, use one scoop; if over, use two.
2:00 P.M.
2PM: Workout 12 Alternate these 2 exercises. Rest 90 sec. between each set. Not supersets. Print 1 Concentration Curls 4 sets, 12 Reps 2 Close-Hands Push-Up 4 sets, to failure
2:30 P.M.
6:30AM: Breakfast Eggs 4 Scrambled Eggs (Egg whites) 4-6 Potato (Baked) 1 large Sour Cream (Light) to taste Banana (Medium) 2 Water (or Juice or Gatorade G2) Ample amount
Noon: Meal 2 Chicken (8 oz. if under 130 lbs., 12 oz. If over) 8 oz. Pasta ((or rice) 1-1/2 cups if under 130 pounds, 2 cups if over) 1 1/2 cups
2:30PM: Meal 3 Ground Beef (8 oz. If under 130 lbs., 12 oz. If over) 8 oz. Pasta ((or rice) 1-1/2 cups if under 130 pounds, 2 cups if over) 1 1/2 cups
4PM: Meal 4 iSatori Hyper-Gro (If your body weight is less than 130 pounds, use 1 scoop; if over, use 2) 1 shake
6PM: Meal 5 Eggs 4 Scrambled Eggs (Egg whites) 4-6 Potato (Baked) 1 large Sour Cream (Light) to taste Banana (Medium) 2 Water (or juice or Gatorade G2) Ample amount
4:00 P.M.
6:30AM: Breakfast Eggs 4 Scrambled Eggs (Egg whites) 4-6 Potato (Baked) 1 large Sour Cream (Light) to taste Banana (Medium) 2 Water (or Juice or Gatorade G2) Ample amount
Noon: Meal 2 Chicken (8 oz. if under 130 lbs., 12 oz. If over) 8 oz. Pasta ((or rice) 1-1/2 cups if under 130 pounds, 2 cups if over) 1 1/2 cups
2:30PM: Meal 3 Ground Beef (8 oz. If under 130 lbs., 12 oz. If over) 8 oz. Pasta ((or rice) 1-1/2 cups if under 130 pounds, 2 cups if over) 1 1/2 cups
4PM: Meal 4 iSatori Hyper-Gro (If your body weight is less than 130 pounds, use 1 scoop; if over, use 2) 1 shake
6PM: Meal 5 Eggs 4 Scrambled Eggs (Egg whites) 4-6 Potato (Baked) 1 large Sour Cream (Light) to taste Banana (Medium) 2 Water (or juice or Gatorade G2) Ample amount
6:00 P.M.
6:30AM: Breakfast Eggs 4 Scrambled Eggs (Egg whites) 4-6 Potato (Baked) 1 large Sour Cream (Light) to taste Banana (Medium) 2 Water (or Juice or Gatorade G2) Ample amount
Noon: Meal 2 Chicken (8 oz. if under 130 lbs., 12 oz. If over) 8 oz. Pasta ((or rice) 1-1/2 cups if under 130 pounds, 2 cups if over) 1 1/2 cups
2:30PM: Meal 3 Ground Beef (8 oz. If under 130 lbs., 12 oz. If over) 8 oz. Pasta ((or rice) 1-1/2 cups if under 130 pounds, 2 cups if over) 1 1/2 cups
4PM: Meal 4 iSatori Hyper-Gro (If your body weight is less than 130 pounds, use 1 scoop; if over, use 2) 1 shake
6PM: Meal 5 Eggs 4 Scrambled Eggs (Egg whites) 4-6 Potato (Baked) 1 large Sour Cream (Light) to taste Banana (Medium) 2 Water (or juice or Gatorade G2) Ample amount
7:00 P.M.
Post-workout arm measurement.
Armageddon Wrap-Up
Once you've completed this full-day arm assault, you should refrain from training your upper body for four days, and measure your arms again to see your final results. Once you've done that, it's back to normal training. Now best of luck, and let me know in the comments if you make it through this massive arm attack!Busy week for app updates right? Today the official Foursquare app for Windows Phone was updated. No, we didn't lose the ability to check-in just yet. That probably won't happen until we finally get their new app called Swarm. Let's check out today's update for Foursquare.
The last update Foursquare had on Windows Phone was back in late March. That update changed a few things around. For example, the trending tab was replaced with the saved tab. Head into the Windows Phone Store today and you'll see the app now at version 3.1.52.0. Here's what we get today:
Bug fix where unread notifications are not cleared
Added Lens support
Other general bug fixes
Hallelujah. We've experienced the bug with our read notifications for far too long. The bug showed that you always had an unread notification, making you think you were really popular. Turns out the notification count wouldn't clear even if you read them, today's update fixes that.
We've also got Lens support for those on Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 8.1. You can launch the Foursquare app by using the Lens picker with the default camera app onboard Windows Phone.
Update and let us know what you think of the app. Or do you just want them to give us Swarm already?
Download Foursquare for Windows Phone.
Thanks for the tip Akram!Chairman Paul Scally confirms the appointment of Peter Taylor as interim manager
Further to the termination of the contract of Martin Allen as manager of Gillingham Football Club, I have received already a huge response from potential new candidates such that the process of considering a replacement manager is clearly going to take some considerable time.With that in mind, and based on my view that the playing staff require some immediate assistance to prepare for up and coming games, I contacted Peter Taylor this afternoon to ascertain whether he would consider coming back to the Club on an 'interim manager' basis pending a full time appointment to be made in the weeks ahead.I am delighted that Peter has accepted this role and he will take responsibility for the team with immediate effect, meeting the Management and Players tomorrow morning, and taking charge of our game against Preston on Saturday and thereafter until a permanent appointment is made.I understand, and share the view that the changing of a Manager is a major concern to all supporters, but I hope you will all accept either now, or in the fullness of time that the decision made was made totally in the interests of the Club, and whilst an extremely difficult decision to make I am absolutely confident it was the correct decision to take.I hope you will all unite as always behind the team on Saturday and give Peter the welcome and support one would expect.Paul D P ScallyChairmanConfused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.
1. Forget about Texas A&M
There are two ways to win at a school like Texas. Either you hire a CEO type, someone who will glad-hand, politic, land whichever recruits he wants, figure out the system from there, and leave the micro details to his assistants. Basically, you could go the Mack Brown route.
For a school with so many resources, this can work just fine. And it did. In Brown's 16 years in Austin, Texas finished with at least nine wins 13 times, finished in the AP top 10 seven times, won 10 bowls, won the Big 12 South four times, won the Big 12 twice, and won the 2005 national title. Brown had issues with underachievement early, and after losing his way following a loss in the 2009 BCS Championship, he never totally recovered. But Texas still won so much more during the Brown era than it had in the 16 years previous.
If you don't find a CEO type that you like, the other approach is to hire a coach with a specific identity and hope that your recruiting base allows him to find the options he needs. By hiring former Louisville head coach Charlie Strong, Texas signified it was going with this approach this time around.
Strong is a Toughness™ guy, a Discipline™ guy, a Family™ guy. Though he provided a strong recruiting upgrade at Louisville, his Cardinal recruiting classes (according to Rivals: 29th in 2011, 42nd in 2012, 52nd in 2013) would have been considered outright disasters in Austin. Meanwhile, Texas would have killed for Louisville's performance on the field in 2013. Louisville has been better than Texas in the F/+ rankings in two of the last four seasons (2010, 2013) and was basically even in a third (2012).
If Strong was able to produce a No. 12 F/+ ranking in 2013 and a 23-3 record in 2012-13 with top-50 recruiting classes, and if it's all but impossible not to finish with top-30 classes at Texas, then in theory, that's a recipe for top-10 results. (In theory.)
Strong proved in his last job that he doesn't need top-20 classes to craft a top-20 product. Now, every job's different, and the Texas job is in a climate all its own. For all we know, the extra pressures, obligations, expectations, etc., might prevent him from gaining traction with the Longhorns. But until he proves otherwise, we know he can identify the pieces he needs, and we know he can coach and develop that talent. He brings to the table everything Mack Brown didn't (for better and for worse), and now we get to find out if his approach will work on the 40 acres. It might not, but it might.
This is a long way of saying this: when it comes to Texas, just ignore Texas A&M for now.
Really, this goes for media as much as Texas fans at the moment. But it's something that needs to be said. Texas A&M is winning the recruiting game. Dominating it. The Aggies' SEC move perfectly coincided with the hire of Kevin Sumlin and the explosion of Johnny Manziel on the national scene.
A&M couldn't have scripted its move any better, and if Texas needs five- and high-four-star talent to thrive, that's a problem because the Aggies are taking all of it. Of the current top 30 Texas prospects via Rivals.com, 19 have currently committed to a school; eight have chosen A&M, and none have chosen Texas. Of Texas' 10 current commits, only three are four-star prospects.
This is a different experience for Texas fans. And by no means is this good news for the 'Horns. They're going after a lot of these kids and not landing them, after all. But if Strong ends up with the right prospects for his system, it won't matter. He's still going to land solid classes, and if he proves he can coach talent up in Texas like he did in Kentucky, he'll be fine. Recruiting rankings absolutely matter, but so does Strong's track record. And if he wins big, the recruits will come back to the burnt orange anyway.
2. Recruiting rankings expire
Recruiting rankings make it difficult to figure out what the future holds for Texas. They're also making it difficult to figure out the present.
Strong inherits a roster littered with more four-star recruits than Louisville will ever have at once. Recruiting rankings hint at potential, and Texas will always have plenty of that. Again, in theory, bringing in a coach who coaxed all sorts of potential out of his players at Papa John's Stadium makes a lot of sense.
But what kind of shelf life does potential have? At what point do recruiting rankings expire?
Strong inherits two five-star running backs who, even at their best, haven't yet looked like five-star running backs. He inherits a sizable batch of receivers, most of whom had per-target averages well below the norm in 2013. He inherits a two-deep full of four-star guys on a line that improved to above-average (and no more) in the line stats last fall. He inherits a blue-chip defensive line that could barely stop the run. He inherits a set of four- and five-star linebackers, and the only proven, healthy quantity in the bunch is a former three-star guy. He inherits a secondary littered with four-star prospects who, despite a great pass rush, couldn't craft a top-30 pass defense.
At what point does potential become wasted potential? The answer will determine Texas' fate in 2014, and I have no idea what the answer is.
2013 Schedule & Results
Record: 8-5 | Adj. Record: 6-7 | Final F/+ Rk: 35 Date Opponent Opp. F/+ Rk Score W-L Adj. Score Adj. W-L 5-gm Adj. Avg. 31-Aug New Mexico State 122 56-7 W 38.6 - 22.6 W 7-Sep at BYU 30 21-40 L 32.6 - 34.4 L 14-Sep Ole Miss 28 23-44 L 21.3 - 34.0 L 21-Sep Kansas State 24 31-21 W 33.7 - 19.8 W 3-Oct at Iowa State 78 31-30 W 19.6 - 36.6 L -0.3 12-Oct vs. Oklahoma 20 36-20 W 29.9 - 17.6 W -1.1 26-Oct at TCU 44 30-7 W 32.0 - 18.4 W 2.0 2-Nov Kansas 101 35-13 W 25.6 - 33.9 L 2.9 9-Nov at West Virginia 76 47-40 W 20.9 - 27.0 L -1.1 16-Nov Oklahoma State 8 13-38 L 30.6 - 28.5 W 2.7 28-Nov Texas Tech 43 41-16 W 32.3 - 19.5 W 2.8 7-Dec at Baylor 7 10-30 L 14.4 - 19.6 L -0.9 30-Dec vs. Oregon 5 7-30 L 14.1 - 23.3 L -1.1
Category Offense Rk Defense Rk Spec. Tms. Rk F/+ +4.1% 46 +6.1% 35 +1.8% 31 Points Per Game 29.3 64 25.8 58 Adj. Points Per Game 26.6 77 25.8 46
3. A small bounce and a scapegoat
It ended up being a dead cat bounce of sorts for Brown at UT. Texas went 25-2 in 2008-09 and ranked third in F/+ in both seasons. But the Longhorns' plummet to 65th and 5-7 in 2010 was nearly unprecedented. Only two major conference teams have fallen further in a single year: 2008 Washington (50th to 117th) and 2006 Iowa State (31st to 99th).
Both of those programs dumped the coach in charge, which meant there was no track record, good or bad, for a coach trying to pick up the pieces when everything had so quickly fallen apart. In 2011, everything began to look positive. New, young assistants pushed the right buttons, especially defensive coordinator Manny Diaz, who engineered improvement from 31st in Def. F/+ to sixth.
The offense took a huge step forward in 2012, but a thin, young defense faltered. And after a single bad performance early in 2013 (BYU's high-paced option offense shredded a confused, increasingly gassed Texas D), Brown dumped a scapegoated Diaz in favor of old hand Greg Robinson.
Robinson was able to steady the ship to a degree, at least to the extent that a defense with one bad performance is unsteady. The move reeked of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, but it didn't matter. An offense that was without both injured quarterback David Ash and offensive coordinator Bryan Harsin (who had moved on to become the head coach at Arkansas State) just couldn't get rolling, so the quality of the defense didn't make a huge difference.
Adj. Points Per Game (first 5 games) : Opponent 29.5, Texas 29.2 (minus-0.3)
: Opponent 29.5, Texas 29.2 (minus-0.3) Adj. Points Per Game (first 6 games) : Texas 28.6, Opponent 24.2 (plus-4.4)
: Texas 28.6, Opponent 24.2 (plus-4.4) Adj. Points Per Game (last 2 games): Opponent 21.5, Texas 14.3 (minus-7.2)
The Mack Brown Retirement Watch began in September and picked up serious steam, but the Longhorns managed to win six games in a row to fend off the vultures. They went out with a whimper, though, and the Brown era quietly ended.
Offense
FIVE FACTORS -- OFFENSE Raw Category Rk Opp. Adj. Category Rk EXPLOSIVENESS IsoPPP 1.11 78 IsoPPP+ 99.2 66 EFFICIENCY Succ. Rt. 39.4% 89 Succ. Rt. + 100.2 62 FIELD POSITION Def. Avg. FP 28.5 41 Def. FP+ 101.4 41 FINISHING DRIVES Pts. Per Trip in 40 4.2 74 Redzone S&P+ 96.3 78 TURNOVERS EXPECTED 22.8 ACTUAL 22 -0.8
Category Yards/
Game Rk S&P+ Rk Success
Rt. Rk PPP+ Rk OVERALL 65 59 63 66 RUSHING 36 69 66 58 PASSING 81 47 61 71 Standard Downs 54 42 89 Passing Downs 63 91 21
Q1 Rk 82 1st Down Rk 81 Q2 Rk 27 2nd Down Rk 67 Q3 Rk 33 3rd Down Rk 26 Q4 Rk 108
4. Two is less than one
More than any current recruiting results, one thing has me particularly concerned about Charlie Strong's first season in Austin: the offense. Strong, offensive coordinator Joe Wickline, and "Assistant Head Coach for Offense" Shawn Watson inherit plenty of interesting, potentially high-caliber pieces, but this spring we really didn't learn much about what they plan to do with them.
Part of this was because of circumstance. When presumptive starting quarterback David Ash went down with a foot injury, Texas was basically down to dual-threat sophomore Tyrone Swoopes (well, "dual-threat" suggests he can pass, and we're not sure about that just yet) and converted tight end Miles Onyegbule. If Ash is healthy (and that's been a pretty big if in his career), Texas could have a strong presence at quarterback. If he isn't, then it's conceivable that incoming freshman Jerrod Heard could get a look this summer.
Another part of my concern, however, has nothing to do with on-field personnel. Toughness™ isn't an offensive identity, and in his coaching hires, Strong did not necessarily seem to know what he was looking for. He brought Watson with him from Louisville, which made a lot of sense -- the Cardinals ranked 10th and 23rd in Off. F/+ in the last two years. Granted, quarterback Teddy Bridgewater had a lot to do with that, but Watson still struck a nice play-calling note. Louisville had a pass-first offense that distributed the ball well between three running backs and about five receivers, and while we don't know if Texas has any true difference makers on offense, they certainly have athletes. Spreading the ball around and minimizing predictability could be an asset.
So Watson was aboard, but not as the offensive coordinator. That job went to offensive line coach Joe Wickline, whom Strong plucked from Oklahoma State. Wickline got the O.C. title, and Strong said he'd be calling plays. But then Watson would be calling plays. And then Wickline would be calling some plays with Watson getting final say.
This could be nothing, but consider it a red flag. As they say with quarterbacks, if you have two play-callers or two offensive visions, you might have none. Perhaps the promise of play-calling and the coordinator title is what allowed Strong to draw Wickline from Stillwater? Regardless, this isn't optimal, at least not yet.
Quarterback
Note: players in bold below are 2014 returnees. Players in italics are questionable with injury/suspension.
Player Ht, Wt 2014
Year Rivals Comp Att Yards TD INT Comp
Rate Sacks Sack Rate Yards/
Att. Case McCoy 187 329 1933 11 13 56.8% 10 2.9% 5.5 David Ash 6'3, 227 Jr. 3 stars (5.7) 53 87 760 7 2 60.9% 4 4.4% 8.1 Tyrone Swoopes 6'4, 241 So. 4 stars (5.8) 5 13 26 0 0 38.5% 2 13.3% 1.1 Miles Onyegbule 6'4, 235 Sr. 3 stars (5.7) Jerrod Heard 6'2, 190 Fr. 4 stars (5.9)
5. The mystery that is David Ash
In terms of pure stats, when David Ash has been healthy enough to see the field, he's been able to do some damage. He averaged at least 8.0 yards per pass attempt and 5.0 yards per non-sack carry (with minimal sacks) in both 2012 and 2013. That's almost Bridgewater-esque.
But he has a bit of a weakness: he can't stay healthy. He injured his wrist in 2012, and while he only missed one game, it significantly limited his upside. In the three weeks following his injury, he completed just 53 percent of his passes with one touchdown and four picks. He got eaten up by TCU later in the year, as well. And in 2013, he only played three games because of the scary, lingering effects of head injuries. This spring, he fractured his foot.
These injuries aren't specifically related to each other, so it seems to be more a case of luck than the dreaded "injury-prone" tag, but... he's been injury-prone. If Ash is healthy, Texas has itself a solid, underrated quarterback. After all, those per-attempt numbers include the awful games, which means the good games were tremendous -- 19-for-23 for 326 yards against Ole Miss in 2012, 25-for-31 for |
will be.”
1. Stick to a baseline grid
I’m not gonna tell you to use any particular size, just as long as you stick to it. I personally prefer an 8px baseline grid because it plays nicely with various typographic standards and has more divisors (1, 2, 4, 8px versus 1, 5, 10px), but I know 10px baseline grids are popular since all design applications ship with Shift+← as 10px. So use whatever floats your tugboat. You can use Nudg.it to change the default Shift+← distance to save yourself time. This does wonders when you’re designing in a style like Google Material Design that works off of an 8px grid.
Sticking to a grid will make spacing components a breeze—and it’ll ensure perfect visual rhythm. It removes guesswork when spacing out components, because distances must be multiples of your baseline grid value. As a bonus, your developers will love you because they’ll likely be working with a layout framework that adheres to a grid system.
2. Use bounding boxes
Once you’ve set your baseline grid, it’s incredibly useful to use bounding boxes to keep objects on your artboard organized and spaced consistently. In the image below, I use bounding boxes for each tab item, and I don’t actually have to put any space between the tab groups. The spacing is built into the bounding box, so each tab is snug against the one next to it.
Using a plugin like Ken Moore’s Relabel Button will allow you to create evenly spaced tabs like this in seconds.
Additionally, objects with bounding boxes have larger click areas and allow you to use things like inner shadows as dividers or highlighters. Which brings us to…
3. Never use lines for dividers
While we’re on the topic of click area sizes, can we talk about how difficult it is to grab a line segment?! It’s like Sketch is saying “We know there are 2 million pixels on the screen, but you need to click just this one. Not that one… nope… the… nope… almos… nailed i… nope.”
Secondly, even if you select the Fit to Pixel option in Sketch preferences, drag-resizing a line will always put it on sub-pixels. Super aggravating, and it’ll really mess up your spacing elsewhere because the ruler will round up values for any object that sits on sub-pixels.
So what should you do instead? I recommend using inner shadows to draw lines. Draw a rectangle and give it an inner shadow like so:
Why is this better? You now have a much larger click area, you’re protected from the dreaded sub-pixel, and, most importantly, you can use it as a style. Imagine you’re creating a list of items and you want a line separating each item. Instead of a bunch of text plus a line, now you can set your bounding box and give it an inner shadow. How cool is that?!
Note: Until Sketch supports borders with controllable sides, I’ve found inner shadows to be the best method for things like this.
4. Organize your styles and symbols
This one is easy. Did you know you can create style and symbol submenus in Sketch? By putting slashes in your style and symbol names, you can create an organized “folder” structure for finding things later.
It even alphabetizes things in your submenu for you! Thanks, Sketch!
5. Name your layers—all of them
Select an object on your artboard and learn this hotkey sequence:
Command+Shift+J
Command+R
Got it? It should select the layer in your layers list, then highlight the layer name to allow you to change it.
Pro-tip: Use the Tab key to jump to the next layer in your layers list to rename that one, too! I recommend this plugin by Rodrigo Soares to rename multiple layers at once, find and replace, and rename with sequencing!
In the screenshot above, you’ll see that I’ve called the “Jason Burke” layer “Name”. Why? Well, because that’s what it is. By default, Sketch names the layer to whatever the text is inside of it, but seeing “Jason Burke” in a list of potentially hundreds of layers isn’t particularly useful for me.
So what? It’s not a huge deal. Not really, no. But where it becomes exceptionally useful is when you can do things like this:
Confession: I used to never use the Search function to find layers, but once I started naming layers semantically to describe what the content was and not what the content said, then I realized the power of searching layers.
One last thing: Clean as you go. When you finish designing that list item, rename it! Group it! If you’re feeling wild… symbolize it! Tiny amounts of work along the way will save you a ton of time in the long run.
No one likes cleaning a tower of dirty dishes after spending an hour cooking dinner, so do yourself a favor and clean as you go.
Happy Sketching!?
Many of the images used in this post were taken directly from the UX Power Tools that we’ve been meticulously designing with these (and other) techniques in mind. Check it out here.
This post was originally published on Medium.Some had the Atari 2600. Others grew up with Mario and the NES. But for a lot of young, budding PC gamers, there were Humongous Entertainment's quirky and colorful edutainment titles. Now, these classic adventure games are making their way to Steam.
Humongous Entertainment's catalog will be arriving on Steam in several batches, restored and made compatible with newer systems by the same folks who revived System Shock 2, Night Dive Studios. Here's a list of the games in order of release; see if you can spot any of the ones you've played:
4/17
Putt-Putt Joins the Parade
Freddi Fish and The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds
Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside
Spy Fox in: Dry Cereal
Putt-Putt and Pep's Balloon-o-Rama
Freddi Fish and Luther's Maze Madness 5/1
Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon
Freddi Fish 2: The Case of the Haunted Schoolhouse
Pajama Sam 2: Thunder and Lightning Aren't so Frightening
Spy Fox 2: Some Assembly Required
Putt-Putt and Pep's Dog on a Stick
Freddi Fish and Luther's Water Worries 5/15
Putt-Putt Travels through Time
Freddi Fish 3: The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell
Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat from Your Head to Your Feet
Spy Fox 3: Operation Ozone
Putt-Putt and Fatty Bear's Activity Pack 5/29
Putt-Putt Enters the Race
Putt-Putt Joins the Circus
Freddi Fish 4: The Case of the Hogfish Rustlers of Briny Gulch
Pajama Sam 4: Life Is Rough When You Lose Your Stuff!
Spy Fox in: Cheese Chase 6/6
Putt-Putt: Pep's Birthday Surprise
Freddi Fish 5: The Case of the Creature of Coral Cove
Pajama Sam's Sock Works
Spy Fox in: Hold the Mustard
Pajama Sam's Lost & Found
Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon, aww yeah. Alien tag was the best.
Night Dive Studios' CEO took to Reddit to answer a few fan questions, where he said that Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, which is missing from the press release list, will be out in August. He also noted that the studio will be looking into bringing over Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise (my personal favorite) and a "rare Pajama Sam game that slipped through the cracks."
Top image via the Humongous Entertainment Games Wiki.
Questions? Comments? Contact the author of this post at andras-AT-kotaku-DOT-com.Over-pumping Harney County, Draining Oregon Day 2, draining oregon day 1
A high-powered wellhead stands sentinel near stacked hay bales in Harney County.
(Mark Graves/Staff)
State regulators approve permits for wells in Oregon even as they suspect there isn't enough water in some areas to keep pace.
A permit application might state it "cannot be determined" whether enough ground water existed for the well. Yet time and again, Oregon Water Resources Department managers approved the application.
The lax regulatory culture is so engrained, some farmers and ranchers began pumping their wells before submitting an application.
The Oregonian/OregonLive reporters Kelly House and Mark Graves detailed the galling practice in a recent four-part series "Draining Oregon."
They showed how the department failed to measure and protect the resource it was tasked to manage and in turn, potentially put fish, animals and the communities that rely on the water at risk. As it stands - and whether or not it's sustainable - the state has approved farmers and ranchers to drain nearly 1 trillion gallons of Oregon's underground reserves annually.
The practice of approving wells in untested basins must stop. And state lawmakers must act quickly to focus on the crisis they've failed to address for years.
House, who has since left The Oregonian/OregonLive, reported how department managers for years ignored warnings by their own hydrogeologists. She found that Water Resource leaders had caved to pressure from lawmakers and interest groups.
The pressure is understandable and so great that in 2013, then-Gov. John Kitzhaber backed away from a solid plan to create a stable funding source for the department with fees on those holding water rights.
Department leaders defend their actions by saying they didn't have the money or staff to do the research necessary to determine whether they should deny permits and defend their decisions. And yet they once offered up the small amount of research money they had for a potential budget cut.
More than a dozen Oregon basins remain a mystery, and research must be done as soon as possible to determine their water levels. Oregonians need to know how much water is available to make responsible decisions about how to tap the aquifers deep underground.
Many environmental emergencies are amorphous and need global attention. The need for water is among them. Yet this small piece of the problem is not so complicated.
The Water Resources Department estimates that between $45 million and $75 million is needed to complete the necessary research. House reported that a $100 annual fee on all water-rights holders along with federal matching money and some new employees could pay for the job that could be completed within five years.
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At the department's current pace, the research wouldn't be done until 2096.
Lawmakers, who have scheduled a September hearing on the issue, must require the scientific reviews and lock in a funding mechanism to make it happen. They'll likely face pushback on ideas involving fees for water-rights holders. But as long as fees remain minimal, it's a small price to pay to protect their own interest in those potentially stressed basins.
Lawmakers also should look north and consider setting higher standards for well approvals. Washington doesn't allow a new well if it would cause any harm to a stream that's already hurting for water, House wrote. Oregon's standard is when harm to streams would be "substantial."
What's most frustrating about this situation is how many of those likely to be affected are farming and ranching communities that have faced declining economies for years - often, they feel, because of government regulation.
Some of that regulation was necessary to protect some lands and various species.
But the Water Resources Department's reluctance to regulate may have set up a situation in which some of the unmapped basins may already be dangerously low and water rights might have to be rescinded.
Lawmakers must launch serious work on the issue in September with the goal to accelerate the pace of basin research that can provide more clarity to all. If not, the anger and distrust that already divides our state is likely to deepen among those Oregonians who have built their lives on the land.SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Wednesday said the country would establish a A$1 billion ($761.60 million) clean-energy innovation fund, in a major departure from his predecessor’s much maligned approach to combating climate change.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull speaks during a media conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, March 21, 2016. REUTERS/Lukas Coch/AAP
Conservative former Prime Minister Tony Abbott was criticized by environmental groups for lagging behind other advanced economies when he announced cuts to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions last year.
Abbott, a climate change skeptic who was ousted in a party coup by Turnbull in September, also faced criticism for his strong support for the coal industry and for scrapping an ambitious carbon tax and emissions trading plan in 2014.
Turnbull said the new fund would focus on investing in high-tech clean energy technologies.
“What that is going to do is every year invest A$100 million in the smartest, most cutting edge Australian clean-energy technologies and businesses to ensure that we... play our part in cracking the very hard problems, the challenging technical difficulties that we face in terms of reducing emissions,” he told reporters.
Abbott pledged that the world’s largest exporter of coal and iron ore would cut emissions by 26-28 percent of 2005 levels by 2030, a target he submitted as part of negotiations on a global climate deal in Paris last year.
Abbott also sought and failed to scrap the country’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which Turnbull said on Wednesday would be retained.
Australia is one of the largest carbon emitters on a per capita basis due to its reliance on coal-fired power plants, and critics say it has done little to match ambitious targets set by the United States and Europe.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt, speaking alongside Turnbull, said the fund would help achieve Australia’s ultimate aim of reducing emissions to zero.
“This will be investing in storage, in new battery technology, in smart grids, in some of the exciting solar visions that people have hoped for and imagined for Australia but which are only now really becoming reality,” he said.
Public support for more action on climate change is strong in Australia, according to recent polls.
A poll released in August by the Climate Institute showed 63 percent of Australians wanted more action on climate change, up six percentage points from 2014.
Turnbull, who has long held progressive views on climate change, has drawn criticism since coming to power for not moving more swiftly to strengthen Australia’s response to climate change.
($1 = 1.3130 Australian dollars)Welcome to our March release! The March release is our anniversary release, with our very first alpha having been made public on February 29th, 2012. We’ve certainly made a lot of progress since then, and it shows! Four years of constant monthly releases have brought us to this point, and we’re closer to beta than we’ve ever been before. We have a home-grown map pack, our model set is close to being finished, and our engine has taken on a life of its own, with other projects interested in porting over to it. Here is another step forward to our long-awaited goal!
In this release, we have a very large new feature in the form of our new renderer. This is a tile-based forward+ renderer, and brings with it a new method of doing lighting that allows for a much larger number of dynamic lights to be present on-scene at once without horribly degrading performance, without many of the drawbacks that come with a deferred renderer. We also have patches that increase the performance for those using our graphical effects, which should hopefully lighten the load on those with weaker hardware, as well as support for physical-based shading and many fixes to some old renderer bugs. Shadows currently don’t work on the tiled renderer, but that’s next on our agenda for it.
With the enormous amount of work we’ve done on our renderer, which was originally forked from a fork (!) of XreaL, and considering that it has undergone a very wide divergence from the renderer it initially came from, it would be more appropriate to call our renderer the Daemon renderer, which is how these articles will refer to it from now on.
Naturally, some new bugs will have evaded our testing, so be vigilant and report them on our GitHub issue tracker! The two renderers will co-exist for a few months while we add features, and you can switch between them by setting r_dynamicLight and r_staticLight to “2” for the new tiled renderer and “1” for the old one. Most of the visible differences in the current state of the tiled renderer will be in the form of the dynamic lights and improved performance.
By now you’re very likely sick of seeing “renderer” repeated, so here’s what else is in our release! We have two new models, with the new lucifer cannon and the new egg making their debuts. The lucifer cannon now looks cool and futuristic, while the egg is a cool blobby addition to your alien base. But wait, there’s more! The shape of the egg was specifically chosen to fit the bounding box better, and as a result, we’re allowing it to be built on walls, a very long-requested feature. All alien buildings should also display their proper icons on beacons and the circle menus. Finally, you can now see dynamic lights on the projectiles of the lucifer cannon and blaster, as well as the detonations of the grenade and firebomb.
We’re now done with alien base models as of this release, with human base models having been finished some time ago. Now, all that’s left would be the battlesuit for human player models, the dragoon for alien player models, and the HMG (chaingun replacement) and painsaw for human weapons. We can (and will) update models as we go along, but those four models are the last models that absolutely must be finished before we embark on getting all the sounds done. Then we’ll be finished with our asset pack, and before you know it, we’ll be swapping monthly alphas for beta release candidates. It’s getting closer than you’d think!
Thank you for reading these posts over the years, and for following the progress of our project. Now go download the game!
CommitsAs it enters its 20th season, Major League Soccer is still looking for a brand-boosting breakthrough in the annual continental competition
It’s been a mixed week for Major League Soccer’s hopes in the Concacaf Champions League after the quarter-final first legs saw the Montreal Impact grab a very credible 2-2 draw in Mexico against Pachuca, while the last remaining US representative, DC United, were heavily beaten by Costa Rican side Alajuelense on Thursday night.
DC, who’d managed a near-flawless qualifying campaign as part of last year’s dramatic turnaround in playing fortunes, had been seeded to avoid the Mexican club sides who tend to dominate the later stages of this competition, but any hopes they had of an easier passage to the semi-finals were dashed by a 5-2 loss that started with a 14th-minute penalty conceded by stand-in keeper Andrew Dykstra. Things only got worse from there.
Dykstra, in for injured starter Bill Hamid, had a night to forget, spilling a 27th-minute cross that allowed Alajuelense’s Johan Venegas to score the home side’s third after Jose Ortiz had scored in the 22nd minute past the off-balance keeper.
At the other end Fabian Espindola had grabbed his side a valuable away goal moments before Venegas had restored the hosts’ two-goal cushion, but when Ortiz grabbed a second after half time the DC goal looked like it would be academic.
And while DC did get another late one when newly Steve Birbaum’s close-range header flew home, they appeared to have taken a page from the Arsenal book of two-legged game management, as less than a minute later Jonathan McDonald was scoring at the other end to round off the 5-2 victory for Alajuelense.
The regional glass ceiling
The DC result means that MLS’s most likely hope for a representative in the semi-finals will be Montreal, whose 2-2 result in Pachuca earlier in the week had some onlookers ranking it high among the results achieved by MLS sides against Mexican teams. (It could even have been better: Montreal led 2-0 after an hour of the game thanks to a brace from Dilly Duka.)
The very fact that a score draw can be placed in the pantheon of MLS’ Champions League achievements probably says everything about a regional glass ceiling the league is still under as it enters its 20th season.
MLS executives have an oft-stated ambition to become a top-10 league in the world by 2022. And after a recent burst of expansion and prioritizing the ownership structure of the league, MLS commissioner Don Garber sees the coming area of priority as the product on the field.
And it follows that regional competitiveness, as measured by the Champions League, is a significant marker of that progress – though it is currently looking as elusive as ever.
MLS sides are not helped in their quest by the less than seamless way the cycles of the competition and their own league mesh. The MLS sides still in the competition earned their original place there by their achievements back in 2013, when DC won the US Open Cup and Montreal Impact won the Canadian Championship. Between those qualifying wins and the quarter-finals, both teams have been through two offseasons. The sides currently representing the hopes of Montreal and DC look very different from the rosters that got them there.
Pre-season woes
In fact both the teams may currently look very little they’ll look in just a month’s time. Both sides are in the MLS pre-season, trying out new players, shuffling systems, finding fitness and shape. Compare to, say, the Mexican teams, who are well into their season as this stage of the tournament takes place.
It can make the knockout rounds a thankless experience for MLS sides, as LA Galaxy’s Robbie Keane noted in an interview with the Guardian last year:
“Yeah, it’s difficult. How can you play a Champions League in two seasons? Players come and go, and stuff like that, so it’s not a fair run for the teams. The Champions League is good – but it’s only good if you win it, to be honest with you. When you’re playing all these games, you’re traveling and so on, it can be a hindrance. It reminds me of the UEFA Cup. The UEFA Cup’s great if you win it, but if you don’t win it it’s a bit of a nightmare, you know?”
Yet the Champions League is there, and the MLS sides and the league they represent would dearly love a significant and symbolic breakthrough in this regional competition, not to mention a brand-boosting appearance at a world club championship.
It’ll mean bridging a gap to Liga MX first though – and serial disappointments by the likes of LA Galaxy and Seattle Sounders suggest there’s a way to go before US squads have the strength in depth to seriously alter the status quo, however eye-catching their very top marquee players might be. Real Salt Lake went close to winning the tournament in 2011 – when they lost the second leg 1-0 at home having apparently done the hard part with a 2-2 draw in Monterrey – but that very much bucked the trend.
As it is, on Friday morning DC United might be looking with envy at another 2-2 draw – the one Montreal managed against Pachuca – and wondering how they now go about finding three unanswered goals at home next week. Montreal, meanwhile, may consider RSL’s example as a warning that the job is not yet done. For yet another season MLS hopes in the CCL can be summed up by the belief that any progress from here on out is a bonus. The next competitive step remains as daunting as ever.If you're looking for a supportive permafreeze char for partyplay, that's also able to hold its own damage-wise well enough to clear maps solo this build may be interesting to you.
______________________________________________________________________________________
About Cold Snap
Cold Snap is a cold-based AoE-spell with high on-hit damage, implicit chance to freeze and a cooldown of 4 seconds. While the cooldown seems to prevent this spell to be used as main skill, you can bypass it by expending a power charge.
There are a few ways to do this, we're using the established method of Resolute Technique with
______________________________________________________________________________________
Leveling this build
Unfortunately you can't level properly with this build, because Romira's Banquet has a level requirement of 60. Until this level, it's best to just use established methods like Flame Totem + Firestorm, Bladefall or leveling in a group.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Passive Tree
20pt - 40pt - 60pt - 80pt - 100pt - 120pt
______________________________________________________________________________________
Bandits
Oak - Alira - Oak
______________________________________________________________________________________
Gems
This setup gives us the highest on-hit damage for maximum freeze duration while maintaining a good AoE. Until you have a Blood Magic staff, you'll have to use a Blood Magic gem.
While Cold Snap is great for freezing stuff, its single target damage is not that good.
This setup is our fix for that, use it for single targets and reflect rares.
Herald of Ice adds a good amount of damage to our Cold Snap, and deals lots of damage through the AoE-explosion occuring on shattering an enemy.
Frostbite lowers enemies cold resistance and gives us more chance to freeze, while Warlord's Mark gives us leech and Endurance Charges on kill. With Blasphemy we won't have to manually cast these curses.
Immortal Call gives us a good uptime of physical immunity in combination with Endurance Charges from Warlord's Mark, Frost Wall saves us from ranged enemies until they're frozen.
Lightning Warp is our movement skill, mostly to get past our selfcasting Frost Walls.
Summon Flame Golem gives us additional damage for more freeze duration.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Gear
Your staff doesn't really need much, only +2 Cold Gem Level and a free prefix for Vagan's Blood Magic craft. +1 Gem Level, Cast Speed and Cold Damage% are great additions.
Taryn's Shiver is also good, mostly due to buffing damage for everyone in your party. But the downside is that you'll have to use Blood Magic gem.
Carcass Jack synergizes will with all our skills and the Blasphemy setup. You can also use a rare chest if you're on a budget.
All you need from these slots is life and resistances. 30ms on boots is nice to have, Dexterity allows you to drop +30 Dex nodes in the passive tree.
Life and resistances build the base, Movement Speed or flask-related mods are also good.
Romira's Banquet is absolutely required to run this build. Its roll doesn't matter, get the cheapest you can. The other jewelry only needs Life and resistances, Cast Speed, Spell/Cold Damage% and Dexterity are good additions.
Try to replicate this flask setup. If you can't afford Taste of Hate, use a Granite Flask of Iron Skin and replace one Quicksilver Flask with a Sapphire Flask or Heat.
Try to get jewels with Freeze Chance/Duration and any form of Cast Speed. Life% is great but increases jewel cost. Also good to have is Spell/AoE/Cold Damage.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Mapping
This build is best played in a group, but can also solo maps. Try to stay behind your Frost Walls and aim into the middle of a pack to make the most out of your AoE. If you see a reflect rare, pop your Sapphire Flask and use Glacial Cascade to burst it down.
Avoid Elemental Reflect, No Regen and Immune to Status Ailments maps. On Blood Magic you'll have to disable your curses and auras.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Videos
Unfortunately no videos for the new spec yet! Not really interested in playing this build atm, if someone runs this and wants their video linked here let me know.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Thanks for checking out my guide! Please leave questions or concerns in comments.
Welcome to my Cold Snap guide, fellow exile!If you're looking for a supportive permafreeze char for partyplay, that's also able to hold its own damage-wise well enough to clear maps solo this build may be interesting to you.______________________________________________________________________________________Cold Snap is a cold-based AoE-spell with high on-hit damage, implicit chance to freeze and a cooldown of 4 seconds. While the cooldown seems to prevent this spell to be used as main skill, you can bypass it by expending a power charge.There are a few ways to do this, we're using the established method of Resolute Technique with Romira's Banquet, which enables us to indefinitely spam Cold Snap.______________________________________________________________________________________Unfortunately you can't level properly with this build, because Romira's Banquet has a level requirement of 60. Until this level, it's best to just use established methods like Flame Totem + Firestorm, Bladefall or leveling in a group.____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Oak - Alira - Oak______________________________________________________________________________________This setup gives us the highest on-hit damage for maximum freeze duration while maintaining a good AoE. Until you have a Blood Magic staff, you'll have to use a Blood Magic gem.While Cold Snap is great for freezing stuff, its single target damage is not that good.This setup is our fix for that, use it for single targets and reflect rares.Herald of Ice adds a good amount of damage to our Cold Snap, and deals lots of damage through the AoE-explosion occuring on shattering an enemy.Frostbite lowers enemies cold resistance and gives us more chance to freeze, while Warlord's Mark gives us leech and Endurance Charges on kill. With Blasphemy we won't have to manually cast these curses.Immortal Call gives us a good uptime of physical immunity in combination with Endurance Charges from Warlord's Mark, Frost Wall saves us from ranged enemies until they're frozen.Lightning Warp is our movement skill, mostly to get past our selfcasting Frost Walls.Summon Flame Golem gives us additional damage for more freeze duration.______________________________________________________________________________________Your staff doesn't really need much, only +2 Cold Gem Level and a free prefix for Vagan's Blood Magic craft. +1 Gem Level, Cast Speed and Cold Damage% are great additions.Taryn's Shiver is also good, mostly due to buffing damage for everyone in your party. But the downside is that you'll have to use Blood Magic gem.Carcass Jack synergizes will with all our skills and the Blasphemy setup. You can also use a rare chest if you're on a budget.All you need from these slots is life and resistances. 30ms on boots is nice to have, Dexterity allows you to drop +30 Dex nodes in the passive tree.Life and resistances build the base, Movement Speed or flask-related mods are also good.Romira's Banquet is absolutely required to run this build. Its roll doesn't matter, get the cheapest you can. The other jewelry only needs Life and resistances, Cast Speed, Spell/Cold Damage% and Dexterity are good additions.Try to replicate this flask setup. If you can't afford Taste of Hate, use a Granite Flask of Iron Skin and replace one Quicksilver Flask with a Sapphire Flask or Heat.Try to get jewels with Freeze Chance/Duration and any form of Cast Speed. Life% is great but increases jewel cost. Also good to have is Spell/AoE/Cold Damage.______________________________________________________________________________________This build is best played in a group, but can also solo maps. Try to stay behind your Frost Walls and aim into the middle of a pack to make the most out of your AoE. If you see a reflect rare, pop your Sapphire Flask and use Glacial Cascade to burst it down.Avoid Elemental Reflect, No Regen and Immune to Status Ailments maps. On Blood Magic you'll have to disable your curses and auras.______________________________________________________________________________________Unfortunately no videos for the new spec yet! Not really interested in playing this build atm, if someone runs this and wants their video linked here let me know.______________________________________________________________________________________Thanks for checking out my guide! Please leave questions or concerns in comments. twitch.tv/enki91 Last edited by Enki91 on Dec 30, 2015, 3:52:44 AM Last bumped on May 13, 2016, 10:53:14 AMTesla is continuing to see demand for its first mass market car, the Model 3, with an average of 1,800 new orders a day.
But on its quarterly earnings call, CEO Elon Musk revealed about 63,000 people have cancelled their Model 3 preorders. The number of orders went from approximately 518,000 to 455,000, Musk said.
“Those cancellations occurred over the course of more than a year,” Musk said on the call. “I think [these numbers] are inconsequential. With a small amount of effort we can easily drive the Model 3 reservation number to something much higher but there’s no point. It’s like if you’re a restaurant and you’re serving hamburgers and there’s like an hour and a half wait for hamburgers, do you really want to encourage more people to order more hamburgers?”
Still, those ordering Model 3s today will likely not receive their cars until the end of 2018 at the earliest.
Musk didn’t change its guidance on the production ramp of its mainstream vehicle, expecting to manufacture 5,000 Model 3 cars a week by the end of 2017.
Musk said he has no doubt that the company will be able to reach a production rate of 10,000 cars a week by sometime in 2018.
While Musk reiterated the difficulty of the next few months, he also said he’s never felt better about the company.
“When I said ‘manufacturing hell,’ I meant it,” he said on the call. “We know this, we signed up for it. Not blaming hell because we bought the ticket.
“This is maybe the best I've ever felt about Tesla, to be frank,” he continued.
Musk said the company has learned a great deal from the mistakes made with Model S and X production. For one, he said he overreached on the technology included in the first generation of its SUV, the Model X.
“We are very confident about costs [of Model 3 production],” he said.
“When we make mistakes it's because we're stupid, not because we’re trying to mislead anyone,” Musk continued. “We aspire to be less dumb over time."
The CEO, who splits his time among Tesla, SpaceX and now The Boring Company, also gave more information about the compact SUV the company expects to produce. Originally the car, tentatively called Model Y, was going to be built on an entirely new manufacturing platform. But Musk said there “will be significant carryover” from Model 3 production in order to bring the compact SUV to market faster.Georgetown has one of the nation's most upscale shopping areas. (iStock)
A large group of juveniles robbed a clothing store in Georgetown on Tuesday evening and stole $13,000 worth of items, according to D.C. police.
The incident happened just before 6 p.m. at the Diesel store in the 3000 block of M Street NW. More than 20 people went into the store and grabbed several items off the racks, police said. They stole four leather jackets, costing about $800, and an additional $12,000 worth of merchandise.
One person who worked at the store was said to have been pushed from behind by someone in the crowd. The employee was not injured, according to police. Police described the suspects only as juveniles.
A spokesperson for Diesel did not respond to requests for comment.
[Georgetown social network accused of racial profiling is suspended]
A group of merchants earlier this year in Georgetown ended its use of a private messaging service that many retailers, residents and police officers had used to talk about people they thought were suspicious. There were concerns that the service was being used to racially profile people.
Georgetown is one of the nation’s poshest shopping districts.
Terrence McCoy contributed to this report.What is the similarity between a bat and a dolphin? Most people’s immediate answer would be “not a lot.” However, a group of researchers have recently sought to investigate the genetic profiles of these two unrelated species, based upon a single similarity in their behavior. The group want to know whether their ability to use echolocation signifies they have rudimentary genetic ties, molded by their environment.
Convergent Evolution
A species’ evolution is typically thought to be based upon divergence of genes. Different genes code for different proteins and regulate various cellular processes and mechanisms; hence, evolution can result in a potential changeup on a cellular level, which can then have an impact upon what is known as an organism’s phenotype, the physical and behavioral traits an animal demonstrates based upon genetic expression.
However, according to recent studies, certain traits may appear around about the same period of time, across several species. This occurs due to selection pressures, where an environmental condition, to which several species are exposed, causes a number of species to develop the same traits and behaviors that confer them some new advantage and increases their chances of survival in the wild. This is referred to as adaptive phenotypic convergence.
An example of such convergent evolution has already been witnessed in a huge number of species, including birds, bats and a number of insects. These different species all developed wings, independently of one another and “converged” around this highly beneficial trait. Anatomically, however, the wings of these species differ considerably, with huge structural differences evident upon inspection.
Meanwhile, dolphins, sharks and, the now extinct, ichthyosaurs all demonstrated the same convergent evolution, with mirroring body shapes that facilitated streamlined movement through water. But, could bats and dolphins really have experienced the same genetic evolution to develop echolocation?
The Study
The study’s authors sought to investigate the genetic sequences of two species of animal that were thought to have evolved independently – bats and bottlenose dolphins. Both bats and bottlenose dolphins use a similar echolocation technique to navigate their surroundings. This led the research team to determine whether their might be genetic similarities between the two species, explaining their phenotypic trait for echolocation.
Researchers looked at the genomic sequences of 22 mammals, consisting of different species of bats (including the greater false vampire bat, Parnell’s mustached bat, the large flying fox and the straw-colored fruit bat) and the bottlenose dolphin. The genome-wide survey used specialized |
For those of you who don’t know me personally, let me explain something about myself. I’m a smart guy who is socially retarded.
I can explain calculus to people who don’t know math. I own at trivia. I have a capacity to remember all sorts of stuff that most people, rightfully so, would never bother to remember. Sometimes it’s spooky.
However, I will also probably forget your name if I meet you and there is a good chance I’ll make a very bad first impression, probably inadvertently saying something offensive. (I was told at my going away party I yelled at someone telling them that “BORNEO ISN’T A COUNTRY. IT’S AN ISLAND!”)
..anyway, I digress.
The reason I bring that up is because I noticed something today that I am probably one of only a small handful of people who would have noticed and been in a position to notice.
I visited the Solomon Islands national museum on Wednesday. The National Museum isn’t really anything to write home about. It’s surrounded by a rusty fence. The one building with exhibits is pretty old and grungy. I was the only visitor there and they had to open up the gift shop just for me. So I suppose that’s the first thing….most people who visit the Solomons (and there aren’t many) don’t bother to go to the museum.
In the museum, they had all sorts of carved sculptures, artwork, photos and artifacts from the Solomon Islands. It wasn’t the level of a display you might expect at a western museum, but that shouldn’t be expected. It got the job done and the lady working at museum was very nice and informative.
While wandering around all the Melanesian artwork and artifacts I came across something which was very out of place. It was an engraved plaque.
It was an engraved plaque with the Apollo XVII mission patch on it.
On the plaque was a small acrylic sphere with a tiny piece of rock in the middle. A moon rock. It was collected in the Taurus-Littrow Highlands of the moon, and it was sitting in a exhibit of Melanesian artifacts in Honoria.
The plaque said it was given to the people of the Solomon Islands by President Carter on July 7, 1978 on the occasion of their independence.
Most people would have noticed the moon rock. There is nothing special in that. I however knew something else. There have been several hundred moon rocks given as goodwill gifts by the United States. About half of them are missing. They might be sitting in a cabinet somewhere or might be in the home of some bureaucrat who was in a position to take the moon rock home 30 years ago.
However, many of them have been flat out stolen and sold on the black market to collectors. On a per gram basis, moon rocks might very well be one of the most valuable things on Earth. One recent case in the news (where I read about all of this) had someone trying to sell the stolen moon rock given to Malta for $5,000,000!!! In public auctions, pieces of the moon have sold for $400,000 for tiny fragments.
It was that knowledge that had my heart racing when I noticed something else…..
the glass display case had no lock….
the glass display case was wide open…..
I was alone in the room…..
I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was a moment of temptation. I, and I alone it would seem, was the only person who had laid eyes on this thing in years who probably knew the real value of it to collectors. No one probably would have noticed it missing for months if not years. (If I had replaced it with a fake, maybe even longer) Five million dollars in the size of a big marble just sitting there unprotected.
With my warped values however, I figured it would make for a better blog post that it would selling it. Besides, I’d really be a shitty human beings if I stole from the poorest country in the world.
I mentioned going to the museum later in the day to the guy at the travel agency who booked my tickets through to Honolulu. He mentioned that there had been several break-ins at the museum.
What was stolen you ask??? Shell and feather money which is still used as currency on some of the islands.
If you want an example of the different values other cultures have, I can think of no better example. They broke in to steal the pacific equivalent of wampum and left the $5m moon rock.
Anyway, having decided not to turn to a life of crime, what to do next?
Given how these things have disappeared over time around the world, it is probably just a matter of time until someone steals it. (It may have been stolen before during the civil unrest here in 2000) If I tell someone who works at the museum about the value of it, there is a good chance they might just take it.
I have no clue who to talk to in a position of authority and, honestly, I don’t think the security of moon rocks is very high on the agenda of the government of the Solomon Islands.
I figured the best thing to do was to make it public and hope that someone will pass this along to someone in NASA or the State Department who might be able to suggest to the Solomon Government they put it away. Also, by making it public, if it disappears, it is going to make it very obvious that is it stolen and at least give and indication of when and where it happened. (I suppose there is a risk of someone reading this, taking the first flight to the Solomons and stealing it, but I think that is slim, and moreover, having made this public, it would make it much harder to sell).
I will probably also stop by the US Consulate today because the office is in the same building as DHL and I need to send a package home.
So if anyone reading this knows someone in some position to do something, please pass this along. It would be a shame to lose another one of these rocks to thieves.Lessons for Old Dogs
"Mike, look out!" yelled Zhao.
The brass city was collapsing around them. Mike slammed to a stop as an enormous bell crashed to the ground in front of him.
"The players must be - huh - losing precision," he panted. "Why did they - hooh - use a brass band?"
Zhao yanked him onto the pavement as the drumskin street tore open. "Trust me," she said, "you don't want to be here when it's catgut and piano wire."
Lifting a streak of silver-grey hair back from her temples, Zhao spoke into her headpiece. "H, where are you? We need to get out."
Four blocks away, Agent Hennessy looked past the text on his visor, at the massive beast a few feet from him. Its powerful metallic legs were curled into a crouch, valves pulsing rhythmically. It turned its head back and forth, and its cymbal-jaws opened, emitting a long horn note of challenge. If he ran, if he made any noise, it would sense him.
His right hand pressed the the communicator at his belt, trying to move as little as possible. 333-C. Stuck. You go.
A nearby flute-tower crumbled and fell, scattering nickel silver keys across the road. SCP-333-C sprang instinctively towards the noise, turning its back on Hennessy.
He ran.
Carter and Zhao were running too, desperately trying to avoid the rain of bronze and steel debris. Ahead, Mike could see the performance hall - the exit. As they reached the doorway, he turned back to look for Hennessy. The streets were full of twisted metal, but empty of life. The doorframe shook as another building fell.
Zhao was shouting into her headset. "H, please! Tell us where you are!"
Hiding. Too far.
"Where? We'll find you." Even as Zhao said it, they heard the bellowing horn again.
No. Get out. Tell them stop playing.
The shaking was getting worse. A door-sized reed slid from the hall's roof and thudded into the pavement in front of them like a guillotine.
"If they stop playing, you'll die!" said Zhao, frantic.
Not dead. Stasis.
The howls of the -C were louder now. Mike saw it burst out of a building up the street. It ran towards them, claws tearing through the shining sidewalk.
"Zhao, it's coming for the exit. We have to go!"
Mike grabbed Zhao's arm. She looked at him with pleading eyes.
The beast was almost on them.
"H, I can't -" she said into the headset. "I -"
Come back for me.
They leapt through the doorway.
The concert hall was silent, expectant.
She looked out, dazzled by the stage lights. If there was an audience out there, it was shrouded in the blackness beyond. Blackness like the mouth of a deep pit, like an open throat ready to…
Emma found her focus, bringing herself back. She was wearing a black shirt and trousers - appropriate for a performer, but also reminiscent of her new MTF uniform.
She wanted to look to her left, but couldn't manage it. She needed to look professional in front of the darkened hall. Instead she stole a glance downwards. There was a music stand in front of her, but the score sitting on it seemed blurry. Still, she didn't need it.
Behind her, Emma sensed the unseen orchestra as it stretched itself and then coiled, ready to spring, waiting for the baton's signal. Who was it holding that baton? Emma still could not turn to look.
The moment stretched endlessly. The bright stage, the enveloping dark: all on a razor's edge. Emma felt a prickling at the nape of her neck.
As the orchestra took off, Emma strained to concentrate on the music. She could hear notes, even the occasional chord, but the full sweep and scope of the work eluded her. What was left were scraps of jangling discord, impossible to piece together.
Emma breathed deeply. Her cue was coming. From the corner of her eye, Emma saw the conductor half-turn. This was her chance. As the baton flashed down like a lightning strike, Emma spun sharply to look left.
The conductor was shrouded in black, darker even than the hall itself. Its face was a pallid carnival mask, featureless but for a leering grin. The eyes were black and empty, and as Emma stared, it loomed closer and larger above her, seeming to fill the hall, to fill the world.
And Emma heard it scream.
She woke to the sight of Agent Sherry Wilson leaning over her.
"Hey, how are you feeling?" came Wilson's calming voice.
Eyes adjusting to the lights, Emma looked around the sleep lab, adrenaline still pumping.
"Did you see it?" she asked.
"Most of it," replied Sherry. "I was in the back of the audience. But it went differently this time, right? You seemed to have more control."
Emma breathed deliberately, trying to slow her heart. "Yes. I changed my clothes, and I managed to turn." As the dream faded, it was easier to remember why she was doing this. "I could even hear the music - some of it, anyway."
"Hmm. I could see them playing, but I didn't hear anything." Sherry scanned through the readings on the touchscreen next to Emma's bed. Of all the members of MTF Omicron-Rho that Emma had worked with, she seemed the most thorough, the most collected.
"This is much better, Emma," she continued. "Good alpha-wave levels, and your breathing stayed steady. Just need to work on staying locked in the dream, even when something surprising happens."
"Actually, I won't need to worry about waking up," said Emma. "How have the others been going?"
Sherry gave an involuntary glance across to the empty beds on the other side of the room.
"They're definitely improving. We tried Hennessey, Zhao and Carter in a few SCP-333 scenarios."
"The musical city? That's appropriate." Emma smiled, and sat up.
"They're adapting well to the dream, staying lucid, finding solutions." Sherry sounded genuinely impressed. "Hennessey actually came up with something I hadn't seen anyone try before."
"Good." Emma's smile grew determined. "That's very good. I'd like to run the same scenarios, please. When can you schedule me in?"
Sherry's look of concern only lasted a fraction of a second, but Emma spotted it.
"I'm not sure," said Sherry, folding her arms. "Unless you're fully trained, we normally wouldn't advise more than three sessions a week."
Emma frowned. "Let's make it tomorrow. I don't have that much time."
Agent Sandra Dee staggered from the tunnel, the ringing in her ears fading. She dropped to one knee, out of breath and trying not to retch. From the corner of her eye, she could see a man step towards her, holding a clipboard and stopwatch.
"Thirty-seven minutes, nineteen seconds," said Sergeant Graham Towers of MTF Zeta-9. "Not bad for a first run through the grinder, especially at your -"
Dee swung her head up fiercely, but the movement was too sudden - black spots filled her vision, and she almost collapsed. She waved away the agent's proffered hand, and shut her eyes tight.
Sergeant Towers had clearly been trained to keep candidates talking after they got through the course. "You never considered joining the Mole Rats then?"
"Wasn't … an option at the time," said Dee, through gritted teeth.
"That's a shame. You did a good job, particularly with the gravitational distortion sections. A tip for the perspective-null room - you can often make quicker progress with one or even both eyes closed. Although you got unlucky with your route, hitting that straight after sensory deprivation."
"Uh huh." Dee had heard enough. Her head was still throbbing, and she lifted herself gingerly into the chair Towers offered.
Twenty minutes later she was still sitting there, just outside the exit from "Mole Rat Maze", watching the Sergeant look anxiously at his watch.
"An hour is the limit, I'm going to have to go in," he said, more to himself than to her.
Just as he put down his clipboard, there was a noise from the tunnel. Towers raced over as Roger Anderson emerged, slumping to the ground and rolling on to his back. Anderson's chest heaved, and Dee watched as Towers checked his pulse and pupils before grabbing some oxygen from the med-pack.
Dee stood slowly, making sure she had her balance back, and strolled over to where Roger was lying. He had taken off the oxygen mask, but was still too weak to sit up.
Agent Dee brought her boots together with a snap, right next to his head. "So, Anderson. Looking forward to being back in the field?"
Towers shot her a look. She met his gaze.
"Come on, Towers," she said, "surely he's set a new record for the octogenarians?"
She spotted the stopwatch, still around Towers' neck.
"There you are, Anderson. Fifty-nine minutes, twelve seconds."
Roger groaned. "Why is it always twelve?"
Emma was starting to get used to meetings in the Site Director's office. She tried to sit still while Director Arora walked slowly around his desk to sit across from her.
The Director unclasped his hands and spread them apart, palms up. Clearly a practised gesture. "So Commander Stark, how is the training going?"
He was stalling; Emma knew he had seen the reports. She aimed to keep her voice light. "The team is performing well, generally strong results, considering. We could use a few more members though. Have you had any luck with recruits?" It wasn't what she had scheduled the meeting for, but it would be a start.
Director Arora was clearly growing accustomed to her newfound directness. He smiled, but she thought she caught a flash of misgiving behind it.
"I think I have two pieces of good news for you there," he said. "Dr. Bettina Reynard is a senior Memetics researcher who is joining us from Site-17, and Charla Flores had just been recruited to Cognitohazards, but her supervisor has gone on medical leave."
"That's good," said Emma. "We could use some more specialists. I know exactly what Dr. Reynard can start with. I don't suppose they have any musical background?"
"Honestly, I'm not sure," replied the Director. "But they should be with you soon, so you'll be able to find out. We have a D-Class who I understand is very musical, but, uh, I'm not sure you would want him in your squad."
Arora paused. Emma waited.
"About your other request," he continued, finally. "I can see why you want to do it, but I just don't know if I can authorise -"
"Sir, with respect, if we're serious about learning more about Twelve, then I think it's the best way forward. The team will be ready."
"Will they?" said Arora. "I'd like to hear your full risk analysis first."
Emma tried to stay calm. "Okay sir, there are four key elements to consider…"
As she left the room fifteen minutes later, Emma realised her hands had been clenched so hard they'd left fingernail marks on her palms.
The spare lab-room was almost empty as Mike and Hennessy walked in. All of the equipment had been cleared out, leaving just four rows of benches and stools, one of which was occupied by a dark-haired young woman, reading.
"Hi," said Mike, "you must be Charla."
The woman looked up from her text. "Charlie," she said. "That's what my family always called me."
"Nice to meet you, Charlie. I'm Mike, and this is H." Mike indicated the smiling Agent Hennessy beside him. "Welcome to Eta-11."
"H?" asked Charlie with a quizzical look.
"For Hennessy." Mike turned to him, grinning. "Or is it Hearing Loss? I can never remember."
"Hey!" said Hennessy loudly.
Turn it down, signed Mike, and continued, "H is deaf, as you may have worked out. He can talk, but we try not to let him. Never has anything interesting to say."
I'll give you interesting, signed Hennessy, and then saw Charlie's nonplussed look. Mike, you're freaking her out. Stop being weird.
"What did he say?" Charlie asked, unsure where to direct the question.
Mike didn't miss a beat. "H was just apologising for being weird, so it's - ow!" He grabbed the back of his head, where Hennessy had cuffed him playfully. "Okay, I'm sorry, Charlie. I was just messing around with H, but it's not fair when you don't know us. You'll regret ever joining Eta-11."
"Oh no, that's okay," said Charlie, settling her hands back down on her book. "To be honest, I'm glad for the change. My last posting - well, it ended a bit strangely. Still, it's been a pretty full on start. I never knew how much training a task force needed."
"Neither did we," Mike laughed. "Did you do the Mole Rat Maze yet?"
"God, yes - that was ridiculous. I couldn't -" Charlie cut off as the door of the lab opened and a researcher walked in.
She was slightly stiff, as if uncertain she was in the right room. She carried a stack of what looked like VR goggles, held in place with her chin.
"Is this Mobile Task Force Eta-11?" Her voice had the slightest hint of a European accent. "This is all of you - there is no-one else?"
"You saw Zhao, Sandra and Roger on Tuesday, right?" Mike replied. "So yeah, apart from Emma that's all of us." Mike waited for a response, eventually wilting in the woman's stare. "We're kind of a small MTF," he added.
The woman hesitated, lips pursed, before putting the sets of goggles on the bench with a half-sigh. "Okay. My name is Dr. Reynard, senior memetics liaison to Eta-11." She pushed a few greying hairs back from her face. "I will be running your Memetic Resistance tests today."
More tests? signed Hennessy wearily.
Dr. Reynard handed out the goggles, and gave them each an electronic grip topped with a button.
"On these headsets, you will experience typical task force activities in a range of environments. When you perceive danger, or determine that a defensive action is required, you are to press the button on your grip.
"The presentation includes a series of perception-altering stimuli, which I have myself designed. These are quite safe, but will test your memetic resistance on various measures: reduced attention span, slower reaction times, impaired judgement and fine motor control."
"So it's like a game, then?" asked Charlie.
"It is a test," replied Dr. Reynard, with a curt nod. "You will be scored for both speed and accuracy in recognizing and responding to legitimate threats."
"Uh, can you tell us the score to beat?" asked Mike, pulling the goggles on to his head. "I mean, from Tuesday."
Dr. Reynard paused. "It is rather interesting, actually. Most of the team were in the average range, but Agent Dee was in the ninety-fifth percentile across all measures."
"Makes sense," Mike chirped. "After the number of times she tested - ow! Again, H?"
Hennessy scowled at Mike, who looked chastened. "I mean, I guess Agent Dee has had a lot of exposure to mind-altering anomalies."
"D, H, do you all have letters?" Charlie pushed the goggles up from her eyes to ask.
"Oh - no, Dee is definitely her name," said Mike hurriedly.
"Like John Dee? Cool. I almost transferred to Alchemical Studies," said Charlie
Dr. Reynard coughed. "If you are all now ready, shall we get on with the test?"
She flicked a switch on a central console as they lowered their goggles and tightened the straps. The last thing Mike heard before the headphones kicked in was Hennessey's voice counting down from a hundred in multiples of seven.
Four days later, the lab was full again, with the whole of Eta-11 in attendance. Zhao and Mike were sitting with Charlie, laughing at something on her phone. Behind them, Roger Anderson and Dr. Reynard were deep in debate. Agent Dee lounged in the back corner chatting to Hennessy, who was struggling to sign with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand.
They looked up as the door opened and Emma came in. Agent Zhao jumped from her chair and stood, and the others joined her, with the exception of Dee, who looked coolly from the back of the room.
"That's not necessary, guys," said Emma, blushing slightly and waving them to sit again.
As they were doing so, another man entered. He was mid-fifties, short and lean, with bushy grey hair and a thin beard. He walked into the room as if expecting it to lunge forward and swallow him.
Charlie was the only one to recognize him, whispering to Mike, "Oh my god, do you know who -"
She was interrupted by Emma, whose voice betrayed both her discomfort with giving speeches and the feeling that she was obliged to give one. "I know you've been wondering why we've been training so hard, and I'm sorry that I haven't been able to tell you yet. The truth is, I've only just received approval from the Site Director to let you know our next mission.
"Since SCP-012 was stolen, we've had almost no clear leads. Commander - well, ex-Commander Richards has no memory of where he hid the score. The Foundation has been unable to track Dr. Pherson, or find out who his associates are. And we know so little about the anomaly itself. But we have one source of information, and I intend to pursue it."
Emma looked at the expectant faces of the MTF. Her MTF. Zhao gave her a brief smile of support.
She continued. "That's the reason for all of the training so far, and I'm afraid there's more to come. Dealing with spatial anomalies, memetic resistance, lucid dreaming - we're going to need all of that."
They had started to understand, thought Emma. Dee had come off the back wall and was sitting straight, Roger was pushing his glasses up over widened eyes, Dr. Reynard was nodding. Emma saw Mike turn to Charla in sudden realization.
"So now that we have official approval, there's someone we need to speak with. MTF Eta-11, this is Dr. Calixto Narváez. We're going to Alagadda."As we approach the one-year anniversary of The City’s current Commuter Shuttle Program, we need look no further than the program’s own data to determine its success. Launched in April 2016 in response to community concerns around the impact shuttles were having on The City’s neighborhoods and transportation infrastructure, the program designated a network of shuttle stops throughout San Francisco and only allowed permitted shuttle operators to use these stops. The ultimate goal was to limit shuttle routes to existing transportation corridors and reduce interference with Muni buses and other vehicles, all while reducing congestion, cutting emissions and making our streets safer.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has found there was a 91 percent decrease in the total number of shuttles operating on small, residential streets each month. An additional $2.1 million in city revenue was collected, thanks to permit fees administered during the first six months of the program alone. Furthermore, these shuttles carry, on average, 9,800 daily passengers who would otherwise be driving their own cars or packing into already overcrowded public transit options.
The proof is in the pudding — this program works. Yet some opponents continue to push for misguided alternatives that in reality would make our city’s streets more crowded and dangerous.
The SFMTA studied the recently proposed “hub” approach under a variety of scenarios, each would dramatically reduce the number of pick-up and drop-off locations by centralizing shuttle stops into hubs. It found that, in one scenario, decreasing the number of shuttle stops would shrink ridership by nearly half, forcing a majority of these individuals to switch to driving. That would mean up to an additional 3,300 cars on our roads every day. Our city’s air quality would undoubtedly suffer thanks to the 65 million additional vehicle miles traveled annually and resulting 23,000 tons of carbon pollution.
Beyond the congestion and environmental impact, this is also a matter of safety. San Francisco was recently named California’s most dangerous city for drivers in a new report, and every additional car on the road increases the likelihood of collisions. City leaders have launched the Vision Zero program, with the goal of eliminating traffic deaths by 2024, and the best way to do that is to implement smart solutions, like the Commuter Shuttle Program, that minimize the number of individual drivers on our city streets.
Critics often cite concerns related to housing prices or the growing tech sector in their opposition to the shuttle program. These are red herrings in the debate around commuter shuttles. We should all be able to get behind a smart program that is proven to make San Francisco safer, cleaner and less congested, while also working to address the other issues of affordability in our evolving city.
That’s why I’ve joined with other transit advocates, as well as housing advocates, labor leaders and community activists to form a new coalition called Rise SF to support practical solutions like the commuter shuttle program.
We urge the SFMTA Board of Directors to continue the program, and ask that you join me in calling for their support of a commonsense, data-driven approach to transportation.
The SFMTA Board will discuss and consider extending the Commuter Shuttle Program at 1 p.m. on Feb. 21 in City Hall, Room 400. Members of the public are invited to attend in-person or submit official comments to mtaboard@sfmta.com.
Bruce Agid is a transportation advocate, community leader and member of Rise SF.
Click here or scroll down to commentA topographic relief of the Orientale impact basin, with higher areas shaded red and lower areas shaded blue
Just how a giant bullseye-shaped basin formed on the Moon has intrigued scientists for years.
Moon key points Key points Orientale Basin on the Moon has three concentric rings
Gravity data from NASA GRAIL mission mapped internal structure of basin
Computer modelling shows initial crater would have been created by impact of 64-kilometre-wide asteroid
Initial crater would have collapsed in on itself causing additional faulting that created outer rings
Now, thanks to data collected by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, they may have the answer.
The Orientale Basin sits on the very edge of the near side of the moon, so it has been difficult to observe.
But close fly-bys by two lunar probes in 2012 mapped the gravity of the area, revealing detail about the interior structure of the basin not previously accessible to scientists.
The data, published today in two papers in the journal Science, indicated the multi-ringed basin was formed by geological faulting caused by the impact of a large asteroid.
The findings could help scientists better understand how multi-ringed impact basins formed on the Moon as well as other planets during a critical time in the evolution of the solar system, said Dr Katarina Miljkovic of Curtin University, who was a co-author on both studies.
"We've shown how the rings form, not just the rings of Orientale, but the exact mechanism for ring formation on the moon, and in general that should work on any other body as well," Dr Miljkovic said.
The Orientale Basin was formed nearly 3.8 billion years ago, during a time when the Moon was being bombarded by asteroids.
It has three concentric rings, which up until now have been not been fully observed.
"GRAIL's given us not only a high resolution gravity map of Orientale, but also a pretty great gravity map of the entire moon," Dr Miljkovic said.
Simulations model violent process
Share The Orientale basin, shot by Luna Orbiter 4 in 1967
The data, published in the first study, revealed that while the outermost of the crater's three rings has a diameter of more than 930 kilometres, there was also a smaller transient crater that is not visible today.
Computer modelling in the second study indicated a crater that matched the GRAIL data would have been formed when a 64-kilometre-wide asteroid slammed into the Moon.
"That's a really big rock. And it hits the Moon at 15 kilometres per second, it's pretty supersonic," Dr Miljkovic said.
"You have this extremely violent process. The entire basin forms within two hours, real time."
According to their model, the impact would have initially formed a bowl-shaped crater about 400-500 kilometres wide and 100 kilometres deep.
After this violent geological event, the walls of the transient crater begin to collapse as it moves back towards gravitational equilibrium.
"The process is so violent a larger portion of the surface feels this pressure going out of excavation, and then the other rings which are beyond this inner depression start faulting," Dr Miljkovic said.
She said under the study's modelling, the energy produced by the collision spread outward through the surface, causing "normal faults."
These are a type of geologic fault occurring on the moon when warm mantle material that flows during the collapse of a transient crater pulls and pushes the cool crust.
This pushing and pulling elevates the rings of crust around the impact crater, creating the 'bullseye' effect we can see on the surface of the Moon today.
"Where the rings form, those are regions of localised high strain, and because of that high strain, or difference in strains in the region, you form these rings and plains," Dr Miljkovic said.
Insights into evolution of Earth and other planets
While the study focused on the Moon, Dr Miljkovic said the research could provide some insight into what happened on Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment, as well as how the distinctive rings around other craters — like the Caloris Planitia on Mercury and the Valhalla crater on Jupiter's moon Callisto — were formed.
"Because Earth and the moon are basically one system, we can prove that a lot of those impacts on the Moon also happened on the Earth as well, it tells us a lot about the evolution of the Earth as well," she said.
Share Callisto's Valhalla crater has concentric rings spreading away from the centre of the impactWhen new ideas and methods are introduced to the Premier League, there’s often a reactionary backlash from fans who find change hard to accept.It happened with rotation, zonal-marking, and when teams first started to experiment with formations other than 4-4-2.
When Brendan Rodgers first arrived at Liverpool a year ago, he brought with him his ideas of ‘Tiki-Taka’, pressing and resting with the ball. While this excited fans keen to see Liverpool play a more continental style in the mould of Spain and Barcelona, others were sceptical. “Pragmatism” suddenly became a buzz-word, as if it were common sense not to have a well-developed playing philosophy – something which arguably defined Kenny Dalglish’s side the previous season. In politics, calls for pragmatism are often veiled opposition to progress, and in football, too, the ‘pragmatists’ are often fans suspicious of any philosophy committed to technique, patience and creativity ahead of the old-fashioned English values of ‘passion’, physical strength and direct passing.
Some Liverpool supporters argued that Tiki-Taka was just a branding exercise, and offered no discernible difference to ‘pass-and move’ football. While not quite on the level of Hodgson’s absurd claim that England play a 4-4-2 “like Dortmund”, this seems like an unwillingness (or inability) to recognise nuance. On one level, all teams are playing the same way. They all have 11 players, all (United aside) must abide by the same rules, and for the most part, teams use similar formations (in the sense that nobody plays in a 2-3-5). There is no ‘fundamental’ difference between styles of football, in the way that there are fundamental differences between football and rugby, but there is a sliding scale of with Barcelona at one pole, and Stoke City at the other.
It’s a myth that Liverpool have always played the same style of football, or even that we did for any long period of time. Evans’ attacking approach was similar to Ardiles’ Spurs or Keegan’s Newcastle in its fluidity going forwards and fragility at the back. Houllier’s team played on the counter-attack, with almost no build-up in midfield whatsoever, and under Benitez Liverpool were arguably more ‘squeeze-and-control’ than ‘pass-and-move’. Even during the glory years there were subtle differences between sides, if only because different players have different qualities which translate to the way the team plays to one degree or another.
As last season progressed, some fans were relieved to see we weren’t religiously adhering to the short passing in triangles that define Tiki-Taka, but it would be wrong to see this as evidence that Rodgers has radically re-thought his philosophy. Our play was at ‘peak Tiki-Taka’ early on in the season when Joe Allen was playing and in form. His passing and ball-retention impressed those of us favouring a slow, patient passing game, and drew criticism from traditionalists preferring a more ‘direct’ style. Having played under Rodgers at Swansea, and as a central midfielder, Allen was in a key position to translate the manager’s philosophy to the pitch. During the first ten games it was sometimes as if Allen was on a different level to his teammates, but when he lost form and confidence (which coincided with a shoulder injury and fatherhood, whether or not those factors were causal) it diminished the team’s ability to play the way Rodgers wanted.
On joining Liverpool Rodgers admitted that he had tried to change things too quickly at Reading, and had learned not to force too much of his philosophy too early, so the adaptation to a new approach was always going to be and incremental one. Neither Suarez or Gerrard are particularly suited to a slow build-up game, but both had to be accommodated, further diluting Rodgers’ ideals on the pitch. By mid-season, it was as if Rodgers had looked at which aspects the players had taken to, and which they hadn’t, and adjusted the approach accordingly. Our play was what you might expect from a pre-existing group of players adapting to a new style: sometimes we looked excellent, and at others disjointed, but unlike Rodgers’ Swansea the previous season, there was no obvious overriding style. There were hints of Tiki-Taka on occasion, especially in games when Liverpool were three or more goals ahead with no pressure to score more, but we were essentially just a very attacking team that liked to pass the ball and control games.
Then Something changed.
From ‘Control’ to ‘Counter’
Around halfway through the season Rodgers decided that Martin Skrtel was a defensive liability, and with only the inexperienced and immobile Coates and the experienced but immobile Carragher to choose from, dropping him meant he was be forced to change tack. I’ve previously explained in-depth the ramifications a slow defence has on the way a team must set up, but to summarise, a lack of pace at the back means the defence must sit deep, meaning the space between the defence and strikers (unless they drop into their own half) widens, making it harder to play short passes and close down space.
With Skrtel deemed insufficient and only slow defenders available as alternatives, Rodgers adopted a counter-attacking style with Carragher marshelling a deep defensive line. With Gerrard and Coutinho’s passing, Sturridge’s pace and Suarez snapping at defenders’ heels, the players at Rodgers disposal were well-suited to playing the counter-attack, and results picked up, but that doesn’t mean we should or will stick to that approach.
Had we not needed attacking reinforcements so badly in January, Rodgers would likely have signed a quicker centre-back and stayed closer to his preferred style. Now Carragher has retired, bringing in defenders capable of playing close to the halfway line must be his priority.
If there was ever a Premiership team defined by camping out in their opponents half with centre-backs stationed on the half-way line, it was Arsenal‘s ‘Invincibles’ of 2003-2004 featuring Kolo Toure beside Sol Campbell. Granted, he’s not as quick as he was then, but Toure is used to taking up those high defensive positions, and the threats inherent in doing so |
, but most fields are not like that. However, if we believe that there are no ‘secrets,’ we’re never going to find out. [...] There is a common belief that all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. I’m telling you that it has always been intermediate-hanging fruit, and it is up to us to find it and pick it."
Thiel then argued, "Capitalism and competition are antonyms," as capitalism is defined as "a system, which results in the accumulation of capital." The entrepreneur said that "happy companies" were different, whereas "unhappy companies" were essentially the same as their competitors.
Further, Thiel claimed that monopolies are only considered as being harmful when artificially reducing supplies. The entrepreneur mentioned the cases of the iPhone and PayPal to illustrate this argument:
"When Apple released the iPhone, there was no reduction in the supply of smartphones, because it was the first one. With PayPal, which was built on the idea of combining cryptography and currency, we were the first to come up with a product among maybe 200 people in the world who were working on the idea."
Thiel also added that US patent and copyright laws were systems that rewarded innovation with monopoly.
Finally, Thiel addressed the topic of digital currencies, qualifying Bitcoin as a product "which was founded on the same set of ideas as PayPal, but which was developed in an entirely different direction." The difference between Bitcoin and PayPal, the entrepreneur said, is that unlike PayPal, Bitcoin succeeded in developing a currency:
"Bitcoin is the opposite of PayPal, in the sense that it actually succeeded in creating a currency. [...] However, its payment system is lacking, and it is often used to make illegal transactions, such as to buy heroin."
While admitting the success of the technology, Thiel said he would remain skeptical "until Bitcoin is used to make more legal transactions."
Peter Thiel is a German-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and hedge fund manager, known to have co-founded acquirer and online payment processor PayPal. In 2010, Thiel created the Thiel Fellowship through the Thiel Foundation, which provides each year 20 people under the age of 20 a total of US$100,000 over two years, as well as guidance and other resources to pursue entrepreneurial projects.
While Thiel might seem “skeptical,” PayPal has multiplied its efforts to integrate Bitcoin within its system. In early September, PayPal-owned online and mobile payments platform Braintree, announced it had partnered up with Bitcoin payments solutions provider Coinbase to enable merchants to accept the digital currency as a payment option.
While a couple of weeks later, PayPal Senior Director of Corporate Strategy Scott Ellison announced partnerships with Coinbase, BitPay and GoCoin to facilitate immediate Bitcoin functionality to the first round of merchants based in North America.
Did you enjoy this article? You may also be interested in reading these ones:Trollwriters submission eggfulives Oct 4th, 2014 254 Never 254Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 12.16 KB A slow day. In a slow week. In a slow month. What was I thinking, getting into this business? In this economy people are more concerned with remortgaging their houses than reframing their pictures. My mother was right - I should have taken that scholarship to the pet grooming academy. No matter how bad the economy gets, people will always have pets and they will always need grooming. But no. I wanted to get into the framing business and, as always, I followed my heart instead of my head. I drum my fingers on the counter, gaze around my store. It's in its usual state of organized chaos, there's a place for everything and everything's in it's place. Those places just happen to be scattered around in a haphazard manner that only I understand or remember. Look at the clock - 11.45 am. Maybe there'll be a lunch rush. The doorbell jingles, my gaze snaps up and my heart races. I see a young woman standing cautiously just inside the doorway holding a picture of about 15x15 in a tattered old metallic frame. She looks around, getting a feel for the place. Framing may seem like a fairly straightforward procedure, but there's more emotional nuance to it than people realise and it's important the customer feel I'm on their wavelength. 'Hi there! How can I help?' - I try not to let the excitement of a potential customer show through my voice. Don't scare her off - the natural flow of the process must be taken into account and my rent isn't going to pay itself. She approaches the counter and hoists the picture up. It's a typical pastoral scene - rolling green hills, a flock of sheep, shepherd in the lower right hand corner, calmly keeping things in order. It radiates a safe, conventional serenity and represents a large proportion of what people come to me with. The frame itself is slightly bent, flaking and the corners are uneven. Oh yes, this has definite potential. 'So, just to get us going, what's the backstory with this piece? If you can provide some context, we should be able to figure out the perfect frame.' She gazes down at the painting, and back at me. Like I said, there's more emotional complexity to this process than many would assume and she looks slightly abashed to be pursuing it at all. 'Well... this painting belonged to my grandfather. I'm not sure where it came from originally, but it's been in my family for decades, and has been in the same frame for as long as I can remember. I'm not entirely sure what I'm after, in terms of change, but I keep getting the feeling that maybe the current frame isn't, I don't know, sophisticated enough? Like, I look at it and I can see what's overtly there, but I feel like a new frame could reveal layers to it that we just haven't been able to see before'. 'That's a great start! I work with scenes like this all the time, there's been a real shift around how people see them in the last few years. Let me take this old frame off, and have a good look.' I remove the frame and carefully spread the painting across the counter. No need to look particularly closely, it's a standard presentation of standard subject matter. While the customer is right in that there are layers that may have gone unseen, this isn't a particularly complex case. 'So, I'll give you my initial take. This piece is a textbook pastoral scene. The intent behind work in this genre is to capture the life of the Anglo agrarian worker in a way that shows him as a simple, content, valuable member of society. The shepherd is a common motif, with underlying ties to religious ideology, but we don't need to go down that road unless it resonates with you.'. A head shake. She's still not fully relaxed, but is beginning to get into the groove. 'No, no. Religion's not a big concern in my family, or for me. I guess we'd identify as Protestant, but we don't, you know, actually do anything about it.' A slightly nervous giggle. Right, keep her comfortable - nothing too deep, try to keep it as non-confrontational as possible. 'No worries. What a lot of people are reacting to in these scenes is the feeling that pastoral art and literature was a manipulative ploy by the upper classes to explain to the peasantry that they were in their correct place and that the social hierarchy was necessary and natural. Obviously, as society's views around these things evolve, we become more sensitive to them. The most straightforward reframing that tends to happen with this kind of work is to take it from an outdated, nostalgic view of the content peasant and to instead frame it in a post-colonial context. Are you familiar with post-colonial ideology?'. Another quick shake of the head. 'I'm in finance, so I've never really learned about ideology in that sense. I guess that's why I've taken so long to get this reframed. To be honest, I wasn't even sure it was necessary.' 'Well, you're under no obligation to go through with the reframing if you decide the original view is something you're more comfortable with, but what we can do now is run through a couple of ideological options, and if you're interested I can give you some leaflets to look over when you get the time.' She begins to relax - the offer of easily digestible information often has this effect. For people who aren't well versed in social theory, or who don't have a background in the liberal arts, the whole thing can be intimidating and the intentionally impenetrable language just compounds the issue. For exactly this reason, I've spent hours upon hours pouring over stale academic texts, translating them into more accessible language and adding clip art. I, personally, abhor clip art - to me it's vulgar, the pictorial equivalent to Comic Sans, but it's safe and it's something everyone has come across at one point or another, meaning it's relatable. The intellectual in me dies a little every time I insert a stick figure or click the 'word art' button, but the practical side of me knows that the type of person who doesn't require this is the sort of person who is capable of reframing pictures on their own, and the customer is always right, even if the customer is... unsophisticated. 'That would be great, thank you'. I begin my well-rehearsed spiel. 'Post-colonial analysis in art and literature arose mid 20th century as a response to the influence and oppressive nature of Anglo culture and the British Empire. The most typical examples of this are instances where an individual who belongs to a group that has been affected by this oppression'reclaims' a famous narrative from the point of view of the non-Anglo participants. Off the top of my head, 'Wide Sargasso Sea' is a re-write of 'Jane Eyre' from the point of view the wife in the attic, going into how she came to be in that situation and the complex dynamic between colonial culture and the culture being colonized. There's also a re-write of 'Robinson Crusoe', written from the point of view of Friday, though the name escapes me right now... it'll be in the leaflet.'. She's leaning forward slightly. I can see the cogs turning, she's intrigued, but still unsure. It's alright though, I know where this is going. 'A lot of the time, people who are themselves descended from the colonial culture feel a little bit uneasy with this particular frame. One factor is that it requires confronting an unspoken privilege in a way you may not have had to before. Another is the feeling that as you're on the wrong side of history, as it were, you don't have right to take part in this conversation because you aren't the oppressed party. All of that is natural, and sensible. But part of what the descendants of oppressors can do to make amends is to integrate this narrative into their own lives and legitimize the feelings of those who were, and are, oppressed. This is where ideological reframing can be an extremely productive thing to do.' A slight slump through the shoulders - relief. A very common response. 'Oh, that's great to hear. I do feel sometimes like I can't talk about things like this because I've never experienced it'. 'It's a tricky position to maneuver, emotionally, but the fact that you can identify that is a really good start. I'll just pause for a moment to say that the post-colonial frame isn't the only one available for this piece - one could come at in from a Marxist position, or in relation to Durkheim's work about the effects of the industrial revolution on social life and support. There's also scope for some good Foucaultian analysis, though I'll be honest, were you to go down that road, I'd feel more comfortable referring you to a friend of mine. I can run through the basics of 'Discipline and Punish', but he's got a much better grasp of Continental social theory than I do... in any case, I can provide literature on all of these approaches and you can see which feels right'. The tension through the shoulders is back. I've overwhelmed her. I tend to do that - I get carried away and forget to grade my language, or I talk as if everyone will be familiar with the theories I'm working with. It's a good quality in some scenarios, but retail isn't one of them. Time to get back to safe ground. 'One way to approach post-colonial analysis from within the colonial culture is to recognise that much of the oppressive nature of the British Empire on a global scale was reflected in social arrangements within the base culture itself. In this case, the strict reinforcement of the natural social hierarchy and the attempt to keep the lower classes in their place is just a different permutation of 'the white man's burden'. In this case, the burden refers to placating and mollifying the lower classes, rather that 'civilizing' people of colour.' She glances at her watch - it's time for me to wrap this up. 'If you like, I can provide you with the leaflets I mentioned earlier and you can go home and have a look at them...' Please don't. I'm counting on her discomfort with this intellectual world to motivate her to take the first suggestion that appeals, have the picture reframed and be done with it. 'No, no. I really like what you've been saying about the complications of colonial dynamics... it's not something I'd thought much about but now that you've explained it, I think that is what was bothering me about this particular piece. I'd always seen in as benign, or simple, but I think that the discomfort I've been feeling around it does have to do with the… what was it you said? Privilege? Yeah… yeah. I think that’s it…’. I give an internal thanks to the forces of the universe – perhaps I’ll be able to afford that shirt I’ve had my eye on after all… ‘Great! Well, leave it with me. I’ll draw up frame of reference for this specific picture from a post-colonial context. I offer a few different options for this. There’s the Basic, which is a brochure with the important theoretical points set out, and a brief explanation of how they relate to this specific piece. There’s the Deluxe, which is the brochure, a PowerPoint presentation and access to some articles further explaining the material from peer-reviewed journals or there’s the Platinum. This has the brochure, the presentation, the journal articles as well as providing some explanations of the frame itself and its relation to this piece that you can memorize and trot out at dinner parties, cafes, or if anyone asks about the piece. Of course, you can just use them as a base and add your own interpretations over the top, but I find a lot of the time clients will use the pre-packaged frame for a while before they feel comfortable with adding to it themselves.’ I slide a sheet with a break down of my fees and services across the counter. She barely even glances at it – she just wants this done. ‘That sounds wonderful. Yeah, I think the Platinum sounds like the way to go. It’s the end of the financial year, and I’m slammed at work, so having the explanations and thoughts written out for me would be great’. And with that, we’re done and she’s gone. It’ll only take an hour or so to edit one of the templates I have set up for pastoral scenes to refer directly to her piece and while it’s maybe not as intellectually stimulating as I’d like, work is work. Dull as post-colonial theory may be, it beats tying bows into the hair of unwilling poodles.
RAW Paste Data
A slow day. In a slow week. In a slow month. What was I thinking, getting into this business? In this economy people are more concerned with remortgaging their houses than reframing their pictures. My mother was right - I should have taken that scholarship to the pet grooming academy. No matter how bad the economy gets, people will always have pets and they will always need grooming. But no. I wanted to get into the framing business and, as always, I followed my heart instead of my head. I drum my fingers on the counter, gaze around my store. It's in its usual state of organized chaos, there's a place for everything and everything's in it's place. Those places just happen to be scattered around in a haphazard manner that only I understand or remember. Look at the clock - 11.45 am. Maybe there'll be a lunch rush. The doorbell jingles, my gaze snaps up and my heart races. I see a young woman standing cautiously just inside the doorway holding a picture of about 15x15 in a tattered old metallic frame. She looks around, getting a feel for the place. Framing may seem like a fairly straightforward procedure, but there's more emotional nuance to it than people realise and it's important the customer feel I'm on their wavelength. 'Hi there! How can I help?' - I try not to let the excitement of a potential customer show through my voice. Don't scare her off - the natural flow of the process must be taken into account and my rent isn't going to pay itself. She approaches the counter and hoists the picture up. It's a typical pastoral scene - rolling green hills, a flock of sheep, shepherd in the lower right hand corner, calmly keeping things in order. It radiates a safe, conventional serenity and represents a large proportion of what people come to me with. The frame itself is slightly bent, flaking and the corners are uneven. Oh yes, this has definite potential. 'So, just to get us going, what's the backstory with this piece? If you can provide some context, we should be able to figure out the perfect frame.' She gazes down at the painting, and back at me. Like I said, there's more emotional complexity to this process than many would assume and she looks slightly abashed to be pursuing it at all. 'Well... this painting belonged to my grandfather. I'm not sure where it came from originally, but it's been in my family for decades, and has been in the same frame for as long as I can remember. I'm not entirely sure what I'm after, in terms of change, but I keep getting the feeling that maybe the current frame isn't, I don't know, sophisticated enough? Like, I look at it and I can see what's overtly there, but I feel like a new frame could reveal layers to it that we just haven't been able to see before'. 'That's a great start! I work with scenes like this all the time, there's been a real shift around how people see them in the last few years. Let me take this old frame off, and have a good look.' I remove the frame and carefully spread the painting across the counter. No need to look particularly closely, it's a standard presentation of standard subject matter. While the customer is right in that there are layers that may have gone unseen, this isn't a particularly complex case. 'So, I'll give you my initial take. This piece is a textbook pastoral scene. The intent behind work in this genre is to capture the life of the Anglo agrarian worker in a way that shows him as a simple, content, valuable member of society. The shepherd is a common motif, with underlying ties to religious ideology, but we don't need to go down that road unless it resonates with you.'. A head shake. She's still not fully relaxed, but is beginning to get into the groove. 'No, no. Religion's not a big concern in my family, or for me. I guess we'd identify as Protestant, but we don't, you know, actually do anything about it.' A slightly nervous giggle. Right, keep her comfortable - nothing too deep, try to keep it as non-confrontational as possible. 'No worries. What a lot of people are reacting to in these scenes is the feeling that pastoral art and literature was a manipulative ploy by the upper classes to explain to the peasantry that they were in their correct place and that the social hierarchy was necessary and natural. Obviously, as society's views around these things evolve, we become more sensitive to them. The most straightforward reframing that tends to happen with this kind of work is to take it from an outdated, nostalgic view of the content peasant and to instead frame it in a post-colonial context. Are you familiar with post-colonial ideology?'. Another quick shake of the head. 'I'm in finance, so I've never really learned about ideology in that sense. I guess that's why I've taken so long to get this reframed. To be honest, I wasn't even sure it was necessary.' 'Well, you're under no obligation to go through with the reframing if you decide the original view is something you're more comfortable with, but what we can do now is run through a couple of ideological options, and if you're interested I can give you some leaflets to look over when you get the time.' She begins to relax - the offer of easily digestible information often has this effect. For people who aren't well versed in social theory, or who don't have a background in the liberal arts, the whole thing can be intimidating and the intentionally impenetrable language just compounds the issue. For exactly this reason, I've spent hours upon hours pouring over stale academic texts, translating them into more accessible language and adding clip art. I, personally, abhor clip art - to me it's vulgar, the pictorial equivalent to Comic Sans, but it's safe and it's something everyone has come across at one point or another, meaning it's relatable. The intellectual in me dies a little every time I insert a stick figure or click the 'word art' button, but the practical side of me knows that the type of person who doesn't require this is the sort of person who is capable of reframing pictures on their own, and the customer is always right, even if the customer is... unsophisticated. 'That would be great, thank you'. I begin my well-rehearsed spiel. 'Post-colonial analysis in art and literature arose mid 20th century as a response to the influence and oppressive nature of Anglo culture and the British Empire. The most typical examples of this are instances where an individual who belongs to a group that has been affected by this oppression'reclaims' a famous narrative from the point of view of the non-Anglo participants. Off the top of my head, 'Wide Sargasso Sea' is a re-write of 'Jane Eyre' from the point of view the wife in the attic, going into how she came to be in that situation and the complex dynamic between colonial culture and the culture being colonized. There's also a re-write of 'Robinson Crusoe', written from the point of view of Friday, though the name escapes me right now... it'll be in the leaflet.'. She's leaning forward slightly. I can see the cogs turning, she's intrigued, but still unsure. It's alright though, I know where this is going. 'A lot of the time, people who are themselves descended from the colonial culture feel a little bit uneasy with this particular frame. One factor is that it requires confronting an unspoken privilege in a way you may not have had to before. Another is the feeling that as you're on the wrong side of history, as it were, you don't have right to take part in this conversation because you aren't the oppressed party. All of that is natural, and sensible. But part of what the descendants of oppressors can do to make amends is to integrate this narrative into their own lives and legitimize the feelings of those who were, and are, oppressed. This is where ideological reframing can be an extremely productive thing to do.' A slight slump through the shoulders - relief. A very common response. 'Oh, that's great to hear. I do feel sometimes like I can't talk about things like this because I've never experienced it'. 'It's a tricky position to maneuver, emotionally, but the fact that you can identify that is a really good start. I'll just pause for a moment to say that the post-colonial frame isn't the only one available for this piece - one could come at in from a Marxist position, or in relation to Durkheim's work about the effects of the industrial revolution on social life and support. There's also scope for some good Foucaultian analysis, though I'll be honest, were you to go down that road, I'd feel more comfortable referring you to a friend of mine. I can run through the basics of 'Discipline and Punish', but he's got a much better grasp of Continental social theory than I do... in any case, I can provide literature on all of these approaches and you can see which feels right'. The tension through the shoulders is back. I've overwhelmed her. I tend to do that - I get carried away and forget to grade my language, or I talk as if everyone will be familiar with the theories I'm working with. It's a good quality in some scenarios, but retail isn't one of them. Time to get back to safe ground. 'One way to approach post-colonial analysis from within the colonial culture is to recognise that much of the oppressive nature of the British Empire on a global scale was reflected in social arrangements within the base culture itself. In this case, the strict reinforcement of the natural social hierarchy and the attempt to keep the lower classes in their place is just a different permutation of 'the white man's burden'. In this case, the burden refers to placating and mollifying the lower classes, rather that 'civilizing' people of colour.' She glances at her watch - it's time for me to wrap this up. 'If you like, I can provide you with the leaflets I mentioned earlier and you can go home and have a look at them...' Please don't. I'm counting on her discomfort with this intellectual world to motivate her to take the first suggestion that appeals, have the picture reframed and be done with it. 'No, no. I really like what you've been saying about the complications of colonial dynamics... it's not something I'd thought much about but now that you've explained it, I think that is what was bothering me about this particular piece. I'd always seen in as benign, or simple, but I think that the discomfort I've been feeling around it does have to do with the… what was it you said? Privilege? Yeah… yeah. I think that’s it…’. I give an internal thanks to the forces of the universe – perhaps I’ll be able to afford that shirt I’ve had my eye on after all… ‘Great! Well, leave it with me. I’ll draw up frame of reference for this specific picture from a post-colonial context. I offer a few different options for this. There’s the Basic, which is a brochure with the important theoretical points set out, and a brief explanation of how they relate to this specific piece. There’s the Deluxe, which is the brochure, a PowerPoint presentation and access to some articles further explaining the material from peer-reviewed journals or there’s the Platinum. This has the brochure, the presentation, the journal articles as well as providing some explanations of the frame itself and its relation to this piece that you can memorize and trot out at dinner parties, cafes, or if anyone asks about the piece. Of course, you can just use them as a base and add your own interpretations over the top, but I find a lot of the time clients will use the pre-packaged frame for a while before they feel comfortable with adding to it themselves.’ I slide a sheet with a break down of my fees and services across the counter. She barely even glances at it – she just wants this done. ‘That sounds wonderful. Yeah, I think the Platinum sounds like the way to go. It’s the end of the financial year, and I’m slammed at work, so having the explanations and thoughts written out for me would be great’. And with that, we’re done and she’s gone. It’ll only take an hour or so to edit one of the templates I have set up for pastoral scenes to refer directly to her piece and while it’s maybe not as intellectually stimulating as I’d like, work is work. Dull as post-colonial theory may be, it beats tying bows into the hair of unwilling poodles.Over the weekend, BlackBerry unveiled its so-called Priv phone in its first official demo. Verdict: It’s uncomfortable to sit through.
You can watch BlackBerry CEO John S. Chen fumbling with the phone, hands hovering maladroitly above its screen and signature retractable keyboard, in an exclusive on-camera interview with Business News Network.
“And the claim to fame, obviously,” he said, presenting the phone’s key feature, “the slider.”
“Your finger will be like a mouse,” he added, waving a semi-clenched hand up and down as though actually manipulating a computer mouse.
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The presentation, let’s just say, fails to achieve the level of ex-Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ panache. Indeed, it’s is a far cry from what consumers have come to expect from rival companies such as Apple, which engineer all aspects of their product demos.
In the video, Chen struggles to open a Google Chrome search engine app on the phone’s home screen. He awkwardly taps the glass six times, finds that the app is not yet set up, and proceeds to exit it.
“Obviously, it runs Google,” he said, before hitting the roadblock. “Then I have to set it up,” he added. “This is a demo unit.”
Chen’s hand wavers above other app icons as he mumbles and apparently decides to change tack. He talks about the phone’s specs instead.
“So is this going to be the phone that brings back the BlackBerry user that abandoned because they needed a different operating system?” the reporter asked him.
“I think everyone loved the BlackBerry 10. They really do,” he said of the company’s proprietary operating system, which claims a paltry 0.3% market share, according to research firm IDC. “But there’s not enough apps. So if I could provide all of the apps of BlackBerry 10 that would be a smashing success.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t put the two together for all the practical reasons and logistic and financial reasons,” he said, referring to the company’s decision to debut a phone powered by Google’s (GOOG) mobile operating system Android. “But this is really the best thing we could do.”
You’ve got to feel for the guy.
For more on BlackBerry, watch the demo here.
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Contact us at editors@time.com.About This Game Full Scale Restoration of the Japanese battleship “Yamato” in VR.
Battleship Yamato was constructed during the World War Ⅱ in 1941, and it was the biggest battleship ever built. Unfortunately, Yamato didn’t last through the war, and it sank to the bottom of the sea.
Now, battleship Yamato is completely restored in full scale in VR. It is based on the blueprints and the recollections of the actual crew who are still alive.
In this app, you can actually get on Yamato and walk across the deck, climb up the bridge, and go inside the ship.
See the Yamato crew taking command. View the explosions of the gun fire from a close distance.
The list below shows what you can actually see in the first edition of VR Yamato.
・Deck
・Inside the first bridge
・Inside the main gun
・Scene of the crew practicing firing the gun
・Fire control center
・Captain’s cabin
・Pilot house
・Hangar
・Ship’s kitchen
With VR Yamato, enjoy the battleship from the perspective of an actual crew.Might Brad Childress be taking his talents to South Beach?
The former Minnesota Vikings coach told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that he will interview on Saturday with the Miami Dolphins about their vacant offensive coordinator's job.
"I don't have any preconceived notions," Childress told the newspaper of the interview with the Dolphins. "If there's a good opportunity there with good people, and that's the key, I'll coach again this year. If not then I'll pass and do something next year."
Childress was fired by the Vikings after a 3-7 start this season a year after coaching Minnesota to the NFC Championship Game. He was offensive coordinator with the Philadelphia Eagles before being hired by the Vikings in 2006.
Childress is owed $3 million the next two seasons by Minnesota. If he accepts a job with another team, whatever he is paid will be subtracted from what the Vikings owe him.
"I really don't know what I want to do," Childress told the Star Tribune. "I may just sit out this year and maybe two years. But I've coached for 33 straight years and if the right position comes up, I'm going to give it strong consideration. I'm a football coach."
Miami's offense struggled last season despite an offseason trade for Pro Bowl wide receiver Brandon Marshall. Third-year quarterback Chad Henne threw for 15 touchdowns but was intercepted 19 times; he was benched for Chad Pennington at one point.
Coach Tony Sparano and offensive coordinator Dan Henning took much of the blame and Sparano was at the center of a messy situation after the season as the Dolphins talked with other coaching candidates while Sparano was still under contract.
Sparano eventually received a two-year extension, but Henning will not return.
Cleveland offensive coordinator Brian Daboll was in Miami on Wednesday to interview with the Dolphins for either the position of offensive coordinator or quarterbacks coach, a league source told ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter.
Daboll already knows the AFC East well, having been a coach in New England from 2000-2006 and with the New York Jets from 2007-2008.
Daboll was hired as Cleveland's offensive coordinator after the Browns hired former Jets coach Eric Mangini. Daboll is still under contract with Cleveland despite Mangini's firing, but is unlikely to return to the Browns once a new coach is hired.
Cowboys tight ends coach John Garrett, older brother of Dallas head coach Jason Garrett, also interviewed for the Dolphins' offensive coordinator position Wednesday.
Information from ESPNDallas.com's Todd Archer and The Associated Press contributed to this report.A false document is often promoted in conjunction with a criminal enterprise, such as fraud or a confidence game.
However, a false document is also a technique employed to create verisimilitude in a work of fiction. By inventing and inserting documents that appear to be factual, an author tries to create a sense of authenticity beyond the normal and expected suspension of disbelief for a work of art. The goal of a false document is to convince an audience that what is being presented is factual.
In business [ edit ]
Forged documents in business are typically for financial gain.
Material certificates [ edit ]
A material's certification, essentially a report of its composition and properties, may be forged. A low-property material, produced for lower cost, may be passed as a higher-property material, which has a higher price. The difference becomes illicit profit. Counterfeit fasteners have low-strength alloys or inferior production processes, but are sold as high-strength fasteners.
Safety certificates [ edit ]
Similarly, parts, systems, and processes for high-valued operations may have their quality-assurance documents forged. Substandard items may be cheaper or simply more readily available. Nuclear power plants in Japan and Korea have found components with forged safety documents. See also: Information Assurance
Degree certificates [ edit ]
Academic degrees often qualify for recruitment, promotions and additional pay. There are many methods to get false degree certificates. First, university officials have been bribed to issue a certificate without study. Second, false universities called diploma mills issue certificates that have no legal standing and are usually purchased outright without study, but they may still be legal. Finally, degree certificates have been directly forged, which is a felony in most jurisdictions. Besides the degree certificate itself, final theses and essays have been falsified by e.g. plagiarism, ghost writing or inclusion of fake references. Thus, the degree certificate itself is genuine but it may be revoked.
In politics [ edit ]
A forged document, the Zinoviev Letter, helped bring the downfall of the first Labour Government in Britain. Conspiracies within secret intelligence services have occurred more recently, leading Harold Wilson to put in place rules to prevent in the 1960s phone tapping of members of Parliament, for example.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination, was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century.
In art [ edit ]
Artist JSG Boggs's life and work have been extensively explored by author and journalist Lawrence Weschler. Boggs draws currency with exceptional care and accuracy, but he only ever draws one side. He then attempts to buy things with the piece of paper upon which he has drawn the currency. His goal is to pass each bill for its face value in common transactions. He buys lunch, clothes, and lodging in this manner, and after the transactions are complete, his bills fetch many times their face value on the art market. Boggs does not make any money from the much larger art market value of his work, only from reselling the goods bought, the change and receipts and other such materials. He has been arrested in many countries, and there is much controversy surrounding his work.
Orson Welles' F for Fake is a prime example of a film which is both about falsification (art forgery and the journalism surrounding art forgery) as well as having falsified moments within the film. The movie follows the exploits of a famous art forger, his biographer Clifford Irving, and the subsequent fake autobiography of Howard Hughes that Irving tries to publish. The issues of veracity and forgery are explored in the film, while at the same time, Welles tricks the audience by incorporating fake bits of narrative alongside the documentary footage.
In cross-marketing [ edit ]
There is a long history of producers creating tie-in material to promote and merchandise movies and television shows. Tie-in materials as far-ranging as toys, games, lunch boxes, clothing and so on have all been created and in some cases generate as much or more revenue as the original programming. One big merchandising arena is publishing. In most cases such material is not considered canon within the show's mythology; however, in some instances the books, magazines, etc. are specifically designed by the creators to be canonical. With the rise of the Internet, in-canon online material has become more prominent.
The following is a list of "false document" in-canon |
following the CSSMatrix interface. This is important for anyone wanting to write an animation library like Firmin, since it provides a way of accomplishing two key tasks. Firstly, it exposes the internal representation of the transformation state of a DOM element. This enables library authors to deal with all transforms in a simple, unified way rather than having to do messy hacking around with multiple transform properties. Secondly, it provides a way to calculate the effect of combining different transformation states. This is essential to developing support for stateful transforms.
Thus far, only WebKit-based browsers such as Chrome and Safari expose a transformation matrix class to the user, WebKitCSSMatrix. Firefox, despite some limited support for 2D transforms, doesn’t provide an implementation of CSSMatrix. Neither does Opera: a CSSMatrix class was added in Opera Presto 2.5, but it appears to have been removed from more recent versions of their layout engine.
It’s my hope that Firmin can eventually become a genuinely cross-browser library, so in that spirit I’ve written FirminCSSMatrix, an implmentation of the CSSMatrix interface in JavaScript. Using this I’m hoping to work around the limitations of Firefox and Opera’s support for CSS transforms, and provide at least some of Firmin’s functionality in those browsers. It’s based on WebKit’s matrix code, and supports both 2D and 3D transformations. However, it’s still a little buggy, so I’ve removed it from the 1.0 release until I have time to resolve the remaining issues.
Stateful transforms
When the transform property of a DOM element is updated, the new transform has no relation to the old one. In a sense this is intuitive—one CSS property is simply being changed to another. However, for many of the things one might want to do with Firmin, it makes less sense. Think about moving a DOM element around with the translate functions. To move an element 400 pixels to the right, call translateX and pass in the element and the argument 400.
Firmin. translateX (el, 400, 1 );
Then call translateY and pass in 200 to move it down 200 pixels. So far, so good.
Firmin. translateY (el, 200, 1 );
Now consider moving it back to its starting point. We’ve come 400 pixels along and 200 down, so we should move it 400 to the left and 200 up. But since transforms are carried out relative not to their current transformation state but to their initial transformation state, we can’t just call translateX translateY again with -400 and -200 as the arguments: it would end up moving the element 400 pixels to the left and 200 pixels above its original position. Instead, we write this:
Firmin. translate (el, { x : 0, y : 0 }, 1 );
Clearly under many circumstances this won’t be a problem, but working in an absolute coordinate system when a relative one is more appropriate is liable to lead to unnecessary confusion, and there will be circumstances where keeping track of an element’s position will introduce unnecessary complexity into the code.
To overcome this annoyance, Firmin comes with support for stateful transforms. The chaining object returned by all animation methods actually stores the previous transforms, so any new transforms applied to the element being animated can be based on its current transformation matrix. This lets us rewrite the above code to better accord with our intuitions for this situation.
// Move the element right 400px and bind the anim variable to the current // transformation state. var anim = Firmin. translateX (el, 400, 1 ); // Move the element down 200px relative to its current position. anim. translateYR ( 200, 1 ); // Move the element back to its origin. anim. translateR ({ x : - 400, y : - 200 }, 1 );
Note the R suffixes: these distinguish the relative transform functions from their absolute counterparts. Every normal transform function, which transforms an element relative to its initial position before any transforms are applied, has a relative version which transforms the element relative to its current transformation state.
Of course, the example above can be rewritten in a chained style.
Firmin. translateX (el, 400, 1 ). translateYR ( 200, 1 ). translateR ({ x : - 400, y : - 200 }, 1 );
3D transforms
3D transforms are also not yet widely supported—like the CSSMatrix interface, they’re only available in WebKit-based browsers like Chrome and Safari. Since Firmin itself is currently only targeted at those platforms, it already has quite a lot of 3D transform support. In particular, it includes all the 3D transform methods (with one omission, discussed below), so elements can be translated, scaled and rotated in three dimensions.
I won’t spend a lot of time explaining 3D transforms, since there are plenty of articles out there which introduce them in a more comprehensive way than I can manage here. Probably the best place to start is the WebKit blog post which first introduced them, while the Apple developer documentation is also good, and includes some helpful diagrams. This Art of Web article might be helpful, and I have a longer list of related articles saved on Pinboard.
The major missing piece in Firmin’s support of 3D transformations is an interface for manipulating the perspective and perspective-origin properties, which control the “camera position” for the whole page, and the perspective transformation function, which modifies that perspective for a single element. These are vital to a really effective use of 3D transforms, so once I figure out a nice way to introduce them and explain their use, they will be added to Firmin. Good documentation is always important, but when the subject matter is slightly obscure and in all likelihood outside most developers’ experience, it’s even more vital.
Apart from full support for 3D transforms, and potentially adding some more convenience functions, the one major thing Firmin is missing is some great demos. Nothing communicates the power of a library or piece of functionality as well as a demonstration of what can be accomplished with it. Unfortunately, this is not a task I have time for at the moment, but if you build something cool, do get in touch (benedict at eastaugh dot net).
By Benedict Eastaugh.Gene Wojciechowski does a nice job in this piece of recounting Joe Montana’s separation from the 49ers and comparing it to what’s unfolding for Peyton Manning with the Indianapolis Colts.
“NFL history repeats itself. The circumstances aren't exactly the same, but they're similar enough. Bottom line: Divorce proceedings between a generational player and the franchise he helped make famous are never easy. ‘It was horribly difficult,’ (Niners team president Carmen) Policy said the other day by phone, describing Montana's departure from the 49ers in 1993. ‘At that time he had won four Super Bowls. He was the quintessential comeback kid. He was so revered in the community, so loved in the locker room.
It's difficult to miss all the signs that point to the Colts separating from QB Peyton Manning. AP Photo/Frederick Breedon "In a strong, strong way there are similarities in terms of what Peyton Manning has done for that franchise in Indianapolis. You almost can't think of the franchise without thinking of Peyton Manning. … To separate is really, really difficult and heart wrenching."
But I have to disagree with Wojciechowski’s conclusion. He believes the Colts should do whatever necessary to hold on to Manning.
“Maybe you push back the March 8 due date on Manning's $28 million option bonus. Maybe you say, ‘I want you to begin and end your career wearing the horseshoe, but you've got to work with me on this $28 mil. Can we restructure it?’
“Maybe you tell him, ‘Come back, play another year, help mentor (Andrew) Luck or RG3 and then we'll put together an organizational golden parachute for you. And if you play like pre-neck surgery Peyton, then we'll re-up you for another year or you go somewhere as a free agent.’
“Professional. Reasonable. Logical.”
But not feasible.
The NFLPA tells me the first renegotiated of a contract can take place at any time. Then the second cannot happen within a year if it causes a salary increase over the first redo.
So Manning's contract isn’t the big issue, actually.
The issue is every move the Colts have made since the end of the season has been intended to set up a fresh start and a new era. And as much as the Colts love Manning and appreciate his work for them, finding a way to keep him on a team that’s going to undergo a major rebuild under a new GM with a new coach and staff and with the No. 1 pick coming to town is impractical.
It’s too late to take the path Woj wants, and while taking it is in some way the noble thing to do to preserve what’s been a beautiful thing, it’s not the practical thing to do for the long-term health of the franchise.
It’s in no way easy. It’s incredibly emotional for all parties involved.
The odds that all these factors would arrive at the same time were incredibly low: Manning’s continued uncertain health; the secondary bonus coming due that triggers the remainder of his contract; the Colts’ terrible season without him that resulted in the No. 1 pick; the availability of Luck with that pick; Irsay’s frustration with Bill Polian and Chris Polian coming off that failed season that led to their dismissals; the hiring of Ryan Grigson as the new GM; the removal of Jim Caldwell; the hiring of Chuck Pagano as the new coach; looming decisions on three old-guard guys heading to free agency -- center Jeff Saturday, receiver Reggie Wayne and defensive end Robert Mathis.
If Irsay had decided to attempt to load up for a three-season push for another Super Bowl with Manning, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. But he either had to go all-in in such fashion, or bail and start anew.
He’s already well down the path to the second strategy. And the Colts brass needs to line up with the approach Policy took with Montana.
There is a Jim Irsay-Manning meeting looming. There is a lot of talk about a decision still to be made. It's hard for me to imagine Irsay hasn't already made it and we aren't just waiting for it to play out.Bas Rutten, one of the true founding fathers of MMA, believes we have not seen the last of former UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar inside the Octageon.
“I have a feeling that – and I know people are gonna go, “oh you’re crazy,” but I think Brock Lesnar will be back as well. I truly believe that,” said Rutten, during a recent appearance on Submission Radio.
Lesnar was fined and suspended for a year dating back to July for his failed post-fight drug test following a bout with Mark Hunt at UFC 200. The current WWE superstar was granted an exception to the four-month testing period typically enforced by the USADA due to his coming out of retirement for the bout.
Recently, Lesnar and the UFC have been served with a civil suit from Hunt due to the usage of a banned substance.
“If (Ronda) Rousey decided to hang it up, they got only Conor McGregor. Now, Conor’s not going to fight for a very long time anymore. I think this guy needs to be in movies also. I think he probably will be a really good actor as well. So I think he probably will take that route. I don’t know, he’s got a very competitive spirit in him, so hopefully we see him fight for a few more years. But what if not? What if he gets injured,” Rutten said. “Boom. I mean there’s nothing compared to it. I mean, you look at Jon Jones who’s a phenomenal athlete, who by the way also has to wait until he comes back, and he draws good pay-per-view numbers, but not what McGregor and Rousey are doing. They need another person. And the only other person that’s there, is Brock Lesnar. And that’s why I’m thinking they’ll go after him.”Critics Blame Airbnb For San Francisco's Housing Problems
Enlarge this image toggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Online rental brokers like Airbnb, VRBO and Flipkey in San Francisco may be finding some success renting to visitors on a nightly basis, but people concerned about a shrinking rental market have turned to legal action and protests.
In the city's North Beach neighborhood, for example, protesters recently gathered around a three-unit apartment with flats an online broker rents to vacationers. This used to be the rent-controlled home of elderly tenants until out-of-town investors bought the building and evicted the residents.
Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union says those units were added to the 7,500 or so available to tourists in San Francisco using sites like Airbnb and VRBO.
"The underlying problem in San Francisco is the conversion of rent-controlled apartments to other uses, be they condo or tourist, which is taking sorely needed rent-controlled units off the market," Gullicksen says.
The city's nearly 3 percent vacancy rate is already one of the lowest in the nation. It's also got some of the most expensive median rents at nearly $3,300 per month. Local law limits rent increases for long-term residents; but if tenants are evicted, like they were here, they'll probably have to pay market rate to stay in the city.
But Peter Kwan, head of Home Sharers of San Francisco, urges critics not to blame all those renting to short-term visitors for the housing crisis.
"I applaud the tenants union for bringing attention to the bad actors, but they may be giving the impression that everybody who hosts are equally bad actors, which is simply not the case," Kwan says.
Kwan's organization has over 1,000 members, and a lot are like him: They don't evict tenants. They live in the property they rent to tourists. Kwan gets about $130 a night for a room in his house — and it's booked pretty solid in the summer.
"During the summer it would be more than 20 days a month," he says.
So is the room he rents out legal in San Francisco? "It could be a violation of the zoning code. I haven't looked into it," he says. He says he may do that.
There are at least two codes and ordinances that make private rentals of less than 30 days illegal in San Francisco, and two lawsuits have been filed so far. The law's the same in New York City, which has been cracking down on rental scofflaws.
San Francisco Planning Director John Rahaim says his city is trying to walk a fine line. It wants to protect vulnerable tenants "in a way that isn't causing heartache to people who are just trying to make a little bit of money in their apartment or house," he says.
Next month, the city's Board of Supervisors is expected to consider a compromise measure that would legalize tourist rentals, but only under some conditions.
Carl Shepherd, co-founder of HomeAway, which runs many vacation rental websites such as VRBO, is pro-regulation. But he says too much could just send the hot market underground.
"So it's a little like Prohibition in the '30s, and what you don't want to do is create a law that can't be enforced because that does no one any good," Shepherd says.
Other cities around the world have made definitive choices. Amsterdam and Paris recently passed laws allowing short-term residential rentals. Berlin and Barcelona both banned them. The short-term-rental arm of the so-called sharing economy will have to adjust one way or the other as regulations slowly catch up with the supply, the demand and the technology that connects the two.Since the BBC officially licensed the TARDIS PC, Scan Computers was able to build it exactly to scale from the original prop schematics, match the interdimensional police box's precise Pantone color, and load its hard drive with a full Whogabyte of memory to prove it really is bigger on the inside. So get ready to travel the (virtual) world in a sickly accurate version of the Doctor's very own trusty whip.
The TARDIS PC begins as over 45 pieces of high quality aluminum lovingly soldered or stapled or whatever you do to affix lightweight metals together, and imprinted with accurate depictions of the police box's handles and signage. Though the door does not open, TARDIS' inside houses a Gigabyte GA-H61N-USB3, Intel H61 Chipset motherboard with USB3, DVI, and HDMI Support, plus a DVD or Blu-ray drive. Its processor is an Intel Pentium G2120, 3.1GHz Dual Core, with 3MB Cache. Actual hard drive memory weighs in at 500GB, and the computer runs on a Windows 7 Home Premium operating system. So probably you can't use the TARDIS PC to take over the world or hack into and reprogram an army of Daleks to assist you in surviving the end of the world, but...owning one might make you the most geekerific cat in the office and an instant magnet to nerdy hot girls, such as Zooey Deschanel and the one who got knocked up in that movie about teen pregnancy with the guy from Arrested Development.Two Republican North Dakota legislators criticized a local library for having the audacity to display and promote books acknowledging that LGBTQ people exist without putting hateful propaganda alongside of it.
West Fargo Public Library shared a display of the LGBT books, along with one of books by prominent writers of color, to its Facebook page earlier this month, in anticipation of the Fargo-Moorhead Pride celebration, held Aug. 10-13, Infoforum reports.
Republican Reps. Christopher Olsen and Ben Koppelman weren’t having it.
The books included Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?, Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Mick Jagger, and Mind of an Outlaw, an essay collection by Norman Mailer.
“I find it very surprising that the West Fargo Public Library would choose to showcase a display promoting these types of materials regarding human sexuality,” Olson said. He contacted West Fargo Library Director Sandra Hannahs to say he was unhappy with this situation.
Meanwhile, Koppleman contacted West Fargo City Commissioner Duane Hanson to express his concerns.
While the library defended its choice as “not intended to judge or promote, simply to respond to the needs and interests of West Fargo residents,” Hannahs weakly buckled and added that it was “insensitive of us to post an announcement on Facebook in which we referred to patrons to the display for a ‘great read’ for the end of summer” due to the “conservative mindset of the city.”
And this is how cities wake up and become more affirming, especially for the young queer people stuck growing up there.
The library has also removed the sign promoting them as “great summer reads,” due to the backlash. The post remains on Facebook, however.
Koppleman and Olsen instead want to fill kids’ heads with nonsense, it seems:
Both Koppelman and Olson felt the display lacked balance because it didn’t include any books that were critical of LGBT lifestyles or questioned their scientific validity. Library officials may have not intended to promote LGBT lifestyles, Olson said, but that was the end result because the display excluded alternative views on the subjects. “The actual content of the promoted material is, at its very heart, promotional of an ideology of sexual fluidity, promiscuity, experimentation and deviation,” Olson said. Olson also feels the display was inappropriate because it would be seen by children visiting the library. He has five children himself, ranging in age from 4 to 14. “With my children, we’ve discussed these issues,” he said. “But there are many people who haven’t. I think it’s very unfortunate that this topic is being pushed into the face of 5-6-7-year-old kids. That’s a real tragedy.”
This Story Filed UnderThe bottom line is this: being a dealer is a lot more challenging than it may appear.
For starters, dealers must do a lot of math, mostly addition, all in their heads. With all of the hands in games like blackjack and baccarat, some dealers estimate that they perform thousands of addition problems an hour — and that’s only the card games. Throw in payouts for a game like craps, where some bets pay 6 to 5, and dealers are making nearly as many calculations as Deep Blue in a match against Garry Kasparov.
Second, as the job title suggests, being a dealer requires much manual dexterity. Most casinos expect dealers to serve up an average of 100 hands an hour for blackjack. When you consider that many tables seat seven players at a time, even dealers who fall short of this mark are working pretty quickly. Not surprisingly, some dealers suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive strain injuries.
Dealers must also double as umpires and line judges, constantly administering the rules of each game. And, finally, while they’re adding numbers, dishing cards and enforcing rules, dealers need to entertain players and keep them engaged. Mr. Hebel says that while he and his colleagues aren’t required to be the next Andy Samberg, they are expected to interact with players and make the experience one to remember.
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“People like personable dealers,” he said. “If you’re likable, they’ll come back.”
With all of these demands in a workday, scheduling regular shifts can become tricky. Most pit bosses believe that even the best dealers can’t be perfectly sharp for more than an hour at a time. Their solution is to give each dealer a 20-minute break after every 60 minutes of work.
For Mr. Hebel, that means no more than six hours of actual table time during an eight-hour shift.
He usually checks in at around 8 a.m. and takes his first break at 9. After the 20-minute break, he is back on the floor at 9:20 a.m., then off again at 10:20. During the rest of the day, he works from 10:40 to 11:40 a.m., noon to 1 p.m., 1:20 to 2:40 p.m. and 3 to 4 p.m.
When it is time to eat, he approaches meals like a guerrilla fighter — tactically, with a quick-strike approach. Instead of hastily devouring a big meal in one sitting, he told me, he usually spreads meals over two or three breaks: a banana here, a cup of soup there. Occasionally, he agrees to dine with others, though conversation takes up precious time.
For all this work — both dealing cards and dealing with days that revolve around 20-minute breaks — most dealers earn about $45,000 a year, including the tips that players usually bestow after a good hand or a few entertaining hours at the table. While this salary isn’t as much as it probably should be in a billion-dollar industry, it isn’t shabby.
PERHAPS the biggest perk for casino dealers is the unpredictability that each day brings. Because different players constantly come and go, no two shifts on the floor are the same.
At Jackson Rancheria, Mr. Hebel sees all types. Some are chatty, others are shy. Some are kind, others are rude. Winning brings out the best and the eccentric; Mr. Hebel remembered a number of players who slapped him five after getting blackjack, and at least one player who sang during winning runs.
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Of course, losing can evoke rage in even the gentlest person.
“I’ve had people call me just about everything you can possibly imagine after a tough loss,” Mr. Hebel said. “Do I like it? Not at all. But I understand that it’s part of the job, and if I sat there and lost my money to some blackjack dealer, I’d be pretty angry, too.”Everyone in Australia already knows that they get ripped off purchasing any sort of digital goods locally, and of course there's the inquiry into pricing in the country, but this ridiculous statistic really puts it all in perspective. News.com.au discovered that it's actually cheaper for an Australian to fly to the United States, purchase a copy of Adobe CS6 Master Collection, then fly back, than to actually purchase the software locally.
In Australia, Adobe's Creative Suite 6 Master Collection costs AU$4,344 for a boxed copy, or AU$3,949 for a digital copy which is GST exempt. In the United States, the exact same product will cost you US$2,599, which when currency converted comes in at AU$2,513 - a difference in price of AU$1,831 over the boxed copy (AU$1,436 over digital).
A return flight to Los Angeles costs AU$1,147.58 on Virgin Australia, meaning if you chose to fly to the United States to purchase CS6 Master Collection you would save AU$228 over buying a digital copy locally, and it's a whole AU$684 cheaper than buying a boxed copy. If you are unlucky and forced to pay import tax and duty for the product coming into Australia, the total amount (CS6 + tax/duty + flight) would be AU$4,049, which is still cheaper than buying a boxed copy locally.
The fact that it's cheaper for Australians to fly internationally to purchase a piece of software highlights just how ridiculous software premiums are for those not living in North America. While Adobe did reduce the price of Creative Cloud subscriptions to more closely match the US prices, the price discrepancy in other products still remains.
Source: News.com.auOne of the many players that had down seasons last year with the Philadelphia Eagles, Connor Barwin is one of the players that stood out for his poor form. Having his worst season since joining Philadelphia back in 2013, Barwin only managed to record 34 tackles, five sacks and one forced fumble.
For a defensive end, these stats are nowhere near good enough, especially for someone that should start all 16 games. While Barwin stats have been trending downward ever since 2014, this past year he really fell flat. Holding a cap hit of $8.35 million this next season, Barwin looks to be a player on his way out of Philly. Combine this with the fact that his dead cap is only $600 thousand and you have a recipe for a cut player.
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That said, the recipe is missing one ingredient. That ingredient is a lack of trade interest, something there appears to be plenty of across the NFL. Heck, one source for the NJ Advanced Media went as far to say that “If they cut him, teams will be lining up for him.”
Going on to further explain what he thought the Eagles should do, the source mentioned trading Barwin due to the amount of interest that exists for the player. “He wouldn’t be out of a job for long. I would think they could trade him and get something back. He has value. His deal this year isn’t that bad.”
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While trading him would be the best option for the team, don’t expect the Eagles to get much back in return for Barwin. Though the player has some suitors, he is still coming off of a poor 2016 campaign and has quite a cap hit to his name. With both these factors involved, the most the Eagles could probably get for him would be a late day three draft pick.
With so much money invested in the defensive line, expect something to give this offseason. Thanks to the amount of holes that exist across the rest of the roster, the Philadelphia Eagles will have to find ways to open up some salary cap space. Thanks to his kind dead cap amount, expect Connor Barwin to be one of these cap casualties either through trade of a straight release.
READ MORE: Eagles could be favorites to land Britt this offseason
The post Connor Barwin could be traded by the Philadelphia Eagles appeared first on Cover32.One reason for the drop-off in the amount of time actually played is the rules of the game. In football, a player who is tackled within the field after running with the ball or making a catch ends the play. The clock continues to move. The team must put the ball back into play within 35 seconds after the play clock is started. As time rolls after tackles are made, players are running back to the huddle, getting the play call and then setting up for the next play. The clock stops on an incomplete pass or when a runner goes out of bounds, but as soon as the referee puts the ball back on the line of scrimmage and rules that it has been readied for play, the clock begins to count down again.Image caption The auditory cortex in the brain usually processes sound
People deaf from birth may be able to reassign the area of their brain used for hearing to boost their sight, suggests a study.
Improved peripheral vision, often reported by deaf people, could be generated by the brain area which would normally deal with peripheral hearing.
The Canadian research, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, tested the theory using congenitally deaf cats.
The researcher involved said the brain did not let unused space "go to waste".
Both deaf and blind people frequently say their other senses are sharper by way of compensation.
However, it has not been obvious how the brain might achieve this.
Compensation
The researchers from the University of Western Ontario used their cat studies to test which parts of the brain were responsible.
The brain is very efficient, and doesn't let unused space go to waste Dr Stephen Lomber, Researcher
Their cats were given tests in which lights flashed at the very periphery of their normal vision.
When only the auditory cortex - the part of the brain which normally processes sound information - was deactivated temporarily, their enhanced peripheral vision appeared to be switched off as well.
Narrowing the search, the team found that the part of the auditory cortex responsible was the part which would ordinarily detect peripheral sounds.
Dr Stephen Lomber, who led the research, said: "The brain is very efficient, and doesn't let unused space go to waste.
"The brain wants to compensate for the lost sense with enhancements that are beneficial.
"For example, if you're deaf, you would benefit by seeing a car coming far off in your peripheral vision, because you can't hear that car approaching from the side - the same with being to more accurately detect how fast something is moving."
He said that understanding what happens within the auditory cortex in the absence of sound information coming in could help doctors work out what is happening when someone with hearing loss is given a cochlear implant.
"If the brain has rewired itself to compensate for the loss of hearing, what happens when hearing is restored?"
Reaction time
Dr Joanna Robinson, a researcher at the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), welcomed the findings.
She said: "This research supports previous findings that people who are deaf from birth have a larger visual field than hearing people.
"Research funded by ourselves recently showed that deaf adults can also react to objects in their peripheral vision more quickly than hearing adults, while deaf children react more slowly than their hearing counterparts.
"This indicates that it may take some time for the auditory part of the brain to make the switch to processing visual information."Overview (4)
Born October 23, 1959 in Downey, California, USA Birth Name Alfred Matthew Yankovic Nicknames The Weird One
The Boneless Boy
The King of Parody Height 6' (1.83 m)
Mini Bio (1)
Few would have guessed that "Weird Al" Yankovic - who as a shy, accordion-playing teenager got his start sending in homemade tapes to the Dr. Demento Radio Show - would go on to become a pop culture icon and the biggest-selling comedy recording artist of all time, with classic song and music video parodies such as "Eat It," "Like a Surgeon," "Smells Like Nirvana," "Amish Paradise," "White & Nerdy" and "Word Crimes." Now in his fourth decade as America's foremost song parodist, he has been honored with four Grammy® Awards and fifteen nominations, including a 2015 win for his 14th studio album Mandatory Fun.
Alfred Matthew Yankovic was born on October 23, 1959, in the Los Angeles suburb of Lynwood, to Mary Elizabeth (Vivalda) and Nick Louis Yankovic. He is of Yugoslavian, Italian, and English descent. He first took up the accordion when a salesman came around to solicit business for a music school. His parents decided on the accordion because of polka king Frankie Yankovic (no relation). As a child and young teen, Al watched a lot of television, which gave him much inspiration for his later work. He also became a fan of such musician/comedians as Allan Sherman and Spike Jones. He became especially acquainted with these musicians through the radio show of Barry Hansen, aka "Dr. Demento", which would later become a great source of publicity for his talents. After an extraordinary career at Lynwood High School, where Al graduated as valedictorian, he attended the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo to study architecture, a field he is said to have chosen because it was listed first in the catalog (although he has said that he really chose it on the advice of a guidance counselor). It was at Cal Poly that Al had a radio show and earned the nickname "Weird Al". Although he had sent tapes to Dr. Demento in the past, it was at Cal Poly where he recorded his first real published piece, a parody of the popular "My Sharona" by The Knack, called "My Bologna". After the astounding success of that song, forever to be known as the "bathroom recording" as it was recorded in the acoustically perfect mens' room, Al began his phenomenal career, which has spanned twelve albums, numerous compilations, a box set, movies, videos and edible underwear. He has also done a great deal to advance the cause of accordion-wielding weirdos, for which we can all be thankful.
In addition to his 1989 cult hit feature film UHF, his late 1990s CBS Saturday morning series The Weird Al Show and numerous AL-TV specials he has made for MTV and VH1 over the years, Yankovic has remained a staple of film and television, from appearances on The Simpsons and 30 Rock to performing on the 2014 Primetime Emmy Awards. More recently he guested on ABC's Galavant (as a singing monk) and The Goldbergs (as the '80s version of himself). In the spring of 2015 Yankovic joined the fifth and final season of IFC's Comedy Bang! Bang! as its co-host and bandleader. Al can be heard as the voice of the title character in Disney XD's animated series Milo Murphy's Law. Additional voiceover work includes Gravity Falls, Wander Over Yonder, Adventure Time, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, The 7D, Teen Titans Go!, We Bare Bears, Pig Goat Banana Cricket, Uncle Grandpa, Voltron: Legendary Defender, Bojack Horseman, and the DC animated feature Batman vs. Robin. Other notable past projects include the 2009 themed attraction Al's Brain: A 3-D Journey through the Human Brain, featuring cameos by everybody from his mother-in-law to Paul McCartney. Two years later, Comedy Central broadcast and released the concert special "Weird Al" Yankovic Live: The Alpocalypse Tour, filmed at Toronto's venerable Massey Hall. Yankovic added "New York Times bestselling author" to his resumé in 2011 with the release of his children's book, When I Grow Up (HarperCollins), followed two years later by My New Teacher and Me! An animated series based on his children's books is being developed in partnership with the Jim Henson Company. 2012 saw the release of Weird Al: The Book (Abrams), an illustrated hardcover on Al's life and career, and in 2015 Yankovic became not only MAD Magazine's cover boy, but the first Guest Editor in their 63-year history. 2016 saw the release of George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison, featuring Al's live performance of "What is Life?" The past year has seen the June premiere of the Dreamworks animated film Captain Underpants, for which Al co-wrote and performed the film's theme song, and the release by NECA Toys of the second in its line of retro-clothed Weird Al action figures. In August, Al wrote and performed "The North Korea Polka (Please Don't Nuke Us)" on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
In May 2017, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce announced that Weird Al would be receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In November of this year, Legacy Recordings will release Squeeze Box: The Complete Works of "Weird Al" Yankovic, a career-spanning box set of all 14 of Al's studio albums remastered for 150-gram vinyl and CD formats, plus an exclusive rarities album and 120-page book of archival photos, all housed in a replica of Weird Al's trademark accordion. Released in July 2014, Mandatory Fun became the first comedy album in history to debut at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, and the first to reach the top of the chart since 1963. Yankovic set the U.S. record on Spotify for having the most tracks from one album in the viral top 10 at one time, taking the first four spots. Internationally, the album debuted in the Top 10 in both Canada and Australia (#3 and #9 respectively). In addition, "Word Crimes" debuted in the Billboard Top 40, making Al one of only four artists to have had Top 40 singles in each of the last four decades - the other three are Michael Jackson, Madonna and U2. For Mandatory Fun, Al blew up the internet by releasing eight music videos in eight days, including "Tacky" (the star-studded parody of Pharrell Willliams' "Happy") and "Word Crimes" (an animated grammar lesson to the tune of Robin |
bait And Switch
Donald J. Trump set the stage for his White House run back in 2011 as the self-appointed ringmaster of Birtherism. He built his political brand by attacking the legitimacy of America’s first Black President. By the time Trump began his assault on GOP field, 66 percent of his supporters believed President Obama was born elsewhere and 43 percent believed he was a “secret Muslim.” Many of his hardcore devotees believed these falsehoods through to the end of the campaign. And many still do today.
With that predicate established, Trump astutely pivoted to hyperbolic and fallacious messaging about a perceived Muslim “threat.” He said Obama was “the Founder of ISIS.” And he outlined a ban on Muslim immigration. Throughout the campaign he contributed to — or simply exploited — the widespread misconception that Muslims make up 17 percent of the U.S. population when, in fact, they are a scant 1 percent of Americans. Either way, the perception was political gold for Trump.
That’s because 2016 was a campaign of perception and emotion, not facts and figures. And like a bristling political antenna, Trump picked up the growing unease in rural and suburban America and masterfully transmitted broad emotional, identity-based appeals rooted in the nation’s shifting demography. He expanded traditional racial parameters of who is dangerous to include Muslims, Mexicans and immigrants in general. He connected voters’ anger with the sense that America had been “lost.” He promised to return America to a supposed state of greatness.
Unsurprisingly, the strongest bastions of Trump’s “red meat and potatoes” support were, according to the Wall Street Journal, those small Midwestern towns and counties that experienced the fastest-shifting ethnic, religious and racial demographics over the last 15 years. On Election Day, his unshakable base of White Working Class males swelled, according to a FOX News exit poll, to include educated Whites, Whites of greater economic means and White women. Yes, he brought the vaunted Reagan Democrats back to the Republican fold. But he also got an unexpected boost from higher income Whites and suburban White women.
Despite the data, some argue that this coalition of Whites is not a “White backlash” vote. Trump’s slightly better than Romney (by 2 points each) performance with Black and Latino voters did exceed quite low expectations (although he still only got 8 percent of African-Americans). It is also true that a combination of Hillary Clinton’s vulnerabilities, economic dissatisfaction and thirst for change all contributed to Trump’s win. But that doesn’t fully explain the stark Whiteness of his base — which produced an Electoral College victory centered specifically in so-called “Duck Dynasty” America and a notable overall popular vote loss in aggregate America.
How Did Trump Win?
So, how did Trump form a strange coalition of the so-called Alt-Right movement and its motley crew of White Nationalists, Klansmen and disgruntled Caucasians with a surge of more educated, more affluent Whites, suburban women and the reborn Reagan Democrats?
Trump resurrected a well-established and all-too successful political ploy that takes racism and perniciously hides it in real issues — like crime, poverty, taxes, job scarcity, social welfare policy. He effectively underlined issues like economic insecurity, fear of terrorism and resentment against trade with politically incorrect, ethnically-themed and racially-conscious messaging. Like his use of faulty crimes statistics, he used these appeals to draw out the grudges and grievances of people who felt transgressed by politicians and/or were fearful and uneasy about the direction of the country.
These grudges simmered underneath the palpable economic grievances of working-class Americans and, specifically, working-class White Americans. But this was about more than just economic dislocation. Making America great “again” also spoke to fears about the changing face of the nation.
Trump hearkened back to a time before all those “politically correct” demographic changes so colorfully embodied by Obama’s coalition. Those were the very voters Hillary Clinton pursued. Instead, Trump built his monolithic, monochromatic base with a well-worn process of coding that replaces overt racism with far more complicated political messaging that marbles issues with bigotry, xenophobia and racism.
For example, Trump’s economic messages about Mexican immigrants and wily Chinese negotiators can appeal to racists and xenophobes while also appealing to people who are not bigots, but endure real or perceived economic hardships that appear to be addressed by expelling immigrant labor or renegotiating “fairer” trade deals.
In other words, it is possible to rationalize a racially-motivated policy as “not racist” because you don’t have to irrationally “hate” Mexicans to agree with a policy of removing an “illicit” labor pool. Nor do you have to “hate” clever Chinese leaders for doing to America what you think American negotiators would’ve done to the Chinese if America’s leaders weren’t so darn “stupid.”
The issues of wage decline from immigration or deindustrialization from bad trade deals can therefore be “race neutral.” It can be easily rationalized as “not racist” to want enforceable borders and better negotiations. It can also seem wholly justifiable to shut down Muslim immigration from specific countries. It possible to believe it’s not based on their religion or ethnicity, but because terrorists (thanks to a conveniently squishy application of the term) always seem to come from “over there.” Therefore, it isn’t technically racist to just want to stop terrorism. Just like it wasn’t necessarily racist to want less crime back in 1988.
Back then, the infamous Willie Horton ad and the relentless “law and order” messaging of the Bush campaign linked crime with Black men to build an electoral victory. The upshot then was a two-plus decade-long merger of crime with racist tropes about Black men. The upshot now is the marbling of economic unease with racism against Mexicans, ethnonationalism against Chinese and fear of Muslim interlopers. And then like now, this powerful style of messaging made it possible to explicitly embrace or tacitly accept prejudicial proclamations that would’ve otherwise been unacceptable.
In fact, there’s a certain symmetry to Trump’s meteoric rise and the conclusion that American law enforcement still grapples with systemic racism. His posture as the “law and order candidate” tapped into the backlash against the backlash against the era of mass incarceration. His consciously abrasive style resurfaced a deeply encoded racism that — like hundreds of thousands of Black men — was locked away into the prison system during the War on Drugs.
Law And Order
Racism has been evermore deeply encoded into the criminal justice system since the civil rights movement scored key victories in the mid-1960s. The old system of Jim Crow was methodically replaced with a “New Jim Crow” that, as Michelle Alexander so painfully detailed, turned incarceration as tool of de facto re-segregation. Controlling African-Americans was expressed as a need to “get tough on crime.” And the phrase “’law and order” became a subtle way of playing on racial fears and trading in a less overt forms of racism.
When Richard Nixon ran on “law and order” during the tumult and race riots of 1968, there was little doubt what he meant. It was about getting a handle on angry Black Americans reeling from the violent loss of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was also a coded response to the new socio-political reality of post-Jim Crow America. At the same time, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts meant White America had lost (at least technically) its legally sanctioned place atop the racially stratified system. America was changing and not everyone was happy about it.
What arose out of that toxic cocktail of backlash and resentment was the racially conscious “Southern Strategy.” In 1972, Nixon’s political team leveraged the “old” Jim Crow South into a sweeping electoral victory. Nixon’s “Silent Majority” of disgruntled working, middle-class, suburban and Southern Whites transformed the Republican Party for decades to come. Notably, 1972 was also the year Nixon officially declared the War on Drugs.
According to Dan Baum, Nixon’s drug war might’ve actually been a surreptitious counter-attack against dissent on both the political Left and, perhaps most balefully, on an increasingly forceful Black activist movement. Writing in Harper’s, Baum cites infamous Nixon aide John Ehrlichman who said Nixon secretly turned the criminal justice system into a tool of political payback and racial control:
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
In other words, the quite real issues of drugs and crime were weaponized for political and racial purposes. Nixon’s War On Drugs and his call for “law and order” became nods and winks to law enforcement as they cracked-down on “crime”… and his opponents. Successive GOP campaigns focused on these quite real issues of drugs and crime. They also paid no political price for the disproportionate outcomes of the policies — particularly those faced particularly by Black Americans. It didn’t become an issue because the issue wasn’t officially “racism.” It was law and order.
By the time former California Governor and committed drug warrior Ronald Reagan made his own “law and order” appeals during the 1980 campaign, many White voters had fled to the suburbs while many White working-class voters grappled with the economic unease brought on by imported Japanese cars. They struggled with chronic economic stagflation and felt trapped in a sense of national malaise. Some were looking for scapegoats and blamed government programs that supposedly were helping Blacks and other minorities. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The Rise of Lee Atwater
It was in this milieu that a whip-smart, guitar-playing Southern-born GOP strategist named Lee Atwater honed the racial massaging that would eventually lead to the most notorious campaign ad in American political history. However unintentionally, he helped to expand Nixon’s War on Drugs into a generational crackdown on Black America. And he created a bipartisan consensus on crime that ultimately haunted Donald Trump’s opponent
During a now-infamous 1981 interview, Lee Atwater explained the evolution of coded racism from its earliest iteration in the Southern Strategy to its penultimate expression during the 1980 campaign to elect Ronald Reagan. Said Atwater:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”
Sadly, Atwater’s language was far less shocking in 1981. But Atwater’s blunt talk (which was uncovered by James Carter IV in 2012) exposed a fundamental truth about American politics and the evolution of racism in American politicking. As a political matter, racism had to be increasingly coded over time. The further America got from the Civil Rights Act, the less acceptable it was to be overtly racist. Instead, race-based appeals were surreptitiously transmitted through coded messages. This was something Lee Atwater knew from first-hand experience.
Atwater — along with his friend Karl Rove — was a rising star in the College Republicans at the same time Nixon’s Southern Strategy was reshaping the party. The South Carolina native then cut his sharp teeth on his home state’s rough-hewn politics. He even worked for former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. But his big leap to the big time came after he helped The Gipper win a racially-tinged knife fight in the suddenly crucial South Carolina primary. In 1981, Atwater was given a spot as White House advisor as a reward for helping plot Reagan’s own Southern Strategy march to the White House.
Frankly, the Gipper was no stranger to the political power of the wedge issue or the code word. He’s long been accused of delivering smoothly-edged, racially-coded messages before, during and after his successful 1980 campaign. Atwater’s interview adds to that record, particularly since Reagan pioneered the conflation of both taxes and social welfare policy with the resentments against Black Americans. In 1976, he launched specious attacks against a fallacious cadre of so-called “Welfare Queens.” He linked “welfare reform” and “State’s Rights” during a purposeful 1980 campaign stop in Mississippi. As President, he often derided supposed “dependency” on government.
These coded messages implied that Blacks wantonly fed off the public trough through “government handouts”. It was implied that cutting off the “free” flow of funds into that trough would force “personal responsibility” onto a recalcitrant group of “lazy” Blacks living off harder-working Whites. Unsurprisingly, “personal responsibility” became a popular GOP code-phrase for three decades.
These messages are louder and clearer given Atwater’s 1981 interview.
But as conservative blogger John Hinderaker rightly points out, Atwater was not just saying coded racism works. He was also saying that blatant racism does not. Atwater — who counted African-Americans among his closest friends, who struggled to prove himself through an ill-fated stint on the Board of Trustees of Howard University and who even cut a blues record with B.B. King — may have actually believed this was “progress.” And it some strange way it probably was.
Like a discordant film negative, the Southern Strategy and the Silent Majority revealed the changing reality of American society. Crass, blatant racism was being pushed out of the public square. That was a good thing. But coded messages remained a potent political tool.
And when Atwater decided to “Strip the Bark” off of Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis during the 1988 campaign and, more importantly, to make convicted murderer Willie Horton his “running mate” … he created a whole new socially-acceptable category of racial profiling — the drug-dealing superpredator. He turned the 1988 election into a de facto referendum on the criminality of Black males. And his winning strategy set the tone for an era of mass incarceration.
Changing the Narrative
In 1988, night was falling on Morning in America. The “Black Monday” crash of 1987 on Wall Street shocked the economy out of its freewheeling frenzy. The nation’s capital was in a yearly competition with other major cities for the ignominious title “Murder Capital of America.” And the often-ridiculed “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign metastasized into a full-on hysteria about a new drug — the dreaded scourge of “crack cocaine.”
Less than two years earlier, the media mania after the drug-overdose death of college basketball star Len Bias galvanized a congressional response to the growing national freakout about cocaine and especially its cheaper derivative “crack,” which was associated more with the Black inner-cities. On Oct. 27, 1986, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 became law and its almost comically disproportionate punishment for crack possession versus powder cocaine launched a process of African-American incarceration that can only be described as systematic.
Although tons of “upscale” powder cocaine had long fueled many of Wall Street’s financial high-rollers and some of Hollywood’s creative lows, the cheap, portable rocks became an obsession for politicians and law enforcement. Over the next two years, the “crack crisis” reached a fever pitch. The War On Drugs unfolded much like a domestic Vietnam War as fear of well-armed gangs, bleak tales of crack babies and relentless “if it bleeds, it leads” coverage by local television news brought the growing violence into America’s safe suburban living rooms every night at 5, 6 & 11.
Also unfolding every night was the high-stakes drama of the Iran-Contra scandal. The wounded Reagan Administration limped through the Congressional hearings of 1987. Reagan’s approval rating dropped to a four-year low. In his final year more Americans actually disapproved than approved of the Gipper. And the stench of constitutional crisis threatened the Presidential aspirations of Vice President George H.W. Bush.
During the 1988 campaign, Vice President Bush’s comical “out of the loop” defense undermined his competence and underlined his shiftiness. On one hand, Newsweek ran a cover story about Poppy’s battle with “The Wimp Factor.” On the other, The Nation ran a story indicating Bush may have been a long-time CIA operative. And, perhaps most ominously for team Bush, Sen. John Kerry’s “Kerry Committee” had been digging into allegations of drug trafficking by Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels and found damaging evidence of a cocaine connection that first came to light in a 1985 story by Brian Barger and Robert Parry for the Associated Press.
The campaign to succeed Reagan looked like a big mess.
The lingering scandal, along with signs of a coming recession, catapulted a mild-mannered straight-shooter from Massachusetts, its Governor named Michael Dukakis, to the top of the Democratic ticket. At the time, Dukakis’s desire to restore competence to a government looked like a winning pitch. In fact, the unfolding Iran-Contra scandal and its relentless buck-passing was a primary motivation for the accountability-obsessed Dukakis. As he’s since said, his run was motivated by a desire to clean-up Washington after the Iran-Contra mess.
As such, the stern and technocratic Dukakis offered a starkly reliable antidote to the malicious maelstrom of the late-stage Reagan White House. For him it was going to be a campaign of facts, figures and forthrightness. Initially, the American people bought his brand. By the time the Democrats triumphantly left their convention in Atlanta, Dukakis opened up a 17-point lead over Vice President George H.W. Bush and Bush’s political team — led by Atwater — struggled to shift the conversation away from the scandals and away from a referendum on competence. Lee Atwater turned to the reliable voter response from the issue of crime.
Really, it was a no-brainer for the GOP’s boyish wonder. He had to change the narrative. And he had to hit voters in the gut. At the time, violent crime reached record highs and the media was already obsessed with the issue. His plan to “make Willie Horton” Dukakis’s running-mate simply took the most effective tool in America’s historical woodshed (the issue of race) and married it to a quite real issue (the rise in crime).
Horton, a convicted murderer, had raped a White woman while out of a Massachusetts prison on “furlough,” a prison-reform strategy with the goal of allowing prisoners to gradually reintegrate back into the community. Atwater used the Horton case as a crude tool to strip the bark off of Dukakis, who was also tied to liberal softness that opposed the death penalty and was portrayed as tolerating marauding urban drug criminals. The strategy quickly peeled ten points off Dukakis’ lead.
By late August, an unremitting focus on crime, felon furloughs and the death penalty (which Dukakis opposed) — along with an ill-advised ride in a tank by the bobble-headed Dukakis — flipped the race. Bush was up by four points going into September. But Atwater wasn’t done. His transformation of the issue crime was just beginning.
The Bush Campaign first featured Willie Horton in stump speeches during the summer of 1988. But those speeches lacked the one thing that made the ad so infamously toxic — William Horton’s iconic face. So, under Atwater’s guidance, the appropriately-named Americans for Bush Political Action Committee (AMBUSH) produced ads that not only framed the contest as a “law and order” election, but it reframed one of America’s oldest racist tropes.
Horton, a convicted murderer, had been released on a weekend furlough when he stabbed a man and “repeatedly” raped his girlfriend, a storyline that the narration bluntly pointed out under the image of Horton’s mugshot. It then paired Horton’s glowering expression, sullen eyes and wildly unkempt afro with the memorable phrase “weekend passes for murderers.” It was ostensibly an ad about crime, but it scored a direct hit by rebooting a dangerous canard first highlighted on film by D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation—the Black man as sexual predator.
The first Willie Horton ad had a limited run beginning on Sept. 7, 1988. It was followed up by the notorious “Revolving Door” ad a couple weeks later. That ad featured a bevy of criminals heading into and out of prison — with, as writer Ismael Reed pointed out, the lone Black man in the line slyly looking up when the narrator said the word “rape.” Again the message was clear—if you are afraid of crime you should be afraid of Black men. Taken together, those ads turned a not-uncommon furlough program into political poison.
Although the ads did not by themselves alter the outcome of the election, they swirled into a national controversy. Even if the ad never ran on your local station, you were likely to have seen, heard or read about Willie Horton. The ads effectively linked the national hysteria about crime and crack with a racially-charged portrayal that inexorably intertwined the issue of crime and with the faces of Black men. It normalized a specific, spurious portrayal of Black male criminals.
The Kill Switch
The two ads also set-up CNN anchor Bernard Shaw’s famous opening question to Dukakis in the second Presidential debate. That question: “If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer.” Dukakis quickly responded, “No I don’t Bernard, and I think you know I’ve opposed the death penalty all my life.” Dukakis went on to say he wanted to fight a “real war, not a phony war against drugs.” He proposed interdiction overseas and drug education at home. But none of that mattered. His death penalty answer was his campaign’s death sentence.
It was also the beginning of a post-Horton era in American society and criminal justice. Approval for the death penalty spiked to an all-time high in the years immediately after the 1988 campaign. The Black incarceration rate accelerated to society-shifting levels. It was followed by controversial new policing tactics that escalated arrests for trivial offenses and that imposed draconian punishments for drug crimes, like Stop and Frisk (1990), Broken Windows Theory (early 1990s), asset forfeiture (jumped 58 percent in 1990), “Three Strikes” laws (1994-6) and the “zero tolerance” focus on drug users and “street level” crime over large-scale distributors (1988).
Like the outcome of the election of 1988, it’s impossible to quantify the exact effect of the Willie Horton ad on the decade-long crackdown that followed. Like Trump’s politically incorrect campaign, it relied on perceptions and feelings. Not fact and figures. Atwater’s law-and-order campaign was in code, so it’s hard to decipher the impact. But, just like the beating of Rodney King, the Willie Horton ad did not inspire soul-searching about racism. Instead, it signaled the beginning of an era of public and political tolerance for excesses in the name of law and order. King’s beating may have been an outgrowth of the excessive policing these politics engendered. But the outrage and riot that followed the acquittal further cemented the racial divide between Atwater’s new coalition and those left behind on the drug war’s front lines.
The Scene of the Crime
Lee Atwater’s successful “law and order” campaign quickly evolved into a bipartisan consensus on crime. In effect, Atwater built a new “law and order” majority that merged the Southern Strategy with Reagan Democrats and, most importantly, the moderate, White, Baby Boomer Middle Class voters now firmly planted in America’s suburbs.
By 1992, “moderate” Democrats — like Southerner Bill Clinton — acknowledged the power of the GOP’s “tough-on-crime” approach. Then-candidate Clinton’s promise to put “100,000 cops on the street” catered specifically to the War on Drugs-based constituency that Atwater created. In a sense, racism was sanitized because it had become so inexorably subsumed into the category of crime. The consensus against crime was easily rationalized as “not racist.” But, like so many things, Clinton took it a step further.
During his run against President George H.W. Bush, Clinton made certain to demonstrate his separation from left-wing sympathy toward Black anger by publicly upbraiding a rapper named Sista Souljah. In fact, “Sista Souljah moment” became political shorthand for triangulating against your own base by attacking a vulnerable proxy. She was one of many rappers making stark, musical statements against White racism and against police brutality in Black communities.
And in a moment of blatant grandstanding, Clinton excoriated her racialism. Of course, he didn’t dare confront N.W.A. or Ice-T or any of the higher profile artists reporting from the frontlines of the Drug War. Instead, he took advantage of an easy target of opportunity to triangulate against African-Americans and traditional Liberals in his own party. It instantly burnished his crime-fighting credentials, which included stern enforcement of the death penalty. And it worked like a charm.
Clinton expunged the Democrats’ perceived “weakness” on crime. He distanced himself from the legacy of Dukakis and the much-derided moniker “liberal.” Then as President he lorded over an escalation of the War On Drugs. By 1994, Clinton signed the draconian, bipartisan 1994 Crime Bill. He shepherded through welfare reform — a.k.a. the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act — in 1996. Yup, there’s that “personal responsibility” code word Reagan loved so much. Clinton turned it into policy. And during the State of the Union that same year he made another Reaganesque turn when he announced that “the era of big government is over.”
Atwater’s triumph was complete — but he wouldn’t live to see it.
Lee Atwater was struck by an aggressive brain tumor in 1990. Some felt it was karma. Suffering mightily, he literally spent his dying days apologizing for the ad, apologizing to Dukakis and fighting in vain to clear his name from the charge that he was racist.
The Bitter Ironies
Atwater’s bare-knuckled campaign was a direct response to G.H.W. Bush’s weakness on Iran-Contra. If the campaign had been about Bush’s competence, his trustworthiness or his role in the Reagan White House, Houston would’ve had a problem. So, the focus on high crimes committed in the Reagan White House was replaced by street crimes committed in urban areas.
After all, Atwater didn’t need urban voters to build an electoral victory. Atwater simply changed what should’ve been a national referendum on a constitutional crisis and replaced it with a referendum on law and order, on crack cocaine and on the furloughed Black male predator roaming freely in the urban decay of a changing America.
Most importantly, the Iran-Contra all-stars desperately needed Poppy Bush to retain control of the Executive Branch, particularly with independent counsel Lawrence Walsh’s investigation churning in the background. Certainly, they could forget getting pardoned under the notoriously staid Dukakis.
And although Gary Webb wouldn’t start his groundbreaking investigation into the Contra-cocaine connection to the crack epidemic until 1995, the Kerry Committee already had cracked open the lid on Contra narco-trafficking. No doubt, the scandal’s biggest players knew there were more damning revelations looming behind the firewall. Losing the White House in 1988 could’ve been much more than a political rebuke. It could’ve meant prison. And that’s the bitterest irony.
Atwater helped preserve the legal firewall between the perpetrators of Iran-Contra and the seediest, most destructive elements of that scandal … by repurposing the fallout from a drug war that was partially due to the CIA-tolerated crack cocaine pipeline into South Central L.A. In essence, the CIA’s protection of Nicaraguan Contras instrumental in that pipeline helped generate part of the “law and order” political justification that ultimately kept the covert perps in power. It was an all-too vicious circle for Black Americans that got them coming and going.
The final irony is that nearly three decades later, Hillary Clinton would bank on African-American turnout to win the White House. But they didn’t quite turn out in the numbers she had hoped. Despite winning the popular vote, Clinton lost the “Battle of the Bases” in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Her racially diverse urban base was trumped by Trump’s monochromatic cadre of supporters in those states’ rural counties. Was that flaccid Clinton turnout partially because she was haunted by her own support for the crime crackdown consensus that got her husband elected and reelected?
Perhaps even more damning were her not-so-coded comments in support of the 1994 crime bill when she warned of Black “superpredators.” She even said society needs to “bring them to heel.” Whether or not that specifically cost her the White House, it certainly didn’t help. She underperformed Obama’s 2012 total with African-Americans by 5 points (Clinton: 88 percent vs. Obama: 93 percent). It also didn’t help that 1.4 million Black Americans had also lost the right to vote thanks to the grinding incarceration she’d once supported. Like far too many others who actually lost years of their lives to needless incarceration, she too was haunted by ghost of elections past. She merely lost the White House. Too many African-Americans lost far more.
The Ghost Of Willie Horton
Although there are as many interpretations of Donald Trump’s win as there are blatherati on a CNN panel, the one undeniable thru-line of his campaign was his effective use of both dog whistling and blatant bullhorning. Like the role of Willie Horton in the 1988 campaign, the exact electoral impact of Trump’s encoded messaging is hard to quantify.
As Peter Grier pointed out in the Christian Science Monitor, Trump wasn’t elected “solely by [W]hite men in pickups who fly Confederate flags.” He did get “almost 63 million votes,” and, Grier continues, “you don’t get that many without winning some women, some college-educated voters, and even some minorities.” True enough.
But also like 1988, the question is far bigger and the impact potentially far deeper than one electoral snapshot in time. Whether Trump won because of or in spite of his resurrection of racially encoded messaging, the simple fact is that his win gave racists and bigots and, for that matter, misogynists a reason to feel both validated and vindicated. Trump normalized the use of so-called “politically incorrect” language that, whether intentionally or not, expanded the old boundaries of racial coding to encompass Mexican criminals, Muslim terrorists and Chinese economic thieves … and even made sexual assault seem acceptable.
Will it also translate into a so-called deportation force that will eject millions of Latinos? And what does it mean to eject Latinos “humanely”? If you have to say you’ll do something “humanely,” it probably means it could easily become inhumane.
Will Latinos — who are already disproportionately subject to criminal penalties — become targets of crackdown on “narcoterrorism”? Like Trump on crime, his pick for Homeland Security wildly overstates the problem … and ignores the true perpetrators of the opioid crisis in the pharmaceutical industry.
Will Trump’s gung-ho pick for Attorney General — the racism-tainted Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama — leverage crime fears into a recharged War on Drugs? Will it happen in spite of voter-led efforts to dismantle it? Does the sudden rise in prison stock prices portend bounce-back for prison privatization and an incarceration rate that’s finally relenting a bit? Will #BlackLivesMatter become a political target under a hostile Department of Justice?
Will Team Trump’s notable hostility to Islam and his supporters’ comfort with the Muslim ban translate into a loyalty test? Will hate crimes continue past a post-election surge? And will it whip up into a wider war if and when one of his hotels is targeted by a lone wolf?
And will Trump’s mantra-like recitation of China as the culprit behind the deindustrialization of America (instead of the true culprits at Walmart and on Wall Street) lead to a trade war … or worse?
While those among Trump’s supporters can claim that none of these possibilities is necessarily indicative of racism, the problem is that he’s marbled these issues with race. Like it or not, people voted for whole package, not just the issue. Frankly, it’s another reminder — perhaps an all-too bitter one — that how elections are won often matters just as much, if not more, than the victory itself. It’s a cliché, but the journey does matter. And Donald J. Trump’s journey to the White House followed a well-worn path through a half-century of racially coded messages littering the campaign trails of the post-Civil Rights Era.
JP Sottile is a freelance journalist, radio co-host, documentary filmmaker and former broadcast news producer in Washington, D.C. He blogs at Newsvandal.com or you can follow him on Twitter, http://twitter/newsvandal.We track the menus at one-hundred of New York City’s most distinguished restaurants which has given us a unique perspective on ingredient sourcing. Although the farm responsible for producing a given ingredient isn’t always listed on a menu, it often is which has allowed us to track the sources of many meat products.
Below, we have outlined the suppliers within each major meat category. Be sure to keep an eye out for our vegetable edition this summer.
BEEF
Creekstone Farms beef is proudly served at fifteen of the restaurants that we track, including Marc Forgione, Marea, and Red Farm. Creekstone Farms was founded over twenty years ago in Arkansas City, KS and has become a staple at fine dining establishments in NYC over the past decade. In fact, the majority of Pat LaFrieda’s beef is sourced from Creekstone Farms. The New York Times profiled Creekstone Farms in 2010 after its sudden rise to prominence.
We counted Niman Ranch on the menus of six restaurants including Batard and Fowler & Wells. Niman Ranch was founded in 1969 and is based in Oakland, CA. The company works with a network of over 700 small farms to source its meat and recently received the humane certification from Humane Farm Animal Care. Perdue purchased the business in 2015 and the founder, Bill Niman, is no longer with the company. Ironically, Bill Niman is a vegetarian.
Beef from Wrighteous Organics in Schoharie, NY is used at The Green Table. They are also the main beef supplier to Dickson’s Farmstand, a butcher shop in NYC located at Chelsea Market.
Marcho Farms of Souderton, PA supplies veal to Per Se and was founded nearly fifty years ago. The company is also in the lamb business and claims to be the largest veal and lamb producer in the United States.
Wagyu suppliers cited on the menus include Imperial Wagyu Beef and Miyazaki Wagyu. Imperial is based in Omaha, NE and supplies Daniel and Riverpark, while Miyazaki is based in San Francisco, CA and supplies Per Se. Imperial’s meat is sourced from farmers in the United States and Miyazaki imports its product from Japan.
Other beef suppliers mentioned on the menus we track include Allen Brothers based in Chicago, IL (used at Crave Fishbar) and Snake River Farms based in Boise, ID (used at Per Se).
Kobe beef has been mentioned on four of the menus that we track, and while no suppliers were credited, the beef is often highlighted as “American Kobe Beef” on the menu.
PORK
Heritage Foods, based in Brooklyn, NY is mentioned as the supplier of pork ribs to three of the restaurants in our database including Mario Batali’s Del Posto. As the name suggests, the company focuses on heritage breeds, traditional breeds raised for generations, and they source their meat from small farms across the country.
The restaurant Print has featured Raven & Boar pork on their menu. Raven & Boar is a farm in Columbia County, NY that predominantly raises the Large Black, Glouchester Old Spot and Red Wattle breeds.
Heritage Farms based in Goldsboro, NC (not to be confused with the aforementioned Heritage Foods) supplies its signature Cheshire Pork to Black Barn. Heritage Farms also supplies its pork to restaurants in Japan.
St-Canut Farms provides the suckling pig for Daniel’s “Cochon de Lait” dish. The Canadian farm specializes solely on the production of milk-fed piglets.
Bacon providers include Neuske’s, Benton Country Hams and Roaming Acres Farm.
Neuske’s, was founded in Wittenberg, WI during the great depression and specializes in producing applewood smoked bacon along with other specialty meat products.
Also a long-tenured operation, Benton Country Hams is based in Madisonville, TN and was founded in 1947 by Albert Hicks, a dairy farmer who expanded his operation.
A supplier local to NYC, Roaming Acres Farm is based in Lafayette, NJ and raises Berkshire Hogs in addition to bison and ostriches.
FISH
Several farm-raised salmon providers have made it onto NYC menus.
Atlantic Sapphire, based in Denmark, raises its fish with a land-based recirculating aquaculture system. The company recently received a strong rating from the Monterey Bay Aquarium which runs the Seafood Watch rating system. This fish breed is used by Oceana Restaurant.
Additionally, the following companies produce their fish in netted enclosures in the sea:
Ora King in New Zealand (used at The Musket Room)
Hidden Fjord in the Faroe Islands (used at Cafe Cluny)
Loch Duart in Scotland (used at The Polo Bar at Ralph Lauren)
Skuna Bay in Canada (used at ABC Kitchen)
Atlantic Grill and Blue Water Grill both serve Joe Catalano’s “catch of the day.” Catalano runs a fish market on Long Island and was (and perhaps still is) the fish buyer for B.R. Guest Restaurants, the owner of both Atlantic Grill and Blue Water Grill. The Village Voice wrote an interesting profile on Catalano and the NYC fish buying industry.
CHICKEN
The chicken supplier that appears more than any other in our menu database is Sullivan County Farms. Their chicken appears on six of the menus, including Gabriel Kreuther, Atlantic Grill and Little Park. Sullivan County Farms is based in Smallwood, NY which lies |
Shanley has registered as a sex offender and posters will be displayed around town notifying the public that Shanley is living in the area, which is typical procedure for the police department.
"We're going to do what we need to do to make sure the citizens are protected and his rights are also protected," Crevier said.
Shanley will be at least the third sex offender living on his street, he said.
Prosecutors sought to hold Shanley beyond his criminal sentence under a law that allows civil commitment of people deemed sexually dangerous. But two psychologists hired by the state found he did not meet the legal criteria to hold him.
A lawyer who represented Shanley in his criminal appeal said he's confident Shanley will not harm anyone. But attorney Robert Shaw Jr. said he understands the reaction from those who opposed Shanley's release from prison.
"I'm sure that law enforcement will ensure that the community feels safe, and I have every expectation that they are going to fulfill their obligation and be certain that Paul Shanley also remains safe," Shaw said.
The state's sex offender registry designates Shanley as a Level 3 offender, considered the most likely to reoffend. But the two psychologists cited Shanley's advanced age and his health issues and concluded his likelihood to reoffend is low.
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who represented dozens of men who say they were abused by Shanley, said the evaluations were incomplete because the psychologists didn't interview Shanley. Instead, they reviewed police reports, prosecutors' files and Shanley's church personnel file containing numerous sexual abuse complaints against him.
"Paul Shanley should be in a hospital being treated and not in the outside world where he can easily gain access to innocent children," Garabedian said.
Both psychologists found Shanley meets the psychiatric criteria for pedophilic disorder. But they said research suggests recidivism rates for people of his age are extremely low. They also cited Shanley's health issues, which were blacked out from the reports, and the fact his last reported offense was in 1990.
Shanley was a street priest who ministered to alienated youths in the 1960s and '70s. Dozens of men came forward decades later and said Shanley had molested or raped them. He was defrocked by the Vatican in 2004 and was convicted of raping a boy at a Newton parish in 2005.
The archdiocese said this week it will not provide Shanley with financial support or benefits. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker said he will review the standards for civilly committing convicted sex offenders who have served their prison sentences.
Reporting by the Globe's Spotlight team helped break open the priest sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston in 2002. The reporting uncovered how dozens of priests in the archdiocese had molested and raped children for decades while church higher-ups covered it up and shuffled abusive priests from parish to parish.
A movie about the Globe's reporting, called "Spotlight," won the 2016 Academy Award for best picture.
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Associated Press writers Collin Binkley and Bob Salsberg contributed to this report.Show full PR text
Chevrolet Corvette Plant Gets $439 Million in Upgrades
New, environment-friendly paint shop drives efficient production, retains 150 jobs
2015-05-21
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – Torch Red, Shark Gray Metallic and Laguna Blue Tintcoat, three popular palate choices on the 2015 Corvette, kept the marketers who make up names working late. Now they can dream about more painstakingly precise pigments, thanks to a new paint shop that is among $439 million being invested at the only plant in the world that builds Chevrolet's iconic sports car.
General Motors announced the moves today that include retaining 150 jobs and building the 450,000 square-foot paint shop that is almost half the size of the entire current production facility. The investment builds on approximately $135 million GM has invested in the plant over the last four years for the new Corvette Stingray and Performance Build Center. The announcement was followed by a groundbreaking event for the new paint shop.
"The Corvette is one of Kentucky's most-cherished icons," said. Lt. Gov. Crit Luallen. "Such a significant expansion of the Bowling Green Assembly Plant will help the company remain competitive in the region and around the world."
Construction of the new paint shop, which includes substantial technology upgrades, is planned to begin this summer and take approximately two years to complete. Corvette production schedules will be unaffected by the construction.
Along with new tooling and robots, the paint shop's state-of-the-art environmental and efficiency enhancements include:
Dry Scrubber Booth Technology with Limestone Handling System designed to eliminate sludge water and waste
Light-emitting diode, or LED, lighting for process decks for improved visual inspection as well as energy savings
State-of-the-art FANUC robots with Versa-bell 3 electrostatic applicators for an extremely smooth finish and maximum transfer efficiency, saving 25 percent of the paint material used, which also benefits the environment
Longer, high-efficiency baking ovens for exceptional paint finish and lower energy use.
"With this major technology investment, we can continue to exceed the expectations of sports car buyers for years to come," said North American Manufacturing Manager Arvin Jones. "These types of investments are evidence that the customer is at the center of every decision we make."
Said UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada: "This new paint shop will mirror the efficiencies and technologies of the new body shop, installed with the launch of the Stingray. Hardworking UAW members have proudly built vehicles in Bowling Green for more than 30 years, and we are pleased to be a part of such a significant facility upgrade."
Corvette production began in 1981 in Bowling Green following assembly in Flint, Mich., and St. Louis. Each has been an exclusive home of the Corvette, contributing to its distinction as the world's longest-running, continuously produced passenger car. More than 1.6 million have been produced in 62 years.
Since the launch of the all-new 2014 Stingray, the Corvette has won more awards than any other car in the industry, including the 2014 American Car of the Year, Car & Driver's 10 Best and Automobile Magazine's Automobile of the Year.
Building on that recognition, Corvette sales reached an eight-year high in 2014 with almost 38,000 cars sold globally. The plant welcomed a record 56,000 tourists last year.
The new Performance Build Center opened last year and in March began hosting customers in the Build Your Own Engine program. More information about Bowling Green Assembly is available at corvetteassembly.com
The investments in Bowling Green are part of the $5.4 billion that GM said April 30 it would invest in U.S. facilities over the next three years.
Founded in 1911 in Detroit, Chevrolet is now one of the world's largest car brands, doing business in more than 115 countries and selling around 4.8 million cars and trucks a year. Chevrolet provides customers with fuel-efficient vehicles that feature engaging performance, design that makes the heart beat, passive and active safety features and easy-to-use technology, all at a value. More information on Chevrolet models can be found at www.chevrolet.com.Brazil’s lower house voted Thursday to grant a 90-day waiver to foreigners who normally need a visa so they can come to the country next year for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The bill is expected to be approved by the Senate and signed by President Dilma Rousseff.
The move benefits Americans, Canadians, Japanese, Chinese and others who need visas to enter Brazil.
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The bill does not require visitors to have Olympic tickets to enter.
A group of ministers will decide when the waiver period begins. The bill says the final day for arrival without a visa will be Sept. 18, 2016.
”This is for Brazil, not only for the Rio Olympics,” Congressman Alex Manente told The Associated Press. ”Our exchange rate is now favorable to tourism in our summer and we have many Olympic test events with many delegations coming in the beginning of the year.”
The value of Brazil’s currency, the real, against the dollar has plunged about 70 percent in the last year. This reduces prices in Brazil for those carrying dollars.
Manente said the waiver could prompt a 20-percent increase in the number of Americans and Canadians entering Brazil.
”Other tourists should benefit too, but these two are more likely to come in big numbers,” Manente said.
Brazil’s visa policy is based on the principle of reciprocity. Because Brazilians need visas to enter the U.S. and other countries, citizens from those nations need visas to enter Brazil.
For a large country, Brazil attracts few foreign tourists. It received 5.8 million foreign tourists in 2013, according United Nations figures. In Latin America it ranked just ahead of Argentina and the Dominican Republic.
By comparison, France receives about 83.5 million foreign tourists. The U.S. was second with 70 million in 2013.
The Rio Olympics are Aug. 5-21, 2016. The Paralympic Games are Sept. 7-18.Vaniville Town
+ Thanks again for the loaner clothes, Serena.
No problem, Cally. Looks like we’re almost ready to set off!
The lights in Serena’s room flicker for a moment.
Not again, we’ve been getting surges for months and still nobody’s been to fix it.
Yours too? I think the whole street’s been having issues.
+ Hmm. Do these houses have external junction boxes by any chance?
Are you an electrician or something?
+ Or something. Could you show me?
Oh, sure.
Serena leads me out to the side of her home. A small metal box is attached to the side of the wall, thick cables lead from the box and into the ground. The front panel is wide open and obscuring something on the other side that appears to be rummaging in the box. A few sparks fly every now and then.
What’s that?
+ Joule!
Uh-oh!
Joule peers over the top of the panel, wires are in her mouth, a couple of sparks arc from the chewed wires to her cheeks.
A Pikachu?
Oh, hey Cally. Who’re your friends?
+ Serena, Shauna, this is Joule.
You already own a Pokémon?
Hey, nobody owns me! Cally and I have an understanding.
It looks mad, did we upset it?
+ Joule doesn’t like the concept of Pokémon ownership. She and I are friends.
You can understand her?
+ Uh, yeah.
You have the gift! That’s so cool! So you can talk to any Pokémon?
+ All the ones I’ve met so far, yeah.
Shauna pulls a Pokéball from her bag and lets out what’s inside.
Ready to battle, master!
Master? What the hell…
What’s my Froakie saying?
+ He said he’s ready for battle.
Hey, why’re you calling that human “master”?
I’m a starter Pokémon! I’ve been bred to help new trainers on their journey!
Oh don’t worry, Froakie. We aren’t battling right now.
Oh thank Arceus.
I thought you were ready for battle?
Oh, uh I haven’t actually battled another Pokémon yet heheh.
Hmph, I was jolting Pidgey when I was still a Pichu!
They certainly are talkative, aren’t they?
+ So, where are we heading?
We’re going somewhere?
We’re going to Aquacorde Town to meet the boys first.
+ Boys?
More friends of ours.
Route 1
+ So are there many places to see in Kalos?
Oh tonnes!
Our destination is the capital, Lumiose City. But we’ll make a few stops along the way.
We’re off to see the Professor!
+ Professor?
Professor Sycamore is starting a new study and he wants the assistance of journeying trainers.
+ What sort of study?
I’m not sure, I guess we’ll find out when we get there.
As long as he doesn’t plan to use me as a battery like Oak did then we’ll be fine.
Aquacorde Town
We approach a nice looking café, two boys are sitting at one of the tables outside.
Hi guys! We’re ready to go!
Oh boy I can’t wait! Uh, there’s three of you.
It would appear Serena and Shauna have brought another friend.
This is Cally. Cally, this is Tierno.
Hi there!
And Trevor.
Hello.
Cally’s new to Kalos so we’re showing her around.
That’s nice. Welcome to Kalos, Cally!
Now that we’re all here, let’s set off proper!
Route 2
Oh, I got us a stock of Pokéballs in case we encounter something we’d want to catch. Here take some.
+ Oh, thanks.
Do you know how to capture Pokémon?
+ Of course I do.
Capturing Pokémon is essential if you’re trying to fill up the Pokédex like me.
Oh sure, just imprison Pokémon just to fill up an arbitrary list!
Oh hey there, Pikachu!
Hm?
Mind if I hang around with you and your trainer? I need somewhere to lay low for a while.
Oh sure. Hey Cally, this Zigzagoon wants to tag along.
+ Oh?
You can understand me? I guess that makes it easier. If any other Pokémon come looking for me, you’re my trainer, okay? In return I’ll be your guide!
It would be handy to have a local guide. No offence to your human tour guides but a Pokémon’s perspective is just better in my opinion.
+ Oh, okay I guess…
Great! The name’s Bandit!
+ Nice to meet you, Bandit. I’m Cally and this is Joule.
‘Sup.
Did you just talk that Zigzagoon into joining you? That’s so cool!
I wish my trainer tried diplomacy, I had to sit there and get pecked at by a Pidgey until she figured out the best way to throw a Pokéball.
Aww, poor little Froakie. Just as useless as his trainer! Did you even try attacking?
Come over here and say that. I’ll kick your butt, Fennekin!
+ Is that your Fennekin, Serena?
Oh, yes. Thanks for your help catching that Fletching, Fennekin return!
No wait! I’m not done taunting the frog!
Fennekin returns to her Pokéball.
Shame, I liked her.
Santalune Forest
Oh boy a whole forest to explore! You coming Trevor?
Just a sec, I’m checking my Pokédex.
If your Pokémon get hurt I stocked up on potions!
This one’s the real MVP.
How come? I find potions strewn about allover the place.
Bandit? Back so soon?
Claire! I found a trainer, she’s one of them special humans who can understand what we say.
Really? Hey there Miss Trainer, I’m Claire. Can I come with you, too?
+ Hello Claire, I’m Cally. Why would you want to come with me?
No reason in particular!
No really, what’s your angle?
I’ve lived in these woods all my life and I want to see the world! Bandit promised he’d take me away some day.
+ Fine you can come too.
Aw man! I wanted to catch that bug! Let’s battle! Go Caterpie!
Imma getcha!
+ Go Joule!
Pathetic worm, you stand before the great Joule!
Tackle!
Caterpie launches itself head first at Joule, hitting her in the stomach.
Ow! That hurt!
+ Give it a Thunderbolt!
Joule charges up and jolts the Caterpie.
That stings!
What? That was barely a Thundershock!
String Shot!
+ Shock it again, Joule!
Joule gives Caterpie another zap, causing it to keel over and leave it twitching on the floor.
You’re pretty strong for a girl!
I don’t get it, I’m stronger than this…
+ You spent those six months chewing wires and getting fat, didn’t you?
Maybe…
Cally! We found the way out!
Route 3
I can see Santalune from here!
It is a nice view, this pond looks pretty.
There’s a rustling noise coming from some nearby bushes.
Hm?
A tiny blue Pokémon ambles out and approaches Joule.
Are you my mommy?
Oh, er… oh boy…
We follow the road for a while, it takes us downhill until we reach the edge of Santalune City.
We’re almost at the city!
+ Joule, what’s keeping you?
We’ve got an issue here. This little guy won’t stop following us.
Mommy!
+ Huh?
Mommy, there’s big scary humins!
Don’t worry, this one’s a friend. Her name is Cally.
+ Hi there little guy.
Aww, look at him, such a cute little bun!
Bun?
+ We can’t just abandon him so close to a city, I guess we’ll have to let him come with us. He’ll need a name… How about Baker?
But I wanted to call him Bun-Bun…
Santalune City
Our first stop. I’m going to prepare a bit before I challenge the gym.
+ Gym?!
A Pokémon Gym. There’s eight of them in Kalos, beat them all and you can challenge the Pokémon League!
+ There’s a Pokémon League here? Why didn’t you say so sooner?
I thought you already knew.
+ I need to find a place to train!
There’s a good spot on Route 22 not far from here.
+ Thanks, I’ll be right back. Joule, good news!
What now?
+ There’s a Pokémon League here, we don’t have to travel back to Kanto!
Not now! It’s too soon!
+ We’ll need more badges first, my other ones got melted.
Fine… I guess the vacation is over…
Route 22
Looking over the road ahead I notice a nearby racetrack, it looks like it’s for Rhyhorn racing. Plenty of trainers are nearby, they look like they’re waiting for something to happen on the track.
I take my time and challenge them all one by one.
Is it me or are these trainers getting weaker?
Oh!
Uh, Bandit? Do I look fat? I feel fat.
Oh, uh. No… you look just fine, Claire.
Trespassers! You must be punished!
The Litleo bounds towards us, spitting embers.
+ Bandit, Headbutt!
Bandit smashes his head on the Litleo, knocking it over. I reach for a Pokéball and throw it at the Litleo, confining it inside. The ball wobbles for a bit before the seal clicks.
Meanwhile in Santalune City…
Quite an interesting turn of events.
Indeed, the target didn’t even show up.
I wonder who this Cally girl is? She just came from nowhere!
None of my instruments showed anything abnormal about her. I’m going to call HQ.
Trevor produces a silver ball from his bag and holds it in front of him in the palm of his hand. Moments later a small hologram of a person veiled in shadow appears above the ball.
Sir, Agent 8 reporting in. Agent 3 is also present.
Sir!
The shadow appears to speak, but no sound can be heard.
There’s no sign of rogue Agents 12 and 13, the primary target has not appeared either.
The shadow silently speaks again.
Sir, the events in Hoenn continue to play out as normal, despite Agent 12′s interference. It seems the primary target inadvertently put things back on track.
No further incursions have been detected but we’re still experiencing bleed-through in some places.
The shadow speaks once more.
Yes sir, we’ll keep you posted.
Hi guys! What’re you talking about?
Oh nothing in particular!
Just stuff.
Cally and Serena are about to challenge the gym!
Cool, let’s check it out!For the first time since even before Facebook acquired it in a whopping $19 billion acquisition two years ago, WhatsApp has changed its terms of service. This time, you’ll want to read them very closely.
Under the new user agreement, WhatsApp will share the phone numbers of people using the service with Facebook, along with analytics such as what devices and operating systems are being used. Previously, no information passed between the two, a stance more in line with WhatsApp’s original sales pitch as a privacy oasis.
“We have not, we do not, and we will not ever sell your personal information to anyone. Period. End of story,” wrote WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum in 2009. In the wake of the 2014 Facebook acquisition, Koum reiterated his stance, promising to maintain the status quo. “Here’s what will change for you, the users: nothing,” Koum wrote at the time. “WhatsApp will remain an autonomous company and will operate independently.”
Much of that remains true in letter, if not in spirit. While the phone numbers themselves will not be sold to advertisers, linking the information will help Facebook identify WhatsApp users and serve them more accurately targeted advertisements. Facebook says the move will also allow for better user accounting across its platforms, identifying overlap to give it a better sense of how many individuals it actually services.
The move prompted a stern response from privacy advocates. “These guys never stop,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “It just shows you that despite its lip service to privacy, Facebook’s goal is to grab more of its users’ data.”
Those with a WhatsApp account but not a Facebook account won’t be as affected by the change. They will see some differences, though; the terms of service update will allow WhatsApp to “explore ways for you to communicate with businesses that matter to you too,” according to a post announcing the changes. Notifications that you currently receive via SMS, like flight delays from airlines, could potentially find their way into WhatsApp.
Another aspect of the privacy rollback likely to rankle users is that not only will the phone number and analytics sharing be activated by default, WhatsApp users will only have a month in which to opt out. “For the next 30 days, we’ve even given you the option to opt out of having your WhatsApp information used for things like friend suggestions and other features on Facebook,” Koum wrote in a Facebook post meant to soothe WhatsApp users. But Chester argues that what Koum frames as generous is in fact grossly inadequate.
“They are being totally disingenuous,” Chester says. “They know very few people ever opt out, they’re not explaining how that data is really being integrated into the commercial marketing system, and 30 days is an insufficient period.”
Facebook says the reason for the limited opt-out period is that once it starts offering friend suggestions and targeted ads based on phone-number linking, it can’t later take back those suggestions. It views the 30 day window as a grace period for all accounts before the synergy kicks in. That makes sense for Facebook, but it’s hard to see how such a short time period benefits users.
There are also broader concerns behind the information-sharing. WhatsApp is prized by those in need of secrecy, both for its previously hands-off approach to data and its mega-scale implementation of end-to-end encryption. Undermining the privacy of those who value it most could have serious consequences.
“In terms of political surveillance and concerns about intrusive governmental practices, that’s a legitimate and real concern,” Chester says. “Companies like Google and Facebook are placing the lives of advocates who work in countries with totalitarian governments at risk. You want to minimize data collection, not maximize it.” Facebook received over 46,000 requests from governments for account data in the second half of last year alone. The company says it only responds to "valid requests relating to criminal cases." The analytics that WhatsApp will share also presents a concern.
"Sharing metadata with Facebook still exposes users to significant risks," says Claire Gartland, consumer protection counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Facebook will have data indicating who WhatsApp users communicate with and how frequently, and connecting WhatsApp users with their social media accounts and broader online activity, associations, political affiliations, and more."
Chester also questions whether the move violates Facebook’s 20-year consent decree, an settlement it reached with the Federal Trade Commission in 2011 after accusations that it had deceived its customers by surreptitiously changing privacy policies. Under that agreement, Facebook promised to obtain “affirmative express consent” before overriding existing privacy preferences, and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of its users’ information.
"Unfortunately, the FTC has a very poor track record of enforcing their consent orders," says Gartland. Both EPIC and CDD plan to file complaints with the FTC over Facebook's actions. The FTC did not immediately respond to an inquiry from WIRED.
Your individual messages on WhatsApp are still safe; that end-to-end encryption isn’t going anywhere. But this change introduces a more insidious kind of privacy erosion, of the very sort people flocked to WhatsApp to escape.
This story has been updated with comments from Claire Gartland of EPIC.It was 1988. Virginia Prodan had no money, spoke no English, and had two children with a baby on the way. But she was finally in the United States. She was finally free.
Prodan, now a Dallas attorney, escaped Communist Romania and was granted political asylum by the United States. She immediately fell in love with the freedom and possibility in America.
She worked hard, graduated from Southern Methodist University law school, and raised three successful children — all without any help from the government.
She takes pride in her journey and has built a career on it. Her journey now frames her commitment as a lawyer to helping immigrants come to America legally.
“I believe that the law should be respected,” Prodan said in a discussion on a recent Heritage Google+ Hangout. “You should have a chance to come to the United States and flourish.”
Many of Prodan’s clients have been waiting for years to complete the legal immigration process. They’ve paid a lot of money and made a lot of sacrifices to become Americans the right way, Prodan said.
Prodan and her clients agree the immigration system is broken. But that doesn’t mean illegal immigrants should be able to receive amnesty—a measure she feels would change the culture of the United States.
“You’re not going to get people to obey the law if you don’t hold them accountable,” she said.
Prodan said she believes amnesty rewards people who broke the law and encourages more illegal immigration.Why would people go through the legal immigration system if they know they could break the law and still eventually be granted an amnesty by the U.S. government?
“We have to fix the immigration law that we have right now, and, more than that, we have to enforce it,” Prodan said.
>>>Hear more of Prodan’s story and her fight for the right approach to immigration reform.CHENNAI: The state health department has slapped notices on more than 500 post-graduate doctors and super specialists who signed a bond promising to serve the government but reneged on it. These doctors may have to pay up to Rs 20 lakh as fine if they don’t don’t join duty, mostly in rural hospitals and PHCs.Heads of various hospitals and departments found that for more than six years now, several doctors haven’t either joined duty or have been absent without leave or approval before completing their term. “The bond was introduced so we can have non-service doctors work in government hospitals for at least two years. They are experienced and are posted to rural and difficult areas so people there can benefit. But we found several people haven’t even joined duty. We are asking them why we should not initiate revenue recovery procedure against them,” said director of medical education Dr A Edwin Joe. Noticies will be issued to at least 100 more doctors in the next few weeks, he said.The government was forced to act as it was unable to reserve 50% of PG seats for government doctors after introduction of NEET, say senior doctors. “Now, students from across the state will enter government colleges where the clinical experience is rich and the fee is subsidised. If we mandate them to serve in the government for at least two years, we will have a steady stream of experienced doctors. Else there will be an acute shortage,” said TN Government Doctors’ Association president Dr K Senthil.Until 2016, non-service candidates admitted to government-run medical colleges at a subsidized fee 10 times lower than private colleges and deemed universities were asked to execute a bond with sureties for up to Rs 10 lakh on admission to PG diploma courses and up to Rs 20 lakh (changes every year) on admission to PG degree and super-speciality courses such as neurosurgery with an undertaking to serve the government for a period of not less than two years, in the posting issued.If a candidate is unable to work in state-run hospitals for the specified period the bond has to be credited to the government along with the stipend received. These doctors are paid a salary on a par with fresh recruits of the state medical services.The notices issued are showing results, said director of medical services Dr P Bhanu. “At least eight doctors have joined duty in districts already.”CakePHP 3.4.0 Released
The CakePHP core team is happy to announce the immediate availability of CakePHP 3.4.0. This is a stable release for the 3.4 release branch. 3.4.0 provides a number of improvements to CakePHP. It also deprecates several features that will be removed in 4.0.0.
CakePHP 3.1.0 End of Life With the release of 3.4.0, CakePHP 3.1.x becomes end of life and will no longer receive security updates. 3.2 will continue to enjoy security fixes until the release of 3.5.0.
Upgrading to 3.4.0 You can use composer to upgrade to the new version of CakePHP, and receive bug fix release as they are created, run the following: php composer. phar require "cakephp/cakephp:3.4.*"
Deprecations 3.4.0 deprecates a number of methods as we transition away from combined get/set methods in favour of separate get/set methods. The migration guide has the full list of deprecated methods and their replacements. Deprecated features will continue to exist and behave as they always have until 4.0.0When you hear Bangladesh in the international media what image pops up in your mind? Just another idiosyncratic South Asian democracy? Or a country of authoritarian rule? If you never thought that Bangladesh is not a democracy that is not your fault. In a global media where sweeping generalizations are ordinary, you might not notice that something fundamentally has changed in Bangladesh. From the everyday extrajudicial killings of opposition political activists to detaining opposition editors to shutting down opposition TV stations!
28 April was the big day for Bangladesh. After three months of street protests and widespread violence from government and opposition, there were civic election in the three biggest municipalities. The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has said ‘rigging and ballot box stuffing by ruling party cadres, polling officers and law-enforcement agencies’ marked the civic polls at Dhaka and Chittagong city. The opposition candidates thereby boycotted the city elections.
But this is not new to Bangladesh, even considering its recent history. You don’t need to be a political scientist to understand that there are some inviolable characteristics absolutely essential in order for a country to operate as a democracy. According to basic outlines of politics 101 or even a dictionary – democracy necessitates a representative government elected through a free and fair election. Bangladesh is not a democracy. It has been such, since 5 January 2014, after a one-sided election which was boycotted by pretty much everyone except the governing party itself. Even that election was marred by widespread stuffing of ballots, which will remind international observers of the elections under Hosni Mubarak or Bashar Assad. The opposition didn’t participate in that election because it didn’t want to give it a stamp of credibility?
Ensuring a free and fair election necessitates the rule-of-law, equality before the law, civil space and liberty, a free press, and the preservation of fundamental human rights. It is really difficult to expect rule-of-law from law enforcing agencies which are reported to have killed more than 143 people through systematic extrajudicial killing in just first three months of this year. Human Rights Watch in its global report 2015 said, the Bangladesh government failed to prosecute security forces for serious abuses including killings, disappearances, and arbitrary arrests. Now, a procedure is under consideration which will give immunity to security forces for killing political activists. Amnesty International has urged Bangladesh government to reject this outright. Many opposition activists, before getting the chance to defend themselves in a court of law, are being killed in ‘gunfights’, ‘truck accidents’ or ‘crossfires’. So, there is no rule-of-law for them; however for few others the law is beyond equal. In other words there is a selective rule-of-law system.
The state of press freedom is also going through the most repressive time, only second to the tenure of the first Awami League government of 1972-75. Under the current regime, three opposition TV channels were shutdown and two opposition newspapers were closed. An investigative report by Al-Jazeera has revealed that journalists and media houses are operating under fear, constant watch and censorship by the Government.
In May 2013, following a massacre on protesters in Dhaka’s Motijheel business district, police took control of the studios of Diganta TV and Islamic TV, forcing the channels to shutdown for airing the live footage of the mayhem. A broadcast policy has been devised that prohibits content that may tarnish the image of the regime; making it mandatory to broadcast programs the regime deems to have national importance (like speeches of government leaders).
Does Bangladesh still sound like an authoritarian country? One top opposition editor is behind the bars indefinitely on allegations of contempt and inciting religious sentiment. Another opposition TV chief was sent to jail for broadcasting a speech of the opposition leader Khaleda Zia’s son. Shutting down popular talk-shows is also a regular phenomenon.
In the political space, the main opposition party Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP’s) chief was barred by sand-trucks from moving out of her office during major programs for a lengthy period of time. It was in effect an “Aung San Suu Kyi style” house arrest, except without calling it an arrest. The offices of the opposition party are beefed up with huge police presence. The spokesperson of BNP is ‘missing’. Opposition parties and rights organization have alleged that the white clothed security forces have abducted him. Another opposition alliance Jamaat-e-Islami’s party office is closed since 2011. Thousands of opposition activists including women are in jail, and facing all forms of repression.
Given the above brief, let us revisit the original question: why call Bangladesh a democracy anymore? In global politics there are some redlines. Until and unless those redlines are crossed the dominant media narrative is not changed. What would be that redline in case of Bangladesh? An eminent arrest of the opposition chief or a massacre involving a larger quantity of opposition protesters? Apparently the sexiest way to make headlines is to let the world know that Bangladesh, by any definition – classic or contemporary, is no more a democracy.Image copyright AP Image caption The BJP has swept to power in three key states
India's main opposition BJP is set to form governments in three crucial states after winning absolute majorities in assembly elections.
The governing Congress was humiliated in Rajasthan and Delhi, while the BJP held Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.
But the BJP stopped short of a majority in Delhi after a surprise strong showing by the new Aam Aadmi Party.
The polls are seen as a key test for the ruling Congress and the opposition BJP, ahead of 2014's general elections.
The only state where the Congress has won is Mizoram in the north-east - the party has won 28 of the 40 seats and is leading in one more. The vote-counting is still going on there.
In Rajasthan, the BJP won 162 assembly seats, leaving the Congress, which had been in power in the state, with just 21 seats.
The BJP also retained power in the central states of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.
It won 165 seats against the 58 for Congress in Madhya Pradesh.
But the contest was much closer in Chhattisgarh where the BJP won 49 seats - just three more than the majority needed to form a government - and the Congress finished its tally at 39.
The Congress party also lost control of Delhi's 70-seat assembly.
With 31 seats, the BJP fell just four short of a majority to form a government in the capital after a surprise strong showing by a new anti-corruption Aam Admi Party (AAP) or Common Man's Party.
The AAP, led by former civil servant Arvind Kejriwal and born out of a strong anti-corruption movement that swept India two years ago, won 28 seats in the Delhi assembly elections.
Mr Kejriwal said his party will "play the role of constructive opposition and will not seek or give support from any party to form a government".
The BJP sprung a surprise on Sunday evening, saying that although it had emerged as the single largest party, it did not have the mandate to form the government.
"We respect the people's mandate and we will not indulge in breaking or supporting other parties or candidates to form the government," the BJP's chief ministerial candidate Harsh Vardhan said.
With a hung assembly appearing imminent, Delhi may be forced to hold re-elections, analysts say.
The Congress party that has ruled India for most of its existence as an independent nation has been humiliated in these polls, in what is being seen as a wave of rebellion against its handling of the economy - and corruption, reports the BBC's Andrew North in Delhi.The impact of exclusionary zoning.
Contributor, The Volokh Conspiracy
Many on the political left have begun to rethink restrictive zoning and point out the ways in which it makes housing more expensive for the poor and lower middle class, and deprives them of job opportunities. Historically, zoning has deep roots in progressive thought, and today it is most aggressively used in more liberal cities. But liberals are increasingly recognizing that this progressive institution has gone way too far.
In a recent New York Times op ed, economist Enrico Moretti points out the awful consequences in the Bay Area of California, where local governments have some of the nation’s harshest zoning regulations:
The area has some of the most progressive voters and policymakers in the nation, yet it has also adopted some of the most regressive housing policies, with large costs for low-income renters and the environment…. [T]ens of thousands of workers want to move here every year. The problem is that the supply of houses in the region’s core remains wildly inadequate. Over the past two years |
opened the tournament with a 5-0 victory over Guyana and looked even more sharp in handling Trinidad and Tobago, 6-0, in a game where Christine Sinclair moved past Mia Hamm into second place on the all-time women's goal list with her 159th international marker. Only Abby Wambach of the United States (184) has scored more goals.
Those victories guaranteed a spot for Canada in one of Friday's semifinals, the matches that determine which two teams will qualify for Rio.
"The team is bright, we're having fun, we haven't got the same sort of pressure that we had in Vancouver [2012 Olympic qualifying] or at the World Cup," Herdman said. "It just feels a lot lighter and the team's got this feeling of we're in a bit of a bubble at the minute, we only need to focus on the game."
Canada, of course, qualified for the 2012 Olympics and came home with a bronze medal, Canada's first Summer Olympics team sport medal since a 1936 men's basketball silver in Berlin.
Veteran player Sophie Schmidt talked about the team's mindset heading into Tuesday's match.
"It's just building off the performances we've had and polishing up a few little things to make sure we put in the best performance come that semifinal," Schmidt said. "Because that's the big game that will have us qualify, or not qualify, for the Olympics."
Win vs. Guatemala comes with a perk
Herdman is well aware that the Group A semifinalists have an extra day of rest to prepare for Friday's penultimate games.
"We looked at the accumulated minutes [of players] and what people can actually recover with," Herdman said. "The goal has always been to make sure that players were fresh for game four [the semifinal], players that we felt we going to have a big impact on that game."
Canada's balanced scoring and offensive output of 11 goals in two games has them fully confident heading into the Guatemala match. Eight different goal scorers, led by Ashley Lawrence with three goals and Deanne Rose with two, have found the net so far in the tournament.
Taking care of business will assure that Canada doesn't overlook Guatemala en route to the semifinal but saves their biggest bullets for Friday's showdown.BY: Follow @FBillMcMorris
Supporters of California’s $15 minimum wage are now working to increase the income threshold for government services, despite their previous insistence that higher wages would save taxpayers money.
Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D., Sacramento) told the state’s budget committee that the state should expand eligibility for government assistance programs so that minimum wage workers would not lose benefits when their wages increased to more than twice the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. He proposed increasing eligibility for the state’s subsidized preschool program to encompass newly-minted $15 hourly earners.
"The other piece which I think is really critical is expanding eligibility," McCarty said. "Some people with the minimum wage increase, they're not rich by any means, but they [now] make a little too much to become eligible for our state preschool program, so we adjust the eligibility for the first time in many years."
The Service Employees International Union, a political powerhouse, spearheaded the attempt to get the $15 minimum wage on the ballot for the November election. The group and its supporters managed to clear more than 400,000 petition signatures on the ballot initiative before Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown negotiated a more gradual wage increase, which would raise the minimum to $15 an hour by 2022 with exemptions in the event of an economic downturn. McCarty publicly backed the initiative and was listed as an endorser on the websites of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West and the Raise the Wage Sacramento. He received a $4,200 campaign contribution from SEIU after the state legislature passed the wage increase.
Supporters of the bill argued that the massive minimum wage increase would help alleviate the state’s multibillion-dollar budget deficit and reduce the number of people seeking government services. According to Raise the Wage Sacramento, a $15 minimum wage would boost income for families with two workers to over $60,000 for full-time work—about $7,000 higher than the national median income for families in 2015.
"Many of these [minimum wage] workers make so little they are forced to depend on Medi-Cal, food stamps, food banks, and other taxpayer-funded safety net programs just to meet basic necessities. This continuous cycle requires taxpayers to subsidize profitable corporations paying low wages," Raise the Wage Sacramento says on its website.
Critics of the minimum wage accused the movement of "doublespeak." Michael Saltsman, research director for the pro-free market Employment Policies Institute, said that the move to increase income thresholds for state services reflects the hollowness of those talking points.
"The argument that a higher minimum wage would save taxpayers money was always factually suspect. Now, we know that even proponents weren't taking it seriously," Salesman said. "It would be laughable if the consequences of $15—for California and elsewhere—weren't so severe."Jamie Vardy is facing the axe for England's Euro 2016 opener against Russia.
Roy Hodgson has not yet told his players the team he intends to pick for the Group B clash in Marseille on Saturday night.
But in their top-secret training sessions here in Chantilly this week, Sportsmail understands England have been practising in a formation that suggests Footballer of the Year Vardy and James Milner are the casualties of their stuttering display against Portugal eight days ago.
Jamie Vardy is set to miss out on a starting place in England's squad to face Russia in their Euro 2016 opener
It will cap an already difficult week for a Leicester striker still agonising over a mega-money offer from Arsenal
PROBABLE TEAM TO FACE RUSSIA Hart; Walker, Smalling, Cahill, Rose; Dier, Lallana or Wilshere, Alli, Sterling, Rooney, Kane.
England's players have certainly been led to believe both are axed, with Raheem Sterling the favourite to replace Vardy, and Jack Wilshere or Adam Lallana coming in for Milner.
The latter decision depends entirely on whether Hodgson and his coaching staff think Wilshere is sharp enough to start a game.
Hodgson would certainly like a player of Wilshere's passing ability on the pitch — if he can trust his fitness levels.
If Vardy does discover he is indeed on the bench on Saturday, it will cap an already difficult week for the Leicester striker, who is still agonising over a massive money offer from Arsenal.
It is unclear if that distraction is influencing Hodgson's decision but the manager has already given Vardy time off to get married in the build-up to the tournament.
The timing of Arsenal's approach for him certainly did not help. That said, Vardy was among England's poorer players against Portugal at Wembley.
Roy Hodgson has not yet told his players the team he intends to pick for the Group B clash on Saturday night
Raheem Sterling, who endured a disappointing season with Manchester City, is the favourite to replace Vardy
ENGLAND'S EURO 2016 FIXTURES Saturday, June 11: England v Russia (20:00, Stade Velodrome, Marseille) Thursday, June 16: England v Wales (14:00, Stade Bollaert-Delelis, Lens) Monday, June 20: Slovakia v England (20:00, Stade Geoffroy Guichard, St Etienne)
He was deployed out wide on the left and had only nine touches — one of which was at the kick-off — before being taken off in the second half.
Over the last two days the same back four has been training as a unit in front of Joe Hart, which suggests it will be Kyle Walker, Chris Smalling, Gary Cahill and Danny Rose in defence.
Ryan Bertrand, who might have threatened Rose for the left back position, only returned to training on Thursday after more than a week on the sidelines following a knock.
Eric Dier and Dele Alli have been operating in midfield, although it remains to be seen if Alli is deployed in a more advanced role behind the forwards.
It appears Vardy and James Milner (centre) are the casualties of their stuttering display against Portugal
Either Jack Wilshere (second left) or Adam Lallana (left) will play instead of Milner in England's opening match
That leaves skipper Wayne Rooney and Harry Kane completing the probable line-up.
England will have one more session behind their nine-foot privacy screens here in Chantilly on Friday morning before flying to Marseille later in the afternoon.
But the players certainly think Hodgson has recognised the difficulties England endured when they ambitiously attempted to play with Rooney, Kane and Vardy in the same attack in the third of their warm-up games last week.
It is understood Wilshere fears he has not played enough during the three warm-up games — having only managed 141 minutes of football for Arsenal this season — to force his way in ahead of Lallana.Ripple is the crypto currency that has achieved a lot of milestones this year. The currency has reached another milestone today when its value crossed 1 dollar mark. The currency was trading at about 1.10 dollar at about 14:34 today. The investors are seeing a lot of spikes in the value of this currency over the past couple of weeks. Since the news of escrowing 55 million funds, the value of the crypto currency is skyrocketing. Coinmarket data shows that the market cap of this digital currency has reached 42 billion today. Here, it is pertinent to mention that the crypto currency was trading at 0.006 cents at the start of 2017.
The positive move in the value of Ripple started in the last week when the news spread that five major banks are also testing Ripple’s blockchain technology. There are already many banks and financial institutions across the globe that are using Ripple as payment platform. All this is due to ultra fast speed of transactions in this platform. The surge has further increased with the increase in the prices of alt coins. Bitcoin and all other crypto currencies are gaining values with every passing day.
There are also reports that Ripple may join Coinbase in 2018. This means that the value of this currency will reach a few dollars in the following year. The adoption of Ripple’s latest blockchain technology by Standard Chartered and Axis Bank has further fueled the prices of the digital currency. This adoption has also played a role in joining the corporate sectors of Singapore with India.
American Express has also introduced this blockchain technology for the convenience of its US customers. This has made it easy for the business owners in USA and UD to complete their transactions with seconds. Santander is the bank that is dealing with payments between USA and UK businesses and their owners. The analysts are also of the view that this positive move is due to the adoption of Ripple by leading banks in United States, Japan, and South Korea.
Earlier on 13Th December the price of the crypto currency showed an increase of about 71%. That move was due to the announcement that more than 61 Japanese banks and top notch South Korean financial institutions are planning to use Ripple’s blockchain technology for faster processing of cross border transactions. On December 15th, there were also reports that the South Korean and Japanese banks have entered the testing stage.
There are also reports that about 70 more banks across these countries are going to enter Ripple’s network. The main objective is the hassle free international transactions. Here, it is pertinent to mention that Japanese and Korean markets have always welcomed the crypto currencies and showed an optimistic behavior for these. Millions of dollars transactions are taking place between the banks of the two countries every day.
The management of Ripple is paying a special heed to crypto currency market and exchanges in South Korea. This is because it is the second largest currency being traded in the country. The trading volume of this currency has crossed almost $700 millions.
Now, the global community is also turning towards investment and adoption of this currency because most of the crypto experts are of the view that 2018 will prove a fruitful year for the currency.Get the biggest Liverpool FC 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
Mamadou Sakho is set to make his first Premier League start for more than three months against Arsenal tomorrow.
The French centre-back is likely to replace Dejan Lovren, who suffered a groin injury against Bournemouth in midweek.
Sakho has missed most of the season with a thigh injury but is now fully fit.
The £18million defender hasn’t started in the Premier League since prior to September’s Merseyside derby, when he stormed off after discovering he hadn’t even made the bench. He subsequently apologised for walking out.
Brendan Rodgers is expected to retain the 3-4-2-1 formation he played against Manchester United and Bournemouth.
Joe Allen (knee) is likely to miss out, while Daniel Sturridge and Glen Johnson remain sidelined. Long-term absentees Suso and Jon Flanagan have returned to light training.Travelling light Posted on September 28, 2013 Last updated on October 20, 2013
He who would travel happily must travel light. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Have you ever gone on a trip and regretted not taking enough with you? Probably not; it is the natural instinct of many to pack for contingencies – take that extra pair of socks, some fancy shoes, and a couple too many t-shirts. I have just recently come back from a month long holiday that spanned Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and India, and the only luggage I carried with me was a 25L backpack (while an average travelling backpacker’s backpack is around 70L). I am trying to reduce my possessions and generally move towards a minimalist lifestyle; this trip was an experiment to see whether travelling light, using a backpack the size you would have gone to school with, is feasible. In the rest of the post, I will cover the advantages of travelling light and my packing list with an analysis of what worked well, and what I would have packed differently.
1 Advantages of packing light
Quick to pack. Very useful if you are moving around hotels every other day.
No need to check in the bag - no waiting time at the airport, and no possibility of lost luggage
Easy to walk around all day with the backpack if you have nowhere safe to store it. My backpack was just around 7kg.
You don’t look like a stereotypical backpacker with a humongous solid-frame backpack on your back.
Easier to travel around. A packed shared mini-bus might not have space for a 70L bag, but your small backpack will easily fit either under the seat, or on your lap.
2 Packing list
Here, I will itemize what exactly I packed for my month long trip. The trip was to warm climates – South-East Asia and India, although in India I have visited the Himalayan region where night-time temperatures were no more than five degrees centigrade. A key point to travelling light is dressing up in layers, of which you can add more when it gets too cold, or take some off when it is getting warm. This disqualifies things such as a jacket with an attached internal fleece - a better alternative is a separate sweater and a windbreaker waterproof jacket.
If you want to comfortably travel light, you cannot skimp on your gear. A cheap cotton t-shirt simply will not do; as technical gear for extended travel cotton, is a terrible material – it’s heavy, dries slowly, makes you cold when it’s wet, doesn’t easily evaporate sweat and smells bad rather quickly. Neither do you want any of the hyped up quick-dry no-smell synthetic materials. I have tried many, but they are all not very nice to the touch, and end up smelling bad fast as well. You might have heard of Ex-officio underwear, but that still isn’t a good choice; I have two pairs, and while they are alright, there is simply no comparison to the alternative material for what your baselayers must be made out of: merino wool. Merino wool comes from sheep and hence is completely natural (some clothes can have additions of elastene; this is fine, it’s just to strengthen the fabric). You might be imagining wool as a sweater your grandma would give you: large knit, itchy, heavy, and too warm. Get this image out of your head, and simply try out a merino wool t-shirt. It is lighter than cotton, dries a couple of times faster, does not smell at all even after multiple wears and doesn’t feel wet until it absorbs more than three times its weight in water. Merino wool is also the perfect material for underwear, a sweater, and socks. The only downside to merino wool is the price. A simple merino wool t-shirt will cost around $65.
An overview of my initial packing list and what I took on the trip:
Backpack
1x Tom Bihn Synapse 25L
Clothing
3x merino wool t-shirt (Icebreaker)
3x merino wool underwear (Icebreaker)
2x merino wool socks (Smartwool)
1x merino wool sweater (Smartool)
1x merino wool running shorts (Icebreaker)
1x 50% linen / 50% cotton jeans
1x convertible pants (Columbia)
1x swimming shorts
1x baseball cap
1x rain jacket
Shoes
1x Xeroshoes Huarache Sandals
1x Clorts sandal shoes
Accessories
750ml water bottle with filter
Merino wool buff
Paper wallet
PakTowel portable towel
Visa Photos
Silk bed liner/sleeping bag
Tom Bihn packing cube
Tom Bihn organizing bag
Tom Bihn accessory bag
Power adapter
USB Charger with cables for iPhone and Kindle
Oakley Juliet sunglasses
Electronics
Camera (Sony RX100M2)
Shure in-ear headphones
Kindle (non-paperwhite, 3rd gen)
iPhone 4
Blackberry (for international sim cards)
Medicine and Toileteries
Malarone - Malaria Tablets (4 weeks supply)
Nifuroxazide (antibiotic)
Ibuprom (10 tablets)
Loperamide (anti-diarrhea, 10 tablets)
Decongestant (phenylephrine based, 10 tablets)
2x 50ml 20% picaridin mosquito repellent spray
Toothpaste (100ml, airplane friendly)
Hand sanitizer gel
Natural alum deodorant (stick)
30 SPF sun block (spray, 50ml)
Diphenhydramine (anti-emetic, car-sickness drug)
The core clothing that I packed consisted of three sets of merino wool t-shirts and underwear. Halfway through the trip, I had one of my sets stolen at a hotel, and ended up with only two sets. That was a sad and expensive loss (more than $120 of gear), but in practice I was only using two sets anyway, the third was backup. Two sets of merino baselayer (t-shirt + underwear) is just enough; if you want to be even more minimalist, you can opt for only one set, but you will have to do laundry much more often, and the extra effort of carrying another set is very small.
2.1 Backpack - Tom Bihn Synapse 25L
A very important part of the gear. This is the thing that you will be carrying on your back for a prolonged time, so you want this to be very comfortable, have enough space, and have a good internal design with enough compartments and pockets. The backpack I chose is the Tom Bihn Synapse 25L backpack. This is a new version of the Tom Bihn 19L Synapse which came highly recommend by many people online, notably Tynan, who is a fervent minimalist, and is the person who inspired me to try merino wool and move towards a more minimalist Buy-it-for-life (BIFL) lifestyle.
19L was just a bit too tiny for me for my first minimalist holidays, so I opted for the recently released slightly larger 25L version, which proved to be just right for this holiday.
The backpack itself could probably warrant a full review, but the gist is that I find it a very good backpack, with some minor concerns:
The backpack is supposed to be water-resistant. The seams are semi-sealed, which prevents rain from going inside, although because on the top pockets, the zipper goes bottom to top, and doesn’t fully close, leaving a small gap through which minimal amounts of water can get in. An improvement would be to end the zipper athe top with a “hood” that would go over the zipper slider and closing down that small hole. I tested the water-resistance during a 4 hour walking trek in medium rain. Overall, it did surprisingly well. The main compartment only got slightly moist, but the culprit was the bottom compartment, which does not have the special lining that is everywhere else throughout the backpack. This caused the fabric (which at this location in the backpack has a large surface area) there to become wet, and carry the water to the internals of the pocket, where I had socks. The socks were quite most at the end of the trek, but not fully wet, and dried quickly. Still, a very good rain performance. Although, I think I would prefer if Tom Bihn would incorporate a plastic rain cover that I could take out from the top of the backpack, cover the backpack up when it’s raining, and then fold it back down to a pocket when it’s no longer raining. This was the design on my other backpack (Samsonite) and it worked well. On another note, I’ve used that Samsonite backpack for school five days a week for seven years, and it’s still not showing many signs of wear – Samsonite makes really good bags, but my backpack wasn’t suited for this trip since it had a laptop slot and wasn’t meant for travelling.
By itself, the backpack doesn’t have much organization, and for optimal performance, you will need to buy some additional organizing cubes. You can get them from Tom Bihn, but they aren’t that cheap, or you can find your own, but you will need them.
2.2 Clothing
2.2.1 Baselayer t-shirt: 2x Icebreaker Anatomica V
Initially, I had three t-shirts, the other one also an Icebreaker of a different model, but I honestly prefer much more the Anatomica series. It has a much better body fit, and feels lighter. I had one Ivory, and one Monsoon color t-shirt. There is simply no comparison between merino wool and cotton. I don’t want you to consider me dirty for not washing my t-shirts every day, but this t-shirt simply does not smell and does not require much washing at all, even after an exhausting day in 30 degrees centigrade sweaty temperature. You can wash this t-shirt around every 5 days. It’s recommended to wash it in the washing machine (do not machine dry it though!), but on a trip, I preferred to handwash it in the sink with a bit of soap. Do this when you go to bed, and the t-shirt will be dry the next morning. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to convince some of the friends of the quality and benefits of merino wool t-shirts, but haven’t gotten a convert yet. Hopefully this blog post will change it. Buy one, and try it.
2.2.2 Baselayer underwear: 2x Icebreaker Anatomica
Again, it is made out of merino wool and it is far superior to any cotton underwear, and also better than the lauded Exofficio underwear, which in my trials had a noticeable smell after just one day of use. Again, do not think that it is dirty to wear the same underwear a couple of days in a row, because it is possible with merino wool. Before discovering merino, I would never wear a t-shirt or underwear twice without washing it, but this underwear you can, just like with the t-shirt, wear for a couple of days in a row with no noticeable odour. You have to wear it to believe it.
2.2.3 Socks
Pretty much any woolen sock will work well. I wanted one thinner one, and one thicker one, in the case if it was cold enough to warrant me putting one on top of the other (layering principle). Here is what I went for:
Icebreaker City Ultralite Crew Trojan
Smartwool heavy socks, for which I can’t find a link.
I have been using this sweater almost daily for more than a year, and it’s everything I could wish for. If it gets a little bit more chilly, simply put this on, and the merino wool will work its magic keeping you much warmer than the equivalent weight cotton hoodie/sweater. I’m comfortable wearing just an Icebreaker t-shirt and this sweater for temperatures down to around 10 degrees centigrade.
2.2.5 Woolen shorts: Icebreaker GT Sonic
I took these as a precaution for use when when my convertible pants are drying. The shorts are very good quality, but I didn’t end up using them too much. They are meant for running, and are a little bit short to wear as normal travelling pants. For another trip, I don’t think I will pack them.
2.2.6 Linen/Cotton Jeans
I brought a pair of lightweight linen/cotton Boss jeans. They are very lightweight, and folded down extremely well. They were useful when it got a little bit cooler, or when the occasion necessitated longer pants. They were a blend of linen and cotton – not wool, but I feel they did their job fairly well.
I took this on my trip without much research, and I had it laying around so I thought I’ll try it out. The material is not wool, but this is one part of the travelling wardrobe that I think does not have to be wool. The benefit of these pants is that they are convertible, so you can easily transform them to long pants which is especially useful if you need to go visit a temple or some other religious monument that requires long trousers. This is not a top-of-the line product, but I was still happy exclusively wearing it everyday for over a month, having to wash it only once (after having fallen into mud).
2.2.8 Swimming shorts
This one is nothing in particular. I knew I would be visiting beaches and swimming, and I just took a pair of Nike swimming shorts which are very lightweight. Conveniently, in a warm climate, you can use swimming shorts just as regular shorts, which I did a couple of times. The issue for me is pockets – I like my pants to have zippable pockets to keep my passport, wallet, and camera handy, and swimming trunks are not good at this.
2.2.9 Baseball cap
I was cajoled last minute into taking this for sun protection. Never used it; waste of space, and I will not be taking hats again.
2.2.10 Rain Jacket Men’s Blue Ridge Paclite Jacket
I hesitated for a long time whether to buy a rain jacket for this trip or not. I read some discussions online, and people were mostly advising to not take a rain jacket, and just buy a cheap $1 poncho from the multitude of sellers that pop-up everywhere in SE-Asia as soon as rain starts falling. The argument is that with the temperature and humidity you will sweat as much as in the rain. I found that to be false, and I have to say that I’m extremely happy I took my own high quality rain jacket. Whether it was rain in Vietnam, or wind and low temperatures in Kashmir in India, the jacket has served me extremely well. I was able to put in my iPhone and camera into the side pocket, and comfortably walk for four hours in medium rain.
Again, the principle of layering is important here. When in a hot climate, I would put this right on top of a t-shirt to not get wet, and the merino wool baselayer and GoreTex jacket are working hard on wicking sweat away and evaporating it. You would be much worse off in the pure plastic ponchos that you can buy for $1, since they trap all the moisture inside unlike GoreTex. Secondly, even though the jacket is rain gear and won’t give you much warmth at all, it’s still better than nothing when there is some wind as it will work as a windbreaker. At 320g, it folded down very nicely and fit inside my backpack.
2.3 Shoes
2.3.1 Xeroshoes Huarache Sandals
This is probably as minimalist as footwear can go, but I unfortunately did not use these a lot; they feel overly minimalist to me, and lack the foot support that I enjoy from larger shoes like sandals. They are also very hard to get “right”. I wore them for a couple of days, and always felt there is something a little bit wrong – either my whole foot was shifted a bit too much to the front, or the tension of the string just didn’t feel right. Maybe wearing them more will convince me. Though they do take up an incredibly small amount of space for shoes.
2.3.2 Clorts sandal shoes
I bought these one day before my trip, and did not do any sandal research online before buying them. I also cannot find them online, as the manufacturer’s website seems to be saying they don’t have any sandals. These were just your standard Teva-style sandals, providing optimal support – much more than the Xeroshoes huaraches. The key point which I debated for a long time is whether to bring closed footwear as well. In the end, I decided not to bring it, which was a good choice. I was mostly in warm climates, and sandals every day where no problem. When it did get at times more chilly, ie there was some light snowfall, I put on a pair of heavy wool socks. Now, of course sandals with socks are not very fashionable, but not taking a second pair of shoes saves a large amount of space in the backpack, and allows me to travel much more light. In the end, if you really do need more footwear, you’ll be able to find a shop and buy one.
2.4 Accessories
2.4.1 750ml Filter Water Bottle: Travel Tap
I thought I would need a water bottle with a filter. Turns out there was always someone to sell bottled water, and I didn’t end up using it all.
Just an accessory made out of merino wool. It’s extremely lightweight, but can be used for many things: as an eyemask to sleep, as a scarf, as a sun protector for the neck and many others. Quite recommended.
2.4.3 Paper Wallet: Mighty Wallet
If my trip was to be as minimalist as possible, I couldn’t take a bulky leather wallet. I took this paper wallet, which worked very well; even after getting wet in rain, it dried quickly and didn’t lose any form.
2.4.4 Portable Towel: PackTowl
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have – “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
A portable quick-dry towel is an essential item. A couple of times on my trip I were in places where was a shower but no towel, or there was some kind of shared towel used by many – clearly, you want your own. A very versatile piece of equipment. Indeed, the towel does dry quickly, and packs down to a very small pack. I got the L, which is small for a towel, but it minimises space.
2.4.5 Visa Photos
Remember to take those on your trip if you’ll be jumping across many countries!
For warm climates and on minimalist travel, you simply cannot take a sleeping bag, it won’t fit. Sometimes though, you are in a place where the bed and the sheets don’t look very clean, and you wouldn’t want to sleep in it to catch some skin disease. This kind of silk liner came extremely useful during my trip. It’s very light, packs down neatly, and unfolds to give you around an extra 3-5 degrees centigrade of warm.
I had one Medium sized packing cube, and kept all my clothes in it, excluding socks and the rain jacket. Good organizational packing cube.
If you are using the Synapse backpack, you will need something along these lines to organize your smaller things, like medicines, headphones, SD cards, cables, camera, etc. The size was just right for my trip. I would also recommend buying a long key-strap to connect this to the main backpack. This ensures that you cannot forget it – I kept my most important things in here, so it was essential I don’t lose this.
I used this as my toiletry bag – it’s lightweight, made out of liquid-proof material, and also has a strap so that I can attach it to the main backpack so that I don’t lose it. I kept this in the front pocket of my backpack for easy access at airports to take out all the liquids.
Very small power adapter that does its job very well!
2.4.11 USB Charger with iPhone and miniUSB cables
I had the following electronics with me: Blackberry, iPhone, Kindle, and camera. There was no way I could bring all the chargers for them. Thankfully, the Blackberry and Kindle both use miniUSB, and my camera allows charging over the camera without an external charger. This means I only had to take a USB charger, an iPhone cable, and a miniUSB cable.
Walking around all day in extremely bright sun without sunglasses is damaging to your eyes, so polarized sunglasses with UV protection are in order. I had these sunglasses for some time, and didn’t really do much research. I like them, but I think there might be better choices. For starters, the Oakley carrying case is very large, but necessary or otherwise the expensive Oakleys won’t live for long. I’m thinking of trying the folding wayfarers since they pack down to a small volume and wouldn’t require a separate carrying pouch.
2.5 Electronics
I originally brought on the trip a smaller point-and-shoot camera, a Sony WSC1000, but that wasn’t quite meeting my standards. While in Thailand, taking advantage of the tax redemption, I got the Sony RX100M2, which is a camera with a 1 inch sensor and many manual features, all at a size a fraction of a DSL and just slightly larger than a point and shoot. Whether you want to bring a camera is up to you – some people don’t like taking pictures, or their iPhone camera is enough for them. Though, at this small size, the Sony RX100M2 is able to give me fantastic pictures such as this one.
I believe these earphones are discontinued now, but you can get another pair of Shure earphones and they will be good quality. I like listening to music and cannot stand crappy earphones, so good earphones were a requirement for me for this trip. Try come in a very nice carry pouch that I attached via a key-strap to an easy-to-access pocket in my backpack so I easily get them out wherever I was.
2.5.3 Kindle 4th Generation
I knew that after sightseeing, and during periods of waiting, there wouldn’t be much to do except read, so a Kindle was good to bring along. I vacillated between the Kindle 4th Gen and the Paperwhite, but went for the 4th Gen because it was much lighter and thinner than the Paperwhite. In retrospect, the Paperwhite would have been a better choice – I cover this at the end of this article.
2.5.4 Blackberry
I’m not even entirely sure what model I had – I took it as a secondary phone to put in international SIM cards while travelling.
2.6 Medicines and Toiletries
I took the following:
Malarone - Malaria Tablets (4 weeks supply)
Nifuroxazide (antibiotic)
Ibuprom (10 tablets)
Loperamide (anti-diarrhea, 10 tablets)
Decongestant (phenylephrine based, 10 tablets)
2x 50ml 20% picaridin mosquito repellent spray
Toothpaste (100ml, airplane friendly)
Hand sanitizer gel
Natural alum deodorant (stick)
30 SPF sun block (spray, 50ml)
I was deciding a long time between a picaridin-based repellent and a DEET-based repellent, but went for a picaridin-based one after reading discussions on how DEET is able to easily destroy plastics, such as parts of my sunglasses and my watch. I didn’t want this to happen, and went for picaridin, which worked very well, and even had a pleasant smell. Remember to take hand-sanitizer gel, you will want it if you are travelling to third world countries.
Here is my complete equipment set (without the camera, with which I took the picture). It all packs down the Tom Bihn backpack, still leaving around half the backpack free.
3 What I would change
In general, I was very happy with my packing, and wouldn’t change too many things. Here a couple of points of interest:
Even though the Kindle Paperwhite with the case is much heavier than the Kindle 4th gen, the backlit screen is simply too good to pass up. Many times, either the electricity was out (because I was at a hut next to a deserted lake at 4500m in the Himalayas), the light wasn’t good enough, or the people around me wanted to sleep and have the lights off. Next trip, I’m going for with a Paperwhite
I haven’t quite convinced myself to the Xeroshoes huaraches. I have worn them a couple of times on the beach, but I don’t see myself going around the city in them. To me, they simply don’t provide enough support, and for the times I did use them, I might as well have been walking barefoot (mostly beaches). I might look for alternatives to this.
Absolutely no need for a water bottle with a filter. In South-East Asia and India, there is a person on every street corner selling bottled water. I have used this bottle only once throughout the whole trip, as I was thirsty in Cambodia in my hotel room at night and didn’t feel like going outside to buy a bottle of water. Most of the time, I would just travel throughout the day with bottled water. A water bottle with a filter might be worth it for you though, if you are exploring some very deserted places off the beaten path, and need to filter lake water to drink it since there are no shops around. I mostly stuck to places on the “beaten path” and haven’t had trouble with water. In general, this was my largest mistake and a large waste of space in the backpack.
Pack wool |
to average down. Even Nortel itself As previously announced, Nortel does not expect that the Company's common shareholders or the NNL preferred shareholders will receive any value from the creditor protection proceedings and expects that the proceedings will result in the cancellation of these equity interests. That said, I can only hope the volume I see come in on NRTLQ each day does not represent a fresh long play or some pathetic attempt to average down. Even Nortel itself advises investors to stay away: It would not shock me to see that boilerplate come from Nokia ( Research in Motion ( Ingredients of a Turnaround It would not shock me to see that boilerplate come from NOK ) or RIMM ) at some point over the next couple to a few years. At this juncture, both stocks represent highly speculative plays. Each company requires wholesale change or something else extraordinary to take place in the absence of such a turnaround if it expects to, once again, deliver results for shareholders. Domino's Pizza ( DPZ ) executed what will go down as one of the great turnarounds of our time. The company took to the extreme the first thing you need to do to chart a truly new course: A private and public acknowledgement that something is seriously wrong. Domino's realized it required more than a tweak here and a tweak there. If you recall, Domino's basically told the world we suck!. It positioned an entire Domino's realized it required more than a tweak here and a tweak there. If you recall, Domino's basically told the world. It positioned an entire ad campaign around that reality. Domino's promised to get better. And it did. It's not just that the quality of Domino's pizza has improved (it really has), but the company transformed itself into a social company. Domino's makes ordering online or via smartphone a smooth, pleasant and interactive process. Domino's took a massive risk, but pulled off its plan. In fact, it has probably worked out better than anybody at the company could have ever imagined. Shareholders reaped rewards as well; DPZ is up about 135% over the last two years. It's not just that the quality of Domino's pizza has improved (it really has), but the company transformed itself into a social company. Domino's makes ordering online or via smartphone a smooth, pleasant and interactive process. Domino's took a massive risk, but pulled off its plan. In fact, it has probably worked out better than anybody at the company could have ever imagined. Shareholders reaped rewards as well; DPZ is up about 135% over the last two years. For one reason or another, RIM refuses to follow Domino's lead and tell the world the truth -- that it sucks. In fact, it's doing just the opposite. Late last year on Seeking Alpha, I Everybody knows that the loft-dwelling, urban hipsters you see heading out on a nighttime group ride would be texting on iPhones, not BlackBerries. In fact, it's almost surreal to see that set messaging on something made by RIM and not Apple. For one reason or another, RIM refuses to follow Domino's lead and tell the world the truth -- that it sucks. In fact, it's doing just the opposite. Late last year on, I wrote about a well-produced television commercial RIM ran, particularly during Canadian hockey telecasts. In it, a group of young hipsters use Blackberry smartphones to set up a late-night bike ride through the rain-slicked streets of a dark and misty downtown. There was just one little issue with the otherwise excellent effort:
RIM made the feeble attempt to brand Blackberries as cool. That's akin to Domino's ignoring the fact that it sent out disgusting-looking and awful-tasting pizzas three years ago. RIM made the feeble attempt to brand Blackberries as cool. That's akin to Domino's ignoring the fact that it sent out disgusting-looking and awful-tasting pizzas three years ago. For all intents and purposes, RIM has told investors, in no uncertain terms, that it has absolutely no plans to make any real change. The company intends to move forward with a pipeline that does not look a whole lot different from previous, failed efforts. In fact, you can hardly call the product RIM is about to stake its survival on -- Blackberry 10 -- all that meaningfully distinct from anything that has come before it. For all intents and purposes, RIM has told investors, in no uncertain terms, that it has absolutely no plans to make any real change. The company intends to move forward with a pipeline that does not look a whole lot different from previous, failed efforts. In fact, you can hardly call the product RIM is about to stake its survival on -- Blackberry 10 -- all that meaningfully distinct from anything that has come before it. While Nokia did not go to the extreme Domino's did, the company admitted failure even if it did not say as much when it dropped the Symbian platform. It also welcomed the type of move RIM was rumored to make for months. While Nokia did not go to the extreme Domino's did, the company admitted failure even if it did not say as much when it dropped the Symbian platform. It also welcomed the type of move RIM was rumored to make for months. Microsoft ( MSFT ) might just save Nokia's hide. If the new Nokia Lumia Windows Phone is any indication, I think there's a hot cup of soup's chance in Finland that it might happen. Lumia is a solid phone. I own one. I only dislike two things about: The absence of Pandora ( Apple's ( Lumia is a solid phone. I own one. I only dislike two things about: The absence of P ) and the poor performance of MSFT's voice recognition system, TellMe, when put up against AAPL ) Siri. Microsoft dropped the ball with TellMe. First, I did not even know my Lumia came equipped with it. I inadvertently held down the Windows icon at the bottom of the phone and discovered it. Second, TellMe has been around for some time, but Microsoft has done very little with it. If it had, it could be as good as if not better than Siri. Microsoft dropped the ball with TellMe. First, I did not even know my Lumia came equipped with it. I inadvertently held down the Windows icon at the bottom of the phone and discovered it. Second, TellMe has been around for some time, but Microsoft has done very little with it. If it had, it could be as good as if not better than Siri. Instead, it's pretty bad. Ask TellMe a question and it, more often than not, does one of two things, tells you it cannot answer or directs you to a general Bing search of your command. It's simply unacceptable that I cannot get local results for even the most basic queries for neighborhood restaurants and such. The voice recognition technology is up to par, but the utility of the feature is an embarrassment compared to Siri on iPhone 4S. Instead, it's pretty bad. Ask TellMe a question and it, more often than not, does one of two things, tells you it cannot answer or directs you to a general Bing search of your command. It's simply unacceptable that I cannot get local results for even the most basic queries for neighborhood restaurants and such. The voice recognition technology is up to par, but the utility of the feature is an embarrassment compared to Siri on iPhone 4S.Some members of a Southern California family narrowly escaped with their lives after a house fire was caused by a botched raid by the San Diego Sheriff’s Department.
Deputies thought they’d found the bad guy when they surrounded a Spring Valley house and ordered everyone out at gunpoint. But the suspect they were looking for — a gunman who had robbed a medical marijuana delivery service — wasn’t there. Instead, they interrupted a family having dinner, and caused a kitchen fire when they wouldn’t allow the housewife to go back inside and turn off the stove.
The whole time the family was being held outside at gunpoint, they were pleading with the deputies to turn off their stove, telling them the food was going to catch the kitchen afire.
10News. The ordeal had begun around 9 p.m., when San Diego County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a report of a medical marijuana delivery person robbed at gunpoint. Officials claimed a witness reported seeing an armed man run into a house, reports
Willie Houston, who lives in the home, said his family was making dinner when they realized they were surrounded by deputies with their guns drawn. “So I go outside to the door and they tell me to stick my hand through the bar and come on out and follow the voice and the light, and as soon as I get out they handcuff me,” Houston said.
Houston’s son-in-law got home around the same time and was also handcuffed. The entire family was ordered out of the house at gunpoint.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute, there’s food on the stove, my grand baby is upstairs, Cherie is upstairs, and all of a sudden all hell breaks loose; all the smoke started coming out of the house,” said Houston’s wife, Christine.
The fire started in the kitchen, and two women and a seven-year-old girl were trapped on the second floor, according to authorities.
One deputy used a skateboard and another used a fire ax breaking out the windows to get the residents out of their home. Deputies had everyone evacuated by the time the fire department arrived.
The Houstons’ kitchen is now a charred mess.
“I think it could be handled better than what it was, especially when we [were]informing them there was no reason for our kitchen to catch on fire; we could’ve lost everything last night,” Willie Houston said.
The Sheriff’s Department apologized (for what that’s worth) and “promised” to compensate the family for the damages, according to Mrs. Houston. But not so fast, Mrs. Houston! Just because they burned your kitchen down doesn’t mean these assholes are going to pay for anything.
Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Jan Caldwell wasted no time in denying the family’s assertion that a deputy offered to reimburse them for their destroyed kitchen, saying the offer never happened.
It’d be awfully nice to have law enforcement officers actually accountable to the working people who pay their salaries through taxes, don’t you think? Apparently, that would be asking far too much of the hapless, incompetent San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.
“This is certainly going to be part of all the investigation that’s going to go on post-incident: What happened, when it happened, reviewing all the reports that have been taken in combination with the fire department and the bomb-arson report,” said Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Jan Caldwell. (Bomb-arson report? Whatever, Jan.)About Erasing My Accomplishments at LolKing
Rhea Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 29, 2017
I wanted to write a quick something about being written out of the about page on LolKing that’s more coherent than 140 character tweets. (I was also removed from Wowhead which was to be expected — they only keep current staff, so I don’t want to be misconstrued as upset over that. I’m not remotely mad about WH.) Anyway, I created this website from the ground up, often spending 80 hour weeks during our original crunch time, and today I checked the site. It was then when I realized that Zam had decided to remove me from the about us page even though I put in a 30 day notice and left on good terms after accepting a new job offer from a completely different industry.
The thing is, they removed me and only me — leaving behind other employees who quit years prior. They also essentially erased the entire origin story: no one at Zam wanted to build a LoL site, but I thought we needed one for brand growth. So, while still running Wowhead, I spent extra hours outside of work to find a site to buy or create. After some research, I found two guys willing to make a site, got Zam to buy them, then built a brand new layout and added guides. It was a three person, whirlwind endeavor (with some help from general Zam), and it blew up. At one point, it was getting 11 million pageviews a day. Not bad for a random dream from a random girl, right?
Well, I guess it meant nothing because they completely removed me from it by removing me from the about us page the day I left.
Now, I would understand if maybe they removed everyone and created a generic TL;DR about us. Sure. I get it, a new bio page would have made sense actually. However, the other two employees whom I made the site with, were left on in the about us page. Oddly enough, their bios are also written as current like they still work there although the last one left in 2015. One of them even left on somewhat bad terms. It makes no sense.
So to sum up things: they removed me from the about us and history of LolKing, did not reply to a professional email, and when I reached out privately (in a very unprofessional ‘WTF’ manner, I was pissed) I was told they had no idea who removed it even though the person I reached out to oversees the whole site. Yeah, right, sure. I believe you.
The worst part? The person who did this was a person I hired. Many people at Zam are people I hired. I gave my life to that company.
It’s honestly a case of minimizing someone’s impact. I’ll always know the truth — and unless they want to delete every article, every Reddit post, or all of its history the internet will remember too. But it’s still pretty shitty and, to me, the worse part is they didn’t answer Tuesday’s email and then feigned ignorance when I privately asked them about it.
I thought about not bringing this up, but then I realized if I didn’t bring it up, no one would know. It would be like it never happened.The fact is I lost so many years of my life working on LolKing in work conditions that were very stressful at times and great at others. I went through a lot of growth pains with Zam and experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly.
In the end, to have it all swept away and to be removed from the site’s history page is basically the biggest insult they could do with the smallest gesture.
Anyway, upward and onward. Treat your remaining employees better. Please. I just wanted to address this in a form better than 140 characters since I got a lot of DMs and messages about it.
Update: they’ve since just removed everyone. They didn’t change the about us, they just removed all our profiles which honestly is OK even if it’s not ideal. No one replied to me nor clarified why they did this, though I have heard some rumors including a fascinating one about a person who isn’t what they seem at all. I was one of the people who previously gave advice on how to handle bad optics or social situations for the network as part of my day job so here’s some for free, off the clock: simply saying sorry or giving a “hey, we’ve fixed it” makes people a thousand times more forgiving. Silence looks shady and it always will.It’s a strange feeling to be standing in front of Zouk bright and early on a Monday morning, when one is more used to partying up a storm inside its dance halls under the cover of night. Take away the sweeping laser lights, the pulsating music and the throng of party-goers lost in the mesmerising beat, and Singapore’s premier nightlife institution looks like a gaudily painted go-down, which is exactly what it was 50 years back when the Singapore river (that fronts the club) was a main thoroughfare for goods transportation.
I am here to meet the flamboyant troop of drag queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race. No, they’re not performing at the club, but actually starring in BAZAAR’s big dance fashion shoot capturing all the glitz and glamour of the coming fall/winter 2016 collections.
Launched in 2009, RuPaul’s Drag Race is the outrageous reality television series that follows the programme’s titular host and his quest to look for “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” Modelled in the same format as Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model, the show pits a motley crew of drag performers against each other through a series of challenges that puts their creativity to the test. Whether they land the coveted tiara or not, each contestant who has appeared on the programme has gone on to become a star in their own right.
The unprecedented success of the show led RuPaul and the production team to follow up with eight seasons and other spin-offs. RuPaul’s Drag Race: Battle of the Seasons is one such offshoot from the colourful franchise. Touted as “the world’s biggest drag revue,” the four month-long travelling tour sees a rotating cast of past winners, finalists and fan favourites entertain audiences with comedic skits and song-and-dance numbers. After stops in cities such as Paris, Berlin and Barcelona, the laugh-a-minute tour finally landed on Singapore’s sunny shores for a one-and-only showing in Asia—sequins, feather boas and all. Making an appearance in our shoot were: Manila Luzon from Season 3, Phi Phi O’Hara from Season 4, Detox from Season 5, and Ginger Minj and Pearl from Season 7.
From the minute the drag queens sashay on set, it’s obvious they’re obsessed with fashion, cooing like excited children in a candy store over the racks of designer clothes. “My fashion icon is Thierry Mugler,” Detox exclaims as he pours himself into Chanel. “He’s the reason I love fashion. But I really want to steal Björk’s wardrobe. I’m sure it’s freaky, weird and very couture!” Without missing a beat, Ginger Minj deadpans: “I want Beyoncé’s so that I can sell it on eBay.”
Whether they are channelling Old Hollywood pin-ups or Goth princesses, part of drag’s artistic appeal lies in the performers’ ability to transform themselves into different personalities. Fashion, of course, plays an important role in their camouflage. Considered an act of self-expression, the cliché that fashion doubles up as a form of armour is further exemplified by the drag queens. “Out of drag, I’m a very shy and quiet boy with severe social anxiety,” Ginger Minj confesses, “I like to blend into the background.”
Part of the reason for the decision to have the drag queens dance their way across these pages—dressed in a turnout of statement clothes fresh off the catwalks—is because they’re also representative of the maximalist aesthetic taking root on the fall runways. They capture the zeitgeist—who better to embody fashion’s over-the-top spirit than a coterie of colourful characters who have crafted their own visual language through the dramatic use of makeup, lip sync, dance and costumes?
Drag runs parallel to fashion’s current obsession with gender fluidity. On top of hiring unisex-looking models to grace their runways, designers Hedi Slimane and Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson have toyed with androgyny over the past couple of years with genderless collections. Others, such as Miuccia Prada and Gucci’s Alessandro Michele have seamlessly melded their menswear and womenswear showings for a complete visual narrative.
Like drag, fashion is revelling in blurred boundaries. In that sense, RuPaul and his motley crew of queens have thrown open the lid on what is masculine and feminine, and with lights, camera and a whole lot of makeup and wig action, brought characters from the fringe of society to the fore. Their talent, wit and humour repackaged with layers of eyelashes and feathers, makes for highly entertaining TV.
From the time RuPaul rewrote history as the first drag queen to appear on M.A.C’s Viva Glam campaign in 1994, to the cast members turning up at Miu Miu’s Cruise 2016 show last year, drag has evolved into fashion’s current bedfellow.
Isn’t it wonderful how it all started with a dream and one humble sequin?
By Gerald Tan
Photographed by Gan
Styled by Windy Aulia
Models: Qian Tan/Mannequin, Lilla/Ave, Ivan/Ave, Xavier/Upfront
Hair: Ken Hong/Evolve Salon
Makeup: Toni Tan/My Makeup Academy
Producer: Dana Koh
Assistant stylist: Debby Kwong
Fashion assistants: James Lennon Chuang, Desiree Liew, Dinie Bte Zainuddin, Donovan Quek
Special thanks to ZoukAlpha 17 – On the Road has been released! This version brings roads and rivers to the world, new world quests, new tools for modders, new combat tools, smarter AI, and rebalancings and adjustments across the whole design.
I’m afraid that this build is not compatible with saved games from previous versions, or mods from previous versions. However, you can continue to use the old version until you’re ready to update. If you’re on Steam, to continue using the old version, go to your Steam Library, right-click on RimWorld, click Properties. Open the Betas tab and use the drop-down menu to select the alpha16 version. Restart Steam to force an update.
If you downloaded the game DRM-free, you can update whenever you like by re-downloading from your existing download link. Your link is always the same and always gives the latest version.
In the old builds, balance problems meant that some exploit-y strategies did work and obviated some of the challenges in the game. Since those problems are now fixed, you may find the game a little bit more difficult. It wouldn’t hurt to play at one notch lower difficulty to start with in Alpha 17. You can always increase the difficulty later, even during the game, through the options menu.
I invite discussion on this post at this forum thread!
A summary of the changes in this alpha follows:
Roads and rivers
World now generates with roads and rivers
There are five road types: path, dirt road, stone road, ancient asphalt road, ancient asphalt highway
Some roads generate with things alongside, like concrete barriers or ancient lampposts
There are four sizes of river: huge river, large river, river, and creek
Rivers generate more in rainy areas, move towards the sea (ignoring tiny lakes) and merge as appropriate
Rivers and roads generate on local maps as expected.
Stone roads generate using local stone and a new flagstone terrain type.
Visitors, caravans, traders, and raiders tend to arrive and leave on the roads.
World generation is more chronological now. First continents form, then rivers, then an ancient society is shallowly simulated to generate ancient roads, then modern settlements and roads are generated (alongside ancient roads, often).
World quests
New “site parts” world site generation system. It allows assembling together a world destination from several ‘parts’. Mixing and matching will allow us to create a huge number of combinations.
New world quest incident: Item stash. An allied faction tells you about a stash of randomly-generated reward items, guarded by a random threat. You can send a caravan to defeat the threat and collect the reward.
New world quest incident: Bandit camp. An allied faction asks you to defeat a bandit camp, and offers you a reward if you do so.
New world quest incident: Caravan request. An allied faction asks you to deliver a particular resource to a particular base in a particular time frame, for a special reward.
New ‘long-range mineral scanner’ building slowly scans for precious resource lumps nearby in the world. You need to send a caravan to collect them. Lumps may be defended.
New caravan incident: Payment demand. Raiders demand items or slaves from your caravan; if you refuse, they attack.
Other new stuff
Added smokepop belt. Emits a cloud of accuracy-reducing smoke when the wearer is shot. Smoke also prevents turret targeting.
Characters can now tend their own wounds (with a penalty to effectiveness).
Added bowler hat.
Corpses now leak black corpse bile while rotting.
Vents can be opened and closed with a flick action.
Add option to render hats only on the main game map (but not on the portraits in the pawn bar).
Bills can now be temporarily paused when satisfied, until automatically reactivated at a lower level. This reduces the need for pawns to repeatedly return to the work bench each time the count falls just one below the target count.
You can now create your own packaged survival meals (with appropriate research and ingredients).
All pawns now have “head butt” attacks they can use if they’re missing all other attacking body parts.
Added a “caravan packing spot” so you can tell your caravans where to assemble.
When trees burn, they leave behind burned tree stumps.
When structures and plants burn, they leave behind ash.
Carpets and wooden floors can now burn.
New training lessons for explaining shield belts, and how door opening speed is affected by material type.
Added ambrosia sprout incident. This sprouts a grove of the pleasurable, nutrition, and addictive ambrosia fruit trees nearby.
New ‘wimp’ trait makes pawn incapacitated from even a relatively small amount of pain.
New chain shotgun weapon
Modding
Modders can now add “def modifiers” which, instead of replacing a whole def, change specific fields of that def. This allows multiple mods to change the same def without wiping each others’ changes (unless they change the same field, of course).
Information on how to use def modifiers is in this forum thread: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=32735.0
Various enums are now defs so modders can add new ones (TrainableIntelligence, DamageArmorCategory, ImpactSoundType, ReservationLayer, BillRepeatMode, PrisonerInteractionMode, FleshType).
GUI tables (like most of the main tabs along the bottom of the screen) are now defined by data, making it easier to add, rearrange, sort, and change columns on the UI.
Increasing skill relevance
Mining skill reworked: Steeper speed penalty for low skill. Mining yield is now slightly dependent on mining skill.
Trade price spread made much wider, but social skill also has a much greater effect on it.
Added “animal gather speed” stat which makes some pawns faster at gathering wool or milk.
Added “animal product yield” stat which makes some pawns more/less likely to waste the product when gathering wool or milk.
Removed post-process curve from melee hit chance so it uses the simple level-by-level tuning. It’ll be much harder to hit things now at low melee skills. Note: Default hit chance is 0.6 for pawns without skills. This equals the chance of a pawn with melee skill 6.
Added a melee dodge stat, so better melee-skilled pawns will have more advantage. Pawns don’t melee dodge while aiming or firing ranged weapons.
Work tab boxes are easier to identify skill level for visually.
Added small crunching sound that plays when you assign a pawn to a skill they’re terrible at.
AI
AI has more intelligent ranged shot target selection with random elements. Harder to exploit, and looks less dumb, doesn’t shoot at chickens as much.
Raider with mega-weapons will now avoid friendly fire
Sapper groups will now choose another sapper if the first one is killed, making them much more persistent.
Sapper groups will now continue digging even while defending from attack.
Animals flee when harmed.
Added a new state to caravan lord job, “bloody exit”, which makes the exit individually, as aggressively as possible. This makes it a bit hard to rob caravans.
Raiders will no longer compulsively attack doors.
Base defense AI is touchier; stealth raids will be much much more difficult (and probably infeasible most of the time).
Doctors now tend heavy bleeding injuries and diseases near lethal severity first.
Misc
Plants now have different graphics when they are harvestable – you can see the berries/cotton/corn on the plant ready to be taken.
Buy/sell price spread for trading is much wider (150%/50%).
Drugs are now slower to produce, slower to grow, and heavier.
Cannibalism is harder on mood.
Integrated incidents (ambush, manhunters, etc) better with caravans and temporary maps. Incidents can now target both of these, and the story state (incident cooldowns, etc) is passed back and forth between a caravan and its map to maintain continuity.
Plant generation algorithm for map start reworked to generate plants in more interesting patterns, with denser areas and more clear areas interspersed, and groves of trees in sparse biomes.
New graphics for some floor types and things (stone floors, stone chunks, etc).
Made crop growing cycles significantly longer, especially for long-cycle plants like corn.
Shifted all medical potencies so that normal medicine has potency of 1.0. (This increases surgery success chances).
Added global sell price factor for apparel (70%) and furniture (70%).
Rebalanced drug economy so it’s viable to buy neutroamine, make drugs with it, and sell them.
Because it was way OP, chemfuel can no longer be made from haygrass.
Reworked surgery success chances. We now feedback room surgery success chance on medical bed. Rebalanced room surgery success chance calculations and fixed a bug where it was 100% when outdoors. Removed surgery success chance exponents.
Colonists wearing human leather clothes now get a negative thought (unless they have a bloodlust or cannibal trait, in which case they get a mood bonus).
Balanced blood loss recovery time to be much slower (50 real seconds -> 4 game days)
Buffed mortars so players use them: Cheaper/faster to build, faster shooting, greater accuracy, cheaper shells
Armor now takes a constant fraction of incoming damage instead of absorbing all prevented damage. This solves an issue where good quality armor would be destroyed sooner.
Sun lamps now turn themselves off when plants are resting
Equipment rack is now a general shelf which can hold pretty much anything.
Small items like gold and silver are now 10x smaller, not 20x, so it’s more feasible to build things from them.
Jade is not small any more.
Other bases regenerate their trade stock less often.
Changed flammability for fur and leather to 100%, and for meat to 50%.
Manhunter pack incident can now use any kind of animal.
Rebalanced all trader stock generation.
Traders will generate with fewer extreme quality items.
Pawns missing heads will have visually missing heads.
It’s no longer possible to create a settlement directly adjacent to an existing settlement.
Caravans now enter/leave tiles when touching the tile boundary, instead of when in the center of the adjacent tile.
Redesigned how capacities are calculated from body part efficiencies with an entirely new collection of algorithms, to stop various nonsensical cases and simplify how health conditions can affect the body.
Gear tab now displays item stack masses.
Caravans now generate a lot tougher.
All caravans now buy art. Art is lighter (e.g. easier to sell) and has a sell price bonus so it’s now a better trade good.
Catharsis thought is more powerful but shorter in duration.
Redesigned stats so that in almost all cases, high numbers are better.
Rebalanced the beauty system to be much more dependent on art; random furniture has less or no beauty effect.
Ship part crash incident now scatters rubble and chunks around the crash site.
Healroot grows wild now, in some biomes
Added caravan route planner. It allows placing several waypoints, and measures the time to travel the route along them.
There is now a progress dialog while the planet mesh is generating (so people don’t think the game crashed).
Date system reworked. Seasons are now arbitrary “quadrums” which cover 1/4 of the year and are the same on the whole planet.
Fixed various memory leaks.
Many exploits mitigated or prevented by various design tweaks.
Many, many, many other bugfixes, tunings, and redesigns.
I invite discussion on this post at this forum thread!KSCS' Mark "Hawkeye" Louis, KRLD's Michael Scott, the Mavericks' Mark Followill and The Ticket's Corby Davidson and Craig "Junior" Miller ran the Oscar Last Men Running challenge. (Instagram/mark.followill)
It was a long day-and-a-half for Voice of the Mavericks, Mark Followill.
Hours after calling the Mavericks' 114-11 loss to the Washington Wizards at the American Airline Center on Saturday night, he was blocks away early Sunday, lining up in front of the Omni Dallas Hotel to run in a benefit challenge at the Dallas Marathon.
Followill was part of the Oscar Last Men Running challenge, which featured five Dallas-based radio and television personalities running to raise donations for Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children.
Title sponsor Oscar Health Insurance pledged to donate funds to the hospital for each runner that the celebrity relay team passed on race day.
Followill joined KRLD's Michael Scott, KSCS' Mark "Hawkeye" Louis, and The Ticket's Corby Davidson and Craig "Junior" Miller, and passed 3,128 runners along their way to a 3:22:11 finish.
The relay-team concept replaced the Last Man Running Challenge held since 2012 at the Dallas Marathon. This year's relay team followed the same race course as the marathon and Behringer Relay participants.
"Everybody ran great," Followill said. "Nobody broke an ankle."
Did Followill have enough in his lungs to compete after calling the Mavericks' near comeback to the Wizards? Word was that Followill's media pals skipped out on him when it appeared the Mavs were done for going into the fourth quarter.
"The lungs were all ready to go," Followill said. "The Mavs game didn't impact us. They made it interesting for those who stuck around."TSN Hockey Insiders Bob McKenzie, Pierre LeBrun and Darren Dreger joined host Gino Reda to discuss what Russia’s Olympic ban means for hockey in PyeongChang, whether the NHL is ready to get serious about Seattle and the latest with the potential sale of the Carolina Hurricanes.
How will Russia’s Olympic ban affect the hockey tournament at the Games?
TSN Hockey Insider Bob McKenzie spoke with IIHF president Rene Fasel about how Tuesday’s news will affect hockey at the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang.
Bob McKenzie: The reality is right now Rene Fasel is no different than the rest of us. He’s in wait and see mode. How are the Russians going to react? And the Russians are defined from everybody from Vladimir Putin to their Duma, to the Russian Ice Hockey Federation, to the KHL and to their Olympic Association. So here’s the quote from Rene Fasel:
“We will see where things are… in the next 48 hours. We have to see how Russia will react. We need to talk to our (IIHF) people, we need to talk to the Russians. It’s too early to make statements.”
What Rene Fasel is simply trying to do is let this thing settle for 24 to 48 hours and see what, if anything, the Russians are going to come out with and then react to that.
What are Canadian hockey officials saying?
Darren Dreger: Canada isn’t sure how to react just yet; they have to allow the IIHF to do its work specific to the Kontinental Hockey League. Now, the KHL had planned on loaning players to their countries to participate in South Korea. Well, if the KHL decides all of a sudden that they don’t care what the IIHF says, they don’t care what the IOC says, they’re not loaning those players, Canada is in a pickle because Sean Burke, the general manager for Team Canada, was hoping for a minimum of 10 players to make up his Olympic roster. So then that factors into the ongoing discussions that Hockey Canada has had with the CHL about junior players being eligible for the Olympics. They had tabled those discussions until after the World Juniors, but if the KHL comes out and says no go to loaning players, then perhaps the CHL and Hockey Canada have to talk again before the World Juniors.
Is the NHL ready to discuss Seattle?
Seattle City Council voted Monday to invest $600 million to renovate Key Arena and say by the end of 2020 it will be ready to host an NHL team. Could this be discussed at the upcoming NHL Board of Governors meeting scheduled for later this week in Florida?
Pierre LeBrun: Well, it’s not actually officially on the agenda that went out Monday and that’s because it went out before the City Council vote in Seattle. But the Board of Governors will absolutely address the Seattle situation. First of all, do not underestimate how significant that vote was in Seattle. For years, the NHL has been intrigued by this market way before they ever thought of Vegas. But the issue was, of course, the rink. That is no longer an issue. At some point in the Board of Governors meeting, I believe NHL commissioner Gary Bettman in one form or another will address Seattle. How that statement takes shape, we will see. But the bottom line is they’re not coming out and awarding a franchise, but they’re going to acknowledge the interest in Seattle.
Bob McKenzie: That’s right, we do not believe that a franchise will be awarded or that even a conditional franchise would be awarded to Seattle, but there is an Executive Committee meeting for the Board of Governors meeting and what happens at those two meetings could go a long way towards how the NHL does react this weekend. Here are the possibilities for the NHL: Number one, they could acknowledge that there’s substantial ownership interest from Seattle, and maybe that even comes in the form of a financial guarantee from the owners in Seattle. Number two, ready to announce that the league is ready to expand to 32 teams. Number three, invite expansion bids. Make this a formal process. Number four, allow the ownership group in Seattle to do test marketing whether that’s a season ticket drive or whatever else. The National Hockey League could technically do any one of those four things, it could do all of those four things in this next week, or it could do none of them. What happens at the meeting on Thursday or Friday will dictate the public response.
Who is behind the Seattle group?
Los Angeles-based Oak View Group is one of the major players behind the Key Arena renovations, which may open the door for NHL expansion talks. Who are some of the members leading the charge?
Darren Dreger: The Seattle group is backed by some real heavy hitters in terms of the landscape of the finances. If you look at Jerry Bruckheimer, he’s been knocking doors of NHL ownership for the past decade, maybe longer than that. You’ve got David Bonderman who’s got deep, deep pockets. This guy is a multi-billionaire. And then you’ve got Tim Leiweke, who’s going to provide considerable influence into the renovation plan of Key Arena. So all of those components I think would be attractive not only to the National Hockey League, but clearly to NHL owners.
What’s the latest with the Carolina |
productivity too.
4. Embrace New Technologies
Studying no longer means jotting things down with a pen on a scrap of paper. The old handwritten method still has its place of course, it’s just that now there are more options for personalising study that ever before. Whether it’s through online tools, social media, blogs, videos or mobile apps, learning has become more fluid and user-centred. If you want to try a new learning technology, GoConqr’s free platform is a great place to start, even if we do say so ourselves!
5. Test Yourself
It’s a strange thing, but sometimes simply entering an exam environment is enough to make you forget some of the things you’ve learned. The solution is to mentally prepare for the pressure of having to remember key dates, facts, names, formulas and so on. Testing yourself with regular quizzes is a great way of doing this. And don’t worry of you don’t perform brilliantly at first – the more you practice, the better you’ll become. Don’t believe us? Then just take a peek at what the experts have to say.
6. Find a Healthy Balance
Take this opportunity to evaluate yourself both physically and mentally. Is your engine running on low? Instead of complaining “I never get enough sleep” or “I’m eating too much convenience food” take control and do something about it! Make the change and see how it positively affects your attitude and study routine. This should motivate you to maintain a healthy balance in the future.
7. Be Positive
Your attitude has a big impact on the level of study that you get done and the effectiveness of your learning process. If you keep saying that you can’t do it and won’t commit to the idea of learning, attempting to study is only likely to become more difficult. Instead, focus your mind on positive outcomes and on how you can use your own individual strengths to achieve them. When you think positively, the reward centres in your brain show greater activity, thereby making you feel less anxious and more open to new study tips.
8. Collaborate with Study Partners
At this stage of the school year, you should know your classmates pretty well. This is a good point in time to select a couple of study partners who you know you work well with and are motivated to achieve good grades also. Don’t worry if you can’t meet up too often, you can use online tools such as GoConqr’s Groups tool to communicate and share study notes with one another.
9. Turn lessons into stories
Everybody likes to read or listen to a good story, and with good reason – not only do stories entertain us, they help us to understand and memorise key details too. You can apply this to your studies by weaving important details or facts into a story – the more outlandish and ridiculous you can make it, the better (since you’ll be more likely to remember a particularly crazy story).
10. Establish a Study Routine
Your study routine is comprised of more than planning what to learn and when. One of the main concerns is your study environment.
Find a place to study that is quiet and with few distractions. Alternatively, you could also try switching it up by sitting in a different place in your school library every day and seeing how this works for you.
11. Mark Small Challenges
When you have to face very long and dense subjects, you can set small challenges to keep your spirits high; a good way to focus on the day-to-day and find motivations while you study. According to scientific analysis, the more motivated and excited we are, the better our brain performs.
12. Consult teachers
Any questions you have about the exam, the best you can do is go to the teacher of the subject and expose your doubts. Not only is the person best suited to solve your questions, but your initiative will be well received and you’ll show good attitude by demonstrating that you’re interested in his subject.
There really aren’t any hard and fast rules to play by when it comes to best times for studying or how long you should work for. Everybody is different, so the best way to establish a routine is to try different things and see what works best for you, then modify your routine for maximum learning effectiveness.
This is an update of a blog post that was published in January 2016.As the Port Authority starts to solicit public comment on a 10-year capital plan that recently won unanimous support from the bistate agency’s commissioners, state lawmakers are beginning to look more closely at exactly how the long-term plan would impact New Jersey commuters.
So far, they don’t like much of what they’re seeing.
During a legislative hearing in Trenton that was convened yesterday to dig deeper into the more than $30 billion capital plan that was put forward by the Port Authority earlier this month, lawmakers questioned high-ranking agency officials about a proposed new Port Authority Bus Terminal — with a possible completion date of 2030 or beyond. Demand at the current 1950s-era facility is projected to increase by 10 percent by 2020, and up to 50 percent by 2040.
The lawmakers also quizzed Port Authority officials about a planned extension of the PATH rail line to Newark Airport that uses up money that could otherwise go to the bus terminal. It now looks like the proposed two-mile extension will not include a stop in Newark’s South Ward that local leaders have long coveted as an economic-development opportunity.
By the end of the hearing, the chairman of the panel raised a series of concerns about both projects, and urged the Port Authority’s commissioners to postpone a vote to grant final approval to the capital plan scheduled for February 16.
“These are huge numbers and the downside of making a mistake is great,” said Sen. Robert Gordon (D-Bergen). “These are decisions that are critical to the economic future of New Jersey and the entire region.”
“I’d like them to just hold off on the vote scheduled for February 16 and have a serious conversation with the experts there and reassign priorities,” he said.
The Port Authority’s commissioners voted unanimously on January 5 in support of the current draft of the 10-year, $32 billion capital plan, and the agency released a detailed version of the plan to the public about a week later. It was considered by officials from both New York and New Jersey to be the best deal that could be struck between the factions from each state, which have clashed in recent years over what should be the agency’s top priorities.
While the capital-plan funds airport projects considered a high priority by New York officials, it also includes $3.5 billion for the bus-terminal replacement project, which is something New Jersey officials have emphasized. Another $2.7 billion is budgeted for the federal government’s Gateway commuter-rail tunnel project, and $1.7 billion is set aside to extend PATH-train service from lower Manhattan to Newark Liberty International Airport.
But Gordon and the other lawmakers yesterday pressed agency officials to explain why the bus-terminal replacement — which is expected to cost between $7.5 billion and $10 — is only being partially funded during the life of the proposed 10-year plan.
Steven Plate, the agency’s chief of major capital projects, said the latest timeline calls for public outreach, planning, engineering, and environmental reviews to take up the next few years heading into 2021. He also noted that a final location for the new terminal hasn’t been picked as agency officials are still working with community leaders in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen.
“At this point, the biggest hurdle right now is to get us all in agreement on where we’re building and what we’re building,” Plate said.
But lawmakers said, given the agency’s two-year delay in completing a major renovation of the Port Authority’s George Washington Bridge Bus Station, that they have a hard time putting much faith in the prediction that construction could start in 2021. They also raised concerns that completion of the new bus terminal could now push into the 2030s. The Gateway project won’t be completed until at least 2030, and federal officials have raised concerns about the existing tunnels lasting that long, leading many to hope the bus-terminal replacement could be completed far sooner to serve as a backup option for New Jersey commuters.
Gateway is a $24 billion public-transit project that calls for the construction of two new rail tubes under the Hudson River connecting New Jersey with midtown Manhattan, as well as several other major upgrades to the region’s transportation infrastructure, all to increase capacity for New Jersey Transit and Amtrak.
From a safety perspective, agency officials have also previously said concrete slabs at the existing bus terminal will last at most another two decades.
“I guess you’re not making us all feel comfortable that we’re actually going to get a new bus terminal some time in the foreseeable future,” said Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen).
Sen. Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen) also raised concerns that the agency is still considering building the new bus terminal at the current location at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street rather than putting up an entirely new facility somewhere nearby.
“If we’re going to sit around until 2021, we’re never going to see this project in our lifetime. That’s my frustration,” Sarlo said.
And while construction on the replacement bus terminal would be delayed until at least 2021, the capital plan envisions construction beginning in 2020 on the PATH extension to Newark airport. The project would open in 2026, costing an estimated $1.7 billion, Plate said. Right now, the PATH line stops about two miles away at Newark Penn Station.
But Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex) questioned why a midway stop in the planned PATH extension that was on the drawing board had not made it into the final draft. Local officials viewed that stop as a key economic-development opportunity since right now the neighborhood is cut off from mass transit.
“There appears to be a better benefit for New Jersey residents, long-term, if we include a South Ward stop. I don’t know how great the benefit is of doing this all at the airport, if not more for the folks in New York, than us here in New Jersey,” Ruiz said.
Plate said the extension plan also includes a parking garage at the airport that commuters from surrounding counties like Morris, Somerset, and Union could use to take a one-seat ride to Wall Street and other locations in lower Manhattan. Sen. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Union) also pointed to that element of the plan as a new trans-Hudson commuting option.
But Gordon and Weinberg questioned why precise ridership projections have not been released for the project even as it has been given priority in the 10-year capital plan. Projections are also not yet available for a similar proposed rail link to LaGuardia Airport in Queens that would cost an estimated $1.5 billion.
“We should have that in short order, senator, I’m happy to have a working meeting with you or your staff,” Plate said to Weinberg.
Janna Chernetz, the New Jersey policy analyst for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, testified later during the hearing. She called some of the answers provided by the Port Authority’s officials “extremely alarming.” She also suggested the two airport-rail projects could be delayed to free up another $3.2 billion for the bus-terminal replacement.
“We urge you to continue to put the pressure on the Port Authority,” Chernetz said. “We need to continue to be steadfast in ensuring the completion of this project over the course of the 2017-2026 capital plan.”
The Port Authority has already scheduled two public hearings on its overall capital plan, with the first set for January 31 in Manhattan, and a second scheduled for February 7 in Jersey City. Both meetings will be held from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Public comments are also being collected via email and can be sent to publiccomments@panynj.gov
But Gordon said the February 16 meeting should be postponed at least a month “so we can have a better understanding of these projects.”Goat Simulator is coming to iOS and Android. Contain your excitement by eating a sock, or something.
Coffee Stain Studios's Armin Ibrisagic announced at GDC Europe in Germany today that its silly simulator has sold nearly one million copies since its April 1st release on PC.
The studio put all of its staff onto working on the game after the trailer for it went viral earlier this year. After release, extra content was added such as multiplayer and a new map.
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The game involves doing whatever you like, mostly. It's like a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game without the time limits...or the skateboards.
As the goat, your tongue can stick and stretch to objects to pull them around. You can bounce around on trampolines, destroy nearly everything around you, and generally cause chaos.
After all the success it's had, Coffee Stain decided that it's time to bring Goat Simulator to iOS and Android. No expected release date was given.Over 100 years ago, a French banker named Albert Kahn undertook a massive photography project that became known as The Archives of the Planet. Sending photographers to every continent, Kahn aimed to collect colour snapshots from all corners of the Earth using a brand new technology known as the Autochrome Lumiere. Over 72,000 colour images were taken over the course of the project, but the following series focuses on the vibrant and iconic daily life of Paris, from nearly a century in the past.
Kahn commissioned four photographers to collect images set specifically in cosmopolitan Paris: Leon Gimpel, Stephane Passet, Georges Chevalier, and Auguste Leon. They utilized pioneering technology that employed colour filters made from microscopic grains of dyed potato starch. The artists began documenting the city in 1914, just days before the outbreak of World War I. The images collected portray the everyday struggle of real life, juxtaposed with a joie de vivre characteristic of Parisians, in a city on the brink of devastation brought on by a war that would alter the world.
This collection showcases an amazing, colourful time period, with historical scenes that are as familiar as they are foreign, not to mention a nostalgic depiction of humanity.
via: [PetaPixel]Former first lady Michelle Obama was criticized for not wearing a head covering on a 2015 visit to Saudi Arabia, but several other female world leaders have done the same. (Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)
In January 2015, President Barack Obama visited Saudi Arabia. It was a high-profile trip: Obama was there to attend the funeral of the late Saudi King Abdullah at a time when the Washington-Riyadh relationship was strained for a number of factors, including the U.S. attempt to secure a nuclear deal with Iran. Much of the immediate attention, however, wasn't on the president, but on first lady Michelle Obama and her choice of attire.
During a number of public events, she appeared without a headscarf — an unusual move in the conservative Islamic country where women are expected to cover their heads and many wear niqabs, a cloth that can cover almost all of the face. The decision sparked criticism on Saudi social media, where it was discussed under the hashtag #ميشيل_أوباما_سفور (roughly, #Michelle_Obama_unveiled).
Before long, her lack of headscarf was triggering discussion back in the United States, as well. Many supported the first lady, arguing that gender equality shouldn't take a back seat to religious sensitivities. However, one prominent Twitter user disagreed: “Many people are saying it was wonderful that Mrs. Obama refused to wear a scarf in Saudi Arabia, but they were insulted,” Donald Trump wrote. “We have enuf enemies.”
Many people are saying it was wonderful that Mrs. Obama refused to wear a scarf in Saudi Arabia, but they were insulted.We have enuf enemies — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2015
Two years later, the shoe is on the other foot. This weekend President Trump will arrive in Riyadh for his first trip as leader of the United States. Accompanying him will not only be his wife, Melania, but daughter Ivanka. It is unclear if the president will insist that they wear headscarves in Saudi Arabia, though it seems unlikely.
First lady Melania Trump. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Obama's decision to not wear a headscarf was less unusual than it might have seemed at the time. While Saudi women are expected to cover their heads, exceptions are made for foreigners, and in some less conservative circles, Saudi women wear their hijabs loosely in a way that hints more at fashion than religion.
Some foreign guests to Saudi Arabia do choose to wear headscarves. Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall and the wife of Britain's Prince Charles, usually wears one on their trips there. And in 2007, first lady Laura Bush was photographed briefly wearing a headscarf she had received as a gift.
Most high-profile Western visitors, however, tend to forgo the scarves. For example, as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton visited the kingdom sans scarf in 2012. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May also did not wear headscarves, instead opting to wear loosefitting clothes that covered their arms and legs instead.
Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz and other top officials greeted German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Jeddah on April 30. Merkel was on her first leg of a two-nation Gulf visit. (Reuters)
Not all conservative Islamic nations are willing to make such concessions: Head coverings are generally required for female dignitaries when they visit Iran. This can put the visitors in difficult situations back home. For example, Sweden's government was recently criticized because members of a delegation wore headscarves during a visit to Tehran, despite the nation's declared feminist ethos.
In hindsight, the furor surrounding Obama's headscarf can be attributed to a broader distrust of her husband's policies regarding Saudi Arabia, which was in turn amplified by the growing power of social media in the Saudi kingdom. President Obama was notoriously skeptical of Saudi Arabia's ambitions in the Middle East and had suggested Riyadh may need to learn to share the Middle East with its rival, Tehran. “It's complicated” he told the Atlantic in 2016 when asked if the Saudi kingdom was a friend to America.
In January 2015, then-White House principal deputy press secretary Eric Schultz said then-first lady Michelle Obama's fashion during a visit to Saudi Arabia was consistent with other first ladies, after she opted not to wear a head scarf. (Reuters)
Although in the past Trump has been critical of Saudi Arabia — even accusing it of killing homosexuals and having links to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — he has softened his tone since becoming president, but he has continued his harsh criticism of Iran.
That he chose Saudi Arabia for the first destination during his first foreign trip as president is significant, and the kingdom is keen to welcome him. Russian state media reports that Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has said that Melania, a former model, is welcome to wear “any style in clothing” she wants in the country.
Even so, the Trumps may be wise to keep in mind the optics of their trip. Much of the Saudi public is more religiously conservative than their leaders, and recent polls suggest young Saudis in particular view the new U.S. president as being anti-Muslim. And just days after visiting Riyadh, Melania Trump is expected to accompany her husband to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and the Vatican to meet the Pope. In both of these locations, religious tradition means women are expected to dress modestly.
More on WorldViews
Trump once denounced Saudi Arabia as extremist. Now he’s heading there to promote moderate Islam.
Donald Trump’s already complicated relationship with Saudi Arabia
Saudi king reported to be taking 506 tons of luggage, including two limos, on trip to IndonesiaThe point of acceptance, I’ve found, is not so much blatant and uninhibited understanding, but a willingness to learn. It’s rooted in the foundation that as human beings, we are always evolving our consciences to make ourselves better people.
I attended an event Thursday at the Ohio Union. The guest speaker was Aamer Rahman, a comedian of Bangladeshi descent who was born and raised in Australia.
In his piece titled “The Truth Hurts,” he talked about hard economic, social and political constructs the world faces today with sharp wit and a cunning nature. There were very few moments where the room was not filled with an uproarious cackling, from myself included. I sat in the very back of the room, hoping to catch a better glimpse of the show as the fly on the wall, pen and notebook in hand, taking down quotes from the piece that I thought might resonate with my audience at The Lantern for a full story. But the story that I sought to find was not the story that I left with.
His jokes were hysterical. Timing was flawless, and the whole room at each punch line would break into unexplainable fits of laughter that seemed to echo into the whole room and shake its core. It didn’t matter what content he spoke of, we all laughed. While speaking of stereotypes, white girls, Muslim haters and terrorist propaganda, he seemed to make the room feel more at ease with just a few sounds into a microphone.
So then why was I starting to feel so queasy? I had reported many stories before, most not as fun as this one would be. I looked down at my notebook at the questions that I had prepared for Rahman for afterward, and I started to panic.
Now before I continue, I should probably mention some important details. I’ve always been the kind to recognize my privilege in regards to race. I am more ethnically diverse than I come off at first glance, but I do still realize that the basis of my roots are European, meaning that no matter what, I’m still a common white girl.
But even without that mention, I shouldn’t have felt uncomfortable in that room, listening to him speak. I’ve been diversified my entire life, and I know what it’s like to feel like the one who is alone, so why was it so hard now?
Then it hit me. I took a look around the room. I was one of a handful of white people sitting in the crowd, and I was beginning to notice some jokes were starting to go over my head. They were going over my head not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t know. How could I report on this story if I hadn’t lived the struggles he had? How could I possibly tell it without understanding that backstory? How was it fair to my readers for me to just ask this man what his favorite color was, and then leave, further perpetuating the “uncaring white person” stereotype? These were the kinds of questions that ran in my head as I started to feel my palms sweat with worry.
So I didn’t stay for my interview. I ran. After I got back home and started to breathe again, I realized the driving force behind what I had just done. I immediately felt regret and shame, a shame that I had put upon myself in solidifying my thoughts. Of course once I was thinking more clearly, I realized that all of those questions I had were redundant and unnecessary. They were built subconsciously in a part of my brain that at that moment I couldn’t control.
I should have stayed and talked to him. I should have made it a point to get to know more about him than the things he was talking about on the surface. I should have been willing to swallow my pride and go through an uncomfortable situation.
What I learned from this experience of fleeing is that the same pit-of-my-stomach-left-out feeling that I got sitting in the crowd for just 20 minutes, is how most people go about their lives every day.
We are so inclined to assume that living is easy unless provoked specifically, but most of the time judgment comes without warning. I’m not saying that in this moment I felt judged. I’m saying that in this moment I felt more empathy and understanding of what privilege really means than in any other.
I implore you to learn more about your own privileges, and challenge yourself to feel the discomfort. Being at such a grand and diverse university such as ours comes with a ticket of acceptance that I believe every student should carry with them in their back pocket at all times. If you are unwilling to use that ticket, you should really start to think about the mark that you want to leave on the world.
If Aamer Rahman ever does read this, I want him to know that I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I let my brainwashed social anxiety get in the way of coming to you and learning more about you. I’m sorry I perpetuated the very ideal that I laughed at just moments before I left. And I thank you, for reminding me that even though I know I’ve come a long way, I am only human, and still have a lot to learn. We all do.Overview (3)
Mini Bio (1)
On November 30, 2016, he was nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to be his Secretary of the Treasury. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on February 13, 2017, with a 53-47 vote, after the inauguration of Mr. Trump as the President. He was not considered a particularly controversial nominee. He was previously a banker with Goldman Sachs.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Sri Pence
Spouse (3)
Louise Linton (24 June 2017 - present) Heather Crosby (25 September 1999 - 2014) ( divorced) ( 3 children) Kathryn Leigh McCarver (1992 -?) ( divorced)
Trivia (4)
National Finance Manager for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump
Co-chairman of the now bankrupt Relativity Media.
Secretary of the Treasury, under President Donald Trump [February 2017].
Before they got married, he and Louise Linton co-starred in Warren Beatty's "Rules Don't Apply". Not long after their marriage, they drew controversy for spending taxpayer money to go see an eclipse.Making a Case for the Overqualified
You think I’m qualified for the job? I’m delighted you think so! When do I start? What’s that? You said overqualified? Really, now, that’s quite a compliment. You’re making me blush. I’m sorry – am I missing something? You say “overqualified” like it’s a bad thing. Oh…I see. I’ll just show myself out, then.
In my current combined job search and self-discovery vision quest, I’ve been met on different fronts with the recurring theme that a wealth of experience may, in fact, be a detriment. There is no shortage of “expert” advice, online or otherwise, suggesting that you should hide or neglect to mention years of education and/or employment. If your light is too bright or its spectrum contains too many wavelengths for the position, hide it under the nearest bushel. Okay, honestly, I do get it – target your resume and cover letter toward a specific position. Focus I understand. However, I can’t completely evade the feeling that this gamesmanship of playing hide-and-seek and cherry-picking facts seems disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst. It’s somewhat against the grain of how one is trained to think as a scientist.
Even if one hasn’t been met with this particular o-word per se, it lies not too far beneath concerns that are more openly stated.
Prospective employers are worried that so-called overqualified candidates might jump ship at the first opportunity for a better position elsewhere. They’re concerned that after going through the interview process, they won’t be able to seal the deal because their budget can’t meet the candidate’s salary requirements. They fear their new hire may soon be bored. This sort of thinking is, well, a bit risk-averse, shall we say.
A recent post by Amy Gallo on the Harvard Business Review blog makes a case for taking such a risk. A challenge is posed:
“When making hiring decisions, visionary leaders don’t just focus on the current needs, but on the future.”
So, will the final hiring decision for the position you desire be made by such a visionary leader? Does the future lurch and loom darkly before them, or will they embrace the challenges ahead? I think it’s safe to say that most people would prefer to work for someone in the latter category. A perceived benefit for a hiring manager to adopt this mindset is driven home:
“Hiring overqualified candidates can help you achieve much higher productivity, grow, and achieve opportunities that you may not even be thinking about pursuing right now.” There are other less obvious benefits too: these employees can mentor others, challenge peers to exceed current expectations, and bring in areas of expertise that are not represented at the company.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Honestly, though, don’t most people’s jobs change over time? There are new developments in technology, best practices, knowledge within your discipline, business needs, what have you, that necessitate modifying some aspect of what you do. If you’re adamantly resistant to change, you’ll be left behind. Successful people aren’t usually like that, though. They have amassed their supply of deep, diverse experience because they want to learn all the time – that’s what has driven them from day one. They don’t wait for knowledge to be fed to them; they seek it out like it’s a special treat, and then devour it – nom nom nom nom. They evolve; curiosity and a hunger for knowledge feed their evolution. To behave otherwise invites negative consequences. The philosopher and writer of social commentary Eric Hoffer put it best: “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” This preferred path of continuous learning will reap benefits whether you’re an experienced professional, a new chemistry graduate, or anywhere in between.
Okay, prospective employers, here’s my mission statement. While I’m in your employ, you will have my full attention. I will give my all and strive to grow in the position. All I ask is a chance to do what I do best every day. I will reward your courage with my efforts to contribute and make a difference. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.Blake is the content manager for DailyMTG.com, making him the one you should email if you have thoughts on the website, good or less good (or not good). He's a longtime coverage reporter and hasn't turned down a game of Magic in any format ever.
On March 20, we'll be revealing the full contents of Duel Decks: Mind vs. Might, but given the preview fever the community has had lately, why not a little peek? Just a bit?
Here's what I'll give you this week. First, this is what the packaging looks like:
Those two face cards? Well, rather than squinting and enhancing, how about I just show them to you?
And, when you pick up the latest incarnation of Duel Decks, you'll also get these cool deck boxes to store the decks after mightily tearing through the packaging.
Duel Decks: Mind vs. Might releases March 31, 2017.PART ONE OF THREE
Mr. A. is Mr. A.
THE SECRET ORIGINS of Steve Ditko's Mr. A. began on February 2, 1905, with the birth of Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a.k.a. noted author/ philosopher Ayn Rand.
Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and she came of age during the Russian Revolution of 1917. The newly-installed Bolsheviks seized her fathers business, igniting in her a life-long hatred of communism. Rand knew she wanted to be a writer since the age of nine, and for her inquisitive young mind, the closed nature of Soviet society -- with its midnight raids, enforced uniformity of thought and abhorrence of the individual -- was an intolerable, soul-crushing monstrosity.
Escaping the Soviet orbit, Rand came to America in 1926 to visit relatives. She soon found work, not as a writer, but as an actress. Just eight months after arriving in the land of opportunity, Rand found herself in Hollywood, California, appearing as an extra in Cecil B. DeMilles silent New Testament epic, the original King of Kings (scene from the film pictured below, right).
Rand met actor Frank O'Conner on the King of Kings set, fell madly in love with him, and married him. "You fall in love with a person," Rand once said, "because you regard him or her as a value, and because they contribute to your personal happiness. My heroes will always be reflections of Frank. He is my best proof that people such as I write about can and do exist in real life."
STEVE DITKO - BORN NOVEMBER 2, 1927 Meanwhile, back in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on November 2, 1927, the very pregnant Mrs. Ditko was finally having a baby boy -- a boy to be named Steven. The Ditko family was of Slavic ethnicity. Young Steve Ditko is pictured left as he appeared in high school, not yet sporting the very Peter Parker-like glasses he would later wear.
Ditko's high school would one day serve as the architectural model for Peter Parker's high school. Ditko, like Parker, was something of a nerd, and as a boy he had to endure the constant needling of a bully similar to abusive jock Flash Thompson (pictured right, by Ditko).
Ditko reached manhood just as Ayn Rand began unleashing a series of novels that would inspire a generation by decimating the forces of collectivism with a new and totally uncompromising philosophy that would come to be known as Objectivism. The first of Rand's novels, published when Ditko was just nine years old, was titled WE THE LIVING.
WE THE LIVING by AYN RAND (1936)
Ayn Rand's semi-autobiographical first novel, WE THE LIVING (1936 first edition seen left), is set in her native Russia after the communist revolution. Originally titled "Airtight," the story centers on beautiful young Kira Argounova and her lover Leo Kovalensky (played in a 1942 Italian film by Alida Valli and Rossano Brazzi, shown right) as they struggle to maintain their integrity in oppressive, "airtight" Soviet Russia. Two key quotes from the novel:
No matter how much your Party promises to accomplish, no matter what paradise it plans to bring mankind. Whatever your other claims may be, there's one you can't avoid, one that will turn your paradise into the most unspeakable hell: your claim that man must live for the state.
"Can you sacrifice the few when those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top -- and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shriveled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can't treat them as if they were.
ANTHEM by AYN RAND (1938)
ANTHEM (1938 first edition shown right), a short story by Rand, was published a full decade before George Orwell's similiarly-theme "1984." Both tales are set far in a distant future where "equality" is strictly enforced, and individual thought and modern technology are banned. In this society, even individual names are banned. Anthem's hero is known as Equality 7-2521, and the novella is written as though it was Equality 7-2521's forbidden diary.
This diary represents an individual effort, and so it opens by stating how his closed society would view it: "It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see."
Equality 7-2521 goes on to rediscover the electric light, but his innovation is rejected because he achieved it as an individual, and in this communistic society, "what is not done collectively cannot be good."
Ultimately, E 7-2521 reclaims his individuality, and gives himself a new name: "I have read of a man who lived many thousands of years ago, and of all the names in these books, his is the one I wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and he brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light must suffer. His name was Prometheus." Equality 7-2521 -- the new Prometheus -- is pictured holding the lightning of the Gods on the cover of a pulp reprint of Anthem printed in Famous Fantastic Mysteries (June 1953, seen left).
"I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.... Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: "I will it!"
"The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the gray of it."
"I am done with the monster of "We," the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: I."
THE FOUNTAINHEAD by AYN RAND (1943)
Rand went from appearing in movies to writing them with THE FOUNTAINHEAD (1943 first edition shown below), the story of architect Howard Roark's heroic individual battle against the forces of collective mediocrity. This novel, originally titled "Second-hand Lives," was made into a remarkably faithful movie starring Gary Cooper and Particia Neal (pictured right). Here are some excerpts:
"Here are my rules: What can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape.
Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless its made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man.
"Collectivism... isn't that the god of our century? To act together. To think -- together. To feel -- together. To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. Divide and conquer -- first. But then -- unite and rule."
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ratified a new contract that many members felt was disrespectful. “It was the board’s final offer, we were not satisfied,” said Tracey Johnson, the union’s president. Johnson would not tell The Intercept whether the Columbus Education Association would be endorsing the school board incumbents or the Yes We Can candidates, though she said her union would make its announcement soon.
Regardless of which Democratic Party wing succeeds in the Columbus elections, the Republicans, who have supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, have worked to sharply limit what blue cities like Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati can accomplish on their own. In a lame-duck session at the end of 2016, the Ohio legislature rushed through a measure that prohibits Ohio cities from raising their local minimum wage, joining 22 other states that passed similar “preemption” laws.
“I will say, there are people in Yes We Can who think the Columbus City Council should just take up the challenge — raise the minimum wage — and go fight the state in court,” said House. “However, our city prosecutor has said he doesn’t think it would be successful, in part because there is only one Democrat on the Ohio Supreme Court.” House thinks the move would result in a large, unsuccessful legal expense for local taxpayers, and that perhaps the best route to raising the minimum raise in Columbus is working to elect Democratic state House candidates in rural Ohio.
Upchurch told the Intercept that at the very least, she sees more room for local progressive governments to make noise. “We can raise awareness, I know for a fact that most of our residents don’t even know what’s happening at the state-level around the minimum wage,” the school board candidate said. “Progressive leaders can start these conversations, and then advocate fiercely around them.”
Petrik concedes that Yes We Can’s odds of uprooting the Democratic establishment are a long shot, but winning this year is not necessarily the goal. “Bernie didn’t win, but he shifted the conversation and inspired a movement,” Petrik told The Intercept. “There is a new base of people who’ve become politically engaged, and they understand how broken the system is. We know change takes time, so it might not be this year, and may not be in three years, but we believe that we will win.”The Community Television sector has today received the news it anticipated: Minister for Communication Mitch Fifield has told them there will be no more extensions to spectrum access.
The bad news comes after a last minute extension in December to the end of June.
Despite broad media reforms for the big guns before the parliament, Community TV will lose spectrum access after June 30th 2017, forced to exist online.
It brings to an end 23 years of free-to-air access for the sector.
Organisations such as C31 Melbourne had been arguing that the deadlines imposed were insufficient time to build alternative revenue streams.
C31 General Manager Matthew Field said “It is unfortunate that the Minister is so eager to kick us off air, given the fact that there is no planned use for the spectrum we currently occupy, and also given our genuine efforts to find a solution that would not stand in the way of more efficient spectrum use in the future. The losers are communities underrepresented in mainstream media, young aspiring screen practitioners and audiences who value a free to air channel committed to airing 100% original Australian content. It is an extraordinary decision in the context of the explosion of shopping and racing channels since the advent of digital TV”.
Some Channels such as C44 Adelaide have already moved online, while Sydney’s TVS shut down in 2015 as a result of govt taking back spectrum.
C31 Melbourne has argued that its spectrum access should be aligned with its broadcasting licence, awarded by ACMA through to 2019, but it will now continue through apps and digital after June 30th.
A post shared by Channel 31 Melbourne (@c31melbourne) on Jun 13, 2017 at 8:47pm PDT
RelatedOn this week's episode of #TheWalkingDead, "Go Getters," the spotlight shined bright on a couple of different characters that haven't had much attention since the gruesome season premiere. We got to catch up with Maggie and Sasha and see how they were doing since the recent loss of their loved ones and how they were holding up at the Hilltop. While the episode had most of its focus on those two, Carl was also a prominent character in the episode.
Carl's character doesn't shy away from adulthood as he drives a car (even if it wasn't great driving) and had his first kiss with his friend, Enid. After having to watch Glenn and Abraham get their skulls bashed in by the wrath of Negan and his bat Lucille, Carl is determined in one thing: Killing Negan. At the end of the episode, we see Carl follow his comic book path as he hops into one of the Savior's trucks along with Jesus.
While there's also a lot going on with Carl's character, there's even more going on with the actor who portrays him, Chandler Riggs, outside of The Walking Dead. A collection of recent events have had fans of the show debating whether or not Riggs would be leaving the show, which would mean killing off another long-standing character this season.
Is Chandler Riggs Leaving the Show?
Many signs are pointing towards the conclusion that Chandler Riggs will be leaving The Walking Dead this season. The first reason is for sure a big one. As some of you know, I am a senior in high school and I am currently in the process of applying to and choosing a college. Chandler Riggs is my age and will be following most senior's footsteps and be going to college. Earlier this month, Chandler revealed to the world that he will be attending Auburn University.
While Chandler heading off to college is a clear sign to some fans that he will be leaving the series, some others think differently. Auburn University is located in Alabama and is about an hour and a half away from Atlanta, where The Walking Dead is shot. Of course, Chandler could definitely commute from college but this it would be a chaotic process in terms of scheduling and no matter what, it would limit the amount of screen time our favorite one-eyed, long-haired friend will have moving forward if they decide to keep him alive.
College is always a tough life decision for actors and actresses, especially ones who are involved with big projects. They have to decide whether or not an education is worth it to drop what they are doing and go to a college for four years or continue their career and building their resume. Another hint suggested by social media came from Riggs' father, William, on his Facebook page. William stated that Chandler's seven year contract is complete and that he is very proud of him:
Post by riggstours.
The original post was actually deleted shortly after it was posted and read:
"7 year contract completed! Grateful to AMC, Cast & Crew, TWD fan base and especially Chandler for always being 100% dedicated. Whether it was getting up at 4AM, working in the freezing cold past 2AM, leaving his friends and carefree kiddom behind, scrambling to make up missed schoolwork, he has done it without complaint and always made me proud & amazed to be his dad!"
A lot of the actors on The Walking Dead are currently in re-negotiations of their contracts. In fact, Andrew Lincoln and Norman Reedus supposedly just renewed their contracts with AMC for an eighth season. Whether or not Chandler Riggs will be renewing his contract or not is not confirmed yet. However, if this news doesn't scare you already and if you believe that Riggs and his family will extend their contract with AMC, pay close attention to William Riggs' hashtags on his Instagram post.
You could argue that Chandler will end up extending his contract until you read his father's Instagram caption on the picture posted above. After congratulating his son, he uses the hashtag "freedom," which implies that Chandler is finished with the beloved zombie show.
Even if the Riggs family is planning on Chandler exiting The Walking Dead and moving forward with his life, AMC will likely do everything in its power to keep Carl well and alive on the show. The character is currently undergoing a massive character arc, which only expands as the story moves ahead. In terms of the comic books, Carl is still alive and there's more than enough source material for another season of the character.
See also:
Truthfully, I don't believe the showrunners planned on killing off Carl's character. However, they had to have seen this coming. I am almost positive that they were aware that Riggs had interest in going to college and that this has been discussed multiple times. It is very possible that AMC ends up paying for Chandler's college in addition to the load of cash they are already paying him. Since his college studies would totally clutter the show's shooting schedule, they could negotiate with Auburn very easily.
In the end, history has shown us that when young actors or actresses are leaving for college, the studios usually have a difficult time holding onto them and in the end, they end up releasing the actor. Could this change with Chandler Riggs? The Walking Dead is the most popular series on television and Carl is a main character whose role is only going to expand in the upcoming seasons. Or will Carl meet his demise and shake up the entire dynamic of the show?
How Would His Death Affect The Show?
I'm not saying that Carl is definitely going to die on the show and honestly, I have no clue how this situation is going to be solved. However, let's just assume he does kick the bucket. This would absolutely change the entire show forever. First off, if you thought the TV show not adapting the "All Out War" storyline from the comics would throw off the continuity, killing Carl would be so much worse. The comics are molding Carl into a main protagonist. If The Walking Dead killed off Carl, they would have to totally depart from the source material and steer into a new direction.
Disregarding the source material, what exactly would Carl's death do to the show? If he were to die, it would probably be towards either the mid-season finale or even the end of this season. If I had to put a finger on it, I would guess it would be by Negan. Perhaps things are going well for Rick's group and everything is looking hopeful until Negan pulls in and smashes Carl's brains out. Maybe Carl and Jesus get caught by the Saviors and Negan brings them back as hostages back to Alexandria and Carl's death could occur very similar to Hershell's, where Negan pretends like his death is a negotiation but ends up killing Carl nevertheless and causes a war between the two groups.
Obviously, this would really affect Rick's character as this would really push him forward to fight. This could be the ultimate cause that sparks an "all out war" between Alexandria and the Saviors. However, it's hard to see Rick moving on after Carl dying. He has stated before that he wouldn't know what he would do with Carl — even if Rick does have another child.
In the end, this is all speculation. The chances of The Walking Dead actually getting rid of Carl is very unlikely. Personally, I think that the producers will definitely be able to find a solution to all of this if they really put their minds to it. Carl's death could potentially throw off the balance of the show and if not done correctly, it could end it entirely. Given that, The Walking Dead will do everything to stay a power-heavy TV series and it will not let Auburn University, William Riggs, or anything/anyone else stand its way.
Do you honestly think "The Walking Dead" will be able to keep Chandler Riggs on the show? No way! The contract won't be extended as most soon-to-be college actors end up leaving #RIP
Of course! He is a central character to the show and will eventually become the show's main focus Poll
What do you guys think? Will Chandler Riggs' contract be renewed or will Carl end up taking it up with Lucille? Tell me below!Please enable Javascript to watch this video
TENINO, Wash. – Police are looking for whoever is responsible for leaving racist graffiti covering a Tenino home.
Police report the vandalism occurred sometime between Thursday night and Friday morning, but it only took the community a few hours after learning about it to clean it up.
The Phillips family was out of town when they got the call that their home and truck were left covered in racist words described by community members as pure hate.
“This is the first time I came out here to look at this,” said Marvin Phillips as he took in the smell of fresh paint on the outside of his home.
Hours earlier it still had graffiti scrawled across the sides of his home.
“I was told it was graffiti and nobody wanted to say what it really was,” said Phillips. “They finally said, ‘Marvin, it was the n-word and KKK, stuff like that.’”
Officer Susie Wilson with Tenino Police Department called Phillips to tell him what had happened. “I was very angry, I was embarrassed, I was sad, I was very frustrated,” she said. “This is my town, my community, this is where I patrol.”
The conversation could have ended with Phillips and Wilson, but it didn’t.
“It was like I had to fix it,” said Heidi Russell. Wilson runs the football team that Phillip’s son is a participant in the Tenino Beavers Youth Football & Cheer.
His teammates and others the family did not know, rallied Saturday morning to clean and repair the damage, before the Phillips got home.
“We had to make sure that truck did not look like that, because that’s the truck that takes his son to practice three nights a week,” said Russell.
Russell said a team of 50 volunteers worked over the course of four hours to clean, paint and scrub the home and vehicle.
“Our mayor was doing it, our police officer Susie was doing it,” explained Russell. They erased the hate.
“I would say love conquered this hate and we need a little bit more in this world,” said Russell.
Phillips said his faith in the community is restored. “I don’t think what happened to me exemplified what’s going on in Tenino, I think the outcome of it shows what’s happening in Tenino.”
Police said the damage amounts to a felony hate crime. Anyone with information is urged to contact police.GPS may now reside in everything from our cars to our smart phones, but it once all began as a military application. So it's perhaps ironic, if not entirely shocking, that the head of the U.S. Air Force said today that the military needs to wean itself off dependence on a GPS network vulnerable to jamming and satellite-killing vehicles. DOD Buzz reports that officials have confirmed that GPS has been "jammed or interfered with recently."
Jamming of GPS signals could present a very serious problem for U.S. military hardware, said General Norton Schwartz, Air Force Chief of Staff, during a conference sponsored by Tuft University's Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. For instance, all those smart bombs and cruise missiles depend upon the GPS constellation of satellites for much of their accuracy.
DOD Buzz pointed out that alternatives to GPS include accurate digital maps, if not the good old ink and paper versions. Or a different system could use cell phone tower networks, similar to Apple's iPhone.
Military concerns aside, at least civvies can still look forward to their future of stylish, GPS-enabled clothing inspired by Star Trek.
[via DOD Buzz]2050 words
Black-white differences in physiology can tell a lot about how the two groups have evolved over time. On traits like resting metabolic rate (RMR), basal metabolic rate (BMR), adiposity, heart rate, Vo2 max, etc. These differences in physiological variables between groups, then, explain part of the reason why there are different outcomes in terms of life quality/mortality between the two groups.
Right away, by looking at the average black and average white, you can see that there are differences in somatype. So if there are differences in somatype, then there must be differences in physiological variables, and so, this may be a part of the cause of, say, differing obesity rates between black and white women (Albu et al, 1997) and even PCOS (Wang and Alvero, 2013).
Resting metabolic rate
Resting metabolic rate is your body’s metabolism at rest, and is the largest component of the daily energy budget in modern human societies (Speakman and Selman, 2003). So if two groups, on average, differ in RMR, then one with the lower RMR may have a higher risk of obesity than the group with the higher RMR. And this is what we see.
Black women do, without a shadow of a doubt, have a lower BMR, lower PAEE (physical activity energy expenditure) and TDEE (total daily expenditure) (Gannon, DiPietro, and Poehlman, 2000). Knowing this, then it is not surprising to learn that black women are also the most obese demographic in the United States. This could partly explain why black women have such a hard time losing weight. Metabolic differences between ethnic groups in America—despite living in similar environments—show that a genetic component is responsible for this.
There are even predictors of obesity in post-menopausal black and white women (Nicklas et al, 1999). They controlled for age, body weight and body composition (variables that would influence the results—no one tell me that “They shouldn’t have controlled for those because it’s a racial confound!”) and found that despite having a similar waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and subcutaneous fat area, black women had lower visceral fat than white women, while fasting glucose, insulin levels, and resting blood pressure did not differ between the groups. White women also had a higher Vo2 max, which remained when lean mass was controlled for. White women could also oxidize fat at a higher rate than black women (15.4 g/day, which is 17% higher than black women). When this is expressed as percent of total kcal burned in a resting state, white women burned more fat than black women (50% vs 43%). I will cover the cause for this later in the article (one physiologic variable is a large cause of these differences).
We even see this in black American men with more African ancestry—they’re less likely to be obese (Klimentidis et al 2016). This, too, goes back to metabolic rate. Black American men have lower levels of body fat than white men (Vickery et al, 1988; Wagner and Heyward, 2000). All in all, there are specific genetic variants and physiologic effects, which cause West African men to have lower central (abdominal) adiposity than European men and black women who live in the same environment as black men—implying that genetic and physiologic differences between the sexes are the cause for this disparity. Whatever the case may be, it’s interesting and more studies need to be taken out so we can see how whatever gene variants are *identified* as protecting against central adiposity work in concert with the system to produce the protective effect. Black American men have lower body fat, therefore they would have, in theory, a higher metabolic rate and be less likely to be obese—while black women have the reverse compared to white women—a lower metabolic rate.
Skeletal muscle fiber
Skeletal muscle fibers are the how and why of black domination in explosive sports. This is something I’ve covered in depth. Type II fibers contract faster than type I. This has important implications for certain diseases that black men are more susceptible to. Though the continuous contraction of the fibers during physical activity leads to a higher disease susceptibility in black men—but not white men (Tanner et al, 2001). If you’re aware of fiber type differences between the races (Ama et al, 1986; Entine, 2000; Caeser and Henry, 2015); though see Kerr (2010’s) article The Myth of Racial Superiority in Sports for another view. That will be covered here in the future.
Nevertheless, fiber typing explains racial differences in sports, with somatype being another important variable in explaining racial disparities in sports. Two main variables that work in concert are the somatype (pretty much body measurements, length) and the fiber type. This explains why blacks dominate baseball and football; this explains why ‘white men can’t jump and black men can’t swim’. Physiological variables—not only ‘motivation’ or whatever else people who deny these innate differences say—largely explain why there are huge disparities in these sports. Physiology is important to our understanding of how and why certain groups dominate certain sports.
This is further compounded by differing African ethnies excelling in different running sports depending on where their ancestors evolved. Kenyans have an abundance of type I fibers whereas West Africans have an abundance of type II fibers. (Genetically speaking, ‘Jamaicans’ don’t exist; genetic testing shows them to come from a few different West African countries.) Lower body symmetry—knees and ankles—show that they’re more symmetrical than age-matched controls (Trivers et al, 2014). This also goes to show that you can’t teach speed (Lombardo and Deander, 2014). Though, of course, training and the will to want to do your best matter as well—you just cannot excel in these competitions without first and foremost having the right physiologic and genetic make-up.
Further, although it’s only one gene variant, ACTN3 and ACE explain a substantial percentage of sprint time variance, which could be the difference between breaking a world record and making a final (Papadimitriou et al, 2016). So, clearly, certain genetic variants matter more than others—and the two best studied are ACTN3 and ACE. Some authors, though, may deny the contribution of ACTN3 to elite athletic performance—like one researcher who has written numerous papers on ACTN3, Daniel MacArthur. However, elite sprinters are more likely to carry the RR ACTN3 genotype compared to the XX ACTN3 genotype, and the RR ACTN3 genotype—when combined with type II fibers and morphology—lead to increased athletic performance (Broos et al, 2016). It’s also worth noting that 2 percent of Jamaicans carry the XX ACTN3 genotype (Scott et al, 2010), so this is another well-studied variable that lends to superior running performance in Jamaicans.
In regards to Kenyans, of course when you are talking about genetic reasons for performance, some people don’t like it. Some may say that certain countries dominate in X, and that for instance, North Africa is starting to churn out elite athletes, should we begin looking for genetic advantages that they possess (Hamilton, 2000)? Though people like Hamilton are a minority view in this field, I have read a few papers that there is no evidence that Kenyans possess a pulmonary system that infers a physiologic advantage over whites (Larsen and Sheel, 2015).
People like these three authors, however, are in the minority here and there is a robust amount of research that attests to East African running dominance being genetic/physiologic in nature—though you can’t discredit SES and other motivating variables (Tucker, Onywera, and Santos-Concejero, 2015). Of course, a complex interaction between SES, genes, and environment are the cause of the success of the Kalenjin people of Kenya, because they live and train in such high altitudes (Larsen, 2003), though the venerable Bengt Saltin states that the higher Vo2 max in Kenyan boys is due to higher physical activity during childhood (Saltin et al, 1995).
Blood pressure
The last variable I will focus on (I will cover more in the future) is blood pressure. It’s well known that blacks have higher blood pressure than whites—with black women having a higher BP than all groups—which then leads to other health implications. Some reasons for the cause are high sodium intake in blacks (Jones and Hall, 2006); salt (Lackland, 2014; blacks had a similar sensitivity than whites, but had a higher blood pressure increase); while race and ethnicity was a single independent predictor of hypertension (Holmes et al, 2013). Put simply, when it comes to BP, ethnicity matters (Lane and Lip, 2001).
While genetic factors are important in showing how and why certain ethnies have higher BP than others, social factors are arguably more important (Williams, 1992). He cites stress, socioecologic stress, social support, coping patterns, health behavior, sodium, calcium, and potassium consumption, alcohol consumption, and obesity. SES factors, of course, lead to higher rates of obesity (Sobal and Stunkard, 1989; Franklin et al, 2015). So, of course, environmental/social factors have an effect on BP—no matter if the discrimination or whatnot is imagined by the one who is supposedly discriminated against, this still causes physiologic changes in the body which then lead to higher rates of BP in certain populations.
Poverty does affect a whole slew of variables, but what I’m worried about here is its effect on blood pressure. People who are in poverty can only afford certain foods, which would then cause certain physiologic variables to increase, exacerbating the problem (Gupta, de Wit, and McKeown, 2007). Whereas diets high in protein predicted lower BP in adults (Beundia et al, 2015). So this is good evidence that the diets of blacks in America do increase BP, since they eat high amounts of salt, low protein and high carb diets.
Still, others argue that differences in BP between blacks and whites may not be explained by ancestry, but by differences in education, rather than genetic factors (Non, Gravlee, and Mulligan, 2012). Their study suggests that educating black Americans on the dangers and preventative measures of high BP will reduce BP disparities between the races. This is in-line with Williams (1992) in that the social environment is the cause for the higher rates of BP. One hypothesis explored to explain why this effect with education was greater in blacks than whites was that BP-related factors, such as stress, poverty and racial discrimination (remember, even if no racial discrimination occurs, any so-called discrimination is in the eye of the beholder so that will contribute to a rise in physiologic variables) and maybe social isolation may be causes for this phenomenon. Future studies also must show how higher education causes lower BP, or if it only serves as other markers for the social environment. Nevertheless, this is an important study in our understanding of how and why the races differ in BP and it will go far to increase our understanding of this malady.
Conclusion
This is not an exhaustive list—I could continue writing about other variables—but these three are some of the most important as they are a cause for higher mortality rates in America. Understanding the hows and whys of these variables will have us better equipped to help those who suffer from diseases brought on by these differences in physiological factors.
The cause for some of these physiologic differences come down to evolution, but still others may come down to the immediate obesogenic environment (Lake and Townshend, 2006) which is compounded by lower SES. Since high carbs diets increase BP, this explains part of the reason why blacks have higher BP, along with social and genetic factors. Muscle fiber typing is set by the second trimester, and no change is seen after age 6 (Bell, 1980). Resting metabolic rate gap differences between black and white women can be closed, but not completely, if black women were to engage in exercise that use their higher amounts of type II muscle fibers (Tanner et al, 2001). This research is important to understand differences in racial mortality; because when we understand them then we can begin to theorize on how and why we see these disparities.
Physiologic differences between the races are interesting, they’re easily measurable and they explain both disparities in sports and mortality by different diseases. Once we study these variables more, we will be better able to help people with these variables—race be dammed. Race is a predictor here, only because race is correlated with other variables that lead to negative health outcomes. So once we understand how and why these differences occur, then we can help others with similar problems—no matter their race.
AdvertisementsHer new guns are installed. Her light-gray paint job has dried. Her airplanes are flying and her engines are turning. Thirteen years after she was purchased from Ukraine half-complete and lacking engines, the Chinese navy's very first aircraft carrier is ready to set sail from Dalian shipyard in northeast China. The former Soviet carrier Varyag, renamed *Shi Lang *in Chinese service, could begin sea trials this summer.
Just how worried should the world be?
The answer depends on who you ask. To China's closest neighbors, the prospect of a carrier speeding heavily-armed Chinese jet fighters across the world's oceans is an alarming one. But the U.S. Navy, the world's leading carrier power and arguably the Chinese navy's biggest rival, seems oddly unaffected.
There are good reasons for the Pentagon's calm. For starters, Shi Lang, pictured above, could be strictly a training carrier, meant to pave the way for bigger, more capable carriers years or decades in the future.
But even if she is meant for combat, there's probably little reason to fear Shi Lang. A close study of the 990-foot-long vessel – plus the warships and airplanes she'll sail with – reveals a modestly-sized carrier lacking many of the elements that make U.S. flattops so powerful.
When Shi Lang finally gets underway in coming months, she will boost the ability of the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) to patrol airspace over contested sea zones, provided they're not too far from the Chinese mainland. And more to the point, she'll look good doing it. "I think the change in perception by the region will be significant," Adm. Robert Willard, commander of U.S. Pacific forces, told the Senate in April.
Willard said he is "not concerned" about the ship's *military *impact.
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Carrier Census ————–
Shi Lang will sail into a Pacific Ocean teeming with carriers. First, there are the American carriers: five nuclear-powered supercarriers home-ported in California, Washington and Japan, plus six assault ships in California and Japan. Between them, the American carriers displace no less than 700,000 tons and can carry 600 aircraft. "Our Navy can carry twice as many aircraft at sea as all the rest of the world combined," outgoing U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pointed out last year.
(In comparison, the Chinese flattop displaces just 60,000 tons and carries no more than 40 planes and choppers.)
Japan's got two 18,000-ton assault ships, plus another on the way. Today they carry just a few helicopters, but it's possible the ships will eventually embark vertical-landing F-35B stealth fighters. The same applies to South Korea's four planned 14,000-ton carriers and the two 30,000-ton Australian flattops still under construction.
Thailand's 12,000-ton Chari Naruebet is an outlier: too small for more than a handful of aircraft, but nevertheless capable of carrying the country's ancient, vertical-landing Harrier jets.
India and Russia both operate full-fledged carriers with jet fighters aboard. Russia's Admiral Kuznetsov is actually Shi Lang's older sister. Her dozen Su-33 fighters are just rustier versions of the Chinese J-15. Lately, Kuznetsov has spent most of her time in the Mediterranean. India's 30,000-ton *Viraat *and her 30 Harriers and choppers tend to stick to the Indian Ocean.
Of the 22 flattops already plying the Pacific or coming soon, none belongs to a country that China can consider a close ally. Today it's not uncommon to see American carriers sailing in mixed formations with carriers from Japan, South Korea, Thailand and India. Beijing can only dream of assembling that kind of international sea power, with or without Shi Lang.
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Empty Nest ———-
A carrier is only as potent as her air wing, a fact the Pentagon appreciates. That's why the U.S. Navy spends an average of $15 billion a year on new airplanes – about the same as the Air Force. Today, a Navy supercarrier sails with a 70-strong air wing. F/A-18 fighters, EA-6B or EA-18G radar-jamming planes, E-2 radar planes, C-2 cargo-haulers and H-60 helicopters are all part of the mix. The aircraft work as a team, patrolling, tracking and attacking targets below, on and above the surface and moving people and supplies to and from the carrier.
Shi Lang will not possess anything close to that mix of aircraft and capabilities. China's J-15 naval fighter, pictured above, is a rough analogue of the F-18, but with a shorter range, less sophisticated sensors and fewer weapons options. The Ka-28 helicopter hunts submarines like the H-60 does.
But that's it. The PLAN doesn't have radar-jamming jets, carrier-based airlifters or fixed-wing radar planes. Rumors of a Chinese copy of the E-2 seem unfounded, for an E-2 would require a steam-powered catapult to boost it into the air, and Shi Lang lacks even that basic equipment. To fill that huge gap in Shi Lang's air wing, China is testing a Z-8 helicopter fitted with a radar. But such a set-up offers only a fraction of the E-2's range and endurance.
The disparity will only increase in the next decade, as the U.S. Navy finally deploys jet-powered killer drones, early versions of which are already undergoing testing in the California desert.
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Defenseless ———–
The same limitations apply to Shi Lang's escorts.
To protect its $10 billion carriers and their air wings from aerial attack, the U.S. Navy assigns several of its 83 destroyers and cruisers to sail alongside each flattop. The escorting warships boast super-sophisticated Aegis radars and carry 100 or more Surface-to-Air Missiles per ship. An American carrier battle group possesses more high-powered radars and at-sea missiles than most other countries' entire naval fleets.
The Chinese navy has just two destroyers that come close to matching America's Aegis warships, although more are under construction. The Type 052C destroyer, pictured above, carries half as many missiles as a U.S. destroyer, and its radar is unlikely to match the Aegis' ability to closely track scores of targets simultaneously. On the surface, Shi Lang will be all but defenseless, by U.S. standards.
Underwater, the situation is even worse. American carriers travel with an unseen companion: at least one nuclear-powered attack submarine. The sub's job is to patrol ahead of the carrier, screening for hostile warships – especially other submarines. After all, submarines are the world's most lethal ship-killers.
The PLAN has two Type 093 submarines capable of long-range patrols. Again, that's too few for carrier-escort duty in addition to the other missions likely assigned to the Chinese attack-submarine force. But the bigger problem is communications. To coordinate surface ships and submarines, the Americans and other advanced navies rely on a mix of Very Low Frequency radios installed aboard special aircraft, plus higher-frequency radios for talking from ship to sub.
China hasn't perfected that system. “Due to the limitations of submarine communications technology, the PLAN currently can only exercise relatively limited tactical control over its submarines,” Garth Heckler, Ed Francis and James Mulvenon wrote in the 2007 book China’s Future Nuclear Submarine Force.
For that reason, Shi Lang probably cannot rely on Chinese submarines for protection from other submarines. That realization evoked a rather pointed comment from National War College professor Bernard Cole. “As a former Navy man, I’d love to see them [the Chinese] build a fleet of aircraft carriers which, increasingly, are just good sub targets,” Cole said.
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Potemkin Carrier —————-
Leaving aside her modest size compared to American carriers, her incomplete air wing and escort force and the fact that she'll sail without the company of allied flattops, Shi Lang could be even less of a threat than her striking appearance implies. Shi Lang's greatest potential weakness could be under her skin, in her Ukrainian-supplied engines.
Powerplants – that is, jet engines for airplanes, turbines for ships – are some of the most complex, expensive and potentially troublesome components of any weapon system. Just ask the designers of the Pentagon's F-35 stealth fighter and the U.S. Navy's San Antonio-class amphibious ships. Both have been nearly sidelined by engine woes.
China has struggled for years to design and build adequate powerplants for its ships and aircraft. Although Chinese aerospace firms are increasingly adept at manufacturing airframes, they still have not mastered motors. That's why the new WZ-10 attack helicopter was delayed nearly a decade, and why there appear to be two different prototypes for the J-20 stealth fighter. One flies with reliable Russian-made AL-31F engines; the other apparently uses a less trustworthy Chinese design, the WS-10A.
For Shi Lang, China reportedly purchased turbines from Ukraine. Though surely superior to any ship engines China could have produced on its own, the Ukrainian models might still be unreliable by Western standards. Russia's Kuznetsov, also fitted with Ukrainian turbines, has long suffered propulsion problems that have forced her to spend most of her 30-year career tied to a pier for maintenance. When she does sail, a large tugboat usually tags along, just in case the carrier breaks down.
If Shi Lang is anything like her sister, she could turn out to be a naval version of the mythical "Potemkin village" – an impressive facade over a rickety interior.
"As China's interests expand globally, the Chinese navy needs to go further outbound, and an aircraft carrier is needed," said Arthur Ding, from National Chengchi University in Taiwan. If so, China might have to wait for the carrier *after *the potentially hollow Shi Lang.
Photos: PLAN, Chinese Internet, U.S. Navy
See Also:When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled |
associated with increasing income inequality, this distributional effect sets up an adverse feedback loop. The increase in inequality engendered by financial openness and austerity might itself undercut growth, the very thing that the neoliberal agenda is intent on boosting. There is now strong evidence that inequality can significantly lower both the level and the durability of growth.
The evidence of the economic damage from inequality suggests that policymakers should be more open to redistribution than they are. Of course, apart from redistribution, policies could be designed to mitigate some of the impacts in advance—for instance, through increased spending on education and training, which expands equality of opportunity (so-called predistribution policies). And fiscal consolidation strategies—when they are needed—could be designed to minimize the adverse impact on low-income groups.
Since the late 1980s and the so-called Washington Consensus, neoliberalism — essentially the idea that free trade, open markets, privatisation, deregulation, and reductions in government spending designed to increase the role of the private sector are the best ways to boost growth — has predominated in the thinking of the world's biggest economies and international organisations like the IMF, and the World Bank. However since the 2008 financial crisis, there has been a groundswell of opinion in both economic and political circles to suggest that the neoliberal consensus is the right way forward for the world.
As one of the report's authors, Ostry, put it in an interview with the Financial Times after the article's publication: "There are a lot of people thinking the same thing at this point, that basically some aspects of the neoliberal agenda probably need a rethink," adding "The crisis said: 'The way we've been thinking can't be right'."
Clearly, one article by three economists inside the IMF doesn't suggest that the fund is about to totally shun neoliberalism and abandon its commitment to the Washington Consensus — in fact, earlier this week, deputy managing director David Lipton gave a speech defending the values of globalisation, and calling protectionism "self-defeating." It does, however, throw up an interesting insight into divisions developing within the IMF about the future of global economics.
In his FT interview, Ostry added that even being allowed to put the article in an official IMF publication showed how much things are starting to move away from the orthodoxy in terms of economic thinking. The post definitely doesn't represent the "mainstream culture" of the IMF he said, adding that "cultures are slow moving things."Did you seriously think that Lindsey Graham would tell the truth about debt and deficits?
Did you think the soon to be retired Ron Paul would tell you the truth about the US currency? He's into the gold standard and Bircher-type monetary conspiracies.
Maybe Sen. Saxby Chambliss? Nope. He's into the Greece thing too. So is Michele Bachmann.
OK it's time for some truth telling. (I know this article came out in October, but it can never be posted enough.) Are you ready cause here it is via Forbes: No, The United States Will Not Go Into A Debt Crisis, Not Now, Not Ever
If there’s one article of faith in Washington (and elsewhere), it’s the idea that the United States might get into a debt crisis if it doesn’t get its fiscal house in order. This is not true. The reason why it’s not true is because we live in a fiat currency system, where the United States government can create an infinite number of dollars at no cost to meet its obligations. A Treasury bill is a promise that the government will give you US dollars–something that the United States government can produce infinitely and at no cost. That’s the reason why interest rates on United States debt have only gone down even as the debt has ballooned. That’s the reason why Great Britain has very low rates on its debt despite having very high debt-to-GDP. That’s the reason why Japan has an astounding debt-to-GDP ratio and still enjoys some of the lowest rates ever. Investors have bet for so long that there would be a run on Japanese debt and have ended up so ruined that in financial circles that trade is called “the Widowmaker”. (Here’s a more detailed analysis by my former colleague Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider.)
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You don’t have to take my word for it. How about Alan Greenspan? He said (PDF): ”[A] government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency. A fiat money system, like the ones we have today, can produce such claims without limit.”
It's been so frustrating listening, reading and watching the travesty about debt, deficits and fiscal cliffs being played out and hardly ever a mention about the TRUTH.
Why am I writing this? After all it’s already common knowledge among economists, Fed officials, and an increasing number of sophisticated investors.Maybe so, but it’s still not common knowledge among politicians and among the general public. A lot of people still think that the US is under some risk of one day becoming like Greece, and it’s distorting our public debate. It’s especially distorting it on the Right, where hysteria about deficits, and debt, and becoming like Greece has reached a fever pitch. Paul Ryan, especially, has framed his entire message on entitlement-cutting on the flawed premise that the US needs to cut its entitlement or it will suffer a debt crisis. This message, in turn, has infected broad swathes of the conservative movement (including very smart people in it), a movement that I consider myself a member of and want to see in strong intellectual health.
This is from a conservative my friends. Is it any wonder that more of them have not taken up his call of truthiness? A whole swath of Dems need to read this piece also. It's very easy to understand.After spending months campaigning for the Remain side, I was distressed by the decision of the British people to vote to leave the European Union. Throughout the campaign, I argued strongly that leaving the EU would leave Britain a poorer country and diminish our influence on the world stage. This remains my view, and I deeply regret the situation we now find ourselves in. However, I accept the outcome of the referendum.
The British people voted for departure but they did not vote for a destination. I totally support the demand for a referendum on the terms of the final negotiated deal, to give people the chance to approve or reject the deal and ensure that the final deal has a democratic mandate.
I fully believe that Remain voters and politicians across all parties must play a key role in influencing negotiations, to ensure that we avoid the damage to the economy and the country’s international status that a Hard Brexit would bring. My personal preference is for the Government to fight for full access to, and preferably membership of, the Single Market, and I will continue, alongside my Liberal Democrat colleagues, to seek to achieve this. I continue to give my full support to Open Britain’s campaign “to keep Britain tolerant, inclusive and open to Europe and the world”.
The Liberal Democrats are united in our opposition to a damaging hard Brexit, united on the Single Market, and united in our determination to make sure the British people have the final say over the final Brexit deal. I fully support our leader Tim Farron and my colleagues inside and outside parliament in campaigning for these outcomes.
However, I have already committed, in public, not to block the triggering of Article 50. It’s no secret that I have an honest disagreement with the party’s position to vote against the triggering of Article 50 unless the Government guarantees a referendum on the terms of the final Brexit deal. Given the vote of the British people on June 23rd, I am not prepared to vote to block the triggering of Article 50 when the bill is brought before Parliament.
Irrespective of my views of the outcome of the referendum, there is a democratic principle at stake, and I feel very strongly about this. When we voted to hold the referendum, we did not set out any preconditions for triggering Article 50, in the event of a vote to leave the EU. I do not see how we can introduce them now. I have therefore made the difficult decision to abstain on this vote.
I will continue to fight, alongside my Liberal Democrat colleagues, for a Britain which is open, tolerant and inclusive, standing tall in Europe and the rest of the world.
Norman LambUnited Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay (Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre)
In a new hard-hitting draft report, Navi Pillay, the United Nation's High Commissioner for Human Rights, has thrown the weight of the U.N. General Assembly behind the idea that digital privacy is a human right, and one under attack amid disclosures of surveillance by "signals intelligence agencies," not only the United States' National Security Agency but the United Kingdom's General Communications Headquarters.
High Commissioner Pillay's worry? That technology-enabled violations of personal privacy are no longer, if they ever were, rare events that affect already marginalized populations. "Examples of overt and covert digital surveillance in jurisdictions around the world have proliferated," reads the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights report, called "The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age," "with governmental mass surveillance emerging as a dangerous habit rather than exceptional measure."
The unnerving dynamic that Pillay identifies is that as "the Internet has become both ubiquitous and increasingly intimate," the digital tools like mass data storage that can serve to amplify the online experience have dropped in price, which can also make routine surveillance less costly to governments. "The technological platforms upon which global political, economic, and social life are increasingly reliant are not only vulnerable," reads the report, "they may actually help facilitate it." The phrase that Pillay uses to describe the product of a reliance upon modern technologies and the degree to which they can be monitored is "chilling efficiency."
And the absence of technological restraints has revealed the fact that in some countries data collection is being allowed to operate largely unfettered by judgment or legal restrictions, the report finds. Often the mechanisms in place, it argues, amount to "an exercise in rubber-stamping."
If the tone seems particularly sharp for a U.N. official, it can be seen as the product of Pillay's long-standing interest in the often hidden side of the relationship between governments and their people.
Pillay is a South African, and before joining that country's High Court she served as a defense attorney on behalf of anti-apartheid activists, people who were often the subject of government watching; in 2005, a Freedom of Information Act request in Britain revealed, for example, that the Special Branch of that country's police had engaged in extensive surveillance of those engaged in efforts to end racial oppression in South Africa.
But Pillay has sympathy for those unwilling to wait decades and master official channels to reveal who's watching them. She has defended the disclosures of Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance, arguing in favor of sparing him judicial retribution and saying, "We owe a great deal to him for revealing this kind of information."
In her work illuminating potential risks of digital government observation, Pillay has the backing of the U.N. General Assembly. Last December, the body passed Resolution 68/167, which called upon the High Commissioner for Human Rights to issue the newly released report on "the protection and promotion of the right to privacy in the context of domestic and extraterritorial surveillance and/or the interception of digital communications and the collection of personal data."
Pillay, for her part, has suggested that her office stands on firm footing in including questions of digital surveillance as part of their mandate. In issuing its online privacy work, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has cited Article 17 of the "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."
Issued in 1966, some three years before the U.S. Department of Defense would even begin work on ARPANET, the Internet's predecessor, the covenant establishes that "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation."
In recent years, of course, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other world leaders have raised objections to the reported use of surveillance technologies to track the communications of their people and, in some cases, themselves.
And in her report, Pillay argues in favor of putting in place, through legislatures and through the courts, remedies for the wider swath of the population that might now find its privacy breached.
"But," the report concludes, "the best remedy of all is to establish strong legal protections to ensure that such violations do not happen in the first place."It’s the stuff of a thousand RPGs: you’ve braved the Barren Pass and crossed the Aching Plains and now, hours since you last spoke to a coherent NPC, you’re finally standing before a city teeming with literally tens of characters, each bursting to tell you at length about the history of their people.
Getting to discover the politics and personalities of a new location should feel like a reward, but the same formulaic text dump from city to city can make you feel awfully weary. Being NPCsplained at with screeds of exposition and feeling you’re taking little meaningful part in it all, game dialogue can make you want to run back into the hills.
It’s easy to blame writers for this, but like every other aspect of videogame development, the craft of game writing is more complex than you’d think. As Adam Hines, co-founder of Oxenfree developer Night School Studio, says, "Writing for games and writing for anything else is a totally different job. It’s more like trying to solve a very complex mathematical problem than it is a pure writing exercise."
Writing for games is more like trying to solve a very complex mathematical problem than it is a pure writing exercise. Adam Hines, Oxenfree
Oxenfree, a modern adventure game built around a group of teens chatting their way through a supernatural mystery, is a prime example of how game dialogue is getting better: more reactive, more natural, more involved, through a combination of game design and writing itself. But that doesn’t mean that game history isn’t already littered with beautifully crafted conversations which succeed at scene-setting, character-introducing, goal-orientating, and instruction-giving. Oh, and also entertaining. Game dialogue needs to do a lot.
The form must be functional
When Chris Avellone—writer and designer of games from Planescape: Torment to Fallout: New Vegas and recent free agent —writes dialogue, he thinks about it performing three fundamental things. First, the conversation needs a purpose. If it’s with a merchant, then they need to provide that service, and quickly.
Second, the dialogue needs to be aware of the narrative happening in the nearby area as well as the overarching story. "If the Enclave is encroaching on a community in Fallout, even a simple merchant can say, 'If you’ve come for supplies, you’d best hurry, won’t be much left after the Enclave arrives.’ That tells the local narrative, and the larger narrative."
And third, dialogue has to be as aware of the player’s actions as possible. "If you’ve just wiped out the Enclave, then you’d script the merchant’s opening node to something else: 'Hey, you’re the one that kicked the Enclave’s ass. Anything I have in stock; for you, half off.’"
For Avellone, the third part is where he finds a lot of the challenge in writing. It’s not just about crafting wonderful words, but making sure they acknowledge the player and react accordingly, and that means a lot of checking and accounting. Has the player already done the quest the NPC talks about? Has the player joined an enemy faction? "I have a checklist I go through for each character to try and make sure I haven’t forgotten anything," Avellone says. "It’s usually a matter of repeating the mantra, 'if-then-else,' again and again."
Those are the basics for dialogue in which you’re rooted to the spot, the typical way games attempt to represent the messy and responsive nature of human conversation. But some games attempt to make it more naturalistic. GTA IV, for instance, has characters who ride with you and deliver story while you’re driving to the next location, and that dialogue changes if you’re restarting a mission.
You don’t get choices, but the experience feels truer to life than a talking head and folds neatly into GTA’s existing gameflow. And in fact, it’s an idea that fits with classic scriptwriting technique.
"Aaron Sorkin said one of his writing tricks was always to have the characters talk about two things at once," says Hines. "Never have them only talking about one subject. In a game design-y way we found that really worked in Oxenfree, where if you’re having a conversation and doing something that isn’t directly tied to that conversation it feels good and like you’re patting your head and rubbing your chest. It just feels very..." He pauses, looking for the right word, but dialogue works so subtly that it’s hard to find one. "...Nice."
Having led writing on The Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands at Telltale Games, Hines wanted to reflect Sorkin’s trick, making an adventure game in which you can walk and talk at the same time. "It very quickly became apparent why every other adventure game in history is written as: you go up and you click on an interact-able and then you stand there and you have a little scene and then you regain freedom again," he admits.
That’s because players, whether they think they do or not, need dialogue to give them information about what they’re meant be doing, where they’re going, and why. In Oxenfree, you can often interrupt, choose not to respond, or simply not be listening. Part of the solution was to make the player feel like they are Alex, Oxenfree’s main character. "It’s important to us that you don’t have to think about the choices you’re making because they’re your natural responses," says Hines.
And with that comes the challenge of delivering all the exposition required to feel secure in your understanding of Alex’s world, something it solves with the device of having a stepbrother character who Alex hasn’t met before. She can relay to him (and therefore us) information about the island they’re visiting and introduce him to her friends, and it feels natural and part of the plot.
Oxenfree uses the multiple-choice format that most dialogue-based games do: dialogue options that branch off into new areas of a greater tree. Managing these trees, ensuring the player flows through them smoothly and gets the right info and tone of response for their choices, makes writing something of a technical job. "In many respects, it’s just like designing a UI," says Avellone.
Better tools can therefore aid better writing. Avellone had to use a scripter to build conversations from Word into Fallout 2, but now dev tools often allow authoring directly in the game engine, making writing faster and playtesting a whole lot easier. As a measure of how important tools were to Oxenfree, its lead engineer, Bryant Cannon, put nearly eight months of the first year of development into creating the tool in which the dialogue was written. Resembling a flow chart, it connects all the dialogue and animations in a visual way.
Oxenfree's custom dialogue tool. This is how you make natural conversations.
But it’s a creative job as well as a technical one, and tools will only go so far. "The sad thing is that the trick is just to write a shit-ton," says Hines.
And there are practical limits to how complex a conversation can be. "If the designer can’t navigate their own conversation, it’s generally the first sign," says Avellone. "This usually happens when they’ve made the conversation too organic, have too many branches, or they don’t use chokepoints when they should." Chokepoints is the name Avellone gives to major branches in a conversation where you’re given many dialogue options, all of which will return you to that chokepoint so you can explore the rest.
And aside from the creative challenge of constructing a dialogue tree, there’s the cognitive challenge for the player trying to digest it all. "There’s a practical limit to how much text a player should be presented with, and this is even affected by if the conversation is voiced or not, since that has rules as well," Avellone says.
The Witcher 3 set a new bar for engaging dialogue and animation, and was comfortable with long conversations. It'll be hard to top. But what about dialogue out in the open world?
The future of dialogue: more ambient, more reactive
Not all dialogue in games is one-to-one. An increasingly important kind is ambient dialogue, barked by NPCs as you move through the world, giving it a sense of life. One of the ambitions Ubisoft Montreal had for Watch Dogs 2 was "to create a non-player-centric universe," according to game writer Leanne Taylor-Giles. "It naturally feels more realistic since that’s the way we, as humans, largely inhabit the world."
In Watch Dogs 2, civilians notice you running around with a gun out or if you’re doing something weird, like hiding next to a wall in broad daylight. But it’s in the details that the sense that the city is made up of people with their own agendas and problems: "For the example of the player running around with their gun out, things might get more heated if one of the nearby civilians happens to be an NRA member, for example."
The challenge for Taylor-Giles was to identify situations that people would realistically react to, as well as not writing lines for situations that are so specific that most players would never hear them. "Those moments can be great, and they are! But when you’re working with a large number of NPCs any additions become exponential." As ever, cost-versus-impact is what really decides what goes into a game.
These dynamic systems feel like they might be the future of game dialogue. "Personally, I love systems that can chain and which thereby tell a story, regardless of whether the player arrives at the beginning, the middle, or the end," says Taylor-Giles.
I often admire writers who don’t use words at all. They just work with the environment artists to build the story in the scene. Chris Avellone
And dynamic storytelling like this doesn’t even necessarily need to be systems-led, or actually be told through dialogue. "I often admire writers who don’t use words at all. They just work with the environment artists to build the story in the scene," says Avellone. "There’s a lot you can say with just an arrangement of environment props and inventory items."
"But the emphasis also needs to be on readability," says Taylor-Giles. "Whether or not the player knows exactly what’s going on, they should be able to come up with a version of events that seems logical and realistic for the world their character is inhabiting."
In other words, developers still need to be sure that players are absorbing the information they need. But one thing that’s helping is steadily changing player expectations. Not all games give strict stories to follow and goals to accomplish, and players are becoming more comfortable with the idea of open-endedness, in which dialogue can more freely be part of the experience rather than a straightforward means to an end.
"We’re now, just in the last few years, getting out of that box and having games where there isn’t a goal and you’re hanging out and having fun and experiencing the art of them," says Hines.
As you enter that city after your long journey, what if you know that its secrets will organically unfurl as you explore it on your own terms, less being told and more feeling your way through it? Now that’d be a reward.In the public feud between Anthony Scaramucci and Reince Priebus, what hasn’t been fully explained is why Scaramucci so dislikes the president’s now-former chief of staff — a man he alternates between calling “Reince Penis” and “Rancid Penis,” according to an adviser to the White House.
The acrimony first surfaced during the presidential transition. The two men had been cordial before then. They met six years ago, when Scaramucci was a fundraiser for presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Priebus was chair of the Republican National Committee. They interacted peaceably during Donald Trump’s campaign as Scaramucci made the rounds on television and at donor events.
After Trump’s victory, Priebus was named chief of staff, and Scaramucci, according to someone close to the transition, was assured that he was also in line for a big position within the administration. (Sources for this story requested anonymity to discuss the details of sensitive conversations.)
While preparing for his move into government, Scaramucci struck a deal — which is still under regulatory scrutiny — to sell his stake in his hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, to Chinese conglomerate HNA Group and another company. He assumed that he’d be put in charge of the public liaison office, a job that Valerie Jarrett held in the Obama administration. He had it all mapped out, according to the White House adviser. He identified 2,500 influential business leaders across the United States and had come up with a clever name for them: Trump Team 2,500. He believed these people would help pressure Congress into supporting the president’s agenda.
Joshua Roberts / Reuters Priebus blocked Scaramucci from getting a top administration job in January, telling the president that Scaramucci "played" Trump, according to a source. Scaramucci now calls Priebus "Rancid Penis."
But Scaramucci’s plans were foiled in early January. That’s when Priebus, according to a confidant of both Scaramucci and the president, told Trump, “He played you.”
“How’s that?” Trump asked Priebus, according to the same source, who has spoken to several people within the White House about the conversation.
Priebus then told Trump that he felt Scaramucci had been offered too much for SkyBridge by HNA Group. The deal, he implied, smelled bad — as if the Chinese might expect favors from within the administration for that inflated price. The source also said that Priebus mentioned there was email traffic between Scaramucci and the Chinese proving this.
The White House rejected this version of events and declined to make Priebus available for comment.
Ultimately, Scaramucci was not offered the job.
But he didn’t give up. He asked Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner to get him in the door. According to two people familiar with the conversation, Kushner assured him that he didn’t think Scaramucci was “shady,” adding, “But it’s not what I think that matters.” Priebus had already planted the seed of doubt in Trump’s mind.
Scaramucci then tried presidential adviser Steve Bannon, who, according to those same two people, explained that he was too busy attempting to save the job of another adviser, Stephen Miller, to spend time or capital trying to help Scaramucci.
A friend of Scaramucci’s said he complained that some in the White House assumed his finances were suspect because he’s of Italian descent. Scaramucci also took Priebus’ behavior as a sign that Priebus was feeling insecure about his own job. “I will try things the Washington way first,” Trump had told his inner circle when he first named Priebus chief of staff, according to the confidant of Scaramucci and Trump. The implication was clear: If the Washington way did not work, then the New York real estate way would take over.
Finally, Scaramucci went to Keith Schiller, the president’s longtime bodyguard. He asked Schiller to put him on the phone with Trump so that he could lodge his complaints directly. The president listened, according to their mutual friend, and said he would find a position for Scaramucci as soon as he could.
In June, Scaramucci was appointed to be senior vice president and chief strategy officer of the Export-Import Bank. But the Priebus incident lingered in his mind.
So, on July 11, when Donald Trump Jr. found himself in trouble for holding a meeting with several people close to the Russian government the previous summer, Scaramucci sensed an opportunity. According to the mutual friend, Scaramucci told everyone he spoke to that day, including the president, that he was sure the person who divulged details of the meeting was Priebus. Scaramucci made the case — not necessarily backed by evidence — that with all the leaks targeting the administration, it was odd that only a few had hit Priebus directly.
Ten days later, Scaramucci was named the new White House communications director. The announcement noted that he would be reporting directly to the president — an unusual move that leapfrogged over the chief of staff.
Priebus balked, insisting that Scaramucci report to him. But Trump overrode his chief of staff. Not only was the hedge fund manager who had known Trump for 21 years officially in charge of the press shop, but he was also set to oversee the reorganization of the White House. Scaramucci seemed to have his revenge.
At least until Thursday evening. In an interview with The New Yorker, Scaramucci called Priebus “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic” and explained how he, unlike Bannon, is “not trying to suck my own cock.” Now, Scaramucci’s future at the White House is less clear, even if Trump reportedly “loved” the outburst.
Two sources close to the president said the very traits that have so endeared Scaramucci to Trump — tenacity, frankness, limitless swagger — could end up endangering his new job if he continues to steal news cycles from the president. But those same sources said he’s safe for now.
“Mark my words: Anthony will ultimately be an exceptionally good communications director,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump aide who still talks to the president. “His career proves he’s a master communicator. I hope he keeps his perfect chin up.”
On Friday, the news broke that Priebus had been ousted as chief of staff.One of the more influential studies that's often used to argue for austerity has come in for an extensive new critique. (Update: The authors respond down below.)
The paper in question is Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff's famous 2010 study "Growth in a Time of Debt," which found that economic growth severely suffers when a country's public debt level reaches 90 percent of GDP. That 90 percent figure has often been cited in the past few years as one big reason why countries must trim their deficits — even if their economies are still weak.
But a new critique (pdf) by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin claims that this result may need revision. For one, the economists argue that Reinhart and Rogoff excluded three episodes of high-debt, high-growth nations — Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in the late 1940s. Second, they argue, Reinhart and Rogoff made some contestable assumptions about weighting different historical episodes.
Now, those are two methodological objections. But there's also a third problem, as Mike Konczal details here. Reinhart and Rogoff appear to have made an error with one of their Excel spreadsheet formulas. By typing AVERAGE(L30:L44) at one point instead of AVERAGE(L30:L49), they left out Belgium, a key counterexample:
This discrepancy wasn't caught earlier because Reinhart and Rogoff hadn't made their full underlying data public. They only shared their spreadsheet with the Herndon, Ash and Pollin after the latter three tried to replicate the initial results and failed.
Taken together, those three changes lead to a different analysis. Herndon, Ash, and Pollin conclude that "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent as as published in Reinhart and Rogoff."
It's worth emphasizing, however, that the Excel coding error itself is only responsible for a small portion of this difference in results — about 0.3 percentage points. So the spreadsheet mistake, by itself, does not appear to be fatal. Here's the difference between the two studies in chart form:
Chart: Jared Bernstein
A few extra points:
--This is not the first critique of Reinhart-Rogoff. As Dylan Matthews explained here, other economists have argued that the initial paper got the causality backward. Countries have high debt-to-GDP ratios because they have slow growth, rather than the other way around. This is a far more substantive criticism than the debate over the precise numbers above.
--Reinhart has responded to the critique of causality this way: "We’re quite aware that you have causality going in both directions,” she told Dylan. “But please point out to me what episodes from 1800 to the present have we had advanced economies who carried high levels of debt growing as rapidly or more rapidly than the norm..”
--At the same time, Reinhart-Rogoff isn't the only study finding that high debt levels are associated with low growth. A 2010 paper (pdf) from the IMF, for instance, found that "a 10 percentage point increase in the initial debt-to-GDP ratio is associated with a slowdown in annual real per capita GDP growth of around 0.2 percentage points per year, with the impact being somewhat smaller in advanced economies." Still, similar questions about causality apply to these papers too.
--Tyler Cowen has some additional thoughts here. He tentatively agrees with the critiques of the paper, but suggests that Reinhart and Rogoff's influence on the austerity debate has been overstated: "The 'case for austerity' didn’t rest much on R&R in the first place, rather on the notion that the bills have to be paid, dawdling on adjustment is not always so easy, and the feasible sum of international redistribution is quite low."
Update: Reinhart and Rogoff have now responded. I've bolded the key parts:Even in the womb babies can tell the difference between light and dark. And at birth, they see shapes by following the lines where light and dark meet. Yet, they are several weeks old before they can see their first primary color – red.
In their first weeks and months, babies learn to use their eyes – actually their eyes “learn” how to see. While each eye has the it needs to begin to see normally, the two eyes haven’t learned to work together yet – and this “binocular vision” develops quickly throughout the first few weeks and months of life.
Can I Stimulate My Baby's Eye Development?
In this critical first year, your baby’s brain and eyes begin to coordinate images and remember what they’ve seen. As a parent, you can participate in your newborn’s eye development and health as a normal part of your time with your baby. Proper stimulation can increase curiosity, attention span, memory, and nervous system development. So be sure to give your baby plenty of interesting things to see.
The First Three Months of Eye Development
Newborns can only focus about eight to 12 inches from their face, and they see only black, white and gray. As early as the first week, your baby begins to respond to movement and begins to focus on your face. Soon your baby will smile when you come close. This is an important sign that your baby sees and recognizes you – a joyful moment for any parent.
Over the next ten to 12 weeks, you will notice your baby following moving objects and recognizing things, especially toys and mobiles with bold, geometric patterns. As their color vision begins to develop, babies will see red first – they will see the full spectrum of colors by the time they reach five months of age.
When Do Babies Begin To See Clearly?
Depth perception and eye-hand coordination begin to develop when infants reach approximately five months. From four to six months, your baby begins to reach out and touch an object – something that previously only happened by chance.
You've probably heard the term 20/20 vision which is typically thought of as “normal” visual acuity. By six months of age your child’s visual acuity is around 20/100. Your child won’t reach adult levels of visual acuity until they are age 4 or 5. You’ll see how eyesight becomes a crucial element in your baby’s ability to coordinate full-body movements such as standing and walking.
When Does a Baby's Hand Eye Coordination Develop?
From 8 to 12 months, the connection between eyes, movement, and memory is strong as your baby approaches his or her first birthday. In the past year you’ve probably noticed tremendous improvements in your baby’s attempts to roll a ball, pick up small toys and objects, and feed themselves foods like cereal or sliced fruit.
Activities that encourage hand-eye coordination, like playing with stacking boxes and rings, blocks or snap-together toys, will help strengthen your baby’s ability to see an object, touch it, and remember things about it.
Your Baby’s Eye Health
The best way to help keep your baby's eyes healthy is through regular professional eye examinations. So have your baby's eyes examined – by your pediatrician or a licensed eye doctor – shortly after birth.
Are There Really Eye Benefits From Nursing?
According to a study published in the January 2007 issue of American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, “babies who are breast-fed have significantly better vision as young children than babies fed from formula.” Because scientists have previously hypothesized that the chemical known as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) – found in higher concentrations in breast milk than in formula – enhances the vision of developing children, the researchers randomly added DHA to the formulas of some of the non-breast-fed children.
To read more, click here.
NPR.0130.USA.18About $1.4 million in grants and gifts will allow Denver B-Cycle to install 30 new bike stations this spring at high-profile locations, like the Denver Zoo, the Museum of Nature and Science and the Auraria Campus, and also in neighborhoods within pedaling distance of a bus or light-rail stop.
The number of B-Cycle stations will increase to 83, giving more people a chance to ride a bike, shed pounds and help the environment, said city and B-Cycle officials said Thursday.
“We plan to take this program to the next level,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock said after he and some city councilmembers cycled to the museum from the zoo. “Riding a bike is better for our environment and better for our collective fitness and Denver B-Cycle is playing a major role on both of these important issues.”
The museum station is one of three new bike-borrowing kiosks that will be open when the 2013 B-Cycle season starts on Monday.
The others are at the zoo and on the Auraria Campus, which will serve a student body already in tune with bike riding, said Denver B-Cycle executive director Parry Burnap.
“We will be able to connect students to downtown and other parts of the city,” Burnap said. “This is our goal to be as accessible as we can.”
In fact, Burnap said, the new station locations have been selected specifically to complement high-use transit locations. Most are close to or within a mile of a bus or light rail stop.
The Denver neighborhoods that |
handle it. All right?"
She took a deep breath. "Are you sure?"
"Yes, I'm sure."
"Because I don't have to go yet, if you don't want me to."
"I'm fine, I can handle it, okay? If you're tired, go on inside."
"If there's anything at all, you know you can talk to me."
"I know, it's fine. Please, if you want to go, don't let me stop you."
"You're sure? Sweetie, I'm serious—"
"Dammit, woman!" I shouted, pounding the steering wheel as hard as I could. "If I say I'm fine, I'm fine! Just let me be! What could you know about having your family fall apart like this?"
Her face fell instantaneously, and immediately I felt mine do the same. I turned and grabbed my face, clawing at my own eyes and gritting my teeth. "Elsa," I said.
"No," heard her say softly, "it's okay, I know you didn't—"
"It's not okay!" I ripped my hands away from my face and slammed them into the dashboard, staring directly into her eyes as intensely as I could. "Don't you ever say that's 'okay,' you hear me?" She looked completely closed off, and I felt my heart break. I took a deep breath. "It's never okay. I'll never let myself be like him."
We stared at each other for a minute or two before she turned away and pulled open the door handle. She dropped out of the cab and closed the door behind her. Her eyes barely reached the bottom of the window. She tapped gently on the glass, and I turned the key a click to roll the window down. "What're you going to do?"
I knew she was talking about my plan for the night. I shook my head. "Stay in the truck," I said, "head out into the sticks somewhere and lay down in the flatbed, I guess."
She nodded. "Okay," she said, backing away from the cab slowly. "I'll call you in the morning." She started up the front steps slowly.
"Elsa?" She paused, looking back over her shoulder. I thumped the passenger seat softly with my fist. "I'm…I'm so sorry. I know that you—"
"I'll call you in the morning," she interjected, "okay?"
I sighed heavily. "Okay." I turned the engine over and reversed the gear, twisting back over the seat to make sure I didn't back over anything. I reached the end of the driveway, and I turned back around to look at the front door. It was closed, and Elsa was gone. I flicked on the headlights and backed into my lane before shifting into drive and setting off away from town.
The shifter felt like it weighed a ton.
I just drove for a while, getting fed up with the radio almost instantly. I wasn't in the mood for Keith Urban at the moment, especially not when he was singing about being together with someone. I punched the power off and drove in silence, listening to the cylinders churn and the tires roll along the broken pavement of the roadway. The quiet was nice, but it left too many opportunities for me to replay that moment in Elsa's driveway again in my mind and pile more and more guilt onto my soul.
Then, my pocket started to buzz. I debated what I should do; it could be Pop calling to chew me out again, or it could be Momma calling to tell me she didn't have enough money to stay anywhere. I didn't want to answer it either way. I just wanted to get away from all this. I'd get a message from whoever it was, so I could just listen to that. I wasn't in the mood to talk any more. The ring stopped, and I paused to wait for the voicemail notification. I felt my pocket buzz once more, and I felt satisfied in my small victory.
But then it buzzed again. And then again. It was still ringing. I slowed down a bit and fumbled around to retrieve the phone from my pocket. Why didn't they just leave a message? Once I checked the screen, though, my thumb couldn't have moved any faster to answer the call.
"Is everything okay?" I braked heavily, making sure nothing could distract me from this call.
The line was quiet for a second. "How far away are you?"
"Twenty minutes. What's wrong?"
More quiet. "I…We have a futon you can use…you know, if you want."
I put the truck in park. My mouth was dry. "You're…you're sure?"
"Yeah."
"It's okay with your godparents?"
"You woke them up with the truck, and they asked why I was home so early. I had to tell them."
I sighed. "I'm sorry, Elsa; I really am, from the bottom of my heart."
"You said twenty minutes?"
"Yes."
A pause. "I need you here, please."
I threw the truck into reverse at lightning speed. "I'll do it in ten."
"Make it five."
I smiled. "I love you," I said, finishing the second point of my turn, "I'll be there in two."
"I love you too, baby," Elsa said. "Drive safe, please."
"Yep, yep." She hung up first, and I tossed my phone into the passenger seat so I could crank the wheel back into position and floor the gas back towards her house. Anything I had been feeling about home was gone from my mind in that moment. Home had a new meaning for me now. Home had nothing to do with Pop any more, it had nothing to do with Aarondale. Home wasn't about being in a suped-up, shiny, red, new truck if she wasn't to my right.
Home meant Elsa now. Home meant being with my girlfr—no, not girlfriend any more.
Home meant being with my wife.If the S&P 500 isn't enough for you, maybe you just need to juice it up.
ProFunds Group is expanding its already massive portfolio of ProShares exchange-traded funds, including yesterday's debut of UltraPro S&P500 (NYSE:UPRO). The ETF aims to deliver 300% of the S&P 500's daily gains. But cheer up, bears: UltraPro Short S&P500 (NYSE:SPXU) targets triple the daily results of shorting the same index.
If this sounds like the kind of high-octane pizzazz that your portfolio is longing for, do the math. These ETFs-on-steroids that hit the market may sound great in theory, but reality hasn't been kind to them.
ProShares already has a pair of ETFs that promise to double the daily performance of the S&P 500. How are they holding up against the SPDR Trust (NYSE:SPY), which simply mirrors the popular index?
2009 Return SPDR Trust 2.0% Ultra S&P 500 (NYSE:SSO) (0.5%) UltraShort S&P 500 (NYSE:SDS) (22.1%)
Returns exclude dividends.
See the problem? The doubled-up long fund hasn't delivered a 4% gain year to date. The jacked-up short fund is off by far more than 4%. These vehicles may be great for nailing a single day's return, or occasionally landing within the ballpark of an entire week's run. But they can be catastrophic over the long haul, particularly if they get whipsawed during volatile markets. Go figure: These magnets of speculation can ironically crumble at the first signs of volatility.
Need a little more proof?
Direxion Daily Financial Bull 3x Shares (NYSE:FAS) and Direxion Daily Financial Bear 3x Shares (NYSE:FAZ) play both sides of the financial-service stocks within the Russell 1000 index -- they swing for 300% of the movements.
At least one of them has to be a big winner in this roller-coaster market for banking stocks, right? Wrong. The bullish fund is trading 64.6% lower than it was when the year began. If you think that's bad, the bearish fund is off by a whopping 86.5%.
If you're a speculator looking for a day-trade gamble, these may be your lottery tickets. However, if you're a serious long-term investor, you don't want to get anywhere near these funds.
The numbers say it all. You'll triple your trouble before you triple the market's returns.
Some other reads that may double -- or triple -- your ETF knowhow:Entering a high-care nursing home is like walking into a vision of hell. Broken bodies huddle in wheelchairs or lie, immobile, in stark rooms. Eyes stare unseeingly, any sense of awareness lost within shattered minds. Voices shout random words.
Visitors sit with loved ones, trying to communicate. Hoping for some sign of recognition. Wondering if this helpless dependence lies in their own future.
Those few patients capable of movement pace endlessly, like wild animals in a cage. At mealtimes, trembling hands attempt to convey food between plate and mouth, failing more often than not. Overworked staff feed those who cannot cope, trying to do the impossible and be everywhere at once. Patience is an essential job requirement.
My mother, completely unable to look after herself, spent the last few weeks of her life in a high-care nursing home. It took two staff and a hoist just to get her frail body out of bed. It was a nightmare, both for her and anyone who visited, the terrible culmination of a two-year period in which the relentless progress of dementia transformed her into a stranger. Our memory of that time inevitably casts a dark shadow over the 88 years that had gone before.The decision of lost Quebec outdoorsman Marco Lavoie to eat his German Shepherd may have saved his life.
Certainly, it’s earned the man the quiet praise of Canadian survival experts — even as dog lovers around the world branded him a heartless pariah.
“Never would I consider eating my pet,” reads a typical comment below a much-cited Daily Mail account of Mr. Lavoie’s ordeal.
Similar messages, many of them claiming they would “rather die” than eat a dog, blanketed blogs, forums and news websites from as far afield as Australia.
“They need to euthanize this guy for eating his dog,” said a caller to a Seattle radio show discussing Mr. Lavoie’s survival.
Nick Buck, chief survival instructor at B.C.’s Canadian Wilderness Tourism Training Centre, scoffed at the suggestion, saying it is “impossible to predict” how someone will react in an extreme situation, no matter their attachment to a canine companion.
“Anyone who says that they would not eat their dog is by extension saying that they value their dog’s life over their own. I find that offensive,” he wrote in an email to the National Post.
Paul Cobham, director of operations at Nova Scotia’s Survival School Canada, posited that Mr. Lavoie’s action was an “absolute last-resort” decision made in a haze of starvation and desperation.
“It’s almost one stage away from becoming a cannibal,” he said. “But nothing’s off the table when it comes to surviving.“
On Oct. 30, Mr. Lavoie was on the brink of death when he was pulled from the Northern Quebec wilderness by rescuers with the Sûreté du Québec.
He entered the Quebec Boreal Forest in June in a canoe trip up the Nottaway River with his dog, but became stranded in August when a bear attacked his campsite, destroying his food and much of his survival gear.
When he was reached by helicopter — his family finally contacted police in late October — Mr. Lavoie was barely able to speak, was suffering from hypothermia and had lost half his body weight.
Only after the badly injured man was safely in hospital did it emerge that in September, wounded from a fall, out of food and ammunition — and with freezing weather closing in — Mr. Lavoie had sacrificed his dog with a rock to the head.
“He is very ill and he can barely talk, but when our officers spoke to him in hospital the only thing he said was, ‘I want to get a new dog,’” the Sûreté’s Richard Carbonneu told a Mail reporter.
A friend later told the U.K. paper Mr. Lavoie had treated the dog “like one of his own children.”
Mr. Carbonneu added, “It is obvious he loved him very much and did not want to do what he did.”
‘It’s almost one stage away from becoming a cannibal’
In a Tuesday analysis for the webzine Slate, cultural historian Rebecca Onion compared the recent outrage against Mr. Lavoie to that of white people 100 years ago who sneered at desperate acts of dog-eating as the uncivilized practice of Aboriginal northerners.
“In the case of Marco Lavoie, we have years of stories telling us that we should starve rather than violate the man-dog bond,” she wrote.
Canadian history is filled with tales of desperate outdoorsmen who broke the man-dog bond. In 1952, lost Alberta trapper Jack Knox ate four huskies from his six-dog sledding team after he was stranded for more than a month.
Three years later, a Newfoundland-born Hudson’s Bay Company trader and his Inuit guide were forced to eat five of their 11-dog team after they got lost while mushing the 250 kilometres from Cape Dorset to what is now Iqaluit.
National Post
• Email: thopper@nationalpost.com | Twitter: TristinHopperBottas was signed as a last-gasp replacement for 2016 world champion Nico Rosberg, who retired over the winter, initially on a one-year deal to partner Lewis Hamilton.
Speaking at the FIA Sport Conference in Geneva, Wolff said he was pleased with Bottas’s start to life at Mercedes.
However, Wolff stressed the Finn knew he would be unlikely to secure a contract extension early in the campaign due to the number of top line drivers – including Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso – who are out of contract at the end of the 2017 season.
“Of course it’s an uncomfortable situation for him with quite some pressure,” said Wolff. “When we decided to make Valtteri the offer, he knew that we would be taking our time with the decision going forward because the driver market is more open in 2018 and beyond – 2018 and 2019.
“That’s why we will not rush into a decision, but continue to work with him and see how that pans out. But generally the view of the team is that he’s done a good job.
“The call he received was pretty late, he’s driving against one of the best drivers of Formula 1 that has been with the team in his fifth season and he’s had a pole position, won a race in Sochi in a very dominant way and he's had the more difficult races.
“But overall his performance on-track and the way he has integrated with the team was very positive.”
Wolff thinks risk has “paid out”
While Wolff accepts that Bottas’s move to Mercedes on a short-term deal was a risk for the 27-year-old, he believes he has boosted his reputation by proving himself in a top car.
“He has taken a decision to leave Williams and join Mercedes in a one-year deal,” he said. “I think that the perception of him as a racing driver has gained.
“He’s won a race rather than lost, so I think it already paid out.”
Wolff added that the fact Bottas brought sponsorship money with him to Mercedes this year increased his appeal, even if it wasn’t the key factor behind the team choosing him as Rosberg’s replacement.
“Today the revenue model for some of the teams, for most of the teams, is also actually to generate income,” he said. “Even if we look at a Red Bull or a Mercedes I would rather have a driver with some sponsorship than not.
“Even Valtteri for example, part of his value proposition for this year was that he came with a sponsor and clearly we would rather have the money than not.”1 / 4 Don't Watch A Movie Without Rating It
When you finish a show or movie on Netflix, the site requests that you give it between one and five stars, based on how much you enjoyed it. You're not being asked to rate that content for kicks, or so that you can later reminisce about how much you liked a certain film: Rather, Netflix has spent many years improving its recommendation engine, even offering a $1 million prize for anyone who could up the accuracy of Netflix recommendations by 10 percent. At this point, the Netflix recommendation engine is pretty darn accurate -- it takes into account your own ratings as well as the viewing habits of those similar to you. Basically, the more films you rate, the more you're likely to enjoy a Netflix recommendation. If you constantly find yourself frustrated that there's nothing on Netflix, take a half hour or so and knock out a few hundred ratings on the "Taste Profile" section of the site, and make sure you've filled in your genre preferences, too. Finally, if Netflix persists in recommending a title that you're just never going to watch -- for me, that would be "The Lincoln Lawyer" -- remember that you can click on the "Not Interested" button on any film's homepage and it will disappear from your recommendations page while simultaneously smartening up your future recs. (For an in-depth look at the Netflix recommendation engine, and how it works, I recommend this post on Netflix's official blog.)
Netflix.comVincent Santino Corleone (né Mancini) is a fictional character in the 1990 feature film The Godfather Part III, in which he is portrayed by Andy García,[1] who was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. Vincent is the illegitimate son of Sonny Corleone and his mistress Lucy Mancini. He eventually succeeds his uncle Michael as head of the Corleone family. Retroactive continuity ("retcon") was employed to create the character's existence for The Godfather Part III, as it is evident from Mario Puzo's original novel that Lucy did not conceive a child with Sonny.
Coppola has said that Vincent is, roughly speaking, an amalgamation of the five Corleone family males, having Vito's cunning, Michael's ruthlessness, Fredo's sensitivity, Sonny's fiery temper and Tom Hagen's absolute loyalty.
Fictional character biography [ edit ]
The Godfather Part III [ edit ]
In The Godfather, married Sonny Corleone and his sister's bridesmaid, Lucy Mancini were having an illicit affair; Vincent Mancini is the result of that union.[2] Being illegitimate, as a youth he was not included in the Corleone family. When Michael Corleone offers him employment in one of the family's legitimate businesses, Vincent declines, preferring to work for Joey Zasa, who runs the remnants of the Corleone family's criminal empire in New York City. Vincent is eventually embroiled in a feud with Zasa when he senses that Zasa is trying to usurp Michael's power. Michael tries to make peace between the two, but this fails; Zasa calls Vincent a bastard, and Vincent bites his ear. That night, Zasa sends two hitmen to kill Vincent, but Vincent kills them instead after forcing one of them to reveal who hired them.
Vincent attempts to ingratiate himself with his uncle by protecting him from rival Mafia families, who are in league with Zasa and an unknown traitor within Michael's circle. Encouraged by his sister Connie, Michael takes Vincent under his wing and starts mentoring him. Michael admires Vincent's loyalty and intelligence, but recognizes that Vincent has inherited Sonny's fiery temper and fears he will suffer his father's fate.
Vincent saves Michael from an assassination attempt orchestrated by Zasa at a Mafia summit in Atlantic City. That same night, Michael is hospitalized following a diabetic stroke. Believing Zasa will make another attempt on Michael's life, Vincent murders Zasa (with approval from Connie and Corleone assassin Al Neri). Michael is angry that Vincent used violence to deal with Zasa and did so without Michael's permission.
When Vincent begins a relationship with Michael's daughter Mary, Michael fears that his nephew's growing involvement in the family's criminal activity will endanger her life; he is also concerned about Mary having a relationship with her first cousin. Michael privately tells Vincent that he always felt responsible for Vincent, and while he and Sonny were different and frequently argued, Michael knew Sonny would have done anything for him. But Sonny's temper clouded his judgment, and Michael doesn't want Vincent to repeat his father's mistake.
When Michael learns that his old friend Don Altobello is the traitor within the family, Michael has Vincent spy on him. Vincent learns that Licio Lucchesi, a powerful Italian politician and criminal underworld figure, was the mastermind of the assassination plot against his uncle, and employed Altobello, Zasa, and corrupt Vatican officials Frederick Keinszig and Archbishop Gilday to undermine Michael's criminal empire.
Vincent wants permission to retaliate. Michael tacitly agrees, then formally retires as Don and names Vincent his successor, instructing him to call himself Don Vincent Corleone. Michael's influence has made Vincent into a new man: wiser, more patient, and understanding his status as the new Don. His first act is to order the murders of Lucchesi, Keinszig, and Gilday. Connie kills Altobello (her godfather) by poisoning him. In return for being made Don, Vincent agrees to end his relationship with Mary. That same night, Altobello's assassin Mosca accidentally kills Mary during an attempt on Michael's life. Enraged, Vincent kills Mosca with a single gunshot.
Abandoned sequel [ edit ]
What follows in Vincent's story, according to author Mario Puzo and director Francis Ford Coppola, is unknown. In The Godfather Part III DVD commentary, Coppola explains that both he and Puzo had envisioned a story depicting Vincent's reign as head of the Corleone family during the 1980s, still haunted by Mary's murder. Vincent, deviating from his predecessors' morals, would have entered the family into the drug trade, driving the Corleone clan back into corruption and eventual decline and ending with his being killed similarly to Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
This proposed film would have been titled either The Godfather Part IV or The Godfather: The Final Part. Flashbacks would include Vito Corleone's early days as Don, and the childhood days of Sonny, Fredo, Michael, and Connie Corleone, when they discover the precise nature of their father's business. The film would have portrayed the early days of Tom Hagen, Luca Brasi, and Johnny Fontane, and Vito's first meeting with Hyman Roth. According to Coppola, Puzo had composed a rough draft alternating between Vincent's reign as boss and the "Happy Years" of 1926–1939; passages from the original novel not previously incorporated into the movie storylines. Leonardo DiCaprio, Luis Guzmán, Ray Liotta, and García himself all expressed interest in the film. However, this project has lain dormant since Puzo's death in 1999.[citation needed]
Family [ edit ]
References [ edit ]I’m walking through the dark woods with three strangers. They’re all carrying knives. A sliver of white moon hangs between the black, bare tree limbs. My dim headlamp barely illuminates the mossy trail. The man in front of me walks without a light, finding the path with his feet. The only noise is the sound of our feet shuffling through the dead leaves.
Behind us, the woman in our party stops. We pause and look back at her.
“Wait a sec,” she says. “I’m gonna call."
She catches her breath for a moment. Then she leans back, cups her hand around her mouth, and releases a high-pitched wail that makes my toes curl inside my hiking boots. It echoes through the empty forest, over the lake and through the valley. The woods are silent for a moment. We listen.
“Not much activity tonight,” she sighs. “Let’s keep going.”
Tonight I’m on a hike with three members of the Southeastern Ohio Bigfoot Investigation Society (that’s SOSBI for short). With a whopping 228 sightings listed on an Internet database, Ohio has the third most Bigfoot sightings in the nation. According to some, the Ohio Bigfoot has been living in the area for centuries. He just doesn’t want to be found.
In 2008, a small-but-eager group of “Bigfooters” founded SOSBI. For the past four years, the club has hosted monthly meetings at a public library in the small town of Cambridge. According to its Facebook page, SOSBI is an open forum created “to give everyone and anyone the chance to talk about Bigfoot without the fear of being made fun of or taunted.”
When Animal Planet featured the group in a reality show called Hunting Bigfoot, the club saw a spike in popularity. Now the meetings draw up to 80 people from across the Midwest. This summer SOSBI started hosting group campouts in Salt Fork State Park. The 17,000 acres of dense forest in Salt Fork are perfect for concealing dreadlocked gorilla-men.
Seriously, though? Bigfoot? These meetings must just be an excuse for some weirdo redneck-types to venture out of their parents’ basements for the night, was what I figured. So, in late September, I decided to find out.
WHEN I ARRIVED AT the campground that night, I found a dozen or so men and women lounging in lawn chairs around a campfire. I’d expected a few skinny, acne-speckled teenage boys and maybe some shotgun-wielding folks in tinfoil hats. But these people looked... normal—a group of middle-aged men and women in blue jeans and lumpy sweatshirts. The men sported camouflage hunting hats, and the women had short frizzy hair. They looked more like volunteer firefighters than paranormal enthusiasts.
I sat down next to a man from Pittsburgh who offered me a cookie.
“I don’t believe in Bigfoot; I just believe in Shawna’s cookies,” he chuckled, gesturing toward one of the women. “I just happened to be lost in the woods one day and come upon these people. And next thing you know, they start talking about hairy guys with big feet who live in the woods.
Then the self-proclaimed non-believer pulled out his phone and opened a photo album called “Evidence.” He scrolled through 380 photos of log piles and bent trees, patiently explaining to me that Bigfoot likes vandalizing the forest shrubbery.
Tall tales and vague pseudo-science swirled around the campfire. I learned that the Sasquatch looks like a large, hairy man with a pronounced brow ridge. They can be three to 15 feet tall and come in any color. And yes, we can talk about Bigfoot in the plural. The Ohio Bigfoot population, someone told me, ranges from 30 to 300 individuals. But since they’re migratory, there’s no good season or area to spot one. They can be anywhere, at any time.
Just like bears, they spend their days foraging for berries, small animals, and sometimes even garbage. Just like deer, they peel the bark off trees in the winter. Like hippies, they stack rocks next to trailheads. Their eyes have the reflective membrane tapetum lucidum, the same thing that makes cats’ eyes glow in the dark. They communicate with long, moaning howls that sound like ambulance sirens. They exude the fetid stench of sewage, urine, and dead animals. Oh, and they’ve never been found. They’re too darn smart.
HERE’S WHAT WE REALLY know: Bigfoot is rooted in folklore. Legends of humanoid creatures in the wilderness come from all over the world. There’s the Yeti of the Himalayas, the Yowie in Australia, the Yeren of Mongolia, and a plethora of wild-man myths from native tribes in North America. Even Daniel Boone claimed to have shot and killed a 10-foot hairy man he called a Yahoo.
Historically, most of Bigfoot sightings are concentrated in the Pacific Northwest. In the 1920s, a Canadian journalist coined the term “Sasquatch” from the Halkomelem Indian word sásq’ets, the name for the tribe’s version of Bigfoot. In 1924, five miners in Washington claimed to have been attacked by several “apemen” throwing rocks at their cabin. Later, one of the men wrote a book about the experience, in which he claimed that the creatures were mystical beings from another dimension. In 1958, a bulldozer operator found tracks at a worksite in Bluff Creek, California, and presented a plaster-casted replica of the footprints to a local newspaper. After his death, his children came forward with a pair of 16-inch wooden feet that he’d used to fake the tracks. In 1967—also in Bluff Creek—Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin captured the iconic film of Sasquatch tramping through the undergrowth. The most recent sighting was 2007—a Pennsylvanian hunter thought he’d caught an image of a creature with an automatically-triggered camera. Turns out it was probably a juvenile bear with mange, according to the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
But there’s been never been one conclusive piece of evidence. No real documented sightings. No captured individuals. No carcasses. Not even a stool sample.
In the book Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot, Micheal McLeod writes that the Bigfoot craze is “a silly slice of history... the first widely popularized example of pseudoscience in American culture.” The fad reached its peak in the 1970s when self-identified “experts” started spouting theories to magazines and television networks. Real scientists, not wanting to get mixed up with the crazies, fled from the Bigfoot scene. Then, nobody was around to challenge what McLeod calls “junk science,” and it was effectively legitimized in the minds of those who wanted it to be. Enthusiasts took heart; the beast couldn’t be disproved! It had to exist.
Since then, groups of self-made Bigfoot “researchers” have sprung up all over the country. The oldest and largest is the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (or BFRO), which has maintained an online Bigfoot database since 1995. The website has a black background and glaring white font proclaiming the legitimacy of their research. The BFRO claims to be a non-profit organization, but they’ve taken some flack for their steep membership fees and their affiliation with the star of Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot, the aptly-named Matt Moneymaker. The members of the Ohio group were glad that they only had to pay $10 to camp at Salt Fork, contrasted with the $500 Moneymaker required to join one of his nighttime stakeouts.
AROUND THE CAMPFIRE, EVERYONE was eager to pull out their favorite monster story. One person had an elderly neighbor with a Bigfoot-infested barn. Another guy’s friend saw it cavorting in his garden. He had the footprints casted in plaster as proof. Someone else had been followed by the animal while on a hunting trip. The listeners nodded, then butted in to tack on extra details to the end of each yarn.
“There’s a lot of bullshittin’ around here,” boomed a pot-bellied man, slapping his knee. “But there’s a lot of fact-finding too. When most people say something, it’s true.”
What does that even mean? I wanted to shout. Do you people really think there’s a giant gorilla man sneaking around rural Ohio? Seriously?
But they kept offering me cookies, calling me “honey,” and showing me pixilated photos of dark shrubbery. They told me about the teasing they’d endured from their coworkers and families and how grateful they all were to have made friends in SOSBI. Everybody was so sweet and earnest. I didn’t want to ruin their campout, slapping them in the face with questions. Instead, I stayed pinned to my camp chair and gazed into the crackling fire.
The next morning, I met Nancy and Bernie, a middle-aged couple from West Virginia. Nancy was bubbly and enthusiastic. She looked like a woman who could belong to my mother’s book club. Bernie was a stocky man with a silver crew cut and square glasses. He shied away from my handheld recorder. They asked me not to use their last name in order to save Bernie from workplace ridicule.
The couple first saw Bigfoot in 2009, Nancy said. They were driving through Salt Fork in the daytime when they passed a huge, hairy figure standing against a tree on the side of the road. By the time they managed to turn the car around, it was gone. But they were sure of what they’d seen—it was a Sasquatch. After that, they were hooked, and they wanted to see it again.
Nancy invited me to go on a nighttime hike. They promised to take me to the best Bigfoot hotspots in the park. And that’s how I find myself wandering through Salt Fork late on a Saturday night.
BACK AT THE TRAILHEAD, we’d met up with another Bigfooter named Todd, a tall, bespectacled Hummer-driver in camo pants. He’d rigged up his other car, a GMC Jimmy, with ultra-bright spotting lights on the roof in case he startles a Bigfoot out on the road.
Nancy puffed on her inhaler, Bernie shoved his “Bigfoot kit” (plaster for footprint casting, a stick of beef jerky, and an audio recorder) into his backpack, and Todd handed out flashlights to everyone. Then we set off down the trail.
For the past two hours, Bernie has led us down miles of dark trails. We’ve walked to the historic stone house by the lake, to the spot where Bernie and Nancy had their sighting, to the entrance of the caves that have the most nightly Bigfoot activity. We’ve taken so many turns; I have no idea where I am.
Every once in a while, we stop so Nancy or Todd can shriek and shout gibberish into the forest. That’s how they communicate with any creatures that might be nearby. They encourage me to try it; Bigfoot is attracted to female voices. I let out a weak yelp. Nancy smiles proudly. I blush and laugh nervously, feeling totally ridiculous. Are they trying to prove something to me here? It’s really not working.
We continue tramping through the undergrowth. Todd has been talking about paranormal activity for the past half-hour. His girlfriends, he says, have never really been into Bigfoot or ghosts. He’s single at the moment. He pauses. “You know,” he says to Bernie, “you guys are lucky to have each other to do this with. It’s good to have anyone to go on these hikes with—especially someone like a mate."
Bernie smiles.
Half-an-hour later, the trees finally thin out and we emerge onto a moonlit road. Nancy shakes her head. “I really wanted you to have some activity,” she says to me. “Did we convince you?” I shrug. I don’t have the heart to tell her no.
The road curves into a long hill. Nancy and Todd fall back; Bernie and I power ahead.
Bernie is more talkative tonight than he was at the campout. I learn that he’s an ex-army guy who used to be stationed in Germany. He and Nancy moved back to Ohio to start a family. As we tramp alone up the hill, he opens up about his and Nancy’s experience with the Bigfoot community.
In 2009, Nancy hated her job, even though she was making good money. She was working at a bar. Bernie had been laid off, so he spent most of his time drinking at that bar. He was exhausted and unhappy. Then they had their sighting, and things finally started looking up. Bernie finally found a new job. Now he and Nancy drive to Salt Fork and hike on his days off. They come two or three days a week, even in the winter. They’re out of the house so much that they’ve canceled their Internet and cable plans.
“We’re probably never going to see it again,” he says, resigned. “But it’s been good. We’ve met so many people that we never would’ve met any other way. I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now if it weren’t for Bigfoot.”
Everything Bernie says is true—because it happened. Bernie and the rest of the Bigfooters seem like genuinely nice people. More than that—they’re genuinely people, just people who happen to spend their free time chasing after a mythological forest-beast. Are they delusional? Sure. The statistics—zero documented sightings, ever—might suggest so. But they also care deeply about what they do. When I asked questions about their research, they bubbled over with enthusiasm, offering me documents and photographs and DVDs of their findings. They invited me to their meetings and let me borrow flashlights and camp chairs. And they seriously wanted for me to have an “experience” of my own to report to the world. Whether or not they’ve actually seen anything or had their own “experiences,” doesn’t really seem to matter.
WE PAUSE AT THE top of the hill to wait for Nancy and Todd.
When we reach the parking lot back at the trailhead, Nancy opens a bottle of wine and Bernie throws a few logs into the fire pit. Todd pulls a cooler out of the Hummer and offers me a bottle of cold water.
Nancy’s beaming with happiness that I tagged along on the hike. She wishes me luck and invites me back any time. Todd offers to carpool with me. I grin but decline.
“Call us when you’re back safe!” Nancy calls as I drive away. “If you hit a Sasquatch, make sure you bring it back so we can show Bernie’s mother-in-law it’s real!”
I smile and wave. Back at home, I pull out my phone and text Bernie: Back safe. No Squatch. Thanks! Maybe it’s not the trail of Bigfoot, but these people are on to something.
Colleen O'Neil is a senior English major and cross country runner at the College of Wooster. She writes about running, traveling, and eating ice cream on her blog.Treated waste at the Back River Waste Water Treatment in Baltimore, Maryland. Flickr/Kristian Bjonard
Poorly planned and weakly enforced infrastructure repairs have created a vicious cycle.
On three back-to-back mornings last week, Angela Valdez walked |
easily share stories that can skew perception. Don’t fear, his idealism doesn’t stand a chance. He can’t win. It would splinter the Democratic Party. Even if he were elected, it wouldn’t change anything – so the corporate media would have us believe.
The last two years of Congress has seen bafflingly low approval ratings. Fourteen percent has been the average yearly approval rating according to the Gallup Poll. In November 2013, the approval rating hit nine percent.
Nine percent. Let that number sink in. As a democratically elected body, only nine percent of Americans felt that Congress was competently doing its job. Do we want to let this continue? Do you want to continue to expect the government to use and abuse the majority of the population for the benefit of major corporations and our elected officials?
As the youth, as educated college students, we have to be active. You should want to determine your fate. You should want this country to be the best it can possibly for the highest possible amount of people. We need to take control of the political direction of this country in a concerted and sustained manner.
Bernie Sanders might not win. As it stands now, he probably won’t win. But maybe he will. The naysayers say that even if he were to be elected, he might not be able to accomplish anything he aims to accomplish. Others point to Obama’s lack of domestic accomplishment as proof of the break between electoral hopes and presidential reality. Yet much of this failure –notably the forced dilution of Obamacare into the ineffective machinery it is today – can be laid directly at the feet of an intransigent Congress, notably the Republican Party.
The art of political compromise seems to be dead. The Republican Party has been caught off guard by the insurgent Trump, who has harnessed the usually aimless racist undertones of many of the party’s policies to whip up a populist frenzy. Clinton is a weak candidate, running a tired establishment campaign. The time for sweeping change is now.
The editorial board can be reached at editorial@ubspectrum.com.Julia Ann (born October 8, 1969)[2] is the stage name of American pornographic actress, feature dancer. She is a member of the AVN Hall of Fame and the XRCO Hall of Fame.
Career [ edit ]
By age 18 Julia Ann started modeling, then became a professional mud wrestler in Hollywood before becoming one half of the popular touring strip club feature act Blondage, with Janine Lindemulder, in the early 1990s.[2] Their success led to offers to join the adult film industry.[3]
Julia Ann debuted in adult films in 1993 in Andrew Blake's Hidden Obsessions, in a lesbian sex scene with Lindemulder. She was under contract to Wicked Pictures in 2006,[4] but in May 2007 she posted on the members section of her website that she had not renewed her contract with Wicked.[5]
She has worked as a make-up artist.[6][7]
She has referred to fellow pornographic actress Christy Canyon as one of her "idols" in the business.[8]
Appearances [ edit ]
Julia Ann has also made appearances as herself on television shows, series, and documentaries such as Rated A for Adult, Night Calls, Give Me Your Soul..., Dreamwagon: Inside the Adult Industry, VS., The Man Show, and How They Make Adult Movies.[7]
In 1989, Julia Ann appeared in the film American Angels: Baptism of Blood.[9]
Awards [ edit ]
AVN awards [ edit ]
XRCO awards [ edit ]
1994 Best Girl-Girl Scene for Hidden Obsessions [16]
for 2009 MILF of the Year [17]
2011 MILF of the Year [18]
2012 Hall of Fame [19]
2017 Mainstream Adult Media Favorite[20]
XBIZ awards [ edit ]
2014 MILF Performer of the Year[21]
NightMoves awards [ edit ]
2013 Best MILF Performer (Fan's Choice) [22]
(Fan's Choice) 2015 Hall of Fame
Personal life [ edit ]
She grew up around animals and developed a love for horses; she also took piano lessons and learned to swim "like a fish."[2] At age 12 she moved to Idyllwild, California, where she attended a college-prep school before moving back to Los Angeles to live with her grandmother at age 17.[2]
She married adult film director Michael Raven on June 21, 2003, divorcing in 2007.[6] Besides breast enlargement, Julia Ann also had labiaplasty and a nose job to remove the after-effects of a broken nose suffered when a horse kicked her in the face.[6]The Pentagon has generated almost $6 billion over the past seven years by charging the armed forces excessive prices for fuel and has used the money - called the "bishop's fund" by some critics - to bolster mismanaged or underfunded military programs, documents show.
Since 2015, the Defense Department has tapped surpluses from its fuel accounts for $80 million to train Syrian rebels, $450 million to shore up a prescription-drug program riddled with fraud and $1.4 billion to cover unanticipated expenses from the war in Afghanistan, according to military accounting records.
The Pentagon has amassed the extra cash by billing the armed forces for fuel at rates often much higher - sometimes $1 per gallon or more - than what commercial airlines paid for jetfuel on the open market.
Under a bureaucracy that dates to World War II, the Defense Department purchases all of its fuel centrally and then resells it at a fixed price to the Air Force, Navy, Army, Marine Corps and other customers, who pay for it out of their own budgets. The system is intended to reduce duplication and promote efficiency.
The Defense Department is the largest single consumer of fuel in the world. Each year, it buys about 100 million barrels, or 4.2 billion gallons, of refined petroleum for its aircraft, warships, tanks and other machines.
The practice of exploiting fuel revenue to plug unrelated gaps in the defense budget has escalated in recent years, prompting allegations - and official denials - that the accounts are being used as a slush fund.
Pentagon officials defended the arrangement.
Congress has routinely approved their requests to skim off the fuel-purchasing accounts as a straightforward way to balance the Defense Department's books. Lawmakers, however, are increasingly questioning the budgeting methods that have enabled the Pentagon to accumulate large windfalls from fuel sales in the first place.
The Washington Post Sources: Defense Logistics Agency, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, office of the defense secretary Sources: Defense Logistics Agency, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, office of the defense secretary (The Washington Post) (The Washington Post)
The obscure accounting policy exemplifies the enormous scale and complexity of the U.S. military's business operations, and how waste and inefficiency in the defense bureaucracy can dwarf what Washington spends on other parts of the federal government.
In recent months, for example, the Pentagon has struggled to explain to Congress why it buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste, including sky-high salaries for legions of defense contractors.
Such fiscal problems are deeply rooted. For the pastquarter-century, the Defense Department has failed to meet a congressional mandate to clean up its books so it can pass an audit - the only federal agency that has failed to do so.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is preparing for a military buildup. President Donald Trump has said that he will ask Congress to add $54 billion to next year's defense budget, about a 10 percent spike over current spending caps.
Some senior leaders with the armed forces accused the Pentagon of intentionally overbilling the Air Force, Navy, Army and Marine Corps for fuel and pocketing the difference to pay for other priorities.
"We've been complaining about this," Ray Mabus, who served as Navy secretary for eight years during the Obama administration, said in an interview. "But if we do it too loudly, oh man, they come back on us really hard."
Officials with the Navy, who have been the most vocal in their opposition, said the pot of money derived from fuel sales is known as a "bishop's fund," an unofficial reserve account controlled by the office of the defense secretary.
"Another word for it is'slush fund,' " said Mabus, who left office in January.
He and other officials said artificially high fuel prices have left the Navy, at times, with less money for military training, operations and maintenance. The Air Force and Army have not complained publicly about the arrangement.
In a statement, the Pentagon acknowledged that it accumulated $5.6 billion in "enterprise gains" from fuel purchases between 2010 and 2016, but said the surplus was the result of falling oil prices in an inherently volatile market.
"What has happened in the last two years is we have been blessed by lower fuel prices," Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, the Pentagon's second-ranking civilian official, said in an interview. "Sometimes you overestimate what the price will cost and you get an asset, and sometimes you underestimate and you get a deficit."
Work denied that the Pentagon had a "bishop's fund" or a deliberate strategy to inflate the price of fuel. "I vehemently disagree with that characterization," he said, adding an expletive for emphasis.
- - -
John Roth, the Pentagon's acting comptroller and chief financial officer, said that it would be impossible to hide a multibillion-dollar slush fund from Congress. He said that the Pentagon must receive approval from four different legislative committees whenever it wants to spend money from fuel savings on other programs.
"I have an enormous number of outside people looking over my shoulder," Roth said in an interview. "The thought that I could somehow establish some sort of reserve in some manner, shape or form and hide it from everyone else just doesn't make any sense."
Congress has approved the Pentagon's requests to tap its fuel revenue to pay for shortfalls in other programs. Legislative aides said they did not think that the Defense Department was intentionally manipulating fuel prices. At the same time, Congress has heightened its scrutiny of how the pool of excess cash has materialized.
In reports commissioned by Congress since 2014, the Government Accountability Office has found that the Pentagon has done a poor job of projecting its annual fuel budget and how much petroleum it would actually consume in a given year.
Lawmakers have also asked the Pentagon to give back some of the surplus. In 2015, they forced the Defense Department to return $1 billion and reduced the budgets for other military programs by $2.6 billion to reflect lower-than-expected fuel costs.
And in approving a defense-authorization bill last year, the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded in a report that it was "concerned about the quality and transparency" of the Pentagon's methodology for setting fuel prices.
The Defense Department purchases all of its fuel centrally through the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which then resells it to the branches of the armed forces.Raspberry Pi Zero, possibly the world's cheapest and smallest fully-functioning computer, has completely sold out less than a day after its launch.
Around 20,000 of the devices have been sold since yesterday, as has almost every copy of MagPi magazine, which came with a free Zero on the cover.
Costing just £4, the Linux-running Zero is equipped with half a gigabyte of RAM and a 1GHz processor - a level of hardware found in premium laptops only a decade ago.
Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, told Wired : "You'd think we'd be used to it by now, but we're always amazed by the level of interest in new Raspberry Pi products,"
"Right now it appears that we've sold every individual Zero we made (that's roughly 20,000 units) and most of the 10,000 MagPi issues with cover-mounted units; people are scouring the country for the last few Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury and Smiths branches that haven't sold out."
• In pictures: 10 things you can build using a Raspberry Pi
• Raspberry Pi's £4 computer is as powerful as the laptops of a decade ago
Several copies of MagPi magazine have been listed on eBay in the last day. At time of writing the highest bid submitted for a copy is £31.
Despite being roughly the size of three stamps, the Zero has two micro USB ports, a micro SD card slot and a mini HDMI slot. It runs Raspbian, a version of Linux.
To assist those still trying to get their hands on one, the Raspberry Pi website has put together a map of everywhere UK retailer that was due to stock The MagPi 40 in this month.
The site says: “We don’t know which of these stores have sold out or not, so your best bet is to ring ahead to find out and avoid disappointment.”
More than five million Raspberry Pi’s have been sold since the first models went on sale in 2012, intended to “put a programmable computer within reach of anyone with $20-35 to spend.”It has been awhile since the violence in Ferguson, Mo. While the violence and destruction was abhorrent, there must be a release valve in our legal system to allow for civil disobedience towards a system that seems bent on incarceration.
There is. It's called jury nullification.
People, the wool has been pulled over our eyes.
We have been told that jurors rule on facts, judges rule on laws.
I will make few friends in the legal community by telling you that this is not true and not the intent of our founding fathers.
The facts of a case might demand conviction, but the law itself might be tyrannical.
As juror, you can, and in fact, should rule "not guilty" to express your nullification of a bad law.
It was a few South Carolinians in the 1794 case of Georgia vs. Brailsford that resulted in the Supreme Court opinion stating that, as jurors, we have the right to rule on both matters of law and fact.
While the juror can pay respect to the opinion of the judge, decisions concerning the law are "within your power of decision" as a juror.
The South Carolina Constitution also contemplates the juror's power over both law and fact.
The case of Sparf vs. U.S. (1895) provides a lengthy discussion on the juror's power for change over laws.
The Court in U.S. vs. Dougherty (1972) made clear that the jury system operates to allow the juror to not convict when they "empathize with the defendant, as when the offense is one they see themselves likely to commit," or when they deem the activity within the "mores of the community."
Why haven't you heard about this before? It is because, as stated in Dougherty, the government is afraid that if you were informed of this right, anarchy would ensue.
This "safety valve" should only be expressed to us simpleton jurors in "exceptional cases."
The government says you should learn of this right through our culture or media. Government deems it appropriate to have you uninformed or misinformed because you are uneducated, non-lawyers.
Fair is fair, and you don't have to tell them why you voted the way you did.
Tired of government tyranny?
Nullify the bad law or abuse of power by making your own law.
If you believe that the never-ending criminalization of our country is wrong, get your community involved, participate in the jury system, and vote "not guilty" even if the facts suggest conviction.
You are making law, and it requires long-term thinking and looking beyond the facts in the case at hand.
Don't wilt as a juror simply because it's getting late in the day and the other jurors want to go home.
If you abhor the violence, take your role as juror seriously.
It is regrettable but understandable that communities erupt in response to a legal system that seems bent on their destruction. The Constitutional right of jury nullification is our "safety valve" against tyranny.
Make real change through nonviolence.
Douglas S. Delaney, J.D., LL.M is a local tax and estate planning attorney in Bluffton. www.delaneylawfirmplansahead.comUsually, when you pick up a piece of furniture off the curb, you're worried about mold or bedbugs, maybe even loose screws. Never snakes.
Grand Rapids resident Holly Wright and her boyfriend brought home a couch they found on the street, hoping to make it a permanent fixture of their abode. And for two months all was peaceful. "We smelled it and everything—it looked OK," Wright told WZZM. "We peeled off the cushions, cleaned it up, never saw anything."
Then one day a boa constrictor emerged from beneath the cushions.
Fortunately, it was clear the snake was starved and represented no threat. "It was very lethargic," said Wright. "It didn't really react or hiss."
Wright said that they initially intended to nurse the snake back to health and care for it indefinitely, but it died soon after it revealed itself. "It was quite cold in the room, there was no food for the snake and I think it came out of the couch because it was dying," Wright explained. The snake's true origins are still unknown.
And that's why you should always check your furniture for snakes.Looking for a way to commemorate the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission landing on the Moon? Here are a few different ways look back on this historic event and take advantage of advances in technology or new data.
Below is a video that uses data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and its amazing suite of cameras, offering a side-by-side view of Apollo 11’s descent, comparing footage originally shot from the Eagle lunar module’s window with views created from reconstructed LRO imagery. This is a fun way to re-live the landing — 1202 alarms and all — while seeing high definition views of the lunar surface.
The National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC has a special way to mark the Apollo 11 anniversary. They have posted online high-resolution 3-D scans of the command module Columbia, the spacecraft that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the Moon. This very detailed model allows you to explore the entire spacecraft’s interior, which, if you’ve ever visited the Air & Space museum and seen Columbia in person, you probably know is a tremendous ‘upgrade,’ since you can only see a portion of the interior through couple of small hatches and windows. The Smithsonian is also making the data files of the model available for download so it can be 3-D printed or viewed with virtual-reality goggles. Find all the details here.
Here’s a remastered version of the original mission video as aired in July 1969 depicting the Apollo 11 astronauts conducting several tasks during the moonwalk (EVA) operations on the surface of the moon, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours.
If you’re pressed for time, here’s a quick look at the entire Apollo 11 mission, all in just 100 seconds from Spacecraft Films:
Here’s a very cool detailed look at the Apollo 11 launch in ultra-slow motion, with narration:
Enjoy, and happy anniversary!Welcome to What's New in The New 52 – where you, the fans, get a sneak peek at the stuff that crosses our desks. This little feature is a way to keep you all in the loop about what's new, different and exciting in The New 52 – whether it's a character design, cover, splash page or panel.
A couple weeks ago, I showed you a sneak peek at “Krypton Returns” by giving you a first look at ACTION COMICS ANNUAL #2. Today, take an all-new look at this upcoming crossover event by checking out some of Ed Benes’ stunning art for SUPERBOY #25 in the gallery above!
On the first of these two spreads, it’s Supergirl vs. the clone army of KON the Abomination. Kara finds herself in Krypton’s savage past (last seen in SUPERBOY #0), and it seems as though everything she’s ever feared about her home planet's history has become realized. But can she make it out alive?
Meanwhile, the second spread depicts Superboy facing The Eradicator in his first New 52 appearance! The duo seems to share a common desire for Krypton to cease existing – so then why are they engaging in battle? And what is The Eradicator’s connection to Kara? That’ll remain a mystery for now, but you can certainly expect to see more of him in the coming months …
With a story by Scott Lobdell, SUPERBOY #25 flies into stores on November 13.
Until next week!
BobI'll be completely honest with you guys: when this game was first shown off at E3 2014, I thought Nintendo was joking. I had no idea Nintendo
I'll be completely honest with you guys: when this game was first shown off at E3 2014, I thought Nintendo was joking. I had no idea Nintendo was going to be making a full-fledged new Captain Toad game and I was kinda convinced that it would be alright, but nothing great. And then I remembered who we're talking about: Nintendo, the one company that seems to be pretty good with surprising people. And they definitely did that with "Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker."
The game is absolutely fun, visually beautiful, features solid character development (even for a Mario game), and the one thing Nintendo is known for when it comes to games: great level design. The level design in this game is extremely clever and it reminds me of why Nintendo dominated for most of the 90s. There's also plenty of challenge here and some reason to go back, which is more than some "one-and-done" games tend to do.
Unfortunately, the game is not perfect. Though the challenge is good, it can be a bit TOO challenging at points, and the game will start to feel like it's overstaying its welcome a little bit.
Even so, the game's positives highly outweigh the negatives and "Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker" is a great game that Wii U owners should definitely pick up.
Final rating: 8 out of 10 "Great"
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This wiki was open for comments during 10 days after the Amsterdam Presidency Conference on Open Science (4-5 April 2016). The Dutch Presidency greatly appreciated all input and studied the comments carefully and with great interest.
Having studied the comments and considering the wide variety of the input, the Dutch Presidency decided not to publish a second or ‘final’ version of the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science. Also, composing a summary of all input was not really possible. Therefore it was decided to select a great number of highlights emerging from the comments.
Together with the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science, the document with the highlights will be published shortly on the website www.openaccess.nl
Many thanks on behalf of the Dutch Presidency for all your input and comments!
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Open science
Open science is about the way researchers work, collaborate, interact, share resources and disseminate results. A systemic change towards open science is driven by new technologies and data, the increasing demand in society to address the societal challenges of our times and the readiness of citizens to participate in research.
Increased openness and rapid, convenient and high-quality scientific communication - not just among researchers themselves but between researchers and society at large - will bring huge benefits for science itself, as well as for its connection with society. Open science has impact and has the potential to increase the quality and benefits of science by making it faster, more responsive to societal challenges, more inclusive and more accessible to new users. An example of this potential is the response to the outbreak of viral diseases such as Ebola and Zika. Access to the most recent scientific knowledge for a broad group of potential contributors, including new or unknown users of knowledge, has brought solutions closer. Open science also increases business opportunities. The speed at which innovative products and services are being developed is steadily increasing. Only companies (notably SMEs), entrepreneurs and innovative young people that have access to the latest scientific knowledge are able to apply this knowledge and to develop new market possibilities. Citizen science brings research closer to society and society closer to research.
A speedy transition is needed
For Europe to remain at the forefront and to ensure sustainable growth in the future, open science holds many promises. Reality, however, has not caught up yet with the emerging possibilities. The majority of scientific publications, research data and other research outputs are not freely accessible or reusable for potential users. Assessment, reward and evaluation systems in science are still measuring the old way. Although these issues are recognised and countless initiatives have been developed during recent years, policies are not aligned, and expertise can be shared more and better. There is a strong need for cooperation, common targets, real change, and stocktaking on a regular basis for a speedy transition towards open science.
The good news is that there is political and societal momentum. More and more researchers are supporting the transition and are moving towards open science in the way they work. Organisations from the scientific community are urging politicians to act. The European Commission and the Council of the European Union have expressed that they are prepared to take a leading role to facilitate and accelerate the transition towards open science.
From vision to action
This Call for Action is the main result of the Amsterdam conference on 'Open Science – From Vision to Action' hosted by the Netherlands' EU presidency on 4 and 5 April 2016. It is a living document reflecting the present state of open science evolution. Based on the input of all participating experts and stakeholders. Stakeholders include research funders, Research Performing Organisations (including researchers, libraries and support staff), publishers (including information service providers) and businesses. as well as outcomes of preceding international meetings and reports, a multi-actor approach was formulated to reach two important pan-European goals for 2020.
1. Full open access for all scientific publications. This requires leadership and can be accelerated through new publishing models and compliance with standards set.
2. A fundamentally new approach towards optimal reuse of research data. Data sharing and stewardship is the default approach for all publicly funded research. This requires definitions, standards and infrastructures.
To reach these goals by 2020 we need flanking policy:
3. New assessment, reward and evaluation systems. New systems that really deal with the core of knowledge creation and account for the impact of scientific research on science and society at large, including the economy, and incentivise citizen science.
4. Alignment of policies and exchange of best practices. Practices, activities and policies should be aligned and best practices and information should be shared. It will increase clarity and comparability for all parties concerned and to achieve joint and concerted actions. This should be accompanied by regular monitoring-based stocktaking.
Twelve action items with concrete actions to be taken
Twelve action items have been included in this Call for Action. They all contribute to the transition towards open science and have been grouped around five cross-cutting themes that follow the structure of the European Open Science Agenda as proposed by the European Commission. This may help for a quick-start of the Open Science Policy Platform that will be established in May 2016. Each action item contains concrete actions that can be taken immediately by the Member States, the European Commission and the stakeholders:
Removing barriers to open science
1. Change assessment, evaluation and reward systems in science
2. Facilitate text and data mining of content
3. Improve insight into IPR and issues such as privacy
4. Create transparency on the costs and conditions of academic communication
Developing research infrastructures
5. Introduce FAIR and secure data principles
6. Set up common e-infrastructures
Fostering and creating incentives for open science
7. Adopt open access principles
8. Stimulate new publishing models for knowledge transfer
9. Stimulate evidence-based research on innovations in open science
Mainstreaming and further promoting open science policies
10. Develop, implement, monitor and refine open access plans
Stimulating and embedding open science in science and society
11. Involve researchers and new users in open science
12. Encourage stakeholders to share expertise and information on open scienceA no-fuss guide to preparing good food that will change the way endurance athletes eat.
Eat like the pros. Feed Zone meals are the perfect balance of science and practice from Dr. Allen Lim and Chef Biju Thomas. With refreshingly simple ingredients that measure up to the demands of training and racing, these recipes are easy to follow and big on flavor. The tantalizing mix of salty, sweet, and savory satisfies an athlete's cravings and prepares the body for top performance.
When Dr. Allen Lim left the lab to work with pro cyclists, he found a peloton weary of food. The sport's elite athletes were underperforming on bland far and processed bars and gels. So Lim set out to make eating delicious and practical. His journey took him inside the kitchens of Tour de France and delivered him to a dinner party where he met celebrated chef Biju Thomas.
Chef Biju and Dr. Lim vetted countless meals with the world's best endurance athletes. Now they share their energy-packed, wholesome recipes to make your meals easy to prepare, delicious to eat, and better for your performance.Amid calls for military intervention after the Syrian regime carried out an alleged chemical weapons attack this week, US commanders have prepared a range of "options" for Mr Obama if he chooses to launch an attack on the Damascus regime, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said aboard his plane en route to Malaysia.
But he declined to provide any details on the positioning of US troops and assets.
"The Defence Department has a responsibility to provide the president with options for all contingencies," Mr Hagel said.
US media reported warships had been sent to the region for possible cruise missile attacks or other action but Mr Hagel declined to comment on the accounts.
"The president has asked the Defence Department for options. Like always, the Defence Department is prepared and has been prepared to provide all options for all contingencies to the president of the United States," he said.
"And that requires positioning our forces, positioning our assets, to be able to carry out different options – whatever options the president might choose."
He also did not comment on a report from CBS News that the Pentagon was making "initial preparations" for a cruise missile attack.
Separately, a US official said Mr Obama's security advisers will convene at the White House this weekend to discuss US options, including possible military action, against the Syrian government over an apparent chemical weapons attack earlier this week.
If Mr Obama takes part in the high-level meeting as appears likely, it would be his first full-scale session with top foreign policy aides since Wednesday's mass poisoning in a Damascus suburb.
US newspapers also have suggested disagreements within the administration over the risks of another American military intervention in the Middle East.
The Pentagon chief and other defence officials made clear no decision had been taken on whether to employ military force against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Mr Hagel, who visited US Marines in Hawaii on Thursday before setting off on a week-long tour of Southeast Asia, said he expected American intelligence agencies to "swiftly" assess whether the Syrian government indeed used chemical weapons.
He said the US government would work closely with its allies.
"The international community should and will act in concert on these kinds of issues," Mr Hagel said.
Edited by Bonnie MalkinISLAMABAD/NEW DELHI: Pakistan’s hawkish Islamist general Hamid Gul, who, as director general of that country’s all-powerful Inter Services Intelligence was known to have nurtured Khalistani and Kashmiri militants, died of brain haemorrhage in Murree on Sunday aged 78.Originally from Sarghoda in Pakistan’s Punjab, Gul was General Zia-ul Haq’s personal favourite. He is considered the brain behind Pakistan’s proxy wars with India, first in the Punjab, and then in Kashmir, and is referred to as “godfather” of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India says carried out 26/11 Mumbai attack and numerous other terror strikes in the country.He openly shared stage on multiple occasions with jihadists like Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed, spewing venom against India and the US.Gul had dismissed allegations against a Pakistan hand in 26/11 attack saying, “They (India) are saying these boys were village boys trained to be killers. How can this be believed? Village boys don't know anything about a five-star hotel. They would not know how to use the toilet.”Gul and three other Pakistanis, all said to be former top officers of the ISI, were on a US list for UN sanctions against them for alleged links to terror activities.Commissioned in the army in 1958 in the Armoured Corps (19 Lancers), Gul was a tank commander at the Chawinda front during the 1965 war. Between 1972 and 1976, he served under Gen Zia as a battalion commander. He was promoted to Brigadier in 1978 and rose to be the commander of the 1st Armoured Division, Multan in 1980. He also conducted the Zarb-e-Momin military exercise in November-December 1989 against India.According to late counter-terrorism expert B Raman, Gul had told Benazir Bhutto when she became PM, “Madam, keeping Punjab destabilized is equivalent to the Pakistan army having an extra division at no cost to the taxpayers.”After Gul retired, he frequently went on TV to defend the Taliban and Kashmiri militants and blame a Jewish conspiracy for the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. His tenure at the ISI and his outspoken backing of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and other extremists showed murky loyalties at play years later when the US and Pakistan formed an unlikely alliance following 9/11.Others viewed Gul as an increasingly out-of-touch braggart later in life, as he appeared on countless TV programmes warning of dark conspiracies and demanding his country militarily confront its nuclear-armed neighbor, India.“The unruly mujahedeen commanders obeyed and respected him like no one else,” Gul’s online autobiography reads. “Later on with the advent of the Taliban's rise he was equally admired and respected.''Gul became an outspoken opponent to the US while cheering the Taliban in public and media appearances after 9/11. There were allegations, however, Gul had a more hands-on approach, like in US intelligence reports later released by WikiLeaks that alleged he dispatched three men in December 2006 to carry out attacks in Afghanistan's capital.“Reportedly Gul’s final comment to the three individuals was to make the snow warm in Kabul, basically telling them to set Kabul aflame,” the report said.When the US special forces killed bin Laden in Abbottabad in 2011, Gul helped spread a rumor that US forces actually killed the Al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan and brought his body to Pakistan to humiliate the country.“My feeling is that it was all a hoax, a drama which has been crafted, and badly scripted I would say,” he said. In conspiracy-minded Pakistan, many believed him. As the last line of his online autobiography reads, “People wait to listen to his direction before forming their own opinions.”The Bridge has been described as a ‘secret Culture novel’, a mystical key to Banks’s literary universe. It blurred the boundaries between genres – and revealed his sense of fun and games • Reading group: The debt The Bridge owes to Alasdair Gray’s Lanark
Iain Banks was “two of our finest writers”, as Tom Chivers pointed out in a touching piece in the Telegraph. Approximately half of Banks’s novels were Earthbound, mainstream (or arguably literary) fiction. For the other half, he added the middle initial “M” to his name and wrote reach-for-the-skies science fiction: universe-traversing space opera generally set around the machine-mind utopia provided by the Culture fictional society.
Except, of course, as with most things related to Banks’s fiction (aside from his early covers), matters aren’t entirely black and white. The 2009 novel Transition, for instance, was published under the name Iain M Banks in the US, partly as Banks joked for “commercial reasons”, because by the time the book came out the Culture novels were outselling his Earthbound fiction in the US. Partly because it was an attempt to write “something like The Bridge” again – a complicated, multifaceted novel teasing out several complicated plot strands, loaded with symbolism and blurring the boundary between mainstream fiction and SF. A novel which is, in fact, a bridge between the two different elements of Banks’s career. A novel that also contains all kinds of references to the other universe Banks had already created in his mind.
Before discussing those connections, a quick point of order. Although the Iain M Banks books sold better in the US by the turn of the millennium, writing SF was not a commercial decision by Banks, as he explained during his final days:
Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round.
Science fiction was a passion and an obsession. Banks would have wanted to write it whatever happened – although as a canny commercial operator, he also took care not to alienate his core audience. Hence the M in his name. Hence, partly, The Bridge, a novel connecting the two different promontories of Banks’s fiction – a direct link between the Scottish themes of his earlier work and the universe he was about to unveil in his next release, Consider Phlebas.
The most obvious connections are abstract. The Bridge bends reality, breaks the rules of physics, invents technologies and plays around with impossible inventions. It also blurs the boundaries between life and death in ways that would have plenty of 1980s bookshelvers pushing it towards the genre zone. It’s worth noting that his source novel Alasdair Gray’s Lanark was originally marketed as SF in the US – where it tanked.
Other connections are more solid, but also stranger, and so abstruse that The Bridge has been labelled a “secret” Culture novel, by blogger Tom Bell. His post convinced me. I’d already spotted a few of the references – that knife-missile the Barbarian finds so irritating, for instance, also makes an appearance within the first 50 pages of Consider Phlebas, and keeps appearing in the rest of the Culture novels. But I also buy Bell’s arguments that the flying castle the Barbarian travels on in the later stages of the novel could be seen as a spaceship, that the “neuro |
treatment refinements.
These improvements remain underused in practice, however. As a result, survival rates after cardiac arrest vary as much as 500 percent across the country.
In the United States, there are roughly 350,000 resuscitation attempts outside hospitals each year, with average survival rates of 5-10 percent, and 750,000 attempts in hospitals, with about a 20 percent survival rate.
But exceptions exist in certain areas. In Seattle and King County, survival rates for cardiac arrests treated by emergency medical services providers improved by 22 percent over the last seven years to 19.9 percent, according to Dr. Graham Nichol, professor of medicine at the University of Washington. In places like Detroit, the survival rate is about 3 percent.
These statistics show “a lot more variation in survival than we see for stroke and heart attack,” Nichol said. “Cardiac arrest is indeed a treatable condition. Providing care, and providing better care, is important.”
Seattle and King County’s improvements come from training EMS providers better, continually measuring the care they provide, and spreading awareness that cardiac arrest is a treatable condition, so citizens are quick to perform bystander CPR, Nichol said.
If Seattle’s innovations could be implemented nationwide for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, he added, as many as 30,000 lives annually could be saved.
CPR the right way
The problem with cardiac arrest treatment begins with the administration of CPR. It requires endurance and training to perform 100 to 120 chest compressions a minute, each at a depth of about 5 cm. Resuscitators often interrupt compressions for too long in order to check for a patient’s pulse, starving internal organs of oxygen, studies have found.
“You should only be feeling for a pulse for 10 seconds, while people fumble around trying to feel a pulse for one minute or more,” said Dr. Stephan Mayer, the director of neurocritical care at the Mount Sinai Health System.
Doctors and nurses also tend to give up too soon. CPR is typically performed for 15 to 20 minutes, but research shows that longer attempts at CPR, up to one hour, can lead to survival. These patients ultimately may fare as well those who are resuscitated more quickly. In patients with a chance of recovery, experts now advise attempting CPR for at least 45 minutes.
If no pulse returns after 20 minutes, however, experts say more powerful interventions should be considered. Often they are not.
“Doing CPR is like today driving a Model T Ford that itself isn’t even being operated properly much of the time,” said Dr. Sam Parnia, the director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook Hospital. “When it struggles to go uphill, we should switch to a more modern car — say a Ferrari with a powerful engine.”
Once circulation is restored, a chain of interventions must occur to prevent further injury to the body and brain. But there’s no guarantee that patients will receive these treatments, which include avoiding toxic amounts of oxygen, maintaining normal carbon-dioxide levels and high blood pressure, and sometimes a cardiac catheterization procedure.
“It’s a lottery of what you will get in the hospital,” Parnia said. “It may depend on which doctor happens to receive you, since none of these treatments are regulated.”
Chilling a comatose patient
Among the most crucial procedures is therapeutic hypothermia. Patients who remain comatose after being in cardiac arrest should be cooled for at least 24 hours to a temperature from 32 to 36 degrees Celsius, to slow down the metabolic processes that cause cells to die.
But this treatment is far more common in Europe than in the United States, said Dr. Romergryko Geocadin, professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. And even when hypothermia is used in conjunction with other life-support measures, physicians and relatives sometimes decide to give up on the patient in the first three days, before the prognosis is truly clear.
“A lot of progress has been made in the ICU, with hypothermia, more ventilators, more ways of supporting blood pressure and glucose,” Geocadin said. “So we should give these people more time to survive.”
A major cause of the variation in outcomes, experts say, is the lack of systematic benchmarking of cardiac-arrest data, which would allow hospitals to see where they rank against others and motivate better performance.
“Right now, even at Mount Sinai, where I am the chairman of the CPR committee, we know what our success rates are for resuscitation but we have no idea if it is above average, average or below average,” Mayer said. “Everyone’s performance is looked at in isolation.”
This lack of accountability and transparency prompted The Institute of Medicine to call in June for the creation of a national registry to track the incidence and outcome of cardiac arrests.
A chain of survival
Every five years, the American Heart Association releases resuscitation guidelines in the journal Circulation based on a synthesis of the latest research. The newest update, published online Oct. 15, stresses the importance of bystanders immediately giving CPR, and doctors in hospitals forming integrated systems in the chain of survival.
“If I drop the ball several hours later after someone has done outstanding CPR, that can be just as devastating as if no one has done CPR,” said Dr. Clifton Callaway, the chairman of the association’s emergency cardiovascular care committee and professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.
While the association’s goal by 2020 is to double survival rates to 16 percent nationwide after out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, the effect of the guidelines remains to be seen.
“My fear is that they won’t make much of a difference,” Parnia said. “You have this information in the ether, but there’s no point if people aren’t doing it to patients.”THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The Palestinian foreign minister will hand evidence of alleged Israeli crimes to the International Criminal Court on Thursday, but it is unlikely that the submissions will speed the court’s progress in its most politically charged case.
Palestinian boys play next to houses that witnesses said were destroyed during the 50-day war last summer, in the east of Gaza City May 4, 2015. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem
Riad al-Malki will give two files to the court’s prosecutor, outlining alleged crimes in the occupied West Bank and in the 2014 Gaza war, the Palestinian mission in The Hague said.
But while his visit to the court will keep the public gaze on the case, the submissions will have no legal force and progress in the court’s examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unlikely for many months.
The Palestinian Authority joined the Hague-based court in April and prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has launched a preliminary inquiry into alleged crimes committed by all parties in last year’s Gaza war.
The submissions are intended to contribute to the preliminary investigation, which covers the period starting June 14, 2014.
A ceasefire in August ended the 50 days of fighting between Gaza militants and Israel, in which health officials said more than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed. Israel put the number of its dead at 67 soldiers and six civilians.
U.N. investigators said on Monday that Israel and Palestinian militant groups committed grave abuses of international humanitarian law during the 2014 Gaza conflict that may amount to war crimes.
Israel disputed the findings, saying its forces acted “according to the highest international standards”.
It has criticized the ICC decision to open an examination, arguing that the Palestinian Authority is not a state and cannot therefore be a member. It has also said the examination will make it harder to conclude a peace deal with the Palestinians.
Without enforcement powers, the court depends on voluntary cooperation of states, including non-members such as Israel, to collect information.
In deciding whether to cooperate, Israel is likely to be guided by indications from prosecutors over the line their investigation will take. The first indication of this is expected in November when prosecutors publish their regular reports into the progress of preliminary examinations.
During preliminary inquiries, prosecutors use publicly available information to establish whether crimes were committed of gravity sufficient to warrant a full investigation.
They typically include fact finding missions to countries involved, even if they are non-members.
Any trip to the Palestinian Territories would require Israel’s cooperation, since the West Bank and Gaza can only be accessed via Israeli airports. That gives Israel substantial leverage over the court’s investigation.
Nonetheless, a refusal to meet with ICC officials would place the country in awkward company, since even implacable opponents of the court have received ICC prosecutors, including Russia in relation to inquiries the ICC is conducting in Ukraine and Georgia into conflicts where Russian involvement is alleged.The province is being sued by its former children's watchdog for breach of contract who say the government reneged on promised pension benefits.
In a statement of claim, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, said the government is motivated by "malice and bad faith" in the disagreement, which dogged her 10-year stint as children's watchdog.
The claim was filed on Friday and states that "[Turpel-Lafond] has suffered mental distress as a result of the [government's] conduct, entitling [Turpel-Lafond] to aggravated and punitive damages, as well as damages for bad faith conduct and damages for mental distress."
The claim states that the government broke a verbal agreement to provide Turpel-Lafond with 18 months worth of pension credits for each year of service. That agreement was extended when the government first offered her the position as an independent representative for children and youth in 2006. At the time, she was a provincial judge in Saskatchewan.
Verbal agreement
The statement of claim says that Turpel-Lafond broached the issue of salary, moving expenses and pension benefits even before she accepted the position.
The B.C. government responded with a verbal agreement.
At the time, Turpel-Lafond was a provincial judge in Saskatchewan. In order to accept the B.C. position, she was required to take a leave from her judicial duties, waiving her right to contribute to the judges pension plan.
But after her first year of service, Turpel-Lafond noted that pension statement did not reflect the entitlement promised by the government. The statement of claim says Turpel-Laford repeatedly raised the pension issue with the government but never received a written contract.
"Despite honouring its commitments to provide the same enhanced pension entitlement to other independent officers of the legislature, the government continues to fail to honour the same commitment to [Turpel-Lafond]." the claim said.
Turpel-Lafond's claim says she ''has or will ultimately suffer a loss of pension benefits as a result."
The government has 21 days to file a formal response but has yet to do so.
But, a statement released from the Ministry of Justice said the government has received the claim and will review it. The statement added that the the ministry won't comment because the matter is before the courts.
Term ended last year
Turpel, who finished her stint last November, has since returned to Saskatchewan and resumed her previous career as a provincial judge.
Her lawyer, Greg Anctil, said it's unusual for a high-profile position such as Turpel-Lafond's job to be offered without a written agreement. But, it's also not the first time the province has failed to provide a written employment contract, Anctil said.
He represented former auditor general John Doyle who sued for pension entitlements after leaving office.
"There should be written agreements," Anctil said. "But this isn't the first time the government has had a situation where promises were made — or allegedly made — and it wasn't subject to a formal written agreement."
The statement of claim says the province had a history of animosity with Turpel-Lafond. It says a deputy minister told her in 2015 that "the government would treat her as a'member of the opposition.'"
The claim said the Minister of Children and Family Development Stephanie Cadieux refused to meet with her in the last 12 months in office.
None of the allegations have been proven in court."Everything is a file" is a bit glib. "Everything appears somewhere in the filesystem" is closer to the mark, and even then, it's more an ideal than a law of system design.
For example, Unix domain sockets are not files, but they do appear in the filesystem. You can ls -l a domain socket to display its attributes, cat data to/from one, modify its access control via chmod, etc.
But, even though regular TCP/IP network sockets are created and manipulated with the same BSD sockets system calls as Unix domain sockets, TCP/IP sockets do not show up in the filesystem,¹ even though there is no especially good reason that this should be true.
Another example of non-file objects appearing in the filesystem is Linux's /proc filesystem. This feature exposes a great amount of detail about the kernel's run-time operation to user space, mostly as virtual plain text files. Many /proc entries are read-only, but a lot of /proc is also writeable, so you can change the way the system runs using any program that can modify a file. Alas, here again we have a nonideality: BSD type Unixes generally run without /proc, and the System V Unixes expose a lot less via /proc than Linux does.
I can't contrast that to MS Windows
First, much of the sentiment you can find online and in books about Unix being all about file I/O and Windows being "broken" in this regard is obsolete. Windows NT fixed a lot of this.
Modern versions of Windows have a unified I/O system, just like Unix, so you can read network data from a TCP/IP socket via ReadFile() rather than the Windows Sockets specific API WSARecv(), if you want to. This exactly parallels the Unix Way, where you can read from a network socket with either the generic read(2) Unix system call or the sockets-specific recv(2) call.²
Nevertheless, Windows still fails to take this concept to the same level as Unix, even here in 2018. There are many areas of the Windows architecture that cannot be accessed through the filesystem, or that can't be viewed as file-like. Some examples:
Drivers. Windows' driver subsystem is easily as rich and powerful as Unix's, but to write programs to manipulate drivers, you generally have to use the Windows Driver Kit, which means writing C or.NET code. On Unix type OSes, you can do a lot to drivers from the command line. You've almost certainly already done this, if only by redirecting unwanted output to /dev/null.³ Inter-program communication. Windows programs don't communicate easily with each other. Unix command line programs communicate easily via text streams and pipes. GUI programs are often either built on top of command line programs or export a text command interface, so that the same simple text-based communication mechanisms work with GUI programs, too. The registry. Unix has no direct equivalent of the Windows registry. The same information is scattered through the filesystem, most of it in /etc, /proc and /sys.
If you don't see that drivers, pipes, and Unix's answer to the Windows registry have anything to do with "everything is a file," read on.
How does the "Everything is a file" philosophy make a difference here?
I will explain that by expanding on my three points above, in detail.
Long answer, part 1: Drives vs Device Files
Let's say your CF card reader appears as E: under Windows and /dev/sdc under Linux. What practical difference does it make?
It is not just a minor syntax difference.
On Linux, I can say dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc to overwrite the contents of /dev/sdc with zeroes.
Think about what that means for a second. Here I have a normal user space program ( dd(1) ) that I asked to read data in from a virtual device ( /dev/zero ) and write what it read out to a real physical device ( /dev/sdc ) via the unified Unix filesystem. dd doesn't know it is reading from and writing to special devices. It will work on regular files just as well, or on a mix of devices and files, as we will see below.
There is no easy way to zero the E: drive on Windows, because Windows makes a distinction between files and drives, so you cannot use the same commands to manipulate them. The closest you can get is to do a disk format without the Quick Format option, which zeroes most of the drive contents, but then writes a new filesystem on top of it. What if I don't want a new filesystem? What if I really do want the disk to be filled with nothing but zeroes?
Let's be generous and say that we really do want a fresh new filesystem on E:. To do that in a program on Windows, I have to call a special formatting API.⁴ On Linux, you don't need to write a program to access the OS's "format disk" functionality. You just run the appropriate user space program for the filesystem type you want to create: mkfs.ext4, mkfs.xfs, or what have you. These programs will write a filesystem onto whatever file or /dev node you pass.
Because mkfs type programs on Unixy systems work on files without making artificial distinctions between devices and normal files, it means I can create an ext4 filesystem inside a normal file on my Linux box:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=myfs bs=1k count=1k $ mkfs.ext4 -F myfs
That literally creates a 1 MiB disk image in the current directory, called myfs. I can then mount it as if it were any other external filesystem:
$ mkdir mountpoint $ sudo mount -o loop myfs mountpoint $ grep $USER /etc/passwd > mountpoint/my-passwd-entry $ sudo umount mountpoint
Now I have an ext4 disk image with a file called my-passwd-entry in it which contains my user's /etc/passwd entry.
If I want, I can blast that image onto my CF card:
$ sudo dd if=myfs of=/dev/sdc1
Or, I can pack that disk image up, mail it to you, and let you write it to a medium of your choosing, such as a USB memory stick:
$ gzip myfs $ echo "Here's the disk image I promised to send you." | mutt -a myfs.gz -s "Password file disk image" you@example.com
All of this is possible on Linux⁵ because there is no artificial distinction between files, filesystems, and devices. Many things on Unix systems either are files, or are accessed through the filesystem so that they look like files, or in some other way look sufficiently file-like that they can be treated as such.
Windows' concept of the filesystem is a hodgepodge; it makes distinctions between directories, drives, and network resources. There are three different syntaxes, all blended together in Windows: the Unix-like..\FOO\BAR path system, drive letters like C:, and UNC paths like \\SERVER\PATH\FILE.TXT. This is because it's an accretion of ideas from Unix, CP/M, MS-DOS, and LAN Manager, rather than a single coherent design. It is why there are so many illegal characters in Windows file names.
Unix has a unified filesystem, with everything accessed by a single common scheme. To a program running on a Linux box, there is no functional difference between /etc/passwd, /media/CF_CARD/etc/passwd, and /mnt/server/etc/passwd. Local files, external media, and network shares all get treated the same way.⁶
Windows can achieve similar ends to my disk image example above, but you have to use special programs written by uncommonly talented programmers. This is why there are so many "virtual DVD" type programs on Windows. The lack of a core OS feature has created an artificial market for programs to fill the gap, which means you have a bunch of people competing to create the best virtual DVD type program. We don't need such programs on *ix systems, because we can just mount an ISO disk image using a loop device.
The same goes for other tools like disk wiping programs, which we also don't need on Unix systems. Want your CF card's contents irretrievably scrambled instead of just zeroed? Okay, use /dev/random as the data source instead of /dev/zero :
$ sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdc
On Linux, we don't keep reinventing such wheels because the core OS features not only work well enough, they work so well that they're used pervasively. A typical scheme for booting a Linux box involves a virtual disk image, for just one example, created using techniques like I show above.⁷
I feel it's only fair to point out that if Unix had integrated TCP/IP I/O into the filesystem from the start, we wouldn't have the netcat vs socat vs Ncat vs nc mess, the cause of which was the same design weakness that lead to the disk imaging and wiping tool proliferation on Windows: lack of an acceptable OS facility.
Long Answer, part 2: Pipes as Virtual Files
Despite its roots in DOS, Windows never has had a rich command line tradition.
This is not to say that Windows doesn't have a command line, or that it lacks many command line programs. Windows even has a very powerful command shell these days, appropriately called PowerShell.
Yet, there are knock-on effects of this lack of a command-line tradition. You get tools like DISKPART which is almost unknown in the Windows world, because most people do disk partitioning and such through the Computer Management MMC snap-in. Then when you do need to script the creation of partitions, you find that DISKPART wasn't really made to be driven by another program. Yes, you can write a series of commands into a script file and run it via DISKPART /S scriptfile, but it's all-or-nothing. What you really want in such a situation is something more like GNU parted, which will accept single commands like parted /dev/sdb mklabel gpt. That allows your script to do error handling on a step-by-step basis.
What does all this have to do with "everything is a file"? Easy: pipes make command line program I/O into "files," of a sort. Pipes are unidirectional streams, not random-access like a regular disk file, but in many cases the difference is of no consequence. The important thing is that you can attach two independently-developed programs and make them communicate via simple text. In that sense, any two programs designed with the Unix Way in mind can communicate.
In those cases where you really do need a file, it is easy to turn program output into a file:
$ some-program --some --args > myfile $ vi myfile
But why write the output to a temporary file when the "everything is a file" philosophy gives you a better way? If all you want to do is read the output of that command into a vi editor buffer, vi can do that for you directly. From the vi "normal" mode, say:
:r!some-program --some --args
That inserts that program's output into the active editor buffer at the current cursor position. Under the hood, vi is using pipes to connect the output of the program to a bit of code that uses the same OS calls it would use to read from a file instead. I wouldn't be surprised if the two cases of :r — that is, with and without the! — both used the same generic data reading loop in all common implementations of vi. I can't think of a good reason not to.
This isn't a recent feature of vi, either; it goes clear back to the ancient ed(1) text editor.⁸
This powerful idea pops up over and over in Unix.
For a second example of this, recall my mutt email command above. The only reason I had to write that as two separate commands is that I wanted the temporary file to be named *.gz, so that the email attachment would be correctly named. If I didn't care about the file's name, I could have used process substitution to avoid creating the temporary file:
$ echo "Here's the disk image I promised to send you." | mutt -a <(gzip -c myfs) -s "Password file disk image" you@example.com
That avoids the temporary by turning the output of gzip -c into a FIFO (which is file-like) or a /dev/fd object (which is file-like). (Bash chooses the method based on the system's capabilities, since /dev/fd isn't available everywhere.)
For yet a third way this powerful idea appears in Unix, consider gdb on Linux systems. This is the debugger used for any software written in C and C++. Programmers coming to Unix from other systems look at gdb and almost invariably gripe about it, "Yuck, it's so primitive!" Then they go searching for a GUI debugger, find one of several that exist, and happily continue their work...often never realizing that the GUI just runs gdb underneath, providing a pretty shell on top of it. There aren't competing low-level debuggers on most Unix systems because there is no need for programs to compete at that level. All we need is one good low-level tool that we can all base our high-level tools on, if that low-level tool communicates easily via pipes.
This means we now have a documented debugger interface which would allow drop-in replacement of gdb, but unfortunately, the primary competitor to gdb didn't take the low-friction path.
Still, it is at least possible that some future gdb replacement would drop in transparently simply by cloning its command line interface. To pull the same thing off on a Windows box, the creators of the replaceable tool would have had to define some kind of formal plugin or automation API. That means it doesn't happen except for the very most popular programs, because it's a lot of work to build both a normal command line user interface and a complete programming API.
This magic happens through the grace of pervasive text-based IPC.
Although Windows' kernel has Unix-style anonymous pipes, it's rare to see normal user programs use them for IPC outside of a command shell, because Windows lacks this tradition of creating all core services in a command line version first, then building the GUI on top of it separately. This leads to being unable to do some things without the GUI, which is one reason why there are so many remote desktop systems for Windows, as compared to Linux: Windows is very hard to use without the GUI.
By contrast, it's common to remotely administer Unix, BSD, OS X, and Linux boxes remotely via SSH. And how does that work, you ask? SSH connects a network socket (which is file-like) to a pseudo tty at /dev/pty* (which is file-like). Now your remote system is connected to your local one through a connection that so seamlessly matches the Unix Way that you can pipe data through the SSH connection, if you need to.
Are you getting an idea of just how powerful this concept is now?
A piped text stream is indistinguishable from a file from a program's perspective, except that it's unidirectional. A program reads from a pipe the same way it reads from a file: through a file descriptor. FDs are absolutely core to Unix; the fact that files and pipes use the same abstraction for I/O on both should tell you something.⁹
The Windows world, lacking this tradition of simple text communications, makes do with heavyweight OOP interfaces via COM or.NET. If you need to automate such a program, you must also write a COM or.NET program. This is a fair bit more difficult than setting up a pipe on a Unix box.
Windows programs lacking these complicated programming APIs can only communicate through impoverished interfaces like the clipboard or File/Save followed by File/Open.
Long Answer, part 3: The Registry vs Configuration Files
The practical difference between the Windows registry and the Unix Way of system configuration also illustrates the benefits of the "everything is a file" philosophy.
On Unix type systems, I can look at system configuration information from the command line merely by examining files. I can change system behavior by modifying those same files. For the most part, these configuration files are just plain text files, which means I can use any tool on Unix to manipulate them that can work with plain text files.
Scripting the registry is not nearly so easy on Windows.
The easiest method is to make your changes through the Registry Editor GUI on one machine, then blindly apply those changes to other machines with regedit via *.reg files. That isn't really "scripting," since it doesn't let you do anything conditionally: it's all or nothing.
If your registry changes need any amount of logic, the next easiest option is to learn PowerShell, which basically amounts to learning.NET system programming. It would be like if Unix only had Perl, and you had to do all ad hoc system administration through it. Now, I'm a Perl fan, but not everyone is. Unix lets you use any tool you happen to like, as long as it can manipulate plain text files.
Footnotes:Jaylen Brown has officially declared for the 2016 NBA Draft. On Thursday, the 6-foot-7-inch forward announced he has decided to forego his three remaining years of eligibility as he plans to sign an agent.
“It’s a decision that’s going to change everything. I wanted to make sure I was informed and I was ready and I was confident and comfortable where I was going,” Brown said. “I feel extremely confident in my decision.”
Brown and fellow freshman Ivan Rabb were the only two underclassmen projected to be selected in the first round not yet declared for the draft, according to DraftExpress.om. The site has Brown going fourth overall and Rabb at 14. Many expected both Brown and Rabb to leave after one year upon their arrival at Cal as five star recruits.
Brown also stated that he plans to continue his education to get his degree at some point and recognized his professors at his press conference.
The pair ended their freshman season with a disappointing loss to 13-seed Hawaii in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on March 18, 77-66. Brown only had four points in the matchup. He will leave UC Berkeley with the third highest scoring average among freshmen in school history.
The Pac-12 Freshman of the Year, Brown, finished the season as the team’s second leading scorer, averaging 14.6 points, 5.4 rebounds and two assists per game and shooting 43.1 percent. Brown was the eighth Cal player to ever win this award and the first since 2011. He was also the only freshman named to the first team All-Pac-12.
“The journey here at Cal has been nothing short of great,” Brown said. “I will always be a Golden Bear.”
After the decision by Brown, the team will now be left without two key players for the 2016-17 season as senior guard Tyrone Wallace has played out his four years of eligibility. It is still unknown what Rabb’s decision will be toward declaring for the draft with the deadline set for Sunday.
Alaina Getzenberg is the sports editor. Contact her at [email protected].Follow her on Twitter @agetzenberg.India plants 66 million trees in 12 hours in record-breaking bid to meet Paris Agreement promise
Posted
India has broken its own world record by planting 66 million trees in just 12 hours, according to a Government official, in a bid to honour a pledge made at the Paris Climate Change Conference.
More than 1.5 million volunteers turned out on Sunday between 7am and 7pm to plant the massive number of tree saplings along the Narmada River in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
State Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced the new record on Twitter.
In 2016, India set the previous record when it planted more than 50 million trees in one day at more than 6,000 locations across the state of Uttar Pradesh.
Guinness World Records' adjudicators reportedly monitored Sunday's plantation and are expected to confirm the new record in the coming weeks.
Under the Paris Agreement, India agreed to spend $6 billion to reforest 12 per cent of its land and help mitigate the effects of climate change.
Other nations are also undertaking massive tree-planting efforts to reduce deforestation and climate change.
At the end of 2016, 10 African nations pledged to restore 31.7 million hectares of land as part of the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative.
In Australia, a team of engineers plan to use drones to plant 1 billion trees every year.
Dr Susan Graham has helped build a drone system that can scan the land, identify ideal places to grow trees, and then fire germinated seeds into the soil.
Deforestation and forest degradation make up 17 per cent of the world's carbon emissions — more than the entire world's transportation sector, according to the United Nations.
The planet loses 15 billion trees every year and much of it is cleared for farmland to feed the world's booming population, but it is feared this could be exacerbating climate change.
Topics: environment, environmental-impact, forests, climate-change, indiaEgypt’s high-end culinary scene has long been dominated by foreign cuisine—sushi, classic French, pizza, international fast food franchises. For the most part, the country’s upper class consumes Egyptian food at home, while opting for international cuisine at restaurants.
But this reality is changing in post-revolutionary Egypt, where a resurgence of nationalism has led to a demand for high-end Egyptian restaurants. This charge is being led partly by Chris Khalifa, 29, a rising star in Egypt’s culinary landscape. The former investment banker quit his job at EFG Hermes, a leading investment bank in the Middle East, to establish Zooba, a restaurant that serves Egyptian food to Cairo’s elite.
“With Zooba, we’ve managed to create a young, eclectic and trendy culture around Egyptian street food,” he said, and customers seem to be eating it up.
The restaurant, located in the posh enclave of Zamalek in central Cairo, opened its doors last March, and serves about 200 customers a day. The menu includes items that were once perceived as “food for the poor,” as a customer pointed out while devouring a ful sandwich, on a busy Friday night.
Zooba A Zooba spread–ful (fava beans with eggs), taamia, lentils, torshy (pickled turnips), and lemon hibiscus.
Ful is the king of classic Egyptian street food. The sandwich is typically made of mashed fava beans, olive oil, and lemon juice, although many variations exist. For the 15 million Egyptians living on less than $1 a day, ful makes up an essential part of the daily diet, as it is affordable, and contains fiber that keeps stomachs satisfied for long hours. The sandwich can be purchased from street vendors in Cairo’s less affluent neighborhoods for under $0.10 a pop.
Over at Zooba, customers are shelling out nearly 10 times the amount for the same sandwich, in addition to other fare such as lentil soup, falafel, and roasted sweet potato, a popular desert. While Khalifa has to worry about costs like expensive rent, which do not apply to street vendors, much of what he sells is the cool factor he has managed to attach to foods that were once perceived as anything but trendy.
“We’ve spent a lot of time on developing recipes, but also paid particular attention to details like the decor, packaging, and the brand identity,” he said. His efforts and attention to detail are evident in the every nook and cranny of Zooba, from the playful neon letters hanging above the restaurant’s entrance, to the potted herbs scattered throughout, and the bright, funky packaging of the food.
Restauranteurs around the country are taking notice to Khalifa’s success and offering customers their take on gourmet Egyptian street food. In the last couple of months, similar restaurants have popped up in Zamalek, and other wealthy neighborhoods throughout the sprawling metropolis.
So far, Zooba reigns as fan favorite. “I go to Zooba two or three times a week with friends,” said Ghufran El Katatney, a customer and self-proclaimed “Zooba fanatic.” She added, “We love the food, and the atmosphere is really fun. I’ve tried the other new restaurant serving Egyptian food here in Zamalek, but I prefer Zooba. The food is better and the atmosphere is more fun.”
At a time when Egypt’s ailing economy struggles while transitioning to democracy, Zooba’s success is a breath of fresh air. Egypt’s unemployment rate has reached a record high, rising from 11.8 percent to 12.6 precent from the first to second quarter of 2012 (according to CAPMAS, Egypt’s official statistics agency). Khalifa employs a staff of 30 people, whom he believes are the establishment’s biggest asset. In a novel move, he is giving the entire team—from busboys to the head chef—a percentage of the companies profits at the end of the year, along with a portion of the tips and service charges. While this is an uncommon practice in Egypt, Khalifa believes it will make his employees feel personally invested in the company, thus allowing for stellar customer service and brand loyalty.
Zooba The Zooba staff all get a portion of the profits.
Khalifa is hoping to add two new branches of Zooba in Cairo within the next two years, while working to eventually scale the concept internationally.
His expansion plans may face hurdles. Recent events, such as the deadly anti-American protests across the Arab world, are potentially discouraging signs for foreign investors in the region.
Some, experts, however, are optimistic. Mustafa El- Halwagi, chair of the trade and industry committee at the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, and a member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs, told Quartz, “It is no doubt that foreign investors prefer to see a period of stability; however, many investors from around the world are encouraged by the fact that Egypt has taken steps on the road of democracy. Despite the recent violence, most multinationals corporation currently operating in Egypt have expansions plans that they are continuing to implement up to this minute.”
In spite of political and economic turbulence, Khalifa has managed to create a successful brand by providing classics with a twist, to a niche market. In an increasingly globalized world, ethnic street food has taken center stage, so it is no surprise to see the trend emerge in every corner of the globe. It is only a matter of time until Cairo sees its first food truck rolling past the Pyramids of Giza.Today, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) told the San Francisco Superior Court that it opposed the efforts of former employee Ellen Pao to reduce the litigation costs that Kleiner says she owes after losing a gender discrimination case that she brought against the firm. The filing also noted that (PDF) since the jury's decision was handed down, Pao has asked Kleiner Perkins for $2.7 million in post-trial fees and costs in exchange for not appealing her case.
In the aftermath of the jury trial, the two sides have been battling over terms to end the fight. The jury sided with Kleiner Perkins in March, deciding |
have disabled this security feature, which is an understandable position to hold: Valve aren’t going to support you if you don’t utilise the available facilities to maintain the security of your account.
This is a good step towards keeping an account’s economy items safe. It will no doubt cut down on the amount of economy items lost through compromised accounts, or potentially through XSS exploits or malicious software on the end user’s machine.
This is another opportunity where Valve could replace the use of an e-mail confirmation with the use of two-factor authentication, for the same reasons we praised two-factor auth in the section above.
Reduction of automated phishing accounts
Valve have implemented a number of improvements over the past year that have greatly reduced the amount of automated phishing bots on Steam. We understand these improvements have been primarily related to the base restrictions applied to newly registered accounts, and there has been a noticeable drop in nuisance bots on Steam as a result. There’s nothing else to say on this point, but we did want to acknowledge it – we’re thankful for the drop in nuisance bots!
To conclude
Valve have made a great number of improvements with regards to the security of their products and customers over the last year, both in response to the points raised in our open letter and of their own volition. We still think Valve need to review their stance on incentives for reporting vulnerabilities, and we’re not quite sure how things stand with regards to Valve’s internal communication and communication with partners – the one example we have above, where we believe Valve failed to adequately communicate a security vulnerability, doesn’t give us enough data to make an objective observation on this point. Beyond those two points, we are happy with the work Valve has put in to security over the past year, and are excited to see what will happen in the coming year.
Sincerely,
Rob Jackson (Official Team Fortress Wiki)
Martin Benjamins (SteamDB)
Pavel Djundik (SteamDB)
Nathaniel Theis (Concerned Citizen)
John Drinkwater (Concerned Citizen)
Jesús Higueras (Galactic Cafe)
Tomáš Duda (Concerned Citizen)
Daniel Evans (Concerned Citizen)There was a significant amount of talk among national hockey insiders last summer that Ivan Provorov might legitimately be NHL-ready just months after being drafted by the Philadelphia Flyers. As a result, Provorov entered Flyers camp in 2015 with a great deal of hype and was positioned by many as the "savior of the defense" for the team.
Ron Hextall had other ideas. After Provorov failed to blow the doors off his competition in the early portion of camp and preseason, the Flyers' general manager quickly sent his prized defense prospect back to the WHL for another season with the Brandon Wheat Kings. The directive from Hextall to Provorov may have been implicit, but it was simple -- clean up the minor issues in your game, work on consistency and conditioning, and make the decision much tougher for us next season.
It's hard to argue that Ivan Provorov didn't check all of those boxes in 2015-16.
No. 3: Ivan Provorov
Position: D
Age: 19 (1/13/1997)
2015-16 League/Team/Statistics: Brandon (WHL) - 21 G, 52 A in 73 GP
Nationality: Russian (Yaroslavl)
Acquired Via: 2015 NHL Draft -- Round 1, Pick 7
Provorov was already one of the best defensemen in the WHL during his draft year, but last season he scratched "one of" out of that description. He was as complete of a defenseman as you'll see in junior hockey -- played in all three situations, created offense, won puck battles, and locked down opposing forwards. Plus/minus is obviously a terrible stat, but when you receive as many minutes as Provorov did and you finish a +64, you're probably doing a lot of things right.
Unlike in his draft year, Provorov's stellar play continued through the postseason, as Hextall himself noted in July.
[In 2014-15, the Wheat Kings] were in the playoffs and [Provorov] hit a wall. Typical young kid. He’s 17 years old, and they had a long season, went deep in the playoffs, and he hit a wall. He didn’t hit a wall this year. Played very well start to finish, and then he played in that [Memorial] Cup.
Provorov did appear to slow down just a bit during the Memorial Cup itself, but that was after 90 games (62 regular season, 21 playoffs, seven in the World Junior Championships) of hockey and while facing the best junior teams in Canada. What is clear is that Provorov stayed great far longer in 2015-16 than he did in 2014-15, while taking an even larger role for his team.
He was rewarded with the CHL Defenseman of the Year award, given to the best blueliner out of all three Canadian junior hockey leagues (OHL, QMJHL, WHL). Winning this award does not guarantee NHL success, considering that players like Danny Syvret and Jonathon Blum are past recipients. But the recent list also includes impact defensemen like Dougie Hamilton and Ryan Ellis, in addition to older winners like Keith Yandle and Dan Hamhuis. And then, of course, there's the great Chris Pronger, who won the trophy way back in 1993.
After being voted the best defenseman in junior hockey, what could possibly be next for Provorov? If you talk to him, it's clear that his primary focus is leaving the WHL behind entirely and breaking camp with the Philadelphia Flyers. That's understandable on the part of the 19-year old -- in his mind, he's ready for the next challenge after lighting up his age-appropriate level last season. But Ron Hextall will be the one making the final decision on Provorov's status, and he's a hard man to please.
As Hextall repeated during the summer, he doesn't buy the line of thinking that a prospect's development will stall by staying at a lower level too long.
I think any player can be the best player in junior hockey if they go back, right? Any of those guys. We want all of our players to be better than they were last year. Is there more for [Provorov] to do if in fact he goes back to juniors? Of course there is. He could be the best player in junior hockey hopefully, or the Western League. There’s always something.
In the end, the decision on Provorov will be made based upon his performance in training camp and preseason, in tandem with his ability to prove superior to one or more options on the current Philadelphia blueline. On Monday, I opined why that shouldn't be a very difficult task.
The hard truth is that the bar isn’t particularly high. As noted previously, Andrew MacDonald and Nick Schultz rank in the bottom-fifth of the NHL in terms of 5v5 on-ice performance over the past three years. These aren’t solid third pair defensemen; they are low-end NHL players when it comes to driving positive results. And if you buy Expected Goals as a better way to evaluate Brandon Manning than Corsi, then he’s right there with them. It would be one thing if all seven of the Flyers’ defensemen were stationed in the 50th percentile or above in most of the on-ice categories. Then, Provorov would need to prove to the coaching staff and front office that he is already an above-average NHL defenseman. Instead, he really just has to prove that he’s better than one of MacDonald, Schultz, or Manning — a much less difficult task.
Of course, being better on paper is one thing. Provorov will need to go out there and prove his superiority over the competition to Hextall, Dave Hakstol, and the rest of the Flyers braintrust in every game, practice and scrimmage. So far, the initial impressions have been positive, but it's impossible to read the mind of Hextall. He could have a totally different evaluation of Provorov's play so far.
The 19-year old Provorov has received a ridiculous amount of hype over the last few weeks, but for once, the hype is warranted. So far in his career, he has looked the part of a possible top-pair, two-way NHL defenseman, totally worthy of his lofty draft selection and of the glowing reports from scouts. That's no guarantee that Provorov will reach that ceiling -- after all, few prospects do. But Provorov's odds of getting there are higher than any Flyers prospect not yet in the NHL, which makes his push towards making the roster over the coming weeks especially exciting.
***
How we voted for Ivan Provorov :
Kelly Travis Charlie Allison Kurt Brent Collin Kevin Al Community 4 3 3 3 3 3 2 3 3 3
How we voted at No. 3 :
Kelly Travis Charlie Allison Kurt Brent Collin Kevin Al Community Travis Konecny Ivan Provorov Ivan Provorov Ivan Provorov Ivan Provorov Ivan Provorov Shayne Gostisbehere Ivan Provorov Ivan Provorov Ivan Provorov
***Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu reportedly attempted to cancel a January briefing to US senators by Mossad officials aimed at warning the lawmakers that an Iran sanctions bill could scuttle the ongoing negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program.
Netanyahu removed the meeting from an itinerary of a delegation of senators visiting Israel in early 2015, led by Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, Time magazine reported Saturday.
Citing sources “familiar with the events,” the magazine reported that Corker, who also serves as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, protested Netanyahu’s move, and threatened to cut the trip short.
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Corker asked Israel’s ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, to intervene, and the January 19 briefing went ahead as planned.
According to reports, the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, warned US officials against a bill that would hit Iran with sanctions if the nuclear talks fail to secure an agreement by the June deadline — a stance that diverges sharply from the Israeli government’s formal position.
In addition to Corker, Mossad Chief Tamir Pardo briefed Republican senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Barrasso, Democratic senators Tim Kaine and Joe Donnelly, and Independent senator Angus King. He described the sanctions bill as a move akin to “throwing a grenade into the process.”
This is not the first time Israel’s intelligence agency has appeared to contradict Netanyahu’s assessment of Iran’s ambitions for nuclear weapons.
In an alleged Mossad cable from 2012 published by Al Jazeera in February, the agency said that Tehran had not yet begun work on building a nuclear bomb. The cable was sent shortly after Netanyahu’s 2012 speech to Congress in which he asserted that Iran was less than one year away from building a nuclear bomb.
Netanyahu has been vocal in his support of maintaining sanctions against Iran, and has repeatedly warned of the global consequences of a “bad” deal with Tehran.
Corker, together with Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, recently introduced the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, which would require any final agreement with Iran to be submitted to Congress for review before the US could officially suspended economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
Obama has vowed to veto any such legislation, prompting Corker and Menendez to seek out a 67-vote congressional majority to override the president’s veto.
Corker was one of a handful of Republican senators who declined to sign a controversial letter to Iran’s leadership arguing that any nuclear deal could be voided once US President Barack Obama leaves office.
On Sunday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said he was hopeful that an interim deal with Iran was possible “in the next days,” provided that Tehran can prove the peaceful nature of its controversial nuclear program.Bell announced plans this morning to buy MTS, the Manitoba-based wireless carrier that has been critical to creating a more competitive wireless market in the province. The nearly $4 billion deal would include a commitment to divest one-third of MTS wireless customers to Telus. The agreement is still subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals along with figuring out how some customers go to Telus and some stay with Bell. While the government has yet to articulate a clear strategy for wireless competition in Canada, the deal appears to kill the hope of four carriers in each market and will likely mean sharply increased prices for Manitoba consumers.
With the four competitors in Manitoba – Bell, Telus, Rogers, and MTS – the province features some of the lowest wireless prices in Canada. Compare Bell’s wireless pricing for consumers in Manitoba and Ontario. The cost of an unlimited nationwide calling share plan in Manitoba is $50. The same plan in Ontario is $65. The difference in data costs are even larger: Bell offers 6 GB for $20 in Manitoba. The same $20 will get you just 500 MB in Ontario. In fact, 5 GB costs $50 in Ontario, more than double the cost in Manitoba for less data. The other carriers such as Rogers and Telus also offer lower pricing in Manitoba. The reason is obvious: the presence of a fourth carrier creates more competition and lower pricing. With MTS out of the way – and Bell and Telus sharing the same wireless network – prices are bound to increase to levels more commonly found in the rest of the country.
The deal therefore represents a huge blow to the government’s hopes for a more competitive wireless marketplace. Instead, one of Canada’s lower cost provinces is likely to see increased prices and the market continues to consolidate around the big three providers. If wireless competition is a priority, the government and regulator should carefully examine the proposed transaction and consider whether it moves Canadian wireless in the wrong direction.Donald Trump went into Sunday night’s presidential debate on the defensive. On Friday, the disclosure of a recording of Trump making breathtakingly vile comments about women in 2005 delivered a serious jolt to a campaign that had been losing support since his jittery performance in the Sept. 26 debate with Hillary Clinton.
The Washington Post had obtained the audio of Trump’s conversation with “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush that began while they were riding on a bus toward the set of “Days of Our Lives,” where Trump was to make a cameo appearance.
The real estate mogul, who had recently married Melania Trump at the time, is recorded bragging about groping and seducing women, whether married or unmarried. He spoke in specifics about how he can force himself on women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it... you can do anything,” he said.
Trump spelled out his attempt to have sex with a particular married woman. “And I moved on her very heavily,” he is heard saying, adding: “I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married.” He also made crude comments about her appearance, suggesting she had breast augmentation.
Some of the words are simply too vulgar for publication.
Trump’s words were disgusting, and his initial quasi-apology was disturbing in itself. His statement dismissed the crude exchange as “locker-room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course — not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.”
If anyone was offended. A human being with any sense of decency would characterize Trump’s comments as patently offensive. But the Republican nominee just cannot bring himself to apologize for anything: for statements that are factually inaccurate, racially insensitive, insulting or otherwise reckless and boorish.
Many years ago. Trump was nearly 60 years old. At that point in life, a person’s essential character has been set for decades. And here’s another way to put that 2005 conversation in context: Trump has been trying to make an issue of Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions in the 1990s.
Bill Clinton has said far worse. Does this sound like the words of a would-be president... or the desperate rationalization of a child who has been caught breaking the rules? He again invoked the Bill-is-worse line in a video released later that night. And, again, his contrition was hedged — and a fresh wave of Republicans distanced themselves from their nominee.
What Trump described pursuing with arrogant glee was not merely distasteful and disrespectful. It was sexual assault — a crime in any state of the nation.
Chronicle recommends: You can read the full text on all of our endorsement editorials to date (including all 17 state propositions) at www.sfchronicle.com/endorsements.Health officials have confirmed a second U.S. case of a mysterious virus that has sickened hundreds in the Middle East.
The latest case is not an American - he is a resident of Saudi Arabia, visiting Florida, who is now in an Orlando hospital.
He was diagnosed with MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Sunday night. It is a respiratory illness that begins with flu-like fever and cough but can lead to shortness of breath, pneumonia and death.
Fortunately, the U.S. cases so far have not been severe. The first case, a man in Indiana, was released from a hospital late last week. And the second patient is doing well, officials said. The two cases are not linked, officials said.
"The risk to the public remains very low," said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
MERS is a respiratory illness that begins with flu-like fever and cough but can lead to shortness of breath, pneumonia and death.
Most cases have been in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere in the Middle East. But earlier this month a first U.S. case was diagnosed in a man who traveled from Saudi Arabia to Indiana.
That man, an American, was a health-care worker at a hospital in Saudi Arabia's capital city who flew to the United States on April 24 on a plane that originated in Riyadh, stopped in London and then landed in Chicago. The man took a bus to Munster, Indiana where he became sick and went to a hospital on April 28.
He improved and was released from a Munster hospital on Friday. Tests of people who were around the man have all proved negative, health officials have said.
Health officials now must track down fellow travelers who were around the newest case, and this time it will be more challenging: There were more flights involved.
This man also was a health-care worker at a hospital where MERS cases were being treated, the CDC said. He traveled on May 1 on flights from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, first to London, then to Boston, then to Atlanta, and finally to Orlando. He went to a hospital on May 8 and was placed in isolation.
The first flight was Saudi Airlines flight 113 to London, according to a Public Health England press release. The U.S. government did not identify the flight information for the other legs.
Health officials did not immediately release additional detail about his travels or his week in Florida, except to say he was not at any theme parks and remained in the Orlando area to see family.
The man is at Dr. P. Phillips Hospital in Orlando. He arrived there with relatively mild symptoms, is stable and doing well, but there is no timetable for his release, said Dain Weister, a spokesman for Florida's health department.
As early as the first flight, the latest case was suffering fever, chills and a slight cough. That doesn't necessarily mean he infected anyone. Experts think MERS cases are most infectious when they are severely ill, with symptoms like pneumonia and difficulty breathing, Schuchat said.
However, health officials are trying to contact as many as 500 people who were on the three flights within the United States to let them know the situation and watch for symptoms. People on the flight from Jeddah to London also will be contacted, CDC officials said.
MERS belongs to the coronavirus family that includes the common cold and SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, which caused some 800 deaths globally in 2003.
The MERS virus has been found in camels, but officials don't know how it is spreading to humans. It can spread from person to person, but officials believe that happens only after close contact. Not all those exposed to the virus become ill.
But it appears to be unusually lethal - some estimates have suggested it has killed nearly a third of the people it sickened. The estimate has been dropping as health officials have begun diagnosing more and more cases with less severe illness. But the estimated fatality rate for MERS still is far higher than what's seen with seasonal flu or other routine infections.
Fortunately, it is not as contagious as flu, measles or other diseases. There is no vaccine or cure and there's no specific treatment except to relieve symptoms.
Overall, 538 people have been reported to have the respiratory illness, including 145 people who have died. So far, all had ties to the Middle East region or to people who traveled there. As many as one-fifth of cases have been in health-care workers, Schuchat said.Russia's Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Yuri Baluyevski looks at his watch before a meeting with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana (R) in Brussels May 11, 2007. Baluyevski said on Saturday Moscow could use nuclear arms pre-emptively if under serious threat, his comments marking no change in defense policy but underlining a renewed military confidence. REUTERS/Thierry Roge
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s armed forces chief said on Saturday Moscow could use nuclear arms pre-emptively if under serious threat, his comments marking no change in defense policy but underlining a renewed military confidence.
Interfax news agency quoted Chief of Staff Yuri Baluyevski as saying also that Russia, rebuilding defenses under President Vladimir Putin after the decline of the immediate post-Soviet years, must guard against “excessive militarization” of society.
He said Russia was not going to attack anyone.
“But we believe all our partners in the international community should understand clearly and have no doubts that in order to protect its and its allies’ sovereignty and territorial integrity, Russia will use its armed forces, including nuclear weapons, and it can do it pre-emptively,” he told a scientific conference in Moscow.
In Soviet times, military doctrine stated Moscow would not use nuclear arms first in any confrontation with the West. With the decline of its conventional forces in the 1990s, Moscow dropped this element of its policy.
President Vladimir Putin, who signed a new doctrine into force in 2000 as acting president, must step down after an election in March likely to be won by his choice of successor, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
Western analysts will be looking for any changes of nuance in defense and other policy, though Putin is expected to maintain strong influence.
Moscow is currently at odds with the West over U.S. plans to develop a missile defense shield it fears could make it vulnerable to U.S. missile attack. It also resists Western moves that could lead soon to the breakaway of the Kosovo region of Russian ally Serbia.“Many in the world, just like the new US administration, believe Iran gained more from the nuclear deal with world powers, but few in the world would claim Iran has incurred losses by signing this deal,” Zarif said in a Farsi interview with ISNA.
However, he added, this does not mean the Americans have kept to their promises.
“In fact, they missed a golden opportunity, because the Leader of [Iran’s] Islamic Revolution had noted the nuclear deal and talks are a litmus test for Americans. If they pass, it is possible to extend it [the negotiation] to other fields,” Zarif added.
“But Americans forced the Islamic Republic to make efforts for every step of the JCPOA implementation.”
“Therefore, instead of using the nuclear deal to build trust, they heightened the distrust, and this was the Americans’ loss more than any other party, because they missed a special historic opportunity.”
Nuclear Deal Not to Turn into Iran Government’s Achilles Heel
He further noted that the opponents of JCPOA who think they can turn the deal into the government’s Achilles heel are mistaken.
The nuclear deal is an agreement endorsed by the Islamic Establishment and “all countries in the world believe that it was a wise decision,” Zarif said.An Oregon school board voted on Wednesday to remove the name 'Lynch' from three elementary schools in Portland.
Lynch Meadows Elementary, Lynch Woods Elementary and Lynch View Elementary were all named after a local family who donated land to the school district in the late 1800s.
In recent years, school officials say they have received complaints from people who are concerned about the name's connotation with lynching.
'There were an increasing amount of questions and some complaints from families of color around the name,' Centennial School District Superintendent Paul Coakley, who is black, told the Oregonian.
'Our diversity is increasing every year, with families coming in from Northeast Portland and out of state, so [the names] needed to be looked at,' he added.
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On Wednesday, an Oregon school board voted to remove the name Lynch from three elementary schools in Portland. Above, Lynch Meadows Elementary which will become Meadows Elementary
The schools got their name from a local family who donated land to the district in the late 1800s. Above, Lynch Wood elementary which will become Wood Elementary
It's unclear how lynch mobs got their names. Some have attributed the violent practice to an 18th century politician named Charles Lynch, while other accounts say the inspiration was an 18th century Virginian named Capt William Lynch.
While there's no connection to the practice and the local family, Coakley says the names have nonetheless become a 'distraction'.
At Wednesday's school board meeting, members of the community spoke passionately, both in favor and against changing the names.
'I don't think any of you have ever seen a picture where one of your decedents was hanging from a tree,' one black man said to the board.
The board voted unanimously to change the names on Wednesday. At their hearing, members of the community spoke for and against the chance
'I don't think any of you have ever seen a picture where one of your decedents was hanging from a tree,' one black man (above) said to the board.
'I’m just disheartened because where will it stop?' Vicki Burnside told KOIN. 'Any moment someone could be offended by any name. Do we keep changing the name of everything? That would be the question, right?'
A young student added: 'I know the majority of you guys are white and it's hard to know how that word could have an effect but it does. If a simple name change could make students feel safe, then why are we holding back?'
'It was a family,' said one woman who was against the change. 'Lynch was named for a family, not an action.'
'I’m just disheartened because where will it stop?' Vicki Burnside told KOIN. 'Any moment someone could be offended by any name. Do we keep changing the name of everything? That would be the question, right?'
David Hayes, Patrick Lynch's great-great-grandson did not attend the board meeting but he has spoken out against changing the name in the past.
'I think my grandfather would have liked me to stand up for the family name a little bit,' he told KGW. '[Schools] are in the business of education so they should be able to educate people that a name and history have a certain meaning versus what other people have tried to turn it into.'
At the end of the meeting, the board voted unanimously to change the names.
Lynch Meadows and Lynch Wood Elementary schools will be chanced to Meadows and Wood Elementary schools temporarily, until permanent names can be decided on. Lynch View Elementary will be chanced to Patrick Lynch Elementary permanently.
Another board member, Pam Shields, says she feels'very comfortable' with the decision because the district no longer owns land that was donated by the Lynch family. She also pointed out that the district's high school, Centennial, was originally called Lynch Terrace, and that name was changed.
The school district has 6,000 students, 55 per cent of whom are not white. The largest racial minority are Latino students, who make up 27 per cent of the student body. A decade ago, the school district was 84 per cent white.
While lynchings were predominantly an issue in the southern U.S., after the end of slavery, they did occasionally happen in Oregon.
In 1902, a black man was lynched in Coos Bay after being accused of raping a white woman.
And in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan drove a black man out of Oregon City with the threat of lynching.Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Of the many great mysteries of the city street, perhaps none is more ubiquitous and more perplexing than the presence of so many black dots.
Even when one knows what they are — gum, walked on many, many, many times — it still seems impossible. Do people really chew that much gum? Do they really spit so much of it on the pavement, and do so many people really step in it on such a regular basis as to grind each one into a dark ovular stain?
“It’s not exactly an urban mystery,” Deborah Stead wrote in The Times in 2003. “More a case of mass denial, or a lack of anthropological curiosity.”
Gum on the ground is nothing new, as Ms. Stead points out, and there was even some amount of concern in the 1920s and 1930s that the whole city would one day be covered in a film of chewed-up rubber.
One hotel manager told The Times in 1921 that absent some effort at cleaning, the city might become totally enveloped. The prospect, she recounted, did not seem to upset one tourist couple from “Latin-America” who “remarked that they had never seen such delightful walks as were found here in spots. ‘Soft to touch, yet very firm.’ ” (One imagines the out-of-town visitor kneeling in his wool suit to push a finger into an early gooey spot.)
However, as far as can be determined, few if any formal studies have ever been made of the sheer tonnage or biological contents of the city’s gum deposits, though they surely contain enough dried DNA of past New Yorkers to populate, Jurassic Park-like, a whole other island – a place where stickball might still be played.
Fortunately, for those who tire of seeing the same speckled patterns, there is someone to call: GumBusters.
“Today when I see people chewing gum and throwing it on the ground, it’s very frustrating,” John Toussaint, 36, a gum-buster, says in a fun audio slide show about the service on Quirky NYC.
“I actually don’t allow my kids to eat gum anymore,” Mr. Toussaint adds.
The Brooklyn-based franchise, which has also been profiled on the television show “Dirty Jobs,” works with the Times Square Alliance and can be found busting gum with their (nonplasma) packs on most weekday mornings from 9 to 11. But the company traces its origins — like the city itself — to Holland.
While no sidewalk is gum-free, some are certainly worse than others.
So what’s the gummiest block in your neighborhood?
Around the Web from link to link; today’s chatter in the New York City blogosphere. Have a tip? E-mail us at NewYorkOnline@nytimes.com or send a message on Twitter to @jdavidgoodman.WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has revealed in a new book that his organization managed to stay afloat thanks to “strategic investments” in bitcoin that helped the organization cover piling costs in financial and legal areas, The Daily Dot reports.
WikiLeaks — much to the disapproval of world governments — is a journalistic outlet that publishes secret information. Its controversial work has led major financial institutions like PayPal, VISA, and MasterCard to block funds serving as donations, with an attempt to financially cripple the organization to its demise.
Using bitcoin, however, WikiLeaks managed to find a funding avenue that couldn’t be stopped by traditional financial institutions.
And two price spikes in 2013 allowed the organization to reap the returns of their bitcoin donations. First when the price topped $200 in April of last year, and then later in the year when the price topped $1,000.
Julian Assange has made no secret of his interest in this digital currency, in which he tried to explain the benefits to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.
“And [bitcoin] is very important, actually,” Assange told Schmidt during a meeting (view the transcript of the meeting here). “It has a few problems. But its innovations exceed its problems.”
The public bitcoin address for WikiLeaks shows they have received 3,859 bitcoins (worth $2.26 million at the time of this writing), with a remaining balance of 3.88 bitcoins.Image copyright AFP Image caption Minibus taxis are widely used form of public transport in South Africa
A boy of 10 was forced to lie face down while his mother was subjected to a four-hour rape ordeal in a Johannesburg taxi, reports from South Africa say.
He and his mother were allegedly tricked into boarding the minibus taxi before she was assaulted and ordered to hand over her bank card and PIN number by the three armed occupants.
It is thought to be the latest in a string of attacks by the gang.
The first reports of the "rape taxi" were made a year ago.
According to the Roodeport Record, the initial attacks happened in March 2016, with at least three taking place in one week last June. All took place in, or near, the Johannesburg township of Soweto.
But it is unclear how many attacks there have been in the last 12 months, or if they are all by the same gang.
Lt-Col Lungelo Dlamini told the BBC: "A group of three to four men driving in two separate [Toyota] Quantums, one grey and another white, pick up women pretending to be a taxi, rob them at gunpoint and then proceed to rape them."
Mr Dlamini said it was not known whether the two Quantums were working separately or together.
Praying for her son
So far, two women - including the mother - have talked to local media in South Africa, describing their ordeals.
The second woman told Kaya FM how a man who had found her after she was attacked had helped another two potential victims he found in the same spot.
She also said the gang had been carrying a card machine, according to Africa News Network.
Both women were picked up during the day, the mother at 11:00, and the lone woman at 08:00.
After the mother and son entered the taxi, the boy was made to lie face down on the floor, while the men raped his mother.
The victim told EyeWitness News she had prayed during her ordeal that the gang would not hurt her child.
South Africa has some of the highest rates of reported rape in the world.Racism Is Literally Bad For Your Health
Enlarge this image toggle caption Sarah Sholes/Courtesy of Harvard Chan Sarah Sholes/Courtesy of Harvard Chan
Most people can acknowledge that discrimination has an insidious effect on the lives of minorities, even when it's unintentional. Those effects can include being passed over for jobs for which they are qualified or shut out of housing they can afford. And most people are painfully aware of the tensions between African-Americans and police.
But discrimination can also lead to a less obvious result: tangible, measurable negative effects on health. A new survey conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health asked members of different ethnic and racial groups about their experiences with discrimination. Ninety-two percent of African-American respondents said they felt discrimination against African-Americans exists in the United States today, and at least half said they have experienced it themselves at work or when interacting with police.
All of this discrimination can literally be deadly, according to Harvard professor David Williams, who has spent years studying the health effects of discrimination.
He tells NPR's Michel Martin: "Basically what we have found is that discrimination is a type of stressful life experience that has negative effects on health similar to other kinds of stressful experiences."
Interview Highlights
On the health problems caused by day-to-day discrimination
The research indicates it is not just the big experiences of discrimination, like being passed over for a job or not getting a promotion that someone felt they might have been entitled to. But the day-to-day little indignities affect health: being treated with less courtesy than others, being treated with less respect than others, receiving poorer service at restaurants or stores. Research finds that persons who score high on those kinds of experiences, if you follow them over time, you see more rapid development of coronary heart disease. Research finds that pregnant women who report high levels of discrimination give birth to babies who are lower in birth weight.
On discrimination at the doctor's office
Across virtually every medical intervention, from the most simple medical treatments to the most complicated treatments, blacks and other minorities receive poorer-quality care than whites. African-Americans who are college-educated do more poorly in terms of health than whites who are college-educated. And these racial differences in the quality and intensity of care persist for African-Americans irrespective of the quality of insurance that they have, irrespective of their education level, irrespective of their job status, irrespective of the severity of disease.
On how to start combating discrimination
Much of this discrimination that occurs in the health care context, and in other contexts of society, may not even be intentional. There is intentional discrimination, but we think the majority of the discrimination that occurs in the health care context is driven by what we call "implicit bias" or "unconscious unthinking discrimination."
If I am a normal human being, I am most likely to be prejudiced. Why? Because every society, every culture, every community has in groups and out groups. And if there are some groups that you have been taught — just subtly, as you were raised — to think of negatively, you will treat that person differently when you encounter someone from that group, without any negative intention on your part, even if you possess egalitarian beliefs. That's why you have to acknowledge that I and everyone else is a part of the human family, and these are normal human processes that occur, and the first step to addressing it is to acknowledge: "It could be me."
NPR's digital news intern Jose Olivares produced this story for digital.We first met Spark this summer when it raised more than $560,000 on Kickstarter for its Arduino-like Spark Core Wi-Fi connector kit. It subsequently went on to raise a $4.9 million Series A round and launch a cloud OS to power its Internet of Things (IoT) enabling hardware. Now it’s back with the Spark Photon, a postage stamp sized Wi-Fi development board for building connected devices.
The Spark Photon costs just $19 and is so small it comes packaged in a matchbox. It’s designed for putting together prototype devices. Once you’ve finalized |
is totally erratic,” Turley added. “His decisions and the way he talks and the way he speaks is not presidential. And I want more than anything for him to do that.”AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) -- Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree says the Marines' tattoo rules unintentionally discriminates against women recruits.
Pingree, a Democrat, wants the U.S. Marine Corps to change its rules and accept 20-year-old Kate Pimental, of Kennebunk, who has a tattoo just below her collarbone.
Pingree says if a man had a tattoo in the same place, the Marines would accept him because he could cover it with a Marine-issued crew T-shirt. But the only T-shirt available to women in the Marines is a V-neck, which would expose the tattoo.
Pimental's tattoo, which she got when she turned 18, reads: "Let your smile change the world but never let the world change you."
Pingree on Friday sent a letter to Marine Corps Commandant Robert Neller asking for a waiver and a policy review.
(Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
Copyright 2016 WCSHThe challenges and threats posed by out-groups have major effects on human social behavior and how individuals interact with one another. We briefly review evidence here that out-group threat similarly affects nonhuman animal behavior. Actual and potential threats posed by out-group individuals (unfamiliar and genetically nonrelated individuals of the same species) affect social behavior promoting “out-group” avoidance and “in-group” bias and enhancing in-group (familiar and/or genetically related individuals) affiliation and interactions. Individuals from out-groups present risks of pathogen exposure as well as being threats to resources, territory, and offspring. All of these threats function to promote in-group bias in humans and nonhumans. There are also striking similarities in the underlying neurobiological mechanisms mediating the responses to out-group threat and the expression of in-group bias. In particular, the evolutionarily conserved, hormone-regulated nonapeptide systems (oxytocin, arginine-vasopressin, and homologous neuropeptides and their receptors) are involved in the mediation of the detection and avoidance of out-groups and response to in-groups and facilitation of in-group responses across multiple vertebrate species. Consequently, comparative investigations of both the behavioral expression of and the mechanism underlying out-group avoidance and in-group bias are necessary for a full understanding of the evolution of social behavior and responses to in- and out-groups.The ‘NFC on USIM’ cards support card emulation and tag read/write functions and are expected to cost in the region of US$30-40 each. Peer-to-peer support will be added towards the end of 2011.
Korean mobile network operator SK Telecom has announced an NFC-enabled USIM card that enables existing mobile phones to be turned into NFC devices by simply replacing the existing SIM with one of the new NFC USIMs.
The ‘NFC on USIM’ cards provide standard SIM functions plus a 13.56MHz near field communication antenna and an NFC controller — all on one, small chip. The new NFC USIM will be available in October 2011 and SK Telecom will release a developer API at the same time.
“The sharp increase in the number of handsets that offer NFC function through NFC on USIM is expected to fuel the spread of NFC-based services and lead to the development of diverse related services,” says SK Telecom.
As well as payments, the NFC USIM can be used to support peer-to-peer communications. A phone equipped with the new SIM can be used to receive product information in stores, mobile advertisements and coupons, conduct real-time account transfers between handsets, exchange electronic business cards, check-in to hotels, unlock doors and verify the user on PCs.
“With the increase of NFC-enabled handsets supported by NFC on USIM, SK Telecom expects to boost the creation and adoption of NFC services, which has been chosen as one of the company’s future growth engines,” says Ihm Jong-Tae, head of SK Telecom’s Institute of Network Technology. “SK Telecom will position itself as the leader in the NFC-based business by constantly developing relevant technology and implementing appropriate business enhancement measures.”
SK Telecom is an established innovator in the NFC market and is heavily committed to adopting the technology. Last month, the company told NFC World that, from then onwards, all the smartphones it stocks must come with NFC.
SK Telecom has confirmed to NFC World that the new NFC USIMs support both card emulation and tag read/write functionality today. Peer-to-peer support will be added towards the end of 2011. The devices are expected to cost in the region of US$30-40 each, depending on volume.Angered by multiple news reports that U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D–Hawaii, didn’t sign a letter with 169 of her Congressional colleagues denouncing President-elect Donald Trump’s appointment of white nationalist Stephen Bannon to be his “chief strategist,” Hawaii Rep. Angus McKelvey, D–West Maui, sent Gabbard a letter of his own. The strongly worded letter criticizes Gabbard for not standing stronger against Bannon’s extremism and support for white supremacists.
As you are aware, Mr. Bannon–the former executive of Breitbart News, has earned a reputation as a racist xenophobe who promotes anti-Semitism and takes a radical approach to illegal immigration,” McKelvey says in his Nov. 17 letter (there’s a link to the complete letter at the end of this post). This flies in the face of what Democrats–particular Hawaii Democrats–stand for. In fact, criticism of Bannon appears to come from both Democrats and Republicans alike. The House Democrats’ opposition letter cites praises on Bannon’s appointment from white nationalist leaders, representing organizations such as the KKK and the Nazi Party, as disturbing. Indeed, this is beyond disturbing. This is something that everyone in America should find reprehensible especially here in Hawaii as we are living, breathing tapestry of a multitude of cultures and races.”
Gabbard’s office has not responded to repeated voicemails and emails asking why she didn’t sign the Bannon letter. On the morning of Monday, Nov. 21, Gabbard met with Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Multiple news organizations reported that Gabbard’s under consideration for a possible job at the Departments of State or Defense or as a possible UN Ambassador (click here for our story on the meeting). Her post-meeting statement mentioned only that she discussed foreign affairs with Trump.
But all of that happened after McKelvey sent his letter.
“All of this begs the question of why you–an elected Democrat representing constituents in a highly Democrat district–support an individual who has a propensity for racism, antiimmigration [sic], anti-Semitism, and ties to White Supremacists groups,” McKelvey added in his Nov. 17 letter. “Your silence on this issue also infers to many that you would rather see our country continue its current course of disorder and turmoil instead of unity for the good of all the people.”
Reached by phone, McKelvey said he hasn’t received any response from Gabbard to his letter. “I’m shocked,” he said of the whole affair. “I’m stunned. If she had campaigned on this, I think Shay [Chan Hodges, Gabbard’s primary election challenger] would have won. Someone has to call her out. Her agenda has been the Tulsi agenda, not our agenda.”
Here’s McKelvey’s letter to Gabbard: 161118_tg_bann_letter_pos_clar_02
Photo courtesy Angus McKelveyFor the first time since The International 3, Alchemist is getting attention from both professional and pub players. He is being picked or banned in almost 50% of all premium professional matches and his pub win rate has drastically gone up since the last patch. Today we would like to discuss what changes to the hero and metagame have made him viable once again and look over some of the most popular builds for the hero.
Reading the Changelogs
In the last two patches, the hero has received some very interesting buffs. One of the most influential ones was the Bounty Rune gold multiplier - getting extra 500 gold at 0:00 means you can either rush some core item or get your mid an early Bottle (or get a bottle yourself if you're mid).
Additionally, Acid Spray now deals 3/4/5/6 extra damage per level. While it might be insignificant in a teamfight, it has certainly increased the speed with which the hero can take stacks of neutral creeps.
Finally, there is an Aghanim's Scepter upgrade. It can serve multiple purposes - it is excellent at conserving item slots on allied heroes and can give your supports a very necessary boost. It is also amazing in the late game, where extra gold can actually translate into extra stats, even if the hero does not have an ultimate upgrade. I do not recall the self-usage of the item in pro games, however in pubs, which tend to be unnecessarily drawn out, it can certainly come in handy.
Core Build
Core Alchemist thrives on the same gold advantage as Anti-Mage does, probably to a higher degree. He does not need a fast Battle Fury to start flashfarming, making it possible for him to go for fighting items early on. Compared to Anti-Mage however, he doesn't scale as well and this should be taken into account.
The classic build for Alchemist involved getting an early Shadow Blade or Blink Dagger for initiation and a quick kill. It was generally followed by situational DPS/Survivability items. The advantage of this approach is how versatile it is. You start off with initiations tools that also help you accelerate your farm and then get whatever items you need against the particular lineup you are facing.
This versatility and gold advantage was the name of the game for core Alchemists during TI3 and it still works. Too much physical DPS on the enemy team? Assault Cuirass can solve this problem, as well as increasing your DPS. Need lockdown? Skull Basher/Abyssal Blade have got you covered. Facing evasion? Get Monkey King Bar. Best part is: with the amount of gold Alchemist earns, getting to these "response" items is fast and easy. Being one step ahead of the enemy not only in terms of Gold but in the way this Gold translates into the power level of the team is crucial for any hero, but especially for Alchemist.
Lately however, one build has gained so much popularity, it could even be considered the default build. I am talking, of course, of the Radiance, Boots of Travel, Manta Style and Octarine Core build. I would like to discuss this build in slightly more detail. You do not necessarily get items in the order discussed here though.
Radiance has received several buffs over the last couple of patches. Not only does it cost less now, but it also provides "miss" chance on the enemies affected, making Alchemist an excellent carrier for the item. With very low armor and HP scaling, Alchemists generally need survivability items to go into a big teamfight. One way to solve it is to initiate yourself and take out the priority target, but this method is prone to being counter-initiated on. Another method is to get a hybrid survivability/dps item - your HP regeneration makes up for dents in your health and restores burst magic damage dealt to you while some item makes sure you don't die to the following barrage of auto-attacks.
Until recently Asssault Cuirass was the answer, but the big problem with it is that you actually have to hit enemy to fully utilize the added DPS. Radiance works regardless - you are constantly dealing a considerable amount of damage (especially given how early Alchemist can get Radiance) and providing yourself and your teammates with extra survivability. What is equally as important is that it also speeds up your farm immensely and gives you 65 damage in case you need to stand and fight.
Manta Style is a very logical addition to the build, since it works wonders with Radiance. It increases you farm speed, your move speed, provides you with an extra source of damage and allows you to split-push very effectively. It provides you with an extra way of evading single-target spells on top of your ultimate and it is also a great stat item for Alchemist considering how desperately he needs armor. With 30 second cooldown on Melee heroes and decreased manacost in 6.85, it makes for a great item on Radiance Alchemist, especially with Octarine Core in mind.
Then there are Boots of Travel - an item which glues all of it together. Being able to constantly apply pressure and remain elusive will always be crucial for illusion split-push heroes, which Alchemist is slowly becoming. However there is more to it than meets the eye. One of the biggest side benefits of this build is that, given these items, you run at 522 MS under the effects of your ultimate. It allows you to chase extremely well and, even more importantly, makes you less kiteable - something melee carries have been suffering from for the longest time. Since this build does not prioritize lockdown, to stay effective it needs this extra movespeed, so that even if you are slowed you can still get close to the enemy or at least stay close enough for Radiance to deal damage.
Octarine Core is just a cherry on top of it all. It decreases downtime on your ultimate to 8.75 seconds and downtime on Manta Style to 2.5. It also greatly increases your survivability and survivability of your illusions with extra ability lifesteal. Finally, it decreases the cooldown on Boots of Travel to 34 seconds allowing you to becomes even more of a global nuisance.
What this build creates is a very fast-farming Alchemist who can fight well and still has two slots which are incredibly flexible. Introduction of Moon Shard essentially makes it three slots while Aghanim's Scepter can be considered very sub-optimal fourth. It provides high survivability, decent stats, amazing DPS, great Movement Speed and potentially up to 62 extra passive HP regeneration from Radiance+Octarine combo alone. These four slots as well as some extra items can be farmed by 30 minutes mark with ease - the time frame where Alchemist is generally at his peak.
There are countless VODs from Pro Players and Pub Stars alike on how to play the hero effectively. Most recently I was particularly impressed with this game:
With time Dota has become more and more efficient to a point where comparing coordination and game sense between TI1 and TI5 is almost laughable. This added efficiency demanded more efficient heroes - the current Alchemist playstyle is almost identical to core Naga Siren but with a much stronger and more reliable early game. Granted, Naga Siren is going to scale better with stronger (and more) illusiuons, better stat growth and high-impact ultimate, but can you really expect her to get 6-slotted 30 minutes into the game?
Support Alchemist
I have been theorycrafting support Alchemist for the longest of times. It is no surprise, since I am primarily a support player, but until recently it did not really click all together. In this case until recently = until the introduction of Solar Crest.
Solar Crest fits support Alchemist like a glove - if for a core one it is essentially a tempo item to be changed later on, losing gold in the process, support one can keep it for the whole game. It gives him incredible gank potential as well as survivability and rosh killing potential. More importantly, it synergises well with his other abilities, all of which deal physical damage. Finally, unlike other supports, Alchemist can get his hands on Solar Crest very early.
The item is especially good when played with Templar Assassin, since the damage from Psi-Blades is calculated based off the initial target's armor.
There are tons of other items Alchemist can get his hands on earlier than other supports. Glimmer Cape is a very situational pick up but even after the nerfs the item is amazing. Force Staff has never lost its relevance while Blink Dagger can be a great addition if your team lacks initiation.
Support Alchemist can sometimes even allow himself to get Hand of Midas to potentially become an extra core in the later stages of the game. As always - with Hand of Midas it is not about the gold (even though it is reliable) - it is about getting levels. The marginal benefit of Hand of Midas on Alchemist is lower than on other heroes when it comes to gold gain - something to keep in mind if you are playing core Alchemist.
Generally, Alchemist's mana pool does not allow him to go Mekansm, but it might be a good idea to get Guardian Greaves solving the problem of low mana pool and getting some heal for the team. Equally as important is the fact than you can dispel silences from yourself - it can and will come in handy against certain heroes and should ensure successful Unstable Concoction usage.
As you can see, in case of support Alchemist the versatility is really high - the only item I would consider core is Solar Crest. Everything else depends on the enemies you are facing and the items you are going for. Heaven's Halberd works wonders against ranged Auto-Attack carries, Silver Edge can be a great pick-up against heroes which rely on their passives, Lotus Orb is amazing at dispelling hexes from your allies and can add to the survivability of your teammates. Vladmir's Offering is a cheap alternative to Assault Cuirass, but sometimes the benefits from it can be even greater. What does a hero truly need? This is for you to decide!
Your general gameplan consists of:
Stacking Camps. You will not necessarily be taking them yourself but the added XP you can get from it is crucial.
Controlling Runes. Keep the bounty ones for yourself, save the "buff" rune for your mid player scaring away enemies.
Ganking. Unstable Concoction is a rather underrated spell with a cast range of 775! It can set up some easy ganks on enemy midlaner.
Applying Pressure on the Lane Enemy. Alchemist is notoriously bad at this. Trading hits with your starting armor is borderline suicidal and melee range certainly doesn't help. Acid Spray if used offensively pushes out the lane and the only way to apply pressure is through Unstable Concoction which has a long cooldown and a huge manacost.
There are only a couple of professional games where the hero was played in the support role, both by VP.fng. The games do not necessarily stand out and are inconclusive, but If you are interested in what exactly fng did you can check the game links here and here
Dealing with Alchemist
Picture by Spectre
After all this praise and theorycarfting it is time to look how to counter the hero effectively. We will omit discussing Ancient Apparition since it is too case specific, but if your draft allows it, getting AA is amazing against Alchemist as it halves the effect of the Alchemists ultimate (he still hits with 1.0 BAT) and deals well with the Radiance+Octarine combo.
Alchemist in the middle lane is not necessarily the strongest adversary. It is easy to harass him out before he hits level 6 and he is generally just spamming Acid Spray and getting an occasional last hit. It is annoying to deal with a constant DoT (Alchemist usually gets Bottle early on), but otherwise should not pose much of a threat against an experienced player.
In the safe lane, Alchemist needs to be harassed as much as possible. He is an extremely weak laner, especially with extra points in greed, so he should not pose much of a threat. An early support rotation from the safe lane or even an aggressive trilane can do wonders. He will pull ahead, but not necessarily by much, if faced with constant harassment.
The bigger issue comes from the fact that on any team with at least some coordination, the neutral camps are going to be stacked. If for heroes like Storm Spirit and Shadow Fiend stacks were primarily used as means of catching up after somewhat weak laning stage (or to pull ahead further if the laning stage went well), for Alchemist it means lots and lots of gold and probably a big item.
Couple it with the fact that mid Alchemist is going to try and control the runes and you are looking at very early itemized aggression.
There are several ways of making the Greed have less of an impact. First of all - rune vision. You do not necessarily need to contest some of the "buff" runes against mid Alchemist - Alchemist with Double Damage and Haste is not really scary (compared to Templar Assassin for instance). But you need to absolutely make sure he does not get a creep wave worth of gold every two minutes. Supports should generally try to rotate to the river, sometimes even destroying the rune if they can't make it to it in time.
Additionally, you generally should keep check on the enemy jungle - having a ward that does not block the camp but provides vision can be an option - it will not be destroyed as easily (doesn't raise suspicion) and can give information for when you need to strike on a weakened camp/enemy.
These wards also serve a very important purpose - when Alchemist goes jungling you can never know what item he is going to purchase next. It can catch you off-guard with a Blink/Invisibility initiation and make you forfeit a lot of gold. Understanding Alchemist's current power level is very important - there are many different builds for the hero and you can never know how exactly you should itemize to counter him.
Finally, the most important piece of advise I can give is to never give up against Alchemist. The game might seem unwinnable at times, but the power level cap on the hero is rather low - even 1.0 BAT cant make him go face to face on equal ground with a similarly slotted proper carry in the late game. Additionally, his Net Worth is going to be terribly bloated - something that can be abused. Every kill on the hero and/or his teammates is going to give more gold and playing from a constant gold deficit does have its perks. Going for pick-offs, even on other heroes, can be extremely beneficial.ATHENS (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Greeks rallied on Monday to back their leftwing government’s rejection of a tough international bailout after a clash with foreign lenders pushed Greece close to financial chaos and forced a shutdown of its banking system.
With a popular referendum on the bailout planned for Sunday, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras put his own position on the line, saying he would respect the result of the vote but would not lead a government to administer “austerity in perpetuity.”
“If the Greek people want to have a humiliated prime minister, there are a lot of them out there. It won’t be me,” he said in an interview on Greek state television as one of the biggest rallies seen in Athens in years was taking place.
The show of defiance came at the end of a day that started with stunned Greeks waking up to face shuttered banks, long supermarket lines and overwhelming uncertainty over Greece’s future in the euro zone.
European leaders and policy makers, wrong-footed by Tsipras’ shock announcement of the referendum in the early hours of Saturday morning, warned that it would be a plebiscite on Greece’s future as a member of the single currency.
With Greece hours away from defaulting on a 1.6 billion euro loan from the International Monetary Fund, the crisis has escalated quickly.
Ratings agency Standard and Poor’s cut Greece’s sovereign debt rating one notch further into junk levels to CCC-, saying there was a 50 percent probability it would leave the euro zone.
Greeks - used to seeing lengthy talks with creditors end with an 11th-hour deal - were shocked by the turn of events. Queues snaked outside ATMs and inside supermarkets while fears of disruptions to fuel and medicine supplies grew.
Drugmakers said they would continue to ship medicines to Greece in coming weeks despite unpaid bills, but warned that supplies could soon be in jeopardy without emergency action.
The breakdown of talks has pushed the European Union and euro zone into uncharted terrain. The Athens stock exchange was closed like the banks, but other financial markets fell on fears that Greece could be heading out of the euro.
The blue-chip Euro STOXX 50.STOXX50E index fell more than 4 percent, with bank shares down sharply [.EU].SX7E. By midday, all three major U.S. stock indexes were down more than 1 percent. [.N]
“I can’t believe it,” said Athens resident Evgenia Gekou, 50, on her way to work. “I keep thinking we’ll wake up tomorrow and everything will be OK. I’m trying hard not to worry.”
After months of talks, Greece’s exasperated European partners have put the blame for the crisis squarely on Tsipras for rejecting a package they consider generous. The Greek side argues that pension cuts and tax hikes demanded of it would only deepen one of the worst economic crises of modern times in a country where a quarter of the workforce is already unemployed.
A snap Reuters poll of more than 70 economists and traders taken on Monday put the probability of Greece leaving the euro zone at 45 percent, up from 30 percent a week ago.
PERSONAL BETRAYAL
Emotions were unusually raw among Europe’s leaders. EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said he felt personally betrayed and told Greeks a “No” vote would be seen as signaling an exit from the euro - a position that other European leaders lined up to echo.
Protesters hold banners in front of the parliament building during an anti-austerity rally in Athens, Greece, June 29, 2015. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis
“I will say to the Greeks, who I love deeply: you mustn’t commit suicide because you are afraid of death,” Juncker told a news conference.
Despite the acrimony over the weekend, the creditors said the door to negotiations remained open.
French President Francois Hollande appealed to Tsipras to return to the negotiating table and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was ready to restart talks with Athens after the referendum, including on how to ease its debt burden.
Hollande spoke to U.S. President Barack Obama, and Hollande’s aide said they had agreed to work together for a resumption of talks and a solution to the crisis to ensure Greece’s financial stability.
Greece’s banks were shut after the European Central Bank rejected its request for 6 billion euros of additional emergency funding on Sunday to cope with massive withdrawals, though the ECB is expected to allow Greek banks to keep using existing funds until the referendum, people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
On Monday, cash machines remained closed until midday, and then opened for withdrawals of no more than 60 euros a day.
“I’ve got five euros in my pocket, I thought I would try my luck here for some money. The queues in my neighborhood were too long yesterday,” said plumber Yannis Kalaizakis, 58, outside an empty cash machine in central Athens on Monday.
“I don’t know what else to say. It’s a mess.”
Businesses complained that they could not pay salaries or suppliers and had to halt imports, while agricultural production was also expected to be affected.
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“The worst has been confirmed by the nightmarish developments,” said retail lobby chief Vassilis Korkidis.
The referendum poses a simple question: “Should the proposal which was submitted by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund at the Eurogroup of June 25, 2015, which consists of two parts that together constitute their comprehensive proposal, be accepted?”
The “No” box appears as the first option, above the “Yes” box. The government says a “No” will strengthen its hand at the negotiating table, though other European leaders say it will instead push Greece out of the euro.
No public opinion polls were available, but the Economist Intelligence Unit said a “No” vote was more likely, raising the probability of Greece leaving the euro zone to 60 percent. ($1 = 0.9026 euros)2013 saw global CO 2 emissions from fossil fuel use and cement production reach a new all-time high. This was mainly due to the continuing steady increase in energy use in emerging economies over the past ten years. However, emissions increased at a notably slower rate (2%) than on average in the last ten years (3.8% per year since 2003, excluding the credit crunch years).
This slowdown, which began in 2012, signals a further decoupling of global emissions and economic growth, which reflects mainly the lower emissions growth rate of China. China, the USA and the EU remain the top-3 emitters of CO 2, accounting for respectively 29%, 15% and 11% of the world’s total. After years of a steady decline, the CO 2 emissions of the United States grew by 2.5% in 2013, whereas in the EU emissions continued to decrease, by 1.4% in 2013.
These are the main findings in the annual report ‘Trends in global CO 2 emissions’, released today by PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the JRC. The report is based on recent results from the joint JRC/PBL Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), the latest statistics on energy use and various other activities.
In 2013, global CO 2 emissions grew to the new record of 35.3 billion tonnes (Gt). Sharp risers include Brazil (+ 6.2%), India (+ 4.4%), China (+ 4.2%) and Indonesia (+2.3%). The much lower emissions increase in China of 4.2% in 2013 and 3.4% in 2012 was primarily due to a decline in electricity and fuel demand from the basic materials industry, and aided by an increase in renewable energy and by energy efficiency improvements. The emissions increase in the United States in 2013 (+2.5%) was mainly due to a shift in power production from gas back to coal together with an increase in gas consumption due to a higher demand for space heating.
With the present annual growth rate, China has returned to the lower annual growth rates that it experienced before its economic growth started to accelerate in 2003, when its annual CO 2 emissions increased on average by 12% per year, excluding the credit crunch years. In 2013, the Chinese per capita CO 2 level of 7.4 tonnes CO 2 /cap just exceeded the mean EU28 level of 7.3 tonnes CO 2 /cap, which is 50% above the global average. It is still less than half than those of the United States of 16.6 tonnes CO 2 /cap, which has one of the highest per capita emissions.The leftists at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which started out fighting the evil of the KKK and its kin, in recent years have transformed their organization into an arbiter on issues such as homosexuality, marriage and immigration.
Groups and public figures who disagree with the SPLC’s agenda are put on its “hate” map, which once prominently included former presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson before the group was skewered on social media, prompting an abrupt retreat.
While featuring organizations such as the KKK, the “hate map” – which is cited by many media outlets – also includes mainstream groups such as the Family Research Council.
But SPLC’s “hate” map designations have been linked to two mass shooting attempts in Washington, including on members of Congress, and many groups on the list are fighting back. Suddenly, it’s the SPLC that’s being called a “hate” organization, retractions are being demanded from newspapers that cite its propaganda and lawsuits are being filed.
On Tuesday, it was talk-radio icon Rush Limbaugh, who had had enough, saying SPLC “is treated as the Vatican” by many in the national media.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center is perhaps one of the biggest hate groups on the left. They tar and feather and slander right-wing groups and call them hate groups,” he said. “They’ve got a map on their website, and whenever a right-wing group that says or does anything that the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is a bunch of leftist freaks, all you have to do is disagree with them and you are called a hater.”
Criticizing support from companies such as Apple and JPMorgan Chase, he described SPLC’s agenda.
Get the Whistleblower Magazine’s revelations about SPLC in “The Hate Racket,” the story of how one group fools government into equating Christians and conservatives with Klansmen and Nazis – and rakes in millions doing it.
“For example, if they support gay marriage and LGBT and all these other things and you happen to disagree with it, you are the hater. You hate. You are a hate-filled person that is bordering on the use of violence. And that’s how they characterize these groups, and it led to a deranged leftist walking into the office of the Family Research Council and actually shooting at somebody. It’s what contributes to this deranged guy shooting up Republicans at a baseball practice in Virginia,” he said.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center and other left-wing groups actually inspire their dope members to violence while claiming that the right-wing groups that they’re identifying – and they point ’em out on a map. They identify where these groups’ headquarters are on a map, and their deranged supporters end up there, protesting and so forth,” Limbaugh went on.
He warned the CEOs of companies such as Apple not to treat the SPLC “as one of the most worthwhile, fair, enduring organizations devoted to equality and fairness.”
“That’s the last thing they’re devoted to,” he said. “These are the people that want to shut you up if you say something they disagree with. You don’t even have to be saying it about them.
“Basically all you have to do is be a prominent conservative or run a prominent conservative 501(c)(3) fundraising organization. If your conservative group raises money, then the Southern Poverty Law Center is out to destroy you. So I asked the question: Do these CEOs not know this? And it was a legitimate question because if all they do, if their total source of information happens to be CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and maybe the Washington Post, it is entirely possibly they don’t know the truth about the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
The National Center for Life and Liberty recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of D. James Kennedy Ministries against the SPLC and others.
Citing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the suit charges religious discrimination by “trafficking in false or misleading descriptions of the services offered under the ministry’s trademarked name; and for defamation pursuant to Alabama common law arising from the publication and distribution of information that libels the ministry’s reputation and subjects the ministry to disgrace, ridicule, odium, and contempt in the estimation of the public.”
It was filed in federal court in Montgomery, Alabama, scene of some of the nation’s most ferocious civil rights battles.
The case alleges that the defendants – online retailer Amazon, online charity reporting company GuideStar and SPLC – damaged the ministries by creating, publishing and promoting SPLC’s infamous “hate” designations.
The hate designations already had prompted a lawsuit by Liberty Counsel against Guidestar. And several organizations, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, have demanded broadcasters retract reports quoting SPLC’s hate designations.
The newest case seeks an award for “special harms from the SPLC” over the groups’ rejection by the AmazonSmile program due to the hate designations.
Related column: What is ‘hate’ and who defines it? The SPLC? by Jerry Newcombe
It was only a few weeks back that Liberty Counsel accused Gatehouse Media in Florida of publishing a defamatory article for quoting SPLC’s description of Florida “hate” groups. Liberty Counsel was listed, and explained that the publication “uses the discredited Southern Poverty … a reckless organization that falsely labels nonviolent people and organizations as ‘hates’ or ‘hate groups’ as a source.”
“This Gatehouse Media article is not only defamatory but dangerous, especially after the recent Charlottesville tragedy. The article includes a picture of a recent white supremacy rally in Charlottesville along with the following: ‘James Alex Fields, the man charged with second-degree murder after driving into a crowd of anti-protesters at the Charlottesville, Virginia, white nationalist event Unite the Right Saturday, was seen with the Vanguard America group at the rally. Vanguard America has since issued a statement claiming Fields was not an official member.’
“The SPLC’s caustic and false rhetoric is dangerous because it creates a ‘Hate Map’ listing so-called ‘hate groups’ that includes nonviolent, pro-family, Christian, or conservative organizations,” Liberty Counsel explained.
“Mark Potock with the SPLC admitted in an interview: ‘Our criteria for a ‘hate group,’ first of all, have nothing to do with criminality, or violence, or any kind of guess we’re making about ‘this group could be dangerous.’ It’s strictly ideological.’ Mark Potok is on video in a public meeting stating: ‘Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them …,” Liberty Counsel explained.
This week, a commentary at PJMedia noted Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim British politician and founder of the anti-Islamist group Quilliam, announced a lawsuit against SPLC for defamation.
“They have named me, alongside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on a list of ‘Anti-Muslim Extremists,'” Nawaz told the publication.
In June, SPLC supporter James Hodgkinson shot Rep. Steve Scalise., R-La.; Zach Barth, a staff member for Congressman Roger Williams; former congressional staff member Matt Mika; and two U.S. Capitol Police officers at a Republican congressional members practice for a charity baseball game just months ago.
SPLC had demonized Scalise for promoting white supremacy and clearly tried to infer “that Rep. Scalise is a so-called ‘hater.'”
Hodgkinson had “liked” SPLC’s Facebook page.
SPLC also was linked to domestic terror through Floyd Lee Corkins, who cited SPLC as his inspiration for his going to the Washington offices of the Family Research Council, armed with a gun, intending to kill as many people as he could. He was stopped by a security guard, who was injured.
WND reported a video showed Corkins entering the FRC offices and confronting Leo Johnson.
FRC repeatedly has explained it adheres to a biblical perspective on homosexuality but is not “anti-gay.”
Liberty Counsel noted that the Philanthropy Roundtable recently published an article pointing out the false labeling.
WND also reported when the Internet payment company PayPal banned the website of Islam expert Robert Spencer from using its service after a far-left news service accused Jihad Watch of “extreme hostility toward Muslims.”
Spencer told WND he was contacted by a reporter with ProPublic |
be found at drive-thru’s ordering and consuming sixteen hundred calorie meals (twelve if they go “diet”) enough sodium to be referred to as a lake, and enough fat to float a boat on the aforementioned water grouping.
What did the TV dinner start?
Television and pre-made food.
The downfall of a once great society.
Then again there is always hope.
Marijuana is almost legal and a cure for everything!
Now that our savior has arrived we can do any and all things without fear of persecution, prosecution, or decomposition.
Drugs. Who knew they’d be better than the Bill of Rights.
They aren’t.
A little while ago I read a book about the fall of Germany during World War II. As bombs were falling on Berlin, Germans were still going to work, still preparing meals, and still falling in love. They were also sprinting towards the American Army and surrendering as fast as they could knowing the Russians were coming and the atrocities committed by the Nazis on Russians, particularly women, were going to be reciprocated upon them. It was an interesting perspective that humans continued to drink water, read books, and have babies even in the middle of ducking for cover.
Of course those Germans who dashed towards the United States soldier ended up with a better lot in life.
Many of those who sat still and did nothing ended in a place called East Germany surrounded by humans who preached “community” and service to the “greater” Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
In other words Democratic Socialism.
Bernie, Hugo, and Joseph.
Two horrible humans holding a place for a third.
Coming full circle Donald Trump is and has done some very good things. The border is slowly being secured. Deportations are happening. Americans feel dramatically better about our country than last year regardless of what Al NBC Jazeera says.
Yes he’s made a few mistakes. He should have fired Comey immediately and kept Flynn indefinitely if only to show who is in charge.
With all that said and as we go about our daily lives in the greatest country in the history of man there’s really only one question.
In our last election we had a binary choice.
Could you imagine the alternative?
Sadly the Democrats, RINOS, Liberals,”Tribalists” and seemingly endless groups of traitors known as the media continue to push the agenda of impeachment and the cannibalizing of America.
I guess they still haven’t got the memo so let me say it again.
CLEARLY.
President Trump isn’t the “stick”.
He’s the carrot we’ve offered you parasites.
If you are unwilling to eat your vegetables, trust me, we will make our way back to Washington D.C. We will gather on the steps of OUR House and walk through the halls if required.
You see you pathetic cowards, WE ARE THE STICK.
We are also the torches, the pitchforks, and the rope.
Keep yapping about impeachment and lot of you are going to meet us up close and personal.
Very close.
Very personal.
Continue forward President Trump.
We have your front and your back.
The United States of America is our country.
OUR COUNTRY.
Jason Kraus
www.aleadernotapolitician.comPretty Much Anyone Who Says They Can’t Pay $15 An Hour is a Lying Swine
I have spent the last year and a half running a small magazine of left-wing political thought called Current Affairs. Our circulation is tiny. We carry no advertising. We have no sponsors. Our revenue comes from selling printed copies through the mail. In other words, we are not exactly the world’s most financially lucrative enterprise. It’s often a struggle to stay afloat, and we have to be very careful about our expenditures. Nevertheless: when we pay someone to do work for us, we would never pay less than $15 an hour. And if we can do it, any employer can, and anyone who says they can’t is lying.
It’s incredible that in the United States, $15 can somehow sound like a high minimum wage. With a regular 40 hour workweek, it’s $600 a week. If you never got a day or a week off, you’d be earning $31,200 a year. Maybe that’s a lot in Turkey, Texas, but if you’re in one of the nation’s major urban centers (say, Seattle), it evaporates pretty quickly. Especially if you have a child. Or two children. Or a car. Or a dependent relative. Or an illness. Or some debt. This map from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, showing how much you need to make per hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment in each state, is illuminating. Even in the states with the least expensive housing, such as Arkansas and South Dakota, you need to be earning around $14 an hour. On average across the United States, it’s about $21.
Except maybe in the most remote areas, then, or among teenagers working their first jobs, paying people less than $15 an hour inflicts hardship. It means they aren’t going to be able to live a decent and comfortable life working full-time. Even at best, especially if they have a child, they’re just going to be subsisting, with no opportunities for vacations or indulgences or any of the occasional costly pleasures that make life worthwhile. (And certainly no retirement savings.) At worst, they are going to be living a truly precarious existence, defined at every moment by the need to think about money.
Everyone should be paid at least $15 per hour, then. Period. What’s more, it’s not difficult. I’ve never run any kind of organization before I began running Current Affairs. So I didn’t know how much credence to give those Small Business Owners who are always whining about how put-upon they are. “How do you know what it’s like if you’ve never run a business?” they ask. Well, now I know. And the answer is: it’s easy. It’s easy to pay $15 an hour. If you’re not paying it, you’re not trying. You’re not making any kind of real effort to think about how to give your employees a decent standard of living.
Now, yes, there are some exceptions. I am sure some people run used bookstores and things, where you’re lucky if you even sell $15 of books in an hour. There are tiny struggling storefronts in poor neighborhoods, and sometimes workers pay other workers for services, and we should keep these cases in mind. But I also know that a lot of business owners are exaggerating the difficulty of paying a living wage. That’s been the way as long as there have been workers and owners: the story of capitalism is the story of the boss telling his employees “I’m sorry, I’d love to pay you more, but you see, then I would have to put my prices up and I would go out of business,” before driving off in a luxury car. And it’s not that there is no conceivable world in which compensating employees properly would drive a company out of business. It’s that we only know we’re in that world if a business owner is not also being handsomely compensated themselves. If they’re doing well, then all of their protestations of poverty are hollow.
Let me be clear on the point I am making here: it is not that the lawful minimum wage necessarily ought to be raised. It is that business owners who complain about having to pay living wages frequently simply haven’t tried to pay living wages, and generally just mean that they are unwilling to sacrifice their own prosperity in order to properly compensate employees. $15 isn’t actually much. It doesn’t go very far. And if you are committed to paying it, you can usually find a way.
Honestly, I was not surprised at the new study suggesting that Seattle’s raise in the minimum wage may have reduced the employment of low-wage workers. Unlike many on the left, I am perfectly open to the idea that as an empirical matter, raises in the minimum wage cause employers to reduce hours and lay off workers in ways that ultimately result in workers being paid less than they were before. (The Seattle study, by a team of University of Washington economists, suggested that the average low-wage worker saw their monthly paycheck shrink by $125.)
Now, the Seattle study is extremely controversial. A Fortune magazine writer called it “utter B.S.,” citing studies of other high minimum wage cities showing that “higher wages boost worker pay and haven’t led to either job loss or a slowdown in economic growth.” Furthermore, another study of the Seattle experience by researchers at UC-Berkeley reached the opposite conclusion: it did not find significant negative effects on employment and did find that many workers got a pay boost. Another recent study, far larger than the Washington one, concluded that the average minimum wage raise “leaves the overall number of low-wage jobs essentially unchanged, while raising average earnings of workers below those thresholds.” And when the New York Times spoke to Seattle employers, it found evidence that due to a favorable local economy, few were considering slowing down hiring as a result of the law. Everyone wants the empirical facts to support their favored political conclusions, so minimum wage advocates quickly point to the Berkeley study, while free-market libertarians gleefully embrace the Washington study while instantly dismissing the Berkeley study as “a cut above propaganda.” I don’t have a particular opinion on which study is more reliable, because I haven’t looked at them closely. But neither result would be startling. The Washington study, showing that employees had their hours reduced and lost jobs because of the minimum wage hike, could well be correct.
It’s important, though, to realize why it would be correct. What free market economists and minimum wage opponents rarely say out loud is that their models and predictions assume that capitalists and business owners are sociopathic; i.e., that they do not act in the interests of their workers’ well-being, but that their workers’ well-being is incidental and will be sacrificed as needed to ensure continued profitability. So if the minimum wage rises, a business owner will not compensate themselves less, but will try to find a way to cut back on labor costs elsewhere, say by requiring greater amounts of work over shorter periods of time. The whole reason that economists believe minimum wage raises hurt workers is that companies do not mind hurting their workers. Corporations are structured so as not to have moral obligations toward human beings, and so it would be unsurprising if they reacted to an effort to get them to behave more morally by behaving less morally.
This is why free-market economists are often right about the potential pitfalls of regulation. It’s true that if you mandate greater livability standards in housing, landlords might just push up rents and pass the cost onto the renters. Or if you set caps on rent, landlords might maintain their apartments less well. It’s a perfectly understandable consequence, but it’s important to acknowledge what this implies: that landlords act without regard for any goal other than their own financial enrichment. The empirical fact might mean that some regulation is not actually a good way of solving a problem, but the reason it will not be a good way of solving a problem is that there is often almost no way to prod a corporation or landlord into treating human beings decently, because of the nature of landlords and corporations as economic entities.
So I believe minimum wage increases should be implemented carefully, in accordance with an unbiased interpretation of the available empirical evidence. But I also believe that few employers who claim they cannot pay $15 should be trusted. They may well believe that this is true. Yet this is only because they have never given any real consideration to reducing their own standard of living, and spend very little time contemplating the question of what moral obligations one has toward one’s workforce. The fact that they’re like this is a good argument for why regulation is not enough, and why a fundamental change in who makes economic decisions should be the ultimate goal of social policy. But regardless of where we come down on the abolition of capitalism (I am for it), let’s be clear: you can pay $15 an hour. It’s not hard.SUNRISE, Fla. -- The late E.J. McGuire, who served as NHL director of Central Scouting for seven years before dying of cancer in April 2011, has always remained in the hearts and minds of those attending the NHL Scouting Combine and NHL Draft each season.
In honor of its beloved friend and dedicated colleague, Central Scouting this year will present the first E.J. McGuire Award of Excellence to a 2015 Draft prospect. The award will be presented Saturday prior to the start of the second day of the draft at BB&T Center in Sunrise, Fla.
"Excellence is what E.J. personified," Central Scouting's David Gregory said. "It was imperative that the winner have strength of character and competitiveness because these traits exemplify what E.J. brought to the hockey community every day."
The Central Scouting award will be presented annually by the NHL to the draft prospect who best exemplifies the commitment to excellence through strength of character, competitiveness and athleticism.
"This strength of character revolves around E.J.'s qualities of integrity, professionalism and humility, and the competitiveness and athleticism is based on Central Scouting's body of knowledge of the player," NHL Director of Central Scouting Dan Marr said. "We identified those main characteristics for this award."
McGuire waged a brave five-month battle after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, Leiomyosarcoma, before he died at the age of 58 on April 7, 2011. He left behind his wife, Terry, and their two children, Jacqueline and Erin.
"We are so honored that E.J. is being remembered in this manner," the McGuire family wrote in a statement. "His whole career was spent reaching for excellence in the sport he loved and this is quite a tribute. E.J. always showed such a passion in encouraging the future of hockey, so it's fitting that the recipient is a young man exhibiting excellence at the beginning of his professional hockey career."
A head coach at the collegiate, junior and American Hockey League levels, an assistant coach for three NHL teams over 12 seasons, and a scout for two teams, McGuire began serving as director of Central Scouting in 2005.
"It is very important for our team to know that Terry, his wife, and their daughters will know that their husband and father will always be recognized in this deserving way," Gregory said.
The Buffalo native, who held undergraduate and Master's degrees from the State University of New York at Brockport, touched and educated thousands of players, coaches and fans. He was the architect of many of the innovations Central Scouting pioneered in the past decade to achieve its mandate of providing the League's teams with the most comprehensive list of draft-eligible prospects each season.
"I consider myself the most fortunate guy in the world that I had the opportunity to not only work with E.J., but become friends with him and his beautiful family," Central Scouting's Chris Edwards said. "He was a great boss, but a better friend. He was a true leader and his fingerprints are all over the League, especially this department."
McGuire began his career at Central Scouting shortly after his last coaching position as an assistant with the Philadelphia Flyers in 2001-02.
He was an assistant in the NHL with the Flyers from 1984-88 and the Chicago Blackhawks from 1988-91. He was head coach of the Maine Mariners of the AHL in 1991-92. He'd return to the NHL with the Ottawa Senators in 1992-93 before taking his second head coaching position with the Ontario Hockey League's Guelph Storm in 1995-96.
McGuire moved back into professional hockey in 1997 to coach the AHL's Hartford Wolf Pack and, after two playoff appearances in two years, returned to Philadelphia for one more season before moving on to scouting.
It was scouting that proved to be the best fit for McGuire, who had the perfect demeanor and skill set for the demanding job of evaluating young players and projecting their hockey development several years down the road.
"The biggest challenge for Central Scouting is trying to place a star player in a commonly acknowledged lower league where his skills have made him a star and project him to a tougher League," McGuire told NHL.com in 2010. "But we need to project three years down the line in the best League in the world, so the discussions get pretty heated, but that's all part of the fun."
NHL Central Scouting, which is in its 40th season, was established prior to 1975-76. The department consists of staff at NHL offices in Toronto, along with eight full time scouts, and 15 part-time scouts throughout North America. To report on prospects playing in Europe, the NHL employs the services of Goran Stubb and his staff of six scouts at European Scouting Services based in Finland. Together, all 29 scouts reporting to Central Scouting combine to witness more than 4,000 games each season.
---UFA, Russia (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin accused foreign rivals on Tuesday of using radical Islam to weaken Russia and appealed to Muslim clerics to help reduce tensions after a deadly suicide bombing and nationalist riots.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin leaves the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders Press Conference and Joint Declaration in Nusa Dua, on the Indonesian resort island of Bali October 8, 2013. REUTERS/Edgar Su
The comments, his first on this month’s riots in Moscow, were delivered in the mainly Muslim region of Bashkortostan and underlined Kremlin concerns that ethnic or religious tensions could threaten the unity of the Russian state.
Monday’s suicide bombing, blamed on a Muslim woman from the North Caucasus, killed six people on a bus in Volgograd and raised fears about attacks as Russia prepares for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
“Some political forces use Islam, the radical currents within it... to weaken our state and create conflicts on Russian soil that can be managed from abroad,” Putin told Muslim clerics meeting in Ufa, Bashkortostan’s capital, in southern Russia.
“Tensions between the West and the Islamic world are rising today, and someone is trying to gamble on that by pouring fuel on the fire,” he added.
Putin did not say which foreign rivals could be fostering Islamist separatism. But he has often accused other countries, including the United States, of interfering in Russia’s affairs and sought to deflect blame for problems onto other nations since securing a six-year third term as president last year.
The Moscow rioting began over suspicions that an ethnic Slav was stabbed to death by an Azeri national. Russian police later responded by rounding up hundreds of migrants.
Putin urged the clerics to help Muslim immigrants adapt to life in Russia to reduce the likelihood of such violence.
“They need to hear your voice,” he said. “Otherwise they become the objects of propaganda by various fundamentalist groups.”
ISLAMIST INSURGENCY
The former KGB officer became president after directing a war against separatist Muslims in power in the Chechnya region of the North Caucasus in 1999 when he was prime minister.
But Russia is still struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus and the Kremlin is concerned violence could spread to other mainly Muslim regions of Russia.
A bomb was discovered and safely detonated by Russian security forces near a trade center on Tuesday in Khasavyurt in Dagestan, in the North Caucasus, law enforcement officials said, underlining the daily threat of violence in the region.
Russia’s 20 million Muslims make up around 15 percent of the population of more than 140 million, and the percentage is expected to grow.
The threat of violence spreading is a particular concern for Putin because Russia hosts the Winter Olympics in February and the soccer World Cup finals in 2018.
He has staked his reputation on hosting a safe and successful Olympics in Sochi, on the Black Sea, but has said security there is improving too slowly. Volgograd, where the female suicide bomber struck, is due to be a World Cup venue.
Attacks by insurgents from the North Caucasus include a suicide bombing at a Moscow airport that killed 37 people in 2011 and subway bombings that killed 40 in 2010.
Putin deflected any responsibility for ethnic and religious strife, putting the blame partly on local authorities which turned “a deaf ear to the people”.
The president also depicted Russia as a force for peace in the Middle East at what he said was a time of meddling by other countries.
The Kremlin takes pride in a diplomatic initiative brokered with Washington last month to eliminate Syrian chemical arsenals following attacks on civilians blamed by other countries, but not Moscow, on President Bashar al-Assad.For those of us who were concerned that Steve Bannon is among the president’s closest and most powerful advisers, the selections of Generals Mattis and Kelly to key national security positions helped ease concerns. They are men of unimpeachable integrity and courage, and if Trump was wise enough to select them to run the departments of defense and homeland security, then we could hope that our nation’s most vital national security decisions would be made with sobriety and competence.
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Then, last week happened, and the Trump administration’s reasonable and defensible executive order blindsided allies, touched off confusion in the government, and led to bizarre and indefensible application to green card holders and those who’ve sacrificed for American soldiers overseas.
Here’s item one:
It wasn’t until Friday — the day Trump signed the order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days and suspending all refugee admission for 120 days — that career homeland security staff were allowed to see the final details of the order, a person familiar with the matter said.
That doesn’t seem wise. And what about the application of the order green card holders? Here’s item two:
Friday night, DHS arrived at the legal interpretation that the executive order restrictions applying to seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Yemen — did not apply to people with lawful permanent residence, generally referred to as green card holders. The White House overruled that guidance overnight, according to officials familiar with the rollout. That order came from the President’s inner circle, led by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. Their decision held that, on a case by case basis, DHS could allow green card holders to enter the US.
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What about Trump’s generals? Here’s item three:
As President Trump signed a sweeping executive order on Friday, shutting the borders to refugees and others from seven largely Muslim countries, the secretary of homeland security was on a White House conference call getting his first full briefing on the global shift in policy. Gen. John F. Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, had dialed in from a Coast Guard plane as he headed back to Washington from Miami. Along with other top officials, he needed guidance from the White House, which had not asked his department for a legal review of the order. Halfway into the briefing, someone on the call looked up at a television in his office. “The president is signing the executive order that we’re discussing,” the official said, stunned.
And, finally, item four:
Jim Mattis, the new secretary of defense, did not see a final version of the order until Friday morning, only hours before Mr. Trump arrived to sign it at the Pentagon. Mr. Mattis, according to administration officials familiar with the deliberations, was not consulted by the White House during the preparation of the order and was not given an opportunity to provide input while the order was being drafted.
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Let’s put this as plainly as possible. The hope that Trump’s best cabinet picks would have more influence than Steve Bannon just took a severe blow. His elevation to the principals committee of the National Security Council is also deeply troubling. The man who proudly announced that Breitbart was the “platform of the alt-right” shouldn’t even be working at the White House, much less potentially having a greater say on key homeland security and defense issues than Mattis or Kelly.
Moreover, given the incompetence of the rollout was inexcusable. The chaos of the weekend was mostly avoidable, and the indignities visited on green card holders and others who should be gaining admission to the U.S. even under Trump’s order were entirely unnecessary. Even people who found most of the order reasonable were shocked at the obvious confusion. Governing isn’t just about ideas. Implementation matters, and nothing about the last 72 hours has given anyone any assurance that the truly hard work will be done well.
During the campaign, Trump said he’d surround himself “only with the best and most serious people.” Show us, don’t tell us. If Steve Bannon is that close to the inner circle on decisions this crucial, then Trump is failing on a key promise.After suffering through a rough start, the F-35 program has been showing improvement in recent years. The cost of the jet fighter has fallen to $112 million a copy and Lockheed hopes to get it down to $80 million to $85 million. But last week, the Pentagon said it will need $500 million more to finish the development phase.
"When they say that the F-35 cannot perform as well as the planes we already have, what are we doing, and spending so much more money?" Trump said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show.
The host asked Trump his thoughts on the fifth-generation fighter and the fact that it's over budget. At the time, Trump responded that he didn't like what he had been hearing in security briefings.
"I do hear that it's not very good," he said. "I'm hearing that our existing planes are better. And one of the pilots came out of the plane, one of the test pilots, and said this isn't as good as what we already have."Percent means out of one hundred. It is often shown with the symbol "%". It is used even if there are not a hundred items. The number is then scaled so it can be compared to one hundred.
For example, I have a bowl of fruit with three apples and one orange. The percentage of apples is 3 out of 4 = 3/4 = 75/100 = 75%.
A percentage is one way of writing a ratio; you can also write it as a fraction or decimal. There are ways to convert fractions to percentages or decimals to percentages.
Percentages are useful because people can compare things that are not out of the same number. For example, exam marks are often percentages, so people can compare them even if there are more questions on one exam paper than the other.Associate member Hong Kong looms as the likely replacement for the West Indies if the two-time world champions decide to pull out of the 2015 Cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand,
The Windies withdrew from their tour of India last week due to a contractual dispute between its players and the West Indies Player’s Association, leaving the host nation fuming.
Doubt now hangs over the West Indies’ involvement in future tours, and if the pay issue is not resolved come February, Hong Kong, who finished third in the World Cup Qualifier tournament in New Zealand earlier this year, are the clear choice to replace the men from the Caribbean.
Quick Single: WICB confirms tour withdrawal
Despite not being contacted by the International Cricket Council as yet, Hong Kong coach Charlie Burke says it would be a dream come true for his players.
"It's out of [the ICC's] control, it's out of our control as well. I mean, if we were given a spot at next year's World Cup, we'd grab it with both hands," Burke told Fairfax media.
"It's not the best situation or the best circumstances to be in a World Cup, but then again it's a dream for every single player for my squad.
“We haven't spoken to anyone, no-one's spoken to us as yet, but we've heard rumours saying that could happen and they might pull out."
In a further blow to the Windies, the Board of Control for Cricket in India said on Tuesday it would “initiate legal proceedings”, with the damages of the abandoned India tour estimated at a whopping $US65 million ($70 million).
The Windies left India following the fourth one-day international in Dharamsala with one ODI, two Tests and a T20 international remaining.
The BCCI has since suspended India’s tour to the Caribbean in February and March in 2016 that included three Tests, five ODIs and a T20 match.
Cricket Australia chairman Wally Edwards commented on the West Indies Cricket crisis and stressed the importance of a quick resolution.
“The situation that has just unfolded, with the West Indian players abandoning the remainder of the Indian tour, is deeply concerning for a game that needs strong cooperation for its survival,” Edwards said.
“We are a long way from what has taken place in India and have sought further details so we can understand more as a priority.
"Put simply, players and Boards must fulfil their commitments to the ICC Future Tours Program.
“Situations such as these have to be avoided at all costs because ultimately those that are affected most are the people that the game depends on so heavily - cricket lovers, key broadcasters and commercial partners.
“For the game’s sake this needs to be resolved as soon as possible.”
But for Hong Kong, it’s now about preparing to possible play in the game’s biggest tournament, and it starts with a two-match ODI series against arch rivals Papua New Guinea starting on November 8 in Townsville.STV will become an affiliate of the Channel 3 Network and is confident it will continue a 'distinct' schedule for Scotland.
© STV
**STV has announced it has reached a comprehensive agreement with ITV on new networking arrangements, which will make STV an "affiliate" of the Channel 3 Network. **
The implementation of this new agreement is subject to regulatory approval and details of the new arrangements have been submitted to Ofcom. If approved, the settlement balance of £10.8m payable by STV to ITV plc over 18 months will be made from programme stock and cash.
STV said it was confident that the new arrangements would "deliver sustainable cost-sharing arrangements for the network and enable the continued delivery of high quality commercially sustainable public service broadcast services into the next licence period."
Rob Woodward, CEO of STV, said: "Today's announcement confirms the stability and certainty of long term, commercially sustainable networking arrangements between the Channel 3 licence holders. STV remains 100% committed to its public service broadcasting credentials, to delivering a distinct schedule for Scotland and to providing a platform for informed debate. We are delighted to have reached agreement on a set of terms which will benefit our viewers and consumers across all distribution platforms."
Adam Crozier, Chief Executive of ITV plc, said: "We look forward to continuing our positive relationship with STV under a new affiliate agreement. This agreement, which is still subject to regulatory approval, represents a major milestone for us as it consolidates and simplifies the ITV Network."Being harassed on the street by strange men is something most women are used to dealing with on a near constant basis. Trans women are no exception. It seems just as bad when we "pass," and can be even worse, and definitely different, when we "fail" to "pass." These are my experiences.
I've never not known overtly gendered harassment. As a child and as a teenager, it was heavily based on hatred and disapproval of femininity. At its core, it was misogyny, but tweaked towards a "non-female" target. I was gendered as male, but I was gendered, at best, as "broken male" "female like male" and so forth. So all of the abuse and harassment I received was certainly gendered. What it wasn't was sexual. That's an experience as a trans girl that I did not have, because only rarely did clothing style, hair style, etc portray me as a young woman. I am beyond glad that I never had to be 14 and deal with a 40 year old making suggestive comments. However, that would change when I started to attend university.
As I intentionally dressed more feminine, experimented with make up, etc, it was more and more common for me to by marked as female. The irony was, sometimes, especially after I joined the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC), and my hair was closely cropped yet my non-uniform clothing choices remained the same, I'd be "mistaken" for a soft butch lesbian, and the harassment I received was homophobic, misogynistic, and sexualised all rolled up into one. They were infrequent, but they happened. As my experiences with the homophobic reactions of my fellow NROTC midshipmen led to my sexual assault and I finally resigned my appointment, I intentionally went much further femme. And the harassment continued.
The most frightening example of street harassment/catcalling I have ever experienced occurred in 2006, right after I graduated, and moved to Atlanta. I had not legally transitioned or medically transitioned, but I had socially transitioned and professionally transitioned. This was before my small testosterone spike, and I passed very easily with just light make up and my long, reddish brown hair. I was in a hoodie and jeans. Because, you know, it's never about what we're wearing.
I was walking from my apartment near Georgia Tech university to the grocery store when a very tall man began to follow me. I quickened my pace, he started following me, shouting out questions about where I lived, what I was doing, where I was going, wouldn't I just talk to him. I walked even faster, but as tall as I am, he was much taller and he began to close the gap. At one point he reached out. I have no idea what he was reaching out for or why, but I bolted. I ended up at a Krystal's fast food restaurant where I stayed until I ran into some off-duty cops who agreed to drive me home in their patrol car. It was one of the scariest experiences of street harassment I'd ever had.
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But it wouldn't be the last while I was presenting as female. I definitely had a reprieve (and again, this would be a difference from the experiences of cis women I acknowledge), when I moved to Korea and then Japan with my transition on pause. It was a return to male privilege, but my experiences as a woman were defining. It's how I came to be involved in feminism. How I came to be involved in the Jezebel community and other communities like it. While I worked my way back into a financially solvent position whereby I might restart my transition, as I eventually did, I knew what would happen. I had no illusions about it. Yet I did it anyway, because I had no more choice in the matter, ultimately, than anyone else does in regards to living authentically. Trading one harm for the loss of privilege which meant dealing with another.
There have been many, many incidents since that day in 2006. The number over the last three years as HRT has affected my being read correctly even when a total "mess" has increased exponentially. So just in order to illustrate the level of harassment, I'll describe a few major incidents which have occurred just in recent months, and what happens when I'm "clocked" in the midst of this harassment as I have been once just in the last month! And I'll end with a description of what happened today, a pretty common incident. Note these are just two of the worst, plus today's. Listing them all would take forever.
This summer, I was about as feminine as I've ever been, certainly by Japanese standards. I was heading to a summer festival which occurs in my area. I had my hair in my standard side pony tail, but I had some various hair doodads dressing it up, full makeup, in a pretty pink yukata (a summer kimono) and white sandals. There was no possible misgendering in that attire. The problem came as I made my way home. I was changing trains at a station, and it was getting very late. A middle-aged Japanese man approached me and asked if I was Russian. Then he made a couple of inappropriate hand gestures indicating both "sex" and "money." Now, to those unaware, the implication here is both sexist and xenophobic (if not racist), because it presumes that any "Russian" (or Eastern European) woman in Japan is there as a sex worker. I responded by saying that no, I was an American, and I didn't have time to talk. He asked me if I wanted to come back to his place. I reiterated, no, I was going the opposite direction, and I walked hurriedly away.
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Fast forward to October, a halloween party, I'm dressed in a sort of 80s/Miami Vice/Pretty in Pink sort of pink dress shirt, blazer, and slacks sort of look. Not remotely feminine (but my face and hairstyle definitely were). While not exactly street harassment, an acquaintance of an acquaintance (dressed in full SWAT gear, no less) comes chats me up and then grabs my ass in front of God and everyone. So, I bluntly say, "Don't ever do that again." And my refusal to respond in any way but bluntly must have triggered something, because he takes another look at me and says, "Oh, you're a dude. You should have said that, because I mean the only reason I grabbed you was because you look like a woman." Essentially, by looking like a woman, I was asking for it, SURPRISE SURPRISE.
So I whip out my picture ID and point to the F. "I am a woman, and what you just did was sexual harassment, and would have been sexual harassment even if I was a dude! What the hell?" Then he started making awful he/she comments and asking if I wanted to step outside. Clearly, this is about the time I start thinking trans woman, outed by angry lecherous man = dead trans woman. Luckily, the party was run by friends, and they stepped in, and while he never was made to see the error of his ways, at least he was finally convinced, yes I was a woman, and if he came within twenty feet of me, he'd be thrown out on his ear. His entitlement meant that he kept asking the hostess to allow him to "apologise" to me. He just didn't seem to understand that my space was more important than his "need" to "apologise." Same damn shit, slightly different form. I ended up leaving with a friend, I just didn't feel safe if he wasn't going to be thrown out.
So finally, this morning. I'm at a 7-11, when I am asked by a non-Japanese man if I speak English. I say yes, can I help him? Yes, he says, he needs to know the way to the station. I'm sorry, I say, but I only pass through this area on my way to work, I don't know. Could he not check GPS on his phone? That's what I do. Immediately, "Oh, phone? Do you have a phone number I could have?" "Sorry, no, I don't give out my phone number to people I don't know." "Well, I need help." "Sorry, I have to get to work." "Oh, well, really, that phone number... Do you live around here? Are you...single?" And I just lost it at that point. His tone, his body language, |
you never touch. We'll show you how to customize the right-click menu with shortcuts you'll actually want to use. Read MoreEvery season, I relish the challenge of picking my 68 All-Stars, knowing that pretty much all of my readers will be spoiling for a fight.
The process gives me insight into how difficult it is for the managers to complete their rosters after the fan and player vote. And of course, it also triggers the usual hysterical responses from readers who insist I hate their teams.
(I do).
Article continues below...
My favorite protests are from fans who object when I not only leave a player off my team, but also fail to include him on my list of exclusions.
"Not even a notable omission?" the fans will ask, incredulously.
NO. NOT EVEN A NOTABLE OMISSION! WHY DOES THIS BOTHER YOU?!?!
(Ah, that feels better).
Seriously, I’m employing the same system that baseball does, picking 13 pitchers and 21 position players for both the American and National Leagues, making sure that, good golly, all 30 clubs are represented.
As always, do not worry about your favorites getting snubbed, by me or anyone else. By the time the injured players and ineligible starting pitchers are replaced, nearly everyone will get a trophy, just like in Little League.
Anyway, here goes. Starters denoted by asterisks.
L Cole Hamels, Rangers
R Corey Kluber, Indians
R Danny Salazar, Indians
L *Chris Sale, White Sox
R Aaron Sanchez, Blue Jays
R Steven Wright, Red Sox
Notable omissions: Trevor Bauer, Indians; Marco Estrada, Blue Jays; Michael Fulmer, Tigers; Matt Shoemaker, Angels; Jose Quintana, White Sox; Masahiro Tanaka, Yankees; Chris Tillman, Orioles; Justin Verlander, Tigers.
Quintana is the worst omission, but I’m going with only six starters to accommodate the ridiculous number of quality relievers in the AL.
Weird random note: Both the Orioles’ Ubaldo Jimenez and Red Sox’s Clay Buchholz made my list of omissions a year ago.
Jimenez’s ERA this season is 6.95. Buchholz’s is 5.91.
R Dellin Betances, Yankees
L Zach Britton, Orioles
R Wade Davis, Royals
R Will Harris, Astros
R Kelvin Herrera, Royals
L Andrew Miller, Yankees
R Francisco Rodriguez, Tigers
Notable omissions: Brad Brach, Orioles; Aroldis Chapman, Yankees; Alex Colome, Rays (DL); Craig Kimbrel, Red Sox; David Robertson, White Sox.
Can’t argue with those who might say Quintana as a starter is more deserving than K-Rod as a reliever, or that Brach’s numbers are too ridiculous to ignore.
Problem is, Harris’ numbers this season are even better than Brach’s, and he’s closing now. K-Rod, the active leader with 409 saves, is still a star after all these years.
Chapman?
Sorry, I’m not about to reward a player who was suspended for the first 30 games for violating baseball’s domestic-violence policy.
*Salvador Perez, Royals
Brian McCann, Yankees
Matt Wieters, Orioles
Notable omission: Stephen Vogt, Athletics
I’d be comfortable ditching either McCann or Wieters to squeeze in someone at another position, but three catchers generally are a must.
* DH David Ortiz, Red Sox
* 1B Miguel Cabrera, Tigers
1B Edwin Encarnacion, Blue Jays
* 2B Jose Altuve, Astros
2B Robinson Cano, Mariners
SS Xander Bogaerts, Red Sox
* SS Francisco Lindor, Indians
*3B Josh Donaldson, Blue Jays
3B Manny Machado, Orioles
3B Evan Longoria, Rays
UT Eduardo Nunez, Twins
Notable omissions: Adrian Beltre, Rangers; Nick Castellanos, Tigers; Chris Davis, Orioles; Ian Kinsler, Tigers; Eric Hosmer, Royals; Victor Martinez, Tigers; Dustin Pedroia, Red Sox; Kyle Seager, Mariners; Danny Valencia, Athletics.
How strong is the AL at third? I’ve got three third basemen on the team, and four in my omissions!
Donaldson vs. Machado as the starter is absurdly close; I’m fine with either.
If you don’t want to live in a world where Eduardo Nunez is an All-Star, I understand.
Carlos Beltran, Yankees
Mookie Betts, Red Sox
*Jackie Bradley Jr., Red Sox
Nelson Cruz, Mariners
Khris Davis, Athletics
*Ian Desmond, Rangers
*Mike Trout, Angels
Notable omissions: Adam Eaton, White Sox; Michael Saunders, Blue Jays; George Springer, Astros; Nomar Mazara, Rangers; Mark Trumbo, Orioles.
My apologies to Trumbo, who is tied for the AL lead with 23 homers.
As for the rest of the list, I’m not sure which selection is a bigger surprise, Desmond or Bradley. Both are great stories.
R Jake Arrieta, Cubs
L *Madison Bumgarner, Giants
R Johnny Cueto, Giants
R Jose Fernandez, Marlins
L Clayton Kershaw, Dodgers
L Jon Lester, Cubs
R Stephen Strasburg, Nationals
R Noah Syndergaard, Mets
R Julio Teheran, Braves
Notable omissions: Jacob deGrom, Mets; Kenta Maeda, Dodgers; Carlos Martinez, Cardinals; Drew Pomeranz, Padres; Tanner Roark, Nationals; Max Scherzer, Nationals.
What a crazy list, even knowing that Kershaw will be unavailable.
I love starting Bumgarner, but Syndergaard and Lester also warrant strong consideration (Arrieta, meanwhile, has a relatively mortal 4.05 ERA in his past six starts).
Martinez would be my replacement for Kershaw; I’m tempted to go with Scherzer, but it’s difficult to select a pitcher who leads the NL with 21 homers allowed.
R Jeurys Familia, Mets
R Kenley Jansen, Dodgers
R Seung Hwan Oh, Cardinals
R Mark Melancon, Pirates
Notable omissions: Adam Liberatore, Dodgers; David Phelps, Marlins; A.J. Ramos, Marlins; Fernando Rodney, Padres/Marlins; Hector Rondon, Cubs; Brad Ziegler, Diamondbacks.
Yeah, I know I’m all-right-handed, but I’m not taking Liberatore over Melancon and lefties don’t touch Oh and Jansen.
Buster Posey, Giants
Jonathan Lucroy, Brewers
*Wilson Ramos, Nationals
Notable omissions: None.
Yadier Molina winning the fan vote would cost a deserving player a spot; Molina’s name recognition should not be enough to overcome his.657 OPS.
*DH Paul Goldschmidt, Diamondbacks
1B Wil Myers, Padres
*1B Anthony Rizzo, Cubs
*2B Daniel Murphy, Nationals
2B Ben Zobrist, Cubs
SS Brandon Crawford, Giants
*SS Corey Seager, Dodgers
3B Nolan Arenado, Rockies
*3B Kris Bryant, Cubs
3B Matt Carpenter, Cardinals
3B Jake Lamb, Diamondbacks
Notable omissions: Brandon Belt, Giants; Aledmys Diaz, Cardinals; Derek Dietrich, Marlins; Danny Espinosa, Nationals; Jean Segura, Diamondbacks; Trevor Story, Rockies.
Addison Russell likely will win the fan vote, but he doesn’t even make my list of omissions, not when his OPS as a shortstop ranks 10th in the NL.
Lamb, you ask?
He’s second in the NL in OPS, behind only Carpenter.
Jay Bruce, Reds
*Yoenis Cespedes, Mets
*Bryce Harper, Nationals
Odubel Herrera, Phillies
Dexter Fowler, Cubs
Carlos Gonzalez, Rockies
*Marcell Ozuna, Marlins
Notable omissions: Charlie Blackmon, Rockies; Ryan Braun, Brewers; Adam Duvall, Reds; Gregory Polanco, Pirates; Christian Yelich, Marlins.
Polanco would be my first choice to replace the injured Fowler; I understand that Braun apologized and served his penalty for PED use, but the sport does not owe him any favors.
Duvall is second in the NL with 22 homers, but I prefer Bruce as my Reds representative; he has 17 homers and a higher on-base percentage.(CNN) Former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle will plead guilty to child pornography charges and to crossing state lines to pay for sex with minors, prosecutors and defense attorneys announced after his initial appearance in federal court.
Fogle "has notified the court that he intends to plead guilty," U.S. Attorney Josh Minkler said in Indianapolis. The prosecutor described the case as a "five-year criminal scheme to exploit children."
The plea deal, filed in court Wednesday, would see Fogle serve between five and 12½ years in prison.
The court will have to approve the agreement, in which Fogle pleads guilty to possessing and distributing child porn, and to traveling across state lines to have sex with at least two teenage girls.
Under the plea deal, the government agrees to recommend less than 13 years in prison for Fogle. Also, Fogle's lawyers agree to ask the judge for no less than a 5-year prison term.
Fogle, 37, also will pay restitution to the 14 victims who were secretly photographed in the images possessed by Fogle or who he paid for sex. Each victim will get $100,000, funds intended for counseling, support and other assistance.
According to court documents, the charges against Fogle are related to his relationship with Russell C. Taylor, the executive director of the Jared Foundation, who was arrested more than two months ago on federal child pornography charges.
• Between 2011 and April 2015, Fogle received from Taylor multiple pornographic images of minors engaging in sexually explicit contact.
• Fogle had conversations with Taylor about the child porn, but instead of alerting authorities, he "chose to benefit from such production by obtaining access to a significant amount of such material."
• The images and videos were recorded by Taylor at his home through the use of hidden cameras.
• Between 2010 and February 2013, Fogle traveled from Indiana to New York to pay to have sex with minors.
• One victim told investigators she had sex with Fogle twice when she was 17 in exchange for money, once at the Plaza Hotel and once at the Ritz Carlton, both in New York City.
• The same minor also said that Fogle had sex with her three other times before 2012, when she was 16.
• Prosecutors say that text messages, travel records, hotel records and a search of Fogle's home provided evidence of these arrangements.
• The same minor said Fogle had sex with another 16-year-old girl on another occasion.
• Prosecutors say they have talked to witnesses who can testify about conversations Fogle had with them offering a "finder's fee" for seeking minors for him.
The agreement says Fogle will adhere to a pornography ban and sexual disorders treatment, and he will have no unsupervised visits with minors, among other requirements.
Computer monitoring will be required, too.
Wife wants to end marriage
By admitting to the crimes, Fogle is accepting responsibility and attempting to make amends, defense attorneys Ron Elberger, Andrew DeVooght and Jeremy Margolis said in a statement.
"Jared also understands that he requires significant psychiatric medical treatment and counseling. He has already begun that process by being extensively examined by a world-renowned expert in sexual conditions in order to chart a course to recovery. It is Jared's intent and goal to become healthy again," they said.
"Most importantly, Jared understands that he has hurt innocent people, vulnerable people, and his family. He has expressed remorse... to his loved ones, and will, when given the opportunity, express that remorse to this court and to the people he has harmed. His intent is to spend the rest of his life making amends."
No date has been set for Fogle's next court date, where he will formally enter a change of plea, Margolis said.
On the same day the indictment and plea deal became known, Fogle's wife, Katie, released a statement saying she wants out of the marriage.
"Obviously, I am extremely shocked and disappointed by the recent developments involving Jared," she said in a statement via her attorney. "I am in the process of seeking a dissolution of the marriage. My focus is exclusively on the well-being of my children."
The family will offer no further comments.
In the brief glances that reporters got of Fogle as he entered the courthouse, it appeared he was not wearing a wedding ring.
Weight loss claim made him famous
Fogle became a household name as "Jared from Subway" after a dramatic weight loss that he attributed to eating at Subway restaurants. He became famous in 2000 when the sandwich chain released a commercial centered on his claims that he dropped about 245 pounds -- from a peak weight of 425 -- in one year as an Indiana University student, thanks in part to exercise and a simpler diet involving Subway subs.
JUST WATCHED Rise and fall of Subway pitchman Jared Fogle Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Rise and fall of Subway pitchman Jared Fogle 02:36
The sandwich chain suspended its relationship with Fogle earlier this year after investigators raided his Indiana home.
After the charges and plea deal were revealed, Subway put out a brief statement.
"Jared Fogle's actions are inexcusable and do not represent our brand's values," the company said via Twitter. "We had already ended our relationship with Jared."
Jared Fogle's actions are inexcusable and do not represent our brand's values. We had already ended our relationship with Jared. — SUBWAY® (@SUBWAY) August 19, 2015
Authorities previously said that Taylor, 43, of Indianapolis, was charged in May with seven counts of production of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography.
During an April search at Taylor's home, authorities found "a cache of sexually explicit photos and videos Taylor allegedly produced by secretly filming minor children" there, federal prosecutors said in statement.
Celebrity status
After Subway heard his story and hired him, Fogle was globetrotting from Canada to Australia, talking health and hoagies.
His celebrity grew. He was asked to serve as grand marshal in NASCAR races, and he helped ferry the Olympic torch through Indiana ahead of the Salt Lake City Games.
Fogle flipped the coin before the 2003 Fiesta Bowl and began traveling the world visiting troops. In 2006, the same year he started the Jared Foundation, he penned a memoir, "Jared, the Subway Guy: Winning Through Losing: 13 Lessons for Turning Your Life Around."
This fame helped him become one of the biggest -- and most effective -- faces in advertising, according to a 2013 study by Technomic's Consumer Brand Metrics, which monitors 120 eateries' brands on attributes including image and customer loyalty, according to Advertising Age.Prior to the Affordable Care Act's passage in 2010, President Obama traveled across the United States to reassure Americans that it wasn't as bad as the vast right-wing conspiracy against it was suggesting.
"If you like your doctor, you're going to be able to keep your doctor," Obama pledged at George Mason University. "If you like your plan you can keep it and you don't have to change a thing due to the health care law," stated the White House website.
These promises proved to false, as thousands of Americans found themselves pushed into more expensive policies, some of which were not accepted by the doctors they had been seeing. But Americans were also told that some of these growing pains were unavoidable, given the goal of improving the health and well-being of all Americans. More than 30 million people were without health insurance, after all, and millions were forced by this to receive expensive treatment for routine problems at emergency rooms rather than at primary care facilities.
"I think that it's very important that we provide coverage for all people because if everybody's got coverage, then they're not going to the emergency room for treatment," Obama said at a town hall forum in Rio Rancho, New Mexico in 2009. This became a very common argument for the health care law.
Unfortunately, it is also being proven false.
According to a poll conducted by Marketing General Incorporated for the American College of Emergency Physicians, three-quarters of emergency physicians say ER visits are actually on the rise, a significant increase from one year ago.
More than 50 percent of the physicians surveyed say the number of Medicaid patients going to the ER has increased as well. One reason for the increase, which directly contradicts the promises made by the Obama administration, is that wait times for patients looking to see primary care doctors has notably worsened.
This isn't surprising — and in fact it was predicted by the law's critics. The Affordable Care Act effectively added millions of insured patients to the health care marketplace without doing anything to increase the supply of doctors.
"There is strong evidence that Medicaid access to primary care and specialty care is not timely, leaving Medicaid patients with few options other than the emergency department," said Dr. Orlee Panitch, chair of the Emergency Medicine Action Fund and an emergency physician for MEPHealth in Germantown, Maryland.
Remember — this goal of reducing unnecessary emergency room visits was cited over and over again as a critical reason to adopt Obamacare. The law has not only failed to accomplish this, but in fact seems to have induced patients to flood emergency rooms.
And so costs continue to rise, wait times have increased, patients have lost preferred doctors and health care plans, and the impoverished still have no resort except to go to hospital emergency rooms instead of primary care doctors when they need routine care.
Now, more than ever, it's apparent the Affordable Care Act needs to be repealed and replaced with a more serious reform effort that will lower costs and improve the lives of all Americans without infringing individuals' rights.
Justin Haskins ( Jhaskins@heartland.org) is an editor at the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank headquartered in Chicago. Follow him @TheNewRevere Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.World of Tanks developers continuously work to bring more updates and improvements to the game. Here's a sneak peek at what our selected Supertesters are trying out.
Stay tuned for your chance to try them out in the forthcoming Public Test.
What's the Supertest?
The Supertest happens at the early stages of development, and involves checking the changes of a new update, searching for the most critical issues before releasing it to the public. World of Tanks Supertests are divided into production tests (new maps, balancing vehicles, etc.), and version tests. These tests usually happen about 60 days before a release.
Once Supertests are complete, public tests become available to anyone interested in trying out the new features.
Update 9.16
We've prepared the first Swedish vehicle for release, reworked the Paris map for Random Battles, made a number of changes to address player toxicity in game, and implemented several new game interface features.
This is preliminary update content. The final set of update features will be revealed just before release.
The First Swedish Tank
At gamescom this year, we revealed the Swedish tech tree. The first Swedish tank introduced is the Strv m/42-57 Alt A2, a Premium tier VI medium tank.
It's got the French AMX 13's oscillating turret mounted on a Strv m/42 suspension, making it the game's first Premium tier VI autoloader medium tank.
Its three-member Crew includes a Commander (who can also serve as a Radio Operator and Loader), a Gunner (can also perform as a Loader), and a Driver.
New Paris Map
The Paris-based map, originally developed for Rampage mode, is being reworked for Random battles. It'll be easily recognizable with real-world structures like the Eiffel Tower, Seine River Bank and the Theatre National de Chaillot.Gov. Mark Dayton is at home recovering after he collapsed Monday during his 2017 State of the State Address.
About 50 minutes into his annual speech to the Minnesota Legislature, Dayton paused to take a drink of water before slurring his words. He then fainted and hit his head on the podium.
Two GOP legislators, Rep. Jeff Backer and Rep. Jim Newberger, gave emergency aid to the governor as he lay on the floor behind the podium. He appeared to be unconscious for several minutes.
The Legislature adjourned following Dayton’s collapse.
Dayton’s Chief of Staff Jamie Tincher said the governor walked out of the Capitol on his own and returned home, where EMTs performed a routine check.
WCCO’s Pat Kessler reported the governor was joking with paramedics after regaining consciousness.
MN Gov Dayton is conscious, joking w paramedic and EMT after collapsing during State of State address. — Patrick Kessler (@PatKessler) January 24, 2017
Dayton’s son, Eric Dayton, tweeted his dad was “doing great” around 8:15 p.m.
I'm with my dad now and he's doing great. Thank you all for your kind well-wishes and words of concern. — Eric Dayton (@ericdayton) January 24, 2017
Legislative leaders tell WCCO they are praying for Dayton and wishing him a quick recovery.
“The governor is in our thoughts and prayers and we’re hoping for a quick recovery,” Daudt said. “I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
“We’re all here just praying for the governor. We’re all one Minnesota on days like this,” Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka said. “We all care for each other. So we — that’s our whole focus right now, period, is praying for our governor. Whatever it is, that he has a speedy recovery. Beyond that, tonight we’re here for him.”
Dayton, who will turn 70 on Thursday, briefly stumbled while entering the chamber to deliver his address.
Tincher said Dayton will present his 2017 budget at 11:15 a.m. Tuesday.White students from the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein had to vacate their residences on Tuesday for fear of more black assaults.
Black rioters, mostly cleaners who demand full employment, attacked the white minority, and damaged the main building and residences in the chaos that erupted on campus as a result of vice-chancellor Jonathan Jansen’s lack of leadership [Editor’s Note: Prof. Jansen is black].
On Monday Jansen fled when the black rioters interrupted a rugby match. In a statement he blamed white students who tried to protect themselves from the ensuing violence.
Black youths later pulled down a statue of South Africa’s first republican president, CR Swart, and dumped it into a fountain.
The black SRC president of the university, Lindokuhle Ntuli, said they would continue their protest action until their demands were met.
He explained the attack on whites by saying they had no place in the institution and that something had to done about “racists”.
Ntuli pointed to the CR Swart statue as proof of racism and said protests would only be ended if cleaners were given permanent, full-time employment contracts. He could offer no other examples of racism.
The university announced the Bloemfontein campus will remain closed until further notice because the safety of students, staff and property could not be guaranteed.
Some 60 additional security guards were deployed on the campus to stop the ongoing vandalism.
Jansen said on Tuesday at a news conference that the violence was a setback for transformation. He expressed his disappointment that the black protestors’ “rights were trampled”.
According to the vice-chancellor, blacks have “rights” that enable them to attack whites and damage property.
At the Fischer residence blacks attacked white students on Monday and stormed the building again on Tuesday.
The police had to escort terrified white female students from the Madelief residence to safety when blacks stormed the place shouting that “all the white man’s children will be killed!”
The police were then pelted with stones and bottles and accused of protecting only white students.
Original Article
Share ThisAnother month, another important UN climate change conference. The latest is in Lima, the capital of Peru. Thousands of experts from the world of politics, business, academia and civil society – and Leonardo DiCaprio – have flown around the world to urge us all to curb our carbon emissions.
Recent meetings have failed to make significant progress. Yet, this year there are high hopes that the US-China climate deal and the New York UN Climate Summit will allow Lima to provide a stepping stone for a binding emissions agreement at next year’s meeting in Paris.
However, even if a deal can be reached – despite the urgent need for it – there is no guarantee that global greenhouse gas emissions will actually come down significantly and dangerous climate change can be averted. Psychoanalytic theory provides disturbing insights into why this may be so – and it is all to do with the split psychological make-up of those who work at the forefront of climate science, policy and activism.
Climate denial can be unconscious
For at least a century, psychoanalysis has taught us that we might be consciously thinking and saying one thing, but unconsciously doing another. In this context that means people are very consciously aware of the threats posed by climate change, even if they aren’t doing too much about it.
Not a week goes by without the media showing catastrophic images of environmental damage and social suffering seemingly caused by a changing climate. Research suggests that such threats lead us to adopt various unconscious coping and defence mechanisms.
EPA
Many people try to keep the catastrophe at bay or deny it is happening. Vested interests such as the Koch brothers in the US and other conservative forces have cleverly exploited this unconscious response by supporting a small group of scientists, politicians and think tanks to spread the message of climate scepticism and denial.
This stuff works. Climate denial is undoubtedly on the rise, particularly in those media-saturated markets of North America, Europe and Australia. The Kochs and others are clearly filling a psychological void. Research has also shown that “people want to protect themselves a little bit”, particularly in times of crisis and uncertainty. If climate change simply isn’t happening, there’s nothing to worry about.
Another popular coping and defence mechanism is to pretend that we can address this global and urgent problem by tinkering at the edges of “business as usual”. For example, politicians and business leaders widely believe that we can achieve a decarbonisation of the global economy while maintaining high economic growth. Social psychologist Matthew Adams says such a response is part of an unconscious coping mechanism that simply implies that we have pushed the problem onto a distant future.
As the geographer Erik Swyngedouw shows, climate change politics could in fact be seen as a “post-political” phenomenon where apocalyptic images of environmental destruction and human suffering are used to justify swift action without allowing any real political and economic choices. For example, while on one day the UK government is acknowledging that climate change is already having stark impacts on developing countries by pledging £720m to poor countries, another day of the political calendar is dominated by rhetoric that emphasises economic growth and even the expansion of the oil and gas industry in the UK.
Urgent action on climate change is thus to be implemented within a business-as-usual framework of high growth and high consumption, despite growing evidence that such growth doesn’t make us happier and that it is very likely to deliver increasing carbon emissions for years and decades to come.
In psychosocial theory these defence mechanisms are also referred to as “splitting”. Consciously we might be talking about the impending sustainability crisis, but unconsciously we find ways to actually maintain the status quo. This is also true for those climate experts who fly around the world, going from one global climate change summit to the next. The very carbon emissions associated with their work can be seen as part of a denial strategy.
In fact, one could argue that those who are very close to the reality of climate change are particularly prone to a need to split their identity. The knowledge they have, and the images they have seen, might unconsciously lead them to the above-mentioned counter-balancing and coping behaviours. Not a good omen for the latest round of climate talks in Peru.DHAKA, Bangladesh — Fear has wormed its way into the mind of Mithila Farzana, who hosts two talk shows on a Bangladeshi television news channel.
These days, she is so alert to the sensation of men coming up behind her that when she walks the halls of the university in Dhaka where she teaches, she will step aside, heart racing, to let students pass. Her husband will no longer allow her to take a car service to work, reasoning that in a city that is home to well-resourced radical networks, “a driver can sell himself easily,” she says. He drives her himself.
In the past, Ms. Farzana could survey the danger from a professional distance, reporting the facts each time militants murdered one of the bloggers campaigning against fundamentalist Islam.
Then, last month, a shadowy group — the one that claimed responsibility for killing the bloggers — sent a letter to a television news channel warning that unless news media stopped employing unveiled women as journalists, “the outcome will be dreadful.” On Saturday, militants carried out simultaneous attacks on two book publishers — not secular activists, this time, but low-profile businessmen who acted as intellectual supply lines for some of the country’s most prominent writers.by Roland Boer
Communism has ‘failed’, or so the common observation goes. More often, one hears the opinion that the Soviet Union ‘failed’, or that the communist countries of Eastern Europe did so as well. But what does ‘failure’ mean here? Usually it simply means that they came to an end, even that they were not eternal. Dig deeper and the ‘failure’ is marked by a host of items: dictatorship and totalitarianism rather than ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’; the sad reality that was far from the perfect dream; the fragmentation that arose instead of the voluntary union of working people from many ethnic and religious backgrounds; state capitalism instead of communism; and simple betrayal of revolutionary Marxism. My answer in the face of this persistent propaganda is that they did not fail, and that communisms – plural – as such have not failed. To be sure, they had and continue to have many problems, for they are not perfect by any means, but this is not failure. In order to deal with the various caricatures of failure, let us travel to various parts of the world, both ‘post-communist’ and still communist.
Romanian ‘Dictatorship’
‘Post-communist’ is what the locals call Romania. Neither communist nor capitalist in any conventional sense, it is in a period never experienced before and thereby unique. One feature of this period is the coming to terms with Nicolae Ceaușescu, the second communist leader of Romania, from 1967-1989. On one side, Ceaușescu is held up as the example of all that is bad about communist dictatorship. Propagator of the ‘mini-cultural revolution’ after his ‘July Theses’ in 1968, he fostered a North Korean style personality cult, gave himself many honours, attempted to build ‘socialism in one family’ by appointing family members to high posts, and destroyed the country economically in the 1980s by attempting to repay onerous debts incurred from Western European countries. In short, he was the most ‘Stalinist’ of all the eastern bloc leaders, ruling by decree and through his feared secret police, the Securitate. The lynching of him and his wife in 1989 is regarded as unfortunate but necessary.
Yet, in a widely publicised opinion poll in July 2010 by IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy), 41% of the respondents said they would have voted for Ceaușescu if he had been alive and run for the position of president. Further, 63% said their lives were better during communism, while only 23% stated that their lives were worse. And 68% stated that communism was a good idea, but had been poorly applied. The facetious response to such a result is that it merely reflects a tainted nostalgia for communism. But Romanians are smarter than that. Let me put this in perspective: the respondents were reflecting on the worst period under the communist government in the 1980s. Earlier, Ceaușescu had fallen into the trap of taking up heavy loans from Western Europe for the sake of economic expansion.
However, by 1982, the debt had become an onerous burden, so he decided to repay it through exporting much of Romanian agricultural and industrial production. This resulted in shortages of food, fuel, energy, and medicines. Yet, it was precisely this period that the respondents said was better than what they have now. Since 1989, the situation has become decidedly worse. The economic devastation of the 1990s, the de-industrialisation of Romania as Western European countries bought up the factories and promptly closed them, and then the swathe cut through the country after the rolling economic crisis of 2008 – all these have made the 1980s look like a relatively benign period. I cannot help thinking of Lukács adage: ‘bad communism is better than good capitalism’.
Bulgarian ‘Perfection’
Ask an older Bulgarian today what they remember most from 1989 and it is highly likely she will say, ‘It was a glorious feeling to know that when you made a phone call, you didn’t have the feeling that someone else was listening’.
But ask, ‘Is it better now?’
And the answer will be, ‘We prefer not to answer that’.
The answer is soon obvious. Travel on any road and you find it potholed beyond belief. Walk any street and you run a serious risk of being knocked on the head by a falling brick or crumbling façade. Ask anyone what they do for a living and the answer will be evasive, since less than 25% of the population is in formal employment. Or if you inquire after someone’s family, chances are the children have moved internationally to find a new life and job. Indeed, in a few years after 1989, two million people left Bulgaria, reducing its population from nine to seven million.
What about communism? Was it perfect? Did it meet its own high aspirations? Denigrators are of course keen to point out its failings, stressing the gaps between the grand aims of the Bulgarian Communist Party, which was the government from 1944 to 1989, and its failings. But communism is by no means perfect. As Lenin and Mao pointed out repeatedly, winning a revolution is the easy part; constructing socialism is far, far more difficult.
So, let us see what the Bulgarian communist government did achieve, keeping in mind the difficulties and a modest sense of what was indeed achievable. The communist government had three leaders, the revolutionary hero, Georgi Dimitrov (1946-49) who died too young, Vulko Chervenkov (1949-54) and the long-lived Todor Zhivkov (1954-89). Zhivkov may have had his limits, like any leader, but his time was marked by political stability and a steady increase in living standards. The reason: communist central economic planning.
Already in the late 1950s, real wages increased by 75 per cent, returning people to pre-war levels, while collective farm workers were the beneficiaries of the first agricultural welfare and pension scheme in Europe. By the 1960s, agricultural incomes rose by 6.7 per cent per year and industrial incomes rose by 4.9 per cent annually. Consumption of healthy foods – fruit, vegetables and even meats – increased significantly, while doctors and medical facilities became commonly available. As a result, fewer children died and people lived longer. While 138.9 in 1,000 children under the age of one died in 1939, by 1990 it was 14 in 1000. And those who survived could expect to live longer: life expectancy rose to over 68 years for men and over 74 years for women. Indeed, a reasonable number could expect to make a century: in the late 1980s, 52 people were found over one hundred years of age per one million.
Meanwhile, Zhivkov exercised his ‘tyrannical’ rule. People often made jokes about his dialect and proletarian manners. But did Zhivkov have the perpetrators arrested and punished by the secret police? No, he collected them for a good laugh now and then. He was usually known as ‘bai Tosho’ (old uncle Tosho) or ‘Tato’, a dialectical term for ‘poppa’.
Yugoslavian ‘Disunity’
Balkanisation is perhaps the term that captures best the image of Yugoslavia – or, rather, the ‘former’ Yugoslavia. Tito may have kept the disparate peoples of that part of the world together for a while, due to his personal charm and iron fist, but it was only a matter of time before it would all fall apart. Deep-seated ethnic hatreds and religious animosity – between Islam, Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism – would resurface eventually, and of course they did with the Balkan War of the 1990s. Or so the official narrative went from the members of the EU and the NATO alliance, which deliberately sought to destabilise and break up yet another socialist country. The NATO attacks on Yugoslavia ensured that they would succeed.
However, the real situation was quite different. Yugoslavia is one of the best examples of what has been called ‘affirmative action’ in relation to ethnicities, cultures and religions. Given the range of peoples and regions in Yugoslavia, the constitution was explicitly designed as an affirmative action constitution. The Socialist Federal republic of Yugoslavia comprised six republics and two autonomous provinces that were part of the socialist republic of Serbia. Given the great ethnic diversity of Yugoslavia, the constitution and the framework of the laws sought to ensure that smaller groups were not discriminated against by larger ones. The measures included very strong anti-discrimination laws, with heavy penalties for vilification in terms of ethnicity, language, and religion. Further, in provinces and regions, local people were encouraged to take up government positions, and local languages, cultures, social formations and education were fostered. At a federal level, all republics and autonomous regions, no matter what the size, had equal representation in the federal government. This entailed toning down the dominance of the larger parts, so they didn’t lord it over the others.
Needless to say, this was a constant work in progress, but the model for this approach was the first affirmative action state in human history – the USSR. It may come as a surprise to some, but the chief theoretician of what was called the ‘national question’ was Stalin. Coming from Georgia – a part of the world with some of the most complex intersections of multiple ethnicities – Stalin developed an |
whoever(Traze) added this to the pool and thus bumped it. You magnificent bastard, the feels. bangnhi almost 5 years ago As heart-breaking and tragic it is, this is the best "Tragedy of Long Life" I've ever read. unicron245 almost 5 years ago I am crying a river now. Having Osana Reimu's OST playing in the background did not help Nana1177 over 3 years ago Author's idea may base on canon information about Sakuya but modified in extremely way. It mention in PMiSS, Sakuya possible live for hundred years but still appear as young woman and may related with her time manipulation that it possible to imply Sakuya can stop or slow her age.The median age of death for Hispanic residents in Hartford was 20 years younger than for white residents, according to data recently released by the city. For non-Hispanic blacks the gap with whites was 14 years.
TrendCT analyzed data that tracked deaths from 2008 to 2012 and found that the median age of death for non-Hispanic whites was 82 — the older end of the spectrum — but for Hispanic residents, it was 62. For Non-Hispanic blacks it was 68. For all non-whites, the median age of death was 17 years younger than for whites.
Median age of death in Hartford by ethnicity Between 2008 and 2012 Ethnicity Median age Number of deaths Per 100 residents Hispanic 62 1108 2.04 non-Hispanic black 68 1456 3.06 non-Hispanic white 82 1307 7.18 Other 72.5 102 3.44 City of Hartford. Rate based on Census 2013 ACS data.
The median age of death for Hispanics is a slight improvement — three years — when compared to 1999, but the gap with non-Hispanic whites remained identical. The median age of death rose two years for non-Hispanic blacks and three years for non-Hispanic whites, so the gap between those two groups increased by about a year.
Heart disease and cancer were the top two specific causes of death for Hartford residents. Between 2008 and 2012, the deaths of 940 people did not fit 15 pre-set categories such as liver disease, HIV, or unintentional injuries.
Leading causes of death in Hartford Between 2008 and 2012 Category Frequency Other unspecified 940 Heart disease 901 Cancer 819 Unintentional injuries 211 Stroke 169 Chronic lung disease 144 Kidney disease 116 Diabetes 106 Homicide 105 Pneumonia & Influenza 104 City of Hartford, US Census 2013 ACS
The top three causes of death are the same for all ethnicities, although they differ in their respective orders. Each group had a unique cause of death that showed up in the fourth through sixth spots.
For Hispanic residents, the unique cause was HIV, with 4 percent.
For non-Hispanic blacks, it was homicides, at 4.5 percent.
For whites, it was chronic lung disease, with 4.5 percent.
For other unspecified ethnicities, it was kidney and liver disease (4 percent).
Leading causes of death by ethnicity Measuring percent of deaths within ethnic groups in Hartford, 2008-2012 Rank Hispanic non-Hispanic black non-Hispanic white Other 1 Other unspecified (26%) Heart disease (24%) Heart disease (26%) Other unspecified (29%) 2 Cancer (18%) Cancer (22%) Other unspecified (25%) Cancer (25%) 3 Heart disease (17.6%) Other unspecified (20%) Cancer (21%) Heart disease (20 %) 4 Unintentional injuries (8%) Stroke (5%) Chronic lung disease (4.5%) Stroke (4%) 5 HIV (4%) Unintentional injuries (4.5%) Stroke (4%) Kidney disease (4%) 6 Stroke (3.8%) Homicide (4.5%) Unintentional injury (4%) Liver disease (4%) City of Hartford
Looking more closely at the data reveals some interesting trends:
In Hartford, white residents made up the highest percentage of deaths related to Alzheimer’s disease (48 percent), suicide (42 percent) and lung disease (40 percent).
Sixty-two percent of homicide victims were black.
Hispanic resident made up the largest percentage of deaths in Hartford related to HIV (46 percent), unintentional injuries (42 percent) and liver disease (43 percent).
Black residents had higher percentages of deaths in eight different categories, including atherosclerosis, diabetes, stroke, and septicemia (blood infection).
Next, we looked at causes of death by neighborhoods. The rates of death are based on the population of each neighborhood, and the percent of residents over the age of 65 was included to add context.
North Meadows had the least amount of deaths with only two in four years
North Meadows also had the lowest median age of death at 43 followed by Clay Arsenal at 59
South West had the highest rate of death related to Alzheimers with 1.59
Barry Square had the highest rate of death related to heart disease at 17.38
Blue Hills had the highest rate of death for cancer at 6.76
Barry Square had the highest rate of death related to homicides at 3.67
Men were most likely to die of heart disease, while women died more often of “other unspecified.” More men than women have died and thus outnumber women for most causes of death except Alzheimers, stroke, lung disease, septicemia, and diabetes. Below is a list of deaths by gender listed in order of percent disparity.ES Football Newsletter Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
Dele Alli is set to be handed a new contract after making a spectacular start to his career at Tottenham.
The 19-year-old midfielder earns about £10,000-per-week and can expect to see that figure at least doubled as Spurs move to reward their player for his outstanding form.
Tottenham have a record of improving the terms of players who perform well. Since July 2014, Harry Kane has signed two new deals, elevating his salary dramatically to about £50,000 a week.
Kane’s latest agreement ties him to Spurs until the summer of 2020 and he is likely to be offered another fresh contract at the end of the campaign, moving him into line with the club’s top earners. In the current first-team squad, Erik Lamela, Hugo Lloris and Mousa Dembele are thought to be at the top of the tree, collecting between £70-80,000 a week.
Before he moved to Real Madrid for a world-record £86million in the summer of 2013, Gareth Bale signed new contracts with the club in May 2010, March 2011 and June 2012.
When Alli signed for Spurs from Milton Keynes Dons one year ago, he was given a five-and-a-half-year contract. Any new deal is likely to run until the summer of 2021.
Alli’s impact at White Hart Lane has been remarkable. He was initially loaned back to MK Dons for the second half of last season and when he linked up permanently with Spurs ahead of this season, he was not expected to become a first-team regular immediately.
In Focus: Dele Alli 5 show all In Focus: Dele Alli 1/5 Personality: 4/5 Making a jump from League One to the Premier League would intimidate many players. Not Alli, who has made it clear he feels he belongs at this level. In his first top-flight start — a 1-0 win at Sunderland in September — Alli produced a display brimming with confidence. “He has a very poorly developed sense of fear,” his former manager at Milton Keynes Dons, Karl Robinson, told Standard Sport. Tottenham are trying to protect Alli from excessive media exposure but when he does speak, he is unruffled and thoughtful. He has integrated well in the dressing room, where he is particularly close to Eric Dier, Heung-Min Son and Harry Kane. 2/5 Technique: 4/5 It is hard to see a weakness in Alli’s game here. He is naturally right-footed but his left side is strong, too. His vision is excellent, his control superb. It is usually rare for a player to score one goal per season of the quality of Alli’s against Everton — when he controlled Toby Alderweireld’s long pass to volley past keeper Tim Howard, not to mention his wonder goal against Crystal Palace. One note of caution: Alli can sometimes try one trick too many in his own half, which is perhaps why he is used more regularly in the No10 position at the moment. 2016 Getty Images 3/5 Eye for goal: 5/5 Alli can play as a deep-lying midfielder or just behind a lone forward but he has the instinct of an experienced striker. He has seven goals for club and country this season and most of them have been spectacular. Yet it all comes naturally, as Alli explained after he struck in that victory over Villa. “I judged the ball, judged the play,” he said. “It was natural instinct that the ball was going to drop at the edge of the box, so I delayed my run a bit and luckily it did.” Thanks to that talent, he was in the perfect place to collect Alderweireld’s passes for the goals against West Brom and Everton. 4/5 Versatility: 4/5 It is difficult enough to master a single position in your first season in top-level football. Alli has managed two. “I believe his best position will be as an ‘eight’ [the more attacking of the two central midfielders in the 4-2-3-1 system] but he is a throwback to the type of midfielder who can attack and defend,” Robinson says. Playing in that No8 role, he dominated midfield along with Dier in the 1-1 draw at Arsenal in November and scored a spectacular goal for England against France. As a No10, he combines effectively with Kane, Christian Eriksen and Erik Lamela, as well as Son. 2015 The Arsenal Football Club Plc 5/5 Prospects: 5/5 Alli has been compared with Steven Gerrard and he has the potential to emulate the achievements of the former Liverpool captain. If he has enough fuel in the tank, he is a possible star of this summer’s European Championships. “When he was 17, I said he would play for England,” Robinson recalls. “He is talented and fearless but also very humble and grounded. He needs the time and space to grow, mature and become a top player.” Alli is also as ferocious as he is skilful, squaring up to Mark Noble in November after the West Ham midfielder made a late challenge on Kane. His value is already above £30 million and if Tottenham do not progress at the same rate, they may find it difficult to keep Alli in the long term. 1/5 Personality: 4/5 Making a jump from League One to the Premier League would intimidate many players. Not Alli, who has made it clear he feels he belongs at this level. In his first top-flight start — a 1-0 win at Sunderland in September — Alli produced a display brimming with confidence. “He has a very poorly developed sense of fear,” his former manager at Milton Keynes Dons, Karl Robinson, told Standard Sport. Tottenham are trying to protect Alli from excessive media exposure but when he does speak, he is unruffled and thoughtful. He has integrated well in the dressing room, where he is particularly close to Eric Dier, Heung-Min Son and Harry Kane. 2/5 Technique: 4/5 It is hard to see a weakness in Alli’s game here. He is naturally right-footed but his left side is strong, too. His vision is excellent, his control superb. It is usually rare for a player to score one goal per season of the quality of Alli’s against Everton — when he controlled Toby Alderweireld’s long pass to volley past keeper Tim Howard, not to mention his wonder goal against Crystal Palace. One note of caution: Alli can sometimes try one trick too many in his own half, which is perhaps why he is used more regularly in the No10 position at the moment. 2016 Getty Images 3/5 Eye for goal: 5/5 Alli can play as a deep-lying midfielder or just behind a lone forward but he has the instinct of an experienced striker. He has seven goals for club and country this season and most of them have been spectacular. Yet it all comes naturally, as Alli explained after he struck in that victory over Villa. “I judged the ball, judged the play,” he said. “It was natural instinct that the ball was going to drop at the edge of the box, so I delayed my run a bit and luckily it did.” Thanks to that talent, he was in the perfect place to collect Alderweireld’s passes for the goals against West Brom and Everton. 4/5 Versatility: 4/5 It is difficult enough to master a single position in your first season in top-level football. Alli has managed two. “I believe his best position will be as an ‘eight’ [the more attacking of the two central midfielders in the 4-2-3-1 system] but he is a throwback to the type of midfielder who can attack and defend,” Robinson says. Playing in that No8 role, he dominated midfield along with Dier in the 1-1 draw at Arsenal in November and scored a spectacular goal for England against France. As a No10, he combines effectively with Kane, Christian Eriksen and Erik Lamela, as well as Son. 2015 The Arsenal Football Club Plc 5/5 Prospects: 5/5 Alli has been compared with Steven Gerrard and he has the potential to emulate the achievements of the former Liverpool captain. If he has enough fuel in the tank, he is a possible star of this summer’s European Championships. “When he was 17, I said he would play for England,” Robinson recalls. “He is talented and fearless but also very humble and grounded. He needs the time and space to grow, mature and become a top player.” Alli is also as ferocious as he is skilful, squaring up to Mark Noble in November after the West Ham midfielder made a late challenge on Kane. His value is already above £30 million and if Tottenham do not progress at the same rate, they may find it difficult to keep Alli in the long term.
Six months later, Alli is one of the most important players in Mauricio Pochettino’s team, and he has won four caps for England, scoring his first goal for them in the 2-0 friendly win over France in November.
He has five goals in 25 appearances for Spurs, including two brilliant volleys in the 1-1 draws with Everton and West Brom, and has shone both as a No10 — operating just behind Kane — and in a deeper midfield role.
Although Tottenham’s pay structure does not compare with those of the wealthiest Premier League clubs, Spurs are keen to show their best young players that their work is appreciated. In 2015 alone, Kane, Ryan Mason, Nabil Bentaleb and Eric Dier all signed new contracts.
Asked about the future of players like Kane and Alli earlier in the season, Pochettino said: “If you are successful the club gives you what you deserve.
“This club always pay their players a good salary. It is step by step. We need to stay calm but if you deserve a new contract, the club will give it to you.”Abstract
Previous research, using an analysis of Google Trends, published in January 2016 suggested that interested in prog may be declining. However, very little critical and independent analysis of this question has been published since then. If prog is really dying, what theoretical hypotheses might explain this decline? Rather than use a data mining methodology, can we discover why prog might be dying out based on an analysis of the elusive prog fan in his or her natural habitat?
The Proglodyte
What are the primary characteristics of the Proglodyte (Progo sapiens)? It is important to note that there are several subspecies with some subtle differences in phenotype:
Progo sapiens classicus: The original species from which many subspecies have evolved. While their mating calls are complex and intricate, they remain isolated. This could be due to the fact that they believe they are the only species of progo sapien, and that all others died out sometime in the mid 70s.
Progo sapiens metallus: The prog metal fan. Individuals of this subspecies can be identified by thick black coats, chains, ear gauges, and fedoras (not the good kind).
Progo sapiens jazzius: The most pretentious subspecies. It is unclear whether this is a subspecies or a separate genus altogether. Musicians in this subspecies are sometimes heard alone at night, scatting under their breath.
Progo sapiens canterburium: Found in the forests and river valleys of southeast Britain as well as on college campuses. They are easily identified by their crooked posture, button up cardigans, and unbrushed mane.
Progo sapiens lysergicacidiethylamidum: Psychedelic and experimental prog fan. Found in habitats where the plant species Cannabis sativa and Salvia divinorum are abundant.
Scientific evidence suggests that cross-subspecies reproduction is common and often causes difficulty in subspecies identification.
Factors that May Affect Progo sapiens’ Reproductive Rates
It is commonly held that members of the Progo sapiens species have low reproductive rates, and this may contribute to habitat loss. It is difficult to determine which factor is most salient in determining the cause of low reproductive rates among Progo sapiens. A few examples are:
High education rates.
Low reproductive interest or compatibility.
Higher risk of predation by lower life forms (e.g., nu-metal fans).
Factors that Contribute to Species Resilience
Other factors may be considered protective to the continued existence of the Progo sapiens into the next century. Some of these factors include:
Broad geographical range.
Adaptations to escape and avoid predators (e.g., face melting guitar solos, patience, odor).
Additionally, predators have difficulty catching Progo sapiens due to the fact that prog is rarely catchy.
Progo sapiens has been observed to flourish in many different biomes and environments.
Members of the Progo sapiens species have an ability to mimic the more familiar Homo sapiens and members of the species may even be indistinguishable. Progo sapiens can even be found hidden among Homo sapiens populations, with varying degrees of successful integration.
Conclusion
In my estimation, Progo sapiens will likely continue, even if the numbers of the species diminish. The species may have to find a biological niche in which Progo sapiens adapts to its future environments without losing its biological distinctiveness. Additionally, the species of Progo sapiens will likely never end, because the average prog song doesn’t seem to either.
AdvertisementsOn Monday, 21 September 2015 at 04:22:30 UTC, Paul O'Neil wrote: > As the title says, cpp_binder is a tool that generates C++ bindings. It reads C++ headers and produces a D file filled with "extern(C++)" declarations. It can translate a bunch of cool, small examples, but is not close to being ready for prime-time. It crashes a lot, especially in the STL; since the STL is pretty pervasive, I have not successfully used cpp_binder on an actual C++ library. > > I've written more about cpp_binder and my experiences at > > The code is available at > > I hope that this post will spur discussion / decisions / action binding C++ libraries into D. I think the language capabilities (e.g. extern(C++, namespace)) get really far and that the next big push needs to be on binding real libraries and tools to help. As the title says, cpp_binder is a tool that generates C++ bindings. It reads C++ headers and produces a D file filled with "extern(C++)" declarations. It can translate a bunch of cool, small examples, but is not close to being ready for prime-time. It crashes a lot, especially in the STL; since the STL is pretty pervasive, I have not successfully used cpp_binder on an actual C++ library.I've written more about cpp_binder and my experiences at http:// www.toda yman.net/ cpp_bin der-pre- announcement- and-sta tus.html The code is available at https:// github.com/ todayman/ cpp_binder. cpp_binder still dumps lots of debugging info to stdout and stderr, so you'll probably want to redirect those somewhere beesides your console.I hope that this post will spur discussion / decisions / action binding C++ libraries into D. I think the language capabilities (e.g. extern(C++, namespace)) get really far and that the next big push needs to be on binding real libraries and tools to help.Roxham Road is about as nondescript as any corner of the United States could be. Yet the country lane lined with trailer homes that dead-ends at the Quebec-New York border is an easily recognized thoroughfare for asylum seekers leaving the uncertainty of Donald Trump's America for the welcoming unknown of Canada.
It's at the end of Roxham Road that RCMP officers greet people entering the country illegally with a smile, handcuffs at the ready.
It's this spot, with the possible exception of the frozen fields outside Emerson, Man., that's come to symbolize the plight of those who no longer feel welcome in the U.S. but know they cannot enter Canada through the front door.
Figures provided by the Canadian government show that in the first two months of the year, the RCMP intercepted 677 asylum seekers crossing into Quebec alone, according to The Canadian Press. Including numbers in Manitoba, B.C. and Saskatchewan brings the total to 1,134, compared to 2,464 in all of 2016, the Immigration Department said.
An RCMP officer warns a man in New York state to stop or he'll be arrested for entering Canada illegally. (Catharine Tunney/CBC)
On a sunny Thursday in March a U.S. Border Patrol agent sits in her vehicle halfway up the road. The agency says it has no power to stop anyone who is legally in the U.S. from leaving.
On the other side of the swampy ditch and solar-powered stand of lights and cameras that marks the border, a pair of RCMP vehicles idle.
The Mounties are a constant presence at this spot, near Hemmingford, Que., about 70 kilometres south of Montreal. Day and night, seven days a week.
That presence is no deterrent to those determined to cross.
"We give them a warning that if you pass the border we are going to arrest you," says RCMP spokesman Const. Erique Gasse. "This is not very common in our job, but when we say that, they start walking toward us!"
The whole world is watching
Images of those arrests have been beamed around the world. Mounties gently carrying children, Mounties assisting women struggling with their possessions once they make it over the ditch.
Gasse shakes his head as he describes how the force has given interviews about the asylum seekers to broadcast crews from Norway and Australia, to the BBC and China state television.
"They tell us they are interested in the story because of the way we treat them when they cross the border. For us, it's a crime. We arrest them. We do our police work. But in other parts of the world they aren't as warm as here in Canada." Posted at the Canadian border south of Montreal, an RCMP officer surveys the U.S. side for illegal border-crossers. (Catharine Tunney/CBC)
That warmth, the generosity of Canada's refugee system, is a source of pride to many Canadians. It's also a growing source of debate.
Just this week Conservative leadership candidate Kevin O'Leary said he'd use the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to ensure people who "sneak across the border" can't claim charter protections, and won't have access to benefits. This clause gives government the authority to respond to situations like this & put in place reasonable policies for Canada. —@kevinolearytv
Not to be outdone, fellow leadership contender Maxime Bernier vowed he'd deploy the military to border points like Roxham Road.
The easy explanation is that both candidates, in their bids to win the Conservative race in May, are intent on exploiting the asylum seekers.
The more politically charged suggestion might be that they're tapping into a strain of anger inside Canada that's readily accessible on social media, that these asylum seekers — many of whom are in the U.S. legally — are taking advantage of a loophole in the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement that allows them to make a refugee claim in Canada just as long as they don't enter the country at an official port of entry. A swampy ditch and a solar-powered stand of lights and cameras mark the border, where RCMP vehicles idle. (Catharine Tunney/CBC)
Montreal immigration lawyer Eric Taillefer represents many of the asylum seekers who've made the journey down Roxham Road. His office in Old Montreal is filled with young men awaiting their date with immigration officials who will decide whether they stay or go.
"What the agreement does, it forces people to enter Canada by any means that they can find, whether it be hiding in a car, crossing through the woods or finding any other kind of method of crossing."
Others have warned that suspending the agreement would only add to the number of refugees arriving in Canada.
For some residents of this northern corner of New York, an area that voted for Hillary Clinton in last year's presidential election, the exodus is disturbing. They consider it a sign the U.S. dream of equal opportunity for all, the country's reputation as a beacon of hope around the world, is being diminished. 'Somehow, this country seems to have lost sight that it was founded by immigrants,' says Carole Slatkin. She is a founder of Plattsburgh Cares, a coalition trying to counter the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. (Catharine Tunney/CBC)
Jo Ellen Miano is one of the founders of Plattsburgh Cares, a recently formed coalition of social groups, faith-based organizations and others in the city about 25 kilometres south of the border, who are trying to counter the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment.
"Our hearts are really broken that this has tarnished who we feel we still are," she says. "The best thing we can do is to articulate that we are determined to hang on to the values that are fundamental to the United States of America."
U.S. 'founded by immigrants'
Group members are writing members of Congress. They've also written to the Canada Border Services Agency and the Montreal YMCA to offer help.
"Somehow, this country seems to have lost sight that it was founded by immigrants,'' another of the Plattsburgh Cares founders, Carole Slatkin, says.
"We want to find out who is coming up here so we can offer food. Offer clothing, To do whatever practical things we can do."
What they can't do, both women acknowledge, is give those terrified of being deported any assurance that things will be all right. That the Trump administration's hard line on immigration will soften.Radian is an open source JavaScript library that makes it easy to embed plots in HTML documents. It is being developed as part of OpenBrain’s BayesHive project. Instead of writing JavaScript plotting code yourself, you use custom HTML elements to represent plots. For instance, the HTML code on the left produces the plot on the right: <plot height= 200 aspect= 2 stroke-width= 2 x= "[[seq(0,4*PI,101)]]" axis-x-label= "Time" axis-y-label= "sin(x) / cos(x)" > <lines y= "[[sin(x)]]" stroke= "red" ></lines> <lines y= "[[cos(x)]]" stroke= "blue" ></lines> </plot> Radian uses the AngularJS JavaScript framework to provide the machinery to implement custom HTML elements, and to allow two-way binding between attributes in HTML elements and JavaScript variables, and it uses the D3.js plotting library for graphics generation. Plots are generated as SVG elements embedded directly in the page, so can be rendered by most modern browsers. Radian is licensed under the Mozilla public license.
Applications Radian is used extensively in the BayesHive Bayesian statistics platform. If you want to get an idea of what you can do with Radian, take a look at BayesHive.
Features
Easy to use for both functional and data-based plots
No need to write any JavaScript
Most common plot types supported: lines, points, bar charts, area plots, heatmaps (WIP)
Integrates with AngularJS for more complicated interactive applications
Open source with a liberal license
Examples and comprehensive documentation
Rationale
There are many JavaScript plotting and graphing libraries out there, ranging in complexity from quick-and-easy utilities like Flot up to powerful but complex libraries like D3.js. These things are great, and produce attractive graphs, but they do require you to write JavaScript. Radian is a plotting API that works in a different way: plots are defined declaratively using custom HTML elements. Apart from a tiny bit of boilerplate setup code, you don’t need to write any JavaScript. This has a couple of benefits:
For users who either don’t know JavaScript, don’t want to write it, or just want a quick and simple way to drop a plot into a web page, Radian offers an ideal solution – you write your plots inline in the HTML for your web page. (This works with other markup systems as well. All of these web pages are written in Markdown. All that’s needed to make Radian plots appear are a few <script> tags to provide access to the Radian library and its dependencies.)
For more complex applications where there may be dozens of plots on a page, and where the numbers and contents of the plots aren’t known in advance, it’s much easier to generate HTML containing Radian’s custom tags than it is to generate an HTML page with parallel JavaScript code defining the plots. In fact, the development of Radian came out of just such an application: the BayesHive Bayesian statistical authoring system allows you to write literate documents describing complex statistical calculations, the results of which are rendered into Radian plots. It became apparent pretty quickly that we needed something like Radian to allow us to do this with a minimum of pain.
We couldn’t do it without…
Radian leverages the power of two very cool JavaScript libraries:
AngularJS is a framework for building web applications that’s based on a couple of interesting and innovative ideas. The first is two-way data binding – you can easily set things up so that the contents of an HTML page are linked to JavaScript variables, so that changes in the JavaScript values are reflected immediately in the displayed page, and changes in the page (via interactive elements in forms) are propagated to the JavaScript values. The second idea is that of extending HTML with custom tags and attributes that to implement application-specific behaviours. As you’ll see, Radian makes heavy use of both of these ideas. For example, two-way data binding makes it almost trivial to produce interactive plots, and custom HTML elements are used everywhere: <plot>, <plot-data>, <lines>, <points>, and so on.
The second big thing we use is D3.js. This is a library for building “data-driven documents”. It’s quite complex to use, but it can produce amazing results – take a look at some of the examples for a taste of what it can do.
We wanted to take some of the best features of AngularJS and D3.js and use them to make a plotting API that was ridiculously easy to use for simple things, and possible to use for complex things.
As well as AngularJS and D3.js, we make use of a few other very useful libraries: we use a modified version of the Acorn JavaScript parser and the estraverse and escodegen libraries for parsing and processing Radian expressions.St. Patrick's Day really snuck up on us this year, huh? By "us," I really mean "me," but I bet you're not as far along in your holiday knitting as you'd like, either. Depending on where you live, this could be due to this year's endless winter—which, bad news, will also be next year's endless winter, because that's how endlessness works—or just the fact that Tuesday is a very dumb day for a drinking holiday.
Booze publicists can usually be counted on to keep me abreast of all upcoming holidays (both real and imagined), but unless the emails started preposterously early and I deleted them all unread in January, I've fallen off the green-drink-pushers' radar. There are worse things to fall off—Midori's for teens, crème de menthe is for day-shift VFW barmaids, and Chartreuse is for drunks and poseurs—but this oversight nearly caused me to be derelict in my duty to advise all you handsome theme-drinkers on just how to get down this Paddy's Day, whenever the hell it is.
I realize it's officially Tuesday, but as discussed above, that's dumb. So if you're celebrating in properly exaggerated fashion, you're probably doing so this weekend. Chicago and Boston are having their parades on Saturday, and your town probably is, too, because you probably don't live in New York City (they're waiting till Tuesday), and though a lot of bloggers tend to forget this, the vast majority of planet Earth's human inhabitants do not live in New York City. Please, though, tell us more about the fucking bagels.
Anyhow, so you're going to drink all day Saturday, and good for you! But you don't want to drink Guinness all day. Guinness is good, for sure, and it's way lower in both alcohol and calories than you'd think (4.2 percent alcohol-by-volume, same as Bud Light; 126 calories, half as much as a big IPA, since a beer's calorie load correlates very closely to its alcohol percentage). But you don't need to be drinking a dozen doses of nitrogen-treated beer, friend. Besides, Guinness isn't really craft beer; it's owned by gigantic Diageo. And it's barely even Irish anymore, with breweries all around the world.
If you want real Irish craft beer in America, you don't have many options. Carlow Brewing Company, located in something called a Bagenalstown, which is likely in County Something or Other, debuted in 1998 as Ireland's first modern craft brewer, and today it's the biggest. They make O'Hara's beer, a reasonable volume of which is shipped overseas. My favorite O'Hara's is their excellent barrel-aged Leann Follain stout, but that's hard to find, and, at 8.1 percent ABV, ill-suited to day-drinking.
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For St. Patrick's Day purposes, then, I recommend sticking with O'Hara's Irish Red, which took a surprising second-place finish in last year's Drunkspin Irish beer ranking (behind Guinness Extra Stout, which isn't the stuff you always see on tap; that one's 6-percent booze and therefore not a great party beer). Red ales tend not to be critical darlings, because they're generally light on both hops and alcohol, and they don't taste like melted dark-chocolate ice cream. And in the United States, they're further tarnished by association with Killian's Irish Red, one of the worst Coors products but also the best-selling red ale in the country.
Red ales are built upon a base of malted barley that's more heavily kilned than pale ale and pilsner malts, but not nearly as roasted as the grain that goes in stouts and porters. Reds tend to be lightly hopped, so the predominant flavor comes from the semisweet, fruity malt. O'Hara's is the best version I've had.
This is what I wrote about it last year. It's still true.
Oh man, this is one hell of a beer. It smells like sweet fruit, maybe maraschino cherries or raspberries. It's bright and lively, with the fruit complemented by a touch of milk chocolate and honest caramel. The finish is dry and assertive for the style, with just enough hops to keep everything on the up and up. This is by far the best red ale I've had.
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If you're looking for a real Irish beer this holiday season, O'Hara's Irish Red is a good way to go. It's easy and fun to drink, not too expensive (generally about the same price as Guinness), and not too hard to track down.
This is Drunkspin Daily, the Concourse's adequate source for booze news, reviews, and bullshit. We'll be highlighting a beer a day in this space; please leave suggestions below.
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Will Gordon loves life and tolerates dissent. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., and some of his closest friends have met Certified Cicerones. Find him on Twitter @WillGordonAgain. Image by Jim Cooke.
The Concourse is Deadspin's home for culture/food/whatever coverage. Follow us on Twitter.After playing in the sand, the Curiosity rover is poised to trek across the Martian landscape in search of a rock to drill into.
The six-wheel rover has been parked for more than a month at a sand dune where it has been busy scooping up soil, sniffing the atmosphere and measuring radiation levels on the surface.
Its next task is to zero in on a rock and that requires driving to a new location.
Mission deputy scientist Ashwin Vasavada expected Curiosity to be on the move in the "next few days".
"It's the bedrock which really gives you the story of ancient Mars," said Vasavada of the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the US$2.5 billion mission.
"The soil is a little harder to interpret because we don't know how old it is or where it came from."
The car-size rover touched down in Gale Crater, an ancient depression near the Martian equator, in August on a two-year mission to probe whether the landing site once had conditions capable of supporting microbial life.
Armed with a high-tech suite of instruments, it's the most sophisticated spacecraft to ever land on the red planet.
During the first three months, a weather station aboard Curiosity detected brief drops in air |
mercury (102 kPa) at a temperature of 62 °F (17 °C). In 1963, the gallon was redefined as the volume of 10 pounds of distilled water of density 7002998859000000000♠0.998859 g/mL weighed in air of density 7000121700000000000♠0.001217 g/mL against weights of density 7003813599999999999♠8.136 g/mL, which works out to 6997454609600000000♠4.546096 l or 6997454609601746720♠277.4198 cu in. The Weights and Measures Act of 1985 switched to a gallon of exactly 6997454609000000000♠4.54609 L (approximately 6997454608946264160♠277.4194 cu in).[17]
Table of commonly used volume units Unit Imperial
ounces Imperial
pints Millilitres Cubic inches US ounces US pints fluid ounce (fl oz) 1 1⁄ 20 28.413 0625 1.7339 0.960 76 0.060 047 gill (gi) 5 1⁄ 4 142.065 3125 8.6694 4.8038 0.300 24 pint (pt) 20 1 568.261 25 34.677 19.215 1.2009 quart (qt) 40 2 1 136.5225 69.355 38.430 2.4019 gallon (gal) 160 8 4 546.09 277.42 153.72 9.6076 Note: The millilitre equivalences are exact, but cubic-inch and US measures are correct to 5 significant figures.
Legal measures from 1826–1870[18] Liquid Dry Capacity (in³) 1/2 gill 4.3 Gill 1/4 pint 8.7 1/2 pint 1/2 pint 17.4 Pint Pint 34.7 Quart Quart 69.4 1/2 gallon 1/4 peck or 1/2 gallon 138.7 Gallon 1/2 peck or gallon 277.4 2 gallons (peck) Peck 554.8 4 gallons (1/2 bushel) 1/2 bushel 1109.7 Bushel 2219.4
British apothecaries' volume measures [ edit ]
These measurements were in use from 1826, when the new imperial gallon was defined, but were officially abolished in the United Kingdom on 1 January 1971.[19][20] In the US, though no longer recommended, the apothecaries' system is still used occasionally in medicine, especially in prescriptions for older medications.[21][22]
Mass and weight [ edit ]
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the UK used three different systems for mass and weight.
troy weight, used for precious metals;
avoirdupois weight, used for most other purposes; and
apothecaries' weight, now virtually unused since the metric system is used for all scientific purposes.
The distinction between mass and weight is not always clearly drawn. Strictly a pound is a unit of mass, although it is commonly referred to as a weight. When a distinction is necessary, the term pound-force may be used to refer to a unit of force rather than mass. The troy pound (6999373241721600000♠373.2417216 g) was made the primary unit of mass by the 1824 Act; however, its use was abolished in the UK on 1 January 1879,[29] with only the troy ounce (6998311034768000000♠31.1034768 g) and its decimal subdivisions retained.[30] The Weights and Measures Act 1855 (18 & 19 Victoria C72) made the avoirdupois pound the primary unit of mass.[31] In all the systems, the fundamental unit is the pound, and all other units are defined as fractions or multiples of it.
Table of mass units Unit Pounds Grams Kilograms Notes grain (gr) 1⁄ 7003700000000000000♠ 7000 6998647989100000000♠ 0.064 798 91 Exactly 7001647989100000000♠ 64.798 91 milligrams. drachm (dr) 1⁄ 256 7000177184519531250♠ 1.771 845 195 3125 ounce (oz) 1⁄ 16 7001283495231250000♠ 28.349 523 125 pound (lb) 1 7002453592370000000♠ 453.592 37 6999453592370000000♠ 0.453 592 37 Exactly 7002453592370000000♠ 453.592 37 grams by definition. stone (st) 14 7003635029318000000♠ 6 350.293 18 7000635029318000000♠ 6.350 293 18 The plural stone is often used when providing a weight (e.g. "this sack weighs 8 stone").[32] A person's weight is often quoted in stones and pounds in English-speaking countries that use the avoirdupois system, with the exception of the United States and Canada, where it is usually quoted in pounds. quarter (qr or qtr) 28 7001127005863600000♠ 12.700 586 36 One quarter is equal to two stones or a quarter of a hundredweight. The term quarter was also commonly used to refer to a quarter of a pound in a retail context. hundredweight (cwt) 112 7001508023454400000♠ 50.802 345 44 One imperial hundredweight is equal to eight stones. This is the long hundredweight as opposed to the short hundredweight of 100 pounds as used in the United States and Canada.[33] ton (t) 2240 7003101604690880000♠ 1 016.046 9088 Twenty hundredweights equal a ton (as with the US and Canadian[33] systems). The imperial hundredweight is 12% greater than the US and Canadian equivalent. The imperial ton (or long ton) is 7003224000000000000♠ 2240 pounds, which is much closer to a metric tonne (about 7003220460000000000♠ 2 204.6 pounds), compared to the short ton of 2 000 pounds (907.185 kg). Gravitational units slug (slug) 7001321740485600000♠ 32.174 048 56 7004145939029400000♠ 14 593.902 94 7001145939029400000♠ 14.593 902 94 The slug, a unit associated with imperial and US customary systems, is a mass that accelerates by 1 ft/s2 when a force of one pound (lbf) is exerted on it.[34] F = ma (Newton's second law) 1 lbf = 1 slug × 1 ft/s2 (as defined above) 1 lbf = 1 lb × g/gc (by definition of the pound force[ citation needed ]) g ≈ 7001321740485600000♠ 32.174 048 56 ft/s2 gc ≈ 7001321740485600000♠ 32.174 048 56 lbm.ft/lbf.s2 ∴ 1 slug ≈ 7001321740485600000♠ 32.174 048 56 pounds
Natural equivalents [ edit ]
Although the 1824 act defined the yard and pound by reference to the prototype standards, it also defined the values of certain physical constants, to make provision for re-creation of the standards if they were to be damaged. For the yard, the length of a pendulum beating seconds at the latitude of Greenwich at Mean Sea Level in vacuo was defined as 7001390139300000000♠39.01393 inches. For the pound, the mass of a cubic inch of distilled water at an atmospheric pressure of 30 inches of mercury and a temperature of 62° Fahrenheit was defined as 252.458 grains, with there being 7,000 grains per pound.[3] However, following the destruction of the original prototypes in the 1834 Houses of Parliament fire, it proved impossible to recreate the standards from these definitions, and a new Weights and Measures Act (18 & 19 Victoria. Cap. 72) was passed in 1855 which permitted the recreation of the prototypes from recognized secondary standards.[31]
Relation to other systems [ edit ]
English units of length
The imperial system is one of many systems of English units. Although most of the units are defined in more than one system, some subsidiary units were used to a much greater extent, or for different purposes, in one area rather than the other. The distinctions between these systems are often not drawn precisely.
One such distinction is that between these systems and older British/English units/systems or newer additions. The term imperial should not be applied to English units that were outlawed in the Weights and Measures Act 1824 or earlier, or which had fallen out of use by that time, nor to post-imperial inventions, such as the slug or poundal.
The US customary system is historically derived from the English units that were in use at the time of settlement. Because the United States was already independent at the time, these units were unaffected by the introduction of the imperial system.
Current use [ edit ]
A baby bottle that measures in three measurement systems—metric, imperial (UK), and US customary.
United Kingdom [ edit ]
British law now defines each imperial unit in terms of the metric equivalent. The metric system is in official use within the United Kingdom for most official applications with Imperial units remaining in widespread use amongst the public.[35] All UK roads use the imperial system except for weight limits, and newer height or width restriction signs give metric alongside imperial.[36]
Units of measurement regulations require all measuring devices used in trade or retail to display measurements in metric quantities. Almost all traders in the UK will accept requests from customers specified in imperial units, and scales which display in both unit systems are commonplace in the retail trade. Metric price signs may be accompanied by imperial price signs provided that the imperial signs are no larger and no more prominent than the metric ones.
The United Kingdom completed its official partial transition to the metric system in 1995, with some imperial units still legally mandated for certain applications such as draught beer and cider,[37] road-signs,[38] and therefore the speedometers on vehicles sold in the UK must be capable of displaying miles per hour. Even though the troy pound was outlawed in the UK in the Weights and Measures Act of 1878, the troy ounce may still be used for the weights of precious stones and metals. The original railways (many built in the Victorian era) are a big user of imperial units, with distances officially measured in miles and yards or miles and chains, and also feet and inches, and speeds are in miles per hour, although more recent systems are metric, and London Underground uses metric.[39]
Most British people still use imperial units in everyday life for distance (miles, yards, feet and inches) and volume in some cases (especially milk and beer in pints) but rarely for canned or bottled soft drinks or petrol.[35][40] Though use of kilograms is increasing, most British people also still use imperial units in everyday life for body weight (stones and pounds for adults, pounds and ounces for babies).[citation needed] Some government documents aimed at the public give body weight and height not only in metric units (kilograms centimetres) but also in imperial units (stones and pounds, feet and inches).[41] A survey in 2015 found that many people did not know their body weight or height in one system or the other.[42] People under the age of 40 preferred the metric system but people aged 40 and over preferred the imperial system.[43] The height of horses in some English-speaking countries, including Australia,[1] Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States is usually measured in hands, standardized to 4 inches (101.6 mm). Fuel consumption for vehicles is commonly stated in miles per gallon, though official figures always include litres per 100 km equivalents. When sold draught in licensed premises, beer and cider must be sold in pints and half-pints. Cow's milk is available in both litre- and pint-based containers in supermarkets and shops. Areas of land associated with farming, forestry and real estate are commonly advertised in acres and square feet, but for official government purposes the units are always hectares and square metres.
Office space and industrial units are usually advertised in square feet. Steel pipe sizes are sold in increments of inches, while copper pipe is sold in increments of millimetres. Road bicycles have their frames measured in centimetres, while off-road bicycles have their frames measured in inches. The size (diagonal) of television and computer monitor screens is always denominated in inches. Food sold by length or width e.g. pizzas or sandwiches, is generally sold in inches. Clothing is always sized in inches, with the metric equivalent often shown as a small supplementary indicator. Gas is usually measured by the cubic foot or cubic metre, but is billed like electricity by the kilowatt hour.[44]
Some pre-packaged products show both metric and imperial measures and it is also common to see imperial pack sizes with metric only labels e.g. a 1 lb (i.e., 454 g) tin of Lyle's Golden Syrup is always labelled 454 g with no imperial indicator. Similarly most jars of jam and packs of sausages are labelled 454 g with no imperial indicator.
India [ edit ]
India's conversion to the metric system from the imperial system occurred in stages between 1955 and 1962. The metric system in weights and measures was adopted by the Indian Parliament in December 1956 with the Standards of Weights and Measures Act, which took effect beginning 1 October 1958. The Indian Coinage Act was passed in 1955 by the Government of India to introduce decimal coinage in the country. The new system of coins became legal tender on April 1957, where the rupee consists of 100 paise. For the next five years, both the previous and new systems were legal. In April 1962, all other systems were banned. This process of metrication is called "big-bang" route, which is to simultaneously outlaw the use of pre-metric measurement, metricise, reissue all government publications and laws, and change education systems to metric.[45]
Today all official measurements are made in the metric system. However, in common usage some older Indians may still refer to imperial units. Some measurements, such as the heights of mountains, are still recorded in feet. Additionally, the Indian numbering system of crores and lacs is used alongside otherwise metricated currency units, while tyre rim diameters are still measured in inches, as used worldwide. Road widths are popularly measured in feet but official documents use metres. Body temperature is still sometimes measured in degrees Fahrenheit. Industries like the construction and the real estate industry still use both the metric and the imperial system though it is more common for sizes of homes to be given in square feet and land in acres. Bulk cotton is sold by the candy (0.35 imperial tons, or 355.62 kg) or the bale (170 kg).[45][46]
In Standard Indian English, as in Australian, Singaporean, and British English, metric units such as the litre (liter), metre (meter), and metric tonne (ton) utilise the traditional spellings brought over from French, which differ from those used in the United States and the Philippines. The imperial long ton is invariably spelt with one 'n'. (See English in the Commonwealth of Nations for more information).[46]
Hong Kong [ edit ]
Hong Kong has three main systems of units of measurement in current use:
The Chinese units of measurement of the Qing Empire (no longer in widespread use in China);
British imperial units; and
The metric system.
In 1976 the Hong Kong Government started the conversion to the metric system, and as of 2012 measurements for government purposes, such as road signs, are almost always in metric units. However, all three systems are officially permitted for trade,[47] and in the wider society a mixture of all three systems prevails.
The Chinese system's most commonly used units for length are 里 (li), 丈 (tseung/cheung), 尺 (tsek/chek), 寸 (tsun/chun), 分 (fen/fan) in descending scale order. These units are now rarely used in daily life, the imperial and metric systems being preferred. The imperial equivalents are written with the same basic Chinese characters as the Chinese system. In order to distinguish between the units of the two systems, the units can be prefixed with "Ying" (Chinese: 英) for the Imperial system and "Wa" (Chinese: 華) for the Chinese system. In writing, derived characters are often used, with an additional 口 (mouth) radical to the left of the original Chinese character, for writing imperial units. The most commonly used units are the mile or "li" (Chinese: 哩), the yard or "ma" (Chinese: 碼), the foot or "chek" (Chinese: 呎), and the inch or "tsun" (Chinese: 吋).
The traditional measure of flat area is the square foot (Chinese: 方呎, 平方呎) of the imperial system, which is still in common use for real estate purposes. The measurement of agricultural plots and fields, however, is traditionally conducted in 畝 (mau) of the Chinese system.
For the measurement of volume, Hong Kong officially uses the metric system, though the gallon (加侖, ka-lun) is also occasionally used.
Canada [ edit ]
A one US gallon gas can purchased near the US-Canada border. It shows equivalences in imperial gallons and litres.
During the 1970s, the metric system and SI units were introduced in Canada to replace the imperial system. Within the government, efforts to implement the metric system were extensive; almost any agency, institution, or function provided by the government uses SI units exclusively. Imperial units were eliminated from all road signs, although both systems of measurement will still be found on privately owned signs, such as the height warnings at the entrance of a parkade. In the 1980s, momentum to fully convert to the metric system stalled when the government of Brian Mulroney was elected. There was heavy opposition to metrication and as a compromise the government maintains legal definitions for and allows use of imperial units as long as metric units are shown as well.[48][49][50] The law requires that measured products (such as fuel and meat) be priced in metric units, although an imperial price can be shown if a metric price is present.[51][52] However, there tends to be leniency in regards to fruits and vegetables being priced in imperial units only. Environment Canada still offers an imperial unit option beside metric units, even though weather is typically measured and reported in metric units in the Canadian media. However, some radio stations near the United States border (such as CIMX and CIDR) primarily use imperial units to report the weather. Railways in Canada also continue to use Imperial units.
Imperial units are still used in ordinary conversation. Today, Canadians typically use a mix of metric and imperial measurements in their daily lives. However, the use of the metric and imperial systems varies by age. The older generation mostly uses the imperial system, while the younger generation more often uses the metric system. Newborns are measured in SI at hospitals, but the birth weight and length is also announced to family and friends in imperial units. Drivers' licences use SI units. In livestock auction markets, cattle are sold in dollars per hundredweight (short), whereas hogs are sold in dollars per hundred kilograms. Imperial units still dominate in recipes, construction, house renovation and gardening.[53][54][55][56][57] Land is now surveyed and registered in metric units, although initial surveys used imperial units. For example, partitioning of farm land on the prairies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was done in imperial units; this accounts for imperial units of distance and area retaining wide use in the Prairie Provinces. The size of most apartments, condominiums and houses continues to be described in square feet rather than square metres, and carpet or flooring tile is purchased by the square foot. Motor-vehicle fuel consumption is reported in both litres per 100 km and statute miles per imperial gallon,[58] leading to the erroneous impression that Canadian vehicles are 20% more fuel-efficient than their apparently identical American counterparts for which fuel economy is reported in statute miles per US gallon (neither country specifies which gallon is used). Canadian railways maintain exclusive use of imperial measurements to describe train length (feet), train height (feet), capacity (tons), speed (mph), and trackage (miles).[59]
Imperial units also retain common use in firearms and ammunition. Imperial measures are still used in the description of cartridge types, even when the cartridge is of relatively recent invention (e.g.,.204 Ruger,.17 HMR, where the calibre is expressed in decimal fractions of an inch). However, ammunition that is already classified in metric is still kept metric (e.g., 9×19mm). In the manufacture of ammunition, bullet and powder weights are expressed in terms of grains for both metric and imperial cartridges.
As in most of the western world, air navigation is based on nautical units, e.g., the nautical mile, which is neither imperial nor metric, though altitude is still measured in imperial feet[60] in keeping with the international standard.
Australia [ edit ]
Metrication in Australia has largely ended the official use of imperial units, though for particular measurements (such as flight altitudes[citation needed] and nominal sizes of computer and television screens) international use of imperial units is still followed. In licensed venues, draught beer and cider is sold in glasses and jugs with sizes based on the imperial fluid ounce though rounded to the nearest 5 mL.
New Zealand [ edit ]
Although New Zealand completed metrication in the 1970s, a study of university students undertaken in 1992 found a continued use of imperial units for birth weight and human height alongside metric units.[61]
In aviation, altitude and airport elevation are measured in feet whilst navigation is done in nautical miles; all other aspects (fuel quantity, aircraft weight, runway length, etc.) use metric units.
Screen sizes for devices such as televisions,[62] monitors[63] and phones,[64] and wheel rim sizes for vehicles,[65] are stated in inches, as is the convention in the rest of the world.
Ireland [ edit ]
Ireland has officially changed over to the metric system since entering the European Union, with distances on new road signs being metric since 1997 and speed limits being metric since 2005. The imperial system remains in limited use – for sales of beer in pubs (traditionally sold by the pint). All other goods are required by law to be sold in metric units, although old quantities are retained for some goods like butter and sausages, which are sold in 454-gram (1 lb) packaging. The majority of cars sold pre-2005 feature speedometers with miles per hour as the primary unit, but with a kilometres per hour display as well.
Other countries [ edit ]
Full imperial measurements are used in Palau, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Belize. Some imperial measurements remain in limited use in Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and South Africa. Measurements in feet and inches, especially for a person's height, are frequently encountered in conversation and non-governmental publications.
Prior to metrication, it was a common practice in Malaysia for people to refer to unnamed locations and small settlements along major roads by referring to how many miles the said locations were located from the nearest major town. In some cases, these eventually became the official names of the locations; in other cases, such names have been largely or completely superseded by new names. An example of the former is Batu 32 (literally "Mile 32" in Malay), which refers to the area surrounding the intersection between Federal Route 22 (the Tamparuli-Sandakan highway) and Federal Route 13 (the Sandakan-Tawau highway). The area is so named because it is 32 miles west of Sandakan, the nearest major town.
Petrol is still sold by the imperial gallon in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Myanmar, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The United Arab Emirates Cabinet in 2009 issued the Decree No. (270 / 3) specifying that, from 1 January 2010, the new unit sale price for petrol will be the litre and not the gallon. This in line with the UAE Cabinet Decision No. 31 of 2006 on the national system of measurement, which mandates the use of International System of units as a basis for the legal units of measurement in the country.[66][67] Sierra Leone switched to selling fuel by the litre in May 2011.[68]
In October 2011, the Antigua and Barbuda government announced the re-launch of the Metrication Programme in accordance with the Metrology Act 2007, which established the International System of Units as the legal system of units. The Antigua and Barbuda government has committed to a full conversion from the imperial system by the first quarter of 2015.[69]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]The surging popularity of the Hyundai A-League has been reinforced yet again with confirmation of record membership numbers across the competition.
The impressive figures show the total combined membership of the ten Hyundai A-League clubs in 2016/17 was 117,415, the highest ever recorded.
That represents an increase of 7% from last season.
The previous record was 114,544 in the 2014/15 season.
Melbourne City and Brisbane Roar had the highest increase in membership of 37% and 32% respectively.
Perth Glory's increase was also a significant 22%.
Meanwhile, Western Sydney Wanderers’ membership topped 20,000 for the first time while Melbourne Victory continues to attract huge numbers with over 26,000 members.
These strong statistics further demonstrate the importance of members to their clubs and the competition as a whole.
Football supporters are being thanked for their contribution to making the Hyundai A-League the most vibrant, colourful and exciting spectator experience in Australasian sport.
And with Season 13 set to be the biggest and best yet, fans are being encouraged to jump on board for 2017/18.
Membership information, on sale details and the opportunity to register interest can all be found on the Hyundai A-League membership website here.On Design Education
Dan Saffer Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 8, 2014
The most important thing I do as a creative director is hire designers. Much like the best thing a movie director can do is focus on casting, hiring great designers makes everything else so much more enjoyable: “Management” time is reduced and the work quality is much, much higher.
A major source of designers is, naturally, design schools. I, and my counterparts at other design studios, agencies, corporations, and startups, rely on design schools to help shape, guide, and train the next generation of designers. So I — and the hundreds like me — have a vested interest in the state of design education.
And we’re concerned.
The crux of the matter is the feeling that many design schools are doing a disservice to their students by preparing them for careers they’re unlikely to have, at least right out of school. “No one wants to hire a 22-year-old strategist,” was how a colleague (perhaps indelicately) phrased it. Graduate schools focus on more and more specialized, baroque areas of design. Meanwhile, undergraduates are pointed towards areas like service and systems design, and social innovation, despite the fact that the job market for those is small. What most undergraduates in the design field will work on when they graduate are products: physical objects, printed materials, or (increasingly) hardware and software. Now certainly, most of these will be part of a service or system, and some (hopefully all) will have a benefit to society. And no one is arguing that an understanding of strategy, services and systems isn’t essential to understanding 21st century design. But too many graduates get out of school and become disillusioned when the work they’re doing is not at the system or service level, but at the product level, where their skills, at least initially, are needed the most. I’ve seen this first-hand.
I have a lot of sympathy for design schools. Design is not easy to teach. It’s a pastiche of methods, tools, theory, and principles, some of which take years to master. The field is evolving, with new tools and new areas to supply our skills towards. Professors have to prepare students for a future that’s uncertain, and I can see how having them study complexity and complex systems seems like a reasonable response. The unintended consequence is that the things in those systems that are begging for design are neglected or somehow seen as beneath doing.
Here’s the thing: professors pass along their values to students. What they care about, what they’re passionate about, is often what students get passionate about. Professors who look down on “pixel pushing” (as though that was easy — it’s not and if you don’t believe me, try it sometime) and the day-to-day, tactical work of product design will pass that attitude along to their students, who’ll see the most strategic/thinking aspects of design as somehow more valuable than the doing/making aspects of design. Untethered as schools are to the marketplace, it’s not difficult to teach what should be done (big system-wide changes) and not what needs to be done (small changes, with often tedious attention to detail). (And, consequently, what companies will pay for. In the era of ballooning student loans, this is not an inconsequential consideration.) From where I sit, there’s a lot that needs to be done, and usually only young designers have the energy and skills to get it done.
Now, I certainly agree that our world needs big, system-wide changes and that young designers can help bring those about. But my experience with those kinds of designers leads me to believe that if you’ve got that kind of fire in your belly, you’re going to pursue it no matter if you’ve taken a class in social innovation or not. And more power to them.
The “design thinking” wind that blew through the design community over the last decade has made its way into university curricula, so that thinking about the problem creatively has become equated with solving the problem. Journey Maps and conceptual models are fine, valuable tools — but only as a means to an end. If the designers you’re training can only do — or only want to do — process documents, they’re not as valuable as they could be. I’ve seen their portfolios.
There are those who say that education is not about making someone “industry-ready.” I agree that that is not the sole purpose of education, but I feel that one purpose of any education, whether it is through a school or self-taught, is to prepare one to meaningfully participate: in society, in personal relationships, in a career. You cannot meaningfully participate in your field if most of the work — arguably the most important work — you are unequipped to address and may even feel is beneath you to address.
It may be that I’m wrong. That in 10 years, all the design work will center around services and systems. That we’ll all be strategists and the detailed product design work will be done by algorithms and robots. But until then, there’s a great need and a great desire for designers who can craft the products we use every day, digital and physical. Keep making those.This savory and extra spicy tofu jerky is made with oven dried tofu strips flavored with smoky seasonings and fiery sriracha sauce!
I generally have a backlog of a few weeks’ worth of recipes for this blog. Occasionally I make something and decide I need to post it the very next day, but most of the time my recipes work their way through the list and slow process of photographing, editing, writing and publishing. This recipe has been in my queue for a few weeks now, and my husband has asked me numerous times when I’m going to post it. I usually take that as a sign that the recipe was pretty damn good.
In this case, I’ve been informed, that not only is the recipe awesome, but jerky played a part in his journey towards going meatless.
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I’m lucky to be with a guy whose food preferences are pretty close to my own. But he tells me that during his younger years, long before contemplating cutting out animal foods, he belonged to a band in which he was the only meat-eating member. His vegetarian bandmates mockingly brought him several packages of veggie jerky, which he devoured and loved, much to their amusement. I suppose if jerky had ever been an obstacle to him going veg, he did away with it then and there.
I don’t really think it’s surprising that he loved it so much. Jerky’s appeal really isn’t about meat, right? It’s all about the seasonings, spices and flavor.
Any recollection I have of eating jerky made from animals is way foggy at this point. I’m sure the texture of tofu jerky isn’t exactly like it, but I definitely had something of an “Oh, yeah, I remember this kind of food!” moment when I tasted it.
I made my jerky by basing tofu in a super-flavorful sauce and then cooking it in the oven at a super low temperature. If you’ve got a food dehydrator I’m sure that would work too.
And just to show you how easy the oven method is, I went and made a video of it!The UK executive of ride-sharing company Uber, Jo Bertram, has reportedly left the company following Uber losing its license to operate in London.
Business Insider UK reports that the UK Uber executive Jo Bertram is leaving the company shortly after Uber lost its license for operating in London. Bertram has worked at Uber for the past four years and acted as the regional general manager for Northern Europe.
Uber recently lost their license to operate in London as they were deemed “not fit and proper” by the public transport body Transport For London. Newly appointed Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi plans to meet with regulators in London on Tuesday to discuss the license.
Bertram announced her departure to staff in an email:
Subject Line: Thank you for a brilliant journey As many of you have just heard at our All Hands meeting, I’ve decided to move on to something new and exciting. I’m leaving Uber with great memories, friendships and many amazing experiences, and I’ll never forget the great things that we’ve achieved together as a team. When I showed up on my first day four years ago, at our tiny serviced office in Baker Street, I quickly realised that this company was special – not only in its ambitions, but also in the way we all pulled together. Whether responding to all sorts of customer questions, buying our own laptops, or distributing mobile phones to our early partner drivers, we all had to roll up our sleeves and figure out how to build a business. I had wanted to experience the pace and craziness of life at a start-up, and Uber certainly delivered! I’m tremendously lucky to have spent the last four years with you, and it has been breathtaking to see the team grow so quickly. When I joined as General Manager for London, we had just three team members in the city and a few hundred drivers. Together, we then rolled out our services to more than 40 towns and cities across the United Kingdom, where we now serve almost 5 million riders and more than 50,000 drivers. Since I became Regional General Manager for Northern Europe, I’ve been proud to lead what is now a team of 300 people across 10 countries. I’ve learned a lot during this rapid expansion and, in every market we entered, you could quickly see the impact we had on the way people travelled and lived their lives. While we often talk about the growth we’ve seen, we can also be proud of the progress our team has made in improving the service for both drivers and riders. Though there’s always more to be done, we’ve taken big strides for a young company. From the introduction of discounted illness and injury cover for drivers, to the roll out of ACCESS for wheelchair users and most recently our Clean Air Plan, there are many initiatives we can be proud of. I know there are many more exciting things to come. Over the course of this year, I’ve been reflecting on these incredible last four years and what might come next for me. I’ve also discussed this with Pierre and I’m proud that we’ve built this business into more than we ever thought possible. And I’ve realised that taking a nascent company and helping it scale into a major international operation is what I’ve enjoyed most. An exciting new opportunity has arisen that will allow me to apply what I’ve learnt here and I’ll be able to share more details with you soon. Given some of our current challenges, I’m also convinced that now is the right time to have a change of face, and to hand over to someone who will be here for the long haul and take us into the next phase. While I would like to have announced my move in smoother circumstances, I’m proud of the team we’ve built here and am very confident in their abilities to lead the business into the next chapter. I’ll work with you in the coming weeks on the best possible transition. I’m grateful for everything I’ve learned in the last four years. This company and its people will always have a very special place in my heart. Jo
According to Uber’s head of EMEA operations, Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, Bertram will stay with the company over the next few weeks to help ensure a smooth transition, while Tom Elvidge, the general manager for London, will be taking over as acting general manager for the UK.
Gore-Coty discussed Bertram leaving the company in an email to staff, writing, “Jo is certainly one the most impressive people I’ve had the pleasure to work with and the success of our business in Northern Europe is in large part down to her leadership. The passion, energy and commitment she puts into her work has made her an inspiring role model and a fantastic leader since she joined Uber four years ago |
to silence my voice, and I will not be silenced on this issue,” Gillibrand said during a press conference just hours after the president’s tweet. “[And] neither will the women who stood up to the president yesterday.” (Republican Bob Corker simply turned a blind eye—“I don’t know that I want you to show it to me, I can’t respond if I don’t know anything about it,” he told a reporter.)
The series of condemnations seemed to fuel the right’s reaction, which coalesced around the idea that Gillibrand was reading sexism into a statement that contained none. Quoth zealous Trump pundit Bill Mitchell:
“Only if your mind is in the gutter would you have read it that way,” was Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s terse assessment.
It’s somewhat of an understatement to say that the president is known for his freewheeling tweets, but Trump lobbed this particular firebomb into the middle of an uncomfortable reckoning regarding sexual harassment and assault that has emerged in nearly every facet of American life. Last week, two congressmen and one senator—one Republican and two Democrats—resigned over accusations of everything from paying off accusers to repeated groping, and reports indicate that up to 40 more congresspeople could potentially be outed as sexual abusers. Meanwhile, members of the Democratic Women’s Working Group have asked the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to conduct an investigation into allegations brought against Trump before he became president, and Trump’s own accusers have resurfaced, dragging the president’s alleged misconduct back into the spotlight.
In his rise from Wharton student to shoddy billionaire to president of America, Trump’s instinct to punch back “10 times harder” when attacked has largely worked in his favor. But in the current environment, wherein lesser charges are hastening the downfalls of a growing number of lawmakers and industry bigwigs, it has the potential to backfire. Worse, it could cost Trump crucial support among Republican women who, at least in Moore’s case, are proving less willing than Republican men to brush off allegations of sexual harassment and assault. “That ‘would do anything to get elected’ is fairly ominous—it can be taken in a way that is very suggestive, and I think that is obviously horrible,” Republican pollster Christine Matthews told The New York Times. “Having a president who attacks other women for how they look or suggests that they are sexually promiscuous or liars, it’s going to hurt the party over all.”In addition to getting the keys to the Batmobile, the Dark Knight has a fancy new suit of armor in Rocksteady’s latest game. We spoke with the creative team behind Batman: Arkham Knight to learn more about Batman’s new suit.
Batman doesn’t start his Arkham Knight adventure with a new suit. The updated armor is a necessity once the Batmobile is introduced. After seeing the intense way he enters and exits the vehicle, it’s clear why a sturdier shell is needed. The design team worked to ensure that Batman’s car and his updated armor were visually – and functionally – compatible with one another.
“You put them next to each other, and you can see that they’re coming from the same family,” says art director David Hego. “You get the same elements on Batman’s suit, you have the same shapes, you have different metal shaders between carbon fiber and the brushed metal shininess. That’s the visual story. The story behind it is that Batman has this new car, and he’s doing all this crazy s--- with it, and he needs to eject at mach 3 out of it.”
Lead character artist Albert Feliu recalls the challenge and opportunities that came with new-gen hardware. “I remember having a meeting with David a year and a half ago, and we were talking about what we could do to make Batman’s suit really special. The Batmobile was there, and we started talking. We wanted to do something that was awesome – it was going to look amazing in terms of shaders and new techniques, but it needs to look different. We couldn’t go the same way. We had to diverge in a new direction, where people would notice that this is a next-gen Arkham. That was our goal – all the materials, all the leathers, and everything that kind of went with that. It takes five or six times more time to make Batman than any other character, so it was heavy and it was hard work, but I thought it paid off in a way.”
Studio head Jamie Walker says the new suit does more than look good – it’s functional as well. “He can move in it. That’s very important to us to have an authentic feel. Parts of it that haven’t ever been before are now articulated as well, so they all move in a different way.”
Attentive fans might notice that Batman’s cape looks different in Arkham Knight, too. It works the same way – even allowing Batman to glide more effectively thanks to an upgrade – but now its design supports its in-game functionality. “The cape still covers the shoulders, but now he has the armor on top,” Feliu says. “If you imagine, if you were gliding down like Batman, down a city, to support that amount of muscle and weight, it makes more sense that it was attached to the cowl. What we did was build this armor thing, and one of the purposes of it was to hold the cape in place when it’s gliding around and all this ridiculous force to keep Batman and the cape attached. The cape is actually still there, it’s just that it’s covered.”
“It’s maybe a little more realistic and a little less theatrical than what we had before,” Hego adds. “It makes a little more sense of how it would work if someone were crazy enough to do it. There are maybe a few more questions answered with the tech and how it could work together than we did before.”
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You can also follow our Batman: Arkham Knight updates and other stories by following Game Informer on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook.Mr. Wildstein recalled, under cross-examination, how Mr. Christie asked him to offer a job at the Port Authority to a Democrat the governor wanted to remove as Passaic County sheriff, because the sheriff had a campaign fund of about $1 million that could help other Democrats. (His account also confirmed that Mr. Christie, who had served as United States attorney for New Jersey, leaked details of a secret grand jury in that conversation, in violation of federal law. Mr. Christie has previously denied this.)
Ms. Kelly’s lawyer, Michael Critchley, also displayed a series of emails in which Mr. Wildstein, from his job at the Port Authority, was producing analyses and advice for Mr. Christie’s campaign, and taking credit for securing endorsements from police and firefighters unions.
In one email, he mused to Mr. Stepien about changing the law in New Jersey to allow Mr. Christie to work around federal laws that prevented him from raising money for his presidential bid on Wall Street.
“You’re just worried about one guy?” Mr. Critchley asked him.
“One constituent, yes sir,” Mr. Wildstein said, a nod to the rule he used to describe how he saw his job, to please only Mr. Christie.
Mr. Critchley showed a photo of Mr. Christie and Mr. Wildstein walking with Mr. Baroni and David Samson, a Christie confidant who was chairman of the Port Authority, in which, Mr. Wildstein agreed, he and the governor look “adoringly” at each other. Mr. Wildstein acknowledged that he had talked to the governor and his advisers about moving to Iowa or New Hampshire to run Mr. Christie’s campaign there.
“Those were the most important states,” Mr. Wildstein said. “Not to be funny, but as Governor Christie learned, if a campaign doesn’t get through Iowa and New Hampshire, it stops.” (Mr. Christie, hobbled by the bridge scandal, dropped his presidential bid after a sixth-place showing in the New Hampshire primary.)
Even after Mr. Wildstein resigned in December 2013, as the governor tried to deflect growing questions about the lane closings on the bridge, Mr. Christie’s wife contacted Mr. Wildstein, he confirmed, to ask his help setting up a private tour of the World Trade Center for her brother’s family.R.I.P. Canadian Comedian and Actor Rick Ducommun
Published Jun 19, 2015
Saskatchewan-born, Vancouver-based comedian and actor Rick Ducommun has passed away due complications from diabetes.In addition to his stand-up career, which saw him release an HBO special in 1989, Ducommun acted in some iconic movies from the '80s and '90s. These include roles in The 'Burbs, Groundhog Day, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Spaceballs and Little Monsters.Along with his career in entertainment, Ducommun spent his childhood as an avid skateboarder. That passion inspired him to start the iconic Skull Skates company with his brother, Peter Ducommun, in 1978.Ducommun's exact age is not clear — IMDb says he was 58 years old, while the CBC reports him as passing away at 62. He is survived by four children, his ex-wife, two brothers, a sister and his father.The great arena debate of 2017 is in full swing, just in time for the municipal election. But lost in the war of words, according to some fans, is that other building which plays home to another Calgary Sports and Entertainment Corporation team: McMahon Stadium.
Unlike the Saddledome, which is leased by CSEC from the city, the corporation doesn't operate McMahon. The football stadium where the Stampeders play is owned by the University of Calgary and is managed by the city.
But CSEC president and CEO Ken King made it clear earlier this week that the organization doesn't intend to spend any money to fix up McMahon, which was last renovated in 2014.
'It needs some work'
The stadium is the second oldest in the CFL, behind Montreal's facility built in 1919.
"The Calgary Stampeders, while they're still a professional team, they're the CFL and, you know, it's a smaller league so the focus is on the Flames," said Stamps fan Keith Loach.
"But people forget that McMahon Stadium was built in the 1960s. It needs some work."
CSEC originally floated the idea of a combined stadium and arena complex it dubbed CalgaryNext for the west end of downtown, but that megaproject was roundly rejected by city council.
CalgaryNext and Plan B
Since then, the city has been pursuing its Plan B project for a new arena in Victoria Park near the aging Saddledome. That project, and discussions so far between the city and CSEC, does not include a new stadium.
"We are in dire need of a new facility, there's no question about that," said Stamps fan Greg Kellery.
"But the fact that nobody wants to put any money into [it]... I understand that from an economic standpoint, because it is an old, old building. It's like putting lipstick on a pig type thing, you're putting a bandaid on a problem."The New York Knicks coaching search for next season and possibly for the long term could be settled sometime this week. According to Newsday sources, Mike Woodson will ink a deal with the Knicks and have his current interim tag removed.
Woodson, who had discussions about a contract extension with Knicks management during the playoffs, received strong endorsements from general manager and former Indiana University teammate Glen Grunwald toward the end of the season. Carmelo Anthony, Amar'e Stoudemire and Tyson Chandler all backed Woodson's return.
If true, those Knicks fans who wanted New York to pursue Phil Jackson will be disappointed. Woodson does, however, seem to be a solid fit for the current roster, which was mainly put together by former head coach Mike D'Antoni, who resigned on March 14. [D'Antoni Discusses Resignation With SI]
For more on the Knicks playoff basketball, check back to this SB Nation New York StoryStream. Meanwhile, this StoryStream has everything on New York's coaching search.I can't believe we reached our goal in under 6 hours! Thank you all for your support. This was the minimum amount I needed for a first print run, so surpassing our goal means I can print even more books!
I will print as many books as are requested through Kickstarter over the next month, making the first print run of I Wonder custom ordered for all of you. I'm very much looking forward to sending you the first copies!
I Wonder
Before my daughter turned two, she began ignoring questions she couldn't answer. Then she moved on to giving answers she knew to be false. I realized that she had grown accustomed to being celebrated every time she answered a question correctly and was, naturally, less interested in exchanges that didn’t produce this response. But I also realized something even more important: I hadn’t taught her to say “I don’t know” let alone celebrated her ability to do so.
I believe that one of the most important gifts we can give our children is the confidence to say “I don’t know.” It’s the foundation from which we begin our investigation of the world: asking questions, taking the necessary time to understand the answers, and searching for new answers when the ones we have in hand don’t seem to work. The feeling of not knowing is also the source of wonder and awe.
In all social and emotional learning, children need our help identifying the many new feelings they experience: “Oh, that Batman costume scared you,” or “I know, you feel sad when Mommy leaves.” So I went looking for a children’s book that would help me talk about the experience of not knowing with my daughter, but I couldn’t find one…
The Book
I Wonder is about a little girl named Eva who takes a walk with her mother and encounters a range of mysteries – from gravity, to life cycles, to the vastness of the universe. She learns to talk about how it feels to not know something, and she learns that it’s okay to say “I don’t know.” Eva discovers that she has much to learn about the world and that there are many things even adults don’t know – mysteries for everyone in the world to wonder about together!
I Wonder is a 24-page picture book for children ages one and up, and it is designed to appeal to parents as much as to their kids. It is intended as a guide for parents who are beginning a conversation with their children that will evolve over many years.
The Artwork
One of the most important steps in writing this book was choosing the right artist to work with. After much searching, I discovered John Rowe. John creates original art and oil paintings for a wide range of clients including the United Nations, Disney, Random House, Simon and Schuster, and Buena Vista Pictures. His work vividly communicates a feeling of awe, and he has already made important contributions to Eva’s story.
The book pages for I Wonder will be full color prints of John’s oil paintings. John is still in the early stages of creating the illustrations for I Wonder, but here are a few of his initial “compilation sketches” on which the oil paintings will be based:
Compilation Sketch #1
Compilation Sketch #2
Compilation Sketch #3
Why
We live in a society where people are uncomfortable with not knowing. Children aren’t taught to say “I don’t know,” and honesty in this form is rarely modeled for them. They too often see adults avoiding questions and fabricating answers, out of either embarrassment or fear, and this comes at a price. To solve the world's most challenging problems, we need innovative minds that are inspired in the presence of uncertainty. Let's support parents and educators who are raising the next generation of creative thinkers.
I’ve decided to self-publish I Wonder, which is why I am launching this project on Kickstarter. It’s important to me to maintain careful control over all the elements of the book – from the story, to the illustrations, to the quality of the paper. I want to create the most beautiful book I can, while staying true to its message.
The most expensive part of the publishing process is the actual printing of the books, so I’m raising money for my first print run of I Wonder by selling copies in advance. Those of you who support this Kickstarter campaign will receive the first copies of I Wonder to read to your children or to give as gifts to your friends.
Let’s celebrate the feelings of awe and wonder in our children, as the foundation for all learning. Let's teach children to say “I don’t know” and help them understand the power behind it. And let's be honest with children about the limits of our own knowledge. There is so much for all of us to wonder about together!
I hope you enjoy the book, and I want to thank you for helping me bring it to press.During the climax of the 1991 sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, the Turtles drop in a dockside night club where Vanilla Ice happens to be performing live. As if by some divine reptile intervention, the Miami rapper starts to freestyle lyrics about the heroes in green party crashers upon seeing their bodacious ninjutsu flow. Thus, "Ninja Rap" was born. "Ninja Rap" became one of Van Winkle's most enduring songs, even being featured in a KRAFT Macaroni & Cheese commercial years later. More than that, the track captured the pure outrageousness of the Ninja Turtles franchise at the very peak of its popularity. According to Myrna Gawryn, who choreographed "Ninja Rap," director Michael Pressman originally only hired her to create a little movement for the song. "He said he didn't want any'real' choreography, just some loose dancing around the club," Gawryn said. "I had created a whole piece and was kind of disappointed." Instead of taking no for an answer, the first night that she arrived on the set, she took the four Turtle actors aside and stayed up late, secretly teaching them the dance that she had choreographed. The next day, they showed the fully rehearsed routine to Pressman, who fell in love with their moves and decided to put the choreography in the film. "When Vanilla Ice arrived, I taught it to him and his two dancers," Gawryn added, "and we shot it a couple of days later." This website chronicles one fan's mission to track down and preserve the last surviving artifacts from the glory days of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The following listed original movie props, production material, artwork, and prototypes are the result of tireless years of research and determination. Through the help of crew members, actors, artists, and private owners, a collection of these treasures and their stories grew. NinjaRap.com was created to share this collected cultural history with the world, and is dedicated to everyone whose lives were somehow touched by those four ordinary pet turtles who went on to do some truly extraordinary things. The Shredder's (James Saito, François Chau) Helmet
This is Shredder's (James Saito, François Chau) screen-worn helmet from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). The inner brown rubber section was used in the first movie before serving as the base for the sequel's modified helmet. The gold-painted squares that adorn the sides are plastic, while the straps that wrap around the helmet are metal, and the blades on top are resin. The mouthpiece, which is separate from the helmet, is also made of resin, and was secured to the actor's face with temple tips and a mask string. The costume pieces can be screen-matched throughout Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991) by comparing the helmet's golden squares and the mouthpiece's distinct wear and markings. According to Richard "Petie" Waldrop, the sequel's prop master, only two helmets were ever made for the original films. This particular one is labeled #2, while the stocking cap on the inside is marked #1. The other helmet was in need of repairs and has since disappeared. This item came with a letter of authenticity from Richard "Petie" Waldrop. Michaelangelo's (Michelan Sisti) Hero Nunchaku
This is an original hero pair of nunchaku from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). Each nunchaku measures 12" in length. They are made of solid wood, and the cords are leather. Michaelangelo's (Michelan Sisti) weapon of choice, aside from his pizza cutter, he can be seen carrying them throughout the movie. It is possible that the weapons were used again for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991), although Mikey didn't twirl them around as much in the sequel due to complaints received from parent groups. These nunchaku show an incredible amount of wear, including several scars on the wood and scattered splotches of white paint, evidence that they had quite the Foot workout. According to Richard "Petie" Waldrop, the sequel's prop master, only three weapon sets were created for the first two Ninja Turtles movies, and Planet Hollywood has one. In his own words, he referred to these particular weapons as "the best" of them all. These items came with a letter of authenticity from Richard "Petie" Waldrop, the sequel's prop master. Leonardo's (Mark Caso) Hero Katana
This is an original hero pair of katana from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). Each sword measures 33" in length. The blades and hand guards are made of a heavily-built aluminum, while the hilts are wooden and wrapped in leather. The blade edges, although dulled, are substantial enough in weight to still cause injury. These katana can be seen at the beginning of the film when Leonardo (Mark Caso) brandishes them at the crooks robbing the mall. According to Richard "Petie" Waldrop, the sequel's prop master, only three weapon sets were created for the first two Ninja Turtles movies, and Planet Hollywood has one. In his own words, he referred to these particular weapons as "the best" of them all. These items came with a letter of authenticity from Richard "Petie" Waldrop, the sequel's prop master. “A” Camera Production Clapperboard
This is a one-of-a-kind “A” camera clapperboard from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). Normally clappers would display the names of the director and the cinematographer, but this clapboard shows the prop master of the movie, Richard “Petie” Waldrop, because it was presented to him by director Michael Pressman after filming wrapped on December 4, 1990. There are hidden magnets on the wooden arm to prevent bouncing after clapping. Similar style slates can be seen in The Making of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Behind the Shells (1991) documentary. This item was originally obtained from Richard "Petie" Waldrop, the sequel's prop master. Donatello's (Leif Tilden) Bandana Knot
This purple fabric knot is part of Donatello's bandana that was worn by Leif Tilden in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). The knot was salvaged by one of the Turtle dressers after filming wrapped. The eye mask part would have been glued onto the foam latex head. (That's a fact, Jack!) According to The Sunday Mail, an Australian tabloid owned by News Corp, Donatello's voice changed in the sequel due to Corey Feldman's drug conviction. He was replaced by Adam Carl. This item was originally obtained from a former EUE/Screen Gems Studios executive assistant. The first two live-action Ninja Turtle movies were shot at EUE/Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina. Set-Ready, Stuffed Ninja Rap Is Born! Newspaper
This is an original Ninja Rap Is Born! newspaper from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). The prop master on the film confirmed its authenticity, recognizing it as one of three set-ready, stuffed versions. The newspaper measures 10 x 14.5". And "stuffed" this newspaper certainly is! There are pages and pages of fake news stories, even a sports page on the back. The newspaper was printed in Wilmington at The Star News, a real local paper. Splinter holds up this newspaper and chastises the Turtles at the very end of the movie, making them do ten back flips as punishment for their very un-ninja-like behavior of showing up on the front page of the Daily News after getting down and busting some radical dance moves with Vanilla Ice the previous night. "Ten flips now!" commands Splinter. "And remember: Go, ninja! Go, ninja! Go! I made another funny! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha..." A prop newspaper using a similar template as this one can be seen in the 1990 Saved by the Bell episode "Save the Max." The school's student newspaper, The Bayside Breeze, features the same sports page section on the back. Another version of the newspaper can be seen in the Full House episode entitled "The King and I." Obtained from a private collector, this particular newspaper was originally loaned to the stills photographer but was never returned. There are production stills of this exact paper in Splinter's hands. Kevin Eastman's TCRI Ooze Canister
This is a production-made TCRI ooze canister from the set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). Measuring 13” in height and 3” in width, the canister is made entirely of aluminum and comes from the personal collection of Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman. This example retains the comic book name TCRI (short for “Techno Cosmic Research Institute”) with a “Warning: Hazardous Material” cautionary caption underneath the lettering. According to Todd Langen, the sequel's screenwriter, the acronym was later changed to TGRI due to the existence of a real laboratory with that name in California. A radioactivity symbol appears on each of the end caps, just like the canister seen in the original movie when Splinter recounts his and his sons' origin story to April O'Neil. However, perhaps due to the fact that the first film does not delve much into the back story of the ooze like the sequel does, the TCRI name is not shown on screen. Instead, the screen-used canister simply displays a generic “Radioactive Material” label. When this prop was made, the canister design was still undergoing several cosmetic changes. For example, it appears that the vinyl lettering was originally a dark burgundy before being colored black. Also, the “R” on one side shows evidence of font style experimentation, with an extra piece of vinyl tape producing a different downward slope. This canister is slightly shorter than the ones used in the second movie, but is much more substantial and sturdier due to the heavy-duty metal material (the canisters in the sequel were made of either PVC or foam, depending on whether they were hero/background or stunt versions). Interestingly enough, a similar-looking TCRI canister was discovered in a lot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991) props from an Azalea Auction event, which was held in Castle Hayne, North Carolina on January 24, 2004, where the Turtles II prop master sold hundreds of props that were previously in storage. This item was obtained directly from Kevin Eastman Studios. Hero TGRI Canister with Mutagen Ooze
This is an original hero TGRI canister from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). The prop master on the film authenticated this canister as one of about 200 canisters used in the film, mostly as background props in the lab. Only one canister used during filming contained any real "ooze," while the others were painted a bright green inside the tubes to simulate the slime. Unfortunately, any hopes of re-animating Tokka and Rahzar are dashed because this is one such green-ooze-painted canister. The canister's tube is made of acrylic, and the side plates and end caps are of a hard plastic. (Stunt canisters contained foam rubber end caps as a safety precaution.) The canister measures approximately 13.5". Ooze canisters are key props in the movie, as they explain the origins of the Turtles and their dramatic transformation from common household pets to lean, mean, green fighting machines. This item was originally acquired from an Azalea Auction event, which was held in Castle Hayne, North Carolina on January 24, 2004, where the Turtles II prop master sold hundreds of props that were previously in storage. Background TGRI Canister with Mutagen Ooze
This is a production-made TGRI canister that was designed for background use in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). The canister is missing its TGRI decal due to heavy production use. Traces of the lettering can still be seen, however. The prop master on the film authenticated this canister as one of about 200 canisters used in the film, mostly as background props in the lab. This item was originally acquired from an Azalea Auction event, which was held in Castle Hayne, North Carolina on January 24, 2004, where the Turtles II prop master sold hundreds of props that were previously in storage. Foot Soldier (Daniel Pesina) Mask and Bandana
This mask and bandana make up part of the Foot Soldier costume that was worn by actor and Wushu Master Daniel Pesina in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). Although similar to the Foot Clan masks seen in the first movie, the sequel's mask eye holes are slightly smaller. The patch is a bolder red than the rest of the bandana to stand out better in the film. The black on the wire frame of the eyes was hand-painted. Daniel Pesina appeared as a Foot Soldier in the majority of the film's fighting scenes, getting kicked, punched, or thrown, including in the infamous night club scene with Vanilla Ice near the end of the movie. At one point during that scene, the actor who played Donatello was supposed to roll Pesina and then do a side kick, but he decided to do a roundhouse kick instead without giving a warning, and as a result, Pesina almost lost his two front teeth. The Foot Soldier actors could barely see where to move in front of whatever technique was being thrown, and the Turtle actors were just as visibly impaired with their giant reptile heads. During the cuts, a few of the Foot would run around and get hit again. In one instance, Pesina was taken down four different times in the same fight. "It was a bloody mess," he admitted. But the fighting didn't end when the cameras stopped rolling. On the first day that Vanilla Ice showed up on set, Michelan Sisti, the actor who played Michaelangelo, went up to the rapper to give him a hug and welcome him aboard. That's when Ice's large bodyguard coldly stiff armed himeven with the full Turtle suit on. About 18 of the actors nearby, including Pesina, stepped forward to pounce until Pat Johnson, the stunt coordinator, who used to work under Chuck Norris (and was the mustached ref in The Karate Kid), stopped them from brawling right then and there. "[Vanilla Ice's] bodyguards almost got their butt kicked," Pesina laughed. This item was obtained directly from Daniel Pesina, who played one of the Foot Soldiers in the movie and starred in the Mortal Kombat games as Johnny Cage, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero. Foot Soldier (Daniel Pesina) Mask and Bandana (#2)
This mask and bandana make up part of the Foot Soldier costume that was worn by actor and Wushu Master Daniel Pesina in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). Multiple props and costumes were made for back-up purposes. This is Daniel's second mask, and it saw much more action than the first. Daniel loaned the rest of his Foot costume to someone, and it was never returned. This item was obtained directly from Daniel Pesina, who played one of the Foot Soldiers in the movie and starred in the Mortal Kombat games as Johnny Cage, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero. Foot Soldier (Daniel Pesina) Arm Guards
These arm guards make up part of the Foot Soldier costume that was worn by actor and Wushu Master Daniel Pesina in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). These items were obtained directly from Daniel Pesina, who played one of the Foot Soldiers in the movie and starred in the Mortal Kombat games as Johnny Cage, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero. Foot Soldier (Daniel Pesina) Belt
This belt makes up part of the Foot Soldier costume that was worn by actor and Wushu Master Daniel Pesina in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). This item was obtained directly from Daniel Pesina, who played one of the Foot Soldiers in the movie and starred in the Mortal Kombat games as Johnny Cage, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero. Foot Soldier (Daniel Pesina) Wrist Bands
These wrist bands make up part of the Foot Soldier costume that was worn by actor and Wushu Master Daniel Pesina in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). These items were obtained directly from Daniel Pesina, who played one of the Foot Soldiers in the movie and starred in the Mortal Kombat games as Johnny Cage, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero. Michaelangelo's (Michelan Sisti) Right Knee Pad
This right knee pad makes up part of the 60-pound latex Turtle costume that was worn by Michelan Sisti as Michaelangelo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). There were four acting Turtles and about six stunt Turtles by the end of the movie. A musician, Broadway actor, and later puppeteer for the Jim Henson Company, Sisti played Mikey in the first two Turtle movies, as well as the Domino's Pizza delivery guy who slides the pizza down the sewer grates in the first film and April's overly friendly neighbor in the sequel. He would later play Charlene Sinclair in the Jim Henson television series Dinosaurs. This pad was saved by one of the British prop girls who gifted it to Daniel Pesina on the last day of filming. The Turtle costumes were to be destroyed after shooting wrapped. Pesina was also given a Turtle arm, which was later presented to Ho Sung Pak, who played Raphael. This item was obtained directly from Daniel Pesina, who played one of the Foot Soldiers in the movie and starred in the Mortal Kombat games as Johnny Cage, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero. Donatello's (Leif Tilden) Elbow Pad
This elbow pad makes up part of the 60-pound latex Turtle costume that was worn by Leif Tilden as Donatello in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). Tilden is credited as playing Donnie in the first two Turtle movies, and also a Foot Soldier in both films. He would later play Robbie Sinclair in the Jim Henson television series Dinosaurs. This pad was saved by one of the British prop girls who gifted it to Daniel Pesina on the last day of filming. The Turtle costumes were to be destroyed after shooting wrapped. Pesina was also given a Turtle arm, which was later presented to Ho Sung Pak, who played Raphael. This item was obtained directly from Daniel Pesina, who played one of the Foot Soldiers in the movie and starred in the Mortal Kombat games as Johnny Cage, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero. Venus de Milo's (Nicole Parker) Hero Waist Belt
This turquoise-colored leather belt with resin emblem buckle was worn by actress Nicole Parker in her role as Venus de Milo in the short-lived 1997 FOX television series Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation. One of only three made, this particular belt is marked "hero" on the inside. Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman came up with the idea of introducing a fifth Turtle in 1994, sketching out designs for a male character called Kirby, as a homage to a personal inspiration of his, comic book legend Jack "King" Kirby. Kirby would have featured prominently in a fourth live-action movie as a mutant from a parallel dimension who meets up with Leonardo, Raphael, Michaelangelo, and Donatello. Although that film ultimately went unproduced, Eastman brought his work over to Saban Entertainment, the production company behind the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, to brainstorm a television program. At the last minute, FOX Kids President and CEO Margaret Loesch requested that the newest Turtle become female, revising the origins story to include an extra Turtle in the glass jar that Splinter neglects to pick up. As a baby, this lone female Turtle floats down to Chinatown, where a Shaman adopts her with the name Mei Pieh Chi (Chinese for "Beautiful Turtle of Energy"). Together, they travel to Shanghai, where the girl Turtle trains in the internal arts of Shinobi mysticism for 17 years, until she finally learns of her American roots. Returning to the sewers of New York City, she joins the rest of the Turtles under a new alias, "Venus de Milo," using her powers of the mind and heart to battle against the dreadful Dragon Lord and his Rank Dragons. Based on promotional material, which emphasizes the Turtles are not biologically related, it is thought that she would have developed into a love interest for one of the green teens had The Next Mutation continued for a second season. One of the most controversial characters in the history of the franchise, Peter Laird, the other co-creator of the Turtles, has called Venus the epitome of "all that is stupid and shallow about Hollywood," and reportedly barred TMNT (2007) director Kevin Munroe from even acknowledging her existence. This item was originally obtained from Chiodo Brothers Productions Inc., which created all of the show's Turtle costumes.
Michaelangelo’s Coming Out of Their Shells Tour Rhinestone-Encrusted Bandana Eye Star
This unassuming rhinestone-encrusted piece of fabric used to make up part of Michaelangelo's flashy outfit as seen in The Making of The Coming Out |
– the home of Bilbo Baggins. The spacious property features an inviting circular green door, a ton of rooms with eye-catching round windows, solid wood decor throughout and a charming garden out back. Judging by their height (or lack of it), I’m guessing Hobbits hate stairs. So like most homes in the Shire; Bag End was a ranch that came with all the amenities a reasonable middle-earthling would want; including unobstructed views of the garden and meadows that lead down to a pond. Take a look below at some more pictures of Bag End and the Shire! Would you mind living there?
Front doors set the tone and say a lot, and this circular green one says, “duck” and “warm/cozy”.
The hallway at ‘Bag End’…truly a view anyone wouldn’t mind having.
Every home needs a floor plan. Look at how spacious Bilbo’s home is!
There’s plenty of space in the dining room at ‘Bag End’ for entertaining interesting company with huge appetites.
Lovely original woodwork is a consistent theme at ‘Bag End’. On another note, looks like Bilbo’s guests are impatiently waiting for food. He should hurry.
The rustic feel of the home’s decor makes it feel extra cozy and Hobbity.
What do you think of the Shire? Does it seem like the kind of neighborhood you’d want to call home? Let us know what you think.3,503 of 5,375 Sponsor Message Sponsor Message
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All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.Clean cooking stoves address multiple problems created by traditional indoor cooking in the developing world: they reduce the amount of smoke and soot that leads to respiratory disease, they cut deforestation rates, and they lighten the carbon impact of food preparation. Canadian social enterprise Novotera has added a further benefit to this technology: its PlanetStove also creates economic opportunities for users because it creates charcoal from the wood users “burn” in their stoves.
Wait, isn’t charcoal production a part of the problem? Traditionally, yes: charcoal makers would cut wood to create their product, which buyers would then burn for cooking. The economic opportunities here came at tremendous costs to local forests and the health of buyers who cooked with the charcoal (not to mention the carbon emissions created). While Novatera isn’t telling stove users what to do with the charcoal the stove produces – local economic conditions will do that – they’re promoting this product as “biochar,” or a soil additive that sequesters carbon and enriches local farmland.
Intrigued? Then take a look at Novotera founders Olivier Kolmel and Dylan Maxwell’s “pitch” of their stove:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B3t7wM44ek
Yes, they’re raising funds for their project: the Indiegogo campaign they’re running is designed to subsidize the price of the stove for buyers in Asia. The PlanetStove costs $35 to make; Novotera will sell a stove for $15 (the price their customers can afford) with each $25 contribution. Like all crowdfunding campaigns, there are rewards with this one, and most of them are stoves that the company makes. They hope to raise $25,000.
Got thoughts about the design of this stove, or the combination of cooking and charcoal making? Let us know what you think.
Image credit: Screen capture from “Novotera Indiegogo Hybrid Biochar Cook Stove Pitch” videoWe love our customers.
Give me a call with any questions or just to talk sound. (818) 590-8621 Ask for Sunny. or Email me alex@withsound.com. If you're proud of using your Soundrise stands in your recording studio, email us a photo to be included in our a Customer's Studios Above all, our customers rave about the perfect fit they get from their 5" and bigger studio monitors.From consumer grade to Pro grade desktop speaker stands, there's a fit for almost every desktop speaker brand. Each aluminum stand weighs about 3 pounds. However the weight they can carry is over 4 times that. Each Soundrise stands have been tested to carry speakers up to 28 - 32 pounds. Anything above 15 pounds tend to have a slight wobble until it settles in place.When reaching the final design, we wanted a durable, high quality product that makes a real difference in people's homes. When you realize how much the right desktop speaker stands improve the quality of sound when aligned with your ears, it should be enough to convince these are important for every sound designer.Barcelona (ACN).- The Fundació Arrels (Arrels Foundation) – a Barcelona-based NGO dedicated to homeless people founded in 1987 – registered 892 persons sleeping on the streets of the Catalan capital on Wednesday night. More than 700 volunteers – in groups of three or four – combed the city divided up into 160 areas from midnight until 2 am. The initiative aimed at counting people sleeping on the streets: inside ATM lobbies, under bridges, on benches of public parks, in front of private entrances or nearby train stations. Barcelona's local Ombudsman service – an institution for the defence of rights and public liberties – also took part, through the presence of some of its staff among the volunteers. According to Maria Assumpció Vilà, Head of Barcelona's Ombudsman office, the reality certified by the Arrels Foundation is "absolutely unacceptable". "An emergency plan must be launched urgently", she stressed, as the Catalan capital cannot accept having 900 people without a place to sleep.
While recognising the efforts made by Barcelona's City Council in building new residential centres and apartments for homeless people, for Vilà, setting up a specific emergency plan requires a specific budget. First of all, a complete examination of the profiles and needs of those affected by this social plague must be provided and later on customised solutions must be sought.
Among the 700 volunteers who hit the streets on Wednesday night, thirty have been or currently are homeless. With this initiative, the Arrels Foundation aims both at updating statistical information about people sleeping on the streets and raising awareness on this painful reality within society.
892: the minimum number of people sleeping on the street every day
According to the Foundation's Director, Ferran Busquets, "the 892 people counted represent the minimum number of people sleeping on the street every day because there are many places in the city where we know people camp out but which we could not access".
The organisation's volunteers patrolled all districts of the city. However, they were unable to access city parks which are closed during the night, such as the Ciutadella Park or areas particularly hidden and far away such as Collserola and Montjuïc. The districts of Ciutat Vella, Eixample and Sants-Montjuïc were those where the highest concentration of people sleeping rough was recorded on Wednesday night.
The methodology used by Arrels is widespread worldwide
Since 1987 Arrels has been working with homeless people in the city of Barcelona, having given support to more than 9,000 individuals through its activities, by offering them housing, meals, social attention and healthcare.
The methodology used by the Catalan NGO is widespread worldwide and has proved to be the only reliable one to detect the scale of the phenomenon periodically. Possessing accurate information about how many people sleep on the street is vital information in order to later decide the amount of resources to be allocated to it.
According to the Foundation's website, "Nobody ends up on the street from one day to the next". Behind this social plague, "there are many and varied reasons: some depend on the person and others have to do with our society". In Catalonia, about 37,000 people suffer serious housing problems, of which 11,500 do not have a home.
79.2% of homeless people in Barcelona suffer chronic mental or physical disorders
In the Catalan capital, the number of homeless people is around 3,000, according to the Arrels Foundation's website. 892 of them were counted on Wednesday night. The Xarxa d’Atenció a Persones Sense Llar (Network of Attention to Homeless People) confirms that 900 people sleep rough, 600 people use irregular settlements and the rest depend on public and private resources to spend the night.
According to data provided by the Fundació Arrels, 90% of homeless people are men and only 10% women. Their life expectancy is 58 years (in comparison to the average of 82.2 years for Catalonia overall). Half of them have children and are looking for a job, while 44.5% have not had their own home for more than three years. 54% are Spanish nationals and 60% have attended secondary school. Finally, 79.2% suffer from chronic disorders, mental or physical.Last week, 22 Democratic senators and independent Angus King of Maine sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Harry Reid to keep the Dickey rider out of the new budget. They stated:
Specifically, the rider provides that none of the funds available to the CDC may be used “to advocate or promote gun control.” Unfortunately, this rider has been misconstrued as a ban on supporting scientific research into the causes of gun violence and has chilled practically all research efforts.
As Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik has reported, “The real blow was delivered by a succession of pusillanimous CDC directors, who decided that the safest course bureaucratically was simply to zero out the whole field.” In other words, CDC officials feared, with good reason, being harassed by members of Congress if it looked into gun violence.
The real culprit in this, as is so often the case when it comes to even the mildest proposed gun-law reforms, is the National Rifle Association. In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published “Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home.” The study conducted by Arthur Kellerman and his colleagues showed that rather than protecting families, having a gun at home increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance. Incensed at this, the NRA leadership demanded elimination of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which had funded the NEJM study. The Dickey rider was the chosen alternative.
In committee Thursday, DeLauro, a longtime advocate of gun reform, said: “The fact is, the gun lobby has a lock on this Congress, and they have continued to block this research at every turn. They’ve taken away our ability to protect the public from gun violence.”
They’re obviously determined to keep doing so.Sega Sammy released their Q3 2016 financial reports over the weekend. How is the company doing? Not too bad currently.
This data concerns business from April 1st, 2015 to December 31st, 2015.
Overall, business was leaner with slightly lower sales than the previous year and the current forecast through the end of the fiscal year shows no real sign of that stopping by the end of the 2016 fiscal year. Sega is anticipating to arrive at about 3% lower sales revenue compared to the prior year.
However, Sega has so far seen a profitable financial year. We have just a couple of months to go until 2016’s fiscal year ends to see how things end up.
If you are the kind of person who enjoys digging into Profit & Loss statements (I know I am!), then have at the reports below. We are not going to pretend we are financial advisers or writing for a financial journal, as most people just want to see a measure of the company’s overall health.
Flash Report Consolidated Financial Statements 9 Months Ended December 31, 2015
Appendix of Consolidated Financial Statements 9 Months Ended December 31, 2015
FY Ending March 2016 3rd Quarter Results Presentation
These reports and those released in the future can be found on Sega Sammy Holding’s site here.Feast your eyes on this super-in-advance Dark Matter sneak teaser! My longtime producing partner, Paul Mullie, did the honors on this one. Pretty sleek, hunh?
Day 2 of the Dark Matter writers’ room comes to an end amid healthy debate, desperate ideas, and soul-crushing frustration. In other words, about par for the course. Also, it was really cold. And rainy. And Alison didn’t bring any donuts.
Today’s Dark Matter season 2 sneak peek screen shot!
Speaking of sneak peeks, check out this awesome shot of Melanie Liburd as Dark Matter’s Nyx Harper (photographed by Norman Wong). As we tick down toward our July 1st season 2 premiere, the photos, interviews, articles and giveaways will be coming fast and furious!
Speaking of giveaways, have you entered for a chance to win a cast-signed copy of our season 2 premiere script (“Episode 14: Welcome To Your New Home) complete with notes and insights on every page from yours truly? Head on over here to get the details on how to enter:
Win a cast-signed Dark Matter script!
Tonight’s the night I join the Geek Soul Brother podcast where I will talk about my dogs, my favorite herbs, and answer your questions about my opinion on such controversial topics as dance shows, hats, and restaurant brussel sprouts.
Fear not, Stargate-fans (most of you who are, no doubt, fans of Dark Matter as well)!
Redemption I and II: Weapon (artist James Robbins)
Redemption I and II: Troop ship (artist James Robbins)
Redemption I and II: Refugee camp (artist James Robbins)
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Like this: Like Loading...Apple CEO Tim Cook has the second-highest approval rating of tech leaders, according to a new Morning Consult poll. In the wake of a swirling conflict over whether the tech giant should help the Federal Bureau of Investigation open an iPhone in a pending criminal case, the publicity seems to be good for Cook.
While Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is still a relative rock star, with 48 percent of registered voters viewing him favorably, people also like Cook. About four out of 10 respondents (39 percent) said they view the Apple leader favorably. Most of the rest (44 percent) said they hadn’t heard of him or have no opinion. (That’s not unusual for CEOs: Thirty-one percent of voters said the same thing about Zuckerberg, and for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella it was 59 percent.)
Related: People Love Zuckerberg, but Don’t Trust Facebook
The only other tech CEO with similar recognition and favorability is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, with 38 percent of respondents saying they like him. (About half haven’t heard of him or have no opinion.)
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Apple is appealing a federal court order compelling the company to create software to help investigators bypass the security features on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.
While the technology community is standing behind Apple’s intention to fight the FBI, Morning Consult’s poll shows that Americans think that the Cupertino, Calif.-based company should help the investigators break into the phone. They say this even with a full understanding of Cook’s reasons for bucking the request.
Just over half (51 percent) of registered voters say Apple should unlock the phone, while 33 percent say the company shouldn’t. Sixteen percent don’t know or care.
Respondents were given a lengthy explanation of Apple’s concerns. Cook fears that the creation of the “break-in” software, known in tech as the “backdoor,” could later be targeted and manipulated by malicious third parties. Members of the technology industry warn that creating these backdoors is a violation of privacy and could threaten the security of millions of other phones.
The government says it is crucial to access the content of messages to pursue violent criminals and terrorists.
Morning Consult’s data show Americans are walking the same tightrope as U.S. intelligence officials when they say privacy is important, but they need access to the data on the phone. In short, people agree that their own privacy could be compromised if tech companies comply with a backdoor request, but they also see it as a way of preventing terrorism.
More than half of respondents (54 percent) say their personal information and data would be less secure if companies such as Apple or Google were required to give the government access to personal information. But one-third of respondents also said “the U.S. would be more likely to prevent terrorist attacks.”
In general, people are aware that online data isn’t totally secure. In Morning Consult Policy Index poll questions asked repeatedly over several months, about half of the almost 13,915 respondents say they expect “a lot” of their personal information to be shared by social media companies such as Facebook (50 percent) or search engines such as Google (46 percent).
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Most respondents have at least heard of the Apple controversy. One-third said they’d seen or read “a lot” about it, and 43 percent said they’d had “some” exposure. That’s fairly good exposure for the encryption debate that has mostly occupied tech wonks in the past few years. To put it in context, about the same percentage of people were aware of the Ebola crisis in 2014. About one-third of respondents in a Kaiser Family Foundation poll (31 percent) said they were “very closely” following the story, and 44 percent said they were following it “fairly closely.”
Just 12 percent said they hadn’t heard much about the Apple controversy, and another 12 percent said they’d heard nothing about it.
As some other polls have suggested, education is still a very important aspect to this debate. Many in the technology community have argued that the public might not truly understand the case, and that’s why they support the FBI, and think Apple should unlock the phone.
Morning Consult’s poll results showed the importance of the public gaining that understanding. The poll prompted respondents with extra information about the case to see if they would then be more or less likely to support Apple’s position. It showed that when respondents saw some of Apple’s arguments laid out before them, they grew more likely to support the tech giant’s position in the debate.
Although it’s unlikely any legislation requiring companies to comply with court orders like Apple does now, there’s been some hype for Congress putting a commission together to hold a deep conversation to assess the best solution. Apple has said it would “gladly participate” in that commission.
Americans like that idea, too. About half of respondents said they support a committee that would file a report on how to best improve or change laws related to privacy, digital security, technology and national security. Far fewer (22 percent) opposed the idea, and 29 said they didn’t know or had no opinion.
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Again, people seem aware that their own privacy could be compromised. Just 15 percent of respondents said the commission would make their data more secure, while twice as many (31 percent) said it would make their information less secure. Mostly, they didn’t think it mattered. Almost one-third of respondents (29 percent) didn’t know or have an opinion, while 26 percent said the commission would make no difference.
[visualizer id=”25478″]
While voters agree with Apple that a committee should be formed, there’s one split between the two. Apple wants Congress to take charge of the committee, while Morning Consult poll respondents think agencies in the executive branch such as the FBI or Department of Justice should lead.
About four out of 10 people (42 percent) think the committee should be under a federal agency. Just 17 percent think the committee should be run by Congress.
The poll was conducted among 1,935 registered voters on Feb. 24 and Feb. 25. The margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points. (Toplines; Crosstabs)JACOBABAD – A man shot both his wives dead ‘to reclaim his honour’ in Jacobabad district of Sindh province. Sikandar Ali Dasti shot his wives – Laghari, 35, and Zareena, 25 – in the Alipur area. Both women died on
JACOBABAD – A man shot both his wives dead ‘to reclaim his honour’ in Jacobabad district of Sindh province.
Sikandar Ali Dasti shot his wives – Laghari, 35, and Zareena, 25 – in the Alipur area. Both women died on the spot, according to the police.
The accused had fled after committing the crime.
Dawn News cited police officials as saying that Dasti had suspected his wives of having ‘illicit relations’ with two men, Haq Nawaz and Azizullah, who reside in the same locality.
Police reached the crime scene and shifted the bodies to the hospital for postmortem.
According to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), nearly 1,100 women were killed by relatives in Pakistan last year in so-called honour killings, while many more cases go unreported.
The Aurat Foundation’s annual report of 2016 showed 7,852 similar cases of violence against women.
Last year, a number of high-profile deaths made headlines both in Pakistan and abroad, including the killing of British woman Samia Shahid in July, allegedly by her father and her former husband.
In July last year, Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch was strangled to death, allegedly killed by her brother in the province of Punjab.
Following public outrage, Pakistan’s government introduced a amended law that closed a loophole allowing those behind so-called honour killings to go free.
A 2005 amendment to the law pertaining to “honour killings” prevented men who kill female relatives pardoning themselves as an ‘heir’ of the victim.
New legislation means killers will get a mandatory life sentence. Previously, killers could be pardoned by a victim’s family to avoid a jail term. Now forgiveness will only spare them the death penalty.SRT has announced production of the 2014MY Viper has restarted, following a break caused by poor sales.
On March 1st, SRT had 756 unsold units which represented a 412-day supply so the company decided to halt production in order to get rid of excess inventory. They stopped assembling cars on April 14 when 91 hourly workers were laid off. Production of the 2014 model year resumed on June 23 and starting with 2015MY the Viper will return to the Dodge nomenclature.
Sales of the SRT Viper have been quite sluggish as through June only 354 cars were sold in United States while in Canada just 70 units were purchased during the same period. With the 2015 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 on the horizon, the future of the Viper doesn't look too bright.[social_buttons]
Tesla says that the additional money is more than it needs, but that it’s necessary to brace for a sluggish economy. The money will be used to focus on its core businesses — including increasing production capacity of the Roadster, expanding it’s electric powertrain supply business and continuing “future product development.”
“Forty million is significantly more than we need,” said Elon Musk, Tesla Chairman, CEO and Product Architect. “However, the board, investors and I felt it was important to have significant cash reserves.”
Without a doubt, the current economic woes of the world are strongly affecting start-up next gen car manufacturers like Tesla Motors. Even in an industry with a bright outlook, funding is getting harder and harder to come by.
It’s an awful reality of civilization that the only times we’re ever driven to significantly change things for the better are the same times we, as a society, can least afford to do it.
Image Credit: Tesla MotorsOn Monday morning, the Syrian Arab Army’s 137th Artillery Regiment of the 17th Reserve Division – in coordination with Shaytat Tribesmen and the National Defense Forces (NDF) – launched a counter-assault on the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham’s (ISIS) positions at the Al-‘Amal Quarter after three straight days of being on the defensive at the Regiment 137 Base.
In the Al-‘Amal Quarter, the Syrian Armed Forces focused their attention on the strategically positioned Deir Ezzor Juvenile Prison that was used by ISIS as a base and housing facility for their armed combatants.
The Syrian Armed Forces’ assault began around 9:15 A.M. (Damascus Time) on Monday, when they stormed the housing projects around the Deir Ezzor Juvenile Prison inside the Al-‘Amal Quarter, capturing a number of buildings, including the surrounding apartment complexes that overlooks the terrorist group’s base.
Following the capture of the Deir Ezzor Juvenile Prion’s surrounding buildings, the Syrian Armed Forces launched their full-scale assault on the base, pounding the terrorist group with a barrage of mortar shells, gunfire, and rockets in order to weaken ISIS’ defenses.
Nearly encircled and short on supplies, the ISIS combatants had no choice but to withdrawal from the Deir Ezzor Juvenile Prison before the Syrian Armed Forces completely cutoff all of the terrorist group’s escape routes.
By 1:30 P.M., the Syrian Armed Forces had announced that they were in full control of the Deir Ezzor Juvenile Prison after they killed 26 enemy combatants from ISIS and seizing a large cache of assault rifles, mortar shells, ammunition, and et al.
In addition to the fighting at the Al-‘Amal Quarter, the Syrian Armed Forces and ISIS clashed at the Jubeileh, Al-Haweeqah, Al-Husseiniyeh, Sheikh Yassine, Al-Arfa, and Sheikh Yassine Districts of Deir Ezzor City.
AdvertisementsIn this month’s tutorial we will be building the uber user side app.
The key concept you will be learning are
CoreLocation
MapKit
Custom Views
Before we start lets go to the Build Phase and add CoreLocation and MapKit framework to our app. Also make sure your application allow location simulation.
To begin with let’s create a new project. Select the ViewController on the Mainstoryboard -> go to embed in -> Navigation Controller. Now we can start adding all the necessary UIKit elements to the storyboard.
First thing is to create a new Image Asset for the location icon. I personally use Icons8 App for all my icon needs.
Select Assets.xcassets
Click on the + icon and drag the location icon on to the 2x and 3x assets
At this point lets go ahead and drag a MapView onto the ViewController in the mainstoryboard. With the mapview selected set the autolayout constraints to 0 on all sides and update the frame if required.
Now drag a UIView on to the view controller to the top just below the Navbar and set the autolayout constraints as shown in the image. Make sure you add the height constraint for the UIView. Within the UIView drag a label and set the constraints for the label as shown in the image below.
Now for showing the reference point lets drag a UIImageView of 45 X 45 and set the image to the location icon which we imported before
Also lets drag a UIButton for the requesting the pickup at the bottom.
If you go ahead and run the application we will get a simple view with a default address, a mapview and a button.
If you prefer watching a video take a look at the video below. Also once you are done with the part 1 make sure you checkout the Part 2 of building an uber app in SwiftShare Pinterest
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The 2011 model year is the last one for the Honda Element, Honda said on Friday, marking the end of an eight-year run for the boxy, small SUV.
The reason? Declining sales. Element sales this year totaled 12,960 units through the end of November, down 3.7 percent from the same period last year. Element sales peaked at 67,478 units in 2003, its first full year on the market. From 2007, when the Element was mildly restyled, to 2009, sales fell by more than half.
In its announcement, Honda noted that buyers were switching to other vehicles, such as the CR-V.
Based on the same platform used by the Honda Civic and the CR-V, the Element is marked by its boxy styling, rear-hinged side-access doors and its lack of a traditional B-pillar. The Element was previewed as the Model X concept at the Detroit auto show in 2001.
Honda executives talked about the Element appealing to younger buyers who have an active lifestyle. The Element's floor covering was a rubberlike material that was easy to wash, and the seats were covered with a sturdy fabric. But Honda found that the Element appealed to older buyers who had finished raising families.
Honda tried to woo dog owners to the Element with the “Dog Friendly” package in 2009. A dealer-installed option, the package included a ramp that connected to the rear cargo opening, a pet bed, a fabric crate and a water dish.
Honda builds the Element at its plant in East Liberty, Ohio.LA Ranks 2nd In US For Number Of Struggling Poor, Report Finds
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) – The number of poverty-stricken residents in the Los Angeles metropolitan area who either live in substandard conditions, or struggle to cover their rent, is the second-highest in the nation, a new report finds.
L.A. had 1.04 million very low-income renter households in 2015, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs.
Of those, a staggering 55 percent, or 567,000 Angeleno households, lived under what HUD termed “worst-case housing needs.” Those were defined as households who spent more than half their income on rent, lived in severely inadequate conditions, or both.
L.A. was behind only New York City, which had 815,000 of its 1.84 million very low-income households designated in worst-case status, a rate of 44 percent.
Riverside also had a high share of struggling poor. Of its 215,000 very low-income households, 123,000 were in worst-case conditions, a rate of 57 percent.
This comes after a report last week by real estate firm Zillow which calculated that a 5 percent rent hike in the L.A. metro area would push nearly 2,000 more residents into homelessness.
The median rent in the L.A. metro area in June was $2,682, according to Zillow, a 4.2 percent increase from June of 2016.
The L.A. Homeless Services Authority’s annual count in January found 57,794 homeless in the county. That was a 23 percent jump from the year prior. Zillow estimates the L.A. metro population at about 13.3 million.
To read the HUD’s full report, click here.The key driving force behind populism can best be determined by workers' share of the economy as seen in a FRED graph
\\https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=cRZz
of worker compensation over GDP. As much as economists would prefer to ignore it, the purchasing power of workers is the fuel that drives all democratic economic systems. Another way of viewing this is to consider it a measure of the extractive--integrative economic continuum described in extensive historical detail in the book "Why Nations Fail" by Doran Acemoglu and James Robinson.
Workers do not care about inequality, they care about their family purchasing power and how it relates to providing housing, food, healthcare and a college education for their children. Today's compensation represents a redistribution upwards of between $1,000 and $2,000 per month for every full-time worker in the U.S. compared to 1948-1972. The forces which continue to increasingly depress workers' share include automation, globalization, breaching of natural limits and the reformation of monopolies. Any solution should harness the best features of Capitalism to motivate workers, executives and owners. An enlightened oligarch should understand by this point that their high return on investment is not sustainable. Far better to have a sustainable half a loaf than the crumbs of collapse. That is why I recommend a federal cap on a corporation's profit to wage ratio based upon their W2 and earnings history. Any excess earnings above the cap would be fined 100%. Let's take a look at the motivations. An executive committee foresees an overrun of $1 million which the government will take if they do nothing. However, given a earnings to wage cap of 0.25, they would increase payroll by $800,000 and give $200,000 to the owners. They would then apply that payroll increase in the areas that would provide the biggest payback for the company. Employees would receive wage increases, job security or a new job thereby increasing their self esteem. Finally if employees work to increase corporate profits, they will share in 80 cents on every dollar. All of this is highly motivating and builds employee-employer unity to profit and grow.The LHC is so large that operators have to correct for a surprising source of error - the moon's gravitational pull
The orbits of protons in the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have to be adjusted regularly to account for the gravitational effect of the moon.
In the graph above, the two lower curves (in beige and green) show the instantaneous luminosity measured last weekend – when the moon was full – by the two largest detectors at the LHC, CMS and ATLAS. Instantaneous luminosity is a measure of how many collisions happen per second in each experiment between the two beams of protons circulating in opposite directions in the LHC tunnel.
The LHC is so large that the gravitational force exerted by the moon is not the same at all points, which creates small distortions of the tunnel. And the machine is sensitive enough to detect minute deformations created by the small differences in gravitational force across its diameter.
As the moon rises in the sky, the force it exerts changes enough to require a periodic correction of the orbit of the proton beams in the accelerator to adapt to a deformed tunnel. The corrections appear as regular dips in luminosity (see graph above) as the LHC operator adjusts the orbits.
Find out more:For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review. (read more »)
Now, as the White House appears ready to ignore subpoenas in the investigations over wiretapping and U.S. attorney firings, FRONTLINE examines the battle over the power of the presidency and Cheney's way of looking at the Constitution.
"The vice president believes that Congress has very few powers to actually constrain the president and the executive branch," former Justice Department attorney Marty Lederman tells FRONTLINE. "He believes the president should have the final word -- indeed the only word -- on all matters within the executive branch."
After Sept. 11, Cheney and Addington were determined to implement their vision -- in secret. The vice president and his counsel found an ally in John Yoo, a lawyer at the Justice Department's extraordinarily powerful Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). In concert with Addington, Yoo wrote memoranda authorizing the president to act with unparalleled authority.
"Through interviews with key administration figures, Cheney's Law documents the bruising bureaucratic battles between a group of conservative Justice Department lawyers and the Office of the Vice President over the legal foundation for the most closely guarded programs in the war on terror," says FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk. This is Kirk's 10th documentary about the Bush administration's policies since 9/11.
In his most extensive television interview since leaving the Justice Department, former Assistant Attorney General Jack L. Goldsmith describes his initial days at the OLC in the fall of 2003 as he learned about the government's most secret and controversial covert operations. Goldsmith was shocked by the administration's secret assertion of unlimited power.
"There were extravagant and unnecessary claims of presidential power that were wildly overbroad to the tasks at hand," Goldsmith says. "I had a whole flurry of emotions. My first one was disbelief that programs of this importance could be supported by legal opinions that were this flawed. My second was the realization that I would have a very, very hard time standing by these opinions if pressed. My third was the sinking feeling, what was I going to do if I was pressed about reaffirming these opinions?"
As Goldsmith began to question his colleagues' claims that the administration could ignore domestic laws and international treaties, he began to clash with Cheney's office. According to Goldsmith, Addington warned him, "If you rule that way, the blood of the 100,000 people who die in the next attack will be on your hands."
Goldsmith's battles with Cheney culminated in a now-famous hospital-room confrontation at Attorney General John Ashcroft's bedside. Goldsmith watched as White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andy Card pleaded with Ashcroft to overrule the department's finding that a domestic surveillance program was illegal. Ashcroft rebuffed the White House, and as many as 30 department lawyers threatened to resign. The president relented.
But Goldsmith's victory was temporary, and Cheney's Law continues the story after the hospital-room standoff. At the Justice Department, White House Counsel Gonzales was named attorney general and tasked with reasserting White House control. On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied Congress for broad authorizations for the eavesdropping program and for approval of the administration's system for trying suspected terrorists by military tribunals.
As the White House and Congress continue to face off over executive privilege, the terrorist surveillance program, and the firing of U.S. attorneys, FRONTLINE tells the story of what's formed the views of the man behind what some view as the most ambitious project to reshape the power of the |
gets much easier. However, I’ve seen people using random forest as a black box model; i.e., they don’t understand what’s happening beneath the code. They just code.
In fact, the easiest part of machine learning is coding. If you are new to machine learning, the random forest algorithm should be on your tips. Its ability to solve—both regression and classification problems along with robustness to correlated features and variable importance plot gives us enough head start to solve various problems.
Most often, I’ve seen people getting confused in bagging and random forest. Do you know the difference?
In this article, I’ll explain the complete concept of random forest and bagging. For ease of understanding, I’ve kept the explanation simple yet enriching. I’ve used MLR, data.table packages to implement bagging, and random forest with parameter tuning in R. Also, you’ll learn the techniques I’ve used to improve model accuracy from ~82% to 86%.
Table of Contents
What is the Random Forest algorithm? How does it work? (Decision Tree, Random Forest) What is the difference between Bagging and Random Forest? Advantages and Disadvantages of Random Forest Solving a Problem Parameter Tuning in Random Forest
What is the Random Forest algorithm?
Random forest is a tree-based algorithm which involves building several trees (decision trees), then combining their output to improve generalization ability of the model. The method of combining trees is known as an ensemble method. Ensembling is nothing but a combination of weak learners (individual trees) to produce a strong learner.
Say, you want to watch a movie. But you are uncertain of its reviews. You ask 10 people who have watched the movie. 8 of them said ” the movie is fantastic.” Since the majority is in favor, you decide to watch the movie. This is how we use ensemble techniques in our daily life too.
Random Forest can be used to solve regression and classification problems. In regression problems, the dependent variable is continuous. In classification problems, the dependent variable is categorical.
Trivia: The random Forest algorithm was created by Leo Brieman and Adele Cutler in 2001.
How does it work? (Decision Tree, Random Forest)
To understand the working of a random forest, it’s crucial that you understand a tree. A tree works in the following way:
1. Given a data frame (n x p), a tree stratifies or partitions the data based on rules (if-else). Yes, a tree creates rules. These rules divide the data set into distinct and non-overlapping regions. These rules are determined by a variable’s contribution to the homogenity or pureness of the resultant child nodes (X2,X3).
2. In the image above, the variable X1 resulted in highest homogeneity in child nodes, hence it became the root node. A variable at root node is also seen as the most important variable in the data set.
3, But how is this homogeneity or pureness determined? In other words, how does the tree decide at which variable to split?
In regression trees (where the output is predicted using the mean of observations in the terminal nodes), the splitting decision is based on minimizing RSS. The variable which leads to the greatest possible reduction in RSS is chosen as the root node. The tree splitting takes a top-down greedy approach, also known as recursive binary splitting. We call it “greedy” because the algorithm cares to make the best split at the current step rather than saving a split for better results on future nodes.
(where the output is predicted using the mean of observations in the terminal nodes), the splitting decision is based on minimizing RSS. The variable which leads to the greatest possible reduction in RSS is chosen as the root node. The tree splitting takes a approach, also known as recursive binary splitting. We call it “greedy” because the algorithm cares to make the best split at the current step rather than saving a split for better results on future nodes. In classification trees (where the output is predicted using mode of observations in the terminal nodes), the splitting decision is based on the following methods: Gini Index – It’s a measure of node purity. If the Gini index takes on a smaller value, it suggests that the node is pure. For a split to take place, the Gini index for a child node should be less than that for the parent node. Entropy – Entropy is a measure of node impurity. For a binary class (a,b), the formula to calculate it is shown below. Entropy is maximum at p = 0.5. For p(X=a)=0.5 or p(X=b)=0.5 means, a new observation has a 50%-50% chance of getting classified in either classes. The entropy is minimum when the probability is 0 or 1.
(where the output is predicted using mode of observations in the terminal nodes), the splitting decision is based on the following methods:
Entropy = - p(a)*log(p(a)) - p(b)*log(p(b))
In a nutshell, every tree attempts to create rules in such a way that the resultant terminal nodes could be as pure as possible. Higher the purity, lesser the uncertainity to make the decision.
But a decision tree suffers from high variance. “High Variance” means getting high prediction error on unseen data. We can overcome the variance problem by using more data for training. But since the data set available is limited to us, we can use resampling techniques like bagging and random forest to generate more data.
Building many decision trees results in a forest. A random forest works the following way:
First, it uses the Bagging (Bootstrap Aggregating) algorithm to create random samples. Given a data set D1 (n rows and p columns), it creates a new dataset (D2) by sampling n cases at random with replacement from the original data. About 1/3 of the rows from D1 are left out, known as Out of Bag(OOB) samples. Then, the model trains on D2. OOB sample is used to determine unbiased estimate of the error. Out of p columns, P << p columns are selected at each node in the data set. The P columns are selected at random. Usually, the default choice of P is p/3 for regression tree and P is sqrt(p) for classification tree. Unlike a tree, no pruning takes place in random forest; i.e, each tree is grown fully. In decision trees, pruning is a method to avoid overfitting. Pruning means selecting a subtree that leads to the lowest test errror rate. We can use cross validation to determine the test error rate of a subtree. Several trees are grown and the final prediction is obtained by averaging or voting.
Each tree is grown on a different sample of original data. Since random forest has the feature to calculate OOB error internally, cross validation doesn’t make much sense in random forest.
What is the difference between Bagging and Random Forest?
Many a time, we fail to ascertain that bagging is not same as random forest. To understand the difference, let’s see how bagging works:
It creates randomized samples of the data set (just like random forest) and grows trees on a different sample of the original data. The remaining 1/3 of the sample is used to estimate unbiased OOB error. It considers all the features at a node (for splitting). Once the trees are fully grown, it uses averaging or voting to combine the resultant predictions.
Aren’t you thinking, “If both the algorithms do same thing, what is the need for random forest? Couldn’t we have accomplished our task with bagging?” NO!
The need for random forest surfaced after discovering that the bagging algorithm results in correlated trees when faced with a data set having strong predictors. Unfortunately, averaging several highly correlated trees doesn’t lead to a large reduction in variance.
But how do correlated trees emerge? Good question! Let’s say a data set has a very strong predictor, along with other moderately strong predictors. In bagging, a tree grown every time would consider the very strong predictor at its root node, thereby resulting in trees similar to each other.
The main difference between random forest and bagging is that random forest considers only a subset of predictors at a split. This results in trees with different predictors at top split, thereby resulting in decorrelated trees and more reliable average output. That’s why we say random forest is robust to correlated predictors.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Random Forest
Advantages are as follows:
It is robust to correlated predictors. It is used to solve both regression and classification problems. It can be also used to solve unsupervised ML problems. It can handle thousands of input variables without variable selection. It can be used as a feature selection tool using its variable importance plot. It takes care of missing data internally in an effective manner.
Disadvantages are as follows:
The Random Forest model is difficult to interpret. It tends to return erratic predictions for observations out of range of training data. For example, the training data contains two variable x and y. The range of x variable is 30 to 70. If the test data has x = 200, random forest would give an unreliable prediction. It can take longer than expected time to computer a large number of trees.
Solving a Problem (Parameter Tuning)
Let’s take a data set to compare the performance of bagging and random forest algorithms. Along the way, I’ll also explain important parameters used for parameter tuning. In R, we’ll use MLR and data.table package to do this analysis.
I’ve taken the Adult dataset from the UCI machine learning repository. You can download the data from here.
This data set presents a binary classification problem to solve. Given a set of features, we need to predict if a person’s salary is <=50K or >=50k. Since the given data isn’t well structured, we’ll need to make some modification while reading the data set.
#set working directory
> path <- "~/December 2016/RF_Tutorial"
> setwd(path)
#load libraries
> library(data.table)
> library(mlr)
> library(h2o)
#set variable names
setcol <- c("age",
"workclass",
"fnlwgt",
"education",
"education-num",
"marital-status",
"occupation",
"relationship",
"race",
"sex",
"capital-gain",
"capital-loss",
"hours-per-week",
"native-country",
"target")
#load data
> train <- read.table("adultdata.txt",header = F,sep = ",",col.names = setcol,na.strings = c("?"),stringsAsFactors = F)
> test <- read.table("adulttest.txt",header = F,sep = ",",col.names = setcol,skip = 1, na.strings = c("?"),stringsAsFactors = F)
After we’ve loaded the data set, first we’ll set the data class to data.table. data.table is the most powerful R package made for faster data manipulation.
> setDT(train)
> setDT(test)
Now, we’ll quickly look at given variables, data dimensions, etc.
> dim(train)
> dim(test)
> str(train)
> str(test)
As seen from the output above, we can derive the following insights:
The train data set has 32,561 rows and 15 columns. The test data has 16,281 rows and 15 columns. Variable target is the dependent variable. The target variable in train and test data is different. We’ll need to match them. All character variables have a leading whitespace which can be removed.
We can check missing values using:
#check missing values
> table(is.na(train))
FALSE TRUE
484153 4262
> sapply(train, function(x) sum(is.na(x))/length(x))*100
> table(is.na(test))
FALSE TRUE
242012 2203
> sapply(test, function(x) sum(is.na(x))/length(x))*100
As seen above, both train and test datasets have missing values. The sapply function is quite handy when it comes to performing column computations. Above, it returns the percentage of missing values per column.
Now, we’ll preprocess the data to prepare it for training. In R, random forest internally takes care of missing values using mean/ mode imputation. Practically speaking, sometimes it takes longer than expected for the model to run.
Therefore, in order to avoid waiting time, let’s impute the missing values using median / mode imputation method; i.e., missing values in the integer variable will be imputed with median and factor variables will be imputed with mode (most frequent value).
We’ll use the impute function from MLR package, which is enabled with several unique methods for missing value imputation:
> imp1 <- impute(data = train,target = "target",classes = list(integer=imputeMedian(), factor=imputeMode()))
> imp2 <- impute(data = test,target = "target",classes = list(integer=imputeMedian(), factor=imputeMode()))
> train <- imp1$data
> test <- imp2$data
Being a binary classification problem, you are always advised to check if the data is imbalanced or not. We can do it in the following way:
> setDT(train)[,.N/nrow(train),target]
target V1
1: <=50K 0.7591904
2: >50K 0.2408096
> setDT(test)[,.N/nrow(test),target]
target V1
1: <=50K. 0.7637737
2: >50K. 0.2362263
If you observe carefully, the value of the target variable is different in test and train. For now, we can consider it a typo error and correct all the test values. Also, we see that 75% of people in train data have income <=50K. Imbalanced classification problems are known to be more skewed with a binary class distribution of 90% to 10%. Now, let’s proceed and clean the target column in test data.
> test[,target := substr(target,start = 1,stop = nchar(target)-1)]
We’ve used the substr function to return the subtring from a specified start and end position. Next, we’ll remove the leading whitespaces from all character variables. We’ll use str_trim function from stringr package.
> library(stringr)
> char_col <- colnames(train)[sapply(train,is.character)]
> for(i in char_col)
set(train,j=i,value = str_trim(train[[i]],side = "left"))
Using sapply function, we’ve extracted the column names which have character class. Then, using a simple for - set loop we traversed all those columns and applied the str_trim function.
Before we start model training, we should convert all character variables to factor. MLR package treats character class as unknown.
> fact_col <- colnames(train)[sapply(train,is.character)]
>for(i in fact_col)
set(train,j=i,value = factor(train[[i]]))
>for(i in fact_col)
set(test,j=i,value = factor(test[[i]]))
Let’s start with modeling now. MLR package has its own function to convert data into a task, build learners, and optimize learning algorithms. I suggest you stick to the modeling structure described below for using MLR on any data set.
#create a task
> traintask <- makeClassifTask(data = train,target = "target")
> testtask <- makeClassifTask(data = test,target = "target")
#create learner
> bag <- makeLearner("classif.rpart",predict.type = "response")
> bag.lrn <- makeBaggingWrapper(learner = bag,bw.iters = 100,bw.replace = TRUE)
I’ve set up the bagging algorithm which will grow 100 trees on randomized samples of data with replacement. To check the performance, let’s set up a validation strategy too:
#set 5 fold cross validation
> rdesc <- makeResampleDesc("CV",iters=5L)
For faster computation, we’ll use parallel computation backend. Make sure your machine / laptop doesn’t have many programs running at backend.
#set parallel backend (Windows)
> library(parallelMap)
> library(parallel)
> parallelStartSocket(cpus = detectCores())
For linux users, the function parallelStartMulticore(cpus = detectCores()) will activate parallel backend. I’ve used all the cores here.
r <- resample(learner = bag.lrn
,task = traintask
,resampling = rdesc
,measures = list(tpr,fpr,fnr,fpr,acc)
,show.info = T)
#[Resample] Result:
# tpr.test.mean=0.95,
# fnr.test.mean=0.0505,
# fpr.test.mean=0.487,
# acc.test.mean=0.845
Being a binary classification problem, I’ve used the components of confusion matrix to check the model’s accuracy. With 100 trees, bagging has returned an accuracy of 84.5%, which is way better than the baseline accuracy of 75%. Let’s now check the performance of random forest.
#make randomForest learner
> rf.lrn <- makeLearner("classif.randomForest")
> rf.lrn$par.vals <- list(ntree = 100L,
importance=TRUE) )
> r <- resample(learner = rf.lrn
,task = traintask
,resampling = rdesc
,measures = list(tpr,fpr,fnr,fpr,acc)
,show.info = T)
# Result:
# tpr.test.mean=0.996,
# fpr.test.mean=0.72,
# fnr.test.mean=0.0034,
# acc.test.mean=0.825
On this data set, random forest performs worse than bagging. Both used 100 trees and random forest returns an overall accuracy of 82.5 %. An apparent reason being that this algorithm is messing up classifying the negative class. As you can see, it classified 99.6% of the positive classes correctly, which is way better than the bagging algorithm. But it incorrectly classified 72% of the negative classes.
Internally, random forest uses a cutoff of 0.5; i.e., if a particular unseen observation has a probability higher than 0.5, it will be classified as <=50K. In random forest, we have the option to customize the internal cutoff. As the false positive rate is very high now, we’ll increase the cutoff for positive classes (<=50K) and accordingly reduce it for negative classes (>=50K). Then, train the model again.
#set cutoff
> rf.lrn$par.vals <- list(ntree = 100L,
importance=TRUE,
cutoff = c(0.75,0.25))
> r <- resample(learner = rf.lrn
,task = traintask
,resampling = rdesc
,measures = list(tpr,fpr,fnr,fpr,acc)
,show.info = T)
#Result: tpr.test.mean=0.934,
# fpr.test.mean=0.43,
# fnr.test.mean=0.0662,
# acc.test.mean=0.846
As you can see, we’ve improved the accuracy of the random forest model by 2%, which is slightly higher than that for the bagging model. Now, let’s try and make this model better.
Parameter Tuning: Mainly, there are three parameters in the random forest algorithm which you should look at (for tuning):
ntree – As the name suggests, the number of trees to grow. Larger the tree, it will be more computationally expensive to build models.
– As the name suggests, the number of trees to grow. Larger the tree, it will be more computationally expensive to build models. mtry – It refers to how many variables we should select at a node split. Also as mentioned above, the default value is p/3 for regression and sqrt(p) for classification. We should always try to avoid using smaller values of mtry to avoid overfitting.
– It refers to how many variables we should select at a node split. Also as mentioned above, the default value is p/3 for regression and sqrt(p) for classification. We should always try to avoid using smaller values of mtry to avoid overfitting. nodesize – It refers to how many observations we want in the terminal nodes. This parameter is directly related to tree depth. Higher the number, lower the tree depth. With lower tree depth, the tree might even fail to recognize useful signals from the data.
Let get to the playground and try to improve our model’s accuracy further. In MLR package, you can list all tuning parameters a model can support using:
> getParamSet(rf.lrn)
#set parameter space
params <- makeParamSet(
makeIntegerParam("mtry",lower = 2,upper = 10),
makeIntegerParam("nodesize",lower = 10,upper = 50)
)
#set validation strategy
rdesc <- makeResampleDesc("CV",iters=5L)
#set optimization technique
ctrl <- makeTuneControlRandom(maxit = 5L)
#start tuning
> tune <- tuneParams(learner = rf.lrn
,task = traintask
,resampling = rdesc
,measures = list(acc)
,par.set = params
,control = ctrl
,show.info = T)
[Tune] Result: mtry=2; nodesize=23 : acc.test.mean=0.858
After tuning, we have achieved an overall accuracy of 85.8%, which is better than our previous random forest model. This way you can tweak your model and improve its accuracy.
I’ll leave you here. The complete code for this analysis can be downloaded from Github.
Summary
Don’t stop here! There is still a huge scope for improvement in this model. Cross validation accuracy is generally more optimistic than true test accuracy. To make a prediction on the test set, minimal data preprocessing on categorical variables is required. Do it and share your results in the comments below.
My motive to create this tutorial is to get you started using the random forest model and some techniques to improve model accuracy. For better understanding, I suggest you read more on confusion matrix. In this article, I’ve explained the working of decision trees, random forest, and bagging.
Did I miss out anything? Do share your knowledge and let me know your experience while solving classification problems in comments below.How To Write a Twitter Bot with Python and tweepy 00:42:00 Python Twitter, tweet.py 0 Comments
pip install tweepy pip install tweepy 1 pip install tweepy
sudo apt-get install python-pip sudo apt-get install python-pip 1 sudo apt - get install python - pip
helloworld.py #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- import tweepy, time, sys argfile = str(sys.argv[1]) #enter the corresponding information from your Twitter application: CONSUMER_KEY = '1234abcd...'#keep the quotes, replace this with your consumer key CONSUMER_SECRET = '1234abcd...'#keep the quotes, replace this with your consumer secret key ACCESS_KEY = '1234abcd...'#keep the quotes, replace this with your access token ACCESS_SECRET = '1234abcd...'#keep the quotes, replace this with your access token secret auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET) auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_KEY, ACCESS_SECRET) api = tweepy.API(auth) filename=open(argfile,'r') f=filename.readlines() filename.close() for line in f: api.update_status(line) time.sleep(900)#Tweet every 15 minutes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- import tweepy, time, sys argfile = str ( sys. argv [ 1 ] ) #enter the corresponding information from your Twitter application: CONSUMER_KEY = '1234abcd...' #keep the quotes, replace this with your consumer key CONSUMER_SECRET = '1234abcd...' #keep the quotes, replace this with your consumer secret key ACCESS_KEY = '1234abcd...' #keep the quotes, replace this with your access token ACCESS_SECRET = '1234abcd...' #keep the quotes, replace this with your access token secret auth = tweepy. OAuthHandler ( CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET ) auth. set_access_token ( ACCESS_KEY, ACCESS_SECRET ) api = tweepy. API ( auth ) filename = open ( argfile, 'r' ) f = filename. readlines ( ) filename. close ( ) for line in f : api. update_status ( line ) time. sleep ( 900 ) #Tweet every 15 minutes
Hello World!
I’m a robot!
Robots are superior to humans in every conceivable way!
python helloworld.py helloworld.txt python helloworld.py helloworld.txt 1 python helloworld.py helloworld.txt
Hello World!
import tweepy, time, sys 1 import tweepy, time, sys
argfile = str(sys.argv[1]) 1 argfile = str ( sys. argv [ 1 ] )
CONSUMER_KEY = 'YOUR CONSUMER KEY' CONSUMER_SECRET = 'YOUR CONSUMER SECRET KEY' ACCESS_KEY = 'YOUR ACCESS KEY' ACCESS_SECRET = 'YOUR ACCESS SECRET KEY' auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET) auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_KEY, ACCESS_SECRET) api = tweepy.API(auth) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 CONSUMER_KEY = 'YOUR CONSUMER KEY' CONSUMER_SECRET = 'YOUR CONSUMER SECRET KEY' ACCESS_KEY = 'YOUR ACCESS KEY' ACCESS_SECRET = 'YOUR ACCESS SECRET KEY' auth = tweepy. OAuthHandler ( CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET ) auth. set_access_token ( ACCESS_KEY, ACCESS_SECRET ) api = tweepy. API ( auth )
filename=open(argfile,'r') f=filename.readlines() filename.close() 1 2 3 filename = open ( argfile, 'r' ) f = filename. readlines ( ) filename. close ( )
for line in f: api.update_status(status=line) time.sleep(900)#Tweet every 15 minutes 1 2 3 for line in f : api. update_status ( status = line ) time. sleep ( 900 ) #Tweet every 15 minutes
Twitter is the social media site for robots. You probably have robot friends and followers and don’t even realize it! In this tutorial, you will write your own Twitter bot with Python and tweepy, and then set it loose in the world.First we need to create a Twitter Application. Go to https://dev.twitter.com/ and log in with your Twitter account.Under your account toggle, select ‘My applications’. On the following screen, select the option to create a new application and fill in the required information.Once your new application is created, select its Settings tab and towards the bottom of the page click the ‘Read and Write’ radio button. Return to the Details tab and click the big blue button at the bottom of the page to generate your access keys.Next, we need to install tweepy. tweepy is the library we will be using to access the Twitter API with Python. From the command line, run:If you don’t have pip installed, run:Now it’s time to make our robot. Open your favorite text editor or IDE and create a new file (don’t use a word processor; it will load your file with unnecessary junk). Save it asBelow is our complete code. Enter your Twitter application keys and tokens accordingly:That’s our robot. But it’s hungry. Let’s feed it! Create a new text file in the same directory as helloworld.py. Save it as. Enter a few memorable lines, such as:Be sure to use lots of exclamation points so your robot can be heard. Twitter is a noisy place. Also be sure there are no blank lines in-between your lines of text. Our robot is not an existentialist. Now we’re ready to go! At the command line enter:Check your Twitter feed and you should see:Let’s break that down into byte sized pieces.Our first line of Python,includes the three packages we need for our program: tweepy, time & sys. We already know what tweepy is for. time will allow us to schedule intervals between our Tweets (so we don’t get in trouble with Twitter), and sys will allow us to feed our robot a file for it to read and Tweet.The next line is how we feed the file to our robot.We’re assigning our text file to argfile. No, not arg as in the sound a pirate makes, but arg as in short for argument. When we run our program from the command line, we are passing the python interpreter two arguments, the first argument, argv[0], is our.py file,; the second argument, argv[1], is our text file,t. What we are saying here is that argfile contains the string, helloworld.txt.The next big chunk of code is how we connect our robot to Twitter through our Application:Here we are creating a variable, auth, and via tweepy, we are authorizing our account with our consumer and access keys. We then create a variable, api, and via tweepy connect to the Twitter API with auth.After that, we open and read the helloworld.txt file:Here we’re using the open() function to read argfile, which you will recall is holding the string helloworld.txt. We read the file with the parameter, ‘r’, for read. Next we read the lines of our file and pass them to a variable called f, for file. Finally, we close the file. Closing something you’ve opened is a good habit. Like the refrigerator.The last block of code is where the magic happens:Using a for loop, we iterate through every line stored in f. For each line, we send out a Tweet using api.update_status(line). Then we tell our robot to snooze with time.sleep(900). The for loop will continue until it reads and Tweets the last line in f(or finds an error in your file), and will then exit.That’s it! Keep in mind there are best practices to be followed on Twitter. You will want to check before you modify this code or you risk getting your account suspended. And that’s no fun for you or your robot.Special thanks to robincamille for writing the post that inspired this tutorial.Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz staunchly defended the Internet company's business practices in China on Thursday and said it was "not our job to fix the Chinese government."
Bartz, appearing at her first shareholders meeting since taking over the Sunnyvale, California-based company in January, said Yahoo! respects human rights.
"We actually hosted a business and human rights summit for high tech companies a month or so ago," she said. "Yahoo! has gone overboard on this point to really be sympathetic, serious and so forth.
"We have done a lot," she said.
"The board does its best, the company does its best to run a good business, to look out for our population around the world, both the people who work for us and the people who come to visit us," she said. "That?s our commitment."
Bartz added that Yahoo! "was not incorporated to fix China."
"It was incorporated to give people a free flow of information," she said.
A number of US companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Google and Yahoo!, have been hauled before the US Congress in recent years and accused of complicity in building what has been called the "Great Firewall of China."
Yahoo! was thrust into the forefront of the online rights issue after the company helped Chinese police identify cyber dissidents whose supposed crime was expressing their views online.
Alluding to the case, Bartz said: "Ten years ago the company made a mistake, and you can?t hold us up as the bad boy forever.
"We have worked better, harder, faster than most companies to respect human rights and to try and make a difference," she said.
"But it is not our job to fix the Chinese government, it?s that simple.
"We will respect human rights, we will do what?s right, but we're not going to take on every government in the world as our mandate," she said. "That?s not the mandate that the shareholders gave us."
Yahoo!, other technology giants and a coalition of human rights and other groups unveiled a code of conduct last year aimed at safeguarding online freedom of speech and privacy.
China exercises strict control over the Internet, blocking sites linked to Chinese dissidents, the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement, the Tibetan government-in-exile and those with information on the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
China and Google are currently engaged in a dispute, with Beijing accusing the Internet giant of providing links to pornography in its Web searches.
And the United States called on China on Wednesday to drop a new requirement for all computers to carry Internet filtering software.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and US Trade Representative Ron Kirk said China may be violating World Trade Organization obligations by requiring that all computers sold in the country from July 1 have the "Green Dam" program.
Beijing says the software will filter out pornography, protecting young people within the world's largest online population.Finale Fireworker said: I think most men (or cishet men) define themselves by what women think of them. Whether it's "women" in general or the opinion of a significant other. Men measure themselves by their ability to attract women, so criticism from women always lands hard on me. Criticism from men feels competitive. Criticism from women feels like they're right.
It only took one woman to tell me I was being sexist once. I took it so personally that it's never been a problem again. At least not that I am aware or have ever been told. Click to expand...
Sir TapTap said: Something I don't see discussed often is how this sexism cuts both ways like this. Men being defined by attracting/dominating women is shit for us too. Yes I know it hurts us "less", but I think it would help some people be empathetic to the cause if this were discussed more. Better to do good for a selfish reason than not at all. Click to expand...
Quoted myself too just for clearer context moving forward.The truth is that, on a wider scale, there is really deeply institutionalized gender system all over the world. This is totally separate from "boys like blue, girls like pink!" as a societal construct. Consider this biology:If the whole natural purpose of sex is procreation, women are significantly more valuable than men. One tribe of 100 women could create 100+ offspring with only 1 man. But a tribe of 100 men and 1 woman is doomed. They are dead in a generation. Basically, a population of men is not necessary to the survival or procreation of a species.This puts men in a situation where they need to compete with each other for a woman's attention. They need to make themselves standout among a population of men that makes them individually inconsequential. This is why sexism exists in men: they need to diminish women in order to inflate their own importance. They need to build themselves up and mentally construct superiority because deep down there is the fact of the matter that they really don't serve a large biological purpose. As soon as a woman can perform the same job they can, or occupies a space they consider masculine, they no longer have anything to offer to the female.This is why it's "women and children first," it's why men go to war, and it's why men are especially tender and vulnerable to female criticism.Of course society and human existence beyond the sole purpose of procreation changes this. But really deep down, I think this is the root of hostile sexism, especially in a work environment. I say this both as a man and as somebody who has studied anthropology. Sure, sexism goes both ways. But it affects us less because men have established the system. We feel extra bad when a woman laughs at us, but usually men will return that anxiety doubly on another woman. Like the workplace or that psychopath who attacked a sorority earlier this year.Over the past 20 years, many have wondered what could have been. What if Wayne Gretzky had finished his career as a member of the St. Louis Blues? What if we were able to see Gretzky on the same line with Brett Hull for three more years, instead of just 31 games? For years, many had written off Gretzky as nothing more than a footnote in Blues history. Others went as far as to say he was not a “True Blue”.
Over this past weekend at Busch Stadium, Wayne Gretzky reappeared as a member of the St. Louis Blues Alumni in a historic game against the Chicago Blackhawks Alumni. Not only was this a magical game for everyone in St. Louis, it was the most attended alumni game since the inception of the Winter Classic. The return of Gretzky seemed to welcome him back into the St. Louis Blues family. Fans wanted to see “The Great One”, and the Blues organization delivered.
On the most recent episode of Chasen Pucks with Panger, Darren Pang was able to catch up with Gretzky after the alumni game and asked his thoughts on what is taking place in St. Louis. “To come here and see the number of people at the alumni game, and not to see one empty seat,” Gretzky said. “They've (fans) really rallied around this event. It just shows you how far hockey has come in this city, how big the sport has gotten, and how popular it can be.”
Apparently, Gretzky's ties to St. Louis went even deeper than his short tenure with the Blues in 1996. “I grew up a huge Cardinals fan,” said Gretzky. “In those days, we'd get the Cardinals games on the radio. So, I used to listen to Jack Buck and kinda fall asleep listening to Cardinal games.”
An avid baseball fan, Gretzky dreamed of playing baseball, not hockey, at Busch Stadium. “I wish I could've played third base or pitched one game here for the Cardinals in professional baseball, but that's obviously not gonna happen,” Gretzky said of his Cardinals fandom. “Maybe it's only fitting my last game was played at a baseball stadium. I can combine the two sports, hockey and baseball.”
Gretzky has also seen the growth of hockey in St. Louis. A lot of things have changed in the past twenty years since he was a Blue, and he was quick to point it out. “The youth hockey programs here have been so strong,” noted Gretzky. “Five boys were selected in the first round of the NHL draft from St. Louis. I don't care if you're St. Louis, or Edmonton, or Winnipeg, or Saskatoon…you get five boys drafted in the first round, that's pretty special. It shows you how far hockey has come in this area, and it's only going to get more |
tried to make this work. Nobody can say that I didn’t try to make this work.
I grew up watching Top Gun on a loop until I could memorize every line. When I graduated high school and the Navy told me I was too short, fat, and blind to be a fighter pilot (which was ironic since I got that way from watching Top Gun every day) I figured the next best thing would be a job that required nonstop travel.
And that’s how we first met, there in that dingy airline terminal. You know the one — with the flickering florescent light. Gosh, we were both so young. Do you even remember what you were wearing? It was that horrible white and gray uniform that made it look like you were a department store security guard. I remember those early days so clearly. You seemed so exotic. You were our knight in shining armor protecting us from the freedom hating filth trying to destroy our way of life.
I think I knew even then that it was a lie. When I think back all the signs were there all along. The way you would swagger in between the x-ray machines oblivious to the exhaustion and resignation of the travelers in line. The way you would all stand around and watch attractive flyers get patted down. Things got a little better when you moved to the blue uniforms. Those beautiful shirts spoke of ocean depths, of tranquility, of the open sky. Now I see that color and I want to cry. Because you ruined it. You didn’t just ruin commercial aviation, you ruined the entire experience of flight. Do you know how hard that is to do?
Think about it for a minute — for millennia humanity dreamed of flying among the clouds. Then some brilliant and brave engineers made that dream a reality. They were followed by some equally brilliant businessmen that found a way to make tickets cheap enough for just about everyone to be able to fly. Then you ruined it all. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I remember when it all started to unravel. It was when you blew a smoking hole in your budget on those porn scanners. You remember the ones, don’t you? Don’t you remember how we argued all night? You kept telling me that they were the best thing on the market, and I was crying because the former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s lobbying group was peddling them. You finally swayed me, and I submitted like I always do. I couldn’t help it, I needed to fly.
And then I saw the pictures of the scanner outputs. You know the ones. Hell, it was like watching “Game of Thrones”. Genitals just hanging out in full display for the world to view. You assured me that the naughty bits would be digitally blurred, and that there would be no way to capture images. And I believed you — because nobody could ever just take a pic of the screen with their phone. That would be ridiculous.
For a while I was nervous and opted for the pat down. I still remember you rolling your eyes when I opted out, you patted me down like a criminal. I felt a sick combination of revulsion and shame as you patted me down, and after that I chose the naked scanners. By then the displays had been updated — no naked pics on the readout. Now it just provided a guide to what part of my anatomy you should grab.
Things got better for awhile when you set up the TSA-Pre system. It was almost like things were new again. I didn’t mind that I was paying you extra money so that you could more efficiently do the job I was already paying you to do with my taxes. All that mattered to me was that I didn’t have to take off my shoes. Or lay out my laptops like I was at a yardsale. I almost felt like things had turned the corner and we would be good again.
But then you just dropped the ball and stopped hiring. Seriously — who lets their workforce wither away by the double digits? I spent an hour in line just to see you the last time I flew. I sat in line the whole time, and the only thing that gave me any solace was seeing the poor schmucks without TSA-Pre in their eternal line.
So that’s it. I’m done. We are done. You are an abusive lover and I don’t know that you have ever done a damn thing to make me any more secure. I am going to get a Prius and hit the open road. Or maybe I will move to one of those cities where they didn’t agree to use your services. Somehow I would prefer to be molested by the free market then a government bureaucracy (although I hear they do a much better job).
Goodbye TSA. We had a good run. Don’t try calling — I’m heading for the open road.Share:
LAHORE - A man slaughtered his 22-year-old daughter in the name of honour in Nishtar Colony, police sources said on Tuesday. The killer is still at large while the police have registered a murder against him and are investigating.
Muhammad Rasheed slit the throat of his daughter Shahida at his house near Dolam Stop in Nishtar Colony. Shahida was rushed to hospital but died on the way. The family told the investigators the deceased had a relationship with a man. Police handed over the body to the family after the autopsy. Further investigation was underway.
Two die in accidents
Two persons, including a teen boy, were killed in road accidents in different parts of the provincial capital on Tuesday, police said. A 30-year-old woman, unidentified so far, was crossing the road in Shafiqabad when a recklessly driven vehicle ran over her, resulting in her death on the spot. The driver along with the driven fled away. Police are investigating.
In another incident, a 13-year-old boy was crushed to death under a passenger bus at Ferozepur in Naseerabad. Police have arrested the bus driver. An eyewitness told the police that the boy, yet to be identified, was walking alongside the road when a bus hit him from the rear side.Researchers at the University of Sheffield have developed a method of sourcing obsidian artefacts that takes only 10 seconds – dozens of times faster than the current methods – with a handheld instrument that can be used at archaeological excavations.
Obsidian, naturally occurring volcanic glass, is smooth, hard, and far sharper than a surgical scalpel when fractured, making it a highly desirable raw material for crafting stone tools for almost all of human history. The earliest obsidian tools, found in East Africa, are nearly two million years old, and obsidian scalpels are still used today in specialised medical procedures.
The chemistry of obsidian varies from volcano to volcano, and the chemical “fingerprints” allow researchers to match an obsidian artefact to the volcanic origin of its raw material. The chemical tests often involve dedicated analytical laboratories, even nuclear reactors, and take place months or years after an archaeological site has been excavated.
The new process uses an analytical technique called portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF), which involves a handheld instrument about the size, shape, and weight of a cordless drill. This portability enables archaeologists to identify the origins of stone tools in the field rather than having to send off artefacts to a distant lab. The newly developed method, which saves time and money, will first be used to study obsidian tools made by early humans, including Neanderthals and Homo erectus, tens of thousands of years ago.
Dr Ellery Frahm from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology explained: “Obsidian sourcing has, for the last 50 years, involved chemical analysis in a distant laboratory, often taking five minutes per artefact, completely separate from the process of archaeological excavation. We sought to bring new tools for chemical analysis with us into the field, so we can do obsidian sourcing as we excavate or survey an archaeological site, not wait until months or years later to learn the results. We can now analyse an obsidian artefact in the field, and just 10 seconds later, we have an answer for its origin.
“We carried out the research in Armenia because it has one of the most obsidian-rich natural and cultural landscapes in the world, and the lithic assemblages of numerous Palaeolithic sites are predominantly, if not entirely, composed of obsidian.”
The work is the latest of Dr Frahm’s achievements in the field of obsidian sourcing, an area that he previously researched in Syria, prior to the current conflict situation which now threatens the country’s heritage.
This research arose from the department’s involvement in the EU-funded Marie Curie network “New Archaeological Research Network for Integrating Approaches to Ancient Material Studies,” known by its acronym as NARNIA. Dr Frahm explained that Sheffield’s research with NARNIA includes uniting archaeological labwork and fieldwork in the field: “We have a broad remit on the project, but we are driven by two goals: work where we couldn’t work before, and answer what we couldn’t answer before.”
Dr Frahm continued: “Here at Sheffield we’re shifting chemical analysis from the realm of ‘white lab coats’ to ‘muddy boots.’ The more that archaeologists and specialists in various fields can work together on-site the better.”
Header Image : XRF : Credit : University of Sheffield
Contributing Source : University of Sheffield
HeritageDaily : Archaeology News : Archaeology Press ReleasesEXCLUSIVE: Captain America: Civil War directors Joe and Anthony Russo are the new kings of Marvel, where they follow their second film built on Chris Evans’ red, white and blue shield with back-to-back installments of The Avengers, the blockbuster series started by Joss Whedon. These two brothers are a long way from Cleveland, where they grew up idolizing Truffaut, and took the most unlikely path possible to the top of the tentpole business. The siblings have worked so long together, they finish each other’s sentences like an old married couple. They sat with Deadline the day after an exuberant Hollywood premiere, right before they flew to China to launch Civil War in the Middle Kingdom. The film, which pits Marvel’s most popular superhero characters against one another, crushed it worldwide this week. It opens stateside tomorrow.
DEADLINE: The mix of action, drama and humor in your movie was so exhilarating it bothered me, seeing a still photo of Joseph, playing a character who was murdered in a bathtub. After all, you set yourselves up so well here for two Avengers movies you have to make. Did the two of you fight over who got to play the stiff?
ANTHONY RUSSO: No. I don’t like to get in front of the camera. Joe is a trained actor, you know.
JOSEPH RUSSO: I played one of the lead characters in Pieces, which was our first movie. Once Steven Soderbergh discovered us, it became an option of focusing on the directing career and not worrying about the acting career. I like acting a lot, but it’s not something I get out of bed for every day. So I started doing it as a joke, early on. Our dad, in the early ’70s, used to wear those gold-rimmed glasses, and had a big thick mustache. When I put the glasses on and the mustache, I look a lot like him. So, over the years, I’ve appeared as this gold-rimmed glasses character in a few of our…
DEADLINE: So you have an alter ego?
JOSEPH RUSSO: I call it…damn, I don’t think we put it in the credits on this film, I forgot. Gozie Agbo is the name. We created him for a comedy sketch we did years ago.
ANTHONY RUSSO: We pulled the name out of the phone book.
JOSEPH RUSSO: I completely forgot to add it in the credits list.
ANTHONY RUSSO: Does it say Joe Russo in the credits?
JOSEPH RUSSO: I don’t know. Maybe I was uncredited. But typically, it’s Gozie Agbo.
DEADLINE: There are so many superhero movies, it’s hard to distinguish. You guys shoot these action sequences where it almost hurts, every time someone gets punched or flung into a building. What’s the secret sauce to making the audience feel that?
ANTHONY RUSSO: We work with our editor. And we’ve done our job if we’re constantly going “Oh, ow, ugh.”
JOSEPH RUSSO: It’s a combination of techniques, which we won’t elaborate on, lest somebody else…
ANTHONY RUSSO: Steal it.
JOSEPH RUSSO: Some of it is in camera, and some comes from our stunt team including a lot of really tough, exceptional stuntmen. Who take a lot of hits. It’s a very physical and that’s probably the largest part of the secret sauce. They take those hits. It’s a mentality that that department has, striving for realism. We have to give them incredible credit for the pain they endure to bring storytelling to the screen for general audiences. And some of it, we do a little tweaking in post. If a hit hasn’t landed perfectly but we like the shot, then we use visual effects to supplement.
DEADLINE: What was the hardest scene to do that you were most proud of here? There is such frantic action going on between so many characters, and yet you never lose your sense of navigation.
ANTHONY RUSSO: It would be the airport scene. Because there’s so many characters involved. Here’s what’s complex about that sequence. Number one, the number of characters. So you’ve got an over-arcing story that you’re telling in that sequence where it’s one side versus the other, but then you’ve got individual stories you’re telling, about every character. Joe and I always say that our guide through action is always story and character. We’re always driving right at the character beats, or else the action beat doesn’t work. So it’s dealing with that number of characters, the number of sub-stories playing out of that sequence. And then on a physical level, the execution is very hard because it’s set at an airport. We did a little bit of shooting at Leipzig Airport in Germany, but most of it in Atlanta on a big slab of concrete with green screen all around it. Some of the characters were there, some are CG. We had to use so many different techniques to realize that sequence. Some of the what you see is our classic hand-to-hand stuff, and some of it is a mile away from that classic hand-to-hand stuff. This was almost like shooting a mini movie, that sequence. We prepped it for months, everybody on our team knew that was the centerpiece of the movie, and what our expectations of that sequence would be, and that we had to just keep bettering it, and bettering it. That was the process.
DEADLINE: Marvel tells you, we need you to introduce Black Panther, so Ryan Coogler can go make a spinoff movie with Chadwick Boseman. And then we’ve got the new iteration of Spider-Man, that will launch another franchises with Jon Watts directing Tom Holland. Also, we want to continue building Ant-Man with Paul Rudd. Add that to Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, Chris Evans’ Captain America, Sebastian Stan’s Winter Soldier, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, Anthony Mackie’s Falcon, Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, Paul Bettany’s Vision and Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch. That is a lot of character choreography to keep straight. How concerned were you this was just going to be too much?
JOSEPH RUSSO: The great thing about Marvel is, it’s a sandbox, right? After Winter Soldier, when they approached us about doing a third Cap film, we set high ambitions for the movie. We wanted to do something that alters the cinematic universe again, and is a very cathartic viewing experience for the audience. Because one incredible thing about Marvel is the emotional investment that the audience has in the material has been built up over 10 years. There’s nothing else like that in movie history, where you have characters from different franchises interweaving into a main story line, all with a large affectionate section of the moviegoing audience caring about them.
As filmmakers, that’s juicy for us, because we can take them on an emotional ride then in a way that you can’t in a traditional story where everybody needs an introduction. The movie could never work if it was a film where each of those characters needed a traditional introduction. That would have been a disaster. It’s only in the Marvel universe we could’ve accomplished this kind of story. We went to Marvel after we landed on the Civil War concept. Once we started exploring the idea, it started to become very binary with the characters. Because The Avengers were just falling on one side or the other. There were no free radical characters that could complicate the storytelling. The other issue we were having was the tone was too consistently heavy. Once you invest in the stakes of the movie, it’s very difficult for those characters who are invested in those stakes to make light of anything in the film. Otherwise, the stakes become devalued. We went to Marvel, and we said we need to add some characters who have different points of view. Black Panther specifically, because we felt like he could be a free radical with a motivation that tied him to the plot, but had nothing to do with anything that the other characters were chasing.
ANTHONY RUSSO: We loved that idea, that he just didn’t care about this big, important issue at the center of the movie, which is one side versus the other.
JOSEPH RUSSO: The life and death stakes that drive the storytelling. Also then Ant-Man and Spider-Man. Neither was connected to the stakes of the plot, so they could allow us to have a tonal shift in the movie which would keep it from being…we like well-balanced filmmaking. Movies, in essence, are a commodity. You go to the theater. You pay it money. If you got kids, it’s going to cost you a lot of money. You want a well-rounded experience, especially from branded IP. If you can laugh, and cry, and be scared, and cheer, you’re getting more for your money than if you just laugh or if you just cry. Our intent was to dimensionalize the storytelling by introducing characters who could be lighter.
DEADLINE: Balancing those life and death stakes are these absurd random moments that happen with Bettany’s Vision, and the interplay between Mackie’s Falcon and Stan’s Winter Soldier, that are so funny they become as memorable as anything else in the film.
ANTHONY RUSSO: You know what, somebody else told me that last night, that same thing.
DEADLINE: I won’t spoil those moments here, but how do you know how far to go, to allow the audience to let off some of the tension, without compromising the seriousness? Do those moments happen spontaneously?
ANTHONY RUSSO: Some were scripted. On a structural level in storytelling, we find the audience gets a particularly kick out of a hard gear shift sometimes. So you’ve got Vision in the kitchen.
DEADLINE: Another laugh out loud moment.
ANTHONY RUSSO: It’s like you’re going from something really awful to something really light.
JOSEPH RUSSO: Contrast.
ANTHONY RUSSO: But because they’re in different contexts, they don’t seem disingenuous to one another. They seem like they can coexist. So I think that we got away with a lot of that because part of the story line was so dark in this movie, and part of it was so light. We got to slam back and forth. I think that’s why those moments, they’re almost like this tension relief where you get to the car with Falcon, Captain America and Winter Soldier, and something weird, goofball, and small happens.
DEADLINE: It’s a strength of Marvel storytelling that wasn’t part of Batman V Superman and its relentlessly serious tone. In Guardians of the Galaxy, Chris Pratt had numerous moments like that; In the first Avengers, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor says, ‘That’s my brother,’ and when the superheroes remind him Loki just killed 30 people, Thor adds, ‘Well, he’s adopted.” Does this consistent playful tone come from Marvel’s Kevin Feige?
JOSEPH RUSSO: We understand that that’s the formula. We worked in comedy for 15 years. Community was a genre-spoofing show that we executive produced. And Kevin saw these paintball episodes that we shot at the end of season two. And he thought, these guys should be doing action. It’s always a bonus with Kevin if you’re entertaining, as well. So the fact that we were doing comedy and that we could spoof action in a way that he could sense that we understood the genre, he brought us in and talked to us on Winter Soldier. I don’t think he knew that we were huge comic book fans or that we love political thrillers or that we would connect on so many other levels.
We developed a process over the years of shooting, where we have a very firm model that you can only make the movie out of what you bring into the edit room. You don’t got it, you can’t fix it, unless you go back and re-shoot it. And re-shoots are expensive. We work in digital and we don’t shut the camera off. We let it run. We’ll do multiple takes in a row because we don’t like the actors thinking too much. We give very succinct notes and there’s not a lot of discussion once we start rolling. Because you don’t build a performance from one take, you can build it from seven takes and layer that performance any way you want. You give small calibrations, so that the actors don’t get stuck in their head. You can give them small calibrative notes that guide them where you want them to go, slowly, over the course of six or seven takes.
We also learned from the many times that we’ve been on set, shot a scene and went, boom, nailed it, and yet in the edit room, we go, wow, we fu*ked that scene up. So we’ve learned too to think about what other dimensionalizing do we want out of the performance. Is playing it too heavy? What if we lighten it up here? In combination with working toward dimensionalizing the emotive side of the performance, we also typically have lines that we want to play with. They can either be dramatic or comedic. We’ll shoot a lot of jokes that we take into the edit room, and then it all becomes about tonal modulation. But you have to have those things in your back pocket to be able to do that. We do vibe very well with Kevin on that front. We have very similar senses of humor.
ANTHONY RUSSO: Kevin does have an excellent sense of humor. He may not be very involved in crafting the comedic material, but we use him as a guide.
JOSEPH RUSSO: He’s a good sounding board.
DEADLINE: You worked for the first time with Robert Downey Jr here, Iron Man changed his life and established the Marvel universe. What’s the balancing act in making him feel these jokes don’t undermine what he has built?
ANTHONY RUSSO: It wasn’t a given that Downey was going to do Civil War. He wasn’t contracted, and so we had to go woo him.
DEADLINE: What’s that like?
ANTHONY RUSSO: It was a big deal. Once we convinced Kevin this was the right way to go, he said, okay, now you guys got to go get Downey. So we met with Downey, and Kevin came with us. It took a series of meetings, but things went well from the get-go, and we ended up spending an enormous amount of time with Downey on this movie. He’s a wonderful collaborator. Character is very important to him and he pours himself into it and he loves it. We use him as a guide, a lot. We had really radical ideas for the character which turned him on. I would say this. Clooney told us one time…when we made Welcome to Collinwood, Clooney played a small role in that movie to help us get it made. We were thanking him for taking the role and saying we were sorry it wasn’t a bigger role and he said, ‘are you kidding me?’ He goes, ‘the job of a leading man is to show up and let everybody else steal the scene. I get to steal the scene, here. This is great fun for me.’ I think Downey might’ve gotten that here. Cap had to carry the load of the arc, and Robert had the ability to go more off book than the character would normally go in a movie. Get darker, go to a stranger place. That really turned him on as a performer.
DEADLINE: Paul Rudd had some moments like that, even though they involved the other superheroes looking at his Ant-Man with a great deal of scorn. It helped the chemistry.
ANTHONY RUSSO: What Rudd did on a performance level there was fascinating. He came to the set and goes, ‘I can’t believe I’m here. I’m looking around at all of these actors who play all these amazing characters, and I feel like I got to pinch myself..’ That was perfectly in line with what his character was doing in the scene. It was kind of funny.
JOSEPH RUSSO: We improvised a lot of that scene with him where he meets Captain America. A lot of that was written on the morning, based on how he was feeling. That’s about having a penchant for experimentation, and putting things down on film. We won’t say no. We’ll put it down on camera, and we’ll go figure it out in the edit room. Why not do everything? We’ll have your back in the editing room. And the writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who’ve written more Marvel films than anyone, they really understand the voices of thee characters. They are two of the best writers in big branded space right now.
DEADLINE: Your Spider-Man was the one I recall reading in the comics, as a kid. There was a playfulness I just didn’t feel onscreen in the last two iterations. Your webslinger is very young, and not as defined by tragedy as the other iterations. Tom Holland had a lot of fun here.
ANTHONY RUSSO: That process was very specific.
JOSEPH RUSSO: I collected comics since I was 10. He was my favorite character, and obviously, when you’re enthralled with the mythology like that at a very young age, it imprints on you. When we got the opportunity to work with the character, I spent a lot of time reaching back into my childhood and thinking, what was the essence of the mythology that spoke to me? He was young, that he was relateable, he was me, he was vulnerable. And he was insecure in a way that fed the humor. He was a kid. This is so critical. He hadn’t been interpreted that way on screen yet, played by an actor who was very close to the age of a high school student. Tom Holland’s 19 years old. So that was critical, to cast someone so young he wouldn’t have a certain self-awareness. The humor comes from a sort of incongruous placement of him into this world. He stands in contrast to all these other experienced superheroes who are dealing with a very adult problem.
DEADLINE: You loved Spider-Man, growing up. How did you feel about Captain America?
JOSEPH RUSSO: I didn’t love Captain America as a kid. It was not one of my favorite comics. I found him a very flat character. A little vanilla. I used to imagine Steve McQueen in my head when I would read the comics because at least it gave it a little bit more edge for me. What we pitched to Kevin was, listen, if you’re going to continue with the story, the fact that this guy crashes in the ice and is going to wake up in modern times is a perfect story reset for us to go after a different tone, a different theme, a different dimensional approach to the character…a modern approach. Our buzz terms are always post-modern and deconstruct; how can you either make something post-modern, or how can you deconstruct it? That’s when we get interested in the concept.
ANTHONY RUSSO: To put it really crudely, the thing we would default to is just we want to butch Captain America way up, and we thought we had a narrative excuse to do it because he had been frozen for 70 years and wakes up in a world that he doesn’t recognize, and so he cannot be the same optimist that he was back in the day.
DEADLINE: You made him this pissed off 16-pound ball, rolling down the alley at the next collision, the bad guys falling like bowling pins.
ANTHONY RUSSO: That’s a cool analogy.
DEADLINE: Your action is just…frantic.
JOSEPH RUSSO: Action for us is a function of story. It either has to move the story forward, or it has to define the character in some way, or it’s vacuous. You can only handle about 30 seconds or a minute or vacuous action before your brain starts to wander. The action films we loved always either had a character in existential crisis or always had beautiful character defining moments, and there also was an artistry to the execution of the action that would bring camera work, performance, sound design, temporal editing, all into it. The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A. 90 miles an hour in a car, somebody’s in the back seat having a panic attack. It ups the tension, not dissimilar to Gene Hackman almost hitting the woman, or the people crossing the street. The reason that chase scene in French Connection is so great is, it illustrates the insane drive behind the character to succeed at beating the villain. A dangerous drive, a reckless drive, which ultimately undoes him at the end of the film. So we approach action on two fronts. One is, what’s the storytelling front, and two, what’s the artistry of it? We like visceral impact. Michael Mann is a huge influence on us. We don’t hide that.
DEADLINE: What, in particular?
JOSEPH RUSSO: That bank heist in Heat is the greatest 10 minutes of action I’ve seen in 20 years of filmmaking. It’s character defining. It’s visceral. It’s intense. I literally feel like I’m in the middle of a heist. I sat in the theater, and when I walked out, I felt like I robbed a bank.
ANTHONY RUSSO: On Winter Soldier, for the causeway sequence where the Winter Soldier jumps onto the car, that’s what we were chasing.
JOSEPH RUSSO: Michael Mann’s bank heist. Limited dialogue. We did that eight and a half minute sequence in Winter Soldier and you could count the lines on two hands.
DEADLINE: How much does this movie plant seeds for the two Avengers movies you are making as your next major undertaking?
ANTHONY RUSSO: I will say that we had one big idea: if Infinity War is intended to be the culmination of the Marvel cinematic universe and this moment where they’re going to finally meet Thanos, which is the greatest threat that the universe has ever seen, then what can we do to set the stage for that in the most fun way? This was part of the reason we embraced Civil War. Is like, yeah, well, let’s shatter The Avengers before we get there. And make it fun to see if and how they come back.
JOSEPH RUSSO: That seemed a better story trajectory, to give them a long distance to travel. The other thing is, we knew we had to deconstruct. Because we’re fans as well of film making, and I’ll be the first guy at a midnight screening with my kid, too. I fu*king love movies, and I love big branded movies, and just from our own gut and our own reaction, clearly, it was becoming a saturated market. We felt like the smartest thing that we could do with the movie was to deconstruct the genre rather than to keep repeating that three-act structure where hero has a problem in the first act. Introduce villain. Hero and villain come into conflict in the second act. Third act, hero beats villain. We worked really hard to subvert that, with twists in the movie that are about subversion and playing with the fact that you are conditioned to believe that that’s where we’re going to go. And then we pull the rug out from under you.
DEADLINE: When do you start these Avengers films?
JOSEPH RUSSO: We already started them, a couple months ago. We had to. We start shooting in November, two movies back to back. So we need two scripts ASAP, and we probably started working on them six months ago.
DEADLINE: So you took advantage of shooting, while you had all those actors in costume?
JOSEPH RUSSO: Not in terms of shooting. Just story.
ANTHONY RUSSO: Just story, with Markus and McFeely, the writers. Hardcore conversations. As soon as we got into post on this movie, we gave ourselves a few weeks to transition and then we spent half days with the writers, and half in the edit room, for months. We’ll get the first draft of both scripts when this movie opens.
DEADLINE: This consecutive shoot trend started with The Lord of the Rings and it continues with Avatar and you guys. What’s the benefit of such a long ordeal?
ANTHONY RUSSO: It’s a very hard way to do it, but here’s the upside. You get to play with all these actors. It’s very hard to make that work financially as a studio, as a producer, to assemble that level of talent, and make them available for those movies. So it’s just that’s the way you have to work. It’s a hard way to work.
JOE RUSSO: Having a shorthand with the crew does create a continuity of vision and efficiency which is invaluable when you’re doing stuff of this scale. Any misspent dollar is a huge waste and a huge mistake.
DEADLINE: I just mentioned Peter Jackson and James Cameron, guys who’ve done multiple installments of big popcorn VFX movies. That’s rarified company. How do two brothers from Cleveland who started out making art films becomes the new Kings of Marvel?
JOSEPH RUSSO: It was a bit of a lottery ticket thing, without question.
ANTHONY RUSSO: We grew up film fans, we enjoyed movies with our dad, and we would watch The Late Show movie.
JOSEPH RUSSO: But our aesthetic growing up came out of the fact that we had a CinemaTech around the corner from us. So we grew up on foreign films, art house films. Truffaut was a huge influence on us. We liked experimentation in filmmaking. We liked to be surprised.
ANTHONY RUSSO: The Belgian film, Man Bites Dog, that was a big favorite of ours.
JOSEPH RUSSO: That was a big influence.
DEADLINE: The one where you went on this entertaining journey with a serial killer and then felt like an accomplice when he butchered a pregnant woman? I remember someone asking me to see that film, and being furious at being taken for that ride.
JOSEPH RUSSO: It’s a very dark…
ANTHONY RUSSO: This may surprise you, but that movie was our major stylistic reference for Arrested Development.
DEADLINE: Shut up.
ANTHONY RUSSO: It’s true.
JOSEPH RUSSO: It’s that vérité docu style approach that was a very dark comedy.
ANTHONY RUSSO: And there was an absurdist element. Even though the move was…at the heart, there was something absurd about it, right, at some level. It was so crazy, right?
DEADLINE: I do recall a moment where the killer runs into another killer with a camera crew, kills that killer and his crew, and is disappointed when his own crew tells them they used Beta equipment that wouldn’t work in their camera.
JOSEPH RUSSO: Exactly.
ANTHONY RUSSO: That was the kind of stuff that tickled us to death.
JOSEPH RUSSO: Lars von Trier was another we loved.
ANTHONY RUSSO: And all the Italian films. We developed a split personality; we’d geek out at the Cinemateque, but we recognized the movies you end up talking to everybody else about the most are the movies everybody loves, the big movies. So we saw those too.
DEADLINE: How did you break in?
ANTHONY RUSSO: Joe was in acting school, I was in law school just because I didn’t know what to do. Even though Joe nagged me to go to directing school, but I didn’t see the road into that world. We started a sketch comedy troupe together, which is where the name Gozie Agbo came from. Then Robert Rodriguez put out that book about how he made El Mariachi, and that you can make a movie for 7,000 dollars. A light bulb went off, and we thought, let’s try to make a movie. That took us six months.
JOSEPH RUSSO: We knew nothing about writing a script. We bought some how-to books, studied them, and wrote a script. But our influences were all radical filmmakers, and so the film itself was extremely radical, non-linear storytelling. It was called Pieces. Never been released, and part of our lack of experience or understanding of the film business, we put, like, a million dollars of music in the movie, which was edited very specifically to it. We didn’t have a million dollars to secure the music.
ANTHONY RUSSO: The money we did get came through credit cards. It probably took us three years to make the movie. We’d make a little bit, go back to work. It would sit for a while. Our family helped a little, but we carried debt from that movie for 10 years.
JOSEPH RUSSO: The interest on those cards killed us. I mean, who gives a credit card to 21 or 22 year olds? It’s going to kill them. The rates were insane, and so we bought some books on how to make movies.
ANTHONY RUSSO: We went to find everybody in Cleveland that we could who knew anything about making movies and would talk with them, and ask them questions, and show them what we were trying to do.
DEADLINE: So how does a movie that has never been released become a career break?
ANTHONY RU |
a potential hazard. Here are our folks on a slooooooowww day.
Our scientists have had lots of discussions on how one might safely and effectively reduce their populations, but apparently scientists in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, have come up with a novel solution: introduction of a Judas Fish. From an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which describes the work of Peter Sorensen, director of the new Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center at the University of Minnesota:
They are called “Judas” animals because, as the biblical reference implies, they betray. Sorensen said the lessons learned elsewhere using “Judas” animals to locate and kill unwanted species could be used here to fight Asian Carp. Radio-collared Judas pigs, sheep and goats have been released into the wild, then tracked until they lead officials to difficult-to-find herds of the same unwanted species. This week, he will use Judas fish implanted with tracking devices to locate the common carp in Staring Lake in Eden Prairie. Though carp are dispersed in lakes during the summer, they congregate in the winter, and the Judas fish reveal to researchers exactly where they are. A commercial fisherman then will net the mass of unwanted carp, estimated at about 26,000 fish, which root up vegetation, causing lakes to go turbid. Water quality and fish habitat usually improve after carp are removed. Sorensen started using the method in 2008 as part of his carp research. “It’s been very successful,” he said. “Carp are really social animals – one will always lead you to another.” Sorensen said officials could apply the same method to seek out and destroy Asian carp.
I’m not sure how well this will work in our Big Rivers where we see large populations, but if Carp are indeed a schooling fish this might be one of the most efficient approaches to controlling the species. I checked online and could not find any efforts underway to map populations on Region 7 Big Rivers, an activity which might help in maximizing the efficiency of Judas Fish introduction. If you have seen any hot spots, on the Missouri River, let us know with a comment below. Perhaps if enough interest is expressed, we can start a twitter hash tag campaign to collect lat/longs of Carp hotspots on the river, eventually building a crowd-sourced map. I smell another blog post…or maybe it is just the fish.
Jeffery Robichaud is a second generation EPA scientist who has worked for the Agency since 1998. He currently serves as Deputy Director of EPA Region 7′s Environmental Services Division. Jeff has never incurred the wrath of a flying fish. Perhaps his aversion to meals of aquatic animals is sensed by these cantakerous critters who thus leave him alone
Editor's Note: The views expressed here are intended to explain EPA policy. They do not change anyone's rights or obligations. You may share this post. However, please do not change the title or the content, or remove EPA’s identity as the author. If you do make substantive changes, please do not attribute the edited title or content to EPA or the author.
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EPA is providing this link for informational purposes only. EPA cannot attest to the accuracy of non-EPA information provided by any third-party sites or any other linked site. EPA does not endorse any non-government websites, companies, internet applications or any policies or information expressed therein.Main points:
1-Dengue epidemic in Brazil persists endemically (on an ongoing basis) due to the marginalisation and misery of millions of people, especially in Northeast Brazil. On top of that, Zika virus, a similar disease although more benign, is now spreading.
2. A dramatic increase of congenital malformations, especially microcephaly in newborns, was detected and quickly linked to the Zika virus by the Brazilian Ministry of Health. However, they fail to recognise that in the area where most sick persons live, a chemical larvicide producing malformations in mosquitoes has been applied for 18 months, and that this poison (pyroproxyfen) is applied by the State on drinking water used by the affected population.
3. Previous Zika epidemics did not cause birth defects in newborns, despite infecting 75% of the population in those countries. Also, in other countries such as Colombia there are no records of microcephaly; however, there are plenty of Zika cases.
4. The pyroproxyfen being used (as recommended by WHO) is manufactured by Sumitomo Chemical, a Japanese company associated with Monsanto in Latin America for weed control.
5. Brazilian doctors (Abrasco) are claiming that the strategy of chemical control is contaminating the environment as well as people, that it is not decreasing the amount of mosquitoes, and that this strategy is in fact a commercial manoeuvre from the chemical poisons industry, deeply integrated into Latin American ministries of health as well as WHO and PAHO.
6. Massive spreading using planes, as the governments of Mercosur are considering, is criminal, useless, and a political manoeuvre to simulate that actions are taken. The basis of the progress of the disease lies in inequality and poverty, and the best defence are community-based actions.
7. The last strategy deployed in Brazil, and which might be replicated in all our countries, is the use of GM mosquitoes —a total failure, except for the company supplying mosquitoes.
To access the full report in pdf click here:REPORT from Physicians in the Crop-Sprayed Villages regarding Dengue-Zika (22581)
Introduction
Along with the chronic epidemic of Dengue in Brazil (almost endemic in Northeast Brazil, just like the millions of people living in poverty and marginality), an outbreak of Zika, a virus disease also transmitted by the Aedes mosquito, has been taking place for 9 months.
In Pernambuco, nearly 4,000 children born in 2015 show congenital malformations, especially MICROCEPHALY (heads smaller than usual). The Brazilian Ministry of Health promptly claimed that it was a consequence of the infection caused by the Zika virus(1)
Discovered in 1947 in the Zika forest in Uganda, the ZIKA virus is an arbovirus of the genus Flavivirus, similar to the virus causing dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile fever, and St. Louis encephalitis. First human cases of Zika infection were described during the 1960’s in Africa; after that there were outbreaks in Southeast Asia and Oceania(2).
Up until 2007, when a large epidemic appeared in Yap —an island in the Pacific Ocean (Micronesia)— Zika infections had been limited to sporadic cases or small-scale epidemics. During the Yap epidemic, an estimated three-quarters of the local population had been infected. (2)
The expanding area of distribution of ZIKA turned Zika fever into an emerging disease, confirmed by the current epidemic affecting French Polynesia since October 2013 and New Caledonia, with reported cases since late 2013. These Pacific Islands are characterised by the large number of mosquitoes that proliferate especially among native villages. (2)
In May 2015, the World Health Organization reported native cases identified in Brazil. Last December, the Ministry of Health estimated that 440,000 to 1,300,000 suspected cases of Zika virus disease had occurred in Brazil during 2015. (2)
The true incidence of Zika fever is unknown, due to the fact that its clinical manifestations imitate the infection caused by Dengue virus, and to the lack of simple and reliable lab tests. In endemic areas, epidemiological studies show a high prevalence of antibodies against ZIKA. For example, the 2007 Yap epidemic resulted in an attack rate of 14.6/1,000 inhabitants, and a seroprevalence of 750/1000 inhabitants after the epidemic (i.e. 750/1000 had the infection without developing the disease.) The infection appears to be symptomatic only in 18% of cases. (2-3)
It usually happens as a flu-like syndrome, often confused with other arbovirus infections such as Dengue or Chikungunya. The typical form of the disease is associated with low-grade fever (between 37.8 ºC and 38.5 ºC), arthralgia, especially of small joints in hands and feet, myalgia, headache, retro-orbital pain, conjunctivitis, and maculopapular rash. Digestive problems (abdominal pain, diarrhoea, constipation), ulceration of mucous membranes (thrush), and itching can be rarely observed. Asthenia after infection seems to be common.(2)
On December 2013, during the Zika epidemic in French Polinesia, an increase in cases of Guillain Barre syndrome, a neurological paralysis linked to immune disruption generated by viruses, vaccines and/or environmental toxins, was reported. (4)
Zika in Brazil
On January 2016, the Brazilian Association for Collective Health (ABRASCO) published a Technical Note and Open Letter to the People of Brazil(1), questioning the linear analysis carried out by the Ministry of Health of Brazil, which linked the emergent congenital malformations to Zika, leaving aside other factors that can have an influence on the problem, and minimising the fact that the widespread epidemic in the Pacific and the current epidemic in Colombia, resulted in no cases of malformations, much less microcephaly. Above all, the role of the chemical model for vector control is ignored. This model, implying the mass usage of chemical poisons in order to reduce or eradicate the presence of mosquitoes, has been carried out in the most vulnerable areas of Northeast Brazil for 40 years, whilst the epidemics, poverty, social marginalisation, deforestation, and climate change have multiplied.
Since the second half of 2014, the Brazilian Ministry of Health(5) stopped using temephos (an organophosphate agrotoxic to which Aedes larvae became resistant) as larvicide, massively incorporating the poison Pyroproxyfen, commercially known as Sumilarv and manufactured by Sumitomo Chemical, Japanese company associated with Monsanto in Latin America for marketing of pesticides to control “weeds”. (1,5).
The spatial distribution by place of residence of mothers of children born with microcephaly shows a higher concentration in the poorest areas of Northeastern Brazil, with poor urbanisation and inadequate sanitation. Large areas of Recife and other cities in Northeastern Brazil, with intermittent water supply, led these communities to store water at home in an unsafe manner, due to the inadequate protection of tanks intended for human consumption, leading to very favourable conditions for the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, by creating a breeding ground which should not exist and that can be mechanically removed.(1)
Pyroproxyfen is applied directly by the Brazilian Ministry of Health on drinking-water reservoirs used by the people of Pernambuco, where the proliferation of the Aedes mosquito is very high (a situation similar to the Pacific Islands).(6) This poison, recommended by the WHO, is a growth inhibitor of mosquito larvae, which alters the development process larva-pupa-adult, thus generating malformations in developing mosquitoes and causing their death or incapacity. It is analogous to the insect juvenile hormone or juvenoids, which has the effect of inhibiting the development of adult insect characteristics (for example wings, mature external genitalia) and the reproductive development, maintaining an “immature” aspect (nymph or larvae), which means that it acts by endocrine disruption and that is teratogenic.
Malformations detected in thousands of children from pregnant women living in areas where the Brazilian state added pyriproxyfen to drinking water is not a coincidence, even though the Ministry of Health places a direct blame on Zika virus for this damage, while trying to ignore its responsibility and ruling out the hypothesis of direct and cumulative chemical damage caused by years of endocrine and immunological disruption of the affected population. Doctors from the Brazilian Association for Collective Health (ABRASCO) demand that urgent epidemiological studies taking into account this causal link be carried out, especially when among 3,893 cases of malformations confirmed until January 20, 2016, 49 children have died and only five of them were confirmed to have been infected with Zika(1).
Many policy-makers, even PAHO and OMS, epidemiologists, public health experts, chemists and politicians in general easily forget that human beings, every one of us, have deployed embryonic development processes in which we go through very different stages. The evolution from zygote to embryo, from embryo to foetus and from foetus to newborn, is not far from the development process of the mosquito affected by pyriproxyfen. They also very easily try to ignore that in humans, 60% of our active genes are identical to those of insects such as the Aedes mosquito. And it is much more confusing when they are “advised” by experts from Foundations and chemical insecticides companies (for ex.: Fundación Mundo Sano and Chemotecnica), or when decision makers from the Ministry of Health are former employees of global companies manufacturing and selling poisons for “domestic purposes.”
Brazil fumigates against adult Aedes using Malation, a carcinogenic organophosphorate compound according to WHO. Paraguay acquired thousands of tonnes of clorpyriphos in order to kill mosquitoes, although we know that clorpyriphos affects the developing brain of foetus and newborns. In Argentina, vector “control” is carried out using pyrethroids, which is a little less toxic but banned in Europe because of its effect on people.
For doctors in ABRASCO, the problem is that behind these decisions we find the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization, holding “Pesticides” committees that maintain no dialogue with the environmental, sanitation and health promotion committees. In these agencies, the committees prescribing the use and regulation of the purchase of supplies for vector control for the entire world are imperial. It is these agencies who convince and endorse the tendering processes for national governments.(1)
How to face these diseases
The hegemonic strategies for facing these diseases spread by mosquitoes and multiplied by poverty, lack of sanitation, excreta, lack of safe water, are vertical intervention programs, while chemical poisons (larvicides and adulticides) demobilise the population by relying on the success of the poison’s properties, which in turn makes them sick, kills the natural predators of mosquitoes and generates the need for repeated applications that only benefit the chemical poisons companies.
A vast amount of independent scientific data shows how this strategy is defective and that it is only useful for taking photographs of the rulers in office. Community-based strategies including social participation and mobilisation yield better results against the impending epidemic.(7,8,9) The steps that lead to defeating the disease are linked to social justice and equity. Clearly, the social sectors affected by Dengue and Zika are the poorest and most deprived of services and rights.
In some very specific moments, massive aerial spraying over inhabited areas might be advisable, but their effects are limited only to decreasing the amount of adult mosquitoes during 2-3 days, which can be useful when colder days arrive (note that the Aedes mosquito is immobilised and does not reproduce nor feed with temperatures below 23 °C.)
Controlled applications around houses in the first case (focus control) are useful to decrease the progress of the epidemic, but massive sprayings over entire cities requires an analysis of health costs (damage to human health and the ecosystem) vs health benefits (control and mitigation of the epidemic), which cannot be justified in any “sanitary” way, despite being used by governments and the hegemonic press to simulate that measures are taken to defend the health of people.
Our experience from the Dengue epidemic in Cordoba in 2009, in which we had direct participation, shows that the distribution of cases corresponds to the same distribution of infant mortality in 2007 and the distribution of the population with higher unmet basic needs, namely: lack of housing, jobs, education and health, which can be seen on the maps attached.
Massive spraying is not the solution to a problem; it’s merely generating a business within a problem.
New strategy: GM mosquitoes (new business)
Within this framework, there is a new health intervention strategy in Brazil, which they will try to expand to the entire region: GM mosquitoes.
The English company Oxitec sells male GM mosquitoes, supposedly in order to decrease the Aedes population. A lethal gene is inserted in those mosquitoes, which is transmitted to the offspring, causing death to larvae if it is not blocked by an antibiotic (tetracycline).
The goal is that millions of male mosquitoes are released to mate with wild females, so that their eggs result in larvae which dies spontaneously.(10,11)
The business is to sell those lab mosquitoes to governments, and then people need to “protect” those mosquitoes because, supposedly, it is neither necessary nor advisable to remove the sites where mosquitoes breed.
Currently in Brazil nearly 15 million GM mosquitoes have been released, and the failure is complete. Where field tests were carried out, less than 15% of larvae were transgenic, that is to say… wild females are not accepting the English mosquito from Oxitec. The response: increasing the release in poor areas. (10)
Also, we must take into account that the biology of the disease shows that the female only “stings” when it’s pregnant and generating eggs after being fertilised by a male; it does it in that state and only then, because it needs blood components in order to develop the eggs. So, if millions of male mosquitoes are released, there will be many more fertilised females looking to suck the blood of mammals, thus increasing the spreading of the disease from infected people to healthy people!
In the face of the Zika threat, mass sprayings in Mercosur
The governments of Mercosur are causing alarm with the threat of Zika and microcephaly, proposing “more of the same.” The agribusiness is offering the services of the “Soya Air Force” to be used for spraying over cities and villages.(12) Monoculture, the massive use of pesticides, deforestation, destruction of flora and fauna, ecological imbalance, climate change, inequality, those factors are not considered as a cause of the problem.
To social inequality, these epidemics will add health inequalities, and governments with their chemical attacks will generate environmental inequality.
References
1- nota técnica e carta aberta à população Microcefalia e doenças vetoriais relacionadas ao Aedes aegypti: os perigos das abordagens com larvicidas e nebulização química – fumacê. Janeiro de 2016. GT Salud y Ambiente. Asociación Brasileña de Salud Colectiva. ABRASCO. https://www.abrasco.org.br/site/2016/02/nota-tecnica-sobre-microcefalia-e-doencas-vetoriais-relacionadas-ao-aedes-aegypti-os-perigos-das-abordagens-com-larvicidas-e-nebulizacoes-quimicas-fumace/
2. Hennessey M, Fischer M, Staples JE. Zika Virus Spreads to New Areas — Region of the Americas, May 2015–January 2016. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2016;65(Early Release):1–4. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6503e1er
3. Duffy MR1, Chen TH, Hancock WT, Powers AM, Kool JL, Lanciotti RS, Pretrick M, Marfel M, Holzbauer S, Dubray C, Guillaumot L, Griggs A, Bel M, Lambert AJ, Laven J, Kosoy O, Panella A, Biggerstaff BJ, Fischer M, Hayes EB Zika virus outbreak on Yap Island, Federated States of Micronesia N Engl J Med. 2009 Jun 11;360(24):2536-43. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa0805715.
4. Oehler E, Watrin L, Larre P, Leparc-Goffart I, Lastère S, Valour F, Baudouin L, Mallet HP, Musso D, Ghawche F. Zika virus infection complicated by Guillain-Barré syndrome – case report, French Polynesia, December 2013. Euro Surveill. 2014;19(9):pii=20720. Available online: http://www.eurosurveillance.org/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleId= 07202.
5. Sumitomo Chemical and Monsanto Expand Weed Control Collaboration to
Latin America. Sumimoto Chemical News Release December 09, 2014. http://www.sumitomo-chem.co.jp/english/newsreleases/docs/20141209e.pdf
6. Orientações técnica para utilização do larvicida pyriproxyfen (0,5 G) no controle de Aedes aegypti. Ministério da Saúde. http://u.saude.gov.br/images/pdf/2014/maio/30/Instrucoes-para-uso-de-pyriproxyfen-maio-2014.pdf
7. Caprara, Andrea et al. “Entomological Impact and Social Participation in Dengue Control: A Cluster Randomized Trial in Fortaleza, Brazil.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 109.2 (2015): 99–105. PMC. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.
8. Espinoza-Gomez, F, H Moises, and R Coll-Cardenas. “Educational Campaign versus Malathion Spraying for the Control of Aedes Aegypti in Colima, Mexico.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 56.2 (2002): 148–152. PMC. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.
9. Andersson, Neil et al. “Evidence Based Community Mobilization for Dengue Prevention in Nicaragua and Mexico (Camino Verde, the Green Way): Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial.” BMJ : British Medical Journal 351 (2015): h3267. PMC. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.
10. Helen Wallace. Mosquitos Genéticamente Modificados: Preocupaciones actuales. TWN Biotechnology & Biosafety Series No. 15. Rapal Uruguay. Web. 3 Feb 2016. http://www.rapaluruguay.org/transgenicos/Mosquitos%20Gen%E9ticamente%20Modificados%20%20parte%20I%20y%20II.pdf
11. Genewatch UK. Marzo 2015. Mosquitos Genéticamente Modificados de Oxitec: ¿Un enfoque creíble para abordar el problema del dengue?. Web 03 Feb 2016. http://www.genewatch.org/uploads/f03c6d66a9b354535738483c1c3d49e4/Mosquitos_Gen_ticamente_Modificados_de_Oxitec.pdf
12. La Nación. Alistan unos 135 aviones para fumigar Mercosur. Web 3 feb 2016. http://www.lanacion.com.py/2016/02/02/alistan-unos-135-aviones-para-fumigar-mercosur/
February 3, 2016, Production Team REDUAS,
Coordinator Dr. Medardo Avila Vazquez.
Translation for “Ayni Translations”The Pittsburgh Steelers filed a formal complaint with the NFL earlier this week, alleging that Dolphins defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh -- who has a history of dirty play going back several years -- intentionally kicked their quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger.
The NFL has reviewed the evidence, and per CBS Sports NFL Insider Jason La Canfora, has decided against fining Suh for the incident.
NFL did not fine Ndamukong Suh for an incident in which the Steelers felt he may have attempted to kick Roethlisberger in the knee — Jason La Canfora (@JasonLaCanfora) October 21, 2016
Here's a shot of the play in question:
Here is a clearer shot of #Dolphins Suh kicking #Steelers Ben Roethliberger that @Alex_Kozora first discovered pic.twitter.com/UubUHFOGAl — Steelers Depot (@Steelersdepot) October 20, 2016
There's no question that Suh kicked Roethlisberger. It's plainly obvious in the video. The question, as it always seems to be with Suh, is whether he did it intentionally. The NFL obviously does not feel that was the case here.Duane Schrock, Jr. was estranged from his father, who wasn’t comfortable with his son being gay. In a sweet gesture, Schrock sent a Father’s Day card in 1989 to try and reconnect, but the letter never arrived. Until now.
Duane Schrock, Sr. is now 87 years old and living in Lynchburg, Virginia. He recently received the letter from his son a full 26 years after it was postmarked. It was like getting a message from beyond the grave for the father, whose son passed away in 1995 from AIDS complications at the young age of 45.
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“I still kind of tear up when I think about it,” Schrock Sr. told Virginia’s WSET. “To get it a few days after Father’s Day [but] mailed in 1989.”
Schrock, Sr. has moved around the country for decades and said the card must have kept getting forwarded until it finally found him.
The card, with an adorable illustration of a panda bear cuddling a baby panda, was inscribed with a simple peacemaking message: “Dear Dad, we haven’t been in touch for quite a while. I’m doing fine and am very happy in Richmond, I’d like to hear from you. Have a Happy Father’s Day, Love Duane.”
The father said that back then, he hadn’t agreed with his son’s “homosexual lifestyle” and “asked him if he’d made peace with God, because I want to see him in Heaven.”
Schrock, Sr. was overjoyed to get the letter, nearly 30 years after the fact. He thanked the post office, and said the fact that postal workers were so persistent, “restored [his] faith in the mail service.”
H/T and screengrab via WSETNEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Adults with higher levels of hostility are more likely to be lighter at birth and throughout childhood than less hostile people according to a study published in journal Psychosomatic Medicine.
Hostility has been linked to risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality, but it is uncertain why this occurs, note Dr. Katri Raikkonen, of the University of Helsinki, Finland, and colleagues. They suggest that a common underlying origin may be low fetal and early postnatal development.
The researchers studied 939 women and 740 men born in Helsinki between 1934 and 1944 who completed a test called the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale at an average age of 63.4 years. The authors then estimated the subjects’ growth patterns from birth, child welfare, and school records. Adult body size was also measured in a physical examination.
Study participants with higher levels of hostility had a lower body weight and smaller body mass index at birth - they also had a slower than average weight gain from birth to 6 months of age and throughout childhood. These subjects, however, became heavier in adulthood, the investigators report.
Individuals with higher levels of hostility also tended to be shorter in the first year of life and were also shorter in adulthood. The authors note that this growth trajectory was mostly attributable to slower growth in stature from birth to 6 months compared with any other factors.
“These two trajectories of growth that characterized men and women with higher levels of hostility are to a large extent comparable to the trajectories that our study group has shown to depict men and women who have coronary events, stroke, or type 2 diabetes as adults,” Raikkonen and colleagues point out.
The effects appeared to be unrelated to sex, father’s occupational status, mother’s age at delivery, number of siblings, breastfeeding or education level attained by adulthood, they note.
“Against this background,” the researchers conclude, “we interpret our findings as suggesting that hostility and cardiovascular disease may share a common vulnerability factor in fetal and early postnatal life.”
Psychosomatic Medicine, April 2008.EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Radical homosexuals claim YOU support homosexual "marriage," special job rights and promotion of homosexuality in schools. Please fill out the survey below and let your voice be heard.
Contacting and organizing pro-Family conservatives costs a great deal of money. After filling out the American Morality Survey below, please consider chipping in with a donation to Public Advocate of the United States to keep this program running.
1. Do you support the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn traditional marriage between one man and one woman? Yes No Unsure 2. Should homosexuality be promoted in schools as a healthy lifestyle choice, while information about the life threatening consequences are ignored? Yes No Unsure 3. Do you support homosexual “marriage” for homosexuals or “marriage like” rights, like homosexuals being able to adopt children and raise them in their “lifestyle”? Yes No Unsure 4. Should homosexuals receive special job rights and force businesses, schools, churches and even daycares to hire and advance homosexuals or face prosecution and multimillion-dollar lawsuits? Yes No Unsure
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Posted
A Muslim parent fears a support kit which is meant to help teachers spot children at risk of becoming radicalised will provoke extreme reactions from some teachers.
The Federal Government is sending the kits out to the nation's schools and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Counterterrorism Michael Keenan said it would be a valuable resource.
"We want to make sure that teachers and other frontline workers are able to identify people that might be at risk to violent extremism and intervene as early as possible to make sure they don't turn into a larger problem," he said.
But Kathryn Jones, who has five children, said she read the kit material online and considered its content divisive.
"Children already struggling a lot with being differentiated because they're Muslim, being antagonised about being bombers and terrorists — which is certainly something that my children have experienced too much — will have the spotlight on them even more," she said.
She expressed concern even innocent behaviours could be misinterpreted.
"Things like using your hand like it's a gun and pretending to shoot someone," she said.
"I heard a story from a friend that one young girl used her carrot like a gun and the teacher totally freaked out at her.
"It's going to push people to extreme reactions over childish things and not really get people looking at what's really going on."
Kit could 'build division, not cohesion'
Ms Jones said the spotlight was too often put on Muslim Australians.
"These decisions by government to get people to look for things actually build division among people, rather than creating that cohesion," she said.
The woman said the terrorism hotline introduced in the Howard government era had bred a mistrust of Australian Muslims and she was worried the new kit would cause the same impact on Muslim children.
"[Former prime minister] John Howard did the same thing when he said if you see anything suspicious ring this number," she said.
"As soon as he said that suddenly we were being treated differently, even though I'm as Aussie as anyone out there.
"Just because I put a headscarf on and decided to become a Muslim I was being treated differently."
Associate lecturer David Olney, an expert on terrorism issues from the University of Adelaide, said the kit had a role to play.
He believed it could help teachers and that "any education is good education".
"Violent extremism, it's the boogie man. We don't know where it's going to come from, we don't know who it's going to be," he said.
"This document's making the point that one bad choice does not lead you to the end of the path of violent extremism and even if that is the only point that people take away from it, that is a positive in educational and societal terms."
But he said he considered some of the case studies in the government kit — including one which talked about a woman who was into "alternative music" and left-wing environmental activism — were patronising.
"The balance may not be perfect, it may range between being patronising in places and incomplete in others but, really, when you're trying to undertake a task like this in under 30 pages, it's probably about as good as it's going to be," he said.
Topics: religion-and-beliefs, schools, teachers, education, community-and-society, government-and-politics, federal-government, sa, adelaide-5000, adelaide-university-5005The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters, aka Welfare Queen Maxine, held her second town hall.
This woman has taken out-of-touch insanity to a whole new level. She still demands the impeachment of our president, even though the fired FBI Director admitted that he was leaking classified data to the press, and both sides of the aisle now acknowledge (Republicans knew it all along) that Trump and Russia never colluded to fix the election.
But that has not stopped Waters from lying repeatedly to her constituents. Nor has she stopped taking on the moniker of “Auntie Maxine” to wayward millennials. They realize that Barack Obama was using them for the last eight years, sticking them with the largest national debt in history, combined with diminished job opportunities and exorbitant student loan and healthcare costs. The millennials are our latest lost generation, and they need any elderly figure ready to ride high on the lies that more government is the answer to all their problems.
What will they think when Bernie Sanders and wife face investigations for the socialist steering big money to help her firm? Come to think of it, Waters had done something similar for her husband. She complains about two scoops, but she has passed only three bills. She’s also been ranked four times as the "most corrupt" in Congress. “Stay woke!” Auntie Maxine assures her supporters.
And yet, in Gardena, CA, the Freeway City where local Republican leadership balanced budgets and welcomed small business, Waters didn’t find the groundswell of support she had been hoping for. No Antifa, no Black Lives Matter. Instead, Trump supporters, conservative Republicans, angry constituents of all backgrounds, and outraged patriots (including the hardcore Proud Boys) showed up to take her on. Waters’ maniacal hatred for President Trump and her rampant disregard for citizens and our Constitution have gone unchecked for too long.
I endured being escorted out of her first town hall. I would not tolerate disrespect this time. I was prepared to make my point, even if I couldn’t say it to her face (See picture above). For the first time in her too-long career, the queen faced a full-court siege against her pre-eminence. Angry voters in California are “woke”, recognizing that playing nice and tolerating the abusive evil of the Democratic hordes and their enabling corporate bundlers will no longer work.
The last bastions of the Democratic Party are the urban ghettos and the public schools, and both of them are falling apart fast. Freedom, innovation, and real education are breaking the chains of the progressive Left. They don’t control the media narrative anymore, either. Perhaps that’s one reason why the press didn’t show up in larger droves at this town hall. And that ties into the first thing I noticed. Where was the press?
Then came the lines of constituents to enter. I had signed up two weeks ago, only to get an email the day before that only constituents who lived in the district could attend the town hall inside. She promised an overflow room for those who wanted to attend. What?! Maxine Waters doesn’t even live in her own district. We the taxpaying stakeholders pay her salary, but we can’t see her in person?!
As soon as we learned this, pandemonium broke out among the Trump supporters, although some of them had prepared for this outrage. Others didn’t even want to go in! All of us blared out on bullhorns, loudspeakers, and never-ending shouts. We stayed “woke” alright, drowning out her annoying, repetitive lies about Obamacare, Russia, and our president.
One press agent inside the town hall recorded her incessant call to “Impeach 45”, but the Los Angeles Times could not run from the louder chants of “USA! USA!” and “Impeach Maxine!” outside. If Waters didn’t want to see us, she definitely had to hear us! A few Trump supporters made it into the meeting, and walked around with “Impeach Mad Max” signs. Meanwhile at every exit, Trump supporters lined up with signs and bullhorns blaring. For decades, Democratic Congressmen have gotten away with just about everything. Activists leaned to the left, and devoured Republicans every chance they could. Eight years of Obama and his community organizing cabal pushed the limits of raw power into the public political sphere. Waters would have to face the deluge from Americans fed up with her socialist pandering and race-baiting.
For twenty minutes after her town hall, she could not escape from the building. She tried exiting one way, but we caught her off guard. As soon as the police walked out, then rolled back in, announcing “She’s not coming out.”
What is it, Maxine? I thought you weren’t afraid of anybody!” I taunted.
Finally, Gardena Police and her servile handlers guided her out a back door. The boos and hollering rang through the air. “Fire Maxine!” “James Brown wants his wig back!” echoed throughout the block. Some of our citizen-reporters chased her car all the way to the street.
We the People have had enough, and we can’t wait to send her packing. It was a glorious rout against the Welfare Queen from Watts. This is the true Resistance, right in anarchy-ridden California. Can you imagine at any other time in her career, Waters’ getting booed so viciously? It’s a new political game, now, and |
Ordinary installation'
Roland Park resident Jon Laria said he didn't understand what all the fuss was about.
"This is a very ordinary installation," said Laria, an attorney and chairman of the new Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Commission, which promotes cycling in the city. "I feel frankly like everybody is afraid of it, but if you go out in the world, this is what cycle tracks look like. There's nothing aberrational about the design or the location."
Laria also said it's important to build up the city's biking infrastructure because the city is "falling behind" others like Chicago, which has hundreds of miles of dedicated bicycle routes.The College Football Playoff committee has yet to rank a single team from outside of the power conference, and that includes an undefeated Marshall. Strength of schedule is a point of emphasis for the committee and the undefeated Thundering Herd do not have it.
Marshall has faced zero teams that are bowl eligible and only Middle Tennessee State has a winning record at 5-4, and Ohio has a 5-5 record. Overall, the opponents for Marshall have a record of 29-51 (.362), and the five Conference USA opponents it has played this year are a combined 18-31 (.367).
Looking at BCFToys.com -- which is run by Brian Fremeau of Football Outsiders -- he puts Marshall's strength of schedule at 128th which is dead last amongst all of the FBS teams. So, it is safe to say that Marshall needs some help and since margin of victory doesn't come into play they need all of the teams they have played to keep winning.
Marshall does have a test against a surging Rice Owls team that is 6-3 and is on a six-game winning streak.
East Carolina falling to Cincinnati essentially removed the American of being the Group of Five representative in a big money bowl game, so it comes down to Marshall and the Mountain West champion. The MAC is not really in the discussion but if Northern Illinois wins the MAC at 11-2 they could be in the mix if Marshall does stumble, and if anyone from the West division wins the Mountain West.
Boise State is right in the middle of the country at 65, Colorado State is a bit lower at 80 and if somehow Nevada wins the Mountain West they have a decent shot to earn the New Year's Day bowl bid and their schedule rank comes in at 74.
Here is the breakdown from BCFToys.com in visual form. First up is Marshall and they are ranked as the No. 32 team in the country, but they also have the worst schedule in all of Conference USA.
Here is the Mountain West and Wyoming has the toughest schedule of the conference, and it helps to have played Oregon and Michigan State. But if you compare the Mountain West strength of schedule to all of the Conference USA teams it is not even all that close.
For good measure, here is the MAC, that league is actually worse than Conference USA for strength of schedule.
Another thing going in favor of the Mountain West is that SportSource Analytics is providing the data that the selection committee is using to help determine the playoff and New Year's Day bowl games. The companies data really likes Boise State as the overwhelming favorite and then Colorado State.
Marshall has little to no chance and the MAC front runner, Northern Illinois, is in a similar situation as Marshall, but they have two loses already on its schedule.
With just four weeks left of college football it is looking more and more likely that the Mountain West champion will get to play in a New Year's Day bowl game.[[{"fid":"109259","view_mode":"full","fields":{"format":"full","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_css_class[und]":"_none"},"type":"media","attributes":{"class":"media-element file-full _none"}}]]
One section of the sprawling camps, from earlier video before the snow
Winter has come to Standing Rock with the season's first blizzard. So has an evacuation order, the rekindling of grievous collective memory, and the exquisite irony of white people once again telling Native people to get off their own land - in the name of concern, yet, for the safety of those living as their ancestors did before them, prayerfully and peaceably except when assaulted by water-cannon, flash-grenade-armed riot police. Friday's statement that the Corps of Engineers would close the Oceti Sakowin camp Dec. 5 and seek "a peaceful and orderly transition to a safer location” was swiftly followed by the governor's executive order calling for mandatory evacuation of all campers.
Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s Chairman Dave Archambault called the order "a menacing action meant to cause fear" - never mind that the state has no authority over tribal lands - and suggested if the governor is worried about safety he should clear the blockade, let water protectors stay warm in their abodes, cease blasting them weaponry and stop putting them in dog pens. "Although we have suffered much,” said the Sioux in a further plea to Obama to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, “We still have hope (you will) close the chapter of broken promises to our people and especially our children.”
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In an open letter to Obama after visiting Standing Rock, rocker and activist Neil Young likewise called the confrontation "a moment of truth" and a moment to do right before "our surprise president" inevitably does more wrong. Clearly moved by the dignity of the protectors, Young noted, "They stand, their hair frozen from water cannons. They stand for all that is good, and they stay strong."
Still, they need help. On this #Giving Tuesday, aimed at supporting good causes, there is much good to be done. You can give money via Stand With Standing Rock, donate to a winter housing project, help fund the Dec. 4 trip of over 2,000 veterans to support Standing Rock, or mail warm things and other supplies to
[[{"fid":"109260","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_css_class[und]":"_none"},"type":"media","attributes":{"class":"media-element file-default _none"}}]]Nordic Components has joined the legion of manufacturers of AR-15-based pistol caliber carbines but with a neat little twist. The Nordic Pistol Caliber Carbine will feature a removable, interchangeable, modular magazine well system that will allow for the use of different makes and models of pistol magazines.
Shooters who have been paying attention to the worlds of IDPA and USPSA competition shooting will know that the pistol caliber carbine (PCC) is red hot these days. The PCC now has classifications and divisions in both shooting sport’s governing bodies.
The Nordic Components Pistol Caliber Carbine touts the ability to lock back on an empty magazine, a feature that Nordic Components says is critical to both a defensive and competition use. The Nordic Components Pistol Caliber Carbine upper, lower and handguard are machined from 7075 billet aluminum and look pretty slick to this writer. The NC-3 handguard is a freefloat design that uses the Magpul M-LOK attachment design.
Initially the Nordic Components Pistol Caliber Carbine will be offered with the most popular calibers and configurations, in this case 9mm, GLOCK magazines and S&W M&P magazines in 16 inch rifle configuration, 8.5 inch SBR configuration, and a 8.5 inch pistol version. Nordic promises additional magwells and caliber in the future.
To learn more about the NC-PCC just follow the linky.Valve announced the PlayStation 3 version of Portal 2 at least year's E3, and promised Sony would be getting the best version of the game. Launching with Steam on the PlayStation 3, giving players a copy of the game on the PC and Mac when accounts are linked, and allowing cross-platform play is certainly a good way to get the attention of gamers.
We spoke with Doug Lombardi, Valve's VP of Marketing, about this news, and what it means for other consoles as well as future PlayStation 3 games.
"It's not two copies of the game, it's the same game"
"The goal is to give a Portal 2 customer access to their game on as many devices as possible. We introduced this notion when we launched Steam Play for Mac and PC games in the spring of last year," Lombardi explained. "Giving a PS3 owner of Portal 2 the ability to also play their game on the PC and Mac is an extension of this philosophy. From our perspective, it's not two copies of a game; it's the same game, but with Sony's help we've worked out a method to allow that Portal 2 PS3 customer to also play their game on the PC and Mac."
Which of course brings up an obvious question: was this option also offered to Microsoft? "It is achievable from a technical standpoint, yes," he told Ars. Allow us to speculate for a moment and say that Microsoft most likely doesn't like third-parties using their own online tools, nor would it agree to giving up any control of patches or updates, an issue that has long been a sticking point between the two companies.
Now that Steam is running on the PlayStation 3, the service may be added to other games as well as Portal 2, but Lombardi refuses to give any specific news. "We are hoping other titles will benefit from the Steamworks tools and services we've created for Portal 2 PS3, but we don't have anything to announce today."
Mouse and keyboard vs. controllers, Episode 3
The PlayStation 3 version of Portal 2 offers a free version of the game for the PC and Mac once you link accounts, and you'll be able to play with friends on those platforms as well. "Portal 2 is cooperative multiplayer, and co-op only. So the mouse/keyboard vs. gamepad flame war doesn't really apply," Lombardi said when asked about the difference in controls. "It's also worth noting that Portal is more about brain power than split-second reflexes. If you're thinking with Portals, the input device used to execute each move is very much secondary."
Some of our readers expressed nervousness about linking their games with their Steam accounts. Will they still be able to resell their games? Lombardi declined to offer specifics when asked about what protections were built in, saying only that we'll have more details on account linking closer to launch.
While we're talking with Doug Lombardi and getting... some answers about these issues from him, we had to take the shot: any news of Episode 3? The question was met with silence.Donald Trump keeps trying to strengthen his relationship with Russian and things just keep happening that blow that to pieces. The latest in a long line of snags in Trump’s Russian butt-kissing involves Russia’s direct knowledge of and possible involvement in Assad’s horrific chemical attacks last week.
The AP is reporting that a senior US official, speaking anonymously, has confirmed that intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government knew about Assad’s attacks in advance.
It’s already been reported that shortly after the attack, a drone flew over a Syrian hospital where the attack’s victims were seeking treatment, and several hours later that hospital was bombed by a Russian-made fighter jet.
The official said that a drone operated by Russians was flying over a hospital as victims of the attack were rushing to get treatment. Hours after the drone left, a Russian-made fighter jet bombed the hospital in what American officials believe was an attempt to cover up the usage of chemical weapons. The U.S. official said the presence of the surveillance drone over the hospital couldn’t have been a coincidence, and that Russia must have known the chemical weapons attack was coming and that victims were seeking treatment. The official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on intelligence matters and demanded anonymity, didn’t give precise timing for when the drone was in the area, where more than 80 people were killed. The official also didn’t provide details for the military and intelligence information that form the basis of what the Pentagon now believes.
The White House had no comment on Russia’s possible involvement with the Syrian attacks. Could that perhaps be because they’re involved alongside Russia, or just because Trump doesn’t want to piss off his boss Vladimir?Some suspect that the Democratic National Committee, which has sponsored three Presidential debates in 2015, is out to render Hillary Clinton’s two remaining opponents—the former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and the socialist New England senator Bernie Sanders—hors de combat. O’Malley and Sanders seem to think so. After all, the past two debates were scheduled on Saturday nights—including the Saturday before Christmas—and it was no surprise that they drew about a third as many viewers as the Republicans, who have had five debates. Clinton’s sparring partners have had fewer chances to embarrass her by bringing up her vote for the 2002 Iraq War resolution, or her interventionist impulses in Libya, or the e-mail controversy. But if that’s been the aim of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic Party chairman, she’s done Clinton no favor. The Republicans, meanwhile, have become more practiced and assured with every outing.
And yet, unlike Clinton, the Republicans—especially cheerfully hawkish ones, like Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, who says he wants to see “if sand can glow in the dark”—have never had responsibility for bombing real people, and have the luxury of sounding ill informed and irresponsible. Foreign policy ought to be Clinton’s best issue, so it’s baffling that she doesn’t take more command of it. She is better informed about international issues than any candidate in either party. But after serving four years as Secretary of State, facing some of what might be in store for the forty-fifth President, her foreign-policy positions often seem confused, most notably when it comes to dealing with the Islamic State and the politics of the Middle East. You heard that during the pre-Christmas Democratic debate, when ABC’s Martha Raddatz tried to pin down Clinton’s advocacy of a no-fly zone in Syria. “ISIS doesn’t have aircraft, Al Qaeda doesn’t have aircraft,” Raddatz pointed out. “So would you shoot down a Syrian military aircraft or a Russian airplane?” Clinton’s reply was that “I do not think it would come to that. We are already de-conflicting air space.” When Raddatz persisted—“But isn’t that a decision you should make now?”—Clinton said that she favored the no-fly zone “because I think it would help us on the ground to protect Syrians.” She sees the dilemma but seems unwilling to deal with it. Without mentioning Iraq or Libya, Sanders put it clearly when he said, “I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change, and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be…. You’ve got to think about what happens the day after.” Clinton didn’t really have a response.
Clinton had faced that sort of questioning before, in September, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” when John Dickerson led her into a swamp of platitudes. When he brought up “arming the Syrian rebels” and asked if “this a bad idea … or was this a good idea, poorly executed?,” the former Secretary of State sounded somewhat passive: “I did recommend that, at the beginning of this conflict, we do more to help train those who were in the forefront of leading the opposition against Assad”—Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria—“looking to try to bring the moderates together.” She continued, “A lot of these rebels, originally, they were—they were businesspeople, they were professional people, they were students. They had no training in going up against the Syrian army, which Assad clearly was going to use to the ultimate effect.” Eventually, she said that “A lot of what I worried about has happened…. So where we are today is not where we were. And where we are today is that we have a failed program.” Ouch. Clinton finally said the sort of thing that some Republicans say when they don’t know what else to say: “But I think we still have to keep working with the Turks, with the Jordanians, with others of our partners. We also have to do more to support the Kurds, something that I have also advocated.” As for a Russian role, Clinton’s sharp response was “Well, I hope we're not turning to the Russians,” even though her successor as Secretary of State, John Kerry, is trying to look for a way to work with Russia in the war against the Islamic State. (The crowd-pleasing Republican view seems to be that of the New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who in the last Republican debate sounded almost eager to shoot down a Russian plane, or perhaps of the Ohio governor John Kasich, who wants to give Russia a “punch in the nose.”)
Henry Kissinger, who, for all his flaws, understood the stakes and possible outcomes when he served as Secretary of State for two Republican Presidents—Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—has observed that “the complexity of the emerging world requires America to operate within the attainable and to be prepared to pursue ultimate ends by the accumulation of nuance.” It’s not a bad way to look at the seemingly limitless problems that are bound to face the next President, and it’s a useful guidepost for Hillary Clinton, the increasingly presumptive nominee, as she tries to disentangle herself from the knots of her own foreign-policy positions.Jaxon is the first animal to receive Meridian's "Hometown Hero Award." (KBOI photo)
MERIDIAN, Idaho (KBOI) - Jaxon, an 11-year-old pug, was the first in his home to notice sparks coming from at outlet inside their home. He took action the best he could and the family's happy he did.
With a wagging tail, a big appetite and a fan base, the heroic canine strutted his way through Meridian City Hall Tuesday to receive the "Hometown Hero Award."
This pup earned well deserved praise for saving his family from a fire.
Mikaela Sebree, Jaxon's owner, said the fire could have destroyed their home were it not for the pug's bark that told them something was wrong.
"Dogs have different kinds of barks, so he has his'somebody's at the door' bark and then he has his 'holy crap something's happening' bark," Sebree said.
Sebree's husband rushed down stairs to find sparks quickly turning into flames around an electrical outlet. After knocking the flames down with a fire extinguisher the Meridian Fire Department arrived.
They too said this canine prevented a lot of destruction.
"Certainly his actions and the actions of this dog saved that house from potentially igniting and catching on fire and going up into walls and up into the attic and caused significant damage," said Meridian Fire chief Mark Neimeyer.
Now this four-legged family member is Meridian's first animal to receive the Hometown Hero Award.
"I've never seen anything quite like this in Meridian," Neimeyer said.
He's also earned an official probationary firefighter badge, giving "Sparky the Fire Dog" a run for his money.
"Jaxon is definitely a super pug, he deserves the hometown hero. He saved our house, he saved our lives and he saved our memories," said Todd Lavoie, the other owner of Jaxon.
Meridian's Fire chief wants to remind the public that not everyone has a pug named Jaxon, so it's always a good idea to check the batteries in your smoke alarms.“A lot of people made it about me,” said Mr. Brownback, a farm boy turned successful lawyer, state secretary of agriculture, member of Congress and the 46th governor of Kansas. “But it’s not about me,” he said. “It’s about Kansas. It’s about the future of this state.”
The outcome in Kansas was likely to send a signal to other red states pursuing similar tax philosophies about the risks and limits of the approach. Republicans control 24 other state capitals, and some have likewise pressed for tax reductions and limits on spending, though few have taken steps as bold or sustained as in Kansas.
Even before this week, Democrats in states like Nebraska and Iowa have held out the Kansas model as a cautionary tale for their own Republican-run states. “It is something that Iowans talk about, that they don’t want to find themselves in a situation like Kansas,” said State Senator Janet Petersen, a Democrat in Iowa, where business property taxes were reduced in 2013 and where Republicans took control of state government this year.
First elected governor of Kansas seven years ago by a wide margin, Mr. Brownback wasted no time steering the Republican Party on a hard-right turn. In his first term, he helped push out moderate Republicans from the Legislature. Under his leadership, Kansas loosened restrictions on guns, made it harder for women to get abortions and passed some of the strictest voting laws in the country.
Most famously, he instituted the largest income tax cuts in Kansas history, a move that he promised would act “like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy.”
All along, Mr. Brownback has been steadfast in his insistence that the sweeping tax cuts he had championed were sound, smart policy that would fuel growth. Kansas began collecting hundreds of millions of dollars less in revenue each year. In 2014, Kansans paid $700 million less in state taxes than the previous fiscal year, a far steeper decline than projected.
Last fall, as the policy faltered, the moderate wing of the party roared back, ousting legislators from the far right.Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses the troops at the Hemeimeem air base in Syria, on Monday, Dec. 11, 2017. Declaring a victory in Syria, Putin on Monday visited a Russian military air base in the country and announced a partial pullout of Russian forces from the Mideast nation. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
MOSCOW (AP) — When Russia launched a military campaign in Syria two years ago, President Vladimir Putin sought to save his ally from imminent collapse and break Russia’s international isolation over a crisis in Ukraine.
He achieved that and more, emerging as a key stakeholder in the Middle East who has brokered deals with many of its key players — from Iran to Saudi Arabia to Turkey and Israel. It’s a regional footprint that comes with a degree of clout that even the Soviet Union, which depended on a handful of Arab allies, couldn’t dream of during the Cold War era.
And it was accomplished with limited resources and a lot of audacity.
“Vladimir Putin is determined to restore a greater role for Russia as a global power... and the Middle East is really the main area where Russia has that potential, in part because the Soviet Union played that role in the Soviet period,” said William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at RAND Corporation.
With just a few dozen jets and several thousand troops, Russia waded into Syria’s war and stubbornly pressed its campaign despite international scorn and an outcry over resulting civilian casualties.
Russia’s bold intervention in Syria came as the United States under President Barack Obama steered clear of military engagement and found itself in a series of acrimonious disputes with key allies, including Israel and Saudi Arabia. Under the vastly inconsistent policies of Donald Trump, and in an era of an inward looking, America-first U.S. policy, Russia’s maneuvers became all the more poignant on the global stage.
Putin’s success in the region was on full display Monday, with the confident and upbeat leader moving between Syria, Egypt and Turkey in a whirlwind tour a week after announcing he will seek re-election for another six-year term in March.
Speaking to Russian troops on the tarmac at Hemeimeem air base in Syria, Putin declared victory over the Islamic State group and Syrian rebels and announced he had ordered a scaling down of the Russian contingent in Syria. In Egypt, he signed a deal for the construction of a nuclear reactor on the country’s Mediterranean coast and sought to strengthen his relationship with a key regional power that has in the past three years bought billions of dollars in Russian weapons. And in Turkey, a NATO member, the Russian leader appeared to be on the same page with strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan on key issues, including opposition to Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which sparked outrage across the region.
The Russian president was frequently derided for his penchant for a 19th century-style Realpolitik characterized by cynical political calculus. But Putin’s approach paid off in Syria, where he managed to play on the conflicting interests of regional powers and strike deals with various players.
When Putin decided to intervene in Syria, President Bashar Assad was on the verge of collapse, his forces losing on all fronts. Within weeks, the Russian military had airlifted supplies needed to set up a base in Assad’s heartland and launched an air campaign at the end of September 2015.
At first, observers were skeptical about Putin’s Syria adventure given Russia’s economic troubles and the overwhelming negative odds on the chaotic Syrian battlefield, where the Islamic State group, al-Qaida militants and a motley collection of rebels backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and others were routing Assad’s shrinking military.
Many in the West and in Russia predicted Syria would turn into another Afghanistan — a botched Soviet intervention that led to massive losses and ended in a humiliating 1989 withdrawal after nearly a decade of fighting. Putin argued that Russia needed to intervene in Syria to fight a terror threat, but made it clear that he wasn’t going to walk into a trap like the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
Another reason for skepticism was the Russian military meltdown that followed the Soviet collapse. The army’s vulnerabilities were highlighted by separatist wars in Chechnya and a brief 2008 war with Georgia, where the lack of modern communications and weapons, lack of coordination between various military branches and poor discipline were woefully apparent.
But the Syrian campaign suddenly saw a different Russian military — one armed with sophisticated precision weapons, well-trained, neatly-dressed and proud of its mission.
“Putin managed to explain to the Russian people why Syria was important and not only did he explain it, he also showed them Syria wasn’t going to be Afghanistan,” Dmitry Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, told The Associated Press.
The war saw the combat debut of an array of Russian weapons, including long-range cruise missiles that were fired from surface navy ships, submarines and bombers.
The display of Moscow’s revamped arsenals also served another key goal — to show the U.S. and its NATO allies that Russia no longer exclusively relies on nuclear weapons. The new cruise missiles gave Putin a long-sought long-range precision cruise capability that only the U.S. had before.
Early in the campaign, Moscow found itself on the verge of a military conflict with Ankara after a Turkish fighter jet downed a Russian warplane on the Syrian border in November 2015. But just a few months later, Putin mended ties with Turkey, offering President Recep Tayyip Erdogan strong support after a failed coup attempt. They struck a deal on Syria, setting up de-escalation zones that helped reduce fighting.
Russia also reached out to other key players — from Iran, which staunchly backed Assad, to the Saudis, the Qataris and others who supported the opposition. It also communicated with Israel to make sure the conflict didn’t hurt their friendly relationship.
Russian military successes in Syria and its rapprochement with Turkey paved the way for another Putin diplomatic coup — a warming of ties with Saudi Arabia, Moscow’s opponent since Cold War times when it armed Afghan fighters battling the Soviet invasion. In a first-ever visit by a Saudi monarch, King Salman visited Russia in October.
While declaring victory in Syria, Putin made it clear Russia is there to stay. He plans to expand the air base and turn a crumbling Soviet-era naval supply facility in Syria’s port of Tartus into a full-fledged navy base capable of hosting big ships.
Russia has also drafted a deal with Egypt to allow its warplanes to use bases there — a deployment unseen since the times when Egypt was a key Soviet ally in the Mideast before going to the U.S. side in the mid-1970s.
Courtney, the RAND analyst, said despite Putin’s successes in the region, Russia will remain a limited great power that serves mainly as a military supplier because it lacks the resources and capability that the West has for nation building or reconstruction.
“The challenge for Putin is to turn the use of his military force and military weapons supplies in the Middle East to something that is a lasting success, and we don’t yet see how Russia is going to get there,” he said.
___
Karam reported from Beirut.via Stop the Harassment and Threats Against Radical Feminists
This month, The Progressive ran an advertisement that seeks comment on the need to eliminate intimidation, threats of violence, and no-platforming and other silencing from the debate around gender identity and radical feminism.
This comes not a moment too soon. The advertisement lists several examples of very serious violations of the norms of political discourse. One incident included transwomen sending rape threats to a radical feminist, along with photographs of their genitals, presumably as a way to prove that they are capable of carrying out the threat.
In January, 2017, Carey Callahan, a person who has detransitioned from a transman back to female (not herself a radical feminist), posted on her blog a link to screen shots of responses a friend of hers, also a de-transitioner, had received to a post the friend made on twitter. Her friend had tweeted that she believed there was a need for female-only space. Two transwomen responded by providing a detailed description of how they would rape her, sending her pictures of their genitals.
This kind of sexual terrorism is more of what women must already endure under the patriarchy and is specifically why radical feminism even exists. It is disgusting and defies all logic that people would use their penises to perpetrate sexual terrorism against women under the guise of promoting gender inclusivity.
My personal take is that the recent rash of promotion of violence among progressives is somehow being influenced by the power structure. In response to the ad, I submitted the following as my comment:
I am writing to submit a comment of support of the initiative to stop the harassment and silencing of Radical Feminists.
I have noticed, because of my work for Black Liberation, that a lot of the themes of Antifa approaches to confronting white supremacy also appear in their confronting what they perceive to be trans exclusion. I oppose Antifa on many grounds but one of the biggest reasons is their promotion of the notion that a means to combat racism would be to “punch nazis.” Interpersonal violence as a strategy for liberation is obviously fundamentally flawed and advances no progress. I became concerned about Antifas involvement in racial struggles because they do not take their orders from POC, but instead self-deputize, which essentially results in a lack of agency by the people Antifa claims to be trying to protect, namely people of color.
I bring that up because I have noticed that, and this is clear from spending anytime on social media, a lot of folks in the current transactivism movement are also loosely affiliated with Antifa and support the Antifa approach that to eliminate problems, here “TERFs”, interpersonal violence will do. This again violates the norms of collective agency because individual interpersonal violence, especially first strike aggressor violence, does nothing to advance the interests of an oppressed class.
It is clear to me that this promotion of individual interpersonal violence is coming down as from a hierarchy. Somebody somewhere is deliberately advancing and distributing this “Punch a [blank]” messaging, and it is not the people at the grassroots that are personally affected by these struggles.
I believe to freeze this line of thinking it would be best to issue a complete moratorium on violence and threats of violence. It may be appropriate to create a RadFem/Trans alliance that is bound by a commitment to nonviolence and the eradication of threatening language. It is also important to have standards for excluding people from places of importance in this debate if they prove they cannot exercise that minimal bit of self control. These are very serious topics with many people’s lives, safety, and futures on the line. We must find ways to move together harmoniously.
I recently became a radical feminist specifically because I noticed there are critical questions and gaps in transgender activism that leave women and girls vulnerable and these things need to be discussed. Biological women, not empowered by any such thing as “cis women’s privilege,” are helpless to fend off silencing by people who simply throw around the term TERF when confronted with genuine concerns about the erasure of biological sex based protections. For the liberation of women, this must end.
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The Winnipeg Jets are currently ranked #1 when it comes to penalties. Fans across Jets nation are wondering how their team can continue to be aggressive but at the same time ensure they don’t lead the parade to the penalty box on a nightly basis?
Following a particularly highly penalized game against the Anaheim Ducks on December 7th (both teams had six power plays) including an Evander Kane checking from behind major and game misconduct, the next day following practice media wanted to know about the Jets style and whether the guys playing at Portage and Donald were the second coming of the Broad Street Bullies. When coach Paul Maurice was asked if this was a problem for his squad during the media scrum he attributed it to the team’s style of play saying “We play an aggressive type gap game. You have more confrontations on the ice. The ones that we talk about, that we want to eliminate are the one handed stick infractions.” He followed this up however by saying “…I don’t want to lose any of that other piece and if we have to live for awhile, the by-product being that we are taking more penalties then we have to do that because coming off it and playing a different game won’t be to our strength”.
After a 4-3 shootout loss to the Colorado Avalanche on December 11th in his post-game scrum with the media once again you heard from the bench boss on the cost of penalties “I actually thought the second penalty (Postma high-stick on Hejda) in the 3rd period hurt us a bit because now we had to run D a little bit harder”.
In early December the Jets penalty kill was ranked 7th overall (84.5%) in the NHL.
Since that time there was a significant change in personnel as the Jets suffered a rash of injuries throughout the month of December but they were still clipping along until the beginning of January.
On January 5th against San Jose the Jets gave the Sharks seven power play opportunities which resulted in a single power play goal against. They then gave up seven power play goals in the next three games on the road providing the Coyotes, Kings and Ducks with 16 power play chances. In the 21 games since that 3-2 loss to the Sharks, Winnipeg has given up 93 power play opportunities allowing 26 power play goals against. Their record during this time was 10-8-2-1. How many points did the Jets leave behind as a result of the penalties they are taking coupled with an inability to stop the opposition on the penalty kill?
The Jets penalty kill is now ranked 19th overall (80.2%).
In the 5-1 loss to the Capitals on February 20th coach Maurice was asked about his team’s penalties to which he responded “we took five tripping penalties tonight. I’ve never seen that. That’s a first for any team I’ve ever seen which either means we have really, really heavy sticks or we were behind it”.
While you cannot quantify momentum, how much energy is sucked out of a team when they are playing well and have to go on the penalty kill? We saw it when Enstrom scored to bring the Jets within one against Washington and a Blake Wheeler tripping penalty fifteen seconds later ended any life that may have given the team as Backstrom scored on the subsequent power play. When Paul Maurice was asked following the Washington game what is different about the current penalty kill from what they were doing earlier in the season he indicated “Just about everything. From faceoffs to blocks to energy to quick reads to good sticks to saves. It’s all missing”.
It will be incumbent on the Jets bench boss to figure out how to keep his team (as it is currently composed) playing that aggressive type gap game that he wants them to play but at the same time taking less penalties. Does he have the right players for this style or might he have to adjust based on the team that is on the ice?
It will be quite a ride as the Jets get ready for the home stretch and attempt to make the playoffs for the first time since the move to Winnipeg.How to configure a distributed file system with replication using GlusterFS 3.67 (73.33%) 3 votes
Distributed file system between multiple servers is a thing I have planned for a long time, but I never got around to it because I first had to find the right filesystem for it.
After a lot of research, I found that GlusterFS was the right file system for me.
My plan was to use a distributed filesystem to share the content of my webservers to make sure all my webservers had the same content on their pages at all time and using some sort of high availability to make sure the content was always there.
To this I used a tool in Linux called Lsyncd before I set up my GlusterFS cluster, this worked well and did live syncing of all the servers using rsync. But there was one problem with it.
If I uploaded a lot of files (20+) to one webserver, and it started to sync to the other webserver before I was finished copying, the result would be that some of the files ended up corrupt, and this was a problem for me!
My distributed file system overview
Here is the overview of the setup I am making, it’s not pretty but I’m sure it’s a lot more easy to explain the setup using a simple mspaint drawing than with text!
As you can see in the picture above, I have build this with high availability in mind, since I want my websites to always be up and running!
If webserver-1 goes down, lets say from a hardware failure, webserver-2 is getting all the website traffic from the router using a load balancer (This guide will not cover webserver load balancing) until webserver-1 is back up and running again.If GlusterFS-host-1 goes down, the files will still be available for the webservers using GlusterFS-host-2, and when GlusterFS-host-1 is restored the file system will resync GlusterFS-host-1 to get it’s files up-to-date!This is in my opinion really smart, and has some great advantages to it. I can do hardware maintenance, have power failures or hardware failures on one server without my websites going offline.
Of course this can also be used if you only have 1 webserver but still want redundancy |
This definition is deceptive in its simplicity; Leslie Lamport, inventor of Paxos, offered a more realistic definition, a distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable. Building a stable modern distributed system can be daunting; so many moving parts makes the system inherently complex and ultimately difficult to adequately test.
Naïve system tests assume ideal conditions: the network is stable, machine failures are absent. Production distributed systems are a world apart– machines fail, latencies wildly fluctuate, and network faults are commonplace. A distributed system must still work despite these difficulties. Modeling these failures is extra work but essential. Otherwise, very real bugs will only surface during catastrophic disasters in production.
How etcd is tested
As of December 8, 2016, etcd weighs in at 114,815 lines of Go code. This is only code that could be considered exclusive to etcd; vendored and auto-generated code doesn’t count. Over half the code base, 60,033 lines, is dedicated to tests and testing infrastructure. Since so much of etcd is dedicated to tests, there are many kinds of tests. The testing infrastructure for etcd includes unit tests, integration tests, migration tests, end-to-end tests, benchmarks, regression tests, soak tests, stress tests, and functional tests.
Unit test checks input and output of a single component within the package. For example, raft package passes a message to its message-step function and checks the response.
Client and server interactions are tested in integration tests: start etcd server using unix sockets, send client requests, and check responses from the server.
End-to-end test configures the whole system locally and simulate the real-world operations: set up 3-node etcd cluster with actual etcd binaries, and verify that etcd command line interface is working correctly. These tests are run locally, integrated with our CI systems.
etcd’s “distributed” functional tester
functional-tester verifies the correct behavior of etcd under various system and network malfunctions. It sets up an etcd cluster under high pressure loads and continuously injects failures into the cluster. Then it expects the etcd cluster to recover within a short amount of time. This has been extremely helpful to find critical bugs, before anyone else; see a list of bugs that it has found at GitHub issues for more.
Here’s the overview of functional-tester:
etcd functional test suite has two components: etcd-agent and etcd-tester. etcd-agent runs on each test machine to control the state of target etcd node: start, stop, restart, manipulate network configurations, and so on. etcd-tester runs on a single machine to control the flow of functional tests: trigger agent to stop, start etcd node, inject various failure cases, verify the correctness of etcd under failures.
Some of the failures are:
Kill random node
Kill leader node
Kill majority of nodes in cluster
Kill all nodes
Kill node for a long time to trigger snapshot when it comes back
Network partition
Slow network
Here’s how etcd-agent kills etcd node:
func stopWithSig(cmd *exec.Cmd, sig os.Signal) error { err := cmd.Process.Signal(sig) if err!= nil { return err } errc := make(chan error) go func() { _, ew := cmd.Process.Wait() errc <- ew close(errc) }() select { case <-time.After(5 * time.Second): cmd.Process.Kill() case e := <-errc: return e } err = <-errc return err }
Network partitions can be simulated by manipulating the iptables. Slow networks can be simulated using tc command in Linux operating systems. etcd implements these utilities at netutil package.
Furthermore, it also performs crash tests, such as power loss, I/O error, partial writes, and so on. It is impractical to run these tests with real power failures. So etcd crash testing is simulated with gofail. etcd has tons of fail points in its code base, and tester triggers Go runtime panics in etcd. Some of the failures are:
panic before/after database commits an entry
panic before/after Raft follower sends message
panic before/after Raft leader sends message
panic before/after Raft saves entries
panic before/after Raft saves snapshot
panic before/after Raft applies entries
etcd functional-tester runs 24⁄ 7 ; cluster gets about 8,000 failure injections per day, 1 failure injection for every 10-second. In 2016, etcd went through more than 1.7 million failure injects.
Please visit dash.etcd.io for realtime testing cluster dashboards.
Injecting failures with gofail
Here’s example usage of gofail:
package gopheracademy import "fmt" func Send() { fmt.Println("before send") // gofail: var beforeSend struct{} fmt.Println("send; success!") }
And auto-generate the failpoints with:
go get -v github.com/coreos/gofail gofail enable
Then output would be:
package gopheracademy import "fmt" func Send() { fmt.Println("before send") if vbeforeSend, __fpErr := __fp_beforeSend.Acquire(); __fpErr == nil { defer __fp_beforeSend.Release(); _, __fpTypeOK := vbeforeSend.(struct{}); if!__fpTypeOK { goto __badTypebeforeSend} ; __badTypebeforeSend: __fp_beforeSend.BadType(vbeforeSend, "struct{}"); }; fmt.Println("send; success!") }
// GENERATED BY GOFAIL. DO NOT EDIT. package gopheracademy import "github.com/coreos/gofail/runtime" var __fp_beforeSend *runtime.Failpoint = runtime.NewFailpoint("github.com/user/gopheracademy", "beforeSend")
And let’s call this function:
package main import ( "time" "github.com/user/gopheracademy" ) func main() { for { gopheracademy.Send() time.Sleep(time.Second) } }
And let’s run this process with failpoints enabled:
go build -v GOFAIL_HTTP="127.0.0.1:2381"./cmd
To list failpoints:
curl http://127.0.0.1:2381/ github.com/user/gopheracademy/beforeSend=
To trigger failpoints:Work is under way to strike a deal between Labour, Tory and Independents to form a minority coalition for Aberdeen City Council, the Evening Express understands.
A Town House source revealed the three groups were making efforts to reach an agreement before the deadline on Wednesday.
It came despite the SNP gaining the most seats at the local authority ballot, with 19 councillors elected.
The source said: “Efforts are under way to sign a deal. We’re working hard to make the deadline, we’re very conscious there is a deadline.”
It was also revealed the next administration is likely to be headed up by a co-leader system, shared between Conservatives and Labour.
Labour dropped from 17 seats to nine on May 4, while the Conservatives saw their numbers increase from two councillors to 11.
There are now two independent councillors in the Town House. This would give the group a minority coalition of 22 – one below the 23 needed for a majority.
The Nationalists have repeatedly ruled out working with the Conservatives.
SNP group leader Stephen Flynn said: “All parties need to get the best deal for Aberdeen.”
A source close to Labour claimed the nationalists offered former council leader Jenny Laing a “co-leader” role in a bid to woo the party to join a coalition.
But it was suggested this wouldn’t happen because of the previous hostile relation between the two parties.
Liberal Democrats group leader Ian Yuill previously said his “best bet” was on a coalition between the Conservatives and Labour.
The Lib Dems, with four councillors, decided not to go into coalition with any party after holding round-the-table talks with other party bosses.
Members have to make an agreement before the inaugural council meeting on Wednesday, where a council leader and Lord Provost are to be appointed.An American Airlines fight bound for Los Angeles was forced to return to London's Heathrow Airport Wednesday after at least six people on board fell ill.
The Daily Telegraph reported that one member of the Boeing 777's cabin crew fainted and five others complained of feeling unwell. With the plane in the air over southwest Iceland, the captain made the decision to return to Heathrow.
American Airlines confirmed that two passengers and "some of our flight attendants" complained of lightheadedness aboard Flight 109, which left Heathrow at 12:05 p.m. local time Wednesday (7:05 a.m. EST). The airline said early Thursday that the aircraft was being inspected by maintenance engineers.
Paramedics and fire crews surrounded the plane as it landed approximately five hours after it had taken off. The Telegraph reported that the passengers' luggage was briefly taken away for inspection before being returned to them.
"About 2.5 hours into the flight just as we were passing Iceland we had a Tannoy announcement asking for any doctors, nurses or medical professionals on board to report to the boarding doors to assist with unwell passengers," passenger Lee Gunn told The Daily Mirror. "The lights then came on in the cabin and there was lots of commotion."
"Eventually, when we did dock, there was only one person who came on and he was monitoring the air," passenger Alan Gray told The Daily Mail. "Then the paramedics were allowed onboard to treat those who were ill and everybody was let off."
The London Fire Brigade said that crews investigating the plane found no evidence of hazardous substances, while the London Ambulance Service said that six patients who complained of feeling unwell were examined, then discharged.
It remains unclear what caused the illnesses.Why Will Smith Said Yes To Suicide Squad By Eric Eisenberg Random Article Blend
This past weekend, the
I guess I like the concept of dubious morals. I always liked to play in that area. With Suicide Squad, we just started on that. I think I haven't explored the psychology enough of Deadshot, somebody who could take money to kill people; how he justifies that for himself.
As Will Smith noted, he will be playing Floyd Lawton a.k.a. Deadshot in Suicide Squad, who in the comics has classically been an assassin with nearly superhuman aiming abilities. Rather than just being a guy looking for a payday, however, the last decade has seen the character doing his work so that he can provide for his daughter. It's very likely that this will wind up being a part of the big screen adaptation, as it provides a bit of depth to a guy who otherwise might just appear to be a heartless killer.
To Smith's credit, Suicide Squad won't be the first time that he has played a character with a greyer view on morals. Not only is he playing a criminal in Focus who gleefully steals from his various marks, but we're only a few years removed from his turn in
At this point there aren't really any firm details available about what we can expect in Suicide Squad, though it has been confirmed that Will Smith will be joined in the film by Jared Leto (The Joker), Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn), Jai Courtney (Boomerang) and Cara Delevingne (Enchantress). It's also been rumored that
Suicide Squad is currently in pre-production, and will be hitting a theater near you on Throughout his career as a movie star, Will Smith has always been identifiable as the hero. Whether he's facing down threats from our own world or others, he's always the smart, charismatic good guy who audiences know will always do what it takes to stop them. And this point in his career, however, Smith has apparently started thinking a bit more about the ranges of morality - and it's because of this personal interest that he decided to join the upcoming DC Comics film Suicide Squad.This past weekend, the Men In Black star participated in a press conference promoting his upcoming con man film Focus, and it was after being asked about his new comic book movie that he expressed why he decided to be a part of it. He explained to the crowd of journalists (via MovieWeb ),As Will Smith noted, he will be playing Floyd Lawton a.k.a. Deadshot in Suicide Squad, who in the comics has classically been an assassin with nearly superhuman aiming abilities. Rather than just being a guy looking for a payday, however, the last decade has seen the character doing his work so that he can provide for his daughter. It's very likely that this will wind up being a part of the big screen adaptation, as it provides a bit of depth to a guy who otherwise might just appear to be a heartless killer.To Smith's credit, Suicide Squad won't be the first time that he has played a character with a greyer view on morals. Not only is he playing a criminal in Focus who gleefully steals from his various marks, but we're only a few years removed from his turn in Hancock, which saw him playing a superhero of the more drunk/homeless variety.At this point there aren't really any firm details available about what we can expect in Suicide Squad, though it has been confirmed that Will Smith will be joined in the film by Jared Leto (The Joker), Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn), Jai Courtney (Boomerang) and Cara Delevingne (Enchantress). It's also been rumored that Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor will be making his first post- Batman v Superman appearance in the movie, though that has not yet been made official. The production is also still looking for an actor to replace Tom Hardy as Rick Flag - though we can expect that to happen in the next couple weeks, as production is starting up very soon.Suicide Squad is currently in pre-production, and will be hitting a theater near you on August 5, 2016 Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topAnna Vasquez was convicted and served 13 years for a crime that appears to have never taken place. She is one of the San Antonio Four, a group of four women convicted of aggravated sexual assault of two girls. The scandalous crime told of satanic orgies and perversions, and after almost 20 years, one of the girls recanted her testimony.
The forensic science that helped convict the women proved as spurious as the accusations, and all of the women were released from jail two years ago. They await a new trial, with no promise of exoneration.
Anna told the Worth Repeating audience her big mistake was trusting that the truth was what the system was after.
Anna told this story at our Feb. 2 show, with the theme "Big Mistakes."
Worth Repeating is Texas Public Radio's live, storytelling event series that looks to bring the Sound of San Antonio out through the stories of your friends and neighbors.The Bounty Brokers Association needs you! The BBA has taken in too many contracts for their regular membership to handle and is asking anyone Level 15 and above to answer the call of bounty hunting between November 12 – 19, 2013. Interested? We thought so!
Here’s how to get started:
1. First, travel to the Imperial or Republic fleet reachable by your ship’s galaxy map, transit shuttles, or the Emergency Fleet Pass.
2. Then head to any of the four elevators on the main floor and look for BBA representative NPCs standing near carbonized bounties:
3. They will give you a one-time mission to head to the Cartel Bazaar, where you can look for these mission terminals:
4. From these terminals, you will be able to choose only Henchman Bounties for the first five days of the event (one a day per character). Complete five to access high-profile targets or “Kingpins” missions, meaning greater difficulty, fun and rewards!
5. Choose your mission and track these dangerous criminals. Once located, bring them to justice by either killing or freezing them in a carbonite block!
If you are late to the party, don’t worry. The event will come back soon and you will be able to resume where you left off, so start the event now even if you missed a few days!
So what are you waiting for? Join the fun now, invite your friends and help the BBA clean its long list of contracts between November 12-19, 2013 and you will be greatly rewarded for your efforts. Prepare your favorite weapons and let the scum (and credits) hunt begin!
Visit www.StarWarsTheOldRepublic.com/info/in-game-events or the Bounty Contract Week Blog for more details!
Stay connected to www.StarWarsTheOldRepublic.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube!And here, the term “man” refers to the manual page software.
I already noted that I was working on fixing man-db to work with heirloom-doctools but I didn’t go in much details about the problems I faced. So let me try to explain it a bit in more detail, if you’re interested.
The first problem is, we have two different man implementations in portage: sys-apps/man and sys-apps/man-db. The former is the “classical” one used by default, while the latter is a newer implementation, which is supposedly active and maintained. I say supposedly because it seems to me like it’s not really actively maintained, nor tested, at all.
The “classic” implementation is often despised because, among other things, it’s not designed with UTF-8 in mind at all, and even its own output, for locales where ASCII is not enough, is broken. For instance, in Italian, it outputs a latin1 bytestreams even when the locale is set to use UTF-8. Confusion ensures. The new implementation should also improve the caching by not using flat-files for the already-processed man pages, but rather using db files (berkeley or gdbm).
So what’s the problem with man-db, the new implementation? It supports UTF-8 natively, so that’s good, but the other problem is that it’s only ever tested coupled with groff (GNU implementation of the (n)roff utility), and with nothing else. How should this matter? Well, there are a few features in groff that are not found anywhere else, this includes, for instance, the HTML output (eh? no I don’t get it either, I can tell that the nroff format isn’t exactly nice, and I guess that having the man pages available as HTML makes them more readable for users, but why adding that to groff, and especially to the man command? no clue), as well as some X-specific output. Both those features are not available in heirloom, but as far as I can see they are so rarely used that it really makes little sense to depend on groff just because of those; and the way man-db is designed, when a nroff implementation different from groff is found, the relative options are not even parsed or considered; which is good to reduce the size of the code, but also requires to at least compile-test the software with a non-groff implementation, something that upstream is not currently doing it seems.
More to the point, not only the code uses broken (as in, incomplete) groff-conditionals, but the build system does depend on groff as well: the code to build the manual called groff directly, instead of using whatever the configure script found, and the testsuite relied on the “warnings” feature that is only enabled with groff (there was one more point to that: previously it returned error when the --warnings option was passed, so I had to fix it so that it is, instead, ignored).
But it doesn’t go much better from here on: not only man-db tries to use two output terminals that are no defined by the heirloom nroff (so I hacked that around temporarily on heirloom itself, the proper fix would be having a configuration option for man-db), but it also has problems handling line and page lengths. This is quite interesting actually, since it took me a long time (and some understanding of how nroff works, which is nowhere near nice, or human).
Both nroff and groff (obviously) are designed to work with paged documents (although troff is the one that is usually used to print, since that produces PostScript documents); for this reason, by default, their output is restricted width-wise, and has pagebreaks, with footers and headers, every given number of lines. Since the man page specification (command, man section, source, …) are present in the header and footer, the page breaks can be seen as spurious man page data in-between paragraphs of documentation. This is what you read on most operating systems, included Solaris, where the man program and the nroff program are not well combined. To avoid this problem, both the man implementations set line and page breaks depending on the terminal: the line break is set to something less than the width of the terminal, to fill it with content; the page break is set as high as possible to allow smooth scrolling in the text.
Unfortunately, we got another “groff versus the world” situation here: while the classic nroff implementation sets the two values with the.ll and.pl roff commands (no, really you don’t want to learn about roff commands unless you’re definitely masochist!), groff uses the LL register (again… roff… no thanks), and thus can be set with the command-line parameter -rLL=$width ; this syntax is not compatible with heirloom’s nroff, but I’m pretty sure you already guessed that.
The classic man implementation, then, uses both the command and the register approach, but without option switches; instead it prepends to the manpage sources the roff commands (.ll and.nr LL that sets the register from within the roff language), and then gets the whole output processed; this makes it well compatible with the heirloom tools. On the other hand, man-db uses the command-line approach which makes it less compatible; indeed when using man-db with the heirloom-doctools, you’re left with a very different man output, which looks like an heirloom in itself, badly formatted and not filling the terminal.
Now we’re in quite a strange situation: from one side, the classic man implementation sucks at UTF-8 (in its own right), but it works mostly fine with heirloom-doctools (that supports UTF-8 natively); from the other side we got a newer, cleaner (in theory) implementation, that should support UTF-8 natively (but requiring a Debian-patched groff), but has lock-ins on groff (which definitely sucks with UTF-8). The obvious solution here would be to cross-pollinate the two implementations to get a single pair of programs that work well together and has native UTF-8; but it really is not easy.High waves continuously shift the sand along the Lake Michigan shoreline, giving visitors a glimpse of historic shipwrecks.
High waves continuously shift the sand along the Lake Michigan shoreline, giving visitors a glimpse of historic shipwrecks.
Sixteen shipwrecks are documented in the Manitou Passage State Underwater Preserve, which surrounds the North and South Manitou Islands in Lake Michigan and lies next to Michigan's Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
The Manitou Passage was a high-traffic shipping area during Michigan's lumbering days. It was also an area where ships sought safety by attempting to ride out storms in the lee of the Islands.
The underwater preserve is also home to the remains of seven docks.
If you stumble across a piece of history while walking the shoreline at Sleeping Bear Dunes remember the artifacts are protected by state law. The shipwreck remains must stay put where they are found. To report a sighting you can call 231-326-4734.Blizzard Entertainment today made wildly popular real-time strategy game StarCraft a free download for Mac and PC, nearly two decades after its original release.The RTS hit was universally acclaimed when it launched in 1998, and went on to become an e-sport phenomenon in South Korea, where big-prize tournaments and TV channels drew legions of fans to the game.The free download is the game's first in eight years and includes the Brood War expansion pack. The patch 1.18 download also sports a handful of new features, including windowed mode, a better online game search engine, and improved response times during multiplayer battles.Blizzard's decision to make the title freely available comes ahead of this summer's Remastered edition of StarCraft, which promises enhanced 4K graphics, better audio, high-quality cinematics, and a redesigned matchmaking system.Making vintage StarCraft free also offers a unique opportunity for getting in some practice before the new version is released: Blizzard says owners of the original game and the remastered edition will be able to play each other online. Nostalgic gamers can find the free download of the original StarCraft hereTHE BRONX — A handful of Hasidic Jews, an Asian baby, two men in cowboy hats, a UCB performer and some protesters walked into a Chino-Latino restaurant. Oh, and Ted Cruz was there too.
Fresh off a major victory in Wisconsin on Tuesday night, the senator from Texas hosted a last-minute event billed as a “meet and greet,” north of 149th street in the Bronx. Embedded in a heavily Latino community, Sabrosura 2 was teeming with more reporters than the several dozen attendees, as Cruz strolled through the restaurant for an interview with “Good Morning America.”
While he was busy, 35-year-old Rodrigo Starz sat at a table in the middle of the restaurant, waiting for his moment to disrupt the proceedings.
“It’s ironic that a presidential candidate with such an anti-immigrant stance is coming to the Bronx,” Starz told The Daily Beast, as his friend filmed the exchange with a what appeared to be a GoPro camera.
As Cruz disappeared into the rear of the restaurant, with anti-gay pastor and state senator Ruben Diaz Sr. in tow, a family clad in Cruz gear with a small baby sat near the would-be disruptors, occasionally poking at the plate of oysters in front of them.
Cruz left his “supporters” with a lot of time to mill about and chat with reporters, patiently waiting for the senator to emerge.
Ben Tumin, who came from Brooklyn wearing a “Cruz’N for a Brusin” shirt sat alone, leaning on a crutch he had been using to get up and down the stairs. He earnestly told a slew of reporters that he was excited to vote for Cruz because he’s a true conservative.
This is not true.
Tumin, as his website “The Chaff” describes him, is a writer and performer with the improvisation group Upright Citizens Brigade. He recently tweeted an unfortunate image of Ted Cruz during a debate in which a white fleshy substance splatted onto his lip. The caption reads: “take one look at this man and tell me you wouldn’t f**k him! #CruzSexScandal.”
Such was the climate of the senator’s event. The base of Cruz’s support, Evangelical Christians, did not turn out in great numbers like they have elsewhere. Unlike his primary competitor in the Republican contest, Donald Trump, Cruz doesn’t often face protesters on the trail. Iowa, and most recently Wisconsin, have turned up more friendly crowds.
But there’s a first time for everything.
Starz sprung to life as Cruz was set to exit his backroom meeting, wading through the crowd to get closer to the object of his hatred. “Ted Cruz has no business being in the Bronx,” he yelled as police began to usher him out.
There were at least two people politely standing in the restaurant who didn’t have interest in berating the man they came to see.
Lazer Axelman, a 24-year-old Libertarian with movie star looks, clutched a cowboy hat in his hands while messing with the locks of his hair.
“He’s the first person who’s ever come out and actually espoused constitutional values,” Axelman told The Daily Beast about Cruz. He had gotten the senator to sign his hat when he met him in Miami last month. Unfortunately, due to his registration as a Libertarian, he can’t back his man on the ballot in the New York primary.
“I think it’s a silly rule but I think a whole lot of the rules are really silly,” Axelman lamented. He thinks Cruz has the best shot of securing the nomination at a contested Republican convention, basically a foregone conclusion at this point.
Waiting in the wings, as Cruz approached a gaggle of press, Axelman hoped Cruz would sign his hat with the fateful date of their first meeting.
During a short question-and-answer session, Cruz condemned New York values once again, saying that Trump’s support of liberal candidates in the past typifies this value system.
“Donald has no solutions,” Cruz said of his opponent, who is currently clearing 50 percent in New York, according to Monmouth University poll released today.
When he hit the sidewalk underneath the roar of a passing 6 train, Cruz was quickly ushered into a black SUV waiting for him. The campaign previously canceled a visit to the Lighthouse Academy in the Bronx, with little explanation.
A 16-year-old student from the school, Destiny, said she and her classmates told the principal they would protest if Cruz visited their school. The senator’s campaign and the school’s administration have not responded to the Daily Beast to confirm the reason for cancellation.
Before Cruz was whisked away from the concrete jungle that spat him out like a mealy apple, one other protester got his message out to the airwaves.
“You’re not going to win, you’re not natural born,” the man, who wouldn’t give The Daily Beast his name, shouted with a camera hoisted into the air. This, of course, is a reference to the fact that Cruz was born in Canada, something Trump has needled him mercilessly for in the past.
It was a rough and tumble visit in a state where Cruz desperately needs to win some support before the April 19 primary, with 95 delegates at stake.
As he drove away from the hectic restaurant, some protesters remained clamoring to get a message to Cruz or anyone who would listen.
Axelman smiled at The Daily Beast and tipped his hat. The date “3/4/16” was written in Sharpie under the brim.PFORZHEIM, Germany (AP) — A nationalist party that wants Germany to close its borders to migrants, leave Europe’s common currency and end sanctions against Russia is predicted to enter Parliament for the first time this month, propelled by voters’ anger at Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to let over a million refugees into the country since 2015.
Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is forecast to take between 8 and 11 percent of the vote on Sept. 24, giving it dozens of lawmakers in the national Parliament. Some polls even project that it could even come third behind Merkel’s party and the center-left Social Democrats.
If the predictions are correct, it would be the first time in 60 years that a party to the right of Merkel’s conservative Union bloc has attracted enough votes to enter the Bundestag.
“It’s quite an achievement for a right-wing party to clear the 5-percent minimum threshold,” said Gideon Botsch, a political scientist at the University of Potsdam near Berlin.
AfD’s poll numbers are all the more remarkable because the party has become increasingly extreme since its founding in 2013, he said.
“German voters haven’t wanted to vote for a right-wing party in recent decades,” Botsch said. “Germany’s Nazi history is obviously one of the reasons for that.”
At an election rally last week in the southwestern city of Pforzheim, the mostly male, middle-aged audience gave a standing ovation to party co-leader Alexander Gauland, a 76-year-old former civil servant who sparked controversy last year by saying that Germans don’t want to live next to a black football player.
Gauland, a former member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, made headlines again recently for suggesting that the government’s integration czar should be “disposed of” in Turkey, where her family emigrated from before she was born.
In Pforzheim, Gauland touched on a subject the party’s supporters are particularly anxious about: the influx of migrants from Muslim-majority countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Only if we defend Europe against a new Islamic invasion,” he told the crowd, “do we have a chance to remain a majority in this country and survive.”
Gauland’s anti-Islam comments fell on fertile ground in Pforzheim, at the northern tip of Germany’s Black Forest. His party achieved a surprise victory there in last year’s regional election. It now has seats in 13 state assemblies and the European Parliament.
Observers say AfD benefited from Pforzheim’s large population of so-called Russlanddeutsche — ethnic Germans who emigrated from the former Soviet Union and hold more conservative views than the general population.
One such voter, Waldemar Meister, said he thinks AfD is the only party that listens to ordinary people’s concerns. “We’re lied to, we’re deceived (by the other parties),” he said.
According to Timo Lochocki, a Berlin-based researcher at the German Marshall Fund think tank, AfD’s success is partly due to the disillusionment voters feel with Germany’s established political parties — a development that mirrors Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the rise of U.S. President Donald Trump, whose election AfD enthusiastically endorsed.
Nico Siegel, head of the infratest dimap polling agency, said more than half of people who vote for AfD say they did so out of dissatisfaction with other parties, drawing votes from all the others.
“The AfD is like a vacuum cleaner for those unsatisfied with the other parties,” he said.
Like populist politicians elsewhere, AfD portrays itself as the lone voice of the people and all others, from mainstream politicians to journalists, as enemies or even traitors. It also enjoys good ties with Moscow.
The party has created a formidable social media machine with which to stoke outrage against migrants, Merkel and the media. It has by far the highest number of Facebook followers of all German political parties, and members avidly use Twitter to share news about crimes if they are committed by migrants.
Although the number of asylum-seekers arriving in Germany has dropped sharply since 2015, the issue remains at the top of the political agenda partly due to the absence of other major problems in the country, Lochocki said. Germany’s unemployment is low, wages are rising and Merkel has absorbed most of her left-wing rivals’ political positions — from phasing out nuclear power to allowing same-sex marriage and easing immigration rules.
“Merkel has lost credibility among conservatives,” said Bernd Lucke, one of the founders of AfD who left the party in 2015 after losing a leadership battle. Lucke said many German conservatives are unsure who they’ll back this time round.
Recent opinion polls show almost half of German voters are still undecided.
Some in AfD fear the party’s unwillingness to clamp down on extreme nationalist rhetoric and veiled anti-Semitism could end up costing it precious votes.
“Germans would rather vote for nuclear war than for Nazis,” AfD’s regional head in North Rhine-Westphalia state, Marcus Pretzell, told The Associated Press in May.
This week, the party closed ranks around co-leader Alice Weidel following media reports that she had expressed racist views in a private email four years ago. Senior AfD figures dismissed the report in the weekly Welt am Sonntag, which quoted from an email Weidel allegedly sent to an acquaintance in which she claimed the government was trying to cause “civil war” by systematically flooding German cities with Arab and Roma migrants.
Botsch, the political scientist, said it’s conceivable that AfD might again fail at the last hurdle — like it did in 2013, when it received 4.7 percent of the vote.
On the other hand, if the party comes third and Merkel’s Union bloc continues its grand coalition with the center-left Social Democrats, AfD could end up being the biggest opposition party, with special privileges in Parliament.
“That will put AfD in a very strong position, but a lot depends on whether it can behave professionally,” Botsch said.As we pick over the bones of the great recession, we get headlines like “Austerity Ireland’s biggest victim: self-employed middle-class.” This one was from the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, over an accurate and interesting report on work by Christopher Whelan. That work finds, perhaps not surprisingly, that the social group that suffered most in the recession is the non-farming self-employed. It usefully confirms what most of us would have guessed anyway. When a construction boom collapses, the white van people – carpenters, plasterers, plumbers, painters and so on – are going to be devastated. So are people with small niche businesses.
The problem is that this reality is easily distorted into a wildly inaccurate version of recent history: the implication that those who were already at the bottom have nothing to complain about because they didn’t fall as far. The very real plight of the self-employed should not distract us from a stark truth: austerity as it was implemented made Ireland a much more unjust society. And it didn’t have to be like this. The great recession was managed here in such a way as to make the country more socially unjust than it was even in 2008 when the bubble economy was producing such extremes of wealth at the top of Irish society.
The great recession and the euro crisis hit every European Union country. How did those countries manage in terms of social justice and how does Ireland compare? We can actually answer this question because the German-based Bertelsmann Foundation publishes a very rigorous annual index of social injustice in the EU, using a broad set of objective measures. The most recent report was published last week and Ireland comes out of it, in general, very badly.
Bad decisions
The troika bears much of the blame: social justice was simply not on its agenda. Yet Portugal was also in a troika programme and its level of social justice is the same in 2016 as it was in 2008. Bad decisions were also made in Ireland: five regressive budgets in a row, for example. The “hard choices” that ministers loved to boast of were much harder on those on the receiving end. And it was perfectly possible to have made other choices.
Readers may remember the repeated insistence, especially by Michael Noonan, that Ireland must be thought of as a “northern European country” – not, in other words, like those chaotic southerners. But social injustice is a form of chaos that we’re very good at and our record is distinctly Mediterranean. If we really must trade in stereotypes of fecklessness, Ireland is, on this measure, somewhere around Sicily – half way between Spain and Greece in the feckless tolerance for poverty, for the exclusion of large numbers of children from the opportunity to grow as equal citizens, for the sustaining of intergenerational injustice.
Plague of ‘bestism’
At the moment we seem to be afflicted with |
a topic that could do with some elaboration. In the now classic Freudian screen theory popularized by Laura Mulvey, the male gaze partakes in a scopophilic desire to look, but is threatened by the castrating power of the image of the woman. One strategy for containing that threat is fetishism, where the body of the woman is reduced to a fetishistic part. Perhaps Azuma is talking about a second-order development. Having reduced the threatening image of the female body to parts it can then be reconstructed out of the database at will as ensembles of moé-points. The movie Ex Machina (2015) might be the furthest end point of this theme so far.
The old model of grand narrative and allegorical fragment lent itself to a hermeneutic procedure in which the fragment of a particular work could be read as lost or ruined bit of a larger historical time. But perhaps the new model is no longer a depth model. Azuma calls this hyper-flatness. He anticipates Lev Manovich’s insistence on the software layer as a generalized meta-medium. For Azuma, there’s only view control. You can look at the data different ways, but there’s no way to read through the fragment to the underlying truth of the totality to which it belongs, other than as database.
Otaku reading practices can only go sideways, as it were, from one view of the database to another. “All such information is consumed in parallel, as equivalents, as if to open different ‘windows’. So today’s Graphical User Interface, much more than simply a useful invention, is a marvelous apparatus in which the world image of our time is encapsulated.” (104) There’s no path from what is visible on the screen to the actual database, only other ways of representing fragments of its content.
In a later work, Azuma explores the political implications of the database. General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google (Vertical Books, 2014) is about a moment after a loss of confidence in political institutions. This book too is a kind of derivate work, détournement or simulacrum, reusing not Kojève in this case but Rousseau’s The Social Contract.
From Rousseau, Azuma cuts the concept of the general will, or popular sovereignty. For Rousseau it is a fictional construct. “He probably never dreamed that it would become possible to see and feel the texture of the ‘general will.’” (7) In political theory, the general will was a symptom of a repressed desire for a non-deliberative form of government. Now it is a latent content beginning to use information as the tech of its material actualization.
In Rousseau’s version the social contract creates the social, and the sovereignty of this sociality is the general will. There is first the social, and then secondly a government. There is a difference between sovereignty and government. The latter is merely the instrument of general will. The social contract thought in this manner does not legitimate any existing government, but rather the possibility of revolution when governments fail the general will.
General will is an ideal construct, perhaps part of a grand narrative, which can generate critical purchase on the corruption of actual governments. But the general will in Rousseau is not public opinion.
Public opinion can be false; the general will is never false. The general will is a shared interest, whereas public opinion is merely a motley of particular interests. Public opinion is the sum of wills; general will is the sum of the difference of wills.
Azuma offers a useful analogy: public opinion is scalar, the general will is vectoral. Public opinion is an averaging of the ‘masses’; the general will is the sum of differences between velocities. Rousseau sometimes writes as if the general will is computable, a mathematical entity. He posits a matheme of collective intelligence centuries before it could exist.
Rousseau is a problem for theorists of democratic governance because of his aversion to not only public opinion but also representative democracy and parties. The general will does not come from citizens communicating with each other at all. “Rousseau thought that the general will is generated not through a process of members of a group affirming a single will cancelling out the differences but instead all at once, through allowing diverse wills to appear in the public sphere will retaining their respective differences.” (33) The general will is a sum of all differences.
The hidden ideal model underlying actual polities and according to which they are to be judged is a politics without communication. The general will belongs to the order of things, not to the social world. It is not a politics made by the social, but a politics conforming to nature. (And in this sense pointing away from Kojève.) Like the otaku, Rousseau preferred solitude to public life. For Rousseau (and subsequently for Fourier) civilization with its cultural artifice is the origin of all evil.
Azuma is skeptical of the value of normative models of deliberative democracy, such as one might find in Hannah Arendt or Jürgen Habermas. For this school of thought, the public sphere detached from labor is where one might find the conditions of rational communication necessary for deliberation. This would be not a mere gathering of needs or desires but their transformation through rational deliberation.
Azuma distances his approach both from deliberative democracy and from one other very different idea of the political: Carl Schmitt’s concept of politics as the making of friend versus enemy distinctions and the ontological extermination of the enemy. Just as the general will does not deliberate, nor does it distinguish between friend and enemy. Perhaps it is the domain of that rather more interesting part of politics, which is always about the non-friend and the non-enemy.
So if the general will is neither a deliberative democracy nor the fight to the death, what is it? For Rousseau it is a regulative ideal, but for Azuma it is rapidly becoming a kind of reality: it’s the database. Ubiquitous computing extracts patterns of unconscious need directly from environments – in the form of big data – quite without the conscious participation of citizens – or should I say – users. The general has been made concrete, but also privatized – its Google. “No-one being conscious of Google, but everyone rendering a service to Google – this contradiction is the crucial point here.” (58)
Some might immediately thematize this as surveillance or biopower or neoliberalism, and not without justice. But Azuma’s approach is at least novel in relation to such received ideas. It seems the otaku were onto something: that underlying the moé-points of attraction there’s a database unconscious. People’s wants become a thing. “Rousseau… remarked that the general will is etched into the hearts of citizens. Therefore, it cannot be perceived. On the other hand, the general will 2.0 is etched into the information environment.” (63)
But where general will 1.0 was a mythic grand narrative, general will 2.0 is an actual database. “So far, access to general will 2.0 is exclusively in the hands of private corporations.”(64) This is a point Azuma chooses not to linger over, however. To put it in my own conceptual language, which here neatly fits with Azuma’s: the governmental power that can be extracted from the database are in the hands of a ruling class – the vectoral class.
Azuma distances his approach from that of Tim O’Reilly and other Silicon valley boosters of the tech industry fraction of the vectoral class, however. To some extent his database general will is still something of a regulative ideal, indeed even a grand narrative. It is in potential, rather than in actuality, a means to supplement a deliberative democracy that can no longer function as such. Politics has in his view become too complex for deliberation by all citizens. But perhaps the database of needs can come to their assistance, and enable a combining of rational deliberation with “a government guided by the unconscious.” (72)
One might expect a great deal of push-back at this point from intellectuals for whom ‘The Political’ is still something sacred and transcendent. But it has to be acknowledged that actual politics is in rather poor shape in much of the (over)developed world. It turns out we human animals are not very good at using reason to overcome our particular sympathies and strive instead for the universal. Reason does not trump empathy, nor universality particularity, nor communication private interest.
Communication leads to networks, not universality. It creates island worlds and echo chambers – as anyone who uses the internet these days would know. What people want from their media tools now is the reduction of information complexity, not endless deliberation. How can there be deliberative democracy when nobody writes comments except trolls and nobody reads them – except other trolls?
Perhaps we need a whole new architecture for politics. One that can visualize unconscious needs and desires. Something like this turns up sometimes in utopian fiction, such as Bogdanov’s Red Star and Vangeigem’s Voyage to Oarystis. But it is also in dystopian fiction such as Zamyatin’s We.
If psychoanalysis is a way of uncovering an individual unconscious unknown to the subject, then the database is a way of uncovering the collective unconscious unknown to the people. And just as in dream analysis, there is no negation. Take Google’s Pagerank, for example: it measures links to a given page, but it does not judge that page. Hence if you Google a ‘sensitive’ term such as ‘Judaism’ it is likely that among the top hits is some anti-Semitic bile. It is possible that anti-anti-Semitic sites that link to it to attack it are part of what generates its high rank.
But perhaps there is a bit missing here. Who owns and controls the database? If the old grand narratives were products of the superstructure, then as Pasolini had already noticed, the new forms of cultural power are actually directly infrastructural. What I would call the vectoral class ends up in charge of the means of detecting the general will as the social unconscious. They use it mostly to make a buck off rewarding our animal needs with simulacra. As Lazzarato has noted the affective life of the species is now one of machinic enslavement.Workers translocate a manzanita bush in San Francisco, at a cost of at least $205,075, to make way for a highway project. (Photo: Michael Chasse/National Park Service.)
(CNSNews.com) -- The government spent at least $205,075 in 2010 to “translocate” a single bush in San Francisco that stood in the path of a $1.045-billion highway-renovation project that was partially funded by the economic stimulus legislation President Barack Obama signed in 2009.
“In October 2009, an ecologist identified a plant growing in a concrete-bound median strip along Doyle Drive in the Presidio as Arctostaphylos franciscana,” the U.S. Department of Interior reported in the Aug. 10, 2010 edition of the Federal Register. “The plant’s location was directly in the footprint of a roadway improvement project designed to upgrade the seismic and structural integrity of the south access to the Golden Gate Bridge.
“The translocation of the Arctostaphylos franciscana plant to an active native plant management area of the Presidio was accomplished, apparently successfully and according to plan, on January 23, 2010,” the Interior Department reported.
The bush—a Franciscan manzanita—was a specimen of a commercially cultivated species of shrub that can be purchased from nurseries for as little as $15.98 per plant. The particular plant in question, however, was discovered in the midst of the City of San Francisco, in the median strip of a highway, and was deemed to be the last example of the species in the “wild.”
Prior to the discovery of this “wild” Franciscan manzanita, the plant had been considered extinct for as long as 62 years--extinct, that is, outside of people’s yards and botanical gardens.
Before that, the bush had grown in the “wild” in two cemeteries in San Francisco’s Richmond District as well as on Mount Davidson, a peak in the middle of San Francisco. The Department of Interior said that there had also been “unconfirmed sightings” of the shrub in the city’s Haight-Ashbury District—an area that became famous in the late 1960s as the epicenter of the psychedelic hippie movement.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr)
The Haight-Ashbury population of the plant, the Interior Department said in the Federal Register, was believed to have been "lost to urbanization."
On Oct. 16, 2009, Dr. Daniel Gluesenkamp, a botanist who was then the director of Habitat Protection and Restoration for Audubon Canyon Ranch, noticed the manzanita when he was driving along Doyle Drive (the highway leading to the Golden Gate Bride that is now under renovation). The manzanita had been previously hidden by other vegetation but was uncovered as the area was being cleared in preparation for road construction.
With help from a biologist from the Presidio Trust (which oversees the Presidio) and an ecologist from the National Park Service, Gluesenkamp’s discovery was determined to be a Franciscan manzanita.
Shortly thereafter, the Presidio Trust, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the California Department of Fish and Game developed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) for saving this one bush from the highway project, for which ground had been broken in December 2009.
The agreement of Dec. 21, 2009 – Memorandum of Agreement Regarding Planning, Development, and Implementation of the Conservation Plan for Franciscan Manzanita – explains how, why, and when the bush would be moved and which agencies would be responsible for which aspects of the move. (MOA - Fran Man - 2009.pdf)
While the MOA did not detail all the costs for moving the bush, it did state that in addition to funding removal and transportation of the Franciscan manzanita, Caltrans agreed to transfer $79,470 to the Presidio Trust “to fund the establishment, nurturing, and monitoring of the Mother Plant in its new location for a period not to exceed ten (10) years following relocation and two (2) years for salvaged rooted layers and cuttings according to the activities outlined in the Conservation Plan.”
Furthermore, Presidio Parkway Project spokesperson Molly Graham told CNSNews.com that the “hard removal”—n.b. actually digging up the plant, putting it on a truck, driving it somewhere else and replanting it--cost $100,000.
The MOA also stated that Caltrans agreed to “Transfer $25,605.00 to the Trust to fund the costs of reporting requirements of the initial 10-year period as outlined in the Conservation Plan.”
President Barack Obama signed an economic stimulus law, now determined by the CBO to cost $821 billion, at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science on Feb. 17, 2009. (AP photo)
The $100,000 to pay for the “hard removal,” the $79,470 to pay for the “establishment, nurturing and monitoring” of the plant for a decade after its “hard removal,” and the $25,605 to cover the “reporting requirements” for the decade after the “hard removal,” equaled a total cost of $205,075 for “translocating” this manzanita bush.
But those were not the only costs incurred by taxpayers on behalf of the bush. According to the MOA, other costs included:
--“Contract for and provide funding not to exceed $7,025.00 for initial genetic or chromosomal testing of the Mother Plant by a qualified expert to be selected at Caltrans’ sole discretion.” (MOA - Fran Man - 2009.pdf)
--“Contract for and fund the input, guidance, and advice of a qualified Manzanita expert on an as-needed basis to support the tending of the Mother Plant for a period not to exceed five (5) years, provided that said expert selection, retention and replacement at any point after hiring rests in the sole discretion of Caltrans.”
“Provide funding not to exceed $5,000.00 to each of 3 botanical gardens (Strybing, UC, and Tilden) to nurture salvaged rooted layers and to monitor and report findings as outlined in the Conservation Plan.”
--“Provide funding not to exceed $1,500.00 for the long-term seed storage of 300 seeds collected around the Mother Plant in November 2009 as outlined in the Conservation Plan.”
The plant is now protected by a fence and its location is kept secret, in part because the Presidio Trust and the National Park Service fear that nature-lovers seeking to see the rare wild Manzanita might trample it to death.
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Calif. (AP Photo)
“[A] single trampling event could result in damage or the death of the wild plant,” the Interior Department noted in the Federal Register for Sept. 8, 2011. “As noted …, the Presidio Trust and NPS have made continuous efforts not to reveal the location of Arctostaphylos franciscana. They are concerned that public knowledge of the A. franciscana location would attract large numbers of plant enthusiasts who may damage the A. franciscana and compact the soil.”
The project to replace the Doyle Drive approach to the Golden Gate Bridge with a new road called the Presidio Parkway has an estimated total cost of $1.045 billion. The project has received a number of federal grants, including two under President Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. These included $83.28 million in stimulus funds awarded to the project on Dec. 24, 2009 (about a month before the manzanita bush was “translocated”) and $46 million awarded on Dec. 30, 2010.
In a Feb. 17, 2010 statement about stimulus money going to the project, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described herself as “a long-time supporter of the Presidio Parkway project.”
“This badly deteriorated structure is designated a Post Disaster Recovery Route and is the only route between the San Francisco peninsula and northern California counties,” Pelosi’s statement said of project. “Unfortunately, the current roadway is reaching the end of its useful life. The Federal Highway Administration ranks Doyle Drive as the fifth worst bridge in the nation and the worst in California for structural sufficiency.
Construction on the new Presidio Parkway began in late 2009 and is scheduled to be completed in 2013.”
In September 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed naming the Franciscan manzanita an endangered species.
Had the plant been moved to a botanical garden it would have remained “extinct in the wild.” According to the MOA “Such translocation would essentially render the plant extinct in the wild (once again); it would be unlikely that the plant could be moved a second time once reintroduced populations are established; the seed from the mother plant would not be usable due to likely genetic contamination from other garden species of manzanitas.”
The plant is still considered wild according to the 2011 Federal Register entry because it has been moved to an undeveloped area of the Presidio and “is not receiving the level of protection, water, and nutrients that plants in a botanical garden may receive.”
One California nursery currently allows customer to purchase Franciscan manzanitas online for $15.98 per bush. Another sells them for $18.00 per bush.Putin at Moscow's Vnukovo airport in December 6, 2014. REUTERS/Vasily Maximov/Pool Rapid changes in the financial markets and the Russian economy are forcing Vladimir Putin to change his calculus.
Now the Russian president has a choice between doubling down on his aggressive foreign policy or concentrate on putting Russia in order.
This week's plunge in the value of the ruble adds another layer of uncertainty to the ongoing faceoff between Russia and the West.
The currency crisis, precipitated by US and EU sanctions against Moscow and a global decline in oil prices, threatens to crater the country's lucrative state-owned enterprises and send the economy into a nosedive.
The question is how an ever-unpredictable Vladimir Putin will respond.
Putin's nationalistic and often-aggressive policies have appealed to Russians' post-Cold War sense of grievance and won him soaring approval ratings at a time when the Russian president is loathed in most western capitals.
But the ruble dive threatens to radically shift the conditions that have allowed Putin to maintain his internal popularity in spite of the western powers' opposition to him.
As New York University professor and Russia expert Mark Galeotti explained to Business Insider, Putin's rule is predicated on a "social contract" that most Russians have found acceptable: "You stay out of politics. You show enthusiasm but don't think you actually get a meaningful say in government. In return for that your life will improve and continue to improve."
Under Putin, Russia achieved perhaps the highest standard of living in the country's history while the government was able to replenish its coffers after periods of actual bankruptcy under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. Weaknesses remained: The new prosperity was largely distributed through Putin's hand-picked former KGB colleagues and much of the country's wealth depended upon robust oil prices and access to European markets. Record military spending also threatens to sap resources and hamstring any government response to a future economic crisis.
The recent decline in oil prices, along with the economic consequences of international sanctions, could bring Putin's arrangement crashing down around him. "This social contract is being torn up," says Galeotti. "But Putin could tear it up more quickly and more assiduously if he's still determined to maintain his aggressive geopolitical stance. It really is one of those guns or butter moments."
The ruble has declined in lockstep with global oil prices over the second half of 2014. Twitter/@Schuldensuehner
Galeotti believes that Moscow may send additional troops to eastern Ukraine in the hopes of pressuring Kiev into a settlement that would result in the lifting of international sanctions. But the chances of immediate escalation — beyond the Kremlin's current spate of military mobilizations and provocative military flights near and even in European airspace — remain low.
Putin has nothing to gain from fresh geopolitical turmoil, especially now. "If we assume that Putin and company want to maximize their chances of exiting this crisis with their fortunes and, ideally, their political power mostly intact, then they need to worry about how NATO and the markets will respond to fresh aggression," Jay Ulfedler, a political scientist and director of the Early Warning Project, told Business Insider. "At this point, I don't see many options for new aggression that carry serious domestic benefits for Russia and don't risk huge new costs, perhaps including a direct war with NATO."
But that's only in the short term. The Russian state has enough money to backstop the ruble for the time being and Moscow has the ability to bail out some of the state's vital assets. "The country's strategic reserves may be (and I think will be) dispatched to help save some of the industries and businesses that are considered strategic (RosNeft and GazProm are first in that list), but others may be sacrificed," Hannah Thoburn, a Eurasia analyst at the Foreign Policy Initiative, told Business Insider.
The alternative is economic collapse and the severing of Putin's social contract — a scenario that could lead to internal disruptions serious enough to put Russia on an even more more aggressive footing.
In an economic worst-case scenario, Russia could see "an increasing tide of protest" and "an accretion of signs of concern" as popular discontent grows, Galeotti explains. In that situation, "the elite may also start to wonder if Putin is really the guy they want in charge."
In the face of public backlash and internal revolt, the long-serving Russian president may feel he has little choice but to rally nationalistic sentiment and push his advantage over his western rivals, which currently resides in the Kremlin's willingness to violently impose its will and violate the sovereignty of Russia's European neighbors.
Putin addresses the Federal Assembly, including State Duma deputies, members of the Federation Council, the heads of the Constitutional and Supreme courts, regional governors, heads of Russia's traditional religious faiths and public figures, at the Kremlin in Moscow, December 4, 2014. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin
Geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer told Business Insider that if he feels he's backed into a corner, Putin's options include more cyberattacks, "more aggression/incursion around NATO borders, excuses found for expansion of military engagement beyond present zone in Russia, [and] closer ties/integration with China."
And then there's the worst-case scenario, an economic meltdown bad enough to convince Putin that the continuity of his rule is under threat. Galeotti says that complete Russian economic collapse is "a possibility but not a probability." But as he notes, "imperial adventurism" in the face of political or social crisis is a Kremlin tactic dating back to the disastrous Russo-Japanese war in 1905.
It's one that Putin could resort to if things get worse. And between eastern Moldova, eastern Ukraine, and parts of Kazakhstan, former Soviet possessions that many Russians believe to be part of the national patrimony, Putin wouldn't have a shortage of obvious targets.Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
Dec. 8, 2015, 6:45 PM GMT / Source: TODAY Contributor By Terri Peters
When Liz Dolder bought a metal Christmas card holder from a thrift store, she had no idea that it contained holiday magic. But combined with the kindness of strangers and the power of social media, the tree-shaped card display is bringing Christmas cheer to Dolder’s niece, Safyre, who was the only member of her family to survive a house fire when she was five years old.
After someone set fire to the upstairs stairwell leading to her family’s apartment in May 2013, Safyre’s father, David Terry, and her siblings Layah, 3, Michael, 2, and Donovan, 11 months, were killed. Because Terry had cradled Safyre in his arms, she was protected from breathing in hot air, allowing her to survive the fire.
According to Dolder, Safyre saw the thrift store Christmas card holder and said she wanted to fill it up with cards. Courtesy of Liz Dolder
Safyre suffered burns over 75 percent of her body, causing her to lose her left foot and right hand, and requiring a 9-month stay in hospitals, where she underwent more than 50 surgeries to graft skin over her burns. And, since her mother had signed over custodial rights to the state, Dolder, who is Terry’s sister and Safyre’s aunt, petitioned the courts to become her guardian.
“Safyre lost everything — her father, her mother, her sister, her brothers, her home, her favorite toy, her favorite outfit — everything that was familiar to her,” Dolder told TODAY Parents. “She even lost the one thing we all take for granted — her reflection. But she wakes every morning with a smile on her face. She is the true definition of hope, faith and love.”
"Safyre is your typical 8-year-old. Only thing is, she is just wrapped in a different package. She is the bravest, most courageous little girl you will ever meet," said Dolder of her niece. Courtesy of Liz Dolder
Dolder, who lives in Rotterdam, New York, with her husband, Michael and their five children, says her niece, now 8, is a fighter who has inspired a community of supporters to keep going regardless of their obstacles. Dolder often posts updates on Safyre’s health to Safyre Schenectady’s Super Survivor, the Facebook community she created after the fire to keep friends and family up-to-date on her niece’s condition.
When Safyre saw the Christmas card tree her aunt had purchased, the young girl said she wanted to fill it up with cards during the Christmas season. Later, when Dolder shared a photo of Safyre with the tree with her Facebook community, a supporter of the family, Kevin Clark, asked for permission to share the photo, along with an address where people could mail cards and fulfill Safyre’s Christmas wish.
The post has been viewed and shared by thousands of people. And, in a matter of days, Safyre has received fourteen cards from throughout the country, from Florida to New Hampshire, to California.
Safyre has received 14 cards in the few days since family friend Kevin Clark shared a post on Facebook asking people to mail her a card to place on her Christmas card tree. Courtesy of Liz Dolder
“She’s even had a few emailed from Italy, Sweden, Russia and the United Kingdom,” said Dolder. “When she opens these cards, the twinkle in her eye and the sparkle in her smile are priceless.”
Safyre hopes the cards will continue to come in. Cards can be mailed to: Safyre, P.O. Box 6126, Schenectady, New York, 12306.
The family has also started a You Caring fundraising site, where they have raised $10,000 of the $15,000 needed to cover medical expenses and a van used to transport Safyre to and from her ongoing medical treatments and surgeries.
“Safyre is a typical 8-year-old — she’s just wrapped in a different package,” said Dolder. “She is the bravest, most courageous little girl you will ever meet. She is funny and witty, sweet and caring, and super strong…She is truly amazing. Once you meet her, she is unforgettable.”Adult Swim, Cartoon Network Piss Off Fans By Removing Free iPad Streams; Now Only For Cable Subscribers
from the that's-not-helping dept
I do not have cable. and, just to make it clear, I am a late 20-something, practicing intellectual property attorney, and I cut my cable not because the economy is bad, but because it is an outrageously overpriced, single direction service that forces me to choke down a ton of content I do not care about, in addition to forcing me to watch ads.
I was happy to watch my favorite cartoons, for free, but with ads, ostensibly, the profits of which go directly to the stations with less dilution than if they had been broadcast, but now I will probably go back to doing what I did before my iPad: not watch stuff, wait for it to come out on DVD and Netflix/Qwikster it, or, potentially, even 'infringe' it.
It's amazing how frequently legacy entertainment industry companies look to screw up a good thing. Cartoon Network and its alter ego Adult Swim launched iOS apps in the last year that received a ton of praise for offering full streams of shows in their free apps. This made them useful apps for plenty of fans of cartoons (and, really, who isn't a fan of cartoons?). But, it appears things have changed. A practicing intellectual property lawyer, who prefers to remain anonymous (he apparently doesn't want the world to know of his cartoon obsession), alerted us to the news that the two apps have nowthe free streams. The deal is you can now only get free streams. In fact, they're even pitching it as if they're doing something new -- totally ignoring that the free streams used to be available for everyone, and now are limited to just people who have cable/satellite subscriptions.Yes, this is weak attempt by everyone to try to hold back the flood of people cutting the cord -- but it's the absolute wrong way to go about it. Rather than providing, they're trying to, and in the process pissing off a lot of people. It's not going to make cord cutters any more interested in re-subscribing to cable or satellite TV, but may make the Cartoon Network and Adult Swim lose some of its most valuable audience -- the young, employed, well-educated folks that advertisers crave... who have been leading the charge in cutting the cord. Here's what the attorney wrote to me:The way to compete in this market is to add value, not take it away. That just pisses people off.
Filed Under: adult swim, cable, cartoon network, free, ipadMax Holloway believes he’s one of a few fighters that have the respect of outspoken UFC featherweight Conor McGregor – both in and out of the octagon.
Holloway (12-3 MMA, 8-3 UFC) and McGregor (17-2 MMA, 5-0 UFC) fought for three rounds at UFC Fight Night 26 in a bout that ultimate saw “The Notorious” leave with the unanimous decision victory. That’s a feat in and of itself, because McGregor has earned the rest of his UFC wins by knockout with no one able to survive past seven minutes.
“Blessed” went all 15 minutes with McGregor in the August 2013 bout. However, instead of receiving praise for his hardened performance, the post-fight storyline focused on McGregor’s torn ACL that he suffered in the second round.
McGregor was out 11 months with the injury, but returned to make a thunderous run up the 145-pound ranks and now sits on the cusp of a title shot. He’ll challenge longtime champion Jose Aldo for the title at UFC 189 in July.
Holloway, on the other hand, rebounded from the loss to go on a nice run of his own. He’s won five consecutive fights, four by stoppage, and is closing in on his most significant bout since McGregor nearly two years ago.
The 23-year-old is set to take on Cub Swanson at UFC on FOX 15 on April 18 in a fight that could elevate him into title contention. That’s exactly where Holloway wants to be, because it would mean he’s closer to one of his largest goals in the sport, and that’s a second date with McGregor.
“I’d do anything for that rematch,” Holloway told MMAjunkie. “It’s going to happen. McGregor is a cool dude. He has nothing but respect for me. Every time someone brings up my name in interviews, he talks some good stuff. I think I earned his respect.”
Holloway’s position as the only man who McGregor failed to finish in UFC competition is one angle for a rematch. However, Holloway’s greatest incentive is the opportunity to compete at full strength. McGregor may have endured a knee injury half way through the fight, but Holloway was also injured in the contest. He said he suffered a sprained ankle in the opening seconds of the fight and was forced to readjust for nearly 15 minutes.
“Everyone always says this and that about the first fight, but he cried about an injury that he had at the end of the second round,” Holloway said. “I didn’t cry about no injury. I had an injury in the first 30 seconds of the fight and I fought him all the way to a decision. He had two rounds to finish me and he couldn’t get it done.
“If he wants to get it done and he wants to get that back, then give me a rematch and we’ll see what happens. If he wins his next fight and I win my fight, we’ll see what happens. Maybe we could do that rematch. I would love to get back at him. The first fight was great and the second fight is going to be even better.”
Holloway is a humble figure in the sport who lives and trains in Hawaii. He’s not one to disrespect past or future opponents, but felt the need to reveal McGregor wasn’t the only one at less than 100 percent. He feels a rematch is imminent, though, particularly because he and McGregor are still relatively young in the game.
“That was the only injury I’ve ever had in any fight, was that fight,” Holloway said. “Of course it had to be against that guy. It just wasn’t meant to be. God has a plan for me and his plan is prevailing. I’m on a different path. We might cross paths again. We might not. But I’m going to be around this division for a long time.”
Holloway knows that several crucial aspects must come together to make the McGregor rematch a reality. The most important of which is defeated Swanson at UFC on FOX 15. The featherweight bout airs on the FOX-televised main card following prelims on FOX Sports 1 and UFC Fight Pass at Newark’s Prudential Center.
Swanson is a stern test, but one Holloway said he’s confident he’ll pass. What he’s not as confident about, though, is McGregor’s chances against Aldo. He’s not ready to count out the brash Irishman, but believes it’s no accident that “Scarface” is the only featherweight champion in UFC history.
“This is MMA; we’ve got these little gloves on so everyone has a chance,” Holloway said. “It just takes one punch to the right spot and you go night-night, or you’re looking up at the ceiling asking what’s happening. It happened to the greatest of all time in there with Anderson Silva.
“I’m not counting Conor McGregor out, but we just have to see. Aldo’s been the king of the division for a reason. I think it’s going to be a great fight and I hope it’s a war and not just one-sided.”
For more on UFC on FOX 15, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.This 9mm handgun was found buried in the sand by a 10-year-old girl at Coney Island Beach. (Credit: NYPD)
— A veteran lifeguard stepped into action this week, after a 10-year-old girl found a loaded gun buried in the sand in the water at the beach at Coney Island.
As CBS 2’s Tony Aiello reported, the girl found the 9mm handgun around 2 p.m. Monday at the beach, buried in the sand under about 2 feet of water.
The NYPD said the girl was playing on the beach and looking for sea shells when she found the gun. The girl made the discovery in front of Jonathan Boyce’s lifeguard stand.
“A little girl runs out of the water with a gun in her hand saying, ‘Look what I just found,'” Boyce recalled, speaking exclusively with CBS 2’s Tracee Carrasco.
Trained to handle just about any situation on the beach, Boyce’s first responder instincts kicked in. He immediately told the excited little girl to gently put the rusty 9mm gun down in the sand.
The five-year veteran kept onlookers back before his boss and the NYPD arrived.
“I had to stay calm and rational, and like, make the right decisions,” he said.
The girl’s mother couldn’t believe it.
“Her mom comes up and like, ‘Oh my God, this is supposed to be a beach,'” Boyce said.
Others at the beach were likewise shocked by the discovery.
“I would have a heart attack,” |
from a DIY store then placed in a polystyrene box.
When the balloon reaches the 22-mile-high mark it pops because the air pressure is too weak to keep the helium inside. As the box falls a mini-parachute automatically opens. Mr Harrison has recovered it from up to 50 miles away.The magic carpet is one manifestation of man's fascination with flight. What does our desire to defy gravity tell us about ourselves? Writer Cathy FitzGerald explores its appeal on the imagination.
Web-dreaming one day, writer Cathy FitzGerald stumbled on a site belonging to a museum in Iran.
It purported to tell the 'true history' of the flying carpet – how it was invented around the time of King Solomon and flourished with the rise of artisan makers in 11th century Baghdad.
The article detailed the many uses of the carpet – military, as a means of aerial attack; commercial, as a vehicle for the transport of goods; and cultural, as a device to help readers in the library at Alexandria reach the high books – and explained how they were finally wiped out during the Mongol invasion of Central Asia.
The article appears across the web, rarely with any caveat or credit. Cathy tracks down its author, the writer Azhar Abidi, and together they separate carpet fiction from carpet fact.
She goes on to meet a Japanese astronaut who took a real carpet into space - and flew it, a Muslim whose prayer mat rises above the mundane and a physicist working on levitation in the quantum world.
Along the way, cultural historian Marina Warner explains the origins of the symbol in the Arabian Nights, and wonders whether we had to invent flying carpets in order to learn how to fly.
We dream of flying and often long to fly unaided - is that part of it?
Cathy FitzGerald explores the past, present, and very real future of the magic carpet and wonders what our desire to defy gravity tells us about ourselves.The chief financial officer with Anglo Irish Bank in 2008 expressed surprise at the amount of interbank loans to Irish Life & Permanent, the trial of four senior bankers has heard.
The interbank loans allegedly involved money being transferred by Anglo to ILP and then being put back on deposit with Anglo via ILP's life assurance division.
Matt Moran, Anglo's chief financial officer at the time, told Paul O'Higgins SC, prosecuting, that on 30 September, he became aware that the interbank loans amounted to over €7bn.
He said he remembered Mr Bowe telling him at the time and that the amount was very significant. He said he expressed his surprise at the amount.
Mr Bowe told him that the government bank guarantee, introduced overnight on 29 September, had "given ILP comfort", the witness testified.
He said he did not become aware that the transactions were "cash for cash" until the end of January 2009.
He said the previous day there was a request from Anglo for emergency overnight funding. He said in the weeks before this there had been a significant outflow of cash from the bank.
Anglo's former head of finance Willie McAteer, 65, and former CEO of Irish Life and Permanent (ILP) Denis Casey, 56, and two others are accused of conspiring to mislead investors by using interbank loans to manipulate Anglo Irish Bank's balance sheets.
The transfer would allegedly appear as corporate deposits and not an interbank loan so the bank's corporate funding figure would appear bigger for the bank's year-end figures on 30 September, 2008.
ILP's former director of finance Peter Fitzpatrick, 63, of Convent Lane, Portmarnock, Dublin; John Bowe, 52, from Glasnevin, Dublin, who had been Anglo's head of capital markets; Mr McAteer of Greenrath, Tipperary Town, Co Tipperary; and Mr Casey from Raheny, Dublin have all pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to conspiring together and with others to mislead investors through financial transactions between 1 March and 30 September, 2008.
The trial continues before Judge Martin Nolan and a jury.After turning cautious on bitcoin earlier this month, Fundstrat's Tom Lee told clients Wednesday to jump back into the digital currency.
"A few weeks ago, we turned short-term neutral on bitcoin as the price level then (~$7400) exceeded our estimate of fair value," Lee wrote in the report. "Last week, Bitcoin fell to $5,600 and since then rebounded. In our view, this move to $5,600 cleaned up weak hands and we no longer feel caution is warranted. … We recommend steady buying of Bitcoin at these levels."
As a result, the strategist raised his mid-2018 price target for bitcoin to $11,500 from $6,000, representing nearly 40 percent upside to its current level.
Lee is bullish on the crypotcurrency because of his forecasts for strong growth in the number of bitcoin accounts and transaction dollar volume per account. He noted how Coinbase has more than 14 million accounts.
The price of bitcoin rose 1.3 percent to $8,200 Wednesday. It surpassed the $8,000 level for the first time Sunday, according to data from industry website CoinDesk. The digital currency is up more than 700 percent so far this year.
Big Wall Street banks are not ignoring the digital currency's rise. Despite JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's outspoken criticism on the viability of bitcoin as an investment, the bank is looking at allowing its clients to trade bitcoin futures, according to a Wall Street Journal report Tuesday.1 of 1 2 of 1
Tens of thousands of people have joined a Facebook group calling for a public inquiry to look into the holding of the G20 summit in Toronto.
As of this afternoon (July 2), Canadians Demanding a Public Inquiry into Toronto G20, started by a Toronto-based law firm, boasted more than 37,000 members.
The group’s wall is filled with links to stories and videos about the heavy-handed tactics that police employed during the G20 protests. Its events tab lists a few upcoming rallies that aim to keep the issue in the spotlight.
Of course, all it takes for someone join a Facebook group is clicking a button on the social-networking site.
Another way Facebook users, as well as people on Twitter, can show their support for a G20 inquiry is by adding a Twibbon to their avatar.
Only 38 supporters had adopted the #G20 Public Inquiry Twibbon, however, as of this afternoon.
The Twibbon overlays an upside-down Maple Leaf on your profile image.
For those who want an inquiry but aren’t satisfied with monkeying around with their social-networking profiles, Amnesty International has created an on-line form that makes it easy to send a message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association also has a petition calling for a G20 inquiry. Getting on that list involves sending the organization an e-mail.
The best way to stay in the loop on all things G20 is to keep an eye on the #G20 hashtag on Twitter.
You can follow Stephen Hui on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenhui.The Bridge by Leroy
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About
This video was produced by rendering the following 330 bytes of code with POV-Ray:
This Video is part of the POV-Ray Short Code Contest #5 which was originally published by Paul Bourke in 2008. This page shows a new re-rendering of the original POV-Ray source code at a higher resolution, although here and there some miniscule syntactic changes had to be made to the code in order to get POV-Ray 3.7 to parse it.
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SCC Award honourable mention Author: Leroy Author's Website: unknown Submission ID: ombpes Source Filesize: 330 Bytes Source Page: SCC5 Source Code: long | short
Render Process
Frames: 120 Pixels: 230 400 000 Rays: 1 581 091 440 CPU-Seconds: 3 200
LinksBREAKING NEWS: a study by the institute for distributed investigation of technologies (IDIOT) has found that all NoSQL technologies are essentially just a massive text file combined with the UNIX tool ‘grep’
NoSQL has risen in popularity in recent years as a hipster alternative to relational databases. Technology companies tend to move their entire data management system to a NoSQL backend, before moving it back to a relational database management system less than 12 months later.
“This is a huge shock!” said Dr Rick Slowman of the University of Birmingham. “We’ve all written shitty scripts that grep huge files to link them together, but noone thought an entire tech sector would be based on this!” he continued.
In a related report, IDIOT have confirmed that XML is totally shit.
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We all know that snakes, insects, and wasps can be venomous but what about a poisonous bird or turtle? The stigma we have for creatures who pack a poisonous punch is reserved mostly for slithering reptiles or ominous spiders. However, venomous creatures run the gamete from insect to mammal.
Duck-billed Platypus
For instance the adorably goofy duck-billed platypus looks less threatening then a pet cat but believe it or not the male platypus has a spur on its hind foot that is more than capable of delivering severe pain to humans. This venom is extremely lethal to smaller creatures including dogs while afflicting enough pain to seriously incapacitate any human affected. Oedema, or fluid filled swelling, develops around the wound and then spreads throughout the limb as the pain develops into a long-lasting heightened sensitivity. Unlike its venomous insect or reptile counterparts, this toxin is actually utilized for asserting dominance during mating season rather than to kill or immobilize prey. I’m sure humans wouldn’t mind the perk of being able to stop a competitor right in their tracks while trying to get a date, but imagine trying to explain to your buddies that a Platypus won a fight against you…
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Pitohui
The hooded Pitohui is the first documented venomous bird. Found in New Guinea, it acquires its poison from eating the same delicious treat responsible for the poisonous dart frog’s venom, the Choresine beetle. A neurotoxin called homobatrachotoxin found in the bird’s skin and feathers causes an intense sensation of numbness or tingling in whoever touches it. While it is thought to feature such brilliant coloring as a warning of its venom, one can’t help but wonder just how good of a warning that is when the Toucan’s even brighter colors threaten at most that it might try to sell you some fruit loops…
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ADVERTISEMENTSamsung Galaxy Mega 7-inch phone detailed for summer
If you thought the 6.3-inch Samsung Galaxy Mega was big, just wait until you get your hands on the Samsung Galaxy Mega 7.0. This device has just appeared in China as the newest in massive-sized smartphone from Samsung, moving through authentication in MIIT. This sort of authentication is generally followed by release several weeks later.
The Samsung Galaxy Mega 7.0 – as it’s being assumed to be called – will be a mid-range device, believe it or not. Like the Galaxy Megas that’ve come before, Samsung will release this device with specifications that do not overshadow their hero phones: Galaxy S5 and the Galaxy Note 3 and 4.
NOTE: Above you’re seeing the Galaxy Mega 6.3 and Galaxy S4 for AT&T. Below are images from MIIT in China.
The Galaxy Note 4 will come later this year, likely not too far away from the release of this beast. The Galaxy Mega we see here works with a 1.2GHz quad-core processor – Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 or MediaTek, quite likely – with 1.5GB of RAM.
With support for microSD card expansion, this Samsung device comes with just 8GB of internal storage right out for he box. It’ll be released with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean in China, and will have an 8-megapixel camera on its back, 2-megapixel camera on its front.
It is not yet known whether this device will be released in the United States. In China it will head to networks with support for 4G along TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE.
VIA: VR-ZoneArby's Sells 50 Venison Sandwiches Per Hour in Nashville, Until They're All Gone
The new Arby's venison sandwich is incredibly popular in Nashville, with stores quickly selling out of the limited-edition meals.
Apparently, the market for the new Arby's venison sandwich was much bigger than the company anticipated. The restaurant rolled out the new venison sandwiches at select locations in Nashville, Tennessee, on November 1st.
The first store promptly sold out of the new sandwiches on the first day of the new promotion, selling over 250 of them in just five hours. This was despite limiting sales to two venison sandwiches per customer. A second store offering the new Arby's venison sandwich sold over 100 in just over an hour.
According to Arby's representative Luke DeRouen:
We stuck a nerve, in a good way, with hunters. Some people drove from an hour away to try it.
Due to USDA regulations, restaurants cannot sell wild game. For this reason, the new Arby's venison sandwich is made from free-range, farm-raised red deer from New Zealand. The 5.5-ounce cuts of top and bottom round steak are slow cooked in hot water for 3.5 hours and served with a Cabernet sauce seasoned with crushed juniper berries and crispy fried onions on top.
I don't know about you, but my mouth is watering just reading that.
The sandwich is part of a marketing campaign to promote Arby's "It's meats season" campaign (check out the video above to see what I mean) and is a natural extension of their "We have the meats" slogan. Clearly, they are trying to attract hunters as a demographic group. Though it's still early, it looks like that approach is working well for them.
Arby's venison sandwiches will soon be available in Atlanta, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
Like what you see here? You can read more great hunting articles by John McAdams on his hunting blog. Follow him on Facebook ennhe Big Game Hunting Blog, Twitter @TheBigGameHunt and on Instagram The_Big_Game_Hunter.
oembed rumble video here
NEXT: IS THIS THE BEST BEAR HUNTING VIDEO YOU'VE EVER SEEN?Counseling important as divorce rates increase in the South Asian community.
By Eva Mendes
In the last several years, marriage has become an increasingly challenging endeavor evidenced by the sharp rise in divorce rates in the Indian or South Asian community (Ravindra, 2013). If more couples received marriage counseling at the right time, it’s possible that many of these divorces could be averted.
Indian couples often hesitate to seek counseling due to the stigma associated with seeking professional help. Or they seek counseling only when they are on the verge of a divorce. By then, it’s often too late to fix things; therefore, working with a couples counselor before things escalate is key.
In an attempt to guide desi couples through the journey of counseling, outlined below are common issues that couples face, and how they can be successfully dealt with:
1.) Getting Married for the Wrong Reasons:
Many people get married out of a sense of obligation or desperation. Fear drives a lot of people to ignore red flags or warning signs about their selected mate. In time, these red flags create conflicts in the marriage.
Counseling Advice: Avoid getting married due to family pressure or the fear of remaining single. Take time to get to know the person you’ve selected to marry, including their family. Have a frank discussion about key issues: where you will live, sharing of domestic tasks, finances, common interests, raising children, and how you plan on resolving differences.
2.) Differences in Family Backgrounds and Upbringing:
Having different family backgrounds can sometimes cause friction for the couple because their upbringing influences their expectations of their partner. Leena was raised in a family where her parents shared in the household tasks. Her husband, Thomas on the other hand, grew up in a home where his mother fulfilled all the domestic duties, and expected the same of Leena.
Counseling Advice: Initially, everyone can be on their best behavior; therefore, it’s important to closely observe relationships between the family members of your future mate. This might tell you a lot about your future partner’s mindset. If you observe that family members are disrespectful to each other, you might be forewarned.
3.) Poor Boundaries with In-Laws:
The over-involvement of in-laws, from either the husband’s or wife’s family, can drive a wedge between a couple and create a sense of conflicting loyalties for them. Intrusions from a mother-in-law or sister-in-law is damaging and leaves little space for the couple to develop their own bond.
Counseling Advice: In counseling, couples can learn to work as a team to address issues with the in-laws. The stronger the unity of a husband and wife, the happier everyone will be: children and even the in-laws! It is in the best interest of the entire family to respect the couple’s boundaries.
4.) Lack of Coping Strategies:
Many people lack coping strategies for their problems. Pratik was deeply unhappy at his job. In order to cope, Pratik began to go online under a false identity and engage in what he thought was some “harmless fun” on adult websites. Pratik continued his habit even though he loved his wife, Mishti. Eventually, she stumbled upon his computer history and his secret was out.
Counseling Advice: In counseling, after her considerable anger subsided, Mishti began to understand how the websites gave Pratik a sense of validation that was lacking in his job, and Pratik was able to brainstorm better coping strategies.
5.) Undiagnosed Mental Health Issues:
In many marriages, undiagnosed mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Personality Disorders can cause significant problems. Mental health issues are stigmatized, but it’s important to realize that many of these so-called conditions also have a positive side to them.
Zoya, a successful computer engineer, struggled with anxiety. Her brain was gifted at writing innovative software. However, her perfectionistic mind made her highly anxious and caused friction in her marriage. Diagnosing the anxiety helped improve her relationship at once.
Counseling Advice: Don’t be afraid to seek counseling for mental health issues. Numerous gifted people— artists, engineers, scientists, and even world leaders—have struggled with mental health issues. Neuroscience has helped us understand the causes of mental issues. Speak to a psychologist, just like you would to a kidney specialist if you had trouble with your kidneys.
6.) Neurological Differences:
Some people have highly logical brains, which can make them unemotional, and unexpressive. They can come across as insensitive, negative, obsessive, and they may have sensory sensitivities. If your partner has these traits, he/she might have Asperger’s Syndrome or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In a marriage, ASD can cause severe misunderstandings, but with awareness, partners can find solutions that work.
Counseling Advice: Online articles and books on the subject of marriage with ASD, including my book, Marriage and Lasting Relationships with Asperger Syndrome: Successful Strategies for Couples and Counselors (2015) explains the dynamics of an ASD marriage.
7.) Power Struggles:
Power struggles can ensue when partners don’t see themselves as a team. They devalue and put each other down.
Sundar had become more and more controlling of his wife, Payal. Her career success had made him insecure. In order to feel better about himself, he found ways to belittle and control her. He would openly tell her, “You’re so stupid!” Constantly being put down began to make Payal feel unsafe, and traumatized.
Counseling Advice: Sitting down in the safety of a counselor’s office, the husband can realize that such feelings of insecurity are normal. Rather than tormenting his wife by having a power trip, he can acknowledge these feelings, and learn to cope with them in a healthy way.
8.) Infidelity:
Often the cheating partner is suffering and doesn’t know how to address these problems. They try to feel better by engaging in a physical or emotional connection outside the marriage. In doing so, they cause more harm to everyone involved.
Counseling Advice: Realize that adultery is rooted in deeper problems. Work with a counselor to address these issues. Escaping into an affair might seem like a relief at first, but long-term, the price to pay is very high. Many couples divorce over infidelity, and those who don’t, spend years rebuilding the lost trust.
9.) Addictions:
Alcohol, drug, and illicit Internet addictions are rather common these days. Due to the shame and stigma, couples go to great lengths to conceal these issues, even from loved ones. These addictions aren’t identified as problems, resulting in both partners suffering in secret.
Counseling Advice: Addictions carry a very high cost to the well-being not only of the couple, but also their children. It’s crucial to get treatment from a counselor and an addictions specialist, rather than living a compromised quality of life.
10.) Verbal/Emotional Abuse:
Some people constantly put-down or mock their partner. Often they might not mean to be abusive, but if they grew up in a difficult family, it’s possible that they never learnt a gentler way to communicate. Verbal abuse is just as harmful as physical abuse, and can even make the receiver physically ill.
Counseling Advice: A counselor can help come up with alternate ways of saying the same thing, minus the cutting tone or snickering voice. Meditation can also help the partner to become more aware of how he/she speaks.
11.) Domestic Violence:
Not hitting your partner should be a given! If couples cannot abide each other without violence, they should consider a separation as neither the spouse nor the children would be safe in such an environment.
Ajay and Neha struggled with domestic violence. Ajay was an alcoholic, had a poor attitude towards women, and anger-management problems. Neha for her part, also retaliated towards him with violence. Finally, family members intervened and got them to divorce.
Counseling Advice: Seek immediate help when faced with domestic violence. If the violence is chronic, decide if it’s even worth saving the marriage. Such situations take years to improve and it is not only the health of the abused partner that is at stake, but his/her very life.
12.) Waiting Too Long to Seek Counseling:
The longer the couple waits to get help, the more entrenched their marital problems become. Amidst the intense anger, and blame, it is hard to get the couple to communicate and try new solutions.
Counseling Advice: Seek out counseling once the communication between your partner and you breaks down. If you can’t discuss issues without getting into an argument or fight, and this has been going on for six months or longer, it maybe time to seek counseling.
If you’re struggling with any of the above issues, please seek counseling immediately. A good couples counselor can help you better understand your partner. Your spouse and you can help you openly communicate. The counselor can remind you of your shared life goals, and give you the tools to evolve to be stronger together.
Cases mentioned in this article are inspired by real cases, but not based on anyone in real life. Any resemble is incidental.
References:
Mendes, E. A., 2015. Marriage and Lasting Relationships with Asperger’s Syndrome. London, UK: Jessica Kingsley Publishers;
Ravindra, G. 2013. Shaadi Remix. Tuscon, AZ: Wheatmark.
(Eva Mendes, LMHC is an Asperger/Autism specialist, couples counselor, author, and speaker originally from Mumbai, India. She is the author of the book, Marriage and Lasting Relationships with Asperger’s Syndrome now available on Amazon. She is a couple’s counselor and psychotherapist working with couples where one or both partners have Asperger Syndrome, Autism Spectrum, depression, anxiety and ADHD. She has a private practice in Boston, MA. Eva is available to work remotely via Skype and sees clients based all over the U.S. and the world. Her website is www.evmendes.com Connect with Eva at: contact@evmendes.com)Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of 'The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity'.
Upon his return from Asia, President Trump announced that he planned to work “as fast as possible” to reduce the U.S. trade deficits with the nations he visited. He later tweeted out his excitement about working with fellow Republicans to pass their “GREAT Tax Bill!”
Left hand, meet right hand. Those two goals stand in stark opposition to one another.
The Republican tax cut plan has been justly criticized for worsening both income inequality and the national debt, but the plan has another big problem: It’s likely to lead to more outsourcing of U.S. jobs and a larger trade deficit. That’s obviously a negative for factory jobs and net exports, but it’s also precisely the opposite of what Trump continues to promise to many of his working-class supporters.
First, the tax plan moves to what’s called a territorial system of international taxation, which means the U.S. tax rate on the overseas earnings of U.S. foreign affiliates would become zero. While it’s true these firms can defer taxes on these earnings for as long as they like, they cannot “repatriate” them tax-free to invest domestically or to pay dividends to their shareholders (instead, they invest them in financial markets).
Would not the lower corporate rate proposed by the GOP’s tax plan — 20 percent — preclude this incentive? Unfortunately not, because our multinationals have perfected the art of “transfer pricing:” booking, if not producing, their overseas profits in tax havens with single-digit tax rates, while booking deductible expenses in high-tax countries. Under the new regime, they’d be able to keep up this tax avoidance with the added bonus of sending earnings back home tax free. As international tax expert Ed Klienbard puts it: “Territorial tax systems … reward successful transfer pricing gamers as “instant winners” by enabling the successful U.S. firm to recycle immediately its offshore profits as tax-exempt dividends paid to the U.S. parent.”
Of course, if they invested those earnings here at home instead of using them for share buybacks or dividend payouts, that would help boost domestic production, and perhaps some of that will occur. I doubt it, for two reasons.
For one, firms are already flush with retained earnings — corporate profitability is near record highs — and borrowing is cheap. If they wanted to invest more in productive equipment, plants, or their workers, they could do so. Yet, current investment is lackluster, and that’s not likely to change due to the tax cut (as Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn learned firsthand). A recent survey that asked corporate executives what they’d do with a tax windfall found their top three uses of the money were to pay down debt, buy back their stocks (to boost the price), and do more mergers.
In fact, we’ve tried this experiment. Back in 2004, we allowed multinationals to repatriate deferred earnings at a sweetheart rate of 5 percent. They said they’d invest and create jobs with the money, but instead, they laid workers off and shared the tax break with their shareholders.
In other words, the shift to territoriality does not dampen the existing incentives in our corporate code to offshore jobs. It exacerbates them, which will lead to more overseas production and the loss of jobs here at home. As tax professor Rebecca Kysar observed: a “pressing goal of tax reform is to reduce the incentives for companies to move their operations overseas. [This] bill does the opposite.”
Interestingly, the tax writers recognized the problem and tried to fix it with a tax penalty for transfer pricing. The alleged patch incentivizes even more offshoring, creating, according to New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen, “new opportunities for small and medium-size firms to use tax havens to slice their tax rate in half.”
Next, if you’ve followed this debate, you’ve heard about the administration’s implausibly large estimates of economic growth allegedly triggered by their plan. What you may not have heard — they don’t like to talk about this part — is these growth effects depend on large capital inflows leading to larger trade deficits.
The big corporate tax cut is expected to raise the after-tax return on capital investment, and this is expected to draw in capital from abroad. These flows increase the U.S. capital account — basically, investments from outside the country — whose the flip side is the trade deficit. For every dollar the capital account goes up, the trade deficit must get a dollar more negative.
To be clear, a higher trade deficit doesn’t have to be a drag on growth if other parts of the economy are picking up the slack. It will unquestionably hurt our manufacturers, as the capital flows put upward pressure on the dollar, making our exports less price competitive. If you believe the magnitude of these flows as implied by an estimate from the conservative Tax Foundation, their impact would lead to trade deficits twice as large as today’s, implying the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs.
For the record, most economists, myself included, do not believe these magnitudes. But especially given the tax plan, by significantly raising the budget deficit, is sure to reduce national savings, the basic dynamics of the above scenario — increased capital inflows and a larger trade deficit — will likely occur.
We are thus left with a plan that lavishes most of its benefits on the wealthiest households, including the heirs of the richest estates, raises taxes on millions in the middle class, adds over $1 trillion to the debt, increases the trade deficit, and, relative to the current system, ratchets up the incentives to offshoring production and jobs. In its latest iteration, it could also now lead to 13 million people losing health coverage.
It should escape no one that President Trump, who assures us the plan is a “middle-class miracle,” was elected in part by working class voters who believed he would find policies to achieve the opposite of every one of those outcomes, especially regarding trade deficits and manufacturing jobs. In other words, it’s impossible to exaggerate the extent of the betrayal of the working class embedded in this plan.What the benchmark can't help you with:
Showing a great detail on how each card has improved.
Comparing between FGLRX (proprietary) and Radeon (FOSS).
Performance in extremely high intensive tasks beyond gaming.
What this benchmark can help you with:
Showing in good detail how performance has been increased in mesa as a whole.
What driver you should choose on your next update.
The general trend in progress, and how the acceleration of development has increased.
Hey people, got a really nice graph to show off today. On a follow up from my last article, loads more work has been done to Mesa and the Radeon driver, and the speed improvement from 10.0.3 to 10.2 is phenomenal.Before we begin here are the benchmark conditions:So with that out of the way, lets examine the results.These results are taken from the same demo files and settings with only the kernel version and mesa version being changed. You can also see the addition of Unigine Valley which did not actually run on the 10.0 drivers which is a big step up in itself. The other games ran from 46% increases all the way to 462% which I am pretty sure must be a bug in Portal or something because I did not believe my eyes even after running repeated tests :).The majority of the source games ran with 2xAA so there is an increase to be seen there when it used to limit the games quite a bit but now it seems its no longer an issue as although not benchmarked here, I can comfortably run each game at a minimum of 40fps now. From these results, its no wonder that AMD wants to drop its catalyst driver for FOSS principles when you see results like this that catalyst just isn't getting on it's own.As with all Linux projects, 10.3 is already in full swing and will be benchmarked as soon as the arch repository's update with it. For those of you that want the action now need to make sure your kernel is as up to date as your distro can be while still being stable and some distributions have third party providers to newer mesa versions. Arch and its derivatives can download the latest mesa from its repositories along with the latest 3.15 kernel.In my own opinion we are accelerating at such a speed with these drivers, especially with the news that valve are now supporting its development If you would like to see the results, demo files for your own benchmarks, or the system specifications then visit this Google Docs page.In 2008, the world’s media was captivated by a study apparently showing that cows like to align themselves with magnetic fields. But attempts to replicate this finding have left two groups of researchers at loggerheads, highlighting the problems faced by scientists working to replicate unusual findings based on new methods of data analysis.
Magneto-reception has been detected in animals from turtles to birds. Three years ago, Hynek Burda, a zoologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and his colleagues added cattle to the magnetic family with a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team used data from Google Earth to show that domestic cattle seem to prefer to align their bodies along Earth’s magnetic field lines1, and showed a similar phenomenon in field observations of deer.
E. ELISSEEVA/GLOWIMAGES.COM
A follow-up study by Burda and his colleagues showed no such alignment near electric power lines, which might be expected to disrupt magneto-sensing in cattle2.
Cow conundrum
Earlier this year, a group of Czech researchers reported their failed attempt to replicate the finding using different Google Earth images3. The Czech team wrote in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A: “Two independent groups participated in our study and came to the same conclusion that in contradiction to the recent findings of other researchers, no alignment of the animals and of their herds along geomagnetic field lines could be found.”
“When in 2008 the authors started to announce their surprising findings in [the] mass media, we got the impression that this is not the way science should be made and we took a closer look. We found out that it is not as fantastic as it was presented,” says Lukas Jelinek, a researcher in the electromagnetic-field department at the Czech Technical University in Prague and one of the authors of the replication attempt.
In response, Burda and his colleagues reanalysed the replication attempt by Jelinek and his colleagues4. Burda says that half of the Jelinek team's data should be excluded because some of the pastures are on slopes or near high-voltage power lines, for example, or because the images are too poor to make out cattle, or appear to contain hay bales or sheep instead. “One half of their data is just noise,” says Burda.
In addition, Burda's group looked at herds as a whole, whereas Jelinek’s team analysed individual cows. “Of the data that were useable, they looked only at 50% of the cows. It’s very subjective,” Burda adds. His team's reanalysis of the Jelinek data actually does support the theory that cattle can magneto-sense, says Burda.
Picture problem
In a response to the reanalysis, Jelinek and colleagues say that in some cases they suspect each team may have inadvertently looked at different pictures, owing to mistakes in coordinates5. The Jelinek team says that it only looked at cows far from power lines, and that the slopes are few and could not cause a statistical bias. They write: “Sheep, horses, hay bales, rocks, cows with unsatisfactory resolution, cows near a track, settlement or feeder, were not taken [in the analysis].”
Sönke Johnsen, who studies magneto-reception at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that at least some of the images in question should probably not have been analysed. He also suggests that the proper unit of evaluation is probably the herd, as the alignment of individual cows in herds is unlikely to be independent. Overall, he says that the original results, “while mysterious, still stand”.
Jelinek says that his team does not intend to pursue any more research on this topic. Meanwhile, Burda’s team is already looking at magneto-reception in other animals.With the World IPv6 Launch coming up on June 6th, 2012, we’ve been working hard to make IPv6 available to all Linode customers so they can participate. We’re happy to announce that IPv6 is now available in all six of our locations across the world!
If you’d like to enable IPv6 for your existing Linode, just navigate to the Remote Access tab of the Linode Manager and click the “Enable IPv6” link. Once you reboot, your Linode will have a native IPv6 address ready to use. New Linodes and Linodes migrating between locations will automatically be IPv6-enabled.
Alternatively, NodeBalancers can be used as an IPv6 endpoint without you needing to actually enable IPv6 on your backend Linodes.
More information can be found on our IPv6 FAQ page.
Filed under: announcements, features, linode by Linode Security TeamThere was a time when Branndon Stewart knew Peyton Manning only as some quarterback from Louisiana. And yes, he realizes how that now sounds.
“I know it seems crazy," Stewart says, "but I wasn’t a football news junkie. I guess that’s the best way to put it.”
Stewart was, like Manning, a mega-recruit of a high school quarterback who, like Manning, committed to Tennessee in 1994.
Their freshmen year, when senior Jerry Colquitt tore his left ACL seven plays into the season, Stewart, Manning and junior Todd Helton all got a shot. Helton started until he sprained his knee in the fourth game.
And so the two freshmen, competing for the job, would put in extra time after dinner, watching film in coordinator David Cutcliffe’s office to learn the nuances of his offense. Coaches had badges to access the facility after hours. Players did not, |
the official announcement of CPEC when levels of violence were much higher in that province, which he acknowledged could factor into any decision to re-route the corridor from KP.[358]
The federal Minister of Planning Development and Reform Ahsan Iqbal formally denied any change in the alignment.[39][359][360] As a rebuttal to this argument, Wu Zhaoli, an assistant research fellow at the National Institute of International Strategy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in his article also published in Global Times, stated that "security concerns are a critical cause which helps to determine the path of this corridor",[343] implying that security concerns, rather than political bias, would be responsible for any route changes. According to Dr Ahmad Rashid Malik, senior research fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSi), the route controversy is "baseless and an unfounded reality...".[361] As a result of objections to CPEC, the Chinese government in 2015 issued a statement urging Pakistani political parties to resolve their differences over the project.[362]
Finances [ edit ]
In addition to the aforementioned issues, some sources have suggested that the interest rate for CPEC related loans would be high, with India's Daily News and Analysis paper suggesting that Pakistan had unwittingly accepted loans that would "be offered at very high rates of interest",[363] although the actual interest rates were negotiated prior to acceptance, and for most projects will be 1.6%.[62]
Several articles in Pakistan have criticised the project's finances as being shrouded in mystery, while one article suggested that "there is far too much secrecy and far too little transparency".[364] The Private Power and Infrastructure Board has also been accused of irregularities in the approval process for coal power plants and the tariffs at which Pakistan is contractually obliged to purchase electricity from those plants,[365] with special concern regarding potential irregularities in the tariff approved for the 300 MW coal power plant to be built in Pind Dadan Khan by China Machinery Engineering Corporation.[366]
Trade imbalance [ edit ]
Chinese exports through the Karakoram Highway have entered the domestic Pakistani market, and are cheaper due to the relatively higher cost of production in Pakistan.[367] It has also been speculated that the CPEC will replace Pakistani exports by Chinese ones in external markets.[367]
Baloch Nationalists [ edit ]
Some Baloch nationalists have opposed the large-scale development projects envisioned by CPEC, fearing that such developments in the province would eventually result in local residents "losing control" over natural resources.[368] Others have alleged that CPEC is a "conspiracy" meant to stimulate the settlement of migrants from other regions of Pakistan in order to render ethnic Baloch a minority in the province.[369]
In accordance to the Pakistani Government's announcement of its intent to issue resident cards to the city's inhabitants as a security measure to prevent the movement of firearms into the city,[370] former Chief Minister of Balochistan province, Akhtar Mengal, suggested at a political rally in November 2015, that execution of CPEC projects and the resident card policy would eventually result in ethnic Baloch being denied entry into the city.[371] The resident cards measure would require any non-resident visitor to the city to register at designated security checkpoints prior to entering the city by road,[370] without any reference to ethnicity. The former Chief Minister did, however, clarify that he would not oppose development projects in the province that he believed would uplift the plight of local residents.[371] Shortly thereafter, the Pakistani government announced its intention to establish a training institute named Pak-China Technical and Vocational Institute at Gwadar which is to be completed at the cost of 943 million rupees to impart skills to local residents to train them to operate machinery at the port.[34]
Athar Hussain, the director of the Asia Research Centre at London School of Economics, has expressed concerns that the CPEC is "likely to bring more development to regions that are already developed, instead of poor areas such as Balochistan."[372] Burzine Waghmar, a member of the Centre for the Study of Pakistan, SOAS, University of London, suggested that CPEC projects are not targeted towards benefiting the indigenous Baloch population, and will accelerate human rights violations in the province.[372]
Gwadar residents' concerns [ edit ]
While nationalists openly oppose CPEC, some local leaders and residents of Gwadar city have also expressed concern in regards to the project – the head of Gwadar's local fisherman association stated in an interview with NBC News that "Development is good, China is our great friend, this CPEC thing sounds amazing, but don't forget that this is our land, first."[373] Other residents doubt they will see any of the benefits promised by CPEC, while others fear they will be evicted from their homes in order to make way for infrastructure works.[374]
In response to concerns of local residents, Lt. General Amer Riaz who heads security operations in the province, stated that locals would not be deprived of benefits, and that local Gwadar residents would have "the first right to everything."[375] Pakistan's Minister of Planning, National Reforms, and Development, Ahsan Iqbal, further stated in May 2016 that Gwadar residents would be regarded as "main stakeholders" in the city's master plan, and that fishermen specifically would also be accommodated by the plan.[376] The developer of Gwadar Port, COPHC, has also announced that it will assist Gwadar's fishermen to help boost the region's seafood industry by developing programmes to improve the quality of local seafoods.[377]
Indian objections [ edit ]
Sovereignty claims [ edit ]
The Government of India, which shares tense relations with Pakistan, objects to the CPEC project as upgrade works to the Karakoram Highway are taking place in Gilgit Baltistan; territory that India claims as its own. During the visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to China in 2015, the Indian Foreign Minister, Sushma Swaraj reportedly told Chinese Premier Xi Jinping that projects passing through Gilgit-Baltistan are "unacceptable" as they require construction in the claimed territory.[378][379] India's Foreign Secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar also confirmed that the issue had been raised with the Chinese government on the trip.[380] Swaraj reiterated this stance during a meeting in August 2016 with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, stating India would "resolutely oppose" the corridor in Kashmir.[381]
India did not object to Chinese construction of the Karakoram Highway,[382] which was built between 1959 and 1979. India further did not initially object to major Chinese-sponsored upgrade works to the Karakoram Highway after a 2010 earthquake, though it did object the presence of Chinese troops in the region that were sent to guard Chinese workers.[383]
India further did not object to construction of the Mangla Dam, undertaken with World Bank funding and British technical assistance in southern Kashmir − a region which India claims as its own territory. India even maintained that the Wullar Barrage project in Indian-administered Kashmir, which Pakistan regards as a violation of the Indus Water Treaty, would ultimately be beneficial for the Mangla Dam.[384] India further did not object to construction works at the Kashmir's Neelum–Jhelum Hydropower Plant, under construction with Chinese assistance since 2008. India in 1991 agreed to allow the Neelum-Jhelum project to move forward,[385] despite the project's location in territory which India legally considers as its own.
Following the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, large-scale reconstruction work of infrastructure took place across northern Kashmir with the assistance of South Korean, Turkish, and Saudi firms.[386] Chinese companies took part in 14 post-earthquake reconstruction projects in the disputed region, worth $6 billion.[387] India did not object to these works, despite the fact that infrastructure near the militarily sensitive Line of Control were upgraded.
Indian objection to Chinese construction works in the Gilgit-Baltistan arose in 2011 in response to a Chinese complaint regarding a joint Indian-Vietnamese oil exploration project in the disputed South China Sea.[388] The influential Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, a think tank funded by the Indian Ministry of Defence,[389] in 2011 called for India to begin raising objection to Chinese projects in the region at the "international level."[390]
Encirclement fears [ edit ]
Former Indian ambassador, Phunchok Stobdan, alleged that China and Pakistan intended to develop the corridor not just for its economic benefits, but also is motivated by the "strategic intent of besieging India", though he also stated that India can do little to scuttle CPEC, and that avoiding China's One Road One Belt project altogether would be to the detriment of India.[391]
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs in May 2015 also summoned the Chinese envoy in New Delhi to lodge India's opposition to the project.[392] The Chinese Premier dismissed the concerns, describing CPEC as a "commercial project"[393] that would not target any third party.[394]
In May 2016, India's Minister of State and External Affairs, Vijay Kumar Singh raised concerns regarding CPEC.[395] Despite Indian objections, China and Pakistan initiated works on the $44 million Pakistan-China Fiber Optic Project on 19 May 2016 which will require passage through Gilgit-Baltistan; the same region for which India expressed concerns to China.[396] Former Indian National Security Advisor M. K. Narayanan also in May 2016 stated "CPEC must be viewed as a major threat. Both countries [China and Pakistan] have a common intention to undermine India`s position in the region."[395]
Despite objections, segments of the Indian public, as exemplified by former Indian Ambassador Melkulangara Bhadrakumar, regard the project as in India's interest vis-à-vis Central Asia, and warn that India might "lose heavily" were India to remain opposed and isolated from the project.[397]
On 28 August, the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations suggested that China will have "to get involved" if India disrupts CPEC.[398] Indian National Congress leader Manish Tewari said that if ultimately the CPEC is going to threaten India, then it should be opposed.[399]
List of major projects [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ [332] Between 2014 and 2015, acts of terrorism decreased by 50% in the province, while sharp decreases were also noted in deaths, kidnappings, and sectarian killings.[335] Which Pakistan alleges are supported by Indian intelligence services.Between 2014 and 2015, acts of terrorism decreased by 50% in the province, while sharp decreases were also noted in deaths, kidnappings, and sectarian killings.See the original story in Japanese.
Here is good news for entrepreneurs aiming to develop hardware.
Japanese internet company DMM.com launched a hardware incubation space called DMM.make Akiba in Akihabara on Friday [1]. The facility will open on 11 November, and has started receiving membership applications.
DMM.make Akiba offers members a facility valued at $4.5 million comprising 150 machines for hardware production, such as 3D printers, testing devices for acquiring public certification for electric appliances, and platforms for mass production. In addition to providing office and event space, members can use the address of the facility to register their company. Tokyo-based hardware startup Cerevo and hardware-focused startup incubator ABBALab will move to the lab and help DMM operate it.
The facility has three floors (see pictures above, click to enlarge); the Studio floor provides environmental testing and mass-production prototyping for hardware development, the Base floor has a shared office and event space, and the Hub floor provides consulting services on hardware development and sells electronic parts. (See this PDF file for a list of the facility’s equipment.)
The process for hardware developments needs to cover a lot of ground, from prototyping, acquiring certification, tests to improve the quality, and operational knowledge for mass production. But equipments or experts for hardware developments are fragmented, which had been preventing startups from launching their hardware products unless they are a large manufacturer. In our recent interview with ABBALab CEO Osamu Ogasahara who has produced this facility, he explained that this is the place where entrepreneurs can create something like Softbank’s humanoid robot Pepper.
Cerevo supervises the project
Cerevo, the Japanese startup best known for its Cerevo Cam and IoT crowdfunding site Cerevo Dash, is also behind this project.
The company invited ABBALab’s Ogasahara to their board and started preparing a $20 million investment fund. Since its launch in 2007, Cerevo has been behind up-and-coming popular “connected” hardware products, though not all of them have been introduced under their name. Regarding these OEM products developed by Cerevo, few details are available due to their non-disclosure agreements with clients. However, users can learn a lot from what Cerevo has said about the new facility.
See also:
ABBALab’s incubation initiatives
ABBALab is a hardware-focused startup incubation program launched by Movida Japan CEO Taizo Son and Ogasahara. Coinciding with the launch of DMM.make Akiba, ABBALab started receiving applications for the next batch of the incubation program. The program consists of two key initiatives; “Scholarship” to support entrepreneurs sell the products and “Fellow” that helps entrepreneurs conduct hardware R&D.
See also:
The Fellow initiative is unique in that it will ask the Scholarship participating startups to provide their engineering skills and resources to Fellow participating startups, and the former can receive funds from ABBALab in return for rendering their services. Participating supporters include Yoshihiro Kawahara (technical advisor for inkjet-printed circuit board startup AgIC), engineering company Progress Technologies, and Incubate Fund partner Masahiko Honma, and several VC firms.
To take part in the program, a team must pass a screening process. The Bridge will provide more details on the program soon.Two of Arizona’s delegates to the Republican National Convention resigned their positions, saying they refused to go to Cleveland to vote for Donald Trump.
And a handful of others were elected as delegates at a fractious Arizona Republican Party convention, only to step down after determining that they just had other things to do that week.
Nine of the 58 Arizona delegates to the July 18-21 GOP convention in Cleveland have resigned, including some of Arizona’s top elected officials.
Maricopa County Supervisor Denny Barney, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, state Treasurer Jeff DeWit and Secretary of State Michele Reagan have all stepped aside, as has former California Congressman Frank Riggs, former Arizona Congressman John Shadegg, Yuma Republican Paul Marchant and Phyllis Ritter, a delegate elected from the 1st Congressional District. Zuhdi Jasser, a doctor and Muslim reform advocate, resigned after learning that he’d be bumped up from an alternate to a voting delegate.
DeWit is the Arizona chairman for Trump’s campaign, and Ritter was elected as a delegate on the developer’s slate as well. But the other resigned delegates largely ran on the slates for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who, at the time of the state convention, were holding out hope that they could wrest the nomination from Trump in Cleveland.
Two of the delegates who resigned – Jasser and Riggs – explicitly said they did so out of opposition to Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
Riggs said his primary reason for stepping aside was because he needs to help his wife, Cathy, with her campaign for justice of the peace. The convention comes shortly before early ballots go out, and Riggs said he’s his wife’s “number one volunteer.”
But a major contributing factor to the decision, he said, was his opposition to Trump.
“I have very serious reservations about Donald Trump as the Republican Party nominee, and just frankly after some soul searching realized that I couldn’t go to Cleveland in good conscience and vote for his nomination,” said Riggs, who ran for a delegate position on the unified Cruz-Kasich slate. “I just can’t. I guess if there are political consequences, I’ll face those down.”
Despite the need to stay in town for his wife’s campaign, Riggs said he agreed to run for a delegate spot on the Cruz slate because there was still a chance at the time that the Texas senator could win the nomination at a contested convention. But now that Trump is unopposed and has reached the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the Republican nomination, that possibility is gone.
If Trump and Cruz were still heading into a contested national convention, Riggs said it’s likely that he would’ve taken a few days off from the campaign trail to go to Cleveland.
“I think I would have felt an obligation to go under those circumstances, although honestly I probably would have tried to get in and out and spend as little time there as possible,” he said.
‘Daily embarrassment to conservatism’
Jasser, too, said he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Trump. He said he was willing to go to Cleveland and cast his first vote for Trump, as Arizona law requires, as long as he didn’t have the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination. But with the race over, he decided to take a pass.
“I cannot at the altar of our party lend my name to the daily embarrassment to conservatism that Mr. Trump represents,” Jasser wrote in a resignation letter to party officials. “I have supported many GOP candidates over the years with whom I differed on certain very important issues, but never has a GOP candidate in my recollection fallen almost every day so far below the bar of what I can explain and take ownership for with myself and my family and my public integrity.”
The Phoenix doctor has a unique vantage point. He said his primary opposition to Trump is as a conservative Republican, and in that regard, he has many of the same criticisms as the presumptive nominee’s other GOP critics.
But Jasser is also a Muslim, a demographic that Trump has antagonized throughout his campaign, calling for a temporary halt to all Muslim immigration to the United States and claiming that crowds of Muslims cheered after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York.
Jasser is a hardliner against ISIS, Islamic extremism, terrorism and the embattled regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, from which his family fled in the 1960s. Like Trump, he criticizes President Obama for his refusal to use the term “radical Islamists.” And he said he believes the U.S. should temporarily halt all immigration until it can implement a vetting process that would more effectively weed out jihadists and Islamic extremists.
However, Jasser said he has a problem with Trump’s demonization of Muslims in general and his call to temporarily halt immigration specifically of Muslims. Jasser said he ultimately wants to see the U.S. welcome many more refugees from war-torn Syria.
“The inability of a presidential candidate who has one of the largest platforms on the planet to thread the needle between identifying Islamism, the theocratic ideology of political Islam, as a threat, and Muslims and Islam coming to terms with modernity as a solution, is beyond a liability,” he said.
Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration plays into ISIS’s hands, Jasser said.
“It’s a bit nativist, not to mention strategically a candidate running for office should be able to telegraph that if the solution to political Islam is Muslims that embrace religious liberty, then you can’t surrender that idea to ISIS, which is what he did by saying that we’re going to ban immigration of Muslims without being able to parse through identifying Islamists as the problem,” he said.
Jasser, a Marco Rubio supporter who switched to Cruz when the U.S. senator from Florida dropped out of the race, said he would have voted for any of the other 16 candidates who sought the Republican nomination. But he won’t vote for Trump, nor will he vote for a Democrat. Jasser said he’ll either leave the presidential race blank on his ballot or vote for a third-party candidate.
Family commitments
The Arizona GOP’s April 30 convention in Mesa was a hotly contested affair. The Cruz and Trump campaigns, and to a lesser degree, Kasich’s team, hustled to elect delegates who would support their candidates if a contested national convention went to a second ballot or beyond, where anti-Trump forces hoped to wrest the nomination from the controversial real estate mogul.
A joint slate by Cruz and Kasich’s teams prevailed, winning at least 39 of the 55 delegate spots that were up for grabs. But that victory only mattered for less than a week. Three days after the Mesa convention, Trump won Indiana’s GOP primary, prompting Cruz and Kasich to drop out of the race.
Two of the delegates who withdrew as delegates said their decisions had nothing to do with any opposition to Trump. But they suggested that their primary interest in going to Cleveland was to attempt to block him on a second ballot.
Shadegg, who represented the north Phoenix area in Congress for 16 years, said he’s been to many conventions, and decided that it would be better to give his delegate spot to a party worker who hasn’t had the privilege of attending before.
But Shadegg, a Rubio supporter who ran on the Cruz-Kasich unified slate at the Arizona GOP state convention, acknowledged that it was the now-irrelevant delegate fight got him into the race in the first place.
“Delegate spots were hot and heavy at the time. And I was asked to run and I said, ‘Sure,’ as a favor to some people involved in the process. But that’s no longer kind of an issue,” he said.
Barney’s resignation as a delegate was a result of family commitments, said his campaign consultant, Chad Heywood.
“He originally could only go for two nights to begin with. And then he’s got a son going on a mission this summer and a kid’s volleyball tournament. He just thought it would be better to let someone who had the whole week attend,” Heywood said.
But Heywood, too, noted that there’s less of a point to going to Cleveland now that the nomination fight is over. Barney ran on the Cruz and Kasich slates, along with the “unity slate,” a ticket comprised of supporters of all three candidates that the Arizona Republican Party put together for the state convention.
“Now that the nomination is clinched, he felt like it would be better from a family perspective and just kind of an impact perspective to give that position to someone who was really wanting to go and could stay the whole week,” Heywood said.
A spokesman for Brnovich said the attorney general also had commitments he had to take care of in Arizona during the convention and wasn’t going to be able to attend the entire event, so he felt that a grassroots volunteer should take his place.
“(He) wasn’t going to be able to attend Convention for duration and wanted a grassroots volunteer to attend in his place,” Brnovich spokesman Ryan Anderson said in an email to the Arizona Capitol Times. “Too many things going on around the Convention and he is choosing to spend time with his family instead.”
Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Reagan, said she, too, had professional responsibilities she needed to focus on, specifically the preparation for Arizona’s Aug. 30 primary election.
“At this time, she feels the convention would be a distraction from her focus on the August primary,” Roberts said.
Neither Brnovich nor Reagan resigned as delegates out of any opposition to Trump, their spokesmen said. Both ran for delegate positions on all four slates at the state convention – Cruz, Kasich, Trump and unity. They were the top two vote-getters in the delegate contest at the state convention.
Constantin Querard, a Republican consultant who led Cruz’s efforts at the state convention, said his understanding is that Marchant, a supporter of the Texas senator, had a timing conflict with a family event.
Resignations not a problem
Arizona Republican Party Chairman Robert Graham said he doesn’t view a small number of resignations as a problem, even with a couple delegates saying they refuse to support the presumptive nominee. He said Republicans are coalescing around Trump and that there are “many more people doing that than people who are naysayers.”
“People are passionate and engaged. So if they don’t want to support Donald Trump, that’s their prerogative. And I support a person’s individual position on candidates. However … we will have a full delegation going into this event, and I have no concerns about it whatsoever,” Graham said.
Other party insiders, however, said the number of resignations, as well as the overt refusal by two delegates to vote for the Republican nominee, is highly unusual.
Some longtime party operatives say they’ve never heard of a delegate resigning in opposition to the nominee. Furthermore, they found it strange that such high-level elected officials were resigning those positions.
Lobbyist Kurt Davis, a fixture in Arizona’s Republican political scene since the 1980s, said he thinks it may have happened before, possibly in 1988 or 1996. Nonetheless, he said he can’t remember so many delegate resignations since at least the 1980 convention.
“Those numbers are definitely higher than the typical,” Davis said. “It has happened. But that’s clearly more than I would ever recall.”
DeWit, a prominent Trump surrogate who speaks frequently on cable news programs in defense of the candidate, said he stepped down from his position as a delegate from the 8th Congressional District in order to open up spots for two others. His resignation allowed state Rep. Phil Lovas, the first alternate elected from CD8, to take a spot as a voting delegate. And Lovas’ elevation allowed Barbara Wyllie, whom DeWit called “one of the strongest Trump supporters in the state,” to take the Peoria lawmaker’s alternate spot.
The treasurer said he’ll still attend the convention, and expects to have some kind of role with the Trump campaign in Cleveland.
“If this was going to be a contested convention, maybe we’d analyze it differently, but once Ted Cruz dropped out, it’s a moot point. So it’s better for me to be helping with the campaign and take care of two really good Trump supporters,” he said. “I’m a worker. I’ll be doing something. I’m the kind of guy who has no problem being in a high-level meeting or taking out the trash.”
For the most part, DeWit took the delegates who said they weren’t resigning because of Trump at their word. But he said it’s a common trait of people in politics to not disclose their real motivations for doing things.
DeWit said he isn’t surprised that delegates are dropping out. Many of the pro-Cruz delegates were only interested in going to the convention – and spending $5,000 to do so – when they thought there was a chance of a brokered convention, and DeWit said he predicted that some would back away once that possibility evaporated.Brutus is a commanding figure in the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of “Julius Caesar.” The wily Mark Antony also looms large. But the most fearsome character in the show isn’t standing on stage — not even in the person of a Donald Trump-like Caesar — but instead storming the bleachers and shouting in the aisles. It’s the mindless Roman mob, or, as director Oskar Eustis’s politically slanted production slyly insinuates, it’s the ecstatic mobs at a Trump rally. Although the show whipped up controversy when funders pulled out over right-wing objections, the furor isn’t warranted: Anyone who reads the plays knows Shakespeare’s main message is that no matter how much you want to get rid of your current political leader, don’t kill him.
In most Shakespeare productions in park, mob scenes have to be taken on faith, with the same handful of actors scurrying about trying to look like legions. But this surging Roman mob has real numbers, and its fickle allegiances to one demagogic political figure after another makes it genuinely frightening.
The satiric Trump references begin with the first appearance of Julius Caesar, depicted in Gregg Henry’s amusing performance as a preening Goldilocks who wears embarrassingly long ties, makes triumphal hand gestures and knows how to work the crowds. Our own crowd of complicit theatergoers roared with delight when he lowered himself into a golden bathtub. Here the hero was joined by his wife Calpurnia, deliciously played by Tina Benko in the slender, beautifully draped (by costumer Paul Tazewell) figure of a professional model speaking in the unmistakable accents of a native-born Slovenian.
Related Public Theater Stands Behind Trump-Inspired ‘Julius Caesar’
The Trump analogy doesn’t hold up once Caesar is assassinated on his way to the Senate and is lauded in dueling eulogies, powerfully delivered here by Corey Stoll’s deeply sympathetic Brutus and Elizabeth Marvel’s cunning Marc Antony. In death, his open bleeding wounds on full public view, the tyrant has become a god. (But the insolent impersonation was fun while it lasted.)
The ever-present threat of dictatorship is visualized by set designer David Rockwell in the brutalist architecture of giant, grinding wheels of government. Kenneth Posner’s aggressive lighting and Jessica Paz’s discordant sound effects provide no comfort from the din of the mob. And lest we miss the message, the spotless white togas normally worn by the intellectual elite like Cicero the orator (Edward James Hyland) are all but eclipsed by the black trenchcoats of the conspirators and the intimidating black military uniforms worn by the ever-present army.
Call it a populist democracy, but don’t underestimate the muscle of a mob that can erupt into violence and claim the lives of honest men like Cinna the Poet (a brief but moving appearance by Yusef Bulos), sadly mistaken by a wild-eyed mob for Cinna the conspirator (Christopher Livingston).
The instigators of violence are exceptionally well cast and forcefully played by theatrical strongman John Douglas Thompson as Cassius, chief among co-conspirators including Decius (Eisa Davis) and Casca (Teagle F. Bougere). But of them all, only Brutus seems honestly patriotic in his fears of Caesar’s demagoguery. The rest look like ambitious Washington politicians holding a convention and/or vacation in Rome.
The most dangerous villain in the piece, though, is the rampaging Roman mob, its allegiances flapping like a weathervane, its hatreds quickly stoked, its rages easily redirected to perceived enemies. Although no one among the rabble actually chants “Lock her up!” or “Trump that b—!” or “Kick him out!,” the echo of mobs past hangs in the air.Dorohedoro 133 Abridged
KAI YOU TUBEFUCKING ASSHOLE ( who I love ) YOU MURDER DOKUGA’S FRIENDS AND TAUNT HIM WITH THEIR GRUESOME DECAPITATED HEADS THEN DUMP NIKAIDO ON HIM TO CARRY LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED LIKE HE’S YOUR OWN PERSONAL WALKING SHELF TO DUMP SHIT ON AND DRAG AROUND WHEREVER YOU GO FUCK YOU KAI DON’T YOU REALIZE HOW TRAUMATIZED HE IS RIGHT NOW YOU HEARTLESS MUTANT SLUDGE ZOMBIE ( who I love )…
AND YET… YOU HAVE NOT KILLED DOKUGA YET… SO… THANK YOU?!? I am both terrified and somewhat relieved at the same time…
Things are coming together quickly! Aikawa, Risu, and Haze are rushing towards Devil Kai, Devil Kai used the spare body parts stored in his sludge crates to replace his head, Noi and Shin are on the verge of being revived.
Dokuga is… ALIVE… for now. I’ve long been dreading this inevitable moment. Will Dokuga maintain his track record of being the only person Kai seems to actually like having around? Will his cuteness overcome this mysterious entity’s impulse to tube everything that moves? Devil Kai has made no aggressive moves toward Dokuga yet, and instead seems to want him to carry Nikaido? Unless he is freeing up his tube appendage to use on Dokuga… I don’t know how I’ll survive until next month with this cliffhanger…What if the NSA's surveillance isn't legal? What if its collection of phone records and its electronic surveillance of foreigners and Americans violates the letter of the laws that the agency cite as its newfound authority, the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? We'd be where we are now, with the government relying on unprovable arguments for efficacy instead of demonstrable legal rationalization.
RELATED: The NSA's PR Offensive Is Not Going Well
We know that in at least two moments the NSA programs likely violated federal law. In a secret ruling, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the body tasked with approving the government's surveillance requests, determined that the NSA's data collection violated the Fourth Amendment. Then, of course, there was the period before the passage of the amendments to FISA in 2008. As documents released by the Guardian Thursday make clear, the NSA's surveillance at least in some ways pre-dates its explicit legal authority to do so.
RELATED: The NSA's Best Defense of PRISM Didn't Even Last a Week
In an opinion piece in The New York Times today, two legal experts argue that even that expansion may not have been enough. The two, Jennifer Stisa Granick of Stanford and Christopher Sprigman from the University of Virginia, first argue that the bulk collection of phone records under the Patriot Act exceeds the legal boundaries. "[A]ny data might be'relevant' to an investigation eventually," they write, "if by 'eventually' you mean'sometime before the end of time.'" But their stronger critique is of the PRISM / electronic data surveillance under FISA. The 2008 amendments state that the NSA can't "intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States."
How could vacuuming up Americans’ communications conform with this legal limitation? Well, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Andrea Mitchell of NBC, the N.S.A. uses the word “acquire” only when it pulls information out of its gigantic database of communications and not when it first intercepts and stores the information. If there’s a law against torturing the English language, James Clapper is in real trouble.
Prior to the passage of the amendments, the government relied on its own legal interpretations of existing mandates to justify its actions. As Thursday's leaks made clear, the push for more data collection in the wake of September 11th preceded the legal rationales used to justify them. Once the NSA began partnering with domestic law enforcement in 2004, even the NSA balked at the government's shaky legal analysis. Granick and Sprigman note that the primary justification came then and comes now from "select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones."
RELATED: The NSA, This New American Digital Life, and Your Privacy: A Handy Guide
The FISA court seems to be taking steps to drop the wall of privacy behind which it acts, however minimally. Earlier this month, it ruled that that it wouldn't block release to advocacy groups of that secret ruling on the Fourth Amendment violations. On Wednesday, CNet reported that it was also willing to allow tech companies to provide more information about government requests for user data.
[Reggie] Walton, the FISC's presiding judge, gave the Justice Department until July 9 to respond to the requests from Google and Microsoft to disclose summary statistics about orders received under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which became [law] in 2008. The pair of companies have until July 16 to submit their replies.
Allowing these companies to reveal the extent of request form the government would provide a very limited amount of information about the government's activity — but it would at least offer some.
RELATED: Both Sides Can Agree: America's Top Spy Lied About Data Mining
The NSA either can't or won't crack the door in that way. Its response to critique has instead been to argue that its surveillance systems are essential to keeping Americans safe, an argument that relies heavily on secret data concerning disrupted terror activity. And, worse, that revealing information about its activity strengthens terrorists.MADISON (WRN) At the University of Wisconsin, a breakthrough on the common cold front.
Researchers construct a model of rhinovirus C and show how it differs from rhinoviruses A and B. “We previously assumed all rhinoviruses would be the same as each other, and it turns out that they’re not,” said biochemistry professor Ann Palmenberg. That discovery goes a long way towards explaining why drug trials targeting rhinoviruses haven’t been very successful. “We now understand why the rhinovirus C is different than the A and B, and why the previous drug trials did’t work.”
The new model may soon lead to the receptor for rhinovirus C, which would be an obvious target for new drug therapy. “Probably 85 percent of the common cold are due to those three species of virus.” said Palmenberg. Rhinovirus C, which was discovered just seven years ago, tends to cause severe colds, deep in the lungs. That can be especially bad for kids.Sabrepulse is, arguably, one of the greatest pioneers of chipmusic. Two of his earliest albums, 2005’s ‘Famicom Connection‘ and 2006’s ‘Chipbreak Wars‘, can be considered as two of the foundational pillars for the chipbreak subgenre. Over the years, Sabrepulse’s style shifted slowly to a more drum ‘n bass influenced vibe, and with the release of ‘First Crush‘ in 2011, a much more modern influence could be heard in his music. Now, with ‘Blood Eagle’, his first of two releases in a three-and-a-quarter year hiatus, Sabrepulse shows us yet again just how well he can adapt to the modern music scene while showcasing his roots as a chipmusician.
Blood Eagle by Sabrepulse
The album’s first track, ‘Here Is To Forever’, begins with some phenomenal synth work while chip chords ring out in the background. A kick comes in with perfect timing, and punchy snares coupled with the track’s optimistic melody follow. The combination of 2A03 square waves and incredible synthwork reminiscent of 80’s science fiction movie soundtracks give this track a beautiful, retro feel. ‘Addicted 2 Love’, the album’s fourth song, is another track with a bit of a nostalgic sense to it. Elements of house music can be heard throughout the song; the track’s rhythm and bassline are both minimalistic in nature, and the melody is catchy and simple, making for a highly memorable and extremely danceable track. A climb in tempo allows Sabrepulse to transition from a house vibe straight into a drum ‘n’ bass motif flawlessly, making for an incredible second half of an already amazing song.
Blood Eagle by Sab |
Agency, that Flynn’s star lost its luster. Flynn’s bosses fired him in 2014 amid complaints about his allegedly overbearing management style and a series of public comments he made that ran counter to Obama administration orthodoxy. From there, it was a short jump to the Fox News circuit, where he reliably bashed the Obama administration for being weak on counterterrorism, and an ever-shorter one to a position as an adviser to presidential candidate Trump.
As they perused the vendor booths offering military widgets at the NDIA tradeshow, the middle-aged former special-ops personnel who made up the bulk of the conference attendees, many of whom had multiple Iraq and Afghanistan tours under their belts, expressed surprise and disappointment that one of their own had lost his job so quickly, and over a question of personal integrity to boot. “There’s a lot of people that are shocked that it happened in the first month in office, and over an integrity issue,” a retired special-operations officer who served on the National Security Council said.
Others saw the issue in starker terms. “He lied to Pence and he had to go,” a retired Special Forces colonel who described Flynn as a passing acquaintance told me. Retaining Flynn would have entailed a major risk for Trump, he said. “The real danger for the administration is if he’s going to lie about something that small … what happens when something really big hits the fan?”
While acknowledging that Flynn enjoys a sterling reputation among his peers, the retired colonel evinced little sympathy for his predicament. “Everybody thinks the world of him,” he said. But “integrity is something you have to give away,” he said. “Nobody can take it from you.”General Motors Co will stop selling cars in India from the end of this year, drawing a line under two decades of battling in one of the world's most competitive markets where it has less than a one percent share of passenger car sales.
The decision was announced as part of a series of restructuring actions from the Detroit automaker on Thursday, and marks a significant blow to India's strategy of encouraging domestic manufacturing.
GM says it would no longer market its Chevrolet brand - its only brand of cars marketed in India - despite India's promise as a market set to overtake Japan as the world's third largest in the next decade.
But it doesn't plan to leave India entirely.
It plans to keep operating its tech center in Bangalore and to refocus its India manufacturing operations by making one of its two assembly plants in India - the one at Talegaon, about 100 km (62 miles) southeast of Mumbai - into an export-only factory. It plans to sell the Halol plant in the western Gujarat state to Chinese joint venture partner SAIC Motor Corp.
"We are not giving up benefits India offers as a local cost manufacturing hub with an excellent supplier base which is extremely competitive," Stefan Jacoby, GM's chief of international operations, said in an interview.
GM's exports from India, mainly to Mexico and Latin America, nearly doubled to 70,969 vehicles in the fiscal year than ended on March 31. The Talegaon plant has a capacity of 130,000 vehicles a year.
Jacoby said the move to turn the Talegaon assembly into an export-only plant will not impact GM Korea and its position as an export hub. India will export vehicles mostly to Mexico and South America, among other destinations, while GM Korea will ship Korean-made cars to North America, Southeast Asia, Australia and Pakistan.
Dan Ammann, GM's global president, said the restructuring actions for India announced on Thursday in essence cancels "most" of the plan GM unveiled in 2015 to invest $1 billion in India to deploy newly-designed vehicle architecture as part of a Global Emerging Market vehicle programme or GEM for short, and build a new line of low-cost vehicles in India.
The decisions to significantly scale down GM's operations in India are results of months of analysis over "where we are going to place our bets (globally) as a company," Ammann said in an interview.
ALSO READ: General Motors stops production at Halol plant
ALSO READ: General Motors to discontinue Chevrolet Tavera, Sail and Enjoy in IndiaArchitectural plans submitted to the Los Angeles City Council have revealed the design of a proposed 11-acre mixed-use complex near the Expo Line's La Cienega/Jefferson Station.
Under plans from San Francisco-based real estate firm Carmel partners, the Jefferson and La Cienega Project would replace a longtime radio broadcast facility with 1.9-million square feet of programmed floor area. In total, the proposed development would include 1,218 multifamily residential units, approximately 200,000 square feet of office space, and a combined 100,000 square feet of of ground-level floor area devoted to a grocery store, shops and restaurants.
Plans also call for a substantial amount of open space including landscaped courtyards within residential buildings and a.68-acre central park.
The project is being designed by an architectural team consisting of TCA Architects, Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB) and Mia Lehrer + Associates. Elevation plans indicate that the project's low-rise buildings would feature a variety of exterior materials, including wood-grain siding, board-formed concrete, metal siding and stucco.
SCB is reportedly spearheading the design of the proposed 29-story tower, which at 323 feet in height, would easily become the tallest building in the Baldwin Hills area. Renderings portray a rectangular structure, clad with glass and metal panels in a offset tile pattern.
The development's approvals are currently being appealed by a group known as the La Cienega Heights Association, which asserts that the project will have a negative impact on traffic congestion in the surrounding neighborhood.
A timeline for Jefferson and La Cienega is currently unclear.Perhaps the funniest thing the comedian Peter Cook did was his last proper thing, an appearance on Clive Anderson Talks Back as the football manager and motivational speaker Alan Latchley ( former Scunthorpe and Manchester City and author of the book Dare To Fail). A riff on the classic big personality English manager, Latchley was a great comic creation and a supreme piece of footballing satire at a time when footballing satire wasn’t really a thing.
In the course of a slightly wild 10-minute spot – eyes blazing with passion, fire and, let’s face it, red wine – Cook produced a stream of classic Latchleyisms. Football is about nothing unless it’s about something! What is football anyway, Clive? She’s more than a mistress. She’s a wife and a daughter. She’s an errant child. Finally, asked what he, Alan Latchley, brings to his teams, Latchley clutches Anderson’s knee, eyes blazing, jaw set, and hisses a single word: “BELIEF!!!”
Aston Villa’s Tim Sherwood tells Benteke to aim higher than Liverpool Read more
Funnily enough, this still sounds like a pretty good description of a certain kind of English footballing attitude. Even more so as Saturdays’s FA Cup final marks the biggest managerial occasion in the career of Aston Villa’s own magnetic force of nature, Tim Sherwood.
It has been a little too easy for some to dismiss Sherwood as a modern-day reboot of the old shouty English manager, Alan Latchley in a goose-down gilet. What success he has had, the theory goes, is based not in sound, transformational methods, but in the ability to induce a kind of instant motivational rage. Sherwood, at Tottenham and now Villa, has acted as a managerial amphetamine, an easy buzz, a Red Bull appointment.
Hopefully this is about to change. Not least because for all his raggedness and bluster it is clear Sherwood has some very obvious strengths. This is a manager who in 43 Premier League matches at two clubs over two seasons has had a significant galvanising effect on an unusual number of players, not to mention leaving Spurs and Villa higher in the table than he found them. At Wembley, Sherwood could become the second English manger to win the FA Cup since Joe Royle in 1995. Not to mention – and get this – the only currently employed English manager with a major trophy to his name.
No doubt Sherwood’s brashness hasn’t helped, the king-geezer schtick on the touchline, where he looks less like a cutting-edge modern manager and more like a man about to have a fight at a wedding. There is undoubtedly a skein of snobbishness in this, a reaction to the basic tone and style of Sherwood’s short-term success at Villa, which has, nonetheless, been sensational.
Before he was appointed Villa had scored 12 goals in 25 Premier League matches under Paul Lambert, who, towards the end, seemed to watch his own team in a state of detached amusement, to the extent you half expected to look up and notice him doing some other more useful task like putting together a flatpack sideboard, or sorting a basket of laundry, with just half an eye vaguely on the football. In three months since, Sherwood has brought eight reviving wins and a slightly wild sense of full-throttle freedom. His players have stormed forward at every opportunity with wild, drunken abandon, while Sherwood has been re-cast as a kind of Man at C&A Zdenek Zeman. His methods might look simple enough: pick your most skilful players; pass the ball quickly; run hard in attack; and do whatever it takes to get your best goalscorer firing. But they work. Fabian Delph has been transformed into a spiky little swaggering midfield prince. Tom Cleverley, who played with a faux Xavi-lite gravitas at Manchester United, like an overly grave and serious teenager, has discovered his own inner Tim-drive. Jack Grealish, who under Lambert was hidden away like a delicate consumptive child, has become a regular cog, funnelling possession, discomfiting defences, and transmitting a heads-up, ball-playing confidence.
There is plenty of method here. A midfield diamond has added a supporting weight of numbers around Christian Benteke to great effect, and encouraged Villa’s high-energy ball-carriers to attack from disconcerting angles. Above all, Sherwood wants his team to run, to sprint, to move with freedom and creative aggression, in its own way an Anglo-variation on the heavy-metal football of Jürgen Klopp, or the more refined, carefully calibrated obsession with sprints of Joachim Löw’s Germany.
Really, though, the best thing about Sherwood is his aggression, his fury, his alluringly pantomime-ish presence. As my colleague Scott Murray put it this week, Sherwood appears to appreciate that football is a piece of theatre. He prowls and prances. He radiates a brooding, peaty masculinity.
At the end of which it is hard for the English-leaning neutral not to want Villa and their own impossibly watchable Tim to win the FA Cup. In Arsène Wenger, Sherwood’s opposite number and English football’s arch euro modernist, there is at least an illuminating contrast. For Arsenal, winning the FA Cup represents a slightly better alternative than not winning the FA Cup, a least good trophy-winning option. Whereas for Villa and Sherwood victory would be a moment to revive not just a club but even the Cup itself. Just imagine, for a moment, the celebrations. Sherwood isn’t just going to put the lid on his head, he’s going to eat it. He’s going to climb the arch in his underpants, a corner flag in each ear, pausing only to challenge Pep Guardiola, Alex Ferguson, Herbert Chapman and Mario Zagallo to a mixed martial arts death match.
Or perhaps not. Either way Sherwood does deserve a little respect. Not just for his underrated sense of method but because he is, above all, an antidote to the one thing football really has to fear: predictability, set formulae, a dwindling away of its own irrational, vaulting, agreeably toxic passions. Sherwood may have failed to shake, just yet, the feeling this a manager who’s here for a good time not a long time but one thing is for sure – it certainly won’t be boring.
• This article was corrected on 29 May 2015 to reflect the fact that Tim Sherwood could become the second English manager to win the FA Cup since Joe Royle in 1995.The White House talking points must have gone out early on Monday morning. Because, before the charges filed against Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Rick Gates, Manafort’s longtime deputy, had been unsealed, Congressman Sean Duffy, a Republican from Wisconsin, was on CNN saying that the federal case against them “could be a nothing-burger” if it concerned events that happened before the 2016 election.
Shortly after 9 A.M., the Times and other news organizations posted online the indictment filed against Manafort and Gates. Some of the charges it contained, such as money laundering and failure to register as a foreign agent, did relate to the years before 2016, when Manafort’s political-consulting firm, for which Gates also worked, received tens of millions of dollars from a pro-Russian party in Ukraine and then, according to the complaint, diverted much of this money through banks in Cyprus and other tax havens.
The response from the pro-Trumpers was immediate. “Wire transfers 12 years ago & Ukraine? So nothing to do with @realDonaldTrump, the election, & Russia?? @CNNPolitics etc. will be sad,” Sebastian Gorka, the former White House aide, tweeted. In another message, Gorka added, “Get this straight: The news is an old wire fraud charge. But Hillary received $145 MILLION as she approved our Uranium sale to RUSSIA.” Just after 10:30 A.M., Gorka’s former boss chimed in with a couple of tweets of his own. “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????” Trump said, before adding, “....Also, there is NO COLLUSION!”
By Trump’s standards, this was a low-key response. Around the same time, the White House let it be known that the President wouldn’t be calling for Mueller’s firing, at least not today. That reassured fans of the rule of law, as well as Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, who appear to be more narrowly concerned about being put in a tough political spot. At least for now, they won’t have to answer the question of whether, if Trump did get rid of Mueller, they would appoint another independent prosecutor to replace him.
But, of course, Trump’s relatively muted reaction doesn’t mean that the White House’s ongoing disinformation and propaganda campaign against Mueller is over. As the special counsel’s investigation continues, this effort will surely expand and intensify, with conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton continuing to feature prominently. And, judging by the last few days, plenty of Republicans on Capitol Hill will be willing to join in this great diversion.
Mueller, a Washington veteran, will be prepared for this. It was almost certainly not a coincidence that it was also revealed on Monday morning that, earlier this month, Mueller’s office had reached a coöperation agreement with George Papadopoulos, a young former foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign. In a court filing dated October 5th, Papadopoulos admitted to lying to the F.B.I. earlier this year about his contacts with two people connected to the Russian government. A campaign volunteer with limited major foreign-policy experience, Papadopoulos seems unlikely to prove a central figure in the unfolding story of the Russia investigation. Yet he was a campaign figure actively seeking coöperation with Russia—Papadopoulos met early last year with an unnamed professor, who told him the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton—and his guilty plea was the first one directly related to the 2016 campaign. The plea gave lie to claims that Mueller is pursuing an old story.
Actually, so did the indictment of Manafort and Gates. The first charge against them, “Conspiracy against the United States”—to wit, “impeding, impairing, obstructing and defeating the lawful governmental functions of a government agency, namely the Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury”—relates to actions “from in or about and between 2006 and 2017.” So it covers the period in 2016 when Manafort was chairman of the Trump campaign, and Gates was working with him.
Similarly, the twelfth charge alleges that, “on or about November 23, 2016 and February 10, 2017,” in seeking to distance themselves from Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian former President of Ukraine, and his party, Manafort and Gates made false statements and created fictitious documents. Manafort cut his official ties to Trump last August, after the Times reported on some of his activities in Ukraine. But, in November, Gates was part of the Trump transition team. And, this February, he was working for a pro-Trump super PAC. Even after he left that job, in March, he reportedly made multiple visits to the White House.
These details from the indictment attracted less initial attention than some other, more colorful details—the $934,350 Manafort spent at an antique-rug store in Alexandria, Virginia; the $849,215 he spent at a men’s-clothing store in New York; and the $520,440 he spent at another store in Beverly Hills. But what brings the indictment together is the way that these details are all being used by Mueller and his high-powered team of prosecutors to dramatically ramp up the pressure on people around Trump to coöperate with their investigation.
In their efforts to flip witnesses, we now know that Mueller and his colleagues are willing to bring charges not directly related to the 2016 campaign. The Papadopoulos guilty plea, meanwhile, indicates that they are on the alert for anybody lying to them. And they are also willing to file felony indictments for crimes that don’t normally merit them—such as failing to register as a foreign agent.
Among the individuals who have surely gotten the message is Michael Flynn, the former national-security adviser. According to news reports, he, too, earned money from foreign governments without disclosing it or registering as a foreign agent. But Flynn isn’t the only Trump associate who has been accused of questionable financial dealings. Back in June, the Washington Post reported that Mueller was looking into Jared Kushner’s finances, too.
As Mueller’s squeeze play expands, another question will be how much Trump knew about Manafort’s efforts to promote pro-Russian interests when he hired him to help his campaign, last March, and when he elevated Manafort to the role of campaign chairman, in June. According to the indictment, Manafort was a foreign agent at that time, and should have been registered as such. It beggars belief that Trump, who was busy praising Vladimir Putin and encouraging the Russians to hack Clinton’s e-mails, knew absolutely nothing of Manafort’s business dealings.
An even bigger question is what damaging information, if any, Mueller suspects that Manafort, Gates, and others, such as Flynn, have to offer. We can only assume that the special counsel’s office believes some of this information may relate directly to Trump. This weekend, Wired published an article by Garrett M. Graff, the author of a book about Mueller’s tenure as director of the F.B.I., pointing out that most large-scale F.B.I. investigations now follow the same template: “Work on peripheral figures first, encourage them to cooperate with the government against their bosses in exchange for a lighter sentence, and then repeat the process until the circle has closed tightly around the godfather or criminal mastermind. There’s no reason to think that this investigation will be any different.”
Also over the weekend, the Times reported one of Trump’s lawyers, Ty Cobb, as saying that the President had “no concerns” about what Manafort or Flynn might tell the special counsel. Cobb also said he thought that Mueller’s investigation might be nearing its end. Right now, that looks like wishful thinking in the extreme. Or, perhaps, it is a case of telling the client, whose approval rating in the Gallup poll has just hit an all-time low of thirty-two per cent, what he wants to hear.This article is over 2 years old
One of the most widely translated works in history has been given a 21st-century update with millennials in mind
The Emoji Bible has arrived... and 😇 has yet to declare it 👌
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and then some time later 😇 created emoji 🙏.
One of the most widely translated works in history has been given a 21st-century update with the publication of the Emoji Bible.
Described as a “great and fun way to share the gospel”, it interprets all 66 books of the King James Version with Unicode-approved emoji and commonly-used internet slang and contractions.
Bible Emoji (@BibleEmoji) 📖 of Genesis: 01:001:001
In the beginning 😇 created the ✨ & the 🌎.
Bible Emoji (@BibleEmoji) 📖 of Luke 2:14
Glory 2 😇 in the highest, & on 🌎 peace, good will toward men.
Totalling just under 3,300 pages, the book – subtitled “Scripture 4 Millennials” – was made available on the iTunes store for US $2.99 on Sunday.
The translator told Guardian Australia that he or she preferred to remain anonymous, identifying only as the cool-dude-with-sunglasses emoji: 😎.
Google proposes new set of female emojis to promote equality Read more
“I thought if we fast forwarded 100 years in the future, an emoji bible would exist,” said 😎. “So I thought it’d be fun to try to make it...
“I wanted to make it similar to how you might text or tweet a bible verse, by shrinking the total character count.”
The project used a program of the translator’s own creation that linked 80 emoji with 200 corresponding words, and took about six months.
“I started tweeting the verses out and it was sort of like a public proofread.”
Bible Emoji (@BibleEmoji).@BibleEmoji - Follow, retweet like and share! pic.twitter.com/U0hYsQt6xK
The translator welcomed suggestions on how to improve the translation. Though 😎 wanted to make the Bible available for Android, the book formats used by each platform presented problems: “Like Amazon for instance doesn’t support emoji.”
The Emoji Bible had been met with a largely positive reception, said 😎: “Some really nice things, some not-so-nice things.”
This was reflected in the response on Twitter – along with some translation difficulties.
bob tinetti (@BobTinetti) @BibleEmoji Amen. Awesome. Powerful n fun. I need this.
2pac's wife (@zanaynayy) @danieldiaz132_ @BibleEmoji its the bible, thats so inconsiderate Daniel
“‘in the beginning angels created the stars & the earth’ i’m pretty sure it doesn’t go like that,” tweeted one user, prompting a correction from the @BibleEmoji account.
Bible Emoji (@BibleEmoji) 😇 = God ✌😊 https://t.co/G8FKsGWvde
Its release comes with declining rates of religious affiliation across the Millennial generation, with the Pew Research Center finding “much lower levels of religious affiliation, including less connection with Christian churches, than older generations” in a May 2015 study of religious affiliation in the US population.
Asked whether this was a concern, 😎 said, “I think we should worry more about spreading ✌️ [peace sign emoji] & ❤️ [heart emoji] & less about what church affiliation we’re doing it under.”
😎 declined to say if they were a Christian. “I’m just an emoji, and I 💪ly [flexed biceps] agree with Jesus message of course.”
“That was strongly,” they added. “Not sure if that one came through on translation lol.”Face/Off is a 1997 American science fiction action film directed by John Woo, written by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, and starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. Travolta plays an FBI agent and Cage plays a terrorist, sworn enemies who assume each other's physical appearance.[3]
The first Hollywood film in which Woo was given major creative control, Face/Off earned critical acclaim for its acting performances (especially Cage and Travolta), stylized action sequences, John Powell's musical score, emotional depth, originality, humor, direction and stunts. It is often cited to be Woo's best Hollywood film. A commercial success, the film grossed $245 million worldwide and serves as the 11th highest-grossing film of 1997. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Sound Effects Editing (Mark Stoeckinger and Per Hallberg) at the 70th Academy Awards.
Plot [ edit ]
On September 9, 1991, FBI Special Agent Sean Archer survives an assassination attempt by freelance terrorist and homicidal sociopath Castor Troy, but the bullet penetrates Archer's chest and strikes his son Michael, killing the boy.
Six years later, Archer's vendetta against Troy culminates in his team's ambush of Troy and his younger brother and accomplice, Pollux at the Los Angeles International Airport. Troy goads Archer with knowledge of a bomb located somewhere in the city set to go off in a few days, but he is knocked into an irreversible coma before Archer can learn more.
Archer affirms that the threat is real, but is unable to convince Pollux to reveal where the bomb is located. At the suggestion of his partner Tito Biondi and Special Ops specialist Dr. Hollis Miller, Archer secretly undergoes a highly experimental face transplant procedure by Dr. Malcolm Walsh to take on Troy's face, voice, and appearance. Archer is taken to the same high-security prison where Pollux is being held, and slowly convinces Pollux that he is Troy, gaining information on the bomb's location. Meanwhile, Troy incredibly awakens from his coma and discovers his face missing. He calls his gang, and they force Dr. Walsh to transplant Archer's face onto him.
Troy visits the prison and surprises Archer. He taunts his nemesis, telling him that he burned down Dr. Walsh's lab with Walsh, Biondi, and Miller inside to eliminate all the evidence of their transplant, and will take over Archer's life. He leaves Archer to languish while he convinces Pollux to "reveal" the bomb's location in exchange for release from prison. Disarming his bomb in a dramatic fashion, Troy-as-Archer gains respect from Archer's fellow FBI colleagues. Troy becomes close to Archer's family, who Archer had neglected since he began seeking revenge against Troy, romancing his wife Eve and rescuing his daughter Jamie from an abusive boyfriend.
Archer escapes after staging a riot and retreats to Troy's headquarters. There, Archer meets Sasha, the sister of Troy's primary drug kingpin, and her son Adam, who reminds Archer of Michael. Archer discovers that Adam is Troy's son, who he once had planned to put in foster care. Troy learns of Archer's escape and hastily assembles a team to raid his headquarters. The raid quickly turns into a bloodbath, killing numerous FBI agents and several members of Troy's gang, including Pollux; Archer, Sasha, and Adam are able to escape. Archer's supervisor, Director Victor Lazarro blames Troy for the numerous slayings. Troy, furious over Pollux's death, kills Lazarro, and makes it look like a heart attack. Troy-as-Archer is promoted to acting director as plans are made for Lazarro's funeral.
Archer finds safety for Sasha and Adam and approaches Eve. He persuades her to take a sample of Troy's blood and his own to compare their blood types at the hospital where she works as a doctor to prove he is Archer. Convinced of her husband's identity, she tells him that Troy will be vulnerable at Lazarro's funeral. At the ceremony, Archer finds that Troy has anticipated his actions and takes Eve hostage. Sasha arrives, and a gunfight ensues; Sasha manages to save Eve after taking a bullet. Archer promises a dying Sasha to take care of Adam and raise him away from criminal life.
Troy flees the church with Archer pursuing him. After killing two more federal agents, Troy briefly takes Jamie hostage, but she escapes by stabbing him with a butterfly knife that Troy had given her for self-defense. A speedboat chase ensues in which Archer forces Troy to shore by collision, then bests Troy in a melee fight. Troy mutilates his own/Archer's face to taunt and distract him, but Archer instead gains the upper hand and impales Troy with a spear gun, killing him. Backup agents arrive and address Archer by name, having been convinced by Eve of Archer's true identity. After the face transplant surgery is undone, Archer returns home, adopting Adam into his family and keeping his promise to Sasha.
Cast [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
Face/Off was a spec script which writers Mike Werb and Michael Colleary tried to sell to a studio from as early as 1990. The first actors who were chosen to play Sean Archer and Castor Troy were Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger respectively but John Woo instead hired John Travolta and Nicolas Cage to play those characters. It took numerous studios, producers and rewrites before John Woo became attached several years later.[4] For the Archer character, Woo considered casting either Michael Douglas or Jean-Claude Van Damme with whom he had worked in Hard Target. When the film was eventually made, Douglas served as an executive producer. Werb and Colleary have cited White Heat (1949) and Seconds (1966) as influences on the plot.[4]
With an $80 million production budget, Face/Off made heavy use of action set pieces including several violent shootouts and a boat chase filmed in the Los Angeles area. The boat scene at the end of the film was shot in San Diego.[5]
Calling the brothers Castor and Pollux is a reference to Greek mythology; Castor and Pollux are the twins transformed by Zeus into the constellation Gemini.[6]
Release [ edit ]
Face/Off was released in North America on June 27, 1997 and earned $23,387,530 on its opening weekend, ranking number one in the domestic box office. It went on to become the 11th highest domestic and 14th worldwide grossing film of 1997, earning a domestic total of $112,276,146 and $133,400,000 overseas for a total of worldwide gross of $245,676,146.[2]
The Region 1 DVD of Face/Off was one of the first films to be released on the format on October 7, 1998.[citation needed] A 10th Anniversary Collector's Edition DVD was released on September 11, 2007 and the now-defunct HD DVD on October 30, 2007 in the United States.[7] The new DVD is a 2-disc set including 7 deleted scenes, an alternate ending, and several featurettes.[8]
The film was released on Blu-ray Disc in the United Kingdom on October 1, 2007 by Buena Vista Home Entertainment, and was released in the United States on May 20, 2008 by Paramount Home Entertainment.[9]
Reception [ edit ]
The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes records that 92% of 86 critical reviews were positive, with an average rating of 7.9/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Travolta and Cage play cat-and-mouse (and literally play each other) against a beautifully stylized backdrop of typically elegant, over-the-top John Woo violence."[10] On Metacritic, the film received a core of 82 out of 100 from 25 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[11] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[12]
The role reversal between Travolta and Cage was a subject of praise, as were the stylized, violent action sequences. Critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three out of four and remarked that, "Here, using big movie stars and asking them to play each other, Woo and his writers find a terrific counterpoint to the action scenes: All through the movie, you find yourself reinterpreting every scene as you realize the "other" character is "really" playing it."[13] Rolling Stone's Peter Travers said of the film, "You may not buy the premise or the windup, but with Travolta and Cage taking comic and psychic measures of their characters and their own careers, there is no resisting Face/Off. This you gotta see."[14] Richard Corliss of Time said that the film "isn't just a thrill ride, it's a rocket into the thrilling past, when directors could scare you with how much emotion they packed into a movie."[15]
Barbara Shulgasser of the San Francisco Examiner called the movie "idiotic" and argued that "a good director would choose the best of the six ways and put it in his movie. Woo puts all six in. If you keep your eyes closed during a Woo movie and open them every six minutes, you'll see everything you need to know to have a perfectly lovely evening at the cinema."[16]
The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Sound Effects Editing (Mark Stoeckinger and Per Hallberg) at the 70th Academy Awards, but lost to another Paramount film Titanic. Face/Off also won Saturn Awards for Best Director and Best Writing, and the MTV Movie Awards for Best Action Sequence (the speedboat chase) and Best On-Screen Duo for Travolta and Cage.[citation needed]
Face/Off is said to have inspired Infernal Affairs. However, Infernal Affairs director Andrew Lau wanted to have a more realistic situation; instead of a physical face change, Lau wanted to have the characters swap identities.[17] The concept of "bian lian" or "change face", a technique traditionally used in Chinese opera, may have been used here to depict the fluid and seamless morph of Chen and Lau's characters' identities between the "good" and "bad" sides. Infernal Affairs in turn has spawned several adaptations, notably The Departed directed by Martin Scorsese which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Soundtrack [ edit ]
Professional ratings Review scores Source Rating AllMusic [19]
The Face/Off soundtrack was released by Hollywood Records on July 1, 1997, the week following the film's release.[20]
All music composed by John Powell, except as noted.
No. Title Music Length 1. "Face On" 4:57 2. "80 Proof Rock" 4:29 3. "Furniture" 7:12 4. "The Golden Section Derma Lift" 3:15 5. "This Ridiculous Chin" 6:51 6. "No More Drugs for That Man" John Powell, Gavin Greenaway 7:27 7. "Hans' Loft" John Powell, Gavin Greenaway 3:34 8. "Ready for the Big Ride‚ Bubba" 3:53 Total length: 41:42
Several pieces of music and songs were used in the film but not included in the soundtrack. These include:Guergis’ suit originated in December 2011, when the former MP sought damages for conspiracy, defamation, misfeasance in public office, intentional infliction of mental suffering and negligence against several defendants including Hamilton and his law firm, Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, and Harper.
The original statement of claim was struck down in 2012 - a decision that was affirmed by an appeal court in 2013 - and Guergis was given leave to file a new claim, which she did in 2014.
That claim alleged that there existed a lawyer-client relationship between the solicitor, the law firm and Guergis, and that the solicitor breached his professional duties to his client, by his actions and by his words, thereby causing her damages.
The amended statement of claim also alleges Hamilton published defamatory words concerning Guergis on four occasions.
In a request for leave to appeal heard before Justice Warkentin in December, the lawyers for Cassels Brock and Hamilton argued the court should strike out the second statement of claim because Harper’s decisions were protected by an exercise of Crown privilege.
But while Parliamentary privilege protected the decisions of the Prime Minister, “those privileges could not be used by Hamilton to shield himself,” Guergis’ lawyers David Sheriff-Scott and Stephen Victor argued.
Warkentin wrote in her Dec. 7 ruling: “It was open to the Motion Judge to find that the issue of parliamentary privilege versus solicitor and client confidentiality was an issue best determined by the trial judge rather than on a pleadings motion.”
In a separate matter overseen by Justice Charles T. Hackland in January, that judge awarded Guergis nearly $40,000 in costs related to an effort by Hamilton and Cassels Brock & Blackwell to strike portions of Guergis’ amended statement of claim.
In a ruling issued in December, Justice Hackland accepted the defendants’ submissions on an issue of defamatory meaning, but decided that Guergis was otherwise successful in defending the motion by the defendants.
Guergis’ claims have yet be proven in court.Genesis 17:1-14 New International Version (NIV)
The Covenant of Circumcision
17 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, “I am God Almighty ; walk before me faithfully and be blameless. 2 Then I will make my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers.”
3 Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, 4 “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. 5 No longer will you be called Abram ; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. 8 The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.”
9 Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. 10 This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. 12 For the generations to come |
Sayfullo Saipov (St. Charles County Department of Corrections/KMOV/AP) More
While no terror group has yet laid claim to the attack, New York and other cities around the globe have been on high alert against attacks by extremists in vehicles.
Isis has released detailed instructions on carrying out vehicle attacks while intensifying calls for global atrocities as its territories shrink in Syria and Iraq.
The first terror attack using a lorry came in Nice, where an Isis supporter killed 86 people in July 2016.
Vehicles have since been used in attacks in Berlin, Stockholm, London, Paris, Spain and the Canadian city of Edmonton.
Isis has released several rounds of instructions on how to use vehicles in deadly rampages, stipulating what kind to use and how to hire or steal them.
The group’s propaganda has cited pedestrianised areas and crowded streets as prime targets after declaring murdering civilians “halal”, meaning permissible under Islam.
Most attackers then attempt to achieve “martyrdom” by being killed by security forces.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called Tuesday’s atrocity a “lone wolf” attack and said there was no evidence to suggest it was part of a wider plot.
New York City Police Commissioner James O’Neill said a statement the driver made as he got out of the truck and the method of attack led police to conclude it was a terrorist act.
On Twitter, President Donald Trump called it “another attack by a very sick and deranged person” and declared, “NOT IN THE U.S.A.”
“We know that this action was intended to break our spirit, but we also know that New Yorkers are Strong, New Yorkers are resilient,” Mr DeBlasio said. “We have been tested before as a city, very near where this attack occured.”When the NSW government first proposed to transfer the Powerhouse Museum from Ultimo on the fringe of Darling Harbour to Parramatta in western Sydney it was greeted with widespread approval.
To many citizens it made perfect sense to elevate public culture in the arts-starved western suburbs. Another point of attraction was the proposed funding arrangement: the sale of the Powerhouse site would pay for the museum’s relocation i.e. there would be no burden on taxpayers.
The Powerhouse has a celebrated 136-year history dating from the Sydney International Exhibition in 1878. The current Ultimo headquarters was officially opened in 1893 when it was known as the Technological Museum. Its priceless collection contains a Catalina aircraft and a Boulton and Watt steam engine which attracts visitors from all around the world.
In the first instance, the relocation project received bipartisan support in State Parliament and from the official (government-funded) arts community. Ministers, arts bureaucrats and the ever-present army of lobbyists and consultants proclaimed the Powerhouse’s closure and its transfer to Parramatta was a “perfect synergy”.
According well-informed opinion the establishment of Sydney’s second arts capital 23 kilometres west of the Central Business District (CBD) was a “done deal”.
In recent days, however, it has become painfully obvious that the proposal has hit a brick wall. A groundswell of opposition has stalled the plan and many now doubt that it will ever be executed.
First and foremost, the project was incorrectly costed and as a result, in the cold light of day, it has simply become unaffordable even for Australia’s No.1 state economy with its glistening Triple-A rating.
Originally, the sale of the Ultimo site was forecast to raise up to $250 million with the new Parramatta museum costed at $450 million, creating a shortfall of around $200 million which would be picked up by the NSW government.
However, when an all-party parliamentary committee took evidence from stakeholders earlier this month, the “official” figures were challenged and the secrecy surrounding the project started to fall apart.
It now seems that the sale of Ultimo – at the mercy of a cartel of major developers – may raise only $130 million and the final cost of the new gallery on the banks of the Parramatta River may be as high as $1 billion.
When the seven-member Upper House committee asked for written public submissions on the performance and effectiveness of the government’s arts policy it was overwhelmed by 169 individual commentaries, many of them focused on the ill-conceived Powerhouse project.
Trevor Kennedy, a former CEO of Consolidated Press, Bulletin editor and Australian Financial Review journalist, told MPs that the closure and relocation of the Powerhouse should be halted and re-examined.
As a life fellow, life member, former trustee, fund-raiser and donor to the Powerhouse, Kennedy said that the decision was “outrageous” and described it as “a thought bubble”.
“Nobody wants to deny western Sydney the opportunities to have greater and easier access to cultural events and artefacts but this proposed solution is – in one word – silly,” Kennedy said.
“It is totally irrational. Let’s fix it before it’s too late.”
Acclaimed arts administrator Leo Schofield, another former Powerhouse trustee, offered “a dozen cogent reasons as to why this proposal is not only misguided but also absurdly costly, in terms of both money and loss of prestige”.
Schofield urged the Baird government to “re-consider” its plan and to involve the knowledge of experts with proven museum experience rather than relying on urban planners and property developers.
Well-regarded arts curator, writer and educator Dr Grace Cochrane said that “it was hard to believe that any government would want to be remembered as the one responsible for destroying so many things we all believe to be important. And yet this is what the current NSW government is doing.”
The most damaging submission came from Powerhouse heavyweight Dr Nick Pappas, a former president of the museum’s trustees, who said the proposed relocation was “a flawed plan”.
“Museums are not departmental offices that can be abruptly shifted holus bolus to new localities for reasons of efficiency or savings, or even for reasons more mischievous,” Pappas said.
MPs heard devastating evidence about siting the new museum on the Parramatta River’s flood plain with Dr Lindsay Sharp, the Powerhouse’s founding director, saying that the “unforeseen” peril was flood mitigation.
“Around the world most museums are moving their collections away from flood plains, like in Paris,” he said.
Lionel Glendenning, architect of the Powerhouse, the National Gallery of Australia and the High Court of Australia, testified: “The [Parramatta] site is on a flood plain. A flood plain has been there for thousands of years. You cannot put basements in the building. If you put a basement in there it would be like building a concrete boat. They would have to tie the damn thing down.
“The Louvre in Paris – this mega, giant airport of a museum – flooded. We have all walked along the Left Bank and looked down at the Seine. Yet this is what is proposed for this site. It does not make a lot of sense.”
The unmentioned strategy behind the Powerhouse transfer to western Sydney is purely political. The NSW Liberal Party is attempting to break out of its traditional electoral ghettoes on the North Shore, the Northern Beaches and the Eastern Suburbs and raise the party’s blue flag in the State’s major population and economic growth area, Western Sydney, home of the so-called “Howard battlers”.
But evidence given to the parliamentary committee has been so universally hostile that the over-paid shiney-pants at Treasury and the Premier and Cabinet Department are running for cover. Those who were devoted supporters of the property developers’ rort only months ago are now looking for ways to avoid being caught in the fall-out. Can a Baird government announcement of a “rescheduling” be far away?American professional wrestling legend “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair claims he slept with more than 10,000 women and drank 10 beers and five cocktails a day for over 20 years, a new documentary reveals.
Director Rory Karpf, in a documentary, followed the career of Flair, 68, and revealed the lifestyle of one of the most influential men in the wrestling business.
Flair, who has been married four times, said that his public persona intertwined with his private life, resulting in sleeping with more than 10,000 women during his lifetime and having a strong alcohol addiction, the USA Today reported.
Flair said he used to consume as many as 10 beers and five alcoholic cocktails a day for decades while travelling from show to show. He recalled telling a psychiatrist that he drank “at least 10 beers, and probably five mixed drinks” every day – to which the medical professional replied saying, “That’s not possible.”
“I work every day. I drink a beer in the car, I get to the hotel and I drink vodka,” he told the psychiatrist in 1989.
He recalled his relationship with the doctor, “By the time I got through with that son of a (expletive), he was laying on the couch and I was on the chair talking to him,” Flair told the documentary makers.
The alcohol addiction almost proved to be fatal to the wrestler. In August, Flair was placed in a medically induced coma before going for surgery amid kidney failure prompted by excessive drinking over the years.
Doctors reportedly said he had only a 20 percent chance to survive, the New York Daily News reported. "I wouldn't even begin to think about drinking,” he told the paper. "If you ever hear that I'm out drinking again, say, 'Ric, you (dummy), you deserve whatever you get."
"Going forward, I want people to take my advice as opposed to wanting to be or act like me. There's a lot of 20-year-old kids that want to be Ric Flair. That's cool if it's in a good context. But if it's drinking to relieve stress or cope with life, that's not the answer," Flair added.Mitt Romney apparently violated the Ethics in Government Act in 2009 by burying an investment in his wife's name, according to a coalition of non-profits and unions. The investment didn't surface through much of the campaign because Romney refuses to release his 2009 tax returns.
The investment in Singer Associates LP used TARP funds in part to ship at least 25,000 jobs overseas and short-change pensioners. Republicans then blamed it all on the Obama Administration, while Romney himself insisted the auto industry be allowed to go bust.
The profits were realized in 2009. Romney has not released his family's tax returns for that year and refused many calls to do so, apparently in part because they would have revealed the investment.
Many have speculated that releasing his 2009 tax returns would also have revealed that he took advantage of a 2009 IRS amnesty program for American investors who had used offshore accounts to dodge taxes. If he had used such accounts that way and hadn't taken the amnesty, Romney would have been guilty of a felony.
The group sent its letter to Don W. Fox, General Counsel of the Office of Government Ethics, on Nov. 1, claiming that an investment of at least $1 million, made in Elliott Associates L.P. in Ann Romney's name, is a violation of the Ethics in Government Act because "Romney's June 1, 2012 Public Financial Disclosure Report to your office did not... disclose the underlying holdings of his private equity and limited partnership funds."
The investment was used to buy up the debt of Delphi Automotive. Elliott is a hedge fund run by Paul Singer, a man with a reputation for what Fortune magazine called "strong-arming his way to profit." According to an Oct. 18 article in The Nation by Greg Palast -- itself based on a recent Palast book that was referred to in the letter -- Elliott used the Delphi debt, bought for pennies on the dollar, to gain control of the company for an average of $0.67 per share.
Once in control, Singer and his associates used a March 2009 meeting to force GM and the U.S. Treasury to pay Delphi $350 million. If not, says Steven Rattner, who chaired the meeting as head of President Obama's Auto Task Force, Singer promised to shut down the bailout by stopping all supplies to GM. Among other things, Delphi supplies GM with steering columns.
Rattner, who described the meeting in his memoir, Overhaul, compared Singer's demands to "extortion demands by the Barbary pirates." His account has been corroborated by Delphi's chief financial officer, John Sheehan.
Singer later offloaded Delphi's pension liabilities to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. (PBGC) and shipped at least 25,000 jobs overseas. Pensions taken on by the PBGC are cut anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent. Delphi, which now has only 5,000 workers in the United States, has an overseas workforce of 100,000.
Later -- after taxpayer-owned General Motors forgave Delphi $2.5 billion in debt -- Elliott and its partner took Delphi public at $22 a share. At this writing, Delphi is trading at $33.24.
The exact amount of the Romney investments -- and the profit it earned -- has not been disclosed; disclosure laws don't require more than what Mrs. Romney made public -- that she invested "at least" $1 million and earned "at least" $15 million. This is the minimum disclosure required by a law that was subject to much lobbying when it was being written and passed.
The Nation's story and the group's letter have attracted media attention in Ohio -- Delphi's home -- but the Romney campaign slammed the reports to the Dayton Daily News, claiming they resulted from a "partisan, left-wing study meant to distract from the $1 billion of taxpayer funds the Obama Administration handed over to the UAW in the Delphi bankruptcy."James Regan, the 62 year-old "well-coiffed" man accused of failing to pay rent while living in several high-end Toronto apartments, has turned himself into police a day after being charged with assault.
Regan surrendered to Toronto police at 53 Division, 75 Eglinton Ave. West, around 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday.
A police media release Monday said Regan assaulted a 56-year-old woman who confronted him about a civil matter at a residence in the Avenue Road and McMaster Avenue area on Sept. 24. The alleged victim is one of Regan's previous landlords, CBC News has learned.
Regan "became enraged, and punched and kicked the woman," the release says.
Owes ex-landlords thousands
In October, Regan was ordered evicted from a Yorkville apartment where he'd been living since July. The decision marked the third time he had been evicted since 2014.
According to the ruling issued by the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board, Regan owes his landlord $10,000 in rent payments.
Court documents show he also owes previous landlords thousands, but never paid.
CBC News has also reported that, along with the disputes with landlords, Regan is alleged to have not paid for $18,000 worth of furniture, not returned a new car to a dealership after his credit application failed, and charged more than $700 to a man's credit card without permission — though in each of those cases, Toronto police did not investigate, deeming them civil matters.
Regan, who has previously spoken with CBC News, has denied any wrongdoing in connection with those incidents.Revealed: How CEOs use corporate jets like their 'personal taxis'
The chief executives of public companies are regularly using shareholder money to fly to exclusive resorts in luxury aboard private jets, a report has revealed.
A review of Federal Aviation Administration flight records found that dozens of jets operated by publicly traded corporations made 30 per cent or more of their trips to or from resort destinations as CEOs use the planes like personal taxis.
The report found that a number of companies are under-reporting the cost of allowing their executives to commute home and on vacation in style, as shareholders struggle with the weak economy.
Life of luxury: The report found that dozens of jets used by public companies made 30 per cent or more of their trips to resort areas
The Wall Street Journal reviewed the records from nearly every jet flight in the U.S. over a four-year period between 2007 and 2010.
It found that a high percentage of the trips made by some corporate jets were to vacation destinations, suggesting that they were being used by executives to make personal trips.
Computer storage company EMC Corp has five jets that chief executive Joseph is allowed ‘limited’ personal use of.
Over the four years to December, the jets landed 393 times at three resorts where Mr Tucci has vacation homes, in Cape Cod, the New Jersey shore and the Florida keys, according to the report. That is about one trip every four days.
One of the aircraft spent 46 per cent of its flights going to or from these or other vacation spots.
Frequent flyer: Jets used by computer storage company EMC Corp landed 393 times in four years at three resorts where CEO Joseph Tucci has homes
FREQUENT FLYERS: THE COST OF FLYING SOLO
Variable cost per hour, 2010 Boeing BBJ - $5,992 Gulfstream G550 - $4,106 Bombardier Challenger 605 - $3,112 Dassault Falcon 900EX - $3,086 (includes fuel, landing fees, crew expenses and annual maintenance) Source: Conklin & de Decker Aviation Information/WSJ
More than half of the flight by four jets used by New York-based Leucadia National Corp went to or from resort areas.
According to the report, in 2009 alone the jets spent 220 hours flying to or from Jackson Hole, Wyoming and New York’s Hamptons, where chairman Ian Cumming has homes.
Under SEC rules, the cost of personal travel on company planes must be disclosed if it exceeds $25,000 per year or more than 10 per cent of executive benefits.
But the report claimed that some companies are disguising personal trips as business travel.
‘Personal use of corporate aircraft is still underreported,’ Brink Dickerson, an attorney at Troutman Sanders LLP, told the Journal.
Leucadia reported less than $30,000 on personal flying by Mr Cumming in 2009.
But according to estimates by the Journal based on hourly operating-cost, flights made by company jets to the two locations where he has homes alone would have been cost $708,000.
Take a seat: A number of companies are under-reporting the cost to shareholders of allowing executives to commute by plane, according to the report
EMC reported the cost of Mr Tucci’s personal flying at $664,079 over the four-year. But the Journal estimated the cost of flights to and from airports near his homes was close to $3.1 million.
Some of the companies that allow executives to use corporate jets for personal use defended their use.
Yum Brands Inc, which owns KFC and Taco Bell, said that chief executive David Novak and his wife are required to use a company plane for personal and business travel, partly because, ‘Mr Novak has been physically assaulted while travelling’.
A spokesman for EMC told the Journal that the company ‘keeps meticulous corporate aircraft records. Any personal use is reflected accurately in our proxy statement each year.A survey conducted by Politiken Research showed on Thursday that Danish municipalities are struggling to house refugees.
Waiting times for permanent housing in some municipalities exceeds three years and local officials have resorted to erecting temporary pavilions in order to deal with the shortage.
“We've reached the breaking point,” Knud Kristensen, the mayor of Vesterhimmerland Municipality in northern Jutland, told Politiken.
Sixty-one of Denmark's 98 municipalities responded to Politiken's survey and nearly half of them reported that they are struggling to find homes for around 12,000 refugees.
In Vesterhimmerland, Kristensen said his municipality has ran out of housing options in towns and villages and temporary options in former schools and care homes are also filled to the maximum. Local officials are now considering putting refugees in houses out in the country.
“But how would they get to shopping options and language schools, if we spread them out so much?” Kristensen asked rhetorically.
Vesterhimmerland has resorted to ordering temporary pavilions and gazebos that will be set up on available grounds. Eight other municipalities said that they are doing the same.
One of those is Allerød Municipality on Zealand. Its mayor, Jørgen Johansen, acknowledged that the pavilions are not a permanent solution and said that the municipality may have to resort to building more housing.
“But that will put a strain on our economy,” he told Politiken.
Not all municipalities are struggling with the problem, however. In Odense, permanent housing is immediately available for the 131 refugees it has been allocated.This article is the second in a three-part series that explores the issue of deforestation and climate change. In part one, GlobalPost considered how a proposed international carbon-credit market could slash greenhouse-gas emissions and save the world's surviving forests. Part two shows how indigenous people can benefit from carbon credits, while part three looks at "carbon cowboys" accused of abusing the system.
PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru — Sitting on the porch of his ramshackle wooden hut, shaded from the Amazonian sun by the thick rainforest canopy, Brazil nut collector Eleuterio Martin admits he has never heard of global warming.
Yet Martin, 73, is now set to play his part in a groundbreaking new project that could become one of the most effective ways to curb rising global greenhouse gas emissions.
He is one of hundreds of local people here in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, near the Bolivian border, who have teamed up with Bosques Amazonicos, a Lima-based company that plans to market carbon credits generated by protecting the rainforest on the land where they have government concessions to harvest Brazil nuts.
Read more: Building the credit market
Although it varies significantly based on latitude, altitude, precipitation and forest type, one acre of Amazon rainforest can sequester more than 150 metric tons of carbon.
In total, Bosques Amazonicos plans to help conserve 360,000 hectares (890,000 acres) of rainforest, thus preventing millions of tons of carbon emissions.
By doing so, the company expects to eventually generate annual revenues of $5 million from the sale of carbon credits.
Of that, 30 percent will be handed over to the Brazil nut collectors, who live a largely subsistence lifestyle, growing their own food and currently earning an average of around $2,000 a year. The other 70 percent will go to the company’s investors.
The credits will be sold on international “voluntary” carbon markets to businesses that freely opt to offset their carbon footprints.
Although it is their own choice, many of those companies will be preparing themselves for the post-carbon world, in which new laws, expected in the coming years, will require them to emit fewer greenhouse gases.
Read more: Carbon cowboys in the Amazon
The project will have to be independently certified, with experts doing everything from counting and measuring the trees in the Brazil nut concessions to calculating the theoretical rate of deforestation that would have taken place without Bosques Amazonicos’ intervention.
The project works because Madre de Dios’ forests are under threat. Carbon credits from forests that no one is about to cut down are worthless.
Martin’s 246-hectare concession is just five miles from a major new road, the Interoceanic highway. Intended to link Brazilian commodities with Asian markets via Peru’s Pacific ports, the Interoceanic has also literally paved the way for illegal loggers, poachers, miners and land-squatters to penetrate the dense rainforest in numbers.
During the two-hour motorbike ride from the regional capital Puerto Maldonado to Martin’s home, along a rutted, often flooded dirt track, we pass through dense stretches of forest interspersed with open fields with grazing cattle.
This is what tropical deforestation looks like on the ground.
In particular, the wave of illegal gold-mining sweeping the region means that Martin and his neighbors now have to be on constant alert against trespassers using primitive mining techniques that destroy the rainforest — including the ancient Brazil nut trees — for a few grains of gold.
Bosques Amazonicos is helping the Brazil nut collectors by placing boundary markers around their concessions for the first time and giving them legal support against intruders.
The backing of the company and its lawyers is critical in this remote, frontier region where law enforcement is usually notable only by its absence.
Bosques Amazonicos is also helping the collectors plant more trees, giving them small loans to buy equipment at the start of each “zafra,” as the harvest is known, and financing the construction of a $1.9 million processing plant, 70 percent of which will be owned by the Brazil nut collectors.
All in all, the average Brazil nut collector can expect to double their income from the carbon credits alone, while also benefiting from the better prices that come from marketing finished products rather than raw, unprocessed nuts.
“This is like a marriage. It is a long-term relationship, that must last 30 or 40 years,” says Jorge Cantuarias, Bosques Amazonicos’ general manager.
“That is not going to happen unless people are happy with the arrangement. This is a business, but we are being very transparent and dealing with people extremely fairly.”
Yet not all carbon entrepeneurs have managed to establish such amicable relationships with rainforest communities. Some, so-called carbon cowboys, have attempted to take advantage of indigenous groups, persuading community leaders to sign away rights to carbon and other resources on their land in languages they do not even understand.
For Martin, however, his arrangement with Bosques Amazonicos has worked out well, he says.
“Life is difficult here,” he muses, as chickens and ducks scamper by. “But I hope that my children and grandchildren can carry on as Brazil nut collectors. It would be terrible if all this forest disappeared and was turned into pasture or was just abandoned after the miners have contaminated it.”In France, they call them Périgords—and they’re known as the diamonds of the kitchen. You probably know them as black truffles, those baseball-sized fungi that are sniffed out of the earth by pigs or dogs, get sold for thousands of dollars, and transform any meal into a luxury item. So what happens when—sacrée merde!—an obsessed Yankee learns to grow them in the scrub woods of Davy Crockett’s Tennessee?
were you to visualize an ideal existence, this might be it: Awaken a mile from Davy Crockett's birthplace, the sun rising over the Blue Ridge Mountains, handily visible from your back porch. Phone for a rare Lagotto Romagnolo truffle-hunting dog to be brought around in an ever available Lexus SUV. Stroll your backyard hazelnut orchard with the happy hound bounding beside you, him sniffing the soft earth for precious Tuber melanosporum, you gathering them up—hardly stressful, since they conveniently grow only inches beneath the ground. Rinse, put in Ziplocs, add rice to absorb moisture, and establish the price you'll charge, about $600 a pound, sometimes more. Try not to fret about the overhead. After all, we're talking bags and rice.
Of course, you must find somebody to buy your harvest, but that's no problem. "I thought the real hard part was going to be the selling," says Tom Michaels, thought to be the only man in America who earns a living selling black Périgord truffles that he's cultivated himself. "They sell themselves."
His personal life isn't bad, either. Michaels's house, that of a divorced man devoid of domestic skills, looks at best like a college dorm room. "Besides being a slob, I'm not organized," he concedes, when I mention that most everything he owns is teetering in piles. On the occasions that his girlfriend, Vicki Blizzard, drives over from Knoxville, Tennessee, she finds it all just fine. "Tom's house is wonderful. He's got that backyard, that view. So what if it's not as pristine as mine. I'm comfortable there."
That's two treasures, a tolerant woman as well as a ready crop of black truffles, one of the most expensive edibles on earth. Long considered a mainstay of French haute cuisine, Tuber melanosporum, a.k.a. the black Périgord truffle, has not always been rare, but it has always been prized.
Black truffles are identified with the culture of French dining, and for good reason, although they were used much earlier by the Greeks and the Romans. Great thinkers among those ancients believed they were formed by thunderclaps, although Plutarch, the wisest of all, declared them to be mud cooked by lightning. Over the years, they have been eaten to gain strength in battle, to cure gout, and of course, as an aphrodisiac.
Until about now, truffles were not part of Tennessee folklore, and they certainly don't figure into the region's culinary traditions. "Most people around here," Michaels points out, "they want to know if you put gravy on truffles." He doesn't claim that his tastes are more refined than those of his neighbors, isn't trying to put himself or his Ph.D. in plant pathology on a pedestal, but he does enjoy his truffles chopped up and stirred into eggs, which is somewhat highbrow. On the other hand, he also admires them shaved over grits. To win the heart of Blizzard, he prepared truffled cheesy chicken breasts.
The black truffle found in Périgord and Provence, and now Chuckey, Tennessee, has dozens of fungal relatives, some of them used in cooking, a few of them not bad at all, none of them its equal in beauty or bouquet. Once cleaned, the black Périgord truffle glitters. Cut open, the veins resemble mica. (When they are cooked, the marbling disappears.) Although the truffle possesses a pleasant crunch, it is treasured not so much for its taste or appearance but for its aroma, which has been likened to bedsheets after a night of abandon, slatterns who disdain to bathe, all that is dark and alluring about the human body and soul. In the middle of the winter growing season, they can be fruity and floral. Later, they become muskier. Michaels remembers handing out samples at a festival, his truffles incorporated into a mushroom-truffle cappuccino: "When I'd be shaving a truffle that was musky, the women, their eyes would roll back. If it was the fruity kind, it was nice but not as high a level of ecstasy. When I talk to women chefs, they seem to like the earthy ones, too, the real ripe ones. I swear there is a gender thing here."
Indeed, the pleasure of truffles is often linked to pheromones, but I suspect they have more noteworthy virtues. Truffles are a dramatic example of a smell, taste, and appearance that should be undesirable but instead becomes the opposite. They are related psychologically to things that are nightmarish, that slough off flesh in the night. They are black, and movie-theater licorice aside, black is generally not an appealing food color. In truth, black truffles should give us the creeps, so alien are they to America's generally sunny dining habits. One would expect them to be categorized as bizarre, much like the oddities that freaky food-show hosts swallow, but in fact they are delectable, possessing a smell with uncommon allure.
They are not just pungent. They meld with certain foodstuffs, in particular fresh pasta, melted cheese, and runny eggs, enhancing their taste. They work well with vanilla ice cream, too. They are intoxicating. They weaken and captivate. All of us have at some time been desperately attracted to someone we knew was wrong. In the food world, that is the role of black truffles, although the only personal danger that results from coming under their spell is fiscal, not emotional.
In the wild, they are denizens of dark woodlands, underground dwellers that seek dampness and the roots of certain species of trees. Originally, they were pursued with pigs, lumbering beasts that sniffed them out and tried to eat their find before the farmer could yank them away. It's part of the romanticism of the black truffle that pigs are perfect hunters, but in truth they got the job because they were the primary farm animal attracted to the dark smells. Says Michaels, "A 300-pound pig will go through an orchard like a rototiller, digging up everything. Truffle pigs are out of control, and they go home when they decide they want to go home." Later came dogs, perhaps not as quixotic, but dogs had virtues. At about thirty pounds (the weight of a Lagotto Romagnolo), they were easy to pick up and heave into the back of a wagon, and they were less interested in eating than in the tongue-wagging joy of the hunt. For a truffle dog, the work has all the pleasure of an Easter-egg hunt.
Over the years, the availability of black truffles has wad and waned. Industrialization, rural exodus, two world wars, and the aging of nineteenth-century truffle fields is blamed for the current depletion of the crop. Once added lavishly to recipes, they tend now to be used cautiously. At the peak of production, near the end of the nineteenth century, about 1,000 tons of black truffles, many of them wild, were harvested in France. Now there might be as few as ten tons a year, almost all of them cultivated. They have become so expensive that almost no chef dares to be overly generous, but there was a hundred-year period, from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when they were abundant.
Larousse Gastronomique, the bible of French culinary arts, lists more than seventy-five truffle dishes, and I can't imagine more than a fraction of them being prepared today. (When's the last time you had sarla-daise sauce, prepared with brandy and truffles and served with roast meat, or were offered lobster cardinal, as much about truffles as about seafood?) To be a French chef—or for that matter a French grandee—was hollow unless your weighty pronouncement on the glories of the fungi was immortalized in print. Alexandre Dumas described them as "the gastronomes' holy of holies."
In the early nineteenth century, the epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (a famous cheese is named for him) praised them as "the jewel of cookery" and added, "It is safe to say that at the time of writing, the fame of the truffle is at its summit. Nobody dares to admit having been present at a meal which did not include a single truffled dish." Colette called the black truffle a "jewel of impoverished lands." (She probably considered rural life to be intolerable drudgery.) When Julia Child wrote her seminal book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, designed for the American kitchen, all but one of her truffle recipes called for canned truffles, probably because fresh ones were almost unknown in this country. (I've had canned truffles. They're quite good on pizza.)
I was fortunate enough to be around near the tail end of the era of abundance. I've had raw truffles sliced thin and served as crisps, accompanied by Château Margaux. (Terrible technically but gratifying spiritually.) I've had them added to a pot of winter vegetables at Alain Ducasse's Le Louis XV in Monaco. (Vegetables never tasted so fabulous, but they might have been nearly as sublime without the truffles.) I've had them at a garden party, on a warm winter day, at the home of Hervé Poron, owner of the Plantin truffle company in Provence, where he put out a bowl of cut-up truffles drizzled with olive oil and suggested we make ourselves truffle crostini. (The greatest outdoor dining of my life.) My neighbor's son once cooked truffles and eggs using Joël Robuchon's recipe for scrambled eggs, and no breakfast equaled his. (The kid wasted his talents by going into medicine.) I've had black truffles on risotto at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. In my opinion, no white-truffle risotto compared, but then I'm no devotee of white Alba truffles (Tuber magnatum). Although they are more expensive than black Périgord truffles and probably higher on the gastronomic food chain, I find them wanting. They are unsightly and not particularly versatile, and they possess a regrettable olfactory profile that tips toward garlic.
Black truffles, on the other hand, are multitalented. They have always been the Hamburger Helper of haute cuisine, taking mundane fare and transforming it into something majestic. Yet today, with black Périgord truffles so uncommon and expensive, they tend to become the star of any recipe, just as they were with all but one of those great truffle dishes of my memory. They are in such short supply in France, where they are thought to be at their best, that efforts at cultivating them are taking place throughout the world, perhaps most successfully in Australia and Spain. In America, where production lags behind, the business of growing the black Périgord truffle is boutique level at best. There have been stunning failures, the most notable an orchard of tens of thousands of trees planted in Texas in the '90s that yielded only a few truffles.
Michaels is the most successful American grower, although he concedes in generous moments that in the next few years the orchards of others are likely to come on line. In his rare prideful ones, he hints that he knows more than anybody else and that other growers might not do so well. His Ph.D. thesis is titled "In Vitro Culture and Growth Modeling of Tuber Spp. and Inoculation of Hardwood with T. Melanosporum Ascospores." That means he studied black truffles, and the other guys did not.
It appears incongruous that gastronomic prominence has come to the hills of Tennessee. The region is hardly famous for fine dining, an exception being Blackberry Farm, the fabled resort outside Knoxville where the on-call truffle dog resides. The land around Chuckey, where Michaels lives, is soft and rolling, studded with tobacco-drying barns now so shrunken and weathered they look like ghosts. When I visited, a local radio station was promoting "a chance to win a weekend in a luxury RV," and Michaels bragged that he had found a Mennonite repairman who fid the hydraulic seal on his tractor for thirty bucks. To drive the countryside is to come upon horses in backyards, wisps of fog that give the Great Smoky Mountains their name, Christian bookstores, old stone churches, and locals |
her on Instagram. She was like, "Hey, I have this idea I want to run by you. I think you're so fucking rare. Let me know if you're interested." I had no idea what she was talking about. I was just freaking out, because Rihanna is messaging me on Instagram, telling me that she thinks I'm cool.
Then I got another message from someone who works for the production company that made the video, and they were like, "We want to put you in Rihanna's video! Send us an email or give us a call." At first, I was just like, This can't be real. This is really weird. I don't know about this. But I ended up getting in touch with the guy who messaged me and it was all legit. I spent my entire day at work going back and forth talking to them. At the end of the day, they were like, "We just got the confirmation from Rih: We want to cast you, and we want to fly you out tomorrow." And I flew down there the next day.
She followed me on Instagram on a Wednesday night, and then I was in LA on Friday morning. It was crazy.
It's already a pretty iconic video. How did they describe the concept to you?
For the first few days, I had a general idea of what was going to happen. We're going to be kidnapping this person and you guys are going to be her henchmen and you just have to be really tough. I think the term they used was "bad bitch." When they told me more about the video, I was like, Holy shit. Knowing Rih, I knew this shit was going to be super controversial.
What was she like in person?
She's so sweet. She was showering us with compliments. She is so fucking real and down-to-earth, which is the corniest thing to say about a famous person, but she really is.
When we were down there, the first day I met her, I was like, "How did you find me?" She was like, "I saw you on my Explore page." She saw that picture of me where I was wearing my nath and my tika. She was like, "I just thought you were so cool, and I was like, I don't know if I should message her or not. I don't know if she's going to be down." I'm just sitting there, like, "Are you crazy? How could you be nervous to message me?"
How was it like on the set? It looks like it was a blast to shoot.
I got the flu the day before I left to go there. So I was super sick the entire time, and the first three days I lost my voice. I was just like, I'm on the verge of death right now, but this is the best week of my life.
I remember we went into her trailer so she could give us a "yes" or "no" on what we were wearing, and she was like, "Do you need anything? Do you want me to get some medicine or something?"
You're like a modern-day brown girl Cinderella. You'd made legions of brown girls jealous.
Yeah, it's really true. You don't see a whole lot of Desi girls doing stuff like this.
Besides working at a plant store, you're also an artist. What kind of art do you make?
I've been painting and drawing since I was younger. Getting older, and especially [since] becoming more aware of social justice issues, I like to make art that speaks on that, but in a really funny, cheeky way. I haven't worked on anything in a long time. I had an art show in Baltimore in February.
It's hard to make art when you're a woman, but especially a woman of color, just because it's not respected in the same way as a white male artist's work. It's really hard to feel empowered sometimes. Being in the video, I feel like that's given me a little bit more of a platform to talk about that kind of stuff.
You met Rihanna on the internet, on Instagram. But you also have this community, and following, that you've built online before, with your art and persona.
I posted one selfie [on Tumblr] that really blew up. I've been on the internet for a really long time. So I really had some kind of a following, but not on this scale. I have a love-hate relationship with the internet, like every other person my age. It can be so fucking toxic and shitty sometimes, but...
But only on the internet can Rihanna cast you in her music video from an Instagram photo.
Exactly. I'm not complaining.
Follow Tasbeeh on Twitter, and check out Sanam on Instagram.Bernie Sanders wants to gain support of Latinos in upcoming Las Vegas trip
In an attempt to make inroads with Nevada’s Latino voters, Democratic socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders will hold rallies and meet with union members Nov. 8 and 9 in Las Vegas, according to sources from his campaign.
Sanders will come here as he battles with frontrunner Hillary Clinton to win the party’s nomination — something he can’t accomplish without support from Latino voters. He will host a rally Nov. 8, and meet with members of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement the following day.
His campaign has acknowledged he must “fight for every vote” in the Latino community while many of the demographic’s voters have signaled alliances with Clinton.
Nevada’s Latino voters are the fastest growing voting bloc in the state — with about 70-percent aligning with Democrats — and will be a make or break for any candidate in the February presidential caucus.
The Vermont senator has been drawing crowds of more than 10,000 to events where he badgers the billionaire class and calls for undocumented immigrants to receive amnesty. When he visits Las Vegas next month, he will need to win the support of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which offers grassroots support and a membership that’s nearly 60-percent Latino.
The union has yet to make an endorsement, and Sanders will likely be reaching out with it and other groups while visiting the state.
While Sanders’ ground game in Nevada is lagging behind the framework of Clinton’s, he has recently been making up for lost time in the state. This month, he launched a grassroots campaign and was front-and-center at the Wynn Las Vegas during the first Democratic debate.
Sanders visited Las Vegas in June to attend an event representing 7,000 Latino education officials. He spoke to union leaders at a state AFL-CIO convention in August.
In polls, Sanders is losing to Clinton by 3 percent in Iowa and beating her in New Hampshire by 15 percent.Australia’s former prime minister says claims by US secretary of state nominee threaten to involve the country in war
Former prime minister Paul Keating has lambasted Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, saying his claim that China should be denied access to artificial islands it has built in the South China Sea threatens to involve Australia in war.
He says Australia must tell the Trump administration “from the get-go” that we will not be part of such adventurism, “just as we should have done on Iraq 15 years ago”.
Tillerson, a former ExxonMobil chief executive, told his confirmation hearing in Washington overnight that China’s control and construction of artificial islands in waters claimed by neighbouring countries was “akin to Russia’s taking of Crimea”.
Tillerson said China was declaring control of territories that did not rightfully belong to it, and it would threaten the “entire global economy” if it was allowed to control access to the waterway.
Trump risks 'war' with Beijing if US blocks access to South China Sea, state media warns Read more
“We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed,” he said during his confirmation hearing to become America’s top diplomat.
“They are taking territory or control or declaring control of territories that are not rightfully China’s. The failure of a response [from the US] has allowed [China] just to keep pushing the envelope on this.
“The way we’ve got to deal with this is we’ve got to show back-up in the region with our traditional allies in south-east Asia,” he said.
Tillerson did not elaborate on how the US would bar China from the islands.
China claims sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea, and has built seven artificial islands on reefs and rocks, and outfitted them with military-length airstrips and anti-aircraft guns.
Keating issued a public statement on Friday, castigating Tillerson for his recklessness.
Paul Keating: Australia's 'dullards' have missed Trump's foreign policy switch Read more
“When the US Secretary of State-designate threatens to involve Australia in war with China, the Australian people need to take note,” Keating said.
“That is the only way Rex Tillerson’s testimony that a ‘signal’ should be sent to China that ‘access to these islands is not going to be allowed’, and that US allies in the region should be there ‘to show back-up’, can be read.
“We should tell the new US administration from the get-go that Australia will not be part of such adventurism, just as we should have done on Iraq 15 years ago. That means no naval commitment to joint operations in the South China Sea and no enhanced US military facilitation of such operations.
“Tillerson’s claim that China’s control of access to the waters would be a threat to ‘the entire global economy’ is simply ludicrous. No country would be more badly affected than China if it moved to impede navigation.
“On the other hand, Australia’s prosperity and the security of the world would be devastated by war,” Keating said.The Vancouver Police Department is making it tougher to steal cars in the City of Vancouver with a new crime prevention initiative targeting the vehicles that are most often stolen.
Over the past five years, the property crime rate has been reduced by over 35 per cent. During the same period, the number of stolen vehicles has declined by over 51 per cent.
However, there was a noticeable change last year when the number of stolen vehicles increased by 6.7 per cent over the previous year. Specifically, the rise was driven by an increase in the number of trucks and vans stolen.
Not only does having a vehicle stolen negatively impact the owner, the majority of stolen vehicles are used to commit secondary property and/or violent crimes.
To combat the issue, and with the support and funding from the Vancouver Police Foundation and ICBC, the Vancouver Police Department is launching “Operation Lock-Up.”
Operation Lock-Up aims to prevent vehicle theft by offering steering wheel locks free of charge to Vancouver residents who own one of the top ten most frequently stolen vehicles:
1. Honda Civic (Pre-2000)
Image: Bula Photography
2. Ford F150, F250, F350 trucks (Pre-1999 F150; Pre-2007 F250 / F350)
Image: ghost 8701
3. Honda Accord (Pre-1998)
Image: 10nisboy
4. Dodge / Plymouth / Chrysler minivan (1991-2000)
Image: Tim Syoen
5. Jeep Cherokee (1993-1999)
Image: Kenjonbro
6. Ford Econoline Van (2000-2007)
Image: Government Auctions
7. Toyota Corolla (1990-2004)
Image: Juan Barredo
8. Chevrolet Silverado / GMC Sierra trucks (1992-2006)
Image: Kevin Sanders
9. Acura Integra (1990-2001)
Image: Brian Renken
10. Toyota Camry / Solara (1989-1999)
Image: Grainger Honda
To obtain a complimentary steering wheel lock, please bring your vehicle’s registration papers to one of the following locations:
VANCOUVER POLICE DEPARTMENT PUBLIC INFORMATION COUNTERS
2120 Cambie Street (map)
Open Daily 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
3585 Graveley Street (map)
Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
VANCOUVER COMMUNITY POLICING OFFICES
Granville CPC
1263 Granville Street
West End Coal Harbour CPC
1267 Davie Street
Aboriginal CPC
875 East Hasting Street
Chinese CPC
118 Keefer Street
Grandview Woodland
1977 Commercial Drive
Hastings Sunrise CPC
2620 East Hastings Street
Collingwood CPC
5160 Joyce Street
South Vancouver CPC
5657 Victoria Drive
Kitsilano Fairview CPC
#78 – 1687 W. Broadway
Kerrisdale, Oakridge & Marpole CPC
6070 East Boulevard
Vancouver Police Community Policing volunteers will be placing flyers on at-risk vehicles telling them about Operation Lock-up, and the VPD will also be giving the steering wheel locks away at various community events throughout the year.
Featured Image: Pure WaterThe Milwaukee Journal Sentinel might not be the first place you’d go when hunting down the country’s biggest breaking story. But staff at the Sentinel knew they had a story 10 seconds after they asked Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain an innocuous question about Libya. Now, they knew that Herman Cain wasn’t too secure with foreign policy questions, but Libya remains current and is still newsworthy. They reckon that a simple pause suggests Mr Cain is struggling.
But the question threw the Presidential hopeful. It took more than ten seconds to get anything resembling a half-decent answer from the candidate. That’s a long time when you are answering journalists’ quick-fire questions. So what is it that the pause suggests?
Because it’s a long ten second pause if you are looking to become the next President of the USA. His little lapse is bound to raise questions about his ability to be President. Is he truly able?
Pause Suggests What Exactly?
Mr Cain defended himself later, noting that, “it was a pause.” He’s well-schooled in rhetoric and giving speeches; it was a pause.
But not as we know it. One of England’s pre-eminent actors, Sir Ralph Richardson, noted that…
The most precious things in speech are the pauses.
But answering questions is subtly different to giving a speech, where you have to know how to use pauses in a speech. We hope that Herman Cain can recover from this lapse…not least because he manages to invigorate the contest that’s got many, erm, um, months to go.
You can always read more tips for speakers with The Art Of Presentation. And when you want to find what else the pause suggests, why not join us for a public speaking course or public speaking coaching session. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch when you are ready to discuss further.
Share this: PrintAuthor's Note: This story is over (maybe, more on that later) but I'm not done with RWBY and F1. I'm writing a reboot called RWBY Turbo that takes place during the 80's turbo era and should start posting soon. I hope you've enjoyed this story, and I hope you'll stick with me for a new adventure.
Epilogue
Pyrrha was right. She did get Yang next year, winning her fourth title in another close race. Ruby did not have long to wait either and won the championship the following year. Then it was time for a surprise. Reese Chloris, originally hired by Schnee Automotive to be the #2 driver to May before her untimely death, won the championship, the first for the organization since Winter's all those years ago. There had been a critical change, all the way at the top. Mr. Schnee had suffered a rather severe heart attack the previous year. He survived but stepped down as head of Schnee Automotive as his health continued to fail. Winter took over and immediately set about reversing his more controversial policies. The result was immediate success.
Weiss had spent three years being outrun by Pyrrha. Now it was abundantly clear that she could not compete if they were in identical equipment. So Weiss made a change that shocked everyone. She went and drove for her sister at a team she had said she would never have anything to do with. Reese was no match, and neither were the rest of the field. Weiss won two titles in succession. Then there was another change, and Schnee Automotive's dominance evaporated.
Winter was on a crusade to make things right. Her father had done some awful things as head of the company. Some were big, affecting thousands of people. Others were more personal. He had certainly done wrong by Blake and Penny. Winter purchased Beacon Motorworks and put Blake and Penny in charge of Schnee Automotive's engine program. That deal included providing those same engines to Beacon GP and Team Juniper. Superior engines, as always, had provided the catalyst for Schnee Automotive's recent dominance. With that advantage gone, the team went into decline.
Yang won the championship and it was not close. Well, not for Schnee Automotive at any rate. Pyrrha and Ruby were close. Weiss was a distant fourth. For her part, Winter did not seem to mind. All she really cared about was doing the right thing. The business side of things was looking great anyway. The following year was another disappointing one for Weiss as Ruby won her second title. The real surprise was the second place runner. After a few up-and-down years Sun and SeaMonkeys F1 had finally put it all together and he fought with Ruby all the way to the wire, losing out by a few points in the last race. That was fine, he would win his next year, though that with rather less competition. More on that in a bit.
Through all that time, safety continued to improve. Pyrrha led the charge, becoming as outspoken and implacable an advocate as Winter had been. Yang and Weiss, joined by Ruby, were her constant allies in the fight to keep drivers safe. There were still deaths. Drivers were still maimed. There were still tracks that were terrifyingly dangerous. The point was it was always getting better. And finally the Emerald Forest, that horrible monstrosity, was gone. After a fiery crash that nearly killed Sun during Yang's third title season, it was removed from the schedule for good. Forever Fall, once suicidally fast, was now broken up by chicanes that slowed the cars to sane speeds. Menagerie was reshaped and transformed into a thoroughly modern circuit. Shadering was finally up to code. The future, for once, looked bright. Racing was not safe, but it was no longer a blood sport.
Flashback. Yang had just edged Pyrrha out for her second title. If anything, the battle brought them closer together. Their engagement was a short one as they were married a few months later in a small ceremony on Patch. A honeymoon to an undisclosed location on Mistral's coast followed. It only ended when the pair had to be back for the start of testing. Flash-forward. Yang and Pyrrha were now both thirty. Ruby had just won her second championship. There was a whole new crop of young drivers in F1, all dedicated to safety in a way most of the previous generation had never been. It was time for them to make their mark. After racing side-by-side for 12 years, Yang and Pyrrha retired together. Thanks to highly advanced - and terrifyingly expensive - technology they would have a pair of children together, a daughter named Summer and a son named Pyrrhus. Both would go on to drive in F1 with somewhat less success than their parents. But that was still far in the future.
Weiss finally took over the GPDA upon Yang and Pyrrha's retirements, with Ruby and Sun at her side. The three of them still had a few years of racing left in them. The four years of their leadership saw only one fatal accident. Then Weiss and Sun retired. Ruby took charge. Her time in the lead was short and tragic. That year saw two fatal crashes, including one that claimed the life of Reese. They were random and flukey, and Ruby could have done nothing to prevent them, but she took it hard nonetheless. She won the championship and promptly retired. F1 was entering a new era and she wanted nothing to do with it. A loophole in the regulations had led to the introduction of turbo engines that were capable of producing unheard of power. If something was not done, the speed would surely kill more and Ruby was no longer willing to put her own life on the line. It would be up to a new generation to do something. They failed to take up the mantle and the GPDA was disbanded with Ruby's resignation.
It would be the governing body, not the drivers, that would put a brake on the increasingly dangerous speeds. Somehow no one had died though a few had come very close. That would all change on one tragic weekend just over a decade after Ruby's retirement. In a painful and ironic twist, the victim would be the driver who had dominated much of the previous decade, Willow Schnee, Winter's daughter. After a crash claimed the life of another driver during qualifying, she had vowed to reform the GPDA. Then in the race she had gone off track at high speed and not survived. It was the wake-up call the world of F1 needed. Safety became the most important factor, more so than even competition and speed. There would not be another fatal crash for over two decades.
After her retirement as a driver, Ruby had stayed involved in F1, working as the chief mechanic for Beacon GP for many years. She could still design a chassis like no one else. Even as the technology changed and carbon fiber replaced steel and aluminium, she was the best of the best. Nora still knew her aerodynamics and no one could beat here there, but when it came to mechanical grip Ruby always had the edge. The competition between the pair defined much of the decade following Ruby's retirement as a driver, with their cars winning every constructors championship and all but three drivers titles, those won by Willow for Schnee Automotive.
Ozpin had already been old when he first hired Yang to drive for him. Somehow he remained in charge of Beacon GP for another three decades. After Willow Schnee's death he decided it was time to get out of the game. Who was there to buy the team but a group consisting of Yang, Pyrrha and Ruby. With F1's renewed focus on safety they decided it was time to get back in. They could not drive of course. They were too old and they had seen too much. That privilege was reserved for the young. They would just see to it that those young drivers had what they needed to be safe and successful on track. It was a new era, one they wished they had driven in. Still, for all the triumph and tragedy, joy and pain, they had lived as few others had, lives they would not trade for anything.
END
Author's Note: Okay, so it says END, but maybe not. I've been writing a little and you may see some surprises in the coming week. Stay tuned.
Inspirations
- The mention of Sun's near-fatal crash at Emerald Forest (Nurburgring) is based on Niki Lauda's fiery crash there in 1976.
- Ruby's year in charge of the GPDA is based on 1982. Reese's crash on Gilles Villeneuve's.
- Willow Schnee represents Senna and that weekend Imola 1994.
Inaccuracies and Anachronisms
- The turbo era was already well underway by 1982.
- Elio de Angelis was killed in a testing crash in 1986.Anger at Wall Street is spilling over into Congress, where Democrats are eyeing a $350 billion financial transaction tax to bring down the deficit.
The measure, introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), would impose a 3-basis point tax on most non-consumer trades, which the Joint Committee on Taxation says would yield $350 billion over the next decade.
"It is hard to argue with this substantial revenue - derived from a tax of $3.00 on $10,000 of Wall Street trading," Harkin said in a statement. "Our country needs every dollar possible to invest in infrastructure, job creation, the education of our children and reducing the debt among other priorities. This commonsense tax provides a viable solution." "This legislation will generate $350 billion in needed revenue for our cash strapped federal government by targeting speculators flipping stocks a thousand times a minute," DeFazio added. "We need serious proposals to get our country back on sound fiscal footing. $350 billion in new revenue will reduce our deficit and enable federal investments in our future."
The measure has a handful of supporters in both chambers, but it is as yet unclear how much — if any — support it has among the leadership.
More on the tax from the statement:
The Wall Street Trading and Speculators Tax places a small tax of three basis points (3 pennies on $100 in value) on most non-consumer financial trading including stocks, bonds and other debts, except for their initial issuance. For example, if a company receives a loan from a financial company, that transaction would not be taxed. But, if the financial institution traded the debt, the trade would be subject to the tax. The tax would also cover all derivative contracts, options, forward contracts, swaps and other complex instruments at their actual cost. The measure excludes debt that has an original term of less than 100 days.
By setting the tax rate very low, the measure is not likely to impact the decision to engage in productive economic activity. It would, however, reduce certain speculative activities like high-speed computer arbitrage trading. Given the very high volume of financial trading, it will raise considerable funds, badly needed for government services and for reducing deficits.
The European Union is considering a similar proposal, but with a tax rate that is more than three times higher. Today, 30 foreign nations have in place a tax some financial transactions, including Great Britain and Switzerland.Ontario will introduce a new rebate program worth up to $75,000 for buyers of electric trucks, in a move that could boost domestic purchases of models by Tesla Inc (TESLA.O) and rivals like China's BYD (BYDDF.PK), a government spokesman said ahead of a Thursday announcement.
The program will offer buyers rebates of up to 60 per cent of the incremental purchase cost of an electric truck, compared with an equivalent diesel vehicle, up to a cap of $75,000 per vehicle, according to documents seen by Reuters.
Ontario's new Green Commercial Vehicle Program, which also gives rebates on other fuel-saving devices, helps brings the province in line with other jurisdictions like Quebec, California and New York states, which offer incentives to defray the higher costs of electric trucks.
Canadian firms, including retailer Loblaw Cos Ltd (L.TO), have been among the first to pre-order Semi trucks from Tesla, which has at least 285 reservations in hand, according to a Reuters tally as of Dec. 12.
Tesla has been trying to convince the trucking community that it can build an affordable electric big rig with the range and cargo capacity to compete with relatively low-cost, time-tested diesel trucks.
The rebate program comes as Ontario is working to attract electric vehicle manufacturers and parts-suppliers. The automaking province has lost ground in recent years to lower-cost jurisdictions like Mexico and the southern United States.
The rebates are being offered through a $12-million fund, for the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2018.
The government used an existing incentive program to help attract BYD, which recently announced it will open an Ontario factory to assembly 900 electric vehicles over the next five years, Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid said by email.
BYD could not be reached for comment.
Ontario has set the target of cutting greenhouse gas pollution to 15 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, 37 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050 and the use of electric vehicles is expected to help reach that goal.VISITORS arriving at Quito’s new airport are swept to Ecuador’s capital, 35km (22 miles) away, along a brand new six-lane motorway. Together with new hospitals, schools, social housing and benefits and student grants, the vastly improved road network is the work of President Rafael Correa’s “Citizens’ Revolution”. With his melange of technocratic modernisation and leftist populism, Mr Correa leads a strong and hitherto popular government that has lasted eight years in a country where none of his three predecessors completed their terms.
But now Mr Correa is running out of money and the citizens are starting to turn against him. In June, in the biggest of many protests, some 350,000 people took to the streets of the port city of Guayaquil to demonstrate against plans to impose punitive additional taxes on inheritances and gains from property transactions.
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The protests came as the plunge in the oil price and the strength of the dollar—which Ecuador has used as its currency since 2000—have combined to halt economic growth. The economy contracted in the first quarter of this year compared with the previous one. Independent economists forecast either no growth or a mild contraction this year and next.
The government claims to be diversifying the economy away from the export of oil and bananas. “It takes time,” concedes Nathalie Cely, the minister of production. She points to investments in food processing and tourism, and soon-to-be-opened Chinese-built hydroelectric plants (which will cut fuel imports). But the driver of growth has been public, rather than private, investment. “If you stuff businesses with taxes…that produces a lack of confidence, an economic slowdown and companies don’t invest,” says Jaime Nebot, the mayor of Guayaquil, who organised the June protest.
Mr Correa used oil revenue and Chinese loans to erect a big state, which spent 44% of GDP in 2013 according to the IMF. The headache now is how to finance this. Despite two rounds of budget cuts there is still a shortfall of around $7.2 billion (or 7% of GDP) this year, according to Observatorio Fiscal, a watchdog.
While the stock of public debt is still low (at 30% of GDP) it is rising fast. Ecuador lacks not just its own currency but also a lender of last resort. External sources of finance are drying up. The government has issued $1.5 billion in foreign bonds this year, but at a steep interest rate of 10.5%. The administration has introduced regulations that would allow it to issue electronic money and Central Bank paper. That way lies Greece, warns Abelardo Pachano, a former banker. Printing a quasi-currency risks a run on the banks by savers who fear deposits would not be returned in dollars; the Central Bank has hard-currency reserves of only $4.6 billion. Mr Correa, seeming to recognise the danger, has been cautious in implementing these measures.
So Ecuador is facing a big and politically testing fiscal squeeze. Mr Correa is still relatively popular, and the opposition is divided. But he has lost the middle class and the cities. He is trying to change the constitution to allow his indefinite re-election, without a referendum. That will provoke further protests.
There is a dark, Putinesque side to the regime. It has split the leftist social movements that were its original allies. It has bullied the media into self-censorship. Many public contracts have been awarded without tender. Opponents claim that corruption is rampant. Those who make specific denunciations are persecuted by a new intelligence service and in pliant courts. At least two witnesses to corruption have died mysteriously.
Cléver Jiménez, a congressman for a left-wing party, was sentenced to 18 months in jail for accusing Mr Correa of responsibility for five deaths during a police mutiny in 2010. Martha Roldós, a centre-left politician who fell out with the president, was stripped of her political rights and says her daughter was twice threatened by gunmen. Guillermo Lasso, a conservative former banker whom Mr Correa defeated in the 2013 presidential election, says his phone is being tapped.
The president’s opponents doubt he will cede power voluntarily. “We appear to be living in a democracy, but all the institutions of state are subject to one person,” says Mr Jiménez. Mr Correa “can only conceive of being president, not an ex-president”, according to Mr Lasso.
Mr Correa faces a choice. He could persist in his bid for permanent power and risk being kicked out by the street, like his predecessors. Or he could swallow his pride, stabilise the economy and drop his re-election bid. He would then go down in history as one of Ecuador’s most successful presidents.This article is adapted from a case study commissioned by the Brookings Institution as part of its Profiles In Negotiation project. The full Brookings paper on the veterans deal is available here. Jill Lawrence is a columnist for Creators Syndicate and a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report.
This is the week where the Republican party's biggest 2016 challenge takes center stage. You can’t say Republicans haven't seen it coming. They’ve known for ages that Hispanics have the capacity to make or break them in 2016. Right now it’s looking more like break, unless a couple of potential saviors pull off a miracle—which is why former Gov. Jeb Bush went on Tuesday to Puerto Rico, not known for its early primary status.
If the GOP is to make any headway with Hispanic voters, analysts across the spectrum say two Floridians are the key. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American, is enjoying a surge of attention and polling popularity after announcing his candidacy this month. Bush is not Hispanic, despite his “oops” moment of checking off Hispanic on a voter form, but he may be an even better bet than Rubio. “He has the most potential,” UCLA professor Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions polling, says of Bush. “Historically, he’s been more moderate than Rubio has been on a host of Latino issues. And his family situation can’t be ignored.”
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That family situation includes brother George W., who as president championed immigration and education reforms important to Hispanics, as well as Bush’s own immediate family. “ I know the immigrant experience because I married a beautiful girl from Mexico. My children are bicultural and bilingual,” Jeb Bush said Tuesday at Universidad Metropolitana in San Juan.
The trip to Puerto Rico was followed Wednesday by a keynote speech to the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference in Houston. In San Juan, Bush talked about statehood and rum in Spanish and English. In Texas, it was education and immigration, in Spanish and English. Boxes, checked.
Rubio is an eloquent speaker who can reach “these Latinos who don’t really feel that the party’s talking to them,” says Stephen Nuno, a Northern Arizona University professor who is writing a book about Latinos and the GOP. “Unfortunately for Marco Rubio, Bush can make the same speech in the same language to the same people, and he comes with a little more gravitas.”
A Bush aide notes that in addition to his Mexican ties, Bush spent six months in Puerto Rico running his father’s 1980 campaign, and before that lived in Caracas, Venezuela, where he was a vice president and branch manager for Texas Commerce Bank. “The governor does have the ability to resonate culturally within the different groups in the Hispanic community. He understands how to communicate within the different sectors,” the aide says.
Puerto Ricans have a growing presence in Florida and are key to winning elections there. From Bush’s standpoint, it’s also potentially relevant that there are nearly 34 million Mexican-Americans scattered across the country. That compares with about 2 million Cuban-Americans who are concentrated ( 70 percent) in Florida and who have enjoyed a warmer welcome—residency, green cards, citizenship—than other groups.
Still, Rubio is now discussing his roots in a way that could resonate with the larger immigrant community. He ran into trouble a few years back when it turned out that, contrary to how he understood his family history, his parents did not come to America to escape Fidel Castro’s 1959 Communist revolution. They actually came earlier, to escape poverty and build better lives. As Rubio put it in announcing his presidential bid, “My father became a bartender. My mother a cashier, a maid and a Kmart stock clerk. They never made it big. But they were successful.”
That’s a classic American Dream saga that speaks directly to the aspirations of many a Mexican or Central American immigrants in places like Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina and his own home of Florida. In other words, the states that could well decide the 2016 presidential election.
***
Yet the primary and general election seasons are riddled with political traps—some Republicans set for themselves, some laid by President Obama—that could well make gains with Hispanic voters in the 2016 cycle more difficult than ever.
The problem began with GOP recalcitrance on immigration reform, despite pleas from party elders after the 2012 election to get behind comprehensive fixes that included legal status and a complicated path to citizenship for many of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country. From there, the dominoes fell. The House killed a bipartisan Senate reform bill. Obama responded with a series of executive actions designed to shield millions from deportation. Republicans and conservatives filed lawsuits to stop him. Courts blocked Obama’s actions. Republicans, having backed off comprehensive reform, narrowed their focus to border control and decrying Obama’s executive “overreach.”
Given that history, get ready for a year or more of questions to GOP White House hopefuls about what they would do about all this as president: Revoke permits for undocumented young people—the “dreamers”—who already have temporary legal status under a 2012 Obama policy? Roll back the executive actions now being challenged in court, even if they eventually take effect and millions receive temporary residency permits? Would orders and actions be reversed on Day One? Day 100? The day Congress passes comprehensive reform? And what day might that be? As a famous New Yorker cartoon caption once put it, “How about never—is never good for you?”
And that’s just immigration. The GOP is also out of step with Hispanics on major Obama initiatives such as the Affordable Care Act and re-establishing relations with Cuba, as well as broader questions about the role of government. The chasms will put identity politics—as well as campaign skills, personal connections and policy creativity—to a stiff test.
Mitt Romney failed the test in 2012. He received a paltry 27 percent of the Hispanic vote that year. Pollster Nicole McCleskey published a series of seminal memos on Republicans and Hispanic voters the following year. She concluded that they were largely talking past each other on values and economic issues, and using unhelpful language that obscured common goals on immigration, among them an easier residency process, learning the language and no shortcuts to citizenship.
Education—an issue McCleskey then called “the great equalizer”—today remains a potential point of connection for Republicans and Hispanics. “Latinos are open |
New York Times newsletters.
Bondholders are under pressure to convert two-thirds of the $27 billion owed them into G.M. stock, while the United Auto Workers union is being asked to substitute stock for 50 percent of their health care benefits for retirees. Both groups have resisted those changes.
Administration officials say they have enough money to offer the assistance they envision under plans already approved by Congress. Even so, Mr. Obama may face skepticism on Capitol Hill and from the public.
As part of the companies’ original agreement for the loans, both were required to submit restructuring plans. Mr. Wagoner’s removal underscores how much more G.M. needs to cut than was proposed in the plan the company submitted.
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Administration officials stressed that the company needed a fresh approach and leadership changes; they said Steven Rattner, the former investment banker who co-chairs the auto task force, delivered the news to Mr. Wagoner.
As recently as March 18 he said in an interview that his discussions with the task force did not give him the impression that his job was at stake. “They so far haven’t commented on that,” he said then.
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Frederick A. Henderson, G.M.’s president, will succeed Mr. Wagoner on an interim basis as chief executive; Kent Kresa, a board member, will assume the chairmanship. Members of the auto panel spoke with Mr. Henderson recently and came away with a favorable impression of him, people familiar with the panel’s discussions said.
Like Mr. Wagoner, Mr. Henderson is a graduate of the Harvard Business School and a lifer at G.M. He started in the finance division in 1984 and later spent nine years in executive positions in South America, Asia and Europe. The Detroit-born son of a G.M. sales manager, Mr. Henderson, 50, became chief financial officer in 2006 and was named president and chief operating officer a year ago.
Mr. Wagoner’s departure at G.M. marks an end to a corporate hierarchy that spanned generations. The last G.M. chairman to leave under duress was Robert C. Stempel, who was forced out in 1992 by outside directors who blamed him for losses.
Mr. Wagoner, 56, came to G.M. in 1977 and rose to become chief financial officer in 1992 when he was 38. He oversaw the company’s North American business for years before being named chairman in 2000.
G.M.’s share of its most important market, the United States, declined steadily under Mr. Wagoner. In 1994, when he took charge of North America, G.M. held 33.2 percent of the American car market. Last month, G.M.’s share was only 18.8 percent, according to statistics from Motorintelligence.com, which specializes in industry data. Auto sales in February were the worst for the industry since 1981.
G.M. collapsed last fall when new-vehicle sales in the United States plummeted to their lowest level in 25 years. G.M. lost more than $30 billion in 2008, and has been subsisting on government loans since the beginning of the year.
The administration briefed lawmakers on the plan Sunday night. Afterward, Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter, Republican of Michigan, whose district is just outside Detroit, expressed frustration over the ousting of Mr. Wagoner and with administration officials for not being clearer about the potential job losses that lie ahead.
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“Why would you ask Rick Wagoner to resign when you are giving G.M. 60 days to meet a new target, but you aren’t saying what the new goal is yet,” Mr. McCotter said in an interview.It’s been a rough season for the San Francisco 49ers and with only two wins thus far there is bound to be change within the organization after the final game. Chip Kelly addressed the media during his scheduled post game press conference and spoke briefly about his future with the 49ers.
Did chief executive officer Jed York or the Yorks reach out to you after the game to--?
“Yeah. They’re in the locker room after every game. So, I see Jed and [49ers Co-Chairman] John [York] after every game.”
Have you had any discussions with either one of them about 2017 yet?
“No.”
Expect that to take place next week then?
“You would think that’s when it would happen, right? We’ve said the same thing every week.”
Just checking.
“OK.”
Do you think you’re coming back next year?
“I’m concerned with Seattle. So, that’s not a discussion, shouldn’t be discussed during the season. So, we’ll discuss it after the season.”
Kelly is the third head coach in Santa Clara in as many years and news about his future could come out as early as the end of the game on Sunday. Jim Harbaugh’s “mutually agreed to part ways” statement was announced right after his closing press conference, but the decision and paperwork was done the Tuesday prior. When Jim Tomsula was relieved of his duties it happened just two hours after the clock struck 0:00 in week 16.
If the 49ers decide to terminate Trent Baalke’s employment, I doubt the announcement will happen until at least Monday after the game if not later in the week. Any other change in coordinators or assistants will obviously fall in line with the decision on the Kelly’s tenure which lies in the hands of the GM in 2017. A new GM may want to start fresh with his own people but if it ends up being Tom Gamble, Kelly will have just bought himself at least one more season.During the 2014 WWDC keynote, Apple demoed a very early build of its upcoming Photos application for Mac. The app will be available next year for OS X Yosemite, but for now all we really know is that its arrival will bring about the end of both iPhoto and Aperture. That news drew the attention of everyone who uses either of those applications, with many saying Apple no longer cared about pro-level users.
In an attempt to quell the outrage, Apple released a statement to ArsTechnica saying that Photos for Mac would still support pro features, but what exactly constituties a “pro-level” feature in Apple’s eyes? According to the statement, Photos will feature support for third-party plugins, library search, and advanced editing. If that sounds a little vague to you, it’s probably because Apple doesn’t really want to answer the question.
The first look we got at Photos for Mac covered a few basic editing tricks: color and lighting adjustments. It certainly wasn’t anything groundbreaking, and the choice of editing tools mirrors what’s available in iOS 8. In other words, the selection isn’t that impressive. At least not that we’ve seen.
Probably the best look we’ve gotten so far at Photos comes from an image on Apple’s website:
Even that doesn’t do much to ease the uncertainty of users who might be looking for something closer to, you know, actual pro-level image editing. It seems that while Apple is claiming that pro users will feel at home because of things like “library search,” the truth is that most will end up frustrated with the company’s insistence on a unified experience across platforms where everything needs to conform to the capabilties of the lowest common denominator.
Of course, the Photos applications is still in development, and it’s possible that the screenshots we see now could differ wildly from what’s eventually launched next year (though it probably won’t). A cursory glance over the Aperture features web page quickly reveals a bevy of features that don’t appear to be included in this new software, especially under the “image adjustments” section. You also likely won’t find support for iPhoto’s printed products in the new app.
One interesting note here is that pro users aren’t the only ones who will likely be disappointed with Apple’s decision to end development on its existing photo products. It doesn’t look like iPhoto or Aperture will be updated with support for Apple’s upcoming iCloud Photo Library feature in iOS 8. As a result, those who make the jump from basic iCloud Photo Streams to the full photo library syncing feature will lose the ability to wirelessly sync their photos between Mac and iOS until Photos for Mac arrives with support for the photo library feature.
Of course, there are always issues that arise when making a significant switch like this, but it seems like a funny thing to overlook. Perhaps the iCloud Photo Library feature will be delayed on iOS until the Mac client is ready, like iCloud Keychain was before Mavericks was released.
Like it or not, Apple is making big changes to its lineup of photo editing products—though, given what we know of the software so far, it seems many power users will end up firmly on the “or not” side.CS:GO Author: Starladder
The organizers of SL i-League StarSeries S2 have announced the names of teams, who were invited to the final stage. Unfortunately, Optic, Immortals and SK won't be able to take part in the tournament.
The team of Gabriel «FalleN» Toledo has received a direct invite to the upcoming finals in Kyiv more than a month ago. However, SK Gaming passed up a chance to fight for the champion's title of the second season of the StarSeries, as they won't be able to perform in a full roster. We'd like to remind you that due to the health issues of Fernando «fer» Alvarenga, his place will be temporarily taken by Gustavo «SHOOWTiME» Gonçalves. You can learn more datailed information here. Also, according to the organizers' decision, FaZe Clan will go to the Ukrainian capital instead of the Brazilian five. It's worth noting that it will be the first event for the European line-up after the arrival of Aleksi «allu» Jalli.
FlipSid3 will take part in the main tournament's stage
Optic Gaming have successfully finished the online-part of a tournament, securing a ticket to the LAN-finals, but they had to refuse because of a move to the «gaming house». Right now they are busy, issuing all necessary documents. This brings us to Immortals, who had also gained upper hand in the NA qualifier, they won't be able to play in the finals in Kyiv. The reason was their participation at the quals for ELEAGUE S2, the dates of which are concurrent with SL i-League StarSeries S2.
Respectively, the quotas of the Brazilian and American divisions were given to Cloud9 and Renegades. The Australians, in turn, have responded with a refusal, as the online-qualifier of the NA division for ECS S2 will be held at the same time. Eventually, it was decided that they will be replaced by FlipSid3 Tactics.
Also, as it recently was made public, fnatic have turned down the invite to a tournament, that resulted in the invite of GODSENT.
The full list of the attending teams looks as follows:
Natus Vincere (direct invite)
Natus Vincere (direct invite) Virtus.pro (direct invite)
Virtus.pro (direct invite) Ninjas In Pyjamas (direct invite)
Ninjas In Pyjamas (direct invite) GODSENT (direct invite)
GODSENT (direct invite) Astralis (direct invite)
Astralis (direct invite) G2 Esports (direct invite)
G2 Esports (direct invite) HellRaisers (direct invite)
HellRaisers (direct invite) FaZe Clan (direct invite)
FaZe Clan (direct invite) Team Dignitas (EU-qualifier)
Team Dignitas (EU-qualifier) Heroic (EU-qualifier)
Heroic (EU-qualifier) Team EnVyUs (EU-qualifier)
Team EnVyUs (EU-qualifier) MVP.Phoenix (CN-qualifier)
MVP.Phoenix (CN-qualifier) TyLoo (CN-qualifier)
TyLoo (CN-qualifier) VG.CyberZen (CN-qualifier)
VG.CyberZen (CN-qualifier) Cloud9 (NA-qualifier)
Cloud9 (NA-qualifier) FlipSid3 (direct invite)
We'd like to remind you that the LAN-finals of the second season of SL i-League StarSeries will be held from September 7-11 in Palace «Ukraine». The tickets are already on sale, available for purchase here.Republicans are using Virginia's gubernatorial race as a dry run to test attacks on former secretary of State Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE for cronyism if she runs for the White House in 2016.
The GOP feels it has the perfect stand-in for Clinton this year in Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton confidante running to become governor of Virginia.
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Republicans are focused on a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into GreenTech Automotive, an electric car company founded by McAuliffe.
The probe concerns the company’s use of visas provided to foreign investors who invest more than $500,000 into U.S. companies.
Republicans are hammering McAuliffe over the company, questioning whether he used his political connections to push visas through the immigration process.
They have also raised questions about Tony Rodham, Clinton’s brother, who headed an investment firm that helped GreenTech gain foreign investors. His involvement helps Republicans underline the connection between McAuliffe and Clinton.
Tim Miller of the GOP opposition research group America Rising said Republicans’ aim is to defeat McAuliffe — and hurt Clinton in the process.
“You might call it message testing,” Miller said. “There are learnings we can gleam from watching the next three months and see how much damage Terry will find from these activities. And we'll absolutely translate that over to Hillary.”
American Rising released a Web video on Monday attacking McAuliffe’s claims that GreenTech would create jobs and has sent around a number of articles detailing Clinton’s ties to McAuliffe in recent days.
“The Washington wheeling and dealing and favoritism shown to supporters and donors, the crony capitalism, to the extent that that is effective against Terry, you will see the same arguments be used against Hillary,” Miller said.
McAullife’s campaign said the attacks are an attempt by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s (R) campaign to distract from an investigation by the Virginia inspector general into whether his office improperly offered legal advice to a private energy company. Other Democrats echoed that message.
“They're trying to distract as much as possible from their very flawed candidate," one national Democratic official said. "I have no doubt between now. And 2016 they're going to try to use every opportunity to try to hit national Democrats, and what you're seeing on the state level is the same as on the national level: distracting from the issues that matter to middle-class voters.”
“Who knows who's doing what and why,” said Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill. “But then again, you wouldn't be asking if you didn't have a pretty good idea.”
The Republican National Committee has also put out a video featuring clips of news reports on the SEC investigation, followed by audio of Clinton saying she’s been in the political arena a long time and has “a lot of baggage.” The video is part of a weeklong series slamming Clinton and the TV networks CNN and NBC for their plans to air documentaries on her life.
RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said the video plays into a “culture of corruption narrative” the party will continue to use against Clinton heading forward.
“You're going to see us using Hillary Clinton and her ties — it's her past and her ties are haunting her. … You're going to see that be a common theme in the way we're talking about Hillary,” she said. “The McAuliffe race isn't good for Hillary. These issues are playing out in real time in an important seat where people in D.C. are paying attention.”
Other Republicans privately admit a goal is to see what sticks to Clinton and remind voters of long-forgotten concerns about her and her husband’s “secretive” business practices.
“They're testing messages and seeing how they resonate, seeking a better understanding of how they can approach a race against Hillary,” said one national GOP strategist. “The people working on the race are focused on Terry, but from a national perspective with people in the party and third-party groups there's definitely an interest in how these messages are impacting the race and what that means a few years down the road.”
The attacks come as Clinton begins to reengage with the political world after five years above the fray. She gave a high-profile speech to the American Bar Association earlier this week and has scheduled a Sept. 30 fundraiser for McAuliffe at her Washington, D.C., home. This will be the first political fundraiser she’s held since she left the State Department.Hillary Clinton is going to prison–or would be, if she were an ordinary person. The FBI has reportedly taken possession of the emails on her home computer server, according to U.S. officials cited by the Associated Press.
According to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), at least two of the emails contained “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information.”
An ordinary person–or even a well-known leader like General David Petraeus–would be prosecuted for moving classified information onto a private system. And that is just the beginning of her legal problems.
Clinton not only allegedly exchanged classified information via private e-mail, but also destroyed her emails before handing them over to the State Department before the government could determine for itself which were personal and which were job-related. That could constitute a felony, with a three-year prison sentence attached. And that is just the beginning of what is known.
It is worth noting, too, that much of the information emerging on Hillary Clinton first emerged from three sources: the Benghazi select committee, which the left attempted to dismiss; the independent Judicial Watch organization, which submitted key Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests; and the thorough research of Peter Schweizer, who documented Clinton’s alleged conflicts of interests.
This time, the Clinton magic may not be able to save her.The following post is intended as a working paper for discussion. (It builds on work started by Peter Lang back in 2009, Does wind power reduce carbon emissions?) This current work is based on the methods and conclusions from the recently published work by Herbert Inhaber in the peer-reviewed journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, entitled: “Why wind power does not deliver the expected emissions reductions“, and is applied to the Australian situation as a case study.
Clearly, there are large uncertainties on the Inhaber equation and they are not quantified. Discussion will almost certainly take place in the scientific literature about the Inhaber equation over the next few months to years. Inhaber, does point out that the chart is schematic, we do not have the emissions data needed and the many major uncertainties.
Peter and I look forward to your feedback. This is an important technical matter to resolve, with potentially strong implications for energy policy.
I note that there may be circumstances where some or most of these problems can be overcome, where the grid is ‘evolved’ or set up in a specially configured manner (unknown cost) — the below findings are most applicable to existing grids which are having wind added incrementally (i.e. all current [real-world] jurisdictions).
A 7-page printable PDF version of this paper can be downloaded here.
Addendum: Peter Lang’s Response to the American Wind Energy Association’s reply
————————————–
CO 2 avoidance cost with wind energy in Australia and carbon price implications
Guest Post by Peter Lang. Peter is a retired geologist and engineer with 40 years experience on a wide range of energy projects throughout the world, including managing energy R&D and providing policy advice for government and opposition. His experience includes: coal, oil, gas, hydro, geothermal, nuclear power plants, nuclear waste disposal, and a wide range of energy end use management projects.
Introduction
This paper presents a simple analysis to estimate the amount of CO 2 emissions avoided by wind generation and the cost per tonne avoided as wind penetration increases from 0% to 20%. The carbon price implications are discussed. The analysis is based on a paper by Herbert Inhaber (2011)1. The analysis is for Australia’s National Electricity Market.
Emissions Avoided by wind generation
Herbert Inhaber (2011) reviewed eleven studies of CO 2 savings by wind generation and concludes wind generation becomes less effective at reducing CO 2 emissions as wind penetration increases. That is, wind generation avoids less CO 2 as wind energy’s share of total generation increases. Inhaber explains:
as wind penetration increases, the CO 2 reduction will gradually decrease due to cycling of the fossil fuel plants that make up the balance of the grid.
Below is an extract from the “Conclusions” and “Uncertainties” sections of Inhaber’s paper [in this extract, references to ‘Fig. 3’ are to the figure in Inhaber’s paper, which is reformatted and called ‘Figure 1’ here):
There are considerable uncertainties about how fast this decrease occurs, and the curve in Fig. 3 should be taken as only suggestive. However, the arc seems to be a mirror image of a sigmoid curve, with an equation: where Q is the CO 2 reduction in percent, x is the wind or intermittent renewable penetration of the grid in percent, and c is a constant, of the order of 0.2 in Fig. 3. Figure 1: [Inhaber’s Fig. 3 reformatted to make it easier to interpret. In Inhaber’s paper, Fig. 3 is presented with log-scale on the vertical axis.] 5. Uncertainties There are considerable uncertainties in developing a curve of this type. A few of the many, not necessarily in order of importance, are:(a) The mix of fossil fuels used in the grid and the type of gas turbines in particular; (b) Some of the literature on wind is of a polemic nature, either advocating its widespread use or pointing out its deficiencies. Care has to be taken to concentrate on the facts and leave opinions aside; (c) Whether renewable energy is exported to other countries, as in the case of Denmark. This could skew results; (d) The number of cycles of the fossil fuel sources that take place over time; (e) What fraction of fossil fuel plants in the grid are relatively inefficient open-cycle gas turbines (as opposed to more efficient closed cycle gas turbines); (f) The carbon dioxide intensity emitted from the fossil fuels used in the grid; (g) The degree of variability of wind resources over a period of time, and a host of others. (h) Funding sources for some literature is sometimes from proponents or opponents of the energy source; (i) Some of the literature is not peer reviewed, posing potential problems in quality control.
For simplicity, let’s assume the average CO 2 emissions intensity of Australia’s electricity generation is 1 tonne per MWh (The figure varies by state and by year ).2
From Inhaber’s chart, at 1% wind energy penetration, emissions are reduced by 90% per MWh of wind generation. This equates to a reduction of 0.9 tonne per MWh of wind energy. However, at 20% wind energy penetration the CO 2 reduction is just 3.6%, or 0.036 tonne per MWh of wind energy.
CO 2 Avoidance Cost
For wind power to be viable the price for electricity would need to be about $120/MWh. The current average wholesale price of electricity is about $30/MWh3. So wind energy must be subsidised by about $90/MWh. If we have a carbon price of $25/MWh then the Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) need to reach $65/MWh to make wind viable. (That means the consumer must subsidise wind by $90/MWh, or three times the current wholesale price of electricity.). The figures are summarised in Table 1.
Let’s calculate the cost of emissions avoided by wind generation at 1% and 20% wind energy penetration.
From Inhaber’s chart, at 1% wind energy penetration, CO 2 reduction is 90%. Using the emissions intensity for electricity of 1 t/MWh this equates to 0.9 tonnes per MWh. Wind energy costs $90/MWh more than the current average cost of electricity. This is the cost we must pay to avoid CO 2 emissions with wind energy.
At 1% wind energy penetration, the cost per tonne CO 2 avoided is:
$90/MWh / 0.9 t/MWh = $100/t CO 2 avoided.
At 20% wind energy penetration the cost per tonne CO 2 avoided is:
$90/MWh / 0.036 t/MWh = $2,500/t CO 2 avoided.
These figures are for the cost to avoid an additional tonne of CO 2 by increasing wind penetration.
Figure 2 shows the CO 2 avoided and the cost of avoidance versus wind energy penetration.
Sensitivity Analysis
The CO 2 avoidance cost is sensitive to the wholesale electricity price and to the minimum price needed for wind power to be a viable investment. Figure 3 shows the results for six scenarios. The inputs for the six scenarios are listed in Table 2:
The greatest uncertainty is the Inhaber equation. As Inhaber states “There are considerable uncertainties in developing a curve of this type.” However, to conduct meaningful sensitivity analyses on the range of possible values for the Inhaber equation is beyond the scope of this simple analysis. Inhaber’s paper does not include ranges for the constants in the equation.
Carbon Price Implications
A carbon price of $2,435 per tonne CO 2 would be required for wind power to be viable at 20% penetration. This is for Scenario 1. The carbon price required for the six scenarios is plotted in Figure 4.
A carbon price of $2,435 per tonne is one hundred times the expected initial carbon price of about $25 per tonne CO 2. This indicates how much the carbon price would need to increase to make wind power reach 20% penetration based on carbon price with an REC price about double what it is now. The Australian Renewable Energy Target is 20% renewables by 2020 and most of this is expected to be provided by wind power. The carbon price would have to increase by a factor of nearly one hundred above the likely initial carbon price to achieve the target.
For the carbon price to stay below $100/tonne CO 2, wind energy penetration would have to be less than about 5% and the Renewable Energy Certificates price above $65 (for Scenario 1).
Another issue is that the carbon price will be paid by the back-up generator owners not the wind farm owners. This is clearly unreasonable since wind is contributing to reduced efficiency of the back-up plant.
Conclusions
As wind energy penetration increases from 1% to 20% the CO 2 avoidance cost increases from $100 to $2,500 per tonne.
The quantities and costs calculated are sensitive to the input assumptions and input data but the broad conclusions are robust to the range of input values tested.
Considerable uncertainties apply to the inputs for the Inhaber equation upon which this analysis is based and therefore to the results. However, these uncertainties have not been quantified.
A carbon price of around $2,500 per tonne would be needed for wind power to reach 20% penetration. The Renewable Energy Target is 20% renewables by 2020 and most of this is expected to be provided by wind power. Therefore, the expected initial carbon price of about $25 per tonne would have to increase by a factor of one hundred to achieve the Renewable Energy Target.
For the carbon price to be below $100 per tonne wind energy penetration would have to be less than about 5% (and Renewable Energy Certificates price above $65 per tonne).
Wind energy is a high cost way to avoid CO 2 emissions.
Australia is paying a high price for policies that mandate renewable energy while at the same time prohibiting other low emissions electricity generation options.
References
1. Herbert Inhaber (2011). Why wind power does not deliver the expected emissions reductions. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 15, 2557–2562
2. Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (2010). National Greenhouse Account (NGA) Factors, Table 5.
3. Matt Chambers, “Force of the near future”, article in “The Renewable Energy Special Report”, The Australian, 16 May 2011; figures attributed to Tim Nielsen, head of economic policy at AGL.
4. ABARES (2011). Energy in Australia 2011. p22
5. EPRI (2010). Australian electricity generation technology costs, – Reference Case 2010. Table 10-9 to Table 10-11, p10-4It's a common belief in America these days that without a high school diploma, you have no future. This opinion may be true to some extent, but it's certainly not a hard and fast rule. There are a lot of highly successful people in this world who never even completed high school. One of these successful people is Flava Flav, who dropped out of school when he was only 13, although, admittedly, it shows. He's now planning to return to school to get his G.E.D., and the ordeal may even become a reality show on VH1. He's not the only celebrity that dropped out of high school and still did well though. In fact, some high school dropouts are actually pretty brilliant. Image Via Jeremy Farmer Photography [Flickr]
Dave Thomas
The founder of Wendy’s, Dave Thomas started working in the restaurant industry at only 12 years old. His family was constantly on the move and at age 15, he refused to keep moving with his parents. He was working part time at the Hobby House restaurant in Fort Wayne and dropped out of high school to start working at the business full time. After working as a mess sergeant during the Korean War, he began working for KFC, where he was able to help turn several of their failing franchises around. In 1969, he sold of the KFC franchises he owned and opened his own restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. He named the restaurant after his daughter, who was actually called Melinda, but was nicknamed Wendy. These days, Wendy’s is the third largest burger chain in America. In 1993, Dave decided that he didn’t want to set a bad example for any youngsters out there, so he enrolled at Coconut Creek High School and earned his GED. Source
George Bernard Shaw
Famed Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw held an outright animosity towards schooling that he maintained throughout his life. He was quoted as saying, "schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.” Not surprisingly, the writer never completed his own education, having dropped out of the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. His main complaints about schooling was the standardization of the curriculum, which he believed deadened the spirit and stifled the intellect. He also deplored the corporal punishment being used in schools, although most modern teachers and parents would agree with him on this issue. Source Public Domain Image Via Wikipedia
George Eastman
Creator of the Kodak Camera Company, George Eastman, was forced to drop out of school due to financial circumstances. At only 14, his father died and the only way George could keep his two sisters and mother alive was to quit school and begin working as an office boy full time. By the age of 26, Eastman found his true calling and began working to improve the emulsion process involved in photography. He thought the liquid emulsions proved quite a problem as they were excessively sticky and had to be used quickly before they dried. In only three years, Eastman had perfected his dry emulsion plates and he started his own photographic business in 1880. Source Public Domain Image Via U.S. Library Of Congress
Quentin Tarantino
While a lot of famous directors hone their skills during college, Quentin Tarantino built up his film knowledge by working in a video rental store in Manhattan Beach, California. He not only never went to college, but he quit going to Narbonne High School in Harbor City, California in his freshman year. He started learning the acting craft in acting school at the James Best Theatre Company in Toluca Lake, but it really wasn’t until he started working at Video Archives with Roger Avery, also a director these days, that he really began sharpening his future skills. Some people complain about Tarantino’s movies having too much focus on the dialogue, but for a high school dropout, I’d say that’s not such a bad thing. Source Image Via pinguino [Flickr]
Richard Pryor
If comedy really is born from tragedy, then it is only logical that Richard Pryor became one of the top comedians of the seventies. Pryor had anything but an easy life. He was raised in his grandmother’s brothel, where his mother “worked” and his father served as her pimp. At only ten, his mother abandoned him and his strict grandmother took over his care, beating him whenever she thought he was acting “eccentric.” With a home life like this, it’s not all to surprising that he ended up being expelled from high school at 14. In the end, Pryor ended up proving the adage that “whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” and his comedy career was one of the longest lasting and most successful of the last fifty years. Source Image Via Alan Light [Flickr]
Peter Jennings
Peter Jennings started broadcasting when he was only nine years old. He followed the footsteps of his father, a respected radio broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and operated as the host of a CBC children’s program called “Peter’s People.” Surprisingly, his father was out on assignment when Jennings was chosen for the gig and he was furious at the network for hiring his son solely because he was the son of a broadcaster. When it came to schooling, Jennings was a great athlete, but a terrible student, which he said was due to “pure boredom.” He failed to pass the 10th grade and dropped out as a result. He tried to attend Carleton University, but "lasted about 10 minutes" before he dropped out there. After school, he started working at The Royal Bank of Canada, but he dreamed of being a professional broadcaster. I’d say did pretty well at meeting those goals, wouldn’t you? Source
Peter Jackson
Before he directed the Lord of The Rings, or even his cult classics like Meet The Feebles, Peter Jackson was just a film-obsessed kid. He was trying to make his own film by age of nine, complete with the special effects he loved to see in shows like "Thunderbirds." After he saw the original King Kong, he started trying to mimic the stop-motion from the film. He spent his entire childhood and all of his teenage years making short films and developing his own special effect techniques, which even included making his own minuscule models. When he was 16, he dropped out of high school and started working as an apprentice engraver in a newspaper photography department. He kept living with his parents so he could save money for film-making supplies, which he soon used to begin production on what would become his first full-length film, Bad Taste. When you know that your future is film you don’t have a real need for the three Rs of "reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic." Source Image Via Natasha Baucas [Flickr]The Taliban continues to attempt to mend the rifts with a faction that broke away after the controversy surrounding the death of Mullah Omar and the naming of his successor. On Aug. 8, the Taliban announced that Mullah Baz Mohammad, who served as a deputy to Mullah Mohammad Rasul, and his followers have rejoined the Taliban.
The Taliban published a statement in Pashtu on Voice of Jihad, its official website, announcing that Baz Mohammad and a commander from Uruzgan known as Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Akhond, pledged allegiance to Mullah Haibatullah, the Taliban’s new emir. From a translation of the statement obtained by The Long War Journal:
Yesterday, [Aug, 8, 2016], senior officials of Islamic Emirate, religious scholars, members of Late Mullah Mohammad Omar’s family, comrades and representatives of Haji Mullah Mohammad Baz Mohammad Haris at a meeting after a detailed discussion recommended to carry out joint efforts to keep unity in the sacred ranks of Islamic Emirate and to make efforts in the light of sharia [Islamic law] for the protection of rights of every person and decided that all the decisions would be made in the light of Islamic Principles. Haji Mullah Mohammad Baz Mohammad Haris, who worked earlier as a deputy of Mullah Mohammad Rasul Akhund, along with his comrades and the persons attached to him, and Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Akhund, a resident of Chora District of Uruzgan Province, who was a military commander during the Islamic Emirate’s reign, on behalf of his comrades announced their pledge of allegiance to the leader of Islamic Emirate, Amir al Momineen [commander of the faithful] Sheikh al Hadis Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada Sahib and promised their complete obedience in the light of Islamic law. The meeting was ended after prayer by Alhaj Mawlawi Ahmad Rabbani Sahib.
Baz Mohammad has been involved with Taliban infighting long before Rasul split from the Islamic Emirate. In 2011, he was involved with a dispute with Mohammad Ismail, who served as the head of Quetta Shura’s military council until 2010. Ismail, who was known to be a corrupt Taliban official, was one of 25 leaders who were assassinated in 2012.
Rasul’s breakaway High Council of Afghanistan Islamic Emirate has served as the primary opposition to the Taliban, or the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It was formed after Mullah Mansour and a cadre of leaders in the Quetta Shura hid Mullah Omar’s death between April 2013 and July 2015. Rasul and other Taliban leaders objected to the way Mullah Mansour was appointed as emir, and broke away. With Mansour’s death in a US drone strike in Pakistan this May, Mullah Haibatullah, who has previously served as the Taliban’s top sharia official, was appointed emir.
The Taliban has worked to reunite leaders who objected to the naming of M |
can remember.
Ultraculture: In reference to peak oil and the ongoing expansion of industrialization and globalization, what is the duty of the “green wizard?”
John Michael Greer: ”Duty” is an overused word, and not a particularly useful one; these days, it normally amounts to “why you ought to do what I won’t”—think of all those climate activists who insist that everyone in the world has a duty to cut their carbon footprint, while they themselves continue to live a typical middle-or upper-class industrial-world lifestyle. It seems more useful to me to talk in terms of possibilities. Peak oil and the “global economy” boondoggle are among the things that make our current way of living radically unsustainable, and what is unsustainable, sooner or later, will not be sustained; thus it’s time, and past time, to start creating other ways to live that fit within the hard limits of a finite planet burdened with the consequences of the idiotic decisions of the recent past. That’s what green wizardry is about: finding ways of life that will work in a de-industrial world, learning them, putting them into practice now, so that as the industrial project chokes to death on its own wastes, the alternatives are already in place.
Ultraculture: Decentralization is something you feel strongly about. How does that connect with the idea of the genius loci or “spirit of the place” in localities?
John Michael Greer: Excellent! That’s a connection few people consider these days. It’s not so much, by the way, that I feel strongly about decentralization; it’s that I recognize that the so-called “global economy” is a boondoggle, a temporary gimmick to allow a few rich people to get richer by exploiting cheap labor overseas, and like all such gimmicks, it’s not going to last indefinitely. As the industrial age stumbles to its end, local production of goods and services for local consumption is going to be the only option left, and that also means that most other things are going to relocalize in the same way.
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One thing that tends to be forgotten these days by people who spend too little time in the real world—that is, the world of nature—and too much time cooped up in little metal boxes of one kind or another, is that different places have their own distinctive qualities, which aren’t limited to the obvious ones. That’s a large part of what the ancients were talking about when they said that every country and region and locality had its own spirit, goddess, or guardian angel, with which the human residents have to deal if they’re going to live there successfully. Industrial humanity convinced itself that it could ignore that experience, and treat land as an interchangeable commodity; getting back to a saner and more productive relationship with the places in which we live and work is an important part of the work ahead of us.
Ultraculture: In several of your works you’ve suggested that American culture, and to some extent Western society in general are all fervent followers of “The Religion of Progress.” What do you mean?
John Michael Greer: Exactly what the words imply. All the blind faith and irrational fantasies that other civilizations have enshrined in their religions are focused by modern industrial humanity on this thing called “progress”—the conviction that history is a straight line leading from the caves to the stars, that industrial humanity is the cutting edge of that process just now, and that in order to fulfill humanity’s destiny, we have to keep on progressing. What does “progressing” mean? That depends, day by day, on who wins the no-holds-barred political struggle to get their agenda defined as the next step in progress. That is to say, this word “progress” doesn’t actually mean a thing; it’s a will-o’-the-wisp, a phantom road to Utopia hanging somewhere off there in the inkblot patterns of the future, and yet people are fixated on it. Try to tell most people these days that we’re not progressing onward and upward toward some bigger and brighter future, and it’s just like trying to tell some illiterate medieval peasant that heaven with God and all the saints and angels isn’t up there in the sky any more.
Ultraculture: Authors such as Ioan Culianu and Edward Bernays have argued that teams of communications executives in media and in government resemble sorcerers; manipulating symbols, images, and words to affect the emotions of the masses. In the Archdruid Report, you’ve also spoken about the realities of mind control. With this in mind, what kind of education, magical or otherwise, would you recommend to promote clear-headedness and independent thinking?
John Michael Greer: First of all, they don’t resemble sorcerers, they are sorcerers, practicing a degraded but effective form of magic. When watching a bunch of little colored images on a glass screen convinces people that their self-respect depends on whether they drink the right brand of fizzy brown sugar water, we’re talking about sorcery pure and simple. Those people are under an evil enchantment right out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, and it’s high time that we discuss it in those terms.
How do you get out from under the spell? The first thing you do is stop watching the little colored pictures. I mean that quite literally. The more of the effluvia of modern media you absorb, the more your thinking will be controlled by the charged emotional images and logical doublebinds that are pumped at you in every ad. Drop your TV into the nearest dumpster, decrease your exposure to other media as much as possible, and as the effect wears off, you’ll find that a lot of things that seemed clear and simple and reasonable when you were under the spell start looking like the self-destructive stupidities they actually are.
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Beyond that, there are plenty of choices, but all of them have one thing in common: You need to learn how to think. Thinking is a learned skill, and most people these days never learn how to do it. Our educational system teaches people not to think—why do you think parroting the approved answers to multiple choice standardized tests is so important a part of education today? It’s a very effective way to teach children not to think for themselves, to repeat mindlessly whatever they’re told, and above all never to ask questions about whether what they’re told is true and who benefits from that belief.
So it’s essential to learn how to think: to know how to reason, and to know the limits of reason; to know how to remember, and how to stock your mind with things worth remembering; to know how to imagine, how to will, how to use all the other powers of the mind—and to do all these things until they come naturally. Those are all learned skills. Until you learn them, you’re basically just a robot—and of course that’s exactly what the sorcerers want: people who buy and guzzle the right brand of fizzy brown sugar water, and snap up all the other garbage offered by consumer society, with no more mental activity than Pavlov’s dogs needed to start drooling at the sound of a bell.
Ultraculture: You’ve written several fascinating fiction works. What I love about Lucretius is that he found a wonderful way to be didactic, socially conscious and enchanting at the same time in his The Nature of Things. How do you manage to write lucid and thought-inspiring fantasy without getting out of touch with societal concerns?
JMG: Fantasy started out as a way of addressing societal concerns! William Morris, who invented modern fantasy fiction in the late 19th century, was a left-wing political activist as well as a brilliant poet, author, painter, printer, designer—there was basically nothing the man couldn’t do well. He invented fantasy fiction as a way of challenging the robot-mentality of his own time. That’s the core reason that his fantasy novels have been completely and systematically erased from our collective memory.
J. R. R. Tolkien was cut from the same cloth. His famous trilogy was a brilliant critique and satire directed at the religion of progress and the myth of the machine. Nobody talks about that now, and of course the movies stripped that right out of the story and turned it into empty spectacle. Long before Peter Jackson sank his orc-fangs into the bleeding corpse of the story, though, that same act of evisceration had been carried out by an entire genre of cheap derivative fantasy that borrowed all of Tolkien’s props and costumes and threw out all of his ideas.
What is The Lord of the Rings, after all? It’s the story of a successful war against progress. Sauron is the most progressive character in the book; he wants to get rid of elves, dwarves, hobbits, trees, and all the rest of that old-fashioned claptrap, and replace it with a rational, productive, cutting-edge industrial landscape of slagheaps and toxic waste.
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Saruman is the classic intellectual apologist for progress—his little canned speech to Gandalf about the inevitable triumph of Sauron is a really clever parody of all the progress-is-unstoppable rhetoric that abounded in Tolkien’s time, as it does in ours. Tolkien was very forthright about that, but with few exceptions everyone’s simply gone on pretending that he didn’t say any of the things about progress and technology that he said so many times, and not just in his fiction.
I don’t claim to be Tolkien’s equal as a writer, or for that matter Morris’, but I’ve tried to do the same thing in my fiction: to use fantasy (including what’s labeled “science fiction” and might better be called future fantasy) to hold up a mirror to the world we inhabit, and to suggest that things can be different if we choose to make a difference. That’s what fantasy fiction was originally about; that’s what motivated the great classics in the field; and I’d be delighted if authors of fantasy fiction could return to that sort of creative vision, instead of dressing up little dolls in medieval outfits and putting them through the same dreary routines over and over again. Fantasy can be more than that; future fantasy (that is, “science fiction” without the Pavlovian dog-drooling over sparkly new machines) can be more than that; and I’ve tried, in my own way, to show some of the possibilities.
John Michael Greer’s latest book is Twilight’s Last Gleaming, “a chilling high-concept geo-political thriller where a declining United States and a resurgent China come to the brink of all out nuclear war.”I’ve pointed it out before; it’s usually the people who claim to be the most moralistic/progressive/unprejudiced who are the worst offenders. No surprise really. Anyone making a big stink about discrimination is probably doing so to cover up the knobby, bigoted cherry-pit they have instead of a heart. But a recent post by Katja Grace got me thinking about feminism specifically and why it irritates me more than having an aroused ferret shoved down my pants. She comments on some of the ‘pro-women’ statements she’s seen in the past:
Some examples from the advertising and equity policies of various academic places I’ve been: ‘Women can make valuable contributions to …’ implies that this is an issue of serious contention. If most people thought women were of zero value in some fields, this would be a positive statement about women, but they don’t. Worse, the author can’t make a stronger statement than that it is possible for women to create more than zero value. Appeals to consider myself capable of e.g. engineering despite being female make the same error but this time suggesting that the viewer herself is likely in doubt. Such a statement can only be useful to women so ignorant of their own characteristics that they need to rely on their gender as deciding evidence in what career to devote their lives to, so it suggests the female audience are clueless. The smartest women have likely noticed that they are smart, and will not be encouraged by the prospect of joining a field where others expect them to be intellectually insecure special people to be reassured and included for human rights purposes. … Recommendations that courses like mathematics should be more focussed on women say that while existing mathematics is about completely gender neutral abstract concepts, not men, it is unsuitable for women. Presumably either women are not up to abstract concepts, or women can’t be motivated to think about something other than women. Despite whichever inadequacy, they should be encouraged to do mathematics anyway by being taught to work out the mean angle of their cleavage or something.
Damn, but it’s good to read something written by a woman who knows that her ideas have merit in and of themselves, and whether or not she sits down to pee doesn’t have any bearing on the issue. Quite frankly, most of you female-types have been so inundated with an incoherent mix of 1st- 2nd- and 3rd-Wave ideals that you can’t even enjoy a good fuck if Emotional Ugliness isn’t tossed into the mix somehow.
I love Katja’s responses to each specific policy she brings up; after all, I never get tired of hearing that a Spade is a Spade. When you live in a world full of doublethink euphemisms (‘Justice System’ comes to mind) it’s a refreshing change of pace. She falls short at the end, however, when she asks what motivates these idiotic policies. Ironically it’s because of her excess of sanity. You’ve gotta stare down the rabbit hole and have it stare back at you, before you can really understand these lunatics.
Feminism as a political movement – which is all I’m going to focus on, I have no interest in Historical Analysis or Literary Theory – began as movement to extend the Basic Rights demanded by Enlightenment Thinking to the soft and curvy half of our species. Given that some people have made half-convincing arguments that we ought to do the same for Chimps and Dolphins, I think it’s safe to take Women’s Equality as a given.
With a particular definition of Equality, that is.
I’m not sure when it started exactly – maybe it’s just a result of living in a wealthy society where so many of our toys and gizmos are divorced from the concept of labour, and even the poorest amongst us have access to 24/7 AC Current at a consistent voltage – but at some point the concept of Rights got mixed up with Entitlements.
As the comedian Doug Stanhope pointed out, if we’re that worried about discrimination we should just ban marriage. The Right to Pursue Happiness – to fuck and marry whomever you want, in whatever arrangement you want – is a great idea. But if you’re born ugly with a bad personality it’s not going to matter what your Rights are – no one’s going to sleep with you anyway. If instead of Rights you’re concerned with everyone’s Entitlements – everyone’s Entitled to a Good Lay every now and then – if that’s the case you’ll pass laws forcing an anonymous sex lottery… but in doing so you’ll be copping to the fact that certain people are toxic assets in the open sexual market.
So what exactly are Feminists admitting, when they craft policies demanding equal gender participation?
A lot of people think that 3rd Wave Feminism is misandric in nature, because of the sorts of laws they pass (just ask any man who’s been divorced in the past twenty years). It’s an understandable mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. What Feminists really hate is women. That’s the reason they’re so driven to hold men down. They fundamentally believe that women can never compete in an open marketplace with their male betters. It’s nothing but the old misogynist argument “Women are too soft and motherly to understand politics,” dressed up in the skin of empowerment. And it’s just as disgusting when a woman says it.
You know, it’s rough being a dude in the current regime; hell, just the other day my Lawyer said “If I were a young man today I’d voluntarily go gay.” I’m still waiting for the “White Male Privilege” thing to come along. But the real victims of this sort of ideology are the minority groups it pretends to protect. It doesn’t matter how thoroughly competent, professional, and accomplished they are – the stigma of affirmative action will follow them around like a greasy fart.
So Katja; the answer to why these patently offensive policies come about isn’t the basic sort of confusion you were looking for. It’s much deeper that cognitive error, and thoroughly pathological. But I’ve gotta say, it speaks to your character that you don’t know these hustlers and their schemes.
Keep fighting the good fight, Sister – and keep a good edge on those throwing knives of yours. We’ll all have to level up before we can take down The Master.A look inside Iya Terra Next: The Green announce 2015 Chocolates & Roses tour
Iya Terra is a roots, rock, reggae band from Los Angeles, California comprised of five members who together, deliver a unique sound with a positive message through their funky reggae music. Their first self-titled EP was completed at Castaway 7 Studios with the help of award winning engineer and producer JP Hesser and was released early 2014. Iya Terra has since aggressively toured with Ital Vibes during the Link Up Tour, presented by WeShouldSmoke and have blessed the stage with the likes of Tribal Seeds, New Kingston, Fortunate Youth, Marlon Asher, The Expanders, Arise Roots, The Simpkin Project, and many more. We had the pleasure and privilege to catch up with lead vocalist Nathan Feinstein to find out more about Iya Terra and what's in store for the new year.
First off, we’d like to congratulate Iya Terra on a job well done on your first EP; we love every single track here at Top Shelf Reggae!
Thanks man! That means a lot. It’s a special thing for us because we put our heart and soul into that EP and it really paid off in helping us get our name out there.
Looking back at 2014, how would you guys summarize the experiences and relationships you’ve made during your “break-out” year?
I can probably speak for the whole band when I say 2014 was the best year of our lives, haha. It was nothing short of a manifestation of our dreams. In 2013, we were just putting the band together and thinking, “man it would be so sick to play some festivals, share the stage with our favorite bands, and get out on tour”, and in 2014 we were able to do that. We started the year out with the Good Vibes festival with Fortunate Youth, Tribal Seeds and the Expanders, played the Summer Meltdown with Matisyahu and Stick Figure, went on our first tour over summer with Ital Vibes, including Reggae on the Mountain with Julian Marley and Black Uhuru, hit a couple other runs with our homies Irie Junctions and Arise Roots, and ended the year really strong with a week-long run with New Kingston and True Press. Definitely really blessed.
We also give a lot of thanks for the relationships we’ve made over the last year. Along with all the bands I just mentioned, we’re thankful for having started work with our manager Rudy and the whole crew at Rude Entertainment, our engineer and producer JP Hesser at Castaway 7 Studios, our artist Jake Tedesco, our good friend Ozzie (aka @weshouldsmoke), the brothers of Uplift Apparel and Cali Vibes Clothing, and all the friends we’ve made along with the way. Thanks for making it a great year.
When writing new music, what is the creative process for you? What inspires your music and most importantly your message?
Everything, really. Surprisingly it’s kind of the every day things that I see and the tedious schedules of conventional life that inspire me most; to get away from that, you know? I sometimes come up with the best lyrics after a long day of work when I just need to escape into this creative place where there’s no rules. I write a lot about ordinary people like myself, struggling, overwhelmed by social standards…and learning how to be free. I’m a firm believer that no human is meant to work a 9-5, and that if you’ve found your passion it's so crucial to follow that. Crucial to your own happiness and crucial to creating a better world in general, filled with art, music and happy people.
I’m also really inspired by moments. Little tidbits of knowledge that people lend to each other without knowing it. For example someone could be having a rough day and a friend says to them, “Don’t worry, tomorrow’s another day”, and then boom. Without knowing it, they just created a lyric for me, haha.
It’s all about people helping each other, you know. We have to work together. I see this huge movement of consciousness happening in the world now. I love being a part of it, and that’s what keeps me singing.
We were blessed to attend the Unity Festival last summer in Guerneville, California where you guys completely rocked it! What stood out instantly about your performance was the positive energy that you guys were emanating to the audience. What is Iya Terra’s message and how does the band stay rooted to your mission?
Give thanks!! That was a special show for us. It was our first show with our new drummer, Blake, which probably contributed to this nice vibe that we felt during the set. It just felt good. Add that to the natural beauty of the outdoor venue (right on the Russian River) and you’ve got all the ingredients for an amazing show. Gotta big up Josey over at Unity Fest for that one.
It’s definitely all that positive energy that helps us stay motivated and dedicated. We take a lot of pride in being a really hard working band, and it’s the response from our friends in the reggae community and the fans at the shows that keep us striving every day. And on top of that, we just love playing music! Nothing feels better than being out there on the stage and just letting go. We love the vibes.
With the many new genres of reggae music sprouting up everywhere and specifically SOJA currently being nominated for a Grammy award, what have you noticed while on tour, in terms of reggae making big waves and moving into the mainstream?
Well first off, let me just say I think that’s a great thing. We could probably be categorized as a band that falls into one of the newer genres of reggae. We take heavy influence from roots reggae music and classic Jamaican and Island artists, at the same time as being able to witness every day the new reggae artists that are touring and playing shows in this time. The fact that reggae music is making huge waves right now is great. In my opinion, it’s the most conscious and positive music there is, and if we can spread that message to the masses... I mean that’s our goal isn’t it? To change to world.
It’s a good thing that there are these huge reggae bands that can bring fans into the genre, and then that fan tends to dig deeper into the genre and get lost in the power that is roots reggae. It’s like a learning process. It takes time to fully understand the world of reggae and there really is an endless amount of knowledge and healing power to gain from it.
While on tour, you really get to experience it all because the fans and friends are so involved in the genre itself that everyone works together to make the reggae community the most tight-knit music scene that I’ve ever been a part of.
With the new year approaching, and the anticipation of your new album titled Full Circle, will there be any collaborations with any of the many talented and hardworking bands you’ve toured with?
Oh man, I can't really say too much about the features on the album, ONLY because they’re not all completed yet…but I will say that we have a pretty solid line up of artists that are gonna bless this album with us. You definitely will be seeing the names of some artists that we toured with last year on the track listing. We are so thankful for that, and we can't wait to release Full Circle.
In the studio, is it mostly work or play? How do you blow off steam during long recording sessions?
Definitely got to say it’s mostly work, although you do have to have a fair amount of play, haha. We’re a relatively low-stress band and we like to keep nice vibes, but when we get in the studio, it’s crunch time! We make sure we have everything nice and tight before we ever go in, so that the process is smooth as can be. We usually experiment with things like minute-meditations before tracking where the whole band will focus on putting positive energy into the music. We’re blessed to have the best recording environment I could imagine at Castaway 7 Studios. There’s always some natural light shining and some fresh ocean air in the studio, a little incense burning, and most likely a spliff going around, haha. So the days never get stressful, but we usually finish a long day of tracking up by going down the street to Surf Brewery in Ventura, CA for some good craft beers. Celebratory Vibes.
We want to wish you guys the best of luck on your new album and much success on your upcoming Youth Rising Tour with Ital Vibes and Synrgy, as well as a big up on the upcoming show with The Expendables! Is there anything you want to say to your fans?
Thank you so much!! We’re really excited for New Years Eve with The Expendables and to hit the road again with our brothers in Ital Vibes and the Synrgy boys.
Huge thank you to our fans, friends and family for making this whole dream possible. We couldn’t do it without you!! Keep supporting local reggae. Make the most out of your life, enjoy every moment and know yourself, love yourself and BE YOURSELF!
Also, if you like what you hear and you’re interested in providing a little extra push for us please visit our Full Circle Fundraiser page at: Igg.me/at/fullcircleIT Thank you with the utmost love and respect.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, much love and respect!
BIG up Top Shelf Reggae!!
For more information about Iya Terra, please visit these links:
Iya Terra "Love Is Crucial" music video
Photographer: Diego OlivaresCLOSE He's already donated his harvest, now this farmer is building a large farm in the city USA TODAY NETWORK
Indianapolis farmer is partnering with community center to establish a large urban farm to feed low-income neighborhood
Mat Davis, left, food justice coordinator at the Flanner House, speaks with Jonathan Lawler, who owns and operates of Brandywine Creek Farms, about testing the soil near the Flanner House in preparation to develop a farm on 2 1/2 acres in the heart of the largest food desert in the city on Nov. 11, 2016. (Photo11: Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar) Story Highlights Our Children: How you can help hungry kids in our community this holiday season.
IndyStar will take the next month to spotlight people and organizations that are helping kids.
INDIANAPOLIS -- When Jonathan Lawler decided to turn his Greenfield farm into a mission to feed the hungry last spring, he had no idea how he would touch the lives of people living on the north side of Indianapolis.
Today, Lawler of Brandywine Creek Farms is working with staff at Flanner House community center to develop the state's largest urban farm in the heart of one of the city's biggest food deserts, areas that lack access to fresh fruit, vegetables and other healthy whole foods.
Flanner Farms will sprout next year on the 2½-acre campus of Flanner House, 2424 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. St. It's not a community garden, but rather a 1.3-acre working farm. And it won't just feed people; it will teach them how to grow their own food.
According to statistics provided by Gleaners Food Bank, 1 in 8 people in Central and southeastern Indiana struggles with hunger and food insecurity; that number grows to 1 in 6 in Marion County. Of the 170,820 people in Marion County who lack consistent access to enough food, 51,440 are children, according to Map the Meal Gap 2015, compiled by Feeding America.
"My job as a farmer is to feed the world, and we have people going hungry in my backyard," Lawler said. The 40-year-old father of three turned about half of his 36-acre Hancock County farm over to his nonprofit operation — growing corn, beans, zucchini, tomatoes and watermelon for people in need.
His original goal was to raise a half-million pounds of food; he estimates he hit 420,000 pounds. "The biggest challenge for us has been getting volunteers when we needed them to harvest," he said. "Some of the food went to waste, and as a farmer, that kills you."
Still, he describes the nonprofit farm's first season as "extremely successful." Later in the summer, he turned to machinery to harvest some of his bean and corn crop, and he firmed up his partnership with Gleaners, which dispatched a truck to collect produce whenever the farm had it available. Lawler said his advisory board estimated the monetary value of what was donated at well over $150,000.
Over the summer, Lawler learned about Flanner House and its work to feed surrounding neighborhoods. He and his three sons delivered a truckload of produce to the center, and there he met Brandon Cosby, executive director. It didn't take long for Cosby to see that Lawler would be an ally in his quest to take the 118-year-old center back to its agrarian roots.
"We are getting back to the historic legacy of Flanner House," said Cosby, who took over as executive director earlier this year.
As Cosby dug into the center's history, he discovered it had a farming program and a cannery as far back as the 1930s. Neighbors learned about urban agriculture and took home what food they needed. The remainder was sold at a co-op.
As the landscape changed and large grocery stores began popping up to supply easy access to food, the idea of growing your own dinner lost its appeal. But now many of those same groceries are closing, forcing vulnerable populations — those without access to transportation — to frequent dollar stores and gas stations for pre-packaged convenience foods.
Last year saw the closing of four Double 8 Foods stores in Indianapolis, one just up the street from Flanner House at 2907 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. St.
The closing was an exclamation point on an issue with which the community was dealing anyway, Cosby said. So rather than lamenting the loss of a store that he said people shopped at only because they had to, he is energized by the possibilities Flanner Farms presents.
Much more than a garden
On a recent tour of the property, Cosby points out where the largest part of the farm will operate, just west of the center's parking lot. They'll grow sweet potatoes, kale, onions, okra and more. Toward the front of the center's campus will be raised beds with produce free for the picking. Also planned are native Indiana fruit trees rimming the property, a fresh flower garden, preschool planting operation, a chicken coop, even a cafe and micro grocery.
In all, the first-year goal is to produce 40,000 pounds of food on-site, with Brandywine committing to another 50,000 to 60,000 pounds — mostly sweet corn, cucumbers, tomatoes and beans. With that, the center hopes to feed a combined 5,200 households with children in the 46208 and 46205 ZIP codes.
From May to September, a weekly farmers market will offer a portion of the farm's organic produce at below-retail prices. The market will operate adjacent to Watkins Park during the weekly Jazz in the Park music series.
Residents of the community will be employed to work the farm, as well as the cafe and grocery. A job-training program, funded in part by a crime-prevention grant from Central Indiana Community Foundation, will give people a fresh start, teaching them food industry skills, including growing, handling, distribution and service, and making them marketable to the city's many restaurants, Cosby said.
"I just love the idea that some folks who may have been responsible for terrorizing the community will be in the position of feeding the community," Cosby said. "That path to redemption is a really important one, and folks can do it in a very tangible, real way. This is how we’re re-creating and stabilizing our community."
Building a local food system
Mat Davis sees the farm as the foundation for a "just and equitable" local food system. As Flanner House's food justice coordinator, his responsibilities include getting the farm up and running, chairing the Northwest Quality of Life Food Access Committee and supporting community and residential garden development.
Mat Davis, food justice coordinator at the Flanner House, tests the soil near the Flanner House in preparation to develop a farm on 2 1/2 acres in the heart of the largest food desert in the city on Nov. 11, 2016. (Photo11: Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar)
"We can really start to make some headway in addressing hunger," Davis said. He believes that means getting away from the reliance on emergency food aid in the form of pantries and soup kitchens.
At the same time, he said, "we're creating economic opportunities by working with young people in the neighborhood. Disadvantaged youth can have a viable opportunity to support themselves and their families while feeding their community."
The 22,000 people who live within the geographic area served by Flanner House are primarily African-American, many descended from the estimated 5 million people who were part of the Great Migration from the South to the North (between 1915 and 1960), Cosby said. Many left behind their lives as tenant farmers, sharecroppers and farm hands for better opportunities in the North.
"These people were responsible for feeding this entire country, and in one generation, we lost the ability to feed ourselves. I'm not OK with that," Cosby said. "We are not only making food more accessible here, but we're giving people the skills to produce it themselves."
'Fair and affordable'
Flanner House has an eager partner in Lawler, who is providing the seed, plants and equipment to get Flanner Farms up and running. He's hoping to turn the soil by Thanksgiving, in preparation for planting next spring, but the center first must raise enough money to build a fence around the property. Donations are welcome at Flanner House, 2424 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. St., Indianapolis, IN 46208. Or call (317) 925-4231.
"We are looking at building a food system that works, that's fair and affordable," Lawler said, adding that he's gotten backlash from some local farmers and chefs who suggest he is cheapening local food.
"I'm not, I'm making it affordable. There's a big difference," he said. "We want people to participate in local food and build an economy around it that will revolutionize food access so everybody has the right to it."
Right now, the local food movement is a fad, Lawler said. "And isn't that sad? The way my grandfather farmed and how farming communities in general relied on local food access, that's gone away. I want it to be commonplace again."
In the next growing season, Lawler expects to make the 25-minute drive from Greenfield to Indy's north side frequently with his sons, but he also expects to see youths from the neighborhoods that feed into Flanner House out at his farm. They'll get a taste of planting and harvesting, an experience he hopes will inspire them to want to learn more.
"If they can take something from seed to fruit, that's going to do wonders for them."
Since his story first appeared in IndyStar earlier this year, Lawler has attracted attention from multiple media outlets, as well as farming publications. In his Metallica T-shirt and International Harvester cap during one interview, he squirms a bit under the spotlight, but he keeps returning to his message.
"People tell me I'm revolutionary. No, I'm just a copycat, copying off what our forefathers did. There's nothing revolutionary about feeding your community."
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Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2fUzrM7Revealed: How surgeons will reconstruct road accident victim's face using 3D printing
Computer image shows how specifically-designed plates will be used to reconstruct road accident victim's face
Unaffected side of the biker’s face has been used to make a mirror image
Adrian Sugar, at Morriston Hospital, Swansea is leading the project that uses CGIs to create titanium implants
This computer image shows how specifically-designed plates will be used to reconstruct a road accident victim's face using 3D printing technology.
A team of British surgeons are poised to carry out a pioneering operation, which will restore the symmetry of a man’s face using new parts produced by a printer.
The unaffected side of the biker’s face has been used to create a mirror image, which will enable perfect facial reconstruction.
This image shows how a biker's face is to be reconstructed after it was damaged in a road accident
A computer image of'scaffolding' for a human ear. The model was created by Wake Forest University in North Carolina, but a similar one will be used to create the 3D printed part of the unknown man's face
Computer images are being used to create titanium implants using Additive Manufacturing, which commonly known as 3D printing.
The images are used both to design guides to cut and position facial bones with pinpoint accuracy and create tailor-made implants for the patient.
The guides and implants are being produced in medical-grade titanium in Belgium, at one of the world’s few specialist 3D printing facilities.
Surgeons in Swansea, south Wales, used an X-ray CT scan to create minutely detailed three-dimensional images to design the bespoke implants.
The futuristic work is led by consultant maxillofacial surgeon Adrian Sugar, at Morriston Hospital, Swansea, run by Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board.
Mr Sugar said: ‘Effectively, we have done the surgery in virtual reality so that we can mirror this in real life. You cannot make a mistake on a face.’
A scaffolding nose is pictured, which could help patients |
the presidential election in favor of Hillary Clinton. Many actors, actresses, and directors accused Trump of being a racist xenophobe who wants to ban all Muslims and deport Hispanics. However, many have been mute to the racist practices that they participate in.
Matt Damon, who’s been vocal against Trump, was criticized for his role in the movie The Great Wall for being a white actor in an Asian setting. Emma Stone was criticized for her role as a Native Hawaiian in the film Aloha. And just in the last year, Scarlett Johannson was at the center of controversy for being a white protagonist in a live-action Japanese anime movie, Ghost in the Shell.
In her praise of Skrein, Bennet wrote, “There is no way this decision came lightly on your part, so thank you for your bravery and genuinely impactful step forward. I hope this inspires other actors/film makers to do the same.”
Latest Videos1 More Triple Driver: A boomy, blurry low end makes basslines lose their definition and clarity. Any song with a forward bassline sounds like a smeared mess, and even live music sounds like it’s in a large hall rather than a smaller venue.
Audeze Sine: Though we like the design and the optional remote/mic/DAC cable, the Sine headphones have highs that were just too piercing to be palatable to our panel. Consonants are more sibilant, and snares a touch tizzy. Their performance is by no means bad—in fact, the Sine headphones are really good—but their price is so high and this field is so competitive that they were edged out.
Audeze LCD2 Closed Back: Audeze tuned the closed-back LCD2 to match the original open-back version. To our ears, Audeze adds too great a high-frequency spike in this pair’s signature sound. Hi-hat, syllables, snare hits, and string noise are especially loud, which can be fatiguing to people sensitive to very high pitches. This is a matter of preference, not quality, as with many of the headphones in this range.
Audio-Technica ATH-M70x: Our panel found that there was less presence in the lower mids than we’d prefer, with a somewhat lispy quality to the high frequencies. Because of this, we felt that the M70x headphones had an artificiality to the sound that caused them to be edged out by our picks.
Audio-Technica ATH-MSR7: The MSR7 headphones have an extra boost in the higher-end frequencies that, though a bit too forward for our panel, are often perceived as extra detail by some people. In addition, the MSR7 pair has an added bass boost to balance out that high end; with certain kinds of music (hip hop, most notably) it can start to feel like the bassline is a little too intrusive.
Audio-Technica ATH-WS1100iS: The bass boost here is way too wide and loud. Kick drums become in-your-face but dull. There is an added high-end bump to try to rein in the lows, but it ends up being sibilant, with the “S” on lyrics sounding especially harsh. If you position yourself next to the subwoofer at clubs and like it, these are for you. If not, stick with our picks.
Beats Pro: The bass is incredibly forward and so resonant that dry male vocals sound as though they have reverb on them. It’s as though someone mashed all the low-frequency EQ faders all the way up.
Beyerdynamic Custom One Pro Plus: Sliders on the back of the earcups enable you to customize the sound to one of four profiles, ranging from treble-heavy to holy-bass-Batman. The price for this all-things-to-all-people design is a slight loss in the fidelity of sound when compared with our top picks, especially when you go into the heavier bass settings. Also, the earcups are huge, so smaller heads can feel a little swallowed up by them.
Blue Lola: Great sound, weird fit. The Lola headphones have a little less sense of space than the original Blue headphones, the Mo-Fi, but still sound very balanced and clear. We love how they sound. Unfortunately, the weight of the earcups makes them gradually sink lower and lower on your ears, and they just aren’t comfortable for long listening sessions. If Blue would scrap the design and keep the sound, it would possibly have a winner.
Blue Mo-Fi: These are a former pick, and our panel loved how they sound: clear, detailed highs; smooth, deep lows; and a nice sense of space. Even the Bass + mode was handled deftly and doesn’t blur the sound. Unfortunately, due to the weight and shape of the headphones themselves, these weren’t the headphones that we reached for, even if we loved how they sound. They just got too heavy, and the earcups gradually slid down our skulls, which affects the sound. The competition caught up sound-wise, so we retired these as a pick and moved them to the Competition section.
Blue Sadie: As with the Mo-Fi, we love the sound, but we can’t get comfortable with the fit. Even though these feel lighter than the Mo-Fi, they still don’t clamp properly and end up sliding down your ears.
Bowers & Wilkins P7: These have an intense bass that not everyone favored, and cost $400 at the time of testing. We think that audio fans will prefer a more balanced sound. If you need an intense, punchy bass option and like this pair’s looks, it’s pretty good; we just prefer the sound and price of our picks more.
Final Sonorous III: These headphones are huge, but surprisingly not uncomfortable or heavy. However, the highs are way too piercing and icy, and there’s something odd in the tuning of the low mids. Perhaps an ill-placed spike in the upper low frequencies? Piano sounds like part of it is underwater, and female vocalists sound as though they are singing behind their hand.
Focal Listen: Our panel found the fit to be uncomfortable, the highs had a shushing quality to them, and the lows were a tad too hyped. None of these factors make the Listen a bad pair of headphones, but even small imperfections were enough to keep it from being a pick.
Focal Spirit Classic: Neither of the Focal Spirit models we tested were suitable for larger heads. Every panelist from the largest hat size to the smallest felt that the squeeze created by the headband and earcups was too uncomfortable for long-term use. This is unfortunate, as the Spirit Classic headphones sound pretty good—mostly flat, although some sonic boosts in the top and bottom frequencies either add character (as Brent thought) or leave the mids feeling a bit dull (as John found). Overall, if we could wear them without getting a headache, we’d probably like them much better.
Focal Spirit Professional: Like their sibling, the Classic, these headphones pinched tightly around our heads and made us unable to fully enjoy them. Sonically, the high end has a slight sizzly quality that the Classic model lacks. Even if we could wear them for more than 15 minutes, we can’t say that we’d buy them over our top choices.
Master & Dynamic MH40: The MH40 headphones have a fun sound that isn’t completely natural. There is a slight bump in the very high highs that lends an icy, metallic tinge to the treble, plus a moderate bass boost that can sound heavy-handed on already bass-forward tracks. Consonants stand out a little more than you’d expect, and on well-loved recordings, you’ll notice the kick drum or synth bassline is more forward in the mix than you recall. It was this mildly colored sound that just edged the MH40 pair out of the top spots. Overall, they were comfortable, sounded great, and were undeniably cool and beautiful.
Monolith by Monoprice M560: The idea of being able to switch from an open- to closed-back design by popping on a magnet cover is nifty. Unfortunately, that means that these headphones aren’t properly tuned for either configuration, but rather fall somewhere in the middle. As such, they have a jagged frequency response that kept them from excelling against either the closed- or open-back competition.
Monolith by Monoprice M1060C: First of all, no exaggeration, the case for these things is the size of a bowling bag. It’s massive. These headphones are definitely not made for easy portability. They are also rather heavy and can slide down if you don’t sit absolutely straight. Though they sound decent enough, with just a bit of a reverb quality to the low mids, they aren’t steller enough to beat out our picks.
NAD Viso HP50: These headphones have a beautiful high end that is basically flat right down to where they drop off at the bass frequencies. It’s that drop-off at the low end that pushed these out of our top picks. Around 127 Hz (think subwoofer territory), the HP50 pair starts to roll off, and by 90 Hz, it’s pretty much silent. What does this mean? Any music that benefits from a good thumping bass feels as though it’s missing its foundation. That said, everything above that bass is really well done and about as close to neutral as you can get. Do you love a sparkling high end and sneer at anyone who uses the term “bumping bass?” Then you may love these headphones.
RBH HP-2: Only one of our panelists liked these headphones; the rest of us felt that the bass was too forward. That’s not to say that the low frequencies were poorly formed, but rather too in-your-face. However, we all agreed that the higher frequencies sounded lovely and had a nice sense of placement, so if you are a fan of folk or chamber music, you might like these.
Sennheiser HD1: Sennheiser replaced its popular Momentum headphones with the nearly identical HD1. These headphones not only carry the looks, but the warm, low-end boosted Sennheiser Momentum sound profile, which folks either love or hate. Our panel found the mellow, occasionally boomy signature to be exciting for electronic music but lacking the crispness and detail that we found in our picks.
Sennheiser HD630VB: Though we love how the bass-boost dial on these headphones is executed, we wish it weren’t quite so easy to turn and accidentally lose your settings. The bass tuning is fun, but the highs were too harsh and the mids too hollow for our panel to enjoy listening for a long time.
Shure SRH840: Overall, these are nice studio headphones. The balance is mostly flat, with a little extra peak in the trumpet/female-voice range. Unfortunately, that peak can be a bit too much for folks with sensitive ears. All of our panelists called the high end a bit harsh for everyday use. Although the price (around $200) is affordable, we’d rather see your money invested in the superior sound or features of our picks.
Shure SRH1540: These are $500 headphones that Tyll Hertsens of InnerFidelity had on his Wall of Fame, but he adds, “They tend to fall apart a bit at higher volumes—bass can get bloated and loose; treble can become a little over-emphatic.” For $500, we want better than that, and we think our readers would, as well.
Sony MDR-100AAP: Bass-forward and lacking clarity in the highs, these lack the detail and definition we’d like to see in this price range. Acoustic guitars sound almost like they were miked inside the body rather than outside.
Sony MDR-1AM2: The design on these headphones is super lightweight and comfy. You could easily wear these all day. Unfortunately, our panel found that the sound had way too much bass and a spike in the highs around 9 kHz that was piercing and off-putting, as it overemphasizes any rattle or recording flaw.
Sony MDR-7520: A reader-requested model, these professional headphones look like the big sibling of our long-time pick and recording-industry staple, the MDR-7506 model. We love that this model has a removable cable, which we wish was the case with the 7506. It sounds as though the 7520 pair does have higher-quality drivers, but unfortunately they aren’t tuned as evenly as those on the 7506 pair. The bass is very forward and has a bloated quality, and the highs can be piercing. It’s a bummer—a few tweaks to the tuning, and these might be a favorite.
V-MODA Crossfade M-100: The durable design is so well-built that you’ll have a tough time noticing anything else. But upon closer listening, What Hi-Fi? called this pair “punchy and inconsistent” and “needing some finesse and detail to compete.” Tyll Hertsens of InnerFidelity said, “I would have preferred the bass boost to happen about 100 Hz lower,” and he found the midrange to be lacking.UPDATE 9:15 a.m.: Judge Denn Whalen, of the 70th District Court, said after the story's publication that he was not "removed" from the case.
"I voluntarily recused myself because of the threat to me and my family," Whalen said in response to the story.
Whalen declined to comment further.
The Texas Rangers were asked to investigate the threats on March 19, according to a Tuesday evening statement from Trooper Elena Viramontes, a spokeswoman with the Texas Department of Public Safety who represents the Rangers. Their investigation is ongoing.
Someone claiming ties to a loosely affiliated collective of computer activist hackers recently threatened cyber attacks against an Ector County District Judge, his family and the mother and the stepfather of a 15-year-old boy at the center of a custody battle.
A YouTube video was posted March 6 by a supporter of the hacker group “Anonymous” that warns 70th District Judge Denn Whalen and others to “expect us.”
The video is titled “Anonymous Message To Caleb Leverett,” naming the boy’s father who chronicled the dispute in a series of YouTube videos in the past year, one of which drew more than 1 million viewers.
“For the judge: We will begin cyber attacks to you and your family,” a disguised voice declares over footage of someone in a mock newscast wearing a Guy Fawkes mask that is associated with the group. “You cannot run from this.”
The video then addresses the boy’s mother: “We also know who you are. We know your husband also. We will begin cyber attacks to your bank accounts, credit cards, computer and phone bill.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Austin Berry said federal authorities were aware of the video.
“There are potential federal charges for this type of threat,” Berry said. He declined further comment.
The video bears the logo of Anonymous, but nonetheless it is difficult to independently verify the level of the affiliation with the group and how many people are behind it. Media representatives of the group identified only by pseudonym on an Internet Relay Chat said they were not aware of the video until a reporter linked it to them but did not rule it out as an Anonymous video either.
“[sic] its hard to say where that came from,” wrote one of the moderators of the IRC designated for reporters, “&Donny”. “a lot of times people will put things on youtube and then nothing will happen, it was just something they felt like doing.”
Two others in the relay chat room said they knew of “Caleb” but not the video.
Whalen declined to comment through his court coordinator. An attorney representing the mother of the boy did not respond to a Monday inquiry.
And Leverett was being held Monday at the Ector County Detention Center on a contempt of court charge, sentenced to 60 days last week after another judge found six violations against him for not returning the boy to his mother last year between Memorial Day and mid-August, when the mother and her husband were moving the family to San Antonio. The jail also listed a bond amount of $2,500.
Reached before his Friday arrest, Leverett declined to comment, citing advice from his attorney. An attorney representing him in the custody battle, William Doonan in Midland, did not respond Monday to a request for comment.
The judge who issued the contempt ruling against Leverett was Judge James L. Rex, assigned to the case Tuesday by Presiding Judge Dean Rucker of the Seventh Administrative Judicial Region in Midland either because Whalen recused himself sometime after the threat or because he was removed. It was not immediately clear from a review of court documents, and Rucker did not respond to an inquiry.
The custody dispute attracted wide social media attention after Leverett, who advocates libertarian social philosophy on YouTube and internet radio and decries what he describes as “statism,” began posting monologues and videos involving his other children and the 15-year-old.
The most viewed was posted June 6 of last year and depicts the boy, then 14, refusing to get out of Leverett’s pickup truck at his mother’s house when he is due back. Police eventually show up and allow the boy to go with his father. Court records state he remained with him until mid-August.
The March 6 video — the only one published by TheAnonymousPharoah” — addresses the boy directly.
Anonymous tends to follow existing events or causes, according to the September 2013 paper “Anonymous in Context: The Politics and Power behind the Mask” by Gabriella Coleman, an anthropology professor at McGill University and the author of an upcoming book about the group.
Anonymous contributed to an “astonishing array of causes” in the past several years from publicizing rape cases in a small-town Ohio, targeting perceived enemies of the group Wikileaks and supporting the Arab and African Spring of 2011, Coleman wrote.
On Sunday, Albuquerque police website went down in what authorities said was a cyber attack, according to the Associated Press. The cyber attack followed a YouTube video that emerged days earlier, bearing the logo of Anonymous and protesting police shootings. The video warned of a cyber attack on city websites and called for a protest march, which also happened on Sunday.
But not all Anonymous activism is illegal and not all activists are computer hackers, Coleman wrote.
“Unlike criminal groups who want to remain hidden, Anonymous seeks the limelight,” Coleman stated. “Partly because of its maverick image and transgressive antics, Anonymous has attracted significant attention, sometimes admiration and sometimes fear. As an entity though, Anonymous is often slippery, evasive and invisible. Its organizing principle — anonymity (or technically pseudonymity) — makes it difficult to tell how many people are involved overall.”The price of bitcoin topped $500 last week, and some hailed the moment as a turning point for the seven-year-old digital currency. "We may well look back on this," said one pundit, "as the time that changed everything for bitcoin."
Then the price dropped again, and some said it had climbed so high only because of some bitcoin-powered Chinese pyramid scheme. Yesterday, the price stood at $311. That's about $800 below its high point in late 2013, just before Mt. Gox, the world's largest bitcoin exchange, completely imploded amid claims that hackers had broken into its systems and stolen more than $460 million in customer funds. "The question prompted by the recent movement in bitcoin is whether it marks a resurgence for the cryptocurrency," wrote The FT, "or merely highlights its turn in the endless parade of get rich quick schemes." Fair question.
But for Brian Armstrong—the CEO of Coinbase, today's dominant bitcoin exchange and a company with the backing of some very big Silicon Valley players—the price of bitcoin (see graphic above) isn't the best way of judging the health of the digital currency. "Sometimes, I feel like running a bitcoin company must be like running a public company," he says. "Everyone is so focused on the price, and that causes short-term thinking."
A better barometer, he says, is how much the world is using bitcoin (see graphic below). And that figure continues to rise. Bitcoin usage has risen pretty much steadily since the brief dip it took in the wake of the Mt. Gox implosion. In fact, last week, as the price of bitcoin topped $500, the usage rate reached an all-time high, after roughly doubling over the past twelve months. "The real usage is catching up to the hype," Armstrong says.
Blockchain.info
Armstrong's point is that for people like him—and companies like Coinbase—the ultimate aim is to turn bitcoin into something that anyone can use to more easily store, send, and receive money. "We want the world to have an open payment network," an Internet for money, he says. And, well, the price of bitcoin may not have much to do with that. Yes, bitcoin is also a means of speculation, a way of making money from money. And according to Peter Van Valkenburgh—director of research at the Coin Center, a non-profit dedicated to bitcoin public policy issues—the recent price fluctuations are likely driven by such speculation. But this is only part of the bigger bitcoin story.
More Bitcoins Moving
To be sure, that graph showing the rise in bitcoin activity doesn't necessarily mean that lots of people are actually using the digital currency to pay for stuff like socks and food and apps. In early 2014, Overstock.com started accepting payments in bitcoin—becoming the largest online retailer to do so, and nearly two years later, bitcoin transactions account for only about 0.05 to 0.1 percent of the company's sales, according to company spokesperson Judd Bagley. Armstrong's graph shows the total number of transactions on the bitcoin network—the worldwide network of Internet machines that drives the digital currency—and that includes any movement of bitcoin from one place to another, not just people paying for goods and services.
"With basic payment applications, we do see usage creep up. But it's important not to be overly optimistic there," Van Valkenburgh says. "It's fairly clear that a American consumer—someone in a developed country—has a fair number of ways to pay for stuff already."
What's more, a lot of that recent bitcoin activity is probably just, well, speculation. But the fact remains: more and more people and organizations are adopting bitcoin for one reason or another. The big question—and it's not that far from the question asked by The FT—is whether bitcoin will ever become a mainstream currency, rather than just a trading commodity. We don't have an answer yet, but there are signs that we're moving in that general direction.
Money Without Borders
Coinbase says that more than 41,000 businesses and 2.8 million people are using its various services, which include not only an exchange for buying and selling bitcoin, but also digital wallets for storing bitcoin and making payments, as well as tools that let apps and websites accept payments. It's signing up about 3,500 new users a day, and this rate jumped about 70 percent in the wake of last week's price rally. And across the pond, European bitcoin payment processor Coinify says its business is growing 30 percent a month, and 600 percent year-over-year—though it doesn't provide specific user numbers.
Meanwhile, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, best known for suing Mark Zuckerberg over the creation of Facebook, recently launched a new bitcoin exchange with approval from regulators in New York and other states. And an exchange called ItBit has received similar approval. Regulators, even here in the U.S., are beginning to embrace the technology in ways they haven't in the past.
As more and more businesses and people adopt bitcoin, the currency comes closer to Armstrong's vision of an Internet for money. If you have an open network for money—as opposed to networks controlled by banks and other big companies—we can more quickly and easily build and adopt new financial technologies. "A lot of innovation is blocked today because of the red tape—or hurdles or friction or whatever—that comes with launching a new business and accepting payments or paying money out to people," Armstrong says.
If bitcoin goes mainstream, it would allow companies to more easily send and receive money across borders. And in the developing world—where online banking and payments aren't nearly as prevalent as they are here in the States—it gives people a power they wouldn't otherwise have.
Changing Markets
Armstrong's graph also reflects tools that are using the bitcoin blockchain—the vast digital ledger that underpins the digital currency—to handle all sorts of stuff beyond just money. Overstock, for instance, runs a new company called TØ that's using the blockchain to handle stock trades, and in recent months, some of the big Wall Street players have followed Overstock's lead. The Nasdaq is building a system that will use the blockchain to oversee stock trades in the private market (before companies go public). And the exchange believes the blockchain could be applied to the public market, too.
"The blockchain could have some pretty fundamental and transformative effects on the capital markets," says Terry Roche, a principal analyst with capital market research firm The TABB Group.
The current trope is that the blockchain will reinvent Wall Street, but that bitcoin as a currency will never quite get there. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said as much last week. When Armstrong hears such talk, his first thought that the bitcoin's mindshare is expanding—and that's a good thing. He very much believes that alternative uses for the blockchain are just a stepping stone to the adoption of bitcoin as a currency.
"They're making an iterative step," Armstrong says of Wall Street. "They'll do a few experiments. Maybe it'll be a year or two. And they'll realize that the blockchain is great, but that the biggest use of the blockchain is bitcoin. I still believe, 100 percent, that bitcoin is the future."
It may or may not be. But as Van Valkenburgh points out, the steady rise in bitcoin activity may indicate that many others feel the same as Armstrong. Some are certainly in search of short-term gain, but the wider expansion of the bitcoin community may indicate that many others see it a good bet on the future. They may be speculating because they believe it will indeed become the Internet of money.
"Bitcoin has been in the news a lot as of late, and it has been good news. People will see that and say, basically: 'I want a cash option on the future of the technology,'" Van Valkenburgh says. "It's like if you were able to buy a small piece of the Internet in 1994. Would you?"Aircraft engine maker Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc on Thursday opened a new defence service delivery centre (SDC) in Bengaluru, the first outside the US and UK, to provide localized engineering support and solutions and reduce turnaround time for the Indian Air Force, Indian Navy and state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL).
Rolls-Royce is looking to improve capability and provide faster front-line support for over 750 engines in a range of aircraft used by the defence as well as commercial aircraft such as the C-130J, Hawk advanced jet, Embraer and Jaguar, among others.
Shaun Agle, vice-president (customer services), India defence, said the new service delivery centre will be able to deliver real-time solutions through MRO (maintenance repair and overhaul), provide first and second line of support, have field service representatives, manage the health of the fleet, manage supply chains and collaborate with the armed forces.
India is the last remaining user of the Jaguar type of aircraft and is one of the largest users of the Hawk, the company said, while trying to highlight the need for a local presence.
The SDC will have at least 10 specialized engineers and service personnel to find localised solutions specific to India. The SDC is based on the model operated by the company at Marham in the UK and Kingsville in the US.
The company did not quantify the reduction in time or cost that would result from setting up the local SDC, which will do the work that would otherwise have been referred to Bristol, UK.
Last year, Indian customers raised 138 issues, according to the company, which were referred to Bristol.
Rolls Royce has over 1,600 engineers based in India who help provide solutions for the UK-based company’s global customers, Kishore Jayaraman, president, India and South Asia, said.Former women’s world champion Japan edged China 1-0 on Monday to make it two wins out of two at the E-1 Football Championship.
Mina Tanaka scored her second goal of the four-team East Asian tournament in the first half to settle the contest at Chiba’s Fukuda Denshi Arena.
North Korea also has six points thanks to a 1-0 win over South Korea at the same venue in an earlier match and leads the standings on goal difference ahead of Japan.
“It was a really tough game but I am glad we could come through with a win,” said Japan coach Asako Takakura.
Japan can clinch its first championship title in three editions of the tournament with victory over North Korea in the final match on Friday.
“That is not going to be an easy match to win and we have to go in there feeling we are challengers and give it everything we have,” said Takakura.
Japan started brightly and Mizuho Sakaguchi forced China goalkeeper Zhao Lina into a smart save on three minutes.
The home side took the lead midway through the first half, Tanaka netting from 12 meters after racing onto Emi Nakajima’s through ball.
“It was a great ball from Emi and all I had to do was put it away,” said Tanaka, on target in Japan’s 3-2 opening win over South Korea. “There are a lot of things we have to work on looking at today’s performance but it is huge that we were able to come through a lot of tight spots to see out the game.”
China almost hit back in the 62nd minute, but Japan goalkeeper Sakiko Ikeda got down to push away a low shot from Wang Shuang.
Substitute Mana Iwabuchi should have added a second goal for the Japanese but scuffed her shot wide after breaking through on goal in the closing stages.
Earlier, a glancing 18th-minute header from Kim Yun Mi was enough to earn North Korea victory over South Korea.
“The players battled well,” said North Korea coach Kim Kwang Min.
“The win came through mental toughness and teamwork (but) I think the players are not satisfied at having only scored one goal.”
On Tuesday in the men’s tournament at Tokyo’s Ajinomoto Stadium, North Korea plays South Korea and Japan faces China.Ninety-five disability rights groups across Indonesia have rejected the government’s plan to issue only one government regulation (PP) to enforce Law No.8/2016 on people with disabilities.
The proposed regulation was later dubbed the "One Size Fits All PP" (PP Sapujagad) by the organizations, which are questioning the government's commitment to protecting the rights of people with disabilities.
“The negative impact of this plan for disabled people is that it will make it difficult to fulfil their rights as Indonesian citizens,” Presti Murni Setiati from the Inclusive Public Center and Disability Advocacy Movement (Sigab) said in a press conference in Yogyakarta on Thursday.
Other rights groups that rejected the so-called PP Sapujagad were Braille’iant Indonesia, Bunga Bali Foundation, the Sidorejo Disabilities Forum, the Yakkum Rehabilitation Center and the Situbondo Association for Deaf Persons.
After the issuance of the 2016 law on people with disabilities, the government was given two years to draw up a regulation to provide the legal basis for its implementation. Disability rights activists said the law mandated the issuance of 15 PPs related to education services, legal assistance, employment opportunities and other rights for people with disabilities.
“The government later reduced the number of regulations to seven, before it decided there would be only one PP issued by the Social Affairs Ministry,” said Presti.
She was worried that other government institutions might be reluctant to implement a regulation that would be drawn up solely by the Social Affairs Ministry. For example, the rights of disabled persons for adequate access to education might remain unfulfilled, as this was the responsibility of the Culture and Education Ministry. (ebf)
Independent voice: A man expresses his opposition to the government’s plan to issue only one government regulation to implement Law No. 8/2016 on People with Disabilities on a large banner at an Aug.10 advocacy event in Yogyakarta. (JP/Bambang Muryanto)The survey conducted on 3,000 people by the Public Health Ministry revealed that 36.6 per cent of potential partygoers had no qualms about being behind the wheel even after consuming alcohol.
“This is even though 48.7 per cent are aware that alcohol consumption is the cause of accidents,” Disease Control Department’s director-general Sopon Mekthon said yesterday.
Highway Police, meanwhile, have produced a video marking bypasses and risky spots on the route from Bangkok to the North and Northeast, as they expect a huge volume of traffic and hope to prevent accidents.
Roads to be clogged
Highway Police predicted there would be heavy traffic yesterday evening and on the evening of December 30.
Highway Police chief Maj-General Somchai Kaosamran said the most problematic spot would be Bang Pa-in Interchange, where four roads to the North and Northeast meet and there are seven petrol stations that many people use as a meeting point.
He said people should watch the video clips his department has posted on the Highway Police website and YouTube for this occasion:
l www.highwaypolice.org/holiday_map.php;
l https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=kQqQXW0_UWw ;
l https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Kd1VAJtjvlE ; and
l https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=wl29g85M_mE.
Leaflets on road safety are available at Highway Police service points and people can also make inquiries via LINE ID “Highway1193”, he said.
Somchai said a recent survey found some 106 accident-prone spots around the country, including 14 most risky ones that went uphill or downhill. He said he would instruct police to be stationed at risky areas and get dangerous U-turn points closed during the New Year break.
But he pointed out that accidents also take place on straight roads due to speeding and motorists disregarding traffic laws.
He said that apart from providing maps of bypasses and risky spots, other measures during this holiday season would include strict enforcement of traffic laws, especially against drink driving; motorists not wearing helmets/seatbelts; speeding; and those driving against the traffic.
He said everybody should check their vehicle’s condition before leaving home and be aware that tiredness can also cause accidents. People who are tired should stop at 196 rest stops along the way to take a nap or get a coffee before continuing their journey.
The New Year holiday period, known as the “Seven Dangerous Days”, last year (from December 27, 2013 to January 2, 2014), saw 151 road accidents, up from 142 accidents in the same period a year earlier.
Most accidents were caused by speeding, while the Highway numbers 1 to 3, which are main routes to the North and Northeast, saw the most accidents (137), followed by rural roads at 11.Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.
TOWARDS the end of 2003 and early in 2004 China's most senior leaders put aside the routine of governing 1.3 billion people to spend a couple of afternoons studying the rise of great powers. You can imagine history's grim inventory of war and destruction being laid out before them as they examined how, from the 15th century, empires and upstarts had often fought for supremacy. And you can imagine them moving on to the real subject of their inquiry: whether China will be able to take its place at the top without anyone resorting to arms.
In many ways China has made efforts to try to reassure an anxious world. It has repeatedly promised that it means only peace. It has spent freely on aid and investment, settled border disputes with its neighbours and rolled up its sleeves in UN peacekeeping forces and international organisations. When North Korea shelled a South Korean island last month China did at least try to create a framework to rein in its neighbour.
But reasonable China sometimes gives way to aggressive China. In March, when the North sank a South Korean warship, killing 46 sailors, China failed to issue any condemnation. A few months later it fell out with Japan over some Chinese fishermen, arrested for ramming Japanese coastguard vessels around some disputed islands—and then it locked up some Japanese businessmen and withheld exports of rare earths vital for Japanese industry. And it has forcefully reasserted its claim to the Spratly and Paracel Islands and to sovereignty over virtually the entire South China Sea.
As the Chinese leaders' history lesson will have told them, the relationship that determines whether the world is at peace or at war is that between pairs of great powers. Sometimes, as with Britain and America, it goes well. Sometimes, as between Britain and Germany, it does not.
So far, things have gone remarkably well between America and China. While China has devoted itself to economic growth, American security has focused on Islamic terrorism and war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two mistrust each other. China sees America as a waning power that will eventually seek to block its own rise. And America worries about how Chinese nationalism, fuelled by rediscovered economic and military might, will express itself (see our special report).
Pessimists believe China and America are condemned to be rivals. The countries' visions of the good society are very different. And, as China's power grows, so will its determination to get its way and to do things in the world. America, by contrast, will inevitably balk at surrendering its pre-eminence.
They are probably right about Chinese ambitions. Yet China need not be an enemy. Unlike the Soviet Union, it is no longer in the business of exporting its ideology. Unlike the 19th-century European powers, it is not looking to amass new colonies. And China and America have a lot in common. Both benefit from globalisation and from open markets where they buy raw materials and sell their exports. Both want a broadly stable world in which nuclear weapons do not spread and rogue states, like Iran and North Korea, have little scope to cause mayhem. Both would lose incalculably from war.
The best way to turn China into an opponent is to treat it as one. The danger is that spats and rows will sour relations between China and America, just as the friendship between Germany and Britain crumbled in the decades before the first world war. It is already happening in defence. Feeling threatened by American naval power, China has been modernising its missiles, submarines, radar, cyber-warfare and anti-satellite weapons. Now America feels on its mettle. Recent Pentagon assessments of China's military strength warn of the threat to Taiwan and American bases and to aircraft-carriers near the Chinese coast. The US Navy has begun to deploy more forces in the Pacific. Feeling threatened |
so enthused. Fantasy writers Diana Gabaldon and George R. R. Martin have been particularly outspoken about their disdain for fanfic.
Martin’s point is mainly that it’s lazy writing. He’s spent a great deal of energy building an elaborate and believable world, and fanfic writers use his hard work to create an instant emotional reaction in readers. Gabaldon is a little more irate and litigious: fanfic is essentially illegal, she says, as it uses her copyrighted intellectual property.
Many are quick to suggest that Gabaldon may be tossing stones inside her glass castle, as the hero of her Outlander series was inspired by a Dr Who character. Nevertheless, she’s spent decades crafting this world: who are we to invade it?
I can understand why creative people are protective of their creations, but also why fans would want to add to them. Is it all that different from an art student practicing painting by copying van Gogh’s Starry Night?
I can also understand why real celebrities would be creeped out by having new lives imagined for them. That said, if you need me, I’ll be reading about the boys from One Direction going on a date. I hope they kiss!This article is over 5 years old
A power cut at Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear plant this week may have been caused by a rat, according to officials.
Masayuki Ono, spokesman for Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company), the utility that runs the Fukushima Daiichi plant, said a 6-inch rodent was found dead near a switchboard. He said the rat might be linked to the power failure, but further investigations were needed.
Cooling systems at the plant for four storage pools for nuclear fuel were knocked out on Monday. Power was restored two days later at all nine affected facilities.
Concerns over the site of the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl remain unresolved, and decommissioning the tsunami-damaged backup generators that triggered the March 2011 disaster is expected to take decades.The White House and congressional Democrats want to cut the payroll tax for another year, paying for it with a surtax on millionaires and billionaires. Congressional Republicans, true to form, have balked. Pressed for an explanation, GOP officials invariably say the surtax on the very wealthy would be bad for small businesses.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) argued this week that “it’s just intuitive” that many small-business owners, who report company profits on their individual taxes, would hire fewer workers after getting “hit with a tax increase.”
This gave NPR a good idea: maybe the public should hear from some of these small-business owners. (thanks to D.M. for the tip)
We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So, NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview. So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to.
Then NPR put out the same challenge on Facebook, and it only heard from small-business owners who said the opposite of what Republicans are saying.
When asked for an explanation, Thune told NPR “most small-business owners who are out there right now” agree with the Republican argument.
Fine. Name one.
It’s such a simple challenge. If Republicans are right, the examples to bolster their point should be practically everywhere. So why would they struggle to offer a single example? Because the GOP talking points only work when there’s no scrutiny.
For the record, the Republican claim about small businesses and the millionaires’ surtax has already been debunked. Indeed, the irony of the larger argument is that if the GOP blocks an extension of the payroll tax break, Republicans will be increasing taxes on small businesses.Technology is transforming American education, for good and for ill. The good comes from the ingenious ways that teachers encourage their students to engage in science projects, learn about history by seeing the events for themselves and explore their own ideas on the Internet. There are literally thousands of Internet-savvy teachers who regularly exchange ideas about enlivening classrooms to heighten student engagement in learning.
The ill comes in many insidious forms.
One of the malign manifestations of the new technology is for-profit online charter schools, sometimes called virtual academies. These K–12 schools recruit heavily and spend many millions of taxpayer dollars on advertising. They typically collect state tuition for each student, which is removed from the local public schools' budget. They claim to offer customized, personalized education, but that's just rhetoric. They have high dropout rates, low test scores and low graduation rates. Some have annual attrition rates of 50 percent. But so long as the virtual schools keep luring new students, they are very profitable for their owners and investors.
Another dubious use of technology is to grade essays. Major testing companies such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill are using software to score written test answers. Machines can grade faster than teachers, but they cannot evaluate factual statements or the imaginative use of language. A student may write that the World War II began in 1839, and the machine won't object. Students will learn to write according to the formula that the machine likes, at the expense of accuracy, creativity and imagination. Worse, the teacher will abandon the important job of reading what his or her students write and will be less informed about how they think. That is a loss for the quality of education. Frankly, it is a problem with online assessment in general, as the job of testing is shifted from the teacher to a distant corporation; the last round of state testing saw computer breakdowns in several states. In addition, it is only a matter of time until students hack into the tests.
The most worrisome use of technology is to accumulate and store personal, confidential data about every public school student. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put up close to $100 million to create the Shared Learning Collaborative, now called inBloom, with partners Wireless Generation (owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation) and Carnegie Corporation. It will gather student data from several districts and states, including New York, Georgia, Delaware, Kentucky and Louisiana (some of these states are reconsidering because of objections from parents). The data will be stored on a cloud managed by Amazon. On the cloud will be students' names, addresses, grades, test scores, disability status, attendance, program participation and many other details about students that teachers and schools are not allowed to release.
Who needs all this personal information, and why is it being shared? Advocates say that the goal is to create better products for individual students. Critics believe that the information will be given or sold to vendors, who will use it to market products to children and their parents. No one knows whether the data will be secure; snoops frequently hack into databases and clouds.
Until recently, the release of personal student data without parental consent would have been prohibited by a 1974 federal law known as FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act). In 2011, however, the U.S. Department of Education revised the FERPA regulations, making this data project legal. The electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has sued the Department of Education in federal court for watering down FERPA and allowing students' data to be released to third parties without parental consent.
Here is the conundrum: teachers see technology as a tool to inspire student learning; entrepreneurs see it as a way to standardize teaching, to replace teachers, to make money and to market new products. Which vision will prevail?Margaret Thatcher told Dr Garret FitzGerald he was welcome to take all Northern nationalists south of the Border during a frank exchange between the two leaders 30 years ago.
Three conversations between the taoiseach and British prime minister in 1986 have been released under the 30-year rule.
One of them was a phone conversation and the other two were face-to-face meetings. The main focus in all of them was the progress, or lack of it, being made under the Anglo-Irish Agreement signed in November 1985.
The first conversation by phone on March 7th featured a disagreement about the status to be given to the taoiseach’s visit to the White House on March 17th, with FitzGerald claiming the British were trying to limit his input to the US president.
“I don’t know anything about that. No one has the authority to make that sort of request without coming to me,” said Thatcher. “You and I have the same views. We have signed the agreement and will implement it.”
The two leaders met again during a European summit in The Hague on June 27th. Much of the meeting centred on a discussion of Libyan aid to the IRA.
“The important thing is to stop the flow of money from Libya as has effectively happened with the US,” said FitzGerald.
“You have done a fantastic job there,” replied Thatcher.
The rest of the meeting focused on the agreement and the problems of implementing it.
FitzGerald said he was willing to push an Extradition Act in the autumn but said it could not be done unless there were changes in the three-judge courts in Northern Ireland.
“We will go firmly,” replied Thatcher. “We need the Extradition Act without derogation. I appreciate that police co-operation is excellent.”
The most frank and detailed of the meetings took place at the Conference Centre in London on December 6th, 1986.
In the course of it, Thatcher said that in some places in the South, like Dundalk, there was a great deal of sympathy with terrorists.
“They get safe houses there and can live in the community,” she said.
“So many people from the North come down to the South and live there. We have 200 people from the North in our jails. You can have them back any time you want!” replied FitzGerald.
“I don’t want them. You can have all the nationalists in the North if you like!” said Thatcher.
The exchange followed a detailed discussion of the security problem, with Thatcher saying there could not be real progress “while the blasts, deaths and the bombings continue”.
“When I started out we had in mind, in our own internal discussions, helicopters on the Border with the right to fly five miles in either direction.
“There would have been a broad corridor about the Border. That disappeared! We have not got anything like it now. We haven’t got that kind of corridor. You haven’t the resources to maintain protection on the other side of the Border.
Violence
During a discussion on cross-Border security, FitzGerald said unionists thought the Republic was interfering in Northern security. In fact, the opposite was happening.
“The RUC have a lot of professional experience in dealing with terrorism. They are passing on the benefits of this experience and, in fact, this is probably improving the way the gardaí work. Both forces have a next-to-impossible Border to watch.”
“Yes. We got it wrong in 1921,” said Thatcher.
The first item on the agenda was extradition and there was a discussion of a controversial Bill then before the Dáil which would give effect to the European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism.
FitzGerald told Thatcher the Bill had no reservations and no prima-facie requirement as was being sought by Fianna Fáil and others.
“We have taken your point on this but it will cause us problems,” he said, pointing out that his government was then in a minority position and facing rebellion on a number of fronts.
“We must therefore get the support of the Progressive Democrats if we are to avoid a prima-facie requirement. This is crucial.
“Some months ago, I briefed their leader [Des O’Malley] personally on the subject... I also briefed him before the text of the Bill appeared as did the minister for justice. The trouble is there are a lot of barrack-room lawyers around him to whom he listens.”
FitzGerald said O’Malley had suggested a way out through some sort of certificate for each case and the attorney general John Rogers was looking at ways of making such a certificate non-justifiable.
“If we do not get this it will be disastrous. Prima facie would be worse than it is now,” said the taoiseach.
He went on to describe the problems facing his government on both extradition and the budget which was going to involve about £8 billion in cuts.
“Yes. You mentioned this to me at dinner. You fair rocked me back,” said Thatcher.
FitzGerald then speculated what would happen if his government lost power in the coming months, which he thought likely.
“Mr Haughey will not, I think, disturb the agreement. If we have got the extradition legislation on the statute book I believe he won’t disturb that either, though he himself could not, politically, introduce it.
“The legislation will come into force in June without his being required to take any positive action, that is, if he is in my position then! We want to be sure now to be able to get a budget in place, having got the extradition legislation through parliament.”
American money
“I wouldn’t dream of asking them. We would be paying 75 per cent of whatever was obtained. I wouldn’t dream of asking the commission for this.
“Europe has other problems, like the Basque problem. We shouldn’t get into this,” she said.
The mood was lightened by an exchange on Sellafield when FitzGerald said: “One more thing – and hear me out without exploding!”
“You mean I have to fasten my seat belt,” said Thatcher.
“Yes. Last week the Dáil passed a motion asking that Sellafield be closed.
“ If I am asked whether I raised this with you at this meeting I will have to say that I did. This, I know, is contrary to our understanding about these meetings that whatever we discuss is not made public afterwards,” said FitzGerald.
“Noted,” she replied.
The two leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the Anglo-Irish Agreement before the meeting ended.
The note of the meeting by cabinet secretary Dermot Nally ended with the prime minister speculating about the pressure on her for an election and other issues “including, rather a wistful reference to whether she could continue, in all seriousness, to send young men to their deaths in Northern Ireland”.
Almost two weeks later, Thatcher sent a message to FitzGerald congratulating him on getting the Extradition Bill passed by the Dáil.
“I know that this has not been easy for your government and I must appreciate the efforts which you have made to get it through... it will provide a strong weapon in the continuing fight against terrorism in these islands. Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year. Yours ever, Margaret.”
It was a close-run thing in the Dáil with the government managing to get the Bill through only on the casting vote of the ceann comhairle.
In his memoirs FitzGerald recalled how the dying Oliver Flanagan – father of current Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan – came into the Dáil to ensure the passage of the Bill.
He received a spontaneous round of applause from the entire House.One of the best parts of being a dad in public is the generalized expectation that you are basically a greased-up Kevin James playing banana-cream-pie Jenga with the Queen Mum. Remember those early solo outings with your baby and the generously low bar that you were held to? Doors held open, the fawning looks from the delighted people in your fancy grocery store as you—a MAN, for Chrissakes, nobly taking time out of his busy man-schedule to “give Mom a break”—strode through the produce aisle, your baby slung from your torso in an Ergo made of gilded copies of the Equal Rights Amendment? The rest of society loved you for the simple act of showing up, and the experience validated everything you’ve ever wanted to believe about yourself as a father, which is that you are a shining beacon of gender-role progressivism for not abandoning your child in the beer fridge.
Volunteering in your kid’s classroom is sort of like that. Without fail, the teacher will tell you that “the kids love it when dads come in,” or “it’s a special treat,” or something to that effect. I have no idea if this is true. It’s possible there are dads in there every day of every year—nothing but dads, just a separate storage closet filled with fresh dad volunteers ready to unfold and deploy when the old one wears out—but they will tell you this anyway. And it kicks the door wide open for you to consider yourself a veritable superhero because you made a cameo at the place where your kid spends hours upon hours every day. It feels great!
(I’m not sure exactly what they tell you if you’re a mom volunteer, but I’m fairly certain that you will not enjoy the luxury of adequacy. I mean, you will, only “adequacy” in your case requires full knowledge of the day’s schedule, detailed plans for an original art project using your own sustainably grown balsa wood, EMT certification, and a batch of individually monogrammed gluten-free cupcakes.)
In any event, the teachers will (rightly, it turns out) expect that you (Dad) know nothing about the classroom or the day’s schedule, and that you possibly have never even considered that your child attends a school of any kind, beyond the fact that sometimes they go in a building for a while and come back alive. If you manage to get through a day in the classroom without causing the facility to lose its operating license, you will be hailed as a monumental success. Go ahead and embrace the soft bigotry of low dad expectations while you can, because there are still a few opportunities for you to fail. First and foremost among them:
Master Snack Duty
Were you supposed to bring the snacks? Are they from the approved classroom snack list? Did you accidentally throw out the list or lose it in a pile of art projects or rolling papers? Snack Duty will pretty much make or break your reputation as a competent parent. You do not want to be the cause of a roomful of irritable, snackless children, nor do you want to be the monster behind little Sladetron’s anaphylactic shock, so be sure to have the snacks on lockdown.
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If you did in fact lose the official snack list and are too embarrassed or procrastination-oriented or drunk to ask for a copy before you get to school, here is a general overview: Snacks typically consist of one fruit and one carbohydrate. Avoid anything with hydrogenated fats and oils. Frosting is not an acceptable carbohydrate. A stick of butter is not a carbohydrate at all. Grapes are choking hazards. Do not bring grapes. Cherry tomatoes are technically fruits, so those are okay. Except cherry tomatoes are choking hazards. Do not bring cherry tomatoes. Hot dogs are also choking hazards. Also, hot dogs are not fruit, so that’s two reasons not to bring hot dogs. Do not bring raisins. Raisins are just old grapes. Raisins are not fooling anyone.
If you brought fruit that requires slicing or peeling, do not slice or peel that fruit until you are in the classroom, so as to avoid serving apples with a side of listeriosis. Observe well-known allergy restrictions. Do not serve nuts or shrimp. Do not bring soft cheeses. Do not serve straws and a 40-pound sack of wheat gluten. If you’re still reading this, go ahead and abandon hope. Take your broken spirit to the store and get some bananas, popcorn, and apple juice for the kids, and a sleeve of cookie dough for the ride over. You deserve it! You’re a volunteer!
Sniff Out The Punks
Volunteering in the classroom is your big chance to rate each student as a potential friend for your kid without parents in there keeping shitty attitudes at bay with the the promise of ice cream. You’ll find out pretty quickly which kid is the Bossy One, the Hyper One, the Perpetually Crying One, the Clearly Has An Older Sibling Because He Knows Slang Terms For Genitalia One. The point is that within a couple of hours, you should be able to label each child as if you were a 1964 newspaperman covering the Beatles.
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Of course, any time you are dealing with other people’s children, you should immediately tap into whatever reservoir of patience you possess. Luckily, as the classroom volunteer, you are not required to teach them anything, nor are you required (or probably allowed) to discipline them in any way. Let the professionals handle the tough stuff and just focus on keeping the kids safe from, like, panther attacks. Avoid excessive hamming, and keep the conversation light.
Appropriate
Kid: “I have a brown kitty.”
You: “That’s nice. What’s your kitty’s name?”
Inappropriate
Kid: “I have a brown kitty.”
You: “Do you know what jet fuel can’t melt?”
After a while, you might even discover a few nice kids that know how to share, or that look like they might own a trampoline.
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Follow Along With the Activities
Surely at this stage in your parenting career, you understand that attention spans are pretty wee in young children, and the schedule will reflect this. Stay sharp. Often there is some sort of color-coded Activity Board that will keep you abreast of the day’s activities, and you’ll want to check in with the board early and often. (Blue means you will be painting. Red means you will be going to the playground. Green means music. Brown also means music. Yellow means crafts. Other times yellow means survival skills. Orange means they were unable to find blue. In many cultures, white signifies death; for you, it means story time. Pink means they washed the white one and the red one together, and the red one bled. Purple means you should evacuate due to dangerous levels of radon. Etc.)
Ideally, you would anticipate the next activity and help smooth the transition between them, but we’re aiming a bit lower than that here, so on second thought, just ignore the board and politely follow the teacher around until you’re given a specific task out of pity.
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Don’t Screw Up Pickup/Dismissal
If you’re sticking around to help with dismissal, you will need to confirm that the person picking up each child is in fact authorized to do so. Aside from Snack Duty, this is the worst possible thing you can screw up. This will feel like a live-action setup of the world’s most consequential LSAT question. So let’s practice: On Tuesdays, Crookedrain may go home with Linzibel’s parents. Xanthangum’s parents may pick up Aybellina on Mondays, but not on Wednesdays. They may not pick up Middlemarch on any day. Fridays are like Mondays for everyone except Honourhawk, who may not go home with Thurstonmoore on that day. Thursdays are Free Days, where anyone may go home with anyone else. Alex has no parents. They died. Thursday is his favorite day. :-(
If you screw up Dismissal and a kid goes missing, make sure you update the Activity Board to show the color for Amber Alert Time, which is teal: the color of failure.
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Be Thankful
Try to remember that people are working here—professional people, whose job, I’m sorry to say, is far more important than the work you do slinging corporate buzzwords at a whiteboard between visits to your fantasy baseball league’s waiver wire. Your sole qualification for being here is that you made a child, which any idiot can do, and many have. Sure, in theory you’re helping, but keep in mind that you are a far less efficient version of the teacher, and that you probably also brought in death-snacks. You aren’t THAT helpful. It’s likely that this teacher is a pretty patient person in the first place (or else they wouldn’t be teaching), and this is why they have been able to withstand a morning’s worth of you in their classroom without pinching the bridge of their nose through to the very bone. Thank them for letting you hang out.
Pete Reynolds writes sometimes. You can reach him here in an emergency.
Illustration by Tara Jacoby.
Adequate Man is Deadspin’s new self-improvement blog, dedicated to making you just good enough at everything. Suggestions for future topics are welcome below.Paul Johnston and Chris Herhalt, CP24.com
A 60-year-old woman wanted in connection with a stabbing in Rosedale Thursday morning is now in police custody, sources have confirmed to CP24.
The arrest comes after police officers were called to the Town Inn Suites on Church Street, at Charles Street, for an unknown trouble call sometime around noon.
At the scene, officers found a woman in crisis on a balcony.
She was ultimately arrested after officers from the Emergency Task Force rappelled down from the building’s roof at around 3:30 p.m.
“She was successfully taken out of the building, and is in fine condition,” Toronto police Const. Jenifferjit Sidhu said at the scene.
The arrest comes hours after police were called to a building located in the Rosedale Valley Boulevard and Park Road area at around 7:30 a.m.
At the scene, officers located a man who had been stabbed several times.
According to police, the 67-year-old victim was stabbed by a woman armed with a large kitchen knife.
The victim was transported to a trauma centre in life-threatening condition with stab wounds to his torso, paramedics said.
The suspect, earlier identified by investigators as Ellis Kirkland, is a prominent consultant in the fields of architecture and infrastructure development. Federal government records indicate she is the owner of Kirkland Capital Corporation.
She is the founder and chair of the NATO Paxbuild Economic Platform and once served as the Ontario Architecture Association’s first female president.
Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 416-808-5300, or Crime Stoppers at 416-222-8477 (TIPS).Police arrested Mark Karpeles, the CEO of the failed bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, in Tokyo on August 1 over allegations he had manipulated data to artificially create nearly $1 million worth of Bitcoin. He has been in custody for the past three weeks, the maximum time suspects can be detained without official charges in Japan.
Tokyo police served another arrest warrant on Karpeles on Friday, suspecting he misappropriated ¥321m ($2.6m) of customer deposits into other personal projects. According to Yomiuri newspaper, the funds were spent on purchasing software rights and a $48,000 bed.
Karpeles lawyer denied the allegations, saying that the "the deposits were used for investments in new businesses while the bed was purchased as interior decoration for his guesthouse, both of which were meant as marketing tools to promote the use of bitcoins."
"Despite the long detention period, the fact that investigative authorities could only come up with these reasons to make their case for embezzlement is evidence that Mark was not involved for personal reasons in the disappearance of massive cash and bitcoins," the lawyer added.
Mt Gox once accounted for 80% of bitcoin trading volume but ever since it announced its bankruptcy, it has been surrounded by scandals.
At the time of the company's collapse, around 744,400 BTC (then worth $340m) was reported missing. Karpeles said he found some 200,000 of the lost coins in cold wallet later; however, speculations still exist over insider involvement.Is anyone else out there a tornado of destruction when the step into the kitchen?
Try as I might to be “clean and tidy” when I work on a recipe, I feel like I spend hours cleaning up the mess that I’ve created. (It doesn’t help that I’m a “soaker” of dishes and not an instant washer!)
I spent some time over the weekend thinking about ways that I could work on my clean cooking strategy. I came up with only one solution… a one pot meal. My thought process is that if only one piece of cookware – other then measuring cups and spoons – to cook the dish, then I only have to clean one dish when I’m done.
That theory did not hold up – but cooking was much quicker and easier than it normally is!
I almost called this one pot mac and cheese – but it doesn’t really hit all the requirements I have for mac and cheese. It was rich and creamy – but it didn’t have that distinct “cheeziness” factor I look for. Instead all the flavors work together to make almost a spicy cream sauce. It does have some nooch in it though (and with the rate and frequency I’ve been using nooch – I’m going to be turning orange soon haha!)
Can I also tell you a little secret? I kind of hate tomatoes…like the flavor just never worked for me! But I know how much other people love them so I decided to give them another chance to win me over in this recipe.
On the first bite, I was in heaven! This recipe CHANGED the way I feel about cherry tomatoes – so I’ll be experimenting a LOT with cherry tomatoes in the future!
So just to review:
This recipe is simple and easy to make – and only takes one pot! (But that didn’t keep MY kitchen clean haha)
It will transform the way you feel about tomatoes (or maybe that’s just me!)
One Pot Creamy Tomato Pasta takes just 30 minutes to create!
So break out a big pot, chop up your ingredients, and in 30 minutes you will have a delicious creamy meal ready to enjoy!
One Pot Creamy Tomato Pasta Print Prep time 10 mins Cook time 20 mins Total time 30 mins Author: Zach Spuckler Cuisine: Vegan Serves: 4 Servings Ingredients 1 Box (12 oz) Whole Wheat Pasta
2 Cups Water
2 Cups Almond Milk
1 Pint Cherry Tomatoes, Halved
1 Medium Sweet Onion, Chopped
3 Cloves Garlic, Minced
¾ Cup Nutritional Yeast
2 Tbsp Mustard Powder
2 tsp Chili Powder
2 tsp Paprika
1 tsp Salt
½ tsp Pepper Instructions Prep the ingredients by chopping the onions, halving the tomatoes, and mincing the garlic Place the liquid ingredients and spices into the bowl and whisk to combine. Add the remaining ingredients to the pot, bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the sauce is thickened, 15-20 minutes. Serve warm and enjoy. Tips and Ideas Feel free to switch up the spices to create different flavors like Cajun or Mexican pasta!
Try using Sun Dried tomatoes for a unique flavor change.
Feel free to add in tempeh or coconut bacon for extra "meatiness"! 3.2.2885
Do you like “One Pot” or “30 Minute” Meals?
Is there one food that going vegan helped you learn to love – like tomatoes for me?C9 vs NWS Game 1
Pick / Ban phase
C9 1st Ban Thresh: Taking away some of the pressure that Thresh allows his junglers to put on the side of the map he’s on. Thresh creates picks very easily with hooks mid-late game and throughout the entire game allows NJWS to make the aggressive plays they want to in order to secure kills. This is in hindsight, a step towards the split push comp that C9 wants to run, but it’s not obvious by this point.
NWS 1st Ban Maokai: Aimed towards Balls, Maokai is an extremely strong team fight oriented champion with his ult, and has less of a range problem than Alistar due to saplings. NWS thrives on team fights and is confident they can beat C9 in them, so taking this away makes perfect sense.
C9 2nd Ban Lee Sin: One of Watches higher impact junglers, this takes some of the kill pressure off the lanes in the early game. C9 aims in their Pick/Bans to survive and gain a small lead over NWS in the early-mid game and hopefully win with that momentum.
NWS 2nd Ban Zilean: Banned for the same reasons that Maokai was in that he has a very strong presence in team fights and also carries a strong early game with his Time Bombs. As NWS is on purple side, leaving Zil open would be disastrous for them, but this creates an opening for Hai to pick his comfort Zed with Zilean out of the way.
C9 3rd Ban Ryze: Very strong flex pick that neither Hai/Balls play very comfortably. C9 is aiming to take away one of the lane bullies available to Save at the top lane, we see later on in the picks how much C9 prioritizes the early-midgame picks as they try to snowball the game in their favor and bleed NJWS out.
NWS 3rd Ban Alistar: Similar to Maokai, high team fight impact and has a very strong laning phase due to his ability to auto attack after a W in this patch. NWS want to focus on shutting down Balls as he has somewhat of a limited champion pool, this almost guarantees that he’ll be playing Rumble however.
C9 1st Pick Zed: With Zilean out of the way, Hai is free to pick up his comfort Zed pick, showing he is clearly able to keep up in CS and put out presence in the game with it. This is obviously a take away from NWS at the same time since Ggoong is strong on him.
NWS 1st and 2nd Pick Nami and Elise: No need to reveal solo lanes here and NWS wants to pick up a strong jungler to shut down C9’s top lane again. Nami is a very strong lane bully from the support role, and this is also somewhat of a take away from C9 since Nami/Rumble is a strong combination for getting Rumble through the laning phase. So it’s highly possible that both picks here reflect NWS’s goal of shutting down the Rumble pick they’ve set up with the bans. This is also a take away from Meteos
C9 2nd and 3rd pick Khazix and Corki: C9 not wanting to reveal their top lane quite just yet either (It’s pretty obvious at this point though.), they pick up Khazix for Meteos of course, one of his more comfortable champions, and given that Elise has been taken away they want to secure Khazix in the odd case NWS picks him up as a laner. Corki being the strong lane bully ADC with good poke that C9 wants here, as we see later on it becomes a valuable asset in stopping recalls.
NWS 3rd and 4th pick Ahri and Kayle: NWS want’s to create a very strong back line with these two picks, predicting very well actually that Lemon will pick up Janna and Balls the obvious Rumble pick up. We’ve seen that Kayle can beat out Rumble in a 1v1 previously with proper usage of her Intervention, this also serves as a team fight tool to nullify Zed’s Death Mark damage. Ahri is easily able to reposition to avoid Rumble ulti and we can see after looking at NWS’s team comp that the entire pick ban phase was really aimed at baiting out the Rumble pick and defeating it.
C9 4th and 5th pick Janna and Rumble: NWS has read them like a book, and their team comp is designed to completely destroy them in team fights, where Rumble shines. C9 picks up Rumble as Balls comfort champ and is confident I guess that they can win the team fights, with the majority of top lane meta champions banned out, he doesn’t have much left to pick anyways.
Overview and Thoughts
While I still hate the Elise picks, the Korean teams are actually making them look good. The value behind Elise is her ability to safely shut down the enemy top laners, which is why we see her being picked up a lot against Rumble. Rengar risks too much if he goes that deep early game into the enemy side, and Jarvan commits very heavily when he uses his CC, opposed to Elise who can throw out cocoons from safety and retreat if need be. NWS has a team fight advantage here with Kayle and Twitch able to pump out large amounts of damage in an area with relative safely due to C9’s lack of hard CC to deal with an interventioned target. On the flip side however, C9 has a split push advantage due to the need for Kayle to stay with the team and no one else on NWS able to truly 1v1 a late game Zed. Khazix does out scale Elise, but NWS’s team composition allows them to blow up anyone that comes within firing range of their backline. In the end this game is decided by C9 forcing NWS to leave their base to contest baron, and then Hai split pushing down an inhibitor, after that it just becomes a slow methodical game where C9 accumulates their positional advantage until they can close it out. NWS definitely had the superior pick/ban phase however and played team fights well. Zefa made some mistakes and tried too hard to commit to certain fights which allowed C9 to catch up.
C9 vs NWS Game 2
Pick / Ban phase
NWS 1st Ban Rumble: Very obvious first ban, Balls has been performing well on Rumble and he seems to suffer from a champion pool issue along with Hai
C9 1st Ban Thresh: See Game 1 Thresh Ban
NWS 2nd Ban Syndra: Direct strike at Hai’s champion pool, we’ve seen the Rumble/Syndra ban create a lot of pressure for C9 on purple side due to their loss of comfort champions and inability to exert pressure on their lanes otherwise. Had C9 banned Zilean at any point, NJWS would have picked up Zed first, and had they not, it wouldn’t have been safe to pick Zed into Zilean.
C9 2nd Ban Ryze: See Game 1 Ryze Ban
NWS 3rd Ban Alistar: Standard ban
C9 3rd Ban Maokai: Standard return ban. It is possible C9 could have left Maokai open and tried to bait NWS into the pick, however with Maokai, NWS may have had a strong enough front line to just dive 5v4 and very quickly decide the pace of the game.
NWS 1st Pick Zilean: Flex pick for NWS, takes this away from C9 but more importantly, prevents C9 from blind picking Zed into him. Traditionally Zilean does very well against assassins due to being able to nullify their burst with his ultimate. Not too much more to be said, theres a good reason he has such a high ban rate with how much team fight presence he has and early game pressure he applies to lanes.
C9 1st and 2nd Pick Nidalee + Corki: With three of Balls champs |
the levy was, they wanted the benefit of input tax credit to stay. "Our margins were already constricted. Without input tax credit, it will become more expensive to run the restaurant. Overall, though, it is a good move for consumers," said Zorawar Kalra, founder and managing director of Massive Restaurants that runs popular outlets Masala Library, Farzi Café and Pa Pa Ya."Denying the input tax credit benefit goes against the very grain of GST and will push up costs by 10 per cent which will be added to the menu price. So, effectively the consumer will get a marginal benefit and not a big relief," Rahul Singh, National Restaurant Association of India vice-president and CEO of The Beer Café, said.The President Barack Obama administration is informing a federal judge that if it's forced to disclose a secret court opinion about the government illegally spying on Americans, the likely result could be "exceptionally grave and serious damage to the national security."
The statement came in response to a lawsuit demanding the administration disclose a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion issued as early as last year. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) was briefed on the opinion as a member of the Intelligence Committee and was authorized last year to reveal that the surveillance had "circumvented the spirit of the law" and was "unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco sought the ruling as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. The government rejected the request. The digital rights group sued in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
In response, the government said that disclosure of the secret opinion should be barred because it "implicates classified intelligence sources and methods." (.pdf)
Jacqueline Coleman Snead, a senior Justice Department counsel, added Monday that the EFF "cannot contend otherwise."
Specifically, the EFF wants the government to make public a secret court ruling that found the feds had broken a 2008 wiretapping law, known as the FISA Amendments Act, that had legalized President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program that was implemented immediately after the 2001 terror attacks.
The public learned of the ruling only because of Wyden's authorized statements about it last year.
The FISA Amendments Act allows the government to conduct widespread e-mail and phone surveillance inside the United States, without probable-cause warrants, targeting people or groups "reasonably believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information." In other words, the government can collect e-mails and phone calls in the United States so long as the target is a suspected terrorist group overseas. If the government collects e-mails that are sent by people believed to be American, the person's identity is supposed to be given a pseudonym or "minimized."
The government is required to get approval from a secret court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to conduct such surveillance. It's opinions are secret, and the government wants to keep them that way.
That's because the FISA Amendments Act generally requires the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to rubber-stamp terror-related electronic surveillance requests. The government does not have to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the secret court rejects the surveillance application.
Hat Tip: Mike ScarcellaThe Republican-controlled Minnesota House has passed a proposal that would block local minimum wage measures and the paid sick leave ordinances set to go into effect this summer in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The vote followed a demonstration and sharp words between lawmakers over local control, and workers' rights versus business needs.
The so-called pre-emption measure would bar cities from setting their own labor regulations. That's been a hot-button issue, particularly in Minneapolis, where advocates have been pushing the city to set a new $15-an-hour minimum wage, higher than the state's standard.
After hours of debate, the measure passed 76-53 on a mostly party-line vote.
Next, a similar measure is set to be considered in the state Senate.
Bill author Rep. Pat Garofalo, a Republican from Farmington, said he expected a veto by Gov. Mark Dayton of the bill as is, but that he hoped a compromise with the Senate could add better wage enforcement or other measures that would make statewide labor standards palatable for both Democratic legislators and Dayton.
"We want to catch those bad guys, and make sure that the businesses playing by the rules don't get punished," Garofalo said. "We also want to have a thoughtful conversation about what it is people are trying to accomplish here with these ordinances."
Republican Rep. Jim Nash of Waconia said city-by-city variation in labor law threatened the very jobs that worker advocates were trying to improve.
"I have a friend that owns restaurants in multiple places and they have employees that go back and forth. The back office paperwork is a nightmare," Nash said.
Opponents of the bill said efforts to improve working conditions, like requiring paid sick leave, improves the lives of working people, even if it's done in a piecemeal, city-by-city way.
"Advocates for this bill keep saying that it'll create a patchwork quilt of different regulations all over the state," said Rod Adams of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change. "But as we know, the lives of workers of color are just a patchwork quilt, working two to three jobs to just patch together income, to just make ends meet."
Democrats on the House floor were particularly critical of the part of the bill that makes it retroactive to January 2016, before Minneapolis and St. Paul approved the sick time ordinances for all employees in the two cities. The mandates are due to go into effect in July.
Rep. Erin Maye Quade said pre-emption would affect thousands of Minnesotans, most of whom are people of color.
"We can't keep talking about racial disparities, act like we're confused about why it happens, do this, and then come back later, and say we should really do something," the Apple Valley Democrat said.
But Republicans insisted it wasn't fair for the two cities to set the standard for every other community. Rep. Dave Baker owns a hotel and restaurant in Willmar.
"We can't just allow certain cities, our two largest cities in the state, to do what they think is right for their communities, because it so much affects our communities as well," Baker said.
DFLers also offered a range of amendments to the bill, such as requiring statewide sick leave, a 21-day notice for hourly work schedules, and better protection for worker's pay. They even offered a tongue-in-cheek idea to abolish city governments and turn all authority over to the state. But no action was taken on the amendments.Most parents tell me that their elementary school child has 20 to 25 minutes to enter the school cafeteria, search for her lunchbox buried in a portable tub, find a place to sit, open all the containers, eat (oh, right, eat), then clean and pack up before the bell rings. In an effort to ensure that their kids eat anything at all, well-meaning parents pack lunchboxes filled to the brim with typically, 7 to 8 different options!
Picture this: Your little first grader searches for spot in a sea of tables, newly found lunchbox in hand. She squeezes in between her best friends, climbing up onto the metal bench, feet dangling, with her little elbows resting on the much too high table top, just below her chin. Most school cafeterias provide the same size seating for the entire school, whether the kids are 3 feet tall or towering 5th graders, about to move on to middle school. Ever try to eat a meal on a narrow bench, your feet dangling and no back-rest? It’s not easy. By the time your child gets the plastic bags opened, the juice box straw unwrapped and poked hard enough into the box that it squirts her in the face, all while holding up her other hand to signal the teacher “Can you please open this lid?” well, another 5 minutes have passed by. Meanwhile, she’s excited to get out to recess, now just 15 minutes away.
As a feeding therapist, I visit lots of school cafeterias and have learned that parents and teachers have one priority: Getting kids to eat a nutritious lunch. In contrast, kids have this priority: Talking to their friends. How then, does a parent pack a lunch, especially for a picky eater or perhaps a child with special needs, that still allows their child some much needed “down time” to chat with friends yet fill their bellies quickly and nutritiously? Here are 3 strategies to do just that:
Send one easy open container plus a drink. I recommend EasyLunchboxes® BPA-free system, because the lid is easy for little fingers to pop off and instantly reveal 3 to 4 yummy choices. Another favorite is the Yumbox®, where the single tray is divided into ½ cup portions designed for the key food groups: Fruit, Veggies, Grains, Protein and Dairy. Both options are quick to open and not as overwhelming as a lunchbox filled to the brim with individual plastic bags, containers and/or drippy fruit cups with tricky foil lids Pack “GRAB and GAB” food. Cut fresh fruit, veggies, sandwiches, cheese, etc. into small enough pieces that kids can grab a piece without gazing down and continue to gab with their friend across the table. My favorite speedy gadget is FunBites® which instantly creates grab and gab bites, yet has no sharp edges. It’s a fun way to get kids in the kitchen making their own lunch the night before – once again, get them involved and they are more likely to eat it later. For some kids, cutting a sandwich into a larger, fun shape like a dinosaur, keeps the conversation and the eating on the same track. But, for those kids who tend to just eat a sandwich and skip the other items, try cutting the sandwich into small pieces with a FunBite® so the child alternates “grabbing” a variety of foods, much like a mini-smorgasbord. Remember, you don’t need to send a whole sandwich when sending half leaves room in little bellies for other key food groups. Include a power- packed smoothie that you made the night before. Freeze it directly in the cup (with a lid, of course) and be sure to include a wide straw. By the time your child opens her lunch, the smoothie will be the perfect consistency, plus it helped to keep the lunch cold. For elementary school age kids, refillable pouches are another option for healthy smoothie or puree blends. One of my favorites is the adorable 4.5 oz. Squooshi™, which is freezer and dishwasher safe and free of all the “bad-for-yous” like BPA, lead and phthalate. Recipes for kids of all ages can be found on the Squooshi website. Another terrific option is to fill a Sili Squeeze with Eeeze™ food pouch and freeze it with the cap on. Please note that the manufacturer does not recommend storing the Sili Squeeze™ in the freezer for an extended periods of time, but states on their website that “Sili Squeeze™ is the perfect lunch box addition to keep your child’s lunch cool and will be perfectly defrosted for lunch time!”
One elementary school that I visited was graciously flexible to help one little girl eat better. They provided a smaller table that fit her so that her feet could be on the floor (or try a box underneath little feet as a footrest). The table should be at sternum-height so your child can see her food and rest her arms for stability. Smaller tables also reduce cafeteria noise and foster social skills thanks to smaller groups of kids sitting together.
Here’s a picture of that sweet little girl. Note the easy “grab and gab” food in one (and only one) container. See the rest of the food on the table? That belongs to the two other kids seated across from her.
Tell me about your kids’ cafeterias – the good, the bad and the delicious! What can we do to help kids in school get more time and more options for a healthy lunch?
Melanie Potock, MA, CCC-SLP, treats children birth to teens who have difficulty eating. She is the author of Happy Mealtimes with Happy Kids and the producer of the award-winning kids’ CD Dancing in the Kitchen: Songs that Celebrate the Joy of Food! Melanie’s two-day course on pediatric feeding is offered for ASHA CEUs and includes both her book and CD for each attendee. She can be reached at Melanie@mymunchbug.com.(Photo: Huxley_slides)
A recent analysis of more than 100 industry documents conducted by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a Washington, DC-based advocacy group, has revealed that the oil industry knew of the risks its business posed to the global climate decades before originally suspected.
It has also long been assumed that, in its efforts to deceive investors and the public about the negative impact its business has on the environment, Big Oil borrowed Big Tobacco’s so-called tactical “playbook.” But these documents indicate that infamous playbook appears to have actually originated within the oil industry itself.
If that is true, it would be highly significant — and damning for Big Oil — because the tactics used by the tobacco industry to downplay the connection between smoking and cancer were eventually deemed to have violated federal racketeering laws by a federal court. The ruling dashed efforts by Big Tobacco to find legal cover under the First Amendment, which just happens to be the same strategy that ExxonMobil and its GOP allies are currently using to defend the company against allegations of fraud. If the playbook was in fact created by the oil and gas industry and then later used by ExxonMobil, it ruins the company’s argument of plausible deniability, making it highly likely that the company violated federal law.
This latest development is a major blow to Big Oil, which has been trying to rebuff comparisons to the tobacco industry. It also comes as a group of state attorneys general are pursuing an investigation into possible fraud committed by ExxonMobil. The probe, which could ultimately extend to include other oil and gas companies, was launched in November by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who has since been joined by 16 other state AGs in a historic national coalition seeking to find out if America’s largest oil company intentionally hid critical climate-related information about their future business from investors and the public.
Environmentalists and corporate accountability advocates have cheered the investigation, contending that ExxonMobil has engaged in a decades-long campaign of climate denial and deception, ultimately delaying action on climate change and putting the planet at risk.
“We began with three simple, related questions,” says Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL, about the recently analyzed documents, which are housed at the tobacco industry document archive at the University of California, San Francisco medical center. “What did they know? When did they know it? And what did they do about it? What we found is that they knew a great deal, and they knew it much earlier and with greater certainty than anyone has recognized or that the industry has admitted.”
Sowing Seeds of Doubt About Climate Science
“Big Oil created the organized apparatus of doubt,” Muffett said. “It used the same playbook of misinformation, obfuscation and research laundered through front groups to attack science and sow uncertainty on lead, on smog, and in the early debates on climate change. Big Tobacco used and refined that playbook for decades in its fight to keep us smoking — just as Big Oil is using it now, again, to keep us burning fossil fuels.” To wit: Exxon’s own Corporate Citizenship Report from last year revealed that the company is still funding climate denial groups.
The documents suggest that the tactics in question were developed by the Smoke and Fumes Committee, a group launched 70 years ago by the American Petroleum Institute, the national trade association that represents the US fossil fuel industry, to study oil industry pollution and present its own spin to the public. If that is the case, it appears those same tactics were likely co-opted by the tobacco industry, which was later found guilty of committing fraud following a racketeering lawsuit filed in 1999 by the Department of Justice. The documents reveals that the deceptive actions taken by the oil industry so many decades ago prevented the possibility of early action on climate change — action that may have prevented potentially millions of climate-related deaths across the globe.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. The World Health Organization estimates that around 6 million people worldwide die from tobacco-related illnesses. Between 2030 and 2050, WHO estimates that climate change will cause approximately 250,000 deaths per year, from heat stress, malnutrition, malaria and diarrhea. That number does not include the deaths caused by climate-related natural disasters, which have more than tripled since the 1960s, resulting in over 60,000 deaths each year, mainly in developing countries.
Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University is also the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller Sr., founder of the American oil giant Standard Oil Company, out of which ExxonMobil was born. Earlier this year, Goodwin decided to divest her shares of ExxonMobil stock and use the proceeds to fight climate change and climate denial. In an interview with AlterNet, she contrasted the impact of tobacco and fossil fuel:
In the large picture … tobacco and fossil fuel emissions are quite different. Tobacco kills people one by one. Climate change will increasingly cause events like hurricanes that will destroy large swathes of property, kill numbers of people, make many homeless. While it can be argued that smoking tobacco is a matter of individual choice, the production and use of fossil fuels is more obviously a social issue. In the long run, producers of fossil fuels will have to lose. The only question is how much the people and ecologies of the world will lose before our economies cease to make the situation worse.
UN: Climate Change Is “Irreversible”
While the climate situation can certainly become worse, the actions of ExxonMobil and Big Oil have helped to put the planet on what many scientists are now saying is an unstoppable path. In 2014, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offered a grim assessment: “Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts.” That has left environmentalists not only angry at the oil industry, but also wondering how the narrative might have been different had the industry been honest and open about its early findings.
“It’s increasingly clear that the fossil fuel industry knew a lot more about the causes of climate change — and its effects — much earlier than anyone else,” said Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, about CIEL’s findings. “It pains me to think how much better shape the planet and vulnerable communities could be in if the fossil fuel industry had taken positive action based on this knowledge instead of trying to profit from it.”
Climate activist Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, has been a long-time critic of the oil and gas industry. “The ongoing revelations about the depth of oil industry research into — and obfuscation of — the greatest crisis humans have ever faced are hard to read; thanks to them, we wasted vital time,” he said in a press statement.
In a CIEL video, Muffett explains how “the world’s most powerful industry used science, communications and consumer psychology to shape the public debate over climate change,” noting “it begins earlier, decades earlier than anyone recognized.” He points out that in 1968, API commissioned a report titled “Sources, Abundance, and Fate of Gaseous Atmospheric Pollutants,” which revealed rising levels of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by the combustion of fossil fuel, in the atmosphere. The report’s authors, Elmer Robinson and R.C. Robbins of the Stanford Research Institute, warned of significant climate risks posed by the continued use of fossil fuel. “If the earth’s temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans, and an increase in photosynthesis,” they wrote, adding, “there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.”
Notably, Muffett said, is the fact that the report’s authors “recognized that the most important remaining uncertainties were technological: How would we respond and how would we modify our technology to reduce emissions?” Now, nearly half a century later, the question becomes: Why did the oil industry hide this information from the public? Of course, we know the answer to that question: Profits. Instead of responding responsibly to the dire warnings that came with this information by moving the nation’s energy portfolio and infrastructure to a low-carbon future, the oil industry kept on drilling, kept businesses and consumers burning their primary retail products, which continued to pollute the environment and damage the Earth’s climate.
Seventy Years of Denial and Deception
The question for Schneiderman and his fellow state attorneys general is, did ExxonMobil, and possibly other oil companies, intentionally mislead investors, consumer and the public, hiding the damning scientific evidence that their own industry paid to discover? With CIEL’s analysis of industry documents, it appears that Big Oil may be even guiltier than originally suspected, as the group traced the origins of the 1968 API report to a meeting of oil and gas industry executives in Los Angeles more than two decades earlier, in 1946.
That was the year API established the Smoke and Fumes Committee. “Faced with growing public concern about air pollution,” Muffett said, “the industry embarked on what would become a well-funded, carefully coordinated, multi-decade enterprise of funding scientific research and using that research to promote public skepticism of environmental regulations the industry considered hasty, costly and potentially unnecessary.”
One of the tactics used by the oil industry was to delay any climate action that might harm its business by sowing seeds of doubt. “The worst thing that can happen, in many instances, is the hasty passage of a law or laws for the control of a given air pollution situation,” wrote Vance Jenkins, executive secretary of the Smoke and Fumes Committee, in a 1954 trade journal article about smog pollution.
The ties between the oil and tobacco industries run deep. In the 1950s, Monroe J. Rathbone, the president and director of Standard Oil, sat on American Cancer Society’s committee on smoking and public policy. In 1968, Esso Research and Engineering Co., an affiliate of Standard Oil, filed a patent claim for a new type of cigarette filter, made out of polypropylene, a thermoplastic polymer that was first synthesized by Phillips Petroleum, an American Oil Company. In 1979, R.G Baker, the chair of British American Tobacco, the second largest tobacco company in the world, also sat on the board of Exxon, the world’s biggest publicly traded oil company. In the 1970s, R.J. Reynolds, America’s second-largest tobacco company, diversified into the energy business, acquiring American Independent Oil Company, Burmah Oil and Gas Company and Burmah Oil Development, Inc.
In a CIEL video, Muffett explains the key events that reveal the oil industry didn’t just borrow the tobacco industry’s playbook, but was actually behind behind it all along:
As evidence mounts of the oil industry’s decades-long campaign of climate deception and denial, Exxon and its allies assure us that oil is not the new tobacco. The 14 million documents at the Tobacco Archives prove Exxon right: Oil is not the new tobacco. But six decades ago, tobacco was the new oil. In December 1953, tobacco executives met in a New York hotel room to hatch a plan to confront the rising tide of science linking smoking with cancer. To help craft that plan, tobacco turned to PR firm Hill and Knowlton. Hill and Knowlton, in turn, drew on its long expertise supporting the oil industry. Richard Darrow, the principal architect of tobacco’s strategy, also represented Hill and Knowlton’s biggest oil company clients.
In the years that followed, the tobacco conspirators looked repeatedly to oil industry campaigns on smog, lead and other air pollutants for models, for resources and for people. They turned to Stanford Research Institute, a key player in the oil industry’s “Smoke and Fumes” effort to develop a suitcase-sized testing kit that would sample smoke without attracting attention. They turned to Truesdail Laboratories, which in 1958 was doing the earliest documented climate research for the American Petroleum Institute, and to a former Standard Oil executive who recommended an array of scientists for the tobacco industry’s scientific advisory board, nearly all with proven links to the oil industry and many of whom would go on to work for tobacco.
Suffice it to say, CIEL’s analysis has uncovered the deep and complex relationship between the oil and tobacco industries that goes back many decades, and continues to this day. From advertising campaigns and marketing tactics to PR firms and scientists, the two industries have shared a wealth of information, strategies and human resources. The relationship was formed on mutual dependence, which consistently placed profits above public and environmental health. As Muffett points out, “For Big Tobacco, gas stations were vital retail outlets. For Big Oil, cigarettes were their biggest retail product after gasoline.”
“These documents are the tip of an evidentiary iceberg that demands further investigation,” said Muffett. “Oil companies had an early opportunity to acknowledge climate science and climate risks, and to enable consumers to make informed choices. They chose a different path. The public deserves to know why.”
The Investigation Continues
ExxonMobil and its allies on Capitol Hill — a coterie of GOP legislators who have received political contributions from the oil industry — have attempted to stop the AGs’ fraud probe by claiming the investigation is a violation of the company’s First Amendment rights.
In June, ExxonMobil filed a complaint in federal district court in Fort Worth, Texas, against Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who had subpoenaed the company under consumer and securities fraud statutes, in an effort to secure company records going back 40 years. In its lawsuit, which is seeking an injunction to stop Healey’s probe, ExxonMobil said Healey’s investigation is “nothing more than a weak pretext for an unlawful exercise of government power to further political objectives,” adding that the attorney general is “abusing the power of government [and] … has deprived and will continue to deprive ExxonMobil of its rights under the United States Constitution.”
Unfortunately for ExxonMobil, the First Amendment claim has already been discredited. In United States vs Philip Morris Inc., a federal appeals court found that the First Amendment does not protect fraudulent statements. Likewise, Healey’s office has dismissed ExxonMobil’s claims.
“For many months, ExxonMobil has engaged in an unprecedented effort to limit the ability of state attorneys general to investigate fraud and unfair business practices,” said Cyndi Roy Gonzalez, Healey’s communications director.
“Our investigation is based not on speculation but on inconsistencies about climate change in Exxon documents which have been made public,” Gonzalez said, and echoing the tobacco lawsuit, added that “the First Amendment does not protect false and misleading statements in the marketplace. Exxon’s assertion that we cannot investigate it because the company has not engaged in business here in Massachusetts is completely preposterous.”
However, a similar battle between ExxonMobil and US Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker ended in a ceasefire, as Walker agreed to withdraw a similar subpoena in exchange for ExxonMobil’s withdrawal of its lawsuit against him. Walker’s withdrawal hasn’t been viewed as a setback for the ongoing probe, as legal experts contend that the primary battlefields will be Massachusetts and New York. So far, Exxon is cooperating with New York’s investigation and has already relinquished more than 700,000 pages of documents to Schneiderman’s office.
But 100 or so recently analyzed documents may reveal the true origin of Big Tobacco’s infamous playbook.
Watch CIEL’s “Smoke and Fumes” videos to learn more about its analysis of those documents:About
If you ended up here from our YouTube channel, you’re probably already pretty familiar with us, but for those who aren’t here’s an introduction:
We’re two friends, Michael and Bryan, and for the past three years we’ve been filming our adventures inside of abandoned buildings and posting them on our YouTube channel. When we started out, we thought maybe there would be a few other people out there who found abandoned places as interesting as we did. Little did we know that we would eventually gain an audience of hundreds of thousands, with our videos being viewed over 23 million times. As we continued exploring, our appreciation for abandoned buildings grew and grew. We’ve always tried to transfer this awe and inspiration we’ve felt to our audience, and I think we’ve been successful, but we want to do more. We can only convey so much in our YouTube videos in their current form and there is so much more to the topic of urban exploration. It’s time for us to do something bigger.
To many, abandoned buildings are merely an eyesore, but for some, they are the ultimate attraction. Urban explorers risk bodily harm and getting arrested just to get a glimpse inside these places, but why? Forbidden Explorers will be a five part documentary series that seeks out some of the various answers to this question.
Each episode will be 45 minutes to an hour long and focus on a different region of the United States. Our goal is to intertwine three different types of storytelling- First, the history. We want to tell the backstory of each location through interviews, archival footage, and our own research. Next, there’s the story of the actual explorations we’ll be undertaking. This element will focus on the actual experience of urban exploration, similar to what you can find on our YouTube channel today. The main difference is that it will be shot and edited in a much more story-centric manner. You’ll be right there with us for all the challenges and obstacles we’ll face, but also the payoffs, and sometimes the busts. We won’t be going into these places alone however. In each episode we’ll be joined by a renowned local explorer who can provide their personal insights into the locations as well as the culture of urban exploration as a whole. Personal philosophies and more societal issues such as historical preservation will also be investigated.
We believe that a mixture of these three elements will create a compelling show that captures just why us “urban explorers” are so passionate about abandoned places. When completed, the series will premiere on our YouTube channel, with one new episode being released each week. Yes, the project will be free to watch and you don’t actually have to contribute to the Kickstarter campaign to see it. We’re hoping the pure desire in your heart to see this become a reality will convince you to donate, but if it’s not we’ve come up with plenty of enticing rewards as well! These include things such as credits, merch, early access, 4k digital downloads, behind the scenes, and much more! You can also check out our stretch goals below, which include things like extra episodes and extra crew members. And if you’re interested in seeing our proposed budget and timeline, you can find that below as well.
$30,000 is the minimum we need to hire one crew member and cover travel and production costs for 5 episodes of Forbidden Explorers.
is the minimum we need to hire one crew member and cover travel and production costs for 5 episodes of Forbidden Explorers. $40,000 will allow us to hire an additional crew member and make other purchases to greatly improve the show's production quality.
will allow us to hire an additional crew member and make other purchases to greatly improve the show's production quality. At $50,000 we will produce 1 additional episode for a total of 6.
This is a general idea of our timeline and is not meant to be a guarantee.
Post production is the area that we are most unsure about, so take "early November premiere" with a grain of salt. Also the reward fulfillment period is so large because of the wide variety of rewards available. Things such as T-shirts and posters will come earliest, but certain rewards obviously cannot be fulfilled until the premiere such as credits and digital downloads.
This outline of our budget is based on our fundraising goal of $30,000, but it should scale in a mostly uniform manner should we exceed it.Two thusand years ago, Norway produced iron in significant quantities. Much of it was exported both southward and northward from Trøndelag in central Norway.
Arne Espelund, a professor emeritus and a mining engineer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), isn't sure exactly when his interest in iron began, but the first time he tried making iron was as a student teacher with an eighth grade in 1977.
It didn't work.
Making iron is not that easy, and something had gone awry for the eighth graders out on the moor near Trondheim. But they had a great experience and asked lots of questions.
It took a few years, but Espelund finally succeeded with another class at Skogn middle school in Levanger municipality.
"The students were thrilled," says Espelund, who has long tried to bring this part of Norway's history to life.
Espelund and his students adopted the iron-making method that Ole Evenstad had described in 1782. But this was by no means the first method devised.
Two older methods using the bloomery technique have been used, but producing good iron by this "direct" method is an advanced process that requires the right temperature and oxygen supply, sometimes involving multiple steps.
Iron production started about 3500 years ago in Asia Minor. In Norway, people have been producing iron for at least 2300 years.
Interdisciplinary approach Even though Espelund is trained as a mining engineer, he works across multiple disciplines. Studying iron production through the ages has been one of his main interests, although he is not a trained archaeologist.
Espelund finds that an interdisciplinary approach is essential to gain a holistic understanding of a subject. He does not hesitate to speak out when he disagrees with some of the archaeological work being carried out at a number of institutions, and is not shy about sharing his own assertions about other researchers' results.
"Archaeology is descriptive," says Espelund, and he thinks that many archaeologists are content to describe how something looks, but without going into depth on how it worked, and without putting the results into a natural scientific context.
But, he says, the context is important and can be figured out. For example, charcoal remnants used in the production process can be analysed using the C14 method to determine their age.
As a mining engineer, he readily uses chemical analysis to explain how our ancestors produced malleable and cast iron.
Finding slag heaps Ore for iron production was gathered in marshes in the springtime, and smelting took place in autumn. After the iron was reduced, slag remained. Around 400 places in Trøndelag alone show traces of early iron production.
The conditions for iron production were ideal in Trøndelag and in Jämtland province in Sweden, with widespread access to both pine trees and ore.
"Today it's the slag heaps we find first," says Espelund. Slag didn't have much value then, and it doesn't now either, except as fill for road surfaces and as a tourist attraction.
Espelund has studied small pieces of iron slag from large slag heaps in Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Austria and Catalonia, and he has found similarities.
The slag heaps found all around Norway testify to significant production. A farm would use one to two kilos of iron per year until the Middle Ages -- not much compared to the 450 kilos of iron we use annually now, but still impressive. Norway is ideal for examining this production.
"No other country has so many well-preserved furnaces from several periods," Espelund says.
The reason is that Norway is a sparsely populated country, and many of the production sites were situated by marshes far from most people. In Denmark, on the other hand, most sites have been ploughed up and traces of iron production have disappeared.
Large scale production In 1982, Espelund was part of the research team that discovered the 2000-year-old iron production facility at Heglesvollen in Levanger in Nord-Trøndelag. Here they found four ovens and dug out one of them.
The researchers found a total of 96 tonnes of slag, which was spread equally between the four furnaces. This suggests that the furnaces operated simultaneously, but in different stages of the production process.
It is quite common to find four ovens beside each other. For some reason, not yet understood, there is always water in front of the ovens.
"We estimate that teams of about 10 people worked together," says Espelund. "We are talking about a well-planned production process and an industrial enterprise with periodic, batch operation of all the furnaces."
Nothing indicates that any religious or other rituals were part of the process, or links it to women or children.
The evidence points to a rational, industrial production of iron, with the focus being on obtaining the best possible metal for tools and weapons through hard work.
The best iron Those involved in iron making must have been highly specialized workers who were taken out of food production and other useful work to produce iron in the summer months. The iron was important, and it was also of high quality.
"A lot of this iron contains about 0.2 percent carbon. That's on par with the best iron a blacksmith can get," says Espelund.
Iron with a low carbon content is malleable, without becoming brittle. However, various kinds of iron were produced depending on the type of application it was used for. How did these people of yore manage to make such good iron? Espelund has studied this for half of his life, but so far he doesn't quite know how they pulled it off. No one knows for sure.
Espelund believes that this iron making method can be compared with the technique used in the Roman Empire -- and this in a region with no written language or imposing buildings.
This first technology was in use in Norway for about 900 years, from around 300 BCE to 600 CE. The production was so high that some 40 tonnes of iron per year were produced in Trøndelag around the year 200 CE. Much of the iron was probably exported south to the European continent, where phosphorus-free welding steel was sought after.
Around the year 600 CE the entire production stopped and lay fallow for several years.
Crash "I think the market collapsed," says Espelund. The crash coincides with pestilence and famine in Europe.
Traditional knowledge can disappear after only a few generations, and the art of iron making was transferred through doing it, not through the written word. Soon Norwegians no longer knew how iron was made.
"They had to start all over again," says Espelund.
The ancient methods of production disappeared, but a new one was developed, until the next crash occurred with the Black |
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movie.
Details are currently scant and loads of projects never ultimately get filmed, but according to Tsujimoto, the Monster Hunter movie is progressing through development.
Monster Hunter exhibitions have been shown at Universal Studios Japan, and the games do seem like they could work as a feature film.
No idea as to when we can expect this, but I do know that if the movie ever gets made, we can look forward to loads of big swords and even bigger monsters.The Salvation Army’s State of the Nation is a hugely important report detailing the progress made by the Government across our social sectors in the year.
1 NEWS Columnist Dita DeBoni Source: 1 NEWS
It’s not just hugely important though – it’s also bloody long – over 60 pages of fine print, statistics and analysis.
I decided this year it might be easier to read Deputy Prime Minister Bill English’s take on the SOTN report. I thought not only does he know of what he speaks, but at just a few lines long, his thoughts would be highly snackable.
But there were some sharp differences between Mr English’s interpretation and the report itself, and the main point made by the Sallies – that Government departments are fudging figures to make themselves look better, was barely even acknowledged by the minister.
I thought I would do a bit of cross-referencing, starting with Mr English’s opening gambit that “overall, the Salvation Army’s State of the Nation shows the Government is making good progress in key areas”.
That is, shall we say, a rather rosy gloss to put on the substance of this report.
Under the section called ‘Our Children’, we read that while teen pregnancy and infant mortality rates are down, which is good, the data around child poverty, at-risk kids, children and violence and educational achievement are not good enough to point to a definite move in the right direction.
In ‘Crime and Punishment’, overall and violent crime are down, although again, changes on how statistics are reported make comparisons difficult. On the flipside, a record high number of prisoners and a “sharp deterioration” in 12-month recidivism rates point to less reason for optimism.
In ‘Work and Income’, “modest if unspectacular job growth has continued”, income inequality hasn’t improved or worsened, and small real increases in incomes were recorded.
Yay us.
But there’s been no change in either unemployment or ‘living costs and food’ poverty, which affect those at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum much more keenly.
In terms of ‘Social Hazards’, results show the overall consumption of alcohol is dropping – considered a positive. Meanwhile, there were mixed results on illicit drug taking and no change in gambling.
In ‘Housing’, the results were definitely lukewarm, with an acknowledgement that more house building was happening, but housing affordability and household and housing-related debt were in decline.
There are some areas where undeniable achievements have been made, but there again, the top-line boasts don’t tell the whole story.
For example, Mr English says “the number of children living on benefits has fallen to the lowest level since at least 1998”. But as child poverty hasn’t improved, and we know the benefit regime is changing and constricting, this statistic may not mean much for ‘Our Children’.
Mr English says more young people are getting NCEA level 2, which is another good thing. But the gap in University Entrance achievement has widened, and “consequently, fewer students gained UE and entry into highly ranked university courses… in this sense, UE can be seen as a passport to social mobility”.
Mr English also says more consents for new dwellings were issued in Auckland in 2015 than in the previous 10 years. But regardless, the overall deficit in the supply of housing has continued to widen. Meanwhile, household debt is now almost reached a level last seen just before the GFC of 2008, according to report authors.
So, a more honest appraisal would be that in certain key areas that the government itself, at one stage, considered important, such as child poverty, there’s been little change if not a worsening of conditions.
The Report actually says “our children’s social progress has stalled”, which doesn’t sound like too much of a congratulatory slap on the back to me.YouTube is a juggernaut. They are, without question, the video sharing platform for content creators. However, many top creators are finding huge drops in views and, in turn, are receiving less money.
Some YouTubers have started switching distributors, such as Vidme or Vimeo, but find those platforms do not have the massive install base and monetization capabilities YouTube has. What about other types of content such as written work or music? For many creators, it can feel like throwing a published work into an ocean full of other content, all looking to get to the surface.
Enter LBRY (pronounced “library”), a Manchester, NH-based startup looking to change the way digital content creators share their work. LBRY sets itself apart from other distribution platforms by utilizing blockchain technology.
The LBRY protocol can be downloaded onto a user’s Internet browser. Then, the user can look through LBRY’s collection of content. The content itself can be purchased for download through the company’s own cryptocurrency, LBRY Credits. The software is also open source, where any user can create and input their own APIs. The open source community has grown to include over 100 contributors to the project.
The company is the brainchild of Jeremy Kauffman, Josh Finer, Jack Robison, and Jimmy Kiselak. Kauffman was an early adopter of Bitcoin back in 2013, after a friend introduced him to the cryptocurrency. After becoming more entrenched in the culture surrounding it, Kauffman became more interested in some of the other aspects of cryptocurrency.
Jeremy Kauffman, Co-Founder and CEO of LBRY
“I was reading a conversation between [Alphabet Executive Chairman] Eric Schmidt and Julian Assange about the applications of Bitcoin to information distribution,” Kauffman said. “What made me interested in learning more about it was the fact that it was decentralized. I began asking myself ‘What other things can be decentralized?’”
While the protocol works for any kind of media or digital content, the current focus of LBRY is on video.
“At first, we didn’t realize how frustrated YouTubers were frustrated with the current system,” the CEO said. “We also had no idea how bad it was becoming. With LBRY, we want to fix these problems.”
“Taking on a giant like YouTube may seem overambitious, but with decentralized technology, there is potential to shake things up, ” Kauffman adds.
While the company is still scaling, several popular YouTubers have become clients of the company, including Casually Explained.
Last summer, LBRY had a booth set up at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, where they showcased the video streaming quality and how their blockchain-inspired technology for the cryptocurrency crowd.
“We were able to stream the first Hollywood film via blockchain,” he said. “A lot of the festival goers were stopping in their tracks to see what we were doing.”
Video streaming is not the only form of content LBRY can distribute; the company supports content of all types, including pictures, written work, and music.
“We even host our own content. I have experience putting some white text on an image and creating memes,” Kauffman said with a laugh. “It’s not exactly high-quality content, but we are users of our own protocol.”
Last month, LBRY entered an open beta, and any first-time user can download the protocol and receive LBRY credits of their own.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain is no longer just an underground movement. Many entrepreneurs and investors in the Boston tech scene are taking a closer look at it, and what it could possibly do for the future.
For digital content creators, knowing there is a startup like LBRY utilizing this type of technology is eye-opening. On top of being part of a new and developing tech sector, LBRY could potentially spearhead a new way to distributing content.
Colin Barry is a contributor to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash.
Images courtesy of LBRYRoth BL, Gibbons S, Arunotayanun W, Huang XP, Setola V, et al. (2018) version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? Correction: The Ketamine Analogue Methoxetamine and 3- and 4-Methoxy Analogues of Phencyclidine Are High Affinity and Selective Ligands for the Glutamate NMDA Receptor. PLOS ONE 13(3): e0194984. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194984 View correction
Abstract In this paper we determined the pharmacological profiles of novel ketamine and phencyclidine analogues currently used as ‘designer drugs’ and compared them to the parent substances via the resources of the National Institute of Mental Health Psychoactive Drug Screening Program. The ketamine analogues methoxetamine ((RS)-2-(ethylamino)-2-(3-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexanone) and 3-MeO-PCE (N-ethyl-1-(3-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexanamine) and the 3- and 4-methoxy analogues of phencyclidine, (1-[1-(3-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexyl]piperidine and 1-[1-(4-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexyl]piperidine), were all high affinity ligands for the PCP-site on the glutamate NMDA receptor. In addition methoxetamine and PCP and its analogues displayed appreciable affinities for the serotonin transporter, whilst the PCP analogues exhibited high affinities for sigma receptors. Antagonism of the NMDA receptor is thought to be the key pharmacological feature underlying the actions of dissociative anaesthetics. The novel ketamine and PCP analogues had significant affinities for the NMDA receptor in radioligand binding assays, which may explain their psychotomimetic effects in human users. Additional actions on other targets could be important for delineating side-effects.
Citation: Roth BL, Gibbons S, Arunotayanun W, Huang X-P, Setola V, Treble R, et al. (2013) The Ketamine Analogue Methoxetamine and 3- and 4-Methoxy Analogues of Phencyclidine Are High Affinity and Selective Ligands for the Glutamate NMDA Receptor. PLoS ONE 8(3): e59334. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059334 Editor: Kenji Hashimoto, Chiba University Center for Forensic Mental Health, Japan Received: October 18, 2012; Accepted: February 13, 2013; Published: March 19, 2013 Copyright: © 2013 Roth et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: Supported by the NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: One of the authors (RT) is employed by LGC Forensics though this does not alter the authors’ adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. No conflict of interest arises because of his employment. All other authors deny any potential conflict of interest relating to the contents of this paper.
Introduction The recent emergence of novel synthetic psychoactive drugs and their sale through internet sites has raised concerns about the potential harms associated with compounds which lack any formal toxicology profiles [1]–[2]. Among the novel psychoactive substances that have emerged in recent years are methoxetamine ((RS)-2-(ethylamino)-2-(3-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexanone), which is an analogue of ketamine ((RS)-2-(2-chlorophenyl)-2-(methylamino)cyclohexanone), methoxetamine’s close deoxy-analogue 3-methoxyeticyclidine (‘3-MeO-PCE’, N-ethyl-1-(3-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexanamine), and both the 3- and 4-methoxy analogues of phencyclidine, namely 1-[1-(3-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexyl]piperidine and 1-[1-(4-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexyl]piperidine (Figure 1). Methoxetamine, also known as ‘MXE’, ‘MXE-powder’, ‘METH-O’, and ‘MEXXY’ has gained some prominence in the United Kingdom as a legal alternative to ketamine [1] [3]. Phencyclidine (PCP) and the related compounds eticyclidine (PCE), rolicyclidine and tenocyclidine are controlled substances, but recently 3-methoxy-PCP, 4-methoxy-PCP, and 3-methoxy-PCE have emerged as legally available alternatives to PCP [4]. PPT PowerPoint slide
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larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 1. Chemical structures of ketamine, methoxetamine, phencyclidine and analogues. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059334.g001 Pharmacologically, ketamine’s main action is on glutamatergic transmission, the major excitatory neurotransmitter system in the brain. It is a non-competitive antagonist at one of the three glutamate receptor subtypes, the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor [5]. The NMDA receptor is also considered to be a key pharmacological target for phencyclidine [6]–[7]. Although there is little information available on the novel ketamine and PCP analogues, their behavioural effects in human subjects resemble those induced by ketamine and PCP, characteristic of dissociative anaesthetics [1]. The wanted effects include euphoria, empathy, dissociation from the physical body, hallucinations, but these may be accompanied by adverse side effects, dizziness, confusion, psychomotor agitation, and cognitive impairment. The clinically reported symptoms of acute toxicology of methoxetamine include a ‘dissociative catatonic’ state similar to that seen with ketamine, accompanied by sympathomimetic toxicity, with significant tachycardia and hypertension [8]–[9]. Reversible cerebellar toxicity has also been reported in three cases of methoxetamine overdose [10]. A major physical harm associated with chronic ketamine use is ulcerative cystitis, leading to significant damage to bladder function, and evidence of dependence [5], but it is not yet known whether methoxetamine will also prove to be associated with these adverse side effects. In the present study the resources of the National Institute of Mental Health Psychoactive Drug Screening Program (NIMH-PDSP) were used to obtain neurochemical profiles of methoxetamine and the novel PCP analogues and to compare these with those of ketamine and PCP and other reference compounds. The results confirmed that all of the novel analogues had significant affinity for NMDA receptors, and revealed other effects possibly mediated by monoamine transporter targets and sigma receptors.
Materials and Methods Compounds Samples of methoxetamine hydrochloride ((RS)-2-ethylamino-2-(3-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexanone HCl), 3-methoxyphencyclidine hydrochloride (3-MeO-PCP; 1-[1-(3-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexyl]piperidine HCl), and 3-methoxyeticyclidine hydrochloride (3-MeO-PCE; N-ethyl-1-(3-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexanamine HCl) were provided by LGC Standards (www.lgcstandards.com). Chemical identity of these materials was established using proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Mass Spectrometry and Infrared Spectroscopy. Purities were established using High Performance Liquid Chromatography with Diode Array Detection, and corrected for any residual water (by Karl Fischer) and residual solvent (by proton NMR). Certified purities were 98.3% (methoxetamine), 99.1% (3-methoxy-PCP) and 99.0% (3-methoxy-PCE)1. 4-Methoxyphencyclidine (4-MeO-PCP; 1-[1-(4-methoxyphenyl)cyclohexyl]piperidine) was purchased from a UK-based website (Mandala supplies). The chemical identity was confirmed by 1- and 2-dimensional Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, High-Resolution Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry (HRESIMS), Infrared Spectroscopy (IR) and elemental analysis which confirmed the presence of the free base form. The 1H-NMR and IR spectral were data were identical to those of synthetic 4-MeO-PCP from the literature [11]. Ketamine and phencyclidine were from the NIMH-PDSP. Chemical structures are shown in Figure 1. Profiling Assays Ki determinations, receptor binding profiles and functional assays were provided by the National Institute of Mental Health's Psychoactive Drug Screening Program essentially as previously described [12]–[16]; full methodological details are found on-line at: http://pdsp.med.unc.edu/UNC-CH%20Protocol%20Book.pdf In brief, compounds were initially screened in quadruplicate at a fixed concentration of 10 µM. Compounds which yielded inhibition of binding >50% were subjected to Ki determinations via 12-point concentration-response studies in triplicate as described [13] [17] and http://pdsp.med.unc.edu/UNC-CH%20Protocol%20Book.pdf. All compounds were screened against the targets listed in Table 1. PPT PowerPoint slide
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Discussion The results obtained in receptor screening reveal that the novel analogues share the profile of ketamine and PCP as ligands for the glutamate NMDA receptor. Although one previous study reported that a number of ketamine and PCP analogues, including 4-MeO-PCP, were active as NMDA receptor antagonists, using both GluN2A and GluN2B receptor subtypes, this study did not include methoxetamine or the 3-MeO-PCP and 3-MeO-PCE analogues [18]. The present screening approach cannot distinguish between NMDA receptor subtypes, but did reveal methoxetamine to have an affinity for the NMDA receptor comparable to or higher than the parent compound ketamine. The methoxy analogues of PCP also had appreciable affinities for the NMDA receptor, and 3-MeO-PCP in particular proved particularly active, with a Ki of 20 nM placing it among the most potent known NMDA antagonists (cf MK-801 Ki = 4.8 nM). Some indications of the relationship between chemical structure and function can be discerned. Thus, methoxetamine is ketamine without the 2-chloro but with a ‘3-methoxyl’ group on the phenyl ring and with an N-ethyl rather than N-methyl substituent, whilst 3-MeO-phencyclidine is phencyclidine with a 3-methoxyl substituent on the phenyl ring. The addition of the 3-methoxyl moiety to the phenyl ring thus appears to enhance the affinity for the serotonin transporter. A potential role for glutamatergic mechanisms in schizophrenia was first proposed based on the observation that psychotomimetic drugs such as PCP and ketamine induce psychotic symptoms and neurocognitive disturbances similar to those of schizophrenia by blocking glutamate actions at NMDA receptors [19], [20], [21] [5]. While previous reports have implicated the dopamine transporter (DAT) and sigma receptors in the behavioural pharmacology of ketamine and PCP analogues [22]–[23], the present findings do not support these suggestions. Nishimura et al [22] found only weak effects of ketamine isomers on rat brain DAT (Ki = 50–390 µM) while Chaudieu et al [23] reported submicromolar potency for PCP and some related analogues. However, in the present study no appreciable affinity was observed for any compound at a concentration of <10 µM for hDAT in binding assays. The poor correlation with the results of Chaudieu et al [23] likely reflects the fact that the substrate can bind to different sites on the transporter than the radioligands used for displacement assays. Although PCP, methoxetamine and the PCP analogues had appreciable affinity for the sigma receptors (Table 1), (Table 1), ketamine had no significant effect on either sigma 1 or sigma 2 receptors when tested at 10 µM, suggesting that while interactions with these receptors might contribute to the profile of some dissociative anaesthetics, this is not a common property which all share. Similarly, while methoxetamine, 4-MeO-PCP and 3-MeO-PCE displayed submicromolar affinities for the serotonin transporter (SERT), this is not a universal property of these drugs. Other publications have described a variety of other synthetic analogues of ketamine and PCP, so it is likely that many other chemical analogues of this family of drugs will be found to possess the characteristic dissociative anaesthetic properties of ketamine and PCP [18], [23], [24], [25] [26]. These results imply that abuse of these ketamine and PCP analogues could be associated with significant psychiatric sequelae. On the other hand, analogues of ketamine are also of pharmaceutical interest, following the discovery of the rapid antidepressant properties of ketamine [27].
Acknowledgments Production of analytical reference standards for 3-methoxy-PCP and 3-methoxy-PCE was funded by the UK’s Forensic Early Warning System and the authors thank the UK Home Office Centre for Applied Science and Technology for permission to use these materials in this study. The NIMH-PDSP is supported by Contract # HHSN-271-2008-00025-C.
Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: BLR LI. Performed the experiments: XPH VS. Analyzed the data: XPH VS. Wrote the paper: BLR SG WA XPH VS RT LI. Responsible for chemistry: WA SG RT.Prosecutors for Special Counsel Robert Mueller probed witnesses about the role The Podesta Group played in advancing Russian interests at the State Department under Hillary Clinton. The revelations come as Mr. Mueller and his team reportedly secured their first indictment, with arrests to come as early as Monday.
Sources with knowledge of the interviews told People’s Pundit Daily (PPD) witnesses, one a former employee at The Podesta Group, were peppered with questions surrounding their knowledge of the relationship between Tony Podesta and Paul Manafort, which began at least in 2011.
Tony Podesta is the brother of former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, who also came under fire for failing to disclose his ties to the Russian-funded Joule Unlimited before he went to work in the Obama Administration. The company gave him 75,000 shares, which were only scrutinized after the 2016 election.
According to sources, the line of questioning clearly indicated the Special Counsel was focused on two potential criminal activities.
First, the Democratic lobbying firm worked on a public relations campaign for the non-profit European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECMU), which aimed to promote the image of the then-Russian satellite regime. The campaign was organized by Mr. Manafort and raises the question of whether the firm violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The law requires those who lobby on behalf of foreign agents to file disclosures with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Neither Mr. Manafort nor The Podesta Group appeared to have been in compliance with FARA. By filing a retroactive FARA disclosure this April, the liberal firm admitted to the lobbying activities.
Second, the access to Clinton’s State Department The Podesta Group provided to Mr. Manafort acting on behalf of the Russians, overlaps with the controversial Uranium One deal.
In 2011, the Obama Administration approved a deal allowing Tenex, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned nuclear giant Rosatom, to sell commercial uranium to U.S. nuclear power plants in a partnership with the United States Enrichment Corp. Prior to the decision, Tenex was only allowed to sell U.S. nuclear power plants reprocessed uranium recovered from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons under the Megatons to Megawatts Program, which began in 1993 and expired in December 2013.
The deal advanced Russia’s effort to corner the world uranium market and gave Moscow control of more than 20% of America’s uranium supply. In January 2013, just one year before the Megatons to Megawatts Program ended, Rosatom purchased Uranium One through its subsidiary ARMZ Uranium Holding for $1.3 billion.
Sources indicate Mr. Mueller’s team discovered at least one meeting between Mr. Podesta and members of the Clinton Foundation, which is believed to have been held for the advancement of the nuclear deal. All of the board members from Rosatom donated to the Clinton Foundation, bringing estimates upwards of $100 million.
Worth noting, a Russian bank pushing for Uranium One paid former President Bill Clinton roughly $500,000 for a speaking fee in 2010. In 2009, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) uncovered a massive bribery, corruption and racketeering scheme before the Obama Administration approved the nuclear deal as the result of an investigation that began when Mr. Mueller was still the director.
Last Wednesday, DOJ cleared an FBI confidential informant to testify before Congress on Uranium One.
His friendship with fired FBI director James Comey and, now, the new revelations about his role in overseeing the investigation into Uranium One has prompted new calls for Mr. Mueller to resign.
The law and DOJ policy governing special counsels states no person shall “participate in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political relationship with any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution, or who would be directly affected by the outcome.”
The Uranium One deal is currently under investigation by the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and resignation calls in the Republican-controlled House are growing.
“The federal code could not be clearer – Mueller is compromised by his apparent conflict of interest in being close with James Comey,” Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., who first called for Mr. Mueller to step down over the summer, said in a statement. “The appearance of a conflict is enough to put Mueller in violation of the code. … All of the revelations in recent weeks make the case stronger.”
Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is calling for a new Special Counsel to investigate the controversial Obama-Clinton era nuclear deal. While his committee also launched an investigation, only the powers granted to a federal prosecutor can get to the bottom of what appears to be a “pay-for-play” quid pro quo.
Democrats, with the hope Mr. Mueller’s investigation politically or legally damages President Donald Trump, have defended the former FBI director. But with his focus turning to The Podesta Group and the Clinton State Department, they may have made a grave miscalculation.Rumors have been circulating for month’s that Brock Lesnar is UFC bound.
The former UFC heavyweight champion is serving out the last stint on his WWE contract, but now, according to reports, his reentry to combat may not come.
Jim Ross breaks it down:
“Sources are saying that it looks more promising that Brock Lesnar could well stay with WWE past WrestleMania due to concerns over long term health affects [sic] of competing in MMA specifically concussion oriented issues later in one’s life,” Ross said this week in his blog. “Gain, these are ‘sources’ and how reliable they are can only be judged after WM31 [WrestleMania 31] and following the status of the former UFC Heavyweight Champion.”
“One thing is certain,” said Ross. “If UFC believes, and rightfully so in my view, that CM Punk will sell PPV’s for at least his first two fights then what would a healthy Brock Lesnar mean to the UFC brand in a time where no combat sport company has a plethora of bona fide star power that can move the needle on the pay per view business.”The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 15 'Olivia' RC. Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project. MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML 5 and two new tools, 'Software Sources' and 'Driver Manager', make their first appearance in Linux Mint. MDM now features 3 greeters: a GTK+ greeter; a themeable GDM greeter for which hundreds of themes are available; a brand new HTML greeter, also themeable which supports a new generation of animated and interactive themes.
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Though it's hard to tell from this recording, Pat Doney of NBC Dallas-Fort Worth says it spilled into the stands where Raiders fans were watching practice. And they weren't finished; there were actually two fights at practice today. This one was between the Raiders offense and the Dallas defense, but after everyone settled down, the Raiders defense and Dallas offense got in on the act.
Update: A reader alerted us to footage he filmed right in the thick of the brawl and you can definitely see someone in the crowd hit a player with the Raiders helmet he's holding.
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Top image viaThe written works of J.R.R. Tolkien are full of songs and poems that help build the mythology of Middle Earth. But while Tolkien’s songs are full of vivid imagery and exciting storytelling, it’s near-impossible to figure out what they were actually supposed to sound like. Fortunately, Tolkien himself knew, and he even recorded a few of the songs and poems.
Brain Pickings has uncovered two rare recordings circa 1952 of Tolkien reading from his works. In the first audio recording below, Tolkien sings “Sam’s Rhyme of the Troll” from The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s fascinating to hear the author give shape to Sam’s song, adding pitch and rhythm to the written words.
In the second recording, Tolkien reads several excerpts from The Lord of the Rings. His voice has a theatricality and musical lilt that brings each character to life—and the excerpts he chooses just happen to include several lines Peter Jackson lifted straight from the books for use in his Lord of the Rings films.
The recording also includes Tolkien reading several poems, imbuing them with a sense of rhythm they lack in print. Whether you’re a |
, and started by winding himself around the rabbit. After a few moments, he announced, "You've got very soft, fuzzy fur, long ears, big rear feet, and a little fuzzy ball for a tail. I think that you must be a bunny rabbit!" The rabbit was much relieved to find his identity, and proceeded to return the favor to the snake. After feeling about the snake's body for a few minutes, he asserted, "Well, you're scaly, you're slimy, you've got beady little eyes, you squirm and slither all the time, and you've got a forked tongue. I think you're a lawyer!"
A man walked into a curio shop and began to browse. He was attracted to a brass rat on a shelf behind the counter. He asked the shopkeeper for a price, and was told to make an offer. Presently they agreed on a price, and the brass rat changed hands. The shopkeeper warned the customer as he took the money, "This sale is final. If you leave the shop with the brass rat, I won't take it back under any circumstances." The customer agreed and left with the rat. As he walked home, he noticed that a live rat came scurrying out of an alley and began to follow him. Soon there were more, all following him and milling bout his feet. The man began to run, but the rats kept up, and more joined the procession. After a few minutes, thousands of rats were chasing after the man. The man ran frantically for the river, and threw the brass rat into the water. The live rats followed the brass rat, and soon all had drowned. The man returned to the curio shop, and on seeing him enter, the shopkeeper shouted, "I told you, the sale was final! You cannot return the brass rat!" The customer replied, "That's no problem. I just wondered if you had a brass lawyer in stock."
A police chief, a fire chief, and a city manager were traveling together by car to a municipal management conference in a distant city. Their car broke down in a rural area, and they were forced to seek shelter for the night at a nearby farmhouse. The farmer welcomed them in, but cautionedthem that there were only two spare beds, and that one of them would have to sleep in the barn with the farm animals. After a short conference, the police chief agreed to take the barn. Shortly after retiring, a knock was heard on the door of the farmhouse. The party inside answered to find the police chief standing there, complaining that he could not sleep. There were pigs in the barn, he said, and he was reminded of the days when everyone called him a pig. The fire chief then volunteered to exchange with the police chief. A short time later, another knock was heard at the door. The fire chief complained that the cows in the barn reminded him of Mrs. O'Leary's cow that started the Chicago fire, and that every time he started to go to sleep, he started to have a fireman's worst nightmare, that of burning to death. The city attorney, in desperation for sleep, then agreed to sleep in the barn. This seemed like a good idea until a few minutes later, when another knock was heard at the door. When the occupants answered the door, there stood the very indignant cows and pigs.
A mother and son were walking through a cemetery, and passed by a headstone inscribed "Here lies a good lawyer and an honest man." The little boy read the headstone, looked up at his mother, and asked "Mommy, why did they bury two men there?"
An attorney was sitting in his office late one night, when Satan appeared before him. The Devil told the lawyer, "I have a proposition for you. You can win every case you try, for the rest of your life. Your clients will adore you, your colleagues will stand in awe of you, and you will make embarrassing sums of money. All I want in exchange is your soul, your wife's soul, your children's souls, the souls of your parents, grandparents, and parents in law, and the souls of all your friends and law partners." The lawyer thought about this for a moment, then asked, "So, what's the catch?"After numerous press conferences and social media updates that chronicled the team’s progression from cool idea to tangible entity, Barcelona marks both a culmination and a beginning.
It has been 30 years since America last fielded a Formula One team. Ironically, that 1986-era team was owned by Carl Haas, who has no relation to Gene Haas, owner of Haas F1 Team and founder of the team’s title partner, Haas Automation, the largest CNC machine tool builder in North America.
That an American entity is back in Formula One is no small feat. Consider that Haas F1 Team was awarded a Formula One license in April 2014, and it is February 2016 when the team gathers for the first time to put its car on the racetrack. In that time, more than 100 people have been hired, spread across bases in three countries – Kannapolis, North Carolina; Banbury, U.K.; and Parma, Italy. A technical partnership with Scuderia Ferrari was formed, with the most successful team in the history of Formula One providing Haas F1 Team its power unit, gearbox and overall technical support. Experienced drivers in Romain Grosjean and Esteban Gutiérrez were signed and, along the way, transporters were built, tools were ordered, parts were machined, firesuits were made and those pieces and many others were logistically organized to circumnavigate the globe from February’s first test in Barcelona to November’s season finale in Abu Dhabi.
It all comes together in Barcelona, where the first racecar Haas F1 Team has ever built is literally put to the test. While nearly two year’s worth of work will be on display on the 4.655-kilometer (2.89-mile), 16-turn circuit, it’s really just the start of Haas F1 Team’s Formula One endeavor. Two four-day tests spread over 12 days is all Haas F1 Team has to ensure its racecars for Grosjean and Gutiérrez are up for the first of 21 grand prix race weekends in 2016.
The longest schedule in Formula One history begins March 20 in Melbourne, Australia. Between the travel from Barcelona back to Haas F1 Team’s European base in Banbury and the outfit’s arrival in Melbourne prior to the race weekend, only 10 days are available to the team. In that time, the lessons learned from Barcelona are applied to their cars before they’re loaded up for a flight to the land down under.
Spain’s motto is “Plus Ultra” which translated from Latin means “Further Beyond”. It is a fitting motto for Haas F1 Team too, with the American team needing Barcelona to take it further beyond testing and into the cauldron of a grand prix weekend.
Born To Run
Haas F1 Team Driver Lineup for Barcelona Test No. 1 (Feb. 22-25)
Monday, Feb. 22: Grosjean
Tuesday, Feb. 23: Gutiérrez
Wednesday, Feb. 24: Grosjean
Thursday, Feb. 25: Gutiérrez
Haas F1 Team Driver Lineup for Barcelona Test No. 2 (March 1-4)
Tuesday, March 1: Gutiérrez
Wednesday, March 2: Gutiérrez
Thursday, March 3: Grosjean
Friday, March 4: Grosjean
Guenther Steiner, Team Principal, Haas F1 Team
Explain what happens during a test.
“In our first test of the season and first as a team, you try to make sure everything works as you designed it. You just prove out whatever you did, and in the second part of the test, you try to get performance out of the car. Or, better said, you try to get performance as quickly as possible. First of all, make sure everything works. Everything is new on the car. The first test is quite important just from a reliability factor. You try to learn as much as possible about the car. You get the baseline on the car and you work off that baseline the rest of the year.”
What are your expectations for the test?
“Because we are a new team, you want to make sure all the people work together – the mechanics work together with the race engineers – to make the car reliable, to understand the car. Everything is new for us. It’s not only a new car, but a new team. In the second test, hopefully we put ourselves in a position to start work on the setups of the car to where we can learn how to make it better for the race.”
How do you manage personnel during a test, as it seems to be a 24-hour work day, everyday?
“At the test, there is no limit to how much we can work. We have a day and night shift. In the old days, which weren’t so long ago, it was the same people doing the day and night shifts. What is done now is you have people coming in around 6 p.m. and have dinner with the guys from the day shift, so they exchange what they learned and know what they have to do. The (night shift) guys take over and work until the sun comes up, then the day shift comes in again and you do the same thing. They have breakfast together and some go to sleep and the others go to work.”
How do you prevent personnel from burning out?
“What you do normally, because at the test you run only one car and have two mechanic crews, you swap them over on the second test. You still have to be careful because you will have some who don’t want to go home. They want to stay, so you have to tell them ‘No, your time is over.’ It is quite a challenge. We try to give them a Saturday or Sunday off before they go to Australia. These guys, when they come back to the workshop after the second test, have to rebuild the cars before they are shipped to Australia. You have to be careful so they aren’t burned out.”
How much of an undertaking was it to build a Formula One team from scratch and be ready for Barcelona?
“For sure, it’s a big undertaking. But you don’t realize it because you do it day by day. You never get up in the morning and think I have a big job in front of me today. It’s a state. You are in a state to put this together. For sure, getting close to this test and everything, temperament gets heated up because the deadline is coming. You just need to keep on going and encourage everyone.”
What do you take from the test at Barcelona and apply to the season opener in Australia?
“You prove out your methodology, how you work, how your guys work. You have the time in between – 10 days to fix it. There is so much electronics in these cars, software programs. You try to prove out everything so there are no mistakes. When you get to Australia and your drivers notice the car’s behavior isn’t right, you will know what to do to get the behavior of the car right. It’s a mix of everything. The biggest thing is to run as much as possible at Barcelona and avoid any downtime with the car breaking or something. The more you drive, the more you learn and the better prepared you are for Australia.”
Romain Grosjean, Driver No. 8, Haas F1 Team
How did you spend your off-season?
“After a long season it was important to me to spend time with my family and, obviously, to rest. I was involved in a few charity events in December and, after Christmas, enjoyed a family holiday. After that it was back to Europe. I’ve been doing some simulator work and my seat fit. Winter is really the time we get to work on our physical training. The hard work has started. I’ve been a bit achy sometimes, but I’m feeling good. I’m ready for the new season.”
What are your expectations for the test?
“The first thing for the test is to get the car to run and to work well from there. Hopefully, we can get a lot of mileage. This is a new team, so we need to get everyone to work together, all the engineers, mechanics and the drivers. We need to get as much data and knowledge as we can. It’s important to get the reliability sorted as early as possible because we don’t get much testing and we’re going straight to Melbourne.”
Do you have a certain protocol that you follow during a test, or is the protocol dictated by the team?
“It’s a little bit of both. As a driver, you want to be comfortable in your seat. You want the steering wheel to work as you want, along with the dashboard. You want the communication with your engineers to work. From the team side, of course, there is a protocol they want to follow. They want to do as much mileage as they can. It’s a big test, which we don’t get during the course of the season. They also want to make sure everyone works together. On the final day, you normally do a race simulation where you do a pit stop and you work on strategy. You want to see that you don’t have any problems so you’re ready to go to Melbourne.”
You spent five years with Lotus F1 Team. Obviously, that time allowed you to build a comfort level with the team. How do you work to find the same level of comfort with your new employer, Haas F1 Team?
“I felt a very warm welcome from day one with Gene (Haas) and Guenther (Steiner) and from everyone I’ve met in the team. It’s a nice spirit. It’s an American spirit. Everyone wants to go racing. It’s very exciting, as it’s a new challenge. It’s going to be something unique having an American Formula One team on the grid for the first time in 30 years. Driving the car out of the garage on day one will be unbelievable. There’s a lot to look forward to. I already feel comfortable in the team. Everyone is motivated and wants to get to the first test, and then the first race.”
Describe a lap around Barcelona.
“Barcelona is probably the track you know best in the world. You can name every part of the layout. There’s a long straight, then the first two corners right and left. You carry quite a good speed into them, and then there’s the famous turn three, which you try to take as flat out as possible. Turn four, there’s usually some front-locking. The hairpin into turn five, going down you don’t see the apex until late, so it’s a tricky corner. Turns seven and eight going up the hill lead to the very high-speed turn nine, which has a new curb on exit. Then you get to the hairpin at turn 10, which is very tricky under braking. Turns 11-15 are almost one corner – as a complex, it’s difficult to get a good flow around those corners. You need to get a good balance there. Turn 16 is the last corner and you want to try to stay as flat-out to prepare for the straight and get a good lap time.”
Esteban Gutiérrez, Driver No. 21, Haas F1 Team
How did you spend your off-season?
“I spent my off-season together with my family in my home town of Monterrey. I also used that time to relax, but at the same time, I continue my physical preparation, as it’s really the best moment of the year to get a good rhythm before all the traveling starts for the season. I also enjoyed some karting days, some days at my ranch with my friends, so all in all it was a great time to get filled up with energy before the season starts.”
What are your expectations for the test?
“We expect to run the car as many laps as possible. This will be our priority, as we need to be sure to sort all the possible issues we may have in order to fix them on time. It will be very interesting to develop our car setup through the tests in preparation ahead of the first race. I am sure we will have plenty of work to do. At the same time, the most important thing will be to always stay together as a team in order to be very efficient with our progress.”
How much are you looking forward to developing a racecar that you’re going to drive for an entire season?
“I feel very excited after a complete season as a reserve driver. I am full of energy, full of ideas and very hungry to race. The development of our car from the beginning will be crucial in order to start the season confident that we have done our job as a team to prepare in the best way possible.”
As the third driver at Ferrari last year, what did you do to stay prepared for a return to the cockpit?
“I focused a lot on my preparation. Basically, anything that will bring me as close as if I were driving. I did a lot of karting, also tested quite a few days in Fiorano with old F1 cars and a lot of days in the simulator in Maranello. Ahead of every race I even tried my best to put my mindset as if I was going to race, and I used my imagination to keep my mind sharp. I used all the time that I had to observe the whole team, mainly the drivers in order to learn the best things from them.”
Describe a lap around Barcelona.
“Barcelona is a track we use a lot for testing. It’s probably the track that I have done the most laps in my career. You come into the first section into turn one, focused on the entry speed and also the line, in preparation for turn two and turn three, which is crucial in order to have a good exit out of the famous and fast turn three of Barcelona. Approaching into turn four, you have a very sharp brake to turn in very quickly, carrying the speed into the corner. The exit is very long with a lot of load on the rear tires. You arrive into turn five, it’s a bit downhill, quite a slow corner, on braking you don’t really see the entry well and, at the same time, it is very important not to miss the apex. Turn seven is very sharp. The corner has some banking, which makes it faster than what you can see from outside approaching. Then into turn nine, it’s up hill. You turn in with very small brake, and a short lift on the throttle. The exit is a bit blind, and the car usually is moving around, trying to go on power as quickly as possible and a very, very fast corner. From turn 10 onward, you have the first sector which is usually very challenging because of the tire temperatures. You have the tires heated up from the previous two sectors and it makes it the most important and challenging part of the track because it’s where you can gain or lose a lot of time as it is the most technical part of the track.”
The Track: Circuit de Barcelona – Catalunya
· This 4.655-kilometer (2.89-mile), 16-turn circuit has hosted Formula One since 1991, with last year’s Spanish Grand Prix serving as the venue’s milestone 25th grand prix.
· Kimi Raikkonen holds the lap record at Circuit de Barcelona – Catalunya (1:21.670), set in 2008 with Ferrari.
· The Circuit de Barcelona – Catalunya is considered to be very representative of all the tracks Formula One visits, making it an ideal facility for testing. The track has only two sub-100 kph (60 mph) turns, and the layout’s mix of medium- and high-speed corners allows teams to gauge their car’s aerodynamic efficiency.
· Weather temperatures in Barcelona in late February/early March average out to 11 degrees Celsius/51 degrees Fahrenheit. According to average forecasts, chance of rain is 19 percent with only a six percent chance of clouds.
· DYK? The circuit was constructed in 1991 as part of Barcelona’s overall buildup to the 1992 Summer Olympics. The circuit was home to the start/finish line for the road team time trial cycling event.
Back In The Day…
· Haas F1 Team is the first American-led Formula One team to enter the FIA Formula One World Championship since 1986. What was going on in 1986?
· “Top Gun” was the highest-grossing movie.
· Sydney Pollack’s “Out of Africa” won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, at the 58th Academy Awards.
· “Rock Me Amadeus” by Falco was the No. 1 single.
· The Chicago Bears defeated the New England Patriots, 46-10, in Super Bowl XX in New Orleans.
· Argentina defeated West Germany 3-2 in the FIFA World Cup final at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City.
· A 20-year-old Mike Tyson knocked out Trevor Berbick in five minutes and 35 seconds at the Las Vegas Hilton to become the youngest heavyweight boxing champion in the world.
· Halley’s Comet made its periodic pass by Earth. (The comet returns to Earth’s vicinity approximately every 75 years, and its next projected fly-by is in 2061.)Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said Tuesday that rival Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the country was a “mistake,” even though it was similar to a plan Paul already proposed to halt immigration from the Middle East.
Trump had said Monday that he wanted to implement a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the U.S. Paul was asked to respond to Trump’s statement during an interview with New Hampshire radio station WGIR.
“I think it’s a mistake to base immigration or moratoriums based on religion,” Paul said. “But you know, I’ve called for something similar, which is a moratorium based on high risk.”
Paul’s legislation, which he introduced last month, is intended to prevent immigration to the United States from certain countries in the Middle East. It would have required the Department of Homeland Security to “suspend issuance of visas to nationals of countries with a high risk of terrorism” until additional security screenings could be implemented.
“And so we have examined where the high risk of terrorism comes from and it’s about 34 countries,” he continued in the radio interview. “And I would put a pause on all immigration from those 34 countries.”
h/t: BuzzFeed NewsAs the hit sci-fi series returns to BBC3, the chameleonic lead actor tells us how she prepares to play its many parts
Orphan Black is the sci-fi series that seriously messes with your head. Lead actor Tatiana Maslany plays eight (and counting) cloned versions of herself, flitting seamlessly between characters including a cop, a Ukrainian sociopath, and an uptight soccer mom with a drink problem. At the centre of it all is Sarah Manning, a petty criminal who takes her style cues from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. She witnesses the suicide of a woman who looks exactly like her, leading her to discover a conspiracy and a mini-army of lookalikes.
Not only does Canadian newcomer Maslany perform a kind of acting heptathlon to inhabit all the roles, but Orphan Black hurdles multiple telly genres too. Far from being a straight-up sci-fi, it adds a dash of Scandi-noir, a pinch of thriller and the occasional sliver of black humour into the mix. The BBC America show has cultivated a slow-burning and now authentically cult audience in the States, building a Twitter following to rival shows such as Homeland and Nashville. Meanwhile, Maslany was deservedly nominated for a Best Actress Golden Globe. Just how does she veer so effortlessly between her clones? Let her explain…
Sarah Manning
Photograph: Allstar
The London-born punk grifter and single mum at the heart of the cloning conspiracy
"I love playing her most; she's my homegirl. There's something primal about her, and listening to the Prodigy's Breathe helped me get into character. What's central to her is this inner conflict she has about motherhood: her daughter Kira is her entire life and yet she doesn't feel like she's fit to be a mother. It's key that Sarah is adopted, too. She was never really part of a family, so she sees herself as a solo act. She has difficulty being intimate with people and she always feels like an outsider. When she meets the other clones she finally feels a sense of 'being home' – a sort of sisterhood, like twins have. The clones help bring her back to herself."
Beth Childs
Beth Childs.
The cop who commits suicide in the first episode. Sarah masquerades as her throughout season one
"I don't think Beth is the original [clone], but the concept of that is interesting in itself: none of the clones want to think they are the copy of someone else. That idea of being unique is something we investigate in the show. Beth is a mystery. We only see her in home-video footage and in Sarah's interpretation of what a strait-laced woman is."
Alison Hendrix
Alison Hendrix.
The highly strung suburbanite whose picket-fence life is not as perfect as it seems. Enjoys a padded gilet
"She was the most daunting clone for me to play. At first, I couldn't get a sense of her beyond the soccer mom cliche. [Showrunner] John Fawcett told me that she's the most feminine character on the show and I just thought: 'I don't know what that means!' I ended up listening to a lot of musicals to get into her headspace. There's something about them that suggests repressed emotions and that connects with her: she's got this 'perfect life' and yet she is a ball of simmering anger ready to explode. Now, weirdly, she's the character I connect with most because I feel like we're all waiting to be found out."
Cosima Niehaus
Cosima.
The dreadlocked scientist with a penchant for lava lamps – and for another scientist, Delphine
"Cosima's sort of a hippy stoner. Personality-wise, she was the lightest of the clones to play. She looks at everyone and everything as being full of possibilities. She's fine with how finding out the truth about the clones involves a lot of theorising and that there aren't necessarily any answers. Intellectually, she's on another plane. I also love how she falls for Delphine: it's stupid and illogical but I love that."
Helena
Helena.
Sarah's feral birth twin, notable for her wild Shakira hair and even wilder clone-slaughtering antics
"We called her 'the little monster' on set. She's part-child, part-trained killer; a saint and a demon at the same time. She's not socialised. Like, she wouldn't know that it's not OK just to burp in someone's face at the dinner table, which allowed me to play her with a measure of black comedy. The wig I wear to play her is amazing. It's super Hips Don't Lie! When the makeup artist put the hair on me I was like, 'I know who this person is…'"
Katja Obinger
Katja. Photograph: Steve Wilkie
A sickly German clone who made contact with Beth before she died
"My grandmother is German so she helped me with the dialect. Katja felt like a guest star, so I didn't think too far ahead in terms of preparing to play her. I think it's interesting that we're discussing doppelgangers as a culture right now. Maybe it's something to do with social media and selfies, but the concept of ownership of ourselves and our image seems to be shifting. It's like [we think]: 'I am me and no one else can be like that'. For me, that's why cloning is such a fraught idea.".
Orphan Black returns on Wednesday, 10pm, BBC3
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• This article was amended on 28 April 2014 because the original picture caption of Cosima Niehaus called Delphine "another of the clones". This has been corrected.245 Shares
McLaren-Honda F1 driver Jenson Button appeared to confirm that he has officially moved on following his split Jessica Michibata, on Monday.
Also the former world champion, was spotted with a huge smile on his face as he enjoyed a daytime date in Los Angeles with Brittny Ward – holding hands as they crossed the road, Dailymail revealed.
Brittny Ward, 25, is a former Playboy Playmate and bears a striking resemblance to Jessica, 31, who broke up with Jenson in December, she is born and raised in California, Brittny is a signed agency model, former UFC ring girl and Playboy’s Miss January 2015.
At the time, a representative said the couple: “Decided to go their separate ways and it is very amicable. There is no one else involved.”
Jessica Michibata – who revealed her split from the Jenson Button in December – was pictured with John Mayer on Sunday.
Click here for more Photos of Brittny Ward, Jenson Button’s new girlfriend
Photo by @rohchick lighting and glasses by @randallslavin A photo posted by Brittny Ward (@brittnyward) on Dec 7, 2014 at 12:02am PSTMy Santa was quite generous and quite awesome! First, she did some great comment stalking and sleuthing, even got my fiance involved in helping pick a board game! She then sent stuff not only for my dog, but my local animal shelter in which my place of work is currently holding a donation drive! It was that day I realized she had sent me 5 packages! I am a nut for opening surprises so the packages themselves made me very happy!
I received A package of larger dog treats, a package of medium sized treats, and a package of tiny treats! The tiny ones are for my dog Pxl! The rest was for my animal shelter as you can see, already placed in our donation box! I was ecstatic to see the donation, that was a gift enough for me, we're all big dog lovers so everyone at work was excited! Thank you Tina, big dogs around here get a lot of love and even more so now with your contribution!
I then received a BB loader for my airsoft gun which hadn't even made it yet, kind of a give a way, but of course I had no clue what gun I was going to get!
The next day I received a board game I have been meaning to get for a long time now, but keep putting it off. NO MORE! I finally have Settler of Catan, it's going to be blast to get my friends over for this one!
Today I received my Electric Beretta Airsoft Gun, which is crazy, but I'll explain in a second. I also received 10,000 BB's for my guns! While absolutely awesome, these things will last me forever at the current rate in which I get to actually enjoy my guns!
Now the crazy thing about the airsoft gun is Tina managed to buy the EXACT gun on my Christmas list without me even mentioning it! I had said in my likes that I had wanted a new electric pistol, but Tina actually got the Beretta that was on my list! I was so happy I :O for nearly 5 minutes straight!
So Tina, thank you so much. Big dogs rule, you rule for taking care of my Pxl, I cannot wait to play Settlers and honor it as your favorite, and yes the BB Loader and BB's are excellent gifts with the gun. The loader isn't very useful on this particular model, but I have others that it will be more than suitable for!Florida Panthers wing Jaromir Jagr recently announced that he is bringing back the legendary mullet that made him a household name back in the 1990s, and it could very well end up being what saves the the team. Sports fans, millennials especially, love anything vintage and Jagr's mullet, a style he shared with teammate Mario Lemieux in its prime, would be no exception.
The fact is that hockey today is a sport that millennials flock in droves to see, both for the fun and casual atmosphere plus the chance to sit down and just chill with a beer while guys on the ice try to kill each other. Given the Panthers' known attendance issues, having finished in the lower tier of such each of the past five seasons, Jagr bringing the mullet back could give the team a much-needed marketing boost that results in getting butts in the seats.
Already helping the Panthers is the fact that fans have long had a fascination with their favorite athletes' hairstyles. Former baseball outfielder Oscar Gamble's afro was so epic that George Steinbrenner asked him to trim it within regulation once he became a New York Yankee. WWE star Daniel Bryan went from being a literal babyface to a look that can only be described as lumbersexual and only saw his brand grow from there, his "Respect the Beard" t-shirts and 2.3 million Twitter followers being a testament to that.
But then there are guys like former San Francisco Giants closer Brian Wilson, whose quirky personality, hipster beard and mohawk haircut made him a media and fan darling during his team's march to a World Series championship in 2010, with fans sporting fake beards from start to finish. Shortly afterward, he became the spokesman for MLB 2K11 and MLB even did a series of commercials regarding what went on "inside the beard."
The same can be said for former Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu, whose long hair flowing out the back of his helmet earned him endorsements aplenty, most notably one with Head & Shoulders shampoo that also carried a $1 million insurance policy for his hair. It was an edgy look that nobody had ever seen before, and Polamalu's on-field talents made it easier to get behind his seemingly unconventional hairstyle.
And the Florida Panthers need a reaction just like that for Jagr's mullet. So long as he can continue playing at a high level and people rally behind his hair, especially his teammates, the possibilities could very well be endless!Welcome to the dystopian reality that is Trump’s America. Muslim people are barred from entering the country, the Dakota Access pipeline is forcefully built by executive order and a dividing wall may slice across the U.S. Mexican border. Increasing social media and eyewitness reports of ICE raids and immigration checks have thrown families into a perpetual state of fear.
But, while we wait on what the Trump administration will do next, Black people should remember a promise made by the “orange” man back in September, a promise that will seriously threaten the safety of Black lives already under attack in this country. That promise was Trump’s vow to make New York’s stop-and-frisk policies national.
Donald Trump has stated numerous times his intentions to nationalize stop-and-frisk policies, first during a Sept. 21 Fox News interview when asked about violence in the Black community, he said: “I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to. We did it in New York and it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and you know you really help people change their mind automatically.” He even brought up nationwide stop-and-frisk at the first presidential debate, claiming that “stop-and-frisk had a tremendous impact on the safety of New York City, tremendous beyond belief.” Trump then preceded to deny that stop-and-frisk policies as they were practiced in New York were deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge. But, they were.
Donald Trump endorsed stop-and-frisk policies to appeal to issues of gun violence affecting communities of color in cities like Chicago. In his first address to congress, Chicago was a continued reference point as he harped on inner-city gun violence and proposed forming a taskforce. How Trump actually intends to enact national stop-and-frisk remains unknown. What is known, however, is that stop-and-frisk polices are inherently racist and greatly increase interactions between law enforcement and nonwhite people. As extra-judicial killings of Black people by police continue, it is clear that a national stop-and-frisk effort would greatly increase the frequency of these killings. With Trump in office, it is time to take his calls for national stop-and-frisk seriously.
Here is what we can expect if Trump puts national stop-and-frisk into action:
1) More Police-Involved Killings of Black People
I grew up in New York City during the era when stop-and-frisk policies aggressively targeted and profiled Black and Latinx people. Stop-and-frisk hot spots were located outside train stations, building entrances and along residential blocks. In my home borough, the Bronx, I watched as people were stopped and frisked on the subway trains. The Operation Clean Halls program initiated by NYPD even allowed officers to conduct stop-and-frisk procedures inside of apartment buildings. Street interrogations amounted to humiliation and state-sanctioned terrorism. It was not enough to manufacture Black criminality, stop-and-frisk officers commodified it in order to prove that the policy was working. Yet, during the heyday of NYC stop-and-frisk, roughly 80 percent of the people stopped were not charged with a crime. The New York Civil Liberties Union estimated that 9 out of 10 of the people stopped were innocent of any wrongdoing.
Any stop made is a possibly deadly encounter with police. It is well documented that stop-and-frisk policies overwhelmingly target Black and Latinx people. According to a New York Civil Liberties report, during the 12-year period that New York Mayor Bloomberg was in office, over five million stops were made. Black people accounted for 52.4 percent of those stops. When Black people are targeted by officers, it is only common sense that the number of police-involved shootings is going to increase.
2) More Police Non-indictments for Killing Black People
More police-involved killings mean more disappointments. There is said to be at least 1000 police killings a year, yet there have been only 13 convictions since 2005. With the exception of the Terrance Crutcher case in Tulsa, Okla., no officer has been charged in any of the high-profile police-involved shootings of Black people since 2013.
With Trump in the pockets of the police unions that endorsed him, it is very unlikely that any justice will be had when the adverse effects of stop-and-frisk result in increased officer-involved killings. While he has talked about so-called “Black on Black” crime, Trump has paid virtually no lip service to the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, he has made it clear on several occasions that his will be a “law and order” administration that will unabashedly support police officers. In a statement made on the White House website just days following the inauguration, Trump’s administration pledged its allegiance to the police state, saying: “President Trump will honor our men and women in uniform |
base.
Hanif has written a historical novel with an eerie timeliness. It arrives as NATO troops battle the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan; as General Musharraf fights Islamic extremism within his own country; as Pakistan assimilates yet another unsolved assassination; and as the menace of Al Qaeda persists worldwide. The most darkly funny scene in “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” imagines a Fourth of July party in Islamabad in 1988, hosted by Arnold Raphel. The American guests dress up in flowing turbans, tribal gowns and shalwar kameez suits, by way of ridiculous homage to the Afghan fighters. Among the invited guests is a young bearded Saudi known as “OBL,” who works for “Laden and Co. Constructions.” As OBL moves through the throng, various people stop to greet him and chat. Among them is the local C.I.A. chief who, after swapping a few words, bids him farewell: “Nice meeting you, OBL. Good work, keep it up.”At least three police officials lost their lives when unidentified assailants opened fire on their vehicle in Peshawar's Chamkani area on Thursday evening, police said.
The police personnel were on a routine patrol after iftar when three gunmen riding a motorcycle targeted the police van, Superintendent of Police (SP) rural Furqan Bilal said.
As a result of the firing, constables Umer Hayat, Shahid and Intikhab Alam laid down their lives while head constable Sheraz sustained injuries.
The police party, which belonged to Waheedabad police post, retaliated to the assailants' firing, shooting dead one of the three militants. The other two gunmen managed to flee the scene, SP Bilal said.
Nobody immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
For decades the city of Peshawar has faced the threat of militants, due to its status as a front line for the ongoing war on terror as well as its proximity to the restless tribal areas and the Pak-Afghan border.
The number of attacks in the country has fallen around 70 per cent, due to a combination of the military offensive against Taliban bases along the Afghan border and government initiatives to tackle militancy, but attacks on security and civilian targets continue to occur occasionally.
The Pakistan Army had launched Operation Raddul Fasaad earlier this year in the aftermath of a fresh resurgence in terror attacks in the country.
The operation seeks to eliminate the "residual/latent threat of terrorism", consolidating the gains made in other military operations, and further ensuring the security of Pakistan's borders.
Hundreds of suspected terrorists have reportedly either been killed or arrested in raids carried out by security personnel since the start of the operation.Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
May 10, 2016, 7:36 PM GMT / Updated Nov. 17, 2014, 8:03 AM GMT / Source: TODAY By Jolene M. Bouchon
The classic marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole graces many holiday tables for a reason. But think about what you might be missing out on. This nutritious tuber, packed full of vitamin A and beta-carotene, is far more versatile than most Thanksgiving spreads would suggest. Sure, its naturally sweet flesh lends itself to more dessert-like preparations, but it also plays off savory and even spicy flavors beautifully.
RELATED: 9 amazing Brussels sprouts recipes to try as a Thanksgiving side
TODAY
Ready to branch out this year? We’ve collected an array of sweet potato recipes to satisfy any taste. Go on: Try one. Who knows? You just might find a new classic for your holiday table.
Averie Sunshine / Avery Cooks
Honey-roasted sweet potatoes with honey-cinnamon dip: These sweet potatoes couldn’t be easier to prepare: Simply toss chunks of sweet potato with honey, cinnamon and coconut oil (or sub canola or vegetable oil) and roast. But their flavor is anything but ordinary, thanks to a tangy-sweet yogurt-based dip. You can stick to cinnamon as your primary spice, but ground ginger, cardamom, nutmeg or any combination thereof will work just as well.
Kim Rosenberger / Kim's Healthy Eats
Rosemary sweet potato stackers: If you prefer your sweet potatoes a little on the savory side, this rosemary- and Parmesan-inflected recipe just might be your new go-to. The layered, almost architectural look of the stackers will add a little drama to your holiday plate, but don’t worry about any fussy construction — they’re baked in muffin tins to hold them in place.
Elizabeth Stark / Brooklyn Supper
Curried sweet potato soup: If served as a first course, this spicy sweet potato soup will really help knock out that November chill. The low burn comes courtesy of Thai red curry, poblano peppers and a little cayenne. Plus, the swirled yogurt garnish and bright sprinkling of Hungarian paprika gives it a festive look.
Ian and Mariana McEnroe / Yes, More Please
Sweet potato, kale and quinoa fritters: Need a side that can also stand in as a main for your vegetarian guests? Quinoa, the only grain that’s also a complete protein, give these wholesome fritters a nice crunch, but the sweet potato lends a little creaminess, too. Vegetarians, you’d better lay claim to these quickly.
Tiffany Johnson / Creme de la Crumb
Candied pecan sweet potato casserole: We know. Some of you will simply not be able to give up your beloved sweet potato casserole. That’s why we offer this twist: A crunchy, candied pecan topping lies hidden between the toasty marshmallow top and the creamy sweet potatoes at the base. Best of all, it can be made in a slow cooker. You’re welcome.
Love sweet potatoes? Here are more recipes to try!The buzz going into the upcoming season premiere of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” is reaching deafening proportions — especially given all the mystery surrounding the fate of Jon Snow (Kit Harington).
Creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were typically tight-lipped on any spoilers about upcoming plot points, but they assured Variety that fans won’t be disappointed. “I honestly believe it’s the strongest season we’ve had,” says Benioff.
Would you say this season has a particular theme?
Benioff: We talked about home a lot.
Weiss: A lot of homecoming. Coming home.
Benioff: That’s one of the nice things about having this long story, a multiple season story — you’re following these characters for… you’re literally spending years with them. You’re truly watching them grow up in some cases or grow old in other cases, like us. Characters who have been separated for many seasons, seeing them reunited. Characters who have never met over the course of the show, seeing them come together for the first time. Those things become very exciting for us, both to write the scenes and also just as audience members to watch them. To watch these actors, these characters come together.
Weiss: There’s energy that comes with compressing something, especially if it’s been allowed to mature. When you start to push everything and everyone together there’s just an excitement that comes with that. There’s nothing that feels peripheral anymore because there isn’t anything that’s peripheral anymore. It’s central people interacting with central people. Like David said, it becomes a lot more exciting to write. I feel like it probably becomes more exciting to watch.
Just like one of the things last year that was so much fun for us was just seeing Daenerys and Tyrion come together. These are two people who are very central to the story who live thousands of miles apart. Tyrion mentions Daenerys in passing to somebody else but they’ve never been in the same space. Just the image of them sitting at a table looking at each other and exchanging words with each other is in its own way is as exciting as a battle of thousands of people fighting thousands of people. That’s, for us, always something that we really look forward to with each subsequent season. That we can do more and more, more and more condensing and compressing and putting people together with people we know together with people they’ve never met before.
You mentioned all the characters you have to serve. This season, we’ll see the return of Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright). How do you decide which characters you’re going to shelve, and when to bring them back?
Benioff: With that particular storyline, it just made sense to both of us that given he was going to… What planet is it that Luke goes to?
Weiss: Dagobah.
Benioff: He was going into training. He had been on a quest from very early on to find the Three-eyed Raven and finally found him. We caught up to his storyline a season before the other ones. To have a bunch of static scenes … We knew where his storyline was going to go, but we didn’t want to get there last season. We wanted it to be this season. That one was actually pretty clear cut for both of us that we needed to be away from Bran for a year.
Weiss: A lot of the other ones it’s really just about, I’m using an over-obvious metaphor for the show. You have a certain number of pieces that you’ve set out on the game board over the course of however many seasons. At a certain point it starts to feel cheap or cheating to add a new piece on the board every time you want to accomplish something in the story. We have many, many characters in this show. More than I would assume have been in any television show before, in terms of characters with significant speaking parts. They’re all a part of this mythology and a part of this world. We’re trying to get to this place and who do we have that’s there, who we’ve established, who we’re already invested in, even if we’ve forgotten that they’re around? A lot of it is just looking at the landscape as a whole and saying, “He would be great for this.” “Oh, last time we saw her she was here. We’ve forgotten about her, but then this person is going there. Why couldn’t they come into contact with a person who’s already there?” There’s a lot of that kind of thing that dictates which people end up being pulled back into the story and how they end up getting utilized.
You’ve started a tradition of the penultimate episode being the big one. Is that something we can expect again this season?
Benioff: The penultimate one is the big one, but there are a lot of massive set pieces in other episodes, which is the fun thing for us. It was one of the fun things last year when the eighth episode actually caught people by surprise, “Hardhome.” I think people were expecting the eighth episode is the slow one before the fireworks of the ninth episode so people weren’t prepared for that. That was really fun for us just to catch people off-guard and to continue to surprise people. That said, the ninth episode, Miguel Sapochnik directed it — the same director who did “Hardhome” — and absolutely crushed it. I’m very excited for people to see that.
Weiss: Not saying that the final episode is not also very hoo-ha.
Benioff: There’s a lot of stuff going on this year.
Weiss: Now what’s great is now that we’ve wrapped and we have the whole season in the can and nobody died…
Benioff: … off-screen.
Weiss: ….Nobody behind the scenes. Actually, everybody survived the production. Then it’s great because you realize the reason it was so challenging for everybody is that there is just so much going on across the entire season. It’s not about let’s save all our marbles for this one scene in episode nine. There are a lot of marbles in episode nine, but there are a lot of marbles all over the place. It’s just all marbles.
Benioff: It’s one of the trickiest things about cutting a trailer for this season — there’s so many great shots that we wish we could use but we can’t because they’re spoilers.
Weiss: It’s like when we wanted to use when the Hound and Brienne fought in Season 4. To date probably the most visceral and exciting fight we’ve ever had on the show. [But] we can’t show a frame of it because this was not in the books and we can’t let people know that these two people meet each other because that would be a tremendous buzzkill of a way to find out they meet each other. Got a lot of that this year as well.
How does this season compare to other seasons for you?
Benioff: I just think it’s better. I think it’s the best one yet. I hate saying it because you sound like a salesman, but I honestly believe that. I honestly believe I’m very, very excited for people to watch the next ten hours. I think the actors have never been better. I think the photography has never been better. It’s just solid, man. I think it’s f—ing solid.
“Game of Thrones” Season 6 premieres Sunday, April 24 at 9 p.m. on HBO.Before Stephen K. Bannon became a close advisor to Donald Trump, he hosted “Breitbart News Daily,” a radio show, on which he interviewed Trump nine times. The Washington Post's David A. Fahrenthold discusses what those interviews tell us about their relationship. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
Before Stephen K. Bannon became a close advisor to Donald Trump, he hosted “Breitbart News Daily,” a radio show, on which he interviewed Trump nine times. The Washington Post's David A. Fahrenthold discusses what those interviews tell us about their relationship. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
Soon after terrorist attacks killed 130 people in Paris last year, Donald Trump faced sharp criticism for saying the United States had “no choice” but to close down some mosques.
Two days later, Trump called in to a radio show run by a friendly political operative who offered a suggestion.
Was it possible, asked the host, Stephen K. Bannon, that Trump hadn’t really meant that mosques should be closed?
“Were you actually saying, you need a [New York City police] intelligence unit to get a network of informants?” Bannon asked. He continued: “I guess what I’m saying is, you’re not prepared to allow an enemy within... to try to tear down this country?”
Trump — presented with a less controversial but entirely different idea than what he’d actually said — agreed.
Senators Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Senator-elect Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) denounce the acts of hatred that have arose since Donald Trump’s election, and urge Trump to rescind Stephen Bannon's appointment. (Reuters)
“That’s right. That’s not going to happen,” he told Bannon.
Today, Trump is president-elect. Bannon, the former Breitbart News chief who helped guide Trump’s victorious campaign, is set to be one of the new president’s most influential advisers. The clearest public sense of how the two will work together — and what policies Bannon may try to push — can be gleaned from a series of one-on-one interviews on Bannon’s radio show between November 2015 and June of this year.
In those exchanges, a dynamic emerged, with Bannon often coaxing Trump to agree to his viewpoint, whether on climate change, foreign policy or the need to take on Republican leaders in Congress.
At times, Bannon seemed to coach Trump to soften the harder edges of his message, to make it more palatable to a broader audience, while in other cases he pushed Trump to take tougher positions. He flattered Trump, praising his negotiating skills and the size of his campaign crowds.
The conversations marked a coming-together of Trump, who at the time was a pariah among many top Republicans, and the alt-right, a loosely defined term describing a far-right ideology that includes opposition to immigration and “globalism” and had found a home in the Breitbart News empire. The alt-right movement has also been saturated with white-nationalist rhetoric, prompting criticism of Bannon’s appointment this week, though Bannon has said the movement is not racist.
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[Trump draws sharp rebuke, concerns over newly appointed chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon]
A spokeswoman for the Trump transition did not respond to a request for comments on behalf of Bannon and the president-elect.
Bannon’s interviews with Trump were done for Breitbart News Daily, a radio program that airs on SiriusXM satellite radio’s “Patriot” channel, a home for conservative talk. In all, they add up to more than two hours of one-on-one conversation.
By the time of that first show, Breitbart had already become a crucial booster of Trump’s presidential campaign.
“Mr. Trump, thank you very much for joining us on the initial Breitbart News Daily Show,” Bannon said on Nov. 2, 2015.
When Trump came on the air, the first thing Bannon wanted to talk about was how well Trump was doing in his campaign — and how Bannon had noticed it before other people did.
“I said, ‘This guy, people are leaning forward in these audiences when he’s talking,’ ” Bannon said, recalling earlier conversations about Trump’s run. “And we were mocked and ridiculed.”
Trump also wanted to talk about how well he was doing.
“We had 20,000 in Dallas.... And 35,000 in Alabama, and 20,000 in Oklahoma,” Trump said, talking about his rallies. “We’ve had a lot of fun talking about very negative subjects. Because everything is negative with the country, Steve, I mean, there’s nothing good happening.”
During their conversations, there were some moments on-air when Trump and Bannon disagreed. Though not many.
Last November, for instance, Trump said he was concerned that foreign students attending Ivy League schools have to return home because of U.S. immigration laws.
“We have to be careful of that, Steve. You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country,” Trump said. He paused. Bannon said, “Um.”
“I think you agree with that,” Trump said. “Do you agree with that?”
Bannon was hesitant.
“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think... ” Bannon said, not finishing the sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
Trump said he would build a border wall, but still wanted to let highly educated foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges to be able to stay in the country.
“I still want people to come in,” Trump said. “But I want them to go through the process.”
Bannon said: “You got to remember, we’re Breitbart. We’re the know-nothing vulgarians. So we’ve always got to be to the right of you on this.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Trump said.
In most of the interviews, Bannon often called his subject “sir” or “Mr. Trump.” Trump called his interviewer “Steve.”
In his questions, Bannon often began with praise for Trump. Asking about foreign affairs, for instance, Bannon praised Trump’s capacity for dealmaking.
“It’s complicated,” Bannon said. “That’s your calling card.”
“I love complicated,” Trump responded. “I thrive on complicated.”
The flattery often came before a leading question.
Last December, Bannon told Trump that, “I know you’re a student of military history.” Then, he laid out a case for questioning the U.S. alliance with Turkey, a member of NATO since the 1950s.
Wasn’t it true, Bannon asked, that the situation was a bit like the web of treaties that connected European countries before World War I?
“People were locked into these treaties.... It led to the beginning of the bloodiest century in mankind’s history,” Bannon said. He said that Turkey had changed since it joined NATO, turning to Islamism under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. What if Turkey was drawn into a broader conflict in Syria, perhaps with Russia?
“This is not something, Steve, that you want to end up in World War III over,” Trump said.
In other cases, Bannon would use his questions to frame policy choices — and then ask Trump if he agreed with the frame and the choice.
In the December interview, Bannon presented the problems of climate change and the Islamic State as a binary option — offering Trump, in effect, the choice of fighting one or the other.
“Do you agree with the pope and President Obama that [climate change] is absolutely a path to global suicide, if specific deals are not cut in Paris, versus focusing on radical Islam?” Bannon asked, referring to the negotiations that eventually led to a global climate agreement in Paris last year.
Trump said that what other people considered to be climate change was probably just weather. Radical Islam should be the focus.
“We are fools,” Trump said, meaning the Obama administration.
In the wake of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s early May announcement that he was not ready to back Trump, Bannon invited Trump to reflect on whether Ryan (R-Wis.) was showing “a lack of respect — not just for you, but for your policies.”
On issues ranging from trade to slowing Muslim immigration, Bannon said, “What [Ryan] wants is for you to drop those policies. Are you prepared to do that for unity?” When Trump later began to say it would be “better if we do get together,” Bannon interrupted, saying that Ryan’s version of unity would represent “a collapse of what you ran on and a collapse on what [voters] backed you on.”
“Well, you can’t do that,” responded Trump.
Bannon also seemed to recognize when Trump had made a potential gaffe — even when Trump had not — and to try to steer him back to correct it. The first time Bannon asked Trump about U.S. foreign policy toward Turkey, Trump volunteered that he had business interests there.
“I have a little conflict of interest, because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump said. “It’s called Trump Towers. Two towers, instead of one. Not the usual one, it’s two. And I’ve gotten to know Turkey very well.”
A little later, Bannon circled back, asking Trump to explain why his conflict of interest should not bother voters.
“They say, ‘Hey look, this guy’s got vested business interests all over the world. How do I know he’s going to stand up to Turkey?’ ” Bannon said.
Trump did not directly address the question.
In another conversation, from February, Trump began with an attack on Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), his GOP primary rival, saying, “I’ve never seen any human being lie like he lies.”
Bannon, who had also praised Cruz in the past, interrupted.
“Mr. Mr. Mr. Trump... You’ve been in New York real estate, and global real estate, and the gaming industry, and with politicians. You can’t say, reasonably, that Ted Cruz is the biggest liar you’ve ever seen,” Bannon said.
“He’s the biggest liar,” Trump said. “Okay, let’s get on to another subject. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
A few minutes later, however, Bannon circled back again. “These personal attacks. It’s turning people off,” he said. “On this Ted Cruz situation: You’ve dealt with the toughest hombres in the world. You can’t expect us to believe that Ted Cruz is the biggest liar you’ve ever met. It doesn’t stand to reason.”
Trump moderated. A little bit.
“He’s right up there, let me tell you,” he said.
Read more:
Key figures purged from Trump transition team
Trump pits establishment against populism at the top of his White House team
House Republicans scramble to avoid criticizing BannonSpread the love
New York, NY — Karim Baker, 26, a former Fed Ex Driver from Queens, is suing the city of New York for $10 million because he was ruthlessly assaulted by a gang of police after he unwittingly gave the wrong person directions.
According to the lawsuit, on December 20, 2014, Baker was working for Fed-Ex delivering packages when a random man asked him for directions, he gave the man directions as he usually would if someone would ask him, and then he went about his day. Coincidentally, the person who asked him for directions was Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a man who later killed two police officers.
It is important to point out that delivery drivers give directions to strangers on a regular basis, because most people assume that delivery drivers know their way around the city.
During the NYPD’s investigation, officers noticed the encounter between Baker and Brinsley on surveillance footage and began to blame Baker for what happened later that day.
They then began to stalk and harass Baker, pulling him over for no reason more than 20 times in just a few months, and never giving him a ticket for any infraction. When Baker finally objected to the harassment, he was beaten mercilessly to the point of hospitalization.
“I cannot really fathom a circumstance where a guy is pulled over 20 times in the span of nine months, never been given a ticket, and then on the heels of that, they beat the hell out of him and put him in the hospital,” lawyer Eric Subin said. Subin added that his client is now traumatized by the incident and that he will probably never look at things the same way again.
“The guy can barely get through a sentence without breaking down in tears,” Subin said.
Baker has no criminal history and has never had a run-in with the law, aside from this one. After the incident occurred, Baker was charged with resisting arrest, criminal possession of a controlled substance, obstructing police and parking within 15 feet of a hydrant.
The NYPD has been silent on the issue, saying only that the case is under review, and that “The arresting officer’s supervisor notified IAB that Karim Baker was injured while resisting arrest. Mr. Baker was treated and released for minor cuts to his head and lip at a local hospital. The incident is being investigated by CCRB and the NYPD’s Office of the Chief Of Department. No allegation of misconduct was reported by Mr. Baker at the time of his arrest.”
Baker made the simple and unavoidable mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time on the day that he gave Brisley directions and for this, NYPD cops have turned his life into a living hell.
John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page and purchase his books at his website www.JohnVibes.com.Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed (The Army of Khalid ibn al-Waleed)- named for a companion of the Prophet who helped secure the Muslim conquest of the Levant through the crucial Battle of Yarmouk- is a group linked to the Islamic State (IS) based in the Yarmouk Valley/Basin (Wadi/Hawdh al-Yarmouk) of southwest Deraa province on the border with the Golan Heights. The group was formed in late May 2016 from the following components:
. Liwa Shuhada' al-Yarmouk (the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade: LSY)- the main component of Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed. Once aligned with the Western-backed Southern Front, it first established connections with IS around summer 2014 and began overtly displaying affinities with IS after heavy clashes with Jabhat al-Nusra in December 2014, which accused LSY at the time of being aligned with IS even as observers were widely sceptical.
. Islamic Muthanna Movement (IMM)- a jihadi group originally founded in 2012 that was once spread across Deraa and Quneitra provinces that tried to mediate between Jabhat al-Nusra and LSY in December 2014. It issued a controversial statement in March 2015 that rejected the IS Caliphate declaration but seemed to show sympathy to IS in fighting the'states of kufr' and called for an end to infighting among Islamic factions. The group was accused of a number of assassinations targeting opponents, including the head of the Dar al-'Adl judicial body in the south who was called Osama al-Yatim. By January 2016, open clashes erupted between IMM and rebel groups, resulting in the retreat of the main contingent westwards to establish governance in some localities just east of LSY territory, while a smaller contingent that had not clashed with other factions remained in Deraa city. In March 2016, after establishing its new main base, IMM cooperated with LSY in a new offensive launched by the latter that ultimately failed. As a result, IMM lost all its territorial holdings and had to retreat into LSY territory, while the Deraa city contingent defected.
. Jama'at al-Mujahideen- remnants of the Saraya/Jaysh al-Jihad group in Quneitra that was routed by rebels in 2015 on charges of ties to IS. The group subsequently took refuge in LSY territory.
Since the formation of Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed, the links with IS have been made more clear publicly, as IS' auxiliary outlet Amaq News reported on the group's formation (though somewhat 'late' to the original news). In addition, Amaq has reported on other developments surrounding Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed, such as an air-raid that reportedly hit the town of al-Shajrah that is controlled by the group, as well as an assassination operation that targeted a rebel commander in Deraa city. In fact, when Telegram shut down Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed's channels, the group's media man Omar Mardini wrote on 17 July:
"#Important #Note: The Telegram administration has closed the first and second channel for #Jaysh_Khalid ibn al-Waleed (may God be pleased with him, and there is currently no media voice in the name of the army via Telegram or any other means of connection. Coverage of the army's news will be done through Amaq Agency until a new channel is opened."
The main media page on Facebook for IMM, "Islamic Muthanna Movement- News" (@mmmsy11), has notably continued to promote Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed as of 19 July, as per below.
However, all has not been well in the integration of IMM into the Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed merger. To begin with, it should be noted that the first announcements of Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed followed the mysterious death of IMM's number two guy known as Abu Omar Sawa'iq, whose real name was Zakariya al-Masri. He was notably reported to be among those in IMM who opposed merging with LSY. Supposedly he was killed by an accidental IED explosion in his home. One might suspect foul play.
In addition, since Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed was formed, at least two prominent people from IMM have been caught by rebels following their fleeing of the Yarmouk Valley area. On 21 June, it was reported that the IMM Shari'i official Abu al-Yaman al-Shamsi (aka Muhammad Shamsi) was arrested by Ahrar al-Sham in the Azaz area in north Aleppo countryside near the border with Turkey, as he and his brother were apparently trying to flee to Turkey. Abu al-Yaman al-Shamsi was said to have been responsible for legitimising the assassinations conducted by IMM including the killing of Osama al-Yatim.
Furthermore, on 26 June, it was reported that rebels in the south had arrested IMM security official Abu Nimr al-Hawrani. The site All4Syria cited a source as saying the arrest had occurred around a month before the announcement of his arrest, as he had tried to flee to Jordan.
Now, multiple sources have confirmed to me that IMM leader Abu Ayyub al-Masalama (aka Naji al-Masalama) has left the Yarmouk Valley. One source, Abu al-Waleed al-Baridi from Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed, explained that Abu Ayyub has gone to Raqqa, while denying that his leaving the Yarmouk Valley is due to a disagreement with Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed. Rather, he explained: "He [Abu Ayyub] left for there because he did not like the situation here [in the Yarmouk Valley], and for reasons that only those close to him know. There is talk that he has gone there [to Raqqa] for a trial against him, but I am not sure of this recent information."
Purported photo of Naji al-Masalama
Two other sources pronounced harsher views on Abu Ayyub. "Frankly he is among the personalities I do not like," said one person from Shajrah supportive of Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed. Abu Ayyub is described as having given an allegiance pledge (bay'a) of some sort (apparently to LSY), but this source characterized that pledge as a "bay'a of idle talk." He elaborated: "When he acknowledged that he could not confront the Free Army, he took refuge with Liwa Shuhada' al-Yarmouk. He lost most of his weapons in his battle in Adwan." As for the claim that Abu Ayyub has gone to Raqqa, this source said: "It is on such grounds, but after a time you will hear that he is in Germany."
Similarly, Abu Ahmad al-Baridi (who was close to original LSY leader al-Khal) characterized Abu Ayyub's departure from the Yarmouk Valley as "fleeing under the pretext of going to the north of Syria." He denounced Abu Ayyub as an "insolent liar," elaborating as follows: "He gave a bay'a of idle talk some time ago. Al-Khal offered to him unification, he rejected. But he was not able to face the Free Army, so he took refuge with us." For context, note that al-Khal was assassinated in November 2015. It seems he had tried to outreach to IMM before the full fighting in January 2016 between rebels and IMM in order to join forces.
The tensions with LSY can be traced to two main factors. First, IMM cannot be seen in origin as an IS-linked group. Second, it seems a number have become disillusioned with the group's losses and the humiliation of having to seek refuge in the Yarmouk Valley, trapped there in subordination to LSY. This contrasts with previously being spread throughout Deraa and Quneitra provinces and widely being recognised as an important rebel force in the south.
At the time when LSY began establishing links with IS, it should be remembered that IMM actually clashed with LSY. IMM certainly had a number of IS sympathisers in its ranks, some of whom apparently went north to join IS in 2015, but as the IMM statement back in spring 2015 made clear, the leadership still rejected the IS Caliphate idea. The anti-fitna notions and sympathy for fighting non-Muslim powers in that statement do not automatically translate to an allegiance to IS. A number of other jihadi groups- including al-Qa'ida branches in the Arabian Peninsula and the Maghreb- expressed similar sentiments back in autumn 2014 as the international campaign against IS had commenced, even though it was clear at the time they were not going to pledge allegiance to IS.
Even when IMM and LSY began cooperating in spring 2016, IMM controlled a separate domain of territory. Once it lost those holdings and had to retreat into LSY territory, IMM was severely weakened. According to Abu al-Waleed al-Baridi, "They were originally [i.e. when they had to retreat into the Yarmouk Valley] not much. In number they did not exceed 60 people. Some of them stayed, some left for Raqqa, and some abandoned arms." As for Abu al-Yaman al-Shamsi (the IMM member who tried to flee to Turkey and was arrested in Azaz), Abu al-Waleed al-Baridi explained that "he was not a Shari'i, but rather an admin official for the Shari'is and official of the Shari'i office, and he had left al-Muthanna some time ago, from the time of their entry into the Hawdh." The source from Shajrah supportive of Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed affirmed that "most of them have shaved their beards and fled from the Hawdh." He added that "30 of them have remained, most of them Shari'i officials. And from their Majlis al-Shura [consultation council], only one remained- Abu Ayyub [i.e. he served as head of the council]- but now he has fled."
The tensions between IMM and LSY even following the formation of Jaysh Khalid ibn al-Waleed give a more nuanced view of IMM and its development. Rather than simply establishing links with IS in the manner LSY did, it seems that in a way, IMM was forced into this position through its clashes with other rebels and defeats at their hands. That is not to overlook IMM's assassinations of rivals or the existence of sympathisers in the ranks (many of whom went up north to join IS in 2015), but those acts should be seen in the context of IMM trying to build its own influence in the south with many in the group at least admiring IS' methods of dealing with rivals, rather than necessarily doing the bidding of IS all along through a secret pact.
At least some members of IMM were alienated by IMM actions as time went on last year. One of the founders of IMM who defected in around August 2015 told me in late March 2016: "It used to be a fine movement...until extremist thought made progress in it without realization...and it arrested people, stole arms, killed Sheikh Osama al-Yatim on the pretext of apostasy, arrested Ya'qub al-Ammar, stole weapons of Darayya, and other deeds besides those...so it |
I’ve been buying for the last two years and wanting to read and not reading due to working so much. Lately all I can keep up to date on is books that friends are writing or drawing. So, one of my personal goals on this trip is to get caught up on that stack. Like, I’ve never read Saga, which apparently is a good comic from what I’ve heard?
Nrama: You could say that.
Will you be writing your comic book work here during this month as well?
Sebela: Yeah, I haven’t even told my editors that I’m doing this but I’m sure they’re probably aware by now. Actually, while I was writing this I got an email from an editor wanting to check about October and deadlines. There’s no dispensations for living in clown motels, so I’ll be hitting my deadlines while I’m there. My plan is to live my life like I live my life here in Portland, only somewhere else. I’m gonna be working on new stuff too. The upside of all this is that I will be completely away from all my housebound distractions, so hopefully — between the book and everything else — I’ll be more productive than usual.
Credit: Marissa Louise
Nrama: Have you spoken to anyone who works at the Clown Motel about your project?
Sebela: I haven’t. I did call to confirm the room rate when I was doing a cost breakdown, but then I suddenly got really self-conscious when I was about to ask if they had a monthly rate. I’m not sure what they’re going to think of it, and I’d kind of like to have that discussion face-to-face. One, just to see how an idea like this lands with them. And two, I know they must get a fair number of goofballs making prank calls to them. I’ve seen at least one on YouTube. I don’t want to be mistaken for that kind of Clown Motel enthusiast. As weird as this whole concept is, I’m approaching it with a fair amount of seriousness.
Credit: Jordan Boyd
Nrama: Your Kickstarter Kickstarter has already surpassed it's $5,000 goal, making this idea awfully real, really quick. What do you think about the response?
Sebela: I launched it around noon on Labor Day, which is probably a terrible time to launch a Kickstarter if you ask people who do their homework. I didn’t do homework. I made it up as I went along, with just the basic premise to hold onto. I never really told anyone it was coming. I talked about it on Twitter here and there, vague references, and I think most people took it as a joke. Which, why wouldn’t you? Then I launched it on accident — thinking there was a whole Kickstarter approval process that would take a few days — and I had no choice but to roll with it.
But it got funded in the first four or five hours and I spent most of Labor Day staring at my phone wondering what was happening. There’s a certain amount of support you can expect from friends, and I got more than that, especially from other comics folks, but lots of the backers were complete strangers. The whole thing is super confusing. I had no idea when I launched it if it would hit its goal or not in the 27 days I allotted to the campaign.
I expected it would get some response, because it’s kind of bizarre when compared to the usual spectrum of Kickstarter stuff, but I didn’t think it would blow up to 250+ people supporting it or even having stretch goals. But we’ve already passed the first one and I’m kinda doing like I’ve been since Labor Day: rolling with it, having no idea what the rest of the campaign will bring, and hoping for the best.At a rally in Coral Gables, Obama responds to McCain's shots:
This morning Senator McCain gave a speech in which his big solution to this worldwide economic crisis was to blame me for it.
This is a guy who's spent nearly three decades in Washington, and after spending the entire campaign saying I haven't been in Washington long enough, he apparently now is willing to assign me responsibility for all of Washington's failures.
Now, I think it's a pretty clear that Senator McCain is a little panicked right now. At this point he seems to be willing to say anything or do anything or change any position or violate any principal to try and win this election, and I've got to say it's kind of sad to see. That's not the politics we need.
It's also been disappointing to see my opponent's reaction to this economic crisis. His first reaction on Monday was to stand up and repeat the line he's said over and over again throughout this campaign -- 'the fundamentals of the economy are strong' -- the comment was so out of touch that even George Bush's White House couldn't agree with it.It is feared that legal advice may mean ministers feel obliged to grant the requests because of a previous European court ruling on human rights.
Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, said there was “no clearer example of why we need changes to the human rights framework”.
Last year it emerged that a prisoner had been given access to artificial insemination on the NHS at a cost of around £2,000.
Since then there have been 13 applications for such treatment made by inmates in England and Wales, the Daily Mail reported. Eight have been rejected by five are still being considered by ministers.
Mr Grayling said “There can be no clearer example of why we need changes to the Human Rights framework.
“I don’t believe the originators of the Convention on Human Rights ever imagined it being used for things like this.
“The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has extended its remit into areas which have little to do with real human rights issues and I intend to bring forward proposals about how we change that.”
The cases come after murderer Kirk Dickson won a European court battle in 2007 over an initial refusal to grant his request for fertility treatment to have a child with his partner.
They are likely to spark further disgruntlement over the influence of European judges in the way Britain deals with its prison population.
The Government is already being told to allow inmates the right to vote despite MPs voting to retain the ban on them doing so.
Andrew Percy, Conservative MP for Brigg and Goole, told the Mail: “When you commit a crime such as murder you should lose your rights and liberties.”Dad's discipline: Although mothers typically discipline their children more often than do fathers, dads' disciplinary style is distinctive. In surveying the research on gender and parenthood for our book, Palkovitz observes that fathers tend to be firmer with their children, compared to mothers. Based on their extensive clinical experience, and a longitudinal study of 17 stay-at-home fathers, Kyle Pruett and psychologist Marsha Kline Pruett agree. In Partnership Parenting they write, "Fathers tend to be more willing than mothers to confront their children and enforce discipline, leaving their children with the impression that they in fact have more authority." By contrast, mothers are more likely to reason with their children, to be flexible in disciplinary situations, and to rely on their emotional ties to a child to encourage her to behave. In their view, mothers and fathers working together as co-parents offer a diverse yet balanced approach to discipline.
The Difference Good Dads Make
The contributions that fathers make to their children's lives can be seen in three areas: teenage delinquency, pregnancy, and depression. Here, to illustrate the connection between fatherhood and child well-being, I compare adolescent boys and girls who fall into one of four categories: those living in an intact, married family with a high-quality relationship with their father (top third), or an average-quality relationship with their father (middle third), or a low-quality relationship with him (bottom third), or living in a single-mother family. Relationship quality was measured by a scale of three items tapping a child's assessment of his father's warmth, communication skill, and overall relationship quality.
Delinquency Boys who enjoy average and especially high-quality relationships with their fathers in an intact family are less likely to engage in delinquent behavior. For instance, boys who enjoy high-quality relationships with their fathers are about half as likely to be delinquent, compared to boys being raised by single mothers or by fathers in intact families who only have low-quality relationships with them.
Teenage Pregnancy Dads also seem to matter for daughters. Here, teenage girls living with their father in an intact family and enjoying at least an average-quality relationship with him are about half as likely to become pregnant as teenagers, compared to girls living with a single mother, or who only have a low-quality relationship with their father in an intact family.
Depression And for both boys and girls, a high-quality relationship with dad is associated with less depression. Such teenagers are less than half as likely to end up depressed, compared to their peers in single-mother households, or intact homes where dad only has a low-quality relationship with them. (Note also that most of these associations remain statistically significant after controlling for maternal education, household income, race/ethnicity, and respondent's age.)
The story told by this data, then, suggests that there is a case to make against the fathers who fail to have good-enough relationships with their children. At least on these outcomes, single mothers do about as well for their children, compared to dads who have poor-quality relationships with their children. By contrast, great, and even good-enough dads, appear to make a real difference in their children's lives.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.TARRYTOWN, N.Y. and BOSTON, Nov. 29, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN) and Decibel Therapeutics, Inc., today announced a collaboration to discover and develop new potential therapeutics to protect, repair, and restore hearing.
Decibel is establishing a leadership position in hearing therapeutics by building the world's first comprehensive, integrated drug discovery, translational research, and drug development platform for hearing loss and tinnitus. Regeneron has established world-leading capabilities in genetics research, drug discovery, and antibody development and manufacturing, which can now be used in synergy with Decibel's efforts in hearing loss.
"Over three decades, Regeneron has established an unparalleled suite of innovative technologies thanks to the science-focused approach championed by their longstanding leadership team," said Steven H. Holtzman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Decibel. "As we work to apply these capabilities to the development of hearing therapeutics, what truly distinguishes this collaboration is that Regeneron and Decibel scientists will be working together, shoulder to shoulder, on project teams beginning at the earliest stages of research. We believe this should significantly reduce the time and investment necessary for Decibel to sustainably discover and develop meaningful new medications for hearing loss and tinnitus, increase our probability of success, and enable us to build the world's leading hearing therapeutics company."
The collaboration has an innovative structure where Regeneron will provide Decibel with broad access to its proprietary suite of technologies to support Decibel's goal of discovering important new medicines for hearing. Regeneron will also directly participate in and provide financial support for Decibel's research and development efforts, both through R&D funding payments and a strategic equity investment in Decibel. Decibel retains worldwide development and commercialization rights to any products discovered in the collaboration and will pay Regeneron tiered royalties based on net sales. Further financial terms were not disclosed.
"Regeneron is committed to following the science as broadly as possible, and we're excited to invest in new discoveries coming not only from our labs but also from young biotechnology companies with whom we believe we can synergize. We see these kinds of creative collaborations as a promising way to extend the impact of our technology and medicines to even more patients in need," said George D. Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer of Regeneron. "Decibel is an ideal example in the area of hearing problems - a condition where new and earlier interventions could truly change the course of a person's entire life."
"This stands out as one of the most unique collaborations that I have seen in my 30-plus years in biotech," said Kevin Starr, Co-Founder and Partner at Third Rock Ventures and Chairman of Decibel. "The scope of the collaboration in research and discovery, as well as the retention by the younger biotechnology company to all commercial rights worldwide, are unprecedented in my experience. It positions Decibel to lead the way in developing meaningful therapeutics for hearing."
About Hearing Loss and Tinnitus
According to the World Health Organization, over five percent of the world's population—360 million people—have disabling hearing loss.1 Hearing loss has a variety of etiologies, including genetics, drug-induced ototoxicity, viral and bacterial infections, trauma, exposure to noise, and aging. The effects of hearing loss are wide-ranging and include delayed learning in children and increased social isolation in adults; economically, global costs secondary to hearing loss exceed $750 billion.1 Currently, there are no medicines available to protect, repair, or restore hearing.
About Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Regeneron (NASDAQ: REGN) is a leading biotechnology company that invents life-transforming medicines for people with serious diseases. Founded and led for nearly 30 years by physician-scientists, our unique ability to repeatedly and consistently translate science into medicine has led to six FDA -approved treatments and over a dozen product candidates in development, all of which were homegrown in our laboratories. Our medicines and pipeline are designed to help patients with eye disease, heart disease, allergic and inflammatory diseases, pain, cancer, infectious diseases and rare diseases.
Regeneron is accelerating and improving the traditional drug development process through our proprietary VelociSuite® technologies, including VelocImmune® to yield optimized fully-human antibodies, and ambitious initiatives such as the Regeneron Genetics Center, one of the largest genetics sequencing efforts in the world. For additional information about the company, please visit www.regeneron.com or follow @Regeneron on Twitter.
About Decibel Therapeutics, Inc.
Decibel is building the world's first comprehensive, integrated drug discovery, translational research, and drug development platform to protect, repair, and restore hearing. Founded by world-leading hearing experts and launched in late 2015 by Third Rock Ventures with SR One, Decibel is committed to creating a world in which the benefits and joys of hearing are available to all. Decibel is headquartered in Boston, MA.
For more information about Decibel, please visit www.decibeltx.com or follow @DecibelTx on Twitter.
Regeneron Forward-Looking Statements and Use of Digital Media
This news release includes forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties relating to future events and the future performance of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ("Regeneron" or the "Company"), and actual events or results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Words such as "anticipate," "expect," "intend," "plan," "believe," "seek," "estimate," variations of such words, and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. These statements concern, and these risks and uncertainties include, among others, the nature, timing, and possible success and therapeutic applications of Regeneron's products, product candidates, and research and clinical programs now underway or planned, as well as those of Regeneron's collaborators (including, without limitation, Decibel Therapeutics, Inc. ); the extent to which the results from the research and development programs conducted by Regeneron or its collaborators (such as Decibel Therapeutics, Inc. ) may be replicated in later studies and lead to therapeutic applications; unforeseen safety issues resulting from the administration of products and product candidates in patients, including serious complications or side effects in connection with the use of Regeneron's and its collaborators' product candidates in clinical trials; determinations by regulatory and administrative governmental authorities which may delay or restrict Regeneron's or its collaborators' ability to continue to develop or commercialize their respective products and product candidates; the likelihood, timing, and scope of possible regulatory approval and commercial launch of Regeneron's late-stage product candidates and new indications for marketed products; ongoing regulatory obligations and oversight impacting Regeneron's marketed products, research and clinical programs, and business, including those relating to patient privacy; competing drugs and product candidates that may be superior to Regeneron's and its collaborators' respective products and product candidates; uncertainty of market acceptance and commercial success of Regeneron's and its collaborators' products and product candidates and the impact of studies (whether conducted by Regeneron or others and whether mandated or voluntary) on the commercial success of such products and product candidates; the ability of Regeneron's collaborators, suppliers, or other third parties to perform filling, finishing, packaging, labelling, distribution, and other steps related to Regeneron's products and product candidates; coverage and reimbursement determinations by third-party payers, including Medicare and Medicaid; the ability of Regeneron to manufacture and manage supply chains for multiple products and product candidates; unanticipated expenses; the costs of developing, producing, and selling products; the ability of Regeneron to meet any of its sales or other financial projections or guidance and changes to the assumptions underlying those projections or guidance; the potential for any license or collaboration agreement, including Regeneron's agreements with Sanofi, Bayer HealthCare LLC, and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (or their respective affiliated companies, as applicable), as well as Regeneron's collaboration with Decibel Therapeutics, Inc. discussed in this news release, to be cancelled or terminated without any product success; and risks associated with intellectual property of other parties and pending or future litigation relating thereto, including without limitation the patent litigation proceedings relating to Praluent® (alirocumab) Injection, the ultimate outcome of any such litigation proceedings, and the impact any of the foregoing may have on Regeneron's business, prospects, operating results, and financial condition. A more complete description of these and other material risks can be found in Regeneron's filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016 and its Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended September 30, 2017. Any forward-looking statements are made based on management's current beliefs and judgment, and the reader is cautioned not to rely on any forward-looking statements made by Regeneron. Regeneron does not undertake any obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statement, including without limitation any financial projection or guidance, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.
Regeneron uses its media and investor relations website and social media outlets to publish important information about the Company, including information that may be deemed material to investors. Financial and other information about Regeneron is routinely posted and is accessible on Regeneron's media and investor relations website (http://newsroom.regeneron.com) and its Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/regeneron).
Decibel Media Contact
Katie Engleman ( Pure Communications )
Tel: +1 (910) 509-3977
Katie@purecommunications.com
Regeneron Investor Relations
Manisha Narasimhan, Ph.D.
Tel: +1 (914) 847-5126
Manisha.narasimhan@regeneron.com
Regeneron Media Relations
Alexandra Bowie
Tel: +1 (914) 847-3407
alexandra.bowie@regeneron.com
1 http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs300/en/
View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/regeneron-and-decibel-therapeutics-announce-strategic-collaboration-to-discover-and-develop-therapeutics-for-hearing-loss-and-tinnitus-300560506.htmlThe 22-year-old Canadian man implicated in the deadly attack on an Algerian gas plant in January threatened to kill one foreign hostage every hour if his militant group's demands were not met.
In exclusive interviews with CBC News, several of his former hostages at the In Amenas gas plant confirmed meeting London, Ont. native Xristos Katsiroubas – a recent convert to an extremist form of Islam – during the attack.
In those interviews — for some, the first public comments on the ordeal since it ended — survivors shed new light on Katsiroubas the militant, painting a picture at odds with the high school photo that has dominated news coverage.
Katsiroubas, who is of Greek-Canadian extraction, apparently wore a beard and fatigues, was constantly carrying what appeared to be an AK-47, and could understand and speak some Arabic.
More significantly, he helped handle weaponry and assemble improvised bombs, said one of the survivors of the ordeal who had a chance to observe him for hours.
Katsiroubas also appeared to play the role of negotiator on behalf of the group of approximately 30 al-Qaeda-like militants who stormed the plant in Algeria near the border with Libya, and held some 800 oil workers hostage. The standoff lasted four days.
Exclusive on The National Tonight and only on The National, we give you a virtual tour of that Algerian gas plant and hear stunning, detailed accounts of what one of the Canadian militants did, according to hostages held by him who lived to tell their stories.
The former hostages all recognized Katsiroubas from the media coverage, and also from a photo shown to them during interviews.
From the start, he stood out among the well-armed militants in the bold morning attack.
"He had eyeglasses, same as John Lennon, and he was skinny, and a small beard then. He speak fluent English," Joseph (Jojo) Balmaceda, a senior instrument technician from the Philippines, told CBC News.
The "blond man" as Balmaceda called him, also "can understand their [Arabic] language."
Just a 'bluff'?
When he came face to face with Balmaceda, Katsiroubas demanded to know his nationality.
Balmaceda was tied up by the militants and remained in close proximity to Katsiroubas at the living quarters for much of his harrowing two days in captivity.
"I heard [Katsiroubas] on the phone: 'If you will not follow our demands … we will start to kill the hostages here every one hour.'"
Joseph Balmaceda, from the Philippines, was a senior instrument technician at the In Amenas facility near the Algerian border with Libya. He was the only hostage to survive an explosion in the truck he was being transported in (CBC)
One of the demands, says Balmaceda, was the withdrawal of the Algerian troops that had surrounded the plant.
For effect, while Katsiroubas was on the phone, one of the other militants would unleash a few rounds into the ground.
Katsiroubas once assured a terrified Balmaceda that it was just a "bluff."
But in reality dozens of foreign workers would ultimately die at the hands of the militants in a bloodbath unleashed by suicide explosions or point-blank shootings.
Others died while being used by the militants as human shields, caught in the crossfire when Algerian forces mounted an assault to end the crisis on its second day.
The attackers belonged to "The Signatories in Blood Brigade," led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a well-known Algerian militant and a former senior member of the al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
Katsiroubas and a fellow Canadian friend, Ali Medlej, both of whom participated and were killed in the gas plant attack, are believed to have received training at an extremist camp in Mali.
The militants began their assault by attacking a bus full of foreign workers, then ramming the gates at the residential base, where they went on a door-to-door hunt for foreigners.
The vast majority of workers at the plant were Algerian. But it is jointly run by Algeria's state oil company, Britain's BP and Norway's Statoil. About 130 foreigners worked there at the time of the attack.
As they found the foreign workers, the militants tied their hands and feet. Some had their wrists bound with "detcord" – an explosive type of rope. In some cases, hostages were even made to wear explosives around their necks like a necklace.
According to an eyewitness, some of the militants posed with the workers — and a flag — and apparently made a hostage video that has not been seen in public.
Balmaceda said the militants used the hostages as human shields. When Algerian helicopters approached the plant on the second day of the hostage-taking, Katsiroubas ordered his hostages to stand in a circle and raise their hands.
Then, according to Balmaceda, as the hostage takers prepared to move the foreigners in a convoy, some of the militants — including Katsiroubas — prepped weapons for the journey, including what appeared to be improvised explosive devices.
"They are assembling the bomb, in front of us," he said.
Balmaceda miraculously survived when a militant detonated just such a device inside the vehicle in which Balmaceda was made to ride. He had been sandwiched between two spare tires.
'Do you speak English?'
One Algerian worker, interviewed by CBC News on condition of anonymity, said that when he came across Katsiroubas during the ordeal, the 22-year-old addressed him in Arabic.
"He called me using very formal Arabic, you know, the one we use only at school," said this man. "He told me 'Come here, do you speak English?' And I said no, because I reflected very quickly if I have said yes, then perhaps I would have been used as a translator.
"He said, 'We are looking for people from operations. We are looking for the expats, where are they?' I said in Arabic, 'Sorry I don't understand.' And then he said, 'OK, OK, you can go, you can go."
Until he escaped on the second day of the ordeal, the worker, who said we could call him Mohammed, would see Katsiroubas repeatedly.
"I understand he was travelling between the residential camp and the plant. He was kind of very active and very smart, very in good shape. Moving very quickly between the members of his group and asking people and so on."
The man also heard Katsiroubas give a kind of situation report over the telephone.
"He was speaking in English. I don't know to whom. But he was speaking in English, saying: 'Everything went well, we have two groups'," in an apparent reference to the hostages.
Katsiroubas and his colleagues asked a lot of questions of the workers, says the Algerian worker, like how to find the car park, where to find gasoline, and how to restart the emergency generator after the power had been cut.
American electrical engineer Cris Castro, who was hiding among a large group of Algerians, also came across Katsiroubas, and noticed him right away.
He once glimpsed Katsiroubas on the phone trying to get away from the crowd, apparently making demands of an unknown but obviously English-speaking party.
"I remember [him] mentioning on his cellphone, talking about negotiations," said Castro at his home in Houston, Texas.
"He was not yelling, he was not fast pacing, back and forth, [or] running around … [he's] talking about negotiations like he's talking about some card game.
"You know, you're talking about lives at risk. But yet he was — that's what really struck me — the calmness that they had."
"Even then I wonder what is this fellow doing here … I said he could have been an electrical engineer … geologist, doctor, some professional. You don't have to be in this business of threatening, killing people."
Mike Lovelady, an American from Nederland, Texas, whose brother Victor Lovelady was killed while riding in the same convoy as Balmaceda, also expressed bewilderment at the involvement of the Canadians.
"You could just walk by these kids and never know they were terrorists, and I just, what do you say? You just wonder why.
"It's almost hard to put your finger on the suffering, it's been so bad, and what these young men have done to many families … the holes they left in the hearts and the families they destroyed."
"Mohammed" also said he was shocked to find out later the man was Canadian.
"I can understand that a guy living in the deep south of Algeria or northern Mali, very poor, no future, joining this kind of group. But a guy living in Ontario... I don't know. I didn't understand."Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump focused on a potential perjury case against Hillary Clinton, with the Republican National Committee providing justification for the case.
Trump tweeted the Republican Party’s promotion of the document Hillary Clinton signed on August 8, 2015 confirming that she turned over all emails from clintonemail.com to the Department of State.
But Clinton did not turn over a smoking gun email in the case.
The email in question popped up in an inspector general’s report. Breitbart News reported:
“In November 2010, Secretary Clinton and her Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations discussed the fact that Secretary Clinton’s emails to Department employees were not being received,” according to the report. Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff told her that “we should talk about putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam.” Hillary Clinton replied, “Let’s get separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.”
Clinton met with the FBI Saturday for two and a half hours. The Republican National Committee asserted that Clinton is the first major party presidential candidate to sit for an interview about her own conduct pursuant to an FBI criminal investigation.How much is a human testicle worth?
A Pennsylvania jury this week ballparked its value at nearly $900,000.
That's how much the Huntingdon County panel decided Steven Hanes, a 54-year-old Mount Union man, should receive in damages because a doctor removed the wrong testicle during an operation in June 2013.
The jury of 11 women and one man reached that verdict against Dr. Valley Spencer Long and the J.C. Blair Memorial Hospital in Huntingdon on Wednesday at the end of a 2 1/2-day civil trial.
Braden R. Lepisto, Hanes' lawyer, said Thursday that the verdict appears to be the first monetary award to be granted by a jury in a medical malpractice case in Huntingdon County in more than 25 years.
The big question here is: How could something like this happen?
"That was my thought when we first got this case," said Lepisto, of the Philadelphia law firm Kline & Specter. "We just felt the evidence was so obvious."
Hanes claimed in his suit that he went to Long, a urologist, because he was experiencing chronic pain in his right testicle. Although other, less invasive procedures were options, Long recommended surgery, Lepisto said.
In the operating room, Long removed Hanes' healthy left testicle while leaving the damaged right one in place, Hanes' suit states. Hanes claimed the doctor was "reckless" in failing to properly identify the testicle that was supposed to be removed.
Court filings show Long wrote in a post-operative report that "it appeared that the left testicle and cord may actually have been removed instead of the right one." Hanes claimed Long told him as much during a follow-up visit.
"The conduct of the doctor during the surgery indicated he had no idea which testicle he was removing," Lepisto said.
"Steve had the right testicle pain for 15 years before he went to see Dr. Long. He wanted to relieve the pain," Lepisto added. "Four years later Steve continues to have the pain. He's had more frequent pain."
He added that Hanes now has a "debilitating fear" of having the ailment treated because of what happened. Lepisto said that if the problem right testicle does eventually have to be removed, Hanes would have to undergo testosterone replacement therapy for the rest of his life.
He noted that his firm is pursuing another pending malpractice case over a patient who died under Long's care. The doctor, now 77, is no longer performing surgeries, Lepisto said.
In rendering its verdict against Long and the hospital, the jury awarded Hanes $620,000 in damages for pain and suffering and $250,000 in punitive damages against Long for "reckless indifference."
The verdict can be appealed.GTR Profile Blog Joined September 2004 47912 Posts Last Edited: 2012-04-21 02:11:14 #1 UPDATE: OpticalShot's full translation can be read off-Teamliquid,
+ Show Spoiler [Old] +
Adding to that, I wasn't really sure whether to put this in SC2 or here, but since it's with the KeSPA teams, I'm siding with BW General for now.
- KeSPA teams (KT, SKT, CJ, Woongjin, STX, Samsung, Team 8, ACE) all see the change to SC2 is inevitable.
- All team head coaches except for ACE participated in this FOMOS-ran'symposium'
- Lee Jae-kyun (WJ Coach) 'STX and SKT have already started preparing'
- Kim Eun-dong (STX Coach) 'That is true, but SKT have been more active than us'
- Lee Ji-hoon (KT Coach) 'We should be using the English version of SC2 as (current BW) fans are more familiar with the English names of units'
- Kim Ga-eul (Samsung Coach) 'Many of our players are unfamiliar to what the Dark Shrine is, lots of unfamiliar buildings in general'
- Eun-dong, Ju Hoon (T8 Coach) 'We should use SC2 as a way of expanding our way of ESPORTS to the foreigners' 'We should also take note of foreign events e.g. MLG'
- Eun-dong 'While BW's competitive peak outside of Korea died after a few years, there was still a community involved in both the domestic (Korea) and foreign scene (Teamliquid), now that community has grown tenfold with the release of SC2'
- Jae-kyun 'I heard there are many SKT players in Grand Master'
- Ji-hoon 'During his (Flash's) rehabilitation, he got to Masters (in SC2) without even knowing what the new units did'
On April 21 2012 01:35 UTL_Unlimited wrote:
Some quick notes on the translations:
1) I think a scary point got jumped across. But SKT and STX coaches mention that there are numerous players who actually JUST played SC2 during the Proleague season in hopes that they can show up on TV later on. But when the coaches can't tell the players when SC2 will be on proleague, many actually just leave and rumors of teams kicking out players begin to spread. so they're very worried about this becoming a bigger problem later on.
2) some coaches agree that SC2 seemed boring in comparison to BW.So when they have to force the players to play this game later on, they feel like players wouldn't be doing it for fun anymore = it actually will be forcing it.
3) When they had players practice SC2 and then switch back to SC1 and then back again to SC2, the players seem to have a really hard time adjusting. They say the games are completely different. Even players who switch races later on for SC2 actually say it's just too hard to adjust and so they switch back to their original SC1 race later on.
4) Coaches feel they need to make Proleague even more spectator friendly than before in order to promote SC2 when the switch occurs. They also think that while fans will either adjust or leave the scene, they feel most of them will just adjust.
5) Reason why KT coach wants the English version (since it wasn't covered), is that they want the fans to feel as accommodated as possible when the switch occurs. High templar should be called a high templar; scv as an scv. Fans will just get confused if they start calling it with the Korean names, and so this should be a big issue.
6) SKT actually had a test where they had an actual paper test with the names of the units in Korean on it and they had pictures to match the units. Results = led to hilariousness.
7) Some coaches don't want the switch = but they feel it's inevitable due to sponsor problems and such.
8) Team8 Coach wants SC1 to exist as a "Living Legend", but they feel that when the SC2 switch occurs, then it will lead to people saying later on in life, "why the hell did we play this shitty old game SC1 for so long". This is because SC1 only really existed in Korea and nowhere else. He doesn't want SC1 to be just thrown away after leaving such a mark in the community, and wants some form of existence for SC1.
9) Another coach is worried that since the industry is so young, if they just switch the game as such, the same problems that they had in the past (the mistakes and other such incidents) will simply occur AGAIN with the new game.
10) Coaches are sad that SC1 only grew in Korea. They really wanted it to grow like how SC2 is with MLG. However, they believe that a foreign community (i.e. mentioning Team Liquid) still exists for BW and they were hoping that this community will always exist. They see that while the eSports community has grown with SC2, in actuality, they feel like the Korean eSports Community has simply grown smaller due to this growth.
11) The coaches REALLY WANTED to approach the foreign scene apparently. Like no other. But because of the strong idea that 'BW is ours and proleague is ours', the coaches couldn't approach the foreign scene. They see that the foreign community is there with the comments, team liquid, and youtube videos, but they just couldn't do anything about it. (tone of regret does exist here) They were happy that the previosu finals was done globally, but still sad that it's so late.
12) In terms of 'practice', in comparison to the GSL and other SC2 tournaments, their players are just screwing around. Coaches are also worried that while they have to make SC2 'theirs', the splitting of fans is very worrisome.
13) SKT VS TEAM8 SC2 HAPPENED TROLOLOLOL. Every player was like: wtf is this new hotkey shit? and then when it came down to it, Team8 whopped ass against SKT 4:2. TROLOLOL. One good thing was that because SC2 battles are so much faster, the player's mechanics increased because they needed faster reactions.
14) coaches see that SC2 is a brand new opportunity for the lower tier players= TBLS won |
sent only one other Democrat to Congress since the Civil War.
Once elected, he engineered a legendary constituent service operation that handled four times as many constituent issues as the average Member of Congress….in part by keeping his congressional office open on nights and weekends to handle the needs of working people unable to visit a congressional office during normal business hours. Sestak got re-elected by 20% without spending a dime on direct voter contact beyond yard signs, even though his Republican opponent ran attack ads on TV against him.
In the 2010 Democratic primary, Arlen Specter had the strong support of labor, then-Governor Rendell, Senator Casey, and almost every Democratic interest group…but Sestak surged in one month from a 21% deficit to an 8% victory.
In the 2010 general election, Sestak lost, but once again overperformed relative to the rest of the ticket. Sestak – despite being outspent by a bigger margin than any Senate candidate in America – lost by less than 2% while the Pennsylvania Democratic gubernatorial nominee lost by 9% and 4 Democratic Congressmen lost their re-elections by broad margins (Patrick Murphy lost by 7%, Paul Kanjorski lost by 9%, Kathy Dahlkemper lost by 11%, and Chris Carney lost by 10%).
Given that track record, rank-and-file Democrats would understandably see Sestak – the highest-ranking military officer ever to elected to Congress – as their strongest standard-bearer in 2016….a year in which the electorate will be a lot more favorable than the 2010 electorate in which he only narrowly lost.
2) Sestak is the hardest-working candidate in Pennsylvania politics
After Sestak narrowly lost in 2010, he declined high-paying lobbying jobs that were offered to him. Instead, Sestak went to each of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties to thank many of the 18,000 volunteers who had supported his campaign. He has kept up that pace since announcing more than a year ago that he intended to run for the Senate, holding more than 400 events for county commissioners and even school board candidates. He’s raised more than $13 million in his 2010 run for the Senate and has already raised $1.2 million for the 2016 campaign.
3) What is the argument against Joe Sestak’s candidacy that would work in a Democratic primary, where his independence is an asset?
Those members of the Democratic establishment cool to Sestak’s candidacy have demonstrated in the past several statewide elections in Pennsylvania a complete inability to win primaries. In 2010, Specter was supported by nearly every Democrat of note….and Sestak won. In 2012, most of that same group rallied behind Patrick Murphy to get the Democratic nomination for Attorney-General, but Kathleen Kane beat him handily. In 2014, the Democratic establishment split their support between Schwartz, McCord, and McGinty….but it was Tom Wolf who prevailed handily. (Note: Wolf pulled into such a large lead so early in the process that he attracted some support from the party establishment before the primary election, but he had virtually none before he rocketed into the lead and looked like the clear frontrunner.)
Sestak is better-known and better-liked by Democratic voters and insiders (as a whole) today than he was in 2010, when he toppled Arlen Specter – the longest-serving Senator in Pennsylvania history – despite Specter’s huge financial advantage and unanimous support from party leaders. Someone could emerge to challenge Sestak in the Democratic primary, but there’s a reason why the past 6 weeks have seen a lot of credible candidates decline to do so.
December 17th, 2014 | Posted in Front Page Stories, Senate, Top Stories | 40 CommentsOKLAHOMA CITY — A transgender candidate who is a former Oklahoma City police officer has advanced to a runoff for a state House seat.
Democrat Paula Sophia will face businessman and former pastor Jason Dunnington in the Aug. 26 runoff.
The winner will take a seat at the Legislature as there is no Republican in the race.
Sophia used to patrol the district she seeks to represent and retired from the police force in April to run for the Legislature.
She is a U.S. Army veteran of Desert Storm who joined the Oklahoma City Police Department in 1992.
She was engaged in a brief legal battle with the city after transitioning in 2001, but ultimately returned to the force.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
This Story Filed UnderSpoiler Warning: Lots of talk about major characters being written out of television shows and movies.
Tonight sees the release of The Huntsman: Winter's War. It's no secret that this film is a spin-off of Snow White and the Huntsman that features no Snow White. The die was cast before the first movie even came out to create a franchise not with Kristen Stewart's Snow White, but with Chris Hemsworth's Huntsman character. That this spin-off, which took a female-led franchise and made it into a male-led one, finally arrives today, with poor reviews and dicey box office prospects heading into the weekend, is not a little ironic. Being the star of a major action fantasy franchise couldn't keep Stewart safe from getting the boot off of her franchise. That seems to be a current trend in television as well.
In just the last few weeks, co-lead Nicole Beharie was killed in the third season finale of Sleepy Hollow, leaving her co-star Tom Mison alive to continue the fight against supernatural evil. And word came down earlier this week that the ninth season of ABC's Castle, if there is to be a ninth season, will continue without its co-lead Stana Katic while co-lead Nathan Fillion will continue to solve mysteries. Last week's The Blacklist featured that show's co-lead (Megan Boone) perishing in childbirth after a car accident, leaving James Spader and the rest of the crew (including Liz's occasionally evil husband) to stop bad guys without her.
The Blacklist has not finished its third season and the death of Boone's character may be a temporary fake-out to give her maternity leave. Yet in this current environment, the notion that The Blacklist didn't actually kill off one-half of the show's star duo would make it an exception to the rule. And don't forget Katie Cassidy's would-be Black Canary being stabbed to death on the most recent episode of Arrow, with her character having apparently outlived her usefulness now that she no longer seems fated to be Oliver Queen's true love. And I'm sure I missed a couple here and there as well.
Taken as a whole, along with any number of times this has happened in the past (such as when CBS fired Criminal Minds's two popular female leads only to bring them back after viewer outrage), the message is clear: Women on television are disposable. You can be the co-lead of a popular network series, one with a massive online fan base no less, but you're still considered as expendable as any of Jack Bauer's doomed lady loves. Even if you are one-half of a two-hander, you are considered inessential in a way that the male co-star rarely is.
Actresses can be written out for budgetary issues. They can be written out and replaced with other new (younger?) females to "spice up" the show. They can be written out due to behind-the-scenes squabbles. Or they can be killed off just to shake things up and make the male heroes a little sad/angry heading into the big fight. They are never truly indispensable. That's why Gillian Anderson was initially offered substantially less money for the X-Files reunion than David Duchovny. Artistic freedom and financial situations notwithstanding, the male lead is considered invaluable while the female lead is seen as expendable.
Now we all know how expendable female characters can be in major movie franchises. Any number of sequels (action films like The Expendables 3 and comedies like Ted 2) have followed the 007 rule of bringing back the male lead(s) along with a new "flavor of the month" female co-star. A franchise like The Mummy or Iron Man where the male lead stayed in a monogamous relationship with the same woman over even three films is a rarity. In most cinematic franchises, the main female character is a prop.
In film franchise world, the female lead is often considered as disposable and replaceable as the location or the "new" villain. Admit it, you're a little surprised that Bryce Dallas-Howard will be back for Jurassic World 2. But Snow White and the Huntsman was something of a terrifying scenario, one planned long before the film even came out. Headlining a major fantasy franchise hit and being at least partially responsible for a massive opening weekend wasn't enough to prevent said female lead from kicked preemptively kicked out of her franchise.
There was talk that Kate Beckinsale might get kicked out of Sony's Underworld so that Theo James could headline the fifth go-around. There was talk that Emily Blunt would get written out of a Sicario sequel (to focus on Benecio Del Toro) even though she was a key reason why that leggy Lionsgate release snagged $84 million worldwide last year. Those discussions turned out to be false alarms, but few would have been surprised if they had come to pass.
Here we are, with Universal/ Comcast Corp. (which since 2012 has turned into a leader in terms of female-led multiplex-friendly offerings) having made good on their preemptive promise to turn their female-led blockbuster into a male-led franchise.
Warts and all, Snow White and the Huntsman was an example of how female-led fantasy action movies could succeed on a comparative level as the male-led ones. But we still have a sequel today starring the male co-star (Chris Hemsworth) with a new female lead (Jessica Chastain) to spice things up. While the original 2012 film was sold as a female-empowerment fantasy action movie featuring an armor-wearing/sword-wielding Snow White, the franchise plans around said picture were not based around Snow White, but rather around her male co-star no matter how well that film did.
If Snow White and the Huntsman had bombed, Stewart would have gotten tarred. It would have served as another example of how female-led films can't possibly be blockbusters. But it snagged a $55 million debut and $396m worldwide cume and she got tarred anyway. Chris Hemsworth, the (unquestionably charismatic, engaging, and talented) would-be movie star who couldn't open In the Heart of the Sea, Blackhat, or Rush (all of which are good-to-great), gets a shiny new action franchise to call his own.
If this new film hits, Hemsworth will reap the rewards that arguably should go to the trio of female co-stars (Chastain, Emily Blunt, and Charlize Theron) who get so few genre star vehicles that something like Girl on a Train or Sicario is an event. If it bombs or underperforms, few will consider that maybe the key ingredient last time out was the fact that Snow White and the Huntsman was a female-led action fantasy in a stereotypically boy-friendly summer which starred Kristen Stewart (who has some very... dedicated fans) at the peak of her Twilight fame, in an unconventional variation on the Snow White legend.
When you're a woman in Hollywood, no matter your stature, no matter your billing, and no matter your importance to the television show or film franchise in which you appear, you may well always have a target on your back. At the end of the day, the only indisposable part of the franchise or the hit television show is the guy. Even starring as Snow White in Snow White and the Huntsman wasn't enough. And nor was being the co-lead in shows like Sleepy Hollow or Castle. No matter how much the fans love you, those in charge love your male co-star that much more.France wants to "give a new impetus" to Turkey's EU membership talks, allowing negotiations to resume this week after a break of almost three years.
"We are favourable to the idea of opening talks on what is called chapter 22," French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said on Tuesday (12 February) in Paris after meeting his Turkish counterpart on the margins of a conference on Libya.
Student, retired or simply can't afford full price? No worries.
A spokesman for the foreign ministry later the same day confirmed that France, a long-term opponent of Turkish EU accession, has had a change of heart and wants to "give a new impetus to EU-Turkey relations."
He said Paris also expects Ankara to "contribute concretely to this dynamic."
Turkey began its EU accession process back in 1963 with a tailor-made "association agreement."
It formally applied to join in 1987 and started accession talks in 2005.
But the negotiations stalled three years ago, in part due to Cyprus' complaint that Turkish soldiers continue to occupy the north part of the island.
France has also proved hesitant to opening new areas in the negotiations, however - out of the 35 so-called chapters, just one has been concluded so far.
France's former President, Nicolas Sarkozy had openly said that Turkey should never get into the EU.
For her part, German Chancellor Angela Merkel still shares Sarkozy's view, but she says her government will not block Turkey's membership talks as such.
The impasse has prompted frequent complaints from Ankara.
In its latest salvo, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week said on TV that he might join the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, a multilateral Asian body, instead of the Union.
For his part, EU enlargement commissioner Stefan Fuele welcomed the French development.
"France's signal of readiness for the EU to restart discussions on regional policy with Turkey adds to momentum to make 2013 a turning point in our relations," he tweeted.
Technical talks on chapter 22, which deals with regional aid and how to align Turkey's legislation to EU rules in this field, are expected to start later this week. But first, the Irish EU presidency needs to get the consensus of all the other member states to move ahead.
Meanwhile, Cyprus is also expected to soften its stance if presidential elections on Sunday put a new administration in power.
Turkey will also need to move, however.
The EU wants it to open access to its ports and airports for Cypriot vessels and airlines.
Concerns over Turkish human rights abuses, the role of the military in Turkish politics and internal conflicts with the Kurdish minority in Turkey are also irritants in EU-Turkish relations.Ubisoft has gone back and forth on its PC DRM policies. With Driver, it's back to always-on.
Ubisoft's relationship with PC users has been a rocky one, thanks to the company's erratic DRM policies. Sometimes its games require a constant online connection to play, sometimes not.
Assassin's Creed II required an Internet connection at first, even if you were playing single-player. So did Splinter Cell: Conviction. Ubisoft eventually patched out that requirement, instead asking players to verify the game's authenticity through a login screen. After that, the game didn't check for an Internet connection. Ubisoft relied on a similar login method for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Not perfect, but it worked.
Ubisoft is returning to the always-on requirement for the PC version of Driver: San Francisco.
"I can confirm that the PC version of Driver San Francisco will require an online connection to play in both single player and multiplayer modes," said Ubisoft public relations representative Dominic DiSanti to me this afternoon.
The change in DRM policy was noticed on the game's official Twitter account.
On the console versions of Driver, players will have to activate Uplay in order to access the game's multiplayer, as Ubisoft adopts the now regular "online pass" feature designed to combat used games.
"When we first introduced the connection requirement last year, we stated that our decision to implement it into our PC titles would be considered on a case by case basis and this remains true," said DiSanti. "We will assess each future PC title and strive to offer the best gameplay experience possible while also ensuring that we are protecting the amazing work and effort of our talented creative teams."
Part of the reason people react strongly to Ubisoft's DRM policy is out of principle. They own the content, why can't they play it, with or without Internet? The other reason is practical, as hackers brought down Ubisoft's DRM authentication servers, which prevented some users from being able to play Assassin's Creed II and Silent Hunter 5, two games with always-on DRM.
It's possible Ubisoft will change its stance, depending on user feedback; the company has done so in the past. As it stands, however, when Driver ships in September, it'll mark a return in DRM policy.According to Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), Interbank funds transfers or Pakistan Real-time Interbank Settlement Mechanism (PRISM) transactions will now be charged a new withholding tax under section 236P of the Income Tax Ordinance 2001.
When asked, Shahid Hussain Asad, Senior Member FBR (Inland Revenue Policy) and Official Spokesperson FBR, said that all PRISM transactions conducted at banks are now subjected to withholding tax. He said the tax will come under Section 236P of the Income Tax Ordinance 2001. The government has already passed the amendment through the Income Tax Amendment Ordinance 2015.
The transactions will be taxed at a relatively reduced rate of 0.3 percent. The amount was previously stated to be 0.6 percent in July but the trade community held a protest which led to this reduction. The protesting community has been given an extension of 1 week (till 7th November) to file their income tax returns under the new ordinance.
The section 236P has been recently introduced in the Financial Act 2015 which requires all banking companies to deduct withholding tax from non-filers at the time of sale or any financial transaction. The tax also applies to “demand drafts, pay orders, special deposit receipts, cash deposit receipts, short term deposit receipts, call deposit receipts, rupee travellers cheques or any other instruments of such nature”.
The tax is also applicable at “the time of transfer of any sum through cheque, interbank or intra bank transfers through cheques, online transfers, telegraphic transfers, mail transfers, direct debits, payments through internet, payments through mobile phones (easypasia etc.), account to account funds transfer, third party account to account funds transfers, real time account to account funds transfer, real time third party account to account fund transfer, automated teller machine (ATM) transfers, or any other mode of electronic or paper based funds transfer.”
via Business RecorderThe cannabis crusader behind Vancouver’s largest and laxest chain of dispensaries says he will continue selling small amounts of pot to customers — even if they can’t prove they need it for medicinal purposes — until the drug is legalized or he is again charged with trafficking.
Don Briere says his eight-store Weeds Glass and Gifts chain will continue its practice of selling under a gram of combustible or edible cannabis to those without a federal medicinal licence or a note from a naturopath or doctor. The colourful 63-year-old entrepreneur says public opinion has shifted further in his favour from 2004 when his Da Kine Smoke and Beverage Shop was surrounded by the VPD’s emergency response team and he was charged with trafficking for selling recreational pot over the counter.
“Worst case is we would more than likely have some charges against us, then we would go to court and we would call it criminal misuse of public resources and we would demand that who ever’s doing this be charged, not us,” Briere told The Sun Monday as he helped open his eighth location near Broadway and Collingwood Street in Kitsilano.
“We’re pushing for total, total legalization,” Briere said. “We’re making it as easy as possible (to buy), we’re trying to help people here.”
A recent Sun investigation found two of Briere’s Weeds stores were the easiest of five separate dispensaries for a reporter to buy edible pot products. While a note from a naturopath or doctor stating that the patient benefited from using marijuana was required at most dispensaries, at both Weeds locations the reporter bought edibles as a non-member without a medical note.
Such customers can buy up to a gram a day with a temporary card at Weeds stores, but Briere said his employees will “egg them on” to see a doctor for a proper medicinal prescription or note.
“If somebody comes in in a wheelchair do I have to call their doctor to let them use some pain relief?” Briere said.
Briere made headlines in 1999 after RCMP busted a network of grow-ops that Crown counsel said was the largest B.C. network it had ever seen. After serving two years in prison, he started Da Kine on Commercial Drive, which was soon raided for selling pot over the counter. While in prison on trafficking charges related to that raid, Briere became the first federal prisoner to run for a seat in a B.C. election.
Briere said he doesn’t think the public would stomach another $1.5 million trial to put him behind bars for selling marijuana.
In 2012, he founded and then sold the Vancouver Pain Management Society dispensary, where the Sun reporter was able to become a member after a 30-minute meeting with an in-house psychologist. About a year ago, he started the Weeds chain. Now Briere said he owns half of each franchise, which can cost at least $50,000 to open once he and the franchisee pay for glass display cases, cannabis products and paraphernalia and the four months’ rent some landlords demand.Although it falls in classics season, you can’t call Strade Bianche a classic. It’s only eleven. Not old enough to drink, vote or have sex.
But it’s starting to feel like a classic.
***
Chianti. The region the race spends much of its time. But also a wine, a celebrated Italian export, made to a strict recipe. Mainly Sangiovese, that most famous of Italian grapes, perhaps with some Canaiolo, another Italian grape, too. Or some Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot (grapes most famous in Bordeaux). Or Syrah (best known in the Rhône Valley).
Bringing together some of the best ingredients from across Europe, blending them to make something wonderful.
Strade Bianche is put together in much the same way.
A pinch of the short, steep hills from the Tour of Flanders. Something to make the legs burn, to keep the peloton guessing. Plentiful opportunities for the masochistic to escape the bunch. Each climb seeming to produce another selection.
A dash of the pavé from Roubaix, but with a local twist. The eponymous strade bianche, the sterrati or white roads themselves. Not cobbles but dirt tracks made of crushed marble giving them their ghostly hue. Throwing up long clouds of dust to mark the passage of the riders like the advance of a marching army. Eleven sectors in all, covering more than a third of the race distance.
Some local ingredients too.
A huge dollop of Tuscan countryside. Views like the canvasses for sale in every piazza in Florence. Cypress trees standing proud among the farmland and vineyards. Farmhouses left empty while their owners work in Islington or Notting Hill.
To round it all off, a sprinkling of culture. The hill town of Siena and the finish in the Piazza del Campo. A basin of a public square most famous for il Palio, a race of another kind, for horses. A race which can trace its origins back over 400 years. Pre-dating la Doyenne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, by the narrow margin of three centuries. But we prefer the bikes.
Blended together, these ingredients create something more than the the sum of their parts. A race that somehow shouldn’t be so compelling. But one that is already a must-see, a must-ride.
***
There was no dramatic attack. Michal Kwiatowski simply rode off the front. Later, he said it was because the others weren’t cooperating well. That he decided just to ride at his own tempo.
Leaning on his elbows where he could, sitting up for the twists and climbs. Bullying the pedals round. Emptying the tank. Leaving all his energy amongst the vines.
Behind him Tim Wellens, Zdeněk Štyber and Greg van Avermaet worked together to bring him back. An exceptional trio. But they couldn’t. Kwiatowski had the strength of three men. Unassisted.
Unless you count the TV moto.
In search of a head-up shot, it kept riding in front of him. Kwiatowski grateful for the slipstream. Never mind what was in the envelope. Who did Team Sky have riding the moto?
It wasn’t all helpful. Buzzing round him as though trying to shoot a single camera Hollywood epic, the moto got too close for comfort. The Polish Kwiatowski communicated in obvious Anglo-Saxon.
The beauty of the Tuscan countryside gave way to the beauty of Siena. Or at least it did after passing a much less-beautiful builders yard. The lead hovered around thirty seconds. More than enough.
Entering Siena, the steep incline on rain-damp flag stones made Kwiatowski look like a club rider with a hangover. As the course levelled off in the heart of town, he eased back, taking the slippery final corners with all the poise of Bambi learning to stand.
Thirty seconds was an age. He rolled down the final few metres towards the finish, waving an imaginary Palio standard in his hand. A warrior returning victorious.
His second Strade Bianche title. One victory away from having a section of sterrati named after him. Chianti would be taken.
***
As the race winds its way through the Tuscan countryside, it passes through the hilltop town of Montalcino. A town of just 5,000 souls. The sort of place you would be amazed by, until you realise there are dozens of towns just like this in Tuscany.
But try the wine. Brunello di Montalcino. Aromatic wood, berries and vanilla dance on your tongue like Claudio Chiappucci on the pedals. Far better than the more famous Chianti. So good, the Italians keep most if for themselves.
Just because something is well known, it doesn’t mean it is the best. Just because something is older, it doesn’t make it better.
Strade Bianche may not have the profile of the Flanders classics (yet). But it will. History has to start somewhere.
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AdvertisementsDudes. Remember that kinda neat grim n’ gritty live-action Pok?mon fan trailer from last week? The one that someone had tried to pretend was a real trailer, so they added in some shaky-cam and crowd noise? Well, the regular trailer is now out, and it turns out the damn thing is totally awesome. First of all, I can actually tell its subtitled Pok?mon: Apok?lypse; second, it takes Pok?mon battles to its inevitable, cock-fighting end; the effects are great (for a fan trailer, come on), and the dude who plays Brock keeps his eyes closed the whole time. Outstanding. Please, please, give this a watch. And if happen to be the geniuses behind this trailer, please, please, don’t pull anymore of that handy-cam bullshit again. You made your awesome video almost unwatchable — you just outsmarted yourself. That’s something Team Rocket would do. Thanks for everyone who sent this in.The recent explosion of interest in gray zone tactics and techniques has spurred an interesting discussion of history and terminology. Writers such as Adam Elkus, writing here at War on the Rocks, have doubts about the novelty of the idea — Adam argues that the concept is “hopelessly muddled,” historically ignorant, and “internally underdetermined and weak in overall policy utility,” and that it suffers from “gaping conceptual holes,” and thus promises to “needlessly confuse” national security debates.
These critiques offer many insightful points, but I think they exaggerate the claims of gray zone analyses, and the ambitions of their authors. The issue is not whether the concept is new. In fact, it obviously is not: As I stress repeatedly in my own report on the topic and at War on the Rocks, history is full of states using things now ascribed to gray zone campaigns. Instead, these analyses — mine and dozens of others from official and unofficial sources alike — are merely trying to understand recent actions by U.S. rivals in coherent terms.
The issue of analytical aspirations is a bit obscure, but it is central to the critiques and demands a quick word. Elkus refers repeatedly to “Mazarr’s conception” of gray zone conflict, seeming to imply that my report aimed to produce an original theory of war. It did not. For one thing, the term gray zone has been used by dozens of governments and scholars for some years now. Some analyses (such as official NATO reports) prefer the term hybrid; others favor “measures short of war.” But nobody I know of working this issue is trying to overturn historical understanding, or thinks they have devised a brilliant new theory. They are merely trying to get a handle on what is going on, and believe that some encompassing category — gray, hybrid, or otherwise — can help us do it.
When B.J. Armstrong, also writing at War on the Rocks, quotes the historian of realpolitik John Bew to the effect that “effective foreign policy is better served by a more textured analysis — a sense of patterns, interactions, and connections — than by new theories,” I do not see how this diminishes the value of gray zone analyses, which are attempting to do precisely that. Their goal is to assess current patterns, interactions, and connections with an eye to informing U.S. and allied strategy.
Armstrong urges that the United States should not “disregard the ideas and concepts previous generations have built” — and I could not agree more. My own report goes into some depth on decades- and centuries-old concepts of unconventional and asymmetric approaches, noting for example that fifth-column-style political disruption has been a feature of rivalry for millennia. Such historical perspective, though, does not deny that Russia, China and others are using measures short of war today in coherent and effective ways.
In his second article on the topic, Elkus summarizes what seems to be his main objection:
[T]he gray zone concept merely puts a new spin on older and more well-understood ideas from political science, military history, and strategic theory about how actors pursue strategic objectives under constraint.
If such a thing helps decision-makers to understand current patterns of behavior, I frankly don’t see the problem. That’s precisely what these analyses are trying to do: Gather together well-known ideas into a coherent portrait of current events.
The question should not be about terminology or novelty. It should be whether there is an identifiable pattern of behavior that threatens U.S. and allied interests. Are Russia, China, probably Iran, and perhaps others using holistic campaigns fashioned from a wide range of military, political, informational, and economic tools to achieve revisionist goals while staying under the threshold of major war? Are the resulting campaigns more determined, coherent, and coordinated than run-of-the-mill diplomacy, enough so that they ought to be considered as a specific danger?
If the answer to all of these questions is yes — and I think there is a good case to be made for that — then the United States and its allies confront a specific form of statecraft; not new, in all its characteristics, but real and relevant. And most observers who have looked at the problem tend to agree that the United States is ill-prepared for such tactics, in part because it simply has not thought of them as a coherent approach worthy of a tailored response.
Notwithstanding theoretical determinacy or the deep history of Russian and Chinese grand strategy, U.S. civilian and military leaders seem convinced, based on the evidence of their daily interaction with Russian and Chinese activities, that these countries are using threshold-busting approaches to achieve revisionist effects short of war. If so, the United States needs to take them seriously and formulate meaningful responses.
To be clear, the case for gray zone campaigns is a provisional judgment. Recent actions by Russia and China could represent a much looser, more ad-hoc seizing of apparent opportunities. Leaders in both countries might have little conscious sense of conducting anything like a gray zone, threshold-straddling, measures-short-of-war campaign. An important recent analysis of the so-called “Gerasimov Doctrine,” for example, suggests that the West should not read too much into its implications for Russian strategy. In my report, I look at various categories of evidence — including patterns of behavior and doctrinal statements — and conclude that there is reason to believe that recent hints do imply self-conscious strategies. But the case, I fully admit, remains inconclusive.
There is a certain truth to the fact that very little in world politics — or the assessment of it — is really new. Yet from time to time, patterns do emerge that — while their specific elements may be antique — reflect important and identifiable mixtures of interests, tactics, and intentions that become characteristic of a particular moment. Sometimes these patters pose a particular danger because they reflect unexpected and unplanned-for concepts: combined-arms blitzkrieg in 1939, insurgency in the 1950s and 1960s, hybrid war in 2006. At such times, terms and concepts can be helpful to understanding what is going on. They can point us to significant trends, make clear the need for analysis, and hint at the right responses — and do so by building on, rather than ignoring or replacing, the many important ideas that have gone before.
Michael J. Mazarr is the acting director of RAND Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program, and a senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
Photo credit: Day Donaldson (adapted by WOTR)As an NBA franchise owner, Michael Jordan has yet to build a team that lives up to his championship standards.
Maybe he’ll have better luck with a golf course.
According to several sources with ties to Jordan, the basketball legend is exploring the possibility of building his own private club in Florida, an exclusive retreat with a tiny membership hand-picked by His Airness himself.
A PGA Tour pro who lives in Florida and is friendly with Jordan confirmed the story. Jordan’s business manager, Estee Portnoy, did not respond to a request seeking comment.
Sources say that Jordan’s course ambitions have been fueled in part by his dissatisfaction with goings-on at the Bear’s Club, the Jupiter club where MJ is a member and owns a lavish home.
Those sources say that Jordan has grown frustrated with pace of play at the club.
“Michael likes to play fast and he can’t stand it when people won’t let him through,” said a golf-industry insider who knows Jordan and who has spoken with several Bear’s Club’s members. “That happens enough out there that he’s gotten fed up.”
According to the same source, who requested anonymity, Jordan has secured the option on a plot of land in nearby Hobe Sound, just south of the luxe Medalist Golf Club, which counts Tiger Woods and Rickie Fowler among its members.
Jordan’s vision, the source said, is to hire a top designer and invite a limited number of like-minded golf buffs to join the club.
“He’s going to keep it small, probably fewer than a hundred,” the source said. “Fellow athletes, buddies, and other people who come highly recommended.”
Brad Faxon, a PGA Tour veteran and Fox Sports golf analyst, said that he assessed the same property at the request of a golf instructor, Mike McGettrick, who at one point was contemplating building a practice facility on the site.
“It’s got potential,” Faxon said of the property. “But it would take a lot of work. It has what looks like sandy soil but the land itself is flat and there’s none of the infrastructure you’d need for a golf course. If you did something there, it would have to be pretty special.”
Faxon said that Greg Norman had also looked at the land for a potential golf-related project, but that nothing had come of those exploratory tours. Representatives from Great White Shark Enterprises, the golf course development and lifestyle company that Norman runs, declined to comment. Norman himself was unavailable.
A source close to Jordan said that golf-course architect Tom Doak is Jordan’s top choice to build the course. Doak did not respond to requests seeking comment.
For everyday golfers, Jordan’s reported dissatisfaction with the Bear’s Club may be hard to fathom. With only a few hundred members and reported initiation fees of $90,000, the club hardly qualifies as overrun.
Its gated entrance gives way to lush, sprawling grounds, with expansive home sites and the kind of tropical quietude big money buys. Rory McIlroy and Luke Donald are members. So are Ernie Els, Keegan Bradley, Camilo Villegas and Michelle Wie. The club’s exclusive air was said to be part of the initial draw for Jordan, who bought land and built an 11-room mansion in the private enclave in 2010 for a reported total of $12.4 million.
But what good is all that privacy if the pace of play is too slow?
Known for his fierce competitiveness, his fondness for smack-talk and high-stakes gambling matches, Jordan also has a reputation as a lightning-fast player with no patience for slowpokes.
“He just steps up, hits, chews your ear off with smack talk and off he goes,” said a source who has played with Jordan. “If he knows the guys he’s with, he will not even wait. He’ll drive up to the green as you’re back in the fairway hitting. And if it’s up to him, his foursome will finish in two-hours and 40 minutes.”
That same source, who is friends with several Bear’s Club members, said that the club has been abuzz over Jordan’s course-construction plans.
For more news that golfers everywhere are talking about, follow @golf_com on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube video channel.Welcome to the Electric Forest 2014 WET Fan Staffing Program
Work at Electric Forest and in exchange, receive Michigan Stage minimum wage.
Work Requirement - 18 hours
This is the average minimum – some work a little more, some a little less.
Parking/Arriving - Workers will be directed to a worker parking lot which will open 1/2 hour prior to shifts. Wokers must exit worker parking lot 1/2 hour after shift end. Workers must arrive at least 15 minutes prior to shift start.
Accommodation - No Accommodation
CAPS Emails - If you are a new worker putting in your WET TICKET for the first time (i.e. you did not previously have a deposit in yet) you must email wet@workexchangeteam |
the same the following three years.
The years 97-99 that saw Dortmund win the Champions League and Bayern coming as close as you can come without actually winning, saw two all-german quarter-finals and even three quarterfinalists in one year. Valencia played two straight CL finals in the age of the Madrid galacticos, and Barcelona joined in for a few semis, even if they could never reach the final at this stage.
After being crushed by Mourinho’s Chelsea machine for a couple of years from 2003-2005 and being dumped out bottom their group in the Champions League of 2006, Sir Alex Ferguson and his Manchester United came back to conquer Europe with one of his best ever teams. Liverpool reached two finals and Arsenal was represented in the one in between those finals, too, in the years that England dominated the semis.
Returning to the present, what most consider to be the second strongest team in Europe at this point, Real Madrid, have been forced to learn to swim again by the all-conquering Barcelona raising the bar to the almost impossible. While Barcelona of the last years are their curse, they have now reached two CL-semifinals in a row, after 6 straight years never getting past the round of 16. They are clear favorites to eliminate Bayern and to set up a chance to beat Barcelona with the whole world watching – in Munich.
Some might point to easier draws these past two Mourinho-years, but they did in the years between 2005-10 not once meet the eventual winner, and only once they lost to a finalist.
Now, of course Bayern cannot keep losing what is rapidly turning into a german Classico. And they can’t keep losing the championship to the BVB in the long run – for all the trappings of Europe, the league is the main task, the bread and butter of a great football team. But there’s no hiding most Bayern fans would prefer to lift the Champions League trophy again, over “just another” championship, if quizzed. Getting the 5th is what most fans of the die Roten desire the most. And having strong domestic competition will help with that.
In rising to what can be seen as a somewhat unfortunately difficult challenge, trying to win the European crown in the age of Barcelona – probably the best club side of all time – having a real rival and a stronger league to push them in Germany again, can only help.
When Bayern smashed 5 past the BVB of Wörns, Kruska and Brzenska with no reply in a cold February day in 2005 at the old Olympiastadion, it looked as If BVB might never pose a real challenge to Bayern again. But 7 years later here they are, doing just that. And that’s a good thing for BVB, for the Bundesliga – and for Bayern.Verizon’s go90 is partnering with the studio division of Robert Rodriguez’s El Rey Network on a programming deal that includes a new animated short series and an independent filmmaking event inspired by Rodriguez’s career.
Animated short series Explosion Jones, starring Michael Madsen, Jaylen Barron, Carl Weathers, James Hong, Danny Trejo and Vivica A. Fox, will debut September 5 on go90. Rebel Without a Crew, an independent filmmaking event to commemorate the 25th anniversary of El Mariachi, Rodriguez’s filmmaking debut, will begin production this fall.
Rebel Without a Crew is designed to mentor and inspire a new wave of independent filmmakers. Rodriguez created his first feature-length film El Mariachi on a budget of just $7,000. To mark the 25th anniversary of the film, Rodriguez will invite five amateur filmmakers to take on the same challenge. They will write, shoot and edit a brand-new feature length film with only $7,000. Go90 will stream the six-episode, one-hour series capturing the filmmakers’ process as well as their final feature films. As the selected filmmakers work on their projects, Rodriguez also will write, shoot and edit a new feature film for $7,000.
Go90 also will stream a 12×10 docuseries that documents his journey, explores the philosophy of his process and shows him re-experiencing ultralow-budget indie filmmaking.
In the 1980s-set 12-episode animated short series Explosion Jones, Bruce “Explosion” Jones is an ex-Special Forces commando-turned-rogue detective/single dad just trying his best. Jones fights through endless armies of mercenaries, smarmy mini-bosses, old friends, new enemies and just might dig too deep to reveal a plot that goes all the way to the top.
Explosion Jones is produced by El Rey Network’s studio division and the animation house Octopie Studios.
“I wanted to re-create my El Mariachi experience with up and coming filmmakers to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the film’s release,” said Rodriguez. “I think the young, tech-savvy go90 audience will appreciate and be inspired by the inside look at the ultralow-budget independent feature filmmaking process. Also, I am a huge fan of animation, and our new series Explosion Jones is cool content you can watch on any device in any location.”
Applications for Rebel Without a Crew can be found here.A 10-year-old boy will be cited after he brought an unloaded handgun to Sylvan Elementary School on Friday, Modesto police said. The student brought the gun to a special education class, according to Modesto police spokeswoman Heather Graves. Another student in the class saw the gun and reported it to the teacher. Officers detained the child, determined that the gun was not loaded and called his parents. He will be cited for possession of a gun, Graves said. The child’s parents could also be cited. No other details have been released.
A 10-year-old boy will be cited after he brought an unloaded handgun to Sylvan Elementary School on Friday, Modesto police said.
The student brought the gun to a special education class, according to Modesto police spokeswoman Heather Graves. Another student in the class saw the gun and reported it to the teacher.
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Officers detained the child, determined that the gun was not loaded and called his parents. He will be cited for possession of a gun, Graves said.
The child’s parents could also be cited.
No other details have been released.
AlertMe[1] Christ Church Gate, Canterbury Cathedral: arms of King Henry VII (centre) with arms of Prince Arthur ( dexter ) and his wife Catherine of Aragon ( sinister ). Probably built in honour of Prince Arthur
Arthur Tudor (19/20 September 1486 – 2 April 1502) was Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester and Duke of Cornwall. As the eldest son and heir apparent of Henry VII of England, Arthur was viewed by contemporaries as the great hope of the newly established House of Tudor. His mother, Elizabeth of York, was the daughter of Edward IV, and his birth cemented the union between the House of Tudor and the House of York.
Plans for Arthur's marriage began before his third birthday; he was installed as Prince of Wales two years later. At the age of eleven, he was formally betrothed to Catherine of Aragon, a daughter of the powerful Catholic Monarchs in Spain, in an effort to forge an Anglo-Spanish alliance against France. Arthur was well educated and, contrary to some modern belief, was in good health for the majority of his life. Soon after his marriage to Catherine in 1501, the couple took up residence at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, where Arthur died six months later of an unknown ailment. Catherine would later firmly state that the marriage had not been consummated.
One year after Arthur's death, Henry VII renewed his efforts of sealing a marital alliance with Spain by arranging for Catherine to marry Arthur's younger brother Henry, who had by then become Prince of Wales. Arthur's untimely death paved the way for Henry's accession as Henry VIII in 1509. The potential for a question as to the consummation of Arthur and Catherine's marriage, was much later (and in a completely different political context) exploited by Henry and his court to cast doubt on the validity of Catherine's union with Henry, eventually leading to the separation between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.
Infancy [ edit ]
The family of Henry VII, depicted on an illuminated page.
In 1485, Henry Tudor became King of England upon defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth. In an effort to strengthen the Tudor claim to the throne, Henry had royal genealogists trace his lineage back to the ancient British rulers and decided on naming his firstborn son after the legendary King Arthur. On this occasion, Camelot was identified as present-day Winchester, and his wife, Elizabeth of York, was sent to Saint Swithun's Priory (today Winchester Cathedral Priory) in order to give birth there. Born at Saint Swithun's Priory[4] on the night of 19/20 September 1486 at about 1 am, Arthur was Henry and Elizabeth's eldest child. Arthur's birth was anticipated by French and Italian humanists eager for the start of a "Virgilian golden age". Sir Francis Bacon wrote that although the Prince was born one month premature, he was "strong and able". Young Arthur was viewed as "a living symbol" of not only the union between the House of Tudor and the House of York, to which his mother belonged as the daughter of Edward IV, but also of the end of the Wars of the Roses. In the opinion of contemporaries, Arthur was the great hope of the newly established House of Tudor.
Arthur became Duke of Cornwall at birth. Four days after his birth, he was baptised at Winchester Cathedral by the Bishop of Worcester, John Alcock, and his baptism was immediately followed by his Confirmation. John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby, William FitzAlan, 16th Earl of Arundel, Queen Elizabeth Woodville and Cecily of York served as godparents; the latter two, his grandmother and aunt, respectively, carried the prince during the ceremony. Initially, Arthur's nursery in Farnham was headed by Elizabeth Darcy, who had served as chief nurse for Edward IV's children, including Arthur's own mother. After Arthur was created Prince of Wales in 1490, he was awarded a household structure at the behest of his father.[4] Over the next thirteen years, Henry VII and Elizabeth would have six more children, of whom only three—Margaret, Henry and Mary—would reach adulthood. Arthur was especially close to his sister Margaret (b. 1489) and his brother Henry (b. 1491), with whom he shared a nursery.
On 29 November 1489, after being made a Knight of the Bath, Arthur was appointed Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, and was invested as such at the Palace of Westminster on 27 February 1490. As part of his investiture ceremony, he progressed down the River Thames in the royal barge and was met at Chelsea by the Lord Mayor of London, John Mathewe, and at Lambeth by Spanish ambassadors. On 8 May 1491, he was made a Knight of the Garter at Saint George's Chapel at Windsor Palace. It was around this time that Arthur began his formal education under John Rede, a former headmaster of Winchester College.[4] His education was subsequently taken over by Bernard André, a blind poet, and then by Thomas Linacre, formerly Henry VII's physician. Arthur's education covered grammar, poetry, rhetoric and ethics and focused on history. Arthur was a very skilled pupil and André wrote that the Prince of Wales had either memorised or read a selection of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Terence, a good deal of Cicero and a wide span of historical works, including those of Thucydides, Caesar, Livy and Tacitus. Arthur was also a "superb archer", and had learned to dance "right pleasant and honourably" by 1501.
Childhood [ edit ]
Prince Arthur, c. 1500. This is likely the earliest surviving portrait of Arthur.
The popular belief that Arthur was sickly during his lifetime stems from a Victorian misunderstanding of a letter from 1502; on the contrary, there are no reports of Arthur being ill during his lifetime. Arthur grew up to be unusually tall for his age, and was considered handsome by the Spanish court: he had reddish hair, small eyes, a high-bridged nose and resembled his brother Henry, who was said to be "extremely handsome" by contemporaries. As described by historians Steven Gunn and Linda Monckton, Arthur had an "amiable and gentle" personality and was, overall, a "delicate lad".
In May 1490 Arthur was created warden of all the marches towards Scotland and the Earl of Surrey was appointed as the Prince's deputy. From 1491, Arthur was named on peace commissions. In October 1492, when his father travelled to France, he was named Keeper of England and King's Lieutenant. Following the example of Edward IV, Henry VII set up the Council of Wales and the Marches for Arthur in Wales, in order to enforce royal authority there. Although the council had already been set up in 1490, it was headed by Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford.[4] Arthur was first dispatched to Wales in 1501, at the age of fifteen. In March 1493, Arthur was granted the power to appoint justices of oyer and terminer and inquire into franchises, thus strengthening the council's authority. In November of that year, the Prince also received an extensive land grant in Wales, including the County of March.[4]
Arthur was served by sons of English, Irish and Welsh nobility, such as Gerald FitzGerald, 9th Earl of Kildare, who had been brought to the English court as a consequence of the involvement of his father, Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, in the crowning of pretender Lambert Simnel in Ireland during Henry VII's reign. Other servants were Anthony Willoughby, a son of Robert Willoughby, 1st Baron Willoughby de Broke, Robert Radcliffe, the heir of the 9th Baron FitzWalter and Maurice St John, a favourite nephew of Arthur's grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort. He was brought up with Gruffydd ap Rhys ap Thomas, the son of powerful Welsh nobleman Rhys ap Thomas, Gruffydd grew quite close to Arthur and was buried in Worcester Cathedral upon his death in 1521, alongside the Prince's tomb.
Marriage [ edit ]
A Flemish tapestry depicting Arthur and Catherine's court.
Henry VII planned to marry Arthur to a daughter of the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, in order to forge an Anglo-Spanish alliance against France. It was suggested that the choice of marrying Arthur to Ferdinand and Isabella's youngest daughter, Catherine (b. 1485), would be appropriate.[4] The Treaty of Medina del Campo (27 March 1489) provided that Arthur and Catherine would be married as soon as they reached canonical age; it also settled Catherine's dowry at 200,000 crowns (the equivalent of £5 million in 2007). Since Arthur, not yet 14, was below the age of consent, a papal dispensation (i.e., waiver) allowing the marriage was issued in February 1497, and the pair were betrothed by proxy on 25 August 1497. Two years later, a marriage by proxy took place at Arthur's Tickenhill Manor in Bewdley, near Worcester; Arthur said to Roderigo de Puebla, who had acted as proxy for Catherine, that "he much rejoiced to contract the marriage because of his deep and sincere love for the Princess".
In a letter from October 1499, Arthur, referring to Catherine as "my dearest spouse", had written:
"I cannot tell you what an earnest desire I feel to see your Highness, and how vexatious to me is this procrastination about your coming. Let [it] be hastened, [that] the love conceived between us and the wished-for joys may reap their proper fruit."
The young couple exchanged letters in Latin until 20 September 1501, when Arthur, having attained the age of 15, was deemed old enough to be married. Catherine landed in England about two weeks later, on 2 October 1501, at Plymouth.[4] The next month, on 4 November 1501, the couple met for the first time at Dogmersfield in Hampshire. Arthur wrote to Catherine's parents that he would be "a true and loving husband"; the couple soon discovered that they had mastered different pronunciations of Latin and so were unable to communicate. Five days later, on 9 November 1501, Catherine arrived in London.
On 14 November 1501, the marriage ceremony finally took place at Saint Paul's Cathedral; both Arthur and Catherine wore white satin. The ceremony was conducted by Henry Deane, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was assisted by William Warham, Bishop of London. Following the ceremony, Arthur and Catherine left the Cathedral and headed for Baynard's Castle, where they were entertained by "the best voiced children of the King's chapel, who sang right sweetly with quaint harmony".
What followed was a bedding ceremony laid down by Arthur's grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort: the bed was sprinkled with holy water, after which Catherine was led away from the wedding feast by her ladies-in-waiting. She was undressed, veiled and "reverently" laid in bed, while Arthur, "in his shirt, with a gown cast about him", was escorted by his gentlemen into the bedchamber, while viols and tabors played. The Bishop of London blessed the bed and prayed for the marriage to be fruitful, after which the couple were left alone. This is the only public bedding of a royal couple recorded in Britain in the 16th century.
Death [ edit ]
Prince Arthur, depicted on a stained glass window at Great Malvern
After residing at Tickenhill Manor for a month, Arthur and Catherine headed for the Welsh Marches, where they established their household at Ludlow Castle. Arthur had been growing weaker since his wedding, and although Catherine was reluctant to follow him, she was ordered by Henry VII to join her husband. Arthur found it easy to govern Wales, as the border had become quiet after many centuries of warfare. In March 1502, Arthur and Catherine were afflicted by an unknown illness, "a malign vapour which proceeded from the air."[note 1] While Catherine recovered, Arthur died on 2 April 1502 at Ludlow, six months short of his sixteenth birthday.
News of Arthur's death reached Henry VII's court late on 4 April.[4] The King was awoken from his sleep by his confessor, who quoted Job by asking Henry "If we receive good things at the hands of God, why may we not endure evil things?" He then told the king that "[his] dearest son hath departed to God," and Henry burst into tears. "Grief-stricken and emotional," he then had his wife brought into his chambers, so that they might "take the painful news together"; Elizabeth reminded Henry that God had helped him become king and "had ever preserved him," adding that they had been left with "yet a fair Prince and two fair princesses and that God is where he was, and [they were] both young enough." Soon after leaving Henry's bedchamber, Elizabeth collapsed and began to cry, while the ladies sent for the King, who hurriedly came and "relieved her."
On 8 April, a general procession took place for the salvation of Arthur's soul. That night, a dirge was sung in St Paul's Cathedral and every parish church in London. On 23 April, Arthur's body, which had previously been embalmed, sprinkled with holy water and sheltered with a canopy, was carried out of Ludlow Castle and into the Parish Church of Ludlow by various noblemen and gentlemen. On 25 April, Arthur's body was taken to Worcester Cathedral via the River Severn, in a "special wagon upholstered in black and drawn by six horses, also caparisoned in black." As was customary, Catherine did not attend the funeral. The Earl of Surrey acted as chief mourner. At the end of the ceremony, Sir William Uvedale, Sir Richard Croft and Arthur's household ushers broke their staves of office and threw them into the Prince's grave. During the funeral, Arthur's own arms were shown alongside those of Cadwaladr ap Gruffydd and Brutus of Troy.[4] Two years later, a chantry was erected over Arthur's grave.
Legacy [ edit ]
Shortly after Arthur's death, the idea of betrothing the widowed Catherine to the new heir apparent, Henry, had arisen; Henry VII and Isabella I were keen on moving forward with the betrothal and the pope granted a dispensation towards that end. Henry ascended the throne on 22 April 1509 and married Arthur's widow on 11 June. They had six children, three of their sons died before reaching three months of age, a daughter was stillborn and another lived for only a week. The couple's surviving child was Mary I (b. 1516). In 1526, Henry started to pursue the affections of Anne Boleyn. At the same time, he became troubled by what became known as the King's "great matter", that is, finding an appropriate solution for his lack of male descendants. It soon became the King's wish to dissolve his marriage and marry Anne, who was more likely to bear children.
Henry believed that his marriage was cursed and found confirmation in the Bible, in Leviticus 20:21.[note 2] Although in the morning following his wedding, Arthur had claimed that he was thirsty "for I have been in the midst of Spain last night" and that "having a wife is a good pastime", these claims are generally dismissed by modern historians as mere boasts of a boy who did not want others to know of his failure,[4] and Catherine maintained the claim that she had married Henry while still a virgin until the day she died. After Henry's constant support of the claim that Catherine's first marriage had been consummated, an annulment was issued on 23 April 1533, while the King had already married Anne on 25 January. Anne was beheaded for high treason in 1536, after which Henry proceeded to marry four more times. At the time of his death in 1547, Henry only had three living children; the only son, Edward VI, succeeded but died six years later. His successors were Henry's daughters by Catherine and Anne, Mary I and Elizabeth I. Upon Elizabeth's death in 1603, the House of Tudor came to an end.
In 2002, following the initiative of canon Ian MacKenzie, Arthur's funeral was reenacted with a requiem mass at Worcester Cathedral, on occasion of the quincentenary of his death. Despite his role in English history, Arthur has remained largely forgotten since his death.
Popular culture [ edit ]
Arthur has been featured in several historical fiction novels, such as The King's Pleasure, by Norah Lofts and Katherine, The Virgin Widow, by Jean Plaidy. In The Constant Princess, by Philippa Gregory, Catherine promises Arthur to marry his brother, thus fulfilling not only her own destiny of becoming Queen of England, but also the couple's plans for the future of the kingdom.[73] The Alteration, by Kingsley Amis, is an alternate history novel centred on the "War of the English Succession", during which Henry VIII attempts to usurp the throne of his nephew, Stephen II, Arthur and Catherine's son.
The historical drama The Six Wives of Henry VIII was broadcast in 1970, with Martin Ratcliffe as "Prince Arthur".[74] In 1972, BBC2 aired a historical miniseries titled The Shadow of the Tower, with "Lord Arthur, Prince of Wales" played by Jason Kemp.[75]
Ancestors [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Endnotes [ edit ]
^ [51] It has been suggested that this illness was the mysterious English sweating sickness tuberculosis ("consumption"), plague or influenza. In 2002, Arthur's tomb was opened, but experts could not determine the exact cause of death; a genetic ailment which also affected Arthur's nephew, Edward VI, was mentioned as a possible cause being investigated. ^ Although Henry would have read the verse in Latin, the translation provided by the 1604 King James Version states that "and if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless."
Bibliography [ edit ]WASHINGTON — The increase of Israeli settlements has "gotten so substantial" that it is inhibiting the possibility for an "effective, contiguous Palestinian state," President Barack Obama said Sunday, in his final interview as president.
Speaking to CBS' "60 Minutes," Obama dismissed the idea that there is a "major rupture" in the relationship between the United States and Israel after last month's decision by the U.S. to abstain from a United Nations vote condemning Israeli settlements.
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"Because of our investment in the region, and because we care so deeply about Israel, I think (the U.S.) has a legitimate interest in saying to a friend, 'This is a problem,'" Obama said. "It would have long-term consequences for peace and security in the region, and the United States."
The outgoing president reflected on his legacy and his biggest challenges during his eight years in office during the hourlong interview. A number of his policies — from health care to his contentious relationship with Israel — could be short-lived as President-elect Donald Trump becomes the 45th president later this week and vows to reverse some of those policies.
Trump has been vocal about his disapproval of many of Obama's policies, often voicing his disagreement or engaging in public disputes with the president on Twitter. Most recently, Trump lashed out over hypothetical comments Obama made that he would beat Trump if they ran against each other in a general election.
Over the holidays, Trump accused Obama of throwing up "inflammatory" roadblocks during the transition of power and his administration of treating Israel with "total disdain."
Obama acknowledged it's been an "unusual" transition, adding, "I suspect the president-elect would agree with that."
"We are moving into an era where a lot of people get their information through tweets and soundbites and some headline that comes over their phone," the president said. "There's a power in that. There's also a danger — what generates a headline or stirs up a controversy and gets attention isn't the same as the process required to actually solve the problem."
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He warned people not to "underestimate the guy" and urged congressional Republicans and Trump supporters around the country to be sure "that as we go forward, certain norms, certain institutional traditions don't get eroded, because there's a reason they're in place."
Obama said there needs to be a focus on "making sure that our democracy stays healthy, and making sure that we maintain that sense of solidarity."
With that, he said he's been "disturbed" about intelligence reports over Russia hacking the U.S. election.
"I have been concerned about the degree to which, in some circles, you've seen people suggest that Vladimir Putin has more credibility than the U.S. government," he said. "You're not going to be able to make good decisions without building some relationship of trust between yourself and that community."
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Obama also reflected on his approach to the civil war in Syria, as it approaches its sixth year with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced around the world.
The president acknowledged that his "red line" declaration about the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar Assad's government wasn't in his 2012 speech and that he didn't have to use those words. They later prompted harsh criticism, since the U.S. did not follow through on the threat.
"I would have, I think, made a bigger mistake if I had said, 'Eh, chemical weapons. That doesn't really change my calculus,'" he said. "And regardless of how it ended up playing, I think, in the Beltway, what is true is Assad got rid of his chemical weapons."Anita and Alex were childhood friends. They had a lot in common. They stayed in the same locality they went to the same school. Since childhood they were quite intelligent, they fared well in studies and sports. Many of their hobbies were also similar.
As they got good grades in school, both got admission in a reputed college of their city. The college was popular among hiring companies and most of the students used to get selected during the campus placements. In the last year of college studies Alex, Anita and some of their batch mates got selected for a multinational company through campus placement and they joined the company together as trainees a few months after their graduation.
Years passed by, both performed well, their colleagues and seniors appreciated them too. Appraisals occurred every year, but Anita was dissatisfied with it. The reason was that after all these years Alex and Anita had not grown at the same pace. Alex got promoted to a Senior Manager position, but Anita could only reach an officer level. Anita started to develop a sense of envy and dissatisfaction.
One day when she felt that the company was not correctly evaluating her performance and she was being underpaid she decided to meet her boss. She sought an appointment with the Head of the department and in the meeting, she complained that her managers did not value her hard work, they were biased against her as she was a woman and she had suffered gender pay gap.
The HOD knew that over the years Anita worked very hard for the company and to help her, the HOD asked her to do one last assignment. The assignment was to find out Designer Glass Dome Chandelier sellers in the city.
Anita returned and said, “Yes, there are two”
The HOD asked, “What is the price range?” Anita went back to her desk, she called the sellers and then returned to tell the HOD; “They are from $500 to $3500 depending on the size and detail in the design”
The HOD suggested Anita, “Now let us ask Alex to do the same thing”
The HOD dialed number of Alex and told him. “Find out where our company can buy Designer Glass Dome Chandeliers in the city and tell me by evening 4:00 pm”
The HOD asked Anita to come back just before 4:00 pm
In the evening as decided Anita reached the office of HOD and Alex too arrived shortly.
The HOD asked Alex to tell his findings.
Alex said: “There are three places where we can get the desired product. One is manufacturer and other two are distributors. The distributors get their product from other city and may not offer us great deals and their listed price range is from $500 to $3500, on this the distributors can offer 30% bulk order discount. The manufacturer can offer good price if we tie up with their company for bulk orders. They are also ready for creating designs specific to our company. We can sell these made to order items through our channel under our branding. Since the manufacturer now has surplus capacity they are willing to offer 45 % discount on listed price if we assure them order of 2000 units for the next quarter. This can improve our profit by 2.5%. I have put all this working on our department’s shared drive and can immediately mail you the link for reviewing it.”
After Alex left the HOD said, “You have now personally seen the difference in the outlook and performance between you and Alex. You should also note that other boys from your college who are not doing as well as you. Some of them were even asked to leave, though they worked well, as they fell in the lower bucket of the bell curve by a few points. You also have overlooked female employees in this organization who are at a higher level than Alex and many boys in the organization who are at levels lower than you. Nothing is stopping you or anyone else to upgrade themselves, each one of our team members can get a higher education, acquire more skills, etc. You have to see the complete picture and from others point of view too.”
Anita was now aware of the difference that she had overlooked. She now realized that the difference between her and Alex was due to the value addition they gave to this company and it was not related to gender at all. She decided she wouldn’t get fooled by the gender wage gap myth. She would learn from Alex and others who have done well in the company.
Let this story help us in going an extra mile.
We can’t expect to be rewarded for doing our assignments, as we get paid for that! We are only rewarded for going an extra mile; performing beyond expectations.
To be successful in life we should proactively be willing to do more, have a more holistic perspective, go beyond the call of duty and never fall prey to hate mongers who can only spread negativity in society.ukmh
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..well Matt really.Posts: 581Likes Given: 232Likes Received: 280 in 166 postsJoined: Apr 2013Reputation: 4 Sex: MaleLocation: Wakefield
Post: #1 The ugliest mod ever created?
This mod is currently wearing a custom dripper in the form of an old ce4 (2.4 ohm) whose plastic tank ruptured, had to cut away the skirt at the bottom to get it screwed onto the 510.
Piece of plastic tube is the driptip.
I'm ready to start taking orders for these as soon as I can find more rusty tins in the road and broken clearos
Update: 4.8v is too much for this coil, thought I might get away with it but it does taste a bit burnt. Checked the resistance on the coil and it's 2.0 ohms actually, so I dropped down to 3.6 volts but no vape. Measured current and batteries are only giving 0.9 amps. Bugger. AA's now on charge in the hope they'll provide enough amps! My cheap ugly nimh mod. Made this last night using an old tin I found by the side of the road (yes, I did clean it).This mod is currently wearing a custom dripper in the form of an old ce4 (2.4 ohm) whose plastic tank ruptured, had to cut away the skirt at the bottom to get it screwed onto the 510.Piece of plastic tube is the driptip.I'm ready to start taking orders for these as soon as I can find more rusty tins in the road and broken clearosUpdate: 4.8v is too much for this coil, thought I might get away with it but it does taste a bit burnt. Checked the resistance on the coil and it's 2.0 ohms actually, so I dropped down to 3.6 volts but no vape. Measured current and batteries are only giving 0.9 amps. Bugger. AA's now on charge in the hope they'll provide enough amps!
(This post was last modified: 16/05/13 02:55 PM by ukmh. )Jerez Track Map with Speed and Gear Telemetry
Please click on the above image to view it larger.
Occasionally some pretty interesting things show up among the usual party line comments in team press releases. Yesterday’s Team Movistar Yamaha press release contained the usual Friday practice information, riders comments, and stock photos. But instead of the usual plain Jane circuit map, the above graphic was included.
As you can see, it includes bike telemetry showing speeds and gears used around the the circuit. So we can see that the factory Yamahas get into 6th gear at only one spot, just before Dry Sack, and never use 1st gear, even through Ducados, the final turn and that with the slowest speed of 70.7 Km/h.
A few other things are interesting to me about this. At trackside I often hear the riders quick-shifting through a gear, usually it appears to be 3rd or 4th, in order to ride the next higher gear through a turn. We can see an example of this at the bottom of the image, the Stadium section where the speeds are 106.0, 144.0, then 117.3 Km/h. Between the 117.3 and the 212.5 speed markers is a quick shift past 3rd in order to stay in 4th through the Crevice and Ferrari turns.
Having looked at this map just before FP4, I watched with interest as Andrea Dovizioso’s telemetry showed on the broadcast. The Ducati did dip into 1st gear in the final turn. Perhaps the Yamahas rely on corner speed while the Ducati’s power determines a different strategy in this section of track.
Image: ©2015 by Yamaha Motor Racing SrlA British graduate student says he’s found a way to tell the difference between male and female stegosaurs, and perhaps dinosaurs in general. But critics are already attacking the study’s methodology and ethics. “I would have rejected this paper on a number of grounds,” says Kevin Padian, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The study began in 2009 when Evan Saitta, then a high school student, volunteered to help dig up dinosaur bones at a Montana quarry. Over the next several years, Saitta—now in graduate school at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom—scraped five stegosaurs’ skeletons out of the rock and noticed something odd about their broad, jutting back plates. Most specimens of this particular species, Stegosaurus mjosi, have wide, oval plates, Saitta says. “We had plates like that, but we also had the exact opposite: tall, narrow plates. Something you don’t expect.”
When Saitta studied stegosaur fossils around the world as an undergraduate at Princeton University, he saw the same pattern: Some skeletons had the wide plates; others had the narrow ones. Noticing that his fossil plates from Montana had been evenly divided between the two types, he began to wonder if the plates marked a telltale difference between male and female stegosaurs, perhaps akin to moose antlers.
To support his hypothesis, Saitta went about excluding other possibilities. One alternative was that the plates changed shape over a stegosaurus’s lifetime, and thus had more to do with maturity than with sex. By looking at bone tissue under a microscope, Saitta says that he could tell that wasn’t the case because some of each type of plate had finished growing—hallmark of a mature animal. Based on this evidence, Saitta reports in PLOS |
are up, and tiny Piedmont City School District has emerged as a national model for digital learning.
That's what rural America can look like in the 21st Century. Smart investments that lead to real, tangible progress. Today, rural unemployment has dropped from a high of about ten percent during the Great Recession to six percent. The rural child poverty rate is dropping, and rural median household incomes are rising again.
We certainly still have more work to do, but we're moving in the right direction. And that couldn't be more important. Because as a prominent rural Kansan – President Eisenhower – once said, "Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America."
In so many ways, from its resilience and ingenuity in the face of a challenge to the defining values that power it every day, rural America represents that beating heart. That's why these communities are so important – because when America's rural communities are strong, America is strong.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.comPolice examined several wells on the Muscowpetung reserve in Saskatchewan in their search for Tamra Keepness, following an anonymous tip. (Regina Police)
Saskatchewan girl Tamra Keepness. Regina police say a search related to a map posted online earlier this week has yielded no trace of missingSaskatchewan girl Tamra Keepness.
In a statement Friday, police said they don't believe the hand-drawn map, posted to the website Reddit, is authentic.
Regina police have offered a $50,000 reward for information that would help them solve the Tamra Keepness missing person case. Ten years after she disappeared, her remains haven't been found. (Regina Police Service/CBC)
"There is nothing to indicate that this information is authentic and a physical search of the area suggested in the sketch has not uncovered any evidence of Tamra Keepness or anything connected to her," the statement said.
"The Regina Police Service will continue to make efforts to contact the person who posted the sketch to Reddit in hopes of learning more about the sketch and the circumstances of its discovery," police said.
They also provided some details on the work officers did, following up on the tip which was posted to Reddit, a social media site, on Sunday.
They said investigators looked at a total of 21 wells using a special camera during a day-long visit to the Muscowpetung First Nation, northeast of Regina, Thursday.
Police have posted a $50,000 reward for information that could solve the case.
Keepness, who was five years old at the time of her disappearance, was last seen the night of July 5th, 2004, in her home in the 1800 block of Ottawa Street. She was reported missing to police at about 12:15 p.m. the next day.Amid all the excitement surrounding the new Strokes track ‘OBLIVIUS’ (read our track review here), you might have overlooked the fact that frontman Julian Casblancas is now a radio host and broadcast his first episode of his own show, Culture Void, on SiriusXM earlier today. Was he as excitable as Zane Lowe or did he just let the music do the talking? What did he choose to play on his radio debut? And what can we expect from future shows? All the answers are below…
Much like Josh Homme, Julian’s got his own radio voice
On The Alligator Hour, Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh speaks in a deliberately languid drawl. Here, Julian did something similar, but with a bit more life to it. And while he didn’t speak too much, when he did it had some fans questioning whether he was in need of some cough syrup.
His presenting style is far from professional
Did you really expect anything else though? Where other radio hosts might give you information about the tracks they’ve just played for you, Julian doesn’t always bother to tell you the artist or the song title. Sometimes he seems like he doesn’t even seem sure what he’s playing, like when No Age came to an end and he announced “I think that was ‘Fever Dreaming'”. Luckily, he was right.
He was late to his own show
At 3:10pm, with a cough and a splutter, Culture Void’s first episode got under way ten minutes late. A little trickery to get the anticipation for the premiere of the new Strokes’ track at an even bigger high, or did Julian just get stuck on the subway? Whatever the reason, the next 50 minutes made up for his tardiness.
The playlist was like nothing we’ve heard on radio before
“I’m going to be playing songs you don’t usually hear on the radio, that’s the point I guess,” Julian said at the top of the show. “It’s simply what I wish mainstream radio would sound like.” If he got his wish, the world would be a much more interesting place, that’s for sure. Who else would go from Bob Marley into Belgian singer Jo Lemaire and then into Shabazz Palaces? That was just the first three songs. As the man himself said towards the end of the show, “People get hung up on one style. I like to go all over the spectrum.”
He sandwiched the new Strokes song between Chopin and Fela Kuti
You’ve got the world premiere of one of the most anticipated songs of the year, which you also just happened to write and record. What would you play in the run up to its grand unveiling? Some people would go for something to get their listeners revved up. Not Julian, who dropped a “sweet little nocturne” by Chopin beforehand, all calm and gentle and elegant and then followed ‘OBLIVIUS’ with a bit of Fela Kuti, presumably lest we all get too excited and pass out before the end of his show.
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Here’s the full tracklist from Culture Void:
Bob Marley – ‘Bad Card’
Jo Lemaire – ‘Je Suis Venue Te Dire Que Je M’en Vais’
Shabazz Palaces – ‘Blastit.’
The Misfits – ‘Cough/Cool’
Chopin – ‘Nocturne op. 9 No 2’
The Strokes – ‘Oblivious’
Fela Kuti – unknown
No Age – ‘Fever Dreaming’
Himitsu – ‘Unhappybirthday’
C.R.E.A.M – ‘Dusty Beats’
The Hollywood Prime Time Orchestra – ‘Knight Rider’
Metronomy – ‘The Look’
Crystal Castles – ‘Magic Spells’
The Outcasts – ‘Loving You Sometimes’
Supertramp – ‘Goodbye Stranger’Hailing from Spokane, Washington, No-Li Brewhouse is the next brewery to set sights on Texas distribution. Through a new partnership with Andrews Distribution, the brewery, which takes its name from the northern lights, will be launching in Dallas-Fort Worth this April.
Following in the footsteps of breweries like Ballast Point, No-Li will test the Texas waters with DFW distribution before deciding when and where within this big, hulking state of ours to expand to next.
“The last thing we want is to open up the whole state for distribution if we can’t supply the demand,” No-Li’s Dylan McDonald said, in an email exchange with Bitch Beer.
While this is a move that’s sure to make other Texas craft beer fans a bit jealous, McDonald said that No-Li is already starting to hear positive feedback via email and social media about their foray into the Lone Star State.
“We are very excited about the DFW/Texas market, and think it will be a great addition to our distribution footprint,” he said.
No-Li’s current roster of out-of-state territories includes Idaho, Oregon, Alaska, Colorado, Ohio, Maryland, Delaware, Washington, D.C., North Carolina, and Hawaii, as well as parts of Canada. The brewery packages in 22oz bombers, kegs and 4-packs of 12oz bottles.
According to a press release from Andrews, “No-Li prides itself on brews that are globally inspired and locally sourced from an area that is home to some of the world’s best hop and malt growing grains. The brewery has developed a portfolio of “Fib Free Ales™” that reflect the honest living and tough work ethic of the area. In April of 2013, No-Li received federal approval for the beer classification, “Spokane Style Beer”, a federally recognized style for beers made in Spokane, by Spokane residents, with ingredients sourced from within 300 miles of the area.”
No-Li’s signature brews include Born & Raised IPA, Silent Treatment Pale Ale, Spin Cycle Red, Jet Star Imperial IPA and Wrecking Ball Imperial Stout.
No-Li beers will hit North Texas shelves April 7. Assuming metroplex dwellers like what they drink (but don’t totally bogart the entire supply), we can hopefully expect to see No-Li brews in other Texas cities in the not too distant future.
No-Li Brewhouse is just the latest solid craft brewery to dip its toe in Texas waters. While last year saw breweries like Firestone Walker, Southern Tier, Upslope and Founders expand their footprints here, 2014 promises to be just as epic, with breweries like Odell, Sweetwater, Atwater, Elevation, and, of course, No-Li Brewhuse, eying our state.
-CarolineThe raw food diet is a great option for those looking to lose weight and improve their health. While it may seem like just another crazy diet fad among juice cleanses, veganism and others, the raw food diet is much more than that. It is a simple, comprehensive diet that cuts out all harmful processed food and can help you lose weight, be healthier, and feel better! If you want to try the raw food diet but aren’t sure where to start, this article can help you familiarize yourself with the diet as well as teach you about dehydrators for raw food and help you choose the best dehydrator for raw food for you through several raw food dehydrator reviews.
What is the Raw Food Diet?
Put simply, the raw food diet is a diet that consists only of natural (or raw) foods that have not gone through extensive processing like the majority of the modern food you can find in any grocery store. Adherents to the raw food diet have some choices. Many choose to go vegetarian and not eat meat, while others choose to cut out all animal products entirely, including eggs and dairy, but still others choose to consume meat and animal products as long as they have not been processed. Regardless of whether or not meat is a part of the equation, large components of the raw food diet include:
nuts
fruits
vegetables
whole grains
sprouts
beans
Why the Need for a Dehydrator?
Because the raw food diet does not include any processed foods, the food you can eat goes bad very quickly without the unnatural preservatives and other chemicals that are packed into processed food. It can be extremely wasteful to throw out all the food that has gone bad before you've eaten it, and it can be a disruptive hassle to have to drag yourself to the grocery store several times a week to replenish your fresh, natural food supply. A raw food dehydrator can be a lifesaver for those on the raw food diet. A dehydrator removes the water from fresh foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and other foods while still retaining its nutrients and flavor. Dehydrated raw foods can remain perfectly preserved for up to several months, allowing you to have fresh, preserved food on hand even if you haven't made a trip to the store in weeks.
Before you invest in a food dehydrator, it's important to have some knowledge on how to properly go about raw food dehydration, starting with the right raw food dehydrator temperature. When dehydrating raw foods, the food should not be heated to a temperature higher than one hundred eighteen degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature is important because, at temperatures over one hundred eighteen degrees, raw foods begin to lose some of their sensitive enzymes and nutrients from the high heat, which can affect their flavor and health benefits.
Dehydrators can help expand the range of foods you can eat while on the raw food diet using a variety of simple dehydrator raw recipes. You can mix together certain dehydrated raw foods to create delicious, easy-to-make raw food dehydrator recipes that taste great without cheating on your diet. These raw dehydrator recipes include moist spongy bread, crisp crackers, yummy raw veggie burgers . sweet and soft apple or zucchini bread, and more. Some other options can even include some amazing raw cookies dehydrator recipes and help you create delicious desserts using only natural ingredients.
Chekc out the following video to see how easy it is to make some delicious raw kale chips in the Tribest Sedona food dehydrator.
What Makes a Good Dehydrator for Preparing Raw Foods?
Before you start shopping and investing your money into a random dehydrator for raw food, it’s important to learn about what makes a top-notch raw food diet dehydrator machine. There are many things to look for in a dehydrator before buying it.
Size
The first and most important thing to consider when searching for a dehydrator is its size. It’s best to get the biggest dehydrator you can for your budget and available space in order to fit more food into the dehydrator at one time to save time and effort. The best-sized dehydrators have nine to ten trays, while smaller and less efficient models have only four to five trays.
Timer
Another thing to consider is the dehydrator’s timer. The best dehydrators have built-in automatic digital timers with up to one hundred hours to programmable timing in order to help you keep track of your food’s dehydration process along the way.
Power / Airflow
In terms of power, dehydrators can be solar or electric. However, electric models are much more efficient for dehydrating raw foods due to easier temperature control. Electric raw food dehydrators come in horizontal or vertical models. Horizontal airflow dehydrators are much more efficient for raw food dehydration because they decrease the risk of mold development and help preserve nutrients and enzymes in food during dehydration.
All of these factors are important to consider before answering the fundamental question, “What is the best dehydrator for raw food?”
Raw Food Dehydrator Reviews and Our Picks
In an effort to narrow down your search and facilitate your selection process when it comes to getting the right dehydrator to create your delicious raw meals, we've done a little digging. Through our research and consulting with many raw foodists, raw chefs and many others in the raw food "uncooking" industry, we discovered that the following dehydrators came highly recommended:
Excalibur 3926TB Food Dehydrator
The Excalibur 3926 Food Dehydrator is arguably the best dehydrator for raw food preparation. This dehydrator for raw food features nine trays with fifteen square feet of drying space, making it an excellent size for dehydrating large amounts of dry food. It also features a flexible poly-screen tray insert that prevents foods from sticking to the trays during the dehydration process. The Excalibur’s thermostat is adjustable and it is equipped with an automatic twenty-six hour timer.
Tribest Sedona SD-P9000
The Tribest Sedona SD-P9000 is also at the top of the list when it comes to raw food dehydrator recommendations. From what we discovered, it was created with the raw food enthusiast in mind. This dehydrator’s best feature is that it its trays are one hundred percent BPA-free. The BPA-free plastic prevents the trays of the dehydrator from releasing harmful gases while under high heat. Plus, the Tribest Sedona is very quiet while dehydrating and is equipped with a convenient digital timer and digital temperature control capabilities.
TSM Food Dehydrator
The TSM Food Dehydrator with 10 Stainless Steel trays is one of the best dehydrators for raw food preparation. It is crafted from food grade stainless steel that is not susceptible to rust formation. It is a horizontal air flow model which makes it an especially great choice as a dehydrator for raw food preparation by creating faster drying times and preventing the formation of mold during the dehydration process. Plus, the TSM dehydrator has a special rack design that makes it easy to clean both inside and out.
Choosing the best food dehydrator for raw food preparations can be a difficult feat, especially if you plan to invest a significant amount of money into your dehydrator. Before buying a dehydrator, it’s important to consider the many factors brought up in this article, including timers, storage, size, and more, in order to ensure you’re getting the best dehydrator possible. However, once you do choose a dehydrator that works for you, you’ll be amazed at how it can change your life and improve your raw food diet by adding convenience and limitless dehydrator raw food recipes to your meal choices.THE MORNING PLUM:
In recent days, the Trump administration’s lies about the GOP health-care bill have reached impressive new heights of cruelty and disingenuousness. The falsehoods have focused mainly on disguising what the bill would do to Medicaid — in one way or another, they are designed to cover up the fact that Trump is eager to sign a bill that would absolutely decimate health-care spending on poor people, in violation of both the letter and spirit of his campaign promises.
There’s a good explanation for all this lying buried in the new Post-ABC News poll: Large majorities say that the federal government should prioritize expanding health coverage to low-income people over cutting taxes. And this includes pretty much every core Trump voter group, too.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell misleadingly claims that the Senate's health-care proposal won't lead to cuts in Medicaid. (Meg Kelly,Julio Negron/The Washington Post)
The Post poll asked: “On health care, which of these do you think is more important for the federal government to do: provide health care coverage for low-income Americans, or cut taxes?”
Americans overall picked providing health coverage to low-income Americans by 63 percent to 27 percent. And according to the crosstabs, pretty much every Trump-friendly demographic agrees:
Whites favor providing coverage for low-income Americans over cutting taxes by 59-31.
Americans aged 50 to 64 agree by 61-25.
Americans older than 65 agree by 60-25.
Non-college whites agree by 58-33.
Even non-college white men, perhaps the most Trump-friendly voters out there, agree by 53-38. Non-college white women agree by 62-28.
Republicans, to be sure, lean toward cutting taxes by 48-39, but that’s pretty tepid — taken all together, this suggests there are probably a lot of “soft” or reluctant Trump supporters who favor providing coverage to low-income Americans over cutting taxes. (Other polls have also found wide opposition to Medicaid cuts.) Separately, as many have already detailed, Trumpcare’s cuts to Medicaid and subsidies would directly hit a lot of the older and working-class whites who make up the Trump and GOP base.
This may help explain why the Post-ABC News poll also finds that Americans favor the Affordable Care Act over the GOP replacement by 50-24. Even Trump-friendly non-college whites are divided on this by 33-33, per the crosstabs. But the question pitting expanded coverage for poor people against cutting taxes strips down the core ideological battle over the GOP bill to its essence — at bottom, it is mainly about gutting Medicaid and subsidies to lower-income people to facilitate tax cuts. Americans broadly oppose this.
And it is precisely the truth that all the latest lying and dissembling from the Trump team are designed to obfuscate.
Over the weekend, Vice President Pence got hammered on social media for claiming in a speech that because of the Medicaid expansion in Ohio, “nearly 60,000 disabled citizens are stuck on waiting lists,” leaving them without care “for months or even years.” But as The Post pointed out, this has nothing to do with the Medicaid expansion, and the office of the state’s GOP governor, John Kasich, flatly declared that this is “the opposite of what happened.” In a related claim, Pence has been saying that the Senate GOP bill “strengthens and secures Medicaid for the neediest in our society,” which it would do, Pence asserts, by returning Medicaid to its “original purpose,” rather than covering so many “able-bodied adults.”
What Pence means is that, by rolling back the expansion of Medicaid to cover that category of “able-bodied adults,” the bill would protect coverage for the most vulnerable, which the program was originally designed to cover. But as the Kaiser Family Foundation has pointed out, one of the main points of the expansion was to cover people who are working — i.e., people who are “able-bodied” — yet cannot get coverage anyway. So all Pence’s demagoguery really means is that the Senate bill would cut the ACA’s assistance to the working poor. What’s more, the Senate bill’s $772 billion in Medicaid cuts would force states to make cuts well beyond the expansion population, which, as Jonathan Cohn explains, would likely hit at least some disabled people. So the cruelty of this lie needs to be appreciated clearly: Pence is falsely claiming that the disabled in Ohio have been hurt by the ACA, to push a policy that likely would hurt the disabled.
Meanwhile, in his weekly address, President Trump played down the bill’s enormous cuts to Medicaid by claiming that it “also expands the opportunity for people on Medicaid to purchase a private plan with federal financial assistance.” Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, similarly, has been preposterously saying that under the GOP bill, more people will get coverage “than are currently covered.” The suggestion here is that the cuts to Medicaid will be more than offset by the increased access to private coverage that the GOP bill will allegedly bring. Suffice it to say that the Congressional Budget Office disagrees: It found that 22 million fewer people will be covered after 10 years, 15 million of those getting knocked off the Medicaid rolls.
All of this dishonesty becomes more understandable, once you see polling such as the above, which shows that large majorities fundamentally reject these priorities. Which gives rise to another question: Is it really true, as we keep hearing, that Trump and/or GOP voters will erupt in fury if this bill does not pass? As noted above, majorities of Trump voter groups oppose its core goals, and even Republican voters are tepid on them. During the campaign, we were told endlessly that Trump’s appeal in part lay precisely in his strong signaling that he was not ideologically aligned with Paul Ryan’s designs on the safety net. Now we’re told his bond with his supporters will be threatened, if he doesn’t get to sign a bill that guts the safety net in spectacularly Ryanesque fashion, including for untold numbers of Trump voters?
It is often claimed that these voters don’t really care what’s in the bill; they simply want to see Trump triumphantly stomp all over something with Barack Obama’s name on it and they want Republicans to fulfill their “promise” to repeal and replace the ACA. Perhaps that’s true, but if so, this would confirm, as Brian Beutler has argued, that the only point of Trumpcare is to fulfill promises that were completely divorced from reality all along. And if, at the same time, large swaths of Trump-friendly voters don’t support its actual policy goals, this disconnect only underscores why Trump and the White House have to keep lying relentlessly about what it would really do.
* ANOTHER POLL FINDS TRUMP’S NUMBERS IN THE TOILET: A new Bloomberg poll finds Trump’s approval at 40-56. His numbers on the economy are 46-44, but on immigration they’re at an abysmal 39-55, and on health care, they’re even worse, at 28-64.
And: “Two-thirds don’t think he’ll succeed in building a wall along the Mexican border during his first term. More than half say he won’t be able to revive the coal industry.” So much winning!
* HEALTH BILL IS DELAYED — NOW WHAT? John McCain’s surgery led GOP leaders to put the vote on the health bill on hold. Axios’ David Nather notes that this could give them more time to win over moderates. But:
Every day heightens the risk that one more Senate Republican will come out against the bill … The Trump administration may be trying to convince the moderates that their concerns are being taken care of, but Senate GOP leaders may not have a lot of new arguments to make. They’ve already added $115 billion (including opioid money), and they’re reminding the moderates they can’t do much more without losing the conservatives.
With the major insurance groups now denouncing the Ted Cruz amendment (which conservatives need to support the bill) as unworkable, passage looks likely to only get harder with time.
* COLLINS: AS MANY AS 10 GOP SENATORS MIGHT OPPOSE HEALTH BILL: On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Susan Colllins (R-Maine) said:
“This bill would impose fundamental, sweeping changes in the Medicaid program. And those include very deep cuts. That would affect some of the most vulnerable people in our society, including disabled children, poor seniors. It would affect our rural hospitals and our nursing homes … There are about eight to 10 Republican senators who have serious concerns about this bill.”
A few more dollars would not meaningfully change this equation, so it’s hard to see how moderates who have expressed such concerns about this could ever support the bill.
* RAND PAUL: DELAY WILL HURT HEALTH BILL’S CHANCES: Here’s what conservative Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had to say on CBS’s “Face the Nation” about the delay in the vote: “I think the longer the bill is out there, the more conservative Republicans are going to discover that it’s not repeal.”
And if GOP leaders are forced to mollify moderates by taking out the Cruz amendment — which would segment the risk pools into healthy and sick, driving up premiums for the latter and gutting protections for them — it will be even harder for conservatives to support it.
* MODERATE REPUBLICANS SHOULD BAND TOGETHER: E.J. Dionne Jr. notes that history will be carefully watching how four moderate Republican senators handle their health-care vote and offers them a good suggestion:
Here’s a suggestion to Dean Heller, Rob Portman, Shelley Moore Capito and Lisa Murkowski, Republican senators who should feel morally bound to vote no. Like Collins, they have spoken strongly against damaging cuts to Medicaid. If they announced their opposition together, they would lessen the political risk of standing alone and create a critical mass of GOP senators who could join Collins in her declared intention of working with Democrats “to fix flaws” in the ACA.
And if they did stand against GOP efforts to roll back the ACA’s coverage expansion, we actually could have the bipartisan talks that Trump says he wants.
* FROM REPUBLICANS, NONSTOP LIES ON HEALTH CARE: Paul Krugman points out that Republicans are conspicuously not openly defending their goal of rolling back health coverage for poor people:
Instead, at every stage of this political fight they have claimed to be doing exactly the opposite of what they’re actually doing: covering more people, making health care cheaper, protecting Americans with pre-existing conditions. We’re not talking about run-of-the-mill spin here; we’re talking about black is white, up is down, dishonesty so raw it’s practically surreal. This isn’t just an assault on health care, it’s an assault on truth itself.
It’s so weird the way these courageous ideological warriors consistently refuse to defend their actual priorities, isn’t it?I think a fair amount about the fact that we're all going to die. It occurs to me at incredibly inopportune moments – I'll be standing in a bar, having managed to get an attractive guy to laugh, and I'll be laughing, too, and maybe dancing a little bit, and then everything goes slo-mo for a second and I'll think: are these people aware that we're all going to the same place in the end? I can slip back into conversation and tell myself that the flash of mortality awareness has enriched my experience, reminded me to just go for it in the giggling and hair-flipping and speaking-my-mind departments because… why the hell not? But occasionally the feeling stays with me, and it reminds me of being a child – feeling full of fear but lacking the language to calm yourself down. I guess, when it comes to death, none of us really has the words.
I wish I could be one of those young people who seems totally unaware of the fact that her gleaming nubile body is, in fact, fallible. (Maybe you have to have a gleaming nubile body to feel that way.) Beautiful self-delusion: isn't that what being young is all about? You think you're immortal until one day when you're around 60, it hits you: you see an Ingmar Bergman-y spectre of death and you do some soul-searching and possibly adopt a kid in need. You resolve to live the rest of your life in a way you can be proud of.
But I am not one of those young people. I've been obsessed with death since I was born.
As a little kid, an unnamed fear would often overtake me. It wasn't a fear of anything tangible – tigers, burglars, homelessness – and it couldn't be solved by usual means like hugging my mother or turning on Nickelodeon shows. The feeling was cold and resided just below my stomach. It made everything around me seem unreal and unsafe. I could most closely equate it with the sensation I felt when, aged three, I was taken to hospital in the night with sudden hives. My parents were away, on a trip, so my Brazilian babysitter Flavia had rushed me to the ER, where a doctor placed me on a high bed and pressed a cold stethoscope between my shoulder blades. On our way into the hospital, I was sure I had seen a man sleeping inside a mailbag. In hindsight, he must have been on a gurney, covered in a dark blanket. Maybe he was comatose or even dead. The doctor removed my shirt, checked under my armpits, and all the while I hovered above us, dissociated, observing.
This chain reaction of observations and implications would repeat itself throughout my childhood, in the face of this unnamed fear, and I came to refer to it as "hospital feeling". I decided it could be cured by taking a swig of grape juice.
I was able to put a finer point on this feeling when my grandmother died. I was 14. I had recently coloured my hair and bought a satin tube top, a transition I considered to be evidence of irreversible maturity. I showed up to my last visit with my grandmother in rich brown lipstick and a slim collarless coat, bought on sale at Banana Republic. I painted my dying grandmother's fingernails carefully with a pearlescent polish by Wet n Wild and promised to return for lunch the next day. But there was no next day: she died late that night, my father by her side. The following morning, when he recounted her passing to us, was the first and last time I saw him cry.
Until I was about 12, my grandmother was my best friend. Carol Marguerite Reynolds – Gram, as I called her – was in possession of a swirling bob of snow-white hair and only one eyebrow, a result of a lack of UV awareness. She was in the habit of drawing on the missing one with a grey-blue Maybelline pencil that didn't even begin to suggest natural hair growth. She wore pants from the maternity store to accommodate her distended belly and the kind of practical shoes that have, in recent years, become fashionable in Brooklyn. Her house smelled of mothballs, baby powder and a loamy moistness that emanated from her overstuffed basement. I called her every day at 4pm.
On the surface, she was traditional. Provincial even. A retired real estate agent in Old Lyme, Connecticut, with a passion for Dan Rather and a freezer full of cheap London broil, she wasn't particularly interested in our life in the city. (In fact, I remember her visiting only once, an event I was so excited about that I put out the milk for tea at 10am, and it spoiled by her 4pm arrival.) But the trappings of her domestic life hid what I now see was the soul of a radical. After attending a one-room schoolhouse in a town full of swamp Yankees – her family had been the first of their neighbours to have a car, which they drove across the frozen lake in winter – she had fled her sheltered life for Mount Holyoke College, Yale nursing school and then the army, where she was stationed in Germany and Japan, suturing wounds and removing shrapnel from German soldiers despite strict orders to let them die. She dated doctors (some of them Jews!) and adopted a dachshund named Meatloaf she'd found rummaging through the trash behind her tent.
Gram recounted her adventures with Plymouth Rock stoicism, but it was clear to me, even as a nine-year-old, that she'd seen far more than she was willing to discuss.
'I painted my dying grandmother’s fingernails carefully with a pearlescent polish by Wet n Wild and promised to return for lunch the next day. But there was no next day: she died late that night.' Photograph: Chris Buck for the Guardian
Gram didn't marry until she was 34 which, in 1947, was the equivalent of being Liza Minnelli on her fifth gay husband. My grandfather was massively obese and came from great wealth, which he had squandered on a series of misguided investments including a chicken farm and a business that sold "all-in-one sporting cages". But Gram saw something in him, and within two weeks they were engaged. From this union came my father and his brother, Edward, aka Jack.
The day after Gram died, my father and I drove up to her house one last time, and I listened to Aimee Mann on a Discman and watched the industrial landscape pass by. This drive had been a fixture of my childhood: abandoned hospitals and train tracks, signs for towns that didn't live up to their names, a stop in New Haven for pizza and gas. This, I remember thinking, is the end. Nothing had ever ended before.
As my father and Uncle Jack organised Gram's things in preparation to sell her house, I wandered the halls in her bathrobe, her crumpled tissues still in the pockets, wailing. They kept working, seemingly immune to the magnitude of the occasion.
"I can't believe she saved all these fucking receipts," my father hissed. "There's canned soup in the cellar from 1965."
"She was just here!" I shouted at the unfeeling adults. "And now she's gone! Her things are still in the refrigerator!"
When I emerged from the bathroom smelling her comb, my uncle took my father aside and asked him to please make me stop.
Enraged by the request, I retreated to her closet and switched to sniffing her pyjamas. My head throbbed with questions. Where is Gram? Is she conscious? Is she lonely? And what does this all mean for me?
The rest of the summer was characterised by a kind of hot terror, a lurking dread that cast a pallor over everything I did. Every ice pop I ate, every movie I watched, every poem I wrote was tinged with a sense of impending loss. Not of another loved one but of my own life. It could be tomorrow. It could be 80 years from tomorrow. But it was coming for us all, and I was no exception.
So what were we playing at?
Finally, one day, I couldn't stand it any more: I walked into the kitchen, laid my head on the table, and asked my father, "How are we supposed to live every day if we know we're going to die?" He looked at me, clearly pained by the dawning of my genetically predestined morbidity. He had been the same way as a kid. A day never went by when he didn't think about his eventual demise. He sighed, leaned back in his chair, unable to conjure a comforting answer. "You just do."
My father can get pretty existential. "You're born alone and you die alone" is a favourite of his that I particularly hate. Ditto "Perhaps reality is just a chip implanted in all our brains." He has a history of staring out into nature and asking, "How do we know this is actually here?" I guess I inherited it. I thought about Gram, about how long and complicated her life had been, and how it had now been reduced to a dumpster full of old canned goods and a vintage Pucci sweater I had already spilled tomato sauce on. I thought about all the things I hoped to get done in my life and realised: I'd better get cracking. I can never spend a whole afternoon watching a Singled Out marathon again if this is what's going to happen.
The fact is I had been circling the topic of death, subconsciously, for some time. Growing up in Soho in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was aware of Aids and the toll it was taking on the creative community. Illness, loss, who would handle the art and the real estate and the medical bills – these topics hovered over every dinner party. As many of my parents' friends became sick, I learned to recognise the look of someone suffering – sunken cheeks, odd facial spotting, a sweater that no longer fit. And I knew what it meant: that person would soon become a memorial, the name on a prize given to visiting students, a distant memory.
Dunham with her father, Carroll. Photograph: Jason LaVeris/Getty
My mum's best friend Jimmy was a swarthy gay fetish photographer who was dying by the time I was born. One of my earliest memories is of a pale, feeble man reclining on the couch by the front windows of our loft, joking weakly with my mother about gossip, and family, and fashion. He was charismatic, talented, darkly funny. My mother helped him get his affairs in order, reached out to friends who hadn't seen him in a long time to say goodbye, navigated New York with his mother when she came to be with Jimmy in his final days. I still have a lot of guilt for screaming at Jimmy when he ate a banana I had been "saving", especially since he died a few weeks later.
The summer after sophomore year of college, I became convinced I, too, would die of Aids. I had ill-advised intercourse with a petite poet-mathematician who, afterwards, removed the condom, placed it under his pillow |
12: 13: 14: // Record type give our event args some structure type PrimeTime = { Time : DateTime ; Prime : int64 option ; ID : string } override x. ToString () = sprintf " %d - %s " ( match x. Prime with | Some ( e ) -> e | None -> 0L ) ( x. Time. ToLongTimeString ()) let primeFinder = PrimeFinder () let pFound = primeFinder. PrimeFound |> Event. filter ( fun (_, e ) -> snd e ) // only where the number was prime |> Event. map ( fun (_, e ) -> { Time = DateTime. Now ; Prime = Some ( fst e ); ID = "p" })
The value pFound only includes events where the PrimeFound returned true. The event argument is then mapped to the record type PrimeTime. This record type provides extra context about the event, such as when the event fired, where the event originated from, and what the event arguments were.
For the sake of this exercise, we'll check the status of the list processing with a button click. When the button is clicked, we want to see the most recent prime number found in the collection. The following code takes the click event from a button and maps it onto an Event of type PrimeTime, just like pFound!
1: 2: 3: 4: 5: let checkStatusButton = new Button ( Text = "Check Status" ) let csClicked = checkStatusButton. Click |> Event. map ( fun _ -> { Time = DateTime. Now ; Prime = None ; ID = "c" })
pFound and csClicked are both of type IEvent<PrimeTime>. This is ultimately the type needed for the final event stream. Getting there is a little bit interesting though.
csClicked will never have a value for Prime. However, pFound will always have a value for Prime. What we need is a stream containing the latest event emitted by both pFound and csClicked.
The following snippet uses Event.merge to combine the streams pFound and csClicked. Event.scan then reduces the merged stream into a stream of type IEvent<PrimeTime option * PrimeTime option>. The first PrimeTime option in the tuple is either Some or None from the pFound stream. The second PrimeTime option in the tuple is either Some or None from the csClicked stream. Each time either pFound or csClicked emits an event, Event.scan passes the tuple and newest event through an aggregation function. When a pFound event passes through the aggregate function a tuple of (Some(e), None) is returned. When a csClicked event passes through the aggregate function, a tuple of (p, Some(e)) is returned. Using this pattern, the aggregate function will always return the latest PrimeFound event (if any) when e is a Click event, but will not return a Click event with when e is PrimeFound event. Doing this guarantees that when a tuple with a Click event is returned, it will have the most recent prime number found if there is one.
1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6: 7: 8: let reduced = pFound |> Event. merge csClicked |> Event. scan ( fun ( p, c ) e -> match e. ID with | "p" -> ( Some ( e ), None ) | "c" -> ( p, Some ( e )) |_ -> ( p, c )) ( None, None )
With reduced in hand, we can now get the most recent prime number found when the "Check Status" button is clicked. This new event stream should only emit events when the "Check Status" button is clicked. This means we only want events from the reduced stream where the second value in the tuple is Some. After the stream is filtered to make sure that a "Check Status" click occurred, we map the event stream back into an IEvent<PrimeTime> stream. The objective of this map operation is updating the None value on the button click event with the Some value from the pFound event if there is one. If the pFound stream hasn't emitted an event we return the unchanged csClicked event. If a pFound event has occurred, the prime number found from that event is swapped in for the None emitted by the csClicked event.
Below is the full code for the filtered, mapped, and refiltered statusCheck stream.
1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6: 7: let statusCheck = reduced |> Event. filter ( fun ( p, c ) -> c. IsSome ) |> Event. map ( fun ( p, c ) -> match p with | Some f -> { c. Value with Prime = f. Prime } | None -> c. Value )
With an async workflow defined for our background process and an event stream we can listen to to get the last prime found we're ready to bring it all together. Below is the full code for this example. Try running it in F# interactive. Clicking the "Check Status" button will write either the latest prime found or 0 (zero) to FSI. Clicking "Cancel" will kill the async workflow.
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: 31: 32: 33: 34: 35: 36: 37: 38: 39: 40: 41: 42: 43: 44: 45: 46: 47: 48: 49: 50: 51: 52: 53: 54: 55: 56: 57: 58: 59: 60: 61: 62: 63: 64: 65: 66: 67: 68: 69: 70: 71: 72: 73: 74: 75: 76: 77: 78: 79: 80: 81: 82: 83: 84: 85: 86: 87: 88: 89: 90: 91: 92: 93: 94: 95: 96: 97: 98: 99: 100: 101: 102: 103: 104: open System open System. Windows. Forms let isPrime x = let rec check i = double i > sqrt ( double x ) || ( x % i <> 0L && check ( i + 1L )) match x with | y when y < 2L -> false | _ -> check 2L type PrimeFinder () = let primeFoundEvent = Event < _ > () member x. PrimeFound = primeFoundEvent. Publish member x. IsPrime n = primeFoundEvent. Trigger ( x, ( n, isPrime n )) type PrimeTime = { Time : DateTime ; Prime : int64 option ; ID : string } override x. ToString () = sprintf "[%s] %d - %s" x. ID ( match x. Prime with | Some ( e ) -> e | None -> 0L ) ( x. Time. ToLongTimeString ()) let findPrimesAsync numbers primeTester = let rec findPrimes n = async { match n with | h :: t -> do! Async. SwitchToNewThread () primeTester h do! Async. SwitchToThreadPool () do! findPrimes t | [] -> () } findPrimes numbers let runForm () = let panel = new FlowLayoutPanel () panel. Dock <- DockStyle. Fill panel. WrapContents <- false let form = new Form ( Width = 400, Height = 300, Visible = true, Text = "Test" ) form. Controls. Add panel let startButton = new Button ( Text = "Start" ) let cancelButton = new Button ( Text = "Cancel" ) let checkStatusButton = new Button ( Text = "CheckStatus" ) let primeFinder = PrimeFinder () // Transform the event args // from the button.Click // and PrimeFound events // into uniform structures // that can be merged let csClicked = checkStatusButton. Click |> Event. map ( fun _ -> { Time = DateTime. Now ; Prime = None ; ID = "c" }) let pFound = primeFinder. PrimeFound |> Event. filter ( fun (_, e ) -> snd e ) // only where the number was prime |> Event. map ( fun (_, e ) -> { Time = DateTime. Now ; Prime = Some ( fst e ); ID = "p" }) let reduced = pFound |> Event. merge csClicked |> Event. scan ( fun ( p, c ) e -> match e. ID with | "p" -> ( Some ( e ), None ) | "c" -> ( p, Some ( e )) |_ -> ( p, c )) ( None, None ) let statusCheck = reduced |> Event. filter ( fun ( p, c ) -> c. IsSome ) |> Event. map ( fun ( p, c ) -> match p with | Some f -> { c. Value with Prime = f. Prime } | None -> c. Value ) statusCheck. Add ( fun x -> printfn "Last prime: %s " <| x. ToString ()) let numbers = [ 1L.. 100000L ] startButton. Click. Add ( fun _ -> printfn "Started" Async. StartWithContinuations ( findPrimesAsync numbers primeFinder. IsPrime, ( fun _ -> printfn "Done" ), ( fun x -> printfn "Exception occurred: %A " x ), ( fun _ -> printfn "Stopped" ) ) ) cancelButton. Click. Add ( fun _ -> Async. CancelDefaultToken ()) panel. Controls. AddRange [| startButton ; cancelButton ; checkStatusButton |] Application. Run ( form ) runForm ()
Conclusion
The basics of F# events are simple but powerful. F# events are of type Event and implement IEvent which in turn implements IObservable and IDelegateEvent. Because of this, IEvent can be mapped, filtered, and more, which allows consumers to add handlers for highly specialized workflows. We can start expensive tasks asynchronously and use events to check on the status of the work.
Resources
namespace System
val timer1 : Timers.Timer
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.timer1
namespace System.Timers
Multiple items
type Timer =
inherit Component
new : unit -> Timer + 1 overload
member AutoReset : bool with get, set
member BeginInit : unit -> unit
member Close : unit -> unit
member Enabled : bool with get, set
member EndInit : unit -> unit
member Interval : float with get, set
member Site : ISite with get, set
member Start : unit -> unit
member Stop : unit -> unit
...
Full name: System.Timers.Timer
--------------------
Timers.Timer() : unit
Timers.Timer(interval: float) : unit
val timer2 : Timers.Timer
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.timer2
event Timers.Timer.Elapsed: IEvent<Timers.ElapsedEventHandler,Timers.ElapsedEventArgs>
member IObservable.Add : callback:('T -> unit) -> unit
val x : Timers.ElapsedEventArgs
val printfn : format:Printf.TextWriterFormat<'T> -> 'T
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.ExtraTopLevelOperators.printfn
property Timers.ElapsedEventArgs.SignalTime: DateTime
property DateTime.Second: int
property DateTime.Millisecond: int
val runTimer : t:Timers.Timer -> s:int -> unit
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.runTimer
val t : Timers.Timer
val s : int
Multiple items
val int : value:'T -> int (requires member op_Explicit)
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.Operators.int
--------------------
type int = int32
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.int
--------------------
type int<'Measure> = int
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.int<_>
Timers.Timer.Start() : unit
namespace System.Threading
Multiple items
type Thread =
inherit CriticalFinalizerObject
new : start:ThreadStart -> Thread + 3 overloads
member Abort : unit -> unit + 1 overload
member ApartmentState : ApartmentState with get, set
member CurrentCulture : CultureInfo with get, set
member CurrentUICulture : CultureInfo with get, set
member DisableComObjectEagerCleanup : unit -> unit
member ExecutionContext : ExecutionContext
member GetApartmentState : unit -> ApartmentState
member GetCompressedStack : unit -> CompressedStack
member GetHashCode : unit -> int
...
Full name: System.Threading.Thread
--------------------
Threading.Thread(start: Threading.ThreadStart) : unit
Threading.Thread(start: Threading.ParameterizedThreadStart) : unit
Threading.Thread(start: Threading.ThreadStart, maxStackSize: int) : unit
Threading.Thread(start: Threading.ParameterizedThreadStart, maxStackSize: int) : unit
Threading.Thread.Sleep(timeout: TimeSpan) : unit
Threading.Thread.Sleep(millisecondsTimeout: int) : unit
Timers.Timer.Stop() : unit
val runTimerAsync : t:Timers.Timer -> s:int -> Async<unit>
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.runTimerAsync
val async : AsyncBuilder
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.ExtraTopLevelOperators.async
Multiple items
type Async
static member AsBeginEnd : computation:('Arg -> Async<'T>) -> ('Arg * AsyncCallback * obj -> IAsyncResult) * (IAsyncResult -> 'T) * (IAsyncResult -> unit)
static member AwaitEvent : event:IEvent<'Del,'T> *?cancelAction:(unit -> unit) -> Async<'T> (requires delegate and 'Del :> Delegate)
static member AwaitIAsyncResult : iar:IAsyncResult *?millisecondsTimeout:int -> Async<bool>
static member AwaitTask : task:Task -> Async<unit>
static member AwaitTask : task:Task<'T> -> Async<'T>
static member AwaitWaitHandle : waitHandle:WaitHandle *?millisecondsTimeout:int -> Async<bool>
static member CancelDefaultToken : unit -> unit
static member Catch : computation:Async<'T> -> Async<Choice<'T,exn>>
static member Choice : computations:seq<Async<'T option>> -> Async<'T option>
static member FromBeginEnd : beginAction:(AsyncCallback * obj -> IAsyncResult) * endAction:(IAsyncResult -> 'T) *?cancelAction:(unit -> unit) -> Async<'T>
static member FromBeginEnd : arg:'Arg1 * beginAction:('Arg1 * AsyncCallback * obj -> IAsyncResult) * endAction:(IAsyncResult -> 'T) *?cancelAction:(unit -> unit) -> Async<'T>
static member FromBeginEnd : arg1:'Arg1 * arg2:'Arg2 * beginAction:('Arg1 * 'Arg2 * AsyncCallback * obj -> IAsyncResult) * endAction:(IAsyncResult -> 'T) *?cancelAction:(unit -> unit) -> Async<'T>
static member FromBeginEnd : arg1:'Arg1 * arg2:'Arg2 * arg3:'Arg3 * beginAction:('Arg1 * 'Arg2 * 'Arg3 * AsyncCallback * obj -> IAsyncResult) * endAction:(IAsyncResult -> 'T) *?cancelAction:(unit -> unit) -> Async<'T>
static member FromContinuations : callback:(('T -> unit) * (exn -> unit) * (OperationCanceledException -> unit) -> unit) -> Async<'T>
static member Ignore : computation:Async<'T> -> Async<unit>
static member OnCancel : interruption:(unit -> unit) -> Async<IDisposable>
static member Parallel : computations:seq<Async<'T>> -> Async<'T []>
static member RunSynchronously : computation:Async<'T> *?timeout:int *?cancellationToken:CancellationToken -> 'T
static member Sleep : millisecondsDueTime:int -> Async<unit>
static member Start : computation:Async<unit> *?cancellationToken:CancellationToken -> unit
static member StartAsTask : computation:Async<'T> *?taskCreationOptions:TaskCreationOptions *?cancellationToken:CancellationToken -> Task<'T>
static member StartChild : computation:Async<'T> *?millisecondsTimeout:int -> Async<Async<'T>>
static member StartChildAsTask : computation:Async<'T> *?taskCreationOptions:TaskCreationOptions -> Async<Task<'T>>
static member StartImmediate : computation:Async<unit> *?cancellationToken:CancellationToken -> unit
static member StartWithContinuations : computation:Async<'T> * continuation:('T -> unit) * exceptionContinuation:(exn -> unit) * cancellationContinuation:(OperationCanceledException -> unit) *?cancellationToken:CancellationToken -> unit
static member SwitchToContext : syncContext:SynchronizationContext -> Async<unit>
static member SwitchToNewThread : unit -> Async<unit>
static member SwitchToThreadPool : unit -> Async<unit>
static member TryCancelled : computation:Async<'T> * compensation:(OperationCanceledException -> unit) -> Async<'T>
static member CancellationToken : Async<CancellationToken>
static member DefaultCancellationToken : CancellationToken
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Control.Async
--------------------
type Async<'T>
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Control.Async<_>
static member Async.Sleep : millisecondsDueTime:int -> Async<unit>
static member Async.Parallel : computations:seq<Async<'T>> -> Async<'T []>
static member Async.RunSynchronously : computation:Async<'T> *?timeout:int *?cancellationToken:Threading.CancellationToken -> 'T
static member Async.StartWithContinuations : computation:Async<'T> * continuation:('T -> unit) * exceptionContinuation:(exn -> unit) * cancellationContinuation:(OperationCanceledException -> unit) *?cancellationToken:Threading.CancellationToken -> unit
Multiple items
type PrimeFinder =
new : unit -> PrimeFinder
member IsPrime : n:int64 -> unit
member PrimeFound : IEvent<PrimeFinder * (int64 * bool)>
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.PrimeFinder
--------------------
new : unit -> PrimeFinder
val primeFoundEvent : Event<PrimeFinder * (int64 * bool)>
Multiple items
module Event
from Microsoft.FSharp.Control
--------------------
type Event<'T> =
new : unit -> Event<'T>
member Trigger : arg:'T -> unit
member Publish : IEvent<'T>
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Control.Event<_>
--------------------
type Event<'Delegate,'Args (requires delegate and 'Delegate :> Delegate)> =
new : unit -> Event<'Delegate,'Args>
member Trigger : sender:obj * args:'Args -> unit
member Publish : IEvent<'Delegate,'Args>
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Control.Event<_,_>
--------------------
new : unit -> Event<'T>
--------------------
new : unit -> Event<'Delegate,'Args>
val x : PrimeFinder
member PrimeFinder.PrimeFound : IEvent<PrimeFinder * (int64 * bool)>
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.PrimeFinder.PrimeFound
property Event.Publish: IEvent<PrimeFinder * (int64 * bool)>
member PrimeFinder.IsPrime : n:int64 -> unit
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.PrimeFinder.IsPrime
val n : int64
member Event.Trigger : arg:'T -> unit
val primeFinder : PrimeFinder
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.primeFinder
property PrimeFinder.PrimeFound: IEvent<PrimeFinder * (int64 * bool)>
val e : int64 * bool
member PrimeFinder.IsPrime : n:int64 -> unit
val filter : predicate:('T -> bool) -> sourceEvent:IEvent<'Del,'T> -> IEvent<'T> (requires delegate and 'Del :> Delegate)
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Control.Event.filter
val snd : tuple:('T1 * 'T2) -> 'T2
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.Operators.snd
val add : callback:('T -> unit) -> sourceEvent:IEvent<'Del,'T> -> unit (requires delegate and 'Del :> Delegate)
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Control.Event.add
val findPrimesAsync : numbers:'a -> primeTester:('b -> unit) -> Async<unit>
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.findPrimesAsync
val numbers : 'a
val primeTester : ('a -> unit)
val findPrimes : ('a list -> Async<unit>)
val n : 'a list
val h : 'a
val t : 'a list
static member Async.SwitchToNewThread : unit -> Async<unit>
static member Async.SwitchToThreadPool : unit -> Async<unit>
type PrimeTime =
{Time: DateTime;
Prime: int64 option;
ID: string;}
override ToString : unit -> string
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.PrimeTime
PrimeTime.Time: DateTime
Multiple items
type DateTime =
struct
new : ticks:int64 -> DateTime + 10 overloads
member Add : value:TimeSpan -> DateTime
member AddDays : value:float -> DateTime
member AddHours : value:float -> DateTime
member AddMilliseconds : value:float -> DateTime
member AddMinutes : value:float -> DateTime
member AddMonths : months:int -> DateTime
member AddSeconds : value:float -> DateTime
member AddTicks : value:int64 -> DateTime
member AddYears : value:int -> DateTime
...
end
Full name: System.DateTime
--------------------
DateTime()
(+0 other overloads)
DateTime(ticks: int64) : unit
(+0 other overloads)
DateTime(ticks: int64, kind: DateTimeKind) : unit
(+0 other overloads)
DateTime(year: int, month: int, day: int) : unit
(+0 other overloads)
DateTime(year: int, month: int, day: int, calendar: Globalization.Calendar) : unit
(+0 other overloads)
DateTime(year: int, month: int, day: int, hour: int, minute: int, second: int) : unit
(+0 other overloads)
DateTime(year: int, month: int, day: int, hour: int, minute: int, second: int, kind: DateTimeKind) : unit
(+0 other overloads)
DateTime(year: int, month: int, day: int, hour: int, minute: int, second: int, calendar: Globalization.Calendar) : unit
(+0 other overloads)
DateTime(year: int, month: int, day: int, hour: int, minute: int, second: int, millisecond: int) : unit
(+0 other overloads)
DateTime(year: int, month: int, day: int, hour: int, minute: int, second: int, millisecond: int, kind: DateTimeKind) : unit
(+0 other overloads)
PrimeTime.Prime: int64 option
Multiple items
val int64 : value:'T -> int64 (requires member op_Explicit)
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.Operators.int64
--------------------
type int64 = Int64
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.int64
--------------------
type int64<'Measure> = int64
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.int64<_>
type 'T option = Option<'T>
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.option<_>
PrimeTime.ID: string
Multiple items
val string : value:'T -> string
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.Operators.string
--------------------
type string = String
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.string
val x : PrimeTime
override PrimeTime.ToString : unit -> string
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.PrimeTime.ToString
val sprintf : format:Printf.StringFormat<'T> -> 'T
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.ExtraTopLevelOperators.sprintf
union case Option.Some: Value: 'T -> Option<'T>
val e : int64
union case Option.None: Option<'T>
DateTime.ToLongTimeString() : string
val pFound : IEvent<PrimeTime>
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.pFound
val map : mapping:('T -> 'U) -> sourceEvent:IEvent<'Del,'T> -> IEvent<'U> (requires delegate and 'Del :> Delegate)
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Control.Event.map
property DateTime.Now: DateTime
val fst : tuple:('T1 * 'T2) -> 'T1
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.Operators.fst
val checkStatusButton : obj
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.checkStatusButton
namespace System.Text
val csClicked : IEvent<PrimeTime>
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.csClicked
val reduced : IEvent<PrimeTime option * PrimeTime option>
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.reduced
val merge : event1:IEvent<'Del1,'T> -> event2:IEvent<'Del2,'T> -> IEvent<'T> (requires delegate and 'Del1 :> Delegate and delegate and 'Del2 :> Delegate)
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Control.Event.merge
val scan : collector:('U -> 'T -> 'U) -> state:'U -> sourceEvent:IEvent<'Del,'T> -> IEvent<'U> (requires delegate and 'Del :> Delegate)
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Control.Event.scan
val p : PrimeTime option
val c : PrimeTime option
val e : PrimeTime
val statusCheck : IEvent<PrimeTime>
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.statusCheck
property Option.IsSome: bool
val f : PrimeTime
property Option.Value: PrimeTime
namespace System.Windows
namespace System.Windows.Forms
val isPrime : x:int64 -> bool
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.isPrime
val x : int64
val check : (int64 -> bool)
val i : int64
Multiple items
val double : value:'T -> double (requires member op_Explicit)
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.ExtraTopLevelOperators.double
--------------------
type double = Double
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.double
val sqrt : value:'T -> 'U (requires member Sqrt)
Full name: Microsoft.FSharp.Core.Operators.sqrt
val y : int64
val findPrimesAsync : numbers:'a list -> primeTester:('a -> unit) -> Async<unit>
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.findPrimesAsync
val numbers : 'a list
val runForm : unit -> unit
Full name: fsharpeventsrxasync.runForm
val panel : FlowLayoutPanel
Multiple items
type FlowLayoutPanel =
inherit Panel
new : unit -> FlowLayoutPanel
member FlowDirection : FlowDirection with get, set
member GetFlowBreak : control:Control -> bool
member LayoutEngine : LayoutEngine
member SetFlowBreak : control:Control * value:bool -> unit
member WrapContents : bool with get, set
Full name: System.Windows.Forms.FlowLayoutPanel
--------------------
FlowLayoutPanel() : unit
property Control.Dock: DockStyle
type DockStyle =
| None = 0
| Top = 1
| Bottom = 2
| Left = 3
| Right = 4
| Fill = 5
Full name: System.Windows.Forms.DockStyle
field DockStyle.Fill = 5
property FlowLayoutPanel.WrapContents: bool
val form : Form
Multiple items
type Form =
inherit ContainerControl
new : unit -> Form
member AcceptButton : IButtonControl with get, set
member Activate : unit -> unit
member ActiveMdiChild : Form
member AddOwnedForm : ownedForm:Form -> unit
member AllowTransparency : bool with get, set
member AutoScale : bool with get, set
member AutoScaleBaseSize : Size with get, set
member AutoScroll : bool with get, set
member AutoSize : bool with get, set
...
nested type ControlCollection
Full name: System.Windows.Forms.Form
--------------------
Form() : unit
property Control.Controls: Control.ControlCollection
Control.ControlCollection.Add(value: Control) : unit
val startButton : Button
Multiple items
type Button =
inherit ButtonBase
new : unit -> Button
member AutoSizeMode : AutoSizeMode with get, set
member DialogResult : DialogResult with get, set
member NotifyDefault : value:bool -> unit
member PerformClick : unit -> unit
member ToString : unit -> string
event DoubleClick : EventHandler
event MouseDoubleClick : MouseEventHandler
Full name: System.Windows.Forms.Button
--------------------
Button() : unit
val cancelButton : Button
val checkStatusButton : Button
val primeFinder : PrimeFinder
val csClicked : IEvent<PrimeTime>
event Control.Click: IEvent<EventHandler,EventArgs>
val pFound : IEvent<PrimeTime>
val reduced : IEvent<PrimeTime option * PrimeTime option>
val statusCheck : IEvent<PrimeTime>
override PrimeTime.ToString : unit -> string
val numbers : int64 list
val x : exn
static member Async.CancelDefaultToken : unit -> unit
Control.ControlCollection.AddRange(controls: Control []) : unit
type Application =
static member AddMessageFilter : value:IMessageFilter -> unit
static member AllowQuit : bool
static member CommonAppDataPath : string
static member CommonAppDataRegistry : RegistryKey
static member CompanyName : string
static member CurrentCulture : CultureInfo with get, set
static member CurrentInputLanguage : InputLanguage with get, set
static member DoEvents : unit -> unit
static member EnableVisualStyles : unit -> unit
static member ExecutablePath : string
...
nested type MessageLoopCallback
Full name: System.Windows.Forms.Application
Application.Run() : unit
Application.Run(context: ApplicationContext) : unit
Application.Run(mainForm: Form) : unitGood Evening. Vivecraft now has some (slightly experimental) support for Oculus Touch controllers. We are excited to welcome our Rift brethren to the roomscale party.
Get yours in Minecraft 1.11 or 1.7.10 flavor and please make sure you are using the beta branch of SteamVR or you’re gonna have a bad time.
I’ve assigned defaults to the Touch controllers based on a lottery system. I put the commands in a hat and drew them at random to assign to buttons. You can view the results on the how-to-play page. I am totally open to changing the defaults if a consensus can be reached as to a better set.
The Touch mappings for in-game actions can be re-bound to touching or pressing any of the main buttons or triggers. Do so in VR Settings > Controller Buttons.
Big thanks to our oculus testing team for helping me out with this one. I’m talking about you, discord user Fritter, you the man.
There’s still a little bit of weirdness at this early stage in properly identifying the tracking system in use. If you find yourself way above or too near the ground use the Reset Origin button on the settings menu and that should sort it.
I also went and implemented a ‘FOV-Reduction’ comfort option while in free-move mode. I personally can’t stand it but hey, different strokes and all that. It’s just a fade-to-black and not some fancy schmancy static horizon like Google Earth. But we ain’t fancy schmancy.
Also gee whiz, people. Endermen. They’ve not worked right… ever. Not since the very first Minecrift-Vive have endermen properly responded to a VR player eyeballin them. You had to get your crosshair all up in their spooky faces to rile them up. Well no more! Just when you thought creepers were the worst things in VR now you get proper endermen aggro to deal with. I understand why no one reported this, I really do. (chickens). Server admins will need to update their server plugin to get this fix in Multiplayer.
RETROACTIVE EDIT: Forgot to plug the new Server Listings Page!. Shows realtime public Vivecraft server status. If you have a Vivecraft-friendly server and want it listed on this page let me know!.
That’s all for now. See you again real soon.
-jrbuddaFor most of the past week, one question more than any other has been rattling round my head: is David Willetts a bit thick? Please understand my reservations in asking this. As a good Indian boy brought up to respect elders, such intergenerational impertinence doesn't come readily. And besides, Willetts is about as high-grade an intellect as Westminster has got: he writes books of political theory; he gives lectures on neuroscience; he even understands the benefits system, for heaven's sake. Put down Two Brains as slow off the mark, and another question soon follows: just what term do you dream up for Nicholas Soames?
But as universities minister, Willetts is the man in charge of introducing higher tuition fees. Faced with this delicate task, he has got his predictions, his proclamations and his maths badly wrong. That much was made clear last week, when universities submitted their proposed course levies – and Guardian research showed that almost three-quarters of English universities plan to charge the top whack of £9,000 a year for at least some subjects. Exactly the opposite of what the government promised.
Now, this isn't a general argument about how to fund higher education – we can have that out another time. For the next few minutes let's just take for granted the fact that tuition fees are going to rise from their current level of just below £3,500. And that the government will slash university funding. Oh, and that it's going to be really tough for school-leavers to find jobs over the next few years, which will just pile the pressure on degree-course places. Any minister working within those constraints would have struggled.
But a result would have been if the 123 English universities had announced a range of fees, giving prospective students and their families some measure of choice: £9,000 a year to don sub-fusc at some grandly quandrangled Oxbridge college, say; £7,500 to study economics at a Victorian redbrick; and £3,800 for an arts degree somewhere relatively new and breeze-blocked.
This was pretty much what Willetts promised – a smooth transition from the Soviet economics of higher education to a free-market nirvana. Had the reality conformed to rhetoric he could have boasted of a giant leap towards introducing a proper market in undergraduate education, where prices for degree courses reflect how much it cost to put them on and the income graduates can expect to see in return. You pays your money, and you takes your choice, Willetts could have said at that point. Although, being Willetts, he'd probably have said it in Latin.
Instead, we've got massive confusion. Oxford has said it will charge the full £9,000 – but so too will the University of East London, for all of its courses. London Met, University of Central Lancashire, Liverpool John Moore's: all of them will be £9k universities.
Had Willetts been a bit smarter and applied just a couple of insights from economics, he could have avoided this – and the costly turmoil that will surely come next.
What are they? The first is on something economists called anchoring. Even before the tuition fees vote at the end of last year, government ministers talked of fees of £9,000 a year. That figure is the one that has stuck in people's minds – which anchors the expectations of university bureaucrats and students' families alike. You don't need to be an economist to know about anchoring; you just need to have gone shopping. I'm not asking for £30, a market stallholder will say, holding aloft some Chinese-made electronic good – but that is the figure he wants you to bear in mind.
The other basic insight the universities minister ought to have borne in mind is that customers often deduce the quality of a product from its price. Want a machine to make popcorn? Researchers have shown that customers think the costlier poppers must be better – even when objective testers have shown the opposite. As marketing professor Akshay Rao put it in a 2005 paper: "Consumers consciously [choose] to rely on the price cue to make quality judgments, because such a process [is] cognitively efficient." When you don't know how to choose between the goods in front of you, going by price is as good a guide as any.
Now apply these two insights to a world in which university officials suddenly have to set their own prices for courses. Nine thousand pounds is the figure everyone is talking about and each institution needs to show that it is a competitive choice. So what do they do? Why, cluster around the £9k mark.
None of this is to excuse universities from kidding themselves that they're all the same rank. But it is to hold the government responsible for not having smoothed out the process, or prevented the pandemonium that will come. As Peter Dolton, an education economist at Royal Holloway University of London, puts it: "Don't underestimate the chaos there'll be over the next year or two." He predicts that there will be a slump in demand for the bottom-ranking 20 or 30 institutions, which will lead to them suffering "severe financial difficulties".
So, let's go back to the original question: is the man in charge of making these changes a bit daft? I would say that anyone who ignored such rudimentary economic insights must be a bit thick. Either that or he's tried to be too clever by half, which – when you're dealing with lots of people trying to make tough decisions – usually has the same disastrous effect.One of the most widely used tools in the web development process is surely the terminal. While you are working on a project, often you find yourself in the position of using the terminal with several tabs open at once, one for launching a local web server, a second tab for managing the database, another for copying files and so on. This can soon become messy and hard to handle. One solution for this problem which works well for me, is the terminal multiplexer, tmux.
What Is Tmux
tmux is a terminal multiplexer: it enables a number of terminals, each running a separate program to be created, accessed and controlled from a single screen.
The definition above, taken from the tmux website, is clear: from one terminal window we can start and control a number of other terminals and in each of them run a different application or a different instance of an application.
tmux is developed on a client-server model. This brings into the game the concept of sessions. A session is stored on the server which holds |
books have messages like this, they’re cleverly layered into the story. The fact you say you want to teach kids would worry us that the tone of your book is too didactic.)
I know this book will grip you from start to finish, and I think it could be the one to really put your agency on the map. ( We’re very happy with our current clients and how great they are – don’t be disparaging about the agency ) It would make a great movie and here is the link to the Pinterest board with the actors I want to play the main character. ( Things like this are fun to do with your writing buddies and critique partners, but we’d worry you were running before you could walk in mentioning it here ).
I am a member of Sewing Anonymous, a big group of people who sew in the church hall at weekends. I’m also a sign language teacher and fluent in Portuguese. ( Are these relevant to your book? If you are member of a writing organisation, tell us. And if your story is set in France, and you lived there for three years, then great – but keep it relevant!)
I will call you tomorrow to see what you think. ( Never call an agent to chase up on a query unless her submission guidelines specifically say you should.)
Best wishes
A
Here's another example of how not to write a query:
Hey,
I have written three chapters of my untitled novel, but I can quickly finish the rest if you want it soon. This book is going to be as big as Twilight and The Hunger Games.
I know from reading a blog interview that you don’t represent thrillers, but I thought my book would make you think differently about them. I couldn’t find the submission details on your website, so I’ve just attached what I’ve written so far. It’s a bit rough, but you’ll get the picture. I bet you probably won’t read it though. I’ve found the search for an agent to be fraught, and I’ve begun to think there aren’t any professional people in publishing left. I’ve had 50 rejections – none of them helpful. I mean how hard is it to just send me a nice email explaining what you didn’t like about my book and giving detailed editorial tips. Seriously! I do hope that I hear from you and you will be the one good person in this whole stupid industry.
Email me back at lovesgiantteddybears@cuddles.com
Laters
B
So, what could "B" have done differently?:
Hey, ( Because agents are all over Twitter talking about what we ate last night, it can be easy to be informal when emailing us. Remember: this is a business letter.)
I have written three chapters of my untitled novel, but I can quickly finish the rest if you want it soon. ( NEVER query an unfinished book. It’s so frustrating for us to request a full manuscript and find out it’s not available. And usually our full request means the manuscript is finished quickly and rushed. Edit and polish your book before you query. We’ll be here – what’s your rush?)
This book is going to be as big as Twilight and The Hunger Games ( Don’t compare your book to the big books. If you mention comparables, show us you’re well-read in the genre you’re querying. For example, for a voicey animal-protagonist MG, you might say ‘This book would appeal to fans of 'The One And Only Ivan.’ )
I know from reading a blog interview that you don’t represent thrillers, but I thought my book would make you think differently about them. ( If it says we don’t represent a certain genre, then don’t think that you have written the one book that will change our mind. We will have good reason that we don’t rep that genre. You need an agent who is passionate about the genre you write in and who has the right editorial contacts.)
I couldn’t find the submission details on your website, so I’ve just attached what I’ve written so far. It’s a bit rough, but you’ll get the picture. ( You only get one chance to make a first impression. Why send something unfinished and unedited? Also, if you’ve found our email address, you’re capable of finding our submission guidelines on our website.)
I bet you probably won’t read it though. I’ve found the search for an agent to be fraught, and I’ve begun to think there aren’t any professional people in publishing left. ( Don’t bad-mouth other industry professionals to us – we’re a tight group and we have a lot of respect for each other ).
I’ve had 50 rejections – none of them helpful. I mean how hard is it to just send me a nice email explaining what you didn’t like about my book and giving detailed editorial tips. Seriously! I do hope that I hear from you and you will be the one good person in this whole stupid industry. ( It’s hard for us to be enthusiastic about working with someone with both an unrealistic view of how the industry works and a bad attitude.)
Email me back at lovesgiantteddybears@cuddles.com. ( Use a professional business email address, ideally yourname@ )
Laters ( Wou ld you really sign a business letter this way?)
B
Okay, so that was a fun look at some common mistakes that crop up in our submissions. So what makes a good query letter? Our advice: don’t overthink it, keep it simple, and make us want to read your book.
Dear [ Agent’s Name],
I am seeking representation for my [age - MG/YA etc.] [genre] manuscript [title] complete at [word count rounded to nearest 1000 words].
[Insert Pitch - 1 or 2 paragraphs explaining your plot. Introduce your main character. What does she want? What’s preventing her from achieving those goals? And what are the stakes if she doesn’t achieve them?]
According to your submission guidelines I have [consult the specific guidelines for the agency, posted on its website. For the Bent Agency, you’d say, ‘pasted the first ten pages of the manuscript below.’]
I am a member of [any writing organisations] and have won [any relevant writing prizes]. [Then add anything relevant to your role as the best person to write this book.] Thank you for your time.
All best,
[your name]
Simple, right?
If you are ready to start submitting to agents, but would like some feedback on your query from Gemma and Molly, then email your query to writers@britishscbwi.org. Submissions will be posted anonymously. Alternatively, if you have a question you would like to put to our agents, email us at the above address, or post them in the comments below.
Gemma Cooper and Molly Ker Hawn represent authors of books for children and young adults. For more information about Gemma and Molly see The Bent Agency
website
and
blog
.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) is continuing to make relatively good progress during its development path, according to the Agency’s key Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP). The latest status update on the top issues – ranging from crew safety items of interest to overall schedule – overviewed the main challenges known as “Red Risks”. The ASAP note these risks appear to be “going down, although they have not yet been eliminated”.
SLS/Orion Status:
The development path for the Space Launch System (SLS) is continuing to avoid the massive issues suffered by its predecessor program, Constellation (CxP).
Had Constellation remained on schedule, the program would have been coming up on the Orion 10 mission atop of the Ares I rocket, its seventh crewed mission to the ISS and four years away from returning humans to the surface Moon via the combination of Ares I, Orion, Ares V and the Altair lunar lander.
Of course, the Vision For Space Exploration (VSE) “Moon, Mars and Beyond” related manifest – produced in 2006 (available in L2) – was soon to suffer from major schedule slips via technical and funding challenges, ahead of the program’s eventual demise at the end of the decade.
The new program, finally confirmed after a number of lengthy technical and costing studies, removed the Moon from the exploration plans – at least from a surface crewed landing standpoint – with a more specific focus on the eventual goal of sending humans to Mars.
That end goal is still without any real specifics, with only vague references of “sometime in the mid-2030s”, partly due to the political funding uncertainty surrounding missions that won’t be close to becoming a reality under the current or the future President.
This hasn’t stopped NASA’s PR drive using the #journeytomars hashtag on nearly every piece of information that has any relation to SLS, while the rocket itself continues to be incorrectly portrayed in official renderings as “painted white”, so as – according to some SLS team members – “to avoid it looking too much like the cancelled Ares V“.
In reality, the media folk shouldn’t be too concerned about any aesthetic association between SLS and its cancelled predecessor, given Ares V was still tucked away out of sight and out of mind on the drawing board during the period Constellation workers battled to find solutions to Ares I’s technical and schedule woes.
Meanwhile, SLS has progressed past the point the Constellation Program was cancelled, as the rocket enjoys much calmer waters during its path into the Critical Design Review (CDR) milestone.
Although the rocket still has the major issue of finding interested payloads, other than Orion, to utilize its superior capability – in turn creating enough missions that will provide it with a viable launch rate – its development path to becoming operational has yet to suffer from a major red flag.
In summarizing what was described as an extremely comprehensive overview by Bill Hill, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development (EDS), the ASAP was provided with updated information on the three main arms of NASA’s deep space system – namely SLS, Orion and the associated ground systems (GSDO).
How those three programs interact with each other has been an item of interest to the ASAP, to which they were informed a Cross-program System Integration (CSI) team handles the interactions between the three bodies.
“They range from relatively simple interface control document (ICD) agreements to more complex items in terms of risk assessments and opportunities to improve performance,” noted the ASAP minutes. “Products are on schedule and the cross-program interdependences (those elevated to ‘watch’ level) have dropped dramatically.
“This means that the programs are getting better at talking with each other and working out the interactions at a lower level to preclude elevation for resolution at the leadership level.”
The ASAP members were told the interfaces are becoming stable and well-defined, which is “very good news”.
The panel was also told that items of interest from the last overview are all being mitigated, while the only new issues were relatively minor, per their primary interest and responsibility, i.e. crew safety.
“There is a concern with gaseous hydrogen buildup just prior to RS-25 start and how that will be handled,” added the minutes as an example. “If there is a problem, there is the potential of using a burn-off. That research is ongoing.”
That reference may relate to ongoing work by SLS engineers on the improvements to the all-important hydrogen burn-off system, or Radial Outward Firing Initiators (ROFIs), as recently overviewed in an article in June.
Another reference to the ASAP refers back to the early days of the Constellation Program, specific to recovering the crew from Orion post-splashdown.
Early concerns focused on the recovery of the crew from the sea during an off-nominal landing – as referenced in 2008. The details were refined once again in 2012, including the unthinkable scenario of a crew having to survive on their own for 24 hours until rescue.
However, the ASAP heard of evaluations relating to high sea states and the recovery of the crew within just a few hours, a delayed process due to high sea states in the splashdown zone.
“There is the question regarding the goal of crew recovery within two hours of splashdown. Under certain sea states, that is a difficult task,” added the minutes, classing it as a new concern. However, the ASAP appears to be satisfied this won’t become a crew safety issue.
“It may mean getting the crew out within two hours and allowing recovery of the capsule to take longer under certain sea states. This seems to be a reasonable safety mitigation.”
The ASAP also heard about ongoing work relating to Orion’s heat shield that may result in a design change from monolithic heat shield to a block heatshield – although no decision has yet been made at the Agency level.
There is also ongoing interest into the larger-than-expected amount of MMOD damage suffered by the EFT-1 Orion during its test mission last year.
Another issue concerned “pendulum risk” – relating to an event where one of the three Orion parachutes fails, resulting in a pendulum effect where there is oscillation of the suspended Orion spacecraft under the parachutes.
The Orion program is continuing to test the parachute system – including failure scenarios – with the next drop test scheduled to take place on August 26.
However, the ASAP members were told that the biggest concern is the launch date for SLS’ maiden flight, Exploration Mission (EM-1), which is currently expected to take place in the middle of 2018.
The launch target remains on track, but the ASAP want to ensure that technical problems do not arise via a scenario where tradeoffs may be inserted to protect that schedule.
“Probably the largest risk area is in risk to the currently configured EM-1 launch date,” added the minutes. “Schedule is a continuing issue as budgets drive schedule and technical problems arise. That is a programmatic risk and is a concern, and it is being closely monitored by the Program.
“Currently, it is not a direct safety risk unless someone starts to make safety tradeoffs in order to gain schedule. That is something that the ASAP looks for continuously.”
However, the ASAP’s overall view on the status on the SLS program appears to be mainly positive, per the Technical Program Metrics (TPM) summary report – which noted the ‘red’ risks “appear to be going down, although they have not yet been eliminated.”
(Images: Via NASA and L2 content from L2’s SLS specific section. SLS renders by L2 artist Nathan Koga)
(L2 is – as it has been for the past several years – providing full exclusive SLS and Exploration Planning coverage. To join L2, click here: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/l2/)CARSON, Calif. (Wednesday, February 1, 2012) – The LA Galaxy today acquired midfielder Kyle Nakazawa and a second round pick in the 2013 MLS SuperDraft from the Philadelphia Union in exchange for one of the Galaxy’s eight international player roster spots during the 2012 season.
A native of Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., Nakazawa was selected by the Union in third round of the 2010 MLS SuperDraft. He made his MLS debut against the Galaxy at The Home Depot Center in May 2010 and went on to play in 14 games for the club as a rookie, making eight starts. Last year, the 23-year-old set career-highs in all statistical categories, playing in 22 matches and scoring once while adding three assists. He started 14 of those 22 games, including both games that Philadelphia played against the Galaxy. He tallied the first assist of his MLS career on May 21, 2011 in a 2-1 home win over Chicago before recording his first goal and an assist in a 6-2 road win over Toronto FC a week later. His third and final assist of the year came on July 17 in a 3-0 win at New England.
A former member of the Galaxy U-20 team, Nakazawa played four years of college soccer at UCLA, scoring 20 goals and adding 26 assists in 75 games for the Bruins. A teammate of fellow Galaxy players Brian Perk and Michael Stephens at UCLA, Nakazawa represented the U.S. at the 2005 FIFA World Youth Championship in Peru, helping his nation reach the quarterfinals by scoring two goals and adding an assist in four games at the tournament.
In exchange for Nakazawa and their natural second round pick in the 2013 MLS SuperDraft, the Union, will now receive one of the Galaxy’s international player roster slots for the upcoming season. The Galaxy will now be able to have seven international players on their roster for the upcoming season, after which the club will return one international spot to D.C. United as part of a previous trade while receiving spots back from the Union and the Portland Timbers, who also acquired an international spot from the club in a prior trade.
Nakazawa and the rest of the LA Galaxy will play their first official game of 2012 on Wednesday, March 7 when they face Toronto FC in the first leg of their 2011/12 CONCACAF Champions League Quarterfinal, which will be played at Rogers Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. They will open the 2012 MLS season three days later on Saturday, March 10 when they host Real Salt Lake at The Home Depot Center in MLS First Kick 2012, presented by Dick’s Sporting Goods. That game will kick off at 7:30 p.m. (PT) and tickets are on sale now as part of season ticket packages as well as three and six-game plans. For more information about this game or to purchase tickets, visit www.lagalaxy.com/tickets.Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) speaks to the media after a joint House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees briefing on Syria, on Capitol Hill, on Sept. 9, 2013. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Rep. Peter D. King (R-N.Y.) is not a fan of Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, newly announced presidential candidate, and fellow Republican.
"To me, he's just a guy with a big mouth and no results," he told CNN this week.
Well, Cruz supporters aren't much fans of King, a moderate representing Long Island who has long been critical of hard-line conservatives in his own party. And, King said Friday, they have called his congressional office to let him know how they felt, prompting him to issue a statement slamming those Cruz backers as suffering "from severe cases of arrested development."
[Monday: Ted Cruz: ‘I am running for president of the United States’]
"I owe it to my staff - particularly the female members and young interns - to make this statement," King said, explaining that he was used to "return fire" in politics.
"What I do find revealing is the number of vulgar, rabid and adolescent-type phone calls my office has received from Cruz supporters," he said in the statement. "The puerile language used is what most kids outgrow and move beyond when they reach sophomore year in high school.... The fact that women and young interns in my office have to listen to these perverse rantings is particularly shameful."
Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler declined to respond to King: "Since you won't find a clip or a quote of Senator Cruz'returning fire' on a Republican colleague, we won't start now."
King acknowledged Cruz "cannot be held responsible for all his supporters." But he added that only twice previously has he been subject to such a "low level of commentary" only twice before: after criticizing Cruz during the 2013 government shutdown, and when he criticized Michael Jackson in 2009.
Added King: "Frankly I can not imagine supporters of Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, or other candidates reacting so disgracefully. Clearly, Sen. Cruz has many decent and honorable supporters. At the same time though we must ask why he has such an unusual appeal to this low denominator in American politics."Cape Town - The ANC on Wednesday said it would investigate the vandalism of its campaign posters in Fish Hoek and "close the fence on such hooligans".
- Elections Map: Previous Fish Hoek results
"We view such acts, particularly messages on the stickers pasted on our posters, as a sign of political intolerance and lack of respect for the democratic space which the masses of our people have fought and bled for," provincial secretary Faiez Jacobs said in a statement.
"As the ANC we are going to begin an investigation, including looking into CCTV footage so as to quickly close the fence on such hooligans, and where such hooliganism has a tacit endorsement from a political party, we will request the IEC to impose punitive measures in line with elections codes that we have all committed ourselves to during these elections."
The posters are believed to have been defaced on Tuesday, with the vandals appearing to have only focused on posters bearing a photo of President Jacob Zuma.
One white sticker pasted below Zuma's face reads: "Tsek jou naai".
ANC Western Cape spokesperson Yonela Diko said it was unclear if the vandalism was an organised campaign or not.
Pic courtesy of @MyCityByNight but I think Fish Hoek do not approve of #Zuma #tsek is such a descriptive word. pic.twitter.com/OZndbyl8GH — Garth Breytenbach (@GBreyts) June 28, 2016
- Find everything you need to know about the 2016 Local Government Elections at our News24 Elections site, including the latest news and detailed, interactive maps for how South Africa has voted over the past 3 elections, or download the app for iOS and Android.To examine the dynamics of AR-AR heteromers in the plasma membrane of a living cell, the motion of the receptors tagged with fluorescent proteins (AR-green fluorescent protein [GFP] or AR-mCherry) was measured by real-time single-particle tracking (SPT) (Fig.). Examples of fluorescent images and individual particle trajectories are shown in Additional file: Figure S1. Analysis of data corresponding to 500 AR-GFP particles showed a linear relationship between the mean square displacement (MSD) versus time lag in the trajectories of up to 1600 single fluorescent particles (Fig.). This is typical for Brownian diffusion, indicating a lack of restrictions in AR-GFP motion. Co-expression of AR-mCherry (Fig.) led to a reduction in the lateral mobility of AR-GFP, which became confined to plasma membrane regions of 0.461 ± 0.004 μm in diameter. Its diffusion coefficient decreased from 0.381 ± 0.002 μm/s to 0.291 ± 0.003 μm/s (p = 0.002, one-tailed t-test). Similarly, AR-GFP also decreased the AR-mCherry diffusion coefficient from 0.317 ± 0.002 μm/s to 0.143 ± 0.005 μm/s (p < 0.0001) (Fig.). AR moved within a confinement zone of 0.941 ± 0.007 μm in diameter that was reduced to 0.360 ± 0.001 μm (p < 0.0001) when both receptors were co-expressed. We conclude from these mobility comparisons that reciprocally restricted motion of the individual receptor particles must be due to AR-AR receptor-receptor interactions.
In order to focus the analysis on heteromer complexes, we identified clusters containing both receptors (individual yellow dots in Fig. 1g, displaying both GFP and mCherry fluorescence). In ~1000 analyzed co-localized clusters that consisted of a mixture of A 1 -GFP and A 2A -Cherry (yellow dots in Fig. 1g ), we found a similar high amount of dimers of A 1 R (75 %, left panel in Fig. 1h and green bar in Fig. 1i ) and A 2A R (74 %, right panel in Fig. 1h and red bar in Fig. 1i ). Trimers and tetramers of A 1 R, and monomers and tetramers of A 2A R, were in the minority or negligible (see Fig. 1h, i). In summary, given that the percentage of dimers of either A 1 R-GFP or A 2A R-mCherry in the yellow dots (which show co-localization of the two receptors) was similar and high (~75 %), the heterotetramer containing two A 1 Rs and two A 2A Rs must have been the most predominant species. To our knowledge, this is the first stoichiometry data for a GPCR heteromer in living cells.
The stoichiometry of the fluorescent receptors on the cell surface can be calculated from the brightness distribution of the individual particles [ 19 ] (see “ Methods ”). In cells expressing A 1 R-GFP, we found the majority of clusters to consist of either two (~47 %) or four (~34 %) receptors, and clusters with one or three receptors were scarce (~10 % and ~9 %, respectively) (Additional file 2 : Figure S2A and black bars in Additional file 2 : Figure S2C). In the case of A 2A R-mCherry, the stoichiometry analysis showed that the clusters mostly expressed trimers (45 %), with dimers (29 %) and tetramers (12 %) the second and third most common populations (Additional file 2 : Figure S2D and black bars in Additional file 2 : Figure S2F). Remarkably, this stoichiometry for either A 1 or A 2A receptors was altered when the partner receptor was also expressed. In cells co-expressing A 1 R-GFP and A 2A R-mCherry, the dimer population increased (57 % for A 1 R-GFP and 49 % for A 2A R-mCherry, blue bars in Additional file 2 : Figures S2C, F) and became the predominant species (Additional file 2 : Figures S2B, C, E, F).
Further, two complementary BRET experiments were performed to determine the orientation of Gand Gwithin the AR-AR heterocomplex. First, Rluc and YFP were respectively fused to the N-terminal domains of the α-subunit of G(α-Rluc) and G(α-YFP) (Fig., bar a); second, they were fused to the N-terminal domain of the γ-subunit (γ-Rluc and γ-YFP) (Fig., bar b). We observed significant energy transfer between γ-Rluc and γ-YFP in cells co-expressing AR and AR (Fig., bar b) but minimal amounts in negative-control cells (Fig., bars c and d). In cells expressing either AR or AR, the energy transfer between γ-Rluc and γ-YFP was also low (Fig., bars e and f), suggesting that dimers but not tetramers were the most prevalent form of surface receptors in single-transfected cells. These results in co-transfected cells corroborate the 2:2 stoichiometry obtained from analysis of the fluorescence in single particles and are consistent with Gand Gbinding to these AR-AR heterotetramers.
Monomeric GPCRs are capable of activating G proteins []. However, recent findings suggest that one GPCR homodimer bound to a single G protein may be a common functional unit []. Thus, an emerging question is how G proteins couple to GPCR heteromers. Because AR selectively couples to Gand AR to G], the working hypothesis was that both Gand Gproteins may couple to the AR-AR heterotetramer. To test this hypothesis, we used bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) assays []. In agreement with the SPT experiments (see above), homodimers and heterodimers were detected by BRET assays in cells expressing AR fused with Renilla luciferase (AR-Rluc) or yellow fluorescent protein (AR-YFP) (Fig.), AR-Rluc and AR-YFP (Fig.), or AR-Rluc and AR-YFP (Fig.). Neither AR-Rluc nor AR-YFP interacted with the ghrelin receptor 1a fused to YFP (GHS1a-YFP), used as a control as a protein unable to directly interact with these adenosine receptors (Fig.). In order to test the presence of the two G proteins in the heterotetramer, we transfected cells with minigenes that code for peptides blocking either Gor Gbinding to GPCRs []. In addition, cells were treated with pertussis or cholera toxins that catalyze ADP-ribosylation of Gor G. Clearly, treating cells with pertussis toxin, or expressing the minigene-coded peptide that blocks αcoupling, reduced the value of BRETfor AR-AR homodimers (Fig.) and for AR-AR heterodimers (Fig.) but not for AR-AR homodimers (Fig.). This indicates that Gis coupled to AR in both the homodimer and the heterodimer. Similarly, blocking G-receptor interaction using cholera toxin or a minigene-coded peptide that blocks αcoupling reduced BRETfor AR-AR homodimers (Fig.) and for AR-AR heterodimers (Fig.) but not for AR-AR homodimers (Fig.). Interestingly, BRET curves showed sensitivity to both cholera and pertussis toxins in cells expressing either AR-Rluc-AR-YFP and AR (Fig.) or AR-Rluc-AR-YFP and AR (Fig.). Functionality of constructs and controls in cells expressing minigenes, and in cells expressing the ghrelin GHS1a receptor instead of one of the adenosine receptors, are shown in Additional file: Figure S3. To further confirm that Gbinds AR in the receptor heteromer, the energy transfer between Rluc fused to the N-terminal domain of the α-subunit of G(G-Rluc) and AR-YFP was analyzed in cells co-expressing or not co-expressing AR (Fig.). A hyperbolic BRET curve was observed in the presence of AR, but not in its absence, indicating that Gand Gare bound to their respective receptor homodimers within the AR-AR heteromer.
Molecular model of G i and G s bound to the A 1 R-A 2A R heterotetramer
s -Rluc (Rluc at the N-terminus of the G protein α-subunit) and A 2A R-YFP (Fig. 4a 3 4 25 s -Rluc and A 2A R-YFP indicated close proximity between the N-tail of the α-subunit of G s and the C-tail of A 2A R. Interestingly, Rluc and YFP in the “monomeric” A 2A R-G s complex (see “ Methods 4b 2A R-YFP protomer. Among all described TM interfaces for receptor homodimerization (see Additional file 4 1 -AR [ 4 26 s -Rluc and a second A 2A R-YFP protomer in a homodimer (Fig. 4c 1 R homodimer was built using the same TM4/5 interface as for A 2A R (see Additional file 4 To identify the orientation of the G protein in the receptor homodimer, we combined energy transfer assays between α-Rluc (Rluc at the N-terminus of the G protein α-subunit) and AR-YFP (Fig.) with information on transmembrane (TM) interfaces based on crystal structures of GPCRs [], which have been recently summarized []. The observed high-energy transfer using α-Rluc and AR-YFP indicated close proximity between the N-tail of the α-subunit of Gand the C-tail of AR. Interestingly, Rluc and YFP in the “monomeric” AR-Gcomplex (see “”) point toward distant positions in space (Fig.). Therefore, the observed BRET should occur between Rluc in the G protein α-subunit and a second AR-YFP protomer. Among all described TM interfaces for receptor homodimerization (see Additional file: Figure S4), we propose the TM4/5 interface, which is observed in the oligomeric structure of β-AR [] and in structures derived from coarse-grained molecular dynamics (MD) simulations []. In fact, this is the only interface that favors BRET between α-Rluc and a second AR-YFP protomer in a homodimer (Fig.). The homologous AR homodimer was built using the same TM4/5 interface as for AR (see Additional file: Figure S4 and its legend).
5 3 1 R (A 1 R-nRluc8) and its C-terminal domain to A 2A R (A 2A R-cRluc8), which only upon complementation can act as a BRET donor (Rluc8). The BRET acceptor protein was obtained upon complementation of the N-terminal fragment of YFP Venus protein fused to A 1 R (A 1 R-nVenus) and its C-terminal domain fused to A 2A R (A 2A R-cVenus). When all four receptor constructs were transfected, we obtained a positive and saturable BRET signal (BRET max of 35 ± 2 mBU and BRET 50 of 16 ± 3 mBU) that was not obtained for negative controls (Additional file 5 5a, b 1 R-nRluc8 and A 2A R-cRluc8) and the hemi-acceptor (A 1 R-nVenus and A 2A R-cVenus) moieties, placed at the C-terminus of the receptors, can only complement if A 1 R-A 2A R heterodimerization occurs via the TM5/6 interface. The TM4/5 interface for homodimerization and the TM5/6 interface for heterodimerization give a rhombus-shaped tetramer organization (Fig. 5a max by 35 % (Fig. 5c s and G i proteins bind to the A 1 R-A 2A R heterotetramer. The remaining possible TMs able to form heteromeric interfaces are TM1 and TM5/6 (Fig.). Both are possible inter-GPCR interfaces as observed in the structure of the μ-opioid receptor (μ-OR) []. To discern between these two possibilities, a bimolecular fluorescence complementation strategy was undertaken. For this purpose, the N-terminal fragment of Rluc8 was fused to AR (AR-nRluc8) and its C-terminal domain to AR (AR-cRluc8), which only upon complementation can act as a BRET donor (Rluc8). The BRET acceptor protein was obtained upon complementation of the N-terminal fragment of YFP Venus protein fused to AR (AR-nVenus) and its C-terminal domain fused to AR (AR-cVenus). When all four receptor constructs were transfected, we obtained a positive and saturable BRET signal (BRETof 35 ± 2 mBU and BRETof 16 ± 3 mBU) that was not obtained for negative controls (Additional file: Figure S5). Figureshows that the hemi-donor (AR-nRluc8 and AR-cRluc8) and the hemi-acceptor (AR-nVenus and AR-cVenus) moieties, placed at the C-terminus of the receptors, can only complement if AR-AR heterodimerization occurs via the TM5/6 interface. The TM4/5 interface for homodimerization and the TM5/6 interface for heterodimerization give a rhombus-shaped tetramer organization (Fig.). Remarkably, cell pre-incubation with either pertussis or cholera toxins decreased the BRETby 35 % (Fig.), further suggesting that both Gand Gproteins bind to the AR-AR heterotetramer.Tonight, His-Negro-In-Chief, Barack Hussein Obama is scheduled to give a speech in front of all the Zionist traitors in DC. Open commenting here during the show.
Obama’s minions are already threatening that he’ll take executive action since “he has a pen and a phone.” Apparently, the one thing he doesn’t have is a copy of the Constitution. He wants: Amnesty for illegal aliens, gun control to make things difficult for us law-abiding Whites and even more socialistic programs to redistribute wealth (i.e. stealing more from those Whites who have a job). All to make “people of color” happy — especially the obviously worthless and violent black race.*
His “signature” health care program is going down in flames. Insurance companies are worried they’ll be run into the ground with legal permutations and lack of healthy “Millennial” enrollees to pay the freight. Middle-aged Whites past child bearing age now have to buy insurance that pays for contraceptives, maternity care and God knows what else. Things are so bad that quite a few are starting to suspect it was designed to fail in the first place, making taxpayers end up footing the bill. Think that’s crazy? Remember this in a year or so.
And will Obama say anything about Israel’s warmongering against Iran in the Mideast? Or how the US is supporting Jihadis in Syria who kill Christians all the time? All so Israel’s agenda of turning Muslim nations (those not already controlled by the corrupt whores of Western bankers) into smaller, more powerless states, incapable of standing up to Zionist Israel when it goes on to the next big step in their plans of regional hegemony.
Don’t make me laugh. Not only would all the Jews here and everywhere have fits should Obongo say JACK, but so too would nitwit Gentiles who think they’re so patriotic. Such clueless bozos can’t seem to get it they’ve been brainwashed since birth to support lousy Israel — even though Jews back here are busy turning our whole country to crap.
Funny how the one thing neither FOX, MSNBC, ABC, NBC or CNN ever says anything bad about is Israel. That huge common denominator gets missed by the “viewing audience.” Tells you something, doesn’t it?
Supposedly, Obama’s term will run out in 3 years. I have my doubts. Why? Because there’s no telling what the Zionist false flag mothers will do between now and then. And plenty of militant black creeps out there want term limits overturned so the skinny punk can have another 4 years — maybe forever — running this country deeper into the Jew ditch.
Oh yeah, yesterday, was “Holocaust Memorial Day.” Like I give a GD rat’s ass. I saw Fox news giant Zio suckup, Mikey Huckabee talking to Eric Cantor about it at Auschwitz, with barbed wire and concentration camp buildings in the background. Cantor started into his Jew victimhood mode, all crybaby about how terrible humanity was to the |
, and the Internet of Things — have the potential to deliver economic value of up to $33 trillion a year worldwide, according to the McKinsey researchers.
That would be a sweeping and disruptive effect indeed, since economists project that by 2025 global economic output will be about $100 trillion.
The McKinsey report does include the estimated value of the social benefits of using a more efficient technology, like time saved. Such benefits — known as “consumer surplus” — are not included in conventional measures of economic output. (An example would be the value of time saved by quickly finding answers to questions by using a search engine. Google economists estimate that saving at up to $65 billion annually.)
The estimated range of the impact of the dozen technologies is also quite wide, from $14 trillion to $33 trillion by 2025. That approach, McKinsey researchers say, takes account of the many uncertainties when projecting possible outcomes more than a decade in the future. Two of the 12 technologies identified in the McKinsey report, for example, are “renewable energy” and “advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery.” Energy prices will have a big effect on the measured impact of those technologies — and energy prices can fluctuate widely. Over the last decade, oil prices ranged from a a low near $23 to a high of about $146.
“We’re not in the prediction business, and we’re not in the forecasting business,” said Michael Chui, a principal of the McKinsey Global Institute. “We wanted to show potential, and do that with a quantitative perspective.”
The research institute has done other quantitative technology assessments in recent years. Two years ago, McKinsey published a report on the potential impact of the explosion in the quantity and variety of digital data and the use of artificial-intelligence software to find insights — a combination known as Big Data.
The current report does not include Big Data as a separate technology. Mr. Chui explained that the Big Data tools are coming to be a foundation technology for several of the 12 categories, including automation of knowledge work, advanced robotics, next-generation genomics, and Internet of Things, which involves embedding sensors, smart software and communications capability into machines and other physical objects.
The McKinsey report is a brief for technological optimism. “It weighs in on the side that there’s a lot of technology innovation going on and it will have a significant impact,” said Martin Baily, an economist at the Brookings Institution, who was an adviser to McKinsey on the study.
In the economics profession, there is a lively debate on that subject. The case for pessimism have been most forcefully presented recently by Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University. Another adviser on the McKinsey study, Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been perhaps the most prominent optimist.
The dueling economists even faced off in a debate last month at a TED conference.Electrons are pretty good at processing information but not so good at carrying it over long distances. Photons, on the other hand, do a grand job of shuttling data round the planet but are not so handy when it comes to processing it.
As a result, transistors are electronic and communication cables are optical. And the world is burdened with a significant amount of power hungry infrastructure for converting electronic information into the optical variety and vice versa.
So it’s no surprise that there is significant interest in developing an optical transistor that could make the electronic variety obsolete.
There’s a significant problem, however. While various groups have built optical switches, optical transistors must also have a number of other properties so that they can be connected in a way that can process information.
For example, their output must be capable of acting as the input for another transistor–not easy if the output is a different frequency from the input, for instance. What’s more, the output must be capable of driving the input for at least two other transistors so that logic signals can propagate, a property known as fanout. This requires significant gain. On top of this, each transistor must preserve the quality of the logic signal so that errors do no propagate. And so on.
The trouble is that nobody has succeeded in making optical transistors that can do all and can also be made out of silicon.
Today, Leo Varghese at Purdue University in Indiana and a few pals say they’ve built a device that take a significant step in this direction.
Their optical transistor consists of a microring resonator next to an optical line. In ordinary circumstances the light supply enters the optical line, passes along it and then outputs. But at a specific resonant frequency, the light interacts with the microring resonator, vastly reducing the output. In this state, the output is essentially off even though the supply is on.
The trick these guys have perfected is to use another optical line, called the gate, to heat the microring, thereby changing its size, its resonant frequency and its ability to interact with the output.
That allows the gate to turn the output on and off.
There’s an additional clever twist. The microring’s interaction with the gate is stronger than with the supply-output line. That’s significant because it means a small gate signal can control a much bigger output signal.
Varghese and co say the ratio of the gate signal to the supply is almost 6 dB. That’s enough to power at least two other transistors, which is exactly the fan out property that optical transistors require.
These guys have even built a device out of silicon with a bandwidth capable of data rates of up to 10 GHz.
That’s an impressive result, particularly the silicon compatibility.
Nevertheless, there are significant hurdles ahead before an all-optical computer made with these devices can hope to compete against its electronic cousins.
The biggest problem is power consumption. Much of the power consumption in electronic transistors comes from the need to charge the lines connecting them to the operating voltage.
In theory, optical transistors could be even more efficient–their lines don’t need charging at all. But in practice, lasers burn energy as if it were twenty dollar bills. For that reason, it’s not at all clear that optical transistors can match the efficiency of electronic chips.
And with the computer industry now responsible for almost 2 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, almost as much as aviation, power consumption may turn out to be the overarching factor for the future direction of information processing.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1204.5515: A Silicon Optical TransistorGeneva LIVE: Subaru XV concept
Mar 2, 2016, 8:00am ET
by Ronan Glon
Subaru\'s next-gen XV is starting to take shape.
Subaru has revealed its new XV concept at the Geneva Auto Show.
It doesn't take an experienced auto industry analyst to tell that the XV Concept previews the next Crosstrek. It's closely related to the two Impreza concepts that were shown last year in Tokyo and in Los Angeles, respectively, but it gets a model-specific grille with a wider frame and a more rugged-looking front bumper. Like the current model, it wears protective black plastic cladding over the wheel arches. It's also blue.
Subaru says the design follows the concept of "Enjoyment and Peace of Mind." Maybe that's why it's such a soothing shade of blue. (Officially, it's "Glacier Khaki Silica," which sounds a lot like an early 20th century British soldier who has been beaten to death by a large rock somewhere in the Arctic circle. So much for peace of mind.)
The next Subaru Impreza will be introduced at a major auto show this year, and the production version of the XV will be unveiled shortly after. The two models will be wider and markedly lighter than the current cars because they will be built on a brand new modular platform developed to underpin most of Subaru's next-gen lineup.
Mechanically, both the 2017 Impreza and the 2018 Crosstrek will be offered with more efficient flat-four engines fitted with direct fuel-injection and Subaru's cylinder-deactivation technology, which promises to turn the four into a flat-twin when its full output isn't needed. A plug-in hybrid model might join the lineup a little later in the production run.
Live photos by Ronan Glon.In case you were a NFL fan living under a rock on Tuesday, you probably heard about Jameis Winston's impressive performance at Florida State's Pro Day.
Winston is widely projected to be the No. 1 overall pick when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are on the clock on April 30, and did nothing to hurt his stock at the workout. Winston threw over 100 passes in front of NFL coaches, scouts, and front office personnel, and left a positive impression on one ex-Giants coach who knows a thing or two about developing quarterback prospects: Kevin Gilbride.
Gilbride, now an analyst for NBC Sports, dissected the good and the bad of Winston's Pro Day, but said there was nothing about the workout that should dissuade the Bucs from making him their new franchise quarterback.
"The things that I kind of expected to see, the strength, the size, even the leadership the way he handled his teammate were all positive, all good things," Gilbride said. "I don't think the accuracy necessarily was the greatest accuracy I've ever seen. The things that would have caused me to pause a little bit, those 5 to 10 yard throws, those swing passes to the back, those throws that have to be so perfect so that the player that catches it can do something with it after he catches it, were not nearly as accurate as he needs to be on a consistent basis."
Gilbride also said that Winston could improve his footwork in the pocket, and that he has "a little bit of a pitcher's motion," and will need to quicken his release at the professional level.
"What bothered me a little bit was when he moved, broke the pocket, he looked very awkward, very uncomfortable, which I was very surprised," Gilbride said.
Having served as the Giants' quarterbacks coach since the day that Eli Manning was drafted in 2004, and later becoming the team's offensive coordinator until 2013, Gilbride said he saw some physical similarities between the two passers. Gilbride said Winston has attributes similar to both Manning and Drew Bledsoe, another quarterback he coached for two seasons with the Buffalo Bills.
"[Winston]'s kind of in between [Manning and Bledsoe]," Gilbride said. "His arm strength would compare probably to Eli's, his accuracy was not at Eli's level. His arm strength was not at Drew Bledsoe's level. If you're talking about those two, you're talking about pretty good company."
It's safe to say the Bucs would be more than happy with a Manning/Bledsoe outcome for Winston's career. The former is a two-time Super Bowl champion and the latter a four-time Pro Bowl passer who had a very good 14-year career.
For more from Gilbride on Winston, check out the video below.
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Nick Powell may be reached at npowell@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @nickpowellbkny. Find NJ.com Giants on Facebook.CERN and seven other physics laboratories open their doors to photographers for an international competition
(Video: CERN)
Cameras at the ready! CERN is teaming up with seven other large physics laboratories for an international photo competition, the 2015 Global Physics Photowalk. On 25 and 26 September, photographers from around the world will be given the opportunity to take photographs behind the scenes at these prestigious laboratories.
At CERN, twenty photographers will be given the chance to take part in the competition, which will take place on 25 September. For the occasion, CERN will be opening the doors to three of its facilities: the new Linac 4 accelerator, which will shortly start supplying beams to the Large Hadron Collider; CERN’s main workshop, where state-of-the-art technologies can be seen in use; and ISOLDE, which supplies beams to around fifty experiments each year. The photographers will also have the opportunity to take shots of everyday life on the CERN campus.
The best photos will be chosen by a local jury and exhibited in 2016. Each laboratory will also choose three photos to be entered for the international competition, which will run until the end of the year. In this case, the winning photos will be selected by a jury and a public vote. They will be exhibited in Asia, Europe and North America and will also be featured in the CERN Courier and Symmetry.
The competition is open to all photographers. For more information and to enter, please go to the CERN Photowalk page.Bitter divisions within Europe over the migrant crisis will be aired on Monday when former Communist countries meet in Prague to state their opposition to Brussels-imposed quotas.
The so-called Visegrad Group of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary will underline stark differences in approach when they meet with representatives from Luxembourg, the current holder of the EU presidency. Luxembourg is also the home of Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the European Commission and architect of the migrant quota plan.
As well as repeating their opposition to Mr Juncker’s idea of compulsory quotas, the Visegrad group will demand the EU makes more effort to weed out economic migrants. They also intend to point out that Eastern Europe is neither financially or culturally suited to large migrant influxes.
"We will talk tomorrow about how Europe should protect its borders, and how to distinguish refugees from economic migrants," said Grzegorz Schetyna, Poland's foreign minister. "Each country must be able to decide how many migrants it can receive. Sweden, Germany and Austria have experience receiving migrants while our countries and the Baltic states do not."
Mr Schetyna spoke as officials in Hungary and Croatia continued to face huge numbers of migrants attempting to cross their borders in a bid to reach Austria and Germany. In the Austrian town of Nickelsdorf, near the Hungarian border, there were chaotic scenes as 8,000 new arrivals filled up the town square. Local officials said they could not find them accommodation because existing camps used to house migrants were already full.
In the Croatian town of Tovarnik, near the border with Serbia, officials unexpectedly unveiled a purpose-built refugee holding centre built in less than 24 hours.
Ranko Ostojic, Croatia’s Interior Minister, told The Telegraph: “This is built for 4,000 people as a temporary camp, they will stay for 24-36 hours and will be transported from here to the Schengen border. We don’t want to be a hotspot as a country.”
Monday's meeting of the Visegrad states comes amid signs that Mr Juncker's plan to relocate 120,000 refugees from Italy, Greece and Hungary around the EU is being watered down. A quota formula which dictated how many migrants each state was obliged to take has now been removed, according to a draft resolution seen by the Financial Times.
While the 120,000 target still stands, states will be able to volunteer numbers rather than have them imposed by the European Commission.
Photo: EPA
The apparent compromise comes ahead of a meeting of EU heads of government on Wednesday, where elected leaders will be under intense pressure to reach a common approach to the continent's biggest migration crisis since World War Two.
As well as clashing with the EU's wealthier Western states, the bloc's Eastern European members bickered viciously with each other over the weekend.
The decision of Viktor Orban, Hungary's right-wing prime minister, to erect a new fence around his country's borders has angered his neighbours, who say it is simply diverting the migrants towards them instead.
Remarks by Bogdan Aurescu, Romania's foreign minister, that it was an "autistic and unacceptable act" that violated the spirit of the European Union drew a sharp response from his Hungarian counterpart, Peter Szijjarto. "We would expect more modesty from a foreign minister whose prime minister is currently facing trial," said Mr Szijjarto, referring to corruption charges filed recently against Victor Ponta, Romania's Prime Minister.
Mr Szijjarto added: "We are a state that is more than 1,000 years old that throughout its history has had to defend not only itself, but Europe as well many times. That's the way it's going to be now, whether the Romanian foreign minister likes it or not."
Meanwhile, the crisis continued to claim lives, as 13 migrants died after their boat collided with a ferry off the Turkish coast. In a sign of the tensions that the crisis has created, an arson attack on an asylum shelter being built to hold up to 400 people in Wertheim in southern Germany left the building as a smoking ruin.
Europe's more welcoming side was on display at Real Madrid football stadium in Spain, where the son of a Syrian refugee was led onto the pitch by the club's star player, Cristiano Ronaldo, in a game over the weekend.
Ziad Abdul Mohsen and his brother Mohammad gained unexpected fame earlier this month when a Hungarian camerawoman was filmed trying to trip up their father, Osama Abdul Mohsen. It has led to Mr Mohsen, a former football coach, receiving an offer to help resettle his family from a Spanish football academy.
Yesterday, America also expanded its role in the crisis, with John Kerry, the US secretary of state, announcing an increase in the number of refugees the US would take each year. Mr Kerry said 85,000 refugees would be taken from around the world next year, up from the current figure of 70,000, and that total would rise to 100,000 in 2017. Many, though not all, of the additional refugees will be Syrian, although others would come from strife-torn areas of Africa.
The new figure still falls short of what pro-refugee groups had hoped for. Asked why America could not take more, Mr Kerry cited screening requirements introduced after 9-11 and a lack of money made available by Congress. "We're doing what we know we can manage immediately," he said.THIS IS THE cover of the first issue of Charlie Hebdo since the attack on its offices in Paris by two gunmen during an editorial meeting last week.
There were 12 people killed in the attack by brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, including the magazine’s editor and a number of well-known cartoonists.
The poignant cover of the “survivors’ edition” of the magazine, which hits the shelves Wednesday, shows the Prophet Mohammed holding a ‘Je Suis Charlie’ sign. This phrase has become symbolic of the incident, with people all across the world displaying it on signs, t-shirts and stickers in marches over the last few days.
The cover also contains the words: ‘All is forgiven’.
Three million copies of the special edition are being printed and will be made available in 25 countries, translated into 16 languages because of international demand.
Speaking on French radio this morning, the magazine’s lawyer, Richard Malka, said staff will “cede nothing” to extremists seeking to silence them. “We will not give in. The spirit of ‘I am Charlie’ means the right to blaspheme,” Reuters quotes Malka of saying.fantastic-nonsense:
maliceandvice:
fantastic-nonsense: maliceandvice: calantheandthenightingale: mydollyaviana: Disney vs. 7 early fairytales The 1812 version of Snow White is even worse when you consider that the girl was only seven years old in the tale (plus her unconscious body ended up being carted around by the prince until one of his servants accidentally woke her up). Also, in The Little Mermaid, the mermaid’s unable to speak because she had her tongue cut out >__< But I’d love to see faithful adaptations of the original tales. Especially Bluebeard. We need a Bluebeard adaptation. Actually, the original-original pre-Grimm Brothers’ stories that were passed around Europe via oral tradition are nowhere near as violent as the Grimm’s made them. Cinderella’s stepsisters were never ugly and kept their eyes, Snow White’s mother was not even a villain (instead a group of bandits were), and instead of spending the whole story napping Sleeping Beauty outwitted a dangerous bandit leader, wouldn’t let him sleep with her, and saved herself. The original oral stories were radically changed by the Brothers Grimm to fit their personal and political beliefs. Most notably, they often added in female characters solely for the purpose of making them evil villains and took away most of the heroines’ agency and intelligence. Both brothers belonged to a small fanatical sect of Catholicism that vilified women because of the idea of Original Sin and Wilhelm in particular had a particularly deep hatred of women. The Grimms were actually pretty horrible people. Those cannibalistic queens and ugly stepsisters and the mass amount of violence against women didn’t exist until the Grimms wanted them to. Their ideas stuck so soundly though that we now assume they were in the original tales and that these terrible characters and ideas come out of some perceived barbaric Old World culture. But in truth they’re really the Grimms’ weird obsession with hating women showing through. The original oral folklore focused on the heroes’ and heroines’ good deeds and used them as ways to teach cultural norms and a society’s rules and encouraged girls to be quick-witted and street-savvy instead of passive princesses, and the Grimms promptly stripped that all away. NOPE! Calling you out on your bullshit time. First, the version of Cinderella that the Disney movie is based on is the (French) Perrault version; the Grimms version, Aschenputtel, is a Cinderella story, containing two stepsisters, a ball, and the infamous cutting off of toes and heels incident, but a Grimms adaptation of Aschenputtel would look radically different than the Perrault adaptation we got in Disney’s Cinderella. Cinderella is one of the oldest and most widely-spread fairy tales in the world. There are literally Cinderella tales from every part of the world (the oldest known variant is from Ancient Greece, and there’s Ye Xian, an early Chinese variant). There is no “original” fairy tale, only the most popular versions. The Perrault version was the one that introduced the glass slipper (before that, it was fur, generally, but the French word for fur was remarkably similar to the word for glass, so it became the glass slipper), the fairy godmother, the pumpkin, and a couple of other things, and is the most famous version of the story. The Joseph Jacobs version of Cinderella also includes the gruesome foot-cutting, as does the Norwegian version of Katie Woodencloak. The Scottish does as well, and the Greek version (Little Saddleslut) has the stepsisters getting hewn into pieces in the end. The Russian “The Little Birch” includes mutilation of the “sisters” as well, and there’s a Native American “Cinderella” that has the sisters being turned into trees at the end. A particularly memorable Chinese version has the stepmother and stepsister getting crushed by stones in the end, and the Story of Tam and Cam, the Vietnamese version, Tam (the “Cinderella”) is actually killed ¾ of the way through the story by the mother and then is reincarnated in various ways, eventually getting her happy ending, and the evil sister is killed in a pot of boiling water at the end (at Tam’s request!). The “pecking out of eyes” thing was literally one of the only violent things that the Grimms brothers added to that story from the version they likely heard. If anyone else is interested, here’s some links to Cinderella tales form around the world. And your statement about Snow White is false too. Snow White’s mother/stepmother is ALWAYS evil (though sometimes every once in awhile it’s her sister). That’s a central part of the story. There are versions where the dwarves are instead robbers, but then again, there’s a version from Albania (that predates the Grimm version by at least 100 years) where the main character lives with 40 dragons and her sleep is caused by an enchanted ring. That version has the princess being urged to kill her stepmother and take her place. One of the earlier variations by Basile (who predated the Grimms by 100 years, and whose stories are often the source of many of the French and German adaptations of the tales) combines the Snow White and Sleeping Beauty tales with “The Young Slave.” The one that I think you’re talking about, an Italian tale titled “Maria, the Wicked Stepmother, and the Seven Robbers,” a fairy tale that has her father abandon her in the woods (similar to Hansel and Gretel) and Maria come upon a house belonging to seven robbers, who welcomed her as long as she agreed to cook and clean for them. This also has the “ring caused the sleep” thing, and the Queen (The mother of the prince) was the one who removed it from her finger, causing Maria to wake up. If you’re interested in the history of Snow White, here’s a link that can inform you, and here are links to collections of Snow White tales. Also the Sleeping Beauty assertion is blatantly false, as a) Basile’s The Sun, Moon, and Talia is not a Grimms tale (and predates “Little Briar Rose,” The Grimms version, by almost 200 years, as does the wildly more popular Perrault version), and b) the whole point of the “Sleeping Beauty” fairy tale type is that the maiden sleeps. That’s the fairy tale type (Type-410). Which version are you talking about that she outwitted a bandit leader and saved herself? As you can see, the Grimms really didn’t radically change the stories, and you’re just spouting off BS because you don’t like them. Once again, there are not “original oral stories” because many of these stories occur in various formats (Cinderella has 500 variants in Europe alone) from various time periods. They each have wildly different stories while keeping the same basic theme (which is why they’re in the Type: Cinderella or Type-Sleeping Maiden, etc). You obviously either didn’t do the research or you’re letting your hatred of the Grimms brothers cloud your analysis (I think both). The Grimms brothers were devout Calvinists, hardly “a small sect of fanatical Catholicism.” Calvinism is a major branch of PROTESTANTISM, actually, and is still a major international denomination today. Most settlers in the New England and Mid-Atlantic region were Calvinists, actually, including the Puritans, the French Hugenot, and the Dutch settlers of New York. Today one of the most famous denominations that uses Calvinist theology is a little denomination called the Presbyterians. The Grimms Brothers were not the only people whose versions of the fairy tales had less than active women (Perrault and Madame Beaumont, for instance, who predated them). You also don’t seem to know the methodology which the Grimms Brothers collected their tales: they went and talked to people and recorded their version of the story. You obviously have no background in fairy tales if you believe that cannibalistic queens and mass amounts of violence magically “didn’t exist” until the Grimms version. And actually, using fairy tales to teach morals didn’t really happen until Charles Perrault, so… Please don’t perpetuate false knowledge, as people on Tumblr will eat it up without doing the research themselves. And I’m gonna call you right back in return because you’re still talking about written versions of the stories, not the oral traditions that I’m talking about. Every single version you’ve pointed out is a written story that has been influenced by the authors’ own bias. While you’re correct in your analysis of those stories, you’re incorrect about some of their origins. You’re obviously well versed in the written folktales, but you’re absolutely wrong about everything that came before the big name collectors stepped into the game. The Chinese versions you linked, The Jacobs version, and many of the Cinderella ones on that list - you need to look at the dates they were written down. These are not the oral versions of the tales, these are stories that have been shaped by a post-Grimm world. You can’t point to a story written by a European scholar in 1954 and tell me it comes from ancient China. You can’t point to Jacobs’ version of Cinderella that was published after the Grimms’ version and say he wasn’t influenced by them, especially not when he hero worshipped them. And you can’t link an unsourced folktale from an elementary school’s website and call it an accurate scholarly version of the traditional tale. And yes, the Grimms were Calvinists, but their specific church was far from the popular, traditional Calvinism that we’re familiar with today. You’re clearly not familiar with the changes in the religion over time or the Grimms’ religious background if you’re going to claim Calvinism didn’t have a stark effect on the Grimms’ storytelling. It’s the main reason physical beauty and purity of women suddenly became important factors of these stories. In Wilhelm’s later editions of the stories in particular you can see the addition of religious themes and motifs that didn’t exist before. Which swings nicely into my next point about them editing the oral stories… As far as their research method goes, yes, they gathered tales by talking to native groups, but they heavily, heavily edited those collected tales. You only have to look at earlier versions of the Grimms’ tales to see this happening. Earlier versions are closer to their original oral stories, but over time and edits become more violent and misogynist. Compare the 1812 version to the 1857 version. You’ll find no violent wicked stepmother in 1812, but simply an unfair mother. Violence against villains - particularly villainous women - increases immensely as well. You can’t argue the Grimms didn’t increase violence in the stories when you can chart the progress of violence within their own writing over 40 years. Also, Wilhelm was known to pick and choose from various other mythologies and traditions when editing to make the stories better fit his personal tastes. The stories are hardly the traditional Germanic stories they’re touted to be because they’re so heavily peppered with things like Greek mythology and Biblical allusions. Saying that the Grimms didn’t change the stories is patently untrue and ignorant. You clearly know nothing about oral fairytales and folklore if you’re going to claim they didn’t teach morals before Perrault. As if Perrault invented telling cautionary tales to your children. As if storytelling as a teaching tool simply didn’t exist prior to 1697. That’s just blatantly not true and I’d be curious to hear what purpose you think they served before that time then. You need to brush up on your Jack Zipes if you don’t think fairytales serve and have always served a social function. The Sleeping Beauty versions I’m talking about are probably easier to find under the name “Blancaflor” or “Blachefloure” (though it’s not the Romantic Medieval story that shares a similar name). Same story type, different name for the girl. Lastly, I highly recommend you read “Enchanted Maidens” by James Taggart for a crash course in real oral folktales. It’s a collection of unedited Spanish folktales straight from the mouths of the ones telling them to their children, verbatim. If you want a well laid out introduction to oral folkore, start there. I think you’ll find you have to take back that statement about Snow White’s stepmother always being evil if you do.
You seem to forget the very nature of fairy tales (ie, that they are never told the same way twice). Every version of a tale (whether written or oral) is as legitimate as the other, regardless of embellishment or changes of the text. There is no “true tale,” because there are so many different versions, even within a confined area. And how are the oral versions that you talk about not influenced by the storyteller’s bias? Once again, every tale never told quite the same way twice; for instance, my English teacher, when reading Red Riding Hood to her child, will sometimes add embellishments like “she was in kindergarten and she liked to play soccer in her spare time” to make it more relatable to her child (who is in kindergarten and likes to play soccer) or to illustrate a point. Every time the tale is told will be different depending on the audience and the storyteller in question. Storytellers have biases just like the people who wrote them down.
Question: how do you know the differences between the oral versions of a tale and the written versions? Written tales are our historical record. We have no knowledge of the differences between the exact details of the (many) oral tales and the written ones. We DO have the Brothers Grimms’ original 1810 manuscripts, though.
And actually, the Chinese version I linked was Ye Xian, one of the oldest known Cinderella stories (from the 9th century). The Story of Tam and Cam (the Vietnamese Cinderella story) could have been written anytime between the 2nd/3rd century and the 15th…and is largely thought to have no Chinese OR European influence. Your assumption that most of them were written in a Post-Grimms world comes from the dates of the ANTHOLOGIES those stories were included in that those sites got their sources from, not the age of the stories themselves, and your refusal to look at actual sources. I admit that the Jacobs version was written post-Grimms, and I will not deny it.
You seem to have this ridiculous notion that excessive violence and violence against women in fairy tales somehow didn’t exist before the Grimms versions. I firmly assure you that this not true. I can’t fathom why you would even think that, but there are fairy tales from all over the world that were recorded CENTURIES before the Grimms brothers that had excessive violence and violence against women (And a hell of a lot of violence against men as well). As I’ve said before, these tales were not intended for the consumption of children, though children were sometimes a part of the audience. As such, they had lots of violence, lots of sex, lots of bawdy jokes and references, and lots of frank discussion about issues that impacted the storytellers’ worlds.
Where are your sources for your assertion that the Grimms’ particular church was not consistent with mainline 19th century Calvinism? Neo-Calvinism wasn’t a thing until around 20 years after their deaths, and if you’re referring to Pietism, that was definitely more a Lutheran thing (and later the Methodists), though it definitely influenced the culture’s view of religion at that time (though the height of the movement was around 50-60 years before the brothers were even born), and did pervade the Calvinist tradition in some ways.
In Wilheim’s later versions, he was bending to the will of middle class parents and the church who wanted the stories to be made suitable for children. You don’t seem to understand that the first edition WASN’T MADE for children, and the Grimms brothers were poor, and so to maximize financial success when it began to become popular, they began to sanitize and edit them to make them more suitable. There is a thing called censorship in fairy tales, and there’s plenty of articles on it.
The Grimms brothers were trying to please two different audiences. Their first edition was not meant for children at all, and was instead a scholarly pursuit with them trying to record the tales faithfully, even down to colloquial language. It was only when people began buying the book and telling the stories to their children, complaining that the stories were too graphic in nature that the Grimms brothers started extensively editing and sanitizing the tales. Many of the Christian references were added because of harsh criticism that they WEREN’T Christian enough.
Your refusal to look at the greater cultural context and WHY the Grimms brothers edited their tales multiple times until their deaths speaks to your incredible bias and your inability to look past your own hatred.
And I am completely bewildered at what you mean by the ‘edited version’ of Snow White vs. the original 1812 version, because they read virtually the same except that the mother has been replaced by the stepmother, the change from the Queen wanting the liver and lungs of Snow White to the heart (And the cannibalistic nature), and the manner in which the apple is dislodged from Snow White’s mouth (and the shortening of the Prince’s mooning over her dead body to make it less creepy). Yes, you do find the violent wicked MOTHER in the 1812 version. She still tries to kill Snow White four separate times (besides the Huntsman one). I am completely nonplussed as to where you are getting this “simply an unfair mother” assertion from.
Yes, the Grimms stories increased in violence (generally) and decreased in literally everything else (mentions of sex and premarital sex, generally immoral things like the Donkeyskin “father wants to marry his own daughter” kind of thing), because surprise surprise: children are fascinated by violence. There is also a cautionary aspect in increasing the violence, as violence to bad characters increases the lesson of “bad people get punished” and violence to good characters, particularly children, helped the MANY abused and poor children of the time (or children who saw themselves as neglected) identify with the characters more. More here.
It is well known (though I guess not by you) that the fairy tales were a relatively accurate representation of everyday life in Germany, particularly among the lower class. In 1806, when the Grimms were beginning to collect their tales, child abandonment and infanticide were still relatively common among the poor. And given the high mortality rate of childbirth, having a stepmother in the house was almost the rule rather than the exception. If you want more information on how the Grimms tales were highly influenced by the everyday life and culture of GERMANY, I suggest you check out “The Hard Facts of the Grimms Fairy Tales” by Maria Tatar, some of which can be viewed for free here. The section detailing the cutlural influences on their tales would be here. I also recommend The Annotated Brothers Grimm, also by Maria Tatar.
I never said that the Grimms didn’t change their stories. You are putting words in my mouth. What I SAID is that their original versions are close to what the women they gathered them from told them (as evidenced by the original manuscripts) and that it was largely due to pressure from society and the pressure to sanitize those tales for children that led to many of the changes and the introduction of Christian motifs and whatnot.
One of my favorite articles on the subject of the Grimms’ life in general, that also touches on the women who they gathered the tales from and their sanitization of the tales is this one from National Geographic.
You forget that fairy tales were not intended for children for a long time. They were told by women, for women. They were tales women told to each other while doing chores, or around the |
have read a number of comments with people concerned about cooking in plastic. My reaction is the sous vide results are so good, I would consider the risk for myself and my family mitigated. There is currently no documented hard corollary between cooking in BPA-free food safe plastic bags and direct health risks…UNLIKE the direct connection that charring food, especially meat, is carcinogenic. Now beyond government regulation, food purity and safety is always a personal choice…For me, I’ll chance my black grill marks and crisp corners…and I demand the thrill of eating sous vide.Symphonie
Most runners, whether they’re training for a marathon or simply out to get some exercise, will stretch before they take off. It’s a ritual that verges on the sacred, strongly connected to the intuitive sense that priming the muscles is a good way to avoid injuring them during the run to come.
But researchers at George Washington University and the USA Track and Field Association (USATF) report that stretching before a run does not appear to reduce injury at all. In fact, among the more than 2,700 runners in the study, ranging from recreational runners to competitive marathoners, all of whom ran at least 10 miles a week, the scientists found similar injury rates — of about 16% — over a three-month period among those who stretched before running and those who did not.
The idea behind stretching is to lengthen the muscle fibers to increase their function and hopefully enhance performance, helping runners maintain a faster pace or run for a longer period of time. A study of British recruits in the military found that a regular stretching routine before training reduced injury rates from 6% to 1%. But other recent studies among gymnasts, football players and wrestlers have questioned the practice, suggesting that stretching does not impact performance at all.
That’s why Dr. Daniel Pereles, a runner himself, decided to look specifically at the role that stretching might play in running injuries. Most studies on the subject, including the British trial in the military, involved stretching routines that included much more than stretching running muscles; they also incorporated calisthenics and other exercises. Pereles wanted to know specifically whether stretching leg muscles — the quadriceps, hamstrings and calf muscles — would have an impact on injuries.
Through the USATF, Pereles was able to recruit enough runners of various levels to get an answer to his question. About half of the 2,729 volunteers were told to stretch their quads, hams and calf muscles for three to five minutes before running for however long they usually exercised. The remaining half were told to run without stretching.
While he found that stretching did not have any effect on injury rates among the two groups, he did find several factors that did seem to influence whether the runners hurt themselves. Heavier runners, as well as those who had recently suffered an injury, were more likely to harm themselves. Interestingly, Pereles also found that those who switched from a stretch to non-stretch or non-stretch to stretch routine for the study were more likely to get injured. Stretchers who were told not to stretch during the three-month study increased their risk of injury by 40%, while those who switched from not stretching to stretching increased their risk by 22%.
Pereles is still at a loss to explain that trend, although he suspects the change in routine accounts for most of the result. “It’s completely confounding, but by switching routines, it somehow messed them up,” he says.
That’s why his advice, as both researcher and runner, is to stick with what works for you. “If it feels good for you to stretch before you run, then continue if you have the time,” he says. “But if it doesn’t feel good, and you like to run and then stretch, or not stretch at all, then that’s fine too. I can’t tell anyone there is conclusive evidence that stretching makes a difference in injuries or performance.”
He notes that professional athletes, who often spend as much time stretching and warming up as they do training, are combining stretching with other activities for a more dynamic warm-up. Most recreational runners, however, don’t have the luxury of spending that much time exercising. Pereles himself admits to changing his running routine as well, and stretching only a little before a run. Part of the reason, he says, is because he doesn’t have the time, and but part of the reason has to do with the science, which so far suggests that it doesn’t seem to make a difference in injury rates.The stadium district in Seattle is located at the northern end of a larger swath of the city that's officially known as the Duwamish Manufacturing and Industrial Center, but more commonly referred to as Sodo. It’s the largest concentration of industrially zoned land in Seattle and home to Harbor Island, the largest container port facility in the Pacific Northwest, as well as the Seattle Seahawks, Sounders and Mariners teams. Sports boosters are excited about the possibility of adding a professional basketball or hockey team, or both, to Sodo. They'd like to see restaurants and other nightlife venues built nearby, maybe even hotels and condos added to the mix. But all of this bubbling enthusiasm for new development has raised the hackles of advocates for Seattle's thriving maritime industry. Buffer Zones
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Seattle Port Commissioner Tom Albro is leery of proposals for new restaurants and hotels near the seaport. "Industrial areas and businesses and these jobs, they're like a salmon stream," he explains. "They need buffer zones. They need to be given a bit a room, because they're not the kinds of things people want to live right up against." In late 2013, the Seattle Planning Department found little support from maritime advocates like Albro when it released two sets of recommendations for land use in this part of the city. On the one hand, the documents reiterated that industry is the priority for the Duwamish industrial zone. But planners also suggested that the northern part of this area could possibly take some residential construction to provide market-rate housing for adjacent Pioneer Square. The city also recommended that hotel construction be allowed throughout the Duwamish zone. Currently, hotel development is specifically outlawed in the sports stadium district. Industrial Branding
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Seattle Planning Department Director Marshall Foster admitted these recommendations were not well received by Port of Seattle supporters. He said the city has to balance industrial needs with the push for a healthy and livable downtown. But he wants to preserve Seattle's industrial base as well. Foster used to work in San Francisco, which pushed most industry across the bay to Oakland. And Foster said maritime is something that really resonates with Seattle citizens. "It's so close to our history, and our identity as a city. It's the blue collar, gritty backbone of what Seattle is." The containers that come through Harbor Island bring in every kind of good you could imagine, said Seattle-based writer and maritime historian Joe Follansbee Harbor Island itself is ringed by supporting businesses — private shippers, marine supply and repair shops — and by the roads that trucks use to bring the containers to and from the seaport. Marine shipping is a multi-billion dollar annual business that provides solid middle class jobs for thousands of people.
SponsorSAN DIEGO -- Since his April debut, Dodgers first baseman Cody Bellinger has torched National League West pitching. The Padres have taken an interesting new tack to combat the rookie slugger.
SAN DIEGO -- Since his April debut, Dodgers first baseman Cody Bellinger has torched National League West pitching. The Padres have taken an interesting new tack to combat the rookie slugger.
They drafted his younger brother.
With their 15th-round selection on Wednesday, the Friars selected Cole Bellinger, fresh off his state title with Hamilton High School in Chandler, Ariz. Cole, a right-handed pitcher, possesses a starkly different skill set from his older brother, a left-handed hitting first baseman.
:: 2017 MLB Draft coverage ::
Once Cole saw his name pop up on MLB.com's Draft tracker, it didn't take long for his mind to wander toward the possibility of pitching in the same division as his brother.
"That would be awesome," said Cole. "If everything goes right and someday I sign and make it to the big leagues and get to pitch to my brother, that would be the coolest experience of my life."
As Cole tells it, the two brothers -- with a four-year age gap -- played plenty of Wiffle ball growing up. But they've only actually squared off once on an actual baseball field.
It was two years ago during Hamilton High School's alumni game. Cole threw a first-pitch fastball; Cody lined a single.
"I took it easy," Cody quipped.
The next time they square off could very well come on a Major League field as division rivals.
"It would be awesome," said Cody. "It's a long road, and he knows that. The rest of our family knows that. But I'm excited for him to start."
First, Cole -- whose father Clay played four big league seasons with the Yankees and Angels -- would need to sign with San Diego. He's currently committed to Grand Canyon University.
"I'm just waiting to talk with the Padres and my family, see what we want to do," Cole said. "Obviously, it's ultimately my decision. But [having a baseball family] makes that a lot easier."
The two brothers were drafted by current Padres executive Logan White, who served as Dodgers scouting director when Cody was taken in 2013.
Cole also played second base in high school, but he's unquestionably a pitcher in the long term. He possesses a four-pitch mix with a fastball, curveball, slider and changeup.
"He came to a workout, threw for us, and our entire group was excited about our upside," said scouting director Mark Conner, who also praised the Bellinger family as being "wired the right way" to succeed in the Majors.
In his senior season at Hamilton, Bellinger posted a 2.06 ERA in nine starts. He pitched four scoreless frames in the state title game and earned the win.
Naturally, Cole credits a lot of his success to his older brother.
"He obviously helped me from a hitting standpoint," Cole said. "As far as the past couple years, being in the Majors, he's definitely helped me realize that's what I want to do. He's talked to me about how cool it is, but how much hard work it takes. He has, hopefully, guided me down that path."
AJ Cassavell covers the Padres for MLB.com. Follow him on Twitter @ajcassavell.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
ST. LOUIS, MO — The city of St. Louis passed a resolution to honor Anthony Lamar Smith Friday. His mother and her husband were there to accept. Jason Stockley, the white ex-police officer whose Friday acquittal in the death of Smith sparked days of protests.
Alderman John Collins-Muhammad introduced the resolution and presented it to Smith's mother, Annie. "I invited her here today to let her know the city of St. Louis and the Board of Aldermen shares her pain, her frustration, and her deep dissatisfaction with the turnout of everything that has happened."
Board of Alderman President Lewis Reed read the resolution before the legislative body and addressed Annie Smith.
"I'm a father of four so I can understand how difficult this is for you. You have my heartfelt condolences. We stand with you at this time," Reed said. "This resolution is the highest honor that this board can give to any organization or individual. When you look back at history, at this time, and you see the changes that has happened so we have a criminal justice system that is fair to everyone that comes in contact with it and we have a police department that works better with its citizens. You're going to see amongst those records, your son's name. Know that he ushered on some change in our city and across this nation. This is going to be a better nation because we won't forget what happened on the streets of the city of St. Louis. Lets give them a big round of applause."
Annie's husband explained that she lost her voice after the board unanimously passed the resolution. He accepted it on her behalf. Mayor Lyda Krewson and Board of Alderman President Lewis Reed hugged Annie Smith after the ceremony.
St. Louis Board of Aldermen pays tribute to Anthony Lamar Smith https://t.co/iRURjAydnP #STLVerdict — Mike Faulk (@Mike_Faulk) September 22, 2017
Today, we presented a resolution to the family of #AnthonyLamarSmith to signify his impact on #STL & the changes that are coming forth #BOA pic.twitter.com/27JyvLUmS4 — Lewis E. Reed (@PresReed) September 22, 2017
Stockley, a former St. Louis police officer, shot and killed Smith, a 24-year-old suspected drug dealer, nearly three years before a Ferguson police officer shot and killed Michael Brown. But he wasn't charged until May 2016 — almost two years after Brown's August 2014 death, which sparked riots that gained national attention.
"Without the Mike Brown case... the prosecution of Jason Stockley never would have happened," CNN's Thomas Lake wrote last month in a report on the so-called "Ferguson Effect."
The concept suggests that police have faced increased scrutiny after Brown's death — so much so that some officers may be more hesitant to use force, even when necessary, because they fear backlash.
After the 2014 shooting, the Ferguson police department lost a third of its officers, and "those who remained were more cautious than before," Lake wrote.
For example, traffic stops fell by nearly 75%.
But at the same time, crime ticked up: Violent crime rose by 65% in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, in the first year after Brown's death. Also, homicides went from two in 2014, to nine in 2016.
No one can say for sure why crime increased after Brown was shot to death, but Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III has a theory — and it all starts with traffic stops.
"Knowles spent five years as a Ferguson police dispatcher, getting a sense of what officers do and why they do it, and he gained an appreciation for the role of the traffic stop. It was not just about revenue, he said. It was about vigilance," Lake wrote. "If a car had the wrong plate, it might be stolen. If the car was stolen, the driver might be wanted for other crimes. If the driver was wanted for other crimes, he might be carrying an illegal gun, and he might be on his way to yet another crime."
The mayor said he frequently hears motorcycles drag racing in the middle of the night near his home, and no police officers stop the drivers.
"Whoever's doing it feels like they can do whatever the hell they want," Mayor Knowles said. "And if you feel like you can do whatever the hell you want, you're going to do all kinds of stuff."
Why Jason Stockley was on trial
Though no one can definitively prove if the Ferguson Effect is real, civil rights activists and police union officials say Stockley's prosecution wouldn't have happened without the Brown case.
Stockley shot and killed Smith in 2011 after a police chase. The former officer said he fired because he believed Smith was reaching for a weapon. Stockley eventually left the department, and the city settled a wrongful-death suit with Smith's family for $900,000, but state and federal authorities declined to seek criminal charges.
That changed in 2016, when then-St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce charged Stockley with first-degree murder, citing new evidence.
Prosecutors argued Stockley planted the gun recovered inside of Smith's car — but a judge ultimately ruled that the weapon was too large for Stockley to hide from cameras at the scene.
More than 120 people have been arrested during protests since Stockley's Friday acquittal.Advertisement 1 / 6
Since Emmanuel Macron’s election to office this past spring, Brigitte Macron has been shaking up the role of France’s First Lady in more ways than one. Aside from being 24 years her husband’s senior, at 64, Macron’s favorite unconventional fashion choices feature hemlines that fall well above the knee—and place her gamine, toned, and tan limbs squarely in the spotlight.
Directly after inauguration day, Macron celebrated mid-May’s sunny days at the Élysée Palace in a cornflower blue Louis Vuitton skirt suit that inched upward to reveal the head-turning limbs that would soon become her signature. A belted black shift, also from Louis Vuitton, came next, paired with leg-elongating nude pumps. Even when swathed in sheer black tights, her willowy stems maintained a scene-stealing presence. But lest one think Macron only shows them off for official occasions, the First Lady left her home in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage on a bicycle in June clad in a crisp button-up, sneakers, and a denim miniskirt that hit at mid-thigh. And today in Germany at the G20 summit, Macron stepped out in a coral funnel-neck frock and flesh-tone stilettos that offered a leggy take on the political uniform.
Historically, the French have never set an expiration date on femininity or sensuality. This may explain why, at a time when America’s youth obsession is paramount, and its restrictions on women ever-more pervasive (including Congress’s recent deeming of sleeveless attire inappropriate), Macron’s rejection of outdated age- and gender-related dress codes feels particularly remarkable. Visible on a global scale, France’s First Lady is cutting a liberating new feminist path with her particular brand of Gallic body confidence. In politics, as in life, what could be more powerful?Study shines light on what makes digital activism effective
Digital activism is usually nonviolent and tends to work best when social media tools are combined with street-level organization, according to new research from the University of Washington. The findings come from a report released today (Nov. 20) by the Digital Activism Research Project run by Philip Howard, UW professor of communication, information and international studies. Founded by Howard in 2012, the project applies rigorous empirical social science methods to the study of global digital activism.
"This is the largest investigation of digital activism ever undertaken," Howard said. "We looked at just under 2,000 cases over a 20-year period, with a very focused look at the last two years."
Howard and coauthors Frank Edwards and Mary Joyce, both UW doctoral students, oversaw 40 student analysts who reviewed news stories by citizen and professional journalists describing digital activism campaigns worldwide. A year of research and refining brought the total down to between 400 and 500 well-verified cases representing about 150 countries. The research took a particularly focused look at the last two years.
Howard said one of their main findings is that digital activism tends to be nonviolent, despite what many may think.
"In the news we hear of online activism that involves anonymous or cyberterrorist hackers who cause trouble and break into systems," Howard said. "But that was 2 or 3 percent of all the cases -- far and away, most of the cases are average folks with a modest policy agenda" that doesn't involve hacking or covert crime.
Other findings include: Digital activism campaigns tend to be more successful when waged against government rather than business authorities. There have been many activist campaigns against corporations, but they don't seem to have succeeded as well as those that had governments for a target, Howard said. Effective digital activism employs a number of social media tools. Tweeting alone is less successful, Howard said, and no single tool in the study had a clear relationship with campaign success. Governments still tend to lag behind activist movements in the use and mastery of new social media tools. They sometimes use the same tools, Howard said, but it's always months after others have tried them.
Howard said these factors, taken together, "are the magic ingredients, especially when the target is a government -- a real recipe for success."
Edwards is a doctoral student in sociology; Joyce is a doctoral student in communication.
Howard added that, in time, the data gathered for this work might yield more insight into the world of digital activism.
Unanswered questions include why there are regional disparities among digital tool use, why phones are prevalent but text messaging is rare in digital campaigns, and whether external political, social or cultural phenomena influence patterns and the effectiveness of digital activism.
Funding for the research came from the United States Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation and the UW Department of Communication.
Report: http://digital-activism.org/2013/11/report-on-digital-activism-and-non-violent-conflict/Government-owned liquor stores would be the best choice to sell legal pot in Ontario, the union representing LCBO staff says.
“If it is legalized, the LCBO should sell it for social responsibility,” Warren “Smokey” Thomas, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), said in an e-mail Friday.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to legalize marijuana, and Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger has recommended it be sold in government-owned liquor stores.
Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa hasn’t addressed the possibility of selling marijuana in LCBO stores, but earlier said legalization will be a “national conversation.”
“I’m not going to speculate what this will mean … We do know it’s complicated and we know that it’s going to involve a lot of different ministries, activity, jurisdictions, and looking at what happens in other parts of the world,” Sousa said.
Dave Bryans, CEO of the Ontario Convenience Stores Association (OCSA), said he hopes the conversation is more open and transparent than the one the government held when deciding where to sell beer.
Although OCSA pushed hard for the right of its members to sell beer, the provincial government offered it to only a select number of grocery stores and the major beer companies still control the market, he said.
Bryans noted convenience stores, unlike the LCBO, are subject to mystery shopper checks from two oversight organizations — the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario and public health units — to ensure they sell tobacco and lottery tickets only to those who are of legal age.
OCSA members haven’t discussed the possibility of selling marijuana because they believe it won’t happen for at least three to four years, he said.
However, Bryan warns that Ontario could become a major producer of contraband marijuana, just as it has contraband cigarettes, if the product is legalized.
The provincial government has shown little interest in confronting the more than 50 cigarette factories on reserves, he said.
“There’s no political will of the government to fix contraband (tobacco) in Ontario, so should this product end up in the aboriginal reserves and end up being sold on the streets … there’d be no taste for the government to fix that either,” Bryans said. “I’m not sure we have the right controls in place to have another smoking-like product.”
He says 30% of cigarettes smoked in Ontario are contraband.
************************************
HOW TO PUT OUT CONTRABAND CIGARETTES
1) Ontario PC MPP Todd Smith introduced a private member’s bill this week to strip the driver’s licence of those convicted of transporting commercial amounts of contraband tobacco and also allow for their vehicles to be sold and some of the profits returned to the investigating police service.
Private member’s bills rarely become law, but the government has promised to look at it.
Two) Finance Minister Charles Sousa introduced a budget bill Wednesday that would allow for tighter controls over raw leaf tobacco.
The bill would create a bale-labelling system, including record-keeping requirements, and establish reporting requirements for the import, export and transportation of raw leaf tobacco.WASHINGTON - The Federal Communications Commission will adopt rules barring Internet service providers such as Comcast Corp. from interfering with their customers' ability to share videos and other online files.
A majority of the five-member commission has agreed the FCC can halt the practice, chairman Kevin Martin said yesterday. The agency has scheduled a Friday public hearing for a vote.
The agency also plans to censure Comcast, the largest US cable-television company, for interfering with customers using peer-to-peer file-sharing services, according to two people with knowledge of the plans. Comcast will be required to take corrective action and won't face a fine, one of the people said.
"We continue to assert that our network management practices were reasonable," Sena Fitzmaurice, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia-based company, said. Comcast has said it delays the transfer of some files when networks are congested to preserve service for other customers.
Martin on July 11 said Comcast had violated rules by hampering customers' transfer of big files such as movies, and he said he wanted to stop the practice.
Those voting to censure Comcast include Martin, a Republican, and both agency Democrats, Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, according to two people who declined to be identified because decisions are confidential until published.
FCC commissioner Robert McDowell in a column in The Washington Post yesterday said engineers have collaborated to solve problems of Internet congestion. "If we chose regulation over collaboration, we will be setting a precedent by thrusting politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions," he wrote. "Let's stick with what works."
"This order would send a strong signal to the marketplace that arbitrarily interfering with users' online choices is not acceptable," Marvin Ammori, general counsel for Free Press, said.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.Image copyright AFP Image caption Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik celebrated with supporters in the town of Pale
Bosnian Serbs have voted overwhelmingly to keep 9 January as a national holiday in defiance of Bosnia's highest court.
With more than 70% of votes counted in Sunday's referendum, 99.8% supported the holiday, authorities said.
The court ruled the date discriminated against Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats and should be changed.
Serbs declared the creation of their own state within Bosnia on 9 January 1992, fuelling an ethnic conflict in which about 100,000 people died.
Bosnia is still split along ethnic lines between the mainly-Serb entity and a Muslim-Croat federation.
The Constitutional Court, based in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, banned the referendum.
About 1.2 million people were eligible to vote and authorities said turnout was more than 56%.
Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik said the referendum would go down in history as the "day of Serb determination".
"I am proud of the people of Republika Srpska, of all those who came out and voted," he said in the town of Pale.
Analysis: Guy Delauney, BBC News, Belgrade, Serbia
Regardless of the result, the referendum has already damaged ethnic relations in Bosnia and, arguably, the credibility of the international officials who still oversee the country.
Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik has challenged the authority of the national court, which ruled the 9 January holiday unconstitutional and banned the referendum. He also ignored pressure from the European Union, the international high representative and Serbia.
This defiance has increased fears that Mr Dodik might follow through with his threat to hold a secession referendum.
The high representative has the ability to remove politicians from office if they threaten the terms of the Dayton Peace Agreement. But in recent years those powers have been used only rarely.
Referendum challenges peace terms
As well as being the anniversary of the declaration of a Bosnian Serb state, 9 January is an Orthodox Christian holiday.
The International High Representative to Bosnia-Hercegovina, Valentin Inzko, told the BBC that the vote was "illegal and unconstitutional".
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The referendum went ahead despite being banned by Bosnia's constitutional court
"No mistake, decisions of the constitutional court are final and binding..., and the constitutional court was very, very explicit..., it suspended this referendum," he said.
Bosniak leader Bakir Izetbegovic, meanwhile, has accused Mr Dodik of "playing with fire".
The BBC's Guy Delauney in neighbouring Serbia says that the Bosnian Serb leader has been deliberately provocative by insisting on celebrating the national holiday on 9 January.
Analysts say by flouting the court, one of the federal institutions set up at the end of the war in 1995, Mr Dodik is threatening the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the conflict.It only took about 2 days after I shared some thoughts on Monero valuation that I regretted doing so. Various other responsibilities have kept me getting around to sharing my updated thoughts, but I’m glad to finally be doing so now, with this note.My regret hasn’t been so much around making an embarrassing technical omission (which I pointed out in it). Even with that, the directional and order-of-magnitude conclusions were still largely intact, it was an interesting idea to explore for me, and I’ve had some fun follow up email exchanges concerning modifications and refinements.My regret was publicly focusing at all on an association between Monero and DarkNet/Criminal activities.At the same time as I’m first and foremost interested in the truth, I believe that there are responsible ways to share it as well as reckless and ill-conceived ways to do so. I don't think my article did a very good job on this front.Unfortuna…Chicago Bears quarterback Jimmy Clausen and Detroit Lions linebacker Josh Bynes, left, play Dec. 21, 2014, in Chicago. (Photo: Nam Y. Huh Associated Press)
The Detroit Lions thought enough of Josh Bynes after they signed him off of the Baltimore Ravens' practice squad last year that they plugged him into certain defensive packages to make sure he got regular snaps the second half of the season.
Bynes played well enough in limited time at middle linebacker that the Lions want him back for 2015. But on their terms.
The team has informed Bynes that it won't tender him as a restricted free agent before the start of the new league year but still wants to re-sign him in the coming weeks.
Bynes is part of a shrinking group of restricted free agents across the league, a class of player being whittled away by the new collective bargaining agreement.
All rookie draft picks get four-year deals, so restricted free agency -- which comes after a player's third accrued season -- typically is left for undrafted players such as Bynes.
The Lions have one other restricted free agent on their roster, quarterback Kellen Moore, and it would be a surprise if they tendered him.
Moore has never dressed for a regular-season game in his three NFL seasons, but the Lions, who went cheap behind starting QB Matthew Stafford last year, would like him back as their second or third quarterback.
Teams can tender restricted free agents at one of three levels: A first-round tender ($3.113 million last year; this year's dollar figures are not yet known) guarantees the team a first-round pick as compensation if it does not match another team's offer sheet. A second-round tender ($2.187 million last year) provides a second-round pick as compensation, while a low tender ($1.323 million last year) comes with no compensation but the right to match any offer.
The minimum salary next year for a player in his fourth season will be $660,000.
The Lions entered today about $17 million under this year's projected salary cap, but they'd need most of that room to sign this year's draft class and re-sign all-pro defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh.
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina said Wednesday his country could present a plan before year's end to legalize the production of marijuana and opium poppies. His comments came in an interview with Reuters.
Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina (user surizar via wikimedia.org)
Perez, a conservative and former general, has been a harsh critic of the US-led war on drugs in Latin America, repeatedly denouncing such policies at international forums. He has also previously mentioned the possibility of moving to legalize marijuana and opium production, but has yet to put forward a concrete plan to do so.
But a presidential commission has been studying the issue of reforms in the country's drug laws, and Perez told Reuters he expected the commission to make its recommendations by October and that the measures could be presented by year's end. That could include a bill to legalize drugs, particularly marijuana, Perez said.
"The other thing we're exploring... is the legalization of the poppy plantations on the border with Mexico, so they're controlled and sold for medicinal ends," Perez said. "These two things could be steps taken on a legal basis."
While Afghanistan is by far the world's largest opium producer, accounting for nearly 90% of global production, poppies are also grown in the Western hemisphere -- in Mexico and Colombia, as well as Guatemala. Western hemisphere opium accounts for most of the heroin consumed in the United States.
Perez is keeping a careful eye on his northern neighbor, too. Mexico decriminalized drug possession in 2009, but has been loath to take further steps to end the drug war there, although there are now proposals afoot to legalize marijuana. Meanwhile, Mexican drug trafficking organizations, under pressure in their home country, have expanded their operations in Guatemala and other Central American nations.Who doesn’t love the Canadian Formula 1 Grand Prix? I will tell you who, the growing list of drivers that have ended up in the “Wall Of Champions.”
Mosport and Mont-Tremblant shared the Canadian Grand Prix from 1961 until 1977 but in 1978 the race finally found a permanent home at the Ile Notre Dame circuit in Montreal, Quebec. Instantly the race became one of the most popular of the season as the new venue proved to be one of the most exciting of the year.
Montreal’s new circuit had a dream result as the local man, the legendary Gilles Villeneuve won the race for Ferrari. The race became a who’s who of winners with Alan Jones and Nelson Piquet winning the next two races. In 1980 however a huge start line accident saw the end of Jean Pierre Jabouille’s career. Piquet won the race in his spare car but Jabouille badly broke both legs, an accident that ended his career.
In 1982 the race became famous for all the wrong reasons. Villeneuve had been killed a month before the race at Zolder in Belgium so the organisers re-named the circuit the “Circuit Gilles Villeneuve,” the name it is still known as today. The race itself was a tragic event as after a start line pile up Ricardo Paletti was killed when his car became engulfed in flames. Professor Sid Watkins extricated him from his car and he was flown to hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.
Over the years the race has been know for strange incidents such as Nigel Mansell’s Williams breaking down on the final lap just as Mansell was waving to the crowd to celebrate an “easy victory.” In 2011 the weather caused chaos and Jenson Button won Formula One’s longest ever race.
It’s also had it’s fair share of nasty wrecks with one of the most memorable been Robert Kubica whose car broke into numerous pieces in a violent wreck in the 2007 race which happened to be Lewis Hamilton’s first win. A year later Kubica won the race in what was his only Grand Prix victory.
So to the Wall of Champions. The final corner used to have “Welcome To Quebec” painted on it, and what a welcome it’s given. It has a habit of collecting World Champions and champions of lower formulae as they push to get their cars onto the start finish straight. The list of “victims” includes ”
Michael Schumacher
Jacques Villeneuve
Sebastian Vettel
Nico Rosberg
Jenson Button
Damon Hill
Juan Pablo Montoya
An incredible list! Jacques Villeneuve never did manage to win the race and his father remains the only Canadian to win it.
The Canadian Grand Prix is one of the highlights of the season with notably exciting racing and unpredictable weather. Daniel Ricciardo gained his maiden win in 2014 proving that at Montreal, anything can and will happen!
Main image:In thanks for our work in the field,
Print numbers Status Donation Level # 34 Available 4, 16, 22, 27, 29, 32, 36, 39,
42, 45, 47, 49, 52, 54, 56, 58 Already Claimed - - -
Each piece is accompanied by a letter of authenticity as well as a copy of a personal letter from Albert Hofmann. It is then enclosed in a protective plastic sleeve and sandwiched between sheets of cardboard to ensure safe delivery. Email
This is likely the last signed "LSD 60" print that Erowid Center will make available as a membership gift. It will no doubt continue to increase in value in the years to come, as Dr. Hofmann's signature on blotter art is rare. It is a great addition to any collection of psychedelic ephemera. All proceeds go towards the continuing development of Erowid Center and public educational resources about psychoactive plants and chemicals.
This blotter art was created by artist Stevee Postman to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Albert Hofmann's discovery of the psychoactive effects of LSD. It is designed in the traditional style found on the street: a 7.5 x 7.5-inch sheet perforated into 900 quarter-inch "hits". It is printed with soy-based inks onto a hemp-blend paper that is chlorine-free, acid-free, and of course, LSD-free.In thanks for our work in the field, Dr. Albert Hofmann kindly signed a limited edition of 60 of these pieces of blotter art, 19 of which were contributed to Erowid. Each piece is numbered in the lower left corner and signed by Dr. Hofmann in the lower right. There is currently 1 print available at the $25,000 level.Each piece is accompanied by a letter of authenticity as well as a copy of a personal letter from Albert Hofmann. It is then enclosed in a protective plastic sleeve and sandwiched between sheets of cardboard to ensure safe delivery. Email donations@erowid.org with questions or for additional details.This is likely the last signed "LSD 60" print that Erowid Center will make available as a membership gift. It will no doubt continue to increase in value in the years to come, as Dr. Hofmann's signature on blotter art is rare. It is a great addition to any collection of psychedelic ephemera. All proceeds go towards the continuing development of Erowid Center and public educational resources about psychoactive plants and chemicals.Jérémy Marie set out from his home in Caen, France in October 2007 and has been touring the world ever since, solely by hitching a ride with generous strangers. He has so far travelled 151,750 km (94,293 miles) across 54 different countries in 1,464 different vehicles. Jérémy is currently in Shanghai and kindly |
people feel like you're evading the answer.”
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS at the Univision Presidential Forum: If you become president are you going to deport them or not?
MITT ROMNEY at the Univision Presidential Forum: Well, we're not –
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS at the Univision Presidential Forum: Yes or no?
MITT ROMNEY at the Univision Presidential Forum: We're not going to we're not going to round up people around the country and deport them. [..] This is something that's going to have to be worked out by Republicans and Democrats together. I will lead a program that gets us to a permanent solution as opposed to what was done by the president which, with a few months before the election he puts in place something which is temporary which does not solve this issue. I will solve it on a permanent basis consistent with those principles.
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS And we still don't get an answer from him. And that is one of the things that is hurting Republicans.
BILL MOYERS: How did you come up with the question asking Romney if he felt like he was an immigrant?
JORGE RAMOS at the Univision Presidential Forum: Are you sure you're not a Hispanic?
MITT ROMNEY at the Univision Presidential Forum: I think for political purposes that might have helped me here at the University of Miami today. But truth is, as you know, my dad was born of American parents living in Mexico. But he came back to this country at age 5 or 6 and was helped to get on his feet and recognized this was the land of opportunity and he's been the role model and inspiration throughout my life.
JORGE RAMOS: It is unthinkable for any Latino to have a dad who was born in Mexico and not to call himself a Latino. And obviously it's a much more complicated story. It's they decided to because of religious--
BILL MOYERS: Mormon-- his grandfather went down there because he was a polygamist; he wanted more than one wife.
JORGE RAMOS: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I watched it. I thought he was honest when he said--
JORGE RAMOS: He was honest.
BILL MOYERS: --at the end of that exchange he —
JORGE RAMOS: Nobody would buy it.
BILL MOYERS: I could tell you that I'm an immigrant but that would be disingenuous--
JORGE RAMOS: And nobody would buy it. And I think he's right on that--
BILL MOYERS: I think he was right about that.
JORGE RAMOS: I think he's about-- if he would call himself a Latino that 21 percent would go to 15 percent. It doesn't work that way. We have to find out who is the real Mitt Romney? The one who talked about that he didn't care about the he didn't have to worry about the 47 percent of the people? Or the one who told us in the meeting that he wants to be the president for 100 percent of Americans? That's the challenge for him.
BILL MOYERS: Have you seen the ad done, the one of his sons, to reach the Hispanic--
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: Right.
BILL MOYERS: Have you seen that ad?
JORGE RAMOS: Yes, yes.
CRAIG ROMNEY speaking in Spanish: “I’m Craig Romney. I would like to tell you how my father, Mitt Romney, thinks. He values very much that we are a nation of immigrants. My grandfather George was born in Mexico. For our family the greatness of the United States is how we respect and help each other, regardless of where we come from. As President, my father will work on a permanent solution to the immigration system, working with leaders of both parties.”
CRAIG ROMNEY speaking in Spanish: “I invite you to listen to him.”
MITT ROMNEY speaking in Spanish: “I am Mitt Romney and I approve this message.”
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: It's very good, it's very, very good. Now, if all Latino voters were to base their decision solely on this one ad, I think Romney's numbers would be much higher. Because he touched upon the fact that his father was born in Mexico, he touched upon the fact that his father wants a permanent solution to the immigration issue. But once they see interviews like ours, once somebody asks to be more specific about Latino issues, that's where he doesn't come through.
JORGE RAMOS: At the end we are getting smarter. The Hispanic community is getting smarter, and more powerful. And stronger. Because just a few years ago, a few elections ago, we would've bought anything. And by that I mean--
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: A few words in Spanish here and there.
JORGE RAMOS: --few words in Spanish. We just wanted it to say, "Hola, buenos noches," just to hear something in Spanish.
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: Wow, he spoke to us in Spanish--
JORGE RAMOS: George W. Bush, he was incredibly effective. But I used to say, that he was the first U.S. President who thought that he spoke Spanish. But he made so many mistakes in Spanish. But he really didn't care, because he made true, honest effort to communicate in Spanish, and it worked for him. Not only that, he had the right idea on immigration.
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: Exactly.
JORGE RAMOS: But now we appreciate ads in Spanish, but it's not enough. You have to give us much more than that true idea, a promise, a plan, a program.
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: It's a much more sophisticated electorate than you had seen before.
BILL MOYERS: When you press these candidates journalistically do you do so knowing that you're constantly referred to as the voice of Hispanic America which you have been referred to? Do you frame your questions that way? And you I mean, “Washington Monthly,” very respected influential magazine in Washington this summer, the headline, "Forget Rachel Maddow, Bill O'Reilly, Anderson Cooper, Sean Hannity. The broadcaster who will most determine the 2012 elections is Jorge Ramos."
JORGE RAMOS: It's a stretch. No, but you know, I still remember--
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: Well, you know--
JORGE RAMOS: You know, did you get to know Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist--
BILL MOYERS: I did, enviously because she could ask questions in a ferocious way.
JORGE RAMOS: And I think I learn from her a lot. I once saw her at the Iraq war and I just didn't have the courage to say-- to tell her that because of her I became a journalist. But if you remember Oriana Fallaci and her wonderful Interview with History. She used to say that the interview should be like an arm, like a weapon and that in an interview an interview is a war between the interviewee and the interviewer.
Obviously some interviews are just for information. But sometimes when you're confronting the powerful you really have to do that. And I'm completely convinced that the most important social role of us journalists is to confront those who are in power. And the place for us to be is as far as possible from power and you know that, no? I mean, you were in power--
BILL MOYERS: Oh, I discovered after I came into journalism after the White House that the closer you are to the truth is more important than the closer you are to power. So let me declare war on you for just a moment.
JORGE RAMOS: Sure, okay, let's do it.
BILL MOYERS: Declare on you, Univision is constantly referred to by the Republicans as a Democratic leaning if not pro left news organization.
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: But we're accused by Democrats as being for being Republican.
BILL MOYERS: The chairman of the American Conservative Union, Al Cardenas, says quote, "Univision is headed and owned by some sophisticated equity fund guys and they have turned it into a corporate institution of great power with a left-leaning message." Do you see yourself as the MSNBC?
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: Let me tell you something, I have been working for Univision for 31 years and I have gone through five different owners. He's talking about the owners in the last three years. So I don't think that the owners in the last three or four years, besides when you look at our management they are so varied and they never get involved in our coverage. Not once has someone come and told us, "This is what you have to say. This is what you have to do. This is what our editorial position in." No, we're--
BILL MOYERS: I believe you.
JORGE RAMOS: I never received--
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: --and I'll tell you, you know who our bosses--
JORGE RAMOS: --a phone call from--
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: Never.
JORGE RAMOS: --anyone, from a CEO telling me what to say or what not to do. And I can under-- you know, what I really love is that we're being criticized from both sides. Republicans might not like us because of what we are saying about their immigration position or because of some of the coverage that we have. And on the other hand just ask the White House if they're happy with our interview with President Barack Obama, they're not.
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: And-- we're going to get answers, you know. Yeah, I'm there to ask questions, but I'm there to get answers. And if I don't a typical politician usually doesn't answer questions, and if you don't get the answer the first time then you happen have to ask it again and again and again in as many different ways as you can--
JORGE RAMOS: But you--
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: --in order to get the answer that you want to serve your community. And that's what our role is really.
BILL MOYERS: Had you two been selected to moderate one of these presidential debates, couple of questions. What would you ask him?
JORGE RAMOS: Obviously we would stress at some point immigration, what would they do with 11 million immigrants. But I want to know what his red line on Iran, I want to find out about how are you going to create 23 million new jobs in this country. I want them to tell me about his relationship with Mexico, how many more people are being killed in Mexico and if we're going to change our programs here in the United States--
BILL MOYERS: Drug war?
JORGE RAMOS: the programs, the drug war? What's the relationship with Hugo Chávez? Is he a threat to national security? If we have--
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: Yeah, those are the questions that we asked them in the debate and--
JORGE RAMOS: --and China and Cuba, I mean, if we have this very special trade relationship with China, why don't we have the same with Cuba? I mean, there's so many different questions. And obviously you're more a person on taxes and promises.
BILL MOYERS: You have been a team now for 25 years. The most successful team, I would say, since Huntley-Brinkley, whom you don't remember. But I do, a long-running team, and very successful. What's next for you as journalists?
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: I think that making that transition into English language, and being able to reach all audiences. And what I mean is, not only Hispanics that speak English but all audiences. To understand who we are, I think, to elevate the position of Latinos in this country, and the role of Latinos in this society is something that we sort of take on as a mission.
JORGE RAMOS: It’s to stay relevant, you know, it's very challenging right now to stay relevant when you have the internet, when you have social media. And it's very difficult that your voice stays relevant and doesn't get lost among the noise. I think that's one of the most important things. And finally, it has to do with trust. After 25 or 30 years, if we say something and people trust what we say, that's the best award.
BILL MOYERS: María Elena Salinas and Jorge Ramos, this has been a pleasure.
JORGE RAMOS: Thank you, Bill.
MARÍA ELENA SALINAS: My pleasure, too.Chandler Muriel Bing[1] is a fictional character from the NBC sitcom Friends, portrayed by Matthew Perry.[2] He was born on April 8, 1968, to Nora Tyler Bing (Morgan Fairchild), a romance novelist, and Charles Bing (Kathleen Turner), a gay female impersonator and star of a Las Vegas drag show called "Viva Las Gay-gas". He is of Scottish and Swedish ancestry. He is an only child and is apparently from an affluent family. Chandler's parents announced their divorce to him over Thanksgiving dinner when he was nine years old, an event which causes him to refuse to celebrate the holiday in his adulthood. It is revealed in season 1 that he went to an all-boys high school.
Chandler's best friend is Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), who was his college roommate. He and Ross were in a band named Way/No Way during college. He met Ross' sister, Monica Geller (Courteney Cox), and her friend, Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston), while celebrating Thanksgiving at Ross' parents' house. Chandler was the first person to know about Ross' love for Rachel. He moved to New York City and lives across the hall from Monica and, through her, meets Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow). At some point during this time, Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) moves in with him and they become best friends. Chandler has a very good sense of humor, and is notoriously sarcastic. He attributes his sarcasm as a defense mechanism he developed due to his parents' divorcing when he was a child. He is the highest earning member of his friends' circle on account of responsible income management, having learned the value of money from a young age. He suffers from commitment issues, but later marries Monica at the end of season 7. In season 10, he and Monica go on to adopt twins.
Appearances [ edit ]
Chandler works as a "Statistical analysis and data reconfiguration," but loathes it.
Chandler is Ross Geller's roommate in college. Chandler met his wife Monica Geller while celebrating Christmas with the Geller family during his first year at college. On a tip from Monica, Chandler later moved to Apartment #4 in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, across the hall from Monica and her roommate Phoebe Buffay. Actor Joey Tribbiani moves in with Chandler, who becomes his best friend.
Ross and Chandler have been best friends since college, where they were roommates. They were in a band together.[3]
Until moving in with Monica, Chandler shared an apartment with his best friend Joey Tribbiani. Chandler and Joey's apartment is an important focal point for the series as one of the few meeting areas of the gang. The two form a close and enduring friendship, and get into many humorous situations.
When Chandler is first considering Joey as a roommate, the two start off on the wrong foot when Joey says that he "is cool with the gay thing" (Joey assuming Chandler was gay). Joey comes to fill the slot, only Chandler had already chosen a roommate – a fashion photographer with a porn-star sister. But after their eccentric neighbor Mr. Heckles (Larry Hankin) tells the photographer that he is Chandler's new roommate and is able to open Chandler's unlocked door, the photographer leaves. This forces Chandler to give the keys to Joey and they find out they had a lot in common, including a fondness for Baywatch and beer. Chandler often supports Joey throughout the show, paying the rent, paying for Joey's head-shots, buying most of the food and even gives money to Joey for his numerous dates.
The relationship between the two is balanced: Joey looks to Chandler as his intellectual superior, while Chandler acknowledges Joey as the more confident counterpart, especially when it comes to getting women.
Chandler and Rachel originally did not like each other, but grew to become good friends. In "The One with All the Cheesecakes" Chandler and Rachel steal and share the cheesecake which originally belonged to their downstairs neighbor. Rachel, who works for Ralph Lauren, is also the one who helps Chandler pick out his wedding suit. Rachel also sets up Chandler with her boss Joanna (Alison LaPlaca). Rachel and Chandler never have any romantic relationships apart from a glance back to their time in college when they made out.
Chandler and Phoebe are good friends. They sometimes are goofy and have fun with one another. In "The One with the Metaphorical Tunnel", Phoebe and Chandler play hide and seek. They also play games, like coming up with superhero names and reclining the Barcaloungers like cowboys. They share a duet of "Endless Love" at the end of one episode, when Chandler is sad after a breakup with his on-off girlfriend Janice (Maggie Wheeler). In "The One Where Everyone Finds Out", she tries to trick him into believing that she is attracted to him, but Monica tells him that Phoebe finds him charming in a "sexless" way, indicating that any hints of romance are jokes. Phoebe is the initial reason that Chandler quit smoking in "The One with the Thumb", after an argument between the group about his smoking. He is leaving the apartment when she offers him $7,000 to never smoke again.
Chandler is brash, zany, and estranged from both of his parents. He suffers from commitment issues, brought on by growing up in a broken home with no idea of what a stable marriage looks like, can be neurotic and extremely defensive, with humour as his shield. Chandler also associates everything that links to his parents' divorce in a negative light, specifically Thanksgiving where his parents reveal their separation over a turkey where his father plans to run away with the bus boy.
Both of Chandler's parents are extremely sexually promiscuous, and he has made several allusions to having caught them during sexual acts. Most of these involve his father with other men. Among other things, he alludes to having witnessed orgies by the time he was seven years old, and playing "the far left" background dancer during his father's rendition of It's Raining Men when he was growing up. His mother Nora is a world famous writer of erotic novels, which is demonstrated when Rachel's short-term boyfriend Paulo - who is Italian and barely speaks any English - is shown to know her.
Chandler began smoking when he was nine years old after his parents announced their divorce. Chandler is first seen smoking during the first season and is chastised by his friends for breaking his non-smoking streak of three years. He does a fairly good job at controlling his habit throughout the series' run, although a few times he cannot resist temptation and has a single cigarette or just a single drag off someone else's. His only major relapse occurs in season 9 when he stays in Oklahoma four days a week for work and smoked "three cartons in three days" because all his colleagues lit up during work meetings. He promises Monica never to smoke again, and is not seen smoking in the series after this point.
Chandler's main catchphrase is starting sentences with "Could that BE any more..."
Development [ edit ]
Relationships [ edit ]
Chandler is afraid of commitment and had the fewest relationships out of all the Friends. Despite all this, he is the first one to have a committed marriage that doesn't end in divorce.
At Ross' wedding in London, Monica and Chandler sleep together and decide to begin dating. They try to keep their relationship secret, as they are unsure about how the others would react. Eventually, however, they all find out. Their wedding takes place during the finale of season 7. In the final episode of the series, Monica and Chandler adopt twins, due to their inability to conceive.
Monica's bossiness, neatness and overly competitive nature forces Chandler into several situations, such as her being unable to throw a game of tennis against Chandler's boss and Chandler hiding the fact that he is incredibly good at ping-pong so Monica won't enter them in doubles tournaments.
Before his relationship with Monica, Chandler has an on-and-off relationship with Janice Hosenstein (Maggie Wheeler). She is a regular feature in his life, even though he regretted dating her and kept ending their relationship in season 1. He dates her again in season 2, but it ends up in a break-up. However, Janice makes further appearances later in the series, even after his marriage.
Kathy (Paget Brewster) makes an appearance in the fourth season of Friends. Chandler sees her in Central Perk and asks the gang if he should ask her out, only to learn that she was already waiting for a date with Joey. She is an actress and Chandler eventually dates her until he gets extremely paranoid when she shares a sex scene with her co-star prompting a big fight between the two. Chandler's paranoia drove Kathy into having an affair with the same person.
Career [ edit ]
Chandler works in statistical analysis and data reconfiguration, which he takes up as temporary work. Despite disliking his job, Chandler stays because they keep giving him promotions and raises, eventually becoming boss to his old workmates. His friends do not understand what he does; during the contest for Monica and Rachel's apartment, Rachel guesses "Transponster" for his job title.
In the episode "The One Where Emma Cries", Chandler falls asleep during a meeting and on waking, realizes that he had agreed to head the new division in Tulsa. Chandler quits his job on Christmas, so that he can fly home to New York to be with Monica. Monica helps Chandler secure a job in advertising through an old colleague of hers. Much to Chandler's dismay, he begins as an unpaid intern. However, his more mature approach eventually pays off, and he secures a full-time job in the business as a junior copywriter.
See also [ edit ]As I haven’t tamed everything myself, this list is incomplete. I hope the gut of this information is able to assist you in taming your favorite Dino!
Creature Favorite Food Narcotics Time to Tame Ankylosaurus Mejoberry ~100 2 Hours Argentavis Prime Meat, Raw Meat ~40 1.5-2 Hours Bat Brontosaurus Mejoberry ~200 3-4 Hours Carbonemys Mejoberry ~40 1.5 Hours Carnotaurus Prime Meat, Raw Meat ~150 1.5-2 Hours Dilophosaur Prime Meat, Raw Meat ~3 10 Minutes Dodo Amarberry 1 5 Minutes Mammoth Mejoberry ~200 2.5-3 Hours Megalodon Prime Meat, Raw Meat ~40 1.5-2 Hours Parasaur Mejoberry ~15 30-60 Minutes Phiomia Mejoberry ~10 30 minutes Piranha Pteranodon Prime Meat, Raw Meat ~40 1-2 Hours Pumonoscorpius Spoiled Meat ~15 30 Minutes to 1 Hour Raptor Prime Meat, Raw Meat ~30 30-60 Minutes Sabertooth Prime Meat, Raw Meat ~40 ~1.5 Hours Sarcosuchus Prime Meat, Raw Meat ~200 1.5-2 Hours Spider Spinosaur Prime Meat, Raw meat ~400 4-6 Hours Stegosaurus Azulberry, Mejoberry ~100 2-3 Hours Titanoboa Triceratops Mejoberry ~50 2 Hours Tyrannosaurus (T-Rex) Prime Meat, Raw meat ~100 3-4 Hours
As always, please comment below to correct, add, or remove information that may need to be corrected.
Best Regards,
-HeatherWelcome to an early edition of the Week in Review. Due to this week’s Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S. we’re posting the WIR today so we can enjoy some well-deserved down time with our long-suffering families. Of course, in between the turkey leftovers and marathon NFL TV sessions, we’ll naturally be online playing Forza Motorsport 5 so, if you find us online, be sure and say hello.
Now let’s kick things off with some important updates on the Forza 5 economy.
Economy Updates
First up, I’ll say thanks to everyone who has played Forza Motorsport 5. It’s encouraging to see so many having such a great time with our game, and the Forza community rallying around the latest Forza Motorsport experience. It’s also amazing to see all of the feedback coming in about our game. Forza players are among the most passionate fans in the world and it’s awesome to see your passion (be it positive or negative) pour through to us on forums, Tweets, Facebook, and e-mail.
Your Turn 10 team continues to value the input of our Forza community, and we keep a careful eye on in-game data that shows how players progress through our games. Based on the numbers we’ve seen from our first week of FM5, as well as feedback we heard directly from you, we’re in the process of making some changes to the Forza Motorsport 5 economy. But, while we’re putting the final touches on that, we want to make sure everyone continues having a great time with Forza 5. So, the following programs are going into effect this week:
Forza Motorsport 5 Photo Comp entry from BadRiver
1) Starting this Friday we’re offering a 50 percent discount (credits & tokens) on every car in the game. This discount is available to all players. Every car, from the 1970 Nissan Datsun 510 to the 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO will be 50 percent off, so, if you’ve got your eye on something special on the car list, now’s the time to play and add them to your garage! This discount will be available between 12:01 a.m. Pacific on Friday, Nov. 29 and 11:59 p.m. Pacific on Sunday, Dec. 1.
2) If you are a Forza Motorsport 5 VIP member, you’ll receive the 2013 Lotus E21 grand prix car as a thank you. (Note: You must own Forza Motorsport 5 VIP membership to take advantage of this offer.) In addition to being one of the most radical and expensive cars in FM5, the E21 is also one of the quickest. For more on the E21, check out its entry on the Forza Motorsport 5 Cars page. This gift may take up to 24 hours or longer to be fulfilled in the game and, in order to receive your gift, you will need to back out to the main title screen with the orange McLaren P1 and then press “A” to log back in.
3) Those players who have already purchased the 2013 Lotus E21 as of today (Wednesday, November 27) will also receive the 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO as a further thank you. This gift may take up to 24 hours or longer to be fulfilled in the game and, in order to receive your gift, you will need to back out to the main title screen with the orange McLaren P1 and then press “A” to log back in.
4) For those players who have purchased the LaFerrari Car Pack or the Forza Motorsport 5 Car Pass we’ll gift the 2013 LaFerrari directly into your Forza Motorsport 5 garage. No need to purchase the car separately with in-game credits or tokens. (Note: In order to receive and use these gift cars, you’ll need to own either the LaFerrari Car Pack or the Forza Motorsport 5 Car Pass). This gift may take up to 24 hours or longer to be fulfilled in the game and, in order to receive your gift, you will need to back out to the main title screen with the orange McLaren P1 and then press “A” to log back in.
Forza Motorsport 5 Photo Comp entry from Wonderpill
5) Finally, we’re dramatically increasing the credit payout available to all Forza players in December via Forza Rewards, our ongoing loyalty program that rewards players with credits and cars for playing Forza games. You’ll be able to redeem these rewards in December but here’s a tip: The higher your Tier level reaches before December rolls around, the better the rewards you’ll be able to redeem, so get your play time in now and level up!
Now, a word about tokens in the Forza Motorsport 5 Limited Edition. In our original description for Forza Motorsport 5’s Limited Edition, we told you that Limited Edition owners would get 1,250 in-game tokens, which we mistakenly said would be enough tokens to afford any car in the Forza 5. It isn’t. As a result, a number of you have pointed this out to us – that there are a number of cars in the game that cost more than 1,250 tokens to purchase.
We’re sorry. In order to make up for this discrepancy, we will soon be offering Forza Motorsport 5 Limited Edition owners the chance to download and own the car of their choice in the game. Players will be able to choose from any of the on-disc cars in Forza 5 and will be able redeem this offer on ForzaMotorsport.net via a dedicated page that will be available no later than December 16.
Looking ahead, we’ll continue to make further adjustments to the Forza Motorsport 5 economy when they’re needed and I’ll be sure to keep you informed as these changes are made. For now, take advantage of all the cool stuff coming your way and, as always, thanks for your patience and for being a member of the Forza Motorsport community.
FM5 Rewards Are Here
Speaking of Forza Rewards, by now you should have received your launch gifts in Forza Rewards. Depending on your Tier level, this includes new cars like the 2012 Ferrari F12berlinetta, the 2013 McLaren P1™ and more. For all the details see our recent post breaking down all the Forza 5 Rewards broken down by Tier level. And remember: If you haven’t redeemed your rewards this month, you’ve still got time!
Forza Motorsport 5 Photo Comp entry from striker2
Feature Thread in Forums
If you’re a painter or tuner and want to get your works of art out there, then you need to check out our Paint and Tuning Galleries (Yes, tunes are works of art, after all. In the Forza World, tunes SHOULD be displayed in a gallery!) Here, you can post your latest UGC creations for the rest of the Forza community to check out. Best of all, if we like what we see, you have a great chance of getting your creation featured in Forza Motorsport 5 and getting featured is a great thing, as it not only gives you more exposure to the wider Forza Motorsport 5 community, it also has the potential to earn you more in-game credits in the process. So don’t be shy! Let’s see your best stuff and we’ll be featuring stuff in the very near future. Whether you want to post your own stuff, or want to just lurk and check out the latest cool stuff, here’s the links you need:
Forza Motorsport 5 Livery Paint Gallery
Forza Motorsport 5 Tune Gallery
Forza 5 Support
If you’ve got a question about an issue in Forza Motorsport 5, we want to help. There’s lots of different ways you can get ahold of us, which I’ll detail in a bit. First, I wanted to point out that community member ManteoMax has a great thread detailing some of the more common issues that players are running into. That thread is a great place to start if you have questions about what’s happening in the world of Forza.
If you can’t find an answer to your question, you can post a thread in the forums or hit us up on our support e-mail. We do our best to answer e-mails as quickly as possible but please be patient as we have a lot of e-mails to get through on a daily basis.
Forza Motorsport 5 Photo Comp entry from P1R Baby Bull
Honda Contests
Now a few words on our ongoing contests with our friends at Honda. Our Forza Horizon Honda Livery Design Contest ends this Sunday, December 1 and the lucky winner will win an Xbox One, a copy of Forza Motorsport 5 and a trip for two to the 2014 Chicago Auto Show. All for creating an awesome livery on your favorite Honda car in Forza Horizon. To find out more, check out the details and get your design entry in before midnight Pacific this Sunday!
With the release of Forza 5, we also kicked off a different Honda contest, the Honda Race to Win Contest, where one lucky winner will win a Honda-branded Mad Catz Xbox One racing wheel. All you need to do is register and play Forza Motorsport 5 between now and midnight on February 2, 2014. For all the details, see the rules page.
Black Friday Forza Gear Sale
Looking for a holiday gift for the Forza fan in your life? Well, assuming they’ve already got an Xbox One and a copy of Forza 5, you can’t go wrong by shopping at the Official Forza Motorsport Store. Beginning on Friday the Forza Store will be holding a store-wide Black Friday sale, which goes from 11/28 to 12/1. During the sale, all hoodies will be $10 off, and all T-shirts will be $15.
Well, that’s another Week in Review in the books. Once again I’d like to express our appreciation for your support during the launch of Forza Motorsport 5. We’re all really excited about the future of the game and we look forward to sharing more great news (and more awesome racing) with you in the near future. For now, get ready for a weekend of awesome car deals in Forza 5 and we’ll see you on Monday!Update: T-Mobile has just announced that customers will be able to order the LG G5 from its online store from March 29th. Anyone who orders before April 5th will be able to claim a free LG 360 CAM, and those who buy before April 17th can get a the free battery bundle mentioned below.
Following the recent announcement that the LG G5 would be available from major US retailers in early April, Best Buy has launched pre-orders through its online store for the all-metal modular flagship.
Both AT&T and Sprint versions are available in gold, silver and titanium, but if you want pink, you’ll need to go with Sprint. And while Verizon models aren’t available to pre-order yet, Best Buy will be accepting orders for those on Thursday, March 24th.
Currently, the retailer is offering Sprint and AT&T models for a subsidized $99.99 with a two-year contract, that’s $100 off the recommended $199 on-contract price. However, customers do have the option of purchasing on an AT&T or Sprint installment plan and claim $100 back via gift card. As previously announced, customers can snag an accessories bundle when they pre-order the new device. This includes a spare battery, charging cradle and a Micro USB to USB Type-C adapter.
While Best Buy launched pre-orders in the US, LG finally announced pricing of the G5’s modular ‘Friends’ in a blog post in Korea. The Plus Cam module which adds physical camera controls and a 1,000mAh battery pack costs ₩99,000 Korean Won ($86 USD). The B&O package — which consists of the Hi-Fi Plus DAC module and H3 earphones — costs ₩289,000 Korean Won ($249 USD), and the battery pack, consisting of a spare battery and charging cradle, is ₩39,000 ($34 USD).
Sadly, the announcement doesn’t include pricing for the awesome rolling bot or the drone remote. Still, it’s interesting to see how the pricing compares between the immediately available modules.Introduction to Linear Programming with Python and PuLP
Linear Programming, also sometimes called linear optimisation, involves maximising or minimising a linear objective function, subject to a set of linear inequality or equality constraints.
It has great applications in the field of operations management but can be used to solve a range of problems.
Leonard Kantrovich was awarded the 1975 Nobel Price in Economics for the optimal allocation of resources using linear programming.
Examples of problems that can be solved by linear programming include:
Scheduling – Rota or Factory scheduling to meet production/workload demands at lowest cost
Resourcing Problems – How best to allocate resources to maximise profits
Blending Problems – Cost effectively blending a mixture of components
Sudoku
In this series of posts, we explore some linear programming examples, starting with some very basic Mathematical theory behind the technique and moving on to some real world examples.
We will be using python and the PuLP linear programming package to solve these linear programming problems. PuLP largely uses python syntax and comes packaged with the CBC solver; it also integrates nicely with a range of open source and commercial LP solvers.
This tutorial should have you up and running and solving your own linear programming problems using python in no time.
Introduction
Part 1 – Introduction to Linear Programming
Part 2 – Introduction to PuLP
Part 3 – Real world examples – Resourcing Problem
Part 4 – Real world examples – Blending Problem
Part 5 – Using PuLP with pandas and binary constraints to solve a scheduling problem
Part 6 – Mocking conditional statements using binary constraints
If you’re interested in downloading the jupyter notebooks to have a go yourself with the examples I’ve written out here, they’re all available on Github hereHey Folks,
Today you’ll be receiving our next OUYA update – so I wanted to take the time to talk about the update and how it ties into our broader goals to grow our great community and better support current/aspiring developers.
You’ll find a detailed rundown of all the new features at the bottom of this post – but first I wanted to briefly talk about our new “Developing Developers” initiative. Kellee will have her own blog post to go through all the details, so consider this a teaser.
After you run the new update, be sure to visit the MAKE section of OUYA. You’ll notice some cool, new stuff |
ously, without fear of being had up for bullying and harassment. When our department was moved from the old hospital to a newly built block at the main hospital some miles away, the entire second floor of the new building was dedicated to neurosurgery. As time passed, however, the management started to reduce our facilities and one of the neurosurgical theatres became a theatre for bariatric surgery – surgery for morbidly obese people. The corridors and rooms were starting to fill with unfamiliar faces and patients the size of small whales being wheeled past on trolleys.
How does IT help?
As she talked she typed on the keyboard and the slices of a huge black-and-white brain scan started to appear, like a death sentence, out of the dark onto the white wall in front of us. ‘You won’t believe this,’ one of the other registrars broke in. ‘I was on yesterday evening and took the call. They sent the scan on a CD but because of that crap from the government about confidentiality they sent two taxis. Two taxis! One for the fucking CD and one for the little piece of paper with the fucking encryption password! For an emergency! How stupid can you get?’ We all laughed, apart from the registrar presenting the case who waited for us to calm down. I went down to my office where I found my secretary Gail cursing her computer again while she tried to get onto one of the hospital databases. ‘This may take a while,’ I added. ‘The scans are on the computer network of your local hospital and this is then linked over the net to our system…’ As I spoke I typed on the keyboard looking for the icon for his hospital’s X-ray network. I found it and summoned up a password box. I have lost count of the number of different passwords I now need to get my work done every day. I spent five minutes failing to get into the system. I was painfully aware of the anxious man and his family watching my every move, waiting to hear if I would be reading him his death sentence or not. ‘It was so much easier in the past,’ I sighed, pointing at the redundant light-screen in front of my desk. ‘Just thirty seconds to put an X-ray film up onto the X-ray screen. I’ve tried every bloody password I know.’ I could have added that the previous week I had had to send four of the twelve patients home from the clinic without having been able to see their scans, so that the appointments had been entirely wasted and the patients made even more anxious and unhappy. ‘It’s just like this with the police force,’ the patient said. ‘Everything’s computerized and we are constantly being told what to do but nothing works as well as it used to. ‘Have you tried your password?’ ‘Yes, I bloody well have.’ ‘Well, try Mr Johnston’s. That usually works. Fuck Off 45. He hates computers.’ ‘Why forty-five?’ ‘It’s the forty-fifth month since we signed onto that hospital’s system and one has to change the password every month,’ Caroline replied. ‘When can I start?’ I asked, unhappy at being kept waiting when I had a dangerous and difficult case to do. Starting on time, with everything just right, and the surgical drapes placed in exactly the right way, the instruments tidily laid out, is an important way of calming surgical stage fright. ‘A couple of hours at least.’ I said that there was a poster downstairs saying that iCLIP, the new computer system should only keep patients waiting a few extra minutes. The anaesthetist laughed in reply. I left the room. Years ago, I would have stormed off in a rage, demanding that something be done, but my anger has come to be replaced by fatalistic despair as I have been forced to recognize my complete impotence as just another doctor faced by yet another new computer program in a huge, modern hospital.
What role does management play?
I returned to the Training and Development Centre. The second session had already started. The PowerPoint presentation now showed a slide with a long list of the Principles of Customer Service and Care. ‘Communicate effectively,’ I read. ‘Pay attention to detail. Act promptly.’ We were also advised to develop Empathy. ‘You must stay composed and calm,’ Chris the lecturer told us. ‘Think clearly and stay focused. Your emotions can affect your behaviour.’ The new chief executive for the Trust, the seventh since I had become a consultant, was especially keen on the twenty-two-page Trust Dress Code and my colleagues and I had recently been threatened with disciplinary action for wearing ties and wristwatches. There is no evidence that consultants wearing ties and wristwatches contributes to hospital infections, but the chief executive viewed the matter so seriously that he had taken to dressing as a nurse and following us on our ward rounds, refusing to talk to us and instead making copious notes. He did, however, wear his chief executive badge – I suppose just in case somebody asked him to empty a bedpan.
How does all of this affect Dr. Marsh?
Not for the first time, I thought of the trivial nature of any problems that I might have compared to my patients’ and felt ashamed and disappointed that I still worry about them nevertheless. You might expect that seeing so much pain and suffering might help you keep your own difficulties in perspective but, alas, it does not.
More: Read Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery.Programming note: due to the short game week, this week’s Charts and Decoding Langsdorf articles will be in condensed into one breakdown. Short week, short breakdown.
After a week in which Athletic Director Shawn Eichorst was sacked by the powers that be, there was yet a game to be played and the game perfectly encapsulated the rollercoaster nature synonymous thus far with the 2017 football season. A solid start followed by a stretch of doldrums was how the day unfolded, before giving way to a Nebraska offensive approach that looked directly out of 1999, with 22 personnel, the hand-off run game, and an offensive line getting into a lather. This breakdown is dedicated in your honor, #RTDB Guy.
Nebraska ran the ball 47 times out of 73 total snaps for a total of 197 yards, paced by tailback Devine Ozigbo at 101 yards. Following Ozigbo’s gritty performance were tailbacks Mikale Wilbon with 78 yards, and true freshman Jaylin Bradley with 16 yards. All told, Nebraska’s tailback triumvirate combined for 195 yards on 44 attempts, for an average yards per carry (ypc) of 4.43.
After QB Tanner Lee’s third pick-six of the season against Rutgers, the triage unit was mobilized to assess Nebraska ails and place a priority on what needed to be fixed and how. Starting on the 3 yard line at the 10:59 mark of the 3rd quarter, the plan to cure the offense’s ails was put into action by going on 17 play drive that included only one run concept being ran on 8 out of 17 plays. That play would be the nasty, resolute, and downhill play known as Gap-Duo, which we’ll hereafter refer to simply as ‘Duo’. Duo allowed Nebraska to work natural angles and double teams to their advantage, while also reducing penetration on plays involving a puller from the Rutgers defensive line.
Duo: Nebraska ran Duo a grand total of 31 times out 44 total tailback run attempts for a total of 130 yards, at 4.19 ypc. Duo is an NFL run game staple, with the Cowboys, Raiders, and Steelers all being very fond of the play. At the college level however, you’d be hard-pressed to find a team that runs Duo, let alone at the rate Nebraska does. Their loss.
Counter: Nebraska unofficially ran the Counter concept 4 times for 9 yards, for a ypc of 2.25 yards (one Counter play was blown dead due to a procedural penalty). Officially, the Huskers ran Counter 3 times for 12 yards, for 4.0 ypc.
Pin & Pull: Against the Scarlet Knights, the Huskers only dialed up ‘Steeler’ one time for no gain. For those keeping track at home, 1 attempt, 0.0 ypc.
Inside Zone: Nebraska’s usage of the Inside Zone was dependent upon utilizing the Slice variation of the play. All told ‘Slice’ accumulated 43 yards on 4 attempts, 10.75 ypc. Slice was generally utilized as the run component on Nebraska’s favorite RPO concept, which you can read about over at www.huskerchalktalk.com
Outside Zone: The Huskers dusted off the Outside Zone blocking scheme and it netted the Huskers 0 yards on 1 attempt.
Ancillary Runs: OC Danny Langsdorf did not dial up any ancillary runs against Rutgers.
Power: Yes, you read that right. For the first time since the Foster Farms Bowl against UCLA in 2015, Nebraska ran the true Power O run play, in all of its nasty, resolute, and downhill glory. For the game, Nebraska ran Power 3 times for 13 yards, an average of 4.33 ypc.
As you’ll recall from the June install of the Duo play in the Decoding Langsdorf series, Duo was referred to as “power without a puller” by offensive line coach Mike Cavanaugh at the 2016 Nebraska Coaches Clinic. By not pulling a guard and thereby gaining an extra double team on the line of scrimmage, the blocking surface hedges against any potential run-thru’s by linebackers and also mitigates any issues in lacking the personnel to pull and/or any frontside penetration issues. However, this brings us to the Decoding Langsdorf portion of this condensed breakdown, power with a puller. Power, also colloquially known as ‘God’s Play’ in some vernaculars, is typically ran to the 3 technique side in order to get a frontside double team block at the point of attack. There are two main schools of thought on Power, that differ based upon defensive response: if there is no down defender inside of the TE threatening C gap, the in-line TE (Y) will block down to the MIKE to pin him inside. If there is a down defender threatening C gap that is aligned inside of the TE, the TE will pin this defender inside and the kick-out man will block the EMOL.
On the frontside, the TE or wing player will block down to pin either MIKE or the EMOL inside, while a fullback or H-Back will kick-out either the EMOL or the force player; the latter of which is similar to Nebraska’s Lead play. The backside guard (BSG) will pull around to the POA to block #1 FSLB.
On the first play of Nebraska’s second to last drive of the game, the Huskers come out in a Formation Into Boundary (FIB) set out of 22 personnel, a contrast from Nebraska typically utilizing FIB from 11 personnel. Rutgers does not over-extend themselves to leverage the boundary, operating out of a 2 high coverage shell to better defend the field, with 7 men in the box aligned in a 3-4 Under alignment. With the 3 tech set to the field in the Under front, Nebraska is without the double team at the POA, but has the defense out-leveraged by being able to account for the both the MIKE run-thru into the open B gap with the pulling guard, while also accounting for the MIKE playing over the top into the C gap with the H-Back looking to pin him back inside.
Power is an attitude play, working angles and double teams to assert the offense’s dominance over the defense in order to punch holes into defensive fronts. For the tailback, Power is read on an inside-out tract, as he will read his ABC’s for a crease in the defense, going A gap, B gap, C gap. The logic for this is if there is a 3 tech on the frontside of Power, the double team block will eliminate the 3 from slanting into the A gap or holding his ground in the B gap, while the pulling guard will induce frontside flow toward the POA from the MIKE. If all else fails, with the 3 tech slanting to the A or holding B and the MIKE flowing frontside, the tailback will take the ball into the C gap behind either a pulling guard or the kick-out of the fullback.
In the video, you’ll see that Ozigbo takes the ball up the B gap, off of the down block of Tanner Farmer, as Farmer is able to block the 2i down*, with brief help from Brendan Jaimes on a ‘Doctor’ call. Speaking of line calls, the blocking assignments on the frontside of Power are identical to the frontside of Counter. In fact, the two plays are identical, except that the BSG pulls and wraps rather than pulls and kicks; in addition to the pathology of calling Power. Power is an attitude play that coaches love to call regardless of circumstance, but especially so when the EMOL is anchoring to the outside or flying straight up the field. Although Power resided within the pages of the Osborne Nebraska playbook, Power was rarely called due to the fact that most DE’s and EMOL’s were keying in on the QB on the option, rather than flying straight upfield or out to the perimeter.
*The Rutgers defensive line shifts just before the snap in attempt to confuse to the Husker offensive line. Center Michael Decker, in his first start, did a fantastic job of keeping everyone on the same page with the correct line calls.
Anytime a team starts the season with struggles and a less than desirable record, it always necessitates two things, a “come to Jesus” moment and a triaging of what is precipitating the struggles. Lee’s third pick six of the season may have been the come to Jesus moment of the 2017 season, while the corresponding 97 yard drive came as a result of triaging our issues and opting to work down blocks and double teams with Duo. It’s always difficult to reconcile what a coach thinks an offense can be with what an offense presently is in the here and now, but here we are. Going forward, I think that a reliance on the run, particularly Duo; paired with the quick passing game and play action, will allow the #Wideouts to get open downfield in the vertical passing game.
In conclusion, consider this article my formal application for probationary membership into the #RTDB Club, as that gives us our best recipe to win until we can troubleshoot the QB, pass pro, and lack of separation issues in the vertical passing game.
****
As you all know this week marked the passing of Corn Nation’s venerated leader, Brian Towle. Although I never met Brian in person, I conversed with him in some form or function nearly everyday for the past year. It seems like just yesterday that I was sitting in the UNO Criss Library when my phone buzzed with a Twitter direct message from Brian asking if I’d be interested in doing these breakdowns for Corn Nation. Although I had never considered doing something like this, I am glad that I did as I am deeply honored to have known Brian, if only electronically. I know that I’ll miss discussing Husker football and a wide range of topics with BT. I am indebted to the opportunity he gave me to write about the X’s and O’s of Nebraska football and for that I will forever be thankful. I always enjoyed hearing his stories about his family; Kelly, Brock, and Emerson, and they have my deepest condolences.
RIP, my friend.
GBRDonald Trump’s foundation, because it didn’t have the proper fundraising authorization, avoided annual audits that New York state requires of charities that seek the public’s money. (Molly Riley/AFP/Getty Images)
The New York attorney general disclosed Monday that it ordered Donald Trump’s personal charity to cease fundraising immediately after determining that the foundation was violating state law by soliciting donations without proper authorization.
The message was conveyed in a “notice of violation” sent Friday to the Donald J. Trump Foundation, of which Trump is president.
The night before, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s foundation — which has subsisted entirely on other people’s donations since 2008 — had failed to register with the state as a charity soliciting money.
Because of that, Trump’s foundation had avoided rigorous annual audits that New York state requires of charities that seek the public’s money. Those audits would have asked, among other things, if the foundation’s money had been used to benefit Trump or one of his businesses.
“The Trump Foundation must immediately cease soliciting contributions or engaging in any other fundraising activities in New York,” wrote James G. Sheehan, the head of the charities bureau in the office of Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D).
The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold explains why the New York Attorney General’s Office on Sept. 30 ordered the Donald J. Trump Foundation to stop fundraising immediately. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
In addition, Sheehan wrote, the Trump Foundation was ordered to supply the state with all the legal paperwork necessary to register as a charity that solicits money within 15 days.
Trump’s foundation must also look back and determine whether it violated state law in prior years by soliciting money without authorization, Sheehan wrote. If so, it must provide the financial audit reports it should have provided for those years. Those reports, Sheehan said, are also due within 15 days.
If Trump’s foundation does not comply, Sheehan wrote, it will be considered “a continuing fraud upon the people of New York.”
Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks responded in a written statement: “While we remain very concerned about the political motives behind AG Schneiderman’s investigation, the Trump Foundation nevertheless intends to cooperate fully with the investigation. Because this is an ongoing legal matter, the Trump Foundation will not comment further at this time.”
Schneiderman has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump’s rival in the presidential race.
Last month, his office launched a broader probe of the Trump Foundation after stories in The Post identified cases in which Trump appeared to have used the charity’s money to buy portraits of himself and to settle lawsuits involving his for-profit businesses. In addition, Trump’s foundation gave a $25,000 gift to a campaign committee supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R). Nonprofits such as the Trump Foundation are prohibited from giving political gifts.
Legal experts said the move to suspend the Trump Foundation’s ability to raise money is a common reaction in cases in which a charity has solicited funds without authorization.
“You have to register with the attorney general if you’re going to raise money from the public. And they’re not doing it. So this would happen to anybody,” said Daniel Kurtz, a lawyer in private practice who previously oversaw the New York attorney general’s charities bureau.
“I think this is probably pretty close to a form letter,” Kurtz said of the notice sent to Trump’s foundation.
Trump started his foundation in 1987 to give away the proceeds from his book “The Art of the Deal.” It has no paid employees and a board of five: Trump, three of his children and a longtime Trump Organization employee. They all work a half-hour per week, according to the foundation’s most recent Internal Revenue Service filing.
For years, Trump himself was the Trump Foundation’s only source of money: Between 1987 and 2006, he donated $5.4 million.
But by the end of 2006, Trump had given away almost all the money he had put in — leaving just $4,238 in the foundation’s coffers. His giving abruptly shrank and then dried up: Trump gave $35,000 in 2007, $30,000 in 2008 and then no donations at all after that, tax records show.
Instead, Trump’s name-branded charity has been sustained entirely by other people’s money. Some of those donors have not said whether Trump himself solicited their gifts.
Vince and Linda McMahon, the pro-wrestling executives, have given a total of $5 million and have declined to comment. NBCUniversal, which televised Trump’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” has declined to explain the reason behind its $500,000 gift in 2012.
But in other cases, there is evidence that Trump was involved in asking for the money or directing it to the foundation.
There was a $100,000 gift from Norwegian Cruise Lines in 2005, after Trump’s wife, Melania, served as “godmother” to a new ship. A spokeswoman for the cruise line said the Trumps helped arrange a donation to the Trump Foundation as part of that deal.
In 2011, Donald Trump appeared on a televised “roast” on Comedy Central and directed that his $400,000 appearance fee be sent to the Trump Foundation.
Trump’s foundation has also received about $1.9 million from a New York businessman named Richard Ebers, who sells high-end tickets and once-in-a-lifetime experiences to wealthy clients. Two people familiar with that arrangement said Ebers owed Trump for goods and services he had purchased — and was instructed to pay Trump’s foundation instead.
The Trump Foundation made its most wide-ranging request for donations earlier this year. After a fundraiser that Trump held for veterans in Iowa, the foundation set up a public website, www.donaldtrumpforvets.com. It took donations via credit card, and Trump said they would be passed on to veterans’ groups.
Under New York law, the foundation was supposed to obtain a special registration before it solicited gifts from the public. The law’s definition of “solicit” was quite broad: “to directly or indirectly make a request for a contribution, whether express or implied, through any medium.”
The state requires any charity that solicits $25,000 or more per year in New York to register under a provision called “7A,” for its article heading.
The most significant consequence, for a charity of the Trump Foundation’s size, would have been a requirement that it submit to annual audits by outside accountants. Trump’s charity never did.
Trump’s campaign has not said anything about why. Earlier this fall, Trump implied that he had trusted lawyers to run the foundation properly.
“Well, I hope so,” he said, when asked whether the foundation had followed the law. “I mean, my lawyers do it.”
But the Trump Foundation has reported spending very little on legal fees — at least, before this year. Between 1990 and 2014, the most recent year for which tax records are available, the foundation spent a total of $211 on lawyers.
Sean Sullivan in Pueblo, Colo., contributed to this report.In this month's On China join Kristie Lu Stout for a revealing conversation with China's leading gay rights advocates.
I'm in Two Cities Cafe, a popular meeting place for the local gay community. Here, I meet with some of the country's leading LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) advocates to learn about gay identity in China.
In the last two decades, China's LGBT community has made huge gains in social acceptance.
Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1997, and a few years later it was removed from an official list of mental illnesses.
But unlike their counterparts in the West, China's LGBT community does not have to face down strident political opposition or right-wing religious uproar.
For them, the biggest source of pressure comes from the family, brought on in part by China's one-child policy.
"You have only one child so you want your child to be as 'normal' as everybody else," says Xiaogang Wei, Executive Director of the Beijing Gender Health Education Institute.
"There's also the pressure of carrying on the family line," adds Chi Heng Foundation founder Chung To.
Fake marriages?
Many Chinese gays and lesbians are responding to the family pressure with "cooperative marriages" -- gay men and lesbian women marrying each other out of social and economic convenience, often finding each other online.
"I grew up in the 80s and 90s and most of the people my age, everyone, got into marriage -- no matter gay or straight," says Xu Bin, founder of the advocacy group Common Language.
"If you're not, you're a monster."
Despite advances, the social stigma remains immense. According to a 2013 survey by U.S. research group Pew, only 21% of China's population was in favor of the acceptance of homosexuality.
Same-sex marriage remains a taboo topic for many across China.
And a number of clinics in China offer so-called "conversion" shock treatment to "cure" homosexuality.
Earlier this year, a Beijing court heard China's first case to challenge the treatment. But a delay in the ruling has raised concerns in the gay community that clinics may continue to provide such treatments without challenge.
Discrimination
China's LGBT professionals must also contend with a lack of legal protection against discrimination at work.
"The job discrimination is very subtle and you might not get a promotion because you are single. You might get fired because of all kinds of reasons," says To.
"There's no protection."
Though China has a long way to go before its gay professionals thrive professionally in all workplaces, Chinese gay activists are encouraged by t he recent announcement by Apple CEO Tim Cook.
"I think Tim Cook's coming out of the closet is very important to the Chinese society, especially in the business world," Wei tells me.
"It also very effectively motivated people into thinking about the direct and non-direct connections between homosexual people and the products that we all use in our lives."
New generation
With these forces for change coming from both outside and inside China, the country's LGBT community is forging ahead, despite its unique set of challenges.
"For the past ten years, the most change probably came from the visibility of the LGBT community in Chinese society. For the next ten years, I would say it's the visibility of LGBT rights in China," says Xu.
As the focus shifts to a stronger call for greater rights, China's pioneering gay activists are looking to the younger generation to pick up the mantle.
"This generation is a lot more confident and self-assertive," To tells me.
"And they have more resources," adds Xu.
"In the end, I think we're fighting not just for a better situation for LGBT (people), but a better situation for all minorities and vulnerable people," says To.
Out and proud, China's gay activists are an increasingly vocal minority pushing for change that could very well reach every corner of Chinese society.Lenovo's Android update tracker has just been updated to give a timeframe when specific devices will be receiving Marshmallow, if at all. To quickly clear the air - hugely popular devices like the K3 Note and A7000/A7000 Plus will indeed be graced with an Android M firmware, just not particularly soon.
Okay, that might have been an understatement. All three models are listed for a Marshmallow release in September 2016, when Google will be gearing up to launch Android N, in all likelihood.
It's the smartphones' budget nature that may be to blame, as models up the lineup will be updated sooner. The yet-to-be-released Vibe S1 and the Vibe P1 that recently hit the shelves will get Android M in June 2016.
As of now, these 5 devices are the only ones with a confirmed Marshmallow update, the current flagship Vibe Z2 Pro (albeit a last-year model) will remain on 5.0 Lollipop for the time being.
SourceSulley Muntari could be about to perform a U-turn in regards to his AC Milan future following the arrival of new coach Sinisa Mihajlovic.
The Ghanian midfielder appeared certain to be leaving the Rossoneri during the summer transfer window after he requested to be left out of Filippo Inzaghi’s squads during the latter part of last season.
However, Sky Sport Italia reports that Muntari may now ask to remain at the club following Inzaghi’s departure last Tuesday. The website reports that the 30-year-old has been galvanised by the enthusiasm brought to Milan by Mihajlovic and the media talk of a high profile transfer campaign to strengthen the squad.
Muntari, who joined Milan from city rivals Inter in 2012, currently has another year left on his contract. He had previously insisted that he would not play for the club again because he was not in their future plans.Wenger has won three Premier Leagues and six FA Cups with Arsenal
Sam Allardyce's departure after 67 days and one game as England manager has left the Football Association sifting through the fall-out before starting the search for his successor.
The FA chose the English option in the 61-year-old as successor to Roy Hodgson after the fiasco of Euro 2016 - with disastrous results.
When the dust settles on this humiliating episode for the FA and Allardyce, might there be a temptation to go for an experienced, successful foreign candidate who was considered last time, has spent his prime years managing in the Premier League and is a global figure in the game?
Namely Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger.
Former FA chairman Greg Dyke told BBC Radio 5 live: "I'm a great fan of Arsene Wenger. If the FA could get hold of him he would be a brilliant appointment."
Would the FA be bold enough to move away from potentially easier options to attempt this coup of appointing Wenger?
Why England should go for Wenger?
Wenger celebrated his 20th anniversary as Arsenal manager in September
When Hodgson made his ignominious departure from France after England's Euro 2016 exit to Iceland in the last 16, chief executive Martin Glenn made no stipulation on his successor's nationality.
He said it would be "the best man for the job" - and the Arsenal manager's credentials easily outstrip those of the other candidates being touted as Allardyce's replacement.
At 66, Wenger might even share Allardyce's view when he was appointed that his age and experience make him the perfect fit for international management.
The "It Must Be An Englishman" lobby may find their frustration eased by the knowledge that Wenger has worked in the Premier League for 20 years, winning it three times as well as collecting six FA Cups. If it is not to be an Englishman, Wenger is effectively the next best thing.
He has managed Arsenal in 758 Premier League games, winning 438 and losing 132, a victory ratio of 57.8%. He has won 67 out of 102 FA Cup games, a win ratio of 65.7%.
He has led Arsenal for 1,128 games in total throughout his 20 years at the helm, winning 646, drawing 263 and losing 219. His teams have scored 2,084 goals and conceded 1,097. Wenger's overall win ratio throughout his Arsenal career is 57.3%.
Wenger has a world view on football and is still regarded as a principled moderniser - too married to his principles for some of his detractors - who wants his teams to play with style, pace and movement.
It is a philosophy that would surely sit easily with the FA's powerful technical director Dan Ashworth and his plans for a "DNA" to run through every England team.
Arsene Wenger with Arsenal Competition Games Win Draw Lose Win % Premier League 758 438 188 132 57.8 FA Cup 102 67 22 13 65.7 League Cup 65 37 8 20 56.9 Community Shield 8 6 1 1 75.0 Champions League 170 79 40 51 46.5 Champions League qualifying 14 13 1 0 92.9 Uefa Cup 11 6 3 2 54.5 TOTAL 1,128 646 263 219 57.3
Wenger remains an avid student of the global game. Arsenal have qualified for the Champions League for 19 consecutive seasons, although that fine record must be placed in context as Arsenal have only reached one final, a 2-1 loss to Barcelona in 2006, and have failed to get beyond the last 16 in the past six years.
He has no skeletons waiting to fall out of the cupboard and is hardly a candidate to be caught in the sort of sting that ended Allardyce's "blink and you'll miss it" England reign.
In other words, the perfect next England manager with the ideal credentials and track record if the FA can formulate a plan to somehow attract him to what many now call an impossible job.
Can England afford to wait for Wenger?
England Under-21 manager Gareth Southgate will take charge of the national team for the next four games on an interim basis
Can the FA afford not to wait for Wenger if there is the slightest chance he might succeed Allardyce?
The usual suspects are already in place as potential replacements, from England Under-21 coach Gareth Southgate, to Bournemouth's Eddie Howe, Steve Bruce (who is currently without a club) and Crystal Palace manager Alan Pardew.
Southgate, 46, has been handed control for England next's four games, starting with the World Cup qualifier at home to Malta on 8 October and a trip to Slovenia three days later.
He will then oversee the qualifying game with 'Auld Enemy' Scotland at Wembley on 11 November before a home friendly against Spain.
England's next competitive game is then a meeting with Lithuania at Wembley on 26 March before the return with Scotland on 10 June.
Are England likely to do too much damage to their chances of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup in Russia before next summer, when Wenger's Arsenal contract expires? Scotland will be tough but England will feel confident.
If there was ever a time the FA might feel it is worth biding its time and waiting for an experienced manager who ticks just about every box, this may well be it.
Southgate will get first crack at making a case to succeed Allardyce. He said in early September he did not feel he was ready for the job, but could World Cup qualifying victories prove intoxicating for a man ingrained in the way the FA thinks - and indeed for the FA itself?
If Southgate still feels he is not ready, what better way to prepare and serve the remainder of his international apprenticeship than to work under Wenger with the full England team?
And the same could apply to Howe. If the FA feels Howe is a potential candidate, could it not help the line of succession by asking Howe and Bournemouth if he could work with Wenger?
There is clearly already trust between the pair as Wenger was happy to allow Jack Wilshere to join the Cherries on a season-long loan.
What are the pitfalls?
Arsenal's win against Chelsea proved they are serious title contenders this season
The unfailingly loyal Wenger is currently under contract to Arsenal - and he simply refuses to break contracts - for one more season so he is unlikely to want to discuss England business until that contract expires.
It may require the FA to play a long game if they want to end up with Wenger as the next England manager.
Arsenal have recovered from an indifferent start to the season to win four Premier League games in succession, with the 3-0 win over Chelsea on Saturday night an echo, at times, of their great performances under Wenger.
If Arsenal are successful this season, Wenger may well feel he has no wish to leave Emirates Stadium with things starting to stir again.
The relationship of some Arsenal fans with Wenger has become strained, perhaps understandably given they have not won the title since "The Invincibles" season of 2003-04 and have seen others, such as Manchester City, emerge to usurp their superiority.
Wenger, however, retains strong support from many Arsenal fans and total backing in the boardroom.
If the FA did decide to at least consider Wenger, they would have a fight on their hands with the Arsenal hierarchy, who want their manager to commit to another contract.
Arsenal, with owner Stan Kroenke a staunch supporter of Wenger, still hope he will sign an extension sooner rather than later.
Much depends now on how Arsenal progress this season and whether Wenger faces any unrest from their fans. If the Gunners continue to progress and finally mount that overdue title challenge, the chances of him making a further commitment to the club will increase.
The FA will also undoubtedly face calls from many to appoint an Englishman, not simply from a nationalistic point of view but also to give a very clear signal of hope to the young coaches it wishes to nurture at St George's Park.
Would that be served by the appointment of a 66-year-old French coach?
This is why Southgate, if he wants the job, and 38-year-old Howe will be strong contenders. If one is appointed, he will have provided a route map for the younger generation being groomed in the seclusion of Staffordshire.
The Wenger strategy would also carry an element of a gamble for the FA - imagine the frustration if it sets its sights on Wenger, played the long game and then ended up missing out? The stakes are high after the Allardyce fiasco.
So many factors will have to fall into place and many will have to be convinced - including Wenger - before he can be entertained as a potential England manager.
The FA must decide if he is worth the wait and the trouble. Wenger's pedigree suggests he is.
Who are the rivals?
The names in the frame are predictable and sure to come under consideration from the FA - Southgate, Howe, Bruce and Pardew.
None can touch Wenger's record of success, despite the relatively fallow period of the last decade, but all are English and all will find support in some quarters.
Bruce was interviewed and impressed when Hodgson resigned. He, in many ways, would represent a similar choice to Allardyce given his age, experience around the leagues, his battle-hardened outlook and shrewd approach to man management.
Southgate and Howe represent the younger generation and will satisfy those wanting to make a stronger, more direct link between the England manager and the future importance of St George's Park as the FA's hub.
Do any compare to Wenger in terms of experience and achievements? No.
And this is one of the factors the FA must weigh up as it attempts to avoid a repeat of the chaos that has swamped the organisation this week.Guests: Sara Schaefer Sara Schaefer Guests: Will Weldon Will Weldon Guests: Nat Luurtsema Nat Luurtsema Guests: David Reed David Reed Guests: Dave Holmes Dave Holmes
Sara Shaefer, Will Weldon, Nat Luurtsema and David Reed join host, Dave Holmes for post-Olympic pop culture quizzing, back to school records from either side of the Atlantic and re-boot pitches for Mad Max and Call the Midwife.
Sara Shaefer wants to plug her comedy album Chrysalis and says you can hear about her upcoming projects via Twitter – she's @SaraShaefer1. Sara recommends Rory Scovel's special on Seeso and Lindy West's latest book, Shrill.
Will Weldon wants to plug the podcast he makes with Eliza Skinner, Angry Little Goats. Will recommends Hidden America with Jonah Ray on Seeso.
Nat Luurtsema wants to |
only ask," Taylor said. "I don't card them. I don't ask for a birth certificate."
Taylor said he had "no beef" with the girl.
"I'll take my punishment like I should, but my problem is at home with my wife, so that's really the only one I have to answer to," he said in the interview.
How did he get in the situation in the first place? Smith asked.
"It happens sometimes," Taylor said. "I'd been on the road 10 or 11 days and I came in to town. Actually, I made a phone call to a friend of mine, and he made a phone call."
Taylor said he has used the services of prostitutes in the past, especially between 1994 and 2001, when he was not married.
"I'm not looking for a relationship. Hey, sometimes I look for some company," Taylor said. "It's all clean. I don't have to worry about your feelings. It's all clean. I'm not saying it's right. It's the oldest profession in the world."
But right or wrong, Taylor appears to not consider prostitution a serious crime.
"I guess you call it a crime," he said during the interview. "It's one of those crimes you don't think about. You never think you're gonna get busted because everyone does it until you get busted, and then it's more embarrassing than anything else."If you want to watch your favorite team on Pac-12 Networks, it's time to drop DirecTV.
That's the simple message Pac-12 Networks is sending to fans with its new campaign comparing the Pac-12 programming you'll find on DirecTV (sparse) versus what you'll get on Pac-12 Networks (alllll over it).
The 30-second spots are pretty funny, if we do say so ourselves. You can watch all 12 of them -- one for each school -- below. Similar ads are set to roll out on billboards, in newspapers and magazines, online and on social media over the next couple weeks.
Check out Pac-12 Networks' press release for more details on the campaign. And use our Switch Page to drop DirecTV and choose one of the many providers that carry Pac-12 Networks.
Click each image to see the spot for your school:
Arizona
Arizona State
California
Colorado
Oregon
Oregon State
Stanford
UCLA
USC
Utah
Washington
Washington StateSaturday Night Live’s Twin Peaks parody is a classic and must-see sketch for all Twin Peaks fans. It was included on the Definitive Gold Box Edition.
The spoof aired as part of the first episode of SNL’s 16th season on September 29 1990, one night before the David Lynch directed season two première. It was co-written by David Spade and Rob Schneider and it was Chris Farley’s first SNL appearance (playing Leo Johnson). Other cast members were Phil Hartman as Leland Palmer, Jan Hooks as Nadine Hurley and The Log Lady, Victoria Jackson as Audrey Horne, Mike Myers as Man from Another Place, and Conan O’Brien as Deputy Andy Brennan.
And last but not least, Kyle MacLachlan himself as Special Agent Dale Cooper, who summarized the spoof as “Everybody knew who killed Laura Palmer, except for Coop.”
Diane, 11:31 pm. Just finished washing up and ready for bed. This morning, I showered for nine minutes. Found seventeen hairs; three curly, fourteen straight. I used the Balsalm shampoo along with the conditioner courtesy of the hotel and delivering what it promised. A silky manageability. Cotton towel by Field Crest with just the right amount of absorbency. Consumed fifteen doughnuts today, Diane. All jelly. I’ll be injecting my insulin in four minutes. Diane, slept great last night. Got to find out what kind of sheets these are; not cotton, not rayon, silky. Damn fine sheets. I’m gonna get naked and slide around in them.
Kyle MacLachlan said that during rehearsals, the cast kept asking if they were getting their characters right. What do you think? Did they nail it?The CNN sign is seen outside its New York City headquarters on Nov. 12, 2002. Mario Tama/Getty Images
The Trump administration is uncannily skilled at being its own worst enemy. In the run-up to the first anniversary of his election this week, the degree to which President Trump has attacked democratic institutions was dissected in a thousand op-eds. And the line that was emerging in many of them was surprisingly sympathetic to him: Though Trump blusters in outrageous ways, the emerging consensus holds, he doesn’t seem to walk his talk. Once we stop paying attention to his Twitter feed and start to look at cold hard facts, it becomes obvious that American democracy is holding up perfectly well.
Just in time to complicate this narrative, the administration is making yet another attempt to remind people just how willing it is to violate the most basic democratic norms when the opportunity arises. After months in which the president has continually attacked CNN as “fake news” for reporting critically on him, the Department of Justice is demanding that Time Warner Inc. sell the news network in order to merge with AT&T Inc. In other words, the administration has decided that a major U.S. corporation will only be allowed to pursue a lucrative business venture if it divests itself from one of the president’s most powerful critics.
This fits the pattern of authoritarian subversion of liberal democracy to a well-nigh comical degree. In every country in which populist leaders have done grievous damage to democratic institutions, from Hungary to Venezuela, one of their very first steps has been to capture state institutions that are supposed to be independent. As soon as they got into power, they appointed loyal cronies to run everything from tax authorities to electoral commissions. And once these cronies were safely ensconced in their new roles, the regime consistently used the seemingly bland apparatus of the regulatory state to punish opponents.
Seen from this perspective, then, the ruling by the DOJ is not the small, complicated issue as which it is being treated in much of the press. On the contrary, it is a huge red flag that suggests the Trump administration seems willing to use all the power it has to reward its friends and punish its enemies.
But might there not be a reasonable justification for opposing the merger between Time Warner and AT&T? And isn’t the burgeoning antitrust movement right to point out that the growing number of corporate monopolies is a huge drag on the American economy?
There are two answers to these questions: one legal and one moral.
The legal answer is that the Department of Justice seems to be breaking with precedent in a very surprising way. For a merger to violate antitrust law, the two merged entities have traditionally needed to be direct competitors. This makes a certain amount of economic sense: If AT&T merged with Verizon, the number of major cell carriers would decline. It would be easier for the remaining providers to demand higher prices from their customers. This is why it is in the public interest to stop such oligopolies from forming in the first place.
But the same problem does not arise when two large corporations that are active in different markets merge. Since Time Warner’s core business is providing cable access and television entertainment while AT&T’s core business is to provide cellphone coverage, a merger between them would not reduce competition; after all, the two companies are not in direct competition in the first place. It is therefore much more difficult to make a case that outlawing their merger is in the public interest. In other words, the legal case for demanding the sale of CNN is weak indeed.
The moral answer is just as important as the legal one—and just so happens to point in the same direction.
One of the most important principles of liberal democracy is that justice doesn’t just need to be done; it also needs to be seen as being done. Let’s say a government official needs to hire a consultant for a lucrative position. Even if his daughter is the most qualified person for the job, hiring her would give the impression of a conflict of interest. This, according to standard government ethics rule, is in itself a reason why he shouldn’t hire her.
The same principle is in play here and it would hold even if we should, as people like Zephyr Teachout have powerfully argued over the past years, try to expand antitrust law. In Teachout’s view, giant corporate conglomerates have advantages over other competitors that render the market uncompetitive in much more complicated ways than the standard jurisprudence of the past few decades has recognized. This means that there are good grounds for opposing the merger between Time Warner and AT&T. But would there also be a good case for a president who has loudly criticized a particular media company to require its sale as a condition of such a merger?
No. For one, Teachout’s basic case for opposing the merger between Time Warner and AT&T would hold even if CNN were to be sold; requiring Time Warner to sell CNN as a condition of the merger thus doesn’t make much sense. For another, even if anti-monopoly activists should somehow be less worried about the merger so long as CNN was not part of the new conglomerate, Trump’s unseemly bashing of the network would clearly make that condition look like a form of retaliation. Justice would not be seen to be done, and the possibility of negative consequences would be substantial: Fearing a similar fate, media companies might decide to go easy on the president from now on. Indeed, even completely different companies that have reason to fear that completely different parts of the regulatory state might one day be used against them might then be cowed into submission on any number of issues.
A full year into Trump’s presidency, we are still dangerously tempted to think that any risk to liberal democracy must come in the form of jackboots and swastikas. But this is not how modern democracies have typically begun to die; on the contrary, the erosion of liberal democracy in countries like Hungary and Venezuela has often taken the form of exactly the kind of bureaucratic gambit in which the DOJ is now engaging.
To be sure, one such instance of what we might call “bureaucratic authoritarianism” will hardly be enough to bring the American Republic to heel. Though the DOJ’s request is outrageous, it is unlikely to result in the sale of CNN. And even if it does, there are still plenty of other excellent media organizations around to pick up the slack. But even though it is unlikely to destroy our freedoms from one day to the next, we should recognize this serious violation of democratic norms for what it is: a thinly veiled power grab that could be the beginning of something much more dangerous if we allow it to succeed.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
HERRIMAN, Utah -- Police are asking for help identifying a pair of suspects wanted in connection with a package theft that escalated into a shooting in Herriman Wednesday.
According to a press release from Unified Police Department, the crime occurred around 11:23 a.m. in Herriman in the area of 5200 South and Ambermount Drive.
A passerby saw two people stealing packages and took photos of the suspect vehicle and then began to follow the car to provide additional information to police.
As the witness followed the suspect vehicle, a male passenger leaned out of the window with a black handgun and fired one round at the witness. The shot was fired in the area of 14806 South Juniper Crest Road.
The witness was not hit by the bullet but stopped pursuing the suspects. Unified Police called the incident an attempted criminal homicide in their press release.
Anyone who recognizes the vehicle or the suspects is asked to call UPD at 801-743-7000. Police say the suspects should be considered armed and dangerous.
One suspect is described as a white male who was wearing a black baseball cap and who had short hair.
The other suspect is a white female who has long dark brown hair. She was wearing a black sweat shirt or hoodie with a green hood.
The vehicle is an early 2000s model of Chevy Impala in egg-shell white with a green and blue colored out-of-state license plate.Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup incubator that helped Airbnb and Dropbox get their starts, is launching a nonprofit research organization dedicated to work on long-term problems that venture-backed businesses aren't good at solving. YC Research, as the group will be called, will work on more "open-ended questions," its website says, along with technologies "that shouldn't be owned by any one company."
Sam Altman, who leads Y Combinator, kickstarted the research group with $10 million of his own money. "At the risk of sounding cliché, this is for the benefit of the world," Altman wrote in a blog post. "As we've seen throughout history, new technological breakthroughs help all of us. Fundamental research is critical to driving the world forward, and funding for it keeps getting cut." In a nice twist, intellectual property generated by the researchers will be given away freely. The initial group of 10 researchers will be announced shortly, Altman said, and YC Research will seek additional funding from investors.
YC Research is an homage of sorts to Bell Labs, the storied incubator credited with developing the transistor, the laser, and UNIX, among other things. "We thought it would be fun as an experiment to try to create that environment today," Altman told The Information. It's also reminiscent of Google X, the experimental lab recently spun off into new parent company Alphabet. In any case, Altman says he's in it for the long haul — Y Combinator expects some of its research to take 25 years or more, he said.Michael Collins leaving 10 Downing Street during treaty negotiations between representatives of Sinn Fein and the British government which resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921.
Robert Mulhern compiles a list of the 100 moments which define the history of the Irish in Britain
Robert Mulhern
1. “It’s a sell-out to Dublin,” says Ian Paisley. But Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and British prime minister John Major believe it’s about self-determination and sign the Downing Street Declaration on December 15, 1993.
2. “It wasn’t an ordinary boxer that beat him that night but a world champion.” Loftus Road on June 8, 1985. Barry McGuigan beats Eusebio Pedroza to win the WBO World Featherweight Title and pays an emotional tribute to Young Ali who died from injuries sustained in a bout with the Clones man in 1982.
3. “It was Christmas Eve babe…” Shane MacGowan and Kirsty McColl duet and Fairytale of New York by the Pogues reaches Number 2 in the British charts. The song goes on to become one of the greatest Christmas hits of all time. It’s December 1987.
4. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!” Rises the chant from the ranks of striking British miners following an IRA bomb attack on the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton. Five people die in the blast and 34 are injured. It’s October 12, 1984.
5. “One cannot expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of Fenian emissaries.” Karl Marx, then living in London, reacts to the hanging of Fermanagh man Michael Barrett for his part in the Clerkenwell bombing. Barrett is the last person to be publicly hanged in Britain on May 26, 1868.
6. “People are dying NOW. Give us the money NOW.” Live on the BBC, Bob Geldof appeals for donations to fight African famine as the great and the good of the music industry comes together for Live Aid on July 13, 1985.
7. “You’ll never beat the Irish.” The Republic of Ireland soccer team beat England 2-0 in a friendly international and become the first foreign side to beat England at home. September 21, 1949.
8. “You must not laugh at me, darling, but it has always been a girlish dream of mine to love a man named Ernest.” The Importance of being Earnest by Oscar Wilde is performed for the first time in London’s St James Theatre in February 1895.
9. Ireland divided: The family of a 14-year-old girl who falls pregnant after a rape attack, travels to Britain for an abortion after being cleared to do so by a Supreme Court ruling. The X Case establishes the right to an abortion if a woman’s life is believed to be at risk because of pregnancy, including the risk of suicide. It’s 1992.
10. “I’m feelin supersonic, give me gin and tonic, you can have it all but how much do you want it?” Born and raised in Manchester to Irish parents, Liam and Noel Gallagher have ambitions for more than just cigarettes and alcohol. The brothers release their first single as Oasis. It’s April 1994.
11. “It’s a stepping-stone.” Michael Collins justifies signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty, December 6, 1921.
12. “Before, I would see lovely T-shirts and not be able to put them on the boys because they were conjoined.” Angie Benhaffaf, the mother of conjoined Irish twins Hassan and Hussein ponders future fashion detail. Her boys were separated after 14 hours of surgery in Great Ormond Street hospital. Oh, and the surgeon was Irish too.
13. Liam is coming err, home! London, yes LONDON, win the 1901 All-Ireland Senior hurling championship. Liam McCarthy, whose name still adorns the cup, was born to Irish parents in the British capital in the 1850s.
14. Health Kick: Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is formed in July 1948 and goes on to become a pillar of employment for emigrating Irish nurses.
15. The fashion police might have been after him for wearing his glasses upside down…but then like the rest of us, they were probably too busy watching the drama unfold. In front of a record television audience of 18.5 million, Denis Taylor beats Steve Davis to become the 1985 World snooker champion. His finger wagging celebration becomes the stuff of legend.
16. Come on over to my place: Tony Blair invites Gerry Adams to a meeting in Downing Street – the first for a Sinn Féin leader since Collins visited in 1921.
17. “Burn everything British but their coal.” Ireland and Britain agree to abolish high trade tariffs created by the Anglo-Irish Economic War. The Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement is signed. It’s April 1938.
18. “I am deeply sorry.” British prime minister David Cameron apologies for Bloody Sunday killings in June 2010.
19. “Who put the ball in the English net? Houghton. Houghton! Not this time. It’s March 1991 and the diminutive midfielder misses a great second-half goal opportunity against England in Wembley. Earlier, Niall Quinn scored a much-celebrated equaliser during the countries Euro ’92 qualifier match.
20. Have one on me! David Cameron commits to a £6 billion bailout loan for Ireland. November 2010.
21. “And as I went home on a Monday night, as drunk as drunk could be…” The Dubliners perform Seven Drunken Nights on Top of the Pops in 1967.
22. Get your head down John. February 1991 and the IRA launches a mortar attack on Downing Street as prime minister John Major meets with his cabinet to discuss the crisis in the Gulf.
23. Exiles Abú! Cheers fly and tears fall as the final whistle sounds in Dr Hyde Park, Roscommon. London have held off Leitrim’s second-half fight back to win through to the 2013 Connacht final.
24. “He’s a national treasure.” But to which country does this treasure belong? Terry Wogan takes over the Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2 in April 1972 and so begins an institution.
25. “The menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality” says a 1923 report sent to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
26. “They race to the line…and the mare’s beginning to get up…and as they come to the line…she’s made it!” Dawn Run and jockey Jonjo O’Neill win the 1986 Cheltenham Gold Cup. The mare becomes the first in history to win the Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup.
27. Baby steps soon become Boy after U2 travel to London to perform their first ever gig outside of Ireland. December 1979.
28. Lazarus wouldn’t have done it better… had he played golf. Padraig Harrington wins the 2007 British Open in Carnoustie after surviving a calamitous finish which saw the Dubliner hit twice into the Barry Burn. “A huge amount of it was genuine shock,” he said afterwards.
29. “I’m going out the front door with Gerry.” Is the line made famous by the hit move In the Name of the Father but Paul Hill did go out the front door with Gerry Conlon after the convictions against the Guildford Four were reversed in 1989.
30. “When boyhood’s fire was in my blood, I read of ancient freemen.” A Nation Once Again, written in the 1840s by Thomas Davis, and made famous by the Wolfe Tones, is voted the greatest pop song of all time by listeners to the BBC’s World Service in 2002. An act of sabotage? Never!
31. Winged wonders: Simon Geoghegan scores the winning try as Ireland record a famous rugby victory over England in Twickenham. February 1994.
32. Sometimes winger swervin’ Girvin Dempsey scores in the opposite corner 10-years later as Ireland beat then world champions England in Twickenham. They were 10-1 outsiders to do so! Not many had them backed.
33. Chasing down Elvis. Irish boy band Westlife score their 14 British Number 1 with their hit single Rose. But they are still seven behind the King. November 2006
34. “Where did it all go wrong George?” The Belfast winger scores in Manchester United’s 4-1 victory over Benfica in Wembley and beats a promiscuous path that brings sport into the world of celebrity. So where did it all go wrong George! It’s May 1968.
35. READ ALL ABOUT IT: New Irish Post Editor Brendan McLua appears on a talk show with Roy Hattersley MP and duly celebrates the arrival of a newspaper for the Irish in Britain. The year is 1970.
36. “Ehhhhh, can you take the 8 o’clock mass Father?” for the first time, Dermot Morgan, aka Father Ted, welcomes the world the living room of Craggy island parochial house and laughter echoes beyond the island for three cheery years and 25 Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews inspired episodes. First broadcast Channel 4, April 21, 1995.
37. “Reid has been brought down by Kevin Moran and it has to be a booking at the very least.” But even commentator John Motson was surprised by the referee’s decision to send the Irish international off. The decision was the first of its kind in an FA Cup final. Manchester United go on to win 1-0. It’s 1985.
38. “It was agony to write.” Edna O’Brien reflects on her ground-breaking first novel Country Girls which tells an Irish story of repression and sexual liberation. The book was first published in Britain in 1960.
39. “Read the Bible. The Bible is always right.” July 2003 and Father Neil Horan gets out among the traffic at the F1 Grand Prix in Silverstone holding aloft a placard emblazoned with the above message. Police on duty contest his message and arrest the dancing priest.
40. “No Irish. No Blacks. No Dogs.” Sex Pistol’s frontman and Irishman John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, sheds a bit of light on the Irish working classes in North London in his autobiography published in 1993.
41. “It makes me feel that you’re the only girl in the world…” Rihanna provides the soundtrack and Katie Taylor provides the punches as the Bray girl boxes her way to Olympic Gold in London’s Excel Arena in August 2012.
42. “Can you give me a lift across the river, Mr Frog asks Mr Scorpion?” British soldier Forest Whitaker gives IRA captor Stephen Rea an insight into the human condition in Neil Jordan’s controversial thriller The Crying Game released in October 1992.
43. Pop pop, pop music, everybody let’s talk about pop pop pop pop music: 2001 and Music mogul Louis Walsh appears on UK TV talent show Popstars and well, he’s been a fixture of Britain’s entertainment landscape ever since.
44. “It would be unfair to describe this as a failure of security. It was a failure of humanity.” Met Police Commissioner Paul Condon reacts to the IRA attack on London’s Docklands in 1996. A 500kg bomb is detonated killing two people and causing £100m worth of damage.
45. “He was a brilliant fighter, in fact an excellent fighter, and he was a gentleman outside the ring as well.” Boxer James Degale mourns the loss of Olympic bronze medallist Darren Sutherland who is found dead in his flat in Bromley.
46. “THIS IS YOUR LIFE.” How many times did Irish broadcaster Eamon Andrews say that between 1955 and his death in 1987?
47. OH AHH… The Black Pearl of Inchicore, Paul McGrath wins the 1993 PFA player of the year award with Aston Villa. Who said anything about dodgy knees?
48. Hold 2010 for a minute in the London Olympics of 1908, 17 Irish athletes won 21 medals competing under foreign flags. Chalk it down.
49. Roddy Doyle Ha Ha Ha, the Dubliners Novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha wins the prestigious Booker Prize award in 1993.
50. We’re all part of Jackie’s army. The 1966 England World Cup winner Jack Charlton succeeds Eoin Hand as Republic of Ireland football manager…Que Sera Sera… The Year is 1986.
53. The Birmingham Six see their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal
51. “I am confident that my death will do more to smash the British Empire than my release.” Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney assesses the impact of his demise while on hunger strike in Brixton Prison. It’s 1920.
52. Green Gunners: Which English soccer team is best associated with Ireland? Liverpool or Manchester United? What about the Arsenal team of the early 1980s, you know, the one with Liam Brady, Frank Stapleton, David O’Leary, Pat Rice, Pat Jennings, Sammy Nelson and John Devine. Forgotten! Not around the green part of Archway.
53. Error of Judgement: The title of Chris Mullin’s ground-breaking book which supported the claims of innocence made by the Birmingham Six. Two years later on March 14, 1991, Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIIkenny, William Power and John Walker had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal.
54. The Bhoys arrive in town: It’s November 1887 and an Irish Marist Brother called Walfrid organises a meeting in Glasgow to form a charitable club…79 years later Celtic become the first British football club to win the European Cup. It’s 1967.
55. “That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today. Those who governed in London at the time failed their people.” June 1997 and Prime Minister Tony Blair issues a statement of apology for Britain’s part in the Great Irish Famine.
56. “Six minutes into the game the referee came to me as captain and said get the players off the pitch.” Liverpool FC’s Ronnie Whelan recalls the moment a football match became one Britain’s greatest peacetime disasters claiming 96 lives. It’s April 1989, Hillsborough.
57. Daring Dev: Often characterised as devious or divisive, the future Irish Taoiseach Eamon De Valera displays another trait beginning with the letter D. He makes good on his escape from Lincoln Jail in 1919 and pushes through the Irish Constitution.
58. Low lie the Fields of Anfield Road: Irish supporters descend on Liverpool for the 1995 European Championship play-off match against Holland. Paddy Kluivert hits the net twice and it’s all over for Ireland and manager Jack Charlton.
59. “My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.” In his own imitable style, Terence Alan Patrick Sean ‘Spike’ Milligan explains that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. The comedian becomes a household name after creating the Goon Show in the ‘50s.
60. Cup of the old Rosie Lee please Mam – Buckingham Palace in 1993 and Mary Robinson chats with Queen Elizabeth II over a brew. The President becomes the first Irish head-of-state to meet a British monarch on an official visit.
61. “It’s not a matter of life of death it’s more important than that.” The immortal words of Bill Shankly but it was Irish professional footballer turned author Eamon Dunphy who got to the nub of just how important in his critically acclaimed Only A Game, a personal diary of Millwall’s 1973-74 season.
62. “Twas in the year of ‘thirty-nine when the sky was full of lead, when Hitler was heading for Poland and Paddy for Holyhead.” Contractor Sir Robert McAlpine becomes part of Irish folklore in Dominic Behan’s 1960s ballad McAlpine’s Fusiliars. McAlpine said on his deathbed in 1934: “If the men wish to honour my death, allow them two minutes’ silence; but keep the big mixer going, and keep Paddy behind it.”
63. O Sister Where Art Thou? Irish lesbian ex-nun Anna Nolan rocks the establishment when she appears in the first ever series of the hit reality TV show Big Brother. The following year Kildare man Brian Dowling goes one better and is crowned the winner.
64. “Iceberg dead ahead.” After leaving Southampton in April 14, 1912, The Belfast built Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic causing the deaths of over 1500 people.
65. Nice little Par 3: Ronan Rafferty, Des Smyth and Eamon Darcy win golf’s Dunhill Cup in St Andrews in 1988.
66. Mayfield on Manchester: It’s 1993 and Roy Keane joins Manchester United for a British transfer record of £3.75m. He goes on to become the most successful captain in the club’s history, winning nine major honours. Oh, and there was that infamous tackle on Alf-Inga Haaland.
67. “I would not say he was slurring his words but he was on his way to being very drunk. He was getting louder and louder.” A guest at a Christmas reception in the Irish Embassy in London recalls the hours before the Bishop of Southwark hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. The next day it was reported that the Rt Revered had clambered into a stranger’s Mercedes after leaving the reception. He faced his congregation the next day sporting a black eye. It’s December 2006.
69. Charlie’s an angel: There’s no slurring of words when Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall make an historic first visit to the Irish Embassy in London November 2010.
70. “Where did you meet her? I met her in the Galtymore.” The venue on Cricklewood Broadway was famous long before Brendan Shine sang those words. But they would never again leak from the walls of the old building. The Galtymore closes its doors for the last time in May 2008.
71. Happiness is home-made: Father and son, Ted (trainer) and Ruby Walsh (jockey) steer their racehorse Papillion safety around the 4.5mile Aintree Grand National circuit and into the record books. It’s 2000.
72. “To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.” Oscar Wilde, telling it like only he can.
73. “People say the customer is always right, but you know what – they’re not. Sometimes they are wrong and they need to be told so.” The ideology that changed modern air-travel. Michael O’Leary is appointed chief executive of Ryanair in 1994.
74. “It wasn’t an act of God but an act of Guinness.” Brendan Behan generates huge publicity when he appears drunk on the Malcolm Muggeridge TV Show to promote his new play The Quare Fellow. Irish American actor Jackie Gleeson was a guest on the show too, and made the above observation. The year is 1956.
75. Last call for alcohol: After almost 70 years, the Guinness brewery in London’s Park Royal rolls out its last barrel of the black stuff. All future kegs will come from St James’s Gate in Dublin. It’s 2004…Stout and About has yet to land in Britain!
76. “It’s unbelievable. I’ll probably be talking babble for the next five minutes.” Normally demure coach Declan Kidney reacts to Ireland first Grand Slam victory in 61 years. There were moments: Tommy Bow’s searing try, Brian O’Driscoll’s scrambled effort, Ronan O’Gara’s super-cool-match-winning-dropped-goal…there had to be.
77. “We don’t have stars in this game, Mrs Weaver, that’s soccer.” Richard Harris assumes the role of uncompromising Rugby League star Frank Machin for one of the greatest sport’s movies of all time – This Sporting Life (1963).
78. Long before Big Bob Casey: 75 years after William Webb Ellis stuffed a ball under his arm and high-tailed it down a sport’s field, the Exiles of London established their own rugby club in Sunbury on Thames. They’d noisy neighbours – London Welsh and London Scottish.
79. “I’m an atheist, thank God.” David Tynan O’Mahony, aka Dave Allen built a much of his reputation as a comic on his disdain for religion. The Dubliner first appeared on New Faces in 1959 and was regarded as Britain’s most controversial comedian at the height of his career in the ‘80s. He died in 2005.
80. “The world owes me a living…” Dublin Band the Boomtown Rats perform on Top of the Pops for the first time with their single: Looking after No. 1. The year was 1977, but the band had changed their outlook by the time Live Aid rolled around in 1985.
81. “What keeps me here is the reek o’beer, the ladies and the craic…” The Crown Pub on Cricklewood Broadway was a focal point for the Irish in Northwest London. But after pints there was work to be done on jobs up and down the country.
82. The Gorgeous Gael Jack Doyle misses out on the British Heavyweight title to the holder, Jack Petersen from Wales. Spectators later claimed that Doyle had done most of his warming up in a pub not far from the bout. It’s 1933
83. The King of Camp: Corkonian Graham Norton appears on BBC Radio 4’s Loose Ends in the early 90s before breaking into the mainstream as Father Noel Furlong in the hit comedy Father Ted. “Now let’s see who can screech the loudest!”
84. “I played in their once. What, in a band or something Gerry?” Some find it hard to believe, others still don’t know about the GAA matches which graced Wembley Stadium annually. The first contest took place in 1958.
85. “Most pop stars have to be dead before they reach the iconic status he has reached in his lifetime.” So said The Independent newspaper of the Smith’s lyricist and solo artist Morrissey. The Mancunian Irishman is widely credited with launching indie music. His 1988 solo album Viva Hate entered the UK charts at No. 1.
86. King Ken: Gardai in Dublin report one of their quietest nights and for explanation, point across the Irish Sea at the exploits of Irish snooker ace Ken Doherty at the Crucible in Sheffield. The Dubliner defeated Stephen Hendry to be crowned world champion on May 5, 1997.
87. They came from the planet Zog. Zig and Zag, one of Ireland’s most famous double acts, find fame on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast show in 1992.
88. “One thing she had in abundance was physical courage; with that she was clothed as with a garment.” Playwright Sean O’Casey celebrates Countess Markievicz, the first woman elected to the British House of Commons. She abstained of course, as per Sinn Féin’s policy. It’s 1918.
89. Here’s Johnny! Don Revie builds a team around John Giles and Leeds United are officially crowned Division 2 champions on Saturday April 25, 1964. Don’t mention Brian Clough.
90. “Give Ireland back to the Irish.” Nationalists find an ally in Paul McCartney who wrote the aforementioned song to draw attention to the plight of Northern Ireland. The single is released in February 25, 1972 and sneaks into the British Top 20. In Ireland it goes straight to No. 1.
91. It’s not just about Katie! Boxers John Joe Nevin, Paddy Barnes and Michael Conlon are presented with silver and two bronze medals at the London Olympic Games. Over in the Equestrian Arena, Cian O’Connor is awarded bronze, but there’s no medal for his horse Blue Loyd. August 2012.
92. April 10 1998: Prime Minister Tony Blair flies into Northern Ireland to sign the Good Friday Agreement.
93. “Now is the time to bet like men.” Racing commentator Richard Baerlein encourages punters to back Shergar for the Derby after the colt wins the Guardian Classic Trail by 10 lengths. He’s backed from 8-1 to odds-on favourite come race-day in Epson, 1981.
94. “I don’t know how people can hate two nice young kids from Ireland.” Louis Walsh asks: where is the love? John and Edward Grimes begin their rise as Jedward in 2009.
95. Third time lucky: Scrumhalf Peter Stringer breaks down the blind-side from a five-metre scrum; a packed Patrick Street in Limerick flashes up on the big screen of Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium…Munster win the European Cup, May 2006, having suffered two previous |
lights, riding on footpaths, going the wrong way up one-way streets and many other dangerous practices, I have really big concerns that the suggestion is just an empty gesture.
I also don't how you would ever convince - or make it convenient for - riders of the Dublin Bikes and other schemes to wear fluorescent jackets and helmets. And if they are excused, how could you possibly make it an offence for others?
There was also talk of making pedestrians wear fluorescent clothing. Of course, that won't become a reality but there could be a real move to get more people to wear high-vis jackets, especially at night, when they are out walking on roads where there are no footpaths.
The time of those publicans who are worried about losing their customers because of drink-driving regulations would be better spent buying a whole load of high-vis jackets and then having a duty of care that no-one goes out walking home at night or on a dusky afternoon without putting one on.
Sunday IndependentEusebio's stellar football career for club and country included several sensational performances which are still remembered half a century later.
In an epic European Cup final against Real Madrid in 1962, when a first-half hat trick by Ferenc Puskas looked enough to secure the trophy for the Spanish club, Eusebio scored the last two goals as Benfica fought back to win 5-3 and clinch its second straight continental title.
But none of Eusebio's goals were more famous than those he scored against North Korea in the quarterfinals of the 1966 World Cup. With Portugal trailing 3-0, Eusebio inspired his team's turnaround with four goals and an eventual 5-3 victory.
Eusebio da Silva Ferreira, who died Sunday aged 71, became affectionately known as the Black Panther for his athletic prowess and clinical finishing that made him one of the world's top scorers during his heyday in the 1960s for Benfica and the Portuguese national team.
Eusebio died at his Lisbon home of heart failure at 3.30 a.m. local time (0330 GMT) Sunday, his biographer Jose Malheiro said. "His health was very poor," Malheiro told reporters. Eusebio was admitted to hospital several times over the past year for the treatment of heart and respiratory problems. Benfica confirmed his death.
Born into poverty in Africa, Eusebio became an international sporting icon and was voted one of the 10 best players of all time. For the Portuguese, he was a national hero.
Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portugal captain who plays for Real Madrid, commented on his Facebook page, "Always eternal Eusebio, rest in peace." Former Portugal captain Luis Figo, the 2001 FIFA world player of the year, tweeted, "The king!! Great loss for us all! The greatest!!"
"On this sad day of [Eusebio's] death... I prefer to look upon him as immortal," Chelsea's Portuguese coach Jose Mourinho told public broadcaster Radiotelevisao Portuguesa.
The Portuguese government decreed three days of national mourning, with flags flying at half-mast. The Portuguese Football Federation ordered a minute's silence ahead of Sunday's Portuguese Cup games.
Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva made a nationally televised address to the nation to praise the "affability and humility" of a man who never let stardom go to his head. "His talent brought joy for entire generations, even those who didn't live through the most glorious moments of his career," Cavaco Silva said.
Global fame
Eusebio achieved global fame, and tributes poured in from around the football world. FIFA President Sepp Blatter tweeted, "Football has lost a legend. But Eusebio's place among the greats will never be taken away," while German great Franz Beckenbauer also took to Twitter to comment, "One of the greatest football players ever has passed away."
Perhaps Eusebio's biggest accomplishment was leading Portugal to a third-place finish at the 1966 World Cup, but his agility and speed made him one of Europe's most dangerous forwards for most of a career that lasted two decades.
He was awarded the Ballon d'Or in 1965 as Europe's player of the year and twice won the Golden Boot — in 1968 and 1973 — for being top scorer in Europe. According to football's world governing body FIFA, he scored 679 goals in a total of 678 official games.
At the 1966 World Cup, where Portugal went on to lose to host and eventual champion England in the semifinals, Eusebio became even more popular at home when he wept openly as he left the field following the defeat.
He finished as the tournament's top scorer with nine goals. In 1998, a panel of 100 experts gathered by FIFA named him in its International Football Hall of Fame as one of the sport's top 10 all-time greats.
"Look, there are only two black people on the list: me and Pele," Eusebio commented on the honour, referring to the Brazilian great who was a friend. "I regard that as a great responsibility because I am representing Africa and Portugal, my second homeland."
He was a member of the 1976 Toronto Metros-Croatia team that won the NASL championship and scored the winning goal in the championship game. The team was inducted into the Canadian soccer hall of fame in 2010.
Eusebio was born in Maputo, the Mozambican capital, during the Second World War when the southeast African country was still a Portuguese colony. He came from a poor family but sparkled for his local team and was lured by Benfica to Portugal when he was 18.
Known for his unpretentious and easy manner as well as his courage and ball skills, his popularity in Portugal was such that in 1964, when Italian clubs offered to buy Eusebio for sums that were astronomical for the time, the country's then-dictator, Antonio Salazar, decreed that the player was a "national treasure" — meaning that he could not be sold abroad.
"A football genius and example of humility, an outstanding athlete and generous man, Eusebio was for all sports fans and for all Portuguese an example of professionalism, determination and devotion to the colours of the national jersey and of Benfica," Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho said in a statement.
In a playing career unparalleled in Portugal, Eusebio was a cornerstone of the Benfica team that won back-to-back European titles in the early 1960s.
With Benfica, he won 11 Portuguese league titles and five Portuguese Cups, and remains the club's best-known player. A bronze statue of him, poised to kick a ball, stands outside Benfica's Stadium of Light where fans began laying flowers after his death was announced.
Paying respects
Eusebio's coffin was to be taken to Benfica's Stadium of Light where fans could pay their respects.
In the 1966 World Cup quarterfinal at Goodison Park in Liverpool, Portugal made a nightmare start and was three goals down after 23 minutes.
"We were taken completely by surprise," Eusebio told The Associated Press at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where the Portuguese had a second meeting with the North Koreans 44 years after the first.
"I remember very clearly what (teammate Antonio) Simoes said when we were 3-0 down. He kept saying, 'As long as we don't go four goals down, we're still in with a chance,"' Eusebio said. "And he was right."
Eusebio led Portugal's remarkable comeback by repeatedly charging at the Korean defence, scoring four goals in just over 30 minutes.
After his first two goals, he picked the ball out of the net, ran back to the halfway line and placed it in the centre spot for the restart. He completed his hat trick with a 56th-minute equalizer before scoring his fourth from the penalty spot as North Korea's defence fell apart amid the onslaught.
"That was the best game of my life in a Portugal jersey," Eusebio said. "It left its mark on me."
Eusebio scored 41 goals in 64 games for Portugal.
After five knee operations, he played his last game for Benfica in 1975. Eusebio then moved to North America where he spent the last years of his career playing for the Boston Minutemen, Toronto, Las Vegas Quicksilver and Buffalo Stallions through 1980.
Eusebio stayed on at Benfica as an assistant coach after his retirement and travelled widely with the Portuguese national side as a paid "soccer ambassador."
Eusebio is survived by his wife, Flora, two daughters and several grandchildren.As farmers in the state are being battered by a severe drought-like situation, a stinging report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has blamed the Congress-NCP led government for mishandling irrigation projects.
The CAG has found that despite costs shooting up by thousands of crores, over 400 canals and dams are incomplete. The state’s auditor has detected massive cost overruns of Rs26,617.26 crore and time overruns – as long as 40 years – in these projects.
After allegations of corruption in these projects surfaced, deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar resigned in September 2012 only to be sworn in again two months later. Pawar was the irrigation minister from 1999 to 2010.
Last year, the economic survey said irrigation in Maharashtra had risen by just 0.1% to 17.9% from 2001 to 2010 despite Rs70,000 crore being spent on irrigation projects.
In its audit report on state finances for the year ending March 2012, submitted to the legislature on Thursday, the CAG said in the 426 incomplete projects, the time overruns were up to 40 years. The projects, on which an expenditure of Rs43,270.01 crore had been incurred, were being executed by the water resource department and the five irrigation development corporations.
“In 242 out of 426 incomplete irrigation projects, the initial budgeted cost increased from Rs7,215.03 crore to Rs33,832.29 crore, resulting in significant cost overrun totalling Rs26,617.26 crore,” it said.
The highest cost overrun was seen in the Krishna Marathwada Irrigation project, which started in 2007. The initial budgeted cost was Rs2,382.50 crore but was later revised to Rs4,845.05 crore, a cost overrun of Rs2,462.55 crore. This was followed by the Kukadi project, where costs rose from Rs31.18 crore in 1967 to Rs2,184.16 crore, an overrun of Rs2,152.98 crore.
“Though these irrigation projects started five to 45 years ago, they are not yet complete. The oldest being Kukadi project, which started in 1967 with a target date of completion of five years (1972),” the report said.
“Under the Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation (98 projects), TIDC (Tapi Irrigation Development Corporation) which has 27 projects and GMIDC (Godavari Marathwada Irrigation Development Corporation) which has three projects, no cost revision had been reported though these projects were commissioned three to 37 years ago,” the report pointed out.
Cost overruns have also been reported in Lower Dudhna (Rs997.37 crore), Nandur Madhyameshwar (Rs817.60 crore), Waghur (Rs1,171.27 crore), Lower Tapi (Rs985.10 crore), Koyna (Rs1,091.27 crore), Shelgaon barrage (Rs870.02 crore) and Bodwad Parisar (Rs819.09 crore).
The state government has appointed a special investigation team, led by irrigation expert Madhav Chitale, to look into “irrigation scam” after the opposition took up the issue.When it was first announced that Pronto Mama and Bwani Junction – arguably two of Scotland’s best live acts- were playing together, it was quickly predicted to be the “gig of the year”.
The highly anticipated line up is made complete by Redolent and singer-songwriter Mark McGowan.
Despite the size of the venue, and the considerably big turn out for the beginning of the night, Mark McGowan takes to the stage and instantly silences the crowd.
His intricate guitar playing compliments his voice as he flows through his first few songs.
With every song, the crowd edges closer to the front, with some even singing along- in his three-month career he has quickly established himself and tonight it is apparent he will leave with some new fans.
There is a definite curiosity to his songs, he draws you in with his inimitable way of telling the stories in his songs that you find yourself not being able to break away from.
Probably the song McGowan is best known for, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, is next as his set nears the end and it is filled with sweet ornaments throughout, and with McGowan’s distinctive voice, making it very easy to see why everyone loves it.
With his last song being, ‘Colour of Surrender’, he changes the song up, bring it down from a high to just a simple beat on the body of his guitar as he sings.
His set finishes to an eruption of applause from those lucky enough to see the first act.
Redolent are next, and they don’t hold back and are full of energy as they start their set.
Right away they take control of the stage, creating a new vibe that only gets more intense with each song.
With two bigger bands to follow they hold their set well with the venue filling up fast.
Definitely a band to watch, and a brilliant support slot.
Bwani Junction is known for having a solid fan base, so there’s no surprise in the sudden rise in numbers.
Tonight is a night to showcase some new songs rather than play their older stuff- a bit bittersweet for their fans, but for many this is their first time seeing this band.
The elaborate signature style of the bands playing has changed, the African influence is still there but the sound is stronger and the new songs go down well if the dancing is anything to go by.
Back in June they performed Paul Simon’s Graceland album in their hometown of Edinburgh, which was met with a massive acclaim, and tonight they treat us to their rendition of ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’.
The whole African feel is still evident, the bass is clear and sounds amazing; they’ve completely mastered this cover, making it their own and bring the atmosphere in the crowd up a level.
To finish they play a fan favourite ‘Two Bridges’, one that everybody knows so of course everyone is singing-along.
Amazing performance from Bwani Junction, the new material sounds very promising and looks like they are ready to make that next step.
As Bwani Junction leave the stage there is a noticeable shift in the crowd, those who were at the front take a step back, while everyone else pushes to get to the front for Pronto Mama.
The six-piece take to the stage, they’ve never played to this big a crowed before and quickly open up ‘Goose Steps’ and ‘Only Human’ from their second EP.
All members come to the front for the third song, ‘Sentiment’, a courageous acapella number that meets with an incredible applause.
It is unlike anything anyone has done today, as well as unlike anything that other bands are doing.
Their musical talents are undeniable, and the next song ‘Remission’ really shows that with prominence of the brass instruments.
They play another few songs including the newest, ‘Arabesque’, like Bwani Junction their new material is more than capable of outdoing the success of the previous stuff.
They end with ‘One Trick Pony’ from their debut EP, always a good one for the crowd to jump fanatically along to, and with the adrenaline at a new high the crowd chant for them to come back on for another song after they leave.
Their encore is a cover of Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take Me Out’, and again for the second time this night, a band have outdone the original version with their own take on a cover.
Pronto Mama have had a great few years gaining a fan base, as well as tightening their sound and constantly progressing, but tonight is the best I’ve personally ever heard them- it doesn’t take a lot to see that they are entering the new year as a well established band with a lot about to happen for them.
Tonight surpasses all expectation, even though the expectations were very high; it’s early December, but it’s definitely one of the best gigs of 2015.
Words: Olivia Campbell
Photos: Bill GrayAs the Alt Right continues to grow, we can expect that our views will increasingly be the subject of public scrutiny and debate. One of the gifts that a publicly-obscure intellectual movement enjoys is the benefit of being able to focus its intellectual efforts on the development of its own beliefs and positions, rather than on responding to critics of those beliefs and positions. The Alt Right is not likely to enjoy this gift for very long: already, mainstream journalists are beginning to spill ink about our movement, and there is not a political pundit in the beltway today who does not have a passing awareness of the existence of something called the ‘Alt Right’.
As public awareness of the Alt Right grows, then, we must prepare ourselves to voice our opinions in the open with the most effectiveness and clarity possible. Soon we will all lay bare our views on race to our wives, friends, colleagues and neighbors, and our leaders and spokesmen will voice them over the mainstream media. Indeed, the explicit ascendance of the Alt Right to the national stage, qua Alt Right rather than religious or constitutionalist right, has already begun: Richard Spencer, for example, has recently revealed that he will be the subject of an upcoming interview with none other than Jorge Ramos (who, despite being white, is himself an Amerindian ethnonationalist and identitarian).
To prepare ourselves for this transition, it is crucial that we possess the argumentative tools to capture the attraction of Whites who are not yet a part of our movement. To this end, I’d like to review an interesting conversation upon which I recently stumbled, between Richard Spencer and Roland Martin, a Black media interviewer. We are lucky to have as capable a spokesman as Spencer, and as we shall see, there is much to learn from this Spencer’s performance in this interview: both what to do, and what not. My intention will be to give some practical rhetorical tips that we can use when we voice our true opinions in public.
To begin, an interesting but unsurprising fact about this interview is that Spencer’s interlocutor is black; in the coming days, we should expect that most of our interlocutors in explicit conversations about race will be black. For while most whites recoil at the thought of white identitarianism, Blacks are already convinced of its existence and power, and themselves familiar with identitarian politics. The idea of white identitarianism is not foreign to them – indeed, they have even convinced themselves that it is there personally looming ominously over them while they sleep – and they are therefore not likely to be averse to it. In addition, as a favored racial minority, Blacks believe themselves to be epistemically privileged with respect to racial questions, and are accustomed to lecturing eager whites about the purported facts on race in America. Hence, they are more likely to be willing to enter the fray than bluepilled Whites may be.
We should not ever hope to be able to bring such interlocutors over to our side, nor should we even expect them to attempt to understand our claims and motivations. The same is true for any anti-White interlocutors we may encounter who are themselves White – they are likely to be vociferously self-hating people, and their opinions simply will not be changed. However, to change the opinions of our interlocutors ought not be our aim: instead, we must speak to the onlookers, whose opinions may not yet be formed.
Spencer, I think, does an excellent job of this. In his answer to Martin’s very first question – why so-called ‘white nationalists’ are encouraged by Trump’s campaign – Spencer obliquely answers by posing a series of questions to the audience: are we a nation? are we a people? This sort of disguised address to one’s audience is an excellent way to reach one’s real dialectical target while still speaking to one’s interlocutor, and should be employed liberally.
However, Spencer makes a crucial mistake in responding to Martin’s next question, on which Martin immediately jumps: when asked whether Trump is deliberately trying to rally the support of White supremacists, Spencer replies that neither he nor anyone he knows is a White supremacist. This is a mistake: it puts Spencer immediately on the defensive, and allows Martin room to attempt to associate Spencer with David Duke, whom he knows his audience will immediately recognize as a hair-raisingly dangerous and evil racist. Instead of this line of reply, one ought to employ Mike Levin’s strategy: at the very first mention of White ‘supremacy’ or Black ‘inferiority’, one ought to ask immediately what one’s interlocutor means by the use of those terms. This allows one to let their interlocutor do the dirty work of talking about low non-White intelligence, slavery, and so on, thereby making themselves look ridiculous. Only then, I think, should one make it clear that that is not what they are, and employ Spencer’s useful follow-up about the importance of White identity, rather than supremacy. (In fact, Spencer does eventually employ the semantic strategy, although it comes too late and is foiled by Martin’s obvious ignorance of the meaning of the word ‘semantic’.)
Next, Spencer goes on to make an excellent point, and one that has a profound effect on the tenor of his ensuing discussion with Martin: Spencer points out that he is a white identitarian in just the same way that Martin is a black identitarian. This remark is extremely powerful: it forces any opposition to white identitarianism to take the form of an explanation for why non-white identitarianism is acceptable, while white identitarianism is not. Pushing the conversation in this direction is desirable for two reasons: first, anyone who attempts to explain why we can do it, but you can’t, will come across as unfair; second, as we shall see, it gives one’s opponent the impossible task of defending an obviously false claim.
Martin takes the bait. He pursues a standard tack: implicitly claiming that Whites do not deserve identitarianism because they are already doing so well, Martin suggests that whites predominate in positions of power in America. Here, Spencer has an important reply: Spencer responds that America is a white country, just as Martin suggests, and goes on to list some of the dangers facing Whites in America: demographic change, drug use, etc. His point is that one can’t claim on the one hand that Whites have historically been the powerful majority in America, and then seriously wonder why Whites are concerned about ceasing to be the powerful majority in America.
Thankfully, however, the subtlety of this point seems lost on Martin (whose verbal IQ is already in question), for I am not convinced that this is the appropriate reply. While Spencer’s point is good, it has a danger of coming off to observers as a kind of unwillingness to share; as the claim that we should have everything because we don’t want to give up what we have. Obviously, this interpretation of Spencer’s claim is infantile – but it is important to keep in mind that most people cease to develop their moral intuitions as soon as they leave the playground.
Indeed, this sort of playground-moralistic response is exactly the one employed by Martin. Suggesting that White American prosperity was entirely the result of African slave labor, he demands that Whites “share” what they have. Here, however, Spencer begins to stumble. He begins by wondering why anyone should expect Whites to want to give up power, as though it were simply obviously that Whites had no right to desire it. Again, this is a powerful way of exposing the double standard of anti-Whites, but the conversation between Spencer and Martin is already downstream from the relevance of this point: to insist that one has a right to desire to keep what one has when one has already been accused of refusing to share what one has is not helpful, as our basic common moral intuitions suggest that the prima facie right to keep what one has can be superceded by obligations to fairness, to repay debts, etc.
Again displaying his lack of verbal intelligence, Martin badly misinterprets Spencer’s claim, loses track of his line of argumentation, and makes an irrelevant use of the thought that America is a ‘melting pot’. Spencer’s response to this is the right one: that America was, until 1965, a melting pot of Europeans, who shared a common history, common customs and habits, and common or similar religions. This is an excellent point, and one which should be deployed at any available opportunity.
However, immediately after making this point, Spencer makes a crucial mistake: he makes the next move in Martin’s own argument for him, rather than giving a taken-aback Martin the chance to respond to one of Spencer’s strongest points. This next move is the mention of slavery as a justification for the displacement of White Americans, and Martin latches on immediately: he claims not only that Whites owe blacks for slavery, but engages in a bit of vain self-flattering by suggesting that the early American economy would have collapsed and been miscarriaged had it not been for the labors of African slaves.
This claim is one that anyone on the Alt Right should expect to encounter time and time again. For the past 30 years, history courses in American undergraduate institutions have ceaselessly trumpeted the claim that America was “built” by African slave labor, endlessly overstating the economic importance of such things as the Triangle trade, and never considering counterfactual scenarios in which there was no African slavery in the New World. Most educated Americans genuinely believe the absurd claim that America could not have survived without slave labor.
This is, of course, false, but Spencer’s response at this juncture is a mistake. His reply that he regrets slavery and considers it a ‘wound’ to the nation is an unnecessary attempt to distance himself from the moral implications of slavery, and wastes an opportunity to hammer Martin with the facts. Indeed we should always look for and seize opportunities to embarrass our interlocutors by aggressively citing facts when they have the historical or scientific facts mistaken. In response to this particular point, one ought to point out that according to economic estimates, the gross national product of the United States on the eve of the Civil War was $121b in 2016 dollars, while the total value of cotton exports was approximately $5.8b in 2016 dollars. Hence, one ought to remind one’s audience, the value of the cotton industry in antebellum America was only 4.7% of American GNP – significant, but quite far from the bedrock on which American prosperity was built. For comparison, the percentage of American GDP contributed by the agricultural sector in 2014 was, according to the USDA, 4.8% – so, cotton was about as important to antebellum America as agriculture is to the modern-day America of strip malls, SUVs and suburbs.
Still, Spencer’s expression of regret notwithstanding, Martin – convinced that he has somehow won the historical argument – goes on to insist on the irrelevant point that Blacks do not intend to return to Africa. Spencer sidesteps this attempt at grandstanding by attempting to find common ground with Martin on the issue of immigration, which I think is a good strategy to pursue when in conversation with a black.
Martin’s response is, quite simply, hilarious. Vainly and thoroughly convinced that he has found his trump card, Martin smugly attempts to remind Spencer that Whites, too, were immigrants to America. Of course, as Spencer tries to note, this fact has no bearing on the question whether mass Hispanic immigration benefits Whites or Blacks, but Martin won’t hear any of it: this brilliant turn of rhetoric has got Spencer pinned to his back, and Martin knows it. Hammering home his relentless and brilliant attack, Martin takes to condescendingly repeating the first name ‘Richard’, and adopting the mannerisms of a schoolteacher reprimanding a child.
Spencer notes that Martin’s question is a non sequitur, but does not do so with speed or the confidence to match Martin. Spencer is right, and to an intelligent audience, Martin does nothing at this juncture but make himself appear ridiculous. However, few audiences are intelligent, and Spencer misses an excellent opportunity to turn Martin’s attack against him. The aim of conversation of this sort must be to humiliate one’s opponent by making their claims and argumentation appear ridiculous, and this can be done by defeating them on the facts as well as on the meta-level of the facts about appropriate argumentative strategy. It is a shame that Spencer did not do so – he could have relentlessly derided Martin for the irrelevance of his point, and the humiliation would have been all the sweeter for Martin’s own arrogance. We must never miss and opportunity to deride our opponent when they truly deserve it; derision is one of the most powerful tools for convincing one’s audience that one’s opponent is not worth listening to.
Unable to make his case with any sort of clarity, Martin ends the conversation with an unintentionally humorous return to playground moralism, indignantly repeating that Spencer must learn to share. One leaves with the impression that neither party has one: Spencer seems to have remained aloof from the fray, allowing Martin to force his claims with little vigorous resistance; however, the infantility of Martin’s argumentation is impossible to miss. A fascinating conversation, to be sure.
Next: Responding to Anti-Whites, Pt. II: Analysis
AdvertisementsSteps
Having colored text in the command line is a great help for spotting error or success messages. Unfortunately, those of us developing under Windows do not have this feature by default. Here’s how to enable it.
Download ANSICON from: https://github.com/adoxa/ansicon Extract the proper files (Depending on if you have a 32 or 64 bit machine) to c:\ansicon\ (For example). I have a 32 bit machine and hence I extracted the files from inside the x86 folder. Open an elevated privilege command line prompt and go to c:\ansicon, and then type “ansicon -i” without the quotes Add c:\ansicon to your path environment variable
Done. You can now enjoy the colored output of PHPUnit for example.
Extra Notes and Updates
Note: I have installed ANSICON 1.3 under Windows 7 x86 (32 bits). My best guess is that this process will work for other versions of Windows too.
Update: I have installed ANSICON 1.61 under Windows 8 x64 (64 bits) and it works perfectly. The above steps are also updated to work under Windows 8.
Update: I have written a new post on how to Generate Command Line Colors with PHPDeficient physical activity in the current sedentary culture lowers NO production in endothelial cells of human coronary blood vessels producing vasoconstriction ( Hambrecht et al. 2000 ). Hambrecht et al. 2000, concluded: ‘This finding provides a pathophysiologic framework for the elucidation of the positive effects of exercise on myocardial perfusion and emphasizes the therapeutic potential of endurance training for patients with stable coronary artery disease.’ The lack of exercise-induced blood flows producing nitric oxide could be a potential contributing factor to explain, in part, the Centers for Disease Prevention's finding that showed ‘no exercise’ accounted for 248 317 deaths from heart disease in the US in 1986 (34 % of total heart deaths) ( Hahn et al. 1990 ).
Clinical and postmortem investigations of recent hunter-gatherer societies (artic Eskimos, Kenyan Kikuyu, Solomon Islanders, Navajo Indians, Masai pastoralists, Australian Aborigines, Kalahari San (Bushman), New Guinea highland natives and Congo Pygmies) reveal little or no heart disease (see Eaton et al. 1988 for references). Eaton et al. (1988) contend: ‘Like our Palaeolithic ancestors, they (recent hunter-gatherer societies) lacked tobacco, rarely had hypertension, and led lives characterized by considerable physical exercise. In addition, their serum cholesterol levels were low ( Eaton et al. 1988 ). When individuals from hunter-gatherer societies became ‘westernized" (migrations of Japanese, Chinese and Samonans to the USA), their incidence of coronary heart disease rises ( Eaton et al. 1988 ). Peery (1975) in his Ward Burdick Award address commented: ‘Ischaemic heart disease should be looked upon as new disease, largely due to greater consumption of meat and dairy products, and the more sedentary lifestyle that have been adopted in the United States as a result of our greater affluence.’ However, Cordain et al. (2002) found from field studies of thirteen 20th century hunter-gatherer societies that they consumed 65 % of their energy from animal food, yet were relatively free of signs and symptoms of cardiovascular disease. They suggest that qualitative differences in fat intake, high intakes of antioxidants, fibre, vitamins and phytochemicals, along with low salt intake may have operated synergistically with more exercise, less stress, and no smoking to prevent cardiovascular disease in the hunter-gatherers ( Cordain et al. 2002 ).
Nitric oxide is also a potent anti-atherogenic agent, mediating its actions via vasodilatation, as well as inhibition of platelet aggregation, smooth muscle cell proliferation, and leucocyte adhesion to endothelial cells in the vessel wall ( Wroblewski et al. 2000 ). A disturbance of endothelial function by the loss of NO and its consequent smooth muscle vasoconstriction is considered a key event in the development of atherosclerosis ( Gielen et al. 2001 ).
Long-term exercise training increases the diameters of coronary blood vessels in exercise-trained monkeys ( Kramsch et al. 1981 ). Kingwell et al. (2000) suggested that NO is one of the crucial signals for such adaptive changes in gene expression in the extracellular matrix that lead to the long-term increases in the vessel's structural diameter, resulting in enhanced coronary flow, and ultimately decreasing myocardial ischaemia. This adaptation would then lower shear stresses at a given blood flow and diminish a disruption in homeostasis.
Many other mechanisms may underlie the maintenance of high NO levels during increased physical activity. For instance, extracellular membrane-bound superoxide dismutase (ecSOD) functions as a major cellular defence against oxygen free radicals (O 2 • − ; Stroppolo et al. 2001 ). Extracellular SOD scavenges these free radicals and converts them into hydrogen peroxide, thereby preventing the formation of toxic metabolities such as peroxynitrite ( Stroppolo et al. 2001 ). The prevention of these toxic metabolites is vital, since these metabolites can induce degradation of NO ( Stroppolo et al. 2001 ). Exercise is associated with an increased level of ecSOD mRNAs in aortas of wild-type mice ( Fukai et al. 2000 ). This adaptation was removed in transgenic mice lacking the eNOS gene ( Fukai et al. 2000 ). The investigators interpreted their findings as suggesting that NO produced by endothelial cells stimulates increased ecSOD mRNA in adjacent smooth muscle cells, thus preventing O 2 • − -mediated degradation of NO as it traverses between the two cell types. Chronic aerobic exercise training selectively increases the levels of SOD-1 mRNA, protein and enzymatic activity in porcine coronary arterioles. This report ( Rush et al. 2000 ) suggested that increased SOD-1 could contribute to the enhanced NO-dependent dilatation previously observed in coronary arterioles of exercised pigs by regulating the amount of superoxide in the vascular cell environment, thereby prolonging the biological half-life of NO.
Interestingly, exercise of sedentary pigs enhances NO-mediated vasodilatation ( Bowles et al. 2000 ). One of the mechanisms for this effect is via increased blood flow that occurs in the heart during exercise, which in turn produces shear stress in endothelial cells, ultimately resulting in enhanced NO levels and coronary endothelium-dependent relaxation ( Muller et al. 1994 ). Exercise-mediated increases in NO levels are largely due to an up-regulation of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (ecNOS) mRNA ( Sessa et al. 1994 ) and protein ( Woodman et al. 1997 ) expression.
The vascular endothelium serves as an important modulator of vasomotor tone and function by synthesizing and releasing nitric oxide (NO) for flow-dependent dilatation of conduit arteries during periods of increased cardiac work ( Kelm, 2002 ). However, endothelial function is dynamic and easily depressed by numerous factors. For example, postprandial lipaemia, hyperglycaemia, mental stress and/or physical inactivity can all lower NO expression levels in vessel walls (Abdu et al. 2001; Kelm, 2002 ). In addition, the coronary vascular response to acetylcholine depends on the integrity of the endothelium and the endothelial NO pathway ( Kelm, 2002 ). Only if the endothelium is healthy can acetylcholine-mediated vasodilatation through NO occur. Patients with coronary endothelial dysfunction respond to acetylcholine by impaired production of endothelium-derived NO and a paradoxical vasoconstriction that is associated with diminished coronary blood flow ( Hambrecht et al. 2000 ). Exercise training reversed the degree of endothelium-dependent vasoconstriction from acetylcholine in both epicardial coronary vessels and resistance vessels in patients with coronary artery disease ( Hambrecht et al. 2000 ), suggesting a correlation between the health of coronary vessels and physical activity levels.
Heart
There are two major categories of cardiac hypertrophy: one in which cardiac reserve (i.e. the maximum percentage that the cardiac output can increase above normal; Guyton & Hall, 1996) and contractility are enhanced (physiological hypertrophy associated with ‘athletes’); and the other in which contractility diminishes (pathological hypertrophy produced by pressure overload, such as hypertension, leading to congestive heart failure; Wikman-Coffelt et al. 1979). For example, according to Guyton & Hall (1996), cardiac reserve is 300–400 % in the healthy young adult, 500–600 % in the athletically trained person, and zero in heart failure. The significance of physiological cardiac hypertrophy is that it improves cardiac function by decreasing oxygen cost per unit of work, |
his AFC Championship T-shirt before turning around to greet the media, wasn't in the mood to talk about his injury scare after the New England Patriots defeated the Baltimore Raven 23-20 in the AFC Championship Game on Sunday at Gillette Stadium.
Questions about Bernard Pollard landing on his left ankle late in the third quarter were brushed off like would-be tacklers. So many, in fact, that an exasperated reporter finally tried a different approach and asked Gronkowski what sort of injury would keep him out of a game.
Rob Gronkowski didn't let a scary-looking ankle injury dampen his postgame celebration. AP Photo/Charles Krupa
Gronkowski just laughed. A few seconds of uncomfortable silence then passed before he said, "Wait, are you serious?"
Yes, the same guy who professed to be "great" in late November after landing awkwardly on his neck while lunging into the end zone against the Kansas City Chiefs, said his left ankle was "good" after Sunday's win. A follow-up question asked what happened on the play -- the one in which Gronkowksi's ankle seemingly could have snapped in half when it got snagged under Pollard as Gronkowski went to the ground -- and Gronkowski elicited laughter by stating matter-of-factly, "Nothing."
All Gronkowski would admit was that he got the ankle retaped (which seemed like a foregone conclusion after he hobbled off the field with trainers and went directly to the locker room). In total, he missed just three minutes of game time before returning to the field with 12:19 to play in the fourth quarter and aiding in blocking as Tom Brady leaped into the end zone with what turned out to be the winning score.
Even in those three short minutes, fellow tight end Aaron Hernandez missed his partner in crime.
"That’s like my brother, and it was weird not being on the field with him," Hernandez said. "Every time I look in the huddle, it’s me and him. But I know he’s a tough person, you see he came back on the field ready to play. I’m sure he’ll be great for that Super Bowl."
Gronkowski finished with five catches for a team-high 87 yards (with a long of 23, which came on the play in which all of New England was left holding its breath as CBS showed numerous cringe-inducing replays of the ankle getting trapped on his way to the ground).
Gronkowski preferred to keep the postgame focus on celebrating with his teammates, but took a moment to savor the Super Bowl opportunity that lies ahead.
"Emotions are flying high -- it's unbelievable, really. My second year in the league, playing with a great team, you've got to enjoy the moment right now. It’s crazy. It doesn’t even feel right. It’s just wild. Especially playing with the veterans here -- watching them growing up and watching them going to the Super Bowl. Now to be part of it, it’s an unreal moment. You can’t take it for granted, you've got to go in and work hard now. But it’s just wild.”
Gronkowski was spotted on the field after the game with a walking boot on his left foot, but will have two weeks to get the injury right before Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis.AleSmith Brewing Company 9990 Alesmith Court, Miramar
Three-Day Speedway Grand Prix: From Wednesday through Friday, AleSmith will offer flights of their stunning Speedway Stout augmented by flavors including bacon, coconut, and vanilla. Bring a muffin tin (seriously) and taste to your heart’s content. | AleSmith, 9368 Cabot Drive, Miramar, 12 p.m.
Rock Bottom Brewery 8980 Villa La Jolla Drive, La Jolla
Rock Bottom Chef & Brewer’s Dinner: Often overlooked, Rock Bottom's La Jolla brewpub has been cranking out solid beer for some time, as evidenced by steady medaling from the Great American Beer Festival. Taste what they’re brewing with dishes including duck ravioli and pumpkin bread pudding. | Rock Bottom, 8980 Villa La Jolla Drive, La Jolla, 6:30 p.m.
Stone Brewing Co. 1999 Citracado Parkway, Escondido
Lost Abbey Master Pairings Dinner: Indulge in five tracks from The Lost Abbey’s Ultimate Box Set plus other offerings from San Marcos’ most acclaimed brewery, paired against five courses and hors d’oeuvres including olive oil-poached quail and bison Wellington. | Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens, 1999 Citracado Parkway, Escondido, 6:30 p.m.
Churchill's Pub and Grill 887 W. San Marcos Boulevard, San Marcos
Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project Dinner: Deafening buzz surrounds Colorado’s Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project, but the beers are extremely hard to come by. Get a bunch paired with specialty dishes to be enjoyed along with chats with the Staves’ brewer. | Churchill’s Pub & Grille, 887 West San Marcos Boulevard, San Marcos, 7 p.m.
Note: All of the events above can be found on the official San Diego Beer Week site.
Disclosure: In addition to his work as a staff writer for the Reader, Brandon Hernández is also a communications specialist for Stone Brewing Co. However, his recommendation of the aforementioned event organized by the company is provided independent of that employment relationship.President Donald Trump holds up his book "The Art of the Deal" during a presidential campaign stop in November 2015. Eric Schultz/AP Donald Trump says his bestselling 1987 business book, "The Art of the Deal," is his second-favorite book in the world, after the Bible.
I wrote two columns about the book for The New York Times back in 2015, and I highlighted one quote from the book that keeps haunting me during Trump's presidency.
"What the bulldozers and dump trucks did wasn't important, I said, so long as they did a lot of it."
Trump was talking about a stunt he pulled in 1982, when he owned a piece of land along the Atlantic City boardwalk and wanted Holiday Inn to partner with him on the construction of a casino.
Contrary to his representations to Holiday Inn, hardly any construction had taken place on the site, and he was concerned the company would decline to invest once they saw what was basically a plot of empty land.
So in advance of a site visit by Holiday Inn executives, he directed his construction manager to hire dozens of pieces of heavy equipment to move dirt around on the site, digging holes and filling them back up if necessary.
We see this strategy repeated over and over in Trump's presidency. Trump signs executive orders to great fanfare, even if they have no effect beyond instructing his cabinet secretaries to prepare reports months from now. He demands that Congress pass a healthcare bill, with no particular concern for what's actually in the bill.
Trump aims to generate the appearance of activity, to do noisy things that demonstrate that he is a do-something president.
Trump believes this strategy served him well in business. Indeed, Holiday Inn agreed to partner with him on the construction of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino.
But less than 18 months after the Trump Plaza opened, the partnership with Holiday Inn had deteriorated to the point that Holiday Inn was suing him. In 1992, the Trump Plaza went bankrupt.
In the long run, it matters what the bulldozers and the dump trucks do.
The Republican healthcare bill grows more and more unpopular over time, as people learn more about what it would do to health insurance (that is, take it away from tens of millions of people and make coverage for preexisting conditions very expensive or impossible to obtain, in order to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans.)
In business, Trump's strategy for when his counterparties figured out he was screwing them was to tie them up in litigation, get paid to go away, and then find new marks. He could find somebody else to fool with a bunch of useless bulldozers: new investors, new lenders, new customers.
In politics, as he is learning, there is no new set of marks. He has to face the same Congress and the same voters over and over. This is not a fact he could prepare for by reading "The Art of the Deal."Astronomers still can't rule out the presence of an alien megastructure around Kepler star KIC 8462852 --- located nearly 1500 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus. Strange dips in the star’s luminosity over four years of observations with NASA ’s Kepler space telescope initially fueled such speculation, even though most of it was quickly dismissed.
But the currently most favored natural explanation for the strange light curves --- a swarm of intervening planetary or cometary debris --- remains largely unsatisfying. Thus, next month, a Kickstarter campaign will fund new ground-based observations to begin this summer that should bring more clarity to the situation.
“I don’t know a single professional [astronomer] that thinks this is an artificial structure, but until we look, we can’t rule it out,” Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, the crowdfunding project’s team leader, told me.
A planet transiting the star would cause a periodic dip that repeats regularly, Travis Metcalfe, a team member and astronomer at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., told me.
“But the observed dips didn't repeat regularly, which is why continued observations from telescopes on the ground will be so helpful in narrowing down the cause,” said Metcalfe.
Two to three years of continuous observations using the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT), will in theory enable to the team to spectroscopically-identify material around the star itself. “The most puzzling thing is that it looked like a normal star for most of the four years that Kepler observed it,” said Metcalfe. “But on a few occasions something eclipses up to 20% of the light for days at a time. It's not like anything we've ever seen before.”
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Metcalfe says that the prevailing natural explanation is that a comet could have been broken up by the gravity and/or the heat of the star so that when it returns on the next orbit it is in a bunch of smaller pieces, each of which causes a dip in the starlight at closely-spaced times.
But if the star’s dips in luminosity are caused by passing comets’ dusty tails, then that, in turn, should show up in the new spectroscopic observations, says Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University and also a team member. Dust blocks blue light more efficiently than red light so, by comparing the dimming at different frequencies, we can get a handle on the amount and size of the dust in the putative comets' tails. “If a very large number of very large comets passed between Earth and the star, they could each block enough light to be detectable,” said Wright.
And if the cause is artificial?
If it's a big solid object or even a swarm of big objects, says Wright, then we expect to see all wavelengths dim equally --- red and blue alike.
Metcalfe notes that the biggest luminosity dips happen roughly two years apart. He says it’s possible to imagine that they could be caused by a “massive artificial structure” surrounding an earth-like planet orbiting at a habitable distance from the star.
If such large dips continue to show up in future observations, says Metcalfe, it decreases the odds of a natural explanation. He says that’s because planetary collisions that could create such a swarm of transitory debris are few and far between.
Follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. And like my 'Distant Wanderers' exoplanet Facebook page.The MLS silly season begins in earnest on Wednesday, when the Expansion Draft takes place at 2 p.m. ET. Fans in Portland and Vancouver will have picked over the list of available players, hoping that there are more Sebastien Le Touxs than David Myries out there.
Given the wealth of talent up for grabs – a clever general manager could make a competitive side out of just the guys Seattle Sounders, FC Dallas and Real Salt Lake exposed – they’re right to have high hopes.
READ: MLS releases unprotected players list
Whether or not those hopes are met will go a long way toward how successful the Timbers and Whitecaps are out of the gate. The most recent expansion teams, Philadelphia Union and the Sounders, made themselves competitive from day one with good drafts.
Their predecessors weren’t as sagacious, digging themselves a hole that, in each case, has required several roster overhauls. Avoiding that will be priority No. 1 for the Portland and Vancouver brain trust. For now.
With that said, MLSsoccer.com plays Nostradamus and tries to predict how the draft will play out.
[inline_node:322806]1) Portland choose Dax McCarty, M, FC Dallas – Provided he’s not about to jump to Europe, this is a no-brainer, especially coming off a fantastic playoff run. McCarty’s just entering his prime, has a middling cap number and is the best box-to-box central midfielder in the league.
FC Dallas protect Eric Avila
2) Vancouver choose Julian de Guzman, M, TFC – “But he didn’t succeed in Toronto!” you say. Well, the list of people who didn’t succeed in Toronto is long and distinguished. Vancouver will happily take the marquee Canadian DP, plug him into central midfield and fire the first shot in what is likely to be one of the league’s best rivalries.
Toronto FC protect Gabe Gala
3) Portland choose Anthony Wallace, D, Colorado Rapids – Seeing Wallace’s name on the unprotected list was as big a head-scratcher as McCarty’s. He’s still a bit raw, but 21-year-old starter-quality left backs don’t just show up every day. The Timbers will happily swoop on Wallace and make him the first defender on their roster.
Colorado protect Wells Thompson
[inline_node:319880]4) Vancouver choose Blaise Nkufo, F, Seattle Sounders – Will Vancouver splurge on two DPs? Possibly. Especially since doing so would probably enrage their bitter rivals to the south, and especially since Nkufo has family in Vancouver and showed he still has life in those 35-year-old legs.
Seattle protect Leonardo Gonzalez
5) Portland choose Nathan Sturgis, M, Seattle Sounders – Portland already showed how eager they are to tick off the Sounders when they bought ad space on a billboard just outside of Qwest Field. Taking Sturgis, who was fantastic in the second half of the season sweeping in front of Seattle’s back line, makes sense both on and off the pitch.
Seattle are off the board
6) Vancouver choose Kyle Davies, D, FC Dallas – Having gone with veterans for their first two picks, Vancouver heads in the other direction by taking the 21-year-old Davies, who acquitted himself well in central defense for Dallas. Pairing his young legs with Jay DeMerit’s experience would make sense for both the players and the club.
Dallas are off the board
7) Portland choose Alex Nimo, M, Real Salt Lake – Nimo has already spent two years with the Timbers, playing in 45 games on loan, and has gone on record saying that Portland is the only place he wants to be. John Spencer and company will likely be happy to take him, though some of the talent left on the RSL board will be hard to pass up.
Real Salt Lake protect Ned Grabavoy
[inline_node:318086]8) Vancouver choose Pat Onstad, G, Houston Dynamo – Onstad grew up watching the old Whitecaps, and though “old” is the operative word when it comes to Onstad these days, he’s still a starter-quality keeper. Adding him to a spine that already includes DeMerit, de Guzman and Nkufo means the ‘Caps will have zero experience issues in their maiden season.
Houston protect Dominic Oduro
9) Portland choose Chris Schuler, D, Real Salt Lake – Everyone expects midfielder Collen Warner to end up in Portland, but the Timbers already have a slew of wingers and attackers. Schuler didn’t play much, but was very, very good when he got on the field and is the second-best young central defender on the board.
Real Salt Lake are off the board
10) Vancouver choose Leandre Griffit, M, Columbus Crew – The 26-year-old Frenchman hardly saw the field when he came to Columbus, but in his brief time on the pitch, he showed himself a dynamic attacking winger with pace and skill. His cap number is small, fits a need on as well as off the field, and keeps up the international theme of Vancouver’s draft. Plus, he and presumptive left back Alain Rochat will satisfy Canadian Francophone regulations.
Columbus protect Kevin Burns
[inline_node:320982]11) Portland choose Tim Ward, D, San Jose Earthquakes – Ward’s been around seemingly forever, but is still just 23 and just had the best season of his career with the Quakes. Purely an attacking right back initiallly, he’s learned the sweet science of defense and, along with Wallace and Schuler, could form a young, solid backline for years to come.
San Jose protect Ramiro Corrales
12) Vancouver choose Shea Salinas, M/D, Philadelphia Union – Salinas is young, cheap, fast and full of running. He hasn’t quite found a permanent home on the field yet, but is capable of giving quality minutes at right back and right midfield. Youth, flexibility and affordability make him the right pick for Vancouver.
Philadelphia protect Alejandro Moreno
13) Portland choose Shavar Thomas, D, Sporting Kansas City – Thomas is one of the most well-traveled players in the league, having been on the rosters of six different teams already. He played well for KC in his half-season there, and at worst would be an experienced back-up for a young Timbers side.
Sporting protect Birahim Diop
14) Vancouver choose Ross LaBauex, M, Colorado Rapids – LaBauex only got into five games for the MLS Cup champs this year, but that’s in large part because of the guys ahead of him. A pure ball-winner with a championship pedigree and years in the Chicago Fire system, LaBauex would be the perfect defensive midfield complement to de Guzman.
Colorado are off the board
15) Portland choose Luke Sassano, M/D, New York Red Bulls – Sassano never won a regular spot in the New York lineup, but played well as a d-mid in the Red Bulls' playoff run of 2008. This year, he was solid as both a right back and central defender in the US Open Cup before an injury derailed his season. Young, cheap and versatile – a great choice.
New York protect Austin da Luz
[inline_node:313870]16) Vancouver choose Jesus Padilla, F/M, Chivas USA – Padilla’s haul of seven goals in 37 matches with Chivas over the past two years isn’t bad for a guy who split time up front and on the wings. Neither Preki nor Martin Vasquez could seem to figure out how to use him best, but he’s just 23 and has a small cap number, so he's worth a flier here.
Chivas USA protect Carlos Borja
17) Portland choose Corey Ashe, M, Houston Dynamo – Ashe isn’t much of a goal-scorer, but he does nearly everything else pretty well and, coming from Houston, you know he’s willing to put in work on both sides of the ball. He’s got continental experience and an MLS Cup, both of which will carry weight with a young team.
Houston are off the board
18) Vancouver choose Peter Lowry, M, Chicago Fire – Lowry has played sparingly for the Fire since being drafted in 2008, but has produced five goals from midfield in just 24 games. Young and with a small cap number, he should provide useful depth for the Whitecaps.
Chicago protect Dasan Robinson
19) Portland choose Seth Sinovic, M/D, New England Revolution – Sinovic, like the rest of the Revolution team, struggled mightily at times in 2010. But he also showed skill going forward and a solid left foot. He’s also a former college walk-on – and a teammate of Schuler – whose drive to succeed would be welcome in any locker room. He’ll be a useful back-up should Wallace get injured or eventually begin to miss games due to call-ups to the US national team.
New England protect Zak Boggs
[inline_node:305501]20) Vancouver choose Sinisa Ubiparipovic, M, New York Red Bulls – Ubiparipovic, like Sassano, played his best during New York's 2008 MLS Cup playoff run and the 2010’s US Open Cup. He’s bounced around the entire midfield in his time with the Red Bulls, but is at his best playing in front of a pure d-mid. A quality, young, cheap back-up to de Guzman.
Summary of picks:
Portland
1) McCarty (DAL)
2) Wallace (COL)
3) Sturgis (SEA)
4) Nimo (RSL)
5) Schuler (RSL)
6) Ward (SJ)
7) Thomas (SKC)
8) Sassano (NY)
9) Ashe (HOU)
10) Sinovic (NE)
Vancouver
1) De Guzman (TFC)
2) Nkufo (SEA)
3) Davies (DAL)
4) Onstad (HOU)
5) Griffit (CLB)
6) Salinas (PHI)
7) LaBauex (COL)
8) Padilla (CHV)
9) Lowry (CHI)
10) Ubiparipovic (NY)Commanding a Tesla Model S with the Amazon Echo
Jason Goecke Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 25, 2016
While Tesla has not released a public API for developers to date, that does not stop one from hacking on the car anyway. Over the weekend I put together a working prototype with many of my favorite technologies, including: a drone, Golang, an Amazon Echo, AWS Lambda, and, of course, a Tesla Model S.
The result is the ability to ask Alexa to pull the Tesla out of or into the garage (asking ‘KITT’ to do it of course):
A fun weekend project for sure, but there are a lot of security issues to address before I leave this skill enabled on my Echo. Not least is the fact my kids could have a lot of fun asking the Tesla to pull in and out of the garage repeatedly while I am fast asleep.
The day will come soon where I may also apply voice biometrics and computer vision to properly secure such a use case. Imagine the day I could ask Alexa from within my house to get my car ready. The car pulls out of the garage and adjusts its settings to my preferences based on the weather, opening my sunroof and windows on a nice sunny day. All the technologies are already here, its stringing them together just right.
We could all be Michael Knight as Tesla makes the platform ever more affordable with the Model 3 and other auto manufacturers, like GM, follow suit…
The tech behind this is all based in the cloud. I am using the Amazon Echo’s Alex Skill Kit to trigger on a keyword (‘ask KITT’) and send the resulting event to AWS Lambda. Lambda then executes my code (I built my Lambda function with Apex, which I highly recommend for anyone working with Lambda) where I use the Tesla Golang library I recently published. The Golang code on Lambda then calls the unofficial Tesla API which in turns triggers the car to take action. In this case, to open the garage door via Homelink and drive on out using the summon capability. You may see the various code snippets needed to tie this together here. If you have a look, with the power of the cloud it is actually very little code. Amazing.
The conclusion here is that no cloud API is truly unpublished. Our friends at Tesla should work with the burgeoning developer community to open a fully supported and safe public API. The real power of any cloud-connected platform, whether it be an iPhone or an amazing electric vehicle, may only be fully realized by building and encouraging a vibrant developer ecosystem. Tesla has built the beginnings of an excellent platform, but it will take a concerted effort to attract developers to build the apps that even Elon Musk hasn’t dreamed of (yet).
Every single cloud connected platform must design for developers as first class users, just as they do for end users. Tesla and Elon, are you up for it?
Credits: A big call out to Tim Dorr, who did the original heavy lifting to reverse engineer the API and come out with the first Ruby library.Like this article? rabble is reader-supported journalism. Chip in to keep stories like these coming.
Problems? Oh, the Trans-Pacific Partnership has a few! Read about them all in the new series The Trouble with the TPP.
The Trouble with the TPP series this week has focused on issues such as the failure to obtain a full cultural exception and the weak e-commerce rules that do little to assist online businesses, particularly small and medium sized enterprises. Yet the Canadian digital failure goes even further. While other countries saw the opportunity to use the TPP to advance their domestic online sector through side agreements, Canada remained on the sidelines. Indeed, as some leading critics such as Jim Balsillie have noted, the Canadian government did little to even consult with Canada's technology sector.
Consider a side letter on online education between Australia and Vietnam. The side letter opens the door to technical assistance and pilot programs for online education between the two countries, providing for assistance on distance education delivery models, assessing applications from Australian providers to deliver online education, and work to recognize the qualifications obtained from such courses.
Moreover, the letter states that:
"Vietnam will cooperate with Australia to facilitate a pilot program under which Australian universities would deliver courses in Vietnam that may be delivered wholly or substantially online."
The letter continues with details on the pilot program, which is geared toward enhancing Australia's higher education presence in the country and taking advantage of digital opportunities. This a good strategy for Australia, but raises the question of why Canada failed to take similar steps to make digital inroads in TPP countries.
This piece originally appeared on Michael Geist's blog and is reprinted with permission.
Photo: flickr/ Marco Assiniby OLIMEX Ltd in MIPS, open source, OSHW, PIC, Pinguino Tags: oshw, retrobsd, unix
RetroBSD is a port of 2.11BSD Unix intended for embedded systems with fixed memory mapping. The current target is Microchip PIC32 microcontroller with 128 kbytes of RAM and 512 kbytes of Flash. PIC32 processor has MIPS M4K architecture, executable data memory and flexible RAM partitioning between user and kernel modes. The project is open source and hosted at RetroBSD.org
PIC32-Pinguino was used by RetroBSD developers since long time as it’s small and easy to use, but the Pinguino bords processor PIC32MX440 has not enough RAM to hold the RetroBSD, so we got number of requests to release PIC32-PINGUINO-MICRO with PIC32MX795F512H processor which is pin to pin compatible, so we run small batch of these boards and named them PIC32-RetroBSD, these surely can be used with Pinguino and MPIDE, but note that you must have additional PIC-KIT3 to re-flash the proper bootloader, as RetroBSD bootloader is different and we ship these boards with RetroBSD bootlaoder. Also you will need PIC32-RetroBSD-SD for the file system.
We are shipping today free PIC32-RetroBSD boards to the 9 RetroBSD developers.Senior leader today rejected Prime Minister Narendra Modi's veiled charge that was an "unconstitutional authority" and instead accused the and the government of "running to" with a "pernicious" hidden agenda.
He attacked Modi saying he runs an "over-centralised" government and it will not go too far if it continues like this. In a dig at him, he said Modi has transformed from Chief Minister of Gujarat to Chief Minister of India.
Chidambaram, who held Finance and Home portfolios during the tenures of UPA government, dismissed criticism that was adopting obstructionism in Parliament and said as Opposition its duty was to raise issues.
"They have not been able to point to a single instance, where Mrs. took any government decision. She was the President of the party. As President of the party she is entitled to give the party's view.
"Why do leaders run to Jhandewalan and Nagpur? ( headquarters). You constantly hear four ministers meet at Jhandewalan, four ministers went to Nagpur," he told PTI in an interview.
He was asked about the Prime Minister's suggestion that was an "unconstitutional" authority exercising "real" power over the PMO during the UPA rule.
Explaining Sonia Gandhi's role during the UPA government, Chidambaram said that a party is entitled to give its view.
"Every decision of the UPA was taken either in the cabinet or cabinet committee. You can criticise the merit of the decision. But, how can one deny that the decision was taken by the cabinet or cabinet committee concerned?" he said.
Reacting to chief Amit Shah's statement that the party-led government lacked the mandate to address its core issues, the leader said, "This Government and party in power are hiding their true colours.
"From time to time, statements like the one made by Amit Shah bring out their true colours. Their pernicious agenda is still there. They keep it hidden for a while, but sometimes it surfaces.Image Source
It’s been a while (too long) since I’ve found the time to post in my usual Thursday morning spot. What made me carve out some time today was an odd thought that occurred to me recently. I’ve been putting in a lot of work on my multi-system campaign setting, Sand & Steam. Due to a promise made to a friend, I’ve been concentrating most of my recent work on Fate. You see, I have a Fate Sand & Steam adventure to run at DC Gameday in a little over a week. I have only little experience with Fate, but since it is one of the systems I’m going to use for Sand & Steam, I figured that things would work out.
Things are, indeed, working out. My odd thought happened as I was exploring the Fate mechanics in more detail. It occurred to me that I have been running Fate for quite a long time without having even known it. And I’ve never run a game of Fate before in my life.
Let me explain.
One of the hallmarks of the Fate system is the collaboration between the players and the GM. In fact, there is a nearly 50/50 split between the players and the GM when it comes to who has narrative control. Through the use of Aspects, players can define things about the game world, or the narrative, that were not true before they made their declaration. I think this is awesome, and it is something that I have been doing with my Pathfinder group for as long as we have been together. I’ve told them numerous times, “If you make something up in the world, I’ll use it and run with it. This is as much your game as it is mine.” That’s an idea that is codified and built right into Fate.
My use of skills is also very Fate-like. Ever since I played D&D 4e, I have liked skill challenges. However, I do not like the rigid structure that has there being key skills that can only be used so many times, and higher DCs for skills that may not apply. What I like to do with skill challenges is have the players pick whatever skills they want to, and justify to me how that skill is applicable. Some are obvious, others are not, depending on the situation, and the results are often awesome. I ran a skill challenge in a Pathfinder Sand & Steam game at GenCon which involved the PCs avoiding a beating by some thugs during a theatrical production in a fancy opera house. It was great. We had PCs swinging from chandeliers, we had PCs bluffing with their combat skill, and generally playing to the crowd for support in the fight. It was one of the best skill challenges I have ever run.
All this is to say: be aware of what system you are really running. Not that you need to stick to the rules as written explicity (gods know I don’t), but if you take the time to examine other rules systems, you might find actual, codified rules that support the way you already run your game. Now that I have firm examples from reading and working with Fate, I have a better idea of how to keep doing what I’ve been doing with players having narrative control, or malleable options in skill challenges. Every GM tweaks the rules to suit their style, but that tweaking shouldn’t be done in a vacuum. Do some reading and see what else is out there. You might find that the game you run is not the game you think it is. And that’s a good thing.Customers impacted by Apple's alleged iBooks price fixing scheme will this week receive settlement payments in the form of store credit or checks for up to $6.83 per e-book, the law firm representing plaintiffs in the case announced on Monday.
Hagens Berman issued a press release notifying e-book purchasers of plans to dole out Apple's $400 million settlement fund starting Tuesday.In compliance with the agreed upon terms, consumers are to receive payouts valued at twice their losses, which translates to $1.57 per most e-books and up to $6.93 for every New York Times bestseller. Titles from Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan (Holtzbrinck Publishers), Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster purchased between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012 qualify for the program.As previously noted, customers who bought digital books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Apple are eligible for payouts, which should arrive automatically in their respective store accounts. Depending on prior survey responses, consumers might alternatively receive checks in the mail.Apple was first hit by a U.S. government antitrust lawsuit over the company's "agency model" e-book price structure. Investigation showed marketing on a "most favored nations" basis restricted content owners to sell their wares to another retailer for a lower price, a system contrasted by the "wholesale model" preferred by industry leader Amazon. Unlike the agency model, Amazon's strategy allows retailers to buy content in bulk and set unit pricing at or below cost.After being found guilty of colluding with publishers to artificially raise the price of e-books sold through the iBookstore, and a failed appeal to the Supreme Court, Apple agreed to settle a related class-action lawsuit seeking redress over questionable business practices. Apple, lawyers representing general consumers and state attorneys general representing citizens in 33 U.S. states and territories agreed to the terms.The coming distribution round will be the second in the case.The day after Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that "even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen," Fox News mentioned the comment twice, devoting just over two minutes of coverage to it. Meanwhile, CNN gave the topic an hour and 20 minutes of coverage and MSNBC covered the topic for 2 hours and 7 minutes.
Mourdock Said God Is At Work When Rape Leads To Pregnancy, Stands By Comment
During October 23 Debate, Mourdock Said "Even When Life Begins In That Horrible Situation Of Rape, That It Is Something That God Intended To Happen." During an October 23 debate for Indiana's U.S. Senate seat, the candidates were asked if abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or incest. Mourdock replied, in part, "I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen." [Associated Press, 10/24/12]
AP: "Mourdock Stands By Rape, Abortion Remark." The AP reported in a follow-up article that Mourdock "refused to apologize for saying that rape resulting in pregnancy is'something God intended.' " The AP article noted that while Mourdock regretted that "some may have misconstrued and 'twisted' his comments," he "stood behind the original remark in Tuesday night's debate." The article quoted Mourdock saying, "I spoke from my heart. And speaking from my heart, speaking from the deepest level of my faith, I would not apologize. I would be less than faithful if I said anything other than life is precious, I believe it's a gift from God." [Associated Press, 10/24/12]
Fox Gave Mourdock Statement Two Minutes Of Coverage, While CNN, MSNBC Gave Statement Hours Of Coverage
The Day After Mourdock's Comments, Fox News Devotes Two Minutes, 12 Seconds To Mourdock Comments. On October 24, the day after Mourdock's comment at the debate, Fox News aired two segments about the controversy. In the first, a 37-second segment, Special Report anchor Bret Baier made a brief mention of the controversy in the context of the presidential election. The second, on The Fox Report, lasted for one minute and 35 seconds.
CNN, MSNBC Devoted Substantial Coverage To The Controversy. CNN spent an hour and 20 minutes covering Mourdock's comment on October 24, beginning on its early-morning show Early Start and running through Piers Morgan Tonight. Likewise, MSNBC devoted two hours and seven minutes to the controversy.
This chart has been corrected.
Media Matters watched programming on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC on October 24 and counted the time each network spent discussing Mourdock's comments.Image copyright EPA Image caption Taiwan has been excluded from the AIIB which counts India and Indonesia among its members
The Chinese government has said Taiwan will not be a member of a new regional bank, but would be welcome in the future under a different name.
China is leading the set-up of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a project opposed by the US.
Taiwan, which split from China in 1949, wanted to join the bank as an independent nation.
But China regards Taiwan as part of its territory and was expected to reject any move which suggested otherwise.
Taiwan's government has reportedly said it will continue to press the case for its inclusion. The bank was created in October with 21 members.
Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesman for China's State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, confirmed a recent report that Taiwan would not be a member.
He said that the bank "is open and inclusive, and welcomes Taiwan to join under an appropriate name", and added that they would be "open to suggestions from all sides".
A report by |
in American politics' MORE, with climate as his focus.
Gore wrapped up his brief statement to the press Monday saying that he found the meeting to be an “extremely interesting conversation, and to be continued, and I'm just going to leave it at that.”
Ivanka Trump reportedly wants to make fighting climate change a priority in her time as first daughter.
Donald Trump has pledged to repeal President Obama’s entire aggressive climate change agenda, including the Clean Power Plan, which limits carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
He’s also promised to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement within his first 100 days in office.Allegri: ‘Not leaving Juventus’
By Football Italia staff
Massimiliano Allegri confirms “next year I will still be Coach of Juventus” despite links with other clubs.
The tactician has been linked with Chelsea, though it now appears Antonio Conte will take over at Stamford Bridge, as well as Real Madrid.
“Next year I’ll still be Coach of Juventus, because I still have another year on my contract,” Allegri told Sky as he received the Golden Bench award for the best Coach of last season.
“It’s 100 per cent [certain], there’s never been anything [with other clubs]. Now we approach the end of the season trying to win the Scudetto and the Coppa Italia, and we’ll see what happens in the Champions League.
“I’m fine here and there are no problems.”
Allegri also took the opportunity to thank his team after he was named Coach of the year.
“This award has important meaning, because it means the whole team did well. I thank the players, the staff and the whole club.
“Who did I vote for? [Lazio’s Stefano] Pioli.
“Next year? I don’t know, it depends on how the season ends. [Napoli’s Maurizio] Sarri will definitely be a candidate.
“[Frosinone’s Roberto] Stellone and [Carpi’s Fabrzio] Castori have done extraordinary things and they’re showing that again this year.”Back in March, Google Maps added a dedicated ride-sharing tab with comparative prices. This is extremely useful if you want to compare prices easily, and of course to see what services are available in a given area.
Today, Google is improving that feature by adding support for Lyft and Gett. Google claims Maps now displays options from "9 ride-sharing partners in over 60 countries." Google also mentions that the ride-sharing tab shows multiple types of services offered by each company. For example, Lyft may also show a Lyft Line ride as an option.
Google says that options from Lyft will show up all across the United States, while Gett will be limited to New York City (which is to be expected, as Gett is exclusive to that city).In our upcoming webinar, learn about how you can use Angular 2 with Telerik Platform to easily develop truly native mobile apps.
If Angular 2 isn't the hottest ticket in town, I don't know what is. Ok maybe Hamilton. But since Angular 2 went final in September, there has been a skyrocketing interest in what the new version of this wildly popular framework brings to the web and mobile developer communities.
For the past few months, the Telerik Platform team has been hard at work to make Angular 2 a first class citizen among our tools and services. And we are ready to talk about how you can leverage Angular 2 to build truly native mobile apps with NativeScript in a free online webinar on Tuesday, November 15 at 11:00 AM ET.
Pro tip: We are also giving away great prizes like an Oculus Rift, Xbox One, and a little something from Nintendo that I think you'll like!
Why Angular 2?
Why are people flocking to Angular 2? Isn't it just another framework? Not at all! Angular 2 is more of a "platform" than a traditional framework—you can use Angular to create responsive websites, hybrid mobile apps and native mobile apps with NativeScript. All from one code base!
While we will talk a lot about Angular 2 during the webinar, you may want to read up on some of the benefits you can take advantage of today. Or even go through an online tutorial.
Why Telerik Platform?
For years now Telerik Platform has enabled novice and expert developers to create engaging mobile app experiences. By using the power of Kendo UI for hybrid mobile apps, and now NativeScript to create truly native apps, Telerik Platform provides an instantly available environment to code, test, publish and monitor your app.
Can't wait for the webinar? Start your free 30-day trial of Telerik Platform today.
Join Us to Learn More
Join our free online webinar on Tuesday, November 15 at 11:00 AM ET to learn more (and to have a chance to win those sweet prizes!). Space is limited, so sign up today!Uber General Manager Sailesh Sawlani was today attacked by a member of the Swabhimani Sanghtana outside the Maharashtra Transport Commissioner's office in Mumbai. Mr Sawlani was not harmed as the traffic police personnel intervened in time.No formal police complaint has been lodged about the attack. Swabhiman Sanghatana is led by Congress MLA Nitesh Rane.Mr Sawlani had come to the Transport Commissioner Mahesh Zagade's office to attend a meeting of all taxi service providers, including those who run web-based applications for hiring taxis in the city."The Commissioner addressed every operator regarding safety concerns. We have taken his points into consideration and this is a tragic incident. We've been looking out for all possible aspects of our operations. So please bear with me, I am not in the position to comment right now," he said after the meeting.When asked what safety measures Uber takes, Mr Sawlani added, "We have commercially registered drivers and vehicles. We are just an aggregator wherein we are giving our source of income to these drivers."Representatives from Meru, Uber, Tab Cabs, Easy Cabs, Ola Cabs and Cabzo were present at the meeting to formulate and regularize norms for background checks of drivers after an Uber driver allegedly raped a 27-year-old woman in Delhi last week.The meeting went on for over an hour. Representatives from Meru and Tab Cabs told the commissioner that they already had very stringent procedures in place and spend a considerable amount of money on background checks of drivers. They added that operators of web-based applications that provide taxi services should be made to follow these procedures as well.The commissioner has also asked operators to submit their drivers' database by Thursday afternoon. Operators have also been asked to submit their improved plans by December 15 so that the news systems can be put in place by mid-January. "Some of the operators showed me their systems but I wasn't very happy with their background check provisions that are existing. So I have given them time up to until this weekend to come up with new provisions," said Mr Zagade.Captains – set a course for Star Trek Mission New York on September 2nd, 2016! This brand new convention is your chance to meet the team, as you explore Star Trek Online before its official debut on console.
Star Trek: The Next Generation star Denise Crosby will be joining the team at the Star Trek Online booth on Friday afternoon from noon until 4PM and Saturday from 10AM to 1PM! Join one of the most influential Star Trek Online voice actors for our meet and greet! Be sure to get there early, when we give out a limited number of autographed headshots. You can also join Denise and crew for the Star Trek Online panel on Friday, September 2nd at 1:30 in Room 1A21 for a behind the scenes look at development for STO and console.
Our booth will also feature an array of activities. Now is the perfect opportunity to play Star Trek Online before console. Be one of the first 1,000 players to play Star Trek Online at the booth and receive a limited edition Odyssey ship t-shirt!
Captains will also have the opportunity to get their picture taken alongside their crew in front of various Star Trek Online backgrounds. Place yourself on a Federation, Klingon, or Romulan bridge with our green screen setup and get your photo taken! We’ll also feature a variety of raffles ranging from the Wiz Kids – Star Trek Attack Wing Sets, Expansions, and a Limited-Edition Odyssey Uniform Crew Shirt.
You will also have tons of other opportunities and chances to chat with the Star Trek Online developers. Join us for our Meet the Devs event and chat over Romulan Ale on Friday, September 2nd at 8PM at Lansdowne Road! You’ll also be able to meet up with the developers later at the Starfleet Academy Experience on Saturday, September 3rd at 7:00PM. Become a cadet and take a tour of the Starfleet Academy with the developers and the team at Priority One! Be sure to use the code STARTREKONLINE.com when you sign up at intrepidmuseum.org
We can’t wait to see you all there!So many people are trolling President Trump after he alluded to a terrorism attack in Sweden that never happened.
"You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this," Trump said.
He later clarified that his statement was in reference to a story, later debunked, that was broadcast on Fox News.
Fox News report on Swedish immigration, referred to by Trump, is full of errors and exaggerations https://t.co/PmfqBdj7OX — Aftonbladet (@Aftonbladet) February 20, 2017
But not before a Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, made a very helpful list in English summarising the day in news:
3:24 PM (local time): A man set himself on fire at Sergels torg, a plaza in central Stockholm. He was taken to the hospital with severe burns. There is so far no information on his motives but the intelligence service is not part of the investigation.
6:42 PM: The famous singer Owe Thörnqvist had some technical problems during rehearsal for the singing competition ”Melodifestivalen”. (However, the 87 year old singer still managed to secure the victory the very next day.)
8:23 PM: A man died in hospital, after an accident in the workplace earlier that day in the city of Borås.
8:46 PM: Due to harsh weather in the northern parts of Sweden the road E10 was closed between Katterjåkk and Riksgränsen. Due to strong winds and snow in the region the Met office also issued an avalanche warning.
12:17 AM: Police officers initiated a chase for a fleeing Peugeot through central parts of the Swedish capital of Stockholm. The pursuit ended in police officers ramming the suspect at Engelbrektsgatan. The driver is now accused of driving under the influence, traffic violation and car theft.
IN LIGHTER NEWS:
11:23 AM: Ok, let’s not be fake news, this story took place in the autumn, but was reported Friday before lunch and we thought you would like it. A wooden moose got the attention of a lovesick moose bull. It all happened in 79 year old Ove Lindqvist’s garden in Byske outside Skellefteå, northern Sweden. ”I thought it was going to start a fight, instead it humped the wooden moose thrice”, he said.
Just to recap: There was a man setting himself on fire in Stockholm, an old and famous singer having technical problems, a drunk car chase and a road closure.
No trace of terrorist attacks.If you've been missing "Defiance," we've got news for you.
HuffPost TV can exclusively reveal that the second season of "Defiance" arrives 8 p.m. ET June 19 on Syfy, along with the premiere of another much-anticipated drama, "Dominion," which arrives at 9 p.m. ET June 19.
But wait, there's more. To bridge the gap between Seasons 1 and 2, Syfy has created a "minisode" series called "Defiance: The Lost Ones." There are five installments in the series (each one is between three and five minutes long). We've got an exclusive look at the first installment here. If it whets your appetite for more, all five parts of "The Lost Ones" arrive Friday on Syfy.com and it will also be available starting Monday via Syfy On Demand.
"The Lost Ones" picks up where Season 1 left off, with Nolan searching for the missing Irisa and making friends along the way. And by "making friends," we mean "risking his life and getting into trouble," of course. For more intel on what happens when Season 2 returns, check out this report from last year's Comic-Con.It's a spider with a unique expression that reminded researchers of a certain someone: Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Our Kyle Midura caught up with the senator at the Capitol.
Reporter Kyle Midura: What do you think about having a spider named after you-- Spintharus berniesandersi?
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont: (laughs) I dunno. I'm speechless, I'm speechless. I hope it is attractive, nice looking spider. That's all I can say.
Kyle Midura: Have you seen a picture of it?
Sen. Bernie Sanders: It's not an attractive looking spider. What can you do? What can you say?
Last week, we spoke with UVM Professor Ingi Agnarsson. He leads teams of students to the Caribbean to search for smiley-faced spiders in the genus Spintharus. Recently, they identified 15 new species and got to name each one of them. Among the winners: David Bowie, Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack and Michelle Obama, and Bernie Sanders.
"Why don't we honor the people that kind of stand up for what we believe is the right thing to do? People that are aware of the importance of biodiversity, the people that are aware of global climate change and its threats," Agnarsson explained.
Sanders says that's what makes Spintharus berniesandersi such an honor.
"It's very nice of students to be thinking about what we are trying to do together and I appreciate that very much," he said.
Those researchers captured the spiders in the Caribbean and tested their DNA back in Vermont. That's when they realized the magnitude of their discovery.An exit poll in South Carolina asked voters questions that some describe as "overt racism" and "shameful," on a day the state elected the first African-American senator in the South since the Reconstruction Era.
"Blacks are getting too demanding in their push for equal rights. Agree or disagree?," the poll asked. Another posed if blacks needed to "try harder" to "be as well off as whites."
An exit poll questionnaire in SC yesterday. This is shameful! pic.twitter.com/MiS0FatnU5 — Auztin (@troyauztin) November 5, 2014
One woman who took the poll wrote of her initial excitement after being approached — she had heard so much about exit polls on TV — only to offended by the "deceptive" questions.
I know there are other people who took the poll and were offended and as confused as I was. Concerned citizens must stand up to people in our community who don’t seem to realize the impact these racist questions will have, especially on people of color. We were told this was an exit poll, not a survey about race, and that in itself is deceptive.
However, it turns out that the poll was worded this way on purpose. Researchers took the questions, word for word, from the Modern Racism Scale — a psychological test developed in 1986 that can be used to determine an individual's inherent discriminations.
The political science researchers who conducted the poll say they administer this type of study often, and they were surprised at the anger to their questions in this latest round.
I spoke to the professor behind a controversial exit poll in #SouthCarolina. Here is my story. http://t.co/dBzvRATY9q #TimScott — Dave Jordan (@DJNYC1) November 6, 2014
“We do this every day. We didn't think too much about it until we got it out in the field and saw that there was some reaction,” said David Woodard, a political science professor at Clemson University, in an interview with Spartanburg news site WSPA.
“You had liberals getting offended. You had conservatives getting offended. It was all over the place,” added Paul White Jr., a doctoral candidate in political science from University of South Carolina.
“It was designed to take advantage of a political moment of Senator Tim Scott's election as the first African-American from a southern state since reconstruction,” Woodard explained. “It was not designed to be provocative.”
See the full exit pollUsman Khawaja has picked up a cricket bat today for the first time since injuring his knee last summer, and remains determined to lead Australia A on their winter tour of India in July.
Khawaja was named captain of the potential-packed four-day and one-day A squads to play a series of matches against India A in July and August that will also feature a return to red-ball cricket for World Cup-winning speedster Patrick Cummins.
Khawaja had set the Matador One-Day Cup alight with Queensland and seemed on track for a big summer until he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in a training drill with the Sydney Thunder just prior to the start of the KFC T20 Big Bash League.
The injury, rare in cricket, required a full knee reconstruction and ended his season. The talented and classy left-hander has stayed the course and battled hard to recover, with his eyes firmly set on leading the A tour.
"Everything is going to plan at the moment so I can't complain," Khawaja told sydneythunder.com.au.
"I've been running for four weeks now and doing straight lines at a 100%. I start doing agility training tomorrow (Thursday), nearly five months after getting injured.
"I'll be back holding a bat this week, I'm going to be doing throw downs and hopefully progress from there.
"I've been selected for the Australia A team in July, fingers crossed I will be fit for that. I feel pretty good so far and every week it's getting better."
Khawaja hit the indoor nets at the Bupa National Cricket Centre in Brisbane today, and posted a video showing the left-hander is quickly regaining his touch and timing despite the long lay-off.
Finally! Had my first hit in 5 months today. ☺#toolong #cricket #ACLrecovery #whippington @graynicollsofficial @qldcricket A video posted by Usman Khawaja (@usman_khawajy) on May 20, 2015 at 11:48pm PDT
Khawaja, still only 28, played the last of his nine Tests during the 2013 Ashes tour. He had been in fine form for Queensland during last year's Matador Cup, scoring 523 runs at 74.71, including a top score of 166, before the injury.
The leadership role is a big incentive to make the India tour for the Islamabad-born batsman, and with new Queensland Bulls coach Phil Jaques yet to name a captain, Khawaja is seen as a contender.
"I'm keen to build on my captaincy experience and this tour will be a great opportunity to do that," he said when the squad was announced.
Australia A's four-day team could feature up to seven players with a Baggy Green already to their name. Besides Khawaja, vice-captain Matthew Wade, Ashton Agar, Joe Burns, Cummins, Glenn Maxwell and Stephen O'Keefe have all represented Australia in Test cricket.
Cummins last played a first-class game in July 2013, but a remodelled action after a series of back injuries saw the 21-year-old play a vital role in Australia's successful World Cup campaign.
Cummins played a solitary Test in November 2011 as an 18-year-old. He played two World Cup games, taking five wickets at 16, but Josh Hazlewood was preferred for the tournament's latter stages to partner Mitchell Starc with the new ball.
Dates for the two four-day and five one-day matches have yet to be finalised by the BCCI, with the tour reciprocating India A's visit to Brisbane and Darwin last winter which saw Mitchell Marsh push his claim as a Test allrounder with a double-century.President-elect Donald Trump’s get-tough stance against illegal immigration faces a key test on his first day in office: whether to follow through on his campaign trail pledge to revoke President Barack Obama’s 2012 directive that gave undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children a chance to work here legally without getting deported.
While other aspects of Trump’s immigration platform, such as building a wall along the border with Mexico, will take time to implement, Trump will confront a stark and immediate choice on the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an executive action Trump vowed to rescind as he campaigned for the presidency.
Story Continued Below
More than 740,000 so-called Dreamers have work permits under the policy. According to recent data, about 7,000 new applications and 21,000 renewals arrive each month. Trump could shut that process down completely on his first day in office, but if he does nothing, immigration officials will continue to grant and renew permits he has argued are illegal.
If he shutters the program altogether, hundreds of thousands of young people who’ve spent most of their lives in the U.S. could be thrown out of work, with some losing the ability to pay for school.
The post-Inauguration Day policy challenge already has Trump facing pressure and lobbying from both sides in the immigration debate, as hard-liners urge him to scuttle the program altogether while Democrats and some Republicans warn that doing so would be catastrophic for those whose livelihoods and education now depend on the special immigration status.
“We’re trying in a variety of different ways, directly and indirectly, to tell them this would be a disaster for 744,000 DACA recipients and this would be a disaster politically, because of all the friends and family that they have,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who came up with the concept of DACA in 2010, said in an interview.
But some Trump supporters say they’re expecting Trump to toe the tough line he laid out during his presidential bid and emphatically end the program on Day One.
“He needs to do something immediately to show that he’s serious and when he made his promises, he’s going to keep them,” said Corey Stewart, Trump’s former campaign chairman in Virginia. “One of the best ways to show that determination is to immediately, by executive order, terminate the DACA program.”
Trump was resolute on the campaign trail about revoking Obama’s executive actions, and he will have an array of options regarding DACA. At the most aggressive end, he could abruptly end the program and seek to revoke the work permits received by the hundreds of thousands of DACA beneficiaries. The biggest fear among advocates is that Trump could go even further, using their personal information on file to seek them out for deportation.
A middle-ground option would allow Trump to phase out the program by allowing existing work permits, which are issued for two years at a time, to expire naturally without renewing them — a path recommended by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). A variation of this option would be to let the program phase out for a few months, but choose a firm date — for instance, the end of this year — when all the existing work permits would be declared invalid.
Or Trump could leave the program intact for a while, perhaps arguing that he wants to give Congress time to work on legislation that might address the Dreamers, his promise of a border wall, guest worker visas and related immigration issues.
“For people who already have the permits, you wouldn’t take it away from them and they wouldn’t be allowed to renew it, and that gives us time to find a legislative solution,” Rubio said of his preferred method, which would appear to result in more and more permits expiring over time unless Congress acts. “I’m going to wait and see what the White House wants to do.”
Still, some of Trump’s DACA options have their own complications, particularly if he chooses to summarily shut down the program on Day One.
While Trump can simply order the Department of Homeland Security to stop renewing work permits and decline to issue new ones, actually canceling those in the hands of immigrants will require additional effort because federal regulations dictate that process, legal experts said.
According to immigration lawyers, the Trump administration would likely have to revoke each work permit case by case, serving notice on each of the 740,000 beneficiaries and giving them 15 days to submit reasons not to rescind their work authorization.
“That would be such a labor-intensive, expensive process that it is hard for me to imagine they’re going to do it,” said Stephen Legomsky, a former chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under Obama.
While Trump — and his choice to lead the Justice Department, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) — declared repeatedly during the campaign that they think Obama’s executive action was illegal, they could argue there is precedent to allow DACA to continue for a while if legislative action appears to be imminent.
During the debate over the legality of Obama’s moves, some experts noted that an executive action issued by President George H.W. Bush and covering large numbers of immigrants involved a kind of bridging action or reprieve that allowed those individuals to stay for a while as Congress worked to address the issue.
While all that is being worked out, Democrats and advocates are devising their own strategy on how to handle immigration in the Trump era. The four Senate Democrats in the “Gang of Eight” three years ago — Dick Durbin of Illinois, Chuck Schumer of New York, Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Michael Bennet of Colorado — huddled last week to begin discussions about how to do that, including ways to protect DACA beneficiaries, aides said.
Durbin said he personally hasn’t been in direct contact with the incoming administration, but the Obama White House has, at least to raise the topic.
Since Trump’s election, key Democratic lawmakers and immigration advocates have been urging the Obama administration to do what it can to protect the Dreamers who’ve been granted a reprieve from deportation and work permits. But realistically, Obama has very few options to protect his signature immigration achievement.
“We’ve explored every aspect and every possibility,” Durbin said. “We haven’t come up with an answer.”
The applications for DACA say the personal information that applicants provided won’t be used to deport them, although the Trump administration could choose to ignore that guidance. Still, the new administration would be likely to face legal challenges if it sought to do so, experts said.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has contemplated simply scrubbing a database with personal information of immigrants in the city illegally who have obtained a municipal identification card. But immigration experts who’ve looked into the issue said that, at least on the federal level, wiping away the personal data of DACA recipients would not be legal.
Menendez — whose staff, like Durbin’s, has been looking into how to safeguard DACA beneficiaries — suggested that the outgoing administration write memos or issue other statements that would lay out legal precedents the Trump administration would have to fight if they wanted to use the personal data to deport Dreamers.
“Give these people at least some fighting chance that the information they voluntarily gave won’t be used against them,” Menendez said in an interview. “That’s first and foremost.”
Others, however, dismissed the likelihood that the new Trump administration would launch its deportation agenda by going after Dreamers — traditionally the most sympathetic group of immigrants without legal status.
“Why would you spend time going through a database of telegenic illegal aliens when you’ve got wife beaters and drunk drivers to deport?” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors more restrictive immigration laws. “Purely as a matter of PR, it’s hilariously improbable to do that.”
House Democrats, including Reps. Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois and Zoe Lofgren of California, have urged Obama to use his pardon power on the 740,000 Dreamers, although the White House has ruled out that option. Durbin also disagreed that pardoning Dreamers would be feasible, noting that the pardon power has traditionally been used for criminal offenses, and being in the country illegally is a civil violation.
A group of senators, including Durbin and Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona, are working on legislation to extend the legal protections under DACA should Trump end the program once he assumes office. Those benefits would last until Congress can come up with a more permanent, legislative fix.
“I’ve always wanted to protect the Dreamers, so we’re just trying to see the best way to do” that, Flake said. “My preference would be to work with the administration on legislation that we could then do.”
Some advocates are guardedly optimistic about Trump’s post-election tone. They point out that his recent statements haven’t alluded to mass deportations, while noting his comments from last week about seeking broad legislation on immigration.
On the other hand, immigrant-rights backers are skittish about Trump’s plans to nominate Sessions as attorney general and about Trump’s post-election meeting with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is in the mix for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
That’s prompting them to do whatever they can while Obama is in office to shield Dreamers, no matter how futile those efforts may ultimately be.
“The clock is ticking, and there’s not a whole lot they can do that can’t be undone,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. “But it’s still worth it.”Jeffrey Jones, a researcher and the Security Strategy Director at Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, recently posted a report (PDF format) that was featured in the CSO online magazine. The report compared the security track records of both Internet Explorer and Firefox, including both older (IE 6 and Firefox 1.0) and newer (IE 7, Firefox 1.5 and 2.0) versions. Jones came to the conclusion that, contrary to popular belief, Internet Explorer has experienced fewer security vulnerabilities than Firefox over the same periods of time.
Now, I can already hear some of you anxiously mashing the "Reply" button in order to point out that Jones' position as an employee of Microsoft has biased his results and thus they cannot be taken at face value. And Mozilla chief evangelist Mike Shaver has some serious problems with Jones' methodology; more on that below.
Jones has anticipated negative reactions and has encouraged readers to challenge his assumptions, analysis, and conclusions by pointing out flaws in his methodology. Jones collected and cross-checked his data from a number of sources in order to ensure its accuracy. Disclosed vulnerabilities for Internet Explorer were compiled from Microsoft security bulletins and for Mozilla's own bulletins for Firefox. Both sources were checked with the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and sites such as Securityfocus.com, the BugTraq mailing list, Secunia.com, and Securitytracker.com.
Vulnerabilities for IE and Firefox. Data source: Jeff Jones.
The report looks at vulnerabilities over the last three years, breaking them down into High, Medium, and Low severity categories. Since November 2004, Microsoft has fixed 87 total vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, while Mozilla has issued 199 fixes to Firefox 1, 1.5, and 2.0. In addition to looking at the total number of vulnerabilities, Jones broke the issue down into four categories of users: IE users who upgraded to new versions right away, IE users who held off from upgrading as long as they could, and Firefox users of both types. Interestingly, delaying upgrades made very little difference to the total number of vulnerabilities on either browser. As shown on the chart, Internet Explorer had significantly fewer vulnerabilities during this time period.
Jones also looked at the trends of vulnerabilities found in new software during its first year of availability: are Microsoft and Mozilla getting better or worse at creating secure software with fewer holes in it? He found that IE 6 had 26 vulnerabilities found in its first year, while IE 7 did slightly better with 17 (IE 7 on Vista, thanks to its improved security capabilities, had only 14). Firefox had a slightly different trend, with version 1.0 experiencing 66 vulnerabilities, version 1.5 upping the trend with 77, and version 2.0 beating both with 56. Still, these numbers are all higher than IE.
Of course, measuring fixed vulnerabilities is not the whole picture: what about unfixed holes? Jones researched this and found 24 disclosed but unfixed holes in Firefox 2, versus 21 in Internet Explorer 7. Jones did not look at earlier versions of either browser, nor did he attempt to estimate the number of undisclosed and unfixed vulnerabilities, which are by their very nature almost impossible to count. He did also not attempt to count the number of sites that attempt to exploit these vulnerabilities, which would also be a difficult task. While some may still think that malware only targets IE, the truth is that most malware today does a simple browser version check and loads the appropriate exploit code for IE or Firefox. Gone are the days of ActiveX-only malware.
A rebuttal from Mozilla
In a blog post today, Mozilla chief evangelist Mike Shaver savaged the Microsoft study. Shaver points out that Microsoft bundles its fixes together, which means that several IE defects may be repaired, but only one vulnerability accounted for. "We count every defect distinctly," argues Shaver. "We count the ones that Mozilla developers find in-house. We count the things we do to mitigate defects in other pieces of software, including Windows itself and other third-party plugins. We count memory behavior that we think might be exploitable, even if no exploit has ever been demonstrated and the issue in question was found in-house. We open our bugs up after we've shipped fixes, so that people don’t have to take our word for our severity ratings."
Shaver also criticizes Microsoft's disclosure standards and what he sees as a lack of transparency. He suggests that Microsoft spend more time fixing bugs instead of "hoping that defects aren't found by someone who they can't keep quiet." Mozilla, he argues, is much more transparent and aggressive when it comes to security. The result? "130 million Firefox users are safer for it every day."
Some people may criticize Jones' approach for cherry-picking the time frames to work in Microsoft's favor: the three-year window neatly coincides with the release of IE 6 for Windows XP SP2. This service pack was the culmination of a massive two-year refocusing on security by Microsoft that mandated security training for every developer in the company. Jones is right to be proud of his company's accomplishments on the security front, but one suspects that if this same test were run again with an earlier start date, the results would have been rather different.Curtis White's book, The Science Delusion, makes two broad points: that science is based upon 'assumptions that are deluded,' and that scientists can be real jerks. He provides ample proof for one of those claims.
The title of the The Science Delusion, published on May 28th, is an obvious reference Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. It's no surprise, then, when Dawkins is one of the many scientists that populate its pages. They're not an attractive bunch. Through anecdotes and commentary, Curtis White paints various scientists as dismissive snobs, smug pseudo-intellectuals, manipulative showmen, immoral politicos, and people who make bad faith arguments from behind a protective screen of elite supporters.
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It's an unsavory picture, but - while it is fortunate that such people are rare in the world of art, religion, and philosophy - it doesn't support the title and premise of Curtis' book. Unpleasant people can have many failings without perpetuating a delusion, and the fact that the book digresses into personal sniping makes it seem less like an argument and more like one of those spiraling flame wars that are often seen on message boards. In fact, the book is less an argument and more a polemic aimed at other polemics, intensifying the sense of animosity, but not necessarily of credibility.
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White's thesis states that scientist's "claims are based upon assumptions many of which are dubious if not outright deluded, and that the kind of culture their delusions support is lamentable." He urges people to use, in place of that science-oriented culture, the intellectual romanticism of the 18th century, particularly its focus on the need for individually-created meaning in the face of the loss of external sources of meaning like the church, the state, and the familial clan. White then claims that the culture of science actively discourages and scorns that search for meaning. While, in between insults, White makes some good points regarding the first two claims, he sabotages himself when it comes to the third.
The best parts of White's polemic come when he shows that certain intellectual traditions are largely used by scientists when they are convenient, and dismissed when they are not. He points out that scientists, from biology to astrophysics, adorn their discoveries with the trappings of meaning to guide people into thinking about these discoveries in certain ways. Evolution should be more impressive than creationism because of its marvelous time scale and simple driving principle. The nebulae and supernovae out there in the infinite universe are wonders. Quantum mechanics is revolutionary. However, when looking at the concept of "marvel," of "wonder," and of "revolutionary," and why they are intrinsically valuable - and thus might apply to other intellectual pursuits - they can be dismissive.
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White also points out the bad habit scientists and science writers have of, when faced with a concept seemingly beyond the grasp of hard science, defining it as a measurable commodity, measuring it, and then announcing that they have a grasp on it. White puts it in terms of neuroscientists announcing that they're on the verge of understanding things like "intellect," and "creativity," by mapping certain parts of the brain. I would add to that scientists running personality experiments on different animals, but only after defining personality in a way that allows it to be measurable through experimentation. White argues that, from Richard Dawkins to Lawrence Krauss, many scientists pretend to have the answers to questions about meaning, but instead redefine the question to fit the answers they have.
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Unfortunately, White does some redefining of his own. This happens often in the book, such as when White quotes Richard Feynman as saying, "all things are made of atoms, and... everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms." White calls this a "mechanistic claim," and goes on to talk about how the symbolic systems that humans create are not made of atoms. We are more |
. However, there is no record of any such assault in the area, and when this claim was examined in 1935 it was dismissed as a flight of fancy.
The Fish family had a mildly retarded handyman named John Straube boarding with them. Fish's wife (and mother of his six children) took up with this boarder and abandoned the household. Fish came home from work one day to find his house deserted and bereft of its furniture. She had left him with the children, though. It was in the wake of her departure Fish claimed he began to hear voices, specifically from the Apostle John. His strange behaviors increased – he rolled himself up in a carpet claiming John the Apostle had told him to do so. On an outing with the children he stood atop a small hill and with upraised arms shouted at the sky, "I am Christ!"
Not long after her departure, Fish's wife came back and asked if she could move into the house again. Fish let her on the condition that her new man, John Straube, stay away. She agreed to this condition, and sent Straube packing. However, a few days later Fish found her sneaking food up to their attic. He discovered she had hidden Straube away up there and had tended to him when Fish was gone to work. Fish advised her again that she was welcome to stay but Straube had to go; Fish's wife and Straube left together and were never seen again by the children or Fish.
Credit: public domainPart of Fish's flagellant routine was to run a thorny rose stem into his urethra then pull it out slowly. Another behavior he developed during this time was inserting needles into his perineum, scrotum, penis, and other parts of his pelvic region. His piquing involved inserting needles in his skin, which he then pulled out. However, as time wore on he began pushing them deeper into his flesh where they lodged, unrecoverable short of surgical removal. At least 29 of these remained buried in his body. [One source hysterically claims one of these embedded needles was an astounding 12" long. Fish's pelvic X-rays do not bear this out; although the needles in stuck in his pelvic region vary from one to a few inches in length, there is nothing of a one-foot length present].
Fish also had a quirky hobby throughout his life of writing letters to Lonely Hearts advertisers. In these letters to strange women he would describe all the whippings and humiliations he would like for the letter's receiver to inflict upon him. He wrote dozens of these, and on more than one occasion was arrested for harassment and obscenity as a result.
Pirahña
Fish stabbed a mentally retarded boy in the Georgetown area of Washington, DC, in about 1919 for purely sadistic reasons. His random stabbings generally targeted the mentally challenged or black people. He thought that if he managed to kill one of them such a person would not be missed in society.
In July 1924, Fish saw eight-year-old Beatrice Kiel playing alone on her parents' farm on Staten Island. He approached the girl. He offered her money to help him look for rhubarb in a nearby field. Beatrice was all set to go with him when her mother found Fish loitering and chased him off. He left, but returned later that night. He sneaked into a barn, and had every intention of staying the night there when the householder discovered him. Beatrice's father, Hans, ran him off.
By this time Fish had begun reading much about cannibalism. He cut out and carried favorite newspaper and magazine articles on the subject with him at all times. It is no doubt his attempt to kidnap Beatrice was probably his first real try to find a victim to cook and eat. To complicate matters, his fantasies about torturing and castrating boys grew stronger by 1925, and he claimed voices were directing him to do this.
Three days after his attempt to abduct Beatrice Kiel, Fish succeeded in kidnapping 8-year-old Francis McDonnell (also living on Staten Island) on the evening of July 14, 1924. The boy was reported missing by his parents when he didn't come home after playing that afternoon with friends down the street. A search effort the next morning went forward to naught. The boy's body was finally found in a densely wooded area near his home. He had been beaten and sexually molested before being strangled to death with his own suspenders.
Francis' playmates were questioned about the day of his disappearance. They reported that an "elderly man with a gray mustache" had lured him away. One of the McDonnell's neighbors also noted seeing Francis with a similar looking man a short time later, headed toward the woods along a grassy path. The boy's mother also reported having seen the same man in the neighborhood a few hours before her son disappeared. She described him to reporters: "He came shuffling down the street mumbling to himself and making queer motions with his hands... I saw his thick gray hair and his drooping gray mustache. Everything about him seemed faded and gray."
The press dubbed the mysterious stranger "The Gray Man". Despite the eyewitness accounts, and the high-profile given the case, no leads developed and this murder went unsolved until Fish confessed to it over a decade later. [Several eyewitnesses from his attempt to abduct Beatrice Kiel in 1924 and from Francis McDonnell's murder came forward and later identified him as the much sought "Gray Man"].
With almost no details known about another crime, Fish was responsible for the abduction and murder of Emma Richardson, age 5. She was taken on October 3, 1926. His next crime is better detailed, gleefully documented in a written account by Fish in 1936.
A 4-year-old boy named Billy Gaffney was spotted by Fish playing in the hallway outside of his family's apartment in Brooklyn with a 3-year-old friend (Billy Beaton) on February 11, 1927. The two toddlers were briefly chaperoned by a 12-year old boy. The oldest boy went into an apartment (where he was supposed to be babysitting his infant sister). Both toddlers disappeared. The older boy contacted Beaton's father, and they found him on the roof of their apartment building. Billy Beaton reported that "the boogey man" had taken Billy Gaffney. Gaffney's body was never recovered.
Another serial killer named Peter Kudzinowski was suspected of the boy's disappearance. [Later when Fish was in custody, a motorman identified him as having been on a trolley that day with a crying boy matching Billy Gaffney's description. The older man with the boy was identified by the motorman from a newspaper photo as Fish. Solid investigative work led to the discovery Fish was employed by a Brooklyn real estate firm as a house painter in 1927, and during the time of Gaffney's disappearance he had been working on a house just a few miles from where Gaffney was abducted. Kudzinowski was found not responsible for the boy's disappearance.]
When Fish was confronted with the investigative effort in 1936 he confessed, and when Gaffney's mother came to Sing Sing seeking information about her son's disappearance, Fish provided a written account. In it he describes, with relish, how he had taken the boy to an abandoned house near the Rikers dump, and stripped, bound and gagged the boy before leaving him trussed and alone for the night.
Fish returned the next day at about 2:00 in the afternoon with a tool kit to dissect and dismember the boy. He then tortured and whipped the boy's buttocks till they bled (claiming his terror combined with the beatings would "tenderize" his meat). While still alive, according to Fish, he cut off Gaffney's nose and ears, slit his mouth (in the "Glasgow smile"), and gouged out his eyes. By this time the boy was dead from his injuries, and Fish then described in graphic detail drinking the boy's blood, and the dismembering and cooking of the boy (with potatoes, onions, turnips, and celery.). He claimed it took him four days to eat Billy Gaffney, and that he wasted nothing – almost. He wrote he had cut off the boy's penis and testicles (which he called "the pee wees"), and roasted them. He said the penis was tasty, but the "pee wees" he could not eat and flushed them down a toilet. [Fish lied about completely consuming Billy Gaffney. He had tossed some of the boy's remains wrapped in potato sacks into a stagnant pool nearby.]
Grace Budd Meets "The Gray Man"
In the early part of the 20th Century children were occasionally farmed out as laborers to rural areas. [The alleged Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, was actually sold into slavery to a Maine farmer by his father when he was young.] Many times in need of helping out their families, teenagers often took work as domestics out of town. Edward Budd was a strapping 18-year-old New York boy who wanted to contribute to his family's coffers, so he took out an advertisement in the papers seeking employment to hire away on a farm.
Credit: public domain
Unfortunately for Edward's little sister, Grace Budd, the person who answered his ad for employment was Albert Fish. On May 25, 1928, Fish spotted the ad (as a mash-letter writer he routinely read the classifieds) in the Sunday edition of the New York World. The ad read: "Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street."
Three days later, the 58-year-old Fish visited the Budd home in Manhattan in search of a victim in Edward Budd (he discovered Budd was a bit larger than he expected and knew he would not be able to abduct him successfully). Fish met Edward's ten-year-old sister, Grace. Foiled by Edward's robust appearance, the unruffled Fish merely sat and interviewed him and a similarly stocky male friend of Edward's for a job that did not exist. Fish gave his name as "Frank Howard" from Farmingdale, New York. He was dapperly dressed and was mannerly. Fish became fixated on Grace and, to keep up his pretense, he told Edward he would hire him to work on his farm, but he would send for him in a few days.
Fish did not turn up as promised, but sent the family a telegram apologizing, and he set a later date to fetch Edward. At this later visit, Fish told Edward he would gladly take him off to his farm, but before they left he had to attend a niece's birthday party in the neighborhood. With that he said he'd come back later to pick Edward up after the party. He then convinced the parents to let Grace come along with him. He claimed it was nearby at his sister's home. They agreed. Grace never came back from the party.
Manhunt for a Man-eater
Police involvement was almost immediate; it was quickly determined there was no job for Edward nor was there any Frank Howard of Farmingdale. The case, despite publicity, went cold fairly quickly. With no leads and no solid eyewitnesses, there was not much to be done.
In September 1930, police got a break on the case, or so they thought. A man named Charles Edward Pope, a 66-year-old apartment building superintendent, was taken into custody as a suspect. The complaining witness was his estranged wife. He spent over 100 days in jail before the jurisprudence system set him free on December 20, 1930. [It is unknown if Pope's vindictive absentee wife was ever brought up on charges for filing a false report].
Fish had married again in February 1930 but that new marriage only lasted a week, ending in divorce. In the same year Pope was accused of Grace Budd's kidnapping, Fish himself was once again in trouble with the law. He was arrested May 1930 for writing and sending another of his obscene letters. This one he sent to a woman seeking a job as a maid. Because of Fish's rantings about Christ and John the Apostle, he was sent to the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in 1930 and again in 1931 for observation. Psychiatrists ("alienists") described him as a sociopath (a term not used then) with "schizophrenic" tendencies. However, since his letter writing crimes were comparatively insignificant he was released without any further action taken.
A couple of years after Fish's last 1931 brush with the law, his incessant obscene letter-writing would be his downfall. In November 1933, an anonymous letter arrived at the Budd residence in Manhattan (over five years after Grace Budd disappeared). Grace's mother was illiterate, so she had to have her son Edward read it to her. The letter was a crazed narrative describing how, where, and when Grace Budd met her demise.
The letter was written by Fish, and he began the missive with a strange tale of how he first became interested in eating human flesh. In 1894 an alleged sailor friend of Fish's had eaten it in China. Later, when this man came to live near Fish he described how exquisite it was. Fish then became obsessed with the idea of eating children, particularly their buttocks (which his friend allegedly described as the most tender and delicious part). This letter then described every thing Fish did to Grace Budd in preparation for her ingestion by him.
Fish pointed out that he had visited the Budd home in June 3, 1928 (the day of the "birthday party"), and had brought them some cheese and strawberries as a gift. He recalled Grace's sitting on his lap during that last visit, and he said it was then he had made up his mind to eat her. He then went off to the "party", but took Grace to an abandoned house in Westchester he had already cased instead [taking her to Westchester had necessitated a 40 minute train ride. Grace, who had only been outside New York City proper twice in her life, was thrilled]. Credit: public domainHe left Grace outside picking flowers while he went upstairs in the house and took off all of his clothing (to avoid blood spattering on them). He then called her into the house – when she saw him naked she screamed and tried to get away, but he overpowered her and strangled her. As he had done with Billy Gaffney, Fish cut her up into morsels for eating. He cooked her and ate her remains over a nine-day period.
Bizarrely, Fish apparently felt Grace's mother needed to have her mind put at ease about one issue. He wrote that although he could have had sex with Grace, he chose not to, and she died a virgin. This was of small comfort to Delia Budd.
Fish lied about completely consuming Grace Budd, though. He had not eaten all of her, and had tossed some of her uneaten remains, and the tools with which he'd dismembered her, on the property where the abandoned murder house stood. Police later recovered these things.
Case Closed
Meticulous police work led to Fish. The envelope of the anonymous letter carried the logo of the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association. Police visited this place, and a janitor there said he had taken some of the stationery to his rooming house, but had left it behind when he moved out.
The landlady of the boarding house was visited. She advised the janitor's old room had been let to Albert Fish, but that he had checked out a few days before. She also said one of Fish's sons had sent him money, but more was on the way. Fish asked the landlady to hang on to the new check when it arrived and he would pick it up later.
On December 13, 1934, the lead investigator on the case received a call from Fish's former landlady. Fish had come by to collect the letter from his son, and he was now at her boarding house. Police advised Fish he was wanted for questioning about Grace Budd; he initially was compliant, but then began waving a straight razor at the arresting officers. He was disarmed and subdued, and taken to police headquarters for booking. Credit: public domainFish made no attempt to deny his involvement in the disappearance and murder of Grace Budd. He confirmed his original intent had been to use Edward Budd as a victim. He also made it clear that raping Grace had never crossed his mind [why this detail was so important to Fish is unfathomable. He later admitted that he had involuntarily ejaculated twice while working on her corpse.]
His lawyer attempted to plead insanity on behalf of his client, but Fish's confessions sank that glimmer of hope. It was while incarcerated during trial he met with Billy Gaffney's mother and gave her the details of her son's murder. He also detailed other crimes as well (claiming over 400 assaults, either sexual or with weapons, and several other murders). His trial began on March 11, 1935, in White Plains, New York, and lasted for ten days. Because of his allegedly hearing voices telling him to kill children he mounted an insanity defense. Several psychiatric doctors testified about Fish's perversions and fetishes: sadism, coprophilia, urophilia, pedophilia, infibulation, and masochism. Fish was considered a unique specimen as there was nothing in the medical literature of the times describing one person with so many sexual abnormalities.
Fish was not a sympathetic defendant, and his claims toward insanity were disproved under rebuttal by the prosecution (one of their witnesses stated categorically that one did not need to be insane to have Fish's fetishes. In fact, this man reported, these were common perversions that were "socially perfectly all right" and that Fish was "no different from millions of other people").
No one was swayed by Fish's insanity defense. The jury found him to be both sane and guilty of the kidnap and murder of Grace Budd. He was sentenced to death. Fish went back to Sing Sing's death row. On January 16, 1936, he was marched to the execution chamber, and strapped into Sing Sing's infamous "Old Sparky". Although it took two jolts of electricity to kill him, he was dead three minutes after entering the chamber at 11:06 AM. There is a persistent myth that the needles in Fish's pelvis somehow short-circuited the equipment, forcing the need for a second charge. This is false – many prisoners have had to be juiced more than once before they expire. The tiny bit of metal that 29 needles represents would not have been enough to short the high voltage of The Big Chair.
Incredibly, Fish's last words were reportedly, "I don't even know why I'm here." Also, he had written a 29-page letter to his attorney thanking him for his services, which he had mailed before execution. When his lawyer received it, he claimed the contents were so obscene and debauched that it was not fit for anyone to read. He smugly and censoriously decided public decency needed to be protected, and he locked this document away. The contents of this document are unknown. It is inconceivable, however, that what Fish had written in that last testament could be any more obscene than the letters and confessional scribblings he wrote before (paraphrased here, but quite graphic in their original form).
Credit: public domainWhile in custody and after his trial Fish confessed to the four canonical murders ascribed to him. There are indications he may have killed at least three other children between 1927 and 1932. His claims were wildly variant (in the same way serial killer Henry Lee Lucas would make outrageous claims of hundreds of victims). In reality, Fish probably did molest an untold number of boys, and he certainly indulged in his fetish behaviors.
Unlike the grossly overrated occultist Aleister Crowley, who enjoyed referring to himself grandly as "The Wickedest Man Alive", Albert Fish really was evil incarnate and not merely a hedonistic poseur. It is Albert Fish (homosexual pedophile, rapist, child murderer, and cannibal) who probably deserved that title more.
***Disgraced GOP state representative Wes Goodman has now been accused of sexually harassing at least 30 men. Goodman, was recently asked to resign after revelations that he allegedly had sex with a man in his public office. The prospect of sex on the public dime wasn’t the prevailing concern, however, as Goodman is known in his Ohio district for his anti-gay stance. Goodman formerly fashioned himself as a “family values” politician dedicated to promoting so-called “natural marriage.”
The latest allegations were relayed by multiple men aged 18-24 and originally reported by Independent Journal Review.
The report says that Goodman often messaged male college students with promises of political mentoring before making sexual overtures. The were usually politically involved, and had mutual friends with Goodman.
One of IJR‘s sources, who remains anonymous, claimed to have connected with Goodman to get into politics. He said:
[Goodman] sent me videos of him masturbating as well as d**k pics. He also sent another Snapchat asking how big my penis was. I immediately blocked him. He later [messaged] me on both Instagram and Facebook leading me to block him on both apps as well.
Another source said that he suffered harassment from Goodman that wasn’t sexual, but political in nature. He said Goodman “badmouthed” him to his boss for being a Democrat.
[image via Ohio State House of Representatives]
Follow Colin Kalmbacher on Twitter: @colinkalmbacherWith all the FBS and NFL head coaching positions now filled, the coaching carousel is starting to (ever so slightly) slow down, but a number of really good coordinator and assistant coaching positions remain open, and we’ve compiled a number of them below.
Clearly, there are a lot more openings out there, but below is a summary of the openings that we’re fielding the most questions about.
Note: The list below is as of February 6, 2016
Nebraska – Defensive line
Texas – Running backs
Arizona State – Defensive line
Texas Tech – Cornerbacks
LSU – Running backs
Utah State – Offensive coordinator, special teams coordinator /RBs
Alabama – Defensive position
Western Kentucky – Offensive coordinator, inside WRs / STC
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest additions, as this list will continue to change.Producer, DJ, and musician iDR spoke to KultScene about becoming a producer in the K-pop world in the first part of our interview. iDR also spoke to KultScene about working with SM Entertainment, including upcoming releases from top girl group Girls’ Generation, details about the thought process behind EXO’s latest song, and some insight into an upcoming group.
EXO’s June release “Love Me Right,” the title song on the repackage, or re-release, of the idol group’s May album “EXODUS,” is an upbeat song. It’s also iDR’s first single with the widely popular boy band EXO, and one filled with a lot of subtle meaning even though it wasn’t initially planned for EXO. “I wasn’t aiming for EXO when I was writing it because it’s more of an uppity, happy, ‘let’s go, we’re up’ song and their [EXO] stuff is what I thought of as a little more aggressive.”
In the past, iDR’s written other songs for EXO, such as “Peter Pan” and “The Winter’s Tale,” but this is his first title track for the group. Their previous singles like “Growl” and “Overdose” were hugely popular across Asia and EXO is one of the world’s most popular boy bands. But in 2014, former members Kris (Wu Yi Fan) and Luhan left EXO to focus on personal careers in China, and a third member, Tao, appears to have followed the same path in 2015. When iDR was asked to write a song, he thought that the happy, very un-EXO sounding song would be perfect.
“The thing is, and I’m sure a lot of people realize, they [EXO] have gone through a lot of drama, lost a few members, and I think, I felt and the SM staff felt, that they needed something that isn’t such a dark and aggressive track. Something that’s upbeat and happy will put a spin on the whole thing and allow them to say, ‘Hey. We’re good, we’re cool, we’re moving on, and there’s nothing to be sad or upset about. Let’s keep it up, let’s keep it moving.’ And when we came up with that feeling and that concept, that track seemed to fit, and boom! We kind of knew as soon as we had it with the A&R’s input that this would be, if not the single, one of the single’s on their [repackage] album. I’m really happy that it turned out that way too.”
Also on KultScene: 4 Ways to Promote a K-pop Trainee
Even though “Love Me Right” was a new style of song for EXO to promote as a single, the track did well in Korea. But nothing is certain, and iDR was excited to see how well the song, and style, did. “It was one of those ‘will it really happen?’ When it [“Love Me Right”] came out, I saw the video and heard the final mix and mastered version, and I was kind of blown away. You know, there’s always that little inkling inside that says ‘I feel like this is the one,’ and I had that feeling for sure. I didn’t really speak about it until this minute. I had the feeling, and I was hoping that it would turn out this way.”
Not only was “Love Me Right” successful, it helped EXO achieved multiple milestones, including becoming the first K-pop male group in many years to sell over one million albums.
Along with working with EXO, iDR has had experience working with other SM Entertainment acts. His first K-pop song ever was Super Junior’s “No Other,” and now he’s working on songs for Girls’ Generation and SM Entertainment’s next male idol group.
When asked if he could say anything else about the upcoming songs, iDR admitted that everything is under tight wraps. “I will say that the rookie group is going to be something SM fans haven’t seen before, a new twist on a group, not the typical group that they [SM Entertainment] would put out. [And] The Girls’ Generation project is also something they are really excited about. Expect to hear a mature, seasoned Girls’ Generation with their signature spunk and flare.”
Check out the first half of our exclusive interview with iDR right HERE.
What do you think about what iDR’s shared? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below and be sure to subscribe to the site and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr to keep up with all of our posts.Samsung seems to only be getting bigger and better. Not only does it now account for the three top-selling Android smartphone models shipped worldwide, but its Galaxy S7 Edge was also the world’s top-selling Android smartphone model in the first half of 2016, according to the latest research from Strategy Analytics.
Samsung has done a killer job with their Galaxy S7 Edge, which has achieved monumental success. The S7 Edge is currently the world’s most popular Android smartphone, thanks to its attractive curved display design combined with an easy to use Edge features, which users find extremely appealing.
Not surprisingly then, Samsung shipped 13.3 million units of the Galaxy S7 Edge in H1 2016, accounting for a share of 2 percent of all Android smartphones shipped worldwide. The world’s second most popular Android smartphone was the Galaxy J2, which shipped 13.0 million units, followed by the Galaxy S7 at the third position with shipments of 11.8 million units during H1 2016.
The research brought more good news for Samsung as it reported that global Android smartphone shipments increased by 5 percent from 552.2 million units in H1 2015 to 577.3 million units in H1 2016. The report, however, failed to bring any cheer for Apple, which is seeing declining iPhone sales, as the research found that the Android smartphone category was outgrowing Apple iOS. According to the report, global smartphone shipments of Apple iOS fell 16 percent from 108.7 million in H1 2015 to 91.6 million in H1 2016.
Even as the South Korean smartphone maker continues to increase its dominance in the mobile market, the report warns that Samsung cannot afford to sit back and relax, as sales of other models being offered by its emerging rivals, such as the Huawei P9, OPPO R9, and Vivo X7, are fast beginning to catch up.
Data from Strategy Analytics for Q2 2016 shows that Samsung’s global smartphone shipments increased to 77.6 million from 71.9 million in Q2 2015, while Chinese smartphone maker, Oppo more than doubled its sales from 7.6 million units to 18 million units over the same period.
Let us know in the comments below if you think that the Android smartphone category will continue to outgrow Apple iOS and Samsung will remain the king of the Android mobile landscape!Vikings punter/musician/gamer Chris Kluwe told Outsports.com that he doesn't know if any of his friends are gay.
Kluwe told Jim Buzinski: "Honestly, I’ve never really asked anyone. I’m more interested in if you’re going to play video games with me! Honestly, I don’t care. People don’t ask me what goes on in my bedroom and I try and give them the same privilege."
But Kluwe said that one of the reasons he's gotten in the issue on the November ballot, recording three radio spots for Minnesotans for Equality, is because "one of my wife’s brothers is gay and I know him and his partner [who live in California] would love to get married but they can’t."
Here's the first of the three spots:
But even without having a family connection, Kluwe said he would still be involved in opposing the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot in Minnesota.
To read why, and to read the entire q-and-a with Buzinski, go here.Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, known professionally as Rodriguez (born July 10, 1942), is an American singer-songwriter from Detroit, Michigan.[1] His career initially proved short lived in the United States, but unknown to Rodriguez his albums became extremely successful and influential in South Africa, where he is believed to have sold more records than Elvis Presley.[2][3] Because of scarce information about Rodriguez, it was incorrectly rumored there that he had committed suicide shortly after releasing his first album.[4]
In the 1990s, determined South African fans managed to find and contact Rodriguez, which led to an unexpected revival of his musical career. This was told in the 2012 Academy Award–winning documentary film Searching for Sugar Man and helped give Rodriguez a measure of fame in his home country. In May 2013, Rodriguez received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from his alma mater, Wayne State University, in Detroit.
Rodriguez has been living in Detroit's historic Woodbridge neighborhood, through which he is seen walking in Searching for Sugar Man. He is known to live a simple life, possessing no telephone or cell phone of his own, and occasionally visiting bars in the Cass Corridor section of Detroit near Woodbridge and Midtown Detroit, such as the Old Miami pub, where he has performed live concerts for small local crowds.
Early life [ edit ]
Sixto Rodriguez at Way Out West in Gothenburg, Sweden 2013
Rodriguez was born in 1942 in Detroit, Michigan. He was the sixth child of Mexican immigrant working-class parents.[5] He was named Sixto (pronounced "Seex-toh") because he was their sixth son. His father had immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the 1920s; his mother was also from Mexico. They had joined a large influx of Mexicans who came to the midwest to work in Detroit's industries.[6] Mexican immigrants at that time faced both intense alienation and marginalization.[7][8] In most of his songs, Rodriguez takes a political stance on the difficulties that faced the inner city poor.
Rodriguez earned a Bachelor of Philosophy from Wayne State University's Monteith College in 1981.[9]
Recording career [ edit ]
In 1967, using the name "Rod Riguez" (given by his record label), he released a single, "I'll Slip Away", on the small Impact label. He did not record again for three years, until he signed with Sussex Records, an offshoot of Buddah Records. He used his preferred professional name, "Rodriguez", after that. He recorded two albums with Sussex, Cold Fact in 1970 and Coming from Reality in 1971. However, both sold few copies in the US and he was quickly dropped by Sussex, which itself closed in 1975. At the time he was dropped, he was in the process of recording a third album which has never been released.
Rodriguez quit his music career and in 1976 he purchased a derelict Detroit house in a government auction for $50 (US$220 in 2018 dollars[10]) in which he still lives as of 2013.[11] He worked in demolition and production line work, always earning a low income. He remained politically active and motivated to improve the lives of the city's working-class inhabitants and has run unsuccessfully several times for public office: for the Detroit City Council in 1989, for Mayor of Detroit in 1981 and 1993 and for the Michigan House of Representatives in 2000.[12]
In 2013, it was announced that Rodriguez was in discussions with Steve Rowland, the producer of his Coming From Reality album. "I've written about thirty new songs," Rodriguez told Rolling Stone magazine. "He told me to send him a couple of tapes, so I'm gonna do that. I certainly want to look him up, because now he's full of ideas."[13]
Belated fame abroad [ edit ]
Although Rodriguez remained relatively unknown in his home country, by the mid-1970s his albums were starting to gain significant airplay in Australia, Botswana, New Zealand, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
When imported copies of his Sussex albums were sold out, an Australian record label, Blue Goose Music, bought the Australian rights to his recordings. Blue Goose released his two studio albums as well as a compilation album, At His Best, that featured unreleased recordings from 1973 – "Can't Get Away", "I'll Slip Away" (a re-recording of his first single), and "Street Boy".
At His Best went platinum in South Africa, which at one stage was the major disc-press source of his music to the rest of the world. He was compared to contemporaries such as Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens. Some of his songs served as anti-Apartheid anthems in South Africa,[14] where his work influenced musicians protesting against the government. Reportedly, anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was a Rodriguez fan.[15]
Rodriguez was also successful in Australia and performed two concert tours across the country in 1979 and 1981.
In 1991, both of his albums were released on CD in South Africa for the first time, which helped preserve his fame. However, few details of his life were known to his fans and it was rumored that he had killed himself during a concert in the 1970s.
Despite his success abroad, Rodriguez's fame in South Africa had remained unknown to him until 1997 when his eldest daughter came across a website dedicated to him.[16] After contacting the website and learning of his fame in the country, Rodriguez went on his first South African tour, playing six concerts before thousands of fans. A documentary, Dead Men Don't Tour: Rodriguez in South Africa 1998, was screened on SABC TV in 2001. He also performed in Sweden before returning to South Africa in 2001 and 2005.
Sixto Rodriguez at Manchester Academy, 2 December 2012
In 1998, Rodriguez's signature song, "Sugar Man", was covered by the South African rock band Just Jinger. In 2002, it was used by disc-jockey David Holmes to open his mix album, Come Get It I Got It, gaining Rodriguez more international airplay. "Sugar Man" had previously gained even more fame by having been sampled in the song "You're Da Man" in rapper Nas's 2001 album Stillmatic.[17]
In April 2007 and 2010, he returned to Australia to play at the East Coast Blues & Roots Music Festival,[18] as well as sell out shows in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. His song "Sugar Man" was featured in the 2006 film Candy, starring Heath Ledger. Singer-songwriter Ruarri Joseph covered Rodriguez's song "Rich Folks Hoax" for his third studio album. Rodríguez continues to tour in various countries.
Rodriguez's albums Cold Fact and Coming from Reality were re-released by Light in the Attic Records in 2009.[19]
In 2014, the French deep house and electro music producer The Avener released a new version of "Hate Street Dialogue" originally appearing in Rodriguez's album Cold Fact. The new version by The Avener features Rodriguez's vocals. The release charted in France.[20]
Belated success in the United States [ edit ]
Since the cinematic release of Searching for Sugar Man in 2012, Rodríguez has experienced a flush of media exposure and fan interest in the United States, as well as Europe. He appeared as a musical guest on the Late Show with David Letterman on August 14, 2012, performing "Crucify Your Mind", and performed "Can't Get Away" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on January 11, 2013.
Prominent news coverage has included a mid-August 2012 CNN feature story with an interview of Rodriguez discussing his life and career resurgence. On October 7, 2012, Rodriguez was featured on the US television news program 60 Minutes.[21] On November 18, 2012, Rodriguez was interviewed on the UK Sunday morning news program The Andrew Marr Show, where he also played a short song over the closing credits. He performed on the BBC2 program Later... with Jools Holland[22] on November 16, 2012, and was interviewed by Holland. Additionally, he has performed on the web on such notable web series as The Weekly Comet.
The film Searching for Sugar Man strongly implies that Rodriguez may have been cheated out of royalties over the years, specifically by Clarence Avant. |
to keep our composure. I felt like we did a good job with that. So biggest thing for us was just playing together and learning each other's games."
With the stakes much higher in Mexico, the level of competition will continue to rise. While Canada rested Olynyk over their final three exhibition games, after he sustained a minor knee injury on opening night, many of their opponents also held back. Ten-year NBA veteran Francisco Garcia was inactive in their matchup with Dominican Republic. Puerto Rico sat out banged up former NBA forward Renaldo Balkman and welcomed Dallas Mavericks guard J.J. Barea back from a two-game suspension.
Adversity will hit harder and the schedule does them no favours. Most teams will play 10 games in 13 days, with one of their days off breaking up the opening round. Canada's day of rest comes on the opening day of the tournament, before their first game, so they'll play 10 in 12.
As talented as they are, and with the success they have had in preliminaries, the Canadians will be considered a favourite in the upcoming FIBA Americas, but don't expect a cake walk. Certainly, they know well enough not to.
"I said before the tournament started it doesn't matter how many NBA players we have, that doesn't guarantee or give us anything," Triano reiterated earlier this week. "We have to become a good basketball team. If we become a good basketball team, then this is going to be a fun team to be around. Our goal obiviously is to get ready for next week, and to be ready when we go to Mexico."22 Top Tips to Effectively Raise Your Profile on LinkedIn
Larry Kim Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 7, 2016
A killer LinkedIn profile is mandatory if you want to grow your personal brand and company.
Even though you’re busy, LinkedIn is one place you can’t forget. The more you put in, the more you’ll get out of it.
Here are 22 top tips to effectively boost your LinkedIn profile.
1. Must Do: Keep Your Profile Basics Updated!
Many people forget to keep their LinkedIn profiles updated. Whether you’re a total newbie, just starting a new job, or starting to explore new opportunities, there’s no excuse to have outdated information on LinkedIn. It will reflect badly on you.
Here are two quick and easy areas you must check are up to date:
Professional Headline: The job of any headline is to entice people to click. At minimum, you can use your headline to highlight your current position and company (e.g., “Director of Inbound Marketing at ABCXYZ Corporation”), but you can and should go further. Highlight your expertise (e.g., “Content Marketing Strategist and Copywriter”) or awards, or showcase skills you want to turn up in searches (e.g., “Speaker, Trainer, Author, Consultant, Evangelist”). Tell everyone on LinkedIn who you are, what you do, and why you’re someone they need to connect with.
Location and Industry: Are your location and industry still accurate? If not, fix them now!
Doing these two simple things will help more people find you and help you find more relevant potential contacts.
2. Only Use Professional Photos
LinkedIn profiles that have a picture are 11 times more likely to be viewed. So if you’re still showing a silhouette, it’s time to make a change and reveal yourself.
However, some friendly advice:
Your LinkedIn photo shouldn’t be from 20 years ago. It shouldn’t look like it belongs on a dating site, stock photo site, or social network (e.g., Facebook or Instagram). And don’t feature your pet or significant other. Just. No.
LinkedIn is for professionals. Be one.
3. Brand Your Profile With a Background Photo
Does your LinkedIn profile look boring and average?
Give your profile page a bit more personality, or branding, with a visually appealing background image.
LinkedIn advises users to use an image (PNG, JPG, or GIF) with a resolution of 1400x425.
4. Write a Ridiculously Good Summary
This is where you really sell yourself to potential connections. Your summary should expand on what appears in your headline, highlighting your specialties, career experience, noteworthy accolades, and thought leadership.
There has been much discussion about whether it’s best to write in first-person versus third-person narrative here. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter either way — just stay consistent with whichever you choose. Don’t go back and forth between first person and third person as it’s confusing and signals a lack of attention to detail.
In summary of LinkedIn summaries: keep your ego in check, focus on the most relevant details about your career, avoid meaningless jargon, and ensure it’s easy to read.
5. Terminate Those Typos
Poor grammar, typos, and misspellings are a no-no.
Avoid typos at all costs.
6. Use Keywords With Intent
Words are so incredibly important, especially when search is a big part of the equation. Using the right keywords in your profile is the difference between being found and being invisible.
Identify the words you want to be found for when people use LinkedIn search and use those keywords in your headline, summary, and profile. Using the right keywords will expose you to more potential connections and opportunities.
7. Neat Trick: Pick the “Other” Website Option
Under your Contact Info, LinkedIn gives you the option to link to a website or blog. But by default, the text that shows in your profile is the extremely dull “Blog” or “Website.” Anyone visiting your profile has no clue where they’ll end up if they click on that.
Want to use your actual brand or business name? You can! Here’s a simple little trick.
When editing the Websites area of your profile, select the “Other” option. Now you can add your own website title and URL.
8. Personalize Your LinkedIn Profile URL
When you created your LinkedIn profile, it had some ugly combination of letters, numbers, and backslashes that had no value for your personal branding. You don’t still have this, right?
If you do, it’s time to customize your public profile URL. For example, my customized URL is https://www.linkedin.com/in/larrykim. LinkedIn makes it simple to keep your profile consistent with your other social profiles.
9. Own Your Media
Visual content is only growing in importance.
Help your LinkedIn profile pop by adding documents, photos, videos, and presentations.
10. Add Shiny New Sections to Your Profile
LinkedIn lets you add several sections to give your profile more visual appeal and depth. You can add sections for posts, volunteering, languages, honors and awards, patents, causes you care about, and many more.
All of these sections open you up to more opportunities to make new connections.
11. Tidy Up Your Endorsements
People are going to endorse you for all sorts of skills — sometimes even skills you don’t actually have. But just because you’ve been endorsed for Fire Eating, Chewing Gum, or Showers (yes, these are all real “areas of expertise,” according to LinkedIn) doesn’t mean you have to show other LinkedIn users — unless, of course, fire eating plays a critical role in your professional life.
LinkedIn lets you remove any irrelevant skills and endorsements. You should avoid “lying” about your skill set, even if it is by omission.
12. Connect With People You Don’t Yet Know
One of the biggest mistakes people make on LinkedIn is failing to reach out to connect with people you want to know but don’t yet. That’s the whole point of networking — getting to know new people, not just established connections.
Building out your LinkedIn network has many benefits. You get in front of influencers. You get more endorsements. More people see your best content, share that content, and visit your website. And it’s great for personal branding.
Have you considered using LinkedIn more like Twitter? You should!
13. Personalize Invitations to Connect
“I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”
The default message LinkedIn provides is so dreadfully boring and impersonal.
When you invite someone to connect, make it more personal — mention where you met or a topic you discussed in a LinkedIn group, over email, or during a phone interview. This personal touch will increase the odds they’ll accept your request.
14. Publish Amazing Posts
LinkedIn posts offer another way to grow your influence, gain more visibility, and acquire new followers.
Your existing connections are notified whenever you publish. New people can discover your posts via search.
Always think about the audience you want to reach. Highlight your expertise and interests by posting awesome content. Just make sure your posts are appropriate for the 400 million business professionals who use LinkedIn.
15. Find and Join Groups
One way to start connecting with people you want to know is to join LinkedIn groups. Whether it’s a group run by a major publication, a group for people with certain job titles, or a group dedicated to a niche topic, there are millions of groups to choose from, so start searching to find groups that are right for you and join them.
Join discussions. Start interesting discussions. Don’t sell your product or service or promote yourself — sell your expertise! That will help build your personal brand.
16. Find People Through Search and Advanced Search
LinkedIn search is your gateway to future connections. Search for people by name, company, or skills.
But you can go much deeper.
LinkedIn’s advanced search helps you find people by job title, school, relationship, location, industry, current/past company, profile language, and nonprofit interests — with additional search options for Premium members.
17. Stalk Users Openly or Stealthily
Whenever you view someone’s profile, LinkedIn will share your name and headline. LinkedIn recommends this.
But sometimes you might want to be a bit stealthier before connecting. If this is the case, you’ll need to manage your privacy under Accounts & Settings.
LinkedIn offers a couple of less revealing options. You can reveal only that “Someone at ABCXYZ Corporation” or “Someone in the Online Media Industry” viewed the profile. But if that isn’t enough, then you can go totally private and users will be told only that a LinkedIn user viewed their profile.
18. Remember Where and When You Met What’s-His-Name
Once you’ve grown your network to thousands, it can be a bit daunting to remember every single person, or to stay in touch with a few important connections.
Luckily, LinkedIn makes this easy. In the Relationship section, in addition to telling you the date when you connected, LinkedIn allows you to write notes about your contact, including how you met, or set reminders to “check in” at intervals from a day to every year.
Don’t worry, these notes and reminders are only visible to you!
19. Build Extraordinary Business Relationships
When someone accepts your request to connect, don’t start pitching your service or product. This is a relationship killer.
Start slow. Comment on, share, or Like their posts.
LinkedIn even makes it super simple to stay in touch, telling you when contacts are celebrating work anniversaries or starting new jobs. Again, these are opportunities to Like or comment.
Build the relationship and trust before you start asking for favors!
20. Use (but Don’t Abuse) Status Updates
LinkedIn status updates are your chance to highlight some of your recent work, share an article or book you’ve read, promote your presence at a conference or event, or offer inspiration through a quote or saying.
Because LinkedIn is a business network, it’s best to use it during business hours. Keep active, but don’t go overboard.
Try to post an update at least once a day at minimum; aim for a maximum of three or four updates per day, as long as you’re sharing useful, relevant content. Every update is another opportunity to strengthen or forge a connection.
21. Be Positive
What you say reflects on you. Never post negative comments about someone’s post or a past employer.
Instead, pause and think if there’s a way you can rethink and rewrite in a constructive way — if you can’t, just hit the delete button and go do something else to shift focus.
22. Ask for Recommendations
So you haven’t received as many LinkedIn recommendations as you’d like? After all, it takes a bit of time and thought for someone to write a recommendation.
What can you do? Ask for them! LinkedIn makes is super easy, providing an “Ask to be recommended” link, where you can specify what you want to be recommended for, who you want to recommend you, and write a personal message.
Pick specific people. Don’t just randomly ask all your contacts if they can recommend you. Be selective.
Share details in your message to your connection. If there are specific skills you want your contacts to highlight in his or her recommendation, don’t be shy, tell them.
Another way to increase the likelihood that you’ll get a great recommendation: Give a great recommendation to someone you’ve worked with. This increases the odds that your contact will feel obligated to return the favor.
Bonus Tip: Export Your LinkedIn Connections
One last helpful tip: Remember to occasionally download your connections. After you’ve gone to all the trouble of building an amazing network, you don’t want to risk losing their contact info!
To do this, click on Connections, then Settings (the gear icon), and on the next page, under Advanced Settings, you’ll see a link to export your LinkedIn connections as a.CSV file.
Now you have a file containing your contacts’ first and last names, email addresses, job titles, and companies.
Summary
Now you know everything you need to do to refresh your LinkedIn profile. Make yourself look amazing, wow future connections, and grow your influence. It all starts with a killer profile.
What are you waiting for? Get updating now!
Originally published on Inc.com
About The Author
Larry Kim is the CEO of Mobile Monkey and founder of WordStream. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.SALE DRESSES
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U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond in Philadelphia said he will rule Monday on the recount bid by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in Pennsylvania, where Republican Donald Trump won, beating Democrat Hillary Clinton by about 44,000 votes.
Stein, who finished far behind Trump and Clinton, is seeking a recount of potentially more than 1 million paper ballots and a forensic examination of election system software in six large counties, including Philadelphia, that use paperless electronic voting machines.
In Madison, Wisconsin, U.S. District Judge James Peterson refused to halt Wisconsin’s presidential recount, which began Dec. 1. He told Trump’s supporters the effort probably won’t change anything anyway. Trump defeated Clinton by more than 22,000 votes in the state.
Wisconsin election officials reported Friday nearly 89 percent of the ballots cast for president had been counted. Clinton had gained just 49 votes.
Locally, Florence County completed its recount Monday and Marinette County finished Tuesday.
The hand recount in Florence County showed Trump gained a vote and Clinton lost a vote, while Stein had no change. Initial results gave 1,897 votes to Trump, 666 votes to Clinton and 17 votes to Stein.
In Marinette County, Trump had 127 more votes, Clinton had 166 more votes and Stein had two less votes after the hand recount, the county clerk’s office reported. The city of Marinette accounted for most of the difference, although no details were available on the reasons.
Initial results had given 12,995 votes to Trump, 6,243 votes to Clinton and 131 votes to Stein.ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL is the sensitive and irresistibly funny story of unsung heroes of Canadian heavy metal Anvil. Jewish teenagers Robb Reiner and Steve “Lips” Kudlow met in the mid-seventies in a Toronto high school and soon decided that rock was their destiny. Anvil was forged. The band gained a cult following among heavy metal enthusiasts during the eighties, but never really made it in the often cruel and clueless mainstream rock circuit. Not withstanding a plethora of eager fans including Metallica and Guns ‘N’ Roses, who have frequently cited Anvil as a source of inspiration, the Toronto based outfit got irremediably swallowed by oblivion. But rocking out isn’t just a matter of attitude or luck; it is instead a vocation which Anvil never turned its back on, while patiently waiting for its call to greatness.
Director Sacha Gervasi (THE TERMMINAL) witnessed Anvil’s fall from grace directly, having worked as a roadie for the band in its heyday. Moving and hilarious, ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL documents Reiner and Kudlow’s last shot at stardom and follows them on the road during an often farcical European tour. The film’s recurring grotesque and surreal situations could see it mistaken for an attempted mockumentary, when it is nothing more than the heart-felt portrait of two stubbornly dedicated dreamers.
Please Excuse The Ads Which Pop Up On First Click. These Have Nothing To Do With Us. They Are Built Into MegaVideos Player & We Do Not Support Popup Ads of Any Kind!Windfall rewards give CEOs an incentive to put worker lives at risk. To see all workers safe, our most recent mining tragedy reminds us, maybe we need to end those windfalls.
By Sam Pizzigati
In a perverse sort of way, CEOs like Don Blankenship, the chief executive at Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia mine where 29 coal miners died last week, perform a vital public service. They lay bare, with their brutal behavior and chilling candor, just how deadly our current corporate order can be.
Before last week, at least outside West Virginia, Blankenship toiled in relative obscurity. That would suddenly change once reporters, after the explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine, asked the CEO about the mine’s long history of safety violations. Americans the nation over shuddered at his response.
“Violations,” the Massey chief unapologetically pronounced, “are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process.”
At Upper Big Branch, we soon learned, “normal” meant plentiful. Mine safety officials last year cited the mine for over 500 violations — and 53 more just last month. In the two months before Monday’s blast, the mine’s methane levels had run so dangerously high that miners had to evacuate three separate times.
Overall, adds the Washington Post, “significant” safety violations at Upper Big Branch have been running “11 times the national average.”
Massey under CEO Blankenship isn’t just racking up safety violations. The coal company, the nation’s fourth largest, is aggressively appealing citations to court, part of an industry-wide counterattack against new federal safety rules enacted in 2006, after 12 miners died in the West Virginia mining town of Sago.
In 2009, Massey collected 50 serious safety violations and appealed 37, a pattern, Rep. George Miller charged at a recent hearing, that threatens to “render the federal efforts to hold mine operators accountable meaningless.”
Massey CEO Blankenship has, over the years, devoted substantial time and treasure to keeping mine operators unaccountable. In 2004 he spent $3 million to knock an incumbent off the West Virginia Supreme Court. The Blankenship-blessed winner went on to supply the decisive vote in the state high court rulings that negated a $50 million jury verdict against Massey.
Labor leaders consider Blankenship the “main reason” why West Virginia’s mines face little union oversight, on safety or anything else. Once 95 percent organized, the state’s mines now run overwhelmingly nonunion.
For environmentalists, Blankenship ranks as the nation’s fiercest promoter of stripping away mountaintops to get at coal seams. As a U.S. Chamber of Commerce director, the Massey top exec has also emerged as a key ringleader among climate change deniers.
Meanwhile, the members of Massey’s corporate board of directors remain absolutely tickled with Blankenship’s “performance” as CEO. Late this past December, they signed him to a new two-year pay deal.
The old deals hadn’t been too shabby. In 2005, Blankenship pulled in nearly $34 million, “roughly four times the industry standard,” notes the New York Times. He followed that up, according to Associated Press reports, with over $17.5 million in 2006 and $23.7 million more in 2007. Blankenship’s take-home would dip to $19.7 million in 2008, and Massey hasn’t yet released figures for 2009.
The new deal dishes Blankenship $83,222 per month in base salary for 2010 and 2011, as much as $10 million more each year in cash incentives, plus a tidy pile of “performance-based” stock incentives, not to mention retirement benefits and perqs “including, but not limited to, use of the Company’s airplanes.”
These outsized rewards give Blankenship all the wherewithal he needs to continue distorting the democratic process in West Virginia and Washington. More importantly, these indecently lavish rewards give Blankenship a continuing incentive to behave indecently, to put miners at risk by cutting corners to speed production and meet his “maximum bonus” metrics.
Safety, to be sure, does appear as one of the “performance” standards in the pay deal Blankenship signed in December. In fact, safety has been one of his “performance” benchmarks almost all along. That sounds somewhat responsible, on the part of the Massey Energy board of directors, until you look more closely.
In 2007, for instance, safety turned out to count for only 10 percent of the criteria Blankenship needed to meet to grab his pay incentives. All the other criteria involved pumping coal out fast and maximizing corporate earnings.
And Massey’s safety standard itself, “Non-Fatal Days Lost,” doesn’t exactly qualify as a “zero tolerance” stance against death in the mines. This “NFDL” standard merely multiplies “the number of employee work-related accidents times 200,000 hours, divided by the total employee hours worked.” Death doesn’t factor in.
In other words, miners can die and Blankenship’s “performance” can still shine.
That’s the magic — and the horror — of “performance-based” executive pay. Enhance shareholder value, all else will be forgiven.
Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the online newsletter on excess and inequality published by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies. Too Much appears weekly. Read the current issue or sign up to receive Too Much in your email inbox.Donald Trump railed against Hillary Clinton’s past support for the North America Free Trade Agreement during Monday night’s presidential debate.
“Your husband signed NAFTA, which was one of the worst things that ever happened,” Trump flatly stated.
“Well, that’s your opinion,” Clinton responded.
“You go to New England, you go to Ohio, Pennsylvania, you go anywhere you want, Secretary Clinton, and you will see devastation where manufacturing is down 30, 40, sometimes 50 percent,” Trump continued. “NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere but certainly ever signed in this country, and now you want to approve Transpacific Partnership.”
“You were totally in favor of it and then you heard what I said how bad it was and if you win, you would approve it and it would be almost as bad as NAFTA,” Trump stated a second time. “You called it the gold standard of trade deals.”
“You said it was the finest thing you’ve ever seen, and then you heard what I said about it, and then you were against it.”
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Ever wanted to own a brewery? Jealous of your friends that have a mug on our wall? We are proud to announce the IPO of Boise Brewing – the Idaho Public Offering, that is. Sale of stock is now open to most residents in the state.
We want everybody to be able to drink our beer AND share in the potential profits. The offering is designed so normal folks can invest and so that we can meet our ambitious plans for growth. For you securities experts, Boise Brewing will be relying upon a federal exemption for intrastate offerings and SEC Rule 147 in order to be exempt from the requirements of SEC registration. Or if you prefer English, you can own a piece of the brewery and we don’t have to be a corporate giant.
The Details
So, what’s the deal? We are offering shares of stock in Boise Brewing. That means ownership, voting rights, shareholder meetings and dividends if the company is able. You’ll be a member of our Community Supported Beer growler fill program and get one of those coveted mugs. There is a minimum investment of $1,000 and it is subject to a few restrictions. Investors must be Idaho residents and twenty-one years or older.
Download introductory information below and contact us for the Confidential Placement Memorandum and more details or to set up a time to see the brewery.
Investment Deadline
Don’t drag your feet on this one. We sold almost all available shares in our first public offering a few years ago.As part of preparations for EU Exit, the UK is establishing a domestic nuclear safeguards regime to ensure that the UK continues to maintain its position as a responsible nuclear state and that withdrawal from Euratom will not result in the weakening of our future safeguards standards and oversight in the UK.
This Government believes that it is vitally important that the new domestic nuclear safeguards regime, to be run by the Office for Nuclear Regulation, is as comprehensive and robust as that currently provided by Euratom. The government has therefore decided that it will be establishing a domestic regime which will deliver to existing Euratom standards and exceeds the standard that the international community would require from the UK as a member of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency).
International oversight will be a key part of the future regime. The UK is seeking to conclude new agreements with the IAEA that follow the same principles as our current ones. This will ensure that the IAEA retains its right to inspect all civil nuclear facilities, and continue to receive all current safeguards reporting, ensuring that international verification of our safeguards activity continues to be robust.
Discussions with the European Union are on-going. We will be exploring a number of options for smooth transition from the current Euratom regime to a domestic one. The unique and important nature of the civil nuclear sector means that there is strong mutual interest in ensuring that the UK and Euratom Community continue to work closely together in the future. The UK’s ambition is to maintain a close and effective relationship with the Euratom Community and the rest of the world that harnesses the UK’s and the Euratom Community’s expertise and maximises shared interests. By maintaining our current safeguards and standards we are providing the best possible basis for continued close cooperation with Euratom in the future.
Whatever the outcome of those discussions, the Government is committed to a future regime that provides at least the existing levels of assurance. The legislation to provide for this was announced in the Queen’s speech and will be brought forward in due course. This policy statement provides important context both for parliamentary consideration of that Bill, and for the forthcoming talks with the European Union, which take place in the last week of September.A 7-Eleven clerk in Florida was fired after he wrestled a would-be robber, who appeared to be carrying a gun, out of the Flagler Beach store last week.
Edward Vaught was working an overnight shift when 31-year-old Christopher Munson entered the 7-Eleven on Highway A1A.
“He pulls [what] looks like a gun out of his waistband and he pointed it right at my forehead,” Vaught told WESH-TV. “He threatened me – threatened he was going to kill me."
Munson did not fire the gun, though, because it was actually a fake. According to Vaught, it looked just like the real thing.
Vaught attempted to call 911, but Munson, as seen on the store’s video surveillance footage, violently jerked the phone out of his hands. That is when Munson pulled his fake gun.
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“This man wants to hurt me so I need to defend myself,” Vaught said.
He wrestled Munson to the doorway, where he held him until police arrived to arrest him.
Vaught said that he expected to be applauded for his efforts and cannot understand why he was let go.
“I thought was in serious mortal danger,” he said.
7-Eleven claims Vaught was fired for violating a policy to not fight back.
“A dismissal was in order because the employee’s action violated our policy of nonconfrontation and posed a danger to himself and a coworker,” 7-Eleven told WESH-TV.
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Vaught said he was working to saving money for school. Now he says he will have to find temporary work to support his dream of becoming a math teacher.
Sources: WESH-TV, TheBlaze
undefinedKang Chol-hwan, North Korean defector and head of the North Korea Strategy Center in Seoul, South Korea, says U.S. North Korea policy cannot be effective unless it engages ordinary North Koreans who are growing impatient with the Kim Jong Un regime. File Photo by Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA
North Koreans dance at an event in Pyongyang, North Korea, on September 9 in celebration of the North Korean government's establishment. Photo by EPA/Yonhap
SEOUL, South Korea, Sept. 19 (UPI) -- North Korea is accelerating the development of nuclear weapons, but despite increased international scrutiny, staggering inattention is being paid to its 25 million people.
That could very well serve as the Achilles heel in U.S. policy toward the Kim Jong Un regime, according to Kang Chol-hwan, a prominent defector-activist who grew up in a North Korea prison camp and later wrote a memoir of his experiences.
Kang, 49, recently told UPI the key to resolving the nuclear standoff ultimately lies with the people of North Korea, who are the primary agents of change in the country.
"The power to stop nuclear weapons development is in the hands of the North Korean people," The Aquariums of Pyongyang author said in the interview in Seoul. "North Korea is now in a different place than where it was during the Sunshine Policy era. People in North Korea now know what life is like in the South."
RELATED Cash from Mideast may be helping Kim Jong Un ignore sanctions
Kang was referring to the period in South Korean history when former President Kim Dae-jung ended Cold War-era hostilities with the rival North through acts of reconciliation.
The notion ordinary North Koreans have the power to turn the fate of their country around is still hard to grasp.
North Koreans are often depicted as repressed or brainwashed, marching obediently under the watchful gaze of their leader in military parades during national holidays, or shouting chants, praising Kim Jong Un.
Refugees' descriptions of human rights abuses, and far-reaching surveillance, have also left the impression that it may be impossible to stage an uprising.
But according to Kang, structural weaknesses of the regime are giving way to people power in new ways.
Not only are North Koreans more informed about the outside world because of media flows into the country, more people are likely to be disillusioned with the regime as they are being forced out of the country to serve as indentured laborers -- and wind up seeing what the rest of the world has to offer.
It's for this reason Kang says he sees overseas laborers as agents of transformation, and thinks the United States and the international community should be careful about banning North Korean labor.
"Overseas laborers can be agents of change," Kang said. "At first they are grateful just for the three meals a day they receive as compensation, but once outside they will realize" what they are missing, he added.
In 2015, Lim Il, a defector who escaped a life of forced labor in Kuwait, said he was never paid for 12 hours of daily manual labor at insufferably hot construction sites, while other foreign workers at the site not only were compensated but also given a three-hour lunch break.
Lim and other North Koreans were allowed only an hour for lunch despite heat exhaustion.
Kang says Kim Jong Un's continued deployment of forced laborers is a sign of his economic desperation in the face of heavier sanctions.
"Do you think he's sending them out because he wants to?" the activist said, adding embargoes on North Korean mineral exports are taking a toll on the regime. "Sending out laborers is very dangerous. They are taking a risk."
"Overseas, North Koreans see workers from Africa, from Pakistan, drinking Coca-Cola, while they can't."
In Kang's view, the more people Kim has to deploy overseas so he can spend money on villas and fine wine, the better.
"If their numbers become 100,000, 200,000, then 300,000, they become extremely threatening to the regime," Kang said.
Instead of sanctions, the United Nations should encourage Russia and China, two countries that host North Korean "guest workers," to raise labor standards for existing workers, giving them fair wages and freedom of mobility.
"Then they become 300,000 defectors," Kang said.
Not only are state-sanctioned workers dangerous to the state, in North Korea, the elements of collapse, or at least major political change, are there, he said.
"When Kim Jong Un killed off his relatives, that destroyed people's trust in him," Kang said, referring to the highly public execution of Jang Song Thaek, the North Korean leader's uncle-in-law.
"At least Kim Jong Il listened to the advice of his subordinates."
It is because the current leader has fallen into disfavor with North Koreans, he needs to "show off his power, and fire off missiles to prove he is still powerful," Kang said.
"How is Kim going to attack Guam?" he added, calling the North Korean claim of a plan to attack the U.S. territory a "lie."
That statement came in August, when a verbal warning from U.S. President Donald Trump threatening "fire and fury" against North Korea led to subsequent threats from Pyongyang to create an "enveloping fire" around Guam.
Trump fell under criticism for responding to North Korean rhetorical threats with rhetoric of his own, but Kang said he doesn't think that's a bad thing, because Trump's hints of a pre-emptive attack are something to be feared in North Korea.
But even credible threats are not enough to make Pyongyang think twice, or steer North Korea policy in the right direction, Kang said.
"The point of North Korea policy should be the North Korean people," the activist said, while discussing what he sees as shortcomings of past South Korean administrations.
President Kim Dae-jung, for example, took reconciliation with the North to an unprecedented level, but his Sunshine Policy did not bring changes to the lives of ordinary North Koreans and only gave the regime more time to consolidate power, according to Kang.
"Kim Dae-jung's policy was fake sunshine," he said.
Kang also said South Korean conservatives, former President Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, while stepping back from a posture of leniency, did not include a substantial policy that could bypass the North Korean leadership to engage 25 million North Koreans.
"President Trump needs to realize this is not a regime that will stop nuclear development in order to engage," Kang said. "Any message [from the United States] should be sent directly to the North Korean people."Bamboo by Felix Buchmüller
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We all have seen the Motorola Moto X with walnut finish. Now there are also coming wood sunglasses from Ray Ban. So why not easily go with this trend and make your smartwatch wood ready!
Felix Buchmüller, a fellow countryman, who is also waiting for his Moto 360 to arrive got bored and therefore made us this wonderful bamboo finished watch face. He is very talented for his 21 years and currently doing a training to become a Digital and Print Multimedia Professional. From my point of view he will be quite successful one day with his Photoshop and Illustrator skills! Support him with a donation!
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Simply import the zip in the WearFaces App.python-for-android is an open source build tool to let you package Python code into standalone android APKs. These can be passed around, installed, or uploaded to marketplaces such as the Play Store just like any other Android app. This tool was originally developed for the Kivy cross-platform graphical framework, but now supports multiple bootstraps and can be easily extended to package other types of Python apps for Android.
python-for-android supports two major operations; first, it can compile the Python interpreter, its dependencies, backend libraries and python code for Android devices. This stage is fully customisable: you can install as many or few components as you like. The result is a standalone Android project which can be used to generate any number of different APKs, even with different names, icons, Python code etc. The second function of python-for-android is to provide a simple interface to these distributions, to generate from such a project a Python APK with build parameters and Python code to taste.Did You Know?
Personal Quote: Am I alive? Yes. Am I happy? No. Did I throw away my career to be skinny? Yes. I wouldn't do [the surgery] again. I would much rather have died happy, rich, and kept my status and gone out on top.
Trivia: Underwent gastric bypass and had 17 major cosmetic surgeries after the gastric operation in late |
also point to the fact that Republicans get about 64 percent of the vote in legislative elections but have more than 80 percent of the seats on Utah’s Capitol Hill.
The group Better Boundaries is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would create an independent commission to advise the Legislature on drawing future legislative and congressional districts.
The two Mike Lees • Utah Sen. Mike Lee voted last week against the $15.25 billion Hurricane Harvey relief bill because it included raising the federal borrowing limit to keep the government going into December.
Merging funding programs like that to keep the government going is disgraceful, the Utah Republican says.
It’s disgusting.
It’s an abomination.
Lee said such legislation should be decided on its own, without tying it to keeping the federal government financed.
Except when Lee wants to do it.
This is the same Mike Lee who tied a measure to keep funding the federal government to a demand that Obamacare be repealed.
Lee and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, two of the most stalwart conservative Republicans in the Senate, joined together to block a funding extension for the government unless it defunded Obamacare, the bane of tea party zealots.
Largely because of the actions of Lee and Cruz, the government was shut down for more than two weeks in 2013, causing havoc and financial losses in many areas, including Utah’s tourism industry, and a backlash against Lee that had some prominent Republicans looking for someone to run against him in the 2016 GOP primary.
Cruz, Lee’s compatriot in the blockade that led to the shutdown four years ago, voted for the spending extension proposal this year even though it was tied to the hurricane-relief bill. Of course, it was Cruz’s state of Texas that was most devastated by Harvey and will be the main beneficiary of the relief. So ideology, for him, took a back seat this time.Let’s play with a hypothetical. Imagine that personality traits are akin to software, and you can download them into your brain. They’re like WordPress plugins — you search through a marketplace of both free and paid options, then install and activate them. Congrats! You’re now smarter, or you have a sardonic sense of humor, or you’re more cautious when evaluating risks.
How would this system be monetized? I assume the hardware for interfacing with your brain would be purchased outright, or maybe you’d sign a two-year contract and make monthly payments. Perhaps the government would subsidize your purchase, as long as you promised to modify your personality in ways that they favored, such as boosting your docility. (Prisoners, needless to say, would have “healing” modules forced on them, developed at the taxpayers’ expense.)
Some of the personality plugins would be available for an upfront payment or a recurring subscription. Others would be open-source, free to anyone and audited by the community. The most popular ones would be nominally free but monetized by advertising. For example, maybe you can gain eight IQ points, but in exchange you have to love Coca-Cola. You know why you love Coca-Cola, but it doesn’t make a difference — you still love it. Not only do you personally buy lots of Coke, but you also evangelize the drink to your friends. If you want to go back to having your original soda preferences, you have to give up your augmented intelligence.
Cracked versions of the Coca-Cola-type plugins are available, but they’re not always trustworthy, and installing them invalidates your hardware warranty. Eventually airports routinely scan your brain as well as your body, and if copyrighted patterns are detected in your gray matter, you’ll be pulled aside and stripped. As in, the TSA engineers will yank out that new part of your mind.
This post was inspired by the “Jedi SpongeBob” episode of Terrifying Robot Dog and based on a conversation with Alex Irwin, who contributed the Coca-Cola/advertising example.Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. reacts to being rebuked by the Senate leadership and accused of impugning a fellow senator, Attorney General-designate, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington Warren was barred from saying anything more on the Senate floor about Sessions after she quoted from an old letter from Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow about Sessions. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The turbulent national debate over race, gender and free speech consumed the normally staid Senate on Wednesday after the GOP majority voted to silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren, abruptly elevating her celebrity status at a moment when liberals are hungry for a leader to take on Donald Trump.
The highly unusual rebuke of the Massachusetts Democrat came as the Senate weighed President Trump’s choice for attorney general, GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who secured confirmation on a nearly party-line vote Wednesday evening. It also gave frustrated Democrats a rallying cry weeks into a presidency that is dividing the country like few before.
“I certainly hope that this anti-free-speech attitude is not traveling down Pennsylvania Avenue to our great chamber,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York warned darkly as Democrats jumped at an opening to link the GOP’s conduct to that of Trump himself. “This is not what America is about — silencing speech, especially in this chamber.”
Republicans argued they were just trying to enforce necessary rules of decorum in a Senate that is a last bulwark of civil debate in an angry nation.
“I hope that maybe we’ve all been chastened a little bit,” chided the No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn of Texas. “We’re at a pretty challenging time in our nation’s history when many people who were surprised and disappointed at the last election are unwilling to accept the results.... I only hope that after the passage of some time they will return to their senses.”
But the debate immediately took on overtones of race and gender. Warren was rebuked as she was reading a letter by Martin Luther King Jr’s widow, Coretta Scott King, opposing Sessions’ ultimately unsuccessful nomination to a federal judgeship in 1986. Subsequently several male Democratic senators stood up and read from the same letter but without drawing objections, leading Democratic activists to proclaim that Senate Republicans were interested only in silencing a woman.
The moment inspired a Twitter hashtag, #LetLizSpeak, and clips from C-SPAN2 went viral. “By silencing Elizabeth Warren, the GOP gave women around the world a rallying cry,” fellow Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California said over Twitter.
Warren was chastised under a little-used Senate regulation, Rule 19, which bars any senator from impugning the motives of any other or imputing “any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming of a senator.” The Senate historian’s office could not immediately say when the rule was last invoked, but Democrats accused Republicans of selectively enforcing it. They noted the GOP did not apply it when, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas accused Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of lying in relation to a dispute over the Export-Import Bank two years ago.
This time, Warren drew a warning from the presiding officer as she quoted Tuesday evening from a letter written by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts that referred to Sessions as “a disgrace.” She continued with her speech, and began quoting from Coretta Scott King’s letter and an accompanying statement that accused Sessions, a federal prosecutor at the time, of using the power of his office to “chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens.”
Democrats are portraying Sessions as a threat to civil rights, voting rights and immigration; Republicans have defended Trump’s choice to be the top law enforcement officer as a man of integrity who will be an independent voice in the new administration.
McConnell stood and invoked Rule 19, saying that Warren has “impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama” in quoting the words from Mrs. King.
Warren, meanwhile, seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2020 along with a handful of other Senate colleagues, was given an even bigger platform to assail Sessions, the GOP and Trump. By midafternoon Wednesday she had raised more than $286,000 for her re-election campaign from more than 10,500 MoveOn members alone, the liberal group said.
“This is about Coretta Scott King’s letter. And that’s all this is about,” Warren said after finishing more than an hour’s worth of television interviews in the ornate rotunda of a Senate office building. “And Mitch McConnell didn’t want me to read that letter. He stopped me. And so I went out and read the letter anyway and posted it on a live feed.”
Democrats challenged McConnell’s ruling, but the GOP majority voted to uphold it, barring Warren from speaking on the floor throughout the remainder of the debate over Sessions.
“She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” McConnell said in words that sparked still more liberal outrage and Twitter hashtags. Hillary Clinton referenced McConnell’s comment about Warren persisting, adding in a Tweet: “So must we all.”
In the aftermath Democrats expressed outrage that Warren had been silenced while quoting from the words of a civil rights hero, as a party that’s struggled over the best way to challenge Trump found something all could agree on.
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Online: Coretta Scott King letter: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3456928-Coretta-Scott-King-Letter.html
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Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor contributed.
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This story has been corrected to change ‘becoming’ to ‘unbecoming’ in the quote of Rule 19.One of the benefits of getting out of Toronto is the contrast that it necessarily provides. Recently, I went to a bar called Thirsty and Miserable in Toronto. I like Thirsty and Miserable. It seats about twenty five and as many as can stand around nodding to the punk rock and indie soundtrack that comes with a small, niche craft beer place of a certain variety. It’s pretty awesome and it has a lot of things going for it, including a carefully selected draught list and a truly excellent selection of bottles, especially when you consider the scale and the amount of thought that must have gone into it.
I want to talk to you about the other end of the spectrum. I want to talk to you about an Edmonton restaurant called Continental Treat.
Now, I never managed to connect with Sylvester, who has the beer stick at Continental Treat, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I’m scheduled pretty tightly in Alberta, and running a restaurant is not exactly a light gig. I did manage to get to Continental Treat for lunch.
The first thing that you notice on walking in is that it is prodigiously old school. It’s old world as well. I’ve been to Vienna and Budapest, and this reminded me of nothing so much as the Amadeus Café. It’s the kind of place that you walk into and expect to hear the theme from The Third Man. Zithers ahoy!
The thing is this, and we forget it from time to time: Beer is an old world thing. Munich. Vienna. Prague. Without those places, I wouldn’t want to think where we might be. I didn’t have a craft beer. I had a Hacker-Pschorr Munich Helles, and because Alan McLeod and I had been discussing it recently, borscht. It’s a world beating borscht for sure. Alan’s helpful addendum was that I should attempt to get into a debate about the spelling on “borscht.”
I believe he’s trying to get my other arm broke.
The bottle list is extensive. They have some representation of all of the Trappist breweries. They have maybe two hundred bottles. That’s by no means an amateur move. There are posters suggesting that they’ve got Westvleteren XII and that there will be a tasting of Affligem coming up shortly.
But that’s not all. They have Anderson Valley. Big IPAs. The entire range of Samuel Smith products. All manner of groovy things are happening on that beer list, as you can see from the list of products available on their website.
As you can see in the photos, the décor is pretty old world as well. It’s the kind of joint that has seen a cross section of the rich and famous, right down to Robert Goulet. You probably think of Goulet as a comic figure as a result of the Will Ferrell parody. I saw Goulet as King Arthur in Camelot in the mid 90’s at the O’Keefe center. He owned it.
If ever I would leave you. Classic Goulet.
This brings me to the point that I have been considering since I had the excellent borscht and a Reuben sandwich that could not be beat.
The music in the background while I was there was not punk rock or indie. It was Tomasini and Vivaldi and Handel. Precision driven Western Art Music. As I sat there, in front of the fireplace, having finished my lunch, I perused the beer list, thinking about having a second lunch beer (research is important). While there were any number of craft beers from California that I hadn’t tried, I couldn’t bring myself to order one. I went with an Achel Bruin, which seemed to suit the mood.
I have noticed that a number of the people involved in craft beer are frustrated musicians. I would like at some point to take a survey of craft brewers to find out how many instruments each of them play. I would bet that it is a ratio of about 2:1 on average. It might be higher. Some of these people have played punk rock or sort of garage or indie music. There is a DIY ethos that carries over to craft beer. Much of the time, craft beer seems to be about creating a mood or a certain amount of impact, which might also be the goal of a young musician trying to make an impact.
There’s a dichotomy between the precision that you find on the soundtrack at a place like Continental Treat and the organized chaos you might find at Thirsty and Miserable. This is neither good nor bad, but a question of appropriateness for the venue.
Is there, then, a reason that I felt totally comfortable ordering a Great Lakes Karma Citra at Thirsty and Miserable, but couldn’t bring myself to order even an excellent pacific northwest IPA at Continental Treat? Karma Citra and Handel’s Water Music would feel wrong. There’s a tonal quality that is incompatible.
There might be a reason that seasoned beer people seem to enjoy a pub without a soundtrack; without televisions. There’s a kind of sensory neutrality that goes with beer appreciation. Would Gregorian Chant turn a Black IPA to ashes in your mouth? I’m willing to bet that it might if you approached it without a certain amount of ironic detachment.
This realization doesn’t make me like either of these places less. Thirsty and Miserable has the rough charm of Shane McGowan. Continental Treat is all Harry Lime. How can you compare them honestly? One is no better than the other.
The difference, essentially, is that the Goulash is better at Continental Treat. Robert Goulet thought so anyway.People are already spreading speculation that the Green Bay Packers need to give Colin Kaepernick a serious look following Aaron Rodgers’ injury.
Rodgers suffered a broken collarbone Sunday against the Minnesota Vikings, and we all knew it wouldn’t take long before Kaepernick’s name was brought up as a potential replacement.
QB Aaron Rodgers suffered a broken collarbone. There’s a chance he could miss the rest of the season. — Green Bay Packers (@packers) October 15, 2017
I heard @Kaepernick7 is available. — Eliza Orlins (@eorlins) October 15, 2017
who do you think the packers are gonna pretend like is better than kaepernick — Shea Serrano (@SheaSerrano) October 15, 2017
a young colin kaepernick, packers fan. also a prepared and proven NFL quarterback pic.twitter.com/5VM0vPscq3 — Harry Lyles Jr. (@harrylylesjr) October 15, 2017
Colin Kaepernick. Birthplace: Milwaukee. Childhood hero: Brett Favre. Green Bay Packers: Need a starting quarterback. Discuss. — Tim Reynolds (@ByTimReynolds) October 15, 2017
Packers fans realizing that Kaepernick the best option they got to sign in place of Aaron Rodgers pic.twitter.com/vp2dD0SD49 — LeOusmane DeMessi (@ChrisCreacy) October 15, 2017
Sad news about Aaron Rodgers. I know a quarterback looking for a job that was born in Milwaukee… Colin Kaepernick — Josiah Johnson (@KingJosiah54) October 15, 2017
This should be very entertaining to follow because there is essentially no chance the Packers are signing Kaepernick. The management for the Packers knows their fans would revolt.
Add in the fact backup quarterback Brett Hundley has been groomed for three years under Rodgers, and I don’t see this happening. Watching people freakout because Kaepernick isn’t on a roster after another quarterback roster spot opening will be fun as always.
WATCH: TUCKER TROLLS AMERICA-HATING COLIN KAEPERNICK
Follow David on TwitterThis book is about the history and evolution of Bauhaus typography, from the early years of Herbert Bayer and Tschichold’s New Typography til today, analyzing fonts with direct reference to the movement. It includes original sketches, revivals, experimentations, decorative, hybrid, display and text fonts, classifying the type foundries involved with biographies of the designers, student works and bauhaus-inspired fonts. Generally, the book analyzes the evidence of the movement’s impact on typography and graphic design today. As a passionate designer for Bauhaus, Andreas Xenoulis, graphic designer based in Greece, had the challenge of designing a book for his favorite movement. The result is fantastic!
Andreas Xenoulis is a graphic designer based in Athens-Greece, graduated from AKTO / Middlesex University London with the Higher Diploma of Education in Graphic Design. Passionate for typography, experimental type and all kind of type treatments, corporate identity, illustrations, posters, publications and product packaging. He has worked as an art director for the Greek Parachute Type Foundry and as a freelancer. Currently he co-founded the Corn Studio.
Digital Printing Services: Igglesis / Drogoudis
Bookbinding Services: Ioannis Evangellidis
Font: PF Haus Square Pro
Photographer: Kynthia Kostaki
Assistant Photographer: Georgia Panakia
Special Thanks: Harris Dimoliatis and Leica’s Academy Studio
Head Professor: Artemis Roussos, AKTO Art & Design College
Comments
commentsThe coordinated media campaign against Hanin Ghaddar was crude and malicious. The objective was to intimidate her into silence, and barring that to raise the specter of violence against her because she dared to criticize Hezbollah’s disastrous military intervention in Syria, and had the temerity to call out Iran’s malevolent role in Syria and Lebanon, during a conference in Washington last week. Ghaddar, the managing editor of NOW English, a successful website based in Beirut, is an accomplished journalist known for her sharp and courageous criticism of Hezbollah, Syria and Iran, the so-called Axis of rejection and resistance.
Like the hyenas on the Serengeti Plain in Africa which hunt in packs by circling their victim from different directions then attack relentlessly, the Hezbollah media mouthpieces, who were on the prowl for Ghaddar for some time, launched their attack before her return to Beirut hoping to score a quick kill. The intimidation was intense to the point that some distant members of her family allegedly issued a statement ‘disowning’ Hanin, a shameful tactic that has been used in the past by Hezbollah against its Shiite critics by terrorizing their families and distant relatives, to shun, ostracize and isolate the offender.
Thought control and mythmaking
The attack on Hanin Ghaddar, was waged by members of the thuggish journalist militia that serves Hezbollah and its masters in Iran as the premier thought control and mythmaking instrument in Lebanon. These journalists, along with an assortment of intellectuals and political hacks have managed to exploit Hezbollah’s battlefield tactical successes against the Israeli army (before and after its withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000) to weave a complex web of myths around Hezbollah’s supposed invincibility, and deterrence. They created a new parlance designed to make Hezbollah untouchable and above criticism, elevating it into a status equal, if not more important than the Lebanese state. Hezbollah has become, in the collective memory of many Lebanese at one time, synonymous with “resistance”. Hezbollah needed this new mythical status to justify maintaining its arsenal and its military structure after the withdrawal of Israel from Southern Lebanon. The mythmaking included deceptive assurances from Hezbollah and its legions of propagandists that it will never turn its guns on fellow Lebanese, and that its mighty sword will be sharpened exclusively for use against the Israelis. In this manufactured political environment, criticizing the “resistance’ is tantamount to treason.
The people, the army and the resistance
Hezbollah’s mythmaking and thought control was so successful in the past to the point that they controlled and influenced almost the whole political class in the country. Even after they turned their guns on fellow Lebanese in 2008, briefly occupying West Beirut and unleashing their thugs to burn their rival’s television station and newspaper and laying siege to the Prime Minister’s office, they managed to forced their opponents to recognize their status as a non-state actor equal to the Lebanese state. They cowed their weak and fractured opponents in the March 14 movement to include in each ministerial document after the formation of a new cabinet a reference to the so-called “tripartite formula of the people, army and the resistance”. In 2008 Hezbollah brought the whole political class in Lebanon to the airport to give a hero’s welcome to a Lebanese prisoner released by Israel after many years of incarceration following his conviction of shooting in cold blood a 28 year old Israeli civilian and smashing the head of his 4 year old daughter with the butt of his rifle.
The baseless case against Hanin Ghaddar
On May 12, Al-Akhbar newspaper, an influential daily that supports the tripartite alliance of Hezbollah, Syria and Iran published an unsigned editorial titled “ A Lebanese journalist competes with (Ehud) Barak” the former Israeli Prime Minister. Ghaddar was invited by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy to participate in a panel discussion of “Syria and Its Repercussions” along with Monzer Akbik representing the Syrian Opposition Coalition, and moderated by the Institute’s Syria expert Andrew Tabler. Al-Akhbar, and the other Hezbollah mouthpieces, created the erroneous impression that Ghaddar was on the same panel with Ehud Barak, who was one of many speakers invited to the Institute’s annual conference. After criticizing the Institute’s well known support for Israel, the editorial claimed that Ghaddar instead of discussing the war in Syria she focused on what the audience wanted to hear, that is Iran’s plan for “regional dominance” and the role of Hezbollah “Iran’s regional militia” and how Hezbollah’s role in Syria is stoking the Sunni-Shiite war. The editorial was indignant that Ghaddar referred to Hezbollah’s “resistance brigades” a reference to their enforcers in Lebanon as “thugs”.
Rarely a week passes by without a journalist, or a blogger or a commentator is harassed, jailed unfairly, beaten or assassinated Hisham Melhem
On the same day, Hezbollah’s television Al-Manar joined the fray, perpetuating the lie that Ghaddar spoke in the presence of Ehud Barak ( a violation of Lebanese Law) and accused her of “going beyond “ Barak in attacking “the resistance” and the Lebanese army. The television station interviewed someone representing something called “the campaign to boycott Israel’s supporters” who accused Ghaddar of committing “serious” violations of Lebanese laws, such as inciting against Lebanese institutions, primarily the army and calling on the authorities to interrogate her. Other media, including the Free Patriotic Movement’s Tayyar.org followed suit.
Context and pretext
The attack on Hanin Ghaddar comes in the context of a renewed campaign by Hezbollah’s media machine against the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, STL investigating the Assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri and others, which accused Al-Akhbar's editor-in-chief Ibrahim Al-Amin of contempt for his refusal to appear at a hearing at The Hague. Al-Akhbar and Al-Jadeed TV, another supporter of the Axis of Resistance were charged with “knowingly and willfully interfering with the administration of justice by broadcasting and/or publishing information on purported confidential witnesses”. The publication of a confidential list of witnesses was seen as an egregious violation of the law covering the working of the STL, and an outright intimidation of the witnesses, if not an incitement to commit violence against them.
Hezbollah’s media machine succeeded in framing the controversy over the SPL charges, as an assault by the SPL against “Lebanon, and against freedoms in Lebanon” according to Al-Amin who claims that SPL is an “enemy” of Lebanon and is devoid of any moral legitimacy. On Al-Manar television, broadcasters and commentators accuse the SPL of committing terror against Lebanon, and its traditions of free expression. Mr. Al-Amin who defended Hezbollah’s attacks in 2008 against the media outlets of its political opponents, is claiming now that he is hounded by the SPL because he is a fighter in the cause of press freedom. In recent weeks, many Lebanese journalists held sit-ins and solidarity meetings at the Press Syndicate headquarters in Beirut to show support for Al-Amin, and the other broadcasters at Al-Jadeed TV. Few voices dared to expose this collective hypocrisy and denial on the part of journalists in Lebanon, a country that once had the most diverse, thriving and freewheeling media in the Middle East. What was scandalous about this shameful display of cowardice and deceit is the fact that while the SPL is tasked primarily with prosecuting those responsible for the assassination of PM Hariri and 21 others, its mandate also covers “connected cases”, a reference to a series of assassinations that followed the killing of PM Hariri, including prominent Journalists such as Samir Qasir and Gebran Tueni of Annahar newspaper, who were known for their courageous criticism of Syria’s domination of Lebanon and Hezbollah’s complicity in Syria’s crimes in Lebanon. Mr. Al-Amin, the fake defender of press freedom in Lebanon has no compunction whatsoever in demonizing the critics of Hezbollah and inciting against them. In one of his television appearances he intoned that anyone who calls for disarming “the resistance” is an “Israeli agent” and such Lebanese should “prove to us” repeatedly that they are “good Lebanese”. This is the man that many Lebanese journalists are defending.
Repercussions
Before Ghaddar’s return to Beirut, many Lebanese took to social media to defend her right to express herself freely, and a campaign was launched in solidarity with her. The organization Media Against Violence, condemned as “cheap and malicious” the thuggish Hezbollah media smear campaign against Ghaddar. The NGO correctly charged that the campaign against Ghaddar “legitimizes the shedding of her blood by accusing her of participating in a conference in Washington [along with] former Israeli PM Ehud Barak”. The statement added “ Ghaddar was the mouthpiece of every Lebanese who adheres to their sovereignty, independence and free choice, whereas the real traitors are those who are trying to put an end to the STL with iron and fire through their cheap fabrications, and through keeping Lebanon under the yoke of the Iranian guardianship”.
Ghaddar, published on her website a poignant rebuttal of the core campaign against her, demonstrating first that she did not violate Lebanese laws, and telling her detractors “my patriotism is not defined according to the political allegiance of the aforementioned media outlets, which need to have their patriotism tested due to the threats and accusation of treason in some of their writings against me and other colleagues”. Finally, Ghaddar reminded her critics that everything she said in Washington she has written and published in Beirut. Unfortunately, very few voices were raised to defend Ghaddar’s rights in the mainstream media in Lebanon, and so far the very well-known columnists are not defending her, and defending themselves since they too could potentially be victimized by the same thuggish journalist militia.
Once upon a time
The relative silence of the media in Lebanon in this case, is a reflection of Lebanon’s diminishing traditions of free media and unhindered intellectual debates. There was a time when an attempt to ban a book would spark a storm among intellectuals and journalists. In 1969, the gifted progressive Syrian intellectual Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm published a collection of essays on religion titled “Naqd al-Fikr al-Dini”, Critique of Religious Thought, in which he exposed how Arab governments and the intellectuals and religious institutions that support them exploit the religious beliefs of their people to cover-up for their abject failure in governance.
He was charged with sedition and was imprisoned briefly. His trial in Beirut became a cause célèbre, and he received a wide support from other intellectuals, journalists and civil society in general. I met Sadiq, during his trial, when a group of us (mostly late teens and early twenties) made a point of going to court to show our solidarity with him. The charges were dropped later and the book, which created an impressive debate, became a best seller. Years later, following the infamous Fatwa against Salman Rushdi, Al-Azm published another collection of essays on the controversy, but this time book stores in Beirut would not display the book in the open, and a limited number of copies were sold clandestinely. As Bob Dylan would say “The Times They Are a-Changin.”
They shoot journalists, don’t they?
Journalists like Al-Amin do exist and serve obediently the powers that be in most Arab states. But there are many reporters, editors and columnists, who practice the craft honorably and professionally, and in most cases do so against tremendous challenges and threats of physical elimination.
Rarely a week passes by without a journalist, or a blogger or a commentator is harassed, jailed unfairly, beaten or assassinated. And when it comes to journalists, sometimes the opposition groups, particularly the armed ones, have proven to be as lethal as the structures of repression at the disposal of Arab governments. According to The Committee to Protect Journalists’ report on journalists killed in 2013, the three deadliest countries are Arab states: Syria: 28, Iraq: 10, Egypt: 6. In the Arab world they shoot journalists, don’t they?
___________
Hisham Melhem is the bureau chief of Al Arabiya News Channel in Washington, DC. Melhem has interviewed many American and international public figures, including Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, among others. Melhem speaks regularly at college campuses, think tanks and interest groups on U.S.-Arab relations, political Islam, intra-Arab relations, Arab-Israeli issues, media in the Arab World, Arab images in American media, U.S. public policies and other related topics. He is also the correspondent for Annahar, the leading Lebanese daily. For four years he hosted "Across the Ocean," a weekly current affairs program on U.S.-Arab relations for Al Arabiya. Follow him on Twitter : @hisham_melhem
Last Update: Saturday, 17 May 2014 KSA 12:51 - GMT 09:51Steðji brewery defends use of dead whale in beer that anti-whalers call 'immoral and outrageous'
Conservationists have criticised the sale in Iceland of a beer which its makers claim contains dead whale.
Icelandic brewery Steðji has teamed up with whaling company Hvalur to launch the beer, which is said to contain whale meal.
The 5.2% beer, produced in time for the Icelandic mid-winter festival, is described by the brewery as healthy because whale meal is full of protein and is very low fat, while the drink has no added sugar.
The brewery's website claims people who drink it become "true Vikings".
But environmental group Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) criticised the latest use of whale meat in products, following earlier concerns that endangered fin whales were ending up in dog food.
The conservation group's Icelandic whaling campaign leader Vanessa Williams-Grey said: "Demand for this meat is in decline, with fewer and fewer people eating it.
"Even so, reducing a beautiful, sentient whale to an ingredient on the side of a beer bottle is about as immoral and outrageous as it is possible to get.
"The brewery may claim that this is just a novelty product with a short shelf life, but what price the life of an endangered whale which might have lived to be 90 years?"
Dagbjartur Ariliusson, the brewery's owner, confirmed it was making the beer, which will only be sold in Iceland during the midwinter month from 24 January to 22 February, and is not being made for export.
He said the beer was being made for a traditional festival in which people gathered and celebrated "as we've done for many centuries and eat cured food, including whale fat, and now we have the beer to drink with this food".It is September 1998 and the action centres on the ill-fated Raccoon City and the horrific consequences of the deadly T-virus outbreak, developed at the Umbrella facility. With a cover up required, Umbrella orders an elite team into Raccoon City to destroy all evidence of the outbreak and eliminate any survivors. Meanwhile, the US Government has quarantined the city and dispatched its own team of elite soldiers to determine the source of the mysterious outbreak. You are an Umbrella Security Services soldier (U.S.S.), competing alone or in up to four player co-op in a battle against all the competing forces at play in Raccoon City. Expect the return of original Resident Evil enemies, iconic landmarks such as the Raccoon City Police Department and fan favourite characters, including Leon S. Kennedy, who, as a rookie police officer in Raccoon City, is on your hit list to eliminate. Experience the Fear: Set in the terrifying world of Resident Evil
Three Corner Conflict: Bio-Organic Weapons (B.O.W) and zombies create an unpredictable third force and additional challenge on the battlefield, adding chaos to the shooter game play.
Campaign Mode - both single player and up to 4 player co-op: You are part of the Umbrella Security Service. Protect the truth behind the T-Virus outbreak by any means necessary.
Fight Online: Robust and fully featured online multiplayer modes
Define your Play Style: Gain new abilities and skills unique to your playable character as your experience level increases.
International Team Development: a high quality, fully loaded, third person co-op / multiplayer shooter developed in collaboration between Capcom Japan development studios and an experienced Western multiplayer specialist studio.
Choose your Order Location:[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Sunday's "Say the Word" episode of AMC's The Walking Dead.]
A week after the gut-wrenching deaths of Lori and T-Dog, the group began to rebuild the prison and care for Rick's late wife's newborn daughter, while Michonne and Andrea clashed over their residency in Woodbury.
While Rick (Andrew Lincoln) spent the bulk of the hour taking out his emotional pain on a cellblock full of walkers, he was somewhat awoken from his mental turmoil when a phone rang near the boiler room where Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) ultimately perished. But was the phone call real? The scene is a familiar one to readers of the comics, who recall that Rick clung to Lori's memory by continuing to talk to her through phone calls that he staged with her in his mind.
Fresh from returning for a formula run for Lori's baby girl, Daryl (Norman Reedus) pays his respects to his late friend Carol (Melissa McBride), delivering a Cherokee rose -- the same flower he gave her when they were searching for Sophia (Madison Lintz) -- on her grave.
PHOTOS: 'The Walking Dead's' Most Shocking Deaths
Meanwhile in Woodbury, Michonne (Danai Gurira) discovers what she believes to be the Governor's secret when she finds Penny's name scribbled in a journal with a long collection of stick figures counting something. What she doesn't realize, however, is that Penny isn't just some girl he's loved but instead the Governor's (David Morrissey) daughter, whom he's still caring for.
After Michonne leaves Woodbury, Andrea (Laurie Holden) learns that her friend was more right than she'd imagined about the community when she has a front-row seat to the Governor's gladiator battles.
The Hollywood Reporter turned to executive producer Robert Kirkman, who created the comic on which the series is based, to answer our burning questions from the episode.
The Hollywood Reporter: That's totally Lori on the other end of that phone line, right?
Robert Kirkman: (Laughs.) There are certain hints to certain storylines that you can get from the comic book series. I'm not going to reveal one way or another, but there's a chance that if you have taken the time to go out and buy the comics, you may have a leg up on the television show. But I'm not going to say anything.
THR: I think you just did! Can we expect this to continue?
Kirkman: He's definitely not in a good place. This is a guy who has had the weight of this entire world on his shoulders for a very long time, and what we've witnessed in this last episode and the one before it is his breaking point. And now that he's broken, it's a question of whether or not he comes back from that or if he continues to go down the dark path. That's what we'll be seeing moving forward.
THR: Is Carol really dead? Did the group find her body? Lori's grave is still open as if they're going to stick her body in it. Daryl sticks a Cherokee rose -- the same flower he gave to Carol when they were searching for Sophia -- on the grave
Kirkman: That implies that they believe that she's dead. We would never do a thing where, "Oh, they found her body and they buried it, and we didn't make that clear." They definitely have not found her body but have very good reason to believe she's dead because everything that has happened implies that she is in fact dead. Whether or not they are going to find her body or they're going to find a zombie Carol or they're going to find Carol alive, that is definitely a storyline that we'll be dealing with moving forward.
THR: What do the tallies in the Governor's journal represent? What about the names?
Kirkman: That's definitely going to be a mystery for now, so we'll just have to see. There's definitely something going on there. The guy is keeping a notebook for |
indeed was made clear during certain subsequent investigations. Late at night the conference disbanded without having developed a definite plan, but all day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulae and mixing chemicals obtained from the college laboratory. The more he reflected on the hellish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the efficacy of any material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur Whateley had left behind him - the earth threatening entity which, unknown to him, was to burst forth in a few hours and become the memorable Dunwich horror. Monday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr Armitage, for the task in hand required an infinity of research and experiment. Further consultations of the monstrous diary brought about various changes of plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertainty must remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out, and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely away in a corner of the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the Associated Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whisky of Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone for Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next day was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had done before him. IX. Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich, arriving at the village about one in the afternoon. The day was pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy ravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some mountain top a gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed against the sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn's store they knew something hideous had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode around Dunwich, questioning the natives concerning all that had occurred, and seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye ruins with their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous swaths of disturbed vegetation in various places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill seemed to Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at the sinister altar-like stone on the summit. At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had come from Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more easily planned than performed; since no sign of the party could be found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car, but now the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep hollow that yawned close by. 'Gawd,' he gasped, 'I telled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an' I never thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the whippoorwills a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday...' A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening. Armitage, now that he had actually come upon the horror and its monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to be his. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous blasphemy lumbered upon its eldritch course. Negotium perambuians in tenebris... The old librarian rehearsed the formulae he had memorized, and clutched the paper containing the alternative one he had not memorized. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order. Rice, beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which he relied despite his colleague's warnings that no material weapon would be of help. Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind of a manifestation to expect; but he did not add to the fright of the Dunwich people by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might be conquered without any revelation to the world of the monstrous thing it had escaped. As the shadows gathered, the natives commenced to disperse homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the present evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shook their heads at the visitors' plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near the glen; and, as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the watchers again. There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable foetor to the heavy night air; such a foetor as all three of the watchers had smelled once before, when they stood above a dying thing that had passed for fifteen years and a half as a human being. But the looked-for terror did not appear. Whatever was down there in the glen was biding its time, and Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to attack it in the dark. Morning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a grey, bleak day, with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier clouds seemed to be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the north-west. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking shelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless, monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather. It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a confused babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting, and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed a coherent form. 'Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd,' the voice choked out. 'It's a-goin' agin, an' this time by day! It's aout - it's aout an' a-movin' this very minute, an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all!' The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message. 'Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heered the 'phone a-ringin', an' it was Mis' Corey, George's wife, that lives daown by the junction. She says the hired boy Luther was aout drivin' in the caows from the storm arter the big bolt, when he see all the trees a-bendin' at the maouth o' the glen - opposite side ter this - an' smelt the same awful smell like he smelt when he faound the big tracks las' Monday mornin'. An' she says he says they was a swishin' lappin' saound, more nor what the bendin' trees an' bushes could make, an' all on a suddent the trees along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an' they was a awful stompin' an' splashin' in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn't see nothin' at all, only just the bendin' trees an' underbrush. 'Then fur ahead where Bishop's Brook goes under the rud he heerd a awful creakin' an' strainin' on the bridge, an' says he could tell the saound o' wood a-startin' to crack an' split. An' all the whiles he never see a thing, only them trees an' bushes a-bendin'. An' when the swishin' saound got very fur off - on the rud towards Wizard Whateley's an' Sentinel Hill - Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he'd heerd it fust an' look at the graound. It was all mud an' water, an' the sky was dark, an' the rain was wipin' aout all tracks abaout as fast as could be; but beginnin' at the glen maouth, whar the trees hed moved, they was still some o' them awful prints big as bar'ls like he seen Monday.' At this point the first excited speaker interrupted. 'But that ain't the trouble naow - that was only the start. Zeb here was callin' folks up an' everybody was a-listenin' in when a call from Seth Bishop's cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit to kill - she'd jest seed the trees a-bendin' beside the rud, an' says they was a kind o' mushy saound, like a elephant puffin' an' treadin', a-headin' fer the haouse. Then she up an' spoke suddent of a fearful smell, an' says her boy Cha'ncey was a-screamin' as haow it was jest like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin'. An' the dogs was barkin' an' whinin' awful. 'An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud had jest caved in like the storm bed blowed it over, only the wind w'an't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' we could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled again, an' says the front yard picket fence hed just crumbled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' old Seth Bishop a-yellin' tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse - not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy again' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nothin' aout the front winders. An' then... an' then...' Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was, had barely poise enough to prompt the speaker. 'An' then.... Sally she yelled aout, "O help, the haouse is a-cavin' in... an' on the wire we could hear a turrible crashin' an' a hull flock o' screaming... jes like when Elmer Frye's place was took, only wuss...' The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke. 'That's all - not a saound nor squeak over the 'phone arter that. Jest still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an' wagons an' rounded up as many able-bodied men-folks as we could git, at Corey's place, an' come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I think it's the Lord's jedgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin ever set aside.' Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics. 'We must follow it, boys.' He made his voice as reassuring as possible. 'I believe there's a chance of putting it out of business. You men know that those Whateleys were wizards - well, this thing is a thing of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I've seen Wilbur Whateley's diary and read some of the strange old books he used to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite to make the thing fade away. Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always take a chance. It's invisible - I knew it would be - but there's powder in this long-distance sprayer that might make it show up for a second. Later on we'll try it. It's a frightful thing to have alive, but it isn't as bad as what Wilbur would have let in if he'd lived longer. You'll never know what the world escaped. Now we've only this one thing to fight, and it can't multiply. It can, though, do a lot of harm; so we mustn't hesitate to rid the community of it. 'We must follow it - and the way to begin is to go to the place that has just been wrecked. Let somebody lead the way - I don't know your roads very well, but I've an idea there might be a shorter cut across lots. How about it?' The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly, pointing with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain. 'I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' across the lower medder here, wadin' the brook at the low place, an' climbin' through Carrier's mowin' an' the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's - a leetle t'other side.' Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction indicated; and most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him and walked ahead to show the right one. Courage and confidence were mounting, though the twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill which lay towards the end of their short cut, and among whose fantastic ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these qualities to a severe test. At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out. They were a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and hideously unmistakable tracks showed what had passed by. Only a few moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just round the bend. It was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and tarry stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints leading on towards the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned slopes of Sentinel Hill. As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley's abode they shuddered visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not see, but that had all the vicious malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster's former route to and from the summit. Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focused the lenses with Armitage's aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained than Morgan's had been. 'Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a'movin'! It's a-goin' up - slow-like - creepin' - up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows what fur!' Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right - but suppose they weren't? Voices began questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind. X. In the end the three men from Arkham - old, white-bearded Dr Armitage, stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr Morgan, ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction regarding its focusing and use, they left the telescope with the frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed round. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker repassed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the pursuers were gaining. Curtis Whateley - of the undecayed branch - was holding the telescope when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it. Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that his sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the party's point of advantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect. Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of grey cloud - a cloud about the size of a moderately large building - near the top of the mountain. Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled, and would have crumbled to the ground had not two or three others seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly. 'Oh, oh, great Gawd... that... that...' There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for him. 'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd it Heaven - that haff face on top...' This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis; and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible three tiny figures, apparently running towards the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these - nothing more. Then everyone noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy. Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic appreciation. 'I guess he's sayin' the spell,' whispered Wheeler as he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the visible ritual. Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of dogs. The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down upon the rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter than before, and the crowd fancied that it had showed a certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with which the atmosphere seemed surcharged. Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words. They were loud - loud as the rumblings and the thunder above which they echoed - yet did they come from no visible being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow. 'Ygnailh... ygnaiih... thflthkh'ngha.... Yog-Sothoth...' rang the hideous croaking out of space. 'Y'bthnk... h'ehye - n'grkdl'lh...' The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human figures on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures as their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy. 'Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah - e'yayayaaaa... ngh'aaaaa... ngh'aaa... h'yuh... h'yuh... HELP! HELP!...ff - ff - ff - FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!...' But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees, grass, and under-brush were whipped into a fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills. The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on and around that fearsome hill Curtis Whateley was only just regaining consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact. 'The thing has gone for ever,' Armitage said. 'It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father - and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills.' There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had prostrated him burst in upon him again. 'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face - that haff face on top of it... that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost....' He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a bewilderment not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been silent heretofore, spoke aloud. 'Fifteen year' gone,' he rambled, 'I heered Ol' Whateley say as haow some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill...' But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew. 'What was it, anyhaow, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it aout o' the air it come from?' Armitage chose his words very carefully. 'It was - well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself - enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I'm going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings those Whateleys were so fond of - the beings they were going to let in tangiblyThe Huemul, a species of deer found only in the Latin American region of Patagonia, is bouncing back from the brink of possible extinction as a result of collaboration between conservationists and the Chilean government, says a new study.
By controlling cattle farming and policing to prevent poaching in the Bernardo O’Higgins National Park – a vast “natural Eden” covering 3.5 million hectares – conservation efforts have allowed the deer to return to areas of natural habitat from which it had completely disappeared.
Researchers are hailing the findings as an example of collaborations between local government and scientists leading to real conservation success, and a possible model for future efforts to maintain the extraordinary biodiversity found in this part of Chile.
The study by researchers from Cambridge, the Wildlife Conservation Society and CONAF, the Chilean national forestry commission, is released today in the journal Oryx, published by conservation charity Fauna and Flora International.
A national symbol that features on the Chilean coat-of-arms, Huemul deer are estimated to have suffered reductions of 99 per cent in size since the 19th century, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Researchers believe 50 per cent of this decline has come in recent years, with only 2,500 deer now left in the wild.
The Huemul is a naturally tame and approachable animal, which led to it becoming easy prey for hunters, particularly with the arrival of European colonists in the area who would hunt Huemul for meat to feed their dogs.
Recent increases by local farmers in the practice of releasing cattle indiscriminately into national parkland for retrieval later in the year has damaged the habitats of endemic wildlife such as the Huemul, and, coupled with continued hunting of the species, deer populations plummeted.
The joint efforts of conservationists and researchers with government and private initiatives created a small number of field stations in this remote natural paradise on the tip of South America – one of the least populated areas of the world, requiring a boat trip of two days along the region’s stunning fjords to reach.
This created a base for monitoring endangered species and natural habitats, as well as a team of park rangers enforcing conservation laws that – although they had been in place since the late sixties – had never been policed on the ground.
The impact was almost immediate, within five short years – from 2004 to 2008 – the Huemul population in the national park not only stabilised but also began to increase, with deer coming down from the hostile mountain areas it had sought refuge in and back to the sea-level valleys where it naturally thrives.
“National parks are at the heart of modern conservation, but there has to be an investment in management and protection on the ground. You can’t just have a ‘paper park’, where an area is ring-fenced on a map but physically ignored,” said Cristóbal Briceño, a researcher from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, who co-authored the study.
“Our results suggest that synergistic conservation actions, such as cattle removal and poaching control, brought about by increased infrastructure, can lead to the recovery of species such as the threated Huemul.”
For Briceño, the “scattering” of endangered species as habitats are encroached on creates not only external threats, but also extremely limited mating diversity.
This leads to levels of inbreeding that can reach “a critical extent from which there’s no return”, causing susceptibility to disease and increased extinction risk, as with another Chilean mammal that Briceño is researching called Darwin’s Fox – named for the scientific genius that first discovered it – with barely 500 now left in the world.
The Huemul’s success offers encouragement for Briceño and others in the field: “I think it’s beautiful that this has turned out to be an example of real hope for an endangered species, an example we would like to replicate.”
For more information, please contact fred.lewsey@admin.cam.ac.ukAmerican transport officials warned of a potential weak spot in Boeing 777s which could lead to the "loss of structural integrity of the aircraft" four months before the disappearance of Malaysia airlines Flight MH370.
The Federal Aviation Administration in Washington drew up an Airworthiness Directive in November. It was triggered by reports of cracking in the fuselage skin underneath a Boeing aircraft's satellite antennae.
In its directive the FAA, which is responsible for supervising the safety of American-made aircraft such as Boeing, told airlines to look out for corrosion under the fuselage skin.
This, the FAA said, could lead to a situation where the fuselage was compromised leading to possible rapid decompression as well as the plane breaking up.
"We received a report of cracking and corrosion in the fuselage skin underneath the SATCOM antenna adapter," the FAA warned. "During a maintenance planning data inspection, one operator reported a 16-inch crack under the 3-bay SATCOM antenna adapter plate in the crown skin of the fuselage on an aeroplane that was 14 years old with approximately 14,000 total flight cycles.
"Subsequent to this crack finding, the same operator inspected 42 other aeroplanes that are between 6 and 16 years old and found some local corrosion, but no other cracking. Cracking and corrosion in the fuselage skin, if not corrected, could lead to rapid decompression and loss of structural integrity of the aeroplane."
The FAA directive in November called for additional checks to be incorporated into the routine maintenance schedule of the worldwide 777 Boeing fleet.
According to a Malaysia Airlines spokesman, the missing aircraft was serviced on February 23, with further maintenance scheduled for June 19.
The FAA stated that carrying out necessary inspection work would cost airlines $3.060 (£1,841).
With terrorism now appearing less likely as a cause of the Malaysian airlines disaster, which claimed 239 lives, focus has switched to problems with the aircraft or pilot error.
Despite both the Boeing 777 and Malaysia Airlines having good safety records, there have been other incidents which could prove relevant during the investigation of the disappearance.
In 2005, a 777 operated by Malaysia Airlines suffered problems with its autopilot system on a flight between Perth and Kuala Lumpur.
It led to the plane pitching up into a sudden 3,000-foot climb, almost causing the plane to stall.
The problem led to another airworthiness directive to correct a computer fault that had been found on 500 Boeing 777s.
Airworthiness directives are commonplace, similar to car recalls.
In the majority of cases, airlines are told to look for and correct the fault, if found, during maintenance.
On rare occasions an entire fleet will be grounded as happened in January last year when the FAA ordered Boeing to stop flying its flagship 787 Dreamliner after faults were discovered with the plane's batteries.
While investigators from Malaysia and the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington search for the plane's black box, they will also be able to glean vital information from a live-data stream broadcast during the flight.
Known as Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, it is the equivalent of an "online black box".
However James Healy-Pratt, an aviation lawyer who has represented bereaved families in other air accidents, warned they face a long wait before the original black boxes are recovered.
A Boeing spokesman said it was working with the NTSB as a technical adviser.
"The team is now in position in the region to offer whatever assistance is required."
The company declined to comment further.
In a subsequent statement, issued 24 hours later, the company said the antenna on the Malaysia airline aircraft differed from that mentioned in the directive.195 houseguests over 16 seasons. Some have played more than once. Some played for a matter of days. But how do they stack up against one another? Let's find out. Tap to play GIF Tap to play GIF CBS A disclaimer: Rankings are based on a combination of likability, gameplay, and how entertaining they were to watch on television. Rankings are also only based on appearances in the house. If someone was awful in the house but has proven themselves to be a splendid person in reality, it doesn't count. Also, if I could rank Julie "Chenbot" Chen, she'd be #1.
193. Adam Jasinski CBS Season: 9 Placed: Winner The less said about season 9 the better. It's the only season of the show that aired during the winter, in order to fill in the blanks in CBS' schedule from the WGA writers' strike. And it was the most aggressively boring season of Big Brother that ever existed. That's the only way to explain why the worst player in the worst season managed to win the whole damn thing. The most interesting thing Adam did was get arrested for starting a drug ring with two other contestants from his season.
192. Braden Bacha Season: 11 Placed: 13th Braden is one of David Girton's Big Brother ancestors. He was misogynist and racist, which aired on the live feeds and not on the show. He called Kevin a "fucking beaner" and ended up getting kicked out of the house first. His racist rants didn't air on CBS, but they were caught on the live feeds.
191. David Girton Season: |
hit by gunfire. He drove himself to Easton Hospital and was later transported to Lehigh Valley Hospital's Cedar Crest campus. He also was in surgery Tuesday afternoon and is currently in stable condition.
"The thoughts of every Pennsylvania State Police employee are with our wounded member at this time," said Commissioner Tyree C. Blocker.
After Clary arrived at Easton, police blocked off the entrance to the hospital and diverted patients to other medical centers.
Photo credit: SkyForce10
Route 33 was shut down in both directions during the investigation. Traffic on nearby State Route 22 was backed up for miles, according to a NBC10 photographer near the scene.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Sen. Bob Casey tweeted their support for the trooper.
Photos: Pa. State Corporal ShotThe Eurythmics 'bloke' has changed his mind about Spotify and explains why all his gold records get sent to north London
"Thom Yorke made a mistake there, him and Nigel Godrich," says Dave Stewart, addressing the pair's criticism of Spotify and the royalties it pays artists. "They were misinformed. I think they just suddenly got a bee in their bonnet, because Spotify is one of the few companies that is transparent and actually pays properly – as a songwriter you should worship Spotify, because they've come along with a solution."
It's an interesting turnaround for the songwriter, producer and one half of the Eurythmics, who told consumer technology magazine Stuff in a 2012 interview that he would earn $47 if his album was streamed non-stop for three years on the music streaming service, and that newer artists would be better off "selling their albums out of the boot of a car".
Stewart now says Spotify's problem lies with its low number of subscribers (currently standing at more than 6 million globally, according to the company). "It's a volume business. If they had 100 million subscribers, which is possible, the payment [for the Eurythmics catalogue] would be equal to the band's income back at the peak of selling," he claims, adding that the way money is distributed by the labels to the artists is another problem.
We're sitting in the Hospital, the London private members club he co-founded with the aim of creating a hub for creators, after a screening of the video for his new single, Every Single Night. Following Stewart's train of thought takes concentration as it bounces between a multitude of new ideas and ventures that he's involved with, interspersed with entertaining anecdotes.
With four decades of experience in the music industry, his view of record labels is, to say the least, tainted. "You see record labels are the devil," he says, leaning in. "Record labels and publishing companies are the worst banks in the world … My own record label boss [Jose Menendez] was murdered by his own kids, and through that murder me and Annie [Lennox] found out where most of our royalties went.
"There was a very famous trial [following the murder] called the Menendez trial. He came from Hertz rent-a-car to run RCA Records in the US [the label was owned by Hertz at the time]. How weird is that? And that's who I had a meeting with for our third album. He was this huge Columbian guy. He shook my hand, saying: 'Love the album – it's just like Ghostbusters.' Ghostbusters?"
There's no doubt that problems arise when labels are owned by corporations that have no experience in dealing with artists.
Perhaps Stewart's reference to labels and banks stems from the fact that a bank was essential in making Eurythmics album Sweet Dreams a reality. After every label turned the band down, he calculated they'd need £5,000 for the equipment to record it by themselves. He went into the local bank in Crouch End, London, and explained to the bank manager that if they could get the equipment they would own the record and the next album.
"We both looked really weird, and Annie was really embarrassed, but at the end of my speech he just said 'that makes sense' and gave us the money. About a year and a half later we put £8m back into his bank. We've sent him all our gold records ever since."
While Stewart has little love for traditional record labels, he has even less love for technology companies and anti-copyright campaigners who expect music to be free. He says his income from music has gone down by 92% in the past decade. "Could you imagine teachers being told that they suddenly would only earn 8% of their income? They wouldn't be able to survive."
He also thinks reducing the length of copyright is "ridiculous". "Imagine if your dad built a business making train engine parts and bought a house and then he had a daughter and was told that it's all public domain now," he explains. "What the fuck? Why are they picking on musicians? Pick on something else!"
Stewart recalls Paul McCartney's lawyer telling him about a decade ago that all the music that had been made already would always be worth more than any of the music produced for a thousand years to come, because of the internet.
As the possibility of Spotify gaining 93 million additional subscribers any time in the near future appears remote at the moment, what should artists do to survive? Stewart takes a leaf out of Neil Young's book, banking on people being willing to pay for better sound. His soon-to-be-released album comes as an app that includes a feature-length film ("it's like Purple Rain or the Beatles' Help"), and is recorded in 11.1-surround sound.
He's also involved with Talenthouse, a company that puts brands together with artists. "Many artists say they don't want to work with brands – and then it turns out they're signed to EMI, which made missiles [Thorn EMI was until the mid-1990s one of the UK's largest defence companies]," he chuckles. "Ben & Jerry's is quite nice, actually – and they've got more stalls than EMI does."
But what he's most excited about at the moment – apart from the release of his "album-movie app" – is a new artist-funding venture that he'll announce at the Reeperbahn festival. My lips are sealed but, hint, it's inspired by the American Farmers Bank.The Alpine swift has the longest non-stop flight pattern known of in the avian world.
Scientists have long suspected that the Alpine swift — a swallowlike bird that has a wingspan of about 22 inches (57 centimeters) and a body length of about 8 inches (20 cm) – spends much of its life in flight, based on field observations and radar data collected during its migration. But, until now, researchers have not been able to prove just how long these birds fly without taking a rest.
Researchers at the Swiss Ornithological Institute and the Bern University of Applied Sciences in Burgdorf, Switzerland, have collected data showing that the birds take little to no breaks during their migration from breeding grounds in Switzerland to wintering grounds in Western Africa and back again the following year. The team details their findings today (Oct. 8) in the journal Nature Communications. [Quest for Survival: Incredible Animal Migrations]
To collect their data, the researchers outfitted six birds with small tags that logged acceleration and ambient light during the course of a yearlong migration cycle that began and ended in Switzerland. Only three of the six birds were recaptured the following year, but these individuals provided enough data to complete the study, the researchers said.
The team analyzed the acceleration patterns captured by the loggers to determine when the birds vigorously flapped their wings, when they glided and when they rested.
The only period of sustained resting appeared during the breeding period in Switzerland. The birds appeared to glide and flap throughout their entire migration across the Sahara Desert and their overwintering period in sub-Saharan West Africa.
"Their activity pattern reveals that they can stay airborne continuously throughout their nonbreeding period in Africa and must be able to recover while airborne," the team writes in the report. "To date, such long-lasting locomotive activities had been reported only for animals living in the sea."
Migrating sea animals, including a variety of whale and fish species, expend less energy migrating than birds do because the swimmers rely partially on their own buoyancy to help keep them afloat.
Birds expend lots of energy during flight, but Alpine swifts do not need to stop to eatbecause they feed midair on what is called aerial plankton — the atmospheric equivalent to marine plankton that can include an array of tiny bacteria, fungus, seeds, spores and small insects that get caught in air currents.
Whether or not the birds sleep in flight remains unclear, though periods of decreased movement suggest that they do, indeed, catch up on a bit of rest midair. Still, the clear lack of significant resting periods suggest that the birds do not need as much sleep to perform their migration as previous research has suggested.
"We cannot rule out that the Alpine swifts may interrupt their flight for a few minutes," the team writes. "Nevertheless, they must be able to accomplish all vital physiological functions in flight over a period of several months."
The team next hopes to determine the evolutionary drivers responsible for what they consider to be an extraordinary behavior.
Follow Laura Poppick on Twitter. Follow LiveScience on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.In Africa’s Danakil (or Afar) Depression three tectonic plates are tearing themselves apart in spectacular fashion. As the plates separate, several active volcanoes have emerged along the seams. One of the most active is Erta Ale, a shield volcano near the Ethiopian and Eritrean border. It is known as the “smoking mountain” and the “gateway to hell” in the Afar language.
Erta Ale has a long-lived lava lake that has gurgled and spattered in its caldera for decades, but the most recent bout of activity involves the southeast flank of the gently sloping mountain. According to reports posted by Volcano Discovery, new fissures opened up on January 21, 2017, about 7 kilometers (4 miles) from the summit caldera, spilling large amounts of lava. Meanwhile, at least one of the lava lakes has experienced large changes in the level of its lava that have led to overflows and intense spattering.
This image was captured by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) sensor on Landsat 8 on January 26, 2017. It is a composite of natural color (OLI bands 4-3-2) and shortwave infrared (OLI band 7). Shortwave infrared light (SWIR) is invisible to the naked eye, but strong SWIR signals indicate increased temperatures. Infrared hot spots representing two distinct lava flows are visible. Plumes of volcanic gases and steam drift from the lava lakes.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Caption by Adam Voiland.After the McConnell sell-out and the Boehner betrayal, after the disgraceful abandonment of principles and conservative values by the Washington Republican establishment, what is the proper response from outraged conservative believers in limited government and fiscal responsibility?
I have been sitting here on the morning after the New Years’s Day capitulation by Capitol Hill Republicans, trying to answer that question for myself.
Start with feelings. I feel abandoned by the establishment Republican Party of Washington, D.C. I feel depressed that I cannot see a single conservative leader in sight who could grab the Republican Party, slap it across the face, and tell it where it can go if it does not shape up. I feel angry that Republican “leaders” in Washington put a higher value on their own survival in office than the principles they claim to stand for.
As I see it, the Republican Party is a rudderless ship that has lost its compass, dead in the water, with no captain and no destination. What this ship needs is a mutiny.
I have already begun my own little mutiny. About 10 days ago, I received a phone call from the Republican National Committee. The guy on the phone asked if I would renew my membership for 2013, for a mere $150 contribution. “No, I won’t do that,” I responded. Well, the fellow said, we understand times are tough for lots of people these days, so how about renewing for, say, $75?
“You don’t get it,” I responded. “I am not renewing for $75 nor for five bucks nor for a dime. I am done with contributions to the RNC. I donated several times in 2012, and donated to the Republican senatorial committee, and you blew an election we should have won. I am no longer going to support the army of consultants, pollsters, media advisors, and other experts who live off the RNC and who botched the election of 2012. I am done with the RNC.”
The conversation went downhill from there, but it left me with a feeling of liberation. It was my declaration of independence from the Republican establishment. I told the RNC guy that from now on, I will pick my own list of true conservative candidates and donate directly to them, not to the party.
I now consider myself a citizen without a party. Everything that Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have done in the past month has reinforced my belief that only a grass-roots revolt — a true conservative mutiny — can save the Republican Party. The party is not worth saving unless it returns to conservative values — limited government, adherence to the Constitution, fiscal responsibility, and a dedication to individual liberty.
I have no hope that the leaders of the party in Washington have the vision or guts to adopt and adhere to such an agenda. They will pay it lip service, of course, but they will also go on making deals with the Democrats and President Obama to sell out those principles when it is expedient for their re-election hopes.
Only if millions of conservatives across the country withhold their money and their support for the collaborators in the capital, the nervous Neville Chamberlains of the Establishment, will there be any chance of real change in the GOP. So bring on the mutiny. There is something worse than being a person without a party. And that is being a member of a party without a soul.Prince Khaled bin Salman, was given Saudi Arabia's top diplomatic post as ambassador to the US.
Meanwhile, another of the king's sons, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, was given one of Saudi Arabia's most important positions, becoming state minister for energy affairs on Sunday.
Eight princes were also given deputy governor posts for cities or regions in Saudi Arabia including Mecca, Medina and Riyadh.
Young blood
Saudi Arabia's ruling al-Saud family have dominated the country's political system since the establishment of the third al-Saud state, with only a few senior roles given to non-royals.
Saudi Arabia has announced that benefits for military personnel and civil servants will be reinstated, as King Salman unveiled a series of royal decree on Sunday.The measures came after Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reviewed the cuts, part of government efforts to curb spending when oil prices tanked in 2014.Mohammed bin Salman reasoned that the overall fiscal situation for Saudi Arabia looks better after two years of austerity and that Riyadh can ease off on some of its austerity measures."The royal order returns all allowances, financial benefits, and bonuses to civil servants and military staff," said the decree, according to Reuters.Riyadh's experiment with austerity saw economic growth slow, after the price of oil went below the $30 a barrel mark early last year.Since then, the price of a barrel has stabilised to around $50 but economists argue that the days of plenty could be over for Saudi Arabia with oil will unlikely to rise significantly in the coming years.Saudi Arabia has unveiled an ambitious diversification programme called Saudi Vision 2030, which Riyadh hopes will see growth in other non-oil sectors.Part of this mission is to see Saudi youth take a bigger role in government and running the economy, while the puritanical vigor of the ulama will be kept in check.This was seen with the announcement of a cabinet shake-up and new roles for young princes in diplomacy and government.One of King Salman's sons, fighter pilotIn addition to the anime film that became the weekend box office winner with 930 million yen, both the novel version of Kimi no Na wa./your name written by the director Makoto Shinkai himself and the film's soundtrack album performed by four-member Japanese rock band RADWIMPS are taking No.1 spots in the latest weekly sales charts.
The novel was originally published from Kadokawa's Kadokawa Bunko imprint 85 days ago, June 18, and its highest ranking was 2nd makred twice in ealy July and late August. But after the huge opening of the film last weekend, it sold 74,000 copes, taking its first top spot in the Oricon weekly bunko sales charts. The 27-song soundtrack album was released on August 24 and sold 57,878 units in its first week, becoming the band's first weekly No.1 album in their career.
The film has already earned 1 billion yen from its first three days run, and distributor Toho expects it to
finish with a gross of about 6 billion yen. If their expectation is fulfilled, there is a possibility that it will
become one of the top-grossing Japanese films of the year.
Novel cover
"Zen Zen Zense" (movie version) by RADWIMPS
Soundtrack album limited edition CD jacket
Regular edition
Related publications:
"Official Visual Guide" (Kadokawa Shoten)
"Kimi no Na wa." Manga 1st volume (illustrated by Ranmaru Kotone/Kadokawa Media Factroy)
"Kimi no Na wa. Another Side:Earthbound" spin-off novel (written by Arata Kanoh/Kadokawa Sneaker Bunko)
"Shinkai Makoto Walker" (Kadokawa Magazines)
"Newtype" September 2016 issue (Kadokawa Shoten)
"MdN" October 2016 issue (MdN Corporation)
"CG World" October 2016 issue (Born Digital)
"Febri" vol.37 (Ichijinsha)
"Eureka" September 2016 issue (Seidosha)
Japanese trailer
Poster visual
Source: Oricon StylePresident Donald Trump met with Senate Republicans about healthcare in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump appeared to take issue Wednesday morning with a New York Times report on his involvement in the Senate healthcare bill.
"Some of the Fake News Media likes to say that I am not totally engaged in healthcare. Wrong, I know the subject well & want victory for U.S.," Trump tweeted Wednesday morning.
The New York Times on Tuesday reported that Trump was "largely on the sidelines" during much of the debate surrounding the bill. One GOP senator who The Times said supported the bill and met with Trump on Tuesday told the paper that the president "did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan."
Trump targeted the paper specifically in a tweet earlier Wednesday.
"The failing @nytimes writes false story after false story about me," Trump tweeted. "They don't even call to verify the facts of a story. A Fake News Joke!"
Senate Republican leaders on Tuesday shelved a plan to vote on their healthcare legislation by the end of the week after resistance from several members of the Senate GOP conference. They plan to revise the bill and work toward passage after the weeklong July 4 recess.Apparently, more and more students are requesting closed captioning or subtitles in some of the high schools I work at.
Many students who have been exposed to captioned media, because it is necessary for their deaf and hard of hearing classmates, absolutely love it. A few kids mentioned how they like that it helps them with their note taking. Others really like that they now know exactly what is being said, because even with their typical hearing, sometimes it can be hard to understand what someone is saying in a video. I bet this makes it easier for them to not have to focus so much. Overall, captioned media has been a big hit.
As you can imagine, this makes the deaf and hard of hearing students happy and feel more accepted in their classrooms, while the teachers are happy with the positive impact captioned media is making on their students.
Yay captions!
For hearing aid prices and best hearing aids. Click here.That’s a Good Question, and I Have an Answer Objections to Libertarianism
I can easily predict what my non-libertarian friends are going to say to me whenever we talk about political issues. They raise objections to libertarianism that make sense from their own perspective, and I used to share that perspective, and I used to raise those objections. I gradually learned the answers by reading–reading F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and (you either lover her or hate her) Ayn Rand. I have read other libertarian authors, but these guys and this gal are among my “must read” suggestions. (Some readers will point out that Ayn Rand was not a libertarian and that she didn’t like libertarians. That’s true, but the joke is on her because many people came to libertarianism because of her writings.)
Here I will give brief but (I hope) relevant and valid answers to some of the objections that my friends have brought up.
1. “How can you trust people with freedom when you know that people are greedy and selfish?”
Let me ask back: how can you trust people with power when you know that people are greedy and selfish? If people are greedy and selfish, then why would you give them the power to dictate how you run your life or your business, the power to tax you, or the power to put you in prison? That’s a lot of power to give to people whom you cannot trust because of their greed and selfishness.
2. “Don’t you like driving on roads?”
I sure do, and I would enjoy driving on even better roads. If the government did not fund the building of roads, then roads would be funded privately. Who builds the roads now? The government doesn’t actually build them; it hires private companies to build them. Those same companies could build roads even if the government weren’t the one paying the bill. And if the government weren’t paying the bill, there would be more accountability, since the road builders would have to keep their customers happy.
3. Have you turned liberal?
That’s what my conservative friends ask, but see #4.
4. Aren’t you too conservative?
That’s what my liberal friends ask. The answer to both questions is that I am neither conservative nor liberal. I have left that axis and operate on a different axis altogether. I am for freedom rather than control. Unlike either conservatives or liberals, I do not support the use of power to run other people’s lives. I have also grown weary of the fighting between the conservative camp and the liberal camp. Most of the things that they fight about would become irrelevant in a truly free society.
5. Don’t you want food that is safe to eat?
Of course I do, and I think it is my job to try to make sure that the food that I eat is safe. The government makes it harder, because they tell people that they can trust any food that they buy. After all, the government is guaranteeing that the food is safe. Some guarantee! What about all those outbreaks of food poisoning that you see on television? They are all occurring while the government is supposedly preventing them. No, I would rather require companies to prove to me that their products are safe for consumption without hiding behind government stickers and stamps that do not seem to actually protect us. If a private company’s own reputation were on the line, they would do everything that they could to keep their products safe. Private watchdog groups and consumer reporting groups would be helpful in this endeavor.
6. How would we educate the children?
Private schools exist now. They would exist if there were not government schools. Or communities could build schools with volunteer labor and could hire teachers with donated funds. Parents could form co-ops, which is what some parents do now. There are many ways that kids could get an education without having the government pay for it. This question and some of the others make a faulty presumption, which is that if a libertarian doesn’t want the government to do something, then he or she doesn’t want it done at all. Not so. Since I am a teacher, I obviously believe in education.
7. How can you be a Christian and a libertarian?
I can do it the same way that these Libertarian Christians do. I can do it because I love other people, which is what Jesus said to do. I want other people to have opportunities. I want other people to reach their potential. I want other people to live their lives under God and not under man. That’s why I support liberty as a Christian. I would like to ask you, if you are a Christian, how you can be a Christian and support controlling other people’s lives? Is that doing to others what you would have them do to you? Is that loving your neighbor as yourself?
8. Wouldn’t your approach allow corporations to control people?
How could they? They cannot tax people. They cannot put people in prison. They cannot force people to trade with them rather than with their competition. They cannot force people to work for them. They would not get bailed out if they fail. They would not have exclusive government contracts or exclusive licenses or charters. They would not get zoning laws to prevent competition from opening nearby. They would not be able to grandfathered out of the regulations that hinder new start-ups.
9. What about monopolies?
It is only with the help of the government that a business can control the production of a product or the provision of a service. Competition in a free market would prevent a company from being the sole provider–unless that company were already making the best possible product and selling it at the best possible price. In that case, customers would not complain. The moment that one company sells something inferior or sells it at too high a price, somebody is going to start selling a better product or selling the product at a lower price–or both. It happens now, and it would happen much more often if the government did not interfere.
10. Didn’t the free market cause the Great Depression?
No, and neither government did not get us out of it. That is what most of us were taught in our government-run schools, but if you go back and read the original sources, it was not that way at all.
If these answers don’t fully satisfy you, I would suggest getting better and fuller answers by reading any of the people I listed above or by reading from some of the linked websites.01
A Good Public Square Promotes People Flow
Greg Coleridge on a Public Square for Public Marches: The old Public Square was a popular staging area for public marches. “In the past,” Coleridge says, “we would circle one or two of the four quadrants before going somewhere else.” He says the new Public Square won’t affect the routes of any major public marches, but “one could easily envision the new square affecting how they form.” The new design makes it far easier for a crowd to encircle the park, or walk through it, which would let a march attract more attention before setting out.
James Corner on the Promenade Ribbon: To transform the four quadrants of the old Public Square into one park, Corner’s team closed one road, reduced the width of the remaining avenue, and surrounded the park with a “promenade ribbon” that encourages visitors to walk around—and through—the park. “Those journeys, especially the diagonal ones, were not available before,” Corner says, adding that they are an essential feature of parks in which “the interaction of a diverse mix of people is allowed to really play out.”
02
Visibility is Good for Democracy
Greg Coleridge on Visibility and the Shape of Public Space: Coleridge says circle- and square-shaped spaces lend themselves to public demonstration. “Everyone can see each other and everyone has a sense of equality,” he says. But the new Public Square is neither circular nor rectilinear. “It’s an hourglass,” he says. It’s true, the new Public Square affords sightlines the old design did not—especially on the diagonals. But large swaths are separated by trees and gardens that limit visibility.
James Corner on Seeing and Being Seen: One of the great joys of a well-designed public space, Corner says, is the simple act of people seeing one another. Among Public Square’s most notable new features are its primary sight lines, which extend in long diagonals across the plaza. “Seeing and being seen, and being juxtaposed with people who aren’t really like you, is important for fostering tolerance and diversity,” Corner says. “It’s an extraordinarily social form of public life, that, in a sense, supports democracy.” He adds that democracy in action takes many forms. “It’s most dominant form is protest and large assembly, and those are important,” he says. “But I also think democracy plays out in everyday life.”
03
Cleveland’s Official Speakers Platform Will Attract an Audience
Paul Wertheimer on the Fountain: Cleveland officials will erect a speaking platform at the southern end of the park, from which people will be permitted to make 30-minute speeches between 9:30 am and 6:30 pm every day of the convention. “Any sizeable crowd will extend up to, and beyond, the fountain in front of the speakers platform,” Wertheimer says. Authorities should make sure the fountain is turned off, to ensure that people can gather there. Public Square is already pretty small, he says, and “there’s a good chance they’ll need the space.”
04
Unofficial Speakers Platforms Could Attract Audiences, Too
James Corner on the Sloping Lawn: “It’s important to support the unpredictable in public spaces,” Corner says. “I think the best spaces for free speech are the everyday spaces that are designed for generosity, openness, and flexibility.” The lawn’s edges slope inward to create a mild amphitheater effect at the lawn’s center. “It’s really intended for picnics, sitting in the sun, looking on the city,” Corner says, “but it also lends itself to larger political gatherings and events.”
Paul Wertheimer on Impromptu Speakers Platforms: Cleveland officials have forbidden the use of soapboxes and other makeshift podiums, but a recent revision to the city’s definition of “speakers platform” indicates that people can use preexisting objects and topography to exercise their freedom of speech. “If people want to stand on a curb, a bench, or at the top of a grassy hill, they can do it,” Wertheimer says.
Greg Coleridge on Multiple Speakers Dividing Audience Attention: The park is full of design elements that could serve as impromptu speaking platforms, Coleridge says—though he worries this could divide crowds rather than unite them. “Instead of addressing one whole group, you might have three different groups, three different sections, for three different speeches,” he says. “It doesn’t lend itself to a single, big event.”
05
Statues Are Rallying Points
Greg Coleridge: Before Public Square’s redesign, a statue of early 20th Century Cleveland mayor Tom Johnson in the plaza’s northwest quadrant was a popular gathering point for anticorporate protests including, for many months, an Occupy Cleveland encampment. “Johnson was a populist of a guy,” Coleridge says. Today, the preserved statue is centered on the north side of the square, in front of what Coleridge describes as a bigger, more attractive, and more connected space.
06
Police Should be Present, Not Overwhelming
Paul Wertheimer on the Importance of an Off-Site Staging Area: It’s important to have police and firefighters at the ready, but too much police presence can make an event feel confrontational. “The parking lot located across the street from the Public Square is a logical assembly point for Cleveland’s police and fire departments” Wertheimer says, “and police inside the park should be dressed in non-confrontational uniforms—no Robocop gear.” An off-site staging area for personnel, vehicles, and riot equipment can help keep public tensions in check.
Greg Coleridge on History: In the past, Coleridge says, police in Public Square have been helpful in times of protest. “They’ve stopped traffic, even when we didn’t have a permit to march in the street.” But he worries police will be less obliging during the RNC. “The new Public Square is meant to be a showcase, the crown jewel … I would imagine the police will be particularly vigilant about keeping order.” The challenge for police, he says, is to allow people—even angry people—to express themselves, without resorting to violence.
07
An Overflow Area Could Reduce Crowd Density
Paul Wertheimer on Overflow: If authorities wind up with more people than they anticipated, a designated overflow area can help keep crowds safely contained. The roads surrounding the park could afford such a space. “Authorities may decide to keep at least one side of the park closed off from overflow, or keep one of the surrounding lanes open, as an emergency lane for fire trucks, ambulances, police, and other official vehicles,” Wertheimer says.
08
A Street Makes the Space Versatile
James Corner on the Flexibility of Superior Avenue: The street that runs through Public Square is primarily a bus route, but on special occasions that bus can be rerouted and the street’s path through the park cordoned off. “You can imagine tents, festivals, carnivals being used on that space and allowing the two halves of the park to be more unified,” Corner says.
Paul Wertheimer on Public Amenities: Public Square was not explicitly designed as a site for prolonged periods of public speaking or protest, “so authorities may need to provide extra amenities,” Wertheimer says. The center of the park, which is easily accessible by people in the square as well as by emergency vehicles via Superior Avenue, is a good location for toilets, water, and first aid.Steve
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Hero MemberActivity: 868Merit: 1000 [ANN] Bit-Pay introduces OpenCart payment extension September 01, 2011, 09:02:35 AM #1
1. Create an invoice based on an order total in USD or BTC
2. Create a unique payment address for each sale
3. Auto-forward the bitcoins to the merchants wallet, or sell them and transfer USD by ACH
4. Track your sales summary and trends
Opencart is a powerful open-source shopping cart platform for online merchants. Many merchants in the bitcoin community use OpenCart, and many of them have been unable to process payments for several weeks now.
We moved the OpenCart module to the top of our list, ahead of other planned developments, so that we can meet the immediate needs of the bitcoin community!
If you are using OpenCart and you would like to accept bitcoins, apply for a merchant account with Bit-pay to get started.
https://bit-pay.com
The opencart extension can be directly downloaded here:
https://bit-pay.com/downloads/bitpayOpenCartExtension-0.1.zip
It is also available via the opencart extension marketplace:
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=3119&filter_search=bitcoin&sort=e.date_modified&order=DESC
Bit-pay has developed an easy-to-use plugin payment module for opencart. The bit-pay module can:1. Create an invoice based on an order total in USD or BTC2. Create a unique payment address for each sale3. Auto-forward the bitcoins to the merchants wallet, or sell them and transfer USD by ACH4. Track your sales summary and trendsOpencart is a powerful open-source shopping cart platform for online merchants. Many merchants in the bitcoin community use OpenCart, and many of them have been unable to process payments for several weeks now.We moved the OpenCart module to the top of our list, ahead of other planned developments, so that we can meet the immediate needs of the bitcoin community!If you are using OpenCart and you would like to accept bitcoins, apply for a merchant account with Bit-pay to get started.The opencart extension can be directly downloaded here:It is also available via the opencart extension marketplace: (gasteve on IRC) Does your website accept cash? https://bitpay.com
Steve
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Hero MemberActivity: 868Merit: 1000 Re: [ANN] Bit-Pay introduces OpenCart payment extension September 01, 2011, 01:35:02 PM #4 Quote from: Piper67 on September 01, 2011, 12:06:57 PM You guys are awesome. Not a week goes by without you coming up with yet another solution. Nicely done!
Thanks, we certainly appreciate the compliment.
By the way, we are in need of a skilled PHP/JavaScript developer with some knowledge of various shopping carts. I am looking for someone that might want to take on a few integration projects (i.e. creating plugins for other shopping cart software and helping merchants integrate their store fronts). It's something that someone could do in their spare time. I'm hoping to find an individual that is reliable and that I could confidently refer merchants to and that would become an expert in the bit-pay platform. Over time if the relationship works well and as we grow, this could lead to a formal role overseeing our professional services. Thanks, we certainly appreciate the compliment.By the way, we are in need of a skilled PHP/JavaScript developer with some knowledge of various shopping carts. I am looking for someone that might want to take on a few integration projects (i.e. creating plugins for other shopping cart software and helping merchants integrate their store fronts). It's something that someone could do in their spare time. I'm hoping to find an individual that is reliable and that I could confidently refer merchants to and that would become an expert in the bit-pay platform. Over time if the relationship works well and as we grow, this could lead to a formal role overseeing our professional services. (gasteve on IRC) Does your website accept cash? https://bitpay.com
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No Maps for These Territories
Hero MemberActivity: 812Merit: 1000No Maps for These Territories Re: [ANN] Bit-Pay introduces OpenCart payment extension September 01, 2011, 01:36:36 PM #5 This almost gets lost between all the crap and the trolling, but this is great!
Easy integration into shopping cards is what Bitcoin needs for wider adoption...
Warning: For most, coin loss is a larger risk than coin theft. A disk can die any time. Regularly back up your wallet through File |
land gamblers have sometimes lost. Rezoning around Cambie hasn't been as extensive as initially expected, Mr. Paolella says.
"There are people that got burnt for sure. That's happening now."
And Main Street is still a tricky market, Mr. Lammam says.
"If it was easy money we would be doing it," he says. "The gamble is that the market doesn't go up. Or, you can't rezone the property, or the demand is not going to move east as quickly as we think it is. Main Street is the perfect example. I know I can sell Cambie Street right now for $800 or $900 a square foot, but Main Street is a millennial demographic. They don't have any money."
It's not only offshore speculators driving prices. Developer Daniel Boffo had to pay top dollar to a local man in North Vancouver who'd assembled land around the hugely desirable Edgemont neighbourhood.
"In that scenario, it was a local real estate guy that was able to make a buck by doing that. He knew the plan and where it was going to go. He was creative in putting together an assembly that would be desirable for a developer to pick up. It's low risk," Mr. Boffo says.
Story continues below advertisement
He had also bid on the Burritt Bros. property on Main Street.
"There's a lot more money coming from overseas. And I think why they like land is it allows them to place a large amount of funds in one spot. It makes it simpler from their end, where they are looking to relocate some of their capital. Unfortunately, it makes it hard for us.
"With all the other stresses that the industry faces – as well as tackling affordability – it's coming more to the surface now. But ultimately, if costs go up on land, and there's not enough of a return to make it viable, it does get passed on to the consumer."
Boffo Properties supplies both market and non-market housing. Mr. Boffo believes that the rash of speculation is a byproduct of the city's growth, and a challenge for city hall as well.
"It's a big topic, a big can of worms. That's [the city's] biggest challenge, in trying to grow communities responsibly and sustainably. There's a lot of change that's happened and that will continue to happen."The shocking video:
…and the story, via the Guardian:
The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.
Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:
Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling for prolonged periods.
Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.
Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.Octavia Spencer landed her most divine role yet when she signed on to play God in the upcoming faith-based film The Shack. But some angry, racist bigots are not happy that the Oscar winner "stole" the job from a white man. Joe Schimmel, the pastor of Blessed Hope Chapel in Simi Valley, California, told Christian News Network that the “pretentious caricature” of God as a “fat Black woman” is “dangerous and false.” Oh, word?
Schimmel continued, “Young’s pretentious caricature of God as a heavy set, cushy, non-judgmental, African-American woman called ‘Papa’ — who resembles the New-Agey Oprah Winfrey far more than the one true God revealed through the Lord Jesus Christ in Hebrews 1:1-3 — and his depiction of the Holy Spirit as a frail Asian woman with the Hindu name Sarayu, lends itself to a dangerous and false image of God and idolatry.”
And he isn't the only one who's mad. Christian author James DeYoung is also a critic of the novel The Shack is based on, and now says, “If the film is a faithful portrayal of the events and the theology of the book, then every Christian should be gravely alarmed at the further advance of beliefs that smear the evangelical understanding of the truth of the Bible.”
Watch the trailer for The Shack, below. Hopefully it won't cause you to burst into flames:Why are US officials hiding behind the cloak of anonymity when presenting the most detailed evidence yet that Iran is supplying anti-US forces in Iraq with weaponry?
After weeks, if not months, of US official planning to present a damning "dossier" of incriminating evidence against Iran, and after this same US administration presented us with lopsided, erroneous information about the capability and evil intentions of the Saddam Hussein regime, the best the US government can give us today is incendiary evidence presented at a Baghdad news conference by three US officials who refuse to be quoted by name?
That's disgraceful and unacceptable.
The American people deserve straight talk from identified US officials.
Here are some of the reports today:
-- Washington Post
-- AP
-- Reuters
-- AFP
If US officials are so sure of themselves -- their evidence appears credible but is disputed by Iranian officials and others -- then they should agree to be identified publicly and appear on-camera.
Also, the voluminous photographic evidence shared with journalists at the Baghdad news conference should be posted in full on a US government Web site.
But, wait, one of the three supposedly unnamed US officials apparently has been outed by an Iraqi news service, Voices of Iraq, whose report on the Baghdad news conference identified one of the three speakers as Major General William Caldwell, whose portfolio includes public affairs and who holds frequent news conference and grants one-on-one interviews. So, if the VOI report identifying Caldwell is correct, why did every other news organization apparently agree to grant anonymity to the general who's the official spokesman of the US-led Multi-National Force in Iraq? Why would Caldwell insist on not having his name associated with these allegations today?
After the bogus Iraq evidence debacle in 2002 and 2003 -- allegations that led to war, tens of thousands of lives lost, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent -- only a fool would accept as the gospel supposed evidence against another country that's presented by officials who insist on making their allegations anonymously.
We deserve better from the US government. We deserve better from the western news media.Why joysticks for gaming controllers? How many controllers have you replaced (or avoid) because the joysticks are either worn out or impregnated with the oil from your hands after many long gaming sessions. I’m not sure how many controllers my wife, friends, and I have worn out while playing video games but it is more than I care to count. I found the first thing to degrade was the surface of the joysticks. Two things would happen, the rubber surface would become impregnated with the oil off our hands; additionally any surface features of the joysticks would become worn down and would not provide that crisp tactile feedback of a new controller. After awhile we would buy new controllers, but it was always sad to see the old ones get retired because the controller surface had been nicely broken in over hours and hours of gaming resulting in a perfect and familiar fit for our hands. Only hours of play can create a controller that has the worn spots on a controller body that gamers actually prefer. This created a paradox. We desired the feel of new joysticks but the broken in feel of a well used controller body. There were a couple aftermarket options that I considered but none of them really fit what I was trying to achieve.Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.
In an address on energy policy at the University of Miami, President Barack Obama mocked the GOP drumbeat for a drill-baby-drill response to rising gas prices. Noting that “it’s an election year,” Obama alluded to Newt Gingrich’s promise to deliver $2.50 gas with a return of drill-everywhere platform. Obama described the “three-point plans for $2 gas”: “Step one is drill, step two is drill, and step three is keep drilling.”
I mean, the American people aren’t stupid. They know that’s not a plan — especially since we’re already drilling. That’s a bumper sticker. It’s not a strategy to solve our energy challenge. That’s a strategy to get politicians through an election. You know there are no quick fixes to this problem. You know we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices. If we’re going to take control of our energy future, and can start avoiding these annual gas price spikes that happen every year when the economy starts getting better, world demand starts increasing, turmoil in the Middle East or some other parts of the world, if we’re going to stop being at the mercy of these world events, then we need a sustained, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy — oil, gas, wind, solar, and nuclear, and biofuels, and more. We need to keep developing the technology that allows us to use less oil in our cars and trucks, less energy for our buildings and our plants and our factories. That’s the strategy we’re pursuing, and that’s the only real solution to this challenge. [Emphasis added.]
Watch it:
In his speech, Obama also noted the role of Wall Street speculators who now dominate oil markets and called for an end to the “outrageous” billions in tax subsidies the massively profitable oil companies receive from the American people.RACELAND, Louisiana — Jamie Simon worked on a barge in the oily waters for six months following the BP spill last year, cooking for the cleanup workers, washing their clothes and tidying up after them.
One year later, the 32-year-old said she still suffers from a range of debilitating health problems, including racing heartbeat, vomiting, dizziness, ear infections, swollen throat, poor sight in one eye and memory loss.
She blames toxic elements in the crude oil and the dispersants sprayed to dissolve it after the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010.
“I was exposed to those chemicals, which I questioned, and they told me it was just as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid and there was nothing for me to worry about,” she said of the BP bosses at the job site.
The local doctor, Mike Robichaux, said he has seen as many as 60 patients like Simon in recent weeks, as this small southern town of 10,000 bordered by swamp land and sugar cane fields grapples with a mysterious sickness that some believe is all BP’s fault.
Andy LaBoeuf, 51, said he was paid $1,500 per day to use his boat to go out on the water and lay boom to contain some of the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spewed from the bottom of the ocean after the BP well ruptured.
But four months of that job left him ill and unable to work, and he said he recently had to refinance his home loan because he could not pay his taxes.
“I have just been sick for a long time. I just got sick and I couldn’t get better,” LaBoeuf said, describing memory problems and a sore throat that has nagged him for a year.
Robichaux, an ear, nose and throat specialist whose office an hour’s drive southwest of New Orleans is nestled on a roadside marked with handwritten signs advertising turtle meat for sale, says he is treating many of the local patients in their homes.
“Their work ethic is so strong, they are so stoic, they don’t want people to know when they’re sick,” he said.
“Ninety percent of them are getting worse… Nobody has a clue as to what it is.”
According to a roster compiled by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a total of 52,000 workers were responding to the Gulf oil spill as of August 2010.
The state of Louisiana has reported 415 cases of health problems linked to the spill, with symptoms including sore throats, irritated eyes, respiratory tract infections, headaches and nausea.
But Bernard Goldstein, an environmental toxicologist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said the US government’s method of collecting health data on the workers is flawed.
For instance, a major study of response workers by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was not funded until six months after the spill, a critical delay that affects both the biology and the recall ability of the workers.
“It is too late if you go six months later,” he told AFP.
Benzene, a known carcinogen present in crude oil, disappears from a person’s blood within four months, Goldstein said.
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, are pollutants that can cause genetic mutations and cancer. They are of particular interest in studying long-term health, but without a baseline for comparison it is difficult to know where they came from — the oil spill or somewhere else in the environment.
“They last in the body for a longer period of time but they also get confounded by, if you will, obscured by, other sources of PAHs,” like eating barbecued meat or smoking cigarettes, said Goldstein.
Further blurring the situation, Louisiana already ranks very low in the overall health of its residents compared to the rest of the United States — between 44th and 49th out of the 50 states according to government data.
Some similar symptoms, including eye irritation, breathing problems, nausea and psychological stress, have been seen among responders to the Prestige oil tanker spill off Spain in 2002 and the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 off Alaska.
Local chemist Wilma Subra has been helping test people’s blood for volatile solvents, and said levels of benzene among cleanup workers, divers, fishermen and crabbers are as high as 36 times that of the general population.
“As the event progresses we are seeing more and more people who are desperately ill,” she said.
“Clearly it is showing that this is ongoing exposure,” Subra said, noting that pathways include contact with the skin, eating contaminated seafood or breathing polluted air.
“We have been asking the federal agencies to please provide medical care from physicians who are trained in toxic exposure.”
She said she has received no response.
Asked for comment, BP said in an email that “protection of response workers was a top priority” and that it had conducted “extensive monitoring of response workers” in coordination with several government agencies.
“Illness and injury reports were tracked and documented during the response, and the medical data indicate they did not differ appreciably from what would be expected among a workforce of this size under normal circumstances,” it added.
Any compensation for sick workers would fall under state law, and “BP does not make these determinations, which must be supported by acceptable medical evidence.”
For Simon, her way of life has been completely altered. She said she takes pain relievers every day just to function.
A couple of weeks ago, she read in a local newspaper that other ex-cleanup workers were feeling sick too, and her grandmother urged her to see a doctor.
“I never put the two together. I am just realizing that this is possibly related,” she said.For Eli Manning, the year 2012 has gone pretty much like so many Giants games — and even seasons — have through the years. You’ve got your wild inconsistency, with its mind-changing highs (remember all the Hall of Fame talk in February?) and derptastic lows (last weekend in Atlanta). You’ve got your blowout games followed directly by hapless stinkers. You’ve got pranks, performances, and awkward photos; you’ve got pick-sixes and hung heads and submissive shoulder shrugs. But through it all, one thing will always be a constant: He’ll always be good old Eli, and all he’ll ever want to do is Play Good Football.
January
January 1: The Giants ring in the New Year with a 31-14 win over the Cowboys in a game to decides the NFC East champion.
January 3: The Star-Ledger runs a “caption contest” on a photo of Eli Manning and Tony Romo talking after the game. Sample responses from readers:
Tony says: “Hey Eli, this is a Godsend for us”
Eli says: “Why is that?”
Tony says: “Jerry says by losing to you guys we will have an easier schedule next year”
Eli says: “You gotta love Jerry, he is so intuitive!!”
and …
Eli Manning: Things will be better when Obama is out of office.
Tony Romo: Yeah Vote for this Guy from Texas he’ll straighten this mess out then we’ll make even more money and get to KEEP IT!
and
Eli: Cruuuuuuuuuz
January 5: With a potential playoff matchup with Aaron Rodgers on the horizon, Giants scribes try to goad Eli into saying something about the Green Bay quarterback, but he refuses. “‘He’s playing good football,’ was the most Eli had to say,” reports Dave D’Alessandro.
January 8: The Giants beat the Atlanta Falcons in the Wild Card round of the playoffs, 24-2. Eli throws three touchdown passes, including a 72-yard sequence to Hakeem Nicks, and no interceptions.
January 15: The Giants upset the top-seeded Packers off a 330-yard, three-touchdown performance from Eli Manning that included a 66-yard touchdown connection with Nicks in the first quarter.
January 16: Eli, on how fun it is to see the team’s confidence building: “It’s fun when you’re playing good football, when everybody is executing, when the team is playing well together.”
January 20: San Francisco sandwich shop Ike’s Place pulls its Eli Manning sandwich off the menu in advance of the NFC Championship game. In other news, Giants teammate Antrell Rolle goes on the radio and has this to say about his quarterback: “I never knew how mentally tough he is … This guy, man, he has that look on his face sometimes and it makes some people question him. That’s just a look. He’s extremely confident. He’s that dude. He’s the one that I consider that dude.”
January 22: The Giants beat the 49ers in overtime on the road to advance to the Super Bowl. Eli Manning does Eli Manning things.
January 26: A website for bored housewives conducts a highly rigorous scientific study and determines that “women would rather have affair with NY Giants QB than Patriots quarterback.” When Grantland’s Robert Mays asked Archie Manning about a similar phenomenon back in 2011, his dad’s answer was: “That’s not the first time I’ve heard that. That came up somewhere else not long ago. Eli kind of favors his mother, so he’s a nice-looking guy. He doesn’t have a big ego, and he knows how to behave himself. He’s a gentleman. Although, he is spoken for.”)
February
February 4: With 3:46 remaining in the Super Bowl and the Giants trailing 17-15, Manning connects with Mario Manningham three times — one of them an iconic catch — to get New York to within second-and-goal on the six-yard line. This sets up one of the strangest Super Bowl-winning touchdowns of all time: Due to a miscommunication, Ahmad Bradshaw falls into the end zone instead of stopping just short to run time off the clock. And so the enduring victory image of Super Bowl XLVI is Eli Manning halfheartedly making a touchdown sign with all kinds of confusion on his face. Fitting, really.
February 5: We all wake up in a world in which Eli Manning is a two-time Super Bowl-winning MVP. Eli Manning makes a super-quick trip to Disney but rushes back to appear on Letterman. He tells ESPN that he wasn’t too upset that his time in the Magic Kingdom was cut short: “I’ve been here before in the past and ridden all the rides.”
March
March 8: Eli restructures his contract. “It was likely players like Brandon Jacobs would have to take a pay cut or get cut,” the Star-Ledger reports. “One other option was to do a simple restructuring of a big contract. The team has done just that with Eli Manning.”
March 23: Mac Miller releases a song called Aliens Fighting Robots that includes the lyrics:
Capicola sandwiches are tasty from Primanti’s
I’m a 5'7" giant, Brandon Jacobs, Eli Manning
March 28: Brandon Jacobs signs with the San Francisco 49ers.
April
April 3: All you need to know is that this URL contains the hyphenated phrase “Eli-Manning-Shirtless-Pictures-Baby-Wife-Miami.”
April 24: At an Ole Miss event, Eli says that “these next seven years are going to be my best football years” (echoing a line he used back during his “elite” assertion) and jokes that, despite having won a Super Bowl, he’s “still the third-most talked-about quarterback in my own city.”
April 25: Members of the band Ra Ra Riot tell me (EXCLUSIVE, MUST CREDIT GRANTLAND) about spotting Eli Manning on a balcony in Mississippi the night before. “Just drinking a Bud Light. Seemed like a very down-to-earth guy.”
May
May 5: Eli hosts Saturday Night Live; his three funniest skits are a Brett Favre-inspired sexting trial in which he mumbles phrases like “my penis” and “the banana is larger”; a send-up of his brother’s beloved old United Way “ad”; and a Madden motion-capture session in which he wears a spandex bodysuit and tries to come up with a good touchdown dance. (The folks at Madden did an actual mock-up of one of the best ones — we’ll call it the “Oops, I dropped my sandwich.”)
May 8: Eli, on his teammates’ reactions to the show: “All good-hearted. They all said they got some good laughs out of it, so that’s always good.”
June
June 16: Eli talks to Parade magazine about his daughter, Ava. “She’s still working on her throwing motion a little bit,” he says. “She does like playing with footballs, basketballs, and baseballs. One of her first words was ‘Balls.'” (No word on whether he challenged Marilyn los Savant to beat his Wonderlic score.)
June 17: Holding his daughter, Ava, Eli throws out the first pitch on Father’s Day at a Mets game. A bizarre and borderline hypnotic YouTube film soundtracked by — is that trance music? — shows them messing around in the infield and, later, hanging out on the floor of what looks to be a corporate box. Later in the video, Eli says the words “You can go to the Pampers Facebook page and tap on the ‘Most Valuable Dad’ section.”
June 18:Eli works the drive-thru window at Dunkin’ Donuts and tells the sad tale of his failed friendship with R.A. Dickey. It’s been a weird three-day stretch for the guy.
July
July 5: Former Giant Amani Toomer compares Manning with Tony Romo and — if you look at him statistically — he’s probably the best quarterback in the NFC East.”
July 29: Many of the pranks for which Eli had become notorious have been avenged by his teammates, we learn. “Listen, we’ve always made fun of the guy,” says offensive lineman Chris Snee. “He’s a goofy guy. He’s easy to make fun of, from his running motion, I love when he wears cutoff shirts to try to show off his arms.”
August
August 1: In a profile of Olivia Manning in Garden & Gun magazine, Eli addresses the time his love for “antiquing” was broadcast to the world a week before Super Bowl XLII. “I don’t think I’d ever use that word,” he says, “but since I was the youngest, a lot of the time it was just me and my mom, and I did enjoy walking around with her and seeing lots of unique things.” Antique unique New York.
August 2: Eli, weighing in on the replacement refs situation: “It’s not the ideal situation if it works out that way. We’ll keep hoping for the best. Right now, we have to worry about playing good football.”
August 3: As reporters swarm the Jets camp, Eli comes up with an idea to drum up Giants coverage. “I told David Carr to take his shirt off while we were running sprints after practice,” he tells ESPN Radio.
September
September 16: Following an opening-day loss to Dallas, the Giants win their second game, over Tampa; Eli throws for 510 yards, three touchdowns, and three interceptions. “After not playing well,” he says after the game, “it’s kind of getting back to that level of playing good football. Really good. No punts, no turnovers.”
September 21: A day after the Giants beat Carolina, 36-7, ESPN.com publishes what is allegedly Eli Manning’s preferred workout mix. The playlist includes such pump-you-up jams as John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” The Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen,” Dave Matthews Band’s “What Would You Say” (AND “The Space Between”), and Crash Test Dummies’ “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm.” Eli Manning may be messing with us, folks.
September 30: The Giants lose to the Eagles, 19-17; Eli throws two touchdown passes and an interception on 309 yards. “The guys know we’re not far away,” Eli says after the game. “We’re close to playing really good football.”
October
October 7: Eli throws three TD passes and an interception as the Giants beat the Browns in bizarre fashion, 41-27.
October 14: The Giants beat San Francisco on the road, 26-3; Eli throws for one touchdown.
Eli on the game, part one: “We played [them] twice last year in very close games, so we knew we had to go out there and play really good football to get a win.”
Eli on the game, part two: “It was going to take a full team. Offense, defense and special teams all played really good football, and I think that was by far our best performance as a team.”
October 17: Eli, previewing the upcoming Redskins game: “We know as an offense we’ve got to play good football, try to win the time-of-possession, don’t turn the ball over, because their offense is explosive and can score some points.”
October 18: A letter arrives in my mailbag bearing more information on Eli’s musical preferences: During one pregame warm-up, the stadium TV screens played selections from various players’ iPods. “Osi and Cruz played hip-hop and Tuck played ‘In the Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins,” explained the e-mail. “Eli? ‘The Warrior’ by Patty Smyth.”
October 21: The Giants beat Washington, 27-23, but the real star of the game is Robert Griffin III. A week later, the Giants beat the Cowboys; Eli throws an interception but no touchdowns, the first of three straight games where he won’t complete a scoring pass.
November
November 1: Eli Manning surveys the damage to his flooded apartment building lobby following Superstorm Sandy.
November 2: And lo, a meme is born.
November 4: The Giants lose to Pittsburgh, 24-20; Eli throws for 125 yards and an interception.
November 5: Eli, on whether the loss is indicative of a slump: “Whatever you want to call it, we’re not playing good football.”
November 7: Eli, on how the team can turn things around: “We’ve still got to do a better job of getting off to a good start, sustaining when we play good football for 60 minutes.
November 11: The Giants lose to the Bengals, 31-13; Eli throws for 215 yards and two interceptions. “Oh, that was terrible,” head coach Tom Coughlin says of Eli’s performance the next day. “He’d be the first one to tell you that.”
November 13: Phil Simms posits that Eli ain’t elite.
November 22: Olivia Manning gets the TMZ treatment and tells them she’ll be spending Thanksgiving with Eli, not Peyton. He is the mama’s boy of the family.
November 24: Eli, on how the team can break out of its funk: “The only way … is to play good football and execute at a better level than what we’ve been doing.”
November 25: The Giants beat the Packers, 38-10; Eli throws three touchdowns, passing Phil Simms for no. 1 on the Giants’ all-time list. On his weekly radio show the next day with Mike Francesa, he says “ya know” a grand total of 238 times; it’s unclear, unfortunately, just how many references he made to Good Football.
December
December 3: The Giants lose to the Redskins, 17-16; it’s their first loss when leading at halftime since 2006.
December 5: Eli, on whether he still feels he’s an elite quarterback: “My concern is trying to play good football, get wins for the Giants and having a good season.”
Eli, on whether the team fears a Super Bowl hangover: “We are going against a good team and we have to make sure we are prepared to play good football.”
December 8: In a New York Times masterpiece about “groin sanctuaries,” Eli explains why he doesn’t wear a cup. “You know, it’s supposed to be centered, obviously,” he explains. “So, if it goes to the side and then you get hit and it presses into … Well, that’s not good.”
December 9: The Giants roll over the Saints, 56-27; Eli throws four touchdown passes and two interceptions.
December 12: Eli, on his late season outlook, part one: “Late in the season, these games are important and they’re big and we’ve got to make sure we continue to play good football and making our strides and getting better each week and have great preparation and get excited for these opportunities.”
Eli, on his late season outlook, part two: “I think these last few weeks we’ve played good football and we’ve got to continue to do that and keep making strides.”
December 16: The Giants are shut out, 34-0, by the Falcons; Eli throws two interceptions, no touchdowns, and costs me a fantasy playoff game. “Last year, Eli Manning could do no wrong,” went the lede in the New York Daily News. “This year, far too often, it has gone all wrong.”
December 19: Eli, on where the Giants now stand: “I think we have to be proud of where we are right now and what we’ve done. We’ve won some big games. We’ve played some good football. We’ve got to make sure we’re playing our best football at the end of the season.”“People just get excited by concepts and forget why we do things. We are still invested in Nexus,” he said. “People have been commenting about Nexus because there is something else and they think that means the end of Nexus. That is the totally wrong conclusion to make.”
For several months now we’ve been hearing rumors that Google’s new Android Silver program was going to replace the Nexus line of devices. This, of course, caused some uproar among the stock Android faithful. David Burke, head of Android engineering and the Nexus program at Google, spoke out in an interview today to put those rumors to rest. Speaking to Read Write, Burke said that people are simply getting excited about the concept of something new (Android Silver) and forgetting about Google’s reasons for the Nexus line in the first place.
Samsung U28E590D 28-Inch 4K Monitor
As for the “something else” Burke mentioned, he said it was Android Silver, but that Google is not ready to comment on it just yet.
“Android Silver is not something that we are commenting on right now,” he said. But the prospect of Silver doesn’t mean that Nexus is going away.
Burke went on to explain why Google has the Nexus line of devices in the first place. He explained that the company focuses on two things at any given time, building a Nexus device and building the open source code. Without the Nexus device, Burke doesn’t know how the company would build the code.The April 24 CNR Top-50, Presented By Dugouthats.com …
The formula for the CB360 Composite National Rankings (CNR) has expanded to include 15 elements – six polls, five RPI-type formulations and four NCAA Tournament projections – with Florida State retaining the top spot for the third straight week while Florida still is #2 (after spending eight weeks in the #1 position). Two other teams – #3 Kentucky and #5 UCLA – likewise retained their positions in the CNR top-10 – while Baylor jumped from #7 to #4, South Carolina moved from #9 to #7, Rice returned to the top-10 (#11 to #8) and Purdue cracked the top-10 (#9, up from #16) for the first time this season. LSU (#4 to #6) and North Carolina (#6 to #10) dropped back but stayed in the top-10, with Oregon slipping from #10 to #14 and Texas A&M from #8 to #16. front-page photo courtesy of Purdue
Scroll down for more info. on the most-recent CNR top-50 update – including the return of the week-by-week chart that displays where each current top-50 CNR team has been ranked on a weekly basis in 2012.
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The CNR formula now includes 15 elements (links to each at bottom of this page):
• Six national polls/rankings, from the coaches (USA Today/ESPN), the writers (NCBWA), Baseball America, Collegiate Baseball magazine, Perfect Game & ESPN (top-20 Power Poll)
• Five RPI-type formulations (NCAA official RPI … RPI calculations from Warren Nolan & Boyds World … Boyds ISR … and Warren Nolan’s NPI
• Four NCAA Tournament 64-team field projections – from BA, PG, ESPN (Bracketology) & SEBaseball.com
Elsewhere in the CB360 top-50, LSU bumped up from #6 to #4, North Carolina moved from #7 to #6 and Baylor now is #9 (up from #7). Three teams moved into the top-10 – UCLA (#11 to #5), South Carolina (#13 to #9) and Oregon (#18 to #10) – while Texas A&M slid from #4 to #8. The three teams that dropped out of the top-10 include: Stanford (#5 to #12), Miami (#8 to #19) and Arizona (#10 to #15).
Earlier CB360 Composite National Rankings (2012 season) …
• Preseason … • Update #2 … • #3 … • #4 … • #5 … • #6 … • #7 … • #8 … • #9 … • #10
The CB360 top-10 now includes four teams from the SEC, two from the and one each from the Big 12, Pac-12, Conference USA and Big Ten. When projecting the 16 #1 seeds in the NCAAs, based on the current CNR, there would be four each from the SEC and Pac-12, two ACC, two Conference USA, two Big 12, and one each from the Big Ten and Big West. Half of the current top-50 come from either the ACC (10), SEC (8) or Pac-12 (7).
Four teams have returned to the CB360 top-50, along with newcomer UNC Wilmington (#47).
Scroll down for the complete CB360 top-50, along with various breakdowns from this update. Information on the CNR formula is included at the bottom of this page.
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SCROLL DOWN for complete breakdown of the latest CNR update …
CNR TOP-50 CONFERENCE BREAKDOWN (after week-10)
ACC (10 … 2 top-10, 4 top-25) – #1 Florida State, #10 North Carolina, #18 North Carolina State, #21 Miami, #26 Virginia, #31 Clemson, #39 Georgia Tech, #40 Wake Forest, #42 Maryland, #45 Virginia Tech
SEC (8 … 4 top-10, 6 top-25) – #2 Florida, #3 Kentucky, #6 LSU, #7 South Carolina, #17 Mississippi, #20 Arkansas, #37 Georgia & #46 Mississippi State
Pacific-12 (7 …2 top-10, 5 top-25) – #5 UCLA, #12 Stanford, #14 Oregon, #15 Arizona, #22 Oregon State, #34 Arizona State & #49 Washington
Big 12 (4 … 1 top-10, 3 top-25) – #4 Baylor, #16 Texas A&M, #25 Texas & #43 Oklahoma
Conference USA (3 … 1 top-10, 2 top-25) – #8 Rice, #11 Central Florida & #27 East Carolina
Southland (3 … 1 top-25) – #24 Sam Houston State, #44 Southeastern Louisiana & #47 Texas State
West Coast (3 … 1 top-25) – #19 San Diego, #29 Gonzaga & #38 Pepperdine
Missouri Valley (2) – #32 Missouri State & #41 Indiana State
Southern (2) – #30 Appalachian State & #33 College of |
trying on but inhabiting their problems and then leaving them behind when the workday was done. It was his passion and his job, and he did it relentlessly and brilliantly, but it seems he also did it in part because he was unable to stop.... Hoffman was an addict, and then he was sober for more than 20 years before relapsing — the story of his rehab stint was briefly in the news earlier this year, to general surprise — and then, this quickly, winding up in the place addiction tends to lead people.
Mystery will always muddy the wake of self-destruction. Even when we defer shopworn notions about madness-as-prerequisite-for-art, it remains painful to recognize that addiction was in part a reflexive response to the self-lacerating discipline behind Hoffman's excellence. Still, there is one certainty we can draw from a Hollywood OD: Money cannot beat drugs.
Nicholas Jackson, arguing for legalization yesterday in these pages, noted that the War on Drugs costs taxpayers $51 billion annually—a number that does not include the far greater cost of incarcerating drug offenders. We can treble the border patrol and start funneling an extra $50 billion per annum into the Drug War and guess what? We'll still be helpless on the bathroom floor.
By all means, repeal mandatory minimums, do away with warped drug laws that incarcerate black users at rates astronomically higher than white users, start looking at clean needle centers, and all the rest—but let doctors start administering ibogaine and educating addicts on all their options. A shorter, less painful withdrawal period, and a solution that doesn't require Beverly Hills-level cash, would create a new culture of curing, one that subordinates moral judgment and anti-drug orthodoxy to more practical concerns of suffering, caring, healing.Old MacDonald had a farm.
But now it’s gone, the barn ravaged by fire.
And officials say the Storybook Gardens barn animals transferred together to a London-area farm may be gone for good as well.
“We might not build a new barn. We might take that space and do something else,” said Bill Coxhead, city manager of parks and recreation.
“This is certainly tragic,” he said of the loss of the Old MacDonald’s Barn, which has been a part of Storybook Gardens since the theme park opened in 1958.
Firefighters say the cause of the blaze will go down as “undetermined,” common with barn fires.
“There is absolutely no way to pin it down,” said fire prevention inspector Brent Smith. “It could be electrical, it could be hay, it could be human activity,” he said, adding the fire is not considered suspicious.
Smith said firefighters are estimating the damage — the barn was demolished — at about $80,000.
All 12 animals — four rabbits, three donkeys, three sheep, two goats, two chickens and a rooster — living in the barn were whisked to safety by Storybook groundskeeper Tom Hudeckie and firefighters.
A shaken Hudeckie told reporters Tuesday that he caught a “slight whiff of smoke” when he stepped into the barn to tend to the animals just after 8 a.m.
He raced up to the loft, where the hay is kept, and found it filled with dark smoke.
Hudeckie cut the power to the barn, called 911 and began coaxing the frazzled animals out.
Firefighters helped Hudeckie drag the animals out of the barn Tuesday and battled the stubborn blaze, which was fuelled by dry wood and hay.
The fire got big fast.
The blaze sent plumes of smoke over west London as emergency workers, media and city staff raced to the scene.
“It’s pretty sad,” said Hudeckie, who’s been at Storybook for nearly 15 years. “She’s had a lot of history
... a lot of animals lived there over the years.”
While city officials emphasized the good news — nobody was injured and all animals were safe — there was sadness in the air Tuesday.
“We are turning our heads to losing the barn today. We are just coming to grips with that,” said Coxhead, whose kids and grandkids have enjoyed the park. “But out of every loss comes a new opportunity. We’ll have to think hard about whether the animals will return.”
Last year, 127,000 people visited the theme park, putting attendance up 9% over the previous three years, said staff. But while visiting the farm animals housed in the barn has remained “part of the attraction,” it is no longer a main attraction.
Coxhead said the park’s splash pad and other play areas, including Pirate Island, are the most popular attractions with today’s families.
Opened in 1958, Storybook was home to a variety of zoo and exotic animals until 2012, when the last three seals were shipped off to St. Louis. They all died. Since then, only domestic animals remained at the park.
Within hours after the blaze, city staff had found an area farmer to take the animals.
“They all went together,” said Coxhead. “That’s always good because they are kind of like buds.
jennifer.obrien@sunmedia.ca
– – –
WHAT OTHERS SAID
“I think there’s definitely a nostalgia, and something that resonates with a lot of people is memories they have of Storybook Gardens. We’ve got to make sure it’s sustainable.” — Ward 3 Coun. Mo Salih
“There are opportunities here to see what can be done with that space. It might look the same, or there are other opportunities to pursue, but now administration is focused on dealing with the tragedy.” — Ward 7 Coun. Josh Morgan, chairperson of city council’s community and protective services committee, when asked if the barn should be rebuilt
TIMELINE
1958: Storybook Gardens opens to the public, but three days before the grand opening, Slippery the Sea Lion escapes into the Thames River. Slippery is captured 10 days later in Sandusky, Ohio.
2003: City spent $7 million to update Storybook.
2008: City council approves closing of Storybook zoo as part of a new business plan.
2012: Two of three remaining seals (Peanut and Atlantis) die en route to St. Louis, and third (Cri Cri) dies at Indianapolis Zoo. No remaining exotic animals at Storybook.
2013: Storybook launches its first full season without exotic zoo animals and vows to focus on interactive play features, including a bouncy pad.
BY THE NUMBERS
127,000: visitors in 2014 (up from 120,000 average of recent years)
50-55%: out-of-town visitors: 50-55%
8.1: size in hectares
50+ : attractions
BALANCING THE BOOKS
Annual budget: $1,416,452
2014: With revenues of $1,363,958, needed $52,494 from city hall to balance its books.
2013: Needed a $46,000 taxpayer subsidyDinocampus coccinellae is a braconid wasp parasite of coccinellid beetles, including the spotted lady beetle, Coleomegilla maculata. D. coccinellae has been described as turning its ladybird host into a temporary "zombie" guarding the wasp cocoon. About 25% of ladybirds recover after the cocoon they are guarding matures.
Description [ edit ]
In 1802, Schrank first described a female adult of this species as "Lady-bird killer 2155. Deep black, eyes green; head, front legs, and apex of the petiolate abdomen mussel-brown."[2] (A petiolate abdomen is one whose basal segment is stalk-like, that is, long and slender.) Nearly all D. coccinellae are female offspring of unfertilized eggs, although males are also occasionally found.[3] The male, when observed, has no ovipositor and is slimmer and darker than females.[4]
Biology [ edit ]
The mature female wasp seeks out adult female ladybirds, although they will sometimes oviposit into a male adult or larval instar.[3][5] One egg is planted in the host's soft underbelly. The wasp larva hatches after 5–7 days into a first instar larva with large mandibles and proceeds to remove any other eggs or larvae before beginning to feed on the ladybird's fat bodies and gonads.[6]
The wasp larva inside the ladybird goes through four larval instars in 18–27 days.[6] Meanwhile, the ladybird continues to forage and feed until the wasp larva, when it is ready to emerge, paralyzes the ladybird before tunneling out.[7] It pupates in a cocoon attached to the leg of the living ladybird, whose brightly colored body and occasional twitching reduce predation.[8] A growing D. coccinellae wasp nestled in its cocoon is extremely vulnerable, and other insects will devour it. If one of these predators tries to eat it, the ladybug retaliates, scaring it off. The ladybug becomes the parasite's bodyguard, by protecting it from predators.[9] However, wasp cocoons protected in this way develop into adults that produce fewer eggs, due to the energy demands of maintaining a living protector.[10]
Ladybirds paralyzed, twitching, and attached to the cocoon of D. coccinellae have been compared to zombies by many writers.[10][11][12] After 6–9 days, the wasp emerges from the cocoon.[6] Remarkably, some 25% of ladybirds revive and emerge from paralysis once the cocoon has been emptied.[10] The paralytic effect has been proposed to be associated with an RNA virus, Dinocampus coccinellae paralysis virus.[13][14]
Ecology [ edit ]
Dinocampus coccinellae can itself be parasitised by Gelis agilis, a hyperparasite that is known for its mimicry of ants. The wingless females of G. agilis oviposit into D. coccinellae cocoons; the egg immediately hatches and consumes the developing wasp. Cocoons hosting G. agilis usually take twice as long to emerge.[citation needed]
Dinocampus coccinellae larva exiting Ladybug
Dinocampus coccinellae larva forming cocoon next to paralyzed ladybug
Economic importance [ edit ]
Because one ladybird can consume up to 5,500 aphids in a year, any ladybird parasite represents a potential threat to agriculture.[6] In Britain, at least, the infestatation of seven-spotted ladybirds (Coccinella septempunctata) with D. coccinellae rose significantly during the 1990s, from about 20% to more than 70%, threatening to have a serious economic impact on British farmers.[15]Long Island Missing Persons
Home » News » Missing Persons
A 2002 government study estimates that nearly 800,000 children go missing in the US annually. The causes for their disappearances vary from runaways, to being taken by family members, and even abduction by strangers.
To help find these missing children, police began instituting AMBER Alerts–a system by which the public can be notified of a missing child through the use of numerous media channels–between the late 90s and early 2000s.
The success of the public notification system in helping to locate missing children has led police to begin issuing similar alerts for other missing persons. Among these broader missing person alerts are Silver Alerts, which spread information about vulnerable citizens who have gone missing–particularly those with mental disabilities and senior citizens with Alzheimer's or dementia.
Together, these alert systems allow authorities to find missing persons with the aid of reports from the general public, helping to reunite missing persons with their families.
Have a question about a recent news story, or want to share a news tip? Email our News Team here.Why Would Certainly You Required Premier League Stats?
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Individuals seek football statistics websites so they can delight in the background of certain rivalries between two groups, to detect the kind of one team or an additional or simply to get more information concerning the depth of what takes place in their favourite video game.
The Trouble With Premier Organization Statistics Sites
The main issue with searching for these stats online is that most of the websites that display them have actually concentrated so a lot on integrating excellent, useful data that really little effort has actually entered to make. So the sites can look outdated and unsightly, however don’t be avoided, these sites usually contain some strong gold.
The other issue is that because most of these sites need to license their information fro world’s major football information suppliers (long times at terrific expense) a great deal of what you locate is repeated across great deals of websites which can make the look for particular data exasperating.
The very best of The Best
With many hours spent doing research I have actually been via the majority of the sites that are out there and offered completely free. So below is a list of those that are top of the stack, unless you’re intending on ending up being a manager, you won’t require any type of others:
1. Football365 Stats - If you’re after the sort of details which is mosting likely to please 90% of normal individuals after that you will not need to look past here. The layout can take a while to obtain utilized to, once you remain in the flow you can find current as well as historical information in the Premier Organization (going back to 1998) and the big leagues as well as competitors in Europe.You can discover this website by trying to find football365 on Google as well as after that clicking the “Statistics” web link in the leading menu.
The just downside to this site is that that data does not return beyond 1998 in many cases as well as you’ll require to be figured out so as to get comfy with the method the data is outlined.
Leading suggestion: Once you’ve picked a season, competitors or organization table, scroll down to the base of the page and take a look at the statistics index, right here you can find loads of various tables to show recent kind, scoring, safeguarding and also fix stats. It’s additionally a fantastic location to look if you want outcomes by individual group instead of organization.
2. BBC Football - There aren’t a huge amount of stats on this site, actually it’s all maintained quite top line as well as basic, yet when it concerns obtaining fixtures, results, objective markers and also leading scorers information by league after that it’s one of the most easy as well as reputable location to obtain them. to discover the site just Google BBC Football as well as click the Premier League on the left.
3. Soccer Base - This site has all the normal statistics, odds, as well as upcoming suits, however it has something most of the others do not. On the web page there is a listing of up coming games, a kind sign, and Specialist Judgment which is amongst one of the most reliable around, specifically if you’re thinking of a bet.
Finding the most effective bits takes a bit of exploring, the trouble exists is just so much data around that might be helpful to you depending on what your purpose is that in some cases this can cause any stats site try and present way too much in insufficient area, once again your decision will certainly get you some gold on this website.
Leading Idea: Where this site truly is available in to it’s very own is the head to head statistics. There is no where else on the internet that you must look if you desire to see just how two groups have bet each other down the years. The moment line returns 20 or 30 years, as well as the majority of the statistics consist of goal markers, yellow cards as well as also the gamers that were playing in each match. A correct journey down memory lane.
4. Soccer Stats - Provides you an excellent introduction of around 20 top organizations in Europe as well as you can promptly discover the ordinary number of objectives being racked up in each league along with easily comparing a few other leading line football stats and also excellent summaries at the end of each web page. You can find the website by inputting “soccerstats” in to Google.With release 1.9.55.122, backtrader can now be used to evaluate the performance of an external set of orders. This can be used for example:
Usage pattern¶
... cerebro. adddata ( mydata )... cerebro. add_order_history ( orders, notify = True or False )... cerebro. run ()
The obvious question here is how orders has to look like. Let’s quote the docs:
orders : is an iterable (ex: list, tuple, iterator, generator) in which each element will be also an iterable (with length) with the following sub-elements (2 formats are possible) [datetime, size, price] or [datetime, size, price, data] Note : it must be sorted (or produce sorted elements) by datetime ascending where: datetime is a python date/datetime instance or a string with format YYYY-MM-DD[THH:MM:SS[.us]] where the elements in brackets are optional size is an integer (positive to buy, negative to sell) price is a float/integer data if present can take any of the following values None - The 1st data feed will be used as target integer - The data with that index (insertion order in Cerebro ) will be used string - a data with that name, assigned for example with cerebro.addata(data, name=value), will be the target
In the case of notify :
notify (default: True) If True the 1st strategy inserted in the system will be notified of the artificial orders created following the information from each order in orders
Note Notice how the example above is adding a data feed. Yes this is needed.
A practical example of how orders could look like
ORDER_HISTORY = ( ( '2005-02-01', 1, 2984.63 ), ( '2005-03-04', - 1, 3079.93 ),... ( '2006-12-18', 1, 4140.99 ), )
An iterable with 3 elements, which could have been perfectly loaded from a CSV file.Cebu Dota2 players are in for a treat as UVNS and the E-Sports Alliance announces The Domination League
The University of the Visayas – New School and the E-Sports alliance, in partnership with Sunstar Cebu and SM Seaside city, announced last March 16, 2017, their upcoming Dota2 event called The Domination League.
First announced back in February, the Domination League will be a 3-day tournament and will be open to all Dota 2 players. It will have a small registration fee, with the amount yet to be announced, and will be held on April 28, 29 and 30 in the Cube Atrium of SM Seaside City.
The tournament will have a grand prize pool of Php 210,000, where the champions of the tournament will receive Php 120,000, while the 2nd and 3rd placers will receive Php 60,000 and Php 30,000, respectively.
The tournament organizers are hyping up this event as the “first world-class Dota2 tournament in Cebu” and they are correct as Cebu has never had a tournament as big as this. Sure, we’ve had smaller in-house tournaments and we’ve even had showmatches between professional Dota2 teams such as Mineski, and MVP Pheonix, although we have never had a tournament of this magnitude before.
Aside from the Dota2 tournament, the event will also have a cosplay competition, a 1 vs 1 tournament, a 10 vs 10 tournament, and a girls only tournament.
Interested teams can register now via NSLeague.net.
This tournament will, for sure, aid the growth of the already rapidly growing eSports scene in our country which has blossomed well in the past couple of years. This tournament will also help people realize that eSports is not only something you can waste your time on, but it’s also something that you can make a career of if you make the right choices.photo credit: Alexander Koerner, Getty Images
PERSECUTION OF REFUGEES IN GERMANY
An estimated one million refugees are now living in Germany. Taking in so many refugees has posed some serious challenges for the country. One problem which had been ignored until recently is the increase in aggression and violence towards Christians in the refugee hostels. For this reason, Open Doors carried out a survey of Christian refugees in temporary accommodations in Germany who had experienced persecution on the grounds of faith. These were put into a report entitled Religiously motivated attacks on Christian refugees in Germany, consisting of 231 interviews carried out among refugees in a variety of locations in Germany over the last two months.
Thomas Muller, an Open Doors persecution analyst, said, “Christian refugees from many different countries are trying and failing to find safety in Europe, and it is likely that the report only shows the tip of the iceberg. It is clear that many Christian refugees – especially those who are converts to the Christian faith – live in fear of persecution from Muslim refugees who make up the majority of residents in the refugee hostels set up throughout Europe. It is sobering to hear persecuted Christians telling a Western country that they recognize the very same persecution patterns in operation as in their home countries.”
HARASSMENT AND PERSECUTION
The Christian refugees involved in the survey indicated that they had suffered from persecution both at the hands of fellow refugees and through hostel security staff. Some 75% stated that this had happened repeatedly. Persecution was suffered in the following ways (with the number of people affected in brackets):
Insults (96)
Bodily harm (86)
Death threats – also towards family (73)
Very loud religious music or prayer (62)
In addition there were physical attacks in the form of punches, spitting, pushing and sexual abuse.
THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG
These figures are just the tip of the iceberg. Many Christian refugees are frightened of facing more difficulties if they report incidents. For instance, there is genuine fear that the information could get into the wrong hands and cause danger for relatives still living in their home countries. Others have given up all hope of receiving help. The research was also limited by the time available to local partners working with refugees. It is therefore clear that the actual number of incidents is far higher than recorded in this report.
Only one in five of those surveyed had been to the police or hostel authorities to report an incident. In most cases nothing was done to offer the victims protection. Very often the Christians were not taken seriously or faced complaints against their own conduct, which made their situation worse. The language barrier also proved to be a great problem, particularly where unsympathetic translators were used and translators relayed false information.
WHAT PERSECUTED CHRISTIANS NEED
Some 80% of the refugees surveyed saw a need for separate accommodation for Christians and Muslims. Others suggested that seminars be held for all refugees to educate them on German law, rights and the freedom of religion. Further suggestions included the need for special training for security staff at the asylum centers and hostels to be able to cope with conflicts caused by religious differences.
In order to ensure the protection of Christian refugees in German refugee housing, Open Doors Germany is campaigning to make politicians and other responsible parties aware of these needs.
WHO WAS SURVEYED?
Open Doors Germany published its first results based on 231 questionnaires filled out earlier this year. Some 82% of those questioned were male and over half of those questioned were younger than 30 years old. Most of those questioned came from Iran (approx. 69%), 13% from Afghanistan and 5% from Syria. 86% of those participating in the survey were Christians with a Muslim background. Of these, the majority had already converted to the Christian faith in their home countries.
PLEASE PRAY:A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that, over the past 20 years, raising the regular and tipped minimum wage for workers in the restaurant and hospitality industries "have not had large or reliable effects" on the number of people working in the industry. The research stands as yet another piece of evidence debunking restaurant industry claims -- frequently promoted by right-wing media -- that local, state, and federal wage increases harm businesses and weaken the job market.
On January 12, the food and nightlife news site Eater highlighted a December 2015 study from Cornell University's Center for Hospitality Research, which investigated the effect raising the minimum wage has had on business and employment activity in the restaurant industry. The study's authors -- social scientist Michael Lynn, and economist Christopher Boone -- looked at 20 years of data and "confirm[ed] previous findings" that "the relatively modest mandated increases in employees' regular and tipped minimum wages in the past twenty years have not had" large, negative effects on restaurants or jobs in the industry. Eater explained:
The duo's hard data suggests, not shockingly, that when restaurant owners pass expenditures, reasonably, on to customers, the sun tends to rise the next day. To put it less glibly, the sheer number of restaurants and restaurant employees did not fall over time in parts of the country that legislated minimum wage increases.
Numerous studies on raising the minimum wage have found that legislated increases have a negligible effect on employment numbers. In spite of continued academic work showing little to no effect on employment, right-wing media have repeatedly pushed the myth that raising the minimum wage hurts businesses and destroys jobs. These media outlets often parrot the anti-minimum wage talking points of restaurant industry lobbyists without disclosing their conflicts of interest. Media Matters has debunked the myth that the minimum wage kills jobs many times, and specifically highlighted media's misguided fixation on the alleged negative effects of Seattle's decision to institute a $15 minimum wage.
The Cornell study, published in the December 2015 edition of Cornell Hospitality Reports, is in line with previous findings that modest minimum wage increases have had little negative effect on employment in the restaurant industry. According the Cornell study, and prior research, businesses pass costs on to consumers by modestly raising prices, which does not appear to result in a decrease in demand. The Cornell study also concluded "[t]here is strong evidence that increases in the minimum wage reduce turnover" and that "the restaurant industry should support rather than oppose reasonable increases in the minimum wage":Turkish officials threaten to go to war with “any country” supporting exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, the alleged mastermind of the coup plot, which would put the US right in Ankara’s crosshairs.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim threated to go to war with any country that would "stand by" exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, a resident of Pennsylvania in the United States who Washington refuses to extradite citing a lack of evidence that he was behind the attempted overthrow of the Erdogan government.
© AFP 2018 / ADEM ALTAN 42 Helicopters Missing in Turkey Sparking Concerns of a Second Coup Attempt
This appears to be a pointed threat against the United States with an implicit demand that Washington must extradite Gulen or face Ankara’s wrath. The provocative comments came after Turkish Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu shocked the world by accusing the America of manufacturing the overthrow effort.
"The US is behind the coup attempt. A few journals that are published there [in the US] have been conducting activites for several months. For many months we have sent requests to the US concerning Fethullah Gulen. The US must extradite him," said the Labor Minister in a statement.
Secretary of State John Kerry responded by saying that Turkey has failed to provide sufficient evidence for the Obama administration to even consider their request to extradite the cleric. He also went on to condemn Ankara’s provocative statements saying that remarks alleging US involvement do serious harm to relations between the two countries.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said that during a conversation on Saturday evening with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavosoglu, the Secretary of State warned Turkey to never make such an accusation.
"He made clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting this investigation, but the public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," said Kirby.
The cleric allegedly behind the overthrow effort has also strongly condemned the coup.
"I condemn, in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey. Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force," said Gulen to the New York Times. "As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations."
Gulen later questioned whether the failed coup attempt was a legitimate effort to overthrow the government or political theater at the hands of Erdogan.
The situation for the United States is now as perilous as ever with Turkey in possession of roughly 90 US tactical nuclear weapons that are stored at the Incirlik Air Base. Turkish officials have blocked access to the air base and the commander in charge of securing those weapons was arrested on Sunday.[Nov. 1, 2016]– The last Tap Takeover of the year is tomorrow night at Wildwood Barbeque (beginning at 5 p.m.) and it promises to be a humdinger. It would be a doozy if the Rosetta Kriek was the only beer being served, but it’s one in a string of hits and rarities that will be on hand from the Ommegang Brewery of Cooperstown, New York (which seems fitting as there’s a World Series game seven on the horizon).
The lineup includes the year-round Hennepin Farmhouse Ale, the Witte Belgian White, and the delicious Abbey Ale, which I wrote up here and where you can find all you need to know about the brewery’s genesis.
Now owned by Duvel Moortgat of Belgium, Ommegang has been producing its Belgian-inspired beers in a profusion of styles, including a string of one-off bottlings in cahoots with HBO and its “Game of Thrones” series. The latest, Valar Dohaeris Tripel Ale, was just released last month, and will be on tap tomorrow night.
So, too, will its Great Beyond Double IPA, a non-Belgian style that debuted in June, and the brand new Collaboration 2016, which is basically a Belgian Doppelback brewed by Urban Chestnut of St. Louis on the Ommegang house yeast.
As for the Rosetta, Ommegang brewmaster Phil Leinhart was looking to produce a sour cherry beer that drinkers might actually want to have two or more of, rather than bowing out after one because of the brew’s excessive sweetness. He has succeeded admirably. I could drink Rosetta all night long, or at least until I dozed off.
It’s actually more accurate to say that the brewers at Liefmans in Oudenaarde, Belgium did the trick, since that’s where the beer was produced for Ommegang, Liefmans now being owned by Duvel Moortgat. But Leinhart was behind the blending ratios, and he’s no stranger to Liefmans, having worked there on another Ommegang one-off, Zuur, a Flemish sour brown with cherries, as is Rosetta.
He’s also well-acquainted with Rosa Merckx, the first female brewmaster in Belgium and long at the helm at Liefmans, for whom the beer is named.
Rosetta is basically a blend of Liefmans Oud Bruin (a sour brown ale) and Kriek-Brut, a sour brown beer aged on cherries. But both of those beers are blends themselves: the Oud Bruin mixes older and younger beers, while the Kriek-Brut mixes an Oud Bruin and a pale beer, then ages it on cherries for up to 18 months.
The Liefmans beers do not spend any time on wood so, Leinhart suggests, the beer is a sour with less acetic acid but a cleaner lactic acid character. Well, I’m not up on my chemistry, but I can say the beer is a compelling concoction, an elixir that sends you on a thrilling ride spinning around poles of sweet and sour but never losing your balance.
There are ruby highlights in the beer, but this is a dark brown ale. A fulsome aroma of cherries is the immediate impression, to be sure, but those leery of fruit beers should give this a try anyway. The Belgians know how to pull this off with panache, with no overweening sweetness, a firm and earthy body, and a tart finish that adds a layer of sophistication all too often lacking in many fruit beers.
The nearest American equivalent I can think of is the Wisconsin Belgian Red from the New Glarus Brewing Company, one of the best beers I’ve ever had. But the last time I had it was at the Kohler Festival of Beer in 2012, and last I checked it was pretty much available only in Wisconsin.
The Rosetta Kriek is available in 45 states, year-round, and now on tap, too.
Name: Rosetta Kriek
Brewer: Brewery Ommegang
Style: Flanders Brown / Kriek
ABV: 5.6%
Availability: Year-round, 45 states
For More Information: www.ommegang.com
Related posts:
12 Beers of Christmas: Ommegang Adoration Dark Winter Ale
TAP Beer of the Week: Ommegang Abbey Ale
TAP Beer of the Week: Cup O’ Kyndnes
Perfect Brews for FallPokemon X and Y are the first games in the series to appear on Nintendo 3DS, so Nintendo will provide two charming system bundles to get trainers up to speed. Official Nintendo Magazine grabbed the first pictures of the twin 3DS XL systems: the above Xerneas and Yveltal Blue Edition, and the below Pokemon-center-exclusive Premium Gold Edition.
(Even Steve Jobs eventually came around to putting logos upside down on Macbooks--so they appear right-side up when in use--so what gives with these otherwise cool designs, Satoru Iwata?)
Both editions will come with the system, a 4GB SDHC card, and a copy of either X or Y for ¥22,000 ($220). The bundles are only confirmed for release in Japan on October 12, but we hope Nintendo sees fit to release them elsewhere.Sen. Richard Blumenthal attacked the tech industry's arguments against the anti-sex trafficking bill, saying they do a disservice to victims. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Senators pledge to defeat Silicon Valley on sex-trafficking bill
Senators on Tuesday vowed to press ahead with an anti-sex trafficking bill opposed by the biggest names in the tech industry, in the latest sign that Silicon Valley has lost some of its luster in Washington.
At issue is a measure introduced by Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that would make it easier for law enforcement to go after websites that host sex-trafficking ads. The bill would do that by changing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from litigation over content posted by users, even though tech companies warn that tinkering with the provision could wreak broader collateral damage to the internet economy.
Story Continued Below
The legislation, which counts 30 sponsors in the Senate and 140 in the House, has become the latest flash point in Washington's increasingly tense relationship with Silicon Valley, which once enjoyed bipartisan praise but is lately drawing scrutiny over its unchecked size and power. D.C. policymakers are taking a closer look at everything from Facebook hosting Russia-linked political ads to antitrust concerns over Amazon's expanding business empire.
Blumenthal, speaking at a Commerce Committee hearing, attacked the tech industry's arguments against the anti-sex trafficking bill, S. 1693 (115), saying they do a disservice to victims.
"We need to pass this measure. If we fail to do so — if we fail to close this gap and fill this legal black hole — we become complicit," he said. "So, when the critics of this legislation say that there will be a deluge of lawsuits, that there will be frivolous or unfounded claims, think of it for a moment. Survivors have to come forward and establish their standing under the law by making the case that they have been sold for sex. There will be no deluge of frivolous lawsuits as a result of this measure."
The legislation is part of a long-running congressional fight with Backpage.com, a classifieds site that has been the target of lawmaker scrutiny and investigations over accusations that it facilitated child prostitution and human trafficking. The site shut down its adults-services section in January, saying it had been subjected to "unconstitutional government censorship."
But Google has emerged as one of the biggest opponents of the bill, deploying its substantial lobbying resources to defeat a measure it considers a broader threat to its way of doing business.
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The Backpage.com saga provided the emotional backdrop of Tuesday's hearing as a packed room heard what happened to one young woman who was trafficked on the site.
"I’m sure when this act was put into place in '96, the internet was in its infancy, and it was not intended to allow companies to legally sell children on the internet," said Yvonne Ambrose, the mother of Desiree Robinson, who was allegedly shopped on Backpage.com before being murdered last year. "But somehow, a dollar has become more important than a human life. If you’re going to fix this problem, fix it."
Still, the tech industry's defenders said the bill is not the way to address the problem.
"I take a backseat to no one in this Senate in the fight against sex trafficking. I just believe the legislation being considered today is the wrong answer to an important question," said Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), urging Congress not to act like "bludgeoning politicians" in tearing up a foundation of today's internet.
Google and Facebook did not appear at the hearing, relying instead on the general counsel of their trade group, the Internet Association, to play defense. The lawyer, Abigail Slater, said in prepared testimony her association supports a "tailored amendment that ensures civil suits were brought against online actors that acted with knowledge and intent."
"The internet |
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